Boy this winter has been long long looonggg. What have you been doing to keep busy? I’ve been working on learning and developing my motion design skills, and my biggest project so far was a water conservation animated YouTube ad, you can see a tiny clip of it in my Artist Blog 3 video, at time mark 8:44 sec.
How do you approach learning new skills? One of my favourite ways to learn a new skill is through a combination of Skillshare and Youtube. I tend to take a Skillshare class as my first base and then use YouTube to complement or troubleshoot since the response time on Skillshare isn’t very quick.
Here are some quick recommendations below:
Step 1: Into to After Effects and what you can use it for
Daniel Scott is a delightful, humorous, refreshing teacher and I thoroughly enjoyed his classes. Most teachers I’ve found are pretty good overall on Skillshare, but he’s two notches higher.
Skillshare Character Animation course by Fraser Davidson
Character Animation Creating Authentic Facial Expressions in Adobe After Effects
Professional Character Rigging & Design,
I used just a few parts of this course when I was trying to figure out how to change the face when moving the head side to side.
General Skillshare for After Effects
My big After Effects playlist on YouTube:
Character Rigging w/ Joysticks n Sliders
How to create a cartoon water effect
Good quick tutorial if you ever attempt to move your file and everything breaks:
(The answer is go to “collect files” under dependencies first. Then, if you’re like me and compress files to move them, make sure you move them out of that compressed folder before you open them again, else everything will always seem broken.)