I was laying down one day, watching “X-Men 2”, when I decided to become a virtual artist. The opening scene of the movie has a mutant, called Night Crawler, in it. His ability is to teleport. In the scene he is poofing in and out of areas to make his way to The President, where he has a failed assassination attempt. When Night Crawler teleports, he travels through this other realm and appears in a different spot in ours. When he goes in and out of it, you can see an atmospheric cloud of dark blacks and purples that reside in the air and fade quickly. I think it’s one of the coolest effects, and super powers ever.
I remember laying there seeing that and saying, “Man I really wish I knew how to make stuff like that.”
It didn’t take long and I was thinking, “WHY CAN’T I?!…..I don’t have to go to school, per say, to learn some basic stuff at home. There’s tons of youtube tutorials that could get me on the right track, at least to start.”
So I turned off the TV (after that scene was over) and hopped on my computer. Hours later, after doing as much research as I could muster, I decided to download Adobe After Effects and try my hand at a couple of the tutorials I had seen. I made some pretty feeble attempts at teleportation and realized that it was going to be harder than I imagined.
As time went on, I practiced and practiced. I was trying different things, not just the teleporting. I was figuring out what Add Ons were, how keyframing worked, what was color correction, understanding audio editing, and learning that half the things I thought were cool in movies and TV shows WEREN’T EVEN REAL!
As time went on I learned about 3D modeling and incorporated that into my workflow with After Effects.
There used to be this add on for After Effects called Element 3D. At the time, it had stopped being used and was 11 years old, but it was what was available to me. I’ve made a lot of things since then and After Effects has been a solid program I use in my workflow today to edit videos and add things to the scenes I make.
I love how when I decided to teach myself something I dove into the hardest thing I could have possibly chosen without realizing it and still managed to pull it together enough to use it in every project I do to this day.
Although I’ve dealt with tons of computer crashes, days without sleep, and headaches from trying to clear my cache over and over again, I’ve gotten the better of it.
Without it I wouldn’t have moved on to other 3D programs, understood what a workflow is, or gained the knowledge and skills I have today.
