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Download: Per-Version AE Icons for Windows
July 21, 2016
Because I write scripts, I keep a whole bunch of different versions of After Effects installed. This can get a little unwieldy, considering the icons don’t change much between versions! With this in mind, I quickly whipped up some alternate AE icons for Windows (I don’t know much about icons on MacOS, so no idea what size/formats are needed, sorry!). They’re fairly pixely, just trying to keep the same dimensions and form factor of the existing. In the zip, there…
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Preset: Shape Layer Inner Stroke
August 3, 2015
Shape Layers. Strokes. You know how they work– add a stroke, and it’ll increase in width both internally and externally from the path. But what if you want to preserve the outer edge of your path, adding strokes internally only (a la Illustrator?)
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Preset: Point on a Circle
In a throwback to Points Along A Line from several years back, here’s a quick expression for ya– “Point on a Circle.” Straightforward, yeah? Yeah.
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Preset: linear() – Syncing Precomp Audio to Main
February 18, 2014
The Idea OK, so, you’re working on an amazing infographic piece slated to become the best thing out there since that Stuxnet video. You’ve got your master comp with the audio bed in place, and have a series of precomps w/ audio & graphics sequenced and arranged together in your main composition. You’re working away on your project, have everything in each precomp chapter timed out and synced properly with the audio, and then… your client wants to re-record the…
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Download: Bacteria Text
October 16, 2013
Hey! So it’s been way too long (though it always does seem to be, no?), and in the meantime I managed to spend 5 weeks overseas traveling around East Asia, as well as a week spent in Albuquerque, NM for a motion-related conference. Lots of fun in both, lots of new friends & connections in the second. However! Before all this traveling around, I worked on a little infographic-style piece dealing with germs and bacteria. As part of this, I…
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Preset: Chunky Text Scrolling
April 16, 2013
The Idea You’re sitting at home, watching some awful* action movie in which our handsome Hollywood hero sits down at a computer, faced with a terminal-esque window and has to ENTER PASSWORD in order to be rewarded with the exalted, famed and fabled “ACCESS GRANTED.” Brilliant, right? Oscar material, right here. Well, something I notice so very often in these screens is that the animator just keyframes the y-position and calls it a day, whereas in any console I’ve seen,…
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Preset: Pose Flipping
September 10, 2012
The Idea I was recently working on a title sequence for an animated children’s film created in a storybook style (in the spirit of Shrek). To fit the style, all of the characters were animated as cutouts/puppets, with several poses for each character/prop drawn by the talented Peter Lee at Arc Productions. From there, I had to animate the scenes, which included finding an efficient way to cycle between distinct poses, creating the illusion of movement.
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Download: Intro to Expressions (AETO Recap)
June 28, 2012
Hey all! Last night I spoke at AETO, giving a primer on expressions and how they can be used to aid and enhance your workflow. I’m putting up the AEP I (had intended to have) used to work through the talk last night here, so that you can read through it at your own pace and, more importantly, play with these things yourself to see the different results you can get. As ever, if you have any questions/comments/concerns, feel free…
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Download: 3d Scroll Wheel
June 19, 2012
Hey! Really quick post this time– been working on quite a bit, haven’t had time to do any proper writeups but there should be lots coming in the next few weeks! Was working on an interface test and came up with this 3d scrolling wheel, which I was using it to demonstrate scrolling through a list of contacts/profiles. The text is done via Text Animation, and the side-circles are using 3d Stroke. If you don’t have the 3d Stroke plugin,…
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Preset: Snapping to Hex Grid
May 11, 2012
The Idea So last year about this time I was doing some motion & comp work for a pair of cinematics for a big ol’ video game. One of my shots involved having these indicators moving across a screen with a hexagonal tile grid, and the art director wanted the indicators to snap from one tile to the next, giving it a much choppier, digital feel. It took a while (longer than I’d care to admit, but alas) to get…
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