In this workshop Jeff Foster — video producer, compositor, visual effects artist, and author of "The Green Screen Handbook" — teaches you the basics of green screen compositing and setting up a streamlined roto workflow with After Effects and a Wacom tablet. You’ll get real-world tips on getting the best mattes and keys from your green screen shots, stabilizing and tracking footage in After Effects, and using the Roto Brush feature to create quick and accurate mattes of anything that moves in the frame. You’ll also learn how to create more believable composites by matching your foreground and background plates, using roto-spline masks, and applying match-moving techniques.

In her career as an animator, Angie Taylor has developed some powerful techniques for creating quick but compelling 2D animation, and in this workshop she shares those secrets with you. You’ll learn how to import layered files and paths from Illustrator into After Effects and how to animate flat vector artwork in both 2D and 3D space, and you’ll explore options for outputting your animations. The videos are short, focused, and solution-oriented, and all the project files are included so you can follow along as you go.

Kinetic typography is an art form that combines text and motion to express ideas in the form of animation designed to accompany spoken word or music. In this unique workshop, art director, author, and motion graphic designer Angie Taylor shares her considerable knowledge of this form. You’ll work along with her as she builds a complete kinetic typography project from start to finish. Along the way you’ll learn how to create and animate text layers directly within After Effects using animators and 3D features, set up Photoshop files for animating in After Effects, and use a variety of effects and techniques to create numerous text animation styles within a single project. You’ll also get lots of tips and tricks for animating 3D cameras and lights and learn how to use expressions and scripts to simplify the processes involved.

Mark Christiansen builds upon his incredibly successful AFX220 class, by leading a team effort focusing on design-related issues in After Effects. Using the new After Effects CS3, we cover a wide range of topics, including design principles, interoperability with Photoshop and Illustrator, animation tricks, keying, and new features in CS3. Most of the course will be not specific to CS3 so you'll be fine using older versions, but we'll highlight changes in the app and cover some of the cool new features.