Old yet trusty After Effects.... Effects

I don't know how most people learned the ins-and-outs of After Effects, and how to utilize its powerful effects and plugins. I mostly taught myself by creating a black solid and going through each effect - one by one and experimenting with what their function was. This was a great way to find out what the hell everything was and gave me an idea how to use some of these abstract names. It was more fun than when you first find filters in Photoshop.

Minimax in action stretching artwork layers

Minimax RULES!

In these investigations you will happen upon some effects that will not function on a Black Solid. Some effects require just a regular shape or layer inside your composition and you may never be the wiser to their actual purpose.

One Effect that I have never utilized until recently being exposed to it via a tutorial by Motion Array where he outlined a technique to make long shadows. Now long shadows have their place and you can love them or hate them, but the technique utilized works in so many other ways. A recent project I am working on required some regional counties to "debuild" into strips, and then "rebuild" together as a woven art asset.
The process was as follows:
1. Separate each county as its own shape in Illustrator.
2. Create Minimax rig for each county. (Minimax with its radius linked to the position of a Transform Effect)
3. Animate parameters
4. Offset keys
5. Create "Rebuild" of the 6 colored strips weaving into each other. This was a large challenge in itself, but in the end required only 2 layers to have a custom track matte created for each layer.

There are a few additional steps that were used to transform a couple of the Minimaxed county shapes into a more rectangular shape. That effect was achieved by:
1. Create Layerstyle to control the stroke width of all the counties.
2. Add a bounding box mask to each county that I was going to transform shape, and then animate the Mask Expansion to choke the shape to the matte.

Another step that ultimately wasn't used because it produced rounded edges was to add a Simple Choker effect to the transformed layer.

Anyway, once you start playing with the Minimax effect you will see that it is used all over the place. Anytime someone wants to make something "glitchy" or something like the fantastic artists at Elastic created for the Halt and Catch Fire intro.

All those old effects are invaluable and well worth exploring - keep After Effecting!