We’ll kickstart the After Effects Bootcamp with a quick introduction to Adobe After Effects’ interface with all its bits and bobs. Along with the interface, we’ll also have a brief introduction of video terminologies like dimensions, fps, aspect ratios and proportions etc.

And to gel it all together and get yourself acclimatized to After Effects, we’ll do a quick sample project. Where we’ll have an overview of the timeline concepts including dealing with compositions, layers, timing, and viewers. And finally, we’ll have a look at customizing and saving workspaces in After Effects.

Now that we’re familiarized with the building blocks, we’ll learn the Six Primary Foundations of After Effects including keyframe animation, and project organization. We’ll do an in-class sample project where we’ll animate a few of the Adobe Illustrator artworks.

And finally, we’ll discuss some of the video terminologies i.e. codecs, bitrates, framerates, file formats, interlacing and pull-downs etc. before we learn to render out videos using After Effects’ native renderer and Adobe Media Encoder (standalone rendering engine).

Shape layers give us some of the most advanced animation functionalities in the vector realm. All thanks to various characteristic animation properties and powerful animation engine. Shape animations are literally the core of motion graphics in After Effects.

And that combined with After Effect’s layer styles for detailing and Effects & Presets, takes your motion graphics to the next level. Week 03 of the After Effects Bootcamp will be all about vector shapes and their relationship with Adobe Illustrator. Plus, we’ll spice it up with masks & mattes and parenting.

After Effects has a pretty sophisticated set of typographic tools. That allow you to create some of the most amazing title graphics and layouts. We’ll learn about type, its principles and animation controls. That will lead you far beyond choosing a fancy typeface and moving it sideways.

Quite like shape layers, After Effects’ type layers have their own powerful animation engine. On Week 04 of the After Effects Bootcamp, we’ll have a thorough overview of how type layers allow you to animate some of the craziest title graphics. Furthermore, we’ll learn to convert text into shapes and animate them as shape layers.

After spending about 4 weeks learning the basic and intermediate concepts of After Effects, you’ll be well versed with it. And that will be about time when we take your knowledge to the next level. With After Effects Bootcamp in full swing, we’ll unveil the power of different types of keyframes along with the graph editor.

Our main project will be the good old ball bounce. But this time it’ll be full blown environment where we will not only be animating the ball bounce, but we’ll do that based on the principles of animation. This project will be the sum up of both technical and applied animation knowledge.

With decent knowledge of motion graphics and understanding of masks and mattes, we’ll get into the VFX realm. Our first session begins with rotoscoping and its principles using shape masks. Then we’ll have a look at chroma keying with matte manipulation and spill suppression.

Finally, we’ll have a look at the After Effects’ native 2D trackers and point tracking features. Having gone through tracking, we’ll take the same principles and approach to stabilization. We’ll also have a brief look at point-tracking based stabilization and Warp Stabilizer VFX.

So far in the After Effects Bootcamp, we’d have been dealing mostly with 2D content. Be it the motion graphics or the video clips. But this week, we’ll be adding another dimension into the mix. We’ll have a look at the After Effects 3D environment (also known as 2.5D) and virtual cameras.

Having understood the concept of tracking in the previous week and being introduced to virtual cameras in week 07, we’ll combine both the concepts and introduce 3D Camera Tracking. This is something that’s also known as Camera Solving or Match Moving in After Effects.

Our final lecture of the After Effects Bootcamp, will address the third-party plugins that are packaged with After Effects. Our first project will involve planar tracking and rotoscoping in Mocha Ae with screen replacement, compositing, and color matching in After Effects. This project will be the amalgamation of several VFX concepts we’ve learnt so far.

Now finally, we’ll go through the workflow of preparing a 3D model in Cinema 4D Lite and doing a multipass composite in After Effects using the Cineware plugin. And that folks marks the end of our 8-Week long journey of learning the amazing After Effects.