wiggle expression after effects keyframe preserve

Let machines do what they’re good at, so you can focus on designing, creating, and being a fun human. It will get the job done, but you’re missing powerful possibilities. Using After Effects without expressions is like spinning a power drill by hand. With some advanced expressions, I made the whole thing fill itself out. With one little expression, she could link the ProTable Comps to the Main Screen Comps and automate half of the deliverables. A clever designer could copy+paste from the spreadsheet to After Effects one entry at a time, saving a few seconds and avoiding typos along the way. I did the design work over an afternoon, got approval, then punched in some very important expressions.

I put the player info in a spreadsheet, and got to work. We agreed I would make a template for each screen, get them approved, then proceed to fill-in-the-blanks for every player. “Every headshot needs the player’s name, number, hometown, major, and academic year,” they said. So now we’re looking at sixty headshots to deliver. There’s the main screen, which is like a giant TV, and the ProTable, which is a long, wide strip in front of the press / announcers table. “The arena has two screens with different dimensions,” they explained. You know, these thingsįor their Mens’ and Womens’ Basketball teams, we were looking at something like thirty players.

A couple years ago, a local university athletics client called me up to do post-production on their moving headshots.

What Happened When I Embraced AE Expressions? My Adobe Premiere tips were quite a hit, so today I have four super easy expressions to get you started using your first After Effects expressions TODAY!Īt the very least, you should know what expressions are capable of doing, so you can call on an expert when streamlining a process might save you hours of work. To many filmmakers, looking at lines of code may not feel “creative,” but film production attracts people with artistic and technical minds, so I think with me guiding the way you can imagine how these tools can help make our work better and faster.

You can find some less advanced material on my resources page, and an introduction to using VFX in small budget films in this lecture. If you’ve just gotten comfortable in After Effects, adding expressions can be an intimidating step – if you aren’t yet comfortable in After Effects, it’s double scary 🙂Īfter Effects is animation and visual effects software sold as part of the Adobe Creative Cloud suite. Even when my visual effects and motion graphics skills became pretty advanced, I had memorized only a handful of tricks and was hesitant to venture out. I put off learning After Effects expressions for years.

Wiggle expression after effects keyframe preserve