After Effects screen shots

This is a screen shot of my final animation in progress in After Effects.
It shows that I have more than one composition open at a time. This is because my final animation is a set of compositions put together for example, I animated my bird on a a separate composition because I found it is easier to split things up as I had a lot going on in my animation as you can see from the layers panel.
I like how you can change the colours of layers in AE as it makes it easier to find the right layer or to group certain layers together. I split my animation up into scenes so each layer in a particular scene had a specific colour.

This a screen shot of one of my experimental animations showing that I used parenting to create my zoom in effect on my type. When I first started using After Effects I really didn't understand how moving the camera worked but I managed to find a tutorial on the basics. That is when I learnt about the null object layer which in this animation I made the parent of the camera layer and my text layer so that it would appear as if I was zooming straight into the words.

When I had done some stop motion I imported the frames at 12 fps and it created it as a composition however I didn't like the outcomes so I decided to manually put in each frame to see if this looked better. For some reason my stop motion looked a lot better and I also liked doing it this way as it was then easy to include digital graphics over the top such as the eyes to my characters.

This is the animation I took the later 2 screen shots from:

<iframe src="http://player.vimeo.com/video/23229155?title=0&amp;byline=0&amp;portrait=0" width="400" height="220" frameborder="0"></iframe><p><a href="http://vimeo.com/23229155">Love is... FOOD</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/user6621171">sarah chester</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.</p>

The screen shot above shows how you can see a graph instead of you time line and it shows when an effect will happen for example in this one the layer will change opacity. I didn't want the layer to suddenly start changing though so I used the 'ease in' and 'ease out' key frames to make the effect more fluid. I have used this tool quite a lot in my animations especially with my characters as it makes their movement look more realistic. On some occasions I have moved the points manually on the graph to create different movement effects.