The first module I was assigned to in New Media was After Effects. I really enjoyed the class but it got off to a rough start for me. The first week or the first quarter of my first year in the SCCA Graphic Design Program I was stuck at home with covid. I attended all of my glasses via zoom and in most situations I felt I was still able to participate with relative comfort. During the first After Effects lesson the zoom connection repeatedly dropped. When I was able to zoom in the connection was very choppy and hard to follow. After Effects can make that happen. I was pretty distraught over this due to the fact that I had never used After Effects before and I really wanted to do well in the module and understand what was going on.
Luckily Erik Scheel recorded the lesson and I was able to follow along and complete my assignment – creating a basic graphics package for a newscast. It turns out following along with the videos at home was my preferred method of learning After Effects. I made my way through the assignment with some hiccups and the end result might have been a little shaky but not bad for my first effort. Cool.
The day before the assignment was due I decided to watch my finished video during a lunch break just to see if I needed to go in and refine anything. I couldn’t find the video. It seems ridiculous but I never found it. I searched my computer, used every key term I could think of in finder, searched all the After Effects files I had and it wasn’t there.
So I just made the whole thing all over again during that lunch break. The second pass came out better than the first. The project originally took several hours and the redo took about one.I was able to remember how I had made the original video and even learned a few new things. So I started the project ill with covid and a bad internet connection, managed to create something half way decent, promptly lost that thing, and to my surprise was able to remake it with some slight improvements.