Someone just asked on a forum what the earliest works to use After Effects were. That conversation caused Dave Simons to hand me the After Effects 1.1 demo reel from 1993. Of course, I just had to post it.
The movie does have sound—just not in the first few segments. I think that this is from primordial times, before we learned that motion graphics without audio might as well be a blank screen. Even smooth jazz is (a little) better than silence.
If you have some old, old After Effects work to point to, let me know in the comments.

The reel with Harry Marks was pretty slick — is that one around?
Thanks for posting Todd! That was great.I used to have an AE demo VHS that was released on or about AE version 3, circa 1995 or 6, that featured Trish and Chris Meyer, Tim Sassoon and others. I’d love to see that one again.Carey Dissmore
It is a wonderful article,i like it,thank you very much!I’d love to see that one again.
Goodness, am I glad we have evolved beyond the 90′s…
Awesome, Todd!Thanks for posting this.
That’s a gem. Good one.
I’m amazed that Nickelodeon has the best spots in here. I actually remember watching those spots when I was younger, and they continue to use heavy motion graphics to this day.Proof positive that though the tools continue to evolve, it will be creative minds that truly pioneer stunning works.
oh man, the 90´s where so sick
I have all the old VHS reels. I even have the very first animation I did during AE 1.0 beta. I remember I couldn’t quite figure out how to use the Set Matte effect, so it was a bit clunky. In those days there was no timeline, so I made a big chart in Quark and printed it out on legal paper, and then wrote in where all the keyframes were…
Here’s something Brian Maffitt and I did in AE in 1993:http://www.grundoon.com/Farm_Folk_Forum.htmlTruthfully, there are a couple of bits towards the end (the chick’s animation and the dust storm) that I redid a couple of years ago, but all the rest of it was animated in AE 1.0 (or 1.1, I guess).
very cool !
Hi there,
Just might point out how far we have _not_ gone on this media fueled oddessy.
The gluetube video runs worse than the first animations out of videoworks.
A penny for anyone who knows what videoworks went onto become and like AE it too has managed to survive the vagnesses of time and markets.
My beta input (apart from being a world expert in braking things on Macs) was to encourage the compositing for video and print line, taking advantage of the 64k x 64k gWorld and 48 bit graphic processing in the OS.
I think there is a v1 box somewhere in storage along with the PAL videos.
.
I actually remember watching those spots when I was younger, and they continue to use heavy motion graphics to this day.