The AE skills to be a successful motion designer

👋 Welcome to the latest edition of my monthly motion design newsletter, where I bring you fresh tutorials, a sneak peak of what’s coming soon, a handy tip, and a random recommendation!

🥳 New

If you want to learn how to animate in After Effects, there’s a whole side of the program for visual effects work that you don’t need to know. This can make After Effects feel more overwhelming than it needs to.

So in my latest video, I break down all the skills you need to know to be a successful motion designer:

You can download a checklist of all the skills to learn and a project template to keep your animation projects organized here:

Ae Skills Checklist + Project Template

In case you missed it… last month, I launched my new course, After Effects, Explained. Because this course is more in-depth than traditional Skillshare classes, I will not be releasing the full course on Skillshare. I will continue to make short, focused classes for Skillshare.

🤫 Sneak Peak You Tell Me (Survey)

What do you want to learn next? Help me decide where to focus, for both new courses and YouTube videos, by filling out this 5-question survey:

Take the survey

By filling out the survey, you’ll be entered to win either a year of Skillshare membership, or free access to my new course, After Effects, Explained (your choice).

Thank you for helping me help you!

⚡ Quick Tip

There are some useful new features in the latest After Effects update.

You may have noticed the new lighting bolt icon (on the timeline) for Quick Apply. This allows you to quickly search for any effect, animation preset, or menu command and apply it. You can also get to Quick Apply using the keyboard shortcut command/Ctrl + return.

One feature that’s easy to miss is that you can adjust multiple layers at once by holding down the keyboard shortcut Cmd+Opt for Mac and Ctrl+Alt for Windows. Here’s an example of how this can be useful:

Other new features include variable fonts (and the ability to animate them with text animators) and an option to import SVGs into AE so that they’re shape layers.

👉 Random Recommendation

Maybe it’s just my algorithms and the people I know and follow, but it seems like everyone is talking about the health impacts of plastics because of The Plastic Detox documentary on Netflix. I would recommend!

I had already tried to remove as much plastic as possible from my life, because I was concerned about the environmental impact. But watching the documentary gave me a new motivation to eliminate even more plastic because of what it’s doing to me!

I’ve also started growing my own broccoli sprouts in a glass jar on my counter (it's super easy) and adding them to salads and sandwiches. The sulforaphane in broccoli (and even more concentrated in broccoli sprouts), could potentially help microplastics be removed from the body.