After Effects CC 2018 Essential Training: The Basics

- [Mark] Hi, and welcome to this essential training course on the basics of Adobe After Effects. If you've never really gotten started with After Effects and are wondering where to begin or what it even does, you're in the right place. This course is for the absolute beginner. After Effects is versatile. And most of the courses you'll find on it quickly get into very specific examples without looking at the big picture. I understand that as a beginner, you want to understand the principles, but you also want to get your feet wet.

We don't waste any time creating our first shot in this course. We'll look at how each section of the application is organized, what it's for, and how they work together. We'll focus on the most used features to help eliminate the, I didn't know After Effects could do that, problem. In the final section, having explore our options, we'll design a 10 second shot. This is a promotional bumper you might see on television or on the splash screen of a web page. It's specifically designed so that no one stage will get you lost in the weeds of multiple steps, but my hope is that it will also help you discover what gets you most excited to learn more.

So this course is for anyone curious about After Effects and what it does, regardless of specialty. If you ever watch movies just to see how the opening credits are designed, or enjoy commercials for the graphics, you might be a motion designer. If you envision yourself creating compelling live action films, visual effects might be more your thing. Or maybe you have the patience to refine motion and timing until you find it perfect, in which case you sound like an animator to me. After Effects is the rare tool that can appeal to all three of those types of people and more.

Let's dig in.