Thank you Marcus. I greatly appreciate the recommendation. But I must be truthful and admit I don't do well learning these types of things from a book. I am an avid reader of other materials, but for applications it doesn't translate for me, I've never know why.

Nevertheless, I thank you again.

Specifically for photo/cut-out/3D work check out training and demos by Josh Fozzard (www.pickwhipstudios.com) and "The Making of A 3D Photomontage"(www.pixelpops.com).

These guys are setting the pace.

Not a patch on the work described in the last post but here is my first attempt at that kind of thing. Actually this is probably my first AE comp of any real complexity, having used it for titles and 2d stuff for a couple of years.

www.film-it.net/client/ppintro.mov

At first the client didn't want me to show this as the sequence contains images of children from thethe school but it transpires that all of these kids have now left and most of them have returned overseas, so they relaxed the rules a bit!

Still to be tidied up (this is the client approval copy) but gives a flavour.

I took the scribbled sketches from a school term wall planner that the client had had made for them and animated the insects, clouds, sun, flowers etc (v. basic animation!). I took the kids pictures from another brochure they use and all the other colours (esp the sky and grass) were lifted from that also. Then I dropped them into my virtual 'garden', animated a camera to fly through, added some lights and that was about it. The music is probably not the final choice but was added to give depth to help the client to review the piece.

Sad to say my pre planning was lacking and this doubled the length of time it took to produce. Had I done a little more than just sketch this out on a napkin I would have found it a lot easier! The biggest problem came when the client asked me to shave off 10 seconds. Ouch.

Anyway, great learning experience. I've seen the photo montage video mentioned earlier but not seen the tutorials - must look into that.

Cheers. Ian . . .

Sorry, I went a bit off topic in the last post - what I meant to say was that I have been inspired and educated through a great book called Creative After Effects 7 by Angie Taylor. Also a book called After Effects & Photoshop by Jeff Foster is well worth a mention, as is the new Chris & Trish Meyer book (not scheduled for release until 2008 but I seem to have got a copy OK from Amazon uin the UK! Not sure how but no complaints!). Working through that one now.

Jeff, it's interesting that you say you don't do so well from a book. I was EXACTLY the same with Vegas - no book really did it for me - I learnt through trial and error, by doing every tutorial under the sun, and by using it for hours every single day.

But with After Effects it was the opposite!! Trial and error had me so utterly frustrated that I turned to the books and started to pick it up from there. Long way to go still, but that was the nudge I needed.

Hope it's the same for you. Vegas books, nil points. After Effects books, douze points! (Hmm, that reference ain't gonna work outside Europe!).

Thank god the rest of the world has not been exposed to that kitsch.

Thanks for the encouragement Ian.

You should also check out this link :

http://www.totaltraining.com/prod/ad...ectcs3_ess.asp

I have the complete training set for AE 6.5 Pro and its absolutely superb. Informative, and well presented

As a result of some of that training, other tutorials on the web and fiddling around and playing you can make simple little effects:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kdDRN7rDmEM

Or move towards more dynamic movement type styles
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qMI3nL0RHAU

You can see the tutorials for the above effect at the following website : http://www.ayatoweb.com/ae_tips_e.html

If you need to ask any questions, drop me a line.

Sorry, don't understand! I'm hoping you're referring to Eurovision, not my video!!

Great site Niall, thanks for the link (ayatoweb.com).

Haha, yes I meant the ESC!

No problem at all.

Some of the tutorials have gaps in them, what with English not being his first language. So the steps sometimes are a little lacking in detail required.

Best bet, is to use them as inspiration and then play around with the effects you are using to see what they do, and how they work.

The TSN wipe stinger I did, took me 2-3hours to do initially. Now I can rollout custom ones to requirement in around 15mins.

Its all about practice. Drop me a line if you need any more help

Oh in addition:

recommended plug-ins for After Effects

www.zaxwerks.com - Look at Invigorator Pro. Can use Illustrator files, and can be animated.

http://www.trapcode.com/ - Checkout shine on this website. Incredible Plugin

Just to show simple effects using these plugins (yes I know they suck :P)

Example of Invigorator :
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5Vd-FovEy4

Example of Shine:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PjqGXWx5BSM
The TsN wipe was using shine as linked in other post.