John from Motionworks put out a great tutorial about a recently finished project where he uses Illustrator, Cinema 4D, and After Effects to composite a scene. What I love about this tutorial is that John doesn’t bog the video down with specifics or details about settings and button clicks. Instead, he opts for a more workflow-based style showing you the general steps it takes and the decisions made throughout the process of designing the animation. This, I believe, is what the training community needs more of. Not just more tips and tricks, but an entire breakdown of a project from conception to final render.
It’s so easy today to get stuck on a technique and not learn how to make decisions. Tutorials like these show that it’s problem solving that makes great work, not button-pushing.
Watch the tutorial here.
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12 Comments
I’m all about this workflow thing.
Totally agree, Nick…I think we all know how to do the light streaks thing by now.
I agree that we need more high-level, big-picture based tutorials. If occasionally perusing sites like AE-Tuts & Video Copilot have revealed anything, it’s that so many people just follow the tutorial to the letter, then post and say “Look what I did!” I remember one where someone just changed the text in a project and claimed it as their own…
Appreciate the work-flow comments and tips John is giving!
Not a big fan of the video copilot stuff. But a good work-flow tutorial overall.
Hey Nick, thanks for the post and regards, John.
Great stuff!
Yeah, it’s nice to see a real client-based project broken down like that. Much better seeing how real problems were solved and how John chose to set up his projects, than being shown step by step how to re-create somebody else’s work.
I totally agree…Those workflow tuts are much more useful, they pack alot of info in a short amount of time.
The click by click ones are fine when looking for specifics but those give us a perspective into a real project flow…to me this is priceless…
Nick, John….thanks for sharing…
It’s all about context. Vague, free-flowing tutorials are great for people with an existing, intermediate level of skill and technical knowledge, not so great for people just learning the ropes from another program. Most of the people here already have some grounding in 3D, vector and Ps so these sorts of tuts are more interesting for that crowd. As long as the trainer makes it clear who the tuts are for, then both kinds (rigid or free-flowing) can work well.
Looking to get an unplugged interview there Nick?
I really think they should turn off the chat-thing though, extremely annyoing.