Posted on 12.31.08

After Effects Expressions Review

by Tim Frick

Marcus Geduld’s book After Effects Expressions from Focal Press is, at 400+ pages, a comprehensive resource for anyone wanting to become an expert at this oft underused feature of Adobe’s flagship animation product. If you know After Effects but have always wondered about the power one can wield with expressions, definitely check this book out. If you know JavaScript and want to know how you can apply those skills to working in After Effects, there’s something here for you as well.

Built on a subset of JavaScript with After Effects-specific additions thrown in by Adobe, expressions allow precise script-based control of composition layers, properties and keyframes. Possibilities include simple transformation properties like scale or rotation and enabling layers (and their properties) to behave in complex ways that would often take hours of keyframing. Expressions have been a feature of many After Effects books since they were introduced in version 6.0 of the program, but to date I have yet to see a book solely dedicated to them. Geduld’s book does a great job explaining all the possibilities (and limitations) expressions have to offer in a friendly way that’s easy to understand.

If you already know JavaScript, some of this book might be rudimentary review for you. But for those of us who aren’t programmers by trade, section one of the book offers easy to understand primers on the anatomy of a script and other expression basics such as variables, arrays and so on as they specifically relate to the familiar tools in After Effects. For the seasoned JavaScript programmer, section two lays a foundation for more mathematically complex features such as loops, randomness, triggers and user-defined functions. Multiple tutorials are included in each chapter and project files for all the book’s lessons are available to download.

Geduld’s writing is playful and fun while still maintaining authority over the subject matter and hundreds of full-color screen grabs, illustrations and script examples make the lessons an easy study. After Effects Expressions offers a comprehensive resource guide that fills a niche like nothing else currently on the market. If you would like to add expressions to your bag of design and development tricks, this book comes highly recommended.