My First Stab At After Effects!

HI! Today I was finally able to try my hand at After Effects after so many years of just picturing it in my head :) I have spent literally hours trying to make space in my laptop to re-install after-effects (it started failing every time I tried to open it) and it said I had to free up 10 GB of storage! Yesterday I got tired of sifting through my files and just moved all of my documents and entire desktop to an external hard drive. I guess I'll just re-download all of the files when I am done with the project. It ended up being a good thing though, since I ended up purging 21 GB of files and old movies. 

Anyways, I was finally able to start playing around with After Effects and would like to confirm that THEORY ≠ Practice. All of those videos I had watched in the past sure helped as I was familiar with the tools of the software, but I was definitely out of my element. As someone who is more into Apple software like Final Cut Pro, all of the shortcuts and icons were difficult to translate without help. I rewatched some of the tutorials I linked earlier and got to work.

I decided I wanted to start with something simple since I am much more of a beginner than I thought :( I recently re-discovered the Clair De Lune Ethereal Remix that I used to listened to a couple of years ago and was inspired to make my project space-themed. Since the youtube algorithm has caught on to my editing interests by now it recommended me this video:  (It uses many of the software's basic tools and includes simple keyframing)

My mother tells me a terrible baker because I am always trying to give the recipes my own spin- I am always switching around the ingredients and take directions more like suggestions. This doesn't really work out when I am making sugar cookies, but works just fine when producing art! I used the tutorial above, but I used my preferred software and gave it a celestial twist :)

1st- Isolate the Elements

I started out by using PROCREATE- My favorite alternative to Photoshop (it's more 'approachable' and iPad friendly)- to separate all of the different parts that I would be moving in this animation. I got a cool astronaut picture for google images, edited it and blocked out the photo's background. Afterward, I used the Selection tool to carve out all of the astronaut's limbs.

2nd- Get Your Background

Next, I started painting a galaxy-looking space background. I started out with black and used the medium-nozzle spraypaint brush in purple, pink and blue to add dimension to the black. When I was satisfied with how it looked I moved on the stars. I got the 'splatter' brush, sprinkled on some white and lowered the opacity to about 20%. I then used a regular round brush draw on stars and put that at about 40% opacity. After that, I put the opacity at 100% and drew on the starts that would be at the front, 'feathering them out' at 30% to make them look like they are glowing.

3rd- Some Extras

I finished my Procreate time by using the medium-nozzle spray paintbrush to paint some gas clouds that I planned to use around the subject to create dimension and make it seem like the 'camera' was moving through space.

4th- AFTER EFFECTS TIME!

Finally, I got to use it!! I created a new project and imported all of the projects that would make up my animation. I started my keyframing the background, the red gas cloud and the blue gas cloud. While I made the galaxy background float farther away as time went on, I rotated and zoomed the gas clouds.

As for the astronaut, I parented or pick-whipped all of the limbs to the torso so that they would all be transformed in unison as I started adjusting the scale, positioning, and rotation. I started keyframing and slowly rotating/ repositioning the limbs until the 10 seconds we over. At first, it was really difficult, but I feel really confident in my keyframing skills now! 

5th- TADA!

I finished! This honestly took me like 2 hours to make. Don't be alarmed though, it was only my first try and I was bouncing between tutorials so I still have hope! I actually think it turned out pretty good, and am proud I was able to make this out of a random image! I know it is not perfect, but I know I can get better if I practice. Hope you like it :)- I recommend you watch in full screen since it is subtle

(Sorry for the bad quality, i wanted it to upload quickly and this was only a test run)