Dont re-invent the wheel when you dont have to. Very often if you have a particular effect-shot you want to produce in After Effects chances are someone has already done something similar. Your first port of call on any effects-shot planning should be to troll the copious number of online tutorial sites to see if there’s a step-by-step guide to produce something similar to what you’re looking for. From there you can build and tweak to get what you’re after.

The key to becoming truly proficient with After Effects is to train yourself to become good at learning from guides and tutorials.

Here are the links to soem of the best collections of After Effects tutorials availible freely online:

LAYERS MAGAZINE is a magazine, online portal and streaming video website focused on Adobe software. They have weekly videos on news and events in the world of creative design but they also have an awesome collection of video tutorials covering, amongst others, After Effects. The tutorials are very well produced and presented as video you can start and stop as you go so you can work through them on your project with ease.

PIXEL 2 LIFE brings together a huge collection of tutorials on every conceivable digital media tool and their collection of After Effects tutes is comprehensive. Some of the tutes here focus on practical ways to work with AE whilst others detail specific visual effects – the tute on creating a HALO forcefield is particularly cool

VIDEO TUTES provides links to scores of tutorials on After Effects. many here detail with very specific functions.

ADOBE TV is Adobe’s own dedicated online TV channel focused purely on working with Adobe software. This of course means a huge range of tutorials and resources for After Effects in particular. Cklick on the link at the top titled VIDEO PROFESSIONAL and you’ll be taken to the episodes of Adobe TV that deal with video related topics.

Lastly the ADOBE VIDEO WORKSHOP is deep and rich repository of video tutorials on all Adobe applications and features a wide range of After Effects tutes. These video tutorials are more geared towards skills and tools
in AE rather than step-by-step specific effects.