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ProVideo Coalition.com: Creating Motion Graphics by Chris & Trish ...

Extending your knowledge of expressions in After Effects.

Many of you are familiar with our book, Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects . As imposing as it may be in print, some miss that there’s another 180+ pages of bonus chapter PDFs on the book’s disc.

One of those chapters is Deeper Modes of Expression , which goes into more advanced expression functions. To make sure more people get to benefit from the information it contains, we’ve decided to serialize it into a series of 12 installments here on PVC. It’s still worth having the book - it contains an accompanying project file with examples and sources, not to mention an introductory chapter for those new to expressions - but hopefully this online version helps some of you looking to expand your expression toolbox.

In this first installment, we’re going to discuss some useful math functions beyond the typical +, -, *, and /. Among other things, you’ll learn how to keep numbers inside of boundaries, and how to trace out perfect circles using expressions instead of motion paths.

If you find that the exact wording of the expressions you create don’t match the wording you see in this chapter or in our example project, here are the probable reasons why:

We know many artists consider math to be incompatible with creativity; we’re sympathetic. Fortunately, the standard add/subtract/multiply/divide math operations will probably be all you need for 99% of your expressions. However, there will be times when you need to do something special, such as round off a number, or cause a property to move in circles. On those occasions, you will have to use some advanced math functions; we’ll demonstrate a few of them here. (For those of you who love math, we’ll be showing just the tip of the iceberg; the main thing for you is to know how and where to access these functions.

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