The language of motion graphics and effects - After Effects Tutorial

- Now let's go over some terms that are general to the work you do in After Effects but not unique to the application. Motion graphics is the art form in which graphics, which could be stills, videos, 3D animation, type or abstract elements you create with effects and other tools, are put into motion. Motion graphics styles range from infographics, which are meant to convey clear and specific information via animated images, to highly conceptual work that draws you in by showing you something you've never seen before. Animation and design are the core skills behind motion graphics but it can also make use of storytelling, illustration and visual effects. Visual effects has a lot of overlap with motion graphics but is specifically oriented toward realism and live-action footage. What we call visual effects, by the way, differs from special effects in movie credits. Those are the effects created live on set, like stuff blowing up, while visual effects occur only in post-production. Common visual effects you can create in after effects include green screen, rotoscoping, motion tracking, and color matching. Green screen is one common, generic term for shooting live-action and using color to create selections that have transparency with maximum detail in post-production. The green areas in the shot are replaced with backgrounds that are created separately, sometimes without using a camera at all. Green is useful for this because it is so mathematically pure on the computer yet so distinct from common foreground shades of flesh and hair. There are sophisticated green screen tools available in After Effects including the Academy Award-winning key light, which is included at no extra cost. Post-production is everything that happens after production, where the cameras roll. Computers have transformed this from what used to be a crude, chemical process to a highly specialized art form, that now includes, not only editing and sound, but elaborate visual effects, animation and color work. Rotoscoping is what you most often do when you need precise transparent selections and don't have green screen footage, or need to fix the footage you have. The process was invented by animator Max Fleischer back in 1915 when it involved projecting an image onto glass and then tracing over the image by hand, frame-by-frame. That painstaking frame-by-frame selection aspect is still what distinguishes roto today, despite many automation advantages such as Mocha for After Effects, Content-Aware Fill and Rotobrush, all of which are found in your copy of the application. Motion track is the art and science of matching the motion within a shot, recreating the precise 3D movement and perspective of the camera, or the detailed movement of a specific detail or object in the scene. After Effects includes a built-in camera tracker, point tracker, and the aforementioned planar tracker, Mocha for After Effects, as well as tools to stabilize the shot and replace unwanted objects. Color correction. Thanks to filters, common to mobile applications such as instagram, you're probably aware of what are usually called filters. Those are adjustments that change the look and feel of a photographed image. Adding a color look to moving images has really transformed what we see on screen in the 21st century. And it's now common for movie and video productions at all levels to have dedicated work done, shot-by-shot to adjust the color in a sophisticated way to give the final image a specific emotional impact. After Effects has many sophisticated third party color correction plug-ins, and includes Lumetri color effects. Compositing is the term for taking visual elements from multiple sources and combining them into a single shot that appears as if it were captured together. In After Effects, we work in what is called a composition, or comp, to create the shot. Each of the terms I've just described corresponds to a whole career that someone might spend a lifetime mastering, as well as a technique one might often do in After Effects. This site is full of resources to help you go further with any one of them.