On March 20th a few of us in the Bay Area, about 300 people, gathered at the San Francisco offices of Adobe to witness the beginning of the local User’s Group. The initiative, started by Matt Silvermann and Marcello and Brandon Grande has been a lot of fun and a chance to meet fellow motion graphics and compositing artists and it was a good occasion to see vitality of the entertainment and media industry in the bay area.
300 people with just a couple of weeks of notice is quite an achievement and the organizers put together a good show, fed the audience and gave away many prizes provided by about 30 sponsors. Once again it was great to see how available is Adobe when it comes to connecting with the end user. The company’s culture, the ease of approach and their care for small companies is truly remarkable when you think of the size of Adobe. One of the treats of the event was the trip down memory lane offered by David Simons and Dan Wilk, original developers of After Effects, when it was a product of a small company called CoSA: the Company of Art and Science. David brought copies of the original development notes and he demonstrated AE 1.x running on Mac OS 9. It was quite funny to see the humble origins of the program that now is the industry standard for motion graphics and compositing. The AE retrospect was followed by a demo of the incredible OpenEXR plugin by Brendan Bolles of fnord software, a project walkthrough by Matt Silverman who showed us a creative use of TrapCode Particular and finally a demo of TrapCode Form by Marcello Grande. An evening of rich information and tips for the After Effects artist. Anyway, while Matt & Co are going to put together a video of the event I wanted to share a couple of photos that I took during the presentation. Keep an eye on the SF Motion Graphics site for the podcast and information about the next meeting.
The eager crowd enters the Adobe headquarters
A page from the features lists planned for After Effects 1 (circa 1991)
Another page from the features lists planned for After Effects 1
After Effects was a major breakthrough at MacWorld
After Effects 1.1 running on Mac OS Classic
More of AE 1.1
CoSA becomes part of Aldus, the pioneering company that created DTP with PageMaker. Aldus was acquired later by Adobe.
The spec list of After Effects, around version 5.x