New site discovered

I just discovered a new site for tutorials about after effects. It looks great and I'm still going to explore it. Here's the web address: http://ae.tutsplus.com/. :-?

My first major project!

Yeah! I finally made my first major project in after effects. It's my 75th monthsary message for my girlfriend. It's a start for me and that I finally turned the tutorials I learned from a lot of cool sources into a project. I really learned a lot and from these cool sites:

1. Videocopilot.net
2. creativecow.net
3. allbetsareoff.com

They are the coolest sites I've been into and the people there are amazingly creative, artistic and very helpful. I enjoyed watching their tutorials and hope you watch too. Here's the link to my project which I posted in youtube.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIRZQbOQEf0

Gregory House, M.D.

Another hobby I do is buy a lot of dvd series like House and watch them all day long from the 1st episode till the last episode I can watch. Right now I'm starting to watch Season 5 of House and I'm excited.

Also, on videocopilot, there's a tutorial about making the video in After Effects about House where the cells in our body are magnified just like in House. It's a great tutorial and I love it!Hoping to make one in the near future! :-?

Freeze!

I made a project just recently about freezing time in After Effects. It sucks and I know it. I just kind of made it in a hurry because I was running out of patience as I always do cause I'm doing it on a laptop and it's kind of slow. Also, the camera that I used is a digital camera with dimensions of 320x240. I wish I had a better camera. It's not cool but hey, it's a start. I learned this from videocopilot(the best site ever). So here it is...

Who Are You?

Conflict

I'm having a hard time right now between Illustrator and After Effects. I'm always tempted to view tutorials for after effects when I see one. It then diverts my attention back to after effects and lose my focus in Illustrator. So, I'll go with whatever pleases me. hahaha...

I've also started to download symbols from deviantart. It's a great website for digital designs. A lot of pictures, graphics, photoshop brushes, and a lot more about art. So check out the website and there are a lot of free stuff there. :-?

Illustrator

Right now I'm learning illustrator so I could get started with making my characters that I'm going to animate in after effects. It's really taking a lot of my time and I'm already excited to make my cartoon skit.

Illustrator is like photoshop but for me, it's more of like drawing things as vectors, they don't lose detail even if you scale them up. It still gives you sharp edges not like in photoshop where the picture would pixelate. So I'm gonna continue watching the tutorials! :-?

Learning After Effects

I'm still trying to learn more about after effects and it's taking longer for me to make my projects than I expected. There are a lot to learn and remember and I can't seem to remember most of what I've learned. Must be "short term memory loss". However, I'm trying to start from animating cartoons because I don't have a good video camera right now and videos are nice to edit if they are high quality which in my case is out of my league.

So what I'm trying to do is to start a 1-3 minute animation in cartoons and see what I'm capable of. I'm having a hard time thinking of what my characters would look like and the plot of my animation. So I'm researching on the net but can't seem to find a good topic. I'm still trying though. I'm also learning from some cool websites and would like you to check it out also.

• Creativecow.net - a lot of tutorials here from a lot of sources
  
• allbetsareoff.com - a good site with cool and useful tutorials
  
• videocopilot.net - the best site for me and my mentor

So I hope I could start animating my cartoon and hope to post it here soon. :-?

After effects

As I've said earlier, after effects is really an amazing program. I'd convince you to try it and you too will be amazed on what you could do with it. I think a lot of people will be discouraged the first time they see after effects because of its overwhelming array of tools that can get you thinking, "What now?". I got the overwhelmed and discouraged the first time I looked at after effects' interface but because I was amazed of what it could as to what I've seen in the net, I was really determined to learn about it.

So I started gathering the resources I needed and got all of them in the net. I started out at youtube, the most popular video resource of the net these days. I searched for after effects and a lot of results came back as I expected. I didn't know where to start so I clicked on one of the videos not knowing what to get. I didn't start out reading articles or help files because I hate reading especially if I'm reading from my monitor. It makes me sleepy in under 5 minutes of reading and dizzy in under 3 minutes. I'm also bored because if I'm reading, nothing moves or it's so dull but when I'm watching video tutorials or pictures, it makes learning after effects easier and more convenient.

There are a lot videos on youtube but the quality and contents are not as convincing and not as educational for me. I needed more. So I turned to yahoo's search engine(I prefer yahoo than google's because it's much easier for me to type). So in yahoo, I typed After effects tutorials and as usual millions came up. I looked at all the web pages that came up in page 1 of the search but found nothing convincing or worth it. So I looked further and I guess it was the 3rd set of results that got me lucky. That's also when I learned that if nothing good comes up in the first page, there are better things on the next results. I had the mentality that after I search, I only look at the first set of results and I don't look any further. So this experience told me, you won't always be lucky the first time around. Okay, so now I clicked a result with the website named videocopilot.net. It didn't hit my mind that this would be the site I'm looking for when I saw the site name. I couldn't see a resemblance with after effects but I didn't judge the site by it's cover so I looked further.

I was all smiles when I saw the tutorial videos especially the most recent post. So I started opening the tutorials and saw what I needed. I got hooked to this site and it was all about videocopilot after that. There are a lot of useful things at this site. The first thing I noticed about the tutorials, the guy talking/ teaching is not boring to listen to. He's like a professor in a classroom with interested students in him because he knows how to throw those punch lines out of nothingness. He know's when to joke around in the tutorial and when to get serious. His name is Andrew Kramer. I haven't looked at his profile yet but he's a great at making tutorials. So if ever you're interested in learning after effects I'd recommend you start out at his website and you'll be learning in no time. I'll stop right here because after a few weeks when I started with after effects, I lost interest because my computer is toooo slow to render my compositions. I just got interested again about 2-3 months ago from writing this blog.