How to reach out to clients: A quick start guide for freelancers

Creating 50+ timed text layers by hand because After Effects has ZERO native caption support

Opening After Effects project files and wanting to burn them to the ground because they're so chaotic

Having to manually adjust the workarea bar and enter your render settings each and every time you render a comp

Spending 20 minutes building a sliding number counter by hand when all you need is a simple number animation

Spending 30+ minutes of your precious time manually animating cryptex style animations

Manually creating gradient ramps for blur maps, switching between comps just to adjust focus, and generally becoming annoyed with camera lens blurs in Ae.

Boring single-color Echo trails with zero creative control over individual copies

The absolute tedium of splitting paragraph text into lines by hand, repositioning each line manually, and then creating perfectly sized mattes for each manually. Seriously, just automate it.

Manually creating shape layers for every single word because After Effects has zero native underline support

Following the exact same time-consuming steps every time you need to create a split second zoom effect

Having to duplicate layers one by one and calculate complex rotation maths just to rotate layers round a circle in AE

The ridiculousness of having to use the polygon tool and a bunch of manual steps just to create triangles in After Effects

Writing orbit expressions from scratch with trial-and-error radius values for every single layer

Spending hours tweaking complicated noise patterns and displacement maps

Spending hours making dozens of random geometric shapes with perfect spacing and rotation

Boring generic drop shadows with zero style options making everyone's work look identical

The complex and time-intensive way of rendering out multiple sections of the same comp via the render queue settings

Building 3D DNA helixes from scratch

Spending hours building sci-fi HUD dials with shape layers for 5-second background elements

Creating nulls and parenting layers one-by-one when you just want to slide a group of things off screen

Creating camera rigs manually and trying to remember isometric rotation values for every project

Pasting text that imports with random fonts and sizes that completely destroy your layout

Trying to remember the expression to wiggle along a single axis.

Scrolling through 200-layer timelines clicking one at a time because there's no "select all above" button

Opening Chrome, Googling "lorem ipsum", copy, switch to AE, paste - breaking flow for dummy text

Googling "Instagram story dimensions" for the 500th time this year