After Effects is turning out to be incredibly interesting. 

I've opened up the program in the past and have been daunted by all the effects and presets and menus and just all around huge variety of options, but after watching a few tutorials I began to feel like I've been using After Effects for years. I watched the entire basic training on Video CoPilot as well as many tutorials that I found on vimeo, and this set me up perfectly to begin working on my own. 

I've been very inspired with After Effects work in the past, but I've always been a bit confused (in terms of my own work) about what I would actually be capable of making within the program. After seeing videos like Above Everything Else my expectations were unreasonably high and were definitely not going to be met. I ended up learning that After Effects is as much of a program that you can create content in, as one that you can also edit and alter already made content within as well. 

This seems a lot more reasonable for me, and although I still have no real idea what I'm going to be doing for my teaser trailer, I find comfort in knowing that I can work with footage/Photoshop layers/and if I'm getting really crazy, 3D objects created in programs like Cinema 4D (I probably won't bother learning how to use yet another program yet though, haha). 

A video like Apache which is a music video for a song by Danger Beach, is simple yet incredibly effective. I'm sure whatever layers were used were created and edited within a program like Photoshop or Illustrator, and then the piece was animated in After Effects. It's amazing what kind of results you can get by simply integrating a few basic tools. 

I can't wait until that idea hits me and I begin actually working on my teaser, because I'm honestly so fascinated with this program. After discovering how uniquely versatile After Effects is I may even consider majoring in Digital Media so that I can work with it in the future. 

Maybe (: