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Our After Effects courses are taught by motion graphics professionals who have a wide array of industry experience in motion graphics and animation, along with years of teaching experience.
What is After Effects?
After Effects is a powerful program with a wide variety of uses, and although it might seem daunting to newcomers, it’s actually quite intuitive and easy to get started. All you need is a quick lesson in After Effects vocabulary and an idea.
After Effects is popular software used by animators, artists, entertainment companies, ad agencies, and compositors. You’ve heard the name before, seen it online, and witnessed work made with it.
So… what is it exactly?
Adobe After Effects is a computer-aided design application for motion graphics, digital compositing, and animation projects. While the tool has a wide variety of functions, it is most frequently associated with special effects animation and digital effects projects undertaken in film and television. Almost all of the memorable special effects you associate with certain films and television shows were created using programs like After Effects, from massive set-piece animated models to subtle digital alterations such as lighting and color in smaller productions. Developed in the early ’90s, After Effects has become an industry-standard tool for digital animation and effects design, and with advances in computer technology, the program has never been easier to learn.
Historically, the computing power necessary to build lifelike, vibrant 3D digital effects was so expensive that only major movie studios regularly undertook these projects. Now, as computing power is cheaper than ever, more independent and small-scale projects are starting to take advantage of this design technology. This means that, more than ever, these projects require the help of creatives trained in programs like After Effects. This makes learning Adobe After Effects an important part of finding work as a special effects artist or motion graphics designer. The program is utilized on diverse projects, so After Effects experts can find work anywhere from Hollywood to YouTube.
Why learn After Effects?
Enter a creative career field
If you have ever watched a movie and wanted to be part of the team that makes the magic of special effects possible, you will want to consider learning After Effects. The program is used in various creative industries, from film and television to online content creation to advertising and social media marketing. These fields hire digital effects artists and animators to make their video projects, online content, video games, or advertising campaigns more evocative and memorable. In addition, since motion graphics and visual effects are such wide-ranging fields, aspiring artists will have a diverse collection of mediums in which they can find work. After Effects is used in everything from traditional animation to stop motion to greenscreen replacement and chromakey animation to digital and special effects.
Work on memorable video projects
An appealing aspect of working in digital animation and motion graphics is that it is one of the most central and visible elements of filmmaking. While writers, editors, cinematographers, and directors may fade into the background of public consciousness, it is hard to forget the work put in by special effects animators to make films possible. These effects are often the things we most vividly remember about a film, and they often compel creatives to consider working in the film industry. Learning After Effects is one of the important steps to take if you want to find work on the kinds of film, television, video game, or other entertainment projects that sparked your interest in these industries.
Learn more about filmmaking
Learning After Effects can also be useful for anyone hoping to learn more about filmmaking. Since film and television are such collaborative processes, learning how individual creative processes are done can be productive for anyone hoping to work in the industry. If you are a writer or director, you’ll want to know what is possible given your budget and constraints in terms of special effects animation. As an editor, you’ll work alongside digital effects artists during the post-production process. Even actors will want to consider how assets will be added to the final shots to give more compelling performances. In the long term, almost every creative who wants to work on a video project will benefit from learning about the totality of the filmmaking process, including effects animation with tools like After Effects.
Create your own animated effects
Learning the basics of After Effects can also be useful for anyone who aspires to make their own video content and wants to add digital effects or make significant digital alterations to their footage. After Effects is a fairly accessible tool for new users to experiment with. With the proper training, it won’t take long for amateur creatives to start adding digital effects to their projects. This can be especially useful for social media content creators, like those working on TikTok, Instagram, or YouTube, since the market for these videos is crowded, and anything that helps a creator stand out is a worthwhile investment. After you’ve learned the basics, you can continue to learn new animation skills at your own pace.
Adobe Creative Cloud skills
One of the major reasons to learn After Effects rather than other motion graphics animation applications is that it is part of the Adobe Creative Cloud and is, therefore, closely integrated with other Adobe filmmaking and animation applications. Notably, anyone licensing After Effects can access Adobe’s 3D model rendering application Cinema 4D. These two programs complement each other in their overall functionalities, and almost every After Effects training program doubles as a Cinema 4D training program, which lets students easily expand their creative toolkits. Creative Cloud subscribers can also access Adobe Premiere Pro, an industry-standard video editing application. Most uses of After Effects will require further work in Premiere Pro, since that program is best equipped for adding animated special effects to a completed video project. Students looking to pair their After Effects training with Premiere Pro training should consider enrolling in Noble Desktop’s Video Editing & Motion Graphics Certificate program.
Applications for After Effects
The first application is for motion graphics. Motion graphics is a branch of animation that primarily deals with text, flat shapes, and objects as major components. The difference between motion graphics and animation is that the latter relies on sequential images to tell its story, whereas motion graphics can be viewed mainly as moving graphic design.
The second use of After Effects, digital compositing, is the method of combining different pieces of footage to create a seamless product. Think of it perhaps like the Photoshop of video, where the goal is to take multiple unrelated pieces and combine them in such a way that they create a single, holistic piece. This is, for example, how digital particle effects are added to a video project.
Lastly, visual effects, or VFX, are both the creation and integration of effects that can only be produced digitally. Magic sparkles, a dragon, or someone breathing fire are all examples of VFX. VFX are also used to remove elements from a scene and replace them with something else. While this is most commonly imagined in contexts like motion capture or greenscreen projects, it is also used in mundane contexts, like removing brand-identifying logos from shots or digitally altering the display of a phone screen on the camera.
After Effects has a massive library of pre-created effects and the tools to create your own. You can combine your computer-generated effects with live-action footage to produce fantastical and otherworldly videos. After Effects users can also license access to Adobe Stock, Adobe’s archive of stock footage, effects, and other digital assets.
Video editing or motion graphics?
As powerful as After Effects is, its strength lies within the above applications. It’s not a video editing tool like Adobe’s Premiere Pro (Noble Desktop offers courses and articles in that program as well). While the two programs are frequently used and taught alongside one another, they serve very different functions in filmmaking. The difference between the two lies in how they handle footage.
A video editing software application is useful for lining up video clips, splicing them, and adding transitions and audio. It’s optimized to play back footage without stuttering and can handle large amounts of raw footage. Video editing, as a process, creates new meaning out of existing footage and material, so professional video editors will have all of the creative assets on hand when they compile a finished project.
After Effects works in layer stacks, allowing different objects that may not even be footage to interact with one another. It’s best used to create video effects rather than transitional footage.
However, when it comes to motion graphics, what After Effects is made for, it’s hard to beat. After Effects is used to create new assets for a video production, designing and rendering these assets from scratch. This makes After Effects a more traditional graphic design application than Premiere Pro.
Most professionals will use a combination of these two programs, but when you consider what kind of work you’ll specialize in, it is useful to consider how the programs are distinct. Students interested in the creative process of animation will want to emphasize After Effects training and learn a bit of Premiere Pro, while students interested in cinematic editing will want to learn Premiere Pro and dabble in After Effects.
Who uses After Effects?
After Effects is utilized mainly by animators, motion graphics artists, compositors, ad and entertainment companies, and designers. You probably see loads of After Effects work every day without noticing it—it’s that ubiquitous. Think of advertisements you see on YouTube or maybe your favorite fantasy show. Even popular movies use the program extensively, as it’s the industry standard for nearly any kind of effect. For instance, Nickelodeon, the studio behind SpongeBob SquarePants, uses After Effects to layer on lighting and textures in their animated works. Pixar, the studio that made Toy Story and The Incredibles, uses After Effects to put together their animatics (an animated storyboard). Star Wars? That’s right—in recent movies, After Effects was used to produce some of those signature special effects.
It’s not just limited to entertainment, either. After Effects is a staple of advertising as well. Nathan Love, who created iconic ads for Sweet ’N Low, Come from Away, and Bank of America, relies on After Effects for their edgy, poppy motion graphics. Walk into a TD Bank and watch the video reel playing behind the teller’s heads—that’s After Effects in your everyday life.
The best thing about this software, though, is not just the endless incredible effects it offers or its intuitive digital compositing capabilities. It’s not even its ability to track motion within footage so you can add animation that moves with the figures in the video.
Key terms and tools for After Effects
After Effects can work with nearly any file type, allowing the user to animate them using keyframes and effects. In this section, we’ll go over different tools and terms within the program to give you a feel for the software. This is by no means a comprehensive list, as After Effects is an extensive, powerful program with literally hundreds of options for the creator to pick from. However, this group of terms is enough to start your projects off with, and with usage and time, you’ll pick up more and more.
- Composition: essentially the “canvas” where all your images, effects, and text are presented. This is what creates your video when rendered.
- Layers: elements of a composition, whether a vector file, soundtrack, or bitmap image. They can either lay on top of each other within a stack or be modified to interact with each other visually. They can even be gathered up and organized into smaller compositions themselves.
- Timeline: the timeline panel shows the length of the video. It allows the user to manipulate the keyframes and layers on a piece.
- Playhead: a marker showing where the video is currently paused.
- Keyframes: a marker on the timeline showing a change in an attribute of an object; usually the position, opacity, or size with a few other options.
- Opacity: the transparency of an object.
- Position: where the object is in the composition’s frame.
- Scale: how big the object is.
- Layer modes: special settings that allow the colors of an object to interact with the layers below it in different ways.
- Project panel: usually found on the top left of the interface, it shows all the files the user is working with in the project.
- Anchor point: the point of reference on an object that After Effects uses to determine position and/or orientation.
- Selection tool: allows the user to choose which element they want to currently work with in the composition or layer stack.
- Hand tool: allows the user to slide around the composition window if they’re too zoomed in to see the entirety of the composition.
- Zoom tool: allows the user to magnify the composition so they can work in detail or to make it smaller to see the whole piece.
- Rotation tool: allows the user to revolve an object around an anchor point.
- Pan-behind (anchor point) tool: allows the user to change the location of the anchor point of an object.
- Shape tool/rectangle tool: allows the user to create a shape in the composition. When used in conjunction with a selected object, it will create a mask in that shape. The default is the rectangle tool, but other options are available within the same tool.
- Mask tool: allows the user to hide parts of an object within the composition window.
- Pen tool: allows the user to draw out a shape or mask manually.
- Text tool: creates text within the composition and is controlled by the text options panel.
- Effects and presets panel: this panel provides the myriad pre-made visual effects that come with After Effects, such as lighting effects, particle simulations like rain or smoke, and countless others. Presets are a pre-made combination of effects together that can be stored within the program, and both effects and presets are available from this panel.
- Keylight: an incredibly powerful digital compositing tool within AE. Keylight provides the user with the ability to separate figures out from a background within footage, provided the background is a simple solid color. You may have heard of the term “greenscreen” in this context. The user can then replace the background with anything else they desire or place the figure into a completely different composition. It’s one of the cornerstones of digital compositing, made easily available through After Effects.
After Effects careers
After Effects is a commonly used application in the film and television industry and the fields of online content creation, video games, and advertising. Most professional After Effects jobs will fall under the broad category of motion graphics designer. However, the responsibilities of these designers will vary greatly depending on the kinds of projects they are working on and the aspects of those projects they are assigned to work on. Motion graphics covers everything from special effects artists and VFX artists to character designers, visual effects artists, background artists, and concept artists. If an element of a project is digitally animated or impacted by digital animation, a motion graphic designer is likely to have had their hand in building that asset. The wide variety of different job titles and responsibilities means that salaries for motion graphics designers will vary greatly, but in the US, the average salary for these effects artists sits at around $70,000 annually.
After Effects is also utilized by 2D animators and 3D animators who specialize in animating digital effects for various video productions. Animators are tasked with creating digital assets that have the illusion of motion and weight. While animation is traditionally associated with cartoons and children’s entertainment, animators can find work on a diverse range of projects, particularly when working alongside motion graphics designers on specialized projects. Their work involves building everything from simple animated logos for web interfaces to designing models for video game characters to working on major Hollywood films (traditionally animated or not). With improvements in computing power and price, 3D animation is beginning to replace 2D animation in almost all contexts (though stylized 2D animation is unlikely to vanish completely), so more 3D animation careers are opening across industries than 2D animation careers. In the US, a 2D animator earns approximately $60,000 annually, while a 3D animator can expect to earn about $71,000 annually.
Conclusion
So there you have it: a basic rundown of what After Effects is for, who uses it, and a couple of terms to get you started. After Effects is a powerful program with a wide variety of uses, and although it might seem daunting to newcomers, it’s actually quite intuitive and easy to get started. With only a few hours of training in a course like Noble Desktop’s After Effects in a Day, you can start building and designing your own 2D and 3D animated assets. Students looking for more advanced training, such as those hoping to create assets for their own professional video projects for a social media account, can consider a course like Noble’s After Effects Bootcamp. Noble also offers a robust career-focused Motion Graphics Certificate program for students looking to prepare for a career using After Effects. No matter what kind of After Effects training you are looking for, Noble Desktop offers a course built to fit your needs. All you need is a quick lesson in After Effects vocabulary and an idea.
Happy animating!
