After Effects Advanced Basic Tutorial

For class, I'll be demonstrating the tutorial on Advanced Lightning in After Effects.
The tutorial itself can be found here:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxnXtYfy19s

It is a very basic tutorial that goes into how to set up the effect, animate it via its attributes like the origin, direction and changing it's colour.

1. Create a new solid layer with any colour (I choose black). Can be smaller than composition.
2. Go to the Presets/Effects window on the right side of the work space. If this window is not present, check it on in the top Window settings. Also make sure the preview panel is visible.
3. Type in advanced in the presets/effects search bar and advanced lightning will appear. Once selected, drag it into the composition.
4. Once the lightning is visible, notice the top point which is called the origin. This is where the lightning starts from.
5. The point at the bottom is known as the direction.When moved, this will change the forks direction.
6. In the lightning Effect panel, theren are several options:
*Lightning type
*Origin
*Direction
*Conductivity Stat
*Core Settings
*Glow Settings
*Alpha Obsticale
*Turbulence
*Forking
*Decay
*Expert Settings
7. Lightning type will alter the lightning appearance like making it a strike, breaking, bouncy, omni,
anywhere, vertical or two-way strike.
8.Turbulence option if increased will add more of a additional thickness to the lightning.
9. Glow settings allow changing the lightning's colour like making it red or green rather than the default blue colour. Opacity and glow size can be changed too.
10. Each of these options can be animated, so you can have control over the lightning's behaviour.

That's all the tutorial demonstrated but there are even more options that can be animated and changed especially in the expert settings, that can go that step further in making a really snazzy effect.

Blood Splatter Tutorial

Here is a video of my attempt at the Blood Splatter Tutorial for After Effects.

Roto Brush example tutorial from After Effects

Here is the Roto Brush example tutorial all complete. I also changed the colour of a flower in the background. :) This is an exported version from Quicktime Pro as a Mpeg4 with the H264 codec. It's image size was originally 1920 x 1080, but I decreased it to1280 x 720 for easier viewing on here.
This tutorial came from this site: http://tv.adobe.com/show/learn-after-effects-cs5/

Lightning Effect References

Here a couple of Lightning effects references and a tutorial I found on YouTube.

 The first one is a tutorial on making Lightning in After Effects.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SxnXtYfy19s

 This next one is a short film. It features a few effects including lightning.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8VOTVLt6Gz4

After Effects Visual Effects Reference Montage

Here's a video from YouTube showing several Visual Effects made in After Effects. These were done from the Video Copilot tutorials.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctfOkGln1uM

From watching these, I'm planning on making an Lightning Effect and soon I'll post up some more details concerning this.