How-To Guides about After Effects

Zombies. That's the first thing that comes to mind when I see footage of a once heavily populated area turned completely desolate. Either that or you stumbled across a Ke$ha concert...BURN.

Into special FX? Check out this video for a lesson in green screen. Watch and learn how to use green screen in After Effects. You can use green screen to make incredible visual effects for your videos and short films.

Largely self-taught, Ryan John Kothe is an animator working out of Auckland, New Zealand. After picking up some rudimentary After Effects skills, he went on to create an impressive portfolio of beautifully rendered stop-motion animations with a distinctly tactile feel. Curious about the process behind Worn Out—Ryan's depiction of objects disintegrating in fast-forward (shown below)—we contacted him for a brief Q&A on the techniques behind his work.

A lot of people use Flash for 2D cartoon animation, but Adobe After Effects is another great tool to create some very cool cartoon animation. This how to gives you a clear idea of the steps to take to use AE as a cartoon creation device. This short video tutorial will demonstrate how to properly export character animation from Flash and import it into After Effects to combine with background and foreground elements. It also gives a handy trick of how to duplicate a character animation clip to...

Pulp heroism rules!  And everyone's favorite masked vigilante hits the big screen tomorrow night, thanks to fantastical filmmaker Michel Gondry and his new superhero movie, The Green Hornet.

This tutorial shows you a great rigging tutorial you can use with Adobe After Effects. Create an animation or clip that looks like you've got stereoscoping rigging. This is an easy tutorial anyone familiar with the basics of Adobe After Effects will be able to do.

This is a quick and easy tutorial that shows you how to add better looking shadows to your projects in After Effects. The video takes two basic spheres and shows you how to alter Drop Shadow to make it look exactly how you want it.

Camera mapper is a function in Adobe After Effects that lets you take a static, 2-D image and turn into a dynamic 3-D shot. Create a zoom feature and make it look like you have a camera panning through the picture!

Take a thoroughly modern clip of digital film, and then send it back in time! This tutorial shows you how to use the Aged Film plugin for Adobe After Effects to make your clip look like it comes stright from the 1970s.

You can simulate the look of fluids using the FreeForm plugin for Adobe After Effects. Play around with the color, viscosity and opacity of your liquid, and animate a container filling up as well. This tutorial covers everything you'll need to know!

Yeah baby! That's right, 1960's, retro style motion graphics. You want em, you need em and this tutorial with Angie Taylor of Red Giant TV shows YOU how to get them by using PlaneSpace, Text Anarchy, Trapcode Echospace and Warp! Shagadelic baby!

Create an effect in your video where the video footage is converted to black & white, pauses, and resumes playback in regular color. This effect is demonstrated by Aharon Rabinowitz with Spy Photo, a brand new set of free presets for Adobe After Effects.

Use a 2D image of clouds to generate realistic video footage of 3D cloud motion. In this tutorial from All Bets Are Off, Aharon Rabinowitz demonstrates how to create this effect using a single 2D image of clouds and a few simple clicks.

Using a layered photograph, chroma key footage and depth of field, prolific Italian designer Juri Ciana demonstrates precisely how to create a stunningly beautiful 3D composition with After Effects. In this informative video-only tutorial, depth of field and focus is utlized as critical elements that provide the various components of this video composition with a living vibrancy and dynamism.

Evoke a dramatic effect in your 720p60 video by upsampling and converting to 24p and 24p slow motion, and adding a little bit of color grading with Adobe After Effects. This informative video shows the footage before, during and after treatment, showing the difference that this editing process can make in ordinary footage.

You can construct a 3-D photo gallery of rotating photographs quite easily in Adobe After Effects. The trick is to use parenting and anchor points to pull it off, and this tutorial shows you how to avoid using the cylinder effect.

Here's a useful technique for any animator to be able to pick up - give your anaglyph animations a 3-D look. To replicate this, you will need Flash, After Effects and Photoshop, or programs that can accomplish similar animation tasks.

Want to add a lens flare to your current animation or film? You can manipulate the picture using Adobe After Effects, and this tutorial shows you precisely how. Play around with the light, brightness settings and other tools to get a lens flare effect.