Goodie: Scripting (Patreon)

In addition to all the questions I get about what program I use to make videos (After Effects), I get quite a few people asking if I do it by hand or have it scripted somehow. The real answer is both.

Most of what you see is done manually. It could be scripted, but a lot of the visual effects I use are specialized to whatever is going on--I'd spend more time overall working if I tried to write a script for everything. But there are a few cases where writing a simple script makes everything go sooo much faster, like what you see in the animation above. In fact, earlier in the video, there a couple examples that only look at a few of the frames you see, and I just do those manually since setting just a quick script in AE is kinda annoying.

And before anyone asks, the scripts I make are in Javascript, since AE has these built in expressions that you can just plug in some JS code and use an API to interface with all the layer effects and properties. You can even read from external files, but usually that bogs down the program so much I just end up inserting the chunk of code/data I need in the script itself.

If you have any other questions about what's going on behind the scenes, feel free to ask! I've been meaning to make a timelapse of a video being created but I always forget to set it up until I've already working on a good chunk of the video, heh.