In this short tutorial learn how to use After Effects’ Fast Blur, Turbulent Displace, Roughen Edges, Texturize, Displacement Map and Gradient Wipe effects to give text a grungy look.
The Foundry has released 3D Camera Tracker and Kronos, two exciting new plug-ins for Adobe After Effects.
Alexander of Amateurmedia.net has created a stylish new font named Typograph Pro. Also check some of the great usage examples created within Cinema 4D.
Red Giant Software has released Colorista 2, with some exciting new features and improvements. Use motionworks10 for a 1o% discount.
Fontfeed.com has an excellent column “Screenfonts” which discusses the use of fonts in movie posters.
Industrial Light and Magic has a new site. It’s quite amazing just how many productions ILM has been involved in.
Urban Dirty has terrific free grunge stock images and also provides color themes for various images with a downloadable .ASE file. You can import the .ASE file into After Effects using Swatch You Want.
18 Responses to this post
March 7, 2009 at 12:26 am |
John–
Nice quick tut. It was all familiar to me except cc composite, I may have to try using that next time – simple, but time saving trick, Just out of curiosity, you mentioned that this was a quick turnaround/rush job – can you be a bit more specific as far as how much time you had to whip this up?
I think we’re taking a couple of fxPHD classes together too, so feel free to say hi to scottF on those boards
March 7, 2009 at 1:09 am |
Hi Scott, It took about 2 hours.
March 7, 2009 at 1:29 am |
2 Hours? Wow! Was it just a client you were familiar with or did someone else drop the ball that the time frame was that limited? I’m about to get out of school and hit the work force, but if clients are looking for 2hr turnarounds I’m in trouble
March 7, 2009 at 1:33 am |
It was a 1 day job so I had to come up with a style quickly so I could have all of the different versions ready by the end of the day. That’s where CC Composite comes in handy; all you need to do to create other text versions is duplicate the original and switch out the text (plus tweek the effect settings depending on how many lines/letters there are).
March 7, 2009 at 5:58 am |
To be honest, I like the most of your other works better than this – thats just my personall opinion. But I think the tutorial is a great one – lots of cool tips (I really forgott about the Texturize effect) in a short time, and as always, very well explained.
Thank you Sir!
March 7, 2009 at 2:05 pm |
illd, I didn’t post this because I thought it would go on my showreel, I posted it to show you my WORKFLOW and I made it clear in the tutorial that it was done very quickly. Not everything can be award winning… sometimes it’s just about getting the job done acceptably and on time.
March 8, 2009 at 5:03 am |
Hi JD,
I apologize – I didnt want to judge you or something
“…sometimes it’s just about getting the job done acceptably and on time.”
I know what you mean – thats what I have to do nearly all the time. youcan say in 9% I am not satisfied with the job I did, but the client is
Btw how is your new showreel doing?
March 8, 2009 at 5:04 am |
I mean 90% – 9% would be great
March 9, 2009 at 3:00 pm |
Just downloaded tutorial and project, gonna watch it tonight at home. Hope the project is not for CS4.
And as always: thank you. You are working full time, taking courses and so on and after that you still have time and energy to create tutorials! Again – thank you.
March 9, 2009 at 5:57 pm |
Great tutorial. I particularly liked how you went through so many effects. I’ve never even touched some of those before. I’m going to review all of them tonight. thanks!
March 9, 2009 at 8:12 pm |
yeah anther great one thanks
March 10, 2009 at 12:37 pm |
Tips on using CC Composite & Colorlink were worth the total price of admission! Thanks for sharing, JD.
March 14, 2009 at 10:34 am |
Hi John !
I have a suggestion for the future tutorials. It would be great, in such a situation where you review different fx, if you open the fx in order to see the parameters.
Here is why : for the ones who don’t work on an english version of AE, it can be tricky to find how the english name of an effect has been translated in their language. In such a case, seeing what are the parameters can be a great help to determine what effect you’re talking about…
In my case, I’m still trying to guess how “Gradient Wipe” has been translated in french…
by the way, could you tell me in which folder I should find it ? Or maybe it’s a new effect in the CS4 version that I’ll never find in my CS3 version ?
(I guess not : it seems to be so useful that it must be an old effect, maybe even a famous one I’ve missed until now…)
Thank you John.
March 14, 2009 at 9:10 pm |
Hi Boreale, The Gradient Wipe effect is in the Transition section of the Effects menu.
March 15, 2009 at 2:39 am |
Great help ! Thanks !
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