Roughly a month ago I signed up with Digital Tutors – if you’re not familiar with it, it’s an online library of video tutorials, providing training from beginner to advanced across a truly staggering range of software used in the creative industries, as well as videos that cover concepts rather than software how-tos. I’ve been greatly impressed with the quality, and it feels like a very worthwhile investment.
I feel a hugely important part of working in any creative industry, in any role, is to remain humble about your work, to continue to learn and develop new skills – it’s something I love about these industries, and learning is something I thrive on. Thankfully, there’s a vast store of online learning resources out in the wilds of the interwebs now that can provide training in a way that just wasn’t possible ten or twenty years ago. It’s changing the educational model for certain skills in a fascinating way, and access to this sort of training is a critical part of being able to continue developing your own skills – alongside hours and hours of practice, for which there is no substitute in my mind.
There are couple of other websites specifically for After Effects that I wanted to mention with this post as well – VideoCopilot.net and GreyscaleGorilla – both of which are excellent but mostly focus on how-tos for specific effects or techniques. That said, it’s useful for inspiration, and in many cases the effects can be adapted for other uses. VideoCopilot also has a good series of After Effects basics tutorials which can be a good place to start if you’re limited with regards to budget for training materials.
Animation Seven Ltd 