Mikey Borup hosts a new tutorial, and again he is talking about creating shadows in After Effects. This time however, he has a new and clever technique for creating long shadows in After Effects using simple effects and tying it all together with expressions.

Long Shadows, love them or hate them, it is a current design trend, there are several tutorials on how to do this in other adobe products like illustrator or photoshop, but this tutorial is all about After EffectsMikey Borup

This is a much more flexible and masterful way to create the long shadow look that is quite popular these days. Before Mikey gets started with the techniques, he shows a couple of possible alternate methods for creating the long shadows in After Effects and discusses why they are not as effective. The key is to get the shadow edges running in parallel, which is a unique look.

Mikey accomplishes this effects using the Set Matte effect that will create the shadows in After Effects, and sets some expressions that will allow you to rotate them easily, choosing any shadow direction in the active view.

Mikey had another great tutorial looking at five ways to create visually distinct shadows in After Effects, covering how to create a simple drop shadow, a 3D style shadow, a light shadow, a shadow using shapes, and one using blur.