Way back in 2006, working with After Effects 6.5 on an 800mhz G4 PowerMac, I completed a conference opener for Centrica that attracted a lot of attention. Although the video looked as though it had been created using a 3D animation package, almost everything was done inside After Effects: I recently completed a 3-part video tutorial on how it was all done, and you can watch the series over at the ProVideo Coalition. To celebrate the release of my first video tutorials for the ProVideo Coalition I’ve put together a small demonstration project that you can download here. For the best result you will need a copy of the Knoll…

Recently I had a small job which was really fun to work on.  Martin Scanlan, a London based writer/director, has written a fantastic feature film screenplay called “Complicated” and I was asked to create several potential posters to advertise it. Without giving too much away, one of the characters is a chaos mathematician and as a fan of fractals I incorporated a Mandelbrot Set into one of the designs.  As it’s the day before Valentines Day I’ve stripped down the original project… …and here – just in time for Valentines Day – is a Valentines Day themed After Effects project just in case the special someone in your life is…

Original article: Flying through a tunnel with After Effects This article was written in July 2004 (AE v5.5) and demonstrates how a tunnel fly-through effect can be achieved by using the polar coordinates filter. I make it quite clear in the introduction that you cannot get a “Hollywood level” tunnel effect using only After Effects, because you can’t get twisty 3D geometry in AE.  So this tutorial was only ever intended to demonstrate a “quick and dirty” technique for faking it. The tutorial is still relevant and the technique is still valid- none of the techniques or plugins used have dated and if I needed a tunnel effect today I…

Original article: Creating cogs and gears in After Effects This is a 5-part behemouth of a tutorial that I wrote a few weeks after finishing the morphing tutorial. I needed to animate some cogs for a corporate presentation and was faced with the problem of how to create cogs in After Effects. When I figured out a solution I was so pleased with myself I wrote these articles as a self-congratulatory exercise. The original problem that I faced was – how do you get an image to follow a path without changing its size? I needed to have the teeth of a cog wrap around circles of different sizes, but…

The Creative Cow website is an incredible resource and it has certainly grown since its launch. I have been proud to contribute several articles to the Creative Cow site over the years but as software and techniques change with time not all of those articles are still current. I thought it would be interesting to look at the articles I’ve written and make some observations about how they stand up today… Original article: Morphing with AE. This was the first article I had published on the Cow and I’ve often suspected it’s the most popular. It was written in October 2002 and I still get emails from people asking questions…

Ever since I started using After Effects I’ve been annoyed at how the pre-compose function works. It’s always bugged me that when you pre-compose a layer the new composition is the duration of the original composition, not the individual layer. It bugged me a lot. Then I found a script on Dan Ebbert’s site which solved this quirk and introduced me to the world of scripting. I was absolutely thrilled by this discovery because it meant that a few lines of text could add new features to After Effects without the need to eagerly await the next version release, hope that your feature requests had been included, and then pay for the…

Printed images are made up of loads of dots and there are several 3rd party plug-ins around which simulate this effect. But what if you want to achieve a halftone effect using only standard AE plug-ins? If we consider how halftone works then we can think of some solutions. Basically an image is divided up into a fine grid, usually of circles, and the size of each circle is proportional to the brightness of the image under it. In After Effects terms this sounds like how compound effects work – the scale of one layer is being controlled by the brightness of another layer. All we have to do is…

According to my website statistics the original watercolour wipe project (further below) is incredibly popular. I’ve always found this intriguing as it’s a very simple project that only took a few minutes to put together. And although it’s useful as a teaching aide it doesn’t look especially great, and honestly it doesn’t look much like a watercolour. So – as promised – here’s a revised and updated project which hopefully looks a lot nicer. The project is driven by two basic compositions – one contains the image to be wiped on and the other contains a very basic gradient to control the direction of the wipe. You can easily import…

“Jekyll” is a 2007 BBC series starring James Nesbitt and Michelle Ryan, which updates the well known tale of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by adding modern technology and a conspiracy theory. The DVD authouring was handled by London company ‘Cheerful Scout’ who gave me the job of designing the DVD menus. The main menu of the DVD features a close-up of Hyde’s eye which was created in After Effects – and this post will demonstrate how it was done. One thing I liked about the series was the low-key approach to visual effects. It must have been tempting for the Director to utilise a full arsenal of CGI technicians…

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…