Cavalry - the Yorkshire After Effects?

October’s here, and I’ve finally got round to having a play around new(ish) motion graphics app Cavalry.

I signed up for the beta programme back at the end of last year but never got round to having a proper look at it. It’s now in version 1.0, available as a limited free and premium subscription package.

It’s not exactly an After Effects killer. It has a much narrower scope, optimised more for creating animations. What’s quite interesting is that it puts a lot of the same elements you’d find in 3D applications to use in 2D environment. Things like cloners, falloffs, behaviours etc.

It’s really good fun to play around with. It’s been designed with an ethos that ‘everything can be connected to everything’ - eg. you can create a noise node, and have it affect both the shape and opacity of a circle, whilst also driving pretty much any other parameter you want. So once you’ve linked a few things together, you can quickly blow you own mind by just tweaking a few sliders. And eveything’s procedural, which is fantastic.

Anyway, here are a few little experimental bits and pieces from my tinkering: