From the course: After Effects CS5 Essential Training

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Making shape layers

Making shape layers

Shape layers are one of my personal favorite areas of After Effects. I don't find that many people love them as much as I do, but I just love this ability that shape layers give you to create and play with shapes as we'll see in this movie and the next one as well. It's kind of like having a mini built-in Adobe Illustrator where you just create and play with and animate shapes in really cool ways. Now this is very similar to masks or at least that process of creating shape layers is very similar to masks. I have this background here. We know from masks that if I were to select let's say, for example, let's select the Star tool. If I were to click and drag on the Star tool, I would create a star shaped mask and basically, because Add is the default Mask mode, then all we see is the star shape and then the layer content filling that star shape. That's how we create masks. I'm just going to select this mask and hit Delete to get back to square one here. The process of creating shape…

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