Design and Animate a Graphics Package from Beginning to End

1. Camping TV Intro: Hey everybody, welcome to how to design and animate a graphics package. In this class, we will design and animate a complete graphics package, including an opening with a logo animation, lower thirds, and transitions. This could be used for a TV show, YouTube channel, or any other video series. Main focus of this class is to learn After Effects and see the process from beginning to end. We will create elements and texts directly inside of After Effects, but we will also use Illustrator to create and edit elements and then Premiere to put it all together. Finally, we will go over exporting files and discuss the proper file types to deliver to an editor or for you to use yourself. This class is for anyone interested in learning a project workflow from beginning to end. It will be very useful for After Effects artists just starting out or maybe looking for a job in a design studio or a production company. A little bit of knowledge of Illustrator and After Effects would be good to have but I will go over my process and shortcuts in detail. Let's get started. 2. Design and edit a logo in Illustrator: Welcome to the first class. How to design an animated graphics package. We're going to start by looking for some stock images to build our logo. That's going to be the bedrock of what we build everything else off of. How I usually start as I go up to the Creative Cloud app. This is where everything happens with Adobe, have your apps and your stock, and everything else. I'll search for camping and that would bring up this. I already found an image that we're going to use, and that's this one right here. I've got it downloaded and installed. What I usually do is I'll save a copy in an illustrator folder inside of my project so I have the original untouched in case I ever have to go back to it. What I do is, I usually start deleting anything I don't need. The reason I picked this file is because it has lots of great literal assets and elements that we can use when animating our logo. I like these trees, it's a really easy shape to draw and you could certainly do that. I recommend drawing these out if you're a designer and starting out and drawing everything yourself is a great experience and it's good to know how to do all of that. For sake of time, I'm going to use stock and I'm going to customize it a little bit. What I usually start doing is deleting the stuff that I don't want. I like the trees, the stars, the mountains, clouds. This icon right here, is a great starting point to use for a main logo. I can change the text and we'll get rid of all of that. This compass might be cool and some of these other lines and flourishes are pretty neat. I don't like these pick axes, those could be cool for something but we're not mining for gold or whatever. We'll start deleting stuff and then separating it out into layers. I'll lock my background and then create a bunch of new layers and start deleting. I don't think we need any of these. Dotted line elements are cool, but we can do that in Illustrator. I'm going to use this backpack, but I'll stick with this one up here, so I'll delete that. These trees, we'll keep those as they are fun. You could draw a couple of triangles and a rectangle and have a tree easily. For the sake of time, we'll do it this way. I'm going to ungroup everything and grab this tree and drag it out to a new layer. When I select this element, that was command ship G to ungroup everything. You see when I select this, it has everything in it. I just want to separate out each of these elements separately. I'll select the tree and then over here on my layers, I'll just drag this little icon up to a new layer. You'll see that with one element selected, it's a small little rectangle. If you click on it, it selects everything on that layer. Then you can see up on here, on this layer I have this tree selected, which is all I need. I'm going to turn that off, we don't need the other trees because we can duplicate the tree layer in after effects. I'll delete that, and I'd like the mountain in the clouds and the star, we can use all of that. Command Shift G again to ungroup, that's up under object Ungroup. I'll select the mountain and drag that up to its own layer, turn that off. I'll grab a cloud, command Shift G again, grab a cloud and put that on its layer, it's the same cloud duplicated so we don't need both of them, then I'll grab a star and bring that up here. We might want to circle too, who knows. We'll grab that, I think that's all we need for this. We'll come back to this icon later, because we would want all of this on separate layers, we may want this compass. I'll grab that. I'll put all of that on one layer, so I'm adding this new layer icon and dragging that up. This star shape is interesting, but I don't think we need that. The tent is really cool. Let's split that out into layers. The way I think we'll do it is get a couple layers. The flaps, I think we want on separate layers because we can actually animate the flaps opening and then maybe the logos inside or something. Having the flaps on separate layers will be important, we'll want this background inside the tent on a separate layer, and then the tenth itself. We can animate all these elements individually, let's Ungroup. I'll just drag my tent over and I don't think we need the rest of this, so I'll delete all that. Let's ungroup the tenth. We've got one flap here. Let's drag that up, then the next one, then the inside of the tent behind the flaps, which is important, then the tents itself. I don't think we need this one at all. This is kind of a neat flourish, but we could create that in After Effects if we need to. I like this line is that's kind of a cool style, I think we're good with everything else, let's delete that. Here's our main title, let's start ungrouping and splitting these out to layers. I like these little arrow elements. Maybe they move out or reveal the logo on it in some way, but we don't need this camping text, let's delete that. I'm going to leave outdoor adventure here, I think it's a cool little elements. It could be something else, a title for your show, maybe it's something you swap out every time, but we're just gonna leave it as that for now. Let's go ahead and put the text in there and create a bunch of more layers, I know the layers are getting pretty heavy, but it'll be okay. I just noticed sometimes these files aren't perfect. You can see right here, this is kind of sloppy, so we'll want to fix that. I'm just going to push A to get the direct selection tool and it's modifying these shapes. I'll select right on the point and drag it over until it snaps, and drag this one down until that matches up. Sometimes you have to clean these files up. That's okay and this side is not as bad, I'll strike that down. What I was thinking is maybe we wipe on this banner from the center, and it kind of wraps around our seal here. It reveals a lot about that way. Let's go ahead and put these on layers. They're not in the way. Let's go ahead and put our text in, I'll just call my show Camping TV. Then what I'll do is I'll center it and choose a good font. I found this font called zing rest demo base. There's also inside of this as a shadow, which is kind of neat. It also has this textured. It's hard to see, but it's another base layer, but inside the font it's actually has this line pattern to it, which I think is kind of cool. What I'll do is I'm going to use this line layer as a shadow, but to make it stand out from the text I'm going to go to type and create outlines, that will actually turn the font into strokes instead of a text layer. Then I'm going to go to my strokes and choose maybe this color. I'm going to go up to window and bring up my swatches. Let's delete all of this. That is obviously not what we want. Let's push I for the eyedropper and select this orange color, let's go into our swatches and select that color and create new. I'm working in RGB, which is important for animation. All video uses RGB, not CMYK. I'll make sure you're working in that color space. Then I'll select this orange. I'll select this color, create a new swatch, and then this color, new, and there's the RGB. This orange is slightly different, let's create that too. I'm going select my text and it's actually not a text layer, it's strokes. It's not a font like this one down here. I'm going to select that, go to my strokes and put this color behind it, go into my stroke and put it on my outside, it's not it's not actually cutting in on my letters. Here's our text with the stroke around it. Let's reduce the stroke size a little bit, maybe 0.5, and let's move our shadow layer behind the text. Right now it's sitting on top of it. Let's command left bracket to move it back, and now it's behind our layer. I think that looks good, but let's put it in place. I'll grab both of those and drag it up. Let's go ahead and scale it up a little bit. I'm holding Shift to constrain it, which means that it won't stretch it up or down like that and since I hold shift it snaps it so it stays in proportion. I think that looks good. I'm going to push command G to group it. Now our text is on one group. I'll drag that up to its own layer and turn that off. I'll select the banner and begin separating out all the rest of the elements. Command, Shift, G, drag it up to a new layer, and you just repeat this process for all of these elements. I'll go ahead and do that now and come back in a minute. Here's my logo, all separated out into layers. You can see over here I renamed everything, which is very important. It looks like a lot of layers, but once you get into After Effects, it's not that bad and having everything named will make a huge difference. You'll definitely want to stay organized like that. I have swatches for each individual color, which is also important when you get into After Effects, you might create Shape layers or text, you will need to use the eyedropper tool or have some kind of color reference to pull colors from. My scale, my logo, and have everything else separated out. I think we're ready to get into After Effects and start animating. 3. Stay Organized! : Okay, in this class we're going to talk a little bit more about organization, and then we're going to set up our aftereffects project. You can see here how I have my project organized. There's the project name for our camping show. I have aftereffects, assets and then any other program that I might be using for the project. You'll see in assets. Here's the original Adobe stock that I downloaded. This could be scripts from your client. It could be Logo files that they provide or anything else that they give you that you just want to save an original that doesn't get modified. Then in my Illustrator folder, I have the logo that we created. I'll split out into layers and this is what we're going to use for animating. I also have this wood texture I found that might be useful as well. We're going to put everything together from here and we're going to render everything out from aftereffects. That's going to go in the renders folder. If you use Final Cut, there's some stuff could lead or footage and it just makes sense to organize it this way because if anyone else comes into your project and needs to organize or edit anything, you want to make it very easy for them to find files and work off of your project. I've actually gotten projects back from people with everything in one folder and there's, you know, hundreds of files and it's just impossible. This is a very organized way of doing it. It makes sense to a lot of people, but there's lots of ways to do it. Just do it how it'll makes sense to you, that's clean and organized. 4. Import files and start animating: Let's start by importing our Illustrator file. Again, that's our camping show, illustrator and camping TV logo and import as a composition retain their sizes so that each layer is the size of itself and not the size of the entire composition. I'll open this camp by double-clicking and drag this into the camps folder and the layers, which is all the illustrator layers into the illustrator folder. I'll change my composition settings. Command K to, HD 1080, and I'll go 24 frames per second. That just depends on what your editor is editing at, so if you're working on a TV production, it's probably 2997. If you're working in film, it's 24 or 23978 or 976. If you're in Europe or someplace, it's probably 25. I'll change my duration to 10 seconds and everything else looks good. I'll say Okay. I'm just going to grab the background and stretch it out so it fills the whole screen. Let's start by pre copying the logo so it's all grouped together. That would be the camping TV, not our swatches. Let's get rid of those and I'm holding Command to de-select layers, so Command Shift C to pre-comp and I'll call this logo. Move all attributes and adjust that solid good and you can click on open, and that will just open it up right here. Let's go back right now and turn that off and turn our colors off as well. Over here is a great little plug-in called raid dynamic color and it will actually find any color in your project and your composition and create a palette for you. I've already set that up and if I hit select it, here's all the colors from the swatches, but I'm not going to use this if you'd like to check it out it's a great little plugin to use. I'm going to just close this right now and we'll use the color swatches because I don't want you to have to spend money on plugins to be able to do this. We'll leave the colors in our composition, just turn those off. Let's start with the tree and it's extremely small right now. Let's hit this little continuously rasterized layer. What that does is I can scale it up If I had as for scale, I can scale this up as high as I want and it stays crystal clear and sharp. I was hoping all of these shapes would be separate but let's open this up. Actually, let's right-click on it and create shapes from vector layers and that makes a copy, and I'm just going to delete the original and open this up. Now what we have is a path for our whole shape and I'm going to duplicate this layer two times and edit T-shapes. I'll grab this path and just select these layers and delete it out, so now I just have a triangle. I'm going to delete all these extra points. Let's go to the next one. I'm going to push QU to bring up the select the animated good properties that had been edited and it's delete these tuck shapes. We need a point for this so I'm going to just extend this out so it looks about right, and then delete these extra points. Now we have our second shape and then lastly we need our base. Again QU and I'll select the path and start deleting points. This could be the base for our tree. May be they get a little bit taller. If I turn all of these layers back on, we have our whole tree back. Let's go ahead and label these so I know what's this will be the trunk, this is the C. I'll just call this tree base two or actually just tree bases and I'll call this tree top and this is in backwards order, so I'm going to drag the trunk down and base so it matches up that way. Then I'll also parent all of these together so that if I grab the trunk, now I can move it around. Let's see, let's animate scale when you have y for the pan behind or anchor point tool and grab the anchor point and drag it down to the base. I'll do the same thing for these. I just want this in the middle. Think of art layer. That looks good. Let's start with the top of the tree and then I'll hit "Scale" and just stretch it out. Let's see may be three frames is enough. I'm going to unlink these properties and just squeeze it in, so it's going to pop out like that. This is a really linear boring of animation. What I'll do is drag this key-frame out three more and copy and paste it and then extend that out parts 100, so like maybe 128 and then come back, excellent. Drag this out three more frames and then come in below a 100 or may be 93. I'll just keep doing this, so it has a little bit of bounce to the animation. Whenever two, then it'll end on 100. Let's see how that looks. I'm going to go to the 1 second mark, push end to end my range here. It's got a nice little bounce to it. This will be the last part of our tree animation. I'll go up three frames or five frames and do the next layer, so what I can actually do is just copy this animation and paste it onto the base. Now we have our base popping out and then the tree to the top. That seems a little bit too slow. Let's may be stagger it like that. Then we want the base to pop up. Let's scale this one on the y. I'll set a key-frame, unlinked that and same thing just drag this down, may be go down to 0. Actually I may be scale it on 0, on the x2 and that we'll pop up. Let's do our same trick and just go down three frames and copy and paste this last key-frame and Drag it on y a little bit more because it has a little bit of overshoot. I'll go to this key-frame and drag it out and copy and paste it. The weird thing about this is I scaled this layer so far, these numbers are really high. That makes it a little bit more confusing than when you're working at 100 percent. We're almost at 2000 per sec right now, so it's a little bit, we are working with numbers like that. A way around it would be to scale up your layer inside of illustrator so it's really big and you wouldn't have this problem. Anyway, I'm going to scale down a little bit on the x. Come down drive this down, copying, paste that again and then just go up on y a little bit more and see how that looks. It's still the base bouncing and it looks a little strange. I'll just play it one more time. It looks a little strange that the base is still bouncing while the other stuff is happening, so I'm going to drag out these layers out just a little bit more, that's okay. It might just not need as much bounce on the base. I'm going to delete these two layers and drag down our final key-frame and overlap these little bit. You get the idea that you can keep tweaking that harvey but the idea is you're scaling things at overshooting it less and less each time. Let's take a look at the scale key-frames and the graph editor. You can see to key-frames are going up and down and it just has this nice tapered off effect to it. What you could also do a select all these key frames, right-click "Key-frame assistance easy ease" and that gives you a really nice gradual curves to everything. Let's see how that looks, it's a nice effects. Let's grab all of the key-frames and if it's easier to see, you can go back to here. Select these key-frames. Right-click "Key-frame assistance easy ease" and that's F9. That's a little bit smoother and I it looks good. What we'll do now is pre-comp this layer or all three of these layers and that's under a layer recompose. Name it, we don't need to open this. There's our tree element, so that's fun. Next we have the mountain so again scale this way up. I think it might be fun to have these guys up around and again we'll do the same trick. We move our anchor point down and animate the scale. S for scale and I'm just going to animate this one on the y and see how that looks. "Easy Ease". Yeah, that's okay. I don't think is quite as balancing as the trees, but it's more of a background element so I think that'll be okay. Another trick you can do, instead of using the default "Easy Ease", you can go to "Keyframe Velocity" and drag these numbers up. I'm going to drag, I don't know, let's go crazy. Let's drag it up like 80 or 90 percent. Say "Okay". That looks a little too stop motioning, so let's undo that. There's our mountain. It's only one layer which is great. We can just duplicate this and drag it around, and build out our scene here. Then what I'll do is I want some of these to appear behind others, it just looks like they are all on top of each other right now. But I'm going to drag this one to the back. Maybe it should be a little smaller. But I've got scale keyframe so I can't just scale it down. What I'll do is go to "Layer", "New", "Null", and pair it to the null, and scale the null down. Now I have this "Null Object", which is nothing that you'll ever see in the render, but you've got this extra bit of control over the layer and I'm not messing up my keyframe animation. We could stretch it, make it taller or skinny. You can animate the position or the scale of this as well. Then the other thing I'll do is I'll go to my mountain layer, and go over to my "Effects and Presets" and type in levels, and drag this into my effects controls. Grab the white point and just pull it in to make this layer darker. Now it really looks like it's back there. Now I'm going to do that with a few of these other objects. I'm going to unpair that layer and say, let's grab this mountain, put this in the background as well. Pairing it to my null, and let's position this one but drag out our levels. Oops, we put levels onto that, don't want them. I'm going to dragging it and just put it right onto my layer. You've got a little bit darker. Then one more for this one over here, make this one darker and put this layer to the back. Something like that. Now we have our tree layer so we can start building out our tree, our forest. What I'll do actually make this a little bit easier, I'll double-click on my tree and use this region of interest button and just select my tree. I'm only rendering what's inside of this box right now. If I bring this in and see it starts cutting off, it's like a crop. That's exactly what we want. I'm going to go up to "Composition", "Crop Comp to Region of Interest" and now my whole comp is just the size of the tree. When I come back into my camping TV logo comp, the box is only around the tree instead of the entire frame. Now that just makes it a lot easier to deal with. I can scale it down and move it around into place. I'm going to delete this null because I don't need that anymore. I just start duplicating my trees and moving them around. You remember the scale is animated on these trees, but there's no scale keyframes inside of this composition. All the animation is happening in my tree comp. I can easily scale this tree down and I won't affect my animation at all. Maybe I want some skinny ones or some fat ones. I'm going to leave that as it is for now. The other thing I did was I created a sky. I'll create a "New", "Solid" and name it Sky. Obviously I don't want it white. Let's drag it all the way back behind everything are in the top of my background. Let's pull up the colors. I had the continuously rasterized and scale this up so I can see it. I think this dark color it would be great for the sky. Let's select our "Sky" and right now it's white. Let's just go up to "Layer", "Solid Settings" and I drop this color right here. We can turn off our colors. We just obviously want it above the mountains. Let's grab the "Mask Tool" and select our "Sky" and drag out a mask. We're just seeing the sky up here. Now let's continue building out our scene with some clouds. That's really tiny again, so let scale that up. It's behind our mountains, which is cool. Actually, just had an idea, what if we duplicate it and put it above some of these mountains and may turn the opacity now? Now it's a foggy look or something. It's neat. But let's just leave it all in the background for now. Maybe we just resize this one a little bit so it's a little bit different. If you right-click, "Transform", "Flip Horizontal". Oops, missed it. It's a little bit different. That looks good. Then maybe we duplicate those. Bring them over here. Maybe dropped the opacity. These right now it's really popping out because it's so bright, so reducing the opacity just helps push elements like that into the background. Something like that. I'm going to draw a moon and I'm going to use the Ellipse tool for that. I'll just draw out a circle and hold Shift to make it a perfect circle. Then I'll right-click on it. If you go to "Transform", "Center Anchor Point", it'll just pop that anchor point to the center of your layer. Now, I'll create a "Group" and drag this out and put my ellipse inside the group. Then I'll duplicate this ellipse and move it over a little bit. Then inside of this group, I'll add a "Merge Paths" and set that to "Subtract". Now I have a crescent moon. It's subtracting one shape from the other, which is basically how Illustrator works as well. I'm going to move this path ever to this side so my moon is pointing that way, and just drag this up in the place and maybe scale it down. I can grab W for the rotate tool and rotate it a little bit. Let's rename this moon. Moon. I think we had a star. Let's grab this star, scale this one up. Push our rasterized button, and let's just drag a few of these around. Before we do that, let's animate the star so that when we duplicate it, it'll duplicate the animation. Maybe we do scale and rotation, so SR. Let's delete that star. Work on this one. Let's set key-frames. This will be our ending point. If you want to end on a little bit of an angle that might look good too. Let's just leave it at that for now. I'm going to maybe make it a 12 frame animation. Rotate it, negatively a whole bunch, it's weird, I hope you can see that. But it's rotating in a wonky way. The anchor point is not right in the center. We can try that center anchor point again. Okay, that moved it. Let's see. It's still got a little bit of a wobble to it, but I think it's okay. Let's set the scale down to zero. It's way too fast right now, so let's select these layers, and right-click and go to key-frame interpolation. Sorry. "Right click" right on the "Key-frame" and go to "Key-frame Velocity." let's drag the influence way up a little bit on the outgoing and then way up on the incoming. What that will do is it'll make it go really fast and then slow down as it's incoming into the key-frame. So if we look at our graph, you see it's kind of starting out slow then it speeds way up and then slows way down. Okay, so they might just be too much rotation going on. Let's just set this to zero. Change everything to zero. That was just on the scale, not on the rotation. So let's do the same thing. Key-frame velocity 95 and you'll see that as the same. Now as it's still rotating just as much but it has much smoother look to it. We could add maybe a bounce to the scale. But let's leave it at that for now. We've got enough other stuff bouncing around, so let's just leave it at that. Then we do want to animate all of our skies. So let's grab our sky layer. We're going to start on the full sky image. Let's grab a "Push M" for mask, this will bring up the mask path and I'll set a key frame. This will be the ending point. I'll go about ten frames in and select this line right here and just pull it down. So now our sky is starting full screen. Again, I'll ease that a little bit, key-frame velocity, drag this way up. The other thing was the mountains, they're all popping on the same time so let's offset those a little bit so there's a little bit of staggered animation to it. Our moon and our clouds, I'm thinking those just slide on from the side or something and maybe the moon drops down or whatever. Let's go ahead and do that. So position, set key-frames. This will be a really fast one. Just drag all these off. I'm using the hand tool, which is a Space-bar, to pan around on my canvas. I'm going to drag my moon and I think I will do a little bit of bounce on the moon. So I'll come down to three frames. Copy and Paste this ending key-frame and just nudge it down a little bit. Now the important thing with position key-frames is that it automatically gives it a bezier curve to the position. So you'll see these handles popped out and this you can actually drag and control the path. But if you just want a linear movement, it's going to really mess it up because you see it overshoot and then goes back and that's not what we want. I'm going to select these key-frames for my moon. "Right-click" and go to "Interpolation." Set this spatial interpolation, which is space, which is position. So it's moving in space to linear. You'll see that these handles kind of pop back when I say "OK". All right. So now it's just moving straight down and then straight back to the other key-frame. Which is great because I can add my own bounce. I'll just move that down and then nudge this up a little bit. So it's going to have a little bit of bounce to it that way. If I just hit the "Solo" button, I can just watch the moon. Yeah, and that looks good. For our cloud, I'm thinking what if they come in quickly and then just kind of keep moving? I'll just keep moving them towards the center of the composition. Let's go all the way to the end and just move these down. In this, where are my clouds. Let's go to the starting position and then bring it in. Then at the very end we'll just slide it over slightly. Again, you'll see a zoom-in. That's command plus to zoom in or command minus to zoom out. It made that path again with the position. We'll need to select all of these key-frames, holding down Shift to select them all. "Right-click", "Key-frame Interpolation", "Linear." All right, so now we have our cloud elements sitting there and then they just kind of have a little bit of life to it as it sits. We have our basic scene built. I'm going to stop this video here and we'll come back and put everything together, and I made the logo next. 5. Complete the Open Animation: So here we are back in my finished project, and I'm going to show you how I did the tent and the logo. So everything's animating on the tent flaps open and we zoom into it and come to the Camping TV. I don't know why there's wood in the tent, but we're designers and we can just do stuff like that. So let's go into our tent composition. If I double-click that, we'll open it up. You'll see I have my tent outlines and again, I use the tent layer, right-click on it and say, "Create Shape Layers from Vector Layers". That creates a shape layer from your Illustrator file. If I open that up, you'll see I have the path animated. So what this is now, if I solo it and select my path, it's just a path just like in Illustrator, and we can animate each of these points. So here's my final resting point of where it started. I just went back and using the same scale trick, I pulled out these points here to give it a little bit of a wobble, and then at the beginning it's like the tree where it just pops up. I drugged all the points down and popped it up, and then down a little bit, and then I held a keyframe. So it just sits there for a few frames and then pops out quickly and there is little bit of wobble to it. So that's how we did the base. The flaps are kind of similar. So if I turn those on, each of the flaps on the right and left side were created into shape layers and it's the same process. If I grab the path, you'll see it's covering the full background there of where it should be, and that animated the color. So if I drag these two keyframes down, you'll see it's blue. Then I animated the color to be the same colors of the tent. So as it's opening, its looks like you're seeing the inside of it. Again, I decided that a little bit of wobble to these keyframes so that it pops in and out. Then the other part of that is the inside of the tent we have to reveal that on in a certain way. So if I show you that tent inside, I'll hit you to bring up those keyframes. This is animating on with the tent, but you're only seeing a little sliver of it because it's behind the flaps. So if I turn the flaps off, you see there it is. It's there the whole time, but it's behind the flaps. So you're only seeing it as the tent opens. Now with the wood texture, I turn that on. That is just fading on. So if I can actually drag this down to make it clear then nothing's happening until this point. So the wood texture, it's fading on, and it's using the inside of the tent. So I just duplicated this layer, put it on top, and set the wood texture layer to Alpha. So it's only showing up, if I unsolo everything. I can turn on this tent inside. It's only showing up where this layer is visible. So if I turn that off now it's only showing up here. If I change this back to no track mat, you'll see it's covering up this whole area. The way I made it tiled like this is with the CC RepeTile effect. That just duplicates it out to make it look bigger. The reason I did that is because we zoom into it. If I look, it zooms in and we see our logo, and I wanted it to be a normal size. So I just duplicated it to fill in the area around. Then on top of that is our logo, which I didn't actually do it that way. Originally, I had it inside of the tent and maybe I thought it could reveal from behind. But we wanted to animate it on anyway. So maybe if the shield were just already there, instead of animating on. That would be a cool look. But instead of doing it that way, I decided to bring on the logo inside of this conflict by itself. So as we zoom in, we're beginning the animation like that. So if I double-click the logo, I can show you what we did in here. Is a lot of the same techniques. You'll see I'm just kind of re-using the same kind of animation properties. I stuck my shield, push to you, again we have scale. This time it's just scaling out from the center and then up. Then at the up, it has a little bit of bounce. On the backpack is just dropping straight in. That's it. The purse is sliding in from the side. But the clever thing about the purse is that it's using the same Alpha channel as our shield. So it looks like it's only sliding on. Actually it's so quick you can't really even tell. But it's not appearing outside of here. It's only appearing on top of the shield. The straps I animated one and then duplicated it. We have the scale so it pops up and then pops down. So it's animating negatively in the y and then animating into place. So it's just popping up and popping down. I duplicated it and moved it over to the other side and offset it a little bit. Then we have the stars, which is down here. It have a little bounce to it. For those, you can do it the same way I did before. There's the anchor points all the way down here. Actually on this, I only have two key frames. So it's going from very small to 100 percent, but there's still a bounce to it. The reason for that is I use this plug-in called Motion 2. This is a really great little tool. It has this fun excite button here. So you select your keyframes, and excite, and it automatically adds this overshoot effect to it. So it'll give it a little bounce. You got a few parameters to adjust here. That's a fun little plugin to use. Now, the banner, we have that separated out onto layers. So let's start with the top here. We've got these arrows pulling out from the center and fading out. Just a little extra elements that add some animation life to it. Then the banner is following that motion and wiping on. We've got the banner left and the banner right. So that's kind of coming on after that. There's just also small and just pop on. Then behind everything else, we have the banner back, left and right, I think its position keyframes wiping out from behind there. So that's our wipe on animation. Then we have our Camping TV logo. That's using an alpha channel of the banner. So as the banner wipes on, its wiping on our logo. We have the outdoor adventure texts in the lines. The way that's coming on, it's just position keyframing up. I have a shake layer here. I turn that on. You can see it's just a shape layer sitting there. But the outdoor adventure text is using it as an alpha channel. So I can turn that off and that just wipes on. Then we have these lines coming out. I think those are just scaling from the middle with a little bit of ease on it. Then the star below. Again, that same rotation movement bouncing into place. So that's everything I believe for the logo. So all that put together it looks like this. This is why we separated everything out into layers. It gives you so much control. You can do so much with all of these layers. It's really not that complicated. We have some position, some scale, a little bit of rotation, really basic stuff. The keys are adding a little bit of overshoot and adjusting the keyframes so that they're just not linear left to right, 0-100 percent. You want to add in that ease. If ease is enough for you then great. But keep going into the keyframe velocity and really influencing that because that makes it really come to life. Again, that motion to plugging up here. I am not using it because I want to show you guys how to build all of this stuff yourselves. But this has some keyframe assistance built into it, as well as this plug-in flow. This is basically showing you the keyframes. Let's see if I can find like this. If I click on read, you're going to see the exact path of those keyframes. Select those two. That's exactly what we're seeing here. It's just a little bit of a graphical way of seeing it. Again, it's called flow. It's just a really fun little way to add this kind of life to your keyframes. I'll post a link in the description to both of these tools. You can check them out. I highly recommend them. But you want to make sure to learn how to do this stuff first without using the plugins. You don't want to depend on those. You really need to learn how to do it by hand first. So that's the logo and the tent. Then it all comes together. The tent is parented to this null right here, which has a little bit of a position on it. So it's just scaling up as everything else is scaling up. Then the push into the tent. All of that you'll see is also parented to the null. So the trees, the mountains are all parented to the null, which it has this position. If turn it on, you can see it. There it is right there. So we're just scaling right into it until the frame is completely full of that wood texture. So hopefully that gives you a good idea of how I pulled all that off. If you have any questions or comments, please message me. We're going to come back in the next video and finish this up. I'll talk about a couple of other quick tricks that could add a little bit more style and give you a different design element to it. 6. Adding Pizzazz : One other thing I wanted to show you was how I got this shadow by my logo. I used a plug-in from Red Giant called universe long shadow. But you can use it default plugins in After Effects and get a similar effect, if you search in your effects and presets for actually it's CC Radial First Blur. Let's zoom out a little bit and move our center point off to the side and let's crank our amount way up. So we can see what's going on. It's going ahead and add a fill. I'm just going to grab my color from up here, dark brown and turn that off. Now let's zoom back in, so we can see what's going on, is duplicate our logo and delete these effects from the top layer, now we have our logo with the shadow behind it and we can go into the radial fast bar and maybe duplicate it, a couple of times to get little more length out of it. I usually like to do a smaller amount on the top and then duplicate the effect then extend these numbers out more each time and that gives you a different look that you might be going for. The other thing you could do is actually duplicate the layer. So instead of duplicating the effect, duplicate the layer and on each instance, just extend it out that way. So this way you're getting that hard edge right where it would be on top of the wood, then on the subsequent layers, it's getting softer and softer like that. Then you can control the colors individually or the opacity. Maybe on this first one, you want it a little bit darker like that and then the second one is maybe getting a little bit lighter. It's just a different look but it's a cool long shadow effect. Let's go into my final and talk about how it all came together. You notice that there is some textures and some other effects I put on top of everything. The first thing, is a noise. This is just a layer. If you go to layer two solid, we can look at our solid settings and see as just a 50% gray solid and the noise effects applied to it at 10%. I maybe overdid it a little bit but I wanted you to be able to see it through the video. It just adds this texture to the video that just brings it all to life a little bit, so it's not completely flat, really looks good over footage. If you're mixing graphics into live action, that's usually a good thing to do to make it look a little less computery. The next thing I found this paper animation, which is pretty cool, and this was just something free I found online, but someone just took a bunch of pieces of paper and scanned them in and then looped each frame. So it's just going to give it a little bit of life and that layer is sets a multiply, I did a little bit of a Levels adjustment to make it a little bit less obvious and distracting. It's probably a little bit too strong as well. So that's something you can play with. You can make this texture, but a lot of these assets you can find free online on different sites. The next thing was an adjustment layer that just added a little bit of wiggle to our lines so that they're not perfectly straight. It's just a little bit of a displacement is, a turbulent displaces the effect, the only thing I animated was the evolution. If you look in here, I just said a keyframe and went all the way to the end and crank that number way up. It had to be really high. So you couldn't see the waviness on it. If you crank that number really high, it'll look more random and less like a effect that you just put on top of everything. So all of those together, give us a little bit of extra life to our animation. One other quick trick is to go into your camping TV open composition, I'm going to hit Command K to bring up the settings and change the frame rate to something like 12 or eight. I'll say 12 for now, then go into advanced and make sure this is checked, preserved frame rate when nested or an rendered to you. Say okay. So now our composition is actually 12 frames per second instead of 24. If I go into my final composition, this one is still 24 frames. What that effectively does is, it duplicates every other frame. If I go into where this flap is opening, I pushed page down to go one frame at a time, you can see that it's duplicating frames. Those two frames are the same and then it goes on to the next one. now what that's going to do when I play it is just give it a little bit of stop-motion, animation to it and you're still delivering the file in the correct frame rate for your editor, but it has a more of a stutterer stop motion field to it, which gives it a different texture, different field and that might be right for you, It might not be. I think it looks really cool, but I'm going to undo that. I just wanted to share that with you so that you have that effect in your back pocket if you ever need it. So I'm going to go back to my open command K and change this back to 24. We've got our open. What we want to do next is rendered this out. I'll push command M to add that to the render queue and click on last list. We want to choose our Render Settings here. Now your editor is going to want the file and the codec that he is working in. So usually that would be a quick-time file and if I click on format options, you'll see right now it's an animation, that's just a huge uncompressed file. It's just way too big. I usually work in ProRes 422. The editing applications really like that, especially final cut. So I'll say okay, and that's all we need to adjust for this. If you have an audio track, you could set this to auto, and if there's audio there, it'll render it out to your file, and if there's no audio, there won't be an audio track so audio is a great option. You can set it on or off to force it to one of those 48 K is for TV. So you'll want to make sure if you're going to TV that's 48. Otherwise, 441 is perfectly fine. 16-bit stereo is good. So we'll say, okay, we'll click here to set wherever we're saving our file and then after that's done, will hit Render. 7. Design and animate a lower third: So we have our animated open first show. Thank you so much for sticking with me this far. The next thing we want to create is a lower third or super and these are used just to label your people or to give some kind of extra information to the viewer. That could be Stats or locations or anything. It could be names. If you have people on screen, you'll want to make sure you tell people who they are. What I did here is I'm re-using a lot of elements right now. We have our tents and then a few Shape layers and our names. So let's go ahead and build this cell. I'll create a new composition and just call this lower third, Jeff, and if you have different people, you'll maybe duplicate the composition and rename it to that person. Let's start with our tent and bring that in and actually what I did, is I duplicated my tent because I didn't want the texture of the wood in there. So in this tent to [inaudible] QC is the same thing just without the width texture. So let's bring that in and delete this one and then we'll drag our composition intercoms folder. Stay organized. So here's our tent. I'm going to turn on the tidal action save and move this into place. What this action save does, it gives us a guideline of where to keep our text in. If you're going to TV, some of the image just gets cropped off and lost. So you want to keep all of your text inside of the title save here and anything of that's really important inside of this line, which is the action save, inside of this line. I'll put my tent and right here and honestly if you're going to web, you can just move it all the way out to the edge, but I think it looks a little bit better just keeping it inside anyway. So that's fine. What I'm going to do though is, bringing my colors. I'll come up here and just typing color and search for my swatches here and bring this in and then I'll scale this up so we can see it and just move it over here and continuously rasterized, now we have our colors to work from. Let's drag up bar out, I'm going to grab the rectangle tool and pick, I think our texts will pop on this dark color and just drag out a shape here and we'll put that below our tent, grab the anchor point, which is this tool, and move this over to the very edge. Now let's maybe scale, so I'll set a key-frame. Let's make it have this like shoot it out really quick and then slow it down. Let's go all the way to the second and put a scale key-frame, and then come back to zero and on the x, scale it all the way down. Let's just type in zero and let's see if we want our tent to kind of come on first and then this bar we will wipe on it. Now we've got that linear motion again, so let's select our key-frames. Right-click on key-frame velocity and drag this influence, it's locked the dimensions and drag this way out. Now it'll shoot out quickly and then slow down. You'd probably do a little bit more than that. Let's go all the way to 100. It's really popping out pretty quickly. Let's turn our background cut off, so we can see everything and turn off the title action save. Okay. That's nice, but we need a little bit more. So let's duplicate this layer, a couple times. Let's change the color of this one to one of these oranges and then drag this over and change this one to look brighter. So now we have these three layers coming out at one's, we will push "N" and then watch this. I think the lines, maybe we can give our tent a little bit more time. Let's add some text to this, I'll grab the text tool and click in here and just write my name and I'm using the same font that was used in the open logo, just to stay consistent. If you're designing a graphics package, you usually want to use the same theme throughout. That's looking pretty good, maybe a little bit bigger and then let's maybe add a second line, usually there's a title or location to go along with it and I'll scale that one down and I'll just give myself a title motion designer. If there's a different stroke or weight of the font, I usually try to mix things up a little bit. This one just has that base and that shadow. I'm using the same font, maybe you want like, a big thin font for the name and then a bolder font for the smaller text or something like that. Let see if we can add a little bit of animation to the name. So we'll select the name and under animate this arrow and let's do position and then we can add opacity and maybe scale. Now we have a range selector with position, scale and opacity and we can animate this on. So let's take the scale down to zero, or maybe we have it a little bit, so we can kind of see it. I'll take that all the way down to zero and then the position, let's move it all over to the right. It kind of comes on from the side and under advanced, what I usually use is ramp up, it eases everything on one letter at a time. Now you have your start and end point, it goes from zero to 100 percent for the start and for the end individually. Instead of animating each of these, we can just animate the offset. So we can go from zero or from negative 100 all the way up to positive 100 percent, and instead of animating everything all at once, I'm going to change the endpoints to 50 percent, so now it's only about half and I'll change the offset instead of going to negative 100, only need to go to negative 50 and so we'll animate that and I'll drag this down and go up to 100. Now you see a wipes on. Let's trim this layer and maybe it's coming on with this bluish green bar. It's still a little bit linear. If you notice everything is coming on all at the same speed. Let's change the ease and low. It's crank that up. It's like adding easy, ease to each individual letter. But the key here is changing the shape to ramp up and then animating the offset. That's really great for animating text on. If you want to animate this text off, you would maybe go to ramp down and that gives you the opposite effect. You can animate everything off screen. But I'll undo that. Those are the two main effects I use for this shape. They just make the most sense to me. Let's close all this down and animate the motion designer, and it will do something similar but different. Maybe it's just position. You've got a lot of great effects and you're tracking is really cool. You can spread them out and like suck them in, like that. But let's just do position. I'll show you one more thing I use a lot and that is, instead of animating each individual letter, I'll change are decided up. We'll start down here, and consider based on characters will change it to words, and again change it to ramp up. Now each individual word is coming on like that. Let's animate it and it will just do negative 100 and up to positive 100 and we don't want to see it on our background. Let's duplicate our Shape Layer and drag that above the motion designer texts and set our motion design text to Alpha map. Now it's white beyond like it should. Again, I'm going to come into the range selector advanced. E is low a little bit. It has the little bit of these on it. I think that's it. Obviously we want to turn off the colors. Maybe we can add another, just one other quick little shape. I'll use the pen tool. I'll turn off the fill. Internal stroke, maybe it's like three-point stroke. Let's just put some, put a stroke on top here. I'm going to click a point and go out to the end and click another point, putting them shift. Looks like on this. Hold down shift and I'll give you a perfectly straight line. Now let's come into trim paths. If I turn off my stroke visibility, I can animate the end and the start. Let's start at zero and set key frames here. I'm going to hit option left bracket to trim my layer and move it down a little bit and then drag these out to 100. It writes on and off. Right now those numbers are the same, so we need to offset the start. We can see a little bit stroke. Let's grab these two key frames and we'll use our trick. Again, key frame velocity will just drag this out to really high numbers. Which is okay. That just gives us a nice little bit of animation. But let's match it up to our bars and drag it down below the tent. It might come out like this. I'm going to hit you for my key-frames. I didn't do both of them. Let go to key frame velocity and drag these out and see how that looks. It's just another little element to give it a little life and style. You can also duplicate this and maybe offset it like I'm just using the arrow keys and moving it around with a little bit. This one might be like one or something thinner, or maybe a different color, something like that. But I'm just going to delete that. There it is. We've got our lower thirds. The last thing to do is to render this out in a format that our editor to use. Commands to add it to the render queue and I'm going to click on lossless and again, I'm going to choose prowess 42. But instead of 42, we need 4,4,4,4. What these numbers reference is. The compression on the file, 4444 is uncompressed and it gives you the extra channel which we need is the Alpha channel. Several, choose that and say, okay and then the other thing is under channels, we need RGB , but we also need to Alpha channel because all of this is transparent and the background is going to go on top of our person taking or our footage. We need that alpha channel in there and then audio. You probably don't need audio for a super. But I'll leave it for now and say, okay. Then under our name, we'll give it a name and save it. One other tip is to go to the post grinder action and choose import. As soon as it finishes rendering, it'll import it back into our project and we can check it to make sure it has an Alpha channel. Say okay, save your file and it render. Rendered and an important the file. It's just drag this into our project and here we can see it. It has an alpha channel, which is great. That's exactly what we want. Now the other thing I didn't miss is I'm going to delete that is my project range here doesn't quite started at 0 and it doesn't go all the way to the end. Now you definitely need to extend this out. I would say ten seconds is a good amount. But you never know how long your editor's going to leave this super up. You just want to give them enough pad to fill the whole time and then you'll notice here I unusual layers around. Stuff is cutting out at the end and that's bad. We'll drag these all out to the end. This is that stroke layer which ends right here. We can just leave that down here and I push you to hide those key-frames. I think that's it. Now we can render this one more time. Make sure it's ready to go. Don't forget to save your project. I always good increment and save so that I have another version of my project. That if I ever need to go back to an old version or if I fall gets corrupt, I've got duplicates. There's always some redundancy and you never lose anything. In the next project, let's work on transitions and then we'll tie everything up in Premier. 8. Design and animate a transition: Here's our transition that we're going to be creating. The reason we have transitions is because sometimes you'll have a clip of someone talking and maybe they flood a line, or you need to cut to a different piece of the voice-over and you'd have to have something to cover that up. Or maybe you're getting from an exterior shot into the interior or you just want some creative way to get from one shot to another. But what you need is transparency, like our super had, it goes full screen and this is where the edit point happens. Then it wipes back off and we're into our new shot. Right in here, sometimes there's going to be an edit point getting from one clip to the other. These are usually pretty quick. I'm going to go ahead and just trim this down to maybe 2.5 seconds. Try right-click. I can say trim calm to work area. Let's draw some shape layers. I'm going to zoom out here. Maybe we need our colors again. Let's look for those and scale this up. I'm just going to draw some shapes wiping. You could use circles. You could use stars or some elements that was in your open. Usually, it's a good idea to reuse different shapes or concepts. I just messed that up, I drew a mask instead of a shape onto my colors layer. Let me delete that. Unselect my my colors and uncheck letter bazzite because that'll automatically gives you a curved path. I'll try that again. I drew my shape and right away I notice that my stroke is on and my fill is off. Let me turn off my stroke and select my fill. We'll just go with that color for now, that's fine. Now I want to go into my shape layer and push U and select my path set a keyframe. Then go maybe ten frames over. I'm going to select this path and this one up here, this points and drag them over. It fills the screen. Then go down a few more frames and animate this one over, all the way off. Let's turn off our colors so we can see what's happening. It's a very boring movement. Again, so let's select our layers. This time I'm going to use the flow plugin. You can right-click and do it the way I've been showing you. This is going to just be a little bit quicker. I'm going to drag that out and it's going to automatically apply this, so let me hit N here and watch this. That's really fast. I'm going to option click on the keyframe and slide this down. This will stretch our animation. Maybe you want to go down to two seconds or so. Let's just watch the whole thing. Maybe two seconds. It's staying on a little bit too long. I'm going to change the interpolation on these key-frames. I'm going to have this e's on quite so much, a little bit out of control. I'm going to select these two and do the opposite. Have it come up, leave sooner, and then ease out, that way. We have this nice little wipe starting out slow and then going fast to fill the frame and then quickly wiping off and then slowing down again as it leaves. Let's duplicate this layer and change the color to this orange and then offset it. Ends at the same color. We'll grab that orange color. Now we have a little bit of an offset. If we wanted to, we could move these key-frames that we are going to use. I can view the key-frames and speed the top animation up a little bit. That wipes off. We're seeing the back of the orange layer too. I'm going to duplicate this layer one more time and change the color to our green color and offset it again. Again, adjust key-frames. Maybe this orange shape is a little bit thicker. We can speed this up a little bit more. What we could do is maybe duplicate this layer again, and instead of having a fill, I'll have a stroke. Our stroke is that orange color. Let's bring up our colors and choose a different color, gray, that looks good. Then the next thing we can do to give it a little bit more style is to make an a dash. Let's bring up the path or the stroke options and under dashes at the plus sign, and then hit the plus sign again. We have the dash size, which is great. Actually let's change the bat cap to round cap. If you look closely, it gives it a nice round edge instead of the flat edge. I think that looks good. The other thing I think we want to adjust, we can animate the offset, but this is so quick that you would never notice. We can adjust the gap. If I hit plus I can adjust the gap in between each of these. Maybe a little bit less. We can adjust the stroke width. I think I want to move it right off of the edge. I'm going to go to offset path and maybe change the amount. I think it's a little bit to thick. Let's go to five or three. If you wanted to, you could duplicate that again and change the dash. I don't know, something like that and see how that looks. I'm going to duplicate the Shape Layer again and change the stroke to something very thick. Open up these contents and get rid of these dashes to announce another solid layer. Let me offset this even more. It's really inside there. It's just one more element. What I don't like is that it is up there in the corner, I don't care for that. Maybe we move it a little, the blue there and offset it in the other direction. It's out here. Maybe it doesn't need it quite as thick, but it's just one more little visual elements as it wipes across. I think that's good. The other thing I did was I brought my logo in, just a little bit of texture in there. Let's drag this in and it's animating. We just want to drag our layer down, so it's up there the entire time. It's a little bit small. Let's go and scale it up and click the continuously rasterized buttons so it's nice and sharp. Maybe it's rotated or I don't know, whatever. But we want it to only appear in the blue area. Let's grab our blue shape layer, which is this one. Duplicate it and drag it up above the logo, and then changes to Alpha mat. Now it's appearing only in the blue area. But let's put it below the stitches, which is those top two layers. Now it's right there. Still bouncing a little bit. Let's drag that down a little bit more so the animation is completely done. Just for a little bit of life, let's add a scale key-frame. Try that, downs the beginning and just scale it up slightly and drag that down to the end. There we go. Maybe there's a little bit of rotation as well. That's good. Maybe if you hold down command while you drag this, it'll give you smaller increments. It's not going to go crazy on you. I'll drag that key-frame down. Now we have a fully designed graphics package with a bunch of different elements already. Let's add this one to the render queue, and then we'll put it together in from here. Command M again to add it to the render queue. Again we'll hit lossless, changes this to produce 4444. Don't forget to change this to RGB plus Alpha and will import it so we can check it to make sure it's right to say okay, save it out, transition with a logo or something. Save it, render. Let's drag this in to make sure it looks right. It does have an alpha channel. You can see, and it's all animating on and off like it should. The other thing you could do is to add some of those paper textures or green or noise to it. That might be a nice touch, but I think that's it. Now, in the next video, we'll put this together and from here so we can see how it's going to look if you're editing yourself or if you're giving it to an editor, you want to make sure that you know how it's all put together. Stay tuned for the next video. 9. Putting it all together in Premiere: Here we are in Premiere. If you've made it this far, thank you so much for sticking around. We're going to put this all together so you can see how it works and if you're editing your own videos, this is how you're going to want to put it together. This should work at any program. Final Cut, Premier, Avid, iMovie, it doesn't matter. It's raining right now, so hopefully you can still hear me okay. I'm just going to play through so you can see what we have. It's the open and then you're opening shot, a transition and then your talents or whatever your video is going to be, and then the name super. Let's just take a look. There's me being goofy. We have the open it cuts to just a random, it's a stock footage I found. This could be your video and then the transition. The key here is that the edit point right there happens, the background is completely covered, so the audience doesn't see that editing point and then of course the Super comes on and there's transparency around everything and that's how it is. Another thing you might want to keep in mind is to animate the super off. Maybe the line wipes back down and wipes the name off and the ten slides offer plays in reverse or something. Then you can animate the super off that way. That's something to think about, animating your supers off, maybe even animating a transition out of the open. Maybe we use some lines to wipe across the logo, zooms at the camera and then a circle wipe south or something like that. Some piece of transition to get out on the open into your video. All things to think about. I hope you learned a lot and came up with some really great projects. I'd love to see it. Again thank you so much. Talk to you next time.