After Effects in Storytelling

NYTimes video

I just used After Effects to do an Indiana Jones-style map title sequence for a journey I took on a recent assignment overland in Asia. I didn’t really know AE before then, so I spent some good time in tutorials, mostly at VideoCopilot. It’s basically Photoshop, on steroids, with a timeline. Since realizing the power, I’ve been on a AE high. This morning, I watched this video from the NY Times on the latest in the election, and the first minute of video, the testimonials, was amazingly effective at giving me elegant yet simple visuals of the audio being spoken. It’s a simple narration piece, but the visuals are stunning, and make it well worth the 80 MB of download, which by the way is coming in super fast even in podunk Thailand. The Brightcove switch seems to be working out.
So there’s some techniques that I want to learn, like super cool depth-of-field mimicking among others. Anyway, it’s a super-cool video, is told in a great way, and is displayed and delivered effectively. Many things to learn from the NYTimes Multimedia dept.