How I started with motion design on After Effects: The unconventional approach
My story as an impatient learner
In 3+ years of my design career, I’ve always been fascinated by those designers who can put life into static designs. The design people around me, colleagues, friends etc were more of a visual designer then. As a new kid in the design world, I once asked one of my seniors, how the designers we see on dribbble come up with such cool & smooth animations and UI interactions. Obviously, this more than just simple gifs we make frame by frame on photoshop. He told me that he’s been trying to learn After Effects to create animations for a while now and it's not easy at all.
My first experience with After Effects and how I failed initially
This screen was enough to scare me at first glance. Questions started popping out in my mind, “what the heck is a composition”, “where can I find layer panel”, I also expected it to behave like Photoshop & Illustrator, why the hell pen tool is not selected on pressing P, why shortcuts aren’t same. There was absolutely no one in my circle, who could guide me to a systematic approach to learn this.
The patient guy approach
So I started learning with step by step conventional approach from a beginner tutorial series.
- Lesson 101: Welcome to After Effects
- Lesson 102: Getting familiar with the interface
- Lesson 103: What is a composition?
- …
- Lesson 192: Reward yourself if you have managed to reach here
Learning this way was too much time consuming and I wasn’t creating something worth sharing. So I gave up.
The impatient guy approach
I’ve always been an impatient kid, it was too much pain for me to go through 100+ videos first and then create something interesting. So, I tried this unconventional approach.
“I looked out for some interesting animation tutorials on Youtube and directly started implementing with no knowledge of After Effects interface whatsoever.
“Initially, it took me around 5–6 hours to implement a simple animation from a 20 minute tutorial. ”
This process was tough initially as I have to replay the tutorial video, again and again, to understand basic operations. But this approach was worth the effort as I have finally created something which I can show to my friends and be happy about it. Most importantly, it motivated me to create more.
Here is the link of the tutorial I followed.
The impatient guy approach is nothing but “Learn by Doing”. You learn the basics in the process of creating something.
What's stopping you?
Most of the designers who want to begin motion design don’t know where to start, how to start. My suggestion to them is just pick up an animation tutorial from Youtube and start implementing. Start with simple animations like text reveal, logo reveal etc. You’ll learn lot of basics and will get familiar with the interface in the process.
There will be cases like where you’ll be taking around 2 hours to make a simple animation but will later discover it can be done in 2 minutes only, but that’s what learning is, isn’t it?
Your time to implement will reduce significantly with practice also you’ll build a thinking ability to figure out how a complex animation will be implemented.
Don’t think much! Just grab a coffee and start
Trust me, After Effects is fun!
Here are some Youtube channels, which I recommend
I’ll be writing about motion design basics in my next story, that will be more of a tutorial series.
