Beyond the Logo: Storytelling with an Animated Logo & Brand Video

1. Introduction: [MUSIC] When I was a kid, I remember turning everything I read into a story, whether it was an encyclopedia, or a recipe from my mom's cookbooks, or a random article from a magazine. I was always compelled by the power of storytelling and how it transforms anything and makes it sound that much more interesting. Hi, I'm Khadija, but everyone calls me Dija. I'm a top teacher here on Skillshare and a freelance graphic designer based in Cairo, Egypt. I worked at a leading branding agency for three years and I've been a full-time freelancer now for two years, specializing in branding, packaging design, and a little bit of animation. In this class, I want to go beyond the logo and focus on the storytelling aspect of a brand. To me, finishing a logo and a brand identity is only half the journey. How do you tell that story? How do you make it emotional, relevant, and believable? This is where brand videos come in. Brand videos help breathe life into your brand and build an emotional connection with your audience. In this class, I'm going to teach you how to create your very own. We'll go over why brand videos are important in the first place with some helpful examples. Then we will dive into the overview of a real-world brand I've already created for a client. I'm going to take you through a step-by-step process of how I build a story for it. Then when we have a solid story, we will start visualizing it through old-school storyboards, then digitizing those storyboards on Illustrator and learning how to layer them correctly on After Effects. We'll search some sites for music, then dive into the world of After Effects to animate the logo, the brand identity, and bring the story message together in one holistic video. The tools you will need for this class are a paper and a pencil, Adobe Illustrator, and Adobe After Effects. You will need to be pretty comfortable and proficient in Illustrator and After Effects to be able to successfully create a brand video at the end of this class. This class is perfect for two kinds of people. A, seasoned designers who have polished brand identities and are looking to bring them to life; and B, total beginners who are new to branding and are looking to widen the horizon on how brand videos are created. This class will give you a detailed overview on how the process is crafted from scratch. Then we'll also give you a real-world understanding on the matter. By the end of this class, you will be able to walk away with a skill set of being a storyteller, learning how to storyboard, or even just learning a whole lot of new tools on After Effects for your future animations. There's definitely something in this class for everyone. So let's go back to a time when we were kids and start telling stories again. I'm so glad you're here and I can't wait to get started. 2. The What & The Why: Before we dive into it, what is a brand video? A brand video is an audible, visual, and emotional story of a brand. It can have many objectives, whether that's to build awareness, to educate, to entertain, or even to inspire people towards a certain action. It can be used to introduce a completely new brand to an audience as a launch video or as a new campaign to an already existing established brand, or as an explainer video to a new product or service. Unlike traditional ads, brand videos focus less on hardcore selling, and instead, they humanize a brand through emotion-driven content and storytelling. That's all well and good. But why are they important? In today's world of branding, graphic design is quickly moving from static design to moving design. That's why you're going to likely see a lot of businesses and agencies animating their logos, animating illustrations, and so on. Even on social media, things are moving more from pictures to videos. Videos offer a more engaging experience and are bound to leave you with a lasting impression. That's why I personally believe it's not enough to just be a great graphic designer these days, but it's also important to be a great storyteller. Even if you cannot animate just yet, just having the tools to build and create a story for your brand, means that you're already halfway there. You can always collaborate with animators to fulfill your vision if you don't have the tools to do so. But creating that emotional connection and delivering it through the brand video is where you come in. Essentially, it's what branding is really all about. You can also use your brand videos to sell your concept to a client. Instead of taking them through hundreds of slides, you can actually leave them with an impressionable impact through a brand video. Likewise, clients can then use your brand video to engage with their consumers more on their platform. In this class, specifically, I'll be walking you through how to do a launch brand video, meaning this is a new brand that's about to hit the market and then it's the first time people will see it and get to know the brand's personality through. I'll be mainly using motion graphics and animation because this is what fits the brand I'm working on today the most. You're going to figure out why later in the process. In the next lesson, I'll be walking you through my personal method of how I construct brand videos, and I'll also be showing you a few examples of other brand videos to gain insights and see how these certain tips are applied. 3. The 360 Degrees Method: Typically any story has a beginning, a middle, and an end. When you're trying to think of a story for a brand video, perhaps that's not always the best route to go. Whenever I'm creating a story for a brand, I always like to use this particular method that I like to call the 360 degree method. The 360 degree method is basically starting your story with certain element, taking your viewers through a journey and then ending that story with the same element coming into a full circle. For example, if you're starting your brand video with a question, then you should also end with a rhetorical question, leaving your audience with the same entry that you started with. This of course, varies from brand to brand and it's not set in stone. For example, if you're creating a brand video for our mobile app, you can always start with a problem that the brand essentially solves. Take the audience through the user journey of how to use the app and then end the video with a solution that your app offers. This is also considered a full circle moment because then the audience can link the solution that you've left them with at the end with the problem that we started with in the beginning. The point being is a brand video's first impression is only as strong as its last. You always want to think of a way to link the beginning of your brand video with the end in a way that makes sense for your brand. Now, I want to show you [inaudible] my favorite brand videos that apply this method in different ways so you can understand what I mean and see how this tip is transferable onto many different brands. The first brand video that I want to show you is Airbnb. This is one of the first brand videos they first got out to explain the story of their symbol, their icon, and the feeling of belonging. [MUSIC] A few things that stood out to me from this brand video is that obviously, they wanted to make sure that Airbnb resonates as a safe and trustworthy company. I love how they took the human route, in this brand video to really show that and they played on one of the most innate feelings of human nature and that's the feeling of belonging, and it's even the title of the video. The 360 degree method comes into here where they're playing on the word belong and this is the introduction of the entire brand concept. This is how they constructed the icon for their brand. If we skip all the way till the end, you'll find that they also end the brand video with the same phrase. Wherever you see it, you'll know you belong, so I really like how they tied up everything together, even if you don't notice it. But now that you do and makes a huge difference to tie up everything together, and the story comes together into a full circle moment. Then they just sign off for their logo just as a trademark at the end. You'll see a lot of brands and brand videos actually do that. The next video that I want to show you is Pivot. Pivot doesn't use illustrations or photography or anything fancy. They just use good old typography and a voice-over. I just wanted to really show you a spectrum of different brand videos so you don't feel pressured that you need to do something super-advanced with illustrations or something that's super fancy. It can be as simple as this. Businesses can't escape change, but they can shape it. When your advantage is eroded, your plans hit resistance. Your launch mates in difference. You'll people are disengaged. It's a sign, something's got to change. The best place to start Pivot. We help businesses facing a turning point find the anchor point and use it to create an advantage strategically and creatively. Pivot makes it easier for you to turn and embark on a new direction while staying true to who you are. How? By understanding you and leveraging your unique story, we work with you to bring solutions to life. Helping you execute when you know what works or experiment when you don't. In this way, we get you where you need to go efficiently and with confidence. Next time you face a turning point, turn to Pivot. I absolutely love how simple but brilliant this brand video is by animating each of the words and the messages written according to what they mean. That's visually very stimulating and it's also reflective of the brand's personality. It's efficient, practical, smart, it's intelligent, it's moving fast, it knows where to go, it knows how to help you. It has the know-how. Even the choice of animation and the way they went about this is reflective of the brand it's not all random. Again, with the 360 concept, if we come to this part of the video where it says turning point, leading into the meaning of the brand Pivot. It ends with the same exact idea, turning point, and then ends with the brand name and logo. I really like that they ingrained this. You see it twice and you'll always remember this whenever you see it again. The next one is Native Brand. I also wanted to include a brand video that works just with photography and images in case your brand does not have illustrations. You do not have the means to do a voice-over, and it's just as basic as possible, but there's something really interesting here that I love about this brand video and we will tackle it later on that I wanted you to have a note of from now. [MUSIC] I don't know if you've noticed the same thing that I've noticed. But this brand took something that's super basic and simple that can be seen in any other brand. It's just average photography footage, nice small caps, but it's pretty basic. Nothing that really stands out. But what's numbering about this brand video is how they paired all the transitions and the frames exquisitely with the music. This is something I'm definitely going to be talking about later, but music is another dimension to brand videos. It's not just something visual. The audible dimension also brings a huge perception and a huge factor into the game. I love how they took something so simple, but elevated it completely by pairing it with this music. It makes it super modern and super-fast paced and very sassy and determined and very witty just by this music. You already can get a sense and feel of the brand's personality just by watching that and just by their choices here. The last brand value that I want to show you is Zippy. [MUSIC] I particularly love this brand video because I find it super simple. The use of basic shapes like squares, rectangles and circles. That's it. Basic messages and typography, basic photography. This could look like any brands you can possibly work on, but they elevated it by adding this happy everyday family feel again with the music and the very joyful, simple, inviting animation style. Just wanted to show you another idea of what that looks like. It's super simple. It doesn't have to be anything complicated, but it's all about defining your objective and the route that you want to go with this, and the tone and voice and what you're trying to look to deliver all of these answers to these questions will dictate what music you're going to be doing. If you're going to be doing an animation or photography or something with [inaudible] or something with footage. The 360 degrees comes here by also highlighting the essence of making life easier for parents and kids and making it more meaningful for families. Then ending the video by being inspired by an everyday family life and bringing everyone together, which is their slogan, we go together. They sign off with the logo at the end. Each of these brand videos use this concept in this method differently depends on your brand. I just wanted you to take a look at a wide spectrum of different examples, and I'll probably link a lot more of my favorites down in the resources so you can watch them at your own pace. I definitely recommend you do so. Because you'll just get a good understanding and look and feel by watching very different examples, and it'll help you get you excited and primed to create your own. With that being said, let's jump into the next lesson. 4. Brand Overview: [MUSIC] Now that we've covered the basic understanding and flow of brand videos, now I want to walk you through the brand that I've created for a real client and it's what I'll be making a brand video for today. I want you to meet Skip in Scoop. Much like the name suggests, Skip and Scoop is an ice cream brand but with a twist. It's more of a magical experience that taps into your nostalgic childhood. It's an indulgent experience for adults to reminisce their childhood and for kids to cater to their imagination, resulting in a magical experience that has a lasting value. I created this brand in collaboration with the boutique branding agency called Ants and Elephants, also based in Cairo. Where they handled the strategy, the client workshops and creative brief and I worked alongside them creating the visual aspect of the brand, from the logo to the illustrations of the brand identity. I want to take you through some of the creative decisions we've made when we created this brand so you have an overall understanding of it before I dive into everything else. I'm going to start with a brand story. A brand story is basically a cohesive narrative that sums up the facts and feelings that are created by your brand. Unlike selling a product or advertising it, a brand story must inspire an emotional reaction. So you'll see that it's written in a way that drives emotion and how certain keywords that are applied visually throughout the brand identity. The brand story is as follows, we believe in imagination, self-expression, and creativity. At Skip and Scoop, there are no boundaries to interactive experiences and ask you to embrace your childlike imagination as you're holding onto your flavorful treats and ice-cream. We are here to take you and your loved ones on a tasting adventure packed with unique flavors for both your eyes and your taste buds. Welcome to a destination for your mind and appetite. Then moving onto brand colors, the primary brand colors are candy cane red and dairy cream. I always like to name the brand colors that I chose because it makes it that much more unique to the brand and each name reflects a certain meaning behind the choice of color. So candy cane red is an iconic brand color that evokes light, passion and love. It's the feeling you're meant to feel when you treat yourself and eat ice cream. It's also a very stimulating color that entices appetite, excitement, and a rush of emotion, so that's the main color we wanted people to recognize the brand with. On the other hand, dairy cream is inspired by the dairy from the ice cream and it's meant to balance out the red and act as a neutral color that's relevant to the brand. Then we also have secondary colors. The secondary colors also have given names, which are sky blue, happy yellow, and bubblegum pink. These are reflective of the brand's keywords and values, and they also act as a bright pop of color with the candy cane red and dairy cream. Now the secondary colors also have another dimension to them, which are these monochromatic shades to each color if we need things to be slightly more realistic or 3D, as opposed to flat colors like here. We just wanted to have flexibility in using the colors across the brand identity, as you'll see throughout. Then we dive into the logo. The logo is this bespoke word mark that's meant to reflect a time back when we were kids young and carefree. What would always get us excited and light up our eyes? Well, ice cream, of course. The word mark was crafted in a way to resemble the feeling of skipping and evoke that childlike and excited feeling we had when we were about to eat ice cream by having the letters individually tilde to different directions as if they were actually skipping. We also chose lowercase letters all throughout because generally, lowercase letters and word marks reflect a younger and friendlier feel. The lines that are added beneath some of the letters are also meant to evoke some kind of a movement and add to the playful aspect of the brand. Then we also created a logo sub mark where we collapse the word mark into SMS. Also a play on the illustration of the name Skip and Scoop and instead of the and, we added an ampersand, so it's visually more balanced. Then this is the word mark on the dairy cream background. Then we move on to the identity and packaging. We also gave the brand identity a name and it's reflective of the concept behind it. Because the brand name is Skip and Scoop, we wanted to think of a concept for the identity that relates to that but gives us room to run wild with it. Where would you normally go skipping? We thought, in a playground. We named it the magical playground of dreams. Now this magical playground has lots of different games and rides, but with a twist. Each ride or element in this playground is re-imagined as ice cream or a certain desert that Skip and Scoop offers. We put ourselves in the shoes of a kid and we were like, how would a kid imagine a magical playground?? We have this magical ice cream sandwich ride and then a waffle biscuit trampoline with ice cream scoops as bouncing balls and then a slide made of churros and a candy cane ladder, and then a magical slide for the milkshakes with a candy cane straw, and a flying bicycle made out of coffee bin wheels, and a magical swing made out of waffle biscuit and a candy cane structure. Also a seesaw made out of a wafer biscuit balanced by a giant ice cream scoop and two ice cream soft serves on either end. We also wanted the typography and messages in the brand to be tilted and have that same skipping effect in a way and have it interact with elements. So this is an example where we wrote take a spin in the sky and have two hula hoops spin around it. The typography choice here is bold, lovely, and childlike as well to reflect the brand's values. This is the general overview of the brand with everything combined. You can see here that the main brand colors are dominant throughout, but the secondary colors act as accentuation and really brings out everything together so well and adds a little flavor to the brand. We then wanted the brand have iconic red cones to further emphasize the brand color and have the logo engraved in them. We also thought to apply the illustrations on the packaging here on the ice cream cones. Same with ice cream cups but with a different illustration. Then the coffee bin bicycle would go on the coffee takeaway cups and the magical milkshake slide illustrations would go on the milkshake cups. For the takeaway bags, we want it to have a pun on it by writing swing by us again and include the illustration of the swing just as a playful impression to leave the customer with as they leave the store. We also made stickers, uniform, aprons and this is one of my favorite activation ideas. So because this is an imaginary playground of sweets and ice cream, our minds immediately went to Willy Wonka. We wanted to create this idea of a golden ticket whenever a new customer purchased ice cream from the store, they would receive this ticket and after 10 ice cream purchases, they would get a free one. Like what you would normally see in coffee shops but we wanted it to make it a bit more exciting and relevant with the brands so we thought this fit the brands playful, fun, and magical-like nature. Then this is a visualization of the menu board inside the store. Because the entire brand concept is built on this imaginary world, we wanted to present ideas of how we can make the story more of an experience where you can get lost in and embrace your inner child. So we wanted to include ideas of 3D installations, clouds all over the ceiling and the floor, melting ice cream bunches and ice cream cone light bulbs. That's pretty much it. This is one of my favorite brands that I've ever worked on in terms of process, collaboration, and visual outcome. Now there's something that's missing and that's telling the story through the brand video. Now for this particular brand, like I said before, I feel like a purely motion graphics and animation video with animating the illustrations and writing the story on the screen, is perfect for this brand and it will be enough to deliver this magical impact that I'm trying to create. Now, if I add footage and typical ice cream shots, I feel like it takes away from the magic a little bit and brings things down to our realistic ground which I want to avoid for this initial launch video. So without further ado, let's get started into the brief. [MUSIC] 5. The Brief: [MUSIC] Like any task in branding, you always need to have a creative brief on you. A creative brief will just help put things in place and make things crystal clear for you or anyone else you're going to be working with if you're going to be sending this document to a collaborator. This is going to be a downloadable keynote template for you. If you want to use it later on for yourself, I will link it down below the resources. I've categorized brief into five sections. Objective, audience, content, brand story, and tonality. What each section has is a prompt of questions at which the answers will help you construct the brief for yourself. This is a great exercise for you to do to set yourself on track and know exactly what you'll be taking with this video. Alternatively, it's a good document to send to someone who you'll be working with potentially and needs to know certain key points. Starting with the objective, what type of brand video will this be? In my case, it's a launch video for a new brand. I'll be imagining that skipping sculpted and launched yet and I'll be making the first video that hits the market and that shapes the brand. This is an important piece of information because it will determine what type of content you'll need in the video. Next, what is the objective? The objective in my case is as simple as telling this magical story of the brand and building brand equity out of it. I want to showcase the concept behind the brand's logo and identity because it's still the first thing that people will see. I want to take them on this journey and for them to understand the story behind it before launching other campaigns for this brand. I want to showcase the backbone of the brand first, embedding the brand image for the consumer. Next is the audience. Who is the target audience of this video? I have two kinds of people I'm targeting. Teenagers, young adults, and individuals who love to indulge in ice cream and aren't afraid to embrace their imagination of inner child, but also, the parents of these kids who will watch the video and want to experience this brand with their kids and see it through their eyes. Then what perception do I want to leave consumers with this video? I want consumers to feel excited, intrigued, and curious. Meaning, I don't want to leave them with the whole picture of the brand. I want to take them through a journey just enough to leave a bit of imagination and a bit of room of wanting to know more so that they would stick around and wait to see what else the brand offers. I want to build a foundation of excitement and delight through this imaginary world I'm creating. Then comes content. What type of content will this brand video have? Because this is a launch video and I only want to introduce the story behind the brand and this magical world, I only want it to be purely emotion graphics, animated video of the logo, the messages, the illustrations, and have background music for now. I want to keep it as magical as possible without having footage of people eating ice cream or mock-ups just yet, because I feel like then it would be more realistic, and for this video specifically, I want to keep them in this imaginary realm and keep it as magical and child-like as possible. Next is the brand story. What is the story I'm ultimately delivering? Because I already had the brand story from the branding stage, so I'm keeping it as it is now and I will find the story later with specific words in the next lesson. But if you haven't written a brand story yet, I urge you to take this moment and write down a small piece of narrative that reflects the meaning behind your brand, the solution it solves if any, and the emotional impact it's meant to have on its audience. This will help you construct the story for your video. Last but not least is the tonality. What is the tone and voice behind your brand? This will dictate almost everything. The music you'll pick in the background, the pace of the video, the messages you will write, and pretty much everything. The tone and voice takes the shape of concise keywords. In my case, they're playful, imaginary, child-like, uplifting, and magical. This will help me in my music choices, the type of animation I'll choose to do, and so on and so forth. That's pretty much the end of our brief. You can use this document as a template for yourself and just write the answers that fit the brand you worked on best, and you will feel already at this stage that you have somewhat of a roadmap. In the next lesson, we'll start constructing a clear story and put it on a timeline for our brand video. 6. Structuring The Story: [MUSIC]. In this lesson, we're going to be learning how to develop an animation idea for our logo, but also link it with a bigger picture of the story. Essentially, we're not just creating a logo animation, we're creating a brand video. So we need to create everything with a 360 outlook on it. I'll be taking you through the structure template that I've prepared and it just helps me put everything took place and link all the elements together, logo with a bigger story. I'll be sharing that template with you and the resources should you need it, you're free to use it. The story structure template is divided into two parts, logo animation and the story. We're going to then link the two of those together and put it on a tentative timeline so that all make sense when they come together, and this will make things easier for you later on to storyboard. First things first, I want you to compile an overview of your brand like I've done here. In order to construct a story for the video, you need to know what you're going to be working with. Now I want you to look at your brand as separate elements. The elements I've got here are the magical ice cream illustrations, the skipping concepts in the logo, and the idea of a tasting adventure. This can differ from your brand. For example, your elements could be basic shapes, graphic lines, dynamic layout structures, photography instead of illustrations. Work with that. Dissect the elements and identify what they are. From these elements, you want to start identifying key concepts. My key concepts from what I've shown you previously in the brand overview is the magical playground of dreams, the skipping concept, and the tasting adventure. The fact that this brand offers so much more than just ice cream, I want to take the audience through a journey. These are the three main concepts I want to showcase in the video. Next, I need to identify what key messages I'm going to be writing in the video. I pulled these from the brand story and somehow I wrote along the way to make it fit and represent the story I'm trying to deliver. The key messages are imagine a world without boundaries and destination for your mind and appetite. A tasting adventure for your eyes and taste buds, and our kitchen is in the clouds. You can always add more or remove key messages along the way, but this is an important step to identify the stage, so it can help you form a basic sequence for the video. The more messengers you have, the more frames you will need to think of, and the less, then the less you'll have to cut. From this point I can move on to my logo animation. Now I know for sure that I want the animation to reflect the concept behind the logo. Because my logo is crafted to evoke the skipping concept and the feeling of happiness you get when you eat ice cream. I'm thinking I can have the letters fall from the top of the screen, scattered, and uneven and they would bounce and skip back into place. Logo is simple, so I want the animation for it to be just as simple and reflect that. But then how do I link it with the magical playground of dreams and smoothly transition everything with the illustrations? We go back to the key concepts and see if there's anything that can help us. From the key concepts I can highlight the word magical playground and tasting adventure. Now, if you go back to the logo, I can work with the dot of the i. The dot of the i is the only basic shape in the entire word mark and it's the only dark on any of the letters. It stands out from the rest. This dot could represent a ball in a playground actually. It could scale up and start bouncing on the ground and then glide and bounce throughout the whole video, interacting with illustrations, and gliding around the messages and then going down the slides and around the swings until it reaches the very end, reunites with the logo and then bounces back in its place as a dot. Now, I got out a couple of references for this concept here. I just went on Pinterest and typed in bouncing animation, pulled out a couple of references that will reflect the idea I'm trying to animate. The reference on the left is how I'm imagining that I want the ball to bounce. You see its shape morphs as it hits the trampoline and as it goes back up again. This will be interesting as the dot also morphs into a ball and then bounces up again into a dot. Then the reference on the right is how I want the ball to travel across the video and bounce and glide in-between the illustrations just to keep things playful and dynamic as possible. Now, you can use the same exact method for the logo that you're working on. You just need to identify the concept behind your logo and then think of an automated way that would showcase that concept, and then look at your brand identity and find a mutual element between both that you can link together. I looked at my references with certain keywords like bounce and skip, and it definitely helped me visualize how I can see this animation going through. You can do the same thing in your case by identifying certain keywords based on your concept. Now that we've established animation idea for the logo and how will link with the brand identity, it's time to have an overview of the whole story. Remember when I talked about the 360 degrees method, this is where it comes in. Now, remember it doesn't have to be a perfect circle. This is not a geometry class. You can definitely be lenient with this. I just want you to understand the power of linking the beginning with the end, and you don't have to do this if you don't want to or if it doesn't fit your brand, this is just extra tip or something that could help you form a structure for yourself. My 360 degrees looks like this. I'm imagining the story. We'll start out by a captivating opening line, something from the key messages like imagine a world without boundaries. Then it can be followed by an animated illustration, preferably something that reflects that line just to make it more relevant, and then I'll introduce the logo with the animation idea. Then I'll entice the audience by taking them on a tasting adventure. This tasting adventure will then go through all the different animated illustrations, and then I'll end the brand video with a closing line that relates to what I started with. When I began with imagine a world without boundaries, I want to end my story with welcome to a destination. After introducing the video with imagine this world, I'm now welcoming you to it. It's almost as if you have arrived. Technically speaking, I'm not ending with exactly what I started with. That's why it's not a perfectly closed circle, but I'm ending it with the same sequence in the end that ties everything together. I always think that ending your video with the logo is the strongest outro, so people can always remember the brand name, and it's almost as a sign off, basically a trademark, a signature. Always keep that in mind. You don't always need to start with the logo right away, but I recommend you end with it. Don't forget that the bouncing ball also comes into a full circle at the end where it bounces off the logo in the beginning, and then it ends its journey at the very end. Now that we have a logo animation and a story to tell, we can now put everything on a visual timeline, so we know exactly which goes where. I've saved you a bit of time already by placing my elements here on the timeline just to move things along a bit. This doesn't have to be set in stone. I can always go back, edit, reorder, rearrange anything at this point. They're just key points along the timeline for now, just so I can know a rough sequence for the video. Each black dot here is meant to be a frame. I'll be beginning with an opening message like you saw earlier, and then switching with an animated illustration between every message, just to keep things visually interesting. I want the audience to be reading, than watching something being animated and vice versa all throughout. At this point you can really play around with this, add as many more frames as you want according to your story and how many elements you have. Or you can shorten them, and have as fewer frames as you'd like. From this point, it's super easy to start story boarding. I can pretty much visualize what it is that I want to go in each frame. I'll start sketching the storyboard in the next lesson and see how we can develop it further and get it ready for animation. 7. Storyboard: In this lesson we're going to start sketching our storyboard. Storyboards are super important because they act as your roadmap for the entire video. You get to see the entire video as a process in front of you. They also help you identify the concept of your video is working or not, and how the flow of your video is going to be. If you need to make any adjustments or fix anything, we order, we edit anything. This is a perfect time to do so. You typically need a paper and a pencil for this but if you have an iPad and you prefer to use it, then by all means you can do so. I just personally like to use a good old paper and pencil. The process is super simple and easy. We're just going to be drawing tiny thumbnails of each frame as our storyboard and draw what will be in each frame. Now you can use your ruler if you want to but I also like to draw freehand as well, so there's no pressure whatsoever what you want to do. But for the sake of this video, I think I'm going to ditch the ruler for now and just draw freehand because it is super simple and easy and you don't want to waste too much time making sure each frame is perfect square or rectangle; that is not important right now. We can begin by, I like to use an HB pencil just to start with light and easy and we need to have any commitment to any lines right now. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to draw my first frame here. I'm going to name this on the top one, just sign on this is Frame 1. Then I'm going to look back at my timeline that I had in the previous lesson and check what is going to be in the first frame. In the first frame, I'm going to have something like a line that goes along with imagine a world without boundaries. I'm also thinking to have clouds in the sky, rounded. Cool. That's what's going to be in my first frame. Now moving on to the second one, I'm going to have a ladder and I think I can link the clouds that we see here and transition it into this one just so it makes sense. Drawing storyboards you can actually write annotations for yourself just so you can remember. I'm just going to write here link clouds, just so I understand how I'm going to transition from here to here. Then the third frame, we're going to have another line. The next frame is the illustration of the way biscuit and the ice cream scoop falling on top of it. I actually want to illustrate how this animation is going to come about. For the first frame, I want the ice cream scoop to come falling down from the screen. I'm just going to draw that for myself and right here, falling from the top. I'm going to go down here and draw my fifth string. The ice cream scoop already fell from the top of the screen and now the wafer biscuit is going to fall on top of it and balance right there. This is all really rough drawing. You don't need to be an artist to do this. This is just for yourself to use later on. Only you should be able to understand what you're drawing. On this frame, I'm going to be drawing the ice cream scoops fall on top of the seesaw. Typically these three frames are going to be one Illustrator file, and we'll get to that later but I'm just drawing them in three separate frames just so I know how the transition is going to happen with each elements. The first element is going to be the ice cream scoop falling from the top, then the wafer biscuit, then the ice cream scoops. If I were to draw this all in one frame, it wouldn't be very clear that's why I had to separate it into three different frames. Then moving on to the seventh frame, I'm going to write here a magical playground of dreams. I'm thinking that in all of these frames, the background is going to be consistent, so maybe the cream background, but then switching to here, I want it to be switched to the red background. I'm just going to draw the same exact frame and just annotate for myself that I'm switching the background color here because when we go to the logo next, I want the logo first to appear on the red background, so I need this transition to happen right there. Now for the logo animation, we're going to have each individual letter fall from the top of the screen scattered. Then I just wanted to lock into the original logo. I'm just writing here and lock into place. Then moving on to the next frame. Remember when we said we're going to use the dot of the I as a bouncing ball? So I'm thinking when it's locked into place, then all of the letters will just drop. Then what's left is the dot of the I that then transforms into this bouncing ball. As the letters drop, it would also bounce on the ground like the reference that we got out earlier. Please, I just wrote it for myself, all letters drop and dot becomes a ball just right now. Then, the dot transitions into the ball and I'm just drawing this for myself to tell myself that this is going to continue all throughout the other frames. The ball is just going to follow me around. I have 12 frames over here, I'm just going to put it aside and continue on a separate paper. I have frame 13 next. Then after, let me take you on a tasting adventure, I have the swing illustration, so I'm just going to draw that. I have two elements here, so the ball coming in and interacting with the swing, and then I have the animation of the swing itself here. Then moving on. Next, I have the trampoline of ice cream, which already has these bouncing scoops, so this would be really cool for the ball to come and bounce on top of the trampoline and then bounce off. We have the line for your eyes and taste buds. Then next up we have the slide. This is also really great because then the ball could slide down literally and then slide off here. Then we have the line or a kitchen is in the court. Then we also have some clouds here. Maybe a hula hoop of some sort so I'm just going to write clouds hula hoop, just so I know if I want to put any more interesting elements here. This is going to be the coffee bean bicycle. I'm just here annotating for myself that I want the bicycle wheels to be animated along with the ball passing through, and then we have the brand slogan, the scoop of dreams served with imagination, and then we have another slide, the churro slide. This is an important part where I'm going to decide what the outro is going to be. My last slide is going to be welcomed to a destination for your mind and appetite. I want the ball to come here on an empty background and bounds for the very last time and then either the logo would be here, ready without the dots. Then it come and literally just hop back into its place here and then this would be my final frame in the end, or I could actually end it the same way I introduced the logo so I would still have to skip and scoop letters fall from the screen along with the ball so the ball would hop back at the top of the screen and the letters would fall in here and then it would all just lock back into place after skipping and the ball bouncing. I'm just going to hop onto its place here instead of having the logo already static here. But, I'm just going to leave this option open for myself because I want to try this on after effects first and see which will have the better result in the end, so that's just something to have for myself to see later. I'm just going to annotate this bit for myself here so I can remember. That's pretty much it so this is what a storyboard looks like. It's pretty rough and simple and easy to do. It should not take time, it's just for you to imagine what the sequence of the entire story is going to be. Remember this is going to make your process so much easier later on when you take these onto Illustrator and even to have as a guide when you're animating, you can always just look at it and look at your annotations. Just look at what you drew and you can always go back re-edit, reorder, anything you want, super easy and simple, shouldn't take you a lot of time, do not spend too much time on this. It should be a quick and easy process, and it should make things easier for you later on. Once you're happy with the flow of things and you feel like you're ready to move on, the next step would be actually digitizing each frame so taking whatever it is that you've created for your brand and start putting it on Illustrator in each frame here and we're going to learn in the next lesson how to layer these elements on your Illustrator files to get it ready for animation. 8. Layering on Illustrator: When you're preparing a file on Illustrator to animate, essentially you want each layer in your file to be on a separate layer because this will make things easier for you to animate later on. That's what we're going to be doing this lesson, and just looking at our storyboard in digital form. What I like to do personally is have each frame as a separate Illustrator file, like you see here. Then I'll import them individually in After Effects, where it can then group them and compile compositions. We'll get to that later. But this is personally what I like to do. If you have another method you're comfortable with, by all means, go ahead. What I have in front of me here is a 1,920 by 1,080 pixels artboard. This is going to be my main artboard size all throughout. This is generally the standard HD entertainment dimensions, especially for laptop screens. I use this in presentations and videos and almost anything as a landscape orientation. I've named this file Frame 1, and this isn't going to be the first frame according to my storyboard. Then I'm just going to go chronologically like this. This is Frame 2 and this is Frame 3, this is Frame 4. But for example, in the storyboard, I've topped up this part into three different frames just for me to know what the animation is going to be, but I don't need to do that here. I can have this all on one artboard because I'm going to separate all of these elements on different layers. I don't need to have a single frame for each animation when the ice cream scoop is falling from the screen. I don't need to have that as a separate screen. I can just have it all here and I'll be able to animate it. In some frames, I would basically have grouped them into one artboard and other frames, they're going to be in separate like here. I have a total of 18 frames as opposed to the storyboard on paper, which is fine. This is just something that we do on the go, and if I need to add anything later in After Effects, I could do that. Back to Frame 1. Anything that has texts here, this is just going to be a placeholder. I'm going to rewrite this text in After Effects. Because if I import this onto After Effects, After Effects is going to read the texts as a shape layer, which we will not be able to animate the text for. I'm going to have to rewrite this with this one on After Effects, but I like to just put it here for now just so I know the size, how it looks like with everything else, what it looks like in general. I like to have as a placeholder and then I'll delete this once we import it on After Effects. What we're going to do right now in this lesson is that we need to layer everything onto its own separate layer. If you see here on your layers panel, you can go to Window and click "Layers" if you don't already have it. On my Layers panel here, everything is in one layer. Now, this is a no-go in After Effects, it will not recognize each individual element and you need to separate them. This is also really good if you're working with an animator and you're an Illustrator and you want to send them the files, they will thank you for sending the files named and layered correctly. This will make their jobs much, much easier. If in my case you're the one animating, you want to make your life easier, trust me. The first thing that I'm going to do it's super easy and it hardly takes any time. What you want to do is you want to start cutting each and every element from your artboard and paste it onto a new layer. I'm just going to do Command X and cut the background out. Then I'm going to go down here and click "Create New Layer". I'm going to have Layer 2 over here. Then I'm going to do Shift Command V. That's just going to basically paste in place, and I've added it to a new layer. I could just drag that down here so the background is my first layer and it's behind everything. I'm just going to rename this BG. I always like to name my layers, even if it's like strand of hair, number 37. I always like to name my layers because it's just so much easier to find later on when you're animating. I don't want to go through a billion layers and try to find out where the star is or where the shoelace is. I would have it named. That's one thing. Then I'm just going to do the same for the rest. I'm just going to cut out this cloud, Command X, create new layer, Shift Command V, paste in place. I'm going to name this Cloud 1. There we go. Everything is put in a separate layer. I just want to Commend Save and save that, and then move on to my next frame. Same exact thing like I did before, I'm going to be cutting the background onto a new layer, renaming it and cutting the cloud, and be very specific. I'm going to call this the center cloud, at least so I know which cloud that is. I'm just going to keep repeating all of these steps all throughout. I'm just going to be very thorough about what I'm going to be layering. Instead of cutting up this entire ladder, I'm going to literally cut up each step should I choose to animate each step going up on its own. I'm just going to repeat that for most of the frames, and I'll pause in between a few things just to show you a few tips and tricks. But this is basically just what we're doing. We want to put our illustrations or our frames into separate Illustrator files like I've done here, and you're going to layer each element inside these files on its own layer. That's pretty much it. I just wanted to show you an example of a file that has a lot of layers like this one. You can see here on the right, all these like sprinkle layers from Sprinkle 1 to Sprinkle 27 are these little sprinkles here on the ice cream. Each one is in a separate layer. Of course, you don't have to do this, but I'm just showing you an idea if you want to animate it. If I want this ice cream scoop to fall from the top of the screen and then all of these sprinkles would come sprinkling down, I would need them to be on separate layers so I can be able to drop them individually, if you will, as if you're actually dropping individual sprinkles. It's a little bit tedious, but it doesn't take a lot of time to cut and paste into place. But it is something for you to know if you want to animate each and every one. This is what your layers panel will typically look like. Then I just separated everything else, so the wafer biscuit and the ice cream scoops individually, each individual star, the spin lines, the shadow, even the ice cream topping is separate. Just because this makes it easier when you come to animate, you want everything on a separate file, you'll be able to move it that way. We're moving on. This is the frame for the logo. What I'm going to do is the logo is going to fall as individual letters from the top of the screen. I need to ungroup my logo, including the dot at the beginning. I'm just going to do the same exact steps. I've separated each one of the letters of the logo on a separate layer now, you've the dot here and P, curved lines, all of them separated. I've also added another layer here of the full logo in red, but it won't show now because we have the letters on top of them. But this is just like the full logo because after they are done skipping, I wanted to log back into place, and I'm going to use the full logo here. Then I've also added a cream background version, but also a red background version because after the local logs back into place, I want to show the version on the red background. I just have these here as layers underneath everything, and after I show all of that and animate all of that, I'll then switch to the red background at the end. It's just important to have these in layers, and I just put them on the very bottom for now. We are done with this part. Moving on to the next. I'm pretty much done here. I just separated each element on its own layer here for each frame, and the more layers you do, the more complicated or probably difficult or detailed your animation would be. It's really up to you for what you're imagining for the animation on how many layers do you want to separate because that will dictate what the animation will be. Some frames don't have a lot of layers. I'm just going to mix and match between having very detailed animations and rather very simple ones just because I don't want it to be too over the top and too stimulating, I find that simple animations are also just as nice. That's pretty much it for setting up your files in Illustrator. Once you have your frames and your sequence from your storyboard, it's just super simple to put them on files and just layer them as I've showed you. Now, in the next lesson, I just want to take a little breather and take you through some of my favorite sites for picking the music. 9. Picking the Music: [MUSIC] Besides being a graphic designer I also dance on the side. One of the most important things of dancing is the musicality. It's the harmony of the movement with the music. It's hitting those beats on the exact melody. I like to think of animation in the same way. I like to move and animate my elements according to the music. That's why picking the songs is so important because I'll be basing all my movements according to the song. I don't dislike using it as background music. I actually treat it as a main elements because I feel like a brand video is just as much as an audible experience as it is a visual one. Now, everything should be picked intentionally and paired for a specific reason. Though, I must warn you, this is the most time-consuming task out of the entire class. Sometimes it can take hours and sometimes it can take days. But I do urge you to sit down, grab a pair of your favorite headphones and just sit down clock in a day and listened to music. Everyone does this differently. Some people like to animate first, then find the music. I personally like to find the music first and then animate according to the music, so I don't just treat it as background music. Contender number 1 is Bensound. I really like this website because it has free music here that you can download, but you need to accredit the artist or just write bensound.com when you're using the music for any of your brand videos. But again, as copyright is to everything, if you're going to be using this for a client, then most likely you're going to have to build them this license and it would be under their name if you are going to be using it for a commercial project, which is totally normal. You can download this for free without any watermarks in the sound. But then if a client were to purchase this license and it's good to go, and it's approved, and it's going to be used commercially in a brand, then you would need to send them this license. But if you're just doing a brand video as practice for yourself or a passion project, this is technically what I like to do. They do have really nice music here. You just need to spend a bit of time finding what you like. Also what I really like is they categorize it into these keywords and these vibes and moods. This is perfect because then you can refer to the keywords that you have from the previous lesson and see which category fits best for your brand. For example, for me, for skip and scoop, I would most likely check out music and positive, inspiring, energizing and happy, and less of hip hop, or electronic, or calm, or cinematic or something like that. You just need to pick the vibe that fits your brand best. Like I said, it just takes a lot of time so be patient with this, invest in it, put on your headphones and just immerse yourself in the music. Whenever I hear a certain song, I'm trying to imagine it with my storyboard so I can see the sequence how everything will fall into place. Really the music will dictate the pace of that video and where everything will start and where everything will end. That's one thing. Then you have Purple Planet Music. It has the same concept where has all of these categories that you can choose from. It's also free to download without any watermarks. But again, you should accredit the website, but if you will need it for a client, then you would probably need to buy a license. For example, if I'm going to click on a beat here, I'm going to have a bunch of songs come up here. What I also like is it tells you the beats per minute so you know that this is a fast song or a slow song or what kind of pace that you want. You can just download it here and it will download instantly. Or if you need to purchase the license, then it will tell you what license each one is, if it's commercial use or if it's something else, like for radio or TV, it's another price and then you would add to cart and you would license it to the client you're working for. But again, if it's just for you and it's just for personal use, then you can just download it here and accredit the website if you're going to be posting it on social media or something of the like. Then you have good old SoundCloud. SoundCloud also has a section for royalty free music, and you can easily download these as well, but you should check under each artist in each song what their terms are. Usually you will have that in the caption here if I were to click on this for example. The artist himself would write this track is free to use on social media. When you give me credit, just copy paste this to the description of your content and tag my channel so they would need some recognition. Just perfect. You can absolutely do that. You can just download it here. I love SoundCloud because it has less of generic music and something that would sound a bit more tailored to your brand and something that's done by someone local and it's not something generic that you would normally see. I would also like to scroll through that and just mix-and-match, see what I find. Next up is Free Stock Music. Again, this is absolutely free to download. If there's a song that has a specific license, it will tell you this is licensed music and you would have to buy it. But again, the prices are super reasonable, if you feel like the song is absolutely the one,then you wouldn't have to pay in a leg and an arm for that. But other than that, they have pretty much free downloadable music anywhere, and again, they do have here categories so you can go through these different categories. You can search by mood, you can search by length, you can search by tempo and you can actually write your own keywords here if you can't find anything that resonates with you in the Category's section. I really like to use Free Stock Music as well. Then you have something like Envato Elements, which you would need a subscription for, for sure. But as soon as you have a subscription, you can definitely play around with all of these check out their licenses, of course first, but they're pretty much easy to download once you have a subscription. Yeah. So that's also another thing. Now Musicbed is more of a professional website for songs and music, but I just have to show it to you because they have the best music that you would normally see on films or advertisements, or something that's truly tailored for the brand. They also have all of these categories. But they're actually really, really good songs and music that's totally worth it if you should choose to subscribe. But this is something you would normally do. If this is something you do as a full-time living or full-time job then it's definitely worth the investment. But if you're just starting out and you're just starting to play around with brand videos and you're just doing them for fun, then I would stay in the free websites section. Then another one is Music Vine. Same thing. You just need to check out the licenses, but they do have a bunch of music on here, just showing you all the options, just in case you didn't find what's working for you yet. Then you have Pixabay. I love Pixabay in general for photos and videos, stock videos with music in my brand video, and I did use it before in a brand video that I did. They have tons of photos and videos that you can use for free. Super nice. They also have a Music section. With all the categories, and the movement, and the themes, you can check all of these out and they are for free. If I click on this one, for example, the artist would usually tell you to use the song for social media, and all you have to do is just give them credit and do not resell and distribute; just normal copyright rules as you would probably already know. Usually if I need anything with sound effects, I would usually also surf these websites or I would head to good old YouTube and just write free copyright sound effects and just download something off of that. I just wanted to show you a spectrum of different sites. If you choose to use the free ones and credit the artist, or if you want to invest in one of these websites where you subscribe something that's reasonable, something that you know, you'll use on a monthly basis, if this is your job or something that you want to get into, then by all means, they are incredible. I just wanted to show you some of the sites that I personally use for music. Typically, if you're still starting, you are going to head to the royalty-free music sites, just like I started. That's it. The process is just really exciting from here on then, you're just sitting down listening to music all day. A top tip to keep in mind when you're picking the songs is to have your storyboard somewhere next to you as a visual aid. When you're listening to the song, if you have your frames in front of you, it will help you link where you're imagining the transition is, how the song is going to fit the frames that you have. It can even spark some animation ideas for you. If you're listening to certain melodies, you can do the link between the melody and the animation. We'll get into that later, but this is a top tip to keep in mind. Have your storyboard in front of you. Then when something clicks, just download it and I'll see you in After Effects where we'll start animating in the next lesson. 10. Animating on AE: File Setup: [MUSIC] In this lesson, we're going to learn how to set up our file in After Effects, import our files from Illustrator, and I'll also show you how I set up my song in After Effects to be ready for animation. You want to go ahead and open After Effects, and this is what's going to come up for you. Then you want to go to New Project here highlighted in blue and click "New Project". Then you're going to have this window over here. We want to go ahead and start by clicking "New Composition", and I'm just going to name my composition brand video, and I'm going to keep the preset as it is for now, and you want to make sure that the dimensions are equivalent to your art board size. Our art board size was 1920 pixels by 1080. I'm just going to keep the frame rate as it is, 29.97, resolution full, and what I'm going to be changing is the duration. My duration here is two minutes and nine seconds. This is the duration of the song that I picked. Now of course, the brand video is not going to be that long. We're definitely going to shorten it and cut it up. But the reason I'm putting the song duration right now is because I need to listen to the song fully and start dissecting which parts are going to be for my intro, for the entire story, and which part I'm going to cut up for the outro. I want to use the ending of the song and pair it with the ending of my video, so it doesn't just end up abruptly. I want it to end like the song ends exactly so that it's nice and smooth and makes sense. We're just going to listen to the song imported, listen to it and see where we can fit all of the frames that we drew, what makes sense, and then we're going to duplicate the song, cut it up, and join it together so it's just one cohesive, shorter version of the entire song. If that makes sense, you'll see. I would just put the duration of my entire song here, and then I'm going to shorten it later before I import my Illustrator files. I'm just going to press "Okay", and you'll see here that the timeline is two minutes and nine seconds. I'm just going to save this for now, brand video, and we're going to start importing our song. A quick way to do that is just by pressing Command I, and you are going to use the song that you picked. I picked this off of Pixabay, and it's an uplifting piano mix and just when I heard it, it clicked with the brand and how I want the piece to be, starts out a bit slow for the first eight or nine seconds that speeds up, and it has this magical and childlike feel to it, so I thought it would fit the brand the best. I'm just going to click "Open", and it's going to import here onto your projects. It's going to be down here on the timeline, so the entire song is right here. We're going to have a listen to it together and I'm going to show you when I stop and when I want our frames to be, and that's just going to help me later on when I'm importing my files to know exactly how long each frame is going to take. The music dictates that. [MUSIC] This first slow part, I can totally imagine the phrases. Imagine a world without boundaries, and the latter with a cloud, and at least to embrace your inner child. This is the first three frames of where this is going to take place. This is a total of 13 seconds. I just need to make sure that my three frames fit in here. They can be equal or one can be longer than the other. But I want to make sure that my intro, the first three frames fit within this duration. Then right here, the song just picks up the pace you're going to see. [MUSIC] Right there where the song picks up the pace, this is where I want my ice cream scoop to just drop from the top of the screen because it's a quick change of pace and it's becoming exciting, toppings are falling, ice cream scoops are falling away, four biscuits are balancing on top of each other. This is the effect that I wanted to have. [MUSIC] Then moving on to a magical playground of dreams can start coming in. [MUSIC] See has a specific rhythm like [inaudible] These certain rhythms are going to help me know when to switch my frames, so by each tone that ends, a new frame is going to begin, if that makes sense. I'm not a music producer or anything, but this is just how I find it to look aesthetically pleasing and makes sense when you're moving frame, so nothing is moving haphazardly. It's moving with the rhythm of the song. [MUSIC] You see how it picks up there. I'm imagining that pickup [MUSIC] right there at the 28th second, I'm imagining this is where the ball starts bouncing off the logo and starts taking me through this testing adventure because things are just starting to get more adventurous, more dynamic, and this is where I think the ball is going to come in, so on the 28th second. [MUSIC] The song just continues on with the same exact rhythm, which is what I want, so I can be able to consistently switch between illustration and phrase, illustration and phrase, and has the same tone and rhythm and not too much is changing all around. If I just scroll right up until almost the end, like here, for example, [MUSIC] you see how it just suddenly slows down now. The slowing down part is going to be the beginning of my outro. This could be, for example, the last illustration, so this slide, for example. Then welcome to a destination for my mind and appetite. [MUSIC] Then this could be where the ball starts to bounce off the last frame, [MUSIC] and see how the song ends with shoo-sh, that last breath. This is where I want the final frame of my logo to be. This is going to be where the ball finally returns as a dot on top of the eye for skip and scoop. It's really important to imagine how you're going to end the video and what makes sense. [MUSIC] Yes, I think that's perfect. What I want to do is the middle of the song, it all has the same rhythm here [MUSIC] and it just keeps on going, keeps on going, keeps on going the same way until the very end. The metal part is all going to be my illustrations and my phrases, and it's just going to keep switching between that. But I'm not going to need to use all of the song, that would be too much. I'm just going to use maximum two or three seconds for each illustration, two or three seconds for each phrase, just so it can be comfortably read. But I don't want it to linger on for too long. Because the metal part is all pretty much the same, I can pretty much cut it at some point, like at the last rhythm, for example and then we link it with the outro. The outro also has the same rhythm and then it slows down at the end. Before it slows down, I'm going to link it with one of the middle parts so we can have a shorter version of the song without it abruptly stopping in the middle. I'm going to try to make it a seamless transition without having it sound like someone just chopped it up in the middle. I'm just going to take another, listen to the entire song again, and really stop at each second to dictate how much each frame is going to take. Then that will help me decide where I'm going to cut the song in the middle so I can start my outro. I'm just going to go ahead and do that. I had a pretty good listen to the song over and over again and I had my storyboard next to me where I started annotating where each frame is going to start, at which second, and when is it going to end. When I'm animating I know how long each frame is going to take, so I know where to place my keyframes and I'm not lost. This is all guided by the music. When I'm animating, I'm going to keep me playing the timeline over and over again just to make sure that the music starts and stops exactly where I want it to. But for my case, the song was way too long and it wouldn't be able to fit all the frames that I have. I had to cut it up and shorten it in a way that fits my storyboard. What I have here are three versions of the song, the beginning and the middle, which is the longer chunk here. The outro music where it has probably the last two illustrations. Then the final frame, which has the final logo where it comes about again and ends the song here. When I was listening, I jotted down how long each frame I want it to be according to the music. It goes all the way to the first minutes here where my last illustration is going to come about. My last illustration is around the first minute. Then the final phrase of welcome to a destination for your mind and appetite ends at minutes and four seconds right here. Then the last part is where the bulk bounces one last time and ends with the logo around a minute and nine seconds. Then rest of the seconds is just where the music completely dies down and ends and I'm going to keep the frame as it is. Yeah, I just listened to where the final rhythm is here and I tried to break it apart so that it transitions smoothly, so If we have a listen to that. [MUSIC] If you heard, I just linked the last rhythm In the first part of the song here and linked it to the last bit of the song here when it starts to end so it sounds the same. Then I did the same thing for the last part of the song here. The last [MUSIC] and I just linked it together here. There we go. Of course, I'm not a professional. I'm sure music producers out there must be crying from what I'm doing. But I'm trying to find just the easiest way that makes sense to me and blends well with my brand video. This is just what I found to be works. I pretty much do this with every run video I make. I try to cut up the song. and I fit it into the storyboard that I have. From here on out, we are ready to start importing our files. Same thing as before. We're going to just click command import. We're going to go to our animation frames here where we saved on illustrator chronologically by numbers. We're just going to select also shift, go all the way down and let them all. Then we're going to go to import as composition retain layer sizes, you want click that and click "Open". It's going to import all of your files. Then you want to go to the brand video composition down here. It already has the composition or the pre-comp music that we have. We just want to rename that as music. If you double-click that, then you'll find the music composition that I made. Think of this as a grouped folder in the main umbrella of composition. Our main composition umbrella is brand video and inside it you'll find music. If you double-click on music, you'll find the actual music files here. Then we want to do the same thing for the frames. You want to click on all the frames and then just drag them to your timeline. Then each frame is a group on its own. If you double-click on Frame-1, you're going to find all the layers that we have put on Illustrator so they're just grouped. Going through the actual animation, we're going to group them even more, so we don't have a million layers. We're going to group them by intro, by illustrations, by outro, but this is for a later stage. Then the last thing that we want to do is readjust our composition duration, so I'm going to go to composition settings. Remember it was two minutes and nine seconds where originally the song was at its fullest version. But after we cut it up, I'm just going to reduce that to one minute and 13 seconds. You can always go back and edit this duration. It's not a big deal at all, but I like to do this just so I know where exactly my timeline begins and ends. There we go. If you play the music now, [MUSIC] is going to play on top of all the frame so when you begin animating, the music will help guide you along with the annotations that I made, so you're not lost on where each frame starts and where each frame ends. I'm just going to click "Command S" and we can go ahead and start animating the intro. 11. Animating on AE: Frame 1: So in the coming few lessons we're really going to roll up our sleeves and get to work and I'm going to show you a step-by-step process of how I animate the brand video from scratch till the end. Now, I've sectioned the brand video into frames across the coming lessons. Each lesson is a bite-sized 15-20 minutes that tackles the animation of each frame. Throughout the lessons, we're going to be learning a whole skill set of After Effects tools. I find that the best way to learn these tools is to apply them directly to practice. Now, your animated brand video will be different than mine but you can use these tools to elevate your animations and spark some ideas. So without further ado, let the fun begin. So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to switch my resolution from full to half or third. Because when it's full resolution it takes much longer time to render like that green line over here, and because we have a lot of frames and a lot of illustrations and a lot of animations about to happen, I don't want After Effects to lag on me. So this just helps keep things smoother and quicker. I'm actually going to do this even a quarter just so it runs faster. Next, I want to start with Frame 1. I'm just going to double-click that. First thing, I'm noticing is that my cloud layers here are going to be cut off when I move them. I also want them to be at full opacity and then I'll lower the opacity in After Effects. So a way you can fix that is just click on the layer that needs to be fixed or whichever layer and you're going to click on Command E. That's just short for edit original and it's going to open the artboard that's on Illustrator when you do that, so you can edit anything. So I'm just going to drag these clouds inwards so they're in the artboard and not cut off, and I'm going to change their opacity to a 100. I'm just going to save that. Then if I go back to After Effects, it is done. So the clouds are full clouds now and they're perfectly full opacity like I wanted. So that's the first thing. The second thing is that remember when I said I'm putting the text as a placeholder but I will actually write the actual text in After Effects so I can be able to animate it, otherwise, right now it's just a shape layer. So I'm going to do Layer, New, Text. There you go. So it's more or less. I'm just going to align this to the center. Now you can delete the Illustrator layer of Imagine a World Without Boundaries, and you're left with this. This is important because if you collapse Imagine Boundaries here, and you'll find that it has an option to animate. So if you click that little white arrow, you're going to have tons of options here to animate it with, and this is really cool just to add some flavor to your animation as opposed to if it was just a shape layer. So our animation should end right about the fourth and half second. I'm going to revise that later with the music but I think our cutoff time is 4:23 here, but we can always revise that. So I just want to zoom in a little bit on my timeline just so this is my working space so I don't go beyond that and it's easy to work with here. So the first thing that I want to do is, I want to actually start the animation with the clouds overlaid one another here, and I actually want to scale them up a bit so the entire background is actually white and then it zooms out and the clouds part, so then you can read what's written. I'll pick a dramatic effect. So I just clicked on both of my layers and shortcut S for scale, and I'm just going to really scale them up. I'm just going to click on my keyframe, maybe here, they can scale back and shortcut P for position. Let's pin their positions here, and then when they get to there, we can move their positions back to where they were. For the text, I'm thinking I want to add a typewriter effect to it. So I'm just going to go to Effects & Presets here and I'm going to write Typewriter, and that's the effect that we want to put. So I'm just going to double-click that. That's going to add it to the text layer. Then you want to go down to Animator, Range Selector, and you're going to find the start and the end keyframes for the typewriter effect. So at second one and half starts and then keeps writing and ends until the four seconds. So you just control where you want to start and where you want it to end. So what I did just now is play around with the yellow star here. What I wanted to do is just scale up and down, up and down, and rotate a bit for the few seconds it appears in, and I wanted it to start as the word is being written, so it doesn't show at the beginning and it just starts as the word is being written. So I just went down to scale and rotation here and I'm playing around with its scale. It goes down and up, down and up, down up, and rotates a full circle every time. Just super simple. I'm just going to repeat this step for the rest of the stars as the word is being written. So that's how stars look like. Just super simple and subtle. Next I want to animate the birds over here. So I'm just going to grab them all, grab P, bring them over here. Then using the puppet tool, I'm going to click on the tool here, and it's just like a puppet master so you have to pin in where you want your puppet to move, if that makes sense. So I'm just going to pin this at the wings on either side of the wings here and add the bottom of the bird so it's pinned equally throughout. So I'm just going to place my pins here, and then I'm going to go down here to Puppet, Mesh 1, Deform, and then you have Puppet 3, Pup 2, and Puppet 1. So in Puppet 1, you're going to find that there's a keyframe already inserted there once we clicked on it. What I want to do here is I didn't want to flap the wings. So I'm just going to move the wings to the middle, and I'm going to do the same thing with Puppet 3. Then I'm going to move it back. I'm just going to copy paste the first frame and possibly bring it down a little bit. So if you play that, it looks like it's flapping its wings here. So I want to put that on loop, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to the stopwatch where my puppet pin is dropped here. I'm going to cover over it and on my keyboard I'm going to press Option and then I'm going to click. So here is where you put expressions, and we're going to get to that in a bit. But the first expression that I want to put is a super easy one and you just type in loop out. You have it already in your drop-down menu, and you click on it, and exit it. This is just going to keep the expression that you put. So whatever keyframes you have, it's going to keep it on loop so I don't have to copy paste all of the keyframes over and over again. There you go. They are all flapping about now. So I just added an Easy Ease frame here from Animation Keyframe Assistant, Easy Ease. It just makes the flapping look a bit softer and less rigid, and that's it. They're just on loop here. I actually want to group them. So how you do that is just right-click and pre-compose. I'm going to name this Birds. It's just going to group it in another layer. Now you have them pretty much isolated. So I'm just going to go back to the frame here and now you can move the birds as one grouped layer. So I think I like their position above the phrase here, and then they move ever so slightly just to the right. Because I think any long or sudden movements make the birds look a bit awkward. I want it to be very dreamy and slow to match the idea of the music. Speaking of which, now that I'm looking at it, I think the clouds are moving way too fast. So I think, I'm not going to have them move across the frame like this. It's just way too fast for clouds. No clouds move that fast almost, it's on time-lapse. So I think I'm just going to have it stop at here and have a slower movement and where the clouds zoom back out. So let me just do that and see what that looks like. I like the slow movement of the clouds here way more and I think now we need to adjust where the typewriter comes in. Now that I'm happy with the general animation, I'll always go back and refine bits and pieces, but this is just the skeleton of the animation. I like the speed, I like the little elements, how everything starts and ends. So now, right about four seconds and 20, I want to begin then transition into the next frame. So I never liked to start the next frame just cut this and move into that, it has to be seamless. If we go to the brand video here, you're going to see the next frame has the ladder with the cloud. So what I want to do is, I actually want the next frame to start really zoomed in the red. As it zooms out, you started to notice that it's a ladder. Then I can zoom back in again and climb up the ladder and into the clouds. But, that's the transition that I'm thinking of. So going back to Frame 1, what I want to do is start moving the clouds and the texts and the birds and everything down and out of the frame. So what's left is the red background. Then that will be a smooth transition with the next frame. So I like to use the raining characters out. So you just go into your effects and presets and write out. This folder is going to come out, animate out, and you're going to find raining characters out. So all of the letters are just going to rain down, because I think that's the effect throughout the entire video where letters seem to be raining down from the screen. I'm just going to go ahead and use that, double-click it. This is the effect that it's going to happen, it shuffles the letters and rains down to the bottom of the screen. However, we could play around with it a little bit. I'm just going to click Animator 2, Range Selector 1. You can see the key-frames here because it's way too slow, it's going into the third frame. I'm going to need it to stop around here maybe. If you go down even further, you're going to have effects and echo coming along with it. I want to reduce the echo because I don't want these traces of the letters to show, I just want it to be nice and clean. Command S. Let's give this a go with the music to see what everything looks like. I think this frame can actually go on till the 6th second and 22 milliseconds if you listen closely. So there is a nice little transition here before it can go to the other frame and we'll still have enough time, have about seven seconds for the two other frames to transition from there on out. So I'm just going to adjust the speed here till 6:22 and see how that affects reading the phrase. Now, let's have a look at that. That's much more comfortable to the way I feel. Then just one last thing that I want to add, and it's a camera layer, so this is just going to make everything feel really cinematic and moving in different directions. So what I want do is, I want to select all of my layers here, and I'm going to right-click and then click on 3D layer. So now, all of my layers are 3D by having this 3D box around them, and this is going to allow us to add a camera. So I'm going to go ahead here at the very top, and I'm going to add a camera layer. So I like to use a one-node camera, it is just easy for me to use. I just usually do a zoom in or zoom out or move right or left with my layers. So I don't do anything crazy, but this is just something that gives a little extra [inaudible]. So a camera layer is super easy. It also has a position, an orientation, extra rotation, y rotation, z rotation, it's super easy. You click on the keyframe so you change the values to whatever you want. You want to go to the right, you want to go to the left, you want to zoom in, and you want to zoom out, totally doable from here. I'm just going to go ahead and do them, show you what it looks like. So I pinned all of my keyframes here in the middle at all the values just so I know that this is where I want it to be at its fullest frame. I've mirrored the same idea of the clouds here just to really emphasize that effect. So at position here, I zoomed in at this value over here. So I put a keyframe here when it's super zoomed in. It just zooms out with the clouds and has that really nice panning effect, and then it stops here at full frame. Then when the letters start to fall off, I drag the whole thing down. While I'm dragging it down, I also zoomed in just a little bit to have a little bit of an effect so it's not completely static. When I'm zooming it down, this is just going to help me transition into my next frame when I'm zooming in on the red of the ladder just so it doesn't seem too static. Now let's see what that looks like in the full composition. As the frame falls out, it would actually fall out into a red background, not the queen background over here. This is just going to give us an effect that we're falling down with the screen if that makes sense. I'm pretty happy with the first frame with the pace and everything. As long as I have everything grouped here, I can just always click back into Frame 1 and change around anything if I need to. 12. Animating on AE: Frame 2-3: The first thing that i want to do Like the previous frame as well as I want to select all of these frames and make them into 3D layers. Then add a camera layer so we can start the frame when it's completely zoomed in on the red letter and then zoom back out. Using the position keyframes here, I kind of zoomed in at the red here of the ladder, zoomed all the way in and then just kept zooming out, zooming out, zooming out so I can see the ladder. Then I moved the position to go up. I follow the ladder all the way up, and I see the cloud, and then the whole background just moves down again, ready to transition into the next frame, which is also going to be on a cream background. It won't be black. That's just going be a nice smooth transition to the next frame. The only thing that I want to do now is I want to kind of shows step-by-step for the ladders, so I don't want them to all show at once. As I'm zooming out, I want the blue step to show first then the yellow then the pink then the blue and then the cloud. I'm just going to go ahead and do that using sequence layers and I'll show you how. As I zoom out, I first see the blue step, and then the yellow step comes in here. I'll just drag out the layer. You just move it around like this. You'll find two arrows here and you'll just move it around to where you want the cursor to be. I'm just going to go ahead and do that for the rest of the steps. Then as soon as the cloud appears, I just kind of wanted to hover in it's placed so I don't want it to move around frantically. I just wanted to hover the way a cloud hovers in its place. Just so it's not so static and it's not extremely dynamic as well. I just added some position keyframes here, nothing too fancy or advanced. I just wanted some subtle movement for the Cloud as I'm moving the background down below. If you just play that back. Yeah, I think that's fine. Now let's revise this with the music and when the last frame and see how both transition well together. That worked nicely. Let's have another look at it. As you can see, it kinda falls into a red background, transitioning into the next frame and then the red background zooms out from the ladder. Then I see the steps. Then I go into the Cloud and then from here, the third frame would transition into a completely cream background so we don't have that sharp cuts. And then when it completely fades away, then we can have the text show up in the middle. Let's go ahead and start on the Frame-3. I'm just going to go to my general timeline here and see exactly where the last frame starts to descend outside of the screen. I think it starts at the 9th second here and then it starts going down, down, down, down until the 10th second, and 10th millisecond. I just need this piece of information to time my transition with the next frame accordingly. I think when the cloud is on this stage, so around the ninth seconds and 22nd millisecond, I can have the clouds from the next frame start moving around it or beside it, just so the transition is seamless and things are always moving when you go from frame to frame. It's not like a static transition. I think that I'm also going to use the typewriter animation for this as well, just so it's all consistent throughout. I don't want to put in a million different animations for each text. I want them to be consistent and cohesive throughout. I think I'm just going to do that and also use the reigning characters out for animating this out, just so it's consistent with this first frame. I'm just going to start at the ninth seconds and the 15th millisecond here to start moving my right cloud here because this is when the previous frame is right at the middle here. I think it would be nice to start moving the Cloud from this point. I'm thinking I can just move it in circles and see what that looks like. If I need to change it from right to left, I might do that. I just want very subtle movement that's not too much, but still nice enough to make me feel that I'm in the sky with clouds moving. Something along these lines for both clouds. I just placed position keyframes to make them move in a semi circle movement here, but we'll see how it goes when it's tested with the music. For now I'm just going to continue on with the rest of my elements. I'm going to do the same thing as we did for the first frame with the stars. Scale them up and down, up and down and rotate them. Also add the typewriter animation effect to the text here. Let's just take a look at everything now. Like I said, I use the same raining animation technique like I used from the first frame, just from Effects and Presets, reading characters out and don't forget to change your text shape layer into an actual text layer in order to do so. Now, what I want to do is actually just test it with the music, see the transition with the last frame, and then check with the music where this frame ends because the next one is where the ice cream scoop is going to drop with the beat of the song. I need to make sure that that's a very sharp and smooth transition. Let's check it out. Cool. I think that worked out for the best. Now I think the only thing I can change here, because I can make the ladder from previous frame actually go descend a bit slower. Just because I feel like it's a bit too fast with the pace of the music. If it's a bit slower, the typewriter would still have enough time to show up and you wouldn't be able to read the phrase. I'm just going to go ahead and adjust that detail a little bit. I just move the keyframe a bit further apart just to make it a bit slower and let's check it out. Perfect. Then now I need to check at which second exactly does the next beat of the drop come in? Right there, do you hear it? Where the next instrument drops in this is where I want my ice cream scoop to drop. I would need to move my entire frame downwards like the rest of them before this beat drops. let's see, I think 13th second and the 27th millisecond. Let's go back to Frame-3 and as it's falling down this is when I want the entire frame to also all move down. I'm going to do the same exact thing as the other frames exactly, and I'm going to go ahead and add a camera layer. As it's actually descending down, so right about here, I'm going to cut my cream background because the next frame will also have a cream background. I'm cutting it here so that the next frame falls or transitions in smoothly without any weird cuts. let's give it a look. This would be an empty cream background and right when the first 10 hits, then this ice cream scoop is going to drop and roll a little bit around. I'm just going to press "Command Save" and we're ready to head onto the fourth frame. [MUSIC] 13. Animating on AE: Frame 4-5: Frame 4. I think I'm going to start Frame 4 at the 13th second and 23rd millisecond, right where the letters are falling down and the clouds are falling down. This is where the ice cream scoop is going to fall from the opposite direction. So I don't want it to wait until all the letters are dropped. I want to do it simultaneously just so it feels like a push and pull situation. I'm just going to double-click on that. I'm going to push away for now all the unnecessary layers that I won't be animating at the moment. My main concern right now is the ice cream scoop, and we'll get to the wafer biscuit and the soft serve scoops later. So just like to push aside all of these layers that I'm not going to use for now, and then I'll come back to them later. But this just helps me focus and not having a million layers in front of me that are just distracting me. So first things first, this is my ice cream scoop right here. So at the cursor exactly is when I want it to start to drop. So I'm going to have this a little bit before the 13th and 23rd second maybe right there. I'm going to drag it up outside of the screen. Then P for position, I'm going to put that there. Then I'm going to have a drop for a second maybe, all the way down here. Cool. Then shortcut R for rotation, I also wanted to have a certain rotation. So I'm just going to go here and click on my stopwatch and have the rotation at zero here. Then as it lands, I wanted to have a full circle. So I'm just going to go where it says zero here, zero times and I'm going to say one time. So that means it's going to spin for an entire circle, and just see what that looks like. So I just place my keyframes here of where I want the ice cream scoops just to start. So this is where the letters are going to be halfway through here falling down, and this is where the ice cream scoop is going to come in and land here. I added a rotation keyframe from where it begins and then where it lands on the ground. I think this might be a little too slow. So I might speed it up a bit. So Instead of having 1x, one time spin, I'm going to write two, which means it's going to spend twice in a full circle. I think four times is fun. I think maybe it's falling down a little too slow for me as well, I would like it to be more of a faster drop. So maybe I could push these two together a little bit. Something like that. Then maybe we can add a bounce to it so it's not so flat and static. So I like to add usually a bounce as an expression. I found this online, I'm going to link it here for you to see. You can find a lot of expressions for after effects use online. So I just grab this one and it's worked for me and it has this bounce effect. So you can use that if you'd like. So I just basically copy paste that and clicking on Option. Then on my stopwatch, I copy paste the expression, and then you can play around with the expression if you want. So you can play around with the decay and the frequency of how much it bounces. You'll see as you play around with it, how it affects the animation. So let's see what that looks like. You see here in the bounce, it bounces a little bit too much than I would like it to. I just want it to be a little bit subtle because right now it looks like a trampoline almost. I just wanted to have a little bit of a thud almost as if it hits the ground. So I'm just going to play around with that, play around with the values here in the expression until something clicks. So I'm okay with this for now. Just played around a little bit with the values here and just wanted it to have just a very subtle bounce so it's not completely static. But I can go back and refine it later. I just want to have the backbone of this frame done. So the next thing that I want to add is the shadow. I just pushed it away here on the side just so I can work on the scoop for now. I want the shadow to also come into play, but not having just static here. I want it to also move, so I'm thinking when the ball drops, it could be a certain size. It gets wider or it gets smaller as the ball approaches the ground. So I'm just going to play around with that and see what that looks like. So I just played with the scale values here of the shadow. I made it wide as the ice cream scoop starts to fall and then it gets narrower and narrower until it becomes the width of the scoop. So now, the next thing I want to do is actually roll the ice cream scoop a little bit. So as it lands on the ground, I just want it to have a little bit of a roll, that balancing roll. Nothing too extravagant, just a tiny little bits so it can feel more natural and realistic. So just using rotation keyframes and position keyframes, I made the ice cream scoop roll a little bit to the right, then roll a little to the left, and then go back to the middle as if it's trying to balance itself. I want this to keep on going until the frame ends then the wafer biscuit comes down. Because normally, it's a seesaw, so it always need to balance out either end and I wouldn't stay in its place. So that's where I'm playing out with it. Now as it rolls, I want the ice cream topping to start rolling down here, melting downwards. So this would happen as soon as it starts rolling to the side, as soon as it's landed. So let me see. Right there. So I'm going to go to ice cream topping and right-click create, create shapes from Vector Layer. This is just going to create a shape out of my layer so I can manipulate it however I like. It will have certain tangent points here that I can pull around and you'll see what I going to do with it. So first things first, I just want to mirror the position and rotation keyframes as the ice cream scoop so it rolls with it. Then I'll show you how I melt this ice cream down from scratch. So I just place the position and rotation keyframes and matched it to where the ice cream scoop so it rolls around with it from side to side. Now what's left is that we need to mask the path here so it starts melting slowly but surely throughout the roll here. So I'm going to go to contents here in group one, and then path. I'm just going to stand on the keyframe here, and I'm going to say that I want the ice cream to complete the melting process right about here. So I'm just going to stopwatch this part. Then go to the beginning and start playing around with path. So by clicking this selection tool, you're going to find that it has paths here with tangent tools as if you were in Illustrator. So I'm just going to move these up a bit and play around with them. It's going to record this phase at the beginning and then it will smooth out on its own to where the original melt looks like at the end. Now if we give it a go just to show you, this is what it would look like. Pretty cool, right? So it just records the path that you created at beginning and records the path that you created at the end, and it will make the work for you to animate it. So maybe when it comes out, it's very last stop here. I can mess around with the path one last time, just so it looks a bit more natural when it's moving. So that's it. Now let's zoom out and check what it looks like from beginning. So I'm pretty happy with how this feels so far. Now, I just want to collapse these layers. So a quick shortcut to collapse your layers without individually selecting each of them is just to click out, outside of your layers completely and just shortcut on your keyboard U, and that's it. Everything is just pretty much collapsed just so I can see everything clearly. Now, remember in our Illustrator file, the file that had so many layers, this happens to be it. So if you recall, we have about 27 sprinkles here ready to fall down from the sky. This is actually a lot simpler than you think. It's just a tedious task because you have to repeat everything with each sprinkle, but the actual animation of it is super easy, nothing too hard or anything. So what I want to do is I want the actual sprinkles to fall down with the ice cream scoop from the sky, we'll have a much more dramatic effect. So first thing, let me just bring the sprinkle layers much closer to our timeline now. So I always like to start backwards and then work my way to the beginning. So working my way backwards means I want to put the keyframe on the last part where the sprinkles are going to land. So I think they're going to land about here. Right there. Then I actually want to group the sprinkles. I'm going to command and then paste. I want to group these sprinkles, so this is just like a duplicate version of them. Then I'm going to pre-compose them and write sprinkles together. Just so I know. What sprinkles together will do is after each individual sprinkle will fall from the sky, I'll then cut those layers. Using sprinkles to gather, the grouped ones, this will be much easier to roll with the ice cream scoop as it rolls from side to side because if I decide to roll each 27 sprinkles, this is going to take hours and hours on end. So this is just something easier. As soon as it lands and stays there put for a second, this layer is going to come in, the grouped one, and roll around with the ice cream scoop. But, for now, I'm just going to hide it by clicking on the eye on the left. I'm going to focus my energy now on dropping each individual sprinkled down on the ice cream scoop. So I want to do this randomly. They just need to look very random as if you would when you drop individual sprinkles. So I'm just going to go here to the top of my ice cream scoop and see where the first keyframe is. So the first keyframe is here, which means that all my sprinkles also need to start from here. Then you want to select all of your sprinkler layers and then shortcut P. So this is going to open all the position keyframes on all the sprinkles. Then with pressing Shift and the Upwards arrow on my keyboard, I'm just going to take all of these out of my screen. Then I'm going to click on any stopwatch here. It doesn't matter which one. It's going to click on all the stopwatches for you as long as you selected all of the layers. This means that I want the sprinkles to start from here. Then if I go down to my ice cream scoop, this is where it lands. So this is when I would need all my sprinkles to be right in their place there. So I'm going to leave my cursor right on this part here and then click out. Then I'm going to take each individual sprinkle, so let's say Sprinkle 1. I'm going to take Shift and this time the downwards arrow on my keyboard and start bringing it down. That's just going to make the sprinkle fall with the ice cream scoop. Then I'm going to press on my layer and shortcut R and that's going to switch to rotation. So I also want the sprinkles to rotate. I don't just want them to fall straight ahead and that's it. So I'm just going to click my stopwatch here at zero then right where it ends here, I'm going to click maybe on 3x and see what that looks like. That's exactly what I had in mind. So that's it. I'm just going to repeat the same process for each and every sprinkle. It's just super simple. We're just going to put a position, bring it from up to down, from up to down, and play around with the rotation here. That's pretty much it. The only thing I'm going to do is I'm not going to put each keyframe at the exact same time or else you're going to find 27 sprinkles fall at the exact same second and it'll just look weird. So what I'm going to do is actually just play around with my cursor a little bit. So for example, Sprinkle 2 will fall a little bit earlier than Sprinkle 1. Sprinkle 7 will fall a little bit earlier or later than the previous sprinkles so that we can have a random fall basically. So I'm just going to go ahead and do that and we'll see what it looks like together. So let's take a look at what the sprinkles look like when I've done all the position and rotation keyframes for each of them. Now, I've cut the individual frames right when they land and I'm going to take my group player now and start moving it and rolling it with the ice cream scoop, same that we did with the topping. So I just placed the position and rotation keyframes for the group sprinkles here according to the movement on the ice cream scoop here. So let's have a look at it. Brilliant. Now we can take a look at this with the music just to assess how everything is looking like so far, and see if we need to make any changes. Perfect. I like how everything flows with the music. Everything has a good pace and rhythm to it. I like how the ice cream scoop is rolling from side-to-side with the little melody as if it's rocking back-and-forth to it. So I really like that bit here. Great. So next up is the wafer biscuit that's going to come falling down as well and balance on top of the ice cream scoop. So I want the wafer biscuit to fall from top of the screen just a second or even half a second after the ice cream scoop falls down. So maybe right about here. So I'm just going to put my keyframe here and I would have it fall starting here. So I'm just going to drag this up. Yeah, perfect. Because as soon as it falls down, the ice cream scoop starts to roll, which would make sense. Then from here on out, as soon as it hits the ice cream scoop, I need it to balance to the right side. So I just tilted it to the right as the ice cream scoop rolls to the right. I'm going to do the same thing as the ice cream scoop rolls to the left again. So let's have a look at it. That is fine by me. Now the last thing is the two little soft serve ice creams that we're going to put and balance on top of the wafer biscuit and they also should fall as soon as the wafer biscuit hits the scoop. So I just added these soft serve ice cream scoops. As soon as the wafer biscuit falls, they fall right after it and balance and move with the wafer biscuit. These are all just position and rotation keyframes, as you can see here. So I just have my position rotation keyframes and I'm just rotating as the wafer biscuit goes right and left, right and left. So ideally, this frame should end at 18 seconds and 20th millisecond because then we need to transition into the next frame that says a magical playground of dreams, just enough before we go into the logo animation. So let's just have a good listen again with the music, make sure everything is all right, and we'll move on with the next frame. Perfect. Now, I think the way this should transition out to the next frame is not fall from the sky because there's a left and right movement. So I think the transition out of this should be the ice cream scoop rolling to either the left or the right and exiting the screen. So this is the last thing I'm just going to do before heading onto the next frame. So I just adjusted the out animation by rolling the ice cream scoop to the left and just adjusting everything else that goes along with it, so the wafer biscuit also rolls to the left. The topping, the sprinkles, everything rolls out and then I also exited the clouds to either side. As a last touch, I just added these stars here, just for a little extra magical field. I just copy pasted the same scaling effect from Frame 3. So I just grab these keyframes from the previous source and I just copy pasted them here so I don't have to do them again individually. Yeah, that's pretty much it. So let's just take one last look at the music and how everything comes together and then we can move on to Frame 5. I think that's good, we can start animating Frame 5. Now, we want to begin frame Number 5. So Frame Number 5 should start around here, so on the 19th second and 14th milliseconds. I'm just going to double-click that. We want to take our cursor to the 19 second. So this is also just really simple. Again, we're going to do the typewriter animation for the text and move the clouds ever so slightly and just copy paste the same keyframes for the stars. Then we're going to switch this to the red background so we can then transition into the logo. So that was pretty simple. So I just started by typing The Magical Playground of Dreams using the typewriter animation and I copy pasted the scale, keyframes, and the opacity keyframes for the stores from the previous frames. Then right about here, I just added a red background on top of it, and then just copy pasted the same text exactly, but made it in cream. That's pretty much it. Then I just exited the text transition using the reigning characters just so we are in consistency with the rest of the animations. That's pretty much it. So from this point on, from the 22nd second, this is when the logo is going to come in on the red background. As the letters are raining down, the letters of the logo are going to come raining from the top. So that's how I'm imagining the transition to happen. So yeah, let's just have a look at everything, once again, from the beginning. I always like to do this because the more you replay it and the more you see it, the more you notice a few glitches in the pace or the speed or something doesn't feel right, so you can always go back and edit before you move on to the next frame. That's it. So now, we're ready to begin our logo animation. 14. Animating on AE: Logo: [MUSIC] In the previous lessons we worked on frames 1 through 5 and now we can begin working on the logo animation. First things first, I actually want to go here to my timeline here and group the first three frames by clicking right-click and then Pre-compose and then I'll name them Intro. Now I have everything grouped here and I can just click on them and then I'll find the frames inside. This will just make things easier and much more organized. I just like to do this instead of having a million frames here. We'll do the same for the logo and then the same for the outro and just group everything so you have less frames here. I just want to give it a listen the last but again so I know exactly where my logo is going to start coming in. [MUSIC] As the letters are falling from the magical playground of dreams, as they are literally falling down, I want the letters of the logo to fall down from the opposite direction just so there is a seamless transition there. I would say this will start around the 22nd and 10th millisecond here on my timeline. I'm just going to go here to Frame-6, double-click on that and I have my logo layers here as both versions, one on the red background and one on the green background, that will then switch to transition into the next frame. I want to start with the red background because this is what links with the previous frame. We're going to start right here where my cursor is. As you've seen before, I've isolated all the letters of the word mark here so they can fall individually from the top of the screen. I've also added the full logo, so it locks back into place perfectly and is ready to switch to the next one. I'm just going to hide the full logos for now. I'm going to hide the red logo and the cream background for now and I'll put them in later. I just want everything that I'm going to be using right now in front of me. There we go. If we just switch out the eye here you'll find that all the letters are completely separated. What I want to start doing is grab all of my letters here and I'm going to press P for position. I'm just going to drag them up out of my screen and I'm going to press the stopwatch. Then I want to go at the 22nd second here. Like we did with the sprinkles of the ice cream scoop in the previous frames, we're just going to individually start dropping each letter individually and play around with their direction and the rotation so that it seems like it's skipping until all of them fall scattered on the ground and then they would bounce up back into the logo. Let me try one letter and see what that looks like and then we can continue doing the rest. [MUSIC] This is how the S looks like. I just pushed it down to the bottom of the screen and I played around with its rotation. [MUSIC] I'm just going to go ahead and do the rest of the letters for the logo but I'm not going to make them fall at the exact same seconds. The same concept as the ice cream topping I want them to have just slight differences so they don't all fall simultaneously. I want them to fall one after the other almost and look random and scattered. Let me just give it a go and see what that looks like. [MUSIC] At this point I'm happy with how the introduction of the animation feels so far. The letters just fall haphazardly from the screen like so. Just using the position and rotation keyframes and I just made them stumble on top of each other like so. I'm also pairing it with the music here so let's give it a listen. [MUSIC] That tin you here is when the logo completely falls down. I really want it to click with the music well. [MUSIC] Then the next step is that I actually want the scattered letters to fall down again from the screen and come back up but this time when they come back up they're going to fall into place. They're going to fall into the correct logo position and also with the tin sound as a guide. Let's give it a listen here. [MUSIC] That second tin here, [MUSIC] that's when it's going to fall. [MUSIC] Those last two melodies, [MUSIC] that's when we're going to lock it into place with the dot on top of the eye so then the dot can start from here and start bouncing. [MUSIC] That big entrance here. [MUSIC] That's when the dots is going to turn into a ball and start bouncing and then we can move on to the next frames. I'm just going to scroll back here again. Right around the 24th second, this is when all the letters should go back up again and start formulating into place. Let's just go ahead and do that. I just want to group here my letters so I can move them easily. I'm going to write wordmark. [MUSIC] I've just taken all of my letters here and kind of drag them around the screen and brought them all the way to the top where I want them to fall down again. This time I copy and pasted my full logo here in cream so that when I individually drag the letters down, I'm using this as a guide to know exactly where I'm going to drag it down because then when it locks into place the letters aren't scattered everywhere. This time I want all the letters to fall in their rightful place. [MUSIC] I'm pretty happy with how this turned out in the end. Let's scroll back for a second here. After I made all the letters fall down from the screen, like I said, I just group them all here and kind of drag them outside of the screen all the way to the top. When they reach the top Let's just look at the P's here. When they reach the top I just drag them one-by-one to their place here and I use the logo here, the logo full cream, as my guide, just to know exactly where they should drop and then I hit it at the end. Then after all the letters drop I had and drop at the very last second. When it drops it creates a little movement here just to keep it a little bit more dynamic. As it drops here I push the position keyframes of all the letters just outside a little bit so it moves as the and drops. Then from here on out, if you listen to the music, like we said, there's a ton. Let's just have a listen. [MUSIC] The first tin is where the curved lines come in and the TM trademark. Then the second tin is where the dot drops in from the top. Let's look at that again. [MUSIC] Do you see that? Let's do it one more time from here. [MUSIC] I really like pairing certain movements with the music and the melodies here, just makes a lot of a difference. That's pretty much it. Right here the dot of the i is going to start morphing into a ball on a playground and it's going to scale big and it's going to start bouncing on the ground. [MUSIC] Right from here, and the letters are just going to fall out again. That's it. This was a pretty easy logo animation, I would say, just using position and rotation keyframes in a creative way and just little bits and bobs here and there but nothing too crazy. It's just simple because we have a lot of animated illustrations coming up so I didn't want the logo animation to be too crazy or too overdone. If you'd like, we can start looking at the entire Brown video from the top just to recap everything and see if everything's okay. [MUSIC] That looks good to me. I think at this point we're ready to move on. [MUSIC] 15. Animating on AE: Frame 7: [MUSIC] Now in frame 7, we want to transition the logo into the dot and morphs into a ball that bounces on the ground and then goes into the next frame. Let me take you on a tasting adventure. Cool. Now, I just want to have another listen here to know exactly when I should begin to scale up the dot and morph it into a ball, and then when should the letters from here drop and know exactly which point that is? That's on the 27th, second, and 20th millisecond. Cool. This means that the letters need to drop and go outside of the screen right before this part hits. I'm just going to do that here. I'm going to open up my letters again and clicked P for position. Right here, I'm just going to click my position keyframe on all the letters and just put a position keyframe there. Then I'm going to scroll right up until the 27th and 28th second here, and begin dragging them down, one by one. Now let's see what that looks like. Yes, that's much better. Yes, as it goes down with the melody, then the ball will drop. Cool. Now we can actually start on the dot. I just took a head start on things a little bit here. I'm going to walk you through what I did exactly and continue showing you the process throughout. This is just to save a little bit of time because I needed to experiment a little with things and get things a little bit right, and then show you the best way how I did that. First things first, I didn't use the dot of the eye. After all, I think it'll be much easier to manipulate using just an irregular white circles. This is just what I did, right after the dot appears over the logo and the beats starts to drop, I just added a white circle with a cream color right on top of the dot of the eye. Then the dot skills into a ball here, just using the scaling keyframe here. I moved to its position a bit above. Then the ball just drops on the ground here. Something to note, so it looks a little bit more realistic. Right here, the ball is a perfect circle. But as it falls down, if you can see, it almost looks like an oval. I just played around here with the scale. I unlinked the proportion constraints here. I made it a little bit unproportional. It looks like an oval as it falls down on the ground and then when it reaches the ground, it actually becomes a little bit flatter here, so it's also a play on the constraints here. It just looks a bit more natural and contrast to if it were a perfect circle, then it will just look a little bit flat here. Then I made it bounce a little bit to the side according to the melody. Then once again in the middle. Then once again on the left side. I just added a shadow here that I'm still yet to move. I want the shadow to move with the ball. It just gives it a little bit of context instead of having just a white circle jump around the screen and actually look like a ball or some object that's jumping around. I just want to show you what that looks like with the music and how the flow looks like so far. That's just basically what I did here and I tried to bounce the ball according to the melody in the music if you hear closely. It bounces at each [MUSIC] I'm going to try to do that throughout the whole video, just so it stays like as sharp as possible. But I'll do my best. [MUSIC] Now I just want to move the shadow here that I did. I just drew a regular ellipse here from layer new shape layer. Then it'll get you the option of either a square or an ellipse or any of these shapes. You can fill the color that you want with it. I just want to move the shadow with the ball just so it stays consistent. Then there's one last beat, the drops. [MUSIC] This one here from the 29th second. [MUSIC] This is the beat that will transition into the next frame because the next frame starts right about there. [MUSIC] There we go. [MUSIC] I'm imagining the ball will fly across the screen into the next transition. Let's go ahead and do that. Let's see what that looks like with the shadow. [MUSIC] You see how much the shadow made a difference here, just gave it a bit of context and your eye is training to see the movement when you see both elements move together. I also like how the shadow changes sizes here, as the ball is further away from the ground and then gets a bit wider when the ball reaches the ground more. This is done in ellipse path in the shape layer, you can find it under any shape player you choose to do. It's much easier to manipulate. That's why I ditch the dot. It's just easier to manipulate when you have a shape inside after-effects. It's super easy when you just are playing around with a circle. I'm very happy with the shadow right now. What's left to do is start bouncing the ball from this second and transition it into the next frame. I just want to show you something when you're working with paths. This is not the only way you can manipulate a path. You can actually draw a path and have an object move around it. But I'll show you how to do that later in a different element. For now, I'm just using good old positions. But for example, I don't want the ball to bounce in these very sharp straight lines. What I do is I go to my pen tool here, and I'm going to click on the tangent basically or the anchor points in the middle that's joining both directions. I'm just going to click on it. [FOREIGN] you can go to your selection tool here and pull on the arrows a little bit to adjust the path that you like. If I want it to be more of an elaborate semicircle, I'll just push it up or I can just make it as simple as possible and that's it. So I just wanted to show you this little part here because it just makes life easier and this is how I made all the other little tiny jumps around the frame. [BACKGROUND] [BACKGROUND] Okay, so let's just review that for a second. [MUSIC] You see how that bounds matches the melody perfectly [MUSIC] and it also really helps when you morph the shape of the ball so it changes shapes and just makes it a lot bounce here than a perfectly static circle. I'm just adjusted the shadow to move along with it [MUSIC] and we're ready to transition it into the next frame. [MUSIC] What I'm going to do is because the next frame, the text just comes right up here, right on the other 10 here, I'm actually going to copy the ball layer here so Command C Command V, Ball 2 and I'm going to cut the layer here of the first ball so option open bracket. That will cut the right side of your layer. Likewise, I want to cut the left side of my layers so I'm just going to press "Option close bracket." There we go. I'm going to have Ball 2 start from here so as if it's coming originally from the left side and landing from the right. I'm just going to click a position keyframe for that and my scale and my rotation. Then I'm going to have it fly in one of the hula hoops here. As I'm working on it now, I'm actually thinking just timing wise and according to the music that I maybe should bring, let me take you on a tasting adventure earlier to this part. Instead of it bouncing around an empty or a solid screen, I would actually have the typewriter write out that line and then when it bounces and flies away from the screen, it would fall into the frame after that, which is the illustration. I think it makes more sense with the music so I just would like to try it if it feels weird, if it doesn't feel right we can just always go back to the original plan and this is what I love the most about animation. You just always have to try. You can make a lot of storyboards. You can have something very specific, by the end of the day just needs to do what fits the music the best, what feels right, what goes well with the flow and yeah, you just edit according to that. Let me just try this bit and we'll see what it looks like. I think I like this setup much, much better, the one where we write, let me take you on a tasting adventure while the ball keeps bouncing, and then it transitions into the swing illustration. I just put the frame of let me take you on a tasting adventure a bit earlier, while the ball is bouncing and same thing as you saw before, just like the typewriter animator effect from the effects and presets section and that's it. I just didn't do anything else. The only thing that I did was prepare the next illustration as the ball goes into the next illustration. This time, because our ball is a shape player, so I colored Ball 2 just to be red because if it's green, then obviously it wouldn't show on the background. The one thing that I want to do though, is start actually animating the hula hoops and the stars. The stars are just going to be the same technique that we did earlier. I'm just going to copy paste the scales keyframes onto the stars. However, for the hula hoops, I do want them to spin around the phrase, so let's just go ahead and do that. I'm going to double-click on the, "Let me take you" frame and let's start with hula hoop 2. I'm just going to start my position keyframe here and then just move it side to side. Then I'm also going to add a scale effect just to give it the illusion that it's going backwards and front again and not just side-to-side. I'm just going to put my scale here and as it goes right, I'm going to lower down the scale a little bit , and there we go. I'm just going to put this on loop so option click on the stopwatch, write loop out. Click on that and do the same expression for the scale. [MUSIC] Now we want to mask the hula hoop because I actually want it to move around the word and not just lay on top of it. What we're going to do is we're going to just command paste and make a duplicate out of your hula hoop, your first one, the blue one. Then you're going to drag it all the way to the bottom. Then you want to go here to parent pick whip, that swirly little icon here and you want to parent the hula hoop 3 with hula hoop 2. You just click and keep pressing on it and then just drag it until the layer that you want to pair into and just release. Parenting just means that everything that you parent to, it's going to do the same thing all the other elements that you want with the parent layer so this is the child layer basically, and this is the parent layer and it's just going to mirror everything that you want with the first one. This is really beneficial if you're animating fingers or hands or a body or eyes and you want to just parent it all using the same movement with one parent, instead of actually going back and individually creating all of these keyframes from scratch again. After we did that, we're going to go ahead and click on our hula hoop 2, and now I want to take my rectangle tool so just go ahead and click that and I'm just going to draw a rectangle, right where the phrase comes up. Then with the selection tool, you can push aside the mask here and that's pretty much it. So now the hula hoop is wrapping around one part of the phrase and then it's coming out from underneath here. So let's just have a look at how that looks. Awesome. Now I just want to do the exact same thing for the yellow hoop. I'm just going to duplicate the layer parent it to the original one, remove all the key frames, and then add a mask and adjust where you want your mask to start and end. There you go. That is how you mask an object. Super, super easy. Now, what I want to do now is figure out how I'm going to actually introduce the hula hoops into the frame because right now the message just pops up as a typewriter when the ball bounces and then the hula hoops just appear. Now I need to figure out a way how I'm going to introduce them into frame whether they drop spinning from the top or come from the side, or scale from really small to big and spin around the phrase. We'll see. It's like I thought. The best way to transition this and transition in the hula hoops and everything is to make it fall from the sky and not use the typewriter, so I just did that with my position keyframes. I just dragged the text from the top of the screen along with the hula hoops and then to exit, I just kept it the same. The texts goes to the right and the hula hoops just fall down below and then it goes into the next frame. I found that the best way to transition everything and the stars, I just used the same exact keyframes from the previous frames. I just copy pasted them from here and pasted them there and that's pretty much it. Let's see how that looks with the entire animation. I'm just going to bring it back to where the logo is and see how the flow looks overall. [MUSIC] Then the texts emphasizes the direction that the ball is going to leading you to the next frame that comes ahead here. Now the only thing I want to do is perhaps, maybe slow down the text a little bit as it falls because it just feels a bit too fast for me [MUSIC] so let's see what we can do about that. I slowed down a little bit the drop of the text here, so let's just see what that looks like. [MUSIC] That's so much better now and now it's just a seamless transition of as if someone is pulling down a curtain so the logo just falls and the ball drops and then the text follows. There's no pause there, which I like and it's less of an abrupt fall, takes it's time a little bit and still hits it with the music. [MUSIC] That's it. Now we're ready to start animating Frame 8 [MUSIC] 16. Animating on AE: Frame 8-9: For Frame 8, we actually want to start animating these swing here and also bounce the ball a little bit until the melody changes for the next frame. I'm just going to go to my swing illustration here and I already precomposed the actual swing here. If we double-click on that, you're going to find that I group the right rope, the left rope and the biscuit seat, just so we can have the entire biscuit as a group player. I already precomposed my swing here. I just grouped the right rope, the left rope and the biscuits seat, so it's one full swing that I can play around with. Now if I want to bend the swing or move it around, I have it as a separate layer altogether. What we want to do here is actually add a CC Bend It effect from Effects & Presets here. This is just going to bend the swing from right to left. We're actually going to scale it down a little bit as it goes right. It gives the illusion that it's actually going back and front. We'll do it together. Right about here, I want to just double-click my "CC Bend It" option. Then I want to take this point right here, around and up and this point here just bring it down and then I'm going to open my Swing layer and then collapse the CC Bend It layer. This is where you want to play around with things at the bend part. This is the value that you're going to be inserting. I want my swing actually to start a little bit bend to the left like so and I'm just going to keyframe that. Then I'm going to scroll through my timeline a little bit here, maybe there and then bend it to the right and then bring it back here and copy and paste that frame. Then I'm going to add a loop to it so hold option, click on the "Stopwatch" and write LoopOut and then click "Out". Then I actually want to add an Easy Ease effect to it so Animation, Keyframe Assistant, Easy Ease, just so the actual swing is smooth. Let's see what that looks like. Maybe we can speed it up just a tiny little bit. That's good. You see how smooth that is from the Easy Ease. Now I actually want to add a scale effect to it so we have that back-and-forth movement. I'm just going to click on "Transform" here and I want the scale to be maybe like that at 106 and keyframe it and then as it goes back, we bring the value down like so. Then just copy paste the first keyframe here. Then also add a stopwatch, loopOut and also add Easy Ease and then let's see what that looks like. You see how the scaling effect just gave us an illusion that it's going back and front. I'm pretty happy with that. Now the next thing that I want to do is actually mask this part of the left rope because it's coming out of the swing structure and we want it to stop there. It's the same exact technique that we did with the hula hoops and it's something you do on Photoshop all the time. I'm just going to go here to swing and grab my rectangle tool and just draw a rectangle over that part. Now you see it masked the upper part of the rope and not the actual swing part so I'm just going to go here to Masks underneath my layer and just click the box next to Inverted. That's it. Now if you can see the mask as the swing goes right, the mask goes left. It's almost as if it's pinned to place. We actually want the mask to move with us as the swing is swinging from left to right. The way we do that is we're just going to drop-down this menu and drop-down the layer of the mask and add the first keyframe. I'm just going to keyframe Mask Expansion and Mask Path. Copy those and paste them at the last keyframe because that's when everything looks okay. Then the middle keyframe here, when the swing goes right, then I'm going to play around with it so you can go to Mask Expansion here and you can reduce the value of Mask Expansion. Now it will only mask the upper part starting from here. Let's just give it a go and see what that looks like. That's it for the swing, it's as simple as that. Now we want to do the same thing for the shadow of the swing so it swings along with the swing. I'm just going to get my keyframe, got my cursor over here. Then I'm going to open my shadow here and I'm also going to CC Bend It. I just want to also complete the line here of the shadow because it gets cut off here so I'm just going to do that in Illustrator command E and it fix that line to make it go all the way till the end of the structure so we don't have any cutoffs. I'm back to my CC Bend It and I'm going to play with the values here until it matches the movement of the swing. Let's take a look at that. Perfect. Now the shadow is also swinging with the swing. Then I want to also copy paste the same scaling keyframes for the stars here so just from the previous frame as well. There we go. The stars are also scaling in and out. Now we actually want to go back to the brand video and start seeing what we're going to do about the ball and the timing of everything. Let's give that a play. It's going to end around the 34th second here. When that turn, that's going to be where the ball finally goes out of the screen and into the next frame. The wall comes here at the 30th second. We have about four seconds of the ball bouncing, or rather three seconds and the fourth one it will bounce out. The first time it bounces will be here, there at the 31st second. That means we have about three bounces before it has to bounce back out again. Let's just go ahead and do that. I just used the same exact thing as the frame before when moving the ball. I just placed position rotation keyframes here and then clicked on my pen to make the path curved and not straight lines. I just kept playing around with it a lot here just to match the music because I think it'll make it that much nicer to watch and to feel. Let's have a look at it with the music. Here that was the idea of making the ball bounce with each hit of the melody just so your eyes and your ears are having the same movement in your mind. The swing is just swinging in the background. At this point, the ball will go into the next frame and we'll make another layer for the ball for the next frame to come flying in from the left like we did last time. Every time the ball bounced on the ground, you'll notice that I made it flatter here just to emphasize the bouncing effect more. As it goes up into the air, I made it a bit narrower just to give the feeling that it's more bouncy. Now, the only thing that I want to add here is the shadow on the ground just to give it a little bit of context. Like we saw previously, it does make it look a little bit more dimensional and less flat. I'm just going to go ahead and do that and we will be ready to go into Frame 9. That's it. I just move the shadow with the same movement of the ball. I decreased its scale size just according to when the ball was higher up and when it was closer to the ground. Let's have a look at that. I think we're ready to move on to Frame 9. Now we want to start going into Frame 9, which is this one here. It's just a simple text frame, nothing to it. We're just going to have the ball come in from the left and keep bouncing on the ground, like we did in all the other frames according to the music and then exit when the melody hits for the next frame. Let's just have a listen to see exactly when we're going to enter the next frame. We're going to enter around the 34th and 10th second. The ball is going to start bouncing at the 36th second and exit to go to the next frame. I'm just going to bring my cursor up here. I'm going to name this frame of unique flavors and double-click on it. I think for this frame, I'm just going to do something super simple like the typewriter effect and then the phrase can move outside of the screen to the right along with the ball. I'm just going to make this layer into a text layer. It'll just look something like this. Now I would just want to go back to my main timeline here and write as the ball exits the frame here, I want to add a camera layer to this layer over here, the swing illustration. I'm just going to go to my 3D box here and click it. Then I'm going to add a camera layer on top of it. Then as the ball approaches the end of the screen, I want to push away the entire swing outside of the frame. Let's see what that looks like. Now they just get pushed outside together. Then right at this second, this is where I want my next ball to come in. I'm just going to copy my ball again. Something I want to do here is because the melody is still the same in every single frame, this one one, I can actually use the keyframes from the last ball path meaning I can just copy these keyframes here. I'm going to paste them in my third ball here. But I'll just play around with them so I don't have to start from scratch again. I can just use the exact same keyframes because it is the same melody, so it does have the same bouncing movement with the timing almost, but I'm just going to tweak it just a little bit so it fits this part of the song. I'm just going to paste my keyframes right here. I'm going to adjust them accordingly according to the music. That was pretty easy after I copy pasted the keyframes from the previous ball, and I adjusted them a tiny little bit just to go with this melody in the frame. It was so much easier. I didn't have to do this from scratch and that's all the same rhythm. I like that it's a little bit consistent. The bouncing is the same. Let's just give that a listen. Pretty much it. I just played around with the position of the text here just to move slightly to the left as a prep. Then it moves to the right with the ball and exits the screen for the next frame. I also copy-pasted the shadow from the last frame and adjusted accordingly just to give some dimension to the ball as well. Let's just have another look at that. Cool. At this point we're ready to head into Frame 10. 17. Animating on AE: Frame 10-11: Frame 10 here is our trampoline. It starts around the 36th and 25th second here, and it ends on the 41st second, so right at the last 10 here. What I want to do first is actually double-click on my trampoline frame here, and what we want to do now before we get into the ball again is that we want to actually make these ice cream scoops bounce on the trampoline. I already drew here a pocket in the trampoline on Illustrator that I'm going to use just as momentum to show that they're actually jumping on it. I'm going to start with this ice cream scoop here first. This is ice cream scoop right. Here we go. It also has toppings on it that I'm going to make jump with it. Let's get a start on that. It starts around here. I've just added here my position keyframes for the ice cream scoop to bounce down, then up again, and I put a loop-out expression. Let's see what that looks like. That is fine by me. Next, what we want to do is actually when it bounces down, we need to mask it so it looks as if it's actually bouncing on the inner part of the trampoline and not outside of it like that. We're just going to do the same method that we did when we masked our swinging ropes. I'm just going to click on that, my layer, but instead of using the rectangle, I'm going to actually need to draw my mask with my pen tool. Then go to "Masks" and hit "Invert". Now, it actually looks like it's bouncing inside of the trampoline. Even though my mask covers this part of the ice cream scoop the way I want it to, the problem with the mask is that it will stay in place when I'm moving it upside down and cut off the part of the scoop. What we want to do is actually play around here with mask path and mask expansion, and that's going to help me move my mask when it goes up and then bring it down to its place when it goes down. I'm just going to keyframe my mask path right here, because that's the shape I want it to stay at. Then when it goes up, you can actually manipulate the shape of the mask however way you want it to. It's just a shape layer with anchor points and you can just pull it down, manipulate its shape however you wanted to. Something like that. You see how the shape of the mask morphs into whatever way you manipulate it. Let's take a look at what that looks like. Okay, cool. Now, the next thing I want to do is actually start moving this pocket that's going to accentuate the bouncing of the ice cream scoop. I've named it here bounce-pocket. I want to create a shape layer out of it. "Create", "Create shapes from vector layer", and that's just going to help me manipulate the movement of it better. The first ice cream scoop starts bouncing here. I'm going to go to my new shape layer here. I'm actually going to bring it up just a little bit. Then as the ball bounces up again, as soon as it lifts off, I want the pocket to go back inside. That's it. That's the movement that I want basically. I'm just going to keep copy-pasting the keyframes here until I get the bouncing that I want. Let's zoom out and see what that looks like. I just want to add some easy ease keyframes just to keep things super smooth. There we go. My little bouncing ice cream scoop. Now, I just want to move these curved white lines along with the movement of the ice cream scoop, just to accentuate the movement and make it seem more elaborate. I just went ahead here and animated the ice cream scoop on the left as well, and just shifted the rotation of the trampoline a little bit, and this is what it looks like. They're both just bouncing on the trampoline now. Then as a transition, I just pulled the entire trampoline down, like that, just using position keyframes. You can see I also animated the little sprinkles on the ice cream scoops as well. Down we go. If we see it with the brand video and the music, this is what it would look like. At the last 10, this is where the trampoline is pulled down. Now, what's left is to actually animate the ball here, coming in from the left again. This time I'm going to try it to maybe bounce it on the trampoline, or if I find it too much, then I might just bounce it on the ground and copy-paste the same keyframes as the ones before. All right, so after a lot of experimentation, I found that the ball bouncing on the trampoline is the best solution for that frame, but I reduced the size of the ball so it can not overshadow the ice cream scoops and look like an actual small ball on trampoline and then it grows into its original size. Let's see what that looks like. As you can see, the ball is landing on the trampoline with the ice cream scoops and it's just bouncing a little bit on the trampoline, same technique as always, and then at the last melody, it jumps off the trampoline onto the ground and off into the next frame. I just added the red shadow here again when the ball is in the air, and again here and out, just to give it a little bit of context again. Let's just have one more look. At the end of the video, I'm just going to go back and refine all of these little itsy-bitsy movements, make sure everything is clean, nothing is jerky or weird in movement, but I think I'm happy with how this is and this looks for this frame, and we're ready to move to Frame 11. Going into Frame 11, it's the next text frame that says for your eyes and tastes buds. I just want this frame to be super simple. I'm just going to go to it here. I've already changed the shape layer from Illustrator into a text layer so that we can then add an typewriter effect to it. I'm just going to go ahead and do that first. Just something like that. Then I want to go back to my brand video and just see at what time it's supposed to leave the frame. Let's just check here. Around the 43rd second here. I'm just going to go back and I want to add a position keyframe to the text, I'm just going to make it go a prep to the left and then just swing it by the right because when we copy the ball that's bouncing, the ball is going to bounce all the way to the right again, so I want the text layer to move with the same direction of the ball. It just looks something like this and then it goes out. Let's just check that with the music again. Maybe it's just a tiny bit faster here. That's good. Now, the next thing that I want to do is just copy-paste the keyframes for the stars from the previous frame so they just keep scaling up and down and disappear at the end of the frame. I'm just going to go to any frame I have that has the stars, and I'll just copy-paste that onto my frame here. There we go. The stars are also animated and they disappear as the text moves to the right. What's left is to actually copy the ball bouncing from another frame, it's the same exact rhythm as a lot of the other frames, I'm just going to copy-paste that and have it bounce on the ground with the shadow, and just make sure the ball is red here, and that's it, we're ready to move on to the next frame. That was just super easy copy-pasting the keyframes onto this frame here, and it matches the rhythm perfectly, so let's just give that a listen. All right, cool. Now, we can move on to Frame 12. 18. Animating on AE: Frame 12-13: This is where we left off. This is our next frame to be animated, the milkshake slide. For the milkshake slide, I'm imagining a bit of a different animation than the rest of them. I want it to be relevant to each illustration and that's what it's going to make the brand video unique. For this animation, I'm thinking to include some type of milkshake liquid pouring in from the top of the screen. Then sliding down the slide here all the way to the end and then going into the cloud, and then exiting the screen by dropping everything or moving your camera down below. This time, the ball would come in and bounce. But maybe perhaps also slide down the slide along with the liquid. We'll see how that plays out. But for now, I do want to draw the liquid and see how it looks like and get it started. How I'm planning to do that is actually creating a new shape layer. Then using my pen tool and a stroke this time, I'm going to draw just a straight white line from above like so. I'm going to name it liquid pouring. Just so I know which one it is. I just want to drag it down beneath my straw here. Then, if you click down the drop-down menu and contents shape, go to stroke, you'll find an option that says wave. You want to click on that. It's going to get you different wave values here. You can change the amount, you can change the wavelength, meaning how many waves there are on the line, and the phase. This is going to be really cool to display a liquid pouring effect. I want to just take my cursor right about here, and I want to change the amount value. You see what happen now to the stroke, it just became a cool liquid wave type of situation. Then you can also play around with the wavelength here. If I just bring this one up, then the amount of waves will decrease. If I bring it down, the amount of waves will increase. I just want it to be as natural as possible, so I'm just going to make it as little waves as possible. You just want to keyframe both of these values here. Then you want to take your cursor a little bit down the timeline. Maybe I can increase the wavelength a little bit as the liquid starts pouring more. Then towards the end of the frame, maybe I can bring it down like that. Let's see what that looks like. Cool. Whenever you're happy with the wave situation here, you can move on and create trim paths for your stroke. We want our stroke to actually start from the top of the screen and watch it as the liquid pours down. You're going to go to Add here and click on the "Play" button, and then click "Trim Paths". Then open Trim Paths. At the beginning, I wanted to start at zero. I'm just going to keyframe that. Then, a little down my timeline here, I can press a 100 percent. That means it's just going to pour from top to bottom. Then, we actually want to change the cap off the stroke here because it's very sharp. I want it to look a little bit more liquidy. You can go to Stroke again, and then go to Line Cap, and click down the drop-down menu and choose Round Cap. So that it actually looks like a stroke here. If you want, there's also a taper option where you can taper the ends of the stroke here. It can be as pointy as you want it to be, or as bubbly as you want it to be. Cool. I just added another trim path's effect here as the frame ends to pull back the liquid again. The next thing that I want to do is actually I want to draw the liquid that goes down the slide here and here as well. I'm going to go here and click on Layer New, Shape Layer. I want to draw my liquid just as soon as the pouring liquid hits the slide here. This time I'm not going to use a stroke, I'm going to use a fill color in white. I'm going to take my pen tool here, and I'm going to start drawing the actual liquid with my pen tool that I want to slide onto this part of the slide. This is what it looks like. Then we're going to go to Contents here. The same thing that we did before with the ice cream topping, is that we're going to manipulate the path and After Effects is going to animate for us that manipulation. Let's say that I want the liquid to pour in from here. Which means right at the second, this is where the liquid is going to start pouring down. Then if I just scroll a little bit, I'm going to tell it that this is where I want the liquid to fill up this part of the slide. I'm just going to keyframe my path here, so I don't lose the shape. Then I want to go back right where the liquid part hits the first entrance of the slide. I'm going to start changing the shape of my liquid here and manipulate the shape all the way up here, so when it gets animated, it looks like it's actually pouring down the slide. Let's see what that looks like. This is what it looks like after I manipulated the path here. It just looks like the liquid is just sliding down. You can always go back and manipulate these shapes. They're super easy to just pull around the anchor points until it looks like something that you want. Always start by keyframing the final shape you wanted to move in so you don't lose that shape. Then start backwards, and then work your way back up again until the shape is as small as possible, so After Effects knows that you want to animate it from this to that. Cool. Now, we want to also do the same thing to this part right here. As the liquid slides down the slide, I wanted it to appear one last time here. Let's just go ahead and do that quickly. Let's just have a look at that. I just did the same exact technique as the liquid above. Just draw, shape, manipulate its path, place keyframes. Super easy. Let's just have a look at what that looks like with the music and everything. That works. The speed is fun. Now we can start animating the straw and also moving these little bits and bobs of water and milkshake splashes as well. I want the top of the straw here, this top part, to move a little bit up and down as if it's actually drinking from the magical slide of milkshakes. I'm just going to get back my cursor here a little bit until it actually pours down here. I'm going to start by perhaps shifting my top straw part a little bit. I'm going to keyframe that. I want to take the rest of the straw here and move it up a little bit and keyframe that. Then before, I'm going to set the rotation back to zero here, and also fix the position of the rest of the straw. I'm just going to add a loop to that here. Cool. That's what the straw looks like. I'm just going to add easy ease keyframes here. Give it another go. Great. Command S that. I'm just going to collapse my layers here. Now as the liquid is pouring down, I also want the straw to fall down from the screen as well. I want to just group my straw parts here. Right-click Pre-compose, call it straw. Then I want to take my position keyframe here and keyframe there. Then at the beginning of the illustration, I'm going to take it all the way to the top. Then I want to add a bounce expression to it, just the one that I showed you before. Copy paste that into my expressions here. Perhaps I'm just going to decrease the bounce a little bit to it. That is better. Let's take a look at that with the music. Now, it's time to animate these little bits and bobs and drops of water and drops of milkshake and the stars and everything else that goes along with the slide animation. This is just going to be really simple, nothing too crazy here. I want to go to my first drop over here. What I wanted it to do is soon as the liquid hits the slide, I just wanted it to jump up and bounce outside to the left here and disappear later on. This is just going to be using my position, rotation, and opacity keyframes. Nothing too crazy here. I just want to rotate it a little bit. That's how I want it to look like. It's just a splash of water out of impact here. It just disappears into a 0 percent opacity, and that's pretty much it. I'm just going to repeat this step for all the little drops here as soon as the liquid passes by them. Then I'll have them like bounce to either side just to add a little bit of bouncy comical effect to the slide. I'm also going to copy paste the same keyframes for the stars here and move the clouds around just a little bit. We'll be done with the slide animation. There are a couple of things here that I want to show you. First, I animated these water drops and the pink drops here, just bouncing outside on either end, if you take a close look. It's meant to be fast just as a splash of water is, it just adds a little bit of flavor to the movement here and accentuates it. I also animated the blue drop here to slide with the movement of the milkshake sliding down. I also exited the milkshake liquid. At first we just had them come in and stay there. But to actually look like a slide, the top part needs to slide down and out. As soon as it goes out, the bottom one appears and then slides down the cloud again. This is again using just manipulating the path on the shape layers. I think, all together this came really well. If we look at it with the music now. Now what's left is to actually bring the ball into this frame here and start bouncing it around and slide down the slide. To animate the ball coming into the next frame, I just need to have another listen to know exactly when I'm going to bounce the ball and when I'm going to make it slide down the slide. I think on the last two melody notes there, that's when the ball is going to slide down the slide here. Let's have another listen to that. Those two little melody notes, this is where it's going to slide. The first half of the frame here, I'm going to let the ball bounce a little bit actually before it comes into the slide. I'm just going to copy again my ball from the previous frame here. Same thing exactly as before, but this time I'm going to cut the path somewhere when it's bouncing to make it bounce on top of the slide. Then just roll down and exit the frame right here along with the slide coming down. I just want to show you something as I'm working. As I'm bringing the ball to the top of the slide here, now because the slide is read and the ball is red, so the ball is not going to really show when it's sliding down the slide. But I need the ball to be red in the first half of the animation because the background is cream. There is an option when you're working with vector shapes in After Effects that you can actually animate when you the color of the shape to change. Right here under fill and coloring, just color pick the color that you want. If I zoom in here on my timeline, I shifted its color right as it approaches the slide here. Then, because this slide is also quite narrow, so the ball is too big to fit inside. I also just put a scale keyframe here for it to go smaller. Then I just put in some position keyframes here and an S-shape here to make it slide down the slide. Because the slide layer is beneath the ball here on my composition window, the ball is currently just sliding on top of the slide rather than inside it. I'm just going to go to my frame pre-comp here. I already had the middle slide part here isolated. I had already made a copy of it on Illustrator. I'm just going to copy that and go back to my main composition window. On top of the ball here, I'm just going to paste that. That just solved the problem. I just pasted the middle part of the slide here. Now, the ball can actually go inside the slide and come out the other end. I just pasted this part only. Now, something else to note, if you're noticing here when the ball bounces, let me just bring this back a bit, I just copy pasted it again, the keyframes from our previous balls because that's the same melody. Everything goes smoothly with the music, however, because the context here is that we're in the sky and there are clouds, it won't make sense to put the shadow underneath the ball and treat it as a ground because there are clouds all around it. I could leave the ball like that, but I'm thinking maybe the ball could bounce on top of clouds, instead of bouncing around just an empty solid background. Just to give it a little bit of context further. What I could do is I could draw clouds right here on After Effects, just using my circle shapes here. Just make the ball bounce on top of them instead of on a cream background. Let me just try that out, and if it works, great. If it's too much and that's too much clutter, then I can just do without it. I just pulled this slide down, and I just pulled this straw as well, but made it rotate a little bit to fall down. Just using the good old keyframes here, nothing too crazy. I think for the next frame, I'm going to have the next frame come in from the top of the screen as well as the ball, as opposed to all the previous frames when it came either from right or left, because this frame is exiting from top to bottom. It would make sense for the next frame to have the same movement. Let's just have a look at that together and we can continue on to Frame 13. Great. Now we can move on to the next frame. Remember when our last frame, everything was pulled down? This was for a reason because then Frame 13, the clouds are up above. I want them to enter the frame being pulled down, so as if I'm gliding throughout the last frame and this frame by moving from top to bottom. That's the first thing that I'm going to do. I'm going to bring the text and the clouds from top to bottom just as a transition to enter the frame. I just grabbed the clouds from above and the text. I just grabbed them down and added a bounce expression to it, like the ones before. That's pretty much it. I want to keep it simple here. Now I just want to add the ball bouncing over here just to continue with the theme of the ball bouncing. But instead of actually having it come from the left, I'm going to make a come from the top. As if it slid down the slide and came falling down from above here. But I'm still going to do the same technique by copying one of the keyframes here from the previous balls that I have. I'm just going to change around the keyframe at the beginning, instead of having it come from the left, I'll change the position keyframe to make it come from the top. That was easy. I just copy pasted the exact same keyframes, but I just changed the keyframe instead of coming from the left, made it come from the top. That just makes the transition from frame to frame just more relevant in that sense. The last touch that I want to do is just add a shadow to the ground like we did before. I'm just going to also copy paste that from one of the other shadows. That was just as simple as that, copy paste the keyframes and we have a shadow. Cool. Now I just want to make an exit for this frame. Since the ball is going to the right again, I'm just going to exit the text to the right and drop the hula hoops down and the clouds can also go to either sides, so we can go into the next frame. It's as simple as that. Let's have another look at it. They move out of the screen. Now we are ready to head into Frame 14, which is the coffee bean bicycle. 19. Animating on AE: Frame 14-15: [MUSIC] This is Frame 14, and it's the coffee bean bicycle illustration and it's coming after our kitchen is in the clouds. I'm just going to double-click on that. My idea for this animation is that I want to spin the coffee bean bicycles around, as well as the pedal here, and also move the bicycle along a path, and animated along the path across the other side of the frame, but we'll get to that part later. For now, I just want to start one-by-one animating the wheels and then animating the pedal here. The way I'm going to animate the wheel actually is not by rotating the entire white wheel here. I'm just going to rotate that pink pod over here in the middle. I've named it here pink line 1 and the one on the left is pink line 2. Great. First things first you want to select that layer and grab your pen behind anchor point tool here. This just identifies for after effects where you want to center your element for rotation or anything really. If I were to put it here, for example, then the rotation would rotate around this point here and this radius in the center. You just want to drag it over here and just make sure that it's centered on the pink line. Then just go back to your selection tool. Then you want to hit "R" for rotation and just keyframe it add zero for now. Then you want to scroll through your timeline a little bit. Maybe here. I'm only going to make it rotate one time per round. I'm just going to press one here next to x. I'm going to put that on loop. Okay, great this speed is fine for me. Now, you see how the pink line, when it comes in the center here, it goes out of the circle here a little bit. How we're going to fix that is we're going to add a mask to it, but a different kind of mask not the one you saw before, and it's called a Track Matte. I'll show you how we're going to do that now. First off, I want to make a copy of the layer below it, so the white wheel. I have it named here as right wheel, I just want to drag that underneath my line. I'm just going to copy paste. I'm just going to have a copy here and I'm going to put the copy underneath. Then you want to go above the pink line and create a new layer. Layer, New, Shape Layer. This time we're actually going to draw our mask. I'm going to draw my mask at the shape of the oval here, because when it comes here, I want the mask to hide the lines coming out of here. With my pencil here, I'm just going to draw a mask around this oval here, but to make things easier when I'm drawing, I'm just going to take the opacity down to 15 just so I can see what it is I'm drawing exactly. Then you want to go back and start adjusting the mask until it just looks and feels right to you. Then what you want to do is you want to go down here to the toolbar and just click the second icon to the first one on the right. It says, expand or collapse the transfer controls pane. You just want to click that and it's going to expand your panels here with more options. Now you have the Track Matte option here on your right. You're going to go to the pink line, so what you want to actually mask underneath the shape that you drew. You want to go to Track Matte here and click Alpha Matte. It's as simple as that and just masked the pink line for me. I'm just going to do the same thing for the wheel on the left, and then we'll move on to the next piece of animation. Okay, cool. So now they're both rotating at the same exact time and they're both masked. The next thing that we're going to do is actually rotate and animate the pedal here in the middle. If I zoom in, you'll see that the pan anchor tool is already placed in the middle. That's fine. I just want to go to the right wheel here. I want to copy the rotation Keyframes that we did for the wheel. I'm just going to copy that. Go back to my frame composition and then go to the pedal here. Then I'm going to click on R and just paste that. Now if we hit the Preview, you'll find that they're both moving at the same time. That's why I wanted to copy paste the exact same keyframe so they can all move together at once. Okay, great. Now, what I want to do next is start animating the bicycle on a path. First thing that I want to do is just group all of the bicycle elements together; the used ones and the unused ones so we can have a full bicycle layer here. Just right-click pre-compose, and I'm going to call it a bike. Now, if I unhide it, I'll have the entire bike now as one layer and everything animated inside it. Now, what we want to do is we want to draw a path. I'm just going to hide the bike layer for now. I'm going to click on Layer, New Shape Layer. Then I'm going to go with my pen tool here and just take out any fills or strokes in it. Just with your pencil, you want to draw a path. This can be any path you choose. It depends on what kind of path you want your element to move in. It can be as wavy as squiggly as random as possible. I think I'm just going to do a wave here, just starting from below and going up and then dipping down again. I'm just going to draw that on my Shape Layer. Now you can always go back and adjust it and I probably will but for now, I'm just going to keep it like this. I might just bring this down a little bit. This just here. So now you have a path, I'm just going to name this here Bike path. Now you want to just drop down the menu for Bike path and go to shape and then click on Path. When you click on Path, you're going to find that all of the keyframes here are selected. What you want to do is just Command C that, copy that, and close the menu here. Then go to bike, drop down, transform, and then go to here to position and paste the path from the bike path. Just put the bike on the path that you drew. Now the next thing that we want to do is orient the bike according to the path. Right now, it's just the same kind of orientation, just looks a little bit weird here. What you want to do is right-click on "Bike" and then go to Transform, and then click on "Auto Orient." Then you'll find that it's clicked on off. You want to actually click Orient "Along Path" and it's just going to do the work for you and rotate the bicycle according to the path that you drew and click "Okay." Now, when you skim through it, you will find that the bicycle actually moves along the path that you created. Obviously, this path is a little bit too elaborate for the bicycle but I just wanted to show you the main idea here. What I'm going to do is just go back and edit the path a little bit and make it a lot more subtle because I don't want the bike to be jerking around like that. I just wanted a very soft wave almost. I'm just going to go back and edit the path a little bit and then just copy paste the keyframes again until I'm happy with how the path looks like. So I just adjusted the path the way I like it. I just want it to be as simplest possible with just a very slight wave here and copy pasted the keyframes again. I added an easy ease the beginning and end and this is what it looks like. That's it. We can see it with the music. [MUSIC] That's pretty much it. What I want to do next is actually bend the grass a little bit as if it's swaying from right-to-left or as if there's a certain breeze passing by the imaginations. Just going to add a little bit of texture to it and not have it just static there. I have my grass cut up into little sections here. Grass 1, grass 2 grass 3, grass 4, and so on. That's just the way I layered it on illustrator. What we're going to do is just we're going to take our cursor to the timeline where the animation starts. Then we're going to take grass 1, which is this one right here. In effects, we're going to write CC bender this time, not bend it, and you want to double-click on that. Then open it, and then in the amount value section here you want to play around with the amount. I'm just going to zoom in on the grass for a second so we can see clearly. I'm going to start bending the grass. You see how it bends but I don't want to bend it too much or else it's just going to look distorted like that and a little bit scary. I'm just going to do a very slight bend. Maybe at around minus 13 here and just keyframe that. Then I probably go a little bit here and just do the other way around. At around 11 maybe, and then I'm just going to copy-paste the first keyframe. Let's put that on loop. I think I'm going to have it a little bit slower. Let me just hide those here so we can see clearly. I just want to easy ease that. Then you just want to copy these keyframes here. I'm just going to select all of my other grass layers here and I'm going to just double-click on CC Bender. Now they're all going to have the effect. I'm just going to open them one by one on CC Bender and go to amount and just paste that. Then let's zoom out and see what that looks like. I'm just playing around with them to have some of them sway to the other side, to the opposite side than the other just to make it look a little less uniform. I like the movement here more than them swaying altogether in one side. side just going to randomly pick different ones here and do the same thing for them. I like that not all of them are moving in the same direction. Just feels more natural that way. I'm just going to click out and collapse my layers. Now we can just animate the stores the way we always have before and just slightly move the clouds a little bit from right to left. Then we'll move into the ball animation. That's done. There we go. What's left is to go back to the main composition and add the ball animation from one of the previous ones. I just copy pasted keyframes from our previous ball bounce that goes along with this melody [MUSIC] actually, if we zoom in, I want to copy paste the grass layer from our frame and paste it over the wall here so the grass can actually cover parts of the ball instead of have the ball sit on top of it like that. I'm just going to go to my composition and I'm going to pre-compose my grass here and call it grass. Then I'm just going to copy that and paste it here. Now that the grass actually covers the wall and it looks much nicer as it's bouncing around, [MUSIC] and that's it. Let's have a look at everything from the previous frame. [MUSIC] That's it. We are ready to move onto frame 15. After finishing off last time with the coffee bean frame here, we jump into the text frame of a scoop of dreams with imagination. Because the ball exited the screen on the right side, I'm going to make a come in from the left. I want my text here to also come in from the left. I'm just going to change my shape layer here into a text layer. I just want to keyframe the position here for my text because that's when it's supposed to enter. Maybe a little bit before we move it outside of the frame so that I could come with the ball from the left. We can also add a little bit of a jolt to it, so it doesn't just come and stop here abruptly. I'll maybe just add a position keyframe to jolt a little bit bound to the side and come right in its position again. Just something like that. Just so it's not so static. I just want to revise that with the music and see if it's too fast or if it's just right. [MUSIC] It's a little bit too fast for me, so I'm just going to slow down where the first keyframe begins. That's a lot better. Let's just give that another look. [MUSIC] It comes in exactly at that tone there. Now going back to my frame as I'm looking at it now, I do think that maybe we can either do without the hula hoops or without the ice cream scoops because I think both of them, with a ball bouncing around, is going to be way too cluttered for the frame, and the frame only lasts for like three seconds. I don't want to overwhelm people when they're watching it or just would like to keep it as simple as possible. I'm just going to decide which do I want to keep in this case which element. I think just for the sake of consistency and just less visual clutter, I think I'm just going to hide the ice cream scoops and keep the hula hoops. Because we've already seen the hula hoops. I don't want to introduce a new element right towards the end of the video now. I'm just going to keep it as simple as that. As the text moves from left to right, I'm going to also make the hula hoops fall from the top of the screen and add a bounce expression to it like we did before. Let me just go ahead and do that. That's pretty much it. The texts comes in from the left and the hula hoops come in from the top when I added the bounds expression to it here and just played around with the decay here to identify how much bounce I want to keep. The higher the number, the less the residue of the bounce and the lower the number, the more it's going to have more of a residue. I just kept it like a middle ground value here. Now I just want to add the previous keyframes, copy-pasted to the stars here, and also move the clouds around till the end of this frame. [MUSIC] That's done. Both the clouds and the stars are now animated as well. Now as per usual, we're just going to add another ball layer copied from one of these here onto our frame here. I just copy-pasted the ball from one of the frames and as well as the shadow here. As the ball exits the frame, I just grabbed my texts and grabbed it to the left as a prep. Then it just swiftly goes to the right with the ball here. Then the hula hoops just fall down below like that. Let's just give it a look here with the previous frame and see how everything ties them together. [MUSIC] Perfect. Now we can head onto frame 16. 20. Animating on AE: Outro: Coming off the last frame here, we move onto Frame 16, which is the churros slide. Now this is just what I have in mind, this is going to be a very simple animation I'm just going to have the ball bounce around and then at the very last second it's going to bounce up here and just glide down the slide like a semicircle here and then just exit the screen right there. Maybe as it's exiting the screen, then I can play around with this puddle here as if it's making a splash or it can melt onto the churros. If I double click on that, I have my pink melting part here, separate and isolated, as well as the puddles here so I can play around with that with shape layers and manipulating them. I could also animate the birds here by copy-pasting the keyframes we did at the very first frame. Remember the puppet tool that we did for the birds. I can just copy-paste those frames, I don't need to do that from scratch again. I'm going to start first with the ball. Actually, I'm not with the actual animation of the slide because there's not much to animate except at the very end when the ball slides, so I need to get the bouncing of the ball here, spot on with music first before I can animate it with the slide. I'm just going to copy-paste again any ball that I had before but at the very end, I'm just going to change the position keyframe so instead of advancing to the right, I'm going to make it bounce up, down the slide, and out. I just copy-pasted the bouncing ball keyframes from the previous ones but at this point here, instead of letting it bound to the left here, I just made it bounce to the top of the slide and decreased its size here so that it fits the slide and isn't too big for it and then just created a slide out just with my keyframes here. As it slides out, it also grows into its original size again so that it falls into the next frame as it's original size. Let's just give this a listen with the music. As the ball reaches the top of the slide, this is where I want to start melting my pink topping here on top of the truce. I'm just going to go click on my frame here and I'm going to go click on the layer and I'm going to tell it, Create Shapes from Vector Layer. I'm going to expand my path here, right around here maybe I'm going to keyframe it, and then I'm going to go back and this is where I want to start manipulating the shape. I just wanted to reduce the melt on here, not completely, but reduce it a little bit so that when I scroll through the timeline, it starts to melt out onto the churros. I just reduced it to a very thin sliver of a topping of the beginning and then if I scrub through my timeline, it just grows into more of a melting topping here. Let's just check that with the ball sliding down. I think it needs to be much faster. That's fine by me. Actually, as the ball rolls down, in this part here, I want these puddles and splashes to just finally appear as if the ball actually made that splash as it's sliding down. I'm just going to go to my layers here and cut them at this point so they just appear. Let's just give that a go and see what it looks like. Cool. Another thing that I want to do is ask the ball slides down the slide, same thing that occurred with the milkshake slide before is that it's on top of the slide because the layer is beneath the ball here. Luckily, I already had the front part of the slide isolated so this one right here. I'm just going to copy that and go on top of my bowl here and paste it on top of the bowl so that it covers this part of the bowl here and it looks like it's inside. Then I'm also going to copy my pink melting part and paste that on top as well, so it shows. Now the ball is inside the slide. I just want to add now a shadow to the ball as it enters the frame and bounces on the ground so again, I'm just going to copy-paste one of those shadows. I added the shadow beneath the ball here, and I adjusted the keyframes according to the bounces and the music so let's just give that a listen. Great, so now I can go back to my frame here and I want to animate my birds. I'm just going to go back to the main composition and go to the very first frame, I believe, intro Frame 1. I'm just going to copy my birds pre-comp and then go back to Frame 16 and I'm going to just paste the birds here and then go to their keyframes and drag them to our timing now. There we go. Once you're happy with that, you can just actually delete your bird layers here and I'm going to remove them. Let's go back to the video and check that out. Okay, Perfect. The last thing that I want to do is just move around the clouds here to exit the screen as the ball finally bounces off at the very end. Let's have a final look at the frame now. Perfect. Now we're approaching the very end and we're ready to animate Frame 17. In the previous frame, I just pulled down the slide to the bottom because I want the next frame where there's the texts to come pull down from the top. I just wanted to do that transition here like we've seen before. As a being pulled down, so right about here, maybe this is where I'm going to pull down my text. I'm just going to go here to Frame 17. I just want to change my text's shape layer into an actual text layer. Then I want to have it being pulled down with my position key-frames and I'm going to add a bounce expression to it, so it bounces as it's being dragged from the top. That's fine. Now let's check it with the music. That's perfect. This frame is going to stay until here. This is just going to have the ball bouncing around in front of it, but on a much slower pace to match the melody. At this point I'm going to copy-paste the keyframes for the ball animation for one of the layers where the ball falls from the top as well so that it matches this frame and I'm just going to paste it in a new layer. [MUSIC] Now that I've added the shadow and adjusted the speed and the size to it. Let's just have a look at that. I just added the animation for the stores here and I made one of the stores at the top-left scale up elaborately at last thing here. Here you've got to listen. There we go. Just something that accentuates the melody of the music and adds a little magical touch there. Then to exit the frame, I just pull the text from left to right in the direction of the ball as we did before and the clouds just exit the frame on either side where they came in. That's it. We're ready to hit him the final two frames and we'll be done with our brand video. We made it almost to the finish line. We're going into the last two frames of the ball bouncing and then closing in with the logo finally, I just want to have a listen to the music here because that's going to dictate how many bounces the ball is going to bounce in an empty red screen before it jumps back in as a dot on the logo. That last tenure here, I'm imagining the ball will fall in the middle of the screen, downwards. Then right here, it would fall from the top of the screen and come back as a dot. In the meantime, it's just going to bounce according to the melody here from one of the previous ball layers. Let me just go ahead and copy one of the ball layers so I can paste it here. I just copy-pasted one of the ball animations from the previous ones, but I just tweaked it a little bit to fit the softness of the melody this time. Then at the very end here it levitates in the air and just suddenly drops. That's going to lead us to the final frame of the logo. Let's look at that with the music and the final frame. That's it. On the final tin, it falls down. For the final frame, I'm just going to copy my last ball that I did here and paste it. Then I want to take the final keyframe here and just delete the rest. Then I'm going to bring this ball up towards the screen in the exact same place as below just pushed up. Around here I want to push the ball down, so as the ball comes down, I actually want to scale it down to the shape of the dot here. I just decreased its opacity, so I know where the dot is exactly in order to scale it down. Then I just want to add a very slight bounce to the ball as it approaches the logo here and then a slide bounce to the logo as well just as a final touch to it. I was going to take each letter and make a drop like before, like we saw in the intro. But I feel like it's going to be a bit too much the way the song ends has a very calm and slow endings, so I think the logo just appearing with a dot coming down again is just enough, I think for this, I don't want to overdo it at this point, so just like a nice clean closing ending is fine by me at this point. I just wanted to add a tiny little bounce using a bounce expression and we'll see what that looks like. Let's take a look at what that looks like. It's as simple as that. I like the simple ending to it. Let's see that up-close again. It's just a tiny little bounce that I added using the mount's expression. It's all that means for that final instruments at the end. That's it. That's an entire minute and eight second brand video. We are finally done and what I'm going to do now is just review all the frames again from the beginning. I'm just going to go through them and make sure that everything is fine. Everything is meshed well with the music. If there are any squiggly parts or any speed issues or movement issues, I'm going to flatten that out and straighten it and make sure everything is smooth and goes well with the music. I'm just going to have like a quick review over it. Then we can head into the next lesson where we're going to export our file and finally watch the brand video. 21. Animating on AE: Exporting: [MUSIC] So after tweaking some things here and there and refining everything the way I wanted to, I just added one tiny little thing that I did want to show you and it's the Motion Blur. If you look down here next to my ball layers, you're going to find these three circles overlapped on one another and this is the Motion Blur enabled. I just wanted to enable a Motion Blur to the ball moving because it just accentuates the movement and makes it seem more realistic and more jumpy and bouncy, and it's just as simple as checking the box next to the ball here. You can do this with any layer you have on your file and it will enable a Motion Blur to it just as long as you have position key-frames on there and the object is actually moving. If you can see here on the screen, there's a slight Motion Blur as the ball keeps bouncing from place to place. It just adds a little something, something to it. Without further ado, I think I'm ready to start exporting. I'm just going to go here to File and Export. Now I'm going to choose Add to Adobe Media Encoder because this is going to help my video export to MP4, which is what we want. I'll also show you another way you can export if you don't have Adobe Media Encoder, that'll also convert your file to MP4. But for now, I'm going to go with this and click on that. Okay, so your video is going to come up here in this Window and the default is H.264, which is what we want so just leave it as it is. You want to leave the bit rate as it is as well. You can see the end it's going to have the MP4 extension here and the status is ready. If everything looks good and it's good to go, you just need to press "Enter." And now it's just going to begin to Export, and it will tell you here how much time is left. So mine is going to take around two minutes. Okay, and it's done. My video is now saved to my desktop with an MP4 extension and it's good to go. I just want to show you another way you can do this. So if you go back to your After Effects file and you click "File" "Export," but this time click "Add to Render Queue." And then this Window is going to come up here and you want to press on "Lossless." Then instead of Animation here, you want to click "Apple ProRes 422" or "Apple ProRes 422 HQ." I just find that it exports to the highest quality this way. Click "Okay," and "Okay" again and just save it here wherever you want to save it, and then click "Render" here, and it's just going to render and save wherever you chose to save it. But After Effects only saves to.mov. It does not export an MP4 directly. You'd have to do it through Adobe Media Encoder. But if you don't have Adobe Media Encoder, you could download a free program called the HandBrake. Now HandBrake basically converts any video file to MP4. You just open the Window here and drag your file onto here, save it wherever you want to save it in this Window, and then click "Start," and it's done. So you have both options just in case you wanted to know. And that's it. We are finally done. So stick around for the next lesson to watch the final reveal of the Brand Video. 22. Brand Video: [MUSIC] Finally, after a long process and experimentation and diving into all those nitty-gritty details, the final reveal is here. Just grab a cup of coffee, sit back and enjoy watching the final brand video. [MUSIC] 23. Class Project: [MUSIC] I'd like to take a moment to thank you and congratulating you for getting to this point of the class and really committing all the way through. It's really important for you to understand how much goes into this craft and understand all the reasoning behind it and the technique that goes into it. Now it's your turn. But don't panic, there is absolutely no pressure in creating a fully polished brand video from the first go. It personally took me a lot of practice to get to this stage and I can only encourage you to do the same. For your class project, you need to have a logo and a brand identity already created. This can be a passion project of yours or a real brand you created for a client. From there you have two options. You can just publish the brand story and the storyboard of the brand video you have in mind. Put these in a JPEG format so it's easy to view. This alone is a great document to present to a client to show the grand video idea before you make it to get an approval on it or documents you can send to an animator that you can later collaborate with to execute the actual video. The second option, if you're feeling brave and adventurous and excited, then by all means, go ahead and publish a 30 seconds to one minute brand video for the brand that you've created. Whenever you're ready, publish it on Vimeo or YouTube, then paste the link here in the class project section. Remember, your brand video can be an animated one like the one I did with the illustrations and after effects, but it can also be just as simple as playing around with photography and type and footage, like the examples I showed you in the beginning of the class. What I really want you to take out of this class is the overall understanding and not really a step-by-step process that's just rigid and set in stone. I want you to take the insights that you feel are relevant to your brand and apply it in your own way. If you have any other stages in the process that you feel like you want to share with me for feedback or something to ask, then please don't hesitate to do so. The process to me is just as important as the outcome. I'm really excited to see what kind of stories and videos you're going to create. 24. Recap: [MUSIC] To wrap this class up for you, I've compiled all the major takeaways into 10 tips, so you can have a clear head start before you begin on your class project. Tip Number 1, know your audience. Who is this brand video targeting? What tone and voice will you be implementing? By knowing your audience, you will know what kind of impact you will want to have on them. Tip Number 2, define your objective. What is the brand video going to be used for? Is it a launch for a new brand? Is an explainer video on how to use a service or an app? Are you showcasing new products or fresh rebrand? By defining your objective, you already have an idea for the structure of your video. Tip Number 3, plan your content. Following the first two tips, you will know what kind of content this brand needs. Will it be purely a motion graphics video? Will it have footage, stop motion, voiceovers, actors, animation? By planning what kind of content you will need, you'll be able to gather all these materials and consider collaborating with others. Tip Number 4, write your story. No one knows the brand better than you. What is this brand about? What type of emotion are you trying to convey? A feeling of belonging, excitement, trust, happiness? Start by writing key words of emotion that you want to deliver and from there write a story that resonates with your brand. Tip Number 5, dissect the brand. Look at the brand as if it's a puzzle of many pieces put together and evaluate which key pieces can be used for the video. This can be the logo or parts of the logo, key messages, illustrations, photography, graphic elements from the brand identity. Tip Number 6, structure your timeline. By using the 360 degree method and the dissected elements from your brand, you can now start laying them on general timeline. What do you want your video to begin with? Which elements will go in the middle? How do you want your video to end? Use this timeline as a visual aid to help you structure your video. Tip Number 7, make a storyboard. With a clear structure in front of you, you can start sketching a storyboard of what will go on each frame. This will act as your guide later on when you're animating or if you're sharing this with an animator. It will also help you see the entire flow of the video before you start. If you need to make any edits, revise anything, this is the stage to do so. Tip Number 8, layer on Illustrator. After the storyboard is completed, start laying your files on Illustrator according to the sequence of the storyboard. Makes sure that any elements you want to animate are separated on individual layers. This will make your life easier later on in after effects. This is also a great stage to send an animator your files and they can take it from there. Tip Number 9, invest in the music. The visual aspect of the brand video is half the impact. The audible aspect is just as important. Spend your time searching for the right music and sounds that reflect the tone of your brand. Make sure the music matches the pace of the video and links together with intention. Tip Number 10, animate with relevance. Your choice of animations could be as simple or as complex as you want them to be. Always go back to the brief and to the brand story to assess what kind of animations fit your brand the best. The animation styles needs to speak the same language as your brand. A bonus tip, which is more of a thought to keep in your head. It's that you are both the storyteller and the audience. You are the one designing the information and the story in a way that's compelling and intriguing. But you are also the audience in the sense that you need to break it down, keep it simple, humanize it and pretend as if you're seeing it for the very first time. Ask yourself, what do I want to feel? 25. Thank You: [MUSIC] Thank you so much for taking this class and being patient with me. I hope you developed a new love and appreciation for storytelling and brand videos. If you only took away one or two things, but with full understanding, then I will be very, very happy. Remember that at any craft, practice makes perfect. So I do encourage you to revisit the tools from this class, revisit some tips, and keep applying it with practice to really hone in your craft. If you found this class helpful, I'd love it if you left a review so other students can know what to expect from this class. Feel free to post your videos on Instagram and tag me. I'd love to see it and connect with you. If you're feeling more adventurous then hop onto my other Skillshare classes and take my wordmark class if you want to learn how to create your own wordmark, PS; it has a brand video as well. If you love packaging and chocolate like me, then by all means head on to my packaging design class and it will not disappoint. Thank you again and I'll see you on the next one.