Dave Basulto talks to Harry Frank, Toolfarm Expert Series trainer for After Effects Expressions Series 1 bundle and they’re discussing Expressions!
Harry will have Series 2 out sometime soon, so if you haven’t checked out Series 1, you’ll want to do that first. It’s like the show Heroes. If you start watching at Episode 10, you’ll have no idea what’s going on.
This is by Valerio who creates professional templates that Toolfarm will be selling by the week’s end. They are really gorgeous templates and inexpensive. I’ll post a link when they’re up.
Ko Maruyama has posted a blog entry at Ninja Crayon about the training that is available for After Effects and happens to mention three of our Forum Experts, Harry J. Frank, John Dickinson and Dean Velez.
Harry’s training is available just this week and to say it’s selling well would be an understatement! After Effects Expressions hits a niche where there is really not a lot of training and Harry’s training is fun to watch and easy to absorb. It’s downloadable immediately and is affordable at just $29 for 60 minutes of Expressions training. It is designed for the designer, not the programmer, and it will take your Expressiophobia away.
John Dickinson’s Creative Background Design Series has also been very popular. John currently has six modules in his series and he uses some innovative techniques and explains several shortcuts that will help your workflow. John’s training is just $5 a pop and great for the beginner or seasoned veteran.
Dean Velez puts out training through his company, The Anvel. His training, The Anvel Industry Training for AE is incredible. I showed my class some of the training last semester and they were completely into it. People actually stuck around until the end of class instead of bagging class after an hour 
Just yesterday, Dean posted the following to our Expert Forum:
Hello Video, Film and Web guys and gals,
The Anvel has just posted 29 new royalty free and fully customizable After Effects 7.0 Professional projects ready for download.
The Projects all deal with Text and adding effects to text. They cover the letters A-Z ( Aura, Balls, Cosmic, Destroy, Electric, Extrude, Fire, Glimmer, Hose, Ice, Join, Killer, Laser, Magnify, Nature, Odor, Paint, Quartz, Road, Strange, Tear, Universe, Vile, Web, Wind, X-Ray, Yank, Zoom )
Some are render intensive…so prerender when you can.
Hope you enjoy them! and drop me a line to let me know which one is your favorite…mine is Killer.
Dean is always posting awesome free stuff every month or two, so you’d be doing yourself a big service to go to our forum and hang out. Ask some questions while you’re there and guys like Harry and John will answer your questions.
Ko also mentions Aharon Rabinowitz’s quality training. Aharon runs After Effects NY user group, which met last night and Toolfarm gave away Harry’s new training at the meeting. I hear the meeting was great, with Curious Pictures showing their Disney Channel program, Little Einsteins ("Come on! Wave your arms to make our ship fly faster!" and so you can hear some Vivaldi… oh, I’m sure you’ve seen it!)
Expressions Demystified… Written for the Designer
Harry J. Frank, freelance motion graphics artist, instructor and Adobe Certified Expert, goes over the basics of Expressions – Expressions for the average designer. Harry teaches you the terminology and the tricks and even explains a bit of basic trigonometry (but don’t worry, it won’t bring back repressed high school math class memories!) Before you know it you will be adding Expressions everywhere. This training will add value to your technique and expand your After Effects skillset.
All project files are included, along with a Quick Reference Guide to help you learn Expressions in the most efficient way possible. You’re not going to get this kind of quality training anywhere else and this series is ONLY available at Toolfarm.
This 3 part series on After Effects Expressions is available lesson by lesson. The bundle of the three lessons is available at a discount.
Harry has been a Toolfarm Forum Expert from about the time the Forums went up and runs Gray Machine, a very popular motion graphics site with tutorials and samples of work. Harry is also half of the relaunched AE Freemart.
A while back, I posted a slightly overly complex method of how to make a layer blink on and off. Just recently, I had an epiphany that I drastically overcomplicated it, as I often do as an animator that moonlights as a programmer. Try applying this newer expression to opacity:
blinkSpeed =10;
n = Math.sin(time*blinkSpeed);
if (n<=0) 0 else 100;
Math.sin(x) will always output a number between 1 and -1. As x increases, Math.sin(x) will output an oscillating series of numbers that go back and forth between 1 and -1, forever and ever. As x increases in speed (ie, how fast the numbers are changing), this series will increase in speed.
In the above expression, you see Math.sin(time*blinkSpeed) being assigned to a variable, n. In the next line, there is a simple if/else saying “If n is less than or equal to 0, pass the value of 0 opacity, otherwise pass the value of 100 to opacity.” As n oscillates back and forth to -1 and +1, the if/else statement is creating a value of either 0 or 100.
This results in a simple blink on and off.
It indeed should be simpler in AE, making an extruded shadow.. the kind you find in many NLE programs.
This uses the AE Type tool, and black solids with “Set Matte”. Each solid is offset 1 pixel in X/Y.
I’d recommend leaving this as its own comp, or placing your layers below the existing layers in this comp, as the expression is based on the layer number of the type.
A friend of mine was asking about easier ways to control depth of field in After Effects.
Although it isn’t complicated, AE cameras measure depth of field with a single number, measured in pixels. So, it isn’t very easy to visualize and estimate when and where
objects are in focus, aside from scrubbing the “Focus Distance” control and trying to put objects in focus by trial and error.
But, expressions come to the rescue. If we want focus distance to be equal to the distance between the camera and and exact, controllable point, we can do this. If we create a Null and use this as the point that we want in focus, we can add an expression to the Focus Distance to be equal to the length in pixels between the camera and the Null. Fortunately, there’s an expression term, “length” that retrieves the absolute distance between the anchor points of any two objects, regardless of position, rotation, scale, etc.
In the example here, the Focus Distance expression is:
length(thisComp.layer(“focusControl”).position, position)
So, it is the length between two numbers, think here in terms of length(a,b). The first number, via pickwhip, is the position of a Null called “focusControl”. The second number is shown as ‘position’. Being that this expression is on the camera’s Focus Distance, “position” in this case refers to the position of the camera. And that’s it!!! The expression will dynamically update the focus distance to be the exact distance between the Null and the camera. Just put the Null where you want something to be in Focus.
You could also just use the camera’s Point of Interest, with the expression like this:
length(pointOfInterest, position)
But, I like the Null, myself. As I often turn off the Point of Interest on my AE cameras.
Download the Focus Control project here
What does the encoded message say? Click the picture and find out! This is a little animation preset that displays random numbers and reveals your orignal source text when you change an expression slider.
Have you seen Harry’s Expressions Blog? He has 6 lessons up there now. Good stuff!
You probably noticed the lack of updates in the past week. I’ve been in New York City, first for NAB NY and then to a fabulous weekend with the folks at Maxon Computer, maker of Cinema 4D and BodyPaint.
At NAB NY I went to a training session with Marcus Geduld that explained some basic Expressions for After Effects, so I thought I’d share a bit of it with you. I learned a hell of a lot. I’m not the most math-oriented person (which I totally blame on two inept mathmatics teachers in high school who basically showed up too collect their paycheck and let student teachers teach their classes… no I’m not bitter! I did have a terrific math teacher in junior high. Thank you, Mrs. Simmons. Because of you, I can make my way through expressions.)
Alright, back on topic here… Let’s chat about Wiggle. Wiggle is fun to say and is one method of generating random movement without keyframes. Marcus gave a terrific example in the training session that showed how to use wiggle with the Write-on effect.
The values of wiggle are as follows.
wiggle(HOW OFTEN IN SECONDS,HOW MUCH FROM PRESENT POSITION)
Replace the words in all caps with numbers. For example, if you want it to wiggle once per second and move 250 from it’s current position, you’d do this:
wiggle(1,250)
So let’s apply this. First, create a screen-sized solid in black. Apply Write-on. To apply the expresson, hold down the option key and click on Brush Position parameter. It will add a default expression. Delete the default expression and type
wiggle(1,500)
You may need to adjust your Brush Size, Hardness and Brush Spacing.
For the Color setting of Write-on, set your color to 50% gray. Then apply this expression:
wiggle(1,0.5)
Watch it go! Wiggle will work with many parameters in After Effects.
Thank you, Marcus, for a terrific class.
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