🔥The After Effect Mega Post🔥 · Freelancing for Animators

Philippe Duvin

20d (edited) • 💎 Resources

🔥The After Effect Mega Post🔥

Hey guys!

You asked for it? There it is. 😊

🔥The After Effect Mega post.🔥

"Where do I actually start with After Effects?"

So I put together the post I wish someone had handed me on day one.

YouTube channels. Learning platforms. Plugins. Scripts.

Free stuff. Paid stuff. My personal stack.

No affiliate nonsense. No "top 50" filler. Just the stuff that actually teaches you something or saves you time.

Bookmark this one. Come back to it.

Let's go.

👉 1. YouTube channels (free, excellent)

If you learn nothing else from this post, follow these people. You can build a real foundation in AE without paying a euro.

Ben Marriott The most beginner-friendly teacher on YouTube right now. Fun, clear, fast. His "Learn After Effects in 10 Minutes" video is how thousands of people started. Start there. youtube.com/@BenMarriott
Jake In Motion (Jake Bartlett) Calm, precise, project-oriented. No fluff. Great for intermediate tricks once you know the basics. youtube.com/@jakeinmotion
ECAbrams (Evan Abrams) Veteran. Over a decade solving real client problems in AE. He teaches you how to think, not just which button to press. That difference matters later. youtube.com/@ECAbrams
Video Copilot (Andrew Kramer) The legend. The reason most of us picked up AE in the first place. Go watch the old tutorials. The projects are dated. The lessons are timeless. videocopilot.net
Dope Motions 500+ tutorials. Huge library. Great rabbit hole once you know what you want to practice. youtube.com/@DopeMotions
Sonduck Film Clean, practical. Strong for Illustrator to After Effects workflows. youtube.com/@SonduckFilm

Start with Ben. Build the habit of watching one tutorial, then opening AE and rebuilding it yourself.

Watching is not learning. Rebuilding is.

👉 2. Learning platforms (when you're ready to pay)

Free tutorials get you far. At some point you plateau. That's when structured courses earn their price.

School of Motion The gold standard. After Effects Kickstart is the course I'd buy if I was starting today. Expensive, but it's the real deal. Community, feedback, structure. schoolofmotion.com
Motion Design School Strong catalog. Fundamentals on After Effects is solid for beginners. Often cheaper than SoM. Frequent sales. motiondesign.school
Motion Practice with Ben Marriott If you vibe with Ben's YouTube channel, his course on MDS is a natural next step. Focused on animation principles, not software gymnastics.
Domestika Short, affordable, project-based. Less structured than SoM but a great way to see how different pros approach the same tool. domestika.org
Udemy Skip the 40-hour mega courses. But if you want one specific thing (expressions, character rigging, 2D FX), there's probably a good 4-hour course for 15 euros. udemy.com

My honest take: don't buy a course until you've done 20 free tutorials and you've hit a wall you can name. Otherwise you're paying to watch Netflix.

👉 3. Free plugins and scripts (install these)

These are the essentials. Free or name-your-own-price. No excuse not to have them.

FX Console (Video Copilot) Searchable launcher for effects. Hit a keyboard shortcut, type "glow," hit enter. Done. Fastest speed upgrade you'll get from a free tool. videocopilot.net/blog/2015/08/fx-console-plugin-now-available
MOBar Floating toolbar that holds your scripts as buttons. Once you install it, you'll wonder how you lived without it. We'll use this a lot inside FFA. https://www.motionape.com/mobar
Motion Bro (free tier) Huge library of presets. Transitions, text animations, effects. The free tier alone is more than most beginners will ever use. motionbro.com
Duik Angela (now Duik Ángela) The rigging tool in 2D animation. Free. Essential the moment you touch character animation. Has a learning curve. Worth every minute. rxlaboratory.org/tools/duik
True Comp Duplicator Duplicates a composition AND all its nested comps. Sounds boring. Saves your life the first time you build a template. aescripts.com/true-comp-duplicator
Overlord (cheap, worth mentioning) Not free but 45 euros. Sends vectors between Illustrator and After Effects instantly. Not essential day one. Essential by month six. aescripts.com/overlord
Flow (paid, a must if you come from CG) If you're coming from Maya, Blender, Houdini, or any 3D package, the native AE graph editor is going to feel like a joke. Flow fixes that. Clean easing curves, presets, a library you can save your own eases into. The plugin that makes AE feel like grown-up animation software. aescripts.com/flow

👉 4. My personal stack (advanced, no pressure)

This is what's inside my After Effects right now. Most of these took me years to add.

You don't need them day one. I'm showing you so you know what "loaded up" looks like.

Duik Angela — full character rigging suite. The backbone of almost every character job I do.

FX Console — muscle memory by now.

iExpressions — library of expressions you can drag and drop. A shortcut to thinking in expressions without having to write them yourself.

AESweets — beautiful motion animation tool. Adds that "flowy" shape feel you see in modern motion design.

QueueMaster — a render manager that helps you manage rendering so much faster!

rd_CompSetter — change comp settings across multiple comps at once.

MOBar — every script above, one click away.

Video Copilot plugins — Optical Flares, Saber. Old school. Still useful.

Again: don't buy any of this yet. I'm showing you the destination, not the path.

👉 5. Where to find more

Two places to bookmark if you want to go deeper on your own:

aescripts.com — the biggest marketplace for plugins and scripts. Almost everything lives here.
aaeplugins.com — catalogs 1,300+ tools with filters (free, paid, category). Useful when you're searching for something specific.

The real advice?

Tools don't make you a better animator.

Reps do.

Pick one channel. Pick one tutorial. Open AE. Do the thing. Break it. Fix it. Do it again.

That loop beats every plugin on the market.

When you hit a wall you can't describe, come back to this post. The resource that unsticks you will be here. And if you have a plugin or channel you love that I didn't list, drop it below.

I want to see what the community is using.😊

Hope you enjoy!

And please, share your animations as simple they are!🙏

It's my only way to help you out to become a killer animator with AE 😊

Talk soon!

Philippe

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