Samples and inspiration

- [Instructor] The use of After Effects in motion graphics can look like many different things, since the tool is so versatile to accomplish almost any creative vision. In addition, the term motion graphics is currently being redefined as the industry is incorporating elements of other fields such as visual effects, 3D, and character animation, to name a few. In terms of what After Effects can accomplish, it may come as no surprise that the end result can often be as varied as the creative voices making them. Here, we'll take a look at a few examples of After Effects in use. So, this is the website of Bran Dougherty-Johnson.

He's a long-time After Effects user and really has a good sense of color and form. I love the fact that most of his animations are very simplistic in nature, in terms of just their base shapes and forms. He's a long-time contributor to Motionographer as well, that's a prominent industry website blog, and this piece right here, I love the use of color and texture here. So it almost looks a little analog-ish with the stop motion and the paintbrush textures, but all inside of After Effects so a really good After Effects motion graphics artist.

Andrew Embury is another artist who really does have a good sense of timing, use of color, he's a really good animator, his character animation is pretty spot on. I love his little running guys here. He really makes use of After Effects and pushes it to its full potential here. 9-squares is a cool collaborative creation among nine artists. I think the only rules here are that they use a similar color palette and that it's a looping square, but just in the span of nine frames, or nine squares, you can really get a sense of how varied the use of After Effects is and what all these creative people can do with it just given a few limitations.

This is great for going frame-by-frame and trying to reverse engineer or dissect how they accomplish some of these pieces. And lastly, on sites like Vimeo, typing in motion graphics will give you a wide-ranging palette of thumbnails here that showcase that motion graphics can be footage, it can be visual effects, it could be text, it could be photoreal, it could be stylized, so the realm of motion graphics is so wide-ranging, and After Effects does have a use and a play in a lot of how these pieces are made.

So these are just a few examples of how After Effects is used to bring motion graphics to life. There's no shortage of inspiration available on the internet, and with so many talented individuals and creative studios using it, it's easy to see why After Effects is the standard tool for creating motion graphics.