AE

Wednesday June 21st 2006 05:37 PM PST

So out of the blue i get asked to jump in on After Effects. Now i gotta admit i've not used AE since version 3, but suddenly i've been thrown into the mix. The thing is.... the software is really kick ass. I guess everybody already knew that. SO... the the guys here are building motion graphics and they want some basic physics to control images moving on screen. An image that takes up the entire screen should be cut into 32 slices so that each horizontal piece can slides on screen to build the final image. The slices should follow one master slice, and they should bounce into their final position one after another.

I started looking at the problem from the point of expressions. Each layer in AE can be scripted so that its motion is controlled by code and not by keyframes. Heather gave me a book that discussed a little of this. In the middle of the chapter about expressions there was a one paragraph mention of scripting, and when it should be used instead of expressions. Suddenly i realized that building a huge project and scripting all the layers was not something i wanted to do. Instead I could script the entire thing and have AE build the project for me, import the images, mask them into slices, and then move them the way i wanted. So in less than a day i've fallen in love with After Effects. I've perfected about 60 lines of code, and in about 20 seconds it builds a project and its ready to render. Its too damn easy. AND ALL MATH!!