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Overview

This is a 5 day Course

You are proficient in After Effects with creating comps and keyframe animation, you understand Layers and pre-comps. You effectively use Effects and Pre-sets. You have the animation skills equivalent to those delivered by the Adobe After Effects Level I & II courses.

But when you make use of an Expression you are not so comfortable? You see them in some Effects and Pre-sets and many Youtube tutorials on making WOW effects, but don’t understand why they work and what else you can do with expressions.

This is the course for you. Starting from the beginning you will understand how to use the Expression Editor and discover the hidden power of AAE when using Expressions.

No programming experience is required or assumed as this course starts you from the beginning.

Using extensive exercise you will leave the course with a toolbox of expressions that execute in sequence that allow you to do animations that keyframe animation alone just can’t do or is so complex nobody can fix or change it when it needs editing.

Extensive Step-by-Step notes are included along with all the exercises in completed so you have a reference for that type of animation.

This course does not cover Selection and Iteration as they are the core topics of the follow on course AAE Expression Animation Level II – Full Tilt. 

Audience

You are already a motion graphic designer and need to expand your MGX skill set or supervise motion graphics designers and need to understand what programming Expressions requires from MGX designers. 

Skills Gained

  • You finish this course understanding the programming paradigm used by After Effects for its programming language.
  • You can design Expression code that has multiple statements that execute in sequence.
  • Use expressions to achieve animations not possible or very difficult to achieve using Keyframes

Prerequisites

  • You are already capable of creating a Motion Graphic composition and use Keyframes for animation of the elements of the composition.
  • You do not need/have any programming experience.
  • Understand syntax error messages and debug syntax errors
  • Create syntactically correct expressions for a variety of AA Expressions that animate layers.

Outline

• The Why, The What & The How of Basic Expressions

• Opening the Expression Editor

• Is There a Constantly Changing Time Value?

• A Clock That Is A Clock?

• Connecting an Expression to the Slider Controller

• Value Returned By expression Overrides Initial Value Set in Property field(s)

• How Do I Know What Values Are Stores Against A Property?

• Key Language Elements

• How Do I Access attributes & methods?

• What Are Arrays & Multidimensional Properties?

• What Are Vectors?

• Indices & Labels

• Time Travel Without a Blue Police Box!

• Expression errors

• // I’ll Take That As a Comment

• Basic Sequence Programming with loop Method

• Loop Family Exercises

• Making Use of Initial Values In Expressions 

• Preparation

• Process

• Initial Value, Isn’t Completely Ignored

• Using the Property value Variable.

• Useful Scenario:

• What about values that can go Negative?

• Making The Pick Whip Work For You

• The Data Structure ARRAY

• Variables as Data Temporary Storage Containers

• More On wiggle Work With Arrays & Variables

• Loop() With Arrays & Variables & The Graph Editor

• Linking Layers But Introducing a Time Lag for Following Layers

• Self Scaling Text

• Introduction to Layer index

• Moving Action With Less Than a Handful of Expressions

• The Interpolation Methods

• Housekeeping

Talk to an expert

Thinking about Onsite?

If you need training for 3 or more people, you should ask us about onsite training. Putting aside the obvious location benefit, content can be customised to better meet your business objectives and more can be covered than in a public classroom. Its a cost effective option. One on one training can be delivered too, at reasonable rates.

Submit an enquiry from any page on this site, and let us know you are interested in the requirements box, or simply mention it when we contact you.

All $ prices are in USD unless it’s a NZ or AU date

SPVC = Self Paced Virtual Class

LVC = Live Virtual Class

Please Note: All courses are availaible as Live Virtual Classes

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