For as long as I’ve known about After Effects, I’ve wanted to become a wizard with it. I got a decent taste of it last year with my “How EasySampler works” animation, and my colleagues were pretty blown away that we can now show, in real time, things that can’t be captured by a camera.
At a dinner with customers earlier in the year, I spoke with someone who asked if I knew who put together that animation on the EasySampler probe. He mentioned that after watching it a few times he was able to explain the process to others, and that I should pass on my compliments if I knew who was responsible. What I’m saying is, it basically took all of my concentration not to hi-five him at the dinner table. I felt totally validated and when I relayed the compliments to the rest of the team, we shared those hi-fives.
One of the great things about where I work is the requirement to continually train in your field of expertise. Last year I took a local training class in Adobe Speedgrade and this year I returned for After Effects Intro & Advanced. (If you’re near Columbia, MD I whole-heartedly recommend Think Big Learn Smart for Adobe and other software training).
With last year’s proof of concept and this year’s training under my belt, all I needed to continue animating was for there to be an actual business case to do so.
Boring work-related stuff aside, we wound up adapting an internal white board for external use in a modern animation style.
Again, let me stress that this is always a team effort! We worked together on concept and storyboard, and my contribution was to record the audio narration and animate the illustrations that were given to me. I love it. I love how many problems this brought up. How many times I said “No, that’s not a thing” and then figured it out the next day. How long each scene took me at first and how quickly I was animating by the end. All of it. Let’s do more. Let’s have fun. Let’s learn every day during the process.