After Effects tutorial day 1

Our first After Effects workshop was a very gentle introduction to the interface and some of the basic tools and preset effects. After Effects is much less scary when you have somebody to hold your hand through it!

We were given several pieces of footage (A DJ, a coloured background and some text that we'd created within Photoshop and imported) and a basic soundtrack and shown how to combine them into one composition. We were introduced to keyframes which allowed us to apply some very simple animation to the text layer.

Today's instruction resulted in this monstrosity:

Disregarding my flagrant abuse of lighting effects, I did find the lesson very helpful in familiarising myself with After Effects' initially terrifying interface. I'm not confident with it by any stretch of the imagination but I'm at least comfortable enough to open the program without running away and screaming.