-
My and Kathlyn’s own After Effects story
Happy 20th birthday to the most inspiring bit of kit that we believe was ever handed to creatives to beat their imaginations against.
We used to say for years that if you can imagine it, it can be done in After Effects. I don’t think there are many who would bet money on that kind of unbridled enthusiasm anymore — we’ve all come up against a few iron walls in the last 20 years — but we still believe most anything you can imagine, can still be done in After Effects. Yes, a bit of a qualifier but just a bit. ;0)
Many of you know our story and how we bought a Media 100 and a box of CoSA After Effects in November of 1994. We loved the Media 100 but we adored After Effects. In fact, over the years we often referred to our Media 100 as our realtime playback device for our After Effects files.
In the beginning it was really tough to learn. We knew of only one place: a five hour drive from our home in Cambria (where we then lived), to a monthly face to face meeting in San Francisco. This was before Brian Maffitt’s Total Traing series, the Meyer books or even the first AE forum we ever saw, which was at Postforum.
It was on the way home from one of those early meetings, we began to hatch the plan for what eventually grew from a seed into what became the internet’s latest and most active After Effects community.
No, it wasn’t the first and there are those who would argue that it isn’t even the best. We never worried about things like that. You see, we always believed that one of the best things that the engineers did when they coded After Effects, was to build an architecture that allowed for people to push the program into solutions they never foresaw or imagined. I have seen newbies do techniques that baffled experienced users who had to concede the originality and brilliance.
As we grew this community over the last 17 years since its gestation with our efforts at the WWUG and then into the incredible growth that came with two milliofn cows wandering these pastures monthly, we’ve always felt the strength of the community was found in the community. It outgrew Kathlyn and me long ago. It outgrew any individual leaders not long after. It became what Kathlyn and I call “the cow herd.”
After Effects is an ecosystem in the truest sense of the word. No other program I can point to has as passionate a base or as intense a community behind it — users, plug-in developers, trainers, etc. etc. (Sorry FCP users but AE wins in this horse race. Don’t agree? This is our write-up, we’ll leave some room for your reply.). :@)
After Effects has solved more design problems, built more careers and brought checks to more creatives than any other tool we know of. Few tools make it to their 20th birthday. After Effects is one of them, and deservedly so. It truly is the tool that changed the course of design, the market, and our lives, as well.
We have always felt After Effects is the backbone of our community and holds an incredibly important place in our personal history. So our deepest gratitude and respect go out to the After Effects team for giving us all an amazingly creative tool that like Creative COW and our own efforts here at the COW, is not without its own limits or blemishes — but in the end, does an amazing job of getting the job done.
Sincerely,
Best regards,
Ronald Lindeboom
CEO Emeritus, Creative COW LLC
Publisher Emeritus, Creative COW Magazine
A 2011 FOLIO: 40 honoree as one of the 40 most influential publishers in America
http://www.creativecow.netCreativity is a process wherein the student and the teacher are located in the same individual.
“Incompetence has never prevented me from plunging in with enthusiasm.” – Woody Allen
“If we listened to our intellect we’d never have a love affair, we’d never have a friendship, we’d never go into business becausecause we’d be cynical: ‘It’s going to go wrong, I’ll get hurt.’ That’s nonsense. You’re going to miss life. You’ve got to jump off the cliff and then build your wings on the way down.” – Ray Bradbury
-
0 Replies
Sorry, there were no replies found.
Reply to this Discussion! Login or Sign Up