Colour Theory Made Simple - A Short Motion Graphic Design Class

1. Introduction: Having a basic understanding of color theory is important to motion graphics. In this class, I'll give you an introduction to the color wheel and color psychology, show you the easiest way to generate a color palette, and together we'll animate a gradient background. Can't wait to see what you create. 2. Getting Started: For this class, you'll need Adobe After Effects, Adobe Media Encoder to export. I'll include a completed gradient file in the project and resources page. Class project is to create a color palette, and together we'll create a gradient background. I feel free to post your project to the project gallery. I love seeing the stuff that you create. 3. Colour Wheel & Colour Harmonies: Here we are on the Adobe color wheel. But really, you can use any color wheel that you find on the Internet. For the purposes of keeping this class short, we're only going to focus on the three most used color harmonies in motion graphics. Remember that these are not the only color harmonies, but they are the most used. The first color harmony we're going to look at is analogous. Analogous is when you use colors that are right beside each other on the color wheel. For example, green always looks good with yellow, red always looks good with orange. Purple always looks good with blue. I've gone ahead and created a Pintrs board with samples of color harmonies that we go through in this class. I really suggest looking through it for some inspiration for your color palettes. You can find the link on the project and resources page. Here's some examples of the analogous color harmony. The next color harmony we'll look at is called monochromatic. Monochromatic is when you use different shades of the same color. This one is pretty straightforward. Here's some examples of the monochromatic harmony. The third color harmony we're going to look at is complimentary. Complimentary is when you use colors on the opposite side of the color wheel. For example, orange always looks good with blue, green always looks good with red and so on. Here's some examples of the complimentary harmony. A 4. Neutral Colours: Black and white, as well as brown, are all neutral, which means that they can look good in almost any composition. Here's some examples of neutral colors being used in compositions. 5. Colour Psychology: Okay. Another thing you might want to consider when choosing your color palettes is color psychology, which is the different meanings and feelings that different colors can convey. For example, red can convey strength, excitement, love, pink can convey sincerity, compassion, and sophistication. Purple conveys luxury, royalty, spirituality. Orange conveys success, confidence, bravery. Yellow can convey happiness, creativity, and warmth. Green can convey healing, nature, freshness, and blue can convey peace, trust, and loyalty. 6. Easiest Way to Generate a Colour Palette: In this lesson, I'm going to show you the easiest way to generate a color palette. It's so easy that it almost makes the rest of this class irrelevant, but I still think it's important to understand why it chooses the colors that it does. We're going to use a website called Coolers. Once you're on the Coolers website, you can click the Start the Generator button. Once we're inside the generator, press the space bar, and it does all the work for you and chooses color palettes that look good together. If you like a color, you can press this lock button to keep that color. I like this purple color, so I'm going to keep that, and then you can continue to press the space bar. Once you have a color palette that you like, you can go up to Export and you can save it as an image. 7. Another Way to Generate a Palette: Okay, so let's say you don't feel like creating a color palette using the other methods. So how else can we go about creating a color palette? Well, here I am back on the Adobe color wheel, and I'm going to show you another method that's super easy. If you go up here, you can find the extract theme tab. We can click to select a File button. Here's a very blurry photo of a sunset that I took. And as you can see, Adobe creates a color palette using the colors from the photo. We can go over to the color wheel and we can see exactly where on the color wheel the colors are. If you want, you can move these around to choose different colors from the photo. There's also the extract gradient tab, which essentially does the exact same thing except it creates a gradient for you. And to save it, we can go up here and click to download as a JPEG button. 8. Animated Gradient Background: Okay. So now let's create our gradient background. First thing we're going to do is import our color palette. We can place our color palette in our timeline. Press S to bring up the scale. We'll scale it down and put it in the corner. Now we'll create a new solid. Using the color picker, we'll choose our solid color to move our solid to the bottom of the timeline. We can duplicate the layer with Control D, search for the fill effect in effects and presets and add it to our new solid layer. Use the color picker again to choose our next color. Again, we'll duplicate our layer. Use the color picker. It's up to you how many layers you want to have and how many colors you want to use. Now that we have all our solid layers, we're going to draw some masks using the Pen tool. Now we're going to draw a mask over each of our solid layers. Okay. Now that we've drawn masks over our layers, let's add a little bit of animation. Search for the turbulent displace effect. Place it onto one of your solid layers. Press Alt and click the Evolution stopwatch. We're going to use an expression time times 50. As you can see, it adds a little bit of animation to our solid layer. And what we're going to do is we're going to copy and paste it onto our other layers. Control C to copy, control V to paste. Now select all the solid layers and press F to bring up the mask feather, and we're going to turn these numbers up to something really high until you get a nice gradient. And that's essentially it. You can always adjust your masks and your mask feathers to get a look that you like. And you can always go back and change your colors. Here's a couple other examples that I created by changing the masks and changing the colors. To give it a more grainy look, we're going to use an adjustment layer. Got a layer, new adjustment layer. With the adjustment layer selected, search for the effect noise HLS auto, change the type to grain, and we can turn the lightness up to something like eight. You could also change the speed of the animation by changing this number in the expression. I look forward to seeing what you guys are able to come up with. 9. Export: Here's a quick lesson on how to export your animation. First, you're going to want to trim your work area. This is how long your animation is going to be when you export. I'm going to make mine 5 seconds by pressing N on the keyboard or dragging the end of the work area. Now we can go to File, Export, add to Adobe Media Encoder queue. Once Media Encoder is open, we can click here to bring up our properties. F format, I'm going to choose H 0.264. And beside preset, you can see a whole list of presets that Adobe has created for you. For this one, I'm going to choose YouTube ten ADP. Here we can name our animation and choose where we're going to export it. And because we chose a preset, we don't really need to worry about any of the other settings. We can go down, click Okay, and then click the Green Arrow to Export. 10. Outro: Congratulations, and thank you for taking this class. Now you can share your project in the project gallery so everyone can see the color palettes you created. 11. Bonus Lesson - The Other Colour Harmonies: So now let's take a look at some of these other color harmonies that we didn't look at earlier. Let's toggle down our color harmony tab. Split complimentary. Instead of having one complimentary color, it takes the complimentary color and splits it into two colors that are right beside each other on the color wheel. Here's some examples I found of the split complimentary harmony. Okay, let's keep going down the list. Next, we have square, which seems to be the most simple taking one color from each side of the color wheel. Here's some examples of the square harmony. Let's check out triad. So triad can be thought of like a triangle. It's similar to square except we're only using three points on the color wheel. Here's some triad examples. Let's keep going. Let's check out compound. Compound seems to be a little bit interesting. Compound seems to be a mixture of complimentary and analogous. It has a complimentary color, and both complimentary colors have an analogous color as well. Here's some examples of the compound harmony that I was able to find. Shade is almost exactly the same as monochromatic. Both monochromatic and shades both use different shades of the same color.