Ok, let’s talk about After Effects. The AE class at Ohio was unfortunately a joke so I skipped trying to learn the program in school and jumped straight to Lynda.com instead. With experience in Premiere, Photoshop and Illustrator, the jump to After Effects wasn’t too difficult. (I will take this opportunity to complain about ‘G’ being for pen tool. If I had a dollar for every time I hit ‘P’ and was confused at my lack of pen tool, I’d be a much richer lady today.)
The actual need for an animation arose at work from a completely new product. It’s quite simple once you understand how it works, but explaining the mechanics succinctly turned to be quite complicated. As the product was developed we learned more about how it truly worked, and as I learned how to use After Effects I was able to provide more options for how to explain the product. We scrapped and restarted this animation more times than I can count, and in the end a customer said to me that he was able to watch this animation once and then explain the product to the rest of his team. Goal: achieved.