Learning track

Motion and video

Working with moving pictures is not one job, it is four: motion graphics, character animation, editing and visual effects. This path starts from that split, because most people who quit halfway went after the wrong one of the four on day one.

  • 10 lessons
  • Free, no signup

Ten lessons, in four stations

Each station stands on the one before it. You can start in the middle, but then you will not know why your work came out the way it did.

  1. 1

    Telling the four apart

    Motion graphics, animation, editing, visual effects. Until this is settled, picking a tool is a coin toss.

  2. 2

    The language of movement

    Timing, easing, anticipation, staging. This is what separates a beginner piece from a professional one.

  3. 3

    Container and tool

    Formats, codecs, audio, editing and storyboards. Where the project leaves your head and becomes files.

  4. 4

    Delivery

    Weight for the web, each platform aspect ratio, subtitles. A video nobody can play was not made.

This path takes you as far as a short piece you can publish. Long-form editing and professional character animation are separate specialities, and these ten lessons build neither.

The path, step by step

Lessons are ordered so each stands on the previous one. You can also jump in anywhere.

  1. 1Learning motion graphicsMotion graphics means moving graphic elements to deliver a message: text, shapes, icons and logos, not characters and not footage. Learning it does not start in the software, it starts by separating it from animation and editing, because those are three different jobs with different skills and different tools.Beginner
  2. 2The twelve principles of animationThe twelve principles of animation are a list two Disney animators, Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston, gathered in their 1981 book Disney Animation: The Illusion of Life. For motion graphics five of them do nearly all the work: timing and spacing, slow in and slow out, anticipation, follow through, and staging.Beginner
  3. 3Video formats and codecsA container and a codec are two different things: MP4 is the name of the box, H.264 is the name of the method the picture was compressed with. That one distinction settles most of the "why will this file not play" problems, because a player has to recognise both the box and the codec inside it.Beginner
  4. 4Audio formatsAudio formats come in two kinds: lossy, which throw part of the signal away and never give it back, and lossless, which shrink the file while keeping the original samples exactly. Neither is better than the other; an archive wants lossless and playback wants lossy.Beginner
  5. 5Video editing basics: from raw footage to a locked cutVideo editing means deciding what does not stay in the video, then arranging what is left so the viewer never gets lost. The work moves in six passes: organising the files, a rough assembly, the first cut, the sound pass, picture lock, and finally colour and export.Beginner
  6. 6What a storyboard is, and how to draw one that is actually usefulA storyboard is a video's shot list, where each shot is pinned down with a very rough sketch and a few lines of notes: what is in frame, what the camera does, what is said, and how long it lasts. Its value is not in the quality of the drawing but in pulling disagreements out before the camera is switched on.Beginner
  7. 7Video for the web: weight, speed and the decision that comes firstVideo is the heaviest thing you can put on a page, so the first decision is not compression but whether this page needs video at all. If it does, there are four real levers: encoding it properly, matching the resolution to the display size, using a poster instead of preloading the file, and hosting the file somewhere other than the server that serves your HTML.Intermediate
  8. 8Generating video with AIAI video generation means a model builds one shot from your text description, typically 8 to 30 seconds long. The unit of work is a shot, not a video, and that single sentence decides where these tools are useful today and where they are not.Beginner
Four film reels lit red, green, blue and white for four different crafts

The order of these ten lessons comes from one decision: work out which of those four jobs you actually want, then open the software. In Iranian job ads the four are mixed together constantly, and "motion designer" sometimes means the person who moves a logo and sometimes the person who cuts a wedding film. Anyone without that distinction spends six months discovering they learned the right tool for the wrong job.

The first two lessons are the foundation and everything else stands on them: what stages a project really passes through, and how movement becomes believable. After that we go to the things that block you in practice, meaning formats and codecs, audio, editing, storyboards and video weight on the web. The last three cover where AI genuinely belongs in video, voice and subtitles, with the same bluntness we use in our own AI reference.

One warning course advertising leaves out, and it is better to hear it now: the expensive part of this field is not the software, it is the hardware. Adobe own minimum for After Effects on Windows is 16 GB of RAM and 4 GB of GPU memory, and on the eight gigabyte laptop most students own, waiting for renders takes more of your time than learning does. The figure and its source are in the tools lesson. And if what you want is still graphics rather than moving ones, the graphic design path is shorter and fits better.

Real follow-up questions

Do I need graphic design before motion graphics?

Not to start, yes to reach sellable work. A still frame with broken layout, contrast and hierarchy does not get fixed by movement; it only becomes a moving mistake. The practical route is to advance in both at once and drop into the relevant graphic design lesson whenever a frame is not working.

Can I start on a weak laptop?

Yes, but not with every application. Adobe published minimum for After Effects on Windows is 16 GB of RAM and Blender published minimum is 8 GB; both numbers sit on the vendors own pages and are linked in the tools lesson. The practical move is to keep the first projects small and short and render at reduced size, rather than waiting to buy a machine.

Now that AI generates video, is learning this still worth it?

For background shots and mood imagery, generators genuinely shortened the work. For something that has to be exactly your brand shape and then get revised, no: a generator output has no keyframes, so you cannot change one movement and must regenerate, which changes everything else too. The last three lessons of this path go at that question with figures and sources.

This path is written for someone who wants to make it themselves. If you need a promo or an explainer now and do not have the time to learn it, see the motion graphics service page