Learning in After Effects

As well as crafting most of the storyboards for our opening sequence, I was also chosen for the task of animating part of the sequence itself. In the style of 'Scott Pilgrim vs. the World' the sequence would include text (onomatopoeia) flashing on the screen as a key sound effect plays, so there is one instance where a 'Beep! Beep!' noise would flash on and off the screen in time with the noise coming out of the alarm clock.

Here is the opening sequence of Scott Pilgrim which I used for reference:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbEsSsiozNU

The words would have to move in a cartoony but believable and smooth way, so I attempted Adobe After Effects for the first time to animate this for our opening. Prior to this I had no experience with using After Effects and my initial feelings were that the software seemed complicated and daunting, even though I had created my own animations for pleasure before (mostly using stop-motion). I resourced to YouTube to watch tutorials from experienced After Effects users who had explained the basics, and the instructions were easy to follow and enabled me to teach myself afterwards how to work the software.