I’m presenting After Effects and Cinema 4D at FMX 2013 with Maxon in April.
You can purchase tickets for FMX here. It promises to be an exciting lineup of 3D art and visual effects. Confirmed FMX highlights include:
Cloud Atlas, Life of Pi, Skyfall, The Croods, Crysis 3. I hope to see some of you there.
Vimeo have just announced access to their new Looks Enhancer so you can enhance Vimeo videos instantly with professionally designed video effects based on industry standard effects.
Vivoom is the core technology behind Vimeo’s enhancer, you can find out more about it here.
I worked on this project as creative director, designing presets for Vivoom with a great team of international designers – I hope you like what we came up with. You can now apply visual effects by me and other artists, directly to your videos in Vimeo. It’s a bit of fun and no substitute for using effects in purpose-built applications but it uses the same technology as used by major visual effects studios – there’s lot of power under the hood! You can try these new looks out free on your videos for the next 30 days.
I’ll be presenting After Effects and Cinema 4D in the Adobe Theater at Broadcast Video Expo 2013 in London between the 26th and 28th of February.
Here are links to some of my Tutorials that cover working with After Effects and Cinema 4D. I’ll be expanding on these at the event.
Once again Adobe will bring its comprehensive suite of creative tools and services to the BVE audience in its dedicated Adobe Theatre on the show floor. The Adobe Theatre timetable can be found at www.bvexpo.com/adobe
Adobe’s experts will be on hand to discuss the advances that have been made in broadcast and production technology with Adobe’s comprehensive suite of tools and services for video content delivery, including Creative Cloud which makes it easier and more affordable to access all of Adobe’s production related tools. The theatre will also present demonstrations of After Effects and Premiere Pro.
In addition, a selection of Adobe’s hardware and software partners feature on the agenda. Maxon will be showing the slick interop between After Effects and Cinema 4D; EVS will talk about its advanced integration between Premiere Pro and EVS servers for fast-turnaround production; Dalet has created the Xtend panel module for Premiere Pro; Dell underpins Adobe’s software with its high performance T- and M- series desktop and mobile workstations; and NVIDIA powers high end capabilities using the latest Kepler technology on Quadro and Tesla graphics hardware.
Adobe will also be on Stand L16 where visitors can take a look at product demonstrations and participate in a prize draw to win a year’s subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud.
Full details of BVE’s entire seminar program can be found here, together with up-to-the-minute news about all aspects of the show. Information is also available across social media on twitter.com/bvexpo, Facebook, Google+ and LinkedIn. Visitors can also download the BVE 2013 App at www.bvexpo.com/app
I’d just like to celebrate a momentous occasion by saying Happy 20th Birthday After Effects. It may seem odd to wish a software application birthday greetings but After Effects is so much more than just an app. It’s the great team of people who build it, the strong user community that support it, the network of professionals who push it’s boundaries to new directions, the third-party community who provide extra functionality and take risks with user-demands and of course the company who bought it and nourished it, and allowed the original team enough freedom to develop it into the De Facto motion graphics application, bar none.
After Effects has a life of it’s own and she has her own personality. She is intelligent, good-looking, hard-working, courageous, funny, belligerent, stubborn, creative, inventive, reliable, naughty, reckless and smart – who could resist such a lethal combination? Not me, I was smitten as soon as I animated one of her properties! I’ve seldom looked back.
Before After Effects (BAE) I would go from job to job, sticking at them for a maximum of two years before getting bored and moving onto the next thing. I’ve been dishwasher, kitchen assistant, chef, prop-maker, model-maker, airbrush artist, cartoonist, deejay, sound engineer but none of them fulfilled me. After Effects did, it offered me so much creative flexibility I would never be bored again. In fact she still throws up endless ideas and new ways of working each time I delve into her timeline, it’s like After Effects has become an extension of my brain. I lose myself in her, and I love it.
To celebrate this occasion I’m giving away some of my latest animation presets in my newsletter. Check out the movie above to see them in action;
These are used in the image illustrating this article and are made with native After Effects features (no additional software required). I’ll also be sharing some tips and tricks so if you don’t want to lose out, please subscribe here.
I could go on but there are many people who I’d like to thank for my career and inspiration. I can’t name them all but special shout-outs go to the entire After Effects team past and present. In particular I’d like to thank these Adobe people; Dave Simons, Dan Wilk, Todd Kopriva, Steve Forde, Kevin Monahan, Jim Guerard, Michael Coleman, Steve Kilisky, Mansi Grover, Eve Hatton, Rory Duncan, Mark Harrison, Mitch Wood, David Trescot, Al Mooney, Bill Hensler, Bruce Bowmann, Bruce Bullis, Ton Fredricks, Karl Lee Soule, Jason Levine, Johan Jonker, Erica Schisler, Amacker Bullwinkle, Nina Ramos, Ellen Wixted, Michael O’Neil, Jane Birch, Michelle Galina, Simon Hayhurst, Simon Williams, Matthew Gyves, Niels Stevens, Eric McCashey, Robin Charney and Dawn Osbourne. there are countless others – I thank you all.
I’d also like to add a big thanks to all the plug-in developers who helped push the product to where it is today (you know who you are). Also to the script-geniuses (or is that genii?) at AEscripts.com.
And finally a special thanks go to René Hedemyr for the amazing Media-Motion list where I met all my AE-pals and learned all about the application from some of the best in the business including Trish Meyer, Chris Meyer, Brian Maffit and countless others. I love this community. Thank you all.
Happy Keyframing!
It’s not like me to be subtle but here ‘s my Subtle Blurs Collection for Sapphire Edge V2.
Sometimes you don’t want to overwhelm a shot and you just need a subtle effect. This month my collection provides you with more gentle blurs, some combined with motion.
These presets are free to download at FX Central for anyone who owns Sapphire Edge software.
Vector shape layer of a Skull – one of the free presets
I’ve created a new set of Halloween presets for After Effects. These presets are for native After Effects plug-ins and include particle effects, vector shape layers and expressions.
3D beveling & extrusion applied to the vector shape layer
You can download these presets free of charge by registering at my new website Effect Cafe – a resource for creative people like you. It’s free to join and my aim is to provide as much free content as possible for my members.
I’d love to see what you do with these presets so please post your results to me on Twitter.
Here are some examples of movies I created using these presets;
07 Skull Trace 1 from Angie Taylor on Vimeo.
Dripping Blood from Angie Taylor on Vimeo.
Skullduggery with Particles from Angie Taylor on Vimeo.
