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No Admin Access? Install AE Scripts Anyway!
November 10, 2020
Common freelance issue: you’re working in-house at some studio (or, in Covid times, remotely logging into a studio’s workstation), and you don’t have admin access to the computer– how are you going to install all of your favourite scripts, presets, and extensions?! Little known fact: on both MacOS and Windows, Adobe’s actually given us specific folders to install anything we’d like that doesn’t need Admin access. That’s right: you can stroll into Buck with your favourite scripts and install them…
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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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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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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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Preset: Points Along a Line
April 23, 2012
Things have been busy! I’m working on several cool projects at the moment, one of which led me to share some cool math with you guys. I’ve got two expressions that produce similar (yet different!) results– both define the position for a point along a line, though one is controlled by % completion from one point to the next (0-1), the other by the distance (in pixels) from the start point.
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