Ae & Maltaannon
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As I kid I wanted nothing more but to become an inventor when I grow up. My hero at that time (and perhaps to this day) was Prof. Grumpy. (I have a TEDx talk about that subject and how it led me to After Effects – http://tinyurl.com/aewgpus).
My parents sent me to a music school which oddly enough got me into programming. From there I moved to more dynamic areas like websites, graphics and video editing where effects of ones work could be seen almost instantaneously. But I wasn’t happy. I couldn’t really draw or paint – I have no manual skills, so when I was viewing myself as a designer I felt bitter. It’s only when I found After Effects I came to peace with myself, my work and my mission in life (if you wan’t to call it that).
Ae & Colby Fulton
20 years ago, I was introduced to After Effects. Created by the enigmatic CoSA corporation. After Effects was an artifact from the future – the natural extension of Photoshop, projected into the fourth dimension. It took my work into a radical new direction, allowing me to move and combine imagery in ways I had only imagined.
AE & Estelle Baylis
After graduating with a design degree back in ’98, I moved to London and was lucky enough to be offered a junior design position at a tiny post-production studio called Blue Source. It was here that I was introduced to Ae for the first time; the only software I had used till then was Photoshop and Quark, so as you can imagine, the learning curve was pretty steep!
However, back then, desktop motion design was still ahead of its time (and very slow) and sadly the studio suffered due to clients’ nervousness using this new, slower technology. I was let go and ended up in publishing, which was fine for a while but eventually found I was missing the excitement and challenges that Ae and motion design had given me.
Ae & Kevan O’Brien
I was first exposed to After Effects at Passion Pictures where they were using it for compositing animated material into live action commercials. Often a comp would come to me - I was editing at the time – and it would need to be “tweaked” or rendered in a different codec on the network to make it “edit-system friendly”. This was back in the days of After Effects 4/4.5.
Learning the basics of After Effects I became aware that plug-ins could be used to enhance its capabilities and to this point I explored the possibility of using After Effects to “up-rez” material from SD to HD and even 2K. By using a plug-in I was able to achieve this goal without the expense of having to go to an expensive post house to achieve the same result. Plug-ins are truly the democratization of production techniques, showing that desktop software is just as capable as larger, more-expensive bespoke solutions. Using this technique I got a number of short films transferred to 35mm, some actually being nominated for major awards.
Whilst using this technique to work with video and 35mm, I came onto Adobe’s radar and they offered me a Business Development role working with After Effects and the other video tools. My time at Adobe was fruitful; I was even able to air my views on the future direction of After Effects through the beta forums.
Plug-ins have become more and more part of the After Effects story with one of the manufacturers, Boris FX, being very prolific in producing high quality and innovative plugins.
Now I find myself actually working for Boris FX, evangelizing the power of After Effects complemented by these amazing plug-ins. So After Effects still plays a huge part in my day-to-day life and I wouldn’t be employed without it.
So happy Anniversary Adobe After Effects – and may you run for another 20 years, if nothing else just to keep me employable.
Ae & Sherry Hitch
I first got involved in the visual effects industry in the 1990s. I’d gone to film school and art school and thought I might try to be a director someday. I went to work as a PA at a VFX boutique house, Foundation Imaging, which was starting to do visual effects on desktop machines. It was the early 90s when most visual effects were still done by machines that cost far and away more than Adobe After Effects. I watched people using Macs running Photoshop and After Effects to break into the visual effects world and I thought, “I can do that!”
Soon I was doing screen displays on the television show Babylon 5 using After Effects. I learned on the job from the likes of Kevin Kutchaver, Mitch Suskin, and Ron Thornton. I moved up to doing more compositing, visual effects and lighting shots on other TV shows, including Star Trek: Voyager and Star Trek: Deep Space 9, and a TV movie called Superfire. We were nominated for some Emmys for work that we did—all using After Effects and LightWave.
Ae & Sagar Doiphode
I’m from India, Mumbai city. After finishing my Animation course in school, I wanted to become a compositor but had no idea where to start. I started with After Effects 7.0 and foudn it very user friendly. After one year working on After Effects, I realize how powerful it really is! I started my career as a graphic designer and now I m working as a compositor in Redchillies.VFX.
After Effects has changed my life! I make good money creating graphics with After Effects, leaving my poor-artist life behind. Using After Effects, I make content that I can share with others and they like it as well as respect me. Plus, I’m really proud of myself.
Ae & & Steven Messing
My focus since childhood was a desire to create unique imagery through filmmaking. After studying Film at USC and design at Art Center in Pasadena, I fostered my passion for visual effects. I started my career in small commercial houses and video game studios creating matte paintings for cinematics and marketing campaigns. I quickly latched on to the diverse tool set that Adobe After Effects offered as a compositing and editing tool in breathing life into my work. I would create complex shots using various 3D software packages and composite all of the layers together with After Effects.
Ae & El Director
I was first introduced to digital video editing my junior year of high school. I had enrolled in a video productions class where we used Adobe Premiere 6.0 to edit our spots for a weekly news show. For some reason, I picked up on it pretty quick. It was also during this time that I started teaching myself 3D animation with a program called Blender. My senior year, we used Premiere 6.5 and I started learning about chromakey. We had a “blue room” and I spent a lot of time filming different hollywood shots and compositing them in Premiere using it’s built in keyer. I tried flying, Honey I Shrunk the Kids, and even a Matrix spoof that was shot entirely on the bluescreen. By April my senior year, I realized that if I put a green or blue background behind my 3D animations, I could key them out too allowing me to use 3D with live action. Of course, all these effects looked terrible and amateurish by today’s standards, but I was learning how to work a shot backwards and accomplish it using the tools I had.
Ae & Dave Bittner
Not long out of college, with a contract position in a government broadcasting facility and a little bit of money in my pocket, I purchased a Mac Quadra 700 and a product called Digital Film from SuperMac. Digital Film claimed to be a complete TV studio on a card (it wasn’t) and bundled with it was a new software package called CoSA After Effects, version 1.
