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What Can Adobe After Effects Do?

After effects you know, when you first opened up after effects you see all of this and you usually click out of it really quick because it's really scary people go oh my gosh there's boxes and timelines and and key frames and all this crazy stuff and I talked to a lot of people who are like, you know, expert designers and they may even be really good video editor's they've been using premiere final cut and they still just can't wrap their heads around after effects because it's like they just don't even know where to start and today I want to take you on a little journey and we're going to do it little baby steps I don't want you to have to know everything and every tool and where everything is because you won't be able to use all of that all it wants anyway and so the principles that I want to introduce our just some very simple animation basics and we're going to kind of work our way through that during the day and then I'm going to be introducing a little more it's like, oh well, we...

take what we just learned we're going to apply it taking a little step further and little step further and that way it kind of sinks in it's like, oh, you know, key frames are my friend and easy and in and out and all of those terms that you hear will make sense and there's purpose behind it because I because I am self taught I I needed to know why, you know, I'm doing something so that's my motivation, it's like acting, you know, what's my motivation here, so it sze yu want to motivate the things to do things on screen, so I'm going to hide after effects right now, and I'm going to take you through a little journey here of some examples of what can be done with after effects because there's, another question to people tend to have this what can I do with after effects? I know it does all kinds of crazy stuff, but I'm afraid because it does too much or it doesn't do enough for I'm not sure what it does, and one of the exercises we are going to be doing today is making things move so that's that's an example that will actually be covering today, and how that's all done and that's done through a siri's of of calms and sub calms and all these confusing things, but the core of that is to photoshopped files that's it that's where it starts one is a pineapple with transparent background on it actually believe it's just a ping file the other one is the little table it's balancing on that's, another ping file and that's it that's why I started with so it's a matter of all these different elements that are in after effects that bring them to life so here's a project that I did for client for sales force and this is through a company that I work with another great design team out of san francisco on dh that's rebel unit and do a lot of work with them animation work and this is about two minutes long but it shows that same concept of taking individual little files in layers and we're just animating them over time and I'll break this down after I play it I'll break it down is to you know, what's moving but basically every character, every piece of text everything is all done in aftereffects this entire project was done in after effects except for the audio in this timo we'll take a look at the sales for its marketing cloud the world's first unified social marketing suite social media has changed marketing forever before social companies and marketers treated customers like data points but people are more than just addresses, phone numbers and credit scores people are people and with social media wear more connected than ever but social media has created chaos for marketing pr campaign managers and digital teams all manage their own social content using different tools the's teams air fragmented and they're too many solutions making it difficult to keep all of your different campaigns in sync and measurable introducing the sales force marketing clown, the first unified social marketing suite that turns insights into action and connections to customers for life. 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As new fans emerged through ads, you can automatically create leads cases or contacts right in sales force and measure the impact your campaign is having driving engagement, conversions or other social metrics and compare these results globally. Salesforce marketing cloud is the world's first unified social marketing suite that turns insights into action and connections into customers for life learn mauritz, salesforce, dot com slash marketing cloud okay so let me just do a quick breakdown of this and it looks like well this is crazy animation everything is going on but the general plan is this is you're making things move but just in little segments you don't have to digest the whole thing while you're working out you work on it in segments and then everything's all brought together and we've got three you know, three dimensional camera and you know things get floating in and out of that but basically we've got background we've got a graphic with a logo on it and that bounces into place this whole peace here with the word cloud that moves it was just a matter of basically fades and moves just all on different layers there's several different layers there that one there's a little more complicated but it's moving there's a three d camera in there and that's moving so they're all in different layers in three d space all of these elements were all their masks they're all photoshopped files that are either mast and moving in one one layer or another so everything's just layers moving in time this stuff that's three d looking there's a lot of faking that goes on too not everything has to be three degenerated sometimes I cheat I do a lot of cheating thes little disks that fly in right about here right in here those were all actually created in photoshopped to look like three d discs and ijust animate them in in place is the same thing happens here with these shadows thes drop shadows those are all just individual layers floating around and even though they look like they're in three d with shadows and lighting those air cheats those air shadows were created in a layer in photo shop so if you're comfortable photoshopped creating your content just think of aftereffects is a way to animate all those little layers and pieces that you have in photo shops a lot times I'll build a scene and it's either done an illustrator or in photoshopped and I'll have my whole layout in photoshopped the photoshopped layers and then I just break it apart in animated in after effects that's basically how all of this has done this whole thing with the fake screen cast is done where it's just a three d camera moving around the cursor is faked in an animated so it looks like it's you know you know really clicking and pointing on things that's all fake and these are all just stills that we've animated in after effects and that's that's really what the power of aftereffects does on dh then something as simple as this three d looking actually the the the helix here of the dna strand was done in three d and then just as it one winds the rest of this whole bio animation here was just done with just two d layers in coms in after effects and so this is a simple type of thing that people are challenged with having animate for the tech industry in the biotech industry all the time and without after effects, this would be a lot much more complicated thing to dio but just breaking it all down into photoshopped layers and everything is just really simple way to do this now outside of animation, I've used this to do other things after effects works with video as well a still images I use it to stabilize footage, teo correct footage to do things with it tracking and all of that we're going toe touch on all of those elements this afternoon, more re timing footage, slowing things down, speeding things up, doing things like that and there's there's a lot of things you can do in there. I did this project for stanford hospital, where they wanted to have a ah guide to get people into the hospital from the closest freeways because there's a bunch of construction, they're building a new hospital there so people are used to going in and out of there they've changed all the roads a little one way streets and everything is all crazy, so they wanted something that would help guide people in there so instead of just a map, I said, well, let's use a map like a a navigation device let's animate some of that make it look like a gps tracker and then taking the concept of google maps and the street view let's actually no strap a gopro to the top of the car drive in there and kind kind of combined the two so that's what I ended up doing here for this and they loved it so we've got several of these were created from different hospitals. Angus well clinic visitor parking and valet from the us one o one freeway way from us one o one north or south take the embarcadero road exit west then cross al camino real straight ahead onto galvez street be sure to stay in the right hand lane fear right at the y on toe arboretum road stay an arboretum road for approximately three quarters of a mile way and then turn left on sandhill road turn left on past your drive good thing that had this video that's why it's very confusing. Yes, people are fine if they just went to google, give him put him right in the middle of construction so they have to do something like cross well trolled for visitor parking. Take your first left to the underground so I'm gonna I'm gonna stop just I can just give you a couple tips of what happened here the first thing that happened was we shot this video and if you're used to seeing much gopro video especially in motion it's a lot of emotion coming at you and driving down the road with that wide angle lands all your stuff your lamp posts everything I'll come in the middle so you've got these bendy everything that looks like it's abandoned it's crazy and it looks like you're going twice as fast they are and people get nauseous watching video like that because it's that motion sickness sensation so I had to go into after effects and I had to do some lens distortion to straighten up everything so it took that wide angle you look out of it and I had to process that video first before I could do anything else then it was still seemed like to clear all of the trees everything going by you you're you're kind of doing this you know, watching the video and again that creates that sensation of motion sickness so I had to use a motion blur and actually we're giving away a copy of a real smart motion blur as one of our prizes today and I used that as ah plug in that is one plug in I I always suggest people get for after effects is is revision effects really smart motion blur because what it does is it looks at the pixels whether it's a video are rendered comp or animation that sometimes has too much clarity and it doesn't have enough natural motion blur look to it, you just apply that plug in and it re creates great motion blur it's wonderful! So I applied that to the video, and that way the trees, everything that moved really fast by the sides went into blur, so your focus is right in the middle of the road. So that's, the first thing I had teo overcome with this, and, of course, all the graphics are pretty obvious that we've got on screen for all the directions thie directions at the bottom, the street signs things like that the the animating map that all had to be just time, just perfectly where the little arrow happened to go right when they're turning the key corner things like that. So there's a lot of of timing with the animation pieces with that, but this is again was done entirely in after effects and couldn't do it without aftereffects. Another thing that we're going to get into toward the end of the day is green screen keen or compositing and that's something that's, another scary area for people. I've got the green screen handbook, which is, I think, our final price today, and that is that covers everything about production and postproduction as well. But a lot of times people just need a very simple little green screen key, you know, some talking head, you know, they're they're client is has to be against a background or you want to drop him out toe white or whatever and it's really easy to do and after effects really accommodates that this is an example ah movie that that been working on with a colleague and this was a kind of a before and after and then the composite so this was before plate slowed down of a guy landing on a table. This is his angry wife and then she's put into the scene so that's just that's just a simple element of of using green screen and we're going to get into how to do a simple green screen composite in one of our later sessions today and it's built into after effects and it's really not a hard thing to do with a few good tips and hope to get some of those tips over to you on dh then we're also going to look at this production later on as well in all the elements of it but this is for another client taking over the white house and the frequency of flying feline sightings appears on ly to be increasing as the storm approaches and now back to our lives the news election night coverage joined now by political analyst and protein perfect. So we'll get into that one a little later as we break it down and and I'll be able to show you all the different elements that were done in after effects. This was done photo shop after effects and premiere, of course, the the trifecta. As far as I'm concerned, I use those three together, but to recreate something that would have a broadcast quality look to it, obviously, some more advanced features in this, we're not going to be trying to learn how to do that today. But it's, good to know what you can dio sa you've got an idea of okay, this, you know, this application is really capable of doing very simple things, like bouncing fruit. Text entitles all the way up to serious compositing and work for motion pictures and tv. So that's, the beauty of it, it can also scare people is like, oh, I can't do that. And if you just break everything down to the very simplest elements that were going to start with today, that will take some of that fear out for you.