As part of my special project for this quarter, I will be curating a multi-faceted course companion for After Effects. However, I have gotten a bit off track. I thought my best learning would be done while working on something of my own that I liked and wanted to work with, but I am realizing that I won’t learn new techniques and I won’t understand the interface like that, so I am developing a checklist to structure my “self-project” sessions. Next post will be one where I follow the tutorials really closely and glean valuable techniques vs. floundering in a sea of interface.

Today, I wanted to animate this painting of mine to help me explore After Effects. (Am I too lazy to come up with new material?) I learned that negative amounts in scale doesn’t mean it recesses into an infinitely small abyss. I worked with a lot of layers, organizing and toggling visibility to focus on the layer that I was working on. There are a lot of dogwood flower layers in this project. I learned that like any project with duplicated layers, that if one has a value that shouldn’t be there (note the scale on the flowers that show up prematurely) that the mistake will be duplicated and annoying to correct.

Checklist for Classwork:

Review My Timeline
Discover Tutorials
Develop Materials for Executing a Project outline in a tutorial
Work Alongside tutorial until completion
Reflect and Document on newly learned technique