After Effects workflow - what helps to get it done.

I’ve started to take a close look at works for me for starting a project in After Effects and thought I would share.  The more I work in After Effects on jobs that aren’t prepared well the more I realize how important a workflow is.

The biggest problem I have when starting a job is a lack of material to work with and no budget.  I can live without time as there are always tricks to speed up the work but without materials it becomes extremely difficult.

My first step is to identify what the iconography of the event or item.

So if it’s a gardening show for example there is a pre established visual language that goes with gardening.  I don’t always rely on the web for images at this stage as I am a big fan of going to the library for research or even going to a place where you can experience what you’re designing for.

So many times you’ll get an idea that you never would have thought of just by diving around online I always take a camera as a recording tool not for useable images but to document what I saw.

Who is it for?

The next step for me is always to find who the market is. 

There are always varying age groups in a market and often you need to talk to one specific area – again there is a visual language when marketing to different age groups.  Finding this out is so important, as it determines a lot of things that follow – the pacing of the project, the music, the style…

If you really want to get into this stage you can cruise around forums to see what interests your age group.  I find the more I research at the early stage the easier the workflow becomes later in the timeline.

Reference, Reference Reference

Once I get my head around the previous steps I start actually collecting files.  I break these up into folders called “ref” and “pics” -  ref becomes purely the reference files that I will never actually use but is important to the style.  Pics is the imagery that I intent to modify later or use in the project.  Inside “pics” I usually have “pics_cut” for psds that I’ve altered.

I also have a folder for “mograph_ref” reference of styles that I think might work.  This isn’t to copy from but to get a sense of what I think might work.

Paint from the bottom up

When I first started taking an interest in a workflow for my work (which I have to admit to being years ago now) I started just looking at how I work and what slowed me down in the process.. This meant going to work on a Saturday morning when no one else was around and picking a subject off the top of my head and setting a deadline of Sunday to develop something that was half decent… I would screen record every step of the way to see what I was doing.  As cheesy as this was, it is a very handy way to see what wasted the most time in my project.

One of the things I learnt from doing that was to work backwards. This meant starting from the background layer of the composition (similar to painting).  I find it hard to do even today as the temptation is to start with what is most obvious in the foreground.  I usually just pick a color palette and add any generic movement as most of the time this layer gets deleted – it’s just a way of getting something in the scene.

Throw away comps

I usually start with a comp where I just begin to throw assets into the project as messy as.  This is a way of just getting all the images into a comp and seeing what I can do with what I've got as a lot of times you have to work around your footage anyway.  I try never to start on the comp that I actually want to render out as it tends to make me precious about what I'm doing. 

At this stage I am also rendering out blocky version of any 3d assets that I might need (usually on a separate machine) so I can just feed the one After Effects project on the one machine. This is where it becomes hand to have 3 machines as you can start to set of tasks on the other two while you work away on the main computer.

Music and sounds

It's sometimes the last step in a job however if you have audio that you can use as a temp I find it really helps with designing.  A lot of times the reference files that you get in your pre-production work also help with defining the music and sound files.