Create a beautiful stroke animation in After Effects! | Andrew Pach ⭐ | Skillshare
Search

Playback Speed


1.0x


  • 0.5x
  • 0.75x
  • 1x (Normal)
  • 1.25x
  • 1.5x
  • 1.75x
  • 2x

Create a beautiful stroke animation in After Effects!

teacher avatar Andrew Pach ⭐, PowerPoint, Animation & Video Expert

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Introduction

      1:03

    • 2.

      Select font and create outlines

      3:04

    • 3.

      Prepare and pre-compose Layers

      3:08

    • 4.

      Applying Effects

      4:26

    • 5.

      Select Color and Fill the Letter

      3:44

    • 6.

      Watch another letter from beginning

      4:46

    • 7.

      Workflow Tips

      2:04

    • 8.

      Leave a Review, Please

      0:32

    • 9.

      Finalizing and polishing

      4:16

    • 10.

      Submit a ready project

      2:14

    • 11.

      Thank You!

      1:32

  • --
  • Beginner level
  • Intermediate level
  • Advanced level
  • All levels

Community Generated

The level is determined by a majority opinion of students who have reviewed this class. The teacher's recommendation is shown until at least 5 student responses are collected.

762

Students

9

Projects

About This Class

In this class I want to show you a quick and effective workflow how to create this animation:

This technique can be applied to any vector object or shape in After Effects. It can be great for any kind of youtube video, text animation, logo intro or swag for your friends! During the class you will learn essential After Effects techniques as well as advanced tricks on how to make any animation a little more interesting. You will work with the Pen Tool, Shape Layers, Effects, Keyframes...so it's action-packed material! The class doesn't require any prior knowledge and will let you dive straight into motion graphic design and teach you valuable skills and keyboard shortcuts along the way!

I'm ready if you are - let's dive intro Adobe After Effects and start the work...Enroll now!

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Andrew Pach ⭐

PowerPoint, Animation & Video Expert

Teacher

Hi! My name is Andrew Pach and if you want to learn PowerPoint you are definately in the right spot! To my friends I'm known as 'Nigel'! I am an After Effects / PowerPoint / video / graphic design junkie eager to teach people how to utilize their yet uncovered raw design talent! I run a YouTube channel called "andrew pach" which I do with absolute joy and passion. Here on Skillshare, I would like to share interesting, project-based classes that will make your design workflow a greater experience. If you look below you can select any of my PowerPoint classes to learn from them! 

See full profile

Level: Beginner

Class Ratings

Expectations Met?
    Exceeded!
  • 0%
  • Yes
  • 0%
  • Somewhat
  • 0%
  • Not really
  • 0%

Why Join Skillshare?

Take award-winning Skillshare Original Classes

Each class has short lessons, hands-on projects

Your membership supports Skillshare teachers

Learn From Anywhere

Take classes on the go with the Skillshare app. Stream or download to watch on the plane, the subway, or wherever you learn best.

Transcripts

1. Introduction: hello, and they hardly welcome to you in this class. I'm going to teach you how to make this beautiful, colorful stroke animation and after effects, we will select a great fun, a great coloristic, and then we will slowly build up this animation from scratch. This class is perfect for anyone wanting to learn a little bit about aftereffect and complete a really cool product. Along the way, it may seem like a simple animation. This class teaches you farm or I don't show you after effects tricks, but you can use in other products, and you will be finally more confidence in the program. If you, however, are a bit more advanced in after effects, this will be a really great product for you to follow along just to stay in shape or seat from another designer's perspective. If you are ready to have fun and create this professional motion graphics product, I invite you to enroll the class. Let's do it together. Let's design. I'll see you on the other side 2. Select font and create outlines: The first thing we need to do is to select a nice, big, bold fund for our composition. I would just go to 1001 phones or different dot com, select new phones and browse the Web site until I have something nice. The grating here is that some of the funds can be paid, but most of them are free for personal use, and some of them on the website are even free for commercial use. So even if this would be an animation, would you sell to your clients? You could use, for example, this fund to do so? I'll just browse the fund and select something big like this. You should do the same. Please browse those fun to websites and let's select something really cool. Okay, no need to select it. For several days, I found something like Digi told and algorithm or, for example, this is also cool, horrific, free. And as I see, I've selected the same fund two times. So on this website, I thought, Wow, this front is really good. It's probably the same fund, and it really stands out. It's a bolt, a good looking fun, and I believe I will roll with this one, and it's also free for commercial use. So it's perfect for any future usage you would have for this fund. You can select your one or if you didn't find anything good. Please roll with this one. No, let us start our fun. Workflow An aftereffect. Want to arrive in the program? Hit this I can to create a new composition. Well, of course, the role with age decides. I want clean 30 frames per second and I want the duration to be maybe seven seconds so you can trust seven and a dot. This should be enough for our entire animation. You can always extend it, so there's no problem. Once you prepare the composition, please select the type two and type the word you want to animate in the middle of the screen. In my case, what should it be in my case, for example, Bravissimo. I'll even write an exclamation mark. And of course, the text is too small. You can work on that in the character panel I have for the character open. I'll make this bigger off course. Select the front I wanted, which is, Dickie told, and I'll make sure that the entire text Okay, this fund has only big letters. So even better for me. Now I'll open the align panel And if you don't see the airline, you can always go to window and select a line. I'll align it in the middle in the middle with those two little buttons. Now you can right click and select. Create shapes from text. This is all you need. You can de select the text. The text will be no longer visible And I'll also activate shyness and make the layer shy. This will hide the layer and if eventually you would need it for later. You can just open up shy layers and layers were appear again For now I want them to be hidden. And this is the first step you had to take right? The text you want to animate and create outlines. If you want to know which effects we will apply to this animation. Please had over instantly to the next lesson. See you there 3. Prepare and pre-compose Layers: in this lesson, we will prepare our layers and then we'll pre compose them so they are ready to work. Welcome again In this stroke animation, we are preparing. So I have selected a really long word and this may be a bit difficult. So if you are very new to aftereffect and like to make a more simple animation, please select a shorter ward off course you can do as you please. We will need to duplicate this layer until we have 11 layers. Because I have 11 letters here. This is a really long word and also an exclamation mark. So I have 11 objects here, so I will select this layer press control or comment D to duplicate 123456789 10 So I have a total off 11 layers. Now please select each layer separately. Hit, enter and call it the layer as the letter. So I'll call it B R. A. The just enter to change its name and place here The letter that you're seeing on the screen Please finish that in your animation. Okay, Once we are here, we'll need to open each layer opened a layer open content and delete everything apart from the letter which is the layer name. This is why I placed the names first. So I will see this. This will be easier for me. I can also select the tilde key on my keyboard toe. Make this for the entire screen. If I will hit the tilde key here, it will make this screen to the entire screen. But if my mouth is here, it will cover the screen with the layer styles. Now I can make my work flow a bit bigger. I can select everything I can select corn tens and I will see the contents off each layer. Maui, just open it Here that are should remain. Now it's the turn letter. So the Asia remain here now is the V. And you'll need to do this for all letters. Please do the same in your animation and war. We already now. I was like control a. I'll close everything down and I'll pre compose each letter. You can select the first letter. Right click, Pre composed. It can stay like that, of course, but I'll crop this so it looks better be. You can, of course, select a shortcut. You don't have to, right click and select recompose. You can select a letter click on layer. And as you see, we have a shortcut for that. In my case, since I'm on Windows, it's control shift. See, I will pre compose each letter and this is the last step. So in this lesson, we did delete the contents. So only one letter remains here and we are pre composing the layers so they will be ready for our animation. Please pre compose all the layers and you'll be prepared for work. If you are in the same spot where I am, please save this file. So you have a backup and we are ready to work in. The next lesson will finally apply the effect. It will be really interesting. So I'm waiting for you in the next lesson. Let's go ahead and continue with our animation there 4. Applying Effects: in this lesson, we will apply the effect and try to animate our first letter. Ah, we are finally here. Now will come the fun part. If you have your ward prepared everything like I have here, select the first pre composition and double click on it to enter it. I'll have might be letter and now let's have some fun with it. We'll select the pencil now and create the mask will use. So please select a pencil. Click on the B letter or letter that you have and remember to have not disconnect. You need to click. Tool creates mask and I will start to create the mask. I'll go with the mask like that because this mask will be the thing that fills out the animation. So I will go from bottom. I'll go here, then I'll come a bit closer. I was selected here and I would go here just so I fill out this letter. Now I go here. If you have any troubles, you click on the old point and you adjust it. Then I go to the new point again and let me continue our work. Boom and boom! Perfect. Now this is the mess I've created for the first letter. Once this is prepared, you will goto effects and presets and generate stroke. Since adobe is so kind, you can also click here to effect by having this layer selected effect generate. And of course, as I said, stroke. Now this is the stroke, and you need to select reveal original image because we want to reveal this image with the stroke we've created and off course will work with the brush lights and the brush size needs to be really big. We need to make it bigger until it covers the entire letter. Since I selected a really big and bulky phoned, it will be a bit difficult. But about 30 40 45 points is enough. In this case, it's a bit much, but this doesn't matter. Since this fund is so heavy, it should work like that. And now watch how we will make this animation. We can off course, work with the start and end off the stroke. You need to select the end and make it so it first letter. I think this is to think so. We need to select the brush hardness. Of course, 100% because I only hard brush and I'll make this brush smaller. Well, maybe we made a small mistake so we can go here toe our masks. I'll select the mask. I'll select the path by having the mask selected. I can select my pen tool and you can move the mask. I opera shift. So actually select the mask and I'll move those points. Well, I made a big mistake here. I make this too far to the right. This looks now pretty. Okay, let me preview if the end animation will help us now. Boom. Boom. Yep, that's far, far better. And 30 brush size is just about enough. So now I can finally make this animation. I'll hit the play head on the beginning. I'll press it needs to be zero on the stopwatch here at 0% and going maybe two seconds forward, or this is how the animation will last. So let's select two seconds and see how it looks. 100% go to the front and press space. Boom. Okay, this looks really nice. You need you see, this little I would not call this a mistake because this is my animation I can do whatever I wanted it. But if I would like to select it and change this just a little bit, I oppress the G. Then I'll press the shift key on this point and just slightly to the left slide David left here. Sorry, I'm making so much adjustment. Boom. Yep. Okay. This animation, that looks really cool. Everything is proper. I think we can roll with that. The only last thing we want to add here is the film, because the film will generate a new collar because we'll select later on several calls I would like to fill to be changed. So this is the letter prepared. Now, if you want to see how I select the color and how, actually, I will make this animation on the letter, please head over to the next lesson where we will make several colors into this layer. So it looks really, really better. And this will be the end off animating this letter 5. Select Color and Fill the Letter: Hello there in this tutorial at first, well served for a nice coloristic we can use, and then we'll apply it to our letters. Now comes another interesting part. Selecting colors and making this animation finally pop and going towards its final form, I'll select a core. You can, of course, select, for example, colors from Adobe Call or C C. I went to Google and just selected color schemes. Six colors because I somehow feel I'd like six colors to be displayed, and I didn't even know about this. But I found a really great pin board, which takes calls from some good photographs, and we have ready color palettes. We just need to make a screenshot and copy it over to aftereffect. Nothing simpler than that. Just don't be shy. Select something crazy. I could, for example, go with this one. I kind of like the coloristic, but I'll assert a little bit true. I also like the scholars really recall. Damn, it's so hard to to select now because all of those pellets are so interesting. Well, let me go with my gut, and since I was told this one looks cool or this one, I'll just go for it. I'll print screen. You can even you can, For example, use the most professional programs in the world like paint control V. Then select the area you want to crop boom crop and this is a ready filed to safe. This will be so damn professional. Let's go to project. Let's import our color scheme. We can even place this color scheme here so it will be easier for us. Let's say it's okay Then select the B Goto Effect controls and we'll select the film. Now the first corps we select will be the last visible Let's like this bright one. Maybe this will be okay and I'll copy this. 12345 times. Let's have a total of six. You can, of course, have only treat it all depends how much work you want to spend and how long you want to create this animation. I'll go boom, boom, boom, boom, boom! We have six colors and now the second color boom, The third goal Boom, the Fort Boom 50 boom and the last one boom like that. Now, in order for this animation toe work, I need to stagger these layers else it will be not visible. And let's, for example, say that I'll come closer and stagger it by five frames. So five frames like this select would shift five frames shaved five frames shift five frames, shift five frames. Okay, let's preview. If this animation looks good, this would be the entire animation. Let me come closer here to preview it a few times. If everything is OK, maybe a little mistake here. I see some red color around. We could get rid off this because once the blue is only visible, let's say, here here the blue is the last remaining layer, so I could select all other layers. I could Presti opacity here and here they would be invisible. So a few second forward. Now we see this red line. Here it's it's a little just read, but if you don't want to be this precise, it's OK. It's a last fine tuning if you want to be completely professional. So here it disappears. It's barely visible. It looks as it would be from this animation and boom. We have the first letter prepared. Now, In the next lesson, I want to show you a quick workflow. How to make the next letter, and then you will be on your own to finish other letters with your selectors color schemes . I can't wait to see your results. Let's continue and follow up with the next letter on this animation. 6. Watch another letter from beginning: So in this lesson, I want to repeat the steps quickly so you'll know how. Toe work, efficient in after effects. Let me select the color scheme. I press control X. I'll go to my composition, open up the next letter and place it here by pressing control or comment. V my have toe work with our letter. So let's come closer to the are Select a panto and, of course, to create mask by having are selected, I will start in the middle. I will try to be precise. Here are This is a very similar letter, Toby. So you just click and drag. Click and drag like here. We can adjust this little bit. If you think this would be better, click here. Oh, and here we definitely need adjustment. Like that. Boom. Click here. Boom! Okay, click here. Well again in perfect. Now the mask is OK now. Our effect The film will be later. But also remember, stroke simple generates stroke. Stroke needs to be first. Of course. Let's go to the stroke. This change reveal original image work with the brush size and again we did the same thing here. The brush size Well, maybe we stay with 30. Let's say 30 will be our standard and let me set here Shift click. It just is a little bit So you see, there is no problem adjusting it. If you have a small mistake like that, that's no problem. Go to the beginning. And 20 If you're lazy, you can go to the last letter press You click on all key frames or, for example, only those and key frames are This was the end. Click on the key frame. Click on you and control V. Now it will do the same. It will copy the key frame and we are prepared. I see something here is invisible, so I need to address this a little bit. This is just a minor mistake. Let me go front here. Well, I would select this. Ah, you're nearly there. Okay, We'll just be okay. Boom, boom, boom! Okay. Yeah, Perfect. This can stay like that. And basically, we're prepared. Where's our color scheme? Is here? Desprez v And take it closer. And now, Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom! Six. The first color was the first caller second corps waas the second cold. Will these be okay? Yep, it goes. Okay. Turned cold. Color number four Welcome. Caller number five. Where are you? Here. Color number six. Bam. Okay, now how the staggering worked from the last layer until the 1st 1 My technique of doing this is coming closer, making the timeline smaller. Going toe still smaller. So I need I need to see five frames. This layer stays here. This layer five frings the next layer to 10 frames control click to 15 frames. Control, click 20 frames control, click 25 frames. And do we have our effect? And I see now my mistake. I did the stroke color, not the fill color. Let's improve that by selecting the physical or boom like that. Let us preview the letter if everything is ok. Yep. It really looks good. I only see the last color is just white. I've de selected the fill somehow, but now it should be proper. We have I need to be certain the blue collar selected. Okay. And on Camp one, we already have the beginning off our animation. Yep. Really, really cool. Later on, if we will do some staggering, it will look really good before we continue. Let me show you a trick because I don't want to settle to be exactly the same. We can always work with the key frames. And remember if I have, for example, Disc Efraim, I created key frames on end from 0 to 100. But you can do the same on the start. It can go forward from here from 100%. Start to 0%. Start to make it from the other side. Now continue the animation with your letters and we see each other a bit later. Won't we have our letters prepared? 7. Workflow Tips: How is it going? I'm in the middle off the work. Let's continue with I. So I'll once again copy my color scheme here and I'll show you something how to start from top or bottom. So I will select the mental. I'll create a mask, a mask going from top to bottom. Now let me go to the previous layers. Select the V Kopi O Effects Goto. I go to beginning and paste them so the effects are pasted. Even the color is pasted and the animation is pasted. Remember to have also the brush hardness to 100%. And let's see if this animation is okay. Well, it's it's perfect. I don't have to do anything. I just copy them. Change the colors, stagger and okay, But what if I wanted it to start from bottom to top? That's absolutely no problem. Let me press you to see the key frames. Now, if I would like to start from bottom, I could select the end to 100% and start to 100% Now I would animate the Starkey frame. I would start with 100% and as I would go forward, the start would slowly go to 0%. This is if I would like to animate it from bottom. So you have total freedom. I can go control Z, and this will be the original animation. Now. Control de de de de until you have six quickly paced the colors. It's very, very simple. Just go layer after layer. I made it a bit hard on myself with six colors, but it really looks interesting with those flashy colors. Now, like this coming closer, you probably already know this work so well. You could go and copy these layers or copy the elements from these layers if you don't want to select the colors by hand. But I selected this workflow aftereffect is very versatile, so you can really do this as you please. You can select your own workflow and decide what works best for you. Let's preview what we already have, and we are half we true. Let's continue 8. Leave a Review, Please: Hey, it would be extremely helpful for this class if you go to the Review tab and click on leave a review and write something there. If you don't see this button yet, you need to watch a few more lectures and it will become available. Sculpture now requires that classes have recent reviews on them. So it would help me greatly. You just click here, you tell if you'd like to class or not, and you write a simpler view and click Submit. I would be very obliged if you can do this right now. Thank you so much and see you soon. 9. Finalizing and polishing: let me share a few tricks on how to polish the animation and prepare it so it's ready to export and show the world we slowly arrive at the end of our animation in order to see the full quality off this animation. Please select this icon and select full. This way you'll know exactly what is good or if we need any changes, we should right click, select new and select a new solid. I will select a new solid to create a background for this composition. You can select any color you like, but I'll select White since I think these colors will look very good on White. I will take this background as the last item here and now we can preview the animation. Let's say I'll render this animation so I'll see this preview and let me come closer. You can see that in the first letter I did disable all other layers, but on the other letters we have some small distortion here. It's fine if you see from far away, but if you want to be really perfect, as I showed you previously, you can select the layers. You can select the opacity and Then you can notch down the opacity on all layers. But the 1st 1 let me show you this one letter a The letter a applies like this. And now we only see the blue color. Here is the point where only the blue color is visible. So I select all older layers. I pressed t I click a key frame. I go a bit forward and I make it 0%. This way the layers slowly fade out. What else you can do? You could, for example, select oldest layers press old and press the right bracket key. But this way they will immediately chop off. This will not be so fluid and not so nicely animated. Let me show you this. You see the letter R and other A and letter V a small shop will be visible. Want this case you see on the V letter? It fits immediately, but on the a letter and on our letter it slowly fades off. It takes a little bit more time, but it looked far better. Now I have adjusted this animation and it looks really clean and good. The last step we could, for example, make is to pre compose everything. Boom, Presti. Opacity Once again, opacity zero. Or maybe Sorry, sorry. Not the background. Everything apart from the background boom background here and the text with nicely disappear at the end, and then it starts again. One less thing you eventually can adjust also is adjusting the key friends. But this is completely up to you in this animation. I believe this study animation flow is really good. But if you think this is boring, you would select all layers. You would press end here because and was the key frame that we are animating, and you would make this off course bigger. You would select these key frames, and you would either right click key frame assistant and Eazy E's them to make this animation a bit more interesting, or if you're a bit more advanced, you can go into the graph editor. Then you can select the key frames, and you can do some tweaks with the entire animation. This would make the animation slow and a bit quicker at the end, but it doesn't have to be like this. This is only your imagination and what you want to do with this animation, I'll go to Camp one. I'll hit my pre camp and another adjustment. I could eventually make its staggered The layers just make a little bit fun. Make them like that. The animation will be more random, a bit more interesting. Let me maybe select the solid and places also here. So I see the background. Now let's preview how the animation would look this way. So the change is not big. But since this is motion graphics, we can do what ever will. Please. I hope you are on the same spot where I am. I will now look forward to your animations and what you did in this class. In the next lesson, we'll go about how you can showcase the work head over to the next lesson where we will discuss how you can share this animation with other students. 10. Submit a ready project: in this lesson, I will show you how to create gift in photo shop with giffey and how to submit a product to skill for Okay. Lets say you are dubbed both and you are ready with your animation. You will go to composition and you can simply add it to render queue. I'll render it 2 a.m. o V extension. If I don't have it in the presets, I'll select lossless a V I R. In quick time, The video Codec can stay animation or h 264 It doesn't really matter. Let's go with a bit lower quality so the file is smaller. Okay, okay. Specify the place where the video shoot. Render, for example to your desktop and render it. Once it renders, I'll show you how to create a gift. If you have Photoshopped, it would be really simple. You just import this video into photo shop, you select file, say for Web. It takes a while to load. And depending on all your options, make sure that it will be not the garden two megabytes. I would simply select the size to be smaller, like 600 pixels. This is completely enough to showcase the product somewhere and the most important option here. Looping options forever. Then you would click safe and you have a ready gift. You can also use some online tools like giffey dot com. You'll simply drag and drop the video, and it will automatically create the gym for you. Maybe I'll make it a bit longer. The start time can stay. Caption caption caption By uploading, I agree and create Jeff in the matter off seconds. It uploads and creates your gift. Once it is there, you just goto Advent and you download the chief. Uploading the product to sculpture is super simple. You just go to skill shirt, goto all products or simply to the community. You start your product. Then you write a description, upload a small time lately and upload the photo, which is in this case, the Jif. I'll select the Chief. You click on upload. You selected Jeff and it will be showcased here. Then you can create and the project is submitted. I really hope to see your products. This is a really quick and fund project which everyone would like to see. Thanks for listening and for staying with me, please proceed to the last lesson where I will summarize everything with it. 11. Thank You!: you know that I am always grateful and happy if you took the time to work with me in after effects or in any of my classes. I really enjoy those little animations, and I always showed them to my friends each time they appreciate the design, and it may seem simple, but other people do not work with motion graphics, so they don't know how to do this animation. And it's always something interesting and cool toe having your skill set. If you'd like to learn more about after effects and take more of my classes, that really no problem, you can go to skilled her. And in the search box you can simply enter my surname. It's spelled P A C eight park and want to search for this. All my classes will pop up. As you see, I have a lot of different aftereffects glasses and also power point classes. You can also go off course to my profile at scale share dot com slash andre pa. This is how you can find all my teaching classes or just click on my profile somewhere you're surely find it. It's no problem if you like those little and fancy animations in after effects. You'll surely appreciate this profile. It would be really great if you could click on the class and leave me a review. This will tell me if you are interested in more off such glasses, and I'll be happy to record them if you'll find them useful. Thank you very much, once again for listening to me until the end. I really appreciate that you took the time and learn something new with aftereffects. My name is Andre Park, as you probably know, and I enjoy motion graphics, probably just as much as you.