The Beginner's Guide to Adobe After Effects
Jake Bartlett · Motion Designer
A genuinely thorough five-hour foundation in After Effects, built for people willing to grind through fundamentals before making anything flashy.
Jake Bartlett's beginner After Effects course runs close to six hours, and it earns nearly every minute of that length by refusing to skip the boring parts. Rather than opening with a flashy result and reverse-engineering it, the course starts with the panel system itself: what the Project panel does versus the Composition panel, how to strip a cluttered default interface down to only the panels a beginner needs, and how to save that arrangement as a custom workspace. It is an unglamorous way to begin a motion design course, but it solves the real problem beginners have with After Effects, which is not knowing what half the screen is for.
Structure and the class project
The course is built around one running project: a looping square animation for Instagram called Taco Tuesday, featuring a taco truck firing food at approaching customer heads. All the artwork arrives pre-made in Illustrator files, a deliberate choice so that design decisions never distract from the software mechanics being taught. That project scaffolds every lesson afterward. Resolution and frame rate get explained through the lens of setting up that specific composition. The five transform properties, position, scale, rotation, opacity, and anchor point, each get their own dedicated lesson using the truck and taco layers as the test subjects, with the anchor point video in particular spending real time on how offsetting that point changes the pivot for both rotation and scale without the instructor ever touching the actual artwork.
The back half shifts into assembling the animation for real: scene setup, keyframing motion, and a transition sequence built from duplicated and rotated rectangle layers nested inside three or four levels of precomps. This section is the strongest technical stretch in the course. A single ten-frame rectangle animation gets copied, rotated in 45-degree increments, and offset in time to produce a starburst wipe effect, and then that whole precomp gets reused and recolored with a fill effect to create the high-score transition. It demonstrates something most beginner tutorials skip entirely: how professionals get complexity out of simple, reusable pieces rather than hand-animating every element separately.
Where it earns its length and where it strains
The pacing is unusually honest about its own demands. A short lesson titled "Pace Yourself" stops mid-course to tell the viewer explicitly that this is not a one-sitting watch, and to take notes and come back with a clear head. That kind of self-awareness is rare and useful, but it also underlines a real weakness: at nearly six hours for topics that could be tighter, sections like the panel and workspace customization run long relative to their payoff, and a viewer who just wants to get moving may find the opening third slow going.
The ending is candid about scope. Shape layers, 3D layers, particle effects, and third-party plugins are all explicitly named as untouched territory, positioned as material for other courses in the same catalog rather than gaps in this one. That framing is fair given the beginner label, but it does mean the course is a foundation only, not a route to any particular visual style.
What it delivers reliably is competence with the actual mechanics: exporting a compressed, loop-ready video file at the correct resolution using Media Encoder, understanding precomposition well enough to use it deliberately, and enough keyboard-shortcut fluency to work efficiently rather than hunting through menus. For a true beginner willing to commit the time, that is a solid, unglamorous foundation to build from.
The standout
The precomposition workflow, where nesting a single animated rectangle through multiple precomps builds a complex, offset starburst transition from one basic movement.
What you will learn
- How to navigate After Effects' panel-based interface and build a custom workspace layout
- The difference between resolution, frame rate, and timecode, and how composition settings tie them together
- How precomposing works, including the 'leave attributes' versus 'move all attributes' distinction and why it matters
- How to animate the five core transform properties (position, scale, rotation, opacity, anchor point) using keyframes
- How to build a looping animation from imported artwork, add a transition effect, and export a compressed video file for social media
- How anchor point placement controls the pivot for rotation and scale, and how to recenter it without shifting artwork
Best for: Complete beginners who have never opened After Effects and want a patient, ground-up explanation before attempting any real motion design project.
Skip it if: Anyone who already knows Illustrator-to-After-Effects workflows and basic keyframing, or who wants to skip straight to effects, 3D, or shape layers.