PROJECT 1

Project 2 – Getting Started

Pre-Production
Creating a new composition
Place art into a composition and fixing broken links
Working with shape layers and blend modes
Animating the opacity transformation
Building a reflection using a pre-composition and effects
Working with text
Adding preset text animations
Exporting options

Challenge Project:

Find a photograph of an emergency vehicle to animate the flashing lights. Time to pull out your old matchbox cars or Lego vehicles!

Project 3 – Company Slogan

Configuring non-visible design tools
Using non-visible design tools to layout composition
Animating with the scale transformation
Using the graph editor
Exporting with Adobe Media Encoder

Challenge Project:

Find a short quote or goal statement to animate. Make sure to practice moving the anchor point and putting a little bounce in your scale.

Project 4 – Mountain Outfitters Commercial

Applying and adjusting effects
Converting vector graphics to shape layers
Animating with the rotation transformation
Exporting using the render queue

Challenge Project:

Take a photograph of your favorite club, sport or class to use as the background for this challenge project. Then animate some text or a logo onto the background using rotation and at least one other transformation property.

Project 5 – Mount Baker Commercial

Using guides to layout design
Working with typographical options
Animating with the position transformation – Spacial Interpolation
Animating with the position transformation – Mt Baker Project
Using a track matte
Exporting – Multiple exports with the Media Encoder

Challenge Project:

Take a selfie or use a great photograph of yourself as the background. Then animate your name onto the project using a track matte and position keyframes.

Project 6 – Cool Credits

Storyboarding with a client
Working with text
Creating a new workspace
Animating with the anchor and scale transformations
Adjusting a motion path and easying keyframes
Exporting and challenge projects

Challenge Project:

Find or take a photograph of a large group of objects, people or other things. This really helps if you start with a high-resolution image. Then zoom in/out of several locations using the anchor point and scale.

Project 7 – Travel Map

Planning Your Route
Starting Your Map
Designing a path
Animating the path with the stroke effect
Animating the stars
Creating an expression controller
Duplicating visual elements
Exporting and challenge project example

Challenge Project Ideas:

This is your chance to be creative and practice the techniques, shortcuts, and workflow. Use your own images and try combining techniques for each of the lessons. This projects will be the video that you can add to your portfolio, they will be unique and personal so unleash your inner creative beast!

Option 1: Use your school map to create an animated clip that illustrates the emergency exit routes. You could also twist this into designing parking routes or bus flows. I bet your old elementary school would love one!  Example

Option 2: Design a treasure map and then animate at least 4 steps.

Project 8 – 3D Effects

Creating 3D Text
Working with Lights
Animating a 3D object
Working with complex shape layers
Animating your logo

Challenge Project:

Find a vector image of your school mascot or favorite pro team. Convert it into a 3D logo and animate it.

Project 9 – Tracking and Time Remapping

Trimming video clips with the footage panel
Warp Stabilizer
The motion tracking workspace
Motion Tracking controls
Motion tracking options
Analyzing your motion tracking
Working with a null object
Parenting a visual element to your null object
Color correcting
Time remapping with keyframes
Applying time remapping and working with adjustment layers
Exporting two comps with the render queue

Challenge Project:

Talk with football or soccer team about getting some highlight footage. Use your new time remapping and tracking skills to create a highlight reel for an athlete.

Project 10 – DJ Project

Organizing the project panel
Project panel options
Blend modes
Keying out green screen with Keylight
Green screen shooting techniques
Obtaining permissions from models and “Greeking”
Motion Tracking the eye
Masking tools and techniques
Time remapping
Animating the mask

Challenge Projects:

Option 1: Try combining a variety of photos, video and text using blend modes and mattes to create a cool moving title for a project.
Option 2: Shoot your own green screen footage and practice using Keylight to replace the background.
Option 3: Take a photograph of your stereo and a snippet of a cool song to replicate this activity.

Project 11 – Sounds Awesome!

Animating text on a path
Connecting an effect to an audio track
Converting audio to keyframes
Using an expression to animate an effect to the audio keyframes
Using Adobe Media Encoder to add meta data to your exports

Challenge Project:

Create a 10 second intro for your school television broadcast that includes at least one thing that is connected to the music. Try the audio waves effect and make sure to animate a little text on a path.

Project 12 – Master of Puppets

Laying out the project
Puppet pin tool
Puppet starch tool
Puppet Overlap tool
Animating with the puppet tool

Challenge Project:

Find a photo of your favorite actor or cartoon character and use Photoshop to cut them out. Save the file as a .png file with a transparent background. Then use the puppet tool to animate the image.

Project 13 – Review

Panel Review
Project panel details
Timeline panel details
Comp panel details
Tool review
Animation Principles

Support Materials

Quizlets: These are great as individual or partner study tools. You can download the app on your smart phone and study anytime!

Kahoots: These are great as a whole class study tool. You can use them as an exit assessment or review before the exam. It will even give you a spreadsheet of your student results if you want to use it as a formative assessment tool.

Study Guides: We have created some .pdf study guides that you can download or print off as references or study guides throughout the course. They focus on the keyboard shortcuts and After Effects Interface.