ENDA Episode 01→ The time when the Endless Apprentice learned not to fear AE

From where I come from and probably for many beginners around the world, After Effects, or for short AE is synonymous with Postproduction, Animation, or VFX, depending on who you ask. I wouldn’t blame you for assuming that in my teenage years, I was an obsessive AE tutorials searcher, but in reality: I was not.

In fact, I was a scaredy-cat regarding everything postproduction-related. If someone mentioned the slight possibility of using AE during my first years of college, my reactions would have gone from instant denial to a straight fear similar to the cat in the gif. At that time just watching that interface would have left me blank-minded and lost on what to do. I attributed this to the fact that most of the time I always look the final results and for me, the people who did know to use the software were either geniuses or magicians. I respected them, but I did not want to meddle in that world.

It wasn’t until one day I was left without a choice in front of a short film project that demanded to use AE to tell the story and I have to learn it from scratch. The results were of course amateurish and almost confirm that I was made for that.

However, just a year later, and due to funny circumstances I was once again faced with a project (this time a TV program) that required a heavy use of AE for all the segments. Then again I had no choice but to dive one more time into the AE interface, but that time something changed: the interface did not feel weird anymore, the keyframes made more sense, the plugins became a source of interest and then the unexpected: I started to enjoy it.

And that joy soon turned into a 360-degree change in many of my priorities and plans for the future. Who would guess that something that I feared so much, would become the spark for many things to come?

Were you afraid too of VFX’s software at the beginning of your journey?