Take a peak inside my toolbox to see what I consider essential. This page contains some free stuff and some affiliate links. If you purchase something, I might get a small cut of the sale at no additional cost to you. This helps me create more helpful content for you (win-win!).
I illustrate all of the artwork for my animations in Adobe Illustrator. Illustrator is a vector-based program which means that if you scale up your artwork, it won't get pixelated. This is especially nice when scaling up or zooming into artwork in an After Effects animation–it stays crisp!
All of my animations are created primarily in After Effects with artwork I created in Illustrator. Learn more about importing artwork from Illustrator into After Effects here.
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Sound effects can add another dimension to educational animations. Once an animation is finished, I create a sound effects track using Adobe Audition. I also record voiceovers with this. I'm not an audio person, and although Audition is powerful, it was also easy enough for me to figure out.
I use Premiere to edit all of the videos for my classes and tutorials. Premiere plays nice with After Effects, so I create animated overlays and titles there and use the dynamic link feature to bring them into my video project in Premiere.
I use Screenflow to record my screen for all of my classes and tutorials. I usually do some lite editing in Screenflow, then import these videos in to Premiere to add titles, overlays, music, and other video clips.
I'm obsessed with using Notion to organize my business, work, garden...pretty much everything.
This website was created in Webflow! While it's not as easy as some other drag-and-drop website builders out there, it's at the perfect sweet-spot of powerfully customizable and not-too-technical.
Even though it's totally possible to import Illustrator artwork into After Effects, I consider Overlord an absolute necessity. Once you adopt the workflow of pushing (and pulling) artwork from Illustrator to After Effects (and vice versa) via Overlord, you'll never go back.
Try Overlord
This suite of tools is so helpful, I use at least one (usually more) of the tools every time I open After Effects.
Try Motion
Limber is my favorite character animation tool for Adobe After Effects. I'll let this character tool comparison video explain why. Learn how to use Limber to animate characters in these classes: Limber Character Rigging and Character Rigging & Animation FUNdamentals
Try Limber
Create all kinds of rigs to streamline you animation workflow. I use Joysticks to create character head rigs and Sliders to create mouth rigs (so characters can talk, smile, frown, etc.). I hope to make a class on that soon!
Try Joysticks & Sliders
This small but mighty tool allows you to copy the easing of keyframes, without copying the value of the keyframes themselves, and paste that easing onto another set of keyframes. You can also copy keyframe values and not their easing.
Try Ease Copy
Exporting After Effects animations as good quality .gif files is a pain... Gif Gun makes it not a pain.
Try GifGun
When you create a Null layer in After Effects, a solid is created and stored in a folder in the Project panel. If you delete this, your project will blow up. It's super annoying, especially if you ever want to copy layers, including Nulls, and paste them into another Ae project. Void solves this issue by being a replacement for a Null (and also solves similar annoyances with Adjustment Layers and Solids).
Try Void
Learn how to use Overlord, Motion, Joysticks n' Sliders, EaseCopy, and GifGun in this online class.
Learn more
Access all my online motion design classes, and thousands of other classes, on Skillshare.
I'm In!
