After Effects: 5 Tutorials you can’t miss

After Effects is a very powerful program for animation and motion graphics, as well as visual effects compositing. I’ve put together a list of five great tutorials from around the web that you should take a look at to improve your AE skills.

1. Sky Replacement by Andrew Kramer This sky replacement tutorial serves as an excellent introduction into the uses of motion tracking on handheld or unstable shots.
2. Rotoscoping in AE by Peter O’Connel No offense to Pete, but he won’t win any awards for most enthusiastic AE tutorial creator. However, rotoscoping is an invaluable tool in your visual effects tool kit, and Pete’s simple method is literally priceless.
3. Muzzle Flare and blowback by Andrew Kramer Yet another great Tutorial from Andrew. When you can’t afford a ton of insurance and a professional gun wrangler, you better know how to to digital gunfire.
4. Morphing by Chris Zwar Morphing is a pretty cool technique for transitioning from one image to another. This particular tutorial shows the typical way its done…morphing one subect (a person) into another (a sheep). I intend to release a tutorial of my own for using morphing for more subtle effects, but for now Chris’s article is a great introduction into the technique.
5. Expression Tips by Aharon Rabinowitz This tutorial basically says, don’t worry expressions aren’t that scary. He covers the basics of addition expressions to control different properties, as well as the linear function to transform values. Overall, you’ll probably never use the specific item he covers, but it serves to spark your imagination with what expressions can do for you.

Until next time, happy animating.