What Tutorials are REALLY good for..

I’ve ranted about my annoyance with lazy people doing tutorials instead of actually learning software.

Last night I had to do an effect in After Effects where some letters needed to sort of appear on screen like smoke. Probably over a year ago now, I did a Video Copilot tutorial where I blew someone up. It included a lot of complex layers, effects, and compositing and since then I’ve used the things I learned a lot. To blow people up? Nope. For a lot of other random effects like today. Part of the effect was the person disintegrating and another part was smoke rising from the disintegration like they were burning. I applied similar techniques to achieve a completely unrelated effect last night.

THAT’S what tutorials are for – not to follow each step like a monkey and then have a reel of tutorials. You do them, internalize them, and then when you have a new problem to tackle, you use what you learned.