Monday, August 24th

Welcome to CSM's After Effects Fall 2009 course.

This course is designed to get you up and running with no prior After Effects experience - if you are already fairly comfortable with AE you may find this class too easy as it is geared towards a beginning user. You should have some experience with digital video, and I consider strong familiarity with Photoshop a prerequisite for this class. If you don't know Photoshop well you've got a little time to catch up - we won't be using it much until the second half of the class - so you may want to find a good Photoshop book to work through while we get started with the class. Knowledge of Illustrator is also useful for AE but not required for this class.

This is not a design class - your grade will be based on your mastery of the program and not your creative abilities. However, the whole point in mastering a program like AE is to do creative stuff with it, so I will be bringing in videos each week to analyze/discuss from both a technical and creative standpoint. If you have something you'd like to discuss, bring it in and we'll take a look at it.

After Effects is a great general-purpose video production tool - sort of the swiss army knife of video apps. However it's two primary uses are for motion graphics (animated text, logos, etc) and visual effects (green screen, compositing, etc). In this class we will touch on aspects of both types of work, although the focus will be on the core basics of the application which will be part of almost any project you undertake in AE.

We'll be working with the latest version of After Effects, part of Adobe's CS4 suite. If you have an earlier version at home most of the concepts and techniques we discuss will be equally valid. Projects created with an earlier version can be opened in the latest version, however once you save the project in CS4 you will not be able to open it in a previous version. Once you render any project you will end up with a quicktime file which can be played just about anywhere, and this is what you will turn in to me for most projects.

The main site here is a public site (divergentshadows.com) which I use to make my class materials available to the general web public. If you are interested in other topics related to digital video, web design, and internet media I encourage you to check out the links at the top. I'm mostly doing this in my spare time, so it's not very complete yet and lately I haven't had a lot of time to update it. The video section has a lot of material related to general production and Final Cut pro, while the links page has a lot of resources which I've found to be useful. The rest will come over time , and I'll keep you updated when I add new material.

This page, and the links on the right, are specifically for this class and not linked from the main site so make sure you write down or bookmark the URL. Make sure you look over the syllabus and schedule as well so that you're clear on the requirements for the course.

I'll be posting updates here every week or so, so check back regularly for class and AE related news.