September 2021 After Effects Community Recap

Report · Sep 30, 2021

Hi friends,

I want to thank all of you for taking the Commuinty Recap survey and for sharing your feedback. I was surprised to see the diversity of answers that we received and I'm sure that it will help us improve this initiative going forward. The survey is still open until 10/15/2021 and if you didn't get a chance to take it yet, I'd encourage you to do so. 🙏🏻

Community Highlight

I'm honored to feature Warren Heaton as our community superstar for this month. Warren has been a part of our community for about a decade now. Wow!! I have had the pleasusre of meeting Warren at Adobe MAX and I can tell you that he is a gem of a person. Warren is a long-time Adobe Community Professional (ACP) and has contributed over 3100 posts. He also has more than 1200 👍🏻 to his name.

Warren is a Senior Designer at CBS Marketing & Brand Design creating promo motion graphics for CBS broadcast, Paramount+ streaming, and corresponding ViacomCBS social media content. He is also Associate Faculty at the Santa Monica College Center for Media and Design teaching Motion Graphics I & II and has written curriculum for several of the certificate program courses offered there. While earning his MFA in Live Action Film and Video (studying to be a cinematographer) from the California Institute of the the Arts, Warren discovered Premiere 3, Photoshop 2.5, and - of course - Cosa After Effects 1.5 which almost instantly changed his career path from feature film production to post production. His first time using 640-by-480 Photoshop files as source footage in a 240-by-160 Premiere A/B Timeline involved waiting what felt like forever to render a Cinepak QuickTime movie file, but watching it play back was nothing short of a “this is what I am supposed to do with my life” moment. 🤩

Prior to joining the design team at CBS, Warren had his own company for a half-decade specializing in CD-ROM and DVD-Video design and authoring. His freelance clients have included DirecTV, Technicolor, Neutrogena, and the California Endowment.

Warren is proud of the award winning work he has done with design teams over the decades, but the awards that he is most proud of are winning DV Magazine’s Media Masters Award for Motion Graphics as well as a couple of Communicator Awards for motion design.

He feels fortunate to be among the very talented group that make up the Adobe Community Professionals. In addition to being an ACP, Warren is also an Adobe User Group Manager as co-host, and co-founder of the world’s longest running After Effects user group Digital Media Artists Los Angeles. If interested in joining, DMALA is the Facebook group and MotionLA is the Facebook page. Being organized entirely by volunteers and with Adobe as the main sponsor, DMALA continues to be free for its talented members since its earliest days as Motion Graphics Los Angeles in the mid-1990s.

Warren’s favorite thing about Photoshop, Illustrator, After Effects, Premiere Pro, Animate, InDesign, Media Encoder, and Audition (among the rest of the expanding collection of Adobe Creative Cloud applications) is that if you can imagine it then you can create it. Let him know that you’ve voted for his feature requests on the Adobe Video and Audio User Voice pages and he’ll happily do the same in return.

We can't thank Warren enough for his contribution to the community. 🙏🏻