During the winter of 2020 I enrolled into a 3 month After Effects expression course by School of Motion called "Expression Session". I wanted to develop myself and expand my knowledge of After Effects by learning how to write code to drive my animations.
An exercise on creating the effect of atmospheric perspective using the linear() expression. The position of the plane was the driver for the amount of blur and color change of the mountains in the distance. No keyframes were used to animate this piece.
School of Motion provided beautiful designs for each exercise. The exercises focused on a specific piece of code we learned about during a video lesson.
The main focus of this exercise was to animate the piece and make sure everything keeps working if the photo, texts and the rest of the content would change.
So we used code to calculate heights and distances to make it work.
Every student had a personal teaching assistant that guided us through the course. They gave in depth feedback and suggestions on how to improve. This really motivated me to get the most out of the exercises.
We didn’t only learn how to animate using code. This data visualisation graph shows data provided from an external JSON file. I imported the data file into After Effects and programmed the graphical elements to represent the file data content accordingly for a clear overview.
At the end of the course I had to use all my newly acquired knowlegde to animate a fake user interface (FUI) of a fishing boat on the ocean.
All animation is driven by the position and speed of the boat, connected to the distance beteween the boat and fishes.
I never thought I would be able to do this before starting the course.
The final project of Expression Session. Everything is animated by using only 6 animation keyframes and lots of code.
Not only did the course teach me how to use code to my advantage for complex animation, but it also taught me how to work more efficient and I didn’t expect that when I signed up. I feel I can take on a whole new level of animation projects.
