Used everywhere from Hollywood special effects to an artist’s own personal narrative, After Effects has established itself as a phenomenal piece of software that can transform zeros and ones into beautiful animation. As a designer, I’ve always known about it, and just recently decided to take it up as a homework assignment to learn.
I have decided to add this skillset to my portfolio not only because it is marketable and helps differentiate me from the quadrillion graphic designers already in Portland, but my brain has always imagined motion, and not just static images. As a child I longed to be a cinematographer, and in a lot of ways, After Effects is a digital cinematography program, but also so much more. I’ve spent nights and weekends for the past few weeks learning this dense, somewhat intimidating software, but despite the eye-strain and data overload that comes with any crash course in software, I am enjoying it very much.
Here is an example of a music video done entirely digitally, using After Effects. I think it shows how technology can be manipulated to our whim, without any sense of digital wizardry, to provide something beautiful, elegant, and seemingly removed from the constraints of a computer.