Lessons

Lesson Info

After Effects CC Motion Graphics

We're going to look at moving stuff that's really what after effects does it just moves stuff and by moving stuff we take it from a still image to a moving image and how we do that is a very subjective process of course um what I've got here is a aftereffects project already brought in my elements I've just got to elements I've got this wood table which obviously it's really huge there um it's just ah pierre png file which means it has transparency around it it's in photo shop and then I brought in thiss little guy this little orange it's just a slice it's a still image with transparency that's just a photoshopped layer so notice I've got two different file types and there doesn't matter they're just still images in whatever we do with this still image you know we just move it around and in this case that layer is under the wood table because we're in two d if I was to move it on top then obviously what's my table there we go he has now underneath it so me undo both of those actually o...

ne more time there we go so if I want this orange to look like it's moving across here is rolling across from here and then just dropping off the table um I have to animate two different things have to animate the position and I have to animate its rotation so one thing that I've covered in some of my other workshops is dealing with this anchor point. The anchor point is really important part of of animation we move this back up here if I troll this down and I look at my transform options here I can see that I can animate anything with a stopwatch in after effects so that means my position I can animate my rotation aiken animate overtime and how do we do that? Will you start with either a beginning point or an end point? So if I move this orange out to the edge where I know it's going to eventually fall off move it up just a little bit um I know that's going to be a ce far is I wanted to gov for that part of the path and I have to decide how long I want that to happen so I was like I'll see one thousand one maybe we'll start with the second we could always move stuff that's a beauty of key frames so if I choose to make my key frame there that's where my end positions going to be for the first part of the animation and then I want to move it back what's I need to change point in time I need to move this little guy the time indicator I want to go back to the beginning of my animation that is set here at one second I want to move back to zero frame zero click and move this guy back all the way off so when I look at what happens between those two comes from here to here there it is that's my move my motion that's my position change so if I play that back thanks see? Ok that's rolling at about a rate that I think will work for my animation but it's not rolling is just scooting right now it's just sliding will notice that right here in the center I've got this little point here that's my anchor plan and that was created in my photo shop player I just centered the center the the slice layer itself the orange slice within the uh photoshopped file so it's square so that by default the anchor points always the center of the layer that you import in ok, so if I was to rotate this let's come out here to the end so I can undo some things. So if I'm to rotate this you know it'll rotate around that center point okay, but what happens if I had something that this orange was on another layer the layer was bigger and it was offset and say the anchor point was off somewhere else say I moved the anchor point somewhere else it's down there in the frame? Well, I just use this tool that I just used the pan behind anchor point tool and I move into the center, but what happens if it's there and I want to rotate it's going to rotate around the anchor point so now it's not going to rotate like it's going to roll it's swinging, which is you know what you want to do if you take my after effects workshop, you'll see that I do that and I parent things together and I can put joints on arms and you can you can move things that way, so sometimes you want to move that anchor point off center, but in this case we want something to rotate right from the center, so we want that anchor point right in the middle of very important that it's in the middle. So here I am at my last point here I'm going to click the stopwatch for rotation and then I'm going to come back here to my first point and let's see, I wanted to rotate clockwise, I'm going to move counterclockwise, I'm just going to drag it out here and see what it looks like again, this is a very subjective thing I'm going to tell whether or not my rotation is good by the way it looks is you know, going too fast is going too slow that looks like I guessed pretty darn close it looks pretty good I mean I would actually accept that so let's rotate that and maybe it's moving a little little bit slow maybe it needs to rotate just a little more so it doesn't look like it's scooting because if we're rotating too fast that's going to be like a cartoon and we're going to get to that in a minute to sometimes you want stuff to do what you don't want it to do so let's see here see how that looks that's probably a little more natural just from point a to point b all right so now if I really wanted to be technical the orange isn't perfectly round we can see it's dipping down in front of the in front of the table here just ever so slightly because it it's not round and I'm not setting more key frames for moving so what I would most likely dio is is move this in time so I would probably see where I'm going and follow the edge of that orange and at this point say it might be good see I've got extra key frames here that I added because there's demo ing two things at the same time so if I've got it to a point where let's see we need to move it up I'll move it up get to my key frames move it up a little bit there we go I don't want to introduce more key frames that I need and they're there I see him right on the edge, but see if I wanted to follow that line along perfectly than I would add another key frame so this one to bring it down just a little bit of aereo then I'd work my ray over a little see it looks like it's hovering a little move that down so again, you can see it's a very subjective thing if you how literal do you want to get on this case? We're not trying to get literal we're just trying to get that orange to move across and have a believable emotion with it. Let me go back out in the fit up two hundred percent so I've got my, uh first stage of my animation now I need to get it to fall off so starting from here and then I'm going to go out just a few frames and then and this time I'm just going to click and drag it down here and then off notice when I did that it automatically started to create this curve. Well, I want that because I want it to fall off that direction if you something falls off the edge, fight something fall off the edge of this table, it isn't going to just get to the edge of the table and drop straight down unless it's a big lead block or something, the more gravity it has, the less in the less amount of inertia that it has and the sharper the decline is going to be. And again, this is kind of a physics thing. You know, uh if you really understand in the real world what something is going to do, you apply that to what your animating so if I know if I roll something off the edge of this table it's not just going to get to the edge and the drop is going to kind of go out as an arc it's going to continue rolling a little bit and then it's going to drop at an arc so have to determine how big of an arc this is going to be and I can play with that with the busy a curve here the's handles, I grabbed this handle on just drag it out just a little bit and then we'll see the little then dropped its probably dropping over a little farther than wants. I could grab this handle and bring it out. There we go. So now the ark is complete. I could see the path of motion here, so like I've seen before, it will continue to roll so I would probably give it just a little more rotation maybe one hundred eighty degrees and down and it falls out so to make this believable, though, we have to add in what our motion blur. So let me play it without motion. Blur and it goes and it looks like it's being thrown off the edge of the table. That looks seems a little rapid. So what I can do is slow that down. So I spread out this time. Lie that key frames on the timeline a little bit. And that will slow it down. Little see if isolated. Too much area that's a probably a little too floaty again. This is a very subjective process. There we go. That's a little better. Another thing I could do is this key frame here in the middle. I can use the command or control key on pc. Click that. And that will turn it tio, eh? Ah, rodeo busy that smooths out things smooths out. You're in between points. So that helps a lot right there. But the one thing that's really missing his motion blur. I just have to click this little button right here on the on the layer and then click the master, turn on, enable motion blur and there it is now, because that is moving. I can use just the motion blur, layer, motion blur that's in after effects and if I want to speed this up I just dragged these key frames I move them all in a little bit speeds up how fast it's coming off and there's a little more of a believable animation of the orange ruling on so it's it's a simple process of making stuff move in after effects because whether you apply that to text reapplied to graphics to reply to you and a little animation sequences um everything's key framed over time it's a very subjective process depending on how fast or slow you want something to go is to where you make your key frames uh in that is that process now if we want to uh take that and kind of spazz it out a little bit which I always like tio I wanted teo I wanted to be absurd so I think of the cartoons where somebody goes you know running and they run off a cliff and they're still moving and then they drop you know, um road runner you know, flintstones whatever they'll they'll do that and so how do we kind of characterizes thing you saw the demo with a pineapple earlier um how do we make this seem a little more cartoony? Well, two things I would do eyes speed up the the animation of the rotation speed that up a lot especially once it gets out to the end and I've got one here where I've done that so let's see what I actually added here and I change scale too because I wanted it to distort a little bit seeing see I've got it really coming out fast it's really blurred here then I speed up the amount of, uh rotation it's just a blur it's an orange blur really spinning fast and the fact that it isn't perfectly round really helps sell the animation because you really see it whipping around fast and then at this point it stops rotating altogether it's that ah ha moment that it's like realizes I have nothing to run on now I'm going to drop so at that point it jumps it stretches out and then it goes down so to complete that hole luke and work and if you've watched any of my animation things you always I always do my own sound effects you got to do is to really feel it right until you can get up and find out and then you find the right sound effects if you can but if you're a an old guy like me that watched a lot of saturday morning cartoons as a kid um yeah, this kind of stuff is just delightful to do it's fun so I've got one here and I think uh that one doesn't have the sound effects in its but I do have one rendered already and here it is here with sound effects for the cartoon one anyway normal in cartoon so okay, we can stop uh that's that again that's just exaggerating something that we've that we would normally dio and that's it's all a very subjective a process. I go into that a lot more detail on some of my other videos so may I close this up here now another process that I wanted to show you is something that I I do a lot of that's animating with with with illustrator layers with illustrator sometimes they give me storyboards toe work from then I have to take all the pieces out of the storyboard and pull it together and make it so that's something they can enemy. Now you can animate um illustrator layers just right out of illustrator or illustrator files I should say it's a little more of a complex process just because the ways and some of the uh illustrations are created so let me open up uh illustrator here open that up again and yes, I've got a fund that is it was a custom font for this particular project rule number one always outlined your fonts in a design that way if the fonts amazing it no big deal you have an outline graphic of it you know you can't edit it is a fun there is a text again but you have it I didn't do that in this one and that's that was on purpose just so I could show you that really it wass so this is not the font that was supposed to be in here. So what I did want to show you here though is how I've constructed this. Let me open up first let me open up let me open up the original let me get back out here and here and in here let me open up this gps this's what I started with it's a stock image from my stock photo um all vector image and this is what I started with I didn't want this background or the border or any of that, so I just got rid of that stuff and this is what I've got left is this cub saucer and esteem ok, so that was my original um, piece that I worked from and I'll say so in this case what I wanted to do is have everything organized where I could easily animate it. So I've got the let's come down here and we've got the text we'll turn that off right now but you see that is actually just text at the text level it's just one element now if I was to bring this into after effects just like this it would have all these elements either altogether mushed together or they would be all individual separate layers that have to deal with so things like this path here. If if I just solo that but my soul. But, um, if I just look at that that's actually, just one part of a drop that I made, I actually added these drops these will spill drips here because I wanted those to animate out of the cup. So let's, look at something like the cup itself, and I drill down here and let's spread this out a bit so you can see what I'm dealing with. Just this part of the cup. Here's the cub that's the whole cup with everything in it. Here's the cup rim, just the rim part of the cup. Um, the interior you go on down the line and you see all the different elements shadows, pads. So each one of these lines is a separate, separate element. I don't want all of that information. I just want everything together is one unit. So I group everything from the original. And this is what takes a lot of time when you're given a production from somebody. They may have several characters on a background with other elements and everything in it. And you have to pull out things that you need to animate they say I want somebody's arm to move. Then I want just their arm which means the arm the shadows, the outline the layers the hand all of the parts that I know we're going to be one unit that I'm going to animate I want all of that together as one unit and I only want that so in this case say I just wanted the cup I didn't want anything else I just group everything together in in pieces there we go um and so now I've got these are the only elements that I want to save out I want to save these groups as something that I can use and what I typically dio is I raster them at this point which means I saved them out as ping files so sierra got my my saucer has all of its elements and then I would export it so I go here file export at this point that's when I would actually save it out as a ping file I can see here I've already got ping files in there of all those elements I don't want to save over those but that's typically what I'll do I'll go ahead and go to this point where I go to export so you could see what I do next now because I'm going to animate I may know that this file is already bigger than what I need to animate but I'm always overly conscious conscious of resolution because just like with frame rates you can't take something short and stretch it out and have it be smooth you can always go the other way khun tighten it up the same thing with graphics just like if you're in photo shop or anything else that non vector based fearing pixel based environment like you are with video editing on graphics a lot unless you're working defectors and text then you can scale down and everything tightens up nicely but to scale up every eight starts looking jackie and nasty so I always come out here and I go to high three hundred p p I and then I make sure that my background color is transparent so that's when I say that my ping file and that allows me to have everything but what I've selected here everything else is going to drop out transparent everything on the outside of that that layer so that's how I manage those I do that with every one of these groups that either then recreated um I got the coffees in its own layer because I was going to animate that different at one point uh then the drops they animate out those air separate and of course the steam animates separately as well so let's close up illustrator have already done that and uh then at that point let's open up the aftereffects project okay? And the only thing that I've done here is I've added I've got some sound effects in here too but I've got the background in here has, um, a mask on it. Let's, get rid of that and m for mask. Here we go and we'll see it's very subtle here on this screen actually, let me hide. There we go. So it's, just a big oval mask on this background. The background itself is this light blue. I've made that the background color, the calm of added a solid white layer in there, and then I did this really wide mask that mask is actually ah hundred and fifty pixels is what I have that feathered that just means it's a nice, soft feather on this mask. So I wanted something more interesting than a white background with white stuff on it or a black background or whatever. I wanted some color in there, so what I've done is I've brought in all of these different pieces. I've got the saucer see it's just with the transparent layer got the cup transparency in the back. The coffee sits on layer, uh, drips and steam and then the text. So the text again, since I rendered it out as a png file, I didn't have to worry about the font issue. It's okay it's there so I didn't have to worry about a font issue at all um because it's it's been rast arised and they were all huge you saw big there there's big is the screen well, now I want to animate the man so what I started with here is thesaurus, sir start with a saucer coming in so I bring a saucer in from the side again motion blur helps and I've got a tipping and moving a little bit what's wrong one here we go so I've got position and rotation just like what we did with the orange adjusted position in rotation with key frames so it's sliding in and it's rotating just to kind of do it do a tip in and a flip back so let me take this up just play it back you'll just see that command think so that kind of comes in yanks back it's just a fun little animation so the next thing I did was I brought in the cub and same thing with it it's got its own key frames all right, so let's troll it down see what we've got moving here should just be rotation and position key framed again so that's moving in well since I decided against it um making the coffee moving the cup because it happened so fast then the only thing I had to do is parent the coffee to the cup which means if I twirl this down I'm going to see I don't have any key frames for the coffee yet it follows the cup and that's just because I took this I found the point in time probably hear it the end when everything's all at rest start with that point make sure everything's lined up and then I just take this little guy here they call that a pick whip looks like a little cinnamon roll on dh I grabbed that and I just drag it down to the layer that I want to copy not the saucer but the cup so I say yes, I want you to follow the cup and do everything the cup is doing that's called parenting that comes from this this column here called parent and I do a whole workshop on just parenting thing so you can go find that out for my last workshop. Um, so there it copies that mimics everything that that one's doing I didn't have to copy all the all the layers again now rightfully so I could have just gone back to my illustrator file combined those two groups together re saved it out and then I have been done but since I brought it in here is already there is really easy for me just got have just copy what it's doing so that handle that then the drips came out next I've got those coming out and those have an extra layer of something going on your extra key frames and that's the opacity so they're moving out of the coffee and out out of the cup because the final logo has to stay there test it has to be arrest some basically reverse engineering how the logo should look when it's done doing a logo for somebody it always has to look like its final resting place he could blow it apart and then bring it back together but it has to stay at that point so with that being the case I just adjusted a little pass ity here did a little fake because everything's moving fast enough and that's able to create this motion all right now finally the steam shouldn't say finally there is text were more thing with the text so the steam is only in a pass it e thing and that decision was made because I didn't want mohr animation happening up here then I needed because I have the text flying in it's actually dropping in kind of like a spider on this spider web it's coming down buying and that does its thing there goes with the sound effects again what is that there's boeing's there's words there is well, you know you understand what those movements are, you know, buying yeah, he can hear you can hear it in your head so they come out your mouth, right? So let me tighten these all up here and we'll see the whole thing in action let me on solo those and we'll turn on I've got a couple sound effects that I used in here is well, so let's render that and they're corny sound effects their way over the top but they get that little idea going here will render much more slotting than a cop would do but more like a dog plane in the water than it does coffee come on, but hey, I know it works you get the idea so little of the coffee steamer than ever that animates in and drop the logo title drops down so that's just basically to illustrate that whole process of working with illustrator animating all the pieces going onto that you know that next step there so with that let's move on to close this all up and we've got another project here that was an animation and this was this I worked on with another group of rebel unit who's, a production company in san francisco and I worked with them a lot of animate stuff they'll create the whole project, they'll have all the answers, storyboards, everything which are basically are finished art by the time I get him in most cases they'll do a rough story board just to sell the idea, but then they do really tight storyboards and illustrator. So it's, like this scene is this, and they have their artists create everything you need in that scene, which is pretty cool because that means you got the stage. You got all these pieces and whatnot, and they give you that to work with. And in that case, um, I just have to animate stuff and then match it to a voice over. So in this case, we had some of that, but then I had to kind of recreate some things in photo shop to get some of the message across that this was a little more creative production on my part. Then then we typically do, but for this one, there's, a lot of elements moving in here, and I want to take time to show you this whole production and how we use some of those animation basics. How we use some of the three d camera moves to make things happen. So let me show you the video first, and then I'll come through and show you that production in this timo, we'll take a look at the sales force marketing cloud, the world's first unified social marketing suite. 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Salesforce marketing cloud is the world's first unified social marketing sweet that turns insights into action and connections into customers for life learn mauritz, salesforce, dot com slash marketing cloud okay, and that video is actually at that u r l so if you want to see it again, you can go watch it there. So instead of just scrubbing through this and explaining, I've got the project here that we can open up and I could go through what this kind of a process looks like, this is actually pretty, pretty deep. Yeah, we've got some fun things that air weird, which don't matter at this point, so got a lot of layers of stuff going on in here. Um, this one has a lot of animated pieces on dh. Oh, and I used text two to create the lines that connect all the little disks around. So if we look at this, I've got the twitter disc let's, open that up in photo shop and take a look at it, so this is the type of thing that I would do if I needed tio tweak something. Um let me go back to yeah, that's fit at that's, right? That's the right place so let's fit up two hundred percent and then what? I'll do it. I've got my layer selected with the item. I want to read it. So if I go to edit original, this will open up this ping file. Well, it should that went into previews. So that's a setting on this particular, um, machine that ping files are opened in in preview instead. So instead of allowing me to open it and photoshopped, I would have to go that route so I'd have to change that out in my settings. Let me hide this and just do that real quick. Um, it's a very quick thing to do. So that's why we do this stuff live right. So any graph? Here we go here's a desk here, so typically it wants to open it up in previa mode, right? I don't want that. I want ping files to open up in photo shops. I right click on it, click get info and then change down here says open with preview is the default I'm going to go down here, open it up in adobe photo shops, sisi then I click change all okay, so now, any time a ping file is accessed either internally in one of the adobe aps or if I just double click it here it will open up in photo shop instead of, um preview mode. So that was that was kind of a force lesson on us there did. Hey, sometimes we get those little jim's it's like, okay, here's an opportunity to show something a little deeper than we intended. So ok, so now I've got this selected and aiken select that either here on the timeline or down here in my project panel, if I was to select it here, I could do it there as well, but I like to do it here on the timeline because that's typically where I'm at, where I need to two tweak something like come up here to edit headed original and now it should open it up and photo shop. There we go. So that opens up in photo shop it's opening in there we go, so now I could go in there. I could tweak that later I could color shift and I could do whatever I needed to to it. We see it's, a png file. I've got all this transparency around in it and, uh, that was created originally, I believe in illustrator when I first got the artwork so there's that work flow of working with other other aps so I've got all of these little guys created in here, but how do I make it look like they're moving in three d space? I've got a camera here, that's following ah, annul object, we're going to get into that just a little more in the next section, we will discover some of that three d capabilities, but typically what I'm doing this, I've just got a three d camera ah built in there into feel notice. I've got all these little boxes checked here that's part of of the three d space anytime you check that box off, you've created a three d layer, so if I was to turn that off, I'd wipe out all of my my key frames. I don't want to do that right now, but I do have this grady and background down here, it doesn't have anything on it is just sitting there. If I was look at this to show you position only notice I just have two elements here I've got x and why that's two dimensional space x and why just moves either horizontally or it moves vertically that's it you don't you don't get this z space that's what we want, so if we want to move anything and z space, we have to be in three days I click that box and we can see oh it's moved it now and it's all crazy because it's now in three d space but knows I've got a third ah third column there with numbers and that allows me to move it now you know, in ze space or maintain it in ze space when the camera moves around it. So I'm going to undo that because I really don't want my background movie and if I leave my background in two d, it always remains a constant infinite thing out in the back. So if you're going to do say like a a star field scene or something, you got spaceships go on or you want stuff to look like it's just going or video or something you get in the background, you just want that to be your background keep it in two d it will always remain your infinite back wall it's like a projected back wall in a theater in the actors are always staying on stage in front of that back wall so that's what I'll do typically for something like this I don't need the background to move I wanted to space constant everything else is going to move around it. So what I've got here with these little discs is they're all moving in three dimensional space over times if I hit pee on my keyboard for position, we'll see that they're all animating in in three d space so I've got them coming in and kind of our king down and at the same time now see all these boxes out here are moving that means the camera's moving um so just like when I took the coffee inside the coffee cup I parented it to the cup so would follow what the cups doing I did the same thing with this no object it's a three d object if you got a layer knew no object what that is is it's basically a place holder in time that doesn't have any physical attributes you can't see it you can't touch it or feel it it's just there but what it does is it it acts like a in object that you can move in three d space so I could animate the camera to do that but I also risk doing other things the camera changing your focal of you changing my focal point changing my depth of field if I've got that turned on I may accidentally rotate things or not look at the right things but if I attach and parent this camera to this null object I can then move that anywhere I want and the cameras just going to follow around and look at whatever I point that no logic to it so that's what I've done here is I've got this this knoll object looking around so if I've got that selected you can see this little box here is moving along a path so it goes points down and then it starts to zoom out and up a little bit over time so several things are going on here I've got these disks are flying in okay those air flying into signified that they're coming into this scene that little guy is standing on his own little disk and that's a separate graphic and that would be c which guy is he that would be customer? I believe so that's him there so he's his own element and the shadows faked in photo shop I fake a cz much as I can and that's part of that work flow thing to jim that somebody had brought up earlier how do you know when you do everything and after effects aaron premiere or in this case I did it in photo shop I've got I know that the shadow has to be there I don't really want to have to set up lights and cast shadows and make the shadow do what I wanted to do and all of that when I could just fake it and photoshopped real quick and then that's my layer that I move around you know and sometimes it's it's knowing enough about the production to know what you can fake because in the end it's all it's a matter of subjectivity in the end it's the end result is what uh what counts? You know how does it look when you're all done you know and that's what we have tio look at here so I've got all of these different people sitting on these little discs that pop up they just fade on then as they fade on we see these little lines coming out there well that's all of these little tees here actually type lines in here and as we look at those they kind of grow over time and that is the reason why did the miss text dots because I could change the animator which we're not getting into text animation today that's in my other workshop but you can see this whole text animator between the key frames you can always reverse engineer somebody else's uh aftereffects project and see how they did something if you really want to know how to do something that's what you do and before the end of this segment I want to tear apart a template that I got from from online. That was a question that was brought up at my last workshop. What how do I take a template and modify it for my needs? Because there's a lot of aftereffects templates out there that you can get and you can download them you can tweak the things they tell you to tweet but you can also dig a little farther and you can really grind outs and different things but if you just drill down and you see how they made something move just by following the key frames that's really all it is's everything is key frame unless it's an expression which is way more advanced that we're going to get into today unless this a textual expression most everything is key frame driven here whether it's opacity, movement scale rotation, anything um so yeah, I've got a rotation of capacity all these things are going on simultaneously with all of these different layers to try to mimic this motion of this scene so rendered just this part of it we'll see those people show up in the background the lines start connecting them all together to kind of create this illusion of a network of people all talking each other between all the different social media and that's kind of how it works to, you know, even creative life today you can go on twitter and you'll see things tweeted about today's events. You can go on facebook and see what everybody's talking about you goto linked in lincoln's linked to twit twitter and you know they're all connected and that's I think the message here in a visual point is has been brought up, so that was just a cool way to tell that part of the story and you can see how in depth just this one little animation was for this entire video so I guess one took me a whole day just to do this one one animation you know, that was a pretty pretty intense one um another one that I had to dio using a lot of the same er same principles here and I see I've got a lot of things are parented here you can look here and apparently one thing's parented to another to another to another and if we look here, we've got, uh, this segment here where the earth is cracking apart here and let me pull this back down because we're at the end of the animation there we go so we start here is a happy, happy person they're more happy people are coming up more happy people again the's air excuse a photo shop players with fake drop shadows because it works and they're all moving along everything's happy then the narration says they've all got their own tools which we had to make the tools just appear thing so again that's it it's another swap of a photoshopped file swap so they're they're being swapped out here we can see look through here here's here's one layer here's the next that's the one where the guy has his tool in there so that again it's just doing a swap and then we get to the point where now they start freaking out because the earth is cracking under their feet and is another image swap too sad faces now they're all freaking out in sad faces so the camera is moving a little bit here we look at our camera null we'll see look at all the motion that the cameras doing here so I'm doing kind of a fake whoa! You know the earth's cracking some rotating the camera frame by frame here very again, very labor intensive, very subjective, but we'll see that they start off here's a happy guy he's got his group of people they all do different things. They all use different tools and here come the tools then but they're all disconnected somehow. If you've ever worked for a corporation, you'll realize this is pretty much every corporation you know that's that's, that's the face I got were all disconnected because everyone's got their own thing and yeah, so we got a standardized or whatever and I think that's that's the whole key here. So again, it was it's just keeping that camera moving because they're narration is holding on somebody and some of that subjective too they liked that idea they liked o the rumbling thing and I wanted to add thunder and there they thought to be too distracting, but keeping this slow panning camera move down on this guy really helped sell that part of it he's really concerned and you know it tells that part of the story again I got the fake shadow and you can see oh, hey is shadows casting on that other gold piece over there but it happened so fast you can't really tell. So now when we get over here and look into it uh we can see how many different things we've got going I got forty five layers here. Yeah oh my god that's that's great. Thank you for our audience. That's that's quotable, isn't it? Yeah. Uh yeah, it gets pretty crazy and you see that each one of these are our different life? Some of them are just straight layers and some of them are these these other sub calms so we build this whole thing together here and we start off with our camera move let me bring down my camera. No two is actually this one got here at the bottom see all these key frames in here those are all times that the camera moves on the master. That doesn't count the times that the sub cops have camera moves in him. Okay, so it's a totally different camera so it's just a ziff I rendered this out and brought it back in I just nested the calm so it's a kind of thing where I could actually this part of it um no I couldn't because I'm moving the camera around so I had to do the whole thing and after effects say see every one of these markers is an event ah that happens and that just means and I time that to the voiceover that means something's happening during that event um this word cloud every single one of these names does something different air these the's text pieces in there you see the camera's moving around in here too so everything just goes deeper and deeper and deeper so marketing that evolves to something else just by moving around um and so you got this floating word cloud all in three d but again that again that's another you know, several hours worth of animation that gets nested in to hear and it's only on screen for you know, a few seconds here so you can see it a project like this takes a couple weeks to do at minimum and typically when you're going back and forth working with a group of people add ah producer on this one that had was I was going with the client getting daily right buy offs on things every couple days we had to try to send them examples little renders of bits and pieces and then they were kind of trying to do a test build there while they're getting voiceover talent they'd have to go in and re record voice over because the client changed you know some of the text and wording there's no easy way to just do you have other than a re doing voiceover talent so that kind of thing happens but but you work in a group of people that that happens now in this case this type of worker I never go to their office and work I only work from my own machine at home and what I'll do is they'll they'll drop box stuff for me who are used to drop or a box dot com whatever they send me content that way as they have it I build content I send them content back but what we do is we'll share say and aftereffects file they have all the assets I have all the assets it's a quick email you know are you send it or whatever he send off your your aftereffects file they drop it in it looks at the same library structure and everything uh that confined all of the assets and just opens it up so well that's what he did that's cool and that way I don't have to render off something because to render this whole thing takes a few hours you know with all those camera moves and everything it could take a long time to render and then he got this huge file that you have to try to get to them so it's much easier for them to have all these little assets have all this code all the code is basically the aftereffects file that's moving all these little tiny assets around in that way they just opening up they can rendered on their end they got the finished product and so that's another way of working with a team and and making a production like this come come into fruition so as we go through here we've got all this beginning animation and uh I've got you know, just layers and layers of this animation coming through here some of it's using masks like in here at a shape of the guy cut up in masks different layers in a sub comp um here we go right here data man so more and more layers more and more sub cops and you just keep digging, digging, digging deeper deeper some of these maybe six, seven eight you know cops deep but they all have a function. This one has got its own camera move and everything I don't have to move the main camera this one's already going around looking at all these different things matching up with the audio and typically have the audio in here I may have taken it out um this project but typically I'll have this scratch audio or something just to set my time and I do all my time into a voiceover on audio so with animation you pretty much have to if you have voiceover there's something's got to be the driving force of that and here's that animation with the dis flying and you can see it's only on screen for like three seconds seems like an eternity when you're working on it, but here's, something new here is this something that I did? And here we look down here, this is where we can use the camera, the three d camera as our transition. So what I'm doing is I'm zooming in while I am fading out of that last scene, so it almost looks like resuming in so jin steve just doing a dissolve, we're fading in and we're zooming at the same time. Now I'm fading, I'm fading out of that guy and then fading into the next one, leaving the white background in there, but I'm also zooming the camera back out now so you can add camera on top of camera on top of camera that way so you can have one camera doing one thing this way and its handling that animation, they can pull that into another cop you got that camera may be doing something else, then you bring it in your master comp and your master cop lets you do that cool here's a scene going on, and now we're gonna wipe away to something else and that's how you can make that work is you that with motion blur your moving cameras, you're moving stuff underneath the plane of the camera, and it gives you that effect. So when you see stuff on tv, where you'll see there's a video or you'll see a graphic and then it wipes off, flies off and then something that's flies on, either they're flying those layers on and off, or they're flying a camera around. So in this case here, as I'm bringing in this element again, I'm zooming in and then wiping off some of these air, just simple fades while we're zooming in like that last transition, some of them actually move over time like this one. They wanted tio crop in a little bit, so instead of looking at just all through for the people standing there, that was my original calm. They wanted to show as the voiceover saying, you know, this type of person, this type of person, that person, that person, I don't know if it's like accounting and and whatever all these people do, they wanted to kind of show them and highlight them. What was much easier to you with just one camera move here than it was to go clear back to the other animation and start moving stuff around so again, the camera helps you tell the story. It will move around as you need to so moving on down the line here, let's see where were going to some of this and I've got mohr elements coming in. Some of them are just visible a lot of times I'll just crop him to the point, so it's much easier to see. Ok, that definitely starts and stops here that's going to be the end of that one and now I'm into something else. I'm very visual on the way I construct things. I'd like to be able to look at the timeline and let the timeline tell me the story. So here, obviously, I've got a new background that's over laid, and then I've also got, um, this logo that was provided, and then we've got these little word things that evolved from one thing to another. I just haven't random izing text and then it settles on the next layer in the next layer, so that gives it the feel that it's as he's talking about these different elements that me pull this up here and just render that little section out real quick. There second scrubbed through it, he's introducing the salesforce marketing cloud, so actually, I I pull that out, so as he's seen, I think he talks about those things cloud, the first unified social marketing sweet that turns insights into action and connections to customers for life seems see again those were timed right on the voice over so as the voiceover change your shifted and they may have said let's tighten up what he says right here okay we're going to take out a half of a second which is you know fifteen frames if you're thirty frames per second you're going oh my god everything's got to move down and so you have to find those points you have to build in that flexibility so yeah if that happens you can visually see I've got everything stacked in order of ascension I can just grab ok I know that I'm gonna have to grab that layer and everything beyond it I'm going to have to select grab and just move down that's why I build stuff this way and because it is scaleable it's goingto happen it's always going to happen and you can't see it is being a bad thing as a designer sometimes change is is the end of the world because you just spent how many days working on something that client wants a change in the fall apart you have a good cry drinks and coffee and eat some chocolate and wipe off the tears and you get back to work so that's going to be a quote I bet you somebody's get court yeah that's what was working once like a few minutes left get in oh gosh but that's the reality of it you know, working working on projects you just have to be flexible and trust me I do my share of wine antimony yes any producer and god god he's such a cry baby but it happens it happens so in that case again I'm just I didn't move the camera I just moved those elements up at a scene back to our white background and then I bring up this guy so now my camera only moves to focus in on the sub group of elements which are those things they're animating up again that's another cop up here thiss cop here and that table it just has a little three d elements that are popping up and come back here to the camera looking what the camera does and it just kind of moves on down line keeps re centering as these things come up as he's talking about they don't they're not even you know, one thing he made to say a few seconds another thing he may take, you know, only half a second so you have to time it to the voice over and then the camera comes the last one and then drops back so again, having the control of that camera is really critical for this stuff um down the line here this is the type of thing where you're basically recreating what you might see on a computer screen so they'll do really screen grabs of software in action say but all of the pointer is faked in we fake in a pointer so basically what they'll do is they'll a lot of times they'll get do screen grabs give you nice clean high res screen grab is and then they'll have ah piece where they've done screen cast recording use camped, asia are snaps or something video flow whatever that's called they'll use something like that to capture a screen cast of somebody going and clicking on stuff that way you can set the pacing, the timing and everything he can follow mouse moves around and you're basically recreate what they already did so that's what that's what's done here is we'll have a cop where we'll have stuff moving around it here we're not clicking on anything yet we just have stuff showing up, but as we're moving around, I'm just scrolling the camera down I'm zooming in on things and then zooming across something else keeping the camera moving all the time keeps it from getting too boring. Um like in this case, we're just doing a slow zoom and he's talking about that we're wiping something across we're wiping across this time and still just a wipe I kind of did a fly in the three d fly in so it comes in and lays on it that kept it a little more interesting there so come on mouse behave there we go so now we're getting into more uh stuff where we may start clicking on things and I think that's down here um that may have more button clicks typically I just have a cursor flout following around it looks like it's there so here it is oh, there it is there's my cursor so look at the path that cursors making again it's just moving it around in time it doesn't rotate it just moves so all my key frames on the cursor are are there now say I had cursor movement here but then I just move it off camera it's just moving it off scene okay right now don't need to see the cursor seas off camera bungie use them again so then I just bring him back in at this point okay comes in here clicks on something there something else happens and all these little layers that have dropped shadows on them uh again the drop shadows faked it's a little slice of the screen capture that we just pop out in time. So there's so many moving parts to something like this to make it look like you're getting a user experience of using this software so again it's everything in motion that's why they call it motion graphics because we ever just moving stuff in motion that's doesn't moving emotion and the sliding off um other elements like this I've got an effect on the text to make it go up ramp up in time you know I said a low number and a high number and then let it come out zooming out the camera I think we did some other zooms that you saw in the final version we zoom in on the graph because anything sitting there static too long on screen you're going to lose people they're going to lose him you've got to keep him engaged to the cameras got to move or something's gotta move underneath that otherwise it's like they're watching a power point the same thing here everything's flying up in around dropping down give them give everything a little bit of animation and balance um and that makes it interesting that's kind like the coffee cup thing I bounced the tax down a bit it just made it a little more interesting than just fading on the logo you know so because it life it gives it life and break is a character you know it brings it to life a little bit I know that there was other things we've done for salesforce where they had clouds we animated clouds around and stuff and it looked a little too much like the opening of the simpsons as you know since I was a little is the clouds and let's just keep it clean and simple now but but you can have a lot of fun and that's that's part of your job as an animator as a content creator is too you bring that message life you're telling a story in motion graphics is all about storytelling it really is whether it's just text on the screen how is that text on this? Come on the screen how does that make you feel? Is it fun? Is it serious? Is it a down are you know you can do a lot with that? You know I think back to the orange I could just have the orange roll off the table yeah or I could have a go would move away and then zipped down the table you know that's more fun and it was appropriate for that type of thing what's the message maybe is orange juice commercial or something? We got the happiest oranges and floor that whatever you know that's that would make sense you're helping to tell that story so that's why it's important as an animator motion graphics person is to always know the intent, not just be given a dry script or dry storyboard. What are you trying to say with this and again that's why I like working with this group at rebel unit because they're very good at communicating that and they are with their notes and the storyboards never then it's really great um and so it's it's really important to communicate that's that's a really, really big thing so we'll get out of this and let's see let's get into tearing apart a template here um you got a couple here from video highs yeah it's no fun I'm always in this no fun okay? But the thing is with these templates they'll either give you the font or they'll say here's a free font but you have to go register and downloaded that type of thing so most of them especially from video hive they're pretty good about it. There's there's there's a lot of sites if you just google aftereffects templates you'll find a dozen places out there and some of them have the same templates they're all about the same price you'll pay about, you know, thirty to sixty bucks typically for a template and some of them are pretty amazing somebody's done a lot of code to make these things work and some of my review reverse engineering the holy crap what did they just do it? I didn't even think about doing that so it's a great way to learn is to go get something that's finished and like I say you you can dig down deeper and deeper and see what it is that they did and discover from reverse engineering how something was built but typically a template is made to be customized and in most cases that customization is just the text itself they want you to go in there and change your own text or put in your own video clips or something like that this one is a movie title I think it's called movie titles is the actual sample that that they give here but what it's kind of like a opening sequence it's actually fairly long for a template most of them aren't that long this one's over a minute and a half most of them are just like stingers or intros or titles that go that go up you know, for presentations or videos and this one's like full pre roll movie credits so I thought it was a pretty cool one to show um so if we're to just go in and change our text again, we don't have the same font that they suggested so it's it's been changed here but you basically go in where you see there's a texting here um and select it and I can say a may turn off that hello keyboard stereo a movie by jeff foster um that's me and I have the caps lock on, which means you can't see what I just did there you go. So now I've got that on there and that just means I've changed that text all the animation is going to be applied to that because that's how they've built this template so if we just scrubbed through here we've actually render off a little bit of it just so we can see it in motion and see how it works hello it's doing that again little aftereffects bug there see if it works didn't ram preview there we go now it's thinking now thing with aftereffects let me just address this while it's rendering um your hardware is important depending on how many your processor how many cores your processor has you can tell it I wanted to use up this much of the ram in the machine allows so much else for other applications you can tell it I want you teo use all multi processors to do my ramp reviews which means think about more than just one frame at a time those are all settings you can change in the preferences which helped speed up um things like this function here and that's that's going to really help you get the most value machine my machine at home I just haven't I mac and it's great I've got video out I have the I mac goto a twenty four inch sent teak and this antique I'll use for painting drawing I do a lot of roto work uh with it so I could do paint rodeo which is frame by frame painting or masking compositing work I do a lot of that kind of stuff and I use the antique for that because I can program the buttons do forward backwards all those things those buttons on both sides you can program them and work on it don't have to touch my keyboard don't have to look at my other monitor I just pull in front of me and his work there for hours and never have to take my eyes or hands off from it which is not great for your health theater but by the way but but it's but but it's a work flow that does work so that and a cz much ram as you could possibly get and fast access to um t your data now notice I misspelled by I got the keyboard was freaking out on me there so I've got a why in there it's not spanish but this is uh this is the text I just edited the taxi and see all this other stuff going on in there in the background it's fading in it's got this other effect um it's got a lot of stuff going on in there now there's a couple things in here that besides editing text they allow you to do different things so like this um this position harris has moved to reposition so oh, I would assume that we're if we're looking in here we dig a little deeper then this is just one of those elements that its animating in there so if you want that to change where it's going so I guess if we're moving this that's parented to this I could move this somewhere else groups so if I just changed my position I go for pete this is typically how I move stuff that's why? Because if I grab it up here I start dragging around nine times out of ten I'm going to re scale it or change that anchor paul I'm going do something besides what I want to do I like to reposition things by the numbers so I just click and drag my numbers and everything moves along with it so it's basically they could have used a null object instead of that graphic but that's what they're using to parent the text to so you can move it somewhere else on the screen so you can see that so but they wanted that graphic in there too that's a part of it so there's that that could be edited and then again the background is a big part that could be edited to um the this one here this is a movie later that they had that's a pre rendered three d thing if I turn that off, I just get black, but what I can do is come in here and add my own background import file and then we're going to go back out to our production and we're going to grab this thing that I made earlier it's not long enough but least you'll be able to see what looks like so this is the re timed version of this again and we're not talking about the same angles or anything but you'll be able to see what the actual scales off a little tuesday s for scale bring it up there we go. All right, so now if I was to go in here and this's bugging me gotta put it be in there okay? All right, so now I'm going to go in there and rear ender just that first part and let render with my own background we'll see what other effects are happening to that the distortions and everything that uses so come on render please. There we go. Okay. Let's force it toe ram preview there we go. So we see there's a lot of a lot of different layers of stuff going on in there. Some of these templates there are things they allow you to change color like I showed you earlier today, that fake news program where we had the template it was the new is like a breaking news type of package in what they call it the packages because they give you separate lower thirds separate backgrounds, different wipes, different wife elements and a lot of those allow you to dig down deeper uh, like in that last production that I showed you all of the nested layers of things you go in, you do color shifts, you can change things you can turn on and off thing and say I liked everything except out like that background you can turn that off and this will allow you to do that so this was designed obviously with a really dark background in mind because I'm looking at that that line with the text coming in of course it has to be dark for white text to show up right um so that was the intention there so even though my text is in there they've got it so that it's tweaking overtime so we just rendered that part so let's see it loop so you just put your own background in there you can adjust your own tax deacon reposition it where you want tio I could additionally come in here and add um another layer to the whole thing if I wanted to or maybe just over the background um I could add a uh an adjustment layer so I've selected this re timing there I'm going to go new adjustment layer can on this adjustment layer I can choose pretty much any effect that I want I'm just going to a color shift here so do color correction and let's do well let's just play with levels because that's really easy to demonstrate here anybody is a photo shop user can appreciate levels because it's just like being in photoshopped so let's let's tweaks and things here so let's first bring our black point up so we get a little more contrast in that picture and then let's darken it up a bit so we go we'll force it a little more that way come back so I can see what I'm looking at there we go um some darkened in it that way I can make my red shift more predominant way more um and warm it up really given in a totally different look and feel even darkened it a little more there we go so now I've got a totally different look and feel on it, but I've done it tio an adjustment layer um that actually is going to apply it to the whole thing so get is going to give it a color cast if I move this adjustment layer down and tweeps a little too far just bring it down right above my background layer here it's only going to affect that background later so just like in photo shop you've got layers and you add and any kind of adjustment layer or anything above it only affects what's below those layers. Same thing here uh if I just want to adjust the background or anything from a certain point down, then that's where I put the adjustment layer so now when I render that it's much more dramatic, actually that doesn't look like fog anymore it looks like smoke or the plague is coming in or something just by a color shift. It's. Amazing how much you can change the field dynamics of fence the story you know it can do to make it really creepy. It looks like a dust storm coming into san francisco. Now it looks it's hideous. It's spookiest could be a really that's a new movie idea. Here, I think it's fun actually it's cool. Okay, let that render out till it gets passed my name. Most of the time, though, these templates air pretty self explanatory. A lot of them come with the tutorial video as well. They'll walk you through what you could do and what you can't do. Um, so that's, that's. Pretty cool. But I'm just to show you how you know you knowing the basics of aftereffects is going to help you edit your templates a lot more, um and take him beyond what they were intended to be. So that's actually came out kind of cool. It does look like a dust storm or something. That's crazy. I really like that. Uh, I just thought I thought something fun to do today. So so I think that's that's, the end of this section here. Jim sir, I'm going to turn it back to you, okay? We'll see if you got anything for people from people were right at the right at the time. Yeah, all right. I'm trying to really watch that closely because I could go right down the rabbit hole of something like this and I know right? And we could spend a whole day just on one project and do it. But but it's like this is just changing the levels something that's simple that's what I like to use a simple plug instead of one of the fancy third party plug ins that I usually by you know yeah. So but that's something that simple can have a great effect. Well, yeah, we do have a great question from okay from fernando and he wanted to know about could you advise us some good software for making sound effects or way you may find your sign sound effects online? How do you how do you approach that, huh? Making them is a little more complicated because it depends on what quality you're looking for. You have to become a fully artist. Basically, you're going to make a lot of your own sound effects, so you have to be able to know and a lot of it's trial and error what's gonna work, good microphone, good environment, no external sounds um and then experiment with what's going to work sometimes you want a deal paper shuffle thie type of paper use may record different than another you know? So it really depends on that kind of thing to find your sound effects there's a lot of sound effects libraries out there some of them are free some of them are not all use well pound upon five is an account that we have a corporate account so use upon five a lot for sound effects on some audio but really, I think I found some of the some of my basic sound effects hits and thumps and bumps and swells and things like that I get right out of the smart sound library I use smart sound for a lot of music beds. The beautiful thing about smart, smart sound is that it lets you customize the length of your production to and in some cases they let you take instruments out stuff some things got a little too much guitar in it you can pull it down, pull a day so you can kind of like mix you get to play mixmaster you know, like you're in a studio with their libraries you get to custom make your length of your sound you say I wanted to be a minute and seventeen seconds boom intro sound perfect ending it doesn't just fade out like most your son some bits I have used a cz smart sounds great sports and there they are truly amazing like they said you have all those different tracks yeah and you just tell you how tell him how long your video is it's amazing so I use that that's a much my first go to a smart sound and if by chance they don't have something in their library that works then I have to go on go look for something you know so so then I'll reach out upon five or something but I do a whole title on smart using smart sounded just go to my block you'll see it but but it's it's it's great and I use that and they've got some some sound effects and some things in there tear there they're really helpful and useful but you know google lee google search you know you'll find a lot of free stuff out there find a lot of crap to do so be careful right now when you are editing that sound when you get it what's where does that fall into your workflow and what do you usually use are just depends depends on the project it depends on how good the sound quality is he needs to be cleaned up I'm going to audition tried to clean it up or fatten it up sometimes I'll go in to audition to then re cue it if I need something to really sound ferocious aw, fatten it up a re cue. It all remastered, and I'll drop. The pitch will be able to do all that stuff without changing the time. And so use audition for a lot of that type of work. If it's just like a little ting bell or something like that, dump it right in my timeline. Crop it to where I need it. So it goes right into premier or after effects, depending what I'm putting it in.