This week I had to work with the adobe after effects program to create a digital menu board for Village Market, to showcase their customizable salad menu. Marla taught me a process that would be a little bit easier than designing everything on after effects. This process I believe also helps reduce the amount of layers you would normally see on after effects. The first step is to design the board on Indesign with 1920 by 1080 pixel specs, you can also convert the pixels into inches to make it easier. Once you have created the design and it has been approved by Marla you select everything on that page and create an outline from it. It helps to have a duplicate of the original so that at least one page is editable and the second is the outline. Once you have the outline, export that outlined page as a pdf and open that pdf in illustrator. In that illustrator file I would hold down control and right click on every element in that file to release. After everything has been released I would release the layers into a sequence and delete the original layer before saving the file as an illustrator file. Then I would go into after effects and import the illustrator file as a footage and then open it as a composition. This lets you manipulate the files layers without there being a layer for every element.
