Transcripts
1. Course Promo: If you want to learn how to take a static logo and animated to life and After Effects, this is the course for you. We will start by breaking down the thought process behind approaching an animation like this one, and then I'll walk you through step-by-step of how I animated this logo in After Effects. We will cover a variety of unique solutions, so there will be plenty to absorb for the intermediate After Effects user. This course would be great for the beginner who wants to jump right into the deep end of animating in After Effects. If that appeals to you, then enroll now and I'll see you in the course. Thanks.
2. Planning and Approach: Welcome to the first class about animating a logo in aftereffects. I'm working in Adobe After Effects creative cloud 2014. But any version of Adobe After Effects will be able to do what we're going to do with this logo. Let's take a look at what we'll be creating. This logo was part of a project by a couple of friends of mine who are hang glider pilots. They had a road trip and they're going around the country and actually got to fly with them. I fly hang gliders as well. Since they know that I do some animation, of course they asked me to animate their logo. I'm sure if you get into animating and aftereffects and people know about that, they're going to ask you to animate their logo too, and that's probably why you're here. Let's jump right in into the first part of this class, which is the planning stage. We're given a logo by a friend or a client and they expect us to do something special with it. Animating a logo is about revealing the identity of something. Keep that idea of revealing in mind when you're doing your animation. Look at how I revealed the logo here. A lot of white bonds and some interesting little bouncy animation here we have maybe a little parallax and then this flies in. The texts was animated. There's a lot going on and we'll break that down here. My thought process going through this and the questions you should be asking yourself before you get started animating a logo that you have. The first thing I did is just spend time with it. I try to break it down into pieces, see what I have to work with, and see if there's any opportunity for things to flow into each other. Are there any anchors that I can start with? For this one is pretty obvious for me was the circles. Not much else can happen until those circles are complete or at least started. Because they anchor everything. We wouldn't want the van to just pop on, on total blackness. We want to start these anchors. The circles have already started. That gives the van somewhere to come out of. We're revealing this stuff slowly one at a time. We don't want everything to happen at the same time. It's like this domino effect. We're slowly learning more about what this logo, this identity is over a short amount of time for a few seconds. That's the idea behind appeal in general. A magic trick, is this your card from the first interaction. The build up to it and there's some flourish and that's about revealing the appeal of animating as well as bringing the viewer in and making them want to see more and that thing. Keep that stuff in mind when trying to think, how do I make this interesting? We have these anchors, essentially these semi-circles, and of course, same thing. Not only are they not starting at the same time, but they're not going in the same direction. We have this contrast of timing and direction on where it's animating and then the opportunity that gives for the van to begin. When I say we want everything to not start at the same time to offset things, that also goes for things that are ending. Notice that I started this little piece of the mountain before the road hit the end of this circle silhouette. The reason for that is we want to separate these things, give them their own time. But do it close enough so that it feels like it's flowing one into the other. If I had let this little piece of road go into the circle and then this mountain goes, it would create this subconscious connection between the mountain and the road which may maybe you want. But for me, I think that would just confuse the imagery. That's why I want to keep those things separated when I'm animating them. It gives them their own time and it allows the eye to bounce around. We want the eye to go, starts at the top and then it follows and it goes down. It sees the van and they can go to the right. Then it starts following the line of the mountain. Then we see these little flourishes, these little accents come in. Of course again, like these wouldn't have started coming in at the very beginning either. They would just have been floating out in space. Think of this natural progression you can find in the logo. They can't begin until they really have a house to live in. Which has these circles. Just thinking about how this should naturally occur, naturally go and once you find that anchor, things can just have a domino effect and you'll start to see these connections. It allows your eye to bounce around like I was saying. To that point again, if there's any text in the logo, you want to have a resting moments so that the viewer can actually read the texts. Notice how when the text starts to come on, there's not a ton happening on the screen. Everything's completed and the van is doing its thing. Then that allows the text to come on and give it its little moment so that we can be like, that's text. That's not just a bunch of lines. That's something I maybe would want to read. It's giving the viewer's eye a moment to catch up and read the text. That's important to have a moment so the eyes can rest in one place when you have text. Then the big piece that really is like this is a hang gliding trip is, of course is the last thing. [inaudible] hang glider is the nail in the coffin on this one. That's my thought process when I animated it, there's a million different ways anyone could have animated this thing. But that's just what I was thinking. Maybe some questions to consider when you're animating your logo. Let's get right into animating this thing and aftereffects and how we actually do that. See you in the next lesson.
3. Outer Circles Animation - Pt. 1: Welcome to the class where we dig into After Effects and start making this. I have all of my layers. Fortunate for me that the designer created this in Illustrator and put each element on their own layer. I can solo each one by hitting this little solo button or I could just, of course, the visibility layers over here to hide each one. If that wasn't the case and you got a logo that was altogether, then you could just use masks to separate it out. Just super-quick, if that's your case. If we had just one layer for the logo, we could duplicate it and then start masking out the areas. At the pin tool, let's say G shortcut or it's up here, right there, we could click and drag to make a Bezier handle and start to isolate each element. Just do that super quickly. I'm hitting "Space bar" to move it after I have made the little vertices. Now that's isolated, then I could go through every element and isolate each one. Unfortunately, that's what you have to do sometimes if the designer or you aren't given it in a format that is like that from Illustrator. Sometimes it's just a PNG or something. Luckily, we have the elements and we're going to start from the outside and work our way in. Let's hide everything that we don't need, which is everything on the inside. We'll have the visibility layer. I'm viewing this on transparent, which is this little button here because the logos black so I can't see it. I could put down like a white background, but I just don't really want to have extra layers here and I don't mind seeing it on the checkerboard. Let's start doing the outer circle. I can solo that to isolate it. I want to remake this because the line isn't exactly right. If we, if we go back and look, it's super thin here and that one's kind of thick. It's like the thickness of that. Yeah, we just need to remake these. I'm going to solo this so I have the guide of it. Then I'm going to go up here and check and click on the ellipsis tool. I don't want any layer selected when I'm using this. Otherwise it's going to start creating a mask. See that? Now we have a mask. Down here mask, we don't want that. I want to make a shape layer. We could do that by saying right-click somewhere like in a gray area and say new shape layer, and then have that shape layer selected and then start using the tool. But it's just faster if we deselect the layer by just hitting "V" in like selecting outside of the workspace. Then we can go up here and click the tool and shift click to make it uniform. It's not an oval. When we hit "Shift", it'll keep it straight. Then we can go up here and kind of get it in the right spot. You could eyeball this. There's also align tools we can use. Let's do that now. Over here on the right side, there's a little tab that says a line. If you don't have that, you can go to Window and align and make sure the check boxes on. We can click the horizontal and over here we have a vertical. That should be good. We don't want to fill, so we'll leave that off. One little confusing thing is making it happen No Fill its actually have to click on the text of Fill to get that option and you want none. We want a black stroke. Let's make this a little thicker, thirteenish. Let's turn that. Let's turn the solo off. It's a little thick. I think maybe nine. Let's go with eight. Okay. Let's call that outer circle. Let's duplicate that layer and we'll call this one inner circle. One really quick thing I wanted to mention that I find a lot of people getting screwed up on an After Effects is if you're trying to rename layers, you have to hit Enter. Everywhere else in the world, you double-click something. But in After Effects, if you double-click a layer, now you're like, "Where am I? What just happened to where I was working and what is this screen now?" You just solo that layer basically in its own little window. To get back to where we are, there's these tabs up here and you actually just go back to the composition tab of the composition that we're working in. Don't get too discouraged if that happens. That happens to me all the time when I'm, it's just so natural to double-click something thinking you're going to rename it. In After Effects that does not happen. You can just get back to the composition tab over here. Then if for some reason that closes, then you're screwed. No. You can just double-click this and it'll open a back up. In awkward way, you didn't have to resize everything again. Wrong one by the way, I was on this one. Let's close that one, that was just the example of showing you how to mask things out. Now we have the correct stroke width. We don't want to scale this down because if you can see the stroke, it's actually going down and nothing. The stroke, even though we set it up here, if you start scaling, it will scale the stroke width. Because we want it to be the exact same, we shouldn't be scaling this. One goofy thing because we use the ellipse tool, we don't actually have Bezier curves to click and change. We have to convert that. We can open up the contents of this layer and go down to the ellipse. On the ellipse path, if you right-click it, you can convert to Bezier path. I know it's a little convoluted and weird, but this is the trick. Now that we have it converted, let's solo this layer so we can actually see it. Now with your selection tool, you should be able to select the path down here in the layer and then double-click on the path itself. Now we have a tool that we can maintain the stroke width and scale it down. Let's un-solo that again. We can see where we're going with it. We want to shift Command click or Shift Control click from the PC and drag it in. Now it's the exact stroke width that we need and we've copied it. Cool. Let's solo those again and now we need to animate them. To animate paths, we can say go into the attributes of this layer. There's this option here on shape layers to add things. I'm going to drag this up here so you can see the options. I going to click and go down to Add a trim pass attribute here. We get these extra little attributes here called trimmed paths and names it for us. We can click and start dragging the percentage and it'll show us what we get here. That's exactly actually what we want. We want it to go in this direction. I'm going to click the "Start" so that we don't see it. Then I'm going to go 20 frames ahead. I'm going to go to 0. One other little thing, which is a small thing, but you can see here the ends are very flat and it's not super appealing. We can change that as well by going to the stroke and underline cap. We can choose round cap. Now we have these rounded ends and it's just a little more appealing. Of course, if we had done that, before we duplicated it, it would have done it on both. But let's go ahead and do it for the other one for when we get there. Now that we have these key-frames, we can hit U to pull them up. Any layer you selected and hit U, it'll pull up just the attributes of that layer that have key frames. Let's go back out and reduce this so you can see it. It's very linear, this animation. It starts and stops at the same speed the whole way. It's very technically and mathematically linear. We can actually see that if we select on this attribute and then look in the graph editor here by toggling, this little button. It is a straight line. It's linear. There's no speed-up, there's no slow down, that's not appealing. Let's change that. Let's select the key frames and right-click and choose key frame assistant easy ease. You can also hit F9, and that starts and stops a little slower and then speeds up in the middle and it slows down again. But it's not as dramatic. It's not as noticeable as I'd like it to be. There are two ways change this. You can go in the graph editor and you can select these key frames in the graph editor and drag this around. Of course, you can go over or under 0 or a 100%, so we'll cap it. But normally this could go pass that. To keep that from happening, hold down shift and it'll keep that tangent flat. It's just like any other graph. It's going fast here in the middle because it's straight down and then it's starting to slow down. You can see the circle at the top as it reaches that key frame. That's kind of of a good way to eyeball it. You're like, "I think that looks good, I don't know." A better way that I like is selecting key-frames and going back to the similar menu, but clicking key frame velocity just above where we were last time. We get this little menu. The default, we can see the default on Easy is 33 percent. Favoring either side are influenced. I like to double that and do like 66. Let's see what that looks like now. That's much better, much more noticeable that start slower and end slow. If we go back to the graph editor, we can see it's much more dramatic curve now. That's the way I like to do those. Now that we have that one, let's do the second one. Add trimmed paths. It's down here off the frame. Scroll down, trim paths. Let's figure out which side we want. We want to do this side and there. Because it's a greater distance, so it would take more time to go the same speed as the inner ring. I'm just going to go out here to maybe 24. We're working on 24 frames a seconds, so that's exactly one second long. Then I'm going to go to a 100 percent. Then do the exact same thing I did just a moment ago. When I hit F9 this time, it's a little quicker. Sorry, on my Mac, I have to hit function F9 on my Mac for that to work. Then key frame assistant and then 66. Before I added the other, 66. Okay. I saw this earlier. For some reason when this gets exactly to 50 percent, it bugs out and it tries to finish the line for some reason. It's a bug. I don't know why it's doing that, but sometimes when you're working on software, stuff like that pops up and instead of pulling your hair out, you can just try to troubleshoot it and work around it. The work I found so that we maintain, not put more key frames in and mess up this nice curve that we have here for the speed, let's just reduce it by one frame so that it never actually gets right exactly at 50 percent, which I think is the issue here. Now that's not happening anymore, or we could go make it longer by one frame. Super weird. I don't know why that's happening, but anyway, that's one little thing to troubleshoot. Hopefully that doesn't happen for you and it's just a bug that I have. Now we can select both of these and we can see they're starting at the same time, which is not what we want. Let's have the outer one start later. Let's select this frame and we can just pull and drag this whole thing over maybe five frames. It takes your eyes maybe five or six frames to begin to receive information. Let's not start any of the animation till five frames in. Now we have this offset between the two. Great, all right. Let's move on to the other elements.
4. Outer Circles Animation - Pt. 2: In this lesson, we're going to cover the other elements that are part of the circle, these lines and the drops of water with a different animation technique, so let's get started. I'm going to move the original inner circle to the bottom. I'll change this to a different color by clicking the color box here and then it gives you options. I'm going to turn those off and lock those. I don't want to be messing with them anymore. The other thing you can do which is nice is hide layers and After Effects have this funny little icon of a guy hiding, being shy. When that's turned on, any layer that you click this on will just disappear, and that's a super nice way to keep things tight and organized in After Effects. I didn't know that until like five years working in After Effects what that did. Now we know we're done with that part, we can work and focus on this next part. I'm going to turn off the text for right now as well and let's just look at these elements. In the original, the lines actually are implying that they're dripping, the drop is coming off of the line because it's like the line comes down and then the drop happens on either side. Let's do that. We're going to approach this a little differently, even though these are lines, they look like what we just did. There is another way to do this that I liked and that's by making a matte so that they reveal on. I'm going to make a new solid, I'm going to make it black and call this DropLinesMatte. We are going to make a little triangle here and just stay with me for a second. We want to make the triangle so that it doesn't cover this and we're going to do the same thing for the bottom. We can actually duplicate Command D that mask and then I click that. We want that part of the triangle in the center. One way I like to see the center of the image is turning on the Title Action Safe here and it has little cross here in the middle to make sure it's equilateral. Then we can pull these out. You can also turn on the grid if you want it. But since I'm going off the edge of these little lines, I'll just eyeball it. That's done. Duplicate that now, double click it to get that selected and then I'm going to pull the little pivot point down and then rotate that around. It's nowhere near the bottom of these lines where we need it. Let's shift keyboard arrow up and just get it in the neighborhood, also needs to extend these out now. Now you maybe thinking, what are we doing? That looks terrible. But we're actually just going to use this as a matte. Let me show you just with LeftDropLineTop. Perfect. Let's do these two. If we get on a toggle switches modes, we get this menu selection here. We can change whatever is above this layer to have it be matted by it, which means it will hide it if it is behind it or covered up by it. But we actually won't see the matte. Let's say Alpha Inverted Matte. When we did that, look what happened. It automatically hid that layer above it and then now we have these two icons that are new. That indicates to us that these have a relationship and we can of course, see that over here too, Alpha Inverted Matte, trying out onto this track matte column. We know these two are in that a relationship, if you will. You can be super organized and have every matte be a certain color if you wanted. Just so you can see in the layer stack where they are. You could also go back and make that a shy layer, so we won't actually see that. But what that does now is anytime our layer gets behind any of those black pieces, it disappears now, which is super helpful. Instead of having to animate a mask or something, since this layer has a pivot point in the center and it's all set up for this so that we can just rotate around the center, since this is a circular design and all these things can and should rotate around the center. We should just take advantage of that. Now that we have that done, I want to shy that one just so you guys can follow along and make sure you understand that these two are related in that way. We can do that for each layer or duplicate this matte, pull it down here and have each layer have a matte. Or we can precompose, get our animations done, use this as a guide, and then just do this once to precomposition, which is what I suggest that we do. I'm going to get this animation done. So we'll add a keyframe on rotation, that's where we want to end up, we can make that keyframe down here and then do a new key frame where it's just off. You can see up here on the triangle, I don't know if you're looking up here, pull it just off, so it's just behind that. We can see it rotating. I'm not worrying about the timing where it is in the timeline right now, I just want to get this thing in and then we can move it around. It's taking way too long, and we want to do a bounce effect here. I'm going to copy this keyframe, go down maybe 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 1, 2, 3, 4. I like to go a descending amount if I'm doing a balance. I'm hitting command and the arrows to go frame by frame, and I think it's control arrows on a PC, so 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and then the distance to the next keyframe is one last and then it's a lot less on four. We have a copy of these. Nothing happens now because it's just the same keyframe. But what we can do is to make it look like a bounce is go past that. I'm holding a Command key to get a small number. Let's go something like this, and then it'll bounce back. We wanted to go past zero, the other direction again, so then it can settle on zero. I want to come in linearly just boom. I'm going to exclude this from this selection and if you get this right-click menu, sometimes it just means you didn't actually right click on the keyframe, so just make sure you're right-clicking on the keyframe. I'm just going to exclude that first now the easiest because I want to come in fast. Now if we play this boom, it has this little bounce effect, and I think I'm going to do our little trick again of making the 66. I like that bounce a lot better and the nice thing about this is now that we have it done, we can just copy it to all these other layers and then we can just adjust the values in the graph editor. I'll show you how to do that. I'm just pasting this and I know it's not going in the right way. But let's just take these one-by-one. I'm going to hit Command R to pull up rulers and click on a ruler and pull that guide down so I can see wherever this ends up. This is the farthest this line goes. That's where we should actually make a new mask just for the drops. Let's go new solid, and turn that off for one second and then we can just make a mask of that matte. We'll just have one because we'll just copy and paste that on both of them because we know both of these lines are going to go the same distance. Now that we have that, we can do our Alpha Inverted Matte and we can see now it disappears when it goes past that little area where we have this matte. Let's get rid of that guide, let's get rid of the rulers so we can see better. We don't want the drop to start animating until this is to this point. Let's click and drag the left drop over, and we went way past it. If we turn this matte off, we should be just right at the starting line. We don't want to start the race and be all the way back here. If the end of this line is the starting line, we should be right there at the edge of that matte. We want to be right at this edge. To do that, let's go on the graph editor. We want to pull this start frame down. Click on this keyframe and just drag it down and get it to where the drop is just about to hit the edge here. Again, that's because that's right where this line is that it's being included by. We know that's where it's going to want to end up. We didn't have to reanimate the whole thing which had to pull the one key frame down, which is nice. When we turn this Alpha Matte back on, the drop is happening because of that and it's going down far. Let's pull that, let's reign that in a little bit. Let's click and drag this up and now the values between each other are shorter. We could probably do with one last key frame here. I like that. Now that we have that done, we can copy and paste that to this other side, left drop, let's go on the right drop, pull-up view and delete the ones we'd pasted their earlier. Copy. Paste. It's on the opposite side of the screen, so this needs to be inverted. We can just invert these numbers instead of a positive, we can make that a negative. We'll go the next one, and instead of a negative, we can make that a positive. Instead of positive, we can make that a negative. Now, we just inverted that. Hopefully, that makes sense. We can copy command D, this down above that, and turn on the Alpha inverted Matte for that one as well. Now, that's happening and being revealed by these little alphabets. Let's turn the sea foam green again. We can see that this is an Alpha Matte here. You can see how this starts to get a little confusing with the layer. Try to stay organized with naming the layers and coloring them. If you have a bunch of these carrots down, the quick ways is just command A, and then clicking the arrows here to collapse everything. What do we have done? We've got this line done, we've got this drop done. Now, let's look on the lower left drop bottom. [inaudible] key frames and it's going the wrong way again. Let's just do what we did a minute ago. Just invert all of these values and just add minuses where there were pluses, and pluses where there were minuses. Of course, we're not going to touch the last frame because remember that's where we want it to end and where it originally ended, zero, so we won't touch that one. Now, that works. Then we're going to do the same for this right side. I'm going skip ahead and get that done, because it's just repeating this and then I will see you in a minute. That's it. All I have to do now is just offset the timing of everything. Let's just get the timing right in relation to each other on these, so that they're not happening the same time. Because the drops are connected to the top line, we'll have to move those together. Let's do a circular thing. These go first, then this, and then this, and then those two. This line and this dropper, fine. The drop bottom will pull back 1, 2, 3, 4 frames. It almost touches that. I wonder if we go back a couple, because I don't want the drop to come really close to it. How many frames was that? Three maybe, 1, 2, looks like it's only two. Let's go the other way because I feel it needs more time to be separated. Yeah, I like that. How many frames is that? 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11. Yeah, let's do 10 frames to the same thing on the right drop bottom line, pull back 10 frames. Except then, we want to take all of this stuff, 1 ,2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Yeah, now I can see how this is all happening except different times. Perfect. Now, let's pre-compose all of the things we just did. We can turn off this track Matte before we do that. Let's say Shift select all of these elements, and go to layer, pre-compose. This is just going to condense everything down into a new layer essentially. We'll say DropLineCOMP. We're going to move all the attributes, say Okay. Now, we have this one layer. If we need to get back into it, we can just double-click it, and it'll open up this new Comp tab here. We can adjust all these things. We can't see it in relation to anything else, which is not ideal, but that's the give-and-take. You can always copy and paste whatever layers you need to relate to in this, and then just hide them. Let's do a little magical Matte now. Boom. Now, all those things are being revealed by that one Matte. Hopefully, that paid off because I'm sure you were staring at that thing thinking, why is this big black triangle thing on here? It just makes it way cleaner, because otherwise, you would have to have that Matte on top of every line. I'm already having to deal with those drops, and it's just like too much. It's easier to just pre-compose it and put it there. Just real quick, I want to update this video because I forgot to offset the drop lines here. These guys are starting before the outer circles are finished or even halfway done. That's a pretty quick fix. Just click and drag and retime just that one layer. That's one of the nice things of pre-composing stuff like this, as it's really just one layer now. We can maybe drag it back here, until there's a little more going on, because we didn't want them to be doing their own thing independent of everything else from the very beginning. We want to see those two lines really take charge and anchor the animation, and then all this other stuff can start happening. Yeah, I just wanted do that quick update because I rendered this out and finished the course, and then realized I had forgot to offset the timing of those. It's just a quick fix, and yeah, thanks for watching.
5. Text Animation: Thanks for following along. This is what we have so far. We have the outer lines done. Now, let's do the text. The text is just right now is just a layer. I want that to write on. Right-click new text and then let's say rhythm of light. Select all, I believe it's fair. Yeah, fair view, something like that and we'll take this down, 99. How did we get this around the circle is the main question. How are we going to do that is actually make a mask on this text layer. Shift, click and we lined up at the bottom of the text a little bit, something like that and like go and then we're going to set that to none because we actually don't want the mask to effect anything. We're going to use that in the path options under Text. Scroll down and actually choose that mask. Boom, now we have it on the circle. We going to actually click reverse path and it will put it on the top. Now, it's in the wrong spots so we can click and drag First margin, get it in the right spot. Now, we can begin to adjust the mask and the text and the font. Here the spacing of the text needs to be more. We can actually go down here and to character and we have more options. We click and drag that down. It's the spacing. This is actually, it's not on auto right now, so let's go to 0 that out. Yeah, it's not what we want. Let's drag this out and then pull that first margin back. It's getting pretty close and this won't be exact. But this is I mean, as close as you're going to get it as one is going to get it. Let's pull the plug down and we get it. It's just playing with this stuff and finding the right. There we go. That's pretty darn close. Remember that. Let's table that for now and we'll come back and animate it in a minute. I'm going to pull this down to the bottom and click the shy layer C, bottom. I'll do the same thing for the bottom. Let's just duplicate this now that we know we have, where the neighborhood on the text type the first part, go to Text path options. If we go all the way around, it's upside down. Then let's turn this reverse path back off. Let's turn off the bottom text for a minute so we can see it. Let's turn this back on to see what it says. Hang gliding project USA. In gliding. Boom. Now, we're cooking. Let's turn that off, and I'm pretty happy with that. I think it's even though it's matching the logo, it's not right in the middle. It should be in the middle. I think. I'm going to take a little liberty here. You probably won't be able to do this if this is like a big client, they get super specific about how their logo supposed to be used in luck. But since this is a friend and just telling them out to center this little more, this text. We got that. We have our text when I move this to the bottom and do a little shy guy and how do we animate this? There's actually quite a few affects for texts that are built-in to aftereffects, it takes a minute to load sometimes, as you can see. If we look at the animation presets and go to text, there are a bunch of options here and you can actually, if you pull up bridge, you can preview these. You have to know where this folder is that holds these presets. But it's pretty straightforward. It's in the Adobe presets folder. Let's go to text. Then if we go, let's see if we click on these. Yeah, so now we can start to see it if we click filmstrip, I think that's what we want because that's bugging out right now. This is how we're going to preview this. We're in the 3D folder. Let's go back up here to text, go to animate in, and let's go to typewriter. Yeah, this is what I want. Is just a bridge is a nice way to preview this stuff. This is honestly like one of the few times actually use bridge. We'll click and drag this into Hang lie on top of the text layer. Depending on where you put the cursor, that's where it'll start the animation. If you hit here, you can see the two key-frames. For now, that's okay. We'll just drag these down because, we're going to want it to be closer to the end and this is actually the bottom texts will drag it below that one. Then we'll drag the typewriter back on to the top one as well and then we have the key-frames of both rhythm of flight. This is the top ones, less words, so it should happen faster. Or the most flight. I think both of these should go way down. You can just play with this. I usually don't easy ease these because it's typewriter effect and the letters are just popping on anyways, I think for now those are fine. One little shortcut is command bracket or sorry, bracket and just so when this is hidden, we can see that's where the frame start for the animation of that. We got the text done, all right. The next lesson we will start to cover the inside of the logo. Thanks for watching.
6. Van Animation: This is what we have so far. We're going to start to work on the inside of the logo. Let's turn on the inside layer so we can see what they are. Most of these are going to be good when we use them way and use them as they are or we're just going to maybe tweak them a little bit. We might have to recreate a couple of them. Let's get started. I'm going to go ahead and start on the bus. The bus, and the bus wheels, and the pack glider are all together. Let's just bring this to the top so we can work on, and we want it to come in from the side, and we want the car to be having its own movement. This is what a hang glider looks like on top of a van, when it's packed up in a little bag, it's like 16 feet long. The glider will be shaking on the rack on the van, so they'll each need to have their own movement, but they all need to move together. To do that we can parent them to the wheels, which makes sense because the wheels are what moves the car in reality. We can select the two layers and use this little pick whip tool here to parent to the bus wheels and then let go. When we did that, you can see in the drop-down menu it did this for us. This is another way you could do it, choosing the drop-down menu. It's also a really nice way to troubleshoot later if you have a ton of layers and you're like what's connected to what, you have a record of it here and you can see it's a layer 3, bus wheels, boom. That's what it is. If we were to move the bus wheels and repeated pop position, everything moves together. The thing with the bus though is, the pivot point is up here and I hit "Y" to get the pivot tool. If we start to rotate the bus from here, that's not going work. A lot the weight of the bus is in the back. Lets put this back over here to have like a pivot here. If we were start to rotate here, I'm going to hit "Command" or "Control" and click "Drag this", so we have a really small views. This makes more sense to me that the van would be bouncing like this. That's why we need to, grab the pivot and put it down here so it can rotate from that position. Same thing is true for the pack glider. I think it'll be back over here by this stretch of the refract, and so now if we hit "r", "Pop rotation command", click and drag, we can see it's going to bounce a little bit, just a little bit. But stuff at this scale, all those little details add up. I think we're going to go, Let's get the bus bouncing to work first, I'm actually going to separate these positions, separate dimensions, if you right-click on position, you can get separate dimensions. Now we have the x and y separate. Now I can move independently, and you know what? I'm just now realizing if we're going to do this, that pack glider actually needs to be parented to the bus and not the wheels, so we can pick that to the bus. Now we move the bus, the glider moves with it. We don't want to go too high because we can see that the lines of the rims of the car down here. We don't want to see nothing here, so we'll keep it low, and we'll move forward three frames, and go up a little bit for three frames, 1, 2, 3, go down a little bit, 1, 2, 3, go up a little bit. Let's look at this in the graph, to make sure we're going in the right direction here, we can click and drag this slider down here to get a better zoomed in view of this. This is where we're beginning. Yeah boom. Let's go 1 ,2, 3. We'll will go up past that point. Let's make it a really jittery, 1, 2, 3, and we'll cycle this here in a minute. I just want to make sure we're doing the right thing. 1,2,3 okay, cool. We'll go back to this view, hit "Minus" to zoom back out and then we can just copy paste that, and then if we select it again, 1,2,3 actually it should be right. Yeah, cool. I was just making sure that the start, that we're going, three, forward at the end here, 1,2,3, is the right thing to do. Which it is. I want this whole thing, copy, paste. Cool. Let's do one more just for safety, we probably won't have mean this much, but then we can always delete it. It was easier than trying to go back and add it, and I would do like a loop function on this, but we're going to kill it, this animation is going to go back down to zero smoothly. I just like to copy and paste this stuff. Now that we have the up, down and let's work on the rotation. When the bus goes up, the front of the car should go down. The front of the bus is dragging and then it catches up; 1, 2, 3, then it should go up when the bus is going down. Boom, 1,2,3. Feel free to make sound effects when you're animating, it helps. Boom, boom. What's the original cycle, the length of the cycle, I'm going to make sure, if you hit "Shift" and then "P", you'll leave up whatever you had, which was rotation, and then you can see this. Let's see where it gets back to itself, which is here. That's the length of this cycle, so we need to make sure that, that one is there because we are going to start and end on the same. We are going to make sure the cycle works for rotation too, so bounce, and it's going back up, so the rotation should go up to counter that and downward motion, catches up and then it should go down again, and then probably up again. Let's see how that looks. Yeah, it looks like it's maybe too much, motion overall, and we can change that in the graph editor, but let's go ahead and copy all this stuff, and now, I know this frame and that frame are the same so I need to paste from this frame now, which is what I was trying to figure out on the up and down if I needed to key for it. When you're doing cycles, it's just stuff like that to keep track. Is the first frame and last frame the same? Then I need to paste from the last frame, however many frames forward was the second frame. I don't know if that makes sense. You'll be able to tell on the Graph Editor because this won't look like a pattern, if you're screwing up. Just delete whatever you're copying and then go back. Cool. I'll just delete those to keep it even. It looks pretty good. I don't know if that's maybe something is wrong with that bus' look and not really like normal road bumps or something. We can go to the Graph Editor, and let's do one at a time, will take down. I actually want to just take down the top, the extremes. This first and last one, we don't want to mess with those because that's where the logo when it stops, that's what it should look like kind of a thing. We can just pull this in and it'll re normalize the graph. When I let go, it'll pop back. Even though we've reduced this, it'll look like the same, and that's just the graph being normalized. Boom. See how it pause back up? But we actually did change the value. I think you can change that auto zoom graph height. It's like a little tool tip just off the screen here. If you turn that off, let's see what happens. See, now I won't auto normalize these view to the new values that you're changing it to. Be weary of that because that can throw you off as well. Likewise, we need to adjust these values a little bit. Select the top extremes and then we can drag these and run this motion. Again, that thing is back on so I can turn that off. I like that off more because you can see, where I start, where am I going, how much did I just change it relative to where it started from? I would recommend keeping that button off. Let's see what it looks like now. That looks more friendly. That looks like a better ride. Okay, now we have the bus working. Let's do the packed glider real quick, which is going to be simpler version of that. But again, we want to kind of keep track of the cycle. Where was it? If this is the start frame, it's going to be whatever it's even with that horizontally, so it's this one. We need to have the packed glider starting in there. The same. It will follow the same kind of rules just on a much smaller scale that the bus rotation was doing, that it's always kind of delayed especially because it's further up in the chain here. It's on top of the car. It's already doing all that motion. It's always trying to play catch up. Let's see. I don't know how that'll look. I think that seems right. That might be a little too much, but we can fix it again. Paste. Instead of selecting the keyframes, I had accidentally selected more than one layer. When you copy it, it'll think you're trying to copy both of these layers. Make sure when you're selecting, it's a very thin click and drag situation so you're not selecting more than you need. Looks like the van animation is kind of working. Cool. Now that this stuff is parented to the wheels, all we have to do is just bring the bus into that position. To kind of give it the effect that it's us as viewers are viewing it, going the same speed as the van, give or take a little bit, there needs to be a little forward and back movement there. I'm just going to put a key frame down way out here because I've done it I know around about where the key frames are, so it should end up here. You don't want to start animating and then you can't remember where it should end up for the logo. It's always nice to set that anchor time key frame, and then around 26 it'll probably be on so we can set that again. Let's go to 11, drag this thing off, and we can't see, what are we dragging it off of? This is another issue. Let's get this in time of where we want it to be. We're going to not have anything on frame for the first five seconds so let's at least pull it there. We're waiting for the road to go on, which is going to go on when this line passes. It is around in here somewhere. Sort of come on. That's probably not enough. I'll go back a little bit to give it the illusion that it's traveling. Let's do our little trick here with keyframe velocity. I'll do 60 then 60 to affect, remember those curves. Let's zoom in. Since we're not moving the y, we could separate these dimensions and get a better view of x, but that's up to you. It looks like we're not totally off like that. End of the packed glider is just barely touching that. I think that looks okay. It stops kind of hard. Let's pull this down. That makes sense to me. Cool. So now we have the car. We just have to make this math, which we actually already have because we have this shape of the inner circle. Boom. We have this inner circle. Let's duplicate that. We'll bring it above the bus situation. We can go ahead and precompose this so we don't have to have a map for each. The packed glider, the bus, the bus wheels. Now that we have that kind of done. Let's precompose that and we'll call it the bus. Move all attributes. This inner circle doesn't really have anything that matter by because it's not a solid shape so we can actually just change that by giving it a fill shape and then selecting the bus precomposed layer and going to Alpha Matte. There we go. Check that out. The only other thing here, we can see the mountain is going through the car, but I don't think the mountain will have written on completely by the time the car is in that position, so we won't have to worry about that right now. Cool. That is the bus. Let's do the rest of the inside in the next lesson.
7. Road & Mountain Animation: This is what we have so far. We just need the mountains, and the road, and the hang glider. Let's start with the road. This little dotted line, we'll have to remake that. That's the road lines. Let's look at it in context of the circles. We'll do that with a shape layer actually. I think the easiest way is just grab the pen tool and click, and then shift click. See what we did there, we actually have that layer selected, so it thinks we're drawing a mask which we're not, so just deselect any layer that you have selected. Click and then now we see we have a new shape layer and then shift click to get a straight line, and so now we see we have that line but it's not dashed. We can do that by going in the contents of this and go to the stroke, and we can go to actually dashes and add a dash. Let's turn off the road line, or we can just adjust for the moment. Sometimes I like to set a key frame just so I remember what the value was if I'm just worrying all over one frame. I'm just pulling it down to have it as reference. Let's scroll back up and try to figure out the length of the dash is that is needed. We can just for at least right now, just pull this offset to get the- that looks pretty close. We can actually just animate this offset to have it look like the road is moving. Let's just pull this way out so we know we have plenty of animation. Which also means we'll perhaps have to increase the value again. I'll have to bump it way up. That looks like we're cruising down the road and then we can turn the road lines off. I'll make that a shy layer just to get rid of it. Now we need to get the road lines to come on at the right time. That little thing is bugging me a little bit. It's just not exactly on there so let's correct that. If I can just shift drag that endpoint, and if you have this little circle in the pen tool, that means you are about to close that line and we don't want to do that. Hit, "V" to pull up the cursor and then we can drag and click that line and then mess with it. Drag it into the black part. You know what, I think the easiest thing for me is just make a mask for this. I think the easiest thing to do is going to be just animate a mask on for this. It's a shape layer, so how do we make a mask on a shape layer? Because if I want to make a mask now and I start clicking, I'm just making more shapes in the shape layer, so how do I mask that? Well, there's this tiny little button up here next to the star and it says tool, create masks, so we want to click that if we're on a shape layer and now we have a mask. That took me a little while to figure out. Now what we have to do is just animate this masked path. This is the end point. We can put that out here somewhere, and then we can just go up here, hit, "V" to get the selection tool, and then just drag that down. We can easy ease that stuff. I think this deserves the key frame velocity treatment as well. Was this going in the other direction though? The original example, again, going back to I guess the circles going different ways, it is nicer and because the car is going that way, makes way more sense. Let's change that. We'll just switch this mask path around. We'll just drag it over here. Now we'll get it right to the edge so it can take advantage of that easy ease home. Let's see, what does that path look like? We need this to be right at the edge because otherwise that easy ease isn't doing anything. Because if we put it all out here, when the edge of the mask is here, it's still going super fast. It's only starting to slow down when it gets over here, which is useless to us when all we're seeing is over here. That's why we want to make sure the mask path is over here, where it ends, where it should end. Now we get a little bit more of that. It's still super fast. I think just need to make this a lot slower. Yeah. The other thing we can do is turn on motion blur. Since this is moving so fast, there's this little button over here, and you can specify motion blur for each layer. This is the first layer we haven't on, and so we turn on and if we watch, nothing happens. It's also because the shy layer here, it won't affect anything until we actually have the motion blur enabled over here as well. Now you can see it, everything got super blurry, you can turn that on and off. It does slow down the render time a little bit like previews, but if it's just a couple elements, it's no big deal. Now we have the road lines. Now we can do the road itself, which should just be able to- let's just do another inner circle mat, and then we can just animate this across. Put a end position here, and then we'll just animate this over. Of course, we're not seeing it because we got that mask on. Let's just turn that off so you can see it real quick. Yeah, so the road's just going out here. Again, we want it to just start right at the end there because we want to take advantage of that bezier curve in the graph editor when we go here and we say easy ease, F9, or we can go to key frame assistant down here and go to easy ease. We'll also do key frame velocity to this. Let's do 66 on either end, see that? Of course we want that in front of the van. Well, in front of it. Let's get it up here. Let's turn this alpha map back on. I think it needs go way sooner. Maybe it's just being too slow. We'll use less key frames. It needs to start on, wait, yeah, it needs to start on yeah, okay. Maybe one less. It's too close to this edge. It's too close, this start, it should it should be at least one more frame away from starting I think. It needs to go faster. Yeah, and then the road lines come on probably here-ish. Let's go to the road lines shape, hit, "U" and then we can animate the mask because that's what's revealing it here. Let's have that start here. There, yeah, cool. We got that and now you see the mountain. One tricky thing about the mountain and it's one way to add like a nice little effect. If you think about it, if we are on a road seeing a car, we would have parallax, which you can look up that phrase. But it's essentially the movement of something relative to how close you are to it. The mounts are super far away, so they should have like this slow drift. Let's say it has to stop here, this is where the logo ends, so hit that anchor point here. So now we can do whatever before that. If we wanted to go from right to left, we're traveling to the right do this. But since it has to end here, we actually have to start over here. So that as we go down this timeline, it goes in the right direction. But of course, that's way too much. That is way too much distance. We just want like a really subtle change. Remember that like Mike Tyson punch-out. He's like on the bike or something. That's what it should feel like with the statue of liberty in the background. I don't know if anybody knows that reference. It was a great game, Mike Tyson punch-out. This needs to happen to the length of the animation as well. So this is where just like tweaking timing comes into play. The other little fixed we need to do, is the fact that we ran out of logo here. So what we can do, is duplicate the mountain layer here. We can delete the animation by doing the stopwatch there. Shift, click and drag to get it to move faster, when you move this up. Basically, we're just like extending this with itself and then we can parent this to the mountain. That's why we could delete the animation on that layer, and we'll call this like mountain extension. Now we have that piece to start with at the beginning. Let's get an overall picture of what's happening now that we can have all the elements starting to be done. Let's turn off the mountain for now. The hack glider, it's distracting until we get it done. Okay, let's get the text figured out. A text should start on the irish.Whereas the text? We didn't hit bracket to move everything to where your cursor is. Then hang gliding should start. Well, after that, just move back. It's should be really gone before the van gets to its first position. Which still bugging me. Let's go into the bus real quick. I'm not a huge fan of how it looks right now. Let's pull this over. Let's get a few more frames. That looks like an actual column. Yeah, that makes more sense. It's a little more active. I feel like I need to bring some emotion back in the pack glider so you can see how even though it's pretty count, we can go back in and tweak stuff and it's not a big deal. I want this one to be bigger. Hang gliding project USA, hang glider comes in. Everything should stop around 140, which is where that almost was. So the road lines ended too soon and we can just drag that out. Let's just make a call. It's going to end at 140. We can go back into the bus. Almost worked pretty perfect. Let's just delete these key frames and then it will go into the correct values there. Same for this. We'll just delete that one and we know that last keyframe is the correct value. Then this ends prematurely. So let's just drag that key frame out, and then drag this out. Let's just easy, ease those last keyframes. It's not such a harsh ending. Well, let's delete two more so it has more time. Let's do the keyframe velocity 66. The least little touch about the one that I originally did was the glider. The glider ended after the car stopped. So there's one final little bump. Let's add that in. It'll end here, but we want to tell it compounds back so let's add that. Send that last keyframe again, and then go back to here and then go past zero just a little bit. So that we get this nice little bounce, pink. It's a little aggressive maybe. I think these don't have the keyframe velocity treatment yet, so let's do that. This comes down to quick. Part of the animation is just starting to play with it and seeing what feels right as you're doing it. I think we need one more like bounce. I'm just copying that last keyframe that I'm going here. I'm just pushing this little past zero again. You know what the problem is? I think this is too high. Let's get that flat. The bus needs something too. I wasn't anticipating tweak and stuff like this. This is the problem. This never got easy ease final deal. Okay, I think you can get the idea. We can't needle that to death but you get the idea. I think the text is working, the car's working, it's all coming to an end. I think that should come to a slow end here. So easy, ease that. The road line slowing down adds a lot. Because the mountains are two layers I don't want to do to mats for them, so let's precompose them. That way we just need the inner one again. So let's go grab and inner circle and paste it. Drag it down right above the extended mountains because it will do it based off of what's right above it and we'll say Alpha map. That's got the parallax. The only thing we need to do is add a little animated mask again, like we did before. So hit "M" to make sure we have that, unlike before, like I said, it does matter where these edges are. I guess not this edge, but so it should come on right around in here maybe. Easy, ease this, you can see a pattern here, keyframe velocity down here off a screen after you right-click the keyframes. Cool. I think it's slow. I think it needs to come on like over here. So we have the mountains and then now the last little piece is the hang glider.
8. Glider Animation: Let's get the glider done. I think should come in about near the end somewhere in here, we'll animate the scale instead of it going into 3D, just because I don't think that's really necessary for it to look right. This is the n position, so we'll make those first and then pull those out of the way, and we know it will not want it to go anywhere in the x but it will come down in the y, it needs to be smaller so then we can adjust it as needed. Then it'll go past where we need it in the y because it's going deep down, like swooped down. It needs to go pass that position and then it'll come up, and during this moment is when we will unchain this. Now we have a sense of the scale animated correctly and then we can invert this one, so negative 56. Now it looks like it's coming down. Let's move this keyframe, over here, so it's going down, and then it's going to rotate up. We need it to go much further down I think, for it to sell that swoop. We get the idea and then now let's easy ease it and really start to swoop that and sell that idea. I don't think this first one needs to be easy ease, so you can just Command or Control left click that and then it will turn the easy ease off. I think we just need to figure out where the scale needs to happen, the scale needs to happen maybe sooner. I like to make sound effect when I animate. I think it also needs like not a balance but like a settle at the end. Let's go and make another n key frame and then go back and overshoot and let's make that really long and make that velocity. P over u, the 66 percent goal, that's the general idea. I think the timing isn't right, but we can figure that out. Just dragging those keyframes out. That feels right, let's turn on motion blur for this because it is going fast. Another little trick, the only thing to consider with motion blur is that, once this isn't on transparent background, it's really light here. What I'd like to do is actually duplicate layers that have motion blur and sometimes just to make that a bit thicker, less transparent. It's a little too much, we'll just do two copies of itself. Now we have that and since it's more than one layer, let's pre-compose those as well. We can just have one of the alpha mattes, Command d to duplicate the matte, pull it down just above the glider, will toggle switch to get back to that menu and down here it says alpha matte. Now, it will come flying enough of screen essentially, and see how it's starting to slow down because the motion blur as it's trying to preview it, and you can see where that starts to affect it. Cool. I think we just need to change the timing a little bit. Let's go in here. Hit u and we can just pull all this stuff down. We could also just grab this layer, it's already precomposed but it's only coming sooner, that stuff is done, I'll just grab v to get selection, its coming in here. It needs one more keyframe. I'm an animator and I'll like to noodle stuff shadows, and then I'll just delete this duplicate for now, and then it needs to come up again. It needs to go down just a little bit, and you can see the keyframes, the distance here. You should just go down a little. That's it. Let's duplicate that again. Go back to the main [inaudible]. You get an idea of what you should be doing to start with, and then once you see it, you can adapt and tweak and you could do this thing forever and still not totally be satisfied. I like where this is at and I hope you enjoyed this tutorial. Please share any of the work that you will create from watching this tutorial, I'm really curious to see what logo designs are out there that you guys are animating, and definitely leave me any questions if something is unclear. But I appreciate you following along and hope to see you in my next course. Thanks.
9. Rendering: Now that we have it done, let's render it out. Their logo is black, but most likely they might need to use it on a black background, so they need it to be white. Let's just clean things up here so we can see all the animation ends around here, So you can just hit N to bring the work area down and say right-click and trim comp to work area, so now we have a nice end to everything, and then we can bring this rhythm of flight separated which isn't a great naming situation here, and that was one of my examples from the beginning of the class, rhythm of flight you can see it's all black because it's black on black, let's bring that into new composition click and drag it down here and let go, and then it's just the exact same thing that we've been looking at, well let's go to the effects tab up here and right-click and say color correction should be invert. I can't remember where it is. Let's just go here and type invert outside a channel. That makes sense. So we can click and drag it here or on here and then like go, soon we'll just make it wide. That way if we say New Solid and say, yeah, it's a black, drag it down below it, now it's black on white, which is maybe more helpful to them and it's a little more striking. So let's render this one out. Command Shift question mark or dash on a Mac, or we'll do not the shortcuts as well so everyone can follow along, which I honestly have to remember where this is 'composition, add to render queue. Now we get to tweak the settings of what we wanted the codec on a Mac , like Apple ProRes 422(LT), so everything looks good to me, we don't need audio, just keep the file size smaller and just make it clear this is just video and best settings there's frame ray, there's some other random things in here, but basically you just need to find a place to save it, you can click on this name and locate that and then just hit Render and it'll run through it, render out exactly what you want. We actually just pick the wrong one because I selected add to render queue from this composition instead of this one. So let's just do that again. Add to render queue, and then, that's fine. We just say render and there we go. One last thing I wanted to cover is how to actually use this rendered file once we have it done. We're going to have a black background with the white lines, and when you start to use it in our footage and want to superimpose it on something, then it just occludes whatever we have beneath it. To get around that we go to a mode called Screen, which will get rid of any black and make that transparent. Now we're left with the white lines of the logo. Similarly, in Premier, we have this little bit of video footage and we have our rendered logo here, and again, it is just blocking all the footage, which is not very helpful. So in Premier, to get to those options, it's under opacity and we have our blend modes here, and the same thing we did in after effects, we want to choose the Screen blend mode and we have it superimposed on footage now. That finishes up the course, I just want to say a big thank you to you guys for taking it and following along, I hope to see all the amazing work that you animate and please share it however you can with me and send me any messages that you may have questions about the course or how to animate, I'm happy to answer them and I hope to see you in the next class that I teach. Thanks a lot.
Lucas Ridley, Professional Animator
