Meet Ben Rollason

Ben Rollason London, England

Ben is a freelance live action director, visual effects designer and motion graphics artist. He uses lots of different tools to indulge his passion for making stuff, but his relationship with After Effects probably goes back the furthest. He's been working with it since version 3.1…. which is probably too long. 

He lived and worked for many years in London, but for the last few years, he's been peddling his wares in Berlin.

You can see the sorts of things Ben like making at vfx.benrollason.com

Articles by Ben Rollason

	Adobe After Effects Lens Flare in AE and Premultiplication Explained Ben reveals not only the easy steps to giving a lens flare an alpha channel for exporting, but also explains what premultiplication means. With this understanding, you may more easily solve some of your trickier compositing problems. In most programs, such as Nuke, Fusion, or Shake, you control premultiplication and predivison manually. Since After Effects does this all for you, it can become very frustrating if you are accustomed to doing this manually and find that you cannot in AE. This tutorial will explain a little background information on how compositing applications create a composite. Tutorial, Video Tutorial

	Adobe After Effects Subtract and Divide Blending Modes in AE CS4 Ben Rollason demonstrates how to do subtract and divide blending modes in Adobe After Effects CS4 and below. CS5 now features the subtract and divide blending modes, which makes this process much easier, but if you are using an earlier version, Ben's tutorial enables you to accomplish these same effects with just a few simple steps. Ben suggests that now that people are creating new CS5 projects with built-in subtract and divide blending modes, there may be a call to 'retrofit' these options to earlier versions. Tutorial, Video Tutorial