After Effects and Learning by Doing
- Sep 25, 2016
- 3 min read
Sometimes I would get messages on Facebook, Tumblr, in real life, etc asking about how I do my work. It feels kind of odd because – let’s be honest here – as proud as I am of my skill and as confident as I am that I can deliver quality work to my clients, compared to the majority of other designers who blog, I would consider myself pretty green.
That thought is compounded when you consider that I wasn’t even taught much about Adobe After Effects back in college, and if you recall the story of how I lied to get my first freelance project, I rose to the challenge of learning After Effects in a couple days through a simple method: Learning how to swim by jumping into the ocean.
I’ll tell you this: After Effects is not as hard to use as you think.
Think of it like puppeteering a marionette. You have independent control for position, scale, transparency (something that Adobe Flash/Animate seriously lacks) and you’re welcome to add more advanced controls yourself. You can tie things up by parenting one element to another, meaning when the parent moves, the child moves with it. With just that basic knowledge, I just fiddled with the tools and came up with my very first animation:
With just this one basic animation's worth of experience, I took on my first project. At the time, it was a great achievement! Looking back, it’s pretty bad hahaha, but that’s a good thing. If you saw your younger self and have an urge to bury your head in shame, that’s a pretty good indicator that you’ve grown since then. You’ve learned tricks that you wish your younger self would’ve known. So on my first project, I ended up with this “masterpiece” right here:
My first client was from Kaplan Singapore, so I got multiple projects from her as well as her colleagues. I graduated in August 2014, and that first video was finished in October 2014. I kept going, and after several projects (learning along the way) my 2015 Kaplan videos started to look like this:
You can see the growth, and maybe if you’re sharp eyed enough, you can even notice that each video was a new experimentation with a new After Effects tool. I started trying out 3D layers and what kind of effect that achieved, I tried playing with colors, I tried out playing with animating line drawings, etc etc etc.
These were all part of learning by doing.
You shouldn’t wait until you’ve become a master before taking on real life, you just go out and practice as you work. Sure, your early work might not be masterful, but hey you’re not only earning money way sooner than you would've if you'd waited, but you’re also spreading word of your services, getting new potential clients, projects, and most important of all: opportunities to grow.
If you just keep sparring with yourself inside instead of taking on the world, by the time you do get out, new features would’ve been added to the software you use, new tools to quicken the workflow. Essentially, by the time you've mastered 5 things, 5 new things would be invented that you’d have to learn about as well.
Tighten your white belt and just come out with fists blazing.
Don’t be afraid to suck at the beginning if it means being awesome by the end.
I mean, look at how much you can improve in just a handful of projects. From absolute garbage to something pretty good:
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