Begin your mastery of Adobe After Effects with this list of our 25 favorite motion graphics tutorials published so far in 2018.
Thanks to some of the best content creators on YouTube, we can sharpen our skills as video editors and motion graphic artists with some incredibly intricate tutorials. And these tutorials are accessible to anyone, regardless of your After Effects skill level.
So here are 25 of the best After Effects tutorials published (so far) in 2018.
Learning the Basics
Todd from Shutterstock walks you through the basic functions you can expect to perform when you open After Effects. Like any program worth mastering, it’s about taking small-but-consistent steps toward a greater understanding of the art form.
In this tutorial, you’ll learn about motion blur, keyframes, null objects, masks, and track mattes. If you’re interested in checking out a few more beginner-level After Effects tutorials, check out these gems:
- AFTER EFFECTS BASICS
- 4 Great Motion Graphic Techniques in After Effects
- Creating Circle Bursts in After Effects
- How to Export In After Effects
All Things Text
Take some of the basic After Effects fundamentals from the list above, and apply them to your titles, lower-thirds, and logos as you learn how to animate and smooth out text. In this tutorial, the goal is simple: make the text bounce in a way that looks like a custom, one-of-a-kind animation. This tutorial is a simple, quick look at how to play with text in your timeline.
- EASY Text Tracking Tool in After Effects
- Logo Animations
- How to Create an Action Promo
- How to Make Scribble Animation
- How to Use Layer Styles in After Effects
Animations and Compositing
As technology around us changes, it’s important to keep up when you replicate it in your work. As you can see in this tutorial, if you know how to animate relevant social platforms realistically, your clients will keep coming back for attractive, relevant content. Once you’ve mastered this skill, learn the basics of screen replacements from the tutorial below.
Here a few more animation- and compositing-focused tutorials:
Recreating Effects
One of the best things to come out of streaming services lately is music videos — lots of them, from artists like Drake, The Weeknd and Cardi B. This kind of content has a quick turnaround, so we get to see plenty of it.
The music video industry has changed and become more accessible to low-budget filmmakers. And the effects you see in popular videos are often easy to mimic in After Effects. So let’s jump into a few tutorials that teach you how to recreate some of the biggest effects out right now.
- 3 SICKO Effects From TRAVIS SCOTT
- 4 Trippy Ways to Blend Footage – DATAMOSHING
- 4 Popular Glitch Effects in After Effects
- Infinity War Disintegration Effect
3D and Beyond
Look, I don’t need to tell you that there’s a new Andrew Kramer tutorial out — you’ve probably already watched it — but just in case . . .
The master of motion graphics and VFX and the Lord of Not Using Plugins has graced us with “Ultra 3D Earth Tutorial” (which, ah, uses a plugin . . . called ORB). For some more After Effects tutorials that cover a wide range of tools, skills, and topics, check out the list below:
- Make a 2D Image to 3D in After Effects
- Infinite Transition in After Effects (KANYE WEST VIDEO)
- GIMBAL HYPERZOOM/ HYPERLAPSE Tutorial
- Mystique Transformation in After Effects
Cover image via VIDEO COPILOT.