Scripting in After Effects

Are you an After Effects artist and want to start automating your workflows? Do words like "programming" sound scary to you? Then this course is for you! In this course, Mathias Möhl will help you to get started with After Effects scripting in the most intuitive way.

Scripts are computer programs - like little robots - that perform tedious repetitive jobs for you automatically. During this course, you will develop step by step a script to adjust the content of lower thirds. In a convenient user interface, you just enter the desired text and some other parameters like the desired color and logo icon - and with a single click the script updates the After Effects project accordingly.

You don't need any programming experience to follow this course. At the end of the course, you will have all the basic AE scripting skills necessary to write your own scripts to streamline your AE workflows. As a side effect you will also gain some basic understanding of JavaScript, since After Effects scripting is based on JavaScript.

Mathias Möhl is cofounder of mamoworld.com, a company with a strong focus on the development of scripts and other extensions for After Effects. His most popular AE scripts comprise MochaImport+, iExpressions, Auto Lip-Sync and Tracker2Mask. Mathias is also an experienced trainer. He released more than 100 free video tutorials on mamoworld.com and has been invited to present at events like Animago and the After Effects World Conference. In an earlier life, Mathias did a PhD in Computer Science (which got the top rating “summa cum laude”) and as a researcher in Bioinformatics, he published more than 15 articles in international, scientific conferences and journals.

course syllabus

We start writing our first lines of code: Set the text of text layers and keyframe some properties. Wow, this is programming? Yes, the code looks a bit scary, but creating it is easy: Mostly pushing some buttons of an intuitive helper tool.

Time for some JavaScript programming essentials: You learn what comments, variables and objects are. We use them to make our script from the previous class more readable. The code looks already less scary now.

You learn that almost everything in your After Effects project can be inspected and modified using the mighty app.project JavaScript object. The programming code that looked so scary in the first class makes a lot of sense now.

We explore app.project in more detail. Since it is so huge, we will not be able to cover all of it. But you will see the most important parts - and learn how to use the documentation efficiently to dig deeper.

Time to refine your JavaScript skills. You learn how to use an "if" statement to make your code react to different situations. We use it for some basic error handling and to extend the lower third script with the ability to choose the desired logo icon.

You learn how to use loops. They are essential, for example, to iterate over the layers of a composition or the keyframes of a property. We use them to ensure that our lower thirds script removes all old keyframes properly before creating new ones.

You know all the basics now - time to apply this knowledge! We create a script to select specific layers in a composition and maybe we also have some fun generating random text layers.

This time you learn how to write your own JavaScript functions. This does not only allow you to structure the code of the lower thirds script much better - it is also a fundamental prerequisite for creating a user interface.

We create a user interface for our lower thirds script. The user interface will look nice, but will still be an empty shell with no functionality connected to it, yet.

We connect the user interface to the code of our lower third script. Congratulations, you finalized your first script with fully functional user interface!