After Effects basics tutorials by Andrew Devis

There are a lot of tutorials about After Effects. A lot. But it’s rather uncommon to find a tutorial (let alone a whole series of tutorials) that does a good job of actually teaching the basics.

I’ve done my best to collect the best of these rare and precious high-quality getting-started resources on this page.

Andrew Devis has added a tremendous wealth of new material in this category in his After Effects basics series on the Creative COW website. The series is good at introducing a wide range of After Effects features, but it’s especially strong regarding shape layers, which are native vector graphics items in After Effects.

Because I couldn’t find a convenient table of contents on the Creative COW website that gave a list of these tutorials in order, here’s a set of links to them:

1. Workspaces
2. Importing Assets
3. Creating Compositions
4. Importing Photoshop Documents (PSDs)
5. Naming & Organising
6. Previewing Your Work
7. Timeline Basics, part 1 , Timeline Basics, part 2
8. Timeline Basics 3 – Work area & layer shortcuts
9. Fitting Items and Creating Solids
10. Transforms
11. Animation 1 – Creating Keyframes
12. Animation 2 – Easing Keyframes
13. Motion Paths Part 1 – The Basics
14. Motion Paths Part 2 – Additional Tools
15. Motion Paths Part 3 – Masks & Paths
16. Parenting
17. Shape Layers Part 1
18. Shape Layers Part 2 – Gradients & Properties
19. Shape Layers Part 3 – Text & The Pen Tool
20. AE Basics 20: Shape Layers Part 4 – Merge Paths
21. Shape Layers Part 5 – Offset Paths
22. Shape Layers Part 6 – Pucker & Bloat
23. Shape Layers Part 7 – The Repeater Operator
24. Shape Layers Part 8 – Round Corner & Stroke
25. Shape Layers Part 9 – Trim Paths
26. Shape Layers Part 10 – Twist & Wiggle Paths
27. Shape Layers Part 11 – Wiggle Transform
28. Shape Layers Part 12 – The Zig Zag Operand
29. Shape Layers Part 13 – Creating a True Spiral Using Illustrator Paths (Note the comments, which recommend using the Spiral animation preset.)
30. The Write-on Effect
31. Brainstorm & Shape Layers
32. Creating a Motion Background with Shapes Layers
33. Options for Creating Text
34. Font Selection and Faux Options
35. The Character Panel
36. Pimping Your Text with Layer Styles
37. Animating Source Text
38. Text Range Selectors, part 1
39. Text Range Selectors, part 2
40. Text Animators, part 1
41. Text Animators, part 2: Fill and Stroke
42. Text Animators, part 3: tracking and more
43. Text Animators, part 4: per-character 3D
44. Text Animators, part 5: shaping text and advanced text options
45. Text Animators, part 6: additional text selectors
46. Mask Feather tool (CS6 and above)
47. Paint: Creating and customizing brushes
48. Paint: panel options (part 1)
49. Paint: panel options (part 2)
50. Paint: Timeline panel
51. Paint: paths
52. Paint: spot & blemish removal
53. motion tracking (Part 1)
54. motion tracking (part 2)
55. Dynamic Link
56. Setting up for export

I hope that Andrew keeps going with this series, as it’s certainly helping a lot of people to get started with many of the key features of After Effects.