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Invited to Speak at the Adobe After Effects World Conference

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In late July this year, I will be speaking at the Adobe After Effects World Conference! You can see the speaker line up here.

I am so excited to attend and meet the organisers, speakers, members of the Adobe Team and fellow After Effects users there! The After Effects online community is incredibly friendly, international and supportive. It’ll be fantastic to meet part of the USA community in person. Alongside the excitement, I am also a little nervous but it’s such an incredible opportunity, I accepted and am preparing for it as best I can.

Speaker info screen shot

I am currently designing materials for demonstrations and planning for the three sessions outlined below. Two of the sessions will dive deep into character rigging which is one of my favourite topics!

Rigging Unique Illustrative Style Characters

Whether you’re new to character rigging in After Effects or familiar, this session covers rigging skills to enable you to animate fun, stylish characters and speed up your AE character animation workflow.

This session will cover rigging more complex characters with texture, shading, detailed facial features and outlines.

What concrete lessons or skills will attendees take away from this session?

    • Preparing designs for rigging in AE
    • Rigging a torso, arms, legs and feet with Duik Bassel
    • Rigging a head turn
    • Rigging facial expression controllers
    • Rigging with textured, outlined and shaded artwork
    • Workflow tips and performance optimisation
Sasha face Rig Screen shot of After Effects rig
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Rigging Non-Human Characters in After Effects

There’s plenty of tutorials and tools for rigging humanoid characters in After Effects but what if you need to animate a dog, fish, insect, dinosaur or octopus? This session will dive deeper into Duik Bassel’s rigging tools so you’ll know how to tackle animating any non-human character!

What concrete lessons or skills will attendees take away from this session?  

    • Preparing designs for rigging
    • How to problem solve and plan your non-human rig
    • Building a rig using custom structures in Duik Bassel
    • Using Duik’s Connector tool
    • Tips for animating non-human character rigs
    • Workflow tips and performance optimisation
Slide from the non-human character rigging deck
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Motion Paintings and Illustrations

Techniques, tips and tricks for working with digital paintings and textured style illustrations that have a hand drawn, traditional media vibe. This session Covers creating your own textures and paint strokes, how to animate in Photoshop, how to use layer styles, mattes and effects in After effects to bring your artwork to life.

What concrete lessons or skills will attendees take away from this session?

    • How to prepare illustrations and textured assets
    • Overview of Photoshop’s motion tools
    • Design theories on light, shadow and colour
    • Using native layer styles, masks, effects and track mattes
    • Using the Ray Dynamic texture plugin
    • Building your own texture and preset library for projects

Screen shot - motion painting

A huge thanks to the organisers of After Effects World for inviting me to be involved and for their advice and support. This will also be the first After Effects / motion design conference I’ve attended. I also want to thanks Hayley Akins and Caitlin Caideux for giving me advice and encouragement. Also to the Motion Hatch Mastermind group for helping me practice and rehearse for these sessions.

Carbon offsetting

To offset the carbon emissions of my flights from the UK to Seattle, USA, I have donated to Trees for Cities. The money will go directly towards planting trees in UK cities which will capture carbon to offset my flights. I also donated to the United Nation’s carbon offsetting plan by supporting renewable energy projects. 

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