After Effects
Crash Course
Over the years, I've had colleagues look over my shoulder and make similar comments about animation. "Is that hard to do?" "That looks confusing."
"What are all of those layers?"
"I'd be so lost." "How did you do that?"
I've had opportunities to do demos and live-edits for clients who have marveled at the process and how simple it can be once you cut start cutting through it, but these demos have always been a slice of whatever project file I had open at the time. A friend of mine suggested creating a Gumroad course for people curious about After Effects. I shrugged knowing I'm too busy to make a course from scratch, but lo and behold I was soon after asked to host a Lunch 'N' Learn session at Microsoft. I had to pounce at the opportunity to make my own course from the ground up.
I decided to make an After Effects file that could double as an assignment of sorts. I made a main composition in the style of a comic book page in which each panel was a pre-comp. Since the course was for people who may have never opened After Effects before, I included pre-animated layers that they could then drag and drop into the main comp to fill-in the comic. Nice and simple!
The goal of the course was mainly to get new users familiar with the layout of After Effects, along with some of the basics. Where each panel exists, how the timeline works, layer management and file structure, simple Position, Scale, and Rotation keyframing. But in the end, having a fun, little export that tells a quick story was the cherry on top, and I think helped give this course an extra little push to be memorable.
The reception to the After Effects Crash Course was overwhelming! People loved the stylized comic frames, the easy-to-grasp format, and their first After Effects export that they assembled on their own (and could even place their signature onto)!
I had the privilege of bringing the course to my old high school to share with the video production students as a special guest lecturer. I've since uploaded the After Effects Crash Course onto Gumroad as a free project file, where new After Effects beginners are still downloading it and learning the basics today.