After Effects Quickstart - a new tutorial series

If you’re a self-op’ing creative with access to After Effects but no time and/or inclination to get into it too deeply, what are the key things you would consider worth learning? Things that would make your life easier making rough cuts, social spots etc? Or maybe quick hacks to give something fairly functional a bit of polish?

Leading on from a conversation with Toby Wright , I set myself the challenge of creating some tutorials that had to follow some basic rules (you know, like Dogme 95):

• No preambling - straight to the point;

• Must describe one specific useful thing, clearly and succinctly;

• Musn’t make you want to throw your keyboard through your monitor;

• Must work with sound on or off.

Long story short, I found this is a lot trickier than it sounded. Where’s the line between too simple and too involved? Is there in fact a good reason why most tutorials use speech rather than just captions? I’ll be seeking feedback on this, but I think there’s a definitely space for this sort of ‘blagger’s guide’ approach. The tutorials can be found here.