About the Contributors

Jeff Almasol (Appendix: Scripting) is a senior quality engineer on the Adobe After Effects team by day and crafter of After Effects scripts at his redefinery.com site by night. His site provides numerous free scripts, reference material, and links to other scripting resources. Prior to Adobe, Jeff worked at Elastic Reality Inc. and Avid Technology on Elastic Reality, Marquee, AvidProNet, and other products; and at Profound Effects on Useful Things and Useful Assistants. You might find him talking in the third person on Twitter (redefinery) and other sites.

Dan Ebberts (Chapter 10: Expressions and After Effects Javascript Guide) is a freelance After Effects script author and animation consultant. His scripting services have been commissioned for a wide range of projects, including workflow automation and complex animation rigging. He is a frequent contributor to the various After Effects forums and has a special interest in expressions and complex algorithms. Dan is an electrical engineer by training, with a BSEE degree from the University of California, but has spent most of his career writing software. He can be reached through his web site at http://motionscript.com.

Stu Maschwitz (Foreword) is a writer and director, and the creator of the Magic Bullet Suite from Red Giant Software. Maschwitz spent four years as a visual effects artist at George Lucas’s Industrial Light & Magic (ILM), working on such films as Twister and Men in Black. He cofounded and was CTO of The Orphanage, a San Francisco-based visual effects and film production company. Maschwitz has directed numerous commercials and supervised effects work on films including Sin City and The Spirit. Maschwitz is a guerilla filmmaker at heart and combined this spirit and his effects knowledge into a book: The DV Rebel’s Guide: An All-Digital Approach to Making Killer Action Movies on the Cheap (Peachpit Press).