OK, so, you're working in After Effects on an amazing infographic piece slated to become the best thing out there since that Stuxnet video. You've got your master comp with the audio bed in place, and have a series of precomps w/ audio & graphics sequenced and arranged together in your main composition.

You're working away on your project, have everything in each precomp chapter timed out and synced properly with the audio, and then... your client wants to re-record the VO. Or add in some copy. Or needs an alternate language version.

Alright, that's cool, we'll just drop in the new audio, slide our precomp over in time to where it should now be, open it up and do a preview to ensure everything's aligned properly. Except– the audio clip in the precomp is now out of sync with the master, as we've time-shifted the entire thing!

You're sitting at home, watching some action movie in which our handsome Hollywood hero sits down at a computer, faced with a terminal-esque window and has to ENTER PASSWORD in order to be rewarded with the exalted, famed and fabled "ACCESS GRANTED." Brilliant, right? Oscar material, right here.

Well, something I notice so very often in these screens is that the animator just keyframes the y-position and calls it a day, whereas in any console I've seen, the text always jumps up in little steps of equal height-- so I sought to recreate that for the film I was working on at the time.

I was recently working on a title sequence for an animated children's film created in a storybook style (in the spirit of Shrek), using sprite-style pose flipping.

To fit the style, all of the characters were animated as cutouts/puppets, with several poses for each character/prop. From there, I had to animate the scenes, which included finding an efficient way to cycle between distinct poses, creating the illusion of movement.

Last year about this time I was doing some motion & comp work for a pair of cinematics for a big ol' video game. One of my shots involved having these indicators moving across a screen with a hexagonal tile grid, and the art director wanted the indicators to snap from one tile to the next, giving it a much choppier, digital feel.

It took a while (longer than I'd care to admit, but alas) to get this expression put together. I won't claim that it's the best (or even most efficient) way, but if anyone has any suggestions on how I can optimize it please let me know!

Things have been busy! I'm working on several cool projects at the moment, one of which led me to share some cool math with you guys.

I've got two expressions that produce similar (yet different!) results-- both define the position for a point along a line, though one is controlled by % completion from one point to the next (0-1), the other by the distance (in pixels) from the start point.