Setting Up the Composition


You'll work within one composition to animate the stars and the letters the stars appear to draw. The stars are provided in a simple Illustrator drawing, and you'll create the letters in the word jason by masking solid layers. You'll include the jason.ai file for visual reference, but that image doesn't appear in the finished project.

Start with these steps:

1.

Create a new composition named Comp 1 using the NTSC D1 Square Pix, 720x540 preset. Set the background to blood red (RGB: 170, 0, 0) and Duration to 10;00 seconds.

2.

Add jason.ai to the Comp 1 Timeline at time 0;00.

3.

Since you'll use the jason.ai layer only as a visual reference and don't need to render it, select the layer and choose Layer > Guide Layer. Now the Timeline labels the layer with a blue guide layer icon so you can easily distinguish it from other layers. In addition, you don't need to remember to hide the layer before rendering, since by default a guide layer won't render unless you turn on a particular guide layer option in the Render Queue window.

4.

Create five white solid layers at comp size. Name each layer for a unique letter in the word JASON.

5.

Create a composition marker (Shift+1) at time 0;00, time ;15 (Shift+2), time 2;15 (Shift+3), time 3;00 (Shift+4), time 5;00 (Shift+5), and time 5;15 (Shift+6). You'll use the markers throughout the project to quickly move between those points in time.

The Comp 1 Timeline



    Adobe After Effects 6.5 Magic
    Adobe After Effects 6.5 Magic
    ISBN: 0321267230
    EAN: 2147483647
    Year: 2005
    Pages: 236

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