• Prehistoric Park – meeting the deadline with a screengrab

    How easy it is to work on any given project isn’t just a matter of how well you know After Effects. All sorts of factors can combine to make one job more or less demanding than the next. Designing the DVD menus for the ITV hit “Prehistoric Park” was probably the most demanding project I have ever worked on, and the extremely tight deadline I had was a significant factor in the job’s difficulty. I had set up the Episode and Chapter select menus to resemble the security room which appeared in the series, and had a bank of TVs set up to display the various episodes or chapters for…

  • Moving things in a circle

    Sometimes you need to move a whole load of things in a circle… so here’s a project with compositions to do it for you. There’s 4 versions, including one which is random. You can download it here: CircularMovement.

  • Watercolour wipe

    This is a simple project based on a gradient wipe. I saw a flash site with a similar transition effect and was wondering how easy it would be to replicate… a gradient wipe with some vector blur was all that was needed. It’s not an especially interesting project but I’ve found it to be a useful example of how you can take a basic gradient, pre-compose it to create a displacement map, an edge map and a vector blur map, and for demonstrating what the vector blur effect can be used for. One day I’ll play around with it and see how much I can enhance it. I’ll probably start…

  • Crosshairs & Target – single layer preset

    Creating a target with crosshairs isn’t a big challenge. But doing it on only one layer is actually quite difficult. This project is really an effects preset (an ffx) as the trick was to fit all the effects onto one layer so they could be saved as a preset and applied to a single solid. It uses a combination of standard effects and expressions to create a crosshairs-style target with many adjustable parameters. It’s a bit like having a plug-in for creating a target with crosshairs. I put an earlier version of this project together about 4 years ago, when I had a client brief that involved using a set…

  • Spirograph-style pattern generator

    This is one of my favourite After Effects projects, and one which I have used many times in various ways. It’s very easy to use and fun to play around with. This project was originally inspired by Ayato’s website, and in particular project 39 – Spirograph-style animation. Ayato’s tutorial shows Illustrator being used to repeat some circles many, many times with a very small offset in their position. The moire patterns that result from the multiple layers interacting create a really lovely gradient. I was interested in this process but I didn’t own Illustrator- so I figured out it wouldn’t be too hard to come up with a few expressions to…

  • Repeating images in a circle

    This is a fairly simple project which I originally wrote to help out a friend who had a brief based on this style. Basically it arranges as many layers as you want in a circle, and you can adjust the parameters with sliders so it’s all very intuitive. Download it here:repeatingshapecircles

  • Image grids and auto-storyboard

    This is one of the first projects I ever created with expressions, and one which I continue to find the most useful. Arranging many images or videos into a grid can be quite a tedious process if you do it manually because you generally want to tweak spacing and size as you go, and you have to continually shuffle things around to keep everything lined up, and then if you decide the images should be bigger or smaller, or more to the left or over to the right then you often have to start again … This project automatically arranges stills or videos into a grid and allows you to…