Visual Effects Tutorials/Research

I've recently been watching a load of visual effects tutorials on youtube that I can make in After Effects so that I can create my own shorts with good visual effects which can go in my showreel at the end of the year. I'm not really sure yet what I'm going to do with the knowledge on visual effects but I was thinking all the tutorials will come in hand for me when I enter the 3rd year of uni when I can do what I want and make a nice visual film that looks some what cinematic.

The first thing that comes to my mind when visual effects is mentioned are the action films like all the marvel films because I'm just a fan of how they use CGI and VFX in the films. So what I looked in to doing in After Effects was a laser blast effect, but I also got inspiration from my friend Oscar because we where messing around and he put a light to his chest and pretended he was Iron Man. I know this is a bit childish however I wanted to add a blast effects to this to make it look more like Iron Man, plus it was fun to do.    

So what I did was I went to youtube and looked up how to create a laser blast effect so that I could place it onto Oscars chest. I found a video that showed me how to composite a blast clip from youtube to a video in After Effects, and it also showed me how to colour correct the blast clip so that it looks like it's in the same video as my own which was very useful. However, the tutorial didn't show me how to create my own energy blast effect which it what I really wanted to know how to do so I've found another video which does show me but I'll blog about that in another post.