Okay, here we are in After Effects. And before we get started, I want to point out a few things. One, I'm using a Mac. So any keyboard shortcuts that I talked about will be Mac specific, just change those if you're using a PC. And the other is, as we look at After Effects, here I have the animation that that we're going to be building or you'll see a few windows that you may not have one being minus right over here on the left hand side. And the other being motion to down here on the right.
These are two plugins that I use a lot. They're extremely helpful. They're extremely powerful, and they're not free, but they are relatively cheap. If you just go to Mount mograph calm, you'll see this and here's motion to and he has a lot of things that he has built, very cheese's $40 for a lifetime license, it updates every now and then minus 40 and finding these things that will save you a lot of time is very, very helpful. You want to find ways to get quicker and you shave off one to three seconds here, few seconds there. And over the course of a project you're talking hours of time that is saving you.
Okay, so back into After Effects are normal windows, I have my effects presets here this is where our timeline is, is where everything is going to kind of take place as far as layers and everything. And then of course, our composition. This is where we build everything. And the way I have it set up, I have my text up here, my color themes if I use them every now and then align, and then the things that we talked about, and your project. So here, so that's a basic layout of After Effects. I'm using the animation and then it added a few things to it.
Go and use whatever of these tabs you like using the most and just get comfortable with it. Sometimes it can be very intimidating and very confusing. When you first open after effects. I remember being there and You just have to dive in. And as you work with it, you'll find what Windows you want open and which ones you use a lot and which ones you don't have, you want to add a window. It is up here in the very top, which you can't see but I'm going up to window at the very top, and I drop that down and you can see all this stuff, you can pad, the emotion sketch, paint, paragraph preview, these will bring up windows like info to bring up info now it's up over here.
And you can also have in this little tab, you can have other ones open. So I usually have paragraph and character I use quite a bit, especially in this project, we're gonna be using text. So I have that open. Okay, that's the basic layout here what you're going to see as we're working, moving forward here. So let's get to our class project.