Prepared with love from Chunk
Simply landing on the perfect colour palette doesn’t happen by accident, so getting some outside help from the tools and references below can prove invaluable. We’ve got some tools to help you generate beautiful colour schemes, some gorgeous, photo inspired combinations for reference, and some online tools to help get more from your existing colours.
Shutterstock have blessed us with oodles of colour combinations, sourced from their own stock image library. Whether you use the colour combinations exactly, or just browse for some inspiration, it’s all free, so go wild!
There’s something so odd about fonts, that overwhelming feeling you should download that free font because you might need it, one day. So to fuel that feeling, below are our favourite places to score some free fonts.
Do keep an eye out when it comes to their usage rights. If some font says it’s for “Personal Use Only”, don’t go using it in a commercial project.
The quality of free photos and video assets that can be used freely has been growing exponentially for the last couple of years.
Below are some of our favourites.
Nothing quite beats hiring a professional, but when you’re starting out, these can help you greatly. There’s a mix of free and paid resources below and we’ve found the quality jump from free to paid is incredible.
As with anything free, but particularly music and sound effects, please check and double check the copyrights and usage rights.
We spend every day inside of After Effects, so if there’s a tool or some code that improves and speeds up our workflow, we will hunt it down. It’s fortunate the plugin development community for After Effects is so alive and passionate, because there is an abundance of incredible plugins and scripts, and below is the hall of fame.
There’s a lot of content out there, so finding the best creations and teachers can sometimes prove difficult. If you’re starting out, this list will give you all you need to know to start creating whatever it is you like inside of After Effects, whether that be drop dead gorgeous inspiration or some of the best teachers in the world.
YouTube, of course, cannot be ignored. Home to many incredible teachers offering their skills for free. We’ve compiled our favourites below:
Here are some of our favourite, more VFX focused channels:
We’re always on the hunt for other stellar teachers on YouTube. If you’ve got any favourites that we haven’t mentioned, please let us know!
There’s more to a video than just production, so we’ve compiled what we use for each project to make sure the best job gets done. This list will cover what we use to manage projects and to review our renders.
We run on Windows PCs here at Chunk, even though we’re Apple through and through otherwise. We built our current PCs in 2015, though they are a lot beefier nowadays. The reason for that is that building your own PC not only allows your to pack in as much power in your buck as you can, but it also allows you to upgrade slowly over time, never becoming obsolete.
Building a PC does sound daunting at first, but think more of it as expensive lego: you’re just following an instruction booklet where things are designed to fit together. Below covers basically everything you need to build your own PC, with some links for building a PC with After Effects or 3D in mind.
It’s not what you’ve got, it’s how you use it. Regardless, this is what we’ve got:
Even though this has the last spot on our resources page, it’s the one closest to our hearts. The Motion Design community really feels like something special, and being involved is wonderful. Whether online or in person, we highly encourage everyone to seek both out and find new animation friends.
