New Grumo Student Course: How to Bring Your Art To Life in After Effects

Benjamin Child tells us how was his experience creating his Udemy course on How to Bring Your Art To Life in After Effects after taking Grumo’s How to Create an Awesome Online Course.

What is the course about?
The focus of this course is taking students through a process of starting with a photoshop painted character and turning it into an animatable character using Adobe After Effects.
I walk (run) students through step-by-step so that before the course is over they will have the skills to rig one of their own characters for an animated short or mini-series;
and there is no After Effects experience needed.

How did you choose the topic of the course?
I know there are people out there who love to draw or paint 2D characters and would love to know how to make their art come to life.
They would also love to no longer poke around in the dark on youtube trying to figure out how to rig a cut-out style character. Ye lookith no furthurth.

Why did you decide to create an online course?
There was once this wise man . . . if I recall his name was Inigo no it was Miguel I believe and he taught we are living in a Golden Age of opportunity; not only for educators but for students as well.
Everybody can save time learning rather than spending years on a subject and then realizing they want to try something else. Now years have been transformed into hours, days or weeks.
This means more people will be able to focus on their passions in life much sooner than ever before.

How did you find time to produce it?
One must make the time, create the space, keep the energy focused and just get it done.

How long did it take you to put together?
Over a month for sure and that’s working on it a lot because a course will require refinement to some degree when the creator (myself in this case) notices something will become confusing to too many students and there I had to re-structure part of the course.

What was the hardest thing to do?
Figuring out how to take a seemingly overwhelming and daunting software in the eyes of new students and keep things simple as well as keep the lessons time durations to a minimum which is tricky with a technical course.
I decided to keep straight to the point with no filler so students can move quickly through the lectures.

What was the simplest thing to do?
Uploading to Udemy because they have a roadmap for instructors to use as a guide when putting all your course components together online.

How did you determine the price of the course?
Good question. Udemy has changed their pricing starting in April so I had to pick a new price closest to what I felt the price should be.
Even at full price, for the time this course will save interested students is very generous.

What is your marketing strategy to promote it?
One strategy I have recently started is putting up a 3-part mini-series on Youtube.
It is called Wicked Love and I teach the same methods used in the animated short.
As people come across the animations on Youtube they will see there is a Udemy course which teaches how to create a mini-series, spread the word, etc.

What software did you use?
Screenflow for recording screencast as well as voice over recording.
Highly recommended as it is so easy to use if you have a Mac. No complaints.

What hardware did you use? (camera, microphone, lights, etc.)
Rode nt-usb microphone to record voice-overs for screen casts. It is a very sensitive mic and affordable, well-built, no regrets.

What was the part the Grumo course help you the most with?
The Grumo course really set me in the right direction to record audio. I had to ‘construct’ a room out of blankets to reduce all the outside noise of the world.
Thank you Grumo 🙂

What other resources have you used to make your course?
I have to say that after using the iPad app Procreate, I highly recommend it for digital drawing/painting. I love it because I used it for creating a course thumbnail and all the artwork for inside the course as it can export art as a photoshop document. This can then be used in After Effects and animated.
I didn’t have to sit right in front of a computer the whole time. Very nice.

Please add anything else you’d think it would be cool for people to know about you and your course.
I want to say if your considering creating a course, take the Grumo course on How to Create an Awesome Online Course. Miguel is an inspiring teacher as you will see.

I am just getting started online anywhere (crazy I know), if you know someone who loves to draw or would love to learn how to animate 2D cut-out style art I invite you to watch a short episode of Wicked Love:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2tVSLgHZ18yDr5NZgjN1Rw

Additionally, to get started I made a coupon for a limited number of students to get my course for free.
https://www.udemy.com/art-to-life/?couponCode=GRUMO

And if you are interested in learning how to create and sell your own courses you can check Miguel’s course here and get it for a nice 50% discount using the coupon GRUMO50OFF.
Check it out here: http://grumoschool.com/course/how-to-create-an-awesome-online-course/