Transcripts
1. Welcome: Welcome to Animated typography and After Effects. In this class, you'll learn how to layer simple animated effects to create complex looking animated typography. I'm Megan Friesth and I'm going an explanimator. That's just my word for what I do, which is to illustrate and animate educational animations. There's texts pretty much everywhere you look, and in today's world, much of that is digital. This leaves a huge opportunity that relatively few people are taking advantage of; animating that text. With animated typography, you can make your letters pop off the screen, either literally or figuratively. You can create eye-catching animations that really amplify your message. There are so many uses for animated topography: from explainer videos, kinetic typography videos, music lyric videos, lower thirds, logos, title sequences, digital greeting cards, websites, digital signage, advertising, and of course, social media. In this class, I'll demonstrate how there are infinite ways create eye-catching animated typography that are totally achievable. You don't need to be an expert. If you're new to After Effects, I'd recommend taking my class, Animated lettering in After Effects, first. Once you're comfortable with the basics taught in that class, you'll be ready to tackle this one. This class will cover how to create your texts design in Adobe Illustrator, including tips to make perfectly aligned and rounded letters, and how to create ready to animate outlines and accents. Then I'll show you how to import and animate your main letter forms in After Effects. After that, it's time to add all the fun flourishes like animated outlines, accents, and bursts of confetti. Once you've created this look, I'll give you some more ideas on how you can animate simple effects to create your very own unique animated typography. So if you're ready to make some animated typography, let's get started.
2. Class project: The project for this class is to animate one letter, number or special character in the style that I demonstrate throughout the class, and to just creating exactly what I'm creating as you watch videos three through 11, I'm going to use the letter A, but you can choose any letter. When you're done, go ahead and post it to the class projects. Then in videos 12 through 18, I'll give you additional inspiration on how you can try other similar effects to make your very own Creation. I'd love to see what you come up with. So post this to the class project too. This method of mimicking and then creating your own unique version has really helped in classes that I've taken. If you really want to learn these techniques, I'd recommend doing the same. When you're done, you'll have something totally unique for your own portfolio or social media. Of course, you don't have to stop at one letter. You can spell out a whole word or multiple words. If you make the whole alphabet like I did, you'll have your own custom animate typeface that you can reuse over and over across many different projects. If that sounds intimidating, just start with one letter, even if you play it on a animating whole word or the entire alphabet, it's best to just start by animating one letter from start to finish. That way, if you decide you want to make changes somewhere in the process, it's easier to change one letter than 26. So let's do it.
3. Create text design in Illustrator: We're going to start in Adobe Illustrator. I've created a new project with an art board that's 1920 by 1080 pixels, because that's the standard size. But if you want to create a different size, that's okay too. I like to create my texts design in Illustrator and then import the layers into After Effects. Now, you could make the text design right in After Effects, but I prefer to use Illustrator because of features like Smart Guides that make it easy to create perfect letters. Smart Guides helps align, and put somethings into place, and if you've never used them before, you'll see what I mean in just a second. To turn on Smart Guides, go up to View and then make sure Smart Guides is checked. The first thing I'm going to do is go over to my text tool and then click on my art board and type out whatever I want to write. I'm just going to do the letters A, B, C, just for demonstration purposes because they have some variety to them. Then you can go up and change the font to wherever you are. I'm going to use Quicksand. I'm going to make my texts even bigger, so holding down Shift, I'm just going to drag it out. Let's make it really big and we'll just round it up to an even number. That looks pretty good. Now, the reason I want to make my text extra big is that when I work in After Effects, sometimes I'll want to zoom in really close to see close up what my letter animation is doing. It can get pixelated in the viewer in After Effects. That's why I want to make it nice and big to alleviate that pixelation problem. But when it renders out, no matter what size it is, it's going to be a vector shape, so it won't have that pixelation problem. What I'm going to do next is just lock this layer that has my text on it and then I'm going to go down to this new layer button and make a new layer. Then I'm going to go over to my Pen tool or hit P on the keyboard. I'm just going to trace over my letters. I'm making paths for all my letters that will take the place of this text layer, because that's the way I'm going to animate it on. Just like if you watched my previous sketch your class animated lettering, I'm using the same technique. First, I need to change this color to a stroke color with no fill and I'm going to change to something that's easy to see on top of this black. I'm just going to move my Pen tool over the letter and start tracing out by clicking and then moving, clicking and then moving the Pen tool. This is what I mean about the Smart Guides being helpful, because right now you can see this pink line that's showing me that my bottom two points are lined up. That's what I mean by Smart Guides being helpful to make perfect letters. I'm going to collect to end that line and then I'll hit Enter to finish off the line. You can see that my stroke is way smaller than the actual letter. I'm just going to go over here and increase the stroke. Maybe something like 68 looks pretty good. Then I'll just make the caps, rounded caps and I'll make the corners rounded corners. Now, I want to just adjust this so that it's more accurate. I'm going to hit the A key or go to the Direct Selection tool here. The Direct Selection tool lets you edit individual points. So I'm going to hit Command Plus to zoom in and then I'll just line this up a little bit better. You can even hit the arrow keys if you want just small increments. Do that, and then move this over, move this over, and doesn't have to be perfect. Just whatever looks good to you. Now I'm going to add another line. So hit P to bring up the Pen tool. Then if I were to add this line right here, you can see that the path is selected, it's just going to add a point to this path and that's not what I want. So I'm just going to go off that letter. That letter isn't activated and then just make my point. Then hit Enter it in the line and I can go back and line this up. If I hold down shift, it will make sure that I'm only moving in the horizontal axis. That's actually not lining up the way I want it to. So I'll just hit the up arrow key over a little bit. I want to move this whole line down. I'll just select the whole thing with the regular selection tool and then I'll just hit the arrow key down a couple times. That looks good. So moving on to the B. Now, I'm going to hit the Pen tool, make another one. I'm holding Shift to make sure that this is a straight line and then I'm going to adjust with the Direct Selection tool. I want the whole thing to move over, so I'll use the regular selection tool, which the shortcut is V and then just click the line and move the whole thing over. You can see that these letters, even though it looks like it's a mono line front. Mono line meaning one stroke throughout the letter. It's actually not a full acrylic closely, select this B, it's thinner right here then right here. The stroke for my A was 68 and that lined up pretty good. But here, when I have a stroke that's 60, it's not quite right. But I'm just going to ignore all of that and just make my font really geometric and really uniform. I'm going to deviate from the actual font a little bit. That's okay because we're not going to see the actual texts layer, the actual font in our final design, we'll just see the lines that I've created that make up the lettering. For these loop shapes of the B, I can use the Rectangle tool to make them perfectly rounded. That's another reason why I like to do my design in Illustrator. I'm going to go to the Rectangle tool and then just draw out a rectangle. That looks about. Then I'm going to go over to the Direct Selection tool and hit these two little corner circles on the right side of my B and then I'm just going to hit Shift to select the second one. Now I have these two corner selected, but these two aren't, and you can tell by the way that this circle and this circle are darker. Now I'm going to drag towards the center to round that off. It makes a really perfect arc here. It doesn't line up exactly with the font, but that's okay. Now, to make the second loop on the B, I'm going to duplicate this shape, so I'm just going to click it and drag it, but hold down Option and Shift. That'll make sure that it stays in the same vertical axis and also duplicates it. That's what Option does. The bottom loop on the B is bigger than the top loop. So what I'm going to do is just to drag it out to make it bigger. But when I drag it out, it's also going to be increasing my font size. I just need to reset that to 68. You can see that I've lined this up pretty well so that the intersection of these two loops is exactly aligned. These loops are also aligned with the back of the B. What I want to do now is when I animate this on, I don't want it to have this back part right here. I'm just going to go into my layers just to show you. You don't have to necessarily do this step. But I'm going to hide everything about this bottom loop on the B by just clicking the eyeball. Now, I have just this visible. Actually, it doesn't look like this is all the way curved out. I'm going to just suggest that because I like it to be really nice and round. Now what I'm going to do is hit the C key. That's going to bring up the Cut tool or the Scissors tool. I'm going to hit this anchor point and in this anchor point. What that's done is detached my shape at those two points. Now I can select this line and just delete it. You might have to hit Delete twice because it'll leave behind some little straggler anchor points. I've gotten rid of all that. Now I just have this loop. This way, when I animate the B, the back part of the B is going to animate in, and then this will animate in separately. I didn't want that connecting part because then that would animate it again and depending on the order of the animation, you might not see it because this would already be animated in. This way, we have everything separated out on a work nice and cleanly. Now we need to do the same thing on the top of the B. I'll just show that one and hit C on the keyboard to bring up the scissors, cut it here and here, and delete this extra piece. I want to just make all these things visible again, you can close up the layer if you want and now let's move on to C. To make the C, I'm going to use the Ellipse tool, so that's going to be under the Rectangle tool, so click and hold or you can use the shortcut L. I'm going to hold down Shift to make a perfect circle. I'm just going to move it into place. One thing I'm going to do really quick is going to to my Transform panel, and if you don't see this panel, go under Window and then you can find it there. I'm going to make sure that scale, strokes, and effects is actually unchecked. This way, I can resize this circle, but it will always keep the 68 point stroke that I want for all of my letters. I'm just going to make sure that this is lined up. I'll probably need to make it a little bit bigger, I think, but it's hard to tell. What I'm going to do is hit command R, to bring up my rulers and then from the ruler I'm going to drag out a guideline and position that right at the bottom of the B, because this is a nice flat bottom. You'll notice that with this typeface and this happened to the water type faces, is that the curved parts of letters will actually extend past this baseline right here. The A extends a little bit past the baseline and the O should too. I'm just using this guide to make sure that my O is extending past the baseline, just about the same amount as the A. I'm just going to nudge this over a little bit, that looks good. Now to make this into a C shape, I'm just going to use the Scissors tool again to cut two points. Then just delete and delete again and that makes a C. I think I like the way that looks, even though it's not quite aligned with the font. Yeah. That will work.
4. Separate letter pieces into layers: Now that we have all of our letters, I'm just going to recolor them to the colors that I want. I'm just going to drag and select all, and then just go in and let's click this blue. Now what I want to do is put all of these pieces of all of the letters on their own layers. What I can do is just hit the space next to the circle on the layer that has all of my letters, and then go to this hamburger menu, and go to release layers to sequence, and then I'm going to select all the layers that it released into the sequence and drag them up above my original layer. Now you can see they're all on their own. Before they were nested, you could tell because they're indented, but now they're all on their own layers. I have this blank layer now which I can delete, and I also have this layer which has this guideline right here, and I don't need that anymore so I'll just hit delete. All right, so now I have each piece of my letter on their own layer. To make this easy to animate I'm just going to rename all the layers, so this will be A-main, this will be A-across, and you can see that my naming convention is, I start with the letter, then space, dash, and then space, and then some descriptor. This is the main A frame, this is the across piece of the A, and that just helps me know what I'm animating when I go into my layers and after effects. When I work with these letters in after effects I want them to be centered in the middle of the column, and that'll just make it easier because I'm going to have all of my layers and all my animation in one comp in after effects, and then I'm going to use that comp for when I want to spell out a word. If that doesn't make any sense right now, just bear with me and follow along, it'll make sense later on. What I need to do now is just put these letters in the center of the comp. I'm going to select both of the pieces of the A, and then I'm just going to go up to transform up here, and then I'm going to type in the center of the art board, so I know that's going to be 960 by 540 because that's half of 1,920 by 1,080. You can see that's centered the A, let me just hide these other layers. Actually it won't matter, I can just delete this reference texts layer because I'm not going to need it anymore. Now my A is centered in my comp, and I'm just going to hide the A and show the B, and do the same thing. Now you might be wondering why I don't just select all of these and then hit the aligned tools. Well because that's what'll happen. It's not going to align all three of the pieces together, it'll align each one of them to the center of the art board. Let me undo that, and then just go into transform and type in half of the art board size, and that will center it up nicely. You can use that trick when you want to center multiple things, but they're not grouped together. The C is actually just one piece, so I can use my align tools here.
5. Create accents in Illustrator: The next step is to make the layers for all of the accenting details that I'm going to animate. I'm just going to focus in on the A and make those. What I'm going to do first is just select all the parts of the A, hit command C for copy. Make a new layer and make sure that in that layer. Then hit Command Shift V, that's going to paste those new layers into the same exact spot that they were before. So if I hide my A across in A main, you can still see that A, that I've just pasted. So basically we have two copies of the A. What I'm going to do from here is go up to Object, Expand, then you're going to just hit Fill and Stroke and hit OK. What that's done is taken my lines that were just a line with a stroke and no fill in Maine those into solid shapes. So I have two pieces here that are just solid shapes. What I'm going to do, select both of them and go into my Pathfinder panel. If you don't see that, that's again going to be in the Windows menu. I'm going to hit the first option which is to unite. Now it's joined those two shapes and made them into one shape. That's just the shape of the A. So now what I can do is make this into an outline. I'll just swap the Fill and Stroke and recall it that, I think I'm going to want that to be one more point thicker, so increase that and now we have an outline of our letter. So I'm going to just rename this. If I show both of my other layers, you can tell that this outline is right on the outside of my letter. What I want to do now is create another outline that's a little bit offset from my letter. What I want to do is make sure that my outline is selected. Go up to the hamburger menu and hit Duplicate now I have another copy. I'm just going to recolor this so that you can tell what it is. I'm going to use this light blue, which is hard to see. So while I'm at it, I'm just going to make a background layer. If you click, when you're using the shape tool, you can actually type in value. So that's what I'll do here. Let's center this to the airport. Make that a dark blue,let's go even darker than that. Alright, that'll do, Let's make a new layer for this background. Target to the bottom and name it background. We can just lock that so it doesn't get in the way. Now with this outline in our copy, I'm going to actually rename that outline outer with it selected, I'm going go up to Object path, offset path. Then it's going to bring up this box. If you hit preview can see what's going on. What it's doing is offsetting the path by whatever pixels you put in here. Let's try something like maybe 10 that looks pretty good. So I'll just hit OK. Then if you look closely, it's actually kept my original path. I don't want that one told us, delete that. So now I have my letter with an inner and outer outline, the pieces that are going to be animating in the letter. There's one more thing that I want to add and that's those accent lines. What I'm going to do is click both my main and across letters, make sure they're selected with these boxes here. Go to the hamburger menu and Duplicate Selection. I'm going to drag these on top of A layers, then I'm going to go in and name these accent. I like to put the common thing first. These all have a in common, then the next thing they have in common for these accents is that they are accents, so I'll put accent here. You don't have to necessarily use my naming convention, but it's something that I found works really well. What I'm going to do with these two accents is make them a different color. Let's go at this pink and make that the stroke no fill, now I'm going to decrease the stroke. Let's try like 10, that's pretty good. We want them to extend past our letters just to make the animation look a little bit more interesting as it's animating in. What I'll do is just go to the direct selection tool. I'm going to drag this line out past the bottom of the and the smart guides are on, which is nice because it'll show me if I am keeping that line straight and the same angle. I'll do the same with the other side. It's showing me that I have the same length, same alignment with this point, which is nice, then actually at the top, I want this line to extend past the a at the top. What I'm going to do is just use those scissor tool again to cut this line, then I can drag this up and drag this side up. Here we go, I'm going to drag the across line now. All right, looks good. So I need to separate these two A lined out into their own. I'll create a new layer. Then with one of the line selected, I'll just take this little box and drag it up into the new layer. This will be a accent-2 and this will be a accent-1. If you're working on multiple letters at the same time, you're going to want to do this for all of your other letters or you can just do one layer, come back and do this step layer for your other letters.
6. Animate main letters: We're ready to start animating. I have a new After Effects Project and I'm just going to go up to file, import file. I'm going to navigate to the Illustrator file I just created and make sure I have import as composition retain layer sizes. If you don't see this drop down, hit the options button. Then I'm going to hit open. If I double click this comp, I have all the layers that I made in Illustrator. The first thing I'm going to do is select all my layers except for the background. Right-click go to create, create shapes from vector layer. That will just make them Shape layers so that I can animate in After Effects. First I'm going to go in and select all of the Shape layers for the A. I'm just going to hit command shift C to pre-compose them and I'll just name this A and hit okay. Now I can double-click on this comp and now I have just the A layers right here. The first thing I'm going to animate here is the main part of the letter which I made blue. I'm going to hide all the other layers and just work on these. I'm going to toggle down and go to add trim paths, and then toggle that down. let's set a keyframe, let's say at maybe 20 frames. Set a key frame for the end value and then go back to 0 and bring the n value down to 0. You'll see that's going to animate in the main part of the A. Now I'm just going to copy these term path onto the across part of the A and hit U on the keyboard to see my keyframes. I want this animation to start a little bit later. I'll just drag these keyframes forward in time, maybe there. The animation doesn't need to take as long because it's a shorter line, so maybe I'll just drag that here, adjust these a little bit and see what that looks like. Good. But it's really boring because these are linear keyframes, and so the movement is just the same speed the whole time. What we can do is select these keyframes. We can actually select both of them at the same time. Now we have a few options from here to add easing. The first thing you can do is right-click, go to keyframe assistant. You can choose from easy ease, easy ease in or easy ease out. Or you can hit F9 to easy ease them. But again, easy ease not all that interesting of an animation. Let's see what else we can do. One thing that I use all the time to help with easing my keyframes and making the animation more interesting is this plug-in called motion, and now we're on motion version three. This is a plug-in that I'm not affiliated with it all, but I would highly recommend it because it saves you so much time. You can use these presets to add easing to your keyframes. Now with motion three, you can even see a little preview of what the graph editor would look like with these buttons. You can still also use the sliders to adjust the easing on your keyframes. If you don't want to spend the money for motion three, I totally get it, but if there's one plug-in, I would recommend for animators, it would be motion three but still if you don't have it, that's totally fine. You don't need it. You can hit this little icon right here to go into the graph editor, and then you can adjust your keyframes from here. I'm going to bring this all the way to the right side, and let's see what that looks like. That's really snappy, it's very slow and then all of a sudden that snaps to the finish. That's a little bit too much. I'll just bring this down a little. Maybe something like that. Maybe even a little less. I think that was looking pretty good. Take some time to adjust your graph editor or use presets or dual combo of both because that's really what makes your animation interesting. If you just use the standard linear keyframes, it's going to be pretty boring. If you use easy ease makes it a little bit better, but if you really go in and adjust your keyframes, especially when you have more complex letters then A, like if you have maybe three pieces going on, it really helps to make your animation much more interesting and just looks a lot more polished. Once you have that the way you like it, then you can click out of the graph editor, and now what I'm going to do is select both of these layers and hit Command Shift C to pre-compose them. I'm going to name this A main because it's the main part of my letters and just hit, okay. Now I have this composition that has both of those layers with that same animation. But what I can do now is duplicate it. I'm going to go over to my Effects and presets, and if you don't see this, you can go to window and you'll find it there. I'm just going to type into this search field right here. I'm going to type fill. I'm going to take this effect, drag that on top of my A main, the top layer. That's going to recolor it and I have this obnoxious red by default, but what I want to actually have is a different color. I'm going to go back to my Illustrator file just because I had those swatches. I'm going to copy the light blue color when I copy this hex number and hit okay. Go back in to After Effects and paste that into this color field. All right, so if I was using motion three, you can click on this color and recolor right here and you can even import your swatches. That's another thing that motion three is really handy for. What I'm going to do now is just drag this layer about two frames into the future. Now you can see that I have my blue layer and then my light blue layer staggered, but both doing the same animation. I'm actually going to do that one more time and stagger that layer, and then let's see. I think I want my first one to be the light blue, the second one to be the medium blue, and then my last layer, I'm going to add that fill too. I'm going to make it dark blue. Now I have a staggered animation of three colors animating in. I was able to reuse that comp in that animation and just recolor it.
7. Animate outer outline: The next thing that I'm going to animate is the outer outline. So I'm going to toggle down, go to add trim paths, and then toggle down the trim paths, I'm going to go to about one second set a keyframe for the n value to be at a 100 percent, and then go to zero frames and bring this down to zero. Now you can see that it's animated in, but the inner part of the a, this little triangle is animating in first and then the outer part. I actually want them to animate both at the same time. So right here, you can see trim multiple shapes is set to simultaneously rather than individually, so you would think that that would mean that they would both animate in at the same time. But since that's not what's happening, I found that if you just drag this trim path layer up underneath path two, it'll work as you would expect. So they're both animating in at the same time. So I have the outline animating in, but in my final design, I don't want to see this outline. So I need to animate it off as well. So under trim paths, I'm going to set a keyframe for the start value to be at zero, and then at a 100 percent. Now when you play this back, you're not going to see anything because the start and the end value are always at the same percent, and that means that you see nothing. What I need to do is adjust the easing on these keyframe, so that they'll animate out and in at the same time, but you'll actually see part of the line because these values are staggered. So I'm just going to hit F9 to ease them, then jump into my graph editor, and I'm going to make the start go fast and then slow, so I'll just drag that like that, so it's going to go fast and then slow down, and the n value is going to do the opposite. So slow and then fast. Let's play that back and see what it looks like. So because I'm working with the stroke, it can be hard to see what's going on when my layer is selected because it's also like a stroke. So what you can do is hit this little button right here, and what that'll do is just make it so that it's not selecting the actual shape of your layer when the layer selected so that way I can see what's going on better. With this animation and the easing on these keyframes, you can see the line because the easing is staggered. So it animates on and off all at once. So let's play this back and see what it looks like. All right. One thing I'm noticing is that the animation for the outline starts over on the right, while the rest of the animation starts on the left. So I want to move this animation on the outline over to start on the left as well. What I can do is change this offset value and just drag it over to bow there. Let's see what that looks like. Nice. I also want to just point out that you can change the direction that the path animates with these buttons right here. I'm going to keep mine as is. I'm going to adjust my keyframes on the outline so that the animation takes a little bit longer. Let's bring the last two keyframes over to about here. That way, I'll have the main animation go first, and then there's still a little bit of the outline still visible that animates off after the main animation is finished. I like the way that looks. All right. We're ready to move on to the next step.
8. Animate inner outline: The next thing that I'm going to animate is the inner outline and I can actually just copy and paste the trim paths from the outer outline onto the inner outline. First I'll go into the outer outline, select the trim path, hit Command C to copy, close that up, go into the inner outline and make sure that my play head is at zero frames and hit Command V to paste. Now I can toggle down to see those trimmed paths and by default they've been pasted into group 2 and I'm just going to move them up into group 1 under path 2 and I can just delete group 2 actually. This is going to be the same exact animation as the outer outline, so I want to change it up. The first thing I'm going to do is just switch the path direction and I'm going to show the outer outline just so I know what I'm working with and let's adjust the offset a little bit, so on the inner outline, I'm going to just move that over to there. I just makes them a little bit staggered and now what I'm going to do, so I'm going to hide the outer outline. I'm going to duplicate this inner outline. I'll just hit Command D to duplicate and then this duplicated version, I'm going to make a different color. If you don't have the motion plugin you can just change the color here and I'm going to make the stroke a little bit thicker on this, like reddish color one. I'll just bring that up to maybe like four and you can see if you look closely that I have this inner outline 2 on top of the red one and so what I'm going to do here is just go into the trim paths and switch the direction of the path, so it's going the opposite direction and I'll just adjust this offset value. They start like right next to each other but then you'll see when they animate on and off, they're going to be breaking apart from each other. The outline 2, the whitish colored one is on top of the red one and I don't want to be able to see it right there overlapping so I'm just going to move it below. One thing I just noticed is that the ends of these lines have a flat cap and I want them to be rounded, even though it's really small and it's a very minor detail I'm just go in and under stroke, I'll change it from butt cap to round cap and I'll go in and do that on the other layers as well and I'll also need to change this on my outer outlines. We're good to go there. I'm just going to close up those layers and I'm going to adjust my work area, zoom out and let's play that back. Just as is, this is a cool effect because you have animation going in both directions. You can read the A for a second and then it animates out. Let's see what everything looks like altogether. This is what we have so far.
9. Animate accent lines: The next thing I want to animate are these accent lines that run through the middle of the letters. I'm going to go in and make my first accent line visible, toggle down, and add trim paths. Then I'm going to toggle down and set a keyframe for the end value to be at zero percent, at zero frames. Then I'm going to go forward in time about 20 frames and then bring this N value to 100 percent. Now I also want this line to animate off, so I'm going to set a keyframe for a zero percent at the start value, go forward in time, and set a keyframe for 100 percent, and that animates the line off. But I don't want my animation to go all the way on and then all the way off because that's not very interesting. I'm going to take these keyframes on the start value and drag them to overlap a little bit with my end keyframes. Let's overlap them about five frames. Let's see what that looks like. Not bad, but we need to ease these keyframes. But first I just want to note that I've animated this before, so I know what's going to look good. If you are doing this for the first time, and when I did this for the first time, I had to tinker with the keyframes in the overlapping and the easing. So don't feel bad if you're spending a lot of time figuring out what looks good, that's totally normal. I've just figured this out already, so you don't have to watch me go through that. I'm going to go in and add easing to my keyframes by just selecting them, right-clicking, and going to easy ease. Then I'm going to hop into the graph editor, and I'm going to make my start keyframe go slow and then fast, and my end keyframe to go fast and then slow. It looks like the star is going to be the orange one. So let's select this keyframe, drag that over, let's drag this over, maybe something like that. Now I'm going to try to make the same arc on the end keyframes, but just mirror imaged. Something like that. Now let's play that back and see how it looks. Yeah, much more interesting than what we had in linear keyframes. All the time that you take to spend adjusting your graph editor is really going to push your animation to the next level. The nice thing about it is that a lot of times you can copy and paste your keyframes, and even the easing on your keyframes so that you don't have to sit there and pull the graph editor for every single keyframe you set. For instance, if I wanted to copy these keyframes onto the second accent, so I don't have to reanimate that because I liked the way that it turned out, I can just go in and copy the trim paths. Make sure you have your play head at zero frames, that's where you want to paste them. I'm going to make these visible and hit ''Command+V'' to paste. You can see the keyframes there, and same thing for that one. I could have done that at the same time. Now what I'm going to do is offset my keyframes so that I have one coming in, and then the next coming in, and then the next coming in, in the same order that the letter animates it in the main section of the letter. So let's drag this accent too to about, let's see, maybe like 10 frames to see if that looks right, only hide this one. Yeah, that looks about right. I want it to be before the main part of the letter comes in, or right about the same time. Maybe even like eight frames. Yeah, that looks good. Then a little bit before these ones come in, maybe that's about 20 frames for this across axons. Let's make that visible. I want to make sure that everything finishes at the same time. You can see these little tiny dots of the animation in the outline is finishing. So let's make sure that this one is finishing at the same time, or a little bit before even, through at the same time, that'll work. Let's play the whole thing back what we have so far. It looks pretty good. One other thing I want to mention is that if you have easing on your keyframes, that you want to copy onto other keyframes, but you don't want to like actually copy the same keyframe, so like if I wanted to copy the easing on these keyframes, this graph, but I don't want to copy the actual trim path keyframes going from 0-100 percent, maybe I wanted to copy them onto the position key frames or something, there's a really useful plug-in for that. It's called EaseCopy. I'm just mentioning that just because it's something that I use a lot, not affiliated with it, but I do recommend it because it makes it really easy to just copy the easing on the keyframes by hitting copy, and then pasting it on other keyframes by hitting ''Ease''. That's just something I wanted to point out because it can save you a lot of time. I wish I would've known about it earlier. Another tip for you as you start working on more complex animations is to play your animation back in slow motion so that you can see what's going on a little bit clear. I know for me this really helps when I have a lot going on. What you can do is go into the preview panel, and then my frame rate for this project is set to 30 frames. What I'm going to do is just change it to something lower. I'll just go at 15. Then when I play this back, it's going to play as if it's in slow motion. This just makes it easier for me to spot anything that's not working, or to make anything better.
10. Reverse animation: Now that we have our letter animating in its time to animate it out. There's a couple of ways you can do this. One is to go into each layer and set key frames to animate the layer off. Or you can have the whole thing aimate off in the same way that it came in. I'll show you how to really easily do that now. So I'm going to take this whole composition, which is called A, and I'm just going to duplicate it. So one way to do that is to drag it onto this little button right here and then it will make a new comp with this comp inside. So it's automatically going to call that A2 and I'm just going to call it A in and out. Then what I'm going to do inside this A in and out comp, I'm going to duplicate the A-comp that has the animation of the letter coming in. So I'll duplicate that by hitting command D. Then on this top layer I'm going to right-click, go up to time, and then time reverse layer. If I just make that layer soloed, you'll see that it's going to be animating in reverse. As you can see, my comp is really long and I don't need all this link. So I'm just going go in, double-click the comp and change the duration of the computer to however long I need. So it looks like my animation takes about one second, 15 frames. So I'm just going to trim my comp to two seconds. So since I already have my work area set for two seconds, I can just right-click on the work area and say, "Trim comp to work area." You could also go to composition settings or Command K to adjust the time right here. So now that I've adjusted the tunnel, my computer, let's go back into the A in and out computer. Now you'll see that the computer short end. So I can just start with these. So after the A comes in, it's going to animate and reverse to animate out. Then I need to un-solo this and then if I play it back, let's see how that looks. Perfect. So let me just turn my work area. Now one downside of this is that it's animating out in exactly the same way that it came in just opposite and if that's not what you want, well, you don't really have any options with this method. So the other way you can do this is to go actually into your main comp and then just adjust the key frame. So actually animated out using the individual key frames on each layer. So you can animate this out in a completely different way. Then you would animate in. You could do something pretty similar, but just maybe a different order. Like the first thing in is the last thing out or vice versa and you can start things exactly the way you want them. But if you're cool with your animation just going out in the same way that it came in, just reverse, then it's easy to duplicate the computer and reverse it. If you have an animation that you're ready to export into a video file or GIF, you can head on over to Video 19 at the end of this course to learn how to render it.
11. Copy animation onto other letters: At this point, you should have one letter animating in and out. It's okay, if it looks exactly like mine. You can even post this version to the class project. In this video, I'm going to show you how you can easily copy and paste that animation onto other letters if that's something that you want to do. The first thing I'm going to do is go over to my project panel and just take this A composition and duplicate it, by hitting command D. That's going to name it A2. But I'm going to hit Enter and rename it B, because that's another letter that I chose to make in Illustrator. Then I'm going to open that up and it didn't just magically change into the letter B because I renamed it. If only that worked. What I'm going to do is go into my ABC comp, that's the one where I made all of the letters in Illustrator. I'm going to copy all of those B layers. But I need to copy the shape layers that I've made. Then I'll hit Command C to copy. Go over to this comp that I've called B, but doesn't actually have any layers that RB in here. I'll hit Command V to paste them. Now I'm just going to close up all my layers. Then let's hide all of the A layers, like that. When I copy and paste these layers, they came in, in the reverse order, as how I have them in my A with the accents on top. Really quickly I'm just going to reorder these. There we go. Then let's hide everything, that's not the first thing that I want to animate it. These are similar to what's in this A main comp. What I'm going to do is actually just go into my A main comp and copy and paste term paths, just these key frames, so the term path. Then go back into the B comp. Make sure that my play head is at zero frames, and then just paste that into the B. I'll just do that for all three of these layers. Let's see what that's looking like. I need to stagger these layers. First, I want the left side of the B, the straight line down to come in. Then we can have the top loop of the B and then the bottom loop of the B. I want to keep the length of my animation consistent across all letters so that if I put the letters together to make a word, the animation looks cohesive. What I'm going to do is go into the A main composition and just see where this animation ends. It ends at one second. That means, that I need to make this B animation end at one second. I can just drag this back. As I play this through, I can see that the bottom loop of the B is starting a little bit too soon, because this line has [inaudible] reached that yet and I don't like how that looks. It's not necessarily wrong. It's just that I don't like the look. I'm going to bring this forward. Maybe this top loop needs to go a little faster. There's a couple of frames right here, where nothing's going on. Because you can't actually see the start of this, because it's overlapping with the top loop. What I'm going to do is just move this top loop back, just a little bit. Let's see what that looks like. I don't want to see this, bottom loop coming in before the top loop comes in. What I'm going to do is just drag this layer, so that it's not visible here. I need to bring it about there. Then you never really can tell that it's chopped, because it's hiding behind that top B. Let me play this back and see what that looks like. It's pretty quick. Maybe I'll just drag these out a little bit and might be slightly better. One thing I can do, if I don't want it to be quite a snappy, is to adjust the keyframes. Let me just go in, and maybe this one is not so harsh. I think I want to keep the last keyframe pretty harsh at the end like it goes really fast at the end. Let's see what that looks like. Oh, and maybe this one needs to be a little bit less harsh as well. Yeah, I like it's snaps at the end, but the animation is a little bit gentler on the first part, like the up and down part of the B in the top loop. Once you get that to a place where you like it, just select all three of those layers, hit Command Shift C to precompose them. Let's name this B main. There we go. Remember how I had on these A layers. I had them staggered with different colors. What I'm going to do is just go over, what the A selected? I'm going to go to my Effects controls. Always if you don't see one of these panels that I'm talking about, there are always going to be under Window. I'm just going to copy this fill. I'll just select where it says fill, hit Command C, and then paste that onto the B. Now that recolored that with the dark blue color. I'm going to duplicate this. First copy. My fill from the A. Hit Command B. Let's stagger that to the same position, as the A. Duplicate that. I'll need to stagger that on too and copy. This fell onto this layer. We can now delete these A main layers. Now we have the B coming in with all three colors staggered. The next thing I'm going to do is show my inner outline. Then I will take the inner outline, toggled down and just copy those trump paths. Make sure your play heads at zero. I'm going to go to my inner outline on the B. Hit Command B. It looks like that's pasted it in a new group. I'm going to need to drag that up above into the group 1 under all three of the paths. Similar to what I had to do in the A. Then I'm just going to delete group 2. Now, let's just saw and it's easier to see. I want to make sure that I'm going in the same direction, either clockwise or counterclockwise as I did with the A. Depending on how the B was built, it may or may not work when I just copy it over. Let's check out when I did the A inner. Let's see you what direction that was going. It was going clockwise. I also have a thicker stroke there that I must have changed it somewhere along the way. Let's just go in and change this stroke to be four and let's take a look. This B is going counterclockwise while the A is going clockwise. I need to switch these. Let me just make sure the inside of the A, I believe is going in the opposite direction. Yes. Inside of A is going counterclockwise. Let's just make sure that's consistent with the B. Looks good. Now I want to take a look at where this animation is starting. On my A, let me just show my A animation again. I started on the outlines down here in the bottom left corner. Then they went up and around. For the B, my animation of the actual letter starts at the top and with my A, I started down at the bottom. Maybe that wasn't such a good choice. Maybe I want to actually start the A at the top and then have every single letter always start at the top. Or maybe I wanted to do some letters on the bottom, some letters from the top. That's a design decision that's totally up to you. But for this, I'm just going to go with the B starting at the top. Because if you were writing B like with your handwriting, you would start at the top and with A capital letter, you'd probably start at the bottom. Maybe that's my rule. The thing about making these decisions is that you just want to be consistent across your letters. Come up with some ideas for I want all of the animation to take this song. I want them all to have these colors. Or these letters start this way, these other letters start this way. Just make up a few rules for yourself so that your letters look consistent when you animate out a whole word or the whole alphabet. But you can create your own rules. What I'm going to do for this B is just make sure that my inner outline is starting at the top near where the B starts drawing in. I just need to go in to the offset of this trim path and just make this start closer to the top. Something about there. Now remember that I duplicate in this outline and then recolored it to a whitish color. Then I made the stroke a little thinner and I reverse the direction. Now let's take a look at what that looks like. I need to make sure that the offset on this is starting from where I want it to, which is going to be right up next to that red outline. Then also I want the red outline to be on top of the white. That's looking pretty good. I didn't have to reanimate anything. It was pretty easy just to copy it over from the outline on the A. Now I can delete those inner outlines on the A. Go into my outer outline, find those trimmed paths, command C to copy. Then on the B, let me show my outer outline and then let's paste it in a new group, which for some reason I have these red outlines on this B. Its group 1, and I don't want those, those are probably left over from Illustrator and I just accidentally didn't delete them. I can just do that really quickly here. Then I'm going to drag my trim paths up under path three. Delete this group because I don't need it. Let's see what that looks like. This outer outline on the A is going clockwise and so is the B. That's looking good. I can delete this outer outline on the A. Let's make sure this is starting in the place that I want it to start. We're probably help here to just show the other outlines. Yeah, I think that looks pretty good without much adjusting. Maybe we don't even have to adjust the offset. The next thing to animate is the pink accent lines on the B. Let's just show these and copy the accent from the A. Copy those trim paths and let's just paste them on all three of these at once. Hit U to see them in. Let's take a look at what this looks like. Let me hide those outlines too, so it's not distracting. Obviously I don't want them all coming in at once because that's not consistent with the A. Let's take a look at these accents and when they finished. The accents on the A finished at one second, 15 frames, so that's my time frame for the accents in the B. The bottom loop on the B is going to be the last one to end, so let me just drag that all the way over to one second 15 frames. Then we'll put the top accents somewhere in the middle. If I play this back really slow, you can see this weird thing right here where this line starts and then it joins the other one. What I'm going to do is just drag that back. It starts like here. I think this second little piece right here, I think that's okay. Let me just show all my layers for the B again. At this point, I can delete the accents on the A. Now I just have my B layers here and I'm easily copied all my key frames from the A over to the B. I've done my best to keep it consistent. But let's see what the final look is. I think that's looking pretty good. The next step would be to put the two letters next to each other and compare them. Let's just make a new comp and call this A and B and then I'm just going to drag in my A drag in the B. Let's move B over this way, A over this way, and play that back. Then those look pretty consistent and like they belong together. That's what I was shooting for. Now, if you want to, you can continue this on more letters to make out a whole word or an entire alphabet.
12. Create your own design: Now that you've animated some letters using this method of layering multiple trim path animations. To create a more complex look, it's time to get creative and make some letters of your very own. In the next couple of videos, I'll show you some other fun and easy effects that you may want to use. You can also find tons of inspiration online, like on Pinterest. I have a whole board of animated typography inspiration. If you take a closer look at a lot of the animations that you see here, you'll notice many of them can be accomplished with trim paths, similar to what we've done in this class. If you need color inspiration, Pinterest is also a great source. There's also Adobe Color and numerous other websites and Instagram accounts. So now it's time to take what you've learned so far plus a few additional ideas in the coming videos and see what kind of typography animation you can come up with.
13. Dashed lines: The first additional effect I'll show you is how to create dashed or dotted lines, and I'm just going to go into the accent of the A. Let's do this one. Toggle down into the group and then the stroke. Under stroke you have a few different options. Obviously, you can change the color, you can even animate the color changing. You could animate the opacity. You could animate the stroke width, so maybe it starts off really wide and then you animate it narrowing or something like that. You always have the option to change the capsule of the stroke, and then down here you'll see dashes. If you have this plus button, it'll create dashes on your line. Let me just zoom in on this so you can see what I'm doing. You can see that this has created some dashes and you have control over how big the dashes are, and you could always animate this value. Maybe they start off that big and then they shrink over time into a straight line, basically, no dash, something like that. You also have the option to adjust the offset of these dashes, so if you wanted the dashes to be moving, you can animate that too. If you hit the plus button again, you can adjust the gap between the dashes. I'm just going to set my gap to be about that big and now you'll see that they end up as dots towards the end. Which is the dots are cool or maybe I just wanted to delete these key frames on the dash and then just have these big dots that animate across. It's cool effect. You have a lot of options that you can adjust with the dash. You could also do a dash around the outline instead of the accent, or maybe you do both. Just play around with this because it could be really cool to add some dashes and even animate the dashes or the gap between the dashes, or even the offset of the dashes to create some unique effects.
14. Multiple strokes: Another thing you can do is add multiple strokes to your letters. So let me show you what I mean with this A. I'm going to go into the A across, and then just go down into the group, and then I'm going to select this stroke and hit Command D to duplicate it. Then if I toggle down into this stroke, I can change the color. You can't actually see that because stroke two is on the bottom. Let me move that up. Then I'm going to make the stroke width thinner, so you can see stroke one below it. Then when I animate this, there's already key-frame set. It'll just all animate at once, and you can do this multiple times. Say I want to duplicate that again, but this time I'm going to show you a little bit different of a way to do it. I'm going to actually duplicate the whole group. Then I'm going to group two, I'll just delete stroke two, and then stroke one I'm going to re-color white. Let's make that even smaller. Now I have a white stroke, but this stroke is in its own group. So we close these up. Then if I play this back, you'll see that it just all animates at the same time. But what if I wanted the white Stroke to animate on its own? Well, one way you could do this is to change the multiple trim-shapes from simultaneously to individually. This way it's going to do the white one first because it's on top, and then the two blue ones. Now you don't get any customization on which one goes first, or if the animation is overlapping at all with this method. But if you wanted to have that control, you could just duplicate the trim paths, and then drag the trim path into the group. Now if I toggle this down, I can move this one maybe this way. You'll see that it's controlling it on its own. If you're the kind of person that doesn't like to have a lot of layers in your project. This is one way that you can condense your layers, so you just have a bunch of strokes animating on one layer.
15. Tube stroke: [Music] Another effect you could try out is what I call the tube stroke. Let me show you an example of when I use this. In this animation, I made this little tube stroke that goes around each letter and then I just duplicated it and recorded it to three different colors. Let me show you how I did that. I'm going to use this A right here, and I'm going to toggle down. Then I have this group with two paths. My Trim Path, there is Merge Paths. That is because the A has this little piece inside of it. Then I have my stroke. What I'm going to do is go up to the Add button and I'm going to add Offset Paths. What that's done is made this tube look on my stroke. The placement of the offset paths matters. Luckily, when I added this, it just put it right in the right place but if, for example, it was placed here, you won't see anything. The order of effects here really matters. You should have the paths on top or if you just have one path and then next Trim Paths. If you have Merge Paths because you have a shape like the A with two pieces and one of the pieces is like a cut off, that will be next. Then your Offset Paths, then your Stroke. You can see when this animates in, it just has this tube-like effect. You'll notice that I have pointy corners on the ends of my tube but if I go into my Offset Paths, I can change this to a Round Join, and that'll make the rounded ends of the tube. I can also adjust the width of this tube with the amount. This will be a skinny tube, fat tube. If I go really crazy, it'll start joining pieces of my letter. So let's just keep that at like ten, where it was. This on its own could be a really cool effect. You could also put a stroke inside of this tube if you wanted to. Let me just go into my A. I'm going to copy that inner paths 2, go back here, paste that and now you can see this isn't staying inside, but I can make it if I wanted to. That's kind of a cool effect too. Play around with this tube stroke effect and also look into some of these other effects in here, maybe like Wiggle paths or Zig zag.
16. Animated confetti: circle & square: Another fun thing you can add to animated topography is what I like to call confetti. First I'm going to show you how to make a little circle confetti. I'm going to go up to the shape tool and click and hold to go to the Ellipse tool. Then I'm going to hold down Shift and draw out a perfect circle. Then I'm going to toggle down this ellipse, go to the Ellipse Path, and let's just pick a nice even number. I'm going to choose 100 and I like to have my anchor point always in the center of my circle, if you have the motion script, you can just use that to center it. Otherwise, you can use the pan behind tool, which is y in the keyboard. Then just hold down Command while you're dragging that, and it'll snap it right to the center. I'm just going to zoom in on this, we can see it really clearly. You can see that I have a stroke that's white and a fill, but the eyeball is off, so it's not visible. I'm just going to turn that eyeball on and I'm actually going to turn off the eyeball on the stroke, because we probably don't need that, I could just delete it. Let me just change this fill color to something else. What I'm going to do is hit Command Shift N, to make a new mask, and in my mask, I'm going to toggle down and change the shape to an ellipse. You can see that brownish color on the mask, is making a circle around my circle. What I can do here, is just to hit Inverted, and you see that I have no more circle. If I adjust the mask expansion, you can see that it's bringing the circle in, towards the middle. This is how I can animate it to disappear like that, like a popping bubble. I want to start with the mask expansion all the way in, so I have a solid circle, and I'll just hit the stopwatch to make a key frame. Then I'm going to go ahead in time, let's say 20 frames, animate this out all the way to zero. We have our bubble popping, but we need a scale it in. I'm actually going to animate the size rather than the scale, because I'm going to duplicate this layer and use it multiple times, but I might want different sizes of confetti. Then I can just adjust the scale on those, but not mess with any key frames that I've already set. I'm going to just set a key frame for the size to be zero, at zero frames, and let's scale it up to 100 at 20 frames. If I preview this, that's not what I'm going for. What I need to do is offset these key frames. If I just drag the mask expansion key frame forward in time, you can see that I'm able to see more of that circle, and so it starts expanding from the inside later. Let's just make those key frames a little bit more interesting, by easing them. I'll just select them and hit F9 to ease them, and then let's jump into the graph editor. Let's see what happens if I adjust the size, to be bigger, faster. I'm making this increase in size faster, whereas the expansion is a little bit slower. I like how that looks, and let's bring the size back down. Bring that back to zero and also bring the mass expansion back down to 50. Again, you're not going to see as much, but let's adjust those key frames and we'll make the size one a little bit more extreme again. I'll show you both of those key frames, what those look like, and it looks like it undid some of my key frame adjustment on these size one, let me increase that, perfect, let's take a look. This is going all the way to nothing and then back, which is a little bit odd. What I want to do here, is just make the mask expansion not quite zero. Let's make it maybe that much, 10, and let's see what that looks like. If I was actually going to make this look like confetti, it would probably need to move in position. Let me just close up my key frames and go to position. Let's set a key frame so that it's right in the center, 960 by 540 will be the center, and then we'll set a key frame, and we'll just make it move out here. Right about 20 frames, it's like in its final position, I'm going to say. Just make it go right to the right and actually maybe we'll just make it drift for a little bit. Let's animate this, so that it goes fast and then slow. It's going to shoot out and then drift at the end, my graph will look like that. Let's see what that looks like. It might be a little bit fast, so let me just go back in, ease that up just a little and take a look. There's no right or wrong way to do this, it's just whatever you think looks good. That's how I would animate a circle confetti. Since I didn't animate the scale already, I can just duplicate this. First, let me name it, and then duplicate it by hitting Command D, and then I can just adjust the scale of this one. So maybe it's 50 percent, these are big confetti. Probably I want to make them this big, for a project, but then I'll move this over and they're both starting right in the middle. Do that again, move this one over here. Let's change the scale to 75, and let's take a look at those. This animation is looking a little bit fast to me. I'm just going to drag out my key frames, to make it slow down a little bit. I'll just go in and take all these key frames, let's bring them to one frame. Actually, let's take these position key frames and drag them over, so that they drift the whole time. Let's take a look at that, that looks a little bit better. We can also stagger these layers so that they don't all come in at the same time. To make a square confetti, you can do the exact same thing as the circle, but just make the shape a square. You would just come in here, draw out a square, and then get rid of the stroke, Command Shift and make a new mask, then make sure you check inverted, then you can animate the mask expansion. It's going to work the exact same way as the circle.
17. Animated confetti: triangle: Making a triangle confetti is going to be a little bit different than the circle or square. Let me show you that now. I'm going to go into my Shape tool, click and hold, and go down to the polygon tool, you can also make star confetti as well. In the polygon tool, I'm just going to click and hold to draw out a polygon. By default, this is going to be a pentagon. But if I toggle down into the poly star, I can go in and adjust the number of points. I'll just make this three and then I'm going to delete the stroke. Let's make the outer radius 100 and I'll center my anchor point. I have one triangle, now I need to make another triangle to use as the expansion because using masks won't work for triangles because there is no option to make a triangle mask. What I'm going to do is just duplicate this poly star path and now I have poly star path two. You're not going to see any difference right now, even if I change the outer radius to something smaller. But if I go and add a merge paths, then toggle down and set the mode to exclude intersections. Now you'll see that my Poly star path 2 is cutting out the center of my poly star path 1. I can just animate the outer radius on the poly star path 2, to get that same effect that the mask where giving me in the circle and the square. I'm just going to set a keyframe on the outer radius here, and also for poly star path 1, that's equivalent to animating the size on the circle or square. Then I'm just going to hit new to condense my keyframes and I'll use this circle as a guide for the way I should place my keyframes. I'll set the scale to zero at zero frames. The first outer radius is going to be for the outer triangle and the second outer radius is going to be for the inner triangle, the cut-out piece. This one is also going to be zero at zero frames then at one second, I'm going to make this 100. Then I'll make the outer radius something that looks equivalent to those other shapes that I have. Maybe like 80 no need to stagger this key frame because that's the equivalent to this expansion and I need to use these keyframes. My top outer radius is going to be something like this, and remember if you have that e's copy script, you can easily copy the easing from one of your keyframes onto these. Let's see what that looks like. Looking good. This is going to go back to zero, this will go back to zero, and I've also added some opacity on my circle just to make it animate out nice and gently, I'll just copy that and paste it here and let's animate the position. Hit p, make it in the center, set a keyframe, and then come over here and bring that out, let's go over here. This has some easing on it, so let me copy the easing from here, something like this. Let's see what that looks like. One thing I can add on shapes like the rectangle and the triangle is rotation. I'm just going to go into my rectangle and copy this rotation and paste it onto my triangle. You can see that my triangle is rotating as it comes out and it looks like I set these keyframes too soon, so let me just drag these over. Now you could go in and change the color of this triangle and adjust the scale. Let's rename it and then you can duplicate it and move it around. Let's make this one even smaller, move this one over here. Now what if I want the rotation of these to all be different, what I can do is just hit on the keyboard to run the rotation properties and then make sure your play head is over one of the keyframes but that both keyframes are selected. Then just drag this either direction and now both keyframes have been changed, but they kept the same ratio. The triangle will rotate the same amount as the other triangle. Let's just do that same thing with this one, maybe this time I'll rotate it backwards a little. Here we've used some basic shapes to make some fun confetti.
18. Animated confetti: squiggle: Another kind of confetti you can make is a zigzag line. First I'm going to go up to my pen tool, and then just click to make a point. Then I'm going to hold shift to make sure that my next point is going to be perfectly horizontal from the first point. Now, I'll just hit V to go back to my selection tool. Then I'm going to toggle down in my Shape layer, and I have this line with a fill and a stroke. I don't need the fill so I'll delete it. Then my stroke, I'm just going to make it a little thicker so it's easier to see. I'm going to change the cap to around cap. Next I'm going to go up to add and hit zigzag. Then if I toggle down the zigzag, you can see that i have a bunch of different options. I'm going to zoom in on this so we can see it. I can make the zigzag different sizes. But this size control, or I can also make it more repetitions in the line or less. I can also change it from corner to smooth. I'm going to stick with smooth and maybe make it something like that. Maybe my line's a little too long. I can just select one of the points and bring it in, maybe something like that. So now to animate this, we're going to use our good friends the trim paths. I'll just add a trim path toggled down, and let's set a keyframe for the end to be at a 100 percent, and then back at zero will make the end is zero. This is going to come out like that, and I also want the start to animate the confetti off. Let's just make a key frame for the start to be zero here, and then we'll move forward in time. See my triangles ended here. Then so I'll bring the start forward here. Now, let's stagger the start and end keyframes, something like that, and let's adjust the easing. Maybe I want my start keyframe to go slow and fast. We see more of the line this way, and then the end keyframe, maybe that's going to do the opposite, fast then slow. I think that looks pretty good. That's way it shoots out like confetti wood and then solely trails off. Now what I need to do is adjust my anchor point, so where is the anchor point? It's all the way over here. I'm just going to hit Y on the keyword, move that anchor point over here to the start of the line, and then I'm going to position this in the center of the comp, and then let's set some position keyframes. Here, see where the position is, and let's shoot it off this way and we'll ease those keyframes. That looks pretty good but, it's traveling at a downward angle, but the line a straight out horizontal. I could animate the rotation of the line, but there's an easier way. What I can do is right-click go to transform, and then down to auto orient, and then just click the circle for orient along path. That's going to just keep the line parallel to the path of motion. Let's see what that looks like. Looks pretty good. I might want to adjust the position a little bit on this. Seems to go a little bit further than my other confetti. Let's rename this. Then we can duplicate this zigzag and move the duplicate around and see how it will nicely just align with whatever my motion path is. So we've got some fun confetti going on. See how you can add this to your animated topography to make it a little bit more exciting.
19. Rendering: If you have an animation that you're ready to export into a video file or GIF, I'll show you how to do that in this video. First I'll show you how to export an MOV file, and this is going to be the highest quality of the files that I'll show you how to export. First, make sure that you've trimmed your comp or your work area to the length of the animation that you want to render out. Then go up to Composition, add to Render Queue, then it's going to bring up this panel and in the Output Module, you can change this to whatever format you like. This is where I'll choose Apple ProRes 422 to make an MOV file. If you're on a PC, this is not going to be the same. Then just hit Okay, and then under Output tool, if you click on the file name, you can navigate to where you want to save the file on your computer. I'm just going to make a new folder and call this out, because I like to have all my final renders in their own folder. Then I'll just hit Save and then hit Render. So now if I go and find that folder on my computer, I'll see my MOV file. Exporting an MP4 file is going to take one extra step because you can't actually export an MP4 from After Effects. You may want to export an MP4 if you want to post on Instagram or on some other website because MP4s are a little bit more compressed than MOV files and they're more universally accepted. So to export an MP4, you're going to go up to Composition, then Add to Adobe Media Encoder Queue, and that's going to open up Media Encoder. Make sure you have that installed, it should be part of your Creative Cloud subscription. Then once Media Encoder opens up, you should have your file that you just sent to it right here in the queue. To make sure you have the right format, click right here under Format, and then I like to choose H264, and that'll make a MP4 file and you can see that right here. If you have audio, make sure you check this button, but I don't, so uncheck it. Then, you'll probably just want to match source, that should be by default, and then just hit Okay. Then under Output File you can choose where you want to save this file and hit Save. Then to render it, just hit this green play button right here, and now you should have your MP4 file. Another way that you can use Media Encoder is to just drag in a file. So you can just drag in your MOV and then switch it over to an MP4. If you want to export a GIF, which are good for websites and they'll automatically play and loop forever then you can also do that through Media Encoder. The only way to do that through After Effects is to use a plugin called GifGun. So to export to a GIF through Media Encoder, you can either send your file from After Effects to Media Encoder like I showed you earlier, or you can drag in your file like I have done here. Then click under Format, and then you can choose under Format, Animated GIF. Then choose your output name and where you want to save it, and hit Okay, and then just hit Render. Then to preview your GIF, just drag it into a web browser.
20. Wrap Up: Thanks so much for joining me in this class. I hope you've had as much fun as I have and that you have a cool inmate topography to show for it. Don't forget to post your work to the class projects. If you want to stay up to date, with what I'm working on, check out my website explanimated.com or follow me on Instagram at explanimated. Timely if you post your animated topography there. Follow me on Skillshare to be the first to know when I have a new class for you. If you enjoyed this class, I'd really appreciate it, if you left a review. If there's anything you're waiting to learn in the future, let me know. Until next time, happy animating.
Megan Friesth, Motion Designer
