Training day & next project (Patreon)

This is what my dumbass French Bulldog looks like when she ran inside a soggy basketball court in the park. And then barked at me until I came and 'rescued' her, despite the gate being like...right there the whole time. I love her to bits, but she's a few sandwiches short of a picnic.

So with Random Far Cry bullshittery  finally complete, I decided to start what I hope will become a regular thing: a training day to improve my understanding of Adobe After Effects, simply with the goal of self improvement:

I learnt the following:

Gained a better understanding of the available tools. Particularly the Pan Behind Tool, which lets me change the anchor points of layers without messing up any masks I've made (where the pews go behind things for example).

Experimented with the available animated presets for text, so I can memorise them and save time.

Discovered that it's possible to edit the Source of a text layer with keyframes at certain times, rather then copy and pasting a new layer for the next sentence. This will make my text adding much more efficient, my timelines less cluttered, and can be very useful for very quick utterances such as "shh shh shh shh".

Discovered that I can use the Path tool to draw a path across the scene, and then snake the text along it instead of fixing it to a point. This could lead to some playful uses of the text where it snakes around the players in a scene.

Generally a better understanding of masks to hide objects behind other objects.

I'll continue on the next training day two weeks from now. 

For my next project, I do have a few options bullshittery wise. CSGO and Arma are the most prominent (and probably highest in demand), BUT...the last three Youtube videos have all been Bullshitteries. I would like to put some more effort into the Womble's Soapbox critique of the DayZ Standalone. As it has been about a year since I've started and there is much more left to edit.

So there are two things I'd like to do with the next couple of weeks:

Finish what I was working on in November, the completed draft of part 6/10 - The importance of PVE mechanics. I only really got the audio finished last November, a small sample of it is here if you're curious.

Make corrections and edits to part 3/10 - The Activities of DayZ. As many of the points I made were unsatisfactory and as many of you have pointed out, it needs to be condensed more.

I also need to create a hidden Youtube account and post the drafts there for you. There was a bit of a security breach thing and lots of videos that were Unlisted or Private were visible, meaning there was a risk that someone would download all of the drafts and host them elsewhere. So I took them down from Youtube and will provide links to parts 1 to 6 for you shortly.

Also how is it March already? It was Christmas like...last week.