After Effects, Then and Now

After Effects has been a constant in my life for a long time. From Personal projects to professional client work, it has shaped how I think about motion, problem solving, and making ideas real. This is not a tutorial or a feature breakdown. It is a reflection on learning After Effects the hard way, teaching it to others, using it professionally, and watching it evolve as AI becomes part of the process. Part nostalgia, part industry perspective, and part looking forward.

My Relationship With After Effects

I first opened After Effects around 2007. Before that, I was making stock frame animations and then painting digital effects like fire on top of them using MS Paint. From there I discovered a piece of software called Particle Illusion by Wondertouch, which let me start adding particle effects to real world footage. That was the turning point. Once I realised you could combine effects with live action, I fell down a rabbit hole and eventually I found After Effects. As a 14 year old kid, I was creating visual effects from my bedroom. It felt limitless.

What made After Effects stick was simple. It did a bit of everything. Motion graphics, VFX, keying, light 3D work. At the time, keying was the big one for me. I tried a lot of different keying tools and could not get decent results from most of them. Looking back, that was largely because I was lighting and shooting green screen badly. But After Effects was forgiving. It let me get something usable and that kept me moving forward instead of getting stuck.

Today, I love it. I have used After Effects almost every day for at least the last ten years, probably more.

Learning, Teaching and Understanding the Mess

I am almost entirely self taught. I learned After Effects through personal projects, trial and error, and breaking things until they worked again. I had a couple of lessons at university, but by that point I had already been using it for years and the introductory classes covered things I already knew.

Tutorials played a big role too, especially in the early days. Video Copilot was a huge influence and one of the few places regularly putting out After Effects tutorials at the time. This was back when YouTube was new and the ecosystem of tutorials was much smaller. Because of that, a lot of problems were solved the hard way, long hours grinding on After Effects until it was fixed.

There is a quote I heard years ago that stuck with me. "Teach people what you know because when everyone is as good as you, it forces you to be better". That mindset shaped how I approached helping others. When I figured something out, I shared it.

When teaching After Effects, a few things come up again and again. There are a hundred different ways to do almost anything and very little guidance on what all the dials actually do. People often drop an effect on a layer and assume that is all it can do, instead of digging deeper. The interface is intimidating, full of panels and options, and expressions are something almost nobody takes the time to learn.

After Effects in the Real World

After Effects has been part of my professional life since I was 18. I used it throughout university and then as a freelance VFX and motion graphics artist during and after that time. I worked on short films, feature films, web series, and a variety of smaller projects.

That led to creating promotional videos for a language learning app. What started as a short stint turned into five years. After that, I moved to a strategic video agency, again spending around five years there. Eventually, I decided to change the pace and return to freelancing under Joe Barlow Media, which is what I am doing now.

Even now, After Effects does a lot exceptionally well. Adobe continues to push it forward and does not shy away from new technology like AI. They have the resources and the teams to do that. There are still bugs, but they are generally better at fixing issues than they used to be.

Where it shows its age most clearly is the UI. It does so much, but it is visually overwhelming. Even on an ultrawide monitor, fitting all the panels I regularly use can be a struggle. Custom layouts help, but there is still a sense that features get added as new boxes rather than being rethought as part of a bigger picture. Even small things like scalable UI text would make a big difference.

Updates That Actually Mattered

Some updates genuinely change how you work. AI based rotoscoping is a huge one. At university, we had a task where we had to rotoscope a person out of a shot. It took days, mostly because the tools were weak and we were effectively redrawing masks frame by frame. Now you can scribble roughly in the right area and the software understands what you want.

Another massive improvement was the change to how mattes work. Previously, you needed a separate matte layer for each matte. It was confusing, messy, and wildly inefficient. Now multiple layers can reference the same matte, and that matte can stay visible. Cleaner, clearer, faster.

More recently, a smaller update has had a surprisingly big impact. Being able to reference dropdown names directly in expressions makes templating far easier for the person using the project later. It is a small quality of life change that saves real time.

Overall, I think After Effects is in a stable place. Unlike Photoshop or Premiere, which have strong competitors, After Effects is fairly standalone. There are AI tools and dedicated VFX packages, but they often lack the flexibility needed for client work. After Effects sits in the middle, part motion graphics, part VFX, part cleanup, part AI, all in one place.

AI and the Shift in Workflow

AI did not arrive all at once. Looking back, tools like the camera tracker were early steps in the same direction. When that appeared around 2012, it felt huge, even if today it does not always give the results I want.

More recently, AI became genuinely useful with tools like Content Aware Fill. The ability to jump into Photoshop, use reference frames, and take advantage of generative fill. Textures that were previously impossible to rebuild or required a clean plate can now be created. It is simply faster. I also use third party plugins now that make the built in AI rotoscoping feel slow by comparison.

Ideally, AI should help with translation between ideas and execution. Getting what is in your head onto the screen is often the hardest part. Whether that is shaping curves, refining paths, or building a colour palette that only exists mentally. A mouse and keyboard are powerful, but the idea of conversationally creating art, telling the software what you want and refining it interactively, is incredibly appealing. Of course, taken to the extreme, that would make people like me obsolete. But in a world where that exists, everything changes anyway.

AI both lowers the barrier to entry and raises expectations. Tasks like object cleanup are easier, until the moment they fail. When that happens, less experienced users often do not know how to do it manually. It's like making bolognese from a jar. You have made dinner, but if the jar is gone, can you still cook it from scratch? At the same time, some clients think AI is magic. It still needs input, reference, and setup, but they expect results pulled from nowhere.

Looking Forward

Will After Effects remain central to motion design long term? Maybe, maybe not. We don't know if we are at the peak of AI or just the beginning. I like to think there will always be a place for it. Adobe tends to go with the flow rather than against it, so even if it changes, it will likely still exist, just not as we know it. There are still blacksmiths in the world. We do not strictly need them anymore, but the craft still has value.

One thing I wish people understood better about After Effects, and motion graphics in general, is how interconnected everything is. It is like inception. Layers linked to layers that drive other layers. Everything is deliberate. Changing something fundamental late in the process can mean unpicking every thread and rebuilding from scratch. That is always possible, but it takes time. Going in with the clearest idea possible will always make the process smoother. If someone is learning After Effects today, my advice is simple. Make a lot of rubbish. Make mistakes and learn from them. Fast! If you keep that in mind you will always stay aheads of others and AI.