Experimental Film - Editing Part 2

Once it got to the part of the project where I had to edit the special effects it was the most difficult thing I've ever done. I've never used After Effects before so the whole software looked bizarre to me so instead of trying to press a load of buttons I didn't know, I looked up tutorials on how to do what I wanted. Even after doing this I realised that I was using the newest version of After Effects, different to what the tutorials were showing so a lot of the buttons and options were either out of place or not available anymore. Because of this I had to turn to a friend who specialises in After Effects to teach me what to do as I was still clueless on how to do everything and asked if he could show me how to do it myself. The two things that I needed doing was to have second hand footage playing on a monitor as the camera zoomed into it and to also change the eye colour of my actors eyes. My friend showed me how to create a mask for the monitor and how to track its movement with the camera as it zoomed in. He also showed me how to make null objects and how to follow the path of the actors eyes without doing it frame by frame which was extremely convenient. The whole editing process was very lengthy but was worth it in the end.