Course Brief

This course introduces participants to the fundamentals of After Effects and will enable students to create motion graphics and visual effects to a professional level for video, multimedia, and the web. This course will allow students to animate and compose media with a range of built-in tools and plug-ins. Adobe After Effects is a timeline based program with an incredibly deep and rich set of tools for creating motion graphics, manipulating movies, adding visual effects, and more.


Target Audience

This course is for anyone who needs a working knowledge of After Effects, broadcast designers, video editors, and graphic artists, and persons interested in visual effects (VFX).


  • This course is offered in 36 contact hours.

On completion of this course, learners will be able to:

  1. Understand basic timeline based editing concepts.
  2. Develop the skills to make original animations by using imported assets (e.g. video, image files, Photoshop/ Illustrator) and graphics generated within Adobe After Effects
  3. Understand and Animate in 3d space
  4. Understand applying special effects and basic compositing.
  5. Output files for Broadcast, Mobile devices & Web

SESSION 1

GETTING STARTED

  • Overview of after effects
  • Introduction to the user interface and workspace
  • Creating a project and importing footage
  • Creating Compositions and arranging layers
  • Composition Settings
  • Understanding layers
  • Getting started with animation and keyframes
  • Animating a composition
  • Working with Switches and Modes in the Timeline
  • Adding effects and modifying layer properties
  • Rendering presets, and rendering a Composition
  • Understanding linked media, and reloading clips
  • Staying organized-  file organization for efficiency
  • Setting Preferences and Project Settings
  • Review

SESSION 2:

BASIC ANIMATION WITH EFFECTS AND PRESETS

  • Working with imported elements
  • Applying effects to layers
  • Previewing effects
  • Nesting and precomposing
  • Adding transparency
  • Working with imported Illustrator and Photoshop layers
  • Title design: Adding text layers
  • Animating Text
  • Using text animation presets
  • Animating with keyframes/ Understanding keyframes
  • Keyframe interpolation
  • Animating using parenting
  • Converting path points to positional keyframes
  • Adding motion blur
  • Rendering the Composition
  • Review

 

SESSION 3

SHAPES AND MASK LAYERS

  • Differences between shape and mask layers
  • Adding a shape layer
  • Creating and animating shapes
  • Using Repeaters
  • Incorporating video and audio layers
  • Adjusting layer anchor points
  • Masking video using vector shapes
  • Applying self-generating effects
  • Creating an animated slide show
  • Mixing audio track levels
  • Understanding alpha channels, masks, mattes, and keying
  • Importing masks from Photoshop
  • Animating masks
  • Creating Animation Presets
  • Creating and editing masks in After Effects
  • Feathering the edges of a mask
  • Using the Mask Feather Tool
  • Applying blend modes
  • Creating a vignette
  • Color correction basics

 

SESSION 4

DRAWING, PAINTING AND PATHS & ANIMATING WITH PUPPET TOOLS

  • Paint tools and paint strokes
  • Brushes and the Brushes panel
  • Paint with the Brush tool
  • Clone Stamp tool
  • Eraser tool
  • Animate and edit paint strokes
  • Puppet tools overview
  • Manually animate an image with the Puppet tools
  • Record animation by sketching motion with the Puppet Pin tool
  • How the Puppet effect creates outlines
  • Work with Puppet pins and the distortion mesh
  • Puppet Overlap controls
  • Puppet Starch controls

 

SESSION 5

Keying Basics and Rotoscoping

  • Keying introduction
  • Using a garbage matte
  • Using a hold-out matte
  • About rotoscoping
  • Using the Roto Brush Tool
  • Roto Brush and Refine Matte overview
  • Creating a segmentation boundary
  • Fine-tuning the matte
  • Creating a transition from the full clip to the foreground
  • Animating text
  • Adding a background image

 

SESSION 6

Introduction to Working in 3D

  • Building a 3D object
  • Working with 3D text
  • Creating a backdrop for 3D animation
  • Adding a camera
  • Animating 3D objects
  • Animating a camera
  • Using 3D lights
  • Adding effects
  • Previewing the entire animation

 

SESSION 7

COLOUR CORRECTION BASICS & RENDERING AND EXPORTING

  • Color correction, color grading, and color adjustment
  • Rendering and exporting overview
  • Supported output formats
  • Render and export with the Render Queue panel
  • QuickTime (MOV) encoding and compression settings
  • Rendering and Exporting to a variety of media types
  • DVD-V
  • Web video
  • YouTube
  • Mobile devices
  • Web video

SESSION 8

Advanced Editing Techniques

  • Using motion stabilization
  • Using single-point motion tracking
  • Using multipoint tracking
  • Creating a particle simulation
  • Open forum

 

**This outline is flexible and may change to accommodate student skills and interests.

LocationStart DateEnd DateDayTimeModeCost
Trincity25-Apr-2018-Jul-20Sat

9:00am – 12:00pm

Sat$2950.00