Create Animations from Photos: Learn After Effects Hands-on

1. Introduction: What you will learn in this course: Hi, my name is set up dollar off. I'm a 2D and 3D motion designer, videographer and founder of Catholic graphics. I've been working in design and animation for the past 11 years. Over the years, I've worked with companies like Walt Disney, Fox, eat palm or Ruby's Walmart and many more to help them tell their unique stories. My goal is to tell funny stories through video and animation. I use all tools necessary depending on the job. Tools like After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator, Cinema 4D and many more. In this course, we will learn how to create a short Christmas themed animation from just photos. You will learn where to look for photos, how to carry out objects in Photoshop, and how to create a fun looking animation in After Effects using basic animation principles, you'll learn how to use all the transform tools in After Effects will apply simple expressions where possible at snow particles greater retro look in at the end. I'll show you how to export for TV and social media. For the final project, you have to create your own fun animated video with household items in a thimble your choice. At the end of the course, you'll be able to apply the knowledge and your clients work or in your own personal social media. If you're new to After Effects in Photoshop, this will be an extremely valuable course to take. I'm looking forward to seeing inside. 2. Creative Brief and Find the Right Photos: In this lesson, I'm going to show you what is the concept for the whole animation. What's my idea? So the whole idea is gonna be to create a Christmas table and we're gonna be looking for photos that are looking from top down. So basically just told you, and we want the Christmas table. And on the Christmas table they're going to be some objects animating like you saw in the intro. So there's gonna be plates, they're gonna be sweets, they're gonna be like gingerbread guys. Gingerbread Man. Anything Christmas related that you can think of presence or Christmas balls or something like that. You can animate these. I wanted to sort of do this as it is a client coming to you and telling you, Okay, we need, we're making this ad campaign and we want to create this new ad for TV. So I've created a creative brief so you can basically see how it would look like if a client comes up to you and asks you for a similar animation. So this is the creative brief. This what you're getting. The project is a Christmas themed animation. The client is center. This is today's date. Then the deadline is gonna be two days from now. And this is the description clear, the Christmas themed animation. The client wants to Christmas dinner table with different Christmas plates with gingerbread, little presence, snowflakes. Whatever else comes to your mind? I drew create the animation for Santa or no presence this year. Sounds pretty serious. So yeah. Then there's the budget and the video duration should be no longer there, 15 seconds, and the final video should be exported into full HD. So ten ADP MP4. So this is gonna be H.264 codec. So this is pretty usual for PV usually get different codecs, but we're gonna keep it simple for now. Let's keep it as mp4. I'm going to show you a different codec that you can use. But usually when a TV or some client comes to you, they usually say, what are their technical requirements? They will say we needed MOV with some complicated requirements there that you can just change in your export settings. It's not that big of a deal, but I might show you at the end an actual, real client technical requirement, but it's going to be different for each client. So it's not that important. But anyway, so this is what we're creating. And I want to show you where I'm looking for photos. So for this, for the first part of the course, you're going to create the dinner, like the Christmas dinner table animation from photos from the internet. Then for the final assignment, which is going to be at the end of the course, you have to create your own themed animation, which is going to be whatever we decide it could be, let's say hardware store, some tools. Maybe it could be kitchen, could be the bedroom or bathroom or whatever you can decide on a team yourself, or it could be another holiday, for example, is there or whatever. And then you will have to create your own animation. And I'm going to prefer if you do it with your own photos, if you can just take them with your phone, like looking top down to the table, and this is going to be best, but I'm still going to show you where to look for photos online. If you want to spice it up a bit or you don't want to take photos with your phone. So the first website that I usually look for photos, Paxos.com. And for this animation, I just looked for Christmas table top view. And I just started looking at the photos. And I'm looking at something from this perspective. So for example, if I want to pick this photo, I'll just cut out these balls here. And this one, maybe this one is a pretty good one. So you can cut out the present here and we can slide the present on the table. This is one that we're gonna be using. Actually, I've downloaded this one. I'm gonna give you all the photos you need for the next lesson. I'm just showing you here so you know where to look for photos, like free photos. You cannot, otherwise you have to pay for stock photos, which sucks. So this one is actually quite good. You can get those sugar canes. I think I might have gotten them from here. I don't remember anymore, but yeah, you can get the snowflakes. And the other one is going to be pixabay.com. So you can do the same Christmas table top view. And you get a lot of these here, so these are actually quite good. And you can do a free download. So you can just like cut out those in Photoshop later. Same with Unsplash, unsplash.com. You can look for like maybe Christmas dinner plates or something. Anyway, you get the idea. So you're going into one of these three websites there, a lot of free stock images. There's a lot of free stock image websites on the Internet, but usually those are the three that I use the most. So this is how we are going to be looking for photos. But like I said, I've already picked some photos online. So we're gonna be using these for the next lesson. And in the next lesson we're going to be cutting out objects in Photoshop. So let's get into the next lesson. 3. Cutting out objects in Photoshop: Okay, So we're in Photoshop now. And what I usually do is I pick my photos. I've got my cookies and my plates here, so I'll just drop them in Photoshop. And these are the two photos. So let's go into the cookies first. And we need to cut out each of these objects from the photo. And we need to put them on separate layers. That's very important because later on when we import them in After Effects, this is how it works. Everything needs to be in its own layer and to cut them out. There are many different ways to do it, but let's start with the easiest way and see how it works. If it doesn't work, then we go to the more difficult way. So the easiest way to do it is with the object selection tool. What we do now is we just clear the rectangle around the object. Drop it, and it usually works quite well. But as you see it here, it got the shadow as well. Here it got some of the background as well, which I don't want. Obviously, what we can do now is I can hold Alt on the keyboard and I can draw a rectangle here around this part of the image. And it's going to start, maybe removing some of it doesn't work that well. So you can go like bits by bits and it might work better. And these could be okay at some point, but you need to go with this one here, but it doesn't work too well. Maybe if you start going like this, it's going to do the job. You can see that it's working. Okay. Usually, like sometimes it's extremely helpful. It works right away. Sometimes not so much like right now. If there are some problems here that you can't like big, you can get the Lasso Tool, Lasso Tool, hold Shift. Shift is going to add to the selection. If I hold shift and do that, it's going to add to a selection. If I hold, Alt is going to take from the selection. So let's, let's fix this one here. So this is usually the lazy way to do it because you're expecting Photoshop to do the work for you and more sometimes it works really well, but right now, not so much. Okay. Okay, So this is gonna be our first selection. We can fix that a bit later if you want, but I think it's pretty good. So what we're gonna do now is we're going to click on Control Shift and j. What, what Control Shift and j does is it brings our selection to a new layer. And you can see that we've selected some bits from the background so we can go with our erase tool. So you can click on E or database or click on knee. And you can start erasing bits here that we don't need. So that's pretty good here. We've got a bit more swell. By the way, I'm changing the size of this width. I'm holding Alt and I'm clicking on the right mouse button and then I'm moving the mouse left or right. So all right, mouse button moving the mouse left or right. Okay. So this is quite good. I'm pretty happy with that. Let's turn on this layer and turn off this layer. So with with the Christmas, with the Christmas tree, We can try again with the object selection tool and see how it works. But you need to select the layer with the object selection tool. And it works. Alright? But let's check you can do with objects selection tool because it's a bit easier. But if you want to do it in the best way and you know what you're selecting. Usually you want to go with the pen tool. And with the pen tool, I know exactly what I'm doing. So if I click, so I can just go very slowly. But I know everything is going to be in the way that I want to be. You can start going around your object. It's a bit slower, but it's much, much better. You can try to get these parts as well. I don't really care that much about them, but okay. Let's do them. You can go closer. Yes. I usually use the pen tool for more complicated objects right now with the Christmas tree. We don't really need to do it, but I just want to show you how you can do it. What you can do. What you can, what else you can use. Also, it's really useful to learn the pen tool if you've never used it before. Because it's something that you will probably have to use. Seen many different softwares. For example, if you're rotoscoping king After Effects or I don't know, in Illustrator, when you're illustrating stuff. If, if you're gonna be illustrating at all. But yeah, usually using those, learning to use those Bezier curves is very important in any like graphic design, animation, whatever. What I usually do is I'm trying to do as less points as possible. So I'm not doing this. I'm trying to do it with as less as I can. Okay? And then we're just going to finish it here. Okay, so now we've got the selection and what we do now we go into paths. This is our selection. Go with the right mouse button. Make selection. Just in. Don't really need it, but let's keep it at one pixel radius. Okay? And we've got the selection now and we'll go back into layers. We've clicked on the background layer, which is good. And now we'll just click on Control Shift and J. And again, this brings our Christmas tree on its own separate layer. And you can go ahead and cut out all the other objects. So I'm going to do it now. Another thing that's very important is to name your objects. So this is layer one is Santa cookie. This is three. And let's continue. I'm gonna go with the object selection tool and see how it goes. This one is pretty good. Okay, So I'm not even going to change anything. Coconuts change this one, maybe just hold on, shift. Draw a rectangle. I'm going to take this bit with the lasso tool. Okay, that's pretty good. So let's click on Control Shift and j. And now it's on a separate layer. This is going to be snowman. Okay, let's continue with a star. With a star might not work that well. Let's see with the object selection tool again. Okay, I guess we can fix this with the object selection. So I'm holding Alt again. Here. I'm going to hold Shift to bring it back. There you go. It's pretty good. So let's go again, Control Shift and j star. Let's turn those off. So let's go again into the background one, we're going to select the cane Control Shift and j. And the last king. And the last one is this one. That was a pretty good selection. Cool. Yeah, that's good. You can fix this one here, but I don't think anybody is going to notice that. So I'm not going to be that careful with my selection. So Control Shift J. And what does this rain gear so cool. Ok, so everything is on its own separate layer. Okay, cool. So what I'm gonna do now is I'm going to delete the background because I don't need it anymore. And I'm going to start cutting out some plates. Here with the plates we basically get, we have quite a big choice here, but at least on the first side, but it's not that big actually because as you can see, like here, displayed is a bit cut out. On the top. This cup is a bit cut out. So I'm not going to be using this one. This one is quite alright. I know there's a bit of go like, I know that here we have like Part of this object here go into the plate, but it's not that much of a big deal. But basically I'm going to pick all the plates that I can see that there are separate from the other objects. So for example, this one is separate, this one is separate, this one is separate. This one is quite good. It's not touching any other objects. This one is cut out, so I'm not going to be using and this one is cut out. I want this sugar cane. So I'm gonna be using this like this bow of jam. So I'm gonna be using all of these. So what I'm gonna do now is I'm gonna go again with the object selection tool and see if I can select displayed in the easiest way possible. So you didn't select this part from going with shift. And I'm trying to select these parts. So I can't select this one obviously. So I'm going to continue to try and select them. If I can do it with the object selection tool, I'll just pick up the Lasso tool, but it seems to be working, so I don't need to make it difficult for myself, so okay, cool. We've got it. So again, atrocious, Jane. And it's on its own separate layer. One. Let's go with this star. Okay, so we need to select the background layer. That's pretty, pretty good actually, control shift and j. Okay, So select the layer and go with displayed. Okay, Control Shift J. Again, select your original layer. Select the plate. Pretty good. Selection control shift and j. Which one? So let's do the king. I'm not sure if we're going to be able to do that came with the object selection tool. It seems a bit more difficult, but I know, okay, Pretty good. There are a few parts here we can fix maybe. But overall, it's pretty good. Okay. This one I think looks fine. Okay. Control Shift and j. Okay. You have something else that we can use? I think I'm going to go with this one, but I'm actually going to use my, so for this one, just for the fun of it on there. If I mess up my selection, my points, I just go Control Z and I do it again. Okay, so like for example here, there's a bit of a curve. I'm trying to be as accurate as I can. But if I'm not that accurate, big deal. So nobody's going to notice. But let's try to be as accurate as we can. So here is the reason why I decided to go with the pen tool. Let's go through this. Okay, so my battery died. So this is the next day and I change my t-shirt. I'm just saying for continuity purposes that you're not wondering why I'm with a different t-shirt and the middle of video, actually at the end of the video but there, okay, so let's fix this curve now. So how do we do it? We click on a, on the keyboard. And you can see that we've just selected these direct selection tool. The shortcut is a. And now we can click on the path, for example, here on this boat or on these dots. Let's click on this one. Just pull the handle and fix it. There you go. So this is okay. You can go around and fix something else if you don't like it. Like for example here or somewhere else. But it's not a big deal. Nobody's going to notice if it's like, but it's not a big deal. Don't get crazy about it. This is perfectly fine right now. Okay, so now let's go to Paths. Click with control here, on this one. Now we get a selection. So Control left button and it makes a selection. Go back to layers. First select the right layer, then Control Shift and j. Okay, so we've got the plate on the separate layer as well. And now we've got all these layers. We can, it's gonna be best if we named them. So for example, this is gonna be played, this is going to be, that's the sugar cane. Okay? This is, I don't know, chocolate. Looks like chocolate bread, so system things. So this is, I don't know what that looks like. Turkish Delight or something, or maybe I have no idea. I'll just type bot. Then this is probably going to be star. Okay, so we've got everything. So let's set an aim is to play, to actually, okay, perfect. So we've got all these layers here, and we've got the cookies on a separate documents. So let's collect everything in the same document. That's gonna be like the easiest way to import it in After Effects. So I'll use this one with the plates here. So just get my cookies. And I'll just click on Control C, Control V. And we've got the cookies in here as well. Let's arrange them in a very simple way. So I'll just put them here so I can see them better when I import them in After Effects. And I will select these and I'll put them on top. So something like that probably is going to be best. Okay. There you go. Okay, so now I'll save the documents. So File, Save As and just save it in your folder. I'll call it Christmas scene too, because already I already have Christmas scene one, the one that I've used before, so I'll just call it Christmas scene two. We need the layers, so I'll leave it like that. Then click on Save. Okay, and that's it. I'll see you in the next lesson where we're going to open After Effects for the first time we're going to style the FX Console. And later on we're going to import this PSD in After Effects. See you in the next lesson. 4. Install FX Console Plugin: In this lesson, we'll install the FX Console plug-in for After Effects. We're only doing this because it's a lot easier to work with After Effects when you've got it. You don't need it to create the animation, but it's the most, but it's basically the most useful plug-in that I am using every day and it's completely free. So I'm recommending that you install it. It's super easy and you're going to use it for the rest of your life. It's amazing. So it's gonna be, it's actually like a really easy plugin, but super functional. Go on Google and just look for FX Console After Effects. I'll also put the link under the video below, so it's on video copilot dotnet opened the link, go down. It's basically this search box that appears in after effects where you can type all the effects that you need to and it's a lot easier. So I'm using a Windows machine, so I'll download it for Windows. Click on Download, open it in your downloads folder, extract it. And now just double-click on this. I agree. Style. Finished. That's it. I'll see you in the next lesson where we're going to open up perfect for the first time. 5. Import the PSD in After Effects: Okay, So we're in After Effects now and I'm assuming this is the first time you open it. If it's not the first time, great for you, but I'll just quickly go through the basics here so you know what you're doing. The first window here is called the project bin. So this is where we're going to import our videos and where we're going to create new compositions and where basically everything is going to sit in like all the files. Then here on the composition window, we're basically going to be looking at our footage here, our animation. This is the window that we're going to see everything. And on the bottom we've got the timeline. The timeline, we're gonna be stuck in different layers in Photoshop here. And it's going to look pretty much the same as in Photoshop. Let's start with importing the PSD file. So I'll click with the right button here in the project in click Import file. And I'll just look for my PSD file and import it Christmas scene tomb. And before we import it, will click on import as footage and we select Composition Retain Layer Sizes. This is really important. Then click on Import. Here we have it. So we've got our first composition. So if you double-click, we can see all the files. And because we clicked on Retain Layer Sizes, every layer is as big as we made it in Photoshop. We have the layers here exactly the same way as we had it in Photoshop. It even imported the background layer. We don't need the background layer so I can actually delete it from here, so I don't need it. And then we need to create a new composition where we're gonna be working with this because this right now, I'm not sure what kind of resolution is in. So we can go to composition, check on composition settings, the resolution which is extremely big. And this is what we were working in Photoshop. But for this actual project, we're gonna be working in a full HD composition, so 1920 by 1080. So to do that, let's just go to our project bin. Click with the right button, click on new composition. Then create a new composition, 1920 by 1080. You can also see that here we have some presets, so you can select, you can select it from the preset. We're going to use frame rate of 25. That's perfectly fine. You can use 24. Swell. The animation. I don't know. Let's make it 30 seconds long. And I'm not sure how long it's going to be yet, but let's say three seconds, we can make it longer after that and click on. Okay. So now we have an empty composition which is called compound. Let's just rename it to main. So this is going to be our main composition. And click here and set it to fit up to 100. Okay, resolution through here. Right now we can start putting some layers scenes. So let's pick our layers from the Christmas scene. So control a, select all of them. Control C, put them here in our main one and you can see that they're super big. So I'll actually make them a little smaller. So you can click with the right button Mu null, null object. So you can see that we've got this null object in the middle. So it's basically just a point, nothing more than that. We can select all these layers. Select the pick whip, pick whip it to the null, then click S on the keyboard for the null object and just scale it down. And you can see that we've just scaled all of our files. We can do it one by one. If we go to this file and click on S, and then we can scale it and move it, but it's going to be too much of a hassle. So that's why I'm creating the null. Um, I'm just scaling the null. So now I can move them. Whoops, I can move the null, and there you go. We have the same thing. Okay, so let's delete that now. We have our files in the middle. Perfect. If this confused, you don't worry about it. It's perfectly fine. No objects are a little difficult in the beginning to understand because it's basically a non-linear. It's nothing just the empty layer which you can use to parents stuff too. So parenting is basically, we're making all the other layers, a child of this layer. So they are basically following the parents. So if we, again, if we pick whip them here, or you can see that here, we also have it here. It says that they're parented to note too. So if I select, for example, the position, we can move the null and everything moves with it. If we rotate it, if we rotate it, it's going to rotate around this point. So there you have it. And of course, if we scale, it is going to be scaling around this point here, which is very useful for this type of stuff. Okay? Okay, so now let's also import our table. So again, right button import file for our table. Let's put it on the bottom of all the layers. So I'm just putting it here. If I put it on the top, then it's on top of the other layers. So this is how it works. What's on top? It's on top, what's on the bottom here? On the timeline is going to be on the bottom on the screen. Okay, so now we can start just simply arranging these. We can change this later. I'm gonna be using the same just the same method to arrange them as I did in my previous video. So this is the previous video. So let's make something similar. So we're half hour. The bigger blade here on the left. Then we're going to have all these smaller layers on the top and the plates basically in the corners. So let's do that. So put displayed here. I'll just make it a bit bigger. I'm clicking on S for scale and I'm moving it left, left and right, scale it. Or you can just type and click and type and you can change the value here. Okay? Then we're going to change, we're going to move this plate here. Then blades aren't going to come. Somewhere here. I'm gonna be exactly the same as in my previous animation, but it's going to be pretty close. We can offer. You can all see that the table is quite big at the moment, so we can scale it down and feed it here. Maybe make it a bit bigger for now. Okay? Something like that is perfectly fine. And just arrange these as we want them to stay. Put. Came over and the snowman. Okay, here we have this. And this is purely creative work. You can do it any way as you like. This is what I'm doing right now. But if you have a better way to position it, if you think of something better and just do it yourself. Like do it however you like it. I think this is okay for now. I'll probably at a position at a few times before I'm done. After I stopped the video, probably keep on just working at a bit. And as you remember, I want to have a merry Christmas sign in the middle. So I'll just try to leave a bit of space from dad. So let's put them a bit more on top. You can make them a bit smaller. Later on. Make, I'll click on the star and click on Control D and duplicate it. And you can see that we've got one more layer here, click Control D to duplicate it again. And we're going to have a few more layers of that. Also the sugar cane. I want to put it somewhere on the side actually. So let's scale it up a bit. Let's put here on top. Move this one. Just rotated. So R for rotation of theta. There you go. And let's kill it. Let's duplicate that a couple of times. So Control D, duplicate it out of rotation, just rotated a bit from throw the rotation theta, something like that. For now, it's okay. I have already imported this strawberry jam bowl because we forgot to cut it out in Photoshop, but you can cut it out yourself if you have forgotten. Unlike me, also, I have heard these green lemon check where it is, okay, So these green leaves, I'm going to leave the green leaves on a PNG file below, so you can download these because I can't find the image, the original image for those, but they've got them out before. You can use them if you'd like. And I'll just probably I'll just speed speed up this part a bit where I'm arranging stuff so it doesn't get boring. But I'm basically just moving objects with the mouse, then clicking on S for scale, you can also like open the transform tools here. So this is the position scale rotation. So that's all I'm doing. I'm just moving the position here. Then maybe R for rotation, just updating it a bit, then scale, maybe it's a bit too small, so I'll just make it a bit bigger. And this is all I'm doing. Nothing more than that. Very simple. So I'll just start moving things around and see how it all works. For example, another important thing is that you always keep the layers above or below one another. So depending on what you want to do. So for example, if I want the gains to be over the leaves, then I need to find them here in the Layer menu. And the leaves, I just call them green. So I'll just put them over the green stuff and then they have it. If I put green over sugar canes, then it's going to be on top. So that's all I'm doing. Very simple. So let's just go ahead and arrange our scene. Here. For example, if I want to create, if I want to rotate this. So if I click on rotation there, just rotating around the middle. And I can just rotate them like that. And again, go one by one and rotate them. But I don't want to do that. I just want to rotate the whole like three objects around the point here. So again, I'll create a new node. So click on New Null Object. I'll move the null object here on the bottom of the canes because I want them to rotate around this point. Then I'll select my sugar canes. Okay. So select the sugar canes and just parent them to the no. You can also, if you don't want to do it with the pick whip, you can just select all three. Click on No three, okay, So here, if I rotate the nodes, so click on R for rotation and rotate it. You can see that they're rotating around the null. Then if I move the now they have it, I can put them here and arrange them the way I want them to be. Okay. Okay, so this is where I'm going to stop for now. And something very important that I forgot to mention is always save your project. So until now I haven't saved it at all. So this is a very big deal, so we need to save it every time. So click on File, save As, and just save it in your folders animation. So I'll just save it here in my folder. Okay, So this is it for now. You can always move it a bit more if you want, for example, these seem too close to me, so probably more than a bit more after that, but until now, I'm fine. Let's not waste any more time into that. And let's go to the next lesson where I'm going to show you how to animate those objects. I'll see you in the next lesson. 6. Animate the Position of the Objects: Okay, So let's start animating the position of the objects. So let's select all the objects. Without the table. I don't need to move the table and click on P for position. And you can see that all of them have their position selected. These are parented to the null object, but it's okay for now. Let's leave it like that. And what we wanna do is let's go to about a second later, let's say two seconds on the 2 second mark. Let's select this stopwatch here, and let's make a keyframe. So as you can see, we've just made a keyframe of the position here. So on the 2 second mark, Let's go to the 0 second and move the objects out of the frame. So I'm first going to move displayed, displayed. I'm not going to move this one. I have a different idea, a different idea, how to animate this one. But let's start moving these. So let's move them like that. Okay. This one, I would like to come from this side. This can come from this side, and those three sugar canes can come from here. Okay, So that's it. So now if we, let's click on feed up to 100. If we click play, we're going to have everything animating on the screen. Right now. It doesn't look that impressive, but we're going to start playing around with the keyframes a bit and we're going to make it look a lot better. First of all, let's decide what we want first to go on the screen. So if this resolution is too high for you and you can't work easily on your computer, then you can just select quarter resolution. And the quality is going to be a bit worse, but it's probably going to play a bit better for me right now for this. Okay, so I'm just going to live with that for now. Just decide which object is going to be first coming on the screen. So I think I want to have these objects here coming in first. So I will actually select these other objects. And I will put them, put them on the top. Let's turn them off. I don't want to see them for now. I just want to focus on these. I'm also going to remove this for now. So just click on the eye. So this is basically turning off the layers so we don't see it. And let's work on these. So the first thing I want to appear is DStream. So let's start with the Christmas theme. So if the Christmas tree is first, so let's move all the other objects with a few frames forward. So I'm just moving them. 123456, we'll see how it works. But the first one that's going to move is this one. So it's gonna be the Christmas Day. Then let the second one is going to be the reindeer. No, actually in the second one is going to be disturbed. So after the Christmas tree, we want this start to animate. Then we want that India, India is going to be after that. Then this one, the chocolate one, is going to be after this, then the strawberry jam. So let's move it after that, then this one, the bowl of candy. So let's move it here. Then. We can move the king 1st and the Santa cookie after that. So what will happen is that they will move sequentially right now. Okay? We also want to fix the position of how they're actually moving on the screen. Okay, so first, the Christmas trees. So I want to change the way it comes in on the screen because right now it just comes in a straight line. And I would like to come in a curvy lines. So if I click on this first dot, so the first dot basically represents this first keyframe. So if I come here and move it around, It's pretty much like S. If I move it around like this. And what I wanna do is click on this dot here and make a curve. So something like that. Then I'm going to click on the last one. Click on the last one. Select the Pen tool. You can also select this Convert Vertex tool and play around with the path. Then I'll also do this like exactly the same thing for the other objects. So I'm just selecting the convert vertex right now. If it works without it, then you can do it without it, but it didn't work for me. So I'm just a little bit weird. If I want to move this here, then we need to select this arrow. So the movement, the move tool, selection tool. So this is v. So let's do it for the reindeer. So we can do it with the V. We don't need the convert vertex for now. Here. I can't move this point. Oh no, actually I can hear this. So I can move it. Then. Here, swirl. So let just make a curve for each of these objects. We can lay their own fixed the curve if we don't like it, but I think it's going to be fine. It might be a bit too strong, but let's see how it goes. Last one Is this. Okay? So now if we play it, you can see that it's following a different path. And now something very important about keyframes, these key-frames right now you can see them. They're linear keyframes. So what this means is that they're moving with the same speed throughout the whole animation. So let's say, let's look at the Christmas tree again. You can isolate it. If you click on this one, you can see that it starts and it ends with the same speed. But if I select those keyframes, then I click on F9 on the keyboard. You can see that we have these different kinds of keyframes, which is called the bezier keyframes. Which means that it starts slow in the beginning, then goes faster than at the finish line. It's slow again, so the moment is a lot more natural. So let's do this for all these keyframes. Select all of these that we just did. Click on F9 and see the animation that we've just created. You can see now that actually takes a bit longer for the animation to buffer the render. So I'm going to change the resolution of water and it's gonna be a lot faster. So there you have it. So much more interesting animation. So it's not going in a straight line, it's following some sort of a curve. And also we have a slow in the beginning, them fast and then slow at the end. What I also did for the original animation and what I advice you to do as well is to select those keyframes that we just created. So let's go to the Christmas theme and select these keyframes. And here, if we click on this button here where it says Graph Editor, you can see what I just explained to you. So basically what this represents is that it's going slow in the beginning, fast, slow at the end. We can change this curve so the animation is a bit different for each of the objects. So what I'm gonna do right now is I want to have a very fast movement in the beginning and then very slow and gradually moving at the end when it's stopping. So to do that, we need to move this. So this is the beginning. So basically we're going super fast. Then at the end where we want to have this curve where it's going very slow. So it goes fast to this point, then very slowly and so we can move it a bit, but something like this will work fine. And if we play it, you can see that it came on the screen extremely fast. That then the ending movement is very slow. And you can play around a bit more with that if you want to see it's a lot faster right now. Or you can get these kind of movement is actually it looks pretty good right now. So it's not going to 100 at the beginning right away. So it has a bit of movement here, like a slower movement then goes to the highest speed around here. So this is the timeline and also basically at around, I don't know what's that like, ten frames or something. So 13 frames, it's going at the highest speed that is going to be going. And then from 132 frames to two seconds, it's basically slowing down. So you can move it around so it represents whatever you want to achieve. But for me this looks pretty good. I'm actually going to select all of these. Select all of these. Click on this graph editor, and I'll just click on F9 to reset all of them. And I'm going to select the first ones, make move them to the right, like this. Then I'm going to select the second keyframes. Move them to the right as well. And we've achieved this exact effect for all of them at the same time. So if I remove the isolation, you can see that the animation is much more interesting right now. Using just F9 is perfectly fine, but this is a bit more advanced. Not too advanced. I'm keeping it as simple as I can, but it's looking a lot better. Usually, that's what we do in animation and motion graphics. We always make them move fast in the beginning and then slow at the end. Or sometimes the opposite as well. But usually this is how movement works and this is true for every movement you do. For example, if I move my hand up and down, the movement is never linear. It's always start slower than events. I can end it super-fast. I always have a bit of a Bezier, sort of like a gradual movement. Slow, fast, slow. So just an ad, just an advice. It's going to make your animations look a lot better. There you go. That's what we have for now. Now let's focus on the rest of the images on the screen. So I'll turn on the other layers. And we have linear keyframes here as well. So let's make them bezier. So I'll just select the linear keyframes on F9. Go to the Graph Editor, move them to the left. Then this second keyframes them to the left as well. And there you have it. Much more interesting. If you want to have those coming Can different times, which is probably what we want to do. We don't want to have everything coming at the same time. We want to have them coming sequentially. It's a bit more interesting, so I'll just move them further on. So the first one that we're going to be appearing are these ones. And before this top, Let's, let show one of the plates, for example, let's see which, which blade is that? So Plate one. So let's put it here. So this is going to be the one on the top. Then let's say plate two, which is going to be the one on the bottom. So actually I want the one on the bottom to be first, then plate one. Then let's just move them and see how it works. And if we don't like it, move them around a bit too slow, I want them to come a little faster. They have it. So these are actually the sugar canes. I would like the sugar canes to come very close to one another. Sugarcane, sugarcane. So this one is that the other sugarcane. So this one is going to be here, here, here. So you can see that I'm just offsetting them a little bit. Okay? And then the green stuff, so this is the one. Okay, let's, let's just leave it like that for now. That on a bit. Okay. This looks pretty good for me. So the plates are coming in a bit slow. So I would like the animation then a little faster. So let's move this closer to one another. Perfect. So this looks very good right now. So if I just, you can see that they're disappearing at the moment because you can see that the layers are finishing here. So the second it finishes, yeah, and then basically you can see the layer anymore. So let's select all of them and just, let, just like pull them to the end of the composition so they don't disappear. You can also, if you go to the nth and click on Alt right bracket and you can end them whatever you like. It's a little shortcut. So I don t think the whole animation is gonna be more than 15 seconds actually. So I think I'll, I'll change the duration of the composition right now. So let's go to composition settings and just change it to 15 for now because it's gonna be easier to work with. Then click on Control S, save the project. Okay, So in the next lesson, I'll show you how to animate the rotation of the objects as well. It's exactly the same thing, but it's going to be with the rotation. So let's go to the next lesson and see how to do it. 7. Animate the Rotation of the Objects: Okay, So let's animate the rotation right now. I also are, right now what's bugging me is this table. It's to scale. So I want actually I want to have it a bit smaller. But when we scale it down, you can see that the image is not big enough. And I would actually like the planks to be no bigger than that. But we have this effect in After Effects called motion tile, which is basically gonna do this for us. So if I click on table, and now this is going to be the first time use the FX Console. If you don't use the FX Console, the weight goes to go to effects and presets and just type motion tile. And that's how you get it. And then you can just drop it on your layer. And that's how you do it. But what FX Console does is a one-step faster. You just go control space on your keyboard, then you get this search box here. So I can just type motion tile and click on Enter and I get it here. So actually I got it twice. So like I said, Control Space, motion, tile enter. And they have the first effect that we've just added to one of our objects. So the table. Now what we wanna do is increase the output width. And you can see that we're actually increasing the image. Although we get the same here, but we're going to fix this in a second. Then the output height, Let's put both of them two hundred, two hundred. There you have it. And then click on this mirror edges. And what it does is basically mirror the edges and you get, there's a bit of a seam, but it's not a big deal. So you I'm pretty sure you have a knowledge that on the original video. So it's not going to be a big deal. Probably this seems here could be avoided, but we can just move the image down a bit and see it looks pretty good. Okay, So let's animate the rotation. The rotation. Let's select the books. If you do what I just did, which is move your top somewhere and you don't know how to fix it. You can select it and move it down. But what's the easier way to do is actually go to Window Workspace. And you can set the default workspace and this is going to bring it back to how it was. So just a quick tip because they'd been a mistake. So just so you know. Okay, so now let's go to our first layer. So these ones, and so these are the layers here. So let's just select them and click on R for rotation. What we want to do is similar with what we did before. And actually let's come to the first one. So this is going to be the Christmas tree. So I'm going to isolate it again so we can look at it. And I'm going to click on the stopwatch in the beginning. And I'll actually move this keyframe to two seconds. So if you click on U on the keyboard while select the frame, it's going to show you all the key-frames, like all the keyframes, properties that you have on this layer. So I have the position and rotation. Now, I'm going to move this keyframe on the same place where the position is. And if you hold Shift, it's going to snap to the other keyframe to the same place on the timeline. Then I'll come to the beginning. And I'll just move the rotation bit here. That's what we get. So we can move it a bit more maybe, or we can move it the other side. So let's check even looks better. This one, this actually, I think it looks better for me. And let's change the keyframe to F9. And let's also do it the same as we did with the other ones. So something like that. Their habits. So this is how we're going to animate the rotation for all the objects. So now let's remove the isolate. And let's get this. Let's go to the rotation here in the beginning. Click on are. Actually, let's go to about here. Now let's click on New. Okay, so let's click on New. Click on Shift, Enter. If you click on Shift and you're also going to get the rotation next year position. So let's click here on this position keyframe. If you want to do them, like all of them at the same time, you can select all of these. Click when you click on the Shift Enter and then get the position and rotation. So I need to go to each of these ones. Let's here. And you can see that right now, if we have to move these keyframes to about here, where the other one, where the position keyframe is, I'm holding Shift to snap them to the other one. And then let's come to the beginning. And I'll select this one. We're going to have to do them manually because we can't do them all of them at the same time. We can, if we move them here, if I click on the left bracket and I can animate the rotation, this is like for example, I don't know, just randomly move them for now. And then we need to select all of this rotation. Let's just select, just select all these keyframes. Click on F9. Okay, so let's grab the first one, move it to the left, and then grab the right one. Move it to the left as well. Not too much. There you have it. And now if we just reposition them like this, one after another, then you get pretty much the same as what we had before, but yeah. So there you have it. They're rotating but I would like I would like some of them through the rotated bit more. So, for example, this bowl, I would come to the beginning and I would move with a few more times. So we get a bit more crazy rotation. I think I want to get similar result with most of them. So just a bit more movement. These ones are not moving too much, so I'm just rotate them and be more. Came something like that. Okay. One other thing, this one a bit more. Okay. So perfect. Now let's rotate the other ones as well. This one is going to be quite easy. So R for rotation. Click again on the keyframe, click on you, see where the other keyframe is. More of this keyframe here, then just rotate it left or right. Whatever we want to do. This is probably a bit too much. But let's first make it like making Bezier, click on F9, fix the keyframes someday it gets a bit too much, so I will just do minus 15 to less, more meaning. Okay, something like that. Then on this one, Let's click again on new, click on Shift an hour to bring the rotation. Let's rotate it a few times. This one is in an oval shape, so it's going to work better with a few more rotations. So let's click on F, F9 again. Let's fix the keyframe. Something like that. Okay. Let's do the same for the subjects. Well, you shift an hour, okay. The keyframe hold on. Shift. Move the keyframe to the right, then rotate it a few times. Click on F9. Let's see how it works. Okay? If you want, you can move the keyframe here in the graph editor. Actually, I think I want to move it the opposite way, so I'll make it plus 150 or 200 or whatever. Okay. Then the last one is going to be this sugar canes. And actually for the sugar canes, I want to have a move, a particular movement. I would like them to rotate from the bottom of the sugar cane. So right now, we have the anchor point in the middle of the sugar cane. So let's actually go back a bit because we're kind of going a bit forward a bit faster than we have to be going with all the objects. So here are the move, all the keyframes for the position. And I will come to this one. And you can see the keyframe here. I'll actually click on this pen behind the anchor point tool. And I'll move this anchor point to the bottom of the sugar cane. So move it bottom of it. Then I'll get the second sugar cane or move its anchor point here to the bottom as well. Third sugarcane. Move. Select the third sugarcane. Move. Move it to the bottom as well. Now if I rotate them, they're gonna be rotating around the bottom. Before that. If I rotated them before, they were going to be rotating around the middle. Okay. So let's click on R for rotation. Just on these three. I'm going to isolate them. And I'm actually going to bring them to the same line. So click on the left bracket. It's gonna be easier to rotate and move the position. So let's click on P for position as well. So shift MP, Shift Enter, and that's how we get both of them. Let's make keyframes here. Who've them? About two seconds. And then in the beginning, I'll move the rotation. This one like that. So like this, this one like this, this one like this. And we're going to move the position as it was before, something like that. Play it. We need to move. We can actually know what we would probably, we're not going to move the position that much. Probably we're not going to move the position and all. Let's try without any position. So let's just try with the rotation. So like this. Okay? So let's just move them further away from one another. So I'll move this one like that. Move this one like this. I can even move this one a bit more. Whoops, this one a bit more. There you have it. So that's what I'm looking for. And I'll click on F9. Go to the Graph Editor. Move this one to the left. You can see that there are opposite, but it's the same way, just how it looks like for rotation. Okay, So that's what I was looking for. And then with the green one, I just want to have a simple rotation. So rotation. Let's click on New. And in the beginning, I'll just move it a few times that and let's change the keyframe. Keyframes F9 to Bezier. Fix this one as well. Something like this. Maybe a bit too much, so I'll just change this one to bit less, something like that. Okay? So we've animated everything here. Everything is coming into the screen pretty nicely. There you have it. In the next lesson, I'm going to show you how we can animate these three stars with very simple expressions. So let's go to the next lesson and see how we do that. 8. Simple Expressions Animation: So for the stars, I had it, I had the idea to animate the scale. So you can click on S for scale and then S with the other one. Just move it a bit further than in the beginning, change this to 0, and make this F9. And just animate it like this. But I've decided that actually I would like to animate the position as I did with the other objects. So I would actually, okay, so let's click on P for position, and let's animate them as well. So, okay, the keyframe here. And in the beginning, just move them outside the frame. I'll click on F9 and I'll let the money made. Then we can just move them around so they don't come at the same time. We can also change the scale to some of them. So for example, probably the song could be a bit smaller. And this one could be a bit smaller. Maybe. Then we can make a few more copies. For example, we can duplicate this one, so Control and D. And we can just remove the keyframes, come to the last keyframe and move it. So let's see here. And the first keyframe, I'm going to move it here. So something like maybe, maybe here is going to be a better place. Okay. I don't like this one, so I'll just leave it to the screen. And what I want them to do is rotate through the whole animation. So to rotate animation, you can just do whatever we did until now, which was just basically, for example, if I select this one, I can click on R for rotation. Then create a keyframe in the beginning, come to the end, and just rotated the few times. You can just type here five or whatever, and it's going to be rotating throughout the whole animation. You can do that. It's quite easy, but I want to show you how you can do an expression animations. So basically without creating any keyframes, how you can create a good looking animation. Without creating the keyframes. I'll just click on this star. And I'll click on while I'm holding the Alt button and clicking on the stopwatch. And we get this sort of a notepad where we can write down some code. And you can make very complicated animations with expressions by basically writing some code. But we're not going to be writing any code, like any complicated code here. We're just going to type time. Then star, which means multiply it by, let's say dirty, and then just click away. And let's see how it looks. You can see that it's rotating body if we do it times by 200, sort of telling a lot faster. So let's decide what kind of speed we would like the animation to be. And what's cool about that is that we are not, we don't have any keyframes and this is going to rotate forever. So it's looping, curtailing, curtailing pathetic. It's never going to stop. And we don't have a single keyframe here. And like I said, you can make very complicated animations using this. I'll just copy this code, time, times 60. And I'll go to the other stars and I'll click on rotational. Both of them click on old and then on the stopwatch. And I'll just copy the code here. Copied here as well. Okay? And now we have it animating, but we can change it so it's not exactly the same. And let's say we would like this one to be rotating the opposite side. So let's click on minus 60 and then insert. This one is rotating to the left. This one is pertaining to right. And let's actually say that this one, we would like it to rotate a bit slower. So let's leave it at 30. And this one, let's say this one is going to be a bit faster at 80. I can actually type 800, so yeah, too fast. Anyway. So that's how we do a simple expressions animation. Okay, so in the next lesson, I'll show you how to create a simple text animation. 9. Text Animation: In this lesson, I'll show you how to create a simple text animation coming into the screen is going to be a Merry Christmas texts. So I'm gonna be basically doing what I did here in this in the original video. So it's going to say Merry Christmas. And we're going to do like a simple animation of, you can see how it's distorting when it's coming from the bottom. So let's see how to do that. To start the first, the first thing we need to do is go to a website like the font.com. I usually use the font.com because it has so many different fonts and all of them are free. And what we're looking for is a Christmas themed animation. If your future animation, the one that you're gonna be doing at the end is in a different style. Then you can look for different style animation here. It has all these very interesting fonts that you can get ideas from. What I'm looking for is a Christmas animation. So you can see here on holiday, it actually has a Christmas section. So let's click on this one. So when you're deciding what type of font you would like, you can type here. The texts that you're going to be using. Made Christmas submit. You can see all the different fonts and you can just select one of them. For example, this one looks okay for me. I like it. This one is quite good. This one is pretty good. This is actually the one that I used. So I'll just download this one. You can click on Download, download the font. Then you can extract it here. So extract to a folder. Then you can open it. Click here on the true type fonts. You can click with the right button and you can install for all users. I've already have it is going to ask me if I want to replace it. I don't want to replace it, but that's how you install it. Once you install it and you go to After Effects, you don't need to close After Effects and reopening is going to be here. Once you do that, you can just click on this type tool and start typing. So married. Then on, on a second text layer, I'm going to type goodies. Okay? And then I'll select these two layers. I'll click on. You can see here on Windows you have a line. So I'll get my Align, change it to Composition. Click on this one which is aligned horizontally, which is going to put it in the middle. Then I'll change the font. So go back to character. And let's select the font, change it to Christmas and some toner. And on the second one, the same thing. Christmas and Santa Anna. Let's align it again. Okay, so you've got the text. Let's animate the text coming from the bottom. So I'll come to about here where everything is about to end, like the animation is about to end. And let's animate the texts coming from the bottom. Click on P for position. Select, click on the stopwatch, create a keyframe. Then move those down so you can just select them and move them down. I can see the layer controls right now, so I just I can't see the other box and it just disappears sometimes if you want to see it again, you can go to View, Show Layer control. And you can see all the boxes, which I think is very useful. And you can see that the anchor point is to the left side. So if you want to do a different type of animation, some rotation or I don't know, scaling or something else, you can move the anchor point. And whatever we move the anchor point is going to be moving around it. So right now if I rotate it, it's going to be rotating around this anchor point. So in the beginning cow just move it down so we can just bring it down there. You have it? I'll first I want to have the Mary coming and then the Christmas. Also, I would change the keyframes, F9 again. And here in the graph editor, play around with them a little bit. Okay, Don't forget to save your project every now and then. Okay, so maybe Christmas coming a little bit later. Okay? And now let's create this distortion effect. Do that. Let's click on Control and space to get our effects console and type CC Lens. Okay? And you can see the distortion is already here. We don't want to get this much of a distortion, so something a bit more simple. So let's change it to something like hello, I'm 1516 and this one to 100, maybe a bit less. Okay. Okay. So that looks pretty good. Now let's get dizzy silence and copied on the memory as well. There we have it. We get this interesting distortion when they're coming from the bottom. If the text is too big for you, you can also come here to character. If you don't see the character tab, you can go to Window and you have character here. You can make them a bit smaller, but you can see that if we make them smaller, they're actually moving next to the anchor points so they're getting smaller there. Or you can just type on the scale and you can move them again, but again, it's next to the anchor point. Or probably the easiest way would be to create a new null object. Let's delete the old one. We don't need it anymore. And let's parent those to the node. And now we can scale down a bit. And that's probably how it's going to be easiest to do it. Okay, so let's remove that now. We don't need it anymore, save our project. And I will see you in the next lesson where I'm going to show you how to add some snow particles. 10. Add Snow with Particles: In this lesson, we're going to add some snow particles. You're going to find snow particle PNG in the folder. But I'm going to show you how I find this type of PNGs. There are a few ways you can find one. If you have something like Illustrator, then it's gonna be a lot easier because you can use three PQ.com. And you can get a lot of these, a lot of these images from here. On three big, you can get a lot of the images, but they're usually vector images. So we have to open them in Illustrator and then export them and open them in After Effects. What you can do for this one is you can just type snowflake PNG in Google and just get one of these. See for example, this is the first one I found. So it's a snowflake PNG. You can see that it's transparent. So if I open it, you can come here and you can download this one for free. So you can very easily do that. Again, I'm saying, I'm going to provide you with a snowflake for the animation, but that's how you would actually do it if you didn't have a snowflake. If you want to get a different snowflake and use something else for your animation. Feel free to look online. Okay, so this is my snowflake. Here it is. And we're going to use it to actually make, to make the whole snowfall. So we're going to make the whole snowfall using just this snowflake here. Let's create a new layer, new solid. We're going to call it particles. So this is going to be your first particle simulation in After Effects. So control and space to open our FX Console. Now, particle world. So that's what we're looking for. Let's isolate it for now. And if we, if we play it, you can see that we have something that looks a bit like fireworks. We're going to start playing around with the particles and see how we can fix them. So the first thing I want to do is go into the particle top here and change the particle type too. Textured square, change it to the square. Then texture here where it says None, click on that and select your snowflake. So now if I play the animation, you can see it yet because it's too small. But if I increase the size, so let's put it 1.7. Then the dead size. Let's put it at the 0.5. Now if we play it, you can see that we actually, let me change the resolution. We have the snowflakes. Let's decrease the bird size. There are too many snowflakes at the moment, so we have a lot less. Now. You can see that the longevity basically says that it's at one right now. So each particle lasts for 1 second, so let's increase that to ten seconds. I don't want to see them disappearing that often. So the particles are falling down at the moment. Okay? We can't see any of the particles dying right now, so we can see the end. Okay, so the next thing we're going to change it. Let's go to the producer and let's increase the radius x. So basically we're just increasing the place where they're coming from. So right now they're coming from this little dot. So let's increase it. Something about one. Increase the radius here to one. The next thing I want to do is change the color to white. So bird color is going to be white. Also the debt color is going to be white. So much better. Now, what else can we do? We can also change the radius z. So this is going to make some of the particles be closer to us and some of them be further away from us. So just change it to something about nine. And some of the particles should be a lot bigger than the other. You can, we can decrease the radius exit if we like, if it's a bit too big. But overall, that's it. This is how you create the whole snow animation. Also change the velocity to 0. Okay, so now we have a lot more believable result. So there you have it. And if we select all the layers, just click here. And you basically what this is going to do. We're gonna get motion blur on each of the layers. You can see that each layer is coming with a bit of motion blur. And it looks so much more realistic, so much, basically, so much better. But what you might notice is that the snow particles don't have motion blur to add some motion blur to the particles as well. And what you can do is add an effect here that is going to simulate motion blur because After Effects, the native motion blur in After Effects doesn't work for the particles, so we can add the effect. So control space for the FX Console. Add motion, CC force motion blur. So that's the one. And then you can increase it to 360 here in the show that, show that angle. And if we come here, you can see on this bigger snowflake, you can see that right now it has motion blur. If I get rid of it, you can see how it looks like before. Let's not use any motion, any of the native motion blur on this one because it doesn't look good at all. So let's just add the CC Force Motion Blur. And it looks so much better. So right now if I play it, it's gonna be much slower to load, but it's going to look a lot better. We're moving pretty good with our video. But what I want to add next is a bit of style to the whole, like basically a different look to the whole video. And for this one, I have chosen a retro look. I think it looks really good. And in the next lesson, I'm going to show you how to create this retro look. I'm talking about. 11. Create a Retro Look: Okay, So creating the retro look is going to be quite easy. So to start, let's select all of our layers. And let's click with the right button. Pre-compose, then just type animation. And now we have our whole animation in a separate composition. Inside the composition is what we had until now. But we have basically a folder inside the folder right now. And here, I would like to add a new adjustment layer. So click with the right button here. New adjustment layer, put it on top of the animation. And first of all, let's add some noise. So noise. And let's increase it to something like 15 per cent. So something like this. And I will leave it like that here. Let's use some color noise. So 15, and you can see that it looks a bit older right now, a bit more retro. So the next thing we're going to add is a bit of hue and saturation. What we want to have here is we want to decrease the saturation a bit. So something like minus ten probably is going to be enough. So very thorough, let's say minus 12. And at the end we're going to add a CC Lens again, CC Lens. And we're going to change this one to 500 and this one to 13, or let's say minus 13. Cauchy. So 13, let's say 13. So we're going to have a bit of a distortion at the edges. Cc Lens. So we'll get a little bit of distortion at the edges. And now we're going to add 3D glasses. So 3D glasses, we're going to select balanced colored, red and blue. And then on the left view, we're going to select our animation. What we get here is a bit of, a little bit of chromatic aberration. Chromatic aberration is the separation of the red, green, and blue channels. So with the CC Lens and the 3D glasses, this is the effect we're getting. So if I increase the convergence here, you can see what we're doing at the edges. So this is the fact that we're achieving just separating these. And this is very common for old counters. So that's what we're getting here. And you can see that I'm just pulling out that 13, which is very subtle. You can put it at 15 if you want, but don't get too crazy with this. I think this is a bit too much, so third thing is probably enough. Okay. Perfect. You can see when the plates are coming here and when everything is coming from the edges, it has a little bit of separation on the red, green, and blue channels, which looks really nice. Okay, another thing we can do to add a bit more of a retro look to our animation is to do a simple color correction. Not that much of a color correction, as much as moving the highlights and the shadows. So I'm going to add a curves, layer, curves effect, so curves. And let's put it over the hue and saturation. What I'm gonna do here is I'm going to put the shadows up a bit. So these are the shadows and these are the highlights. So if I move this one, the shadows go up. If I move down this one, the highlights go down. So we're going to do this. And then let's add a second curves layer. Put it over the hue and saturation, select the red channel. And we can just increase the red into the shadows. So you can see that we get a bit more of a washed-out look with a bit more red because the Christmas animation, okay, So this is how I created the retro look for this one. For this animation, That's all you need. If you want, you can increase the noise amount. You can put it in 1525, whatever you decide to. Just remember that the noise is actually animating. Once you play the animation, you're going to see that the noise is moving. So we might not need as much as you think. So 15 could be quite enough. But see how it works for you. In the next lesson, I'll show you how I did the transition in the initial video. I'll see you in the next lesson, guys. 12. Transition: Okay, So let's create the transition that you saw in the initial animation. So to create a transition, let's take our animation composition. Click with the right button, review, review layer sourcing project. This is the animation composition. Let's click on Control plus D, Control D. And we've just made a copy. We've just made a duplicate here in our project bin. So let's add the duplicate here as well. Okay? And let's put it on top. On the duplicate. Let's open it. And I will delete the table. And I will just change the background. So I'll create a new solid. The solid on the bottom. Click on Control and space to open our, our FX Console. Now type Gradient Ramp. Change it to radio. And let's change the colors a bit. So I want to make this one red. So this is going to be darker that, and this one is going to be a bit lighter, red, something like that. Then let's swap the colors. I want the darker red to be on the outside. And now you can see the DOM. You can move these values here, or you can just move them here on the screen. So those little dots here and here. And we're going to create some sort of a gradient. Gradient, radial gradient. Okay, perfect. In the files you're also going to find this presence image. So let's add the presence. Okay, I'll put them over our gradient and don't make them smaller now. So make them like that big. And let's add a Motion Tile to dose presence. And let's extend them on the width. So something like 200 should be enough, maybe two-fifths. Let's put 120 on the top you in case I want to make it smaller. Okay, so now let's change the blending mode to add. Okay, so they're a bit lighter. Now, let's change the transparency, the opacity to something about like ten per cent. So click on T on the keyboard for opacity. Something like this. It's okay. Let's say 10%. It was better, okay, 8%. So that's pretty much what we're gonna do for this second version of the animation. And we have those two animations here. So keep the second animation on the top. First of all, I don't want to have the retro look on the second animation. And second of all, since we use this 3D glasses, they're connected to our animation one. So if I put the animation under the adjustment layer will get some sort of a weird results. So we don't want that. And overall, we don't have, we don't want to have the retro look on this animation anyway. Okay, so now let's create a transition. The transition is going to be very easy. So let's click on animation to select our Pen Tool and create some sort of a shape here, something like that. In the beginning, let's click on M, M for mask, or you can just open the masks from here. On mask path, I'll click on the keyframe, on the stopwatch in the beginning. And after about 1 second and something, I'm going to change the position of this layer. So something like that. So this is pretty much what the transition is going to be. But we're also going to add a drop shadow. So let's add a drop shadow. Let's change the distance. Softness, I want it to be a bit softer. The position of the shadow should be something like that. Okay, so this looks okay. And now let's change the keyframes to easy ease. Let's also change it in the graph editor. Okay? So this is the transition. Okay, so I've just moved the keyframes a bit more. So this is the movement that we got. So basically the position is in the mask path is exactly what we did so far. So basically this is the animation that we're getting. I just slowed it down a bit. Just move the keyframes a little bit. That's it. That's all I did. What I wanna do now is I want to scale this second animation a bit. So I'll just scale it by 120. And we'll get some sort of like weird effect by doing this, maybe you want, it could be a bit more. So 115, let's say. Okay, So this is interesting, just adding some interest to the whole animation. What else I want to do is since we're on the topic of drop shadows, let's go into each of the items here and put a drop shadow to all of these elements. So that's what I did in the original. Now, what did you not want to measure? So let's do it here as well. So again, let's add a drop shadow. This is our one of the stars. So let's start over here. So let's just extend the shadow a little bit. Change the distance. Let's say 50, softness, something like then maybe I'll get that. The position is okay. Then let's copy this shadow to all of the others and see how it looks like. Okay, it looks fine. Maybe a bit softer. Let's go Control Z, softness. Let's change the 20. Drop shadow again, copy it, copy it to each of these. Okay, so it's a bit better. Now let's go to the medic Christmas one. Let's create a drop shadow there as well. So here and here. Going a bit too far, what I want. So let's change the distance to 30 to bottom then. 3030. Okay, that's fine. Okay, cool. So let's also copy these ones to the animation tool. So I'll copy it. Control C, Control V to all of these. Okay, Perfect. Okay, so now we've got drop shadows on each of the objects, on all of the objects that are going through the frame. Another thing I wanna do is I would actually go to the first animation. And I'll take this particles, the particles, basically the snow, the snow fall. And I'll just copy it here in the main animation. I don't want to have it in both animations. I just want to have it in the main one on top. So I'm going to remove it from the first one, from the second one. So I'm just going to turn it off here. And it's very important that we go to the particle stop here two particles and on texture will load up the snowflakes because it loses the texture. And another thing I wanna do is on the first frame, we don't have any snowflakes, so I just want to push this layer of bit like this to the front. And that's it. So I'm pretty happy with this animation right now. In the next lesson, I'll show you how you can export different aspect ratios. This one is 16 by nine. This one is probably what you're going to be using for TV. So I'm going to show in the next lesson how we can create also a vertical version and how you can upload this one to your Instagram account. Okay, I'll see in the next lesson, guys. 13. Create a Vertical Version for Social Media: Okay, So in the previous lessons, we created a horizontal version of the animation. So 16 by nine, which you're probably going to be using if you're doing this for a client, for example, if it's, let's say sum, if it's, for example, for a commercial or something else. But let's say you want to just do it for social media. So we want to upload it to Instagram account, or your client wants something for their Instagram account, looking like this. So let's see how we can explore how we can easily create a vertical version from what we just created. So let's go into our main animation and let's actually open and reveal competition in project. Let's rename it to main 16 by nine. Okay, let's duplicate it here, and let's rename this one to five by seven. Now in the five by seven, Let's also duplicate this animation one in animation tool. So these are going to be animation 116 by nine. Animation to is gonna be an emission to 16 by nine. And now let's duplicate this and let's rename them to want to mention one, five by seven, animation to five by seven. Now here on the main five by seven, we're going to replace this. So to replace animation, one, to replace it, Let's click on Alt. Hold old. I've selected this five by seven. I'm holding Alt, and I'm just dropping the new composition somewhere here in the timeline. And as you can see, it just replaced it in the timeline. As you can see, it just got replaced by the new one. Then with animation to again hold Alt and drop it somewhere here, and we get the same thing. Okay, so now let's go to Animation 15 by seven. And let's change the composition settings to ten AD by 1350. Okay? Perfect. Now, as you can see, some of the objects are not visible at all. Okay, So now to make them visible, Let's start moving them around. Move, first of all, I'll move the background layer. So I'll move it about that, about this way. Then if I just grabbed the plate, I move it here. I'm going to create a new keyframe. So we don't want that to move them in the easiest way, like in the most easy way. We're going to attach them to some nos and we're gonna be moving the nose. So with this one, I'm going to create a new null object. I'm going to duplicate it a few times. So first, let's take all these and let's parent them this now. So the noise here, so let's just move them in here. We can scale them down a bit. Okay, then I'll just remove this now. Then take this plate parented to this now. Then take the now. Move a little bit like that. Scale it down. We can actually just unprecedented and we can work with one no, You know what I mean? So basically we can come to this one now and we can put it in parented to this now. Then take the now, move with molten. Now a bit. Come on. Okay. Then this one. No, I'm button the other one. What is the no, no. No. Okay. This one. I don't think it has it has position keyframes. Okay. So again, parented to the null on the top component, the previous one. And you're getting what I'm gonna be doing here. I'm just going to be moving these around and I'm going to reposition them. So these once for example, let's just scale them down. So I'm just going to pardon those to the No button on this one. Go to the nano, scale it down a bit. Okay, or so probably I'm going to scale this down. Let's say 28. These three. I'm going to just create a new layer, new null object. And these three, I'm going to parent them to this new now. And Tours now, this is the now, So just move them closer here and make them a little bit smaller. Then I'm going to do exactly the same for these ones. Layer new null object. Let's bar and D. Let's burn them to the no. Let's move them here. Make them a little bit smaller, Something like that. Okay, so wrong now, this one and that's pretty much how you do it. I'm actually going to move this one a little bit more. So I've come to a keyframe here, so I don't have to create an even know they have it. So this is gonna be your vertical version of the animation. You know, you can pretty much move them a bit closer here and play a bit more with that. But that's what we're, that's what we're gonna be doing. And actually to be a bit easier, instead of doing absolutely the same thing for animation to five by seven, I'm just going to get these layers on the bottom. I'm going to delete animation tool. I will duplicate animation one. Since I already did it. I don't want to do it again. Five by seven. Go into animation to just copy these layers on the bottom. Then then I'm just going to change the size of both of them. So let's take them, move them here. I am going to change the size of the black solid. So go click on the black solid, then go into Layer Solid Settings. Then here change it to ten AD by 1350. And you can just go to Align and align the layer also with the presence. Presence actually I think they look for k. We can just increase the height a bit because I'm not sure if there's nothing actually there. I think they're fine. Okay, so here we have the second version as well. So here when we come to main five by seven and we add animation to also main five by seven, or should the composition settings should be changed to ten AD by 1315. Okay. And then what else? I need to change here? The 3D glasses, I need to change this to layer number five. You should be working fine. Okay, So we don't have the mask since we deleted the layer. Also the particles sink. We need to change this to ten AD by 1350 as well. And Snowflake, no adjustment layer need to change this one to not compositional layer, solid settings then AD by 1350. Okay, Perfect. And also, like I said, I don't want to keyframes again. So just copy this mask, this mask layers. Just copy the mask. So go to the mat M for mass Control C, then go to our animation to Control V. And then also, let's copy the drop shadow. And let's scale it to 115. There you have it. So this one is working for vertical now as well as for horizontal. In the next lesson, I'm going to show you how you can export this for social media and for TV. 14. Exporting the Video for TV and Social Media: Okay, so first of all, with the television, so if you're exporting it for broadcast, then each television is going to have their own export settings. Usually they're going to give you all the information you need. From my experience, they usually use MOV or an XF. Most of the cases in my, in my personal experience, some in Europe, they use em access to export in an XF or like I'm going to show you both TV and social media at the same time. So let's click on while we're on the main 16 by nine. So let's say this is going to be for PV. So let's go Up to Adobe Media Encoder Queue. And let's just wait for Media Encoder to open. Okay, So first of all, I'm going to show you how to export as like broadcast, like, like I'm, I'm gonna, I'm gonna say again, that is gonna be completely different for every television. But I'm gonna give you like general settings that you can use. So first thing you wanna do is go to M, XF or B1A. This is going to save a lot of, a lot of quality, a lot of information to the video. Then we can go to video codec and change it to x d h d t power 422. Okay, so then we're going for upper first. Then you can just copy these settings. And basically, it's very important to use a preferred for television. They're not using progressive. I'm clicking on a render at maximum depth. Here we're keeping these two default for fixed length, GOP's force close, GOP's use maximum render quality. For audio. We, most of the times we used four channels and 24-bit. And that's all you need to know. Like these are the general settings. If you want to export it like that, that's perfectly fine. This is going to keep a lot of quality, but you're not going to need these for your everyday exporting needs. Like if you're exporting for social media, this is completely unnecessary. And then if you want to save it, just click select Output Name. Decide where you want to save it. Click Okay, and click the play button, and that's gonna do it for you. Let's export the vertical version up to Adobe Media Encoder Queue. And let's just, let's just pick one of these. Let's just click on here. And let's select H dot H.264. I already have some presets that I've made for myself, so it's easier for me. I'm going to show you, like for most of the cases, if you're exporting 301080 by 1315, then you're not going to need a very high bitrate. But if you want to explore for k, then the bit rate should be a bit higher. So let's start from the beginning. So width and height here, I'm keeping it. Then I divide 1350. It's basically matching the settings of the whole composition. Frame rate. Again, I'm matching the settings of the composition. I'm not even touching hear anything at all. But render at maximum depth. Hardware encoding, that's fine. And let's go to the most important setting. For me. I've checked all of these three options. This is the bit-rate, so this is basically what's most important when you're exporting for social media. If you're exporting VBR, one bus and VB are two passes, you're gonna get a little bit smaller file size in theory, for my personal taste, I have found pretty much like almost no difference between CBR and VBR. Most of times I get better results at CBER. The difference is that VBR is variable bitrate, which means that the program decides when it should put higher bitrate and when you should put lower bitrate. For example, if you have a black screen, He's going to put lower bitrate. If it has something super dynamic, like a lot of motion blur, particles, whatever, like a lot of stuff moving, then the program is going to decide, okay, then we need a bit more betrayed. If I'm using, let's say VB are two paths, then let's say, we're going to say, let's say the target bitrate is going to be 25. Okay, let's say 20. The third it'd be trade is 20, but we don't want to go higher than 25, which means that the highest betrayed for the most dynamic scenes is gonna be 25, which means that the program is going to be targeting for 20. This is at the end, the final bit rate is probably going to be something about 21 or something like that. Something in the middle. Doesn't matter which CBR. It stands for constant bit rate, which means that it doesn't matter if it's a black screen, if it's a white screen, whether it's a lot of a lot of dynamics in the scene or nothing happening. The bit rate is going to be constant, which means that the file size is going to be bigger. But overall quality in my opinion, is better because I'm deciding where I want to have more betrayed and where I want to have less betrayed. So I'm always using CBR. The file size is not that much bigger, is going to be probably ten megabytes bigger. I don't care about that. So I'm putting 25. Make them megabits per second, which is more than enough for, for HD, which is 1920 by 1080, or in this example four, then eight, then 80 by 3050. So 25 is more than enough for that. And then we're going to click on use maximum render quality. And that's all you need to know about exporting. In audio. You need to go and select betrayed again to 320. So this is like the maximum. And if you're exporting for King, this is a bit different. Everything like the only thing that's different is that you need to change from 25 to 50. That's it. Some people use 104 for K. I never, i've, I've made many tests. I don't see the difference is not too visible. I mean, if your pixel peaking, then I guess yeah, you can see something, but you're not gonna be able to see anything, especially if you're exporting for social media, the footage gets compressed. So you're not gonna see absolutely no change between 5200 is going to be much bigger. You can see the estimated file size here on the board and see if I lower it, the Twenty-five, the file size is twice as small. Anyway. So let's keep it like that. And click on, Okay. And if you're happy with that, you can just click on the Play button over here on the right, and it's going to start exporting your videos. What I forgot to tell you before we started exporting the videos, we always select the layers. Click here for motion blur and also this icon, if it doesn't load up. And make sure that all your layers have the motion blur here selected. And then you can go ahead and export your videos. So this is how you export for social media and for television. 15. Create your own themed animation: Awesome guys, I'm super happy that you made it this far. And the hope what you've learned was valuable until now. And I think that now is the most important part of the whole course. This is going to be the part where you're going to create your own team to animation, which means that you can use any team you like, and the team could be everything. So here we use the Christmas theme. You can use Easter team, bedroom, nightstand, kitchen table. I don't know. Make-up. Jim. I don't know any other holiday that you're thinking of, Thanksgiving or something else that you think is going to be interesting. And what I think is going to be the best is if you go the extra mile and you take the photos by yourself and feel free to use your phone. If you don't have another camera like false are perfectly fine Right now, they make really good images. So you can just select the objects that are gonna be in the same team, put them on a table and make a few images of them looking top-down. And what you are gonna get from this is basically your own animation that nobody can copy. This is gonna be really interesting for me to see what you come up with. If you want. You can also use the websites I showed you a splash, Paxos and Pixabay, and there are other websites as well. So if you want to do that, That's perfectly fine. But I'm pretty sure you have interesting items in your house. So just pick up those items, pick a team and do something interesting. And don't forget to follow me on social media, subscribe to my YouTube channel. Follow me on Instagram, check my websites for other courses and digital products. And I'm gonna be really happy to see you again.