From the course: After Effects Guru: Templates for Premiere Pro and After Effects

Breaking down your template idea - After Effects Tutorial

From the course: After Effects Guru: Templates for Premiere Pro and After Effects

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Breaking down your template idea

- Now, before you begin to create your template, it's important to have a plan of action. Are you creating the template to be used by your fellow colleagues? Or maybe you're wishing to sell your template online. Several questions are going to need to be asked before you begin to create it. In this movie, we'll break down some tips to get you up and running. When breaking down your After Effects template idea, I think there's some important things to keep in mind. Some of those things simply just involve, who are you making this for? Now if you're making this to be sold, you're probably going to want to do a ton of research on what's already out there. There are some very aggressive After Effects template sites. Some to note are Videohive.net, you've got other sites specifically geared towards After Effects templates if you simply just do a search on Google. And studying those templates and maybe finding some of the best-selling ones, as well as some of the ones that seem to be used the most might be beneficial. Now if you're using this for a work environment, then your layout of the template is going to be completely different. Maybe it could be based on the way a certain brand needs to carry out how logos fly in, or how text flies in, particular fonts that you're going to use. So first thing you want to do is always ask yourself, who are you making this for, and who do you want to utilize your project, your template? Now, who will be using your After Effects Project is another thing, or just a very similar question to the first one in terms of who you're making this for. You might be making it for a company, but is the After Effects user a beginner? Is he an intermediate? Is he an advanced After Effects user? You can change how those people access the template, as you've seen in the first couple chapters, as well as what you show them through some simple neat organization tricks, as well as just asking yourself some questions before you dive into the creation of your template. Now, what do they need to control, is an extremely important question as well. In some cases, you want to give your user just enough to control, not too much, or not too little. You also want to make it easier for them to control your template. So asking yourself ahead of time what they need to control in most instances can get you to a good ground base of how you're going to go about to create that template. Does it need to be complicated? A lot of people will go out to make a very shiny, amazing-looking template. But some of the best-sold templates, and most-used templates online, are in fact the most simplistic. They're lower-thirds that come on screen from left to right, or up and down, or in fact, they're something that are used to replace a logo with a very simple camera animation. So the questions is, does it need to be complicated, or can it be solved by creating a simple After Effects project, with some simple replacement methods. Do they have access to that font, effect, and version of AE, I think, is an extremely important question as well. As a designer, you might be wanting to use a particular font that's not available through After Effects, that you have the rights to. You might want to use a certain effect that's a third-party plugin, and you might be tempted to use the most recent version of After Effects. All this is all good. if you're selling this, this is going to potentially frustrate your user base if they don't have access to that font, that third-party effect, or that version of After Effects. So in some cases, using an earlier version of After Effects, making sure that you only use effects that ship with After Effects, as well as fonts that ship with After Effects, can get you a long way to not having people contact you with these missing assets. This might be completely different depending on your work flow if you're making this template for people at work. But I think these questions also need to be considered there as well. Now does it need to be unique? Again, sometimes unique templates will definitely stick out from the rest, especially on social media sites, or basically when you're selling it online. But in many cases, if you're just trying to create something for a functioning purpose of being able to alter that as much as possible, or give a junior After Effects user, they're used to basically, just switch some text with a very functional lower-third template, it might not need to be as unique as you want to set it out to be. And in some cases, your guidelines might just not allow you to be that unique. Now, is it self explanatory, a huge question that goes all the way down from organizing your template, to the way that you present people with how they can use it, i.e., with a PDF, or maybe a video explanation, the way that they look at your After Effects project files. If you put yourself in the position of the person who's going to be using your After Effects project, think about, is it easy for them to use in that light? And last thing is, how do you guide that user to a pleasant experience? And by asking the questions above, hopefully you'll get there to this final answer. So these are just a couple things to keep in mind when breaking down your template idea that can steer you in the right direction for the template that will suit your needs.

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