Have you always wanted to learn how to add cool effects to videos? Are you wondering if you could turn that into a career? The answer is yes! After Effects is part of Adobe Creative Cloud, a collection of tools that help you explore your creativity. You can use After Effects to create motion graphics and animated effects using photographs, drawings, or videos. After Effects is used in the film and television industry, advertising, marketing, and graphic design.
Start a New Career
After Effects is the industry standard for creating motion graphics and animated effects. Learning to use this powerful tool can help you start an interesting and rewarding career in video production and special effects. Special Effects Artists and Animators use tools like After Effects to create digital animation for films, television, or video game development. The U.S. Department of Labor Statistics Occupational Outlook Handbook reports 60,000 jobs in this field with an expected growth rate of 5 percent in the next ten years. The median annual salary is around $79,000.
If you are interested in working in the film and television industry, you will need to learn tools like After Effects. Some people enroll in college or art school, but it is possible to get into the industry without a college degree. Create a demo reel of work and put it on a portfolio website to show people what you can do. Moving to an area where films are made like Los Angeles, New York City, or Atlanta will get you closer to the action. Once there, join a professional association or union to help connect with upcoming jobs. Going to film festivals is another way to make new connections.
Many people who are new to motion graphics find their first jobs creating “lower thirds, ” text and graphics located in the lower third of the screen. This is usually identification information. In a newscast, it could be scrolling headlines, the name of a person appearing on the screen, or breaking news. In a televised sports event, the lower third gives the names of the teams playing, the score, and other relevant information. Another role for Motion Graphics Designers is creating animated channel identification icons.
Improve Your Video Skills
If you are already working with video in your job or want to start a career as a Video Editor, learning After Effects can help you with your current job. Knowing how to add animation to your videos can open up new opportunities. Camera Operators shoot footage for movies, television programs, documentaries, music videos, and news and sports shows. After the raw footage is shot, Video Editors go to work to create a product that tells a story by making cuts, moving clips, deciding what frames to keep and what to get rid of, and inserting transitions.
After this video is created, especially with Adobe Premiere Pro, it can be imported into After Effects to add to it. One of the things After Effects does really well is to create motion graphics, which are often used for opening titles and end credits in films. The earliest title sequences were often simply static text that was photographed. With programs like After Effects you can make text move, change size, give it texture, and make it turn into something else entirely.
You can add many effects to a video using After Effects. Compositing is the process of combining images to create a new image. You can use compositing to put different takes together to create a better shot or add people to a crowd scene. Another common use for compositing is to replace a green screen. The original video footage is shot with an actor in front of a green screen and then that screen is replaced with a chosen background using After Effects during post-production.
Compositing is also used to replace any screens in the video. Trying to film a screen on a cell phone, computer, or television often leads to a flickering image, exposure levels that don’t match, and other problems. Plus, the director might simply want something else there. After Effects can remove the screen and replace it with whatever image is called for.
Another animation technique in After Effects is called rotoscoping. This is actually quite an old practice that in the early days of animation called for shooting footage of live actors and then tracing over the film to get more life-like movements for animated characters. Tools like the Rotoscoping Brush in After Effects makes rotoscoping easier.
Motion tracking is another After Effects animation technique that allows you to insert a computer-generated image into your video to take your work to another level. Motion tracking can make it look like an actor is interacting with an object or creature that wasn’t on the original footage. This is how the alien creatures in science fiction films are created. You can also use this technique for fantasy weapons or items that don’t exist in the real-world.
Even if you don’t want to create a fantasy landscape After Effects can help you clean up your footage. It can stabilize camera movement to get rid of a shaky scene. After Effects can match the color between shots or change the color quality if you prefer it to be brighter or darker. After Effects can make your videos look better.
You can also use After Effects to add sounds like a door closing, a bird singing, or other environmental noises to enhance your video. You can remove or tone down unwanted sounds too, as well as fix dialog and change background noise. After Effects can also add a musical soundtrack to your project.
Finally, After Effects lets you add animation to your video. You can import photographs or drawings and then use animation tools called plugins to add different effects like squashing or stretching, flames, smoke, particles, raindrops, and many more. There are thousands of plugins created to be used with After Effects, many of which are free to use, and the program allows you to create libraries of preferred effects so you can easily find them to use again. If your job involves making videos for advertisements, social media, training films, or informational materials, learning After Effects can add more value to your productions.
According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, Video and Film Editors earn a median wage of $60,000 per year, and the field is expected to grow by 12 percent during the next decade. There are currently around 82,000 people employed in the video and film editing field in the United States, with more than 10,000 working in California and 6,000 in New York.
Add a Skill to Your Digital Marketing Resume
If you work as a Digital Marketer you know how important video is to selling products and services on social media and websites. Videos increase sales by 86 percent. Movement catches the user’s attention better than static images. Videos also help you connect with customers by telling a story. For example, if you are selling a beaded dress, the photograph and written description of the item attracts attention, but seeing how the fabric moves and how the beads glitter in the light lets the user imagine how they would look in the dress, where they would wear it, and how it would make them feel.
Digital Marketers also use video to give customers a behind-the-scenes look at the company and the people who work there. This shows the story of the brand instead of telling it and increases customer engagement. This kind of video is especially successful on social media.
Learning to create videos, edit them, and add animation and effects using tools like After Effects will make you more valuable as a Digital Marketer. You may be able to convince the company you are working for to pay for training courses to help you learn to create videos. You are already working for them and after your training they won’t have to hire someone outside to make videos. You already understand the brand and the vision of the company.
If you are thinking of learning video production and animation with a plan to change to a career as a Digital Marketer, this could be a good move for you. Digital marketing is one of the fastest growing careers out there with a lot of flexibility. Employment website Glassdoor.com reports an average annual salary of $65,000 for Digital Marketing Specialists. Digital Marketing Managers earn an average of $78,000 a year. These are averages of salaries voluntarily reported to Glassdoor. Many Digital Marketers start out as freelancers and either go on to get jobs with advertising agencies and companies or start their own firm.
Stay Current in Graphic Design
Another reason to learn Adobe After Effects is to keep up with current trends in graphic design. If you are already working as a Graphic Designer, you might want to take a class in After Effects to learn how to create motion graphics. You already understand the principles of graphic design like balance, contrast, proportion, emphasis, repetition, hierarchy, white space, pattern, variety and unity. With After Effects you can add movement.
Motion graphics are text and images that move. After Effects excels at creating motion graphics. For example, rather than presenting a client with a static bar graph, you can make the bars rise up to their levels. You can make a company logo turn around or get bigger. Motion gets ideas across more successfully because it can call a user’s attention to where you want them to look. You can make a button shake or get bigger to indicate that the user needs to click on it to take the next step. Motion graphics can be entertaining and make the experience more fun and engaging for the user.
After Effects works in layers, so each part of a design is created separately. That way if you want to change a part, you don’t have to worry about how that change will affect the rest of a design because it won’t. Using After Effects’s many tools, you can create shapes, add color, align items horizontally and vertically, create masks that allow you to alter the visibility in parts of a design, and add text. You can customize your workspace to your liking and Ae keeps track of the tools you have used to help you stay organized.
After you have created a design, you can make it move with the many animation tools in After Effects. You can also work in 3D and add textures and visual effects. Learning After Effects can help you create much more effective designs.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports 265,000 people employed as Graphic Designers in the United States earning a median annual wage of $50,000. There are around 20,000 Graphic Designers in the New York metropolitan area, 16,000 in Los Angeles, and 8,000 in Chicago.
Explore Your Creativity
Maybe you don’t want to learn After Effects to get a new job or get more out of your current one. Perhaps you simply want to work on your own projects and explore your creativity. With After Effects you can create your own animated videos.
Many people start by creating an image using Adobe Illustrator. This allows you to create vector files for animation and import them into After Effects. Unlike pixel files, vector files can easily be scaled up or down making them much easier to work with for animation.
Because After Effects is arranged in layers, it is easy to isolate each layer and work with it. You can create different effects in different layers of an image. For example, you can make the sun rise over a lake, ripples on water, and trees swaying in the wind all with different tools and plugins in After Effects.
After Effects is used for major films and small personal passion projects. After Effects was used to create the title sequence for Star Trek: Into Darkness and animation for Ender’s Game. The YouTube channel Action Movie Kid uses After Effects to portray his son as an action hero. The animated series Archer is also done with After Effects. Once you master this powerful tool, a world of creativity is waiting for your clicks.
You can find Artists who work with After Effects to create engaging motion graphics on platforms like Dribble, STASH, and Behance. Scroll through the examples of what others have done with After Effects to get inspiration for your own projects, then join a community to ask questions, share insights, and find support.