1-Week Visual Effects Workshop

The 1-Week Visual Effects Workshop is an intensive hands-on exploration of Adobe After Effects. Adobe After Effects is a digital visual effects, motion graphics, and compositing application. This New York Film Academy course introduces students to the tools and skills necessary to create impressive visual effects and digital image manipulation.

Veteran Hollywood animator and NYFA Chair of 3D Animation & VFX Craig Caton (Jurassic Park, Terminator 2, Batman Returns) will instruct the course by creating specific projects, with plenty of room for exploration and experimentation. Students will expand their repertoire of fundamental and advanced techniques, including keying, tracking, compositing, and animation.

Central to NYFA’s visual effects workshops is the philosophy of learning by doing, through which students learn the craft of visual effects through hands-on instruction and continuous practical exercises. Every day of the workshop, students can expect to be actively creating, manipulating, editing, and assessing VFX imagery. The program is constructed to deliver a great deal of content in just one week.

No prior experience is required to enroll in the 1-Week Visual Effects Workshop.

Students can look no further than Craig Caton to find a master of animation and visual effects who can teach them the fundamentals of the craft, including:

Compositing

Understanding compositing fundamentals opens the door to your creativity. In this 1-Week workshop you will learn how to combine visual elements from separate sources into single images, creating the illusion that these elements are part of the same scene.

2.5D Animation

Learn the process, 2.5D animation, used to make images or scenes that simulate the appearance of being three-dimensional. Students will bring still images to life by creating false perspective and also learn how to animate cameras for creating distance parallax.

Visual Effects

Students will learn the key components of creating incredible visual effects such as camera tracking, particle systems, image masking, and more to create common cinematic effects including fire, explosions, set extensions, fog, rain, and snow, as well learn how to use color correction, look up tables, use green screen footage, animation effects, digital distortion, screen and monitor image replacement, create planets and space imagery, energy portals, and even the ability to turn people into dust clouds!