30 Day Challenge: Day 15 After Effects flop

I'm a little angry today. First, I thought I had fixed my problem with the missing effect for the tutorial. Then I found out that the effect I was missing isn't available in the trial version, so I pretty much wasted yesterday.

Today, I started a new tutorial in After Effects. It looked interesting. I would make a laser that would cut out a word. Unfortunately, after messing with it for 30 minutes, my preview did not work. I managed to get the laser to follow the path of the words, but the timing was off and the laser wasn't positioned over the words.

I'm not sure if I will continue with this tutorial tomorrow or give up and try a different one; I might even just give up on After Effects and go back to photoshop. That's how irritated I am.