Learning Adobe After Effects: Self Starting and Learning from the Community

For those who were curious, I did end up finishing the rest of the sections of the tutorial (there were four more) despite my impatience to begin my own project. Since I have been in this learning design program at Pepperdine, I have grown to appreciate the intentionality with which these tutorials are made. I am curious to see if they really do set me up for success despite my impatience. After being “cleared” by the tutorial to start my own project, I quickly discovered that this next phase proved to be more frustrating and required more information than the tutorial could give me.

When you go through the tutorial, the files to import are all prepared and organized within the folder on your computer. Within the constraints of the guided tutorial, it was impossible to make a mistake or have incompatible files that would put me at a standstill. When I tried to create my own animated logo, I ran into some issues with the way I had prepared the file, and I needed to know how to best prepare the design to add it into After Effects. However, this had to be done within Illustrator, so I wouldn’t be able to take a step by step guided tutorial within After Effects. I also did not have the patience to sit through another long tutorial in a different program. I needed another place I could turn to, where I could look for help and maybe even ask for it. 

There are multiple boards for each of Adobe’s programs, and each board functions as community of practice

This is how I discovered the Adobe Support Community. Knowing that their applications take days, months, even years to learn, Adobe set up this online community for users of their programs to ask questions, find answers, learn from experts, and share their knowledge. Each application has its own “board” with thousands of conversations happening in each one. I observed that this was a community of practice where this global group of people are able to share common concerns such as how to login and install the programs, present their problems with bugs or gaps within the systems, and have a unifying interest in fulfilling their goals to create projects with adobe products. I saw that there was also a desire for community members to support each other by posting new features they discovered within the programs. 

In order to define this community of practice, I looked specifically at the After Effects Community. The domain of interest for this community is the use of Adobe After Effects for creative purposes. The reason people join is to share how they are using the programs for their own projects and be inspired by one another to continue to enhance their work. I saw how users were committed to the domain through their excitement in introducing new effects they have discovered within the application. I see how they hope to inspire others to add it to their own creative work.

This is the Adobe After Effects community

The community has more than 40,000 conversations within the boat, with hundreds of new conversations each month. Each of these conversations have people within the Adobe creative community engaging in discussions about their creative projects or asking each other questions about various challenges they are facing with the program. Lastly, the practice of this community is easy to see despite how many members there are. In order to post within the forums or answer questions, each user must have a registered Adobe creative cloud membership. I see names pops up around, so I searched in the search bar their username and saw how often and when they answered or asked questions. This shows how members routinely come back to interact and contribute to the discussions.

I was able to find my question about preparing files in the search bar, and discovered that in December 2020, another user had the same question as me and had their question answered. While this was helpful and proved the usefulness and effectiveness of this community of practice, I realized that I probably would have a thousand more questions and this journey was going to be a long one.