The Last Two Weeks on AEtuts+

Its that time again where we check out what’s going on with our “sister” site, AEtuts+ and seeing what new tutorials they have posted over on the main tutorial front.  If you haven’t checked out AEtuts+ in a while, well you will be happy to know that Plus Content is up and running strong, and that means materials, project files, images, and full tutorials available for download!

Every couple weeks we will showcase the tutorials from the past weeks so you can brush up and hone your After Effects skills to learn some new tricks and broaden your horizons when it comes to our favorite application.

AEtuts+ Photo Logo Contest!

The newest contest over at AEtuts+ is the Photo Logo Contest, and you don’t have much time left to sit around and not enter!  All you have to do is print out the logo, and take a picture of yourself and have the picture fit into one of the following categories: Funny, Creative, Cute, Group, and “Holy Crap, Seriously?”  Seems simple enough, right?  Up for grabs are five sets of After Effects Keyboard Stickers (check out the AEtuts+ article for pics), one set for each category.  You can only submit one picture, so make it good and hurry up because the contest ends on Friday the 13th, at midnight Pacific Eastern Standard Time.

Writing With The Clouds

This is a fairly simple concept to grasp, not to mention the first tutorial in the newly added Basix category at AEtuts+, but Remington McElhaney really puts it out there in a really easy to follow way.  What you are going to be doing with this tutorial is taking shapes, text or whatever, and making those shapes form into and out of clouds.  This doesn’t use any third party plugins, so don’t fret if you don’t have Particular… this is an awesome tutorial to gain a few easy concepts for your work flow.

Create A Comic Book Style Animation

This is actually a pretty heavily based Photoshop tutorial, in which Lyndon Alvarez shows you how to make a comic book style effect WITHOUT using the Cartoon filter in CS4 or Red Giant Toonit (just in case you are still rocking CS3).  Using batch processing with Photoshop recorded actions on a rendered out image sequence provides a nice, albeit lengthy workaround, but alas, it is a workaround.  Also if you are heavily skilled in Photoshop, this might be a good technique for you.  John Dickinson also notes in the comments of this tutorial that you can actually do the same technique with Quicktime movies converted to Smart Objects, but only if you have Photoshop Extended.

Boharg II Breakdown

The short film, Boharg II is kind of a mindtrip… but once you get past the shear awesomeness of it you really realize there are some really tricky editing and visual effects techniques in here.  This tutorial relies heavily on good camera work on set, because if you don’t plan this out correctly it won’t work for you.  David (who is actually the actor as well) also takes you through some distortion effects, color correction and time-remapping, to show you how to make the awesome slo-mo effects and the cold, eerie color treatment.

Shine Some Light On The Situation

Marc Leonard shows you how to creating an awesome looking VFX shot with this tutorial… but this one really isn’t about the end result at all… it’s what you learn in the process of getting there.  This tutorial is chuck full of little tricks for knocking out blown out whites with Colorama and inverted luma mattes, or perhaps getting rid of unwanted light spill or annoying chromatic aberration.  Yeah, this may use Trapcode Shine, but it is well worth the watch, even if you don’t have the plugin to follow along, because that really is just a small part of the tutorial.

50 Free Movie Themed Fonts To Download

Ahh, you gotta love roundups of epic proportions!  In this font themed roundup I grab 50 fonts from the far reaches of the interwebz and bring you a huge list of movie themed fonty goodness.  Maybe you are making some spoofs, maybe you are into the fan film type of genre… who knows?  At least now you will be ready to create some nice looking title treatments and opening credits!

So that’s it guys, the last two weeks over at AEtuts+. If you want access to these project files to experiment with, and full downloadable tutorials and materials that you check out the Plus Membership option available. On Plus you get exclusive access to tutorials like the Sniper Scope tutorial a couple weeks ago, and you can get that being just a free user, and its $9 a month! Oh, and one more reason… you get access to PSDTuts+, NetTuts+, VectorTuts+ and all the other Plus content across the Tuts+ platform as well! So what are you waiting for… check it out!