After Effects is not just for commercials and network ID's anymore. It's being used more and more in films and music videos. Here's a sampling.
20 Short Films and Music Videos Made with After Effects
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Take The Bus!
I like this movie, because you don't really know what your looking for until it happens. Could be color grading, could be compositing... you won't know until you watch!
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The Meteor
This mini-movie was the promo for the series of tutorials on matte-painting, 3D modeling, and compositing that Andrew Kramer and the Video Copilot team developed. Starring Tino Hertz this is an awesome movie with some killer VFX.
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Warriors Within Vol. 2
I couldn't find Volume 1 of this, but whatever. This video is pretty cool and features two kids deuling their super powers in a field. Amateur acting but very cool looking visual effects.
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Christmas in May!
I know this isn't really the right season for this kind of video, but I liked the look of it. There are a few elements that are modeled in 3Ds Max, but apart from that, everything else was composited and made in After Effects.
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The Fray - Look After You
This video sadly never made it to air, because the project got cut before it was completely finished. It's a shame, it really is a great work. The world in the video is completely made in AE along with all of the compositing. The characters and birds are the only things that are modeled in 3D.
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Food Fight
Portraying the world's conflicts and wars by having the nationalities of corresponding foods batter it out (pun intended), Food Fight is a video unlike any other.
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The Organ - Let the Bells Ring
Valerie Toumayan illustrates this music video (literally) inside of a notebook with the band as animated sketches.
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Death Star Over San Francisco
The premise: "Imperial Fleet Week SF. After almost 3 decades of development and construction, the Star Wars Strategic Defense Initiative, enacted by Ronald Reagan in 1983, has begun it's first phase of deployment." Stills and roto'd video, matchmoved into place and color graded, all makes this a very unique peice.
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Warp Whistle
Matthew Dominick's Warp Whistle takes Mario out of his world and sweeps him to New York where he encounters new creatures, obstacles, and cars that can run him over.
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Abacus - Fionn Regan
Similar to Coldplay's "Don't Panic" Music video, the look gives the bodies of the character's almost a paper look, animated as if by the puppet tool, although the faces are very real.
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Mimas - Cats on Fire
Out of all the sock puppet videos that I watch on a regular basis... this one is the best by far. The sock characters in this production were shot on blue screen and then later composited in After Effects with a ton of other elements to recreate the entire environment.
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Polar dans la ville - Promo
This isn't really an article for promos, but this one I couldn't pass up. The color grading, the rain, everything about it is very artistic. You can actually find a tutorial on how to create the rain effect seen in the video right here at AEtuts+.
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Jumper
The effect taken from the movie "Jumper", this is one of the best short films I have found demonstrating the effect. Acting isn't too great, but the effect is spot on.
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Shatter
Aptly named, this movie uses the Shatter Effect within After Effects to recreate the effect in Silent Hill, where everything deteriorates around the characters.
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M83 - We Own The Sky
Using Trapcode Form and Particular, Dan Norton makes an awesome music video that reacts to sound and creates a very fluid motion with the particles. This also got feature on Trapcode's Gallery Page.
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A Certain Frame of Mind
A basic skate video, taken into illustrator, vectorized, and put together in After Effects. I can tell this took a long time to create, but damn, they did a good job
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Magnus Engsfors - Suddenly
The story of how this was put together is that Magnus, the subject, was laying on sawhorses, and still images were taken. The sawhorses were then photoshopped out, and he was composited into the AE environment. using some clever particle placement and subtle puppet tool rigging, he really sells the idea of being suspended in time.
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Magic Flashlights
A snowboard video using the effect popularized by iPod, the team flips and slides all around the mountain with their magic flashlights light-painting as it trails along.
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Ryan Vs. Dorkman
Ryan Wieber and Michael "Dorkman" Scott face off in a series of epic lightsaber battles, the latest of which has taken the online star wars-vfx scene by storm.
