Adobe After Effects: 3d Spotlights

One of the more frequent questions I’ve gotten as the result of the Screencasting as Art project is “how do you pull off those lighting effects.” It’s a valid question and one I wanted to do justice by. So here’s the latest cinematic screencast detailing how to create and manipulate 3d lights in Adobe After Effects. Along the way you’ll learn how to:

• Configure your After Effects workspace to handle working with elements in 3d space.
• Manipulate the x, y, and z position of your lights.
• Adjust cone angle, cone feather, light intensity and light color.
• Animate the position and light properties.

The video runs 7:05 – feedback welcome.

Screencasting notes:

In this video, I again focused on narrative structure, pacing and humanizing the videos, but I paid special attention to making the production value of the talking head footage much higher. I once again relied on my trusty Flip Mino HD, but decided to try and frame things up a bit better and feed the Flip some light (the Flip really struggles in low lighting conditions). So after convincing Santa Claus (my wife Nancy) that I needed a soft box or two, I set up in front of a bare section of wall in my living room and filmed a couple of talking head segments off the cuff. They turned out well and, much to Nancy’s chagrin, have led me to set up shop in the living room permanently. ;-)