Essential Motion Graphics Templates: Crafting Engaging Lower Thirds with Adobe After Effects

1. Introduction: So you want to have fancy motion graphics for your social media content such as this, or maybe this. But you don't want to spend tons of money on an expensive motion graphics preset pack. Well, I'm going to show you how to build your own with Adobe After Effects, and even in a way that you will be able to use your finished animations directly in Premiere Pro without having to touch after effects again. So even if you have absolutely no previous experience with After Effects, you will be able to follow this course. Marcus. And I started creating videos for YouTube more than ten years ago in 2012, when I was still going to school, which in the end led to me studying media and computer science. Back then, when I started creating videos for YouTube, I was always searching for preset packs that were free to download because I was a broke student. And at some point, I was so annoyed by it that I decided just going to build my own. By now, I have created countless animations with the After Effects and I've even created a small business out of it by selling my own text animation preset pack on my website. Now I'm going to do a very bad business decision and share all of this knowledge with you so that you don't have to buy my preset pack because you will simply be able to create your own. First, we're going to go over the fundamentals of animation with After Effects. We will be briefly dipping our toes into the worlds of Adobe Illustrator, and I'm going to show you how to prepare assets that you can later use in your animations. But don't worry, we will quickly come back to After Effects and cover the basics of what is called an expression in the world of After Effects before finally putting everything together for our final animation. But that's not yet it, because the final step will be to export the animation into a proper preset so that you can then use it directly in Premiere Pro when editing your videos. I'm really excited about this course. And I can't wait to see all of the amazing animations all of you are going to create. So let's not waste any more time and finally get started. Hope to see you over in the course. 2. Class Orientation: Our clus project for this course will be to create a social media lower third similar to this one. I'll show you each step along the way and explain you how to recreate this specific animation. But of course, this is only meant as an example we can work with for this course. By taking the steps and principles that I explain, you will actually be able to create much more complex animations as well. So the only thing you need to follow this course is obviously Adobe After effects, but also slightly less obvious Adobe Illustrator, which we will use to prepare assets to animate later on. And that's it. You don't need anything else. You also don't need to have any previous knowledge of after effects because we will cover all of the basics in this course. If at any point, you have the feeling though that I'm rushing, and you're not able to follow what I'm saying, I would suggest you check out my course about text animation with Adobe After Effects, where I go more into detail of the basics. While in this course, we will also cover some more advanced techniques. Nonetheless, this still is a beginners course, and I promise you should be able to follow even if you have never touched after effects before. Naturally, in the first lesson of this course, we will cover the fundamentals of animation with Adobe After Effects and create some first very basic animations to get into the essential of what a composition is, what keyframes are, and how we can use them to animate in After Effects, and we've covered those basics, we will then jump into Adobe Illustrator to prepare some assets for our actual lower third animation, and we will then import those assets back into after effects. After that, we will discuss the concept of expressions in after effects, which oftentimes sound a bit daunting to new after effects users because you have to code, but I promise they aren't that complicated. And then ultimately, we will put together our actual lower third animation, and I will even show you how to export it in a way that you can use it directly in Premier Pro and even still have the ability to adjust stuff. So if you follow the course up until the very end, you will walk out of this course with your very own social media lower third as well as the ability to create almost every motion graphic you might need for your content. So, what are we waiting for? Let's jump into our first 3. Fundamentals of After Effects: Okay, everybody. Welcome to the first actual lesson of this course. So I promise that you will be able to follow this course, even if you have no previous experience with Adobe After Effects. This lesson is the one where we are going to cover all of the basics. Even if you already have experience with After Effects, consider this lesson as a refresher, maybe. When you first open up Adobe After Effects, this is what you're greeted with, and the very first thing we're going to do is, of course, click on project. Now, as you can see, the window is clustered in four main areas. The first of which is the project window up here. The project window is our essential hub for our assets. So for example, if we double click in here, it automatically opens the import dialogue. But we can also create, for example, folders in here and even sub folders, and so on and so forth. This basically works like any other file browser you know from your operating system, such as the finder in MacOS or the windows Explorer on windows. I typically always create myself at least two folders. The first of which I call zero, zero assets, and the second of which I call 01 compositions. And it's not supposed to be a subfolder. I want to have it on the same layer as the zero, zero folder. As you can see, I tend to name my folders with prefixed numbers. This keeps them in a very specific order that I can control easily. I know this sounds a bit nerdy, and it's definitely not a must do, but it's a way that I personally like because I can keep everything a structured, how I want it. And I would highly encourage you to keep at least some form of structure. Because I promise you don't want to end up with a messy project. I know it. I've been there searching for that one file that you are entirely sure that you imported, but you can't seem to find it is very, very annoying. Second window we have is the composition window, which we can see over here. The composition window will later show a live preview of what we are currently working on. It works basically like a media player. You see what we're actually currently doing. For example, if we were to import star wars and then play star wars in After Effects, you would see that in this window. But the composition window has also some more advanced features that a regular media player doesn't have. For example, you can also work in three D space. Us you can create very complex three D animations in After effects as well. But that is very advanced and not something we're actually going to do in this course. Then third down here, we have our timeline. Timeline is where we will later on layer our different elements on top of each other because after effect works in a layered approach, differently to, for example, Davini resolve or for example, programs like blender that are node based. Now, I know there are people that say that a node based approach is much more powerful because you can do more with it, but in my opinion, it becomes very very complicated, so I actually prefer it with a layered approach. Then last but not least our fourth window over here is one with various different settings, such as, for example effects and presets, which houses well effects and presets. I've already talked about compositions a few times. I've called this folder compositions, and I called this window the composition window. But what even is a composition? You can think of a composition as a container for your actual animation, because you can, of course, in the same after effects project, create multiple different animations. And each of these animations is then wrapped in a composition. And that composition also defines some general rules about your animation, such as the frame rate, the dimensions, and stuff like that. To create our very first animation, we simply have to click on this button down here. Now, this might look scary. It's not that scary. The only thing we are going to adjust for now is the dimensions. We're going to set this to 3840 by 2160, which is exactly four k. But you could, for example, also set this to 1920 by 12 80, which is what it was previously at, which would be exactly full HD or you could also set it to whatever format you want. For example, if you need a vertical animation for TikTok or something like that. But we're going to go with four K for now. The frame rate, we are actually going to set to 24 frames per second, and we also adjust the duration 20 seconds. And before we click okay to actually create our very first animation, we're also going to give this a name because, as the very great after effect Stub Ban Mario always says, we always label our layers. And I totally agree we always label our layers to keep everything structured. So we're going to call. This one, fundermentals of imation. And then I'm just going to click Enter or you can click to create our very first animation. Now, as you can see, this suddenly changed the composition window to be a black rectangle. Because so far our composition is entirely empty. There is nothing inside, so we just have a black space. To then actually create our very first element that we will then be able to animate. We can, for example, click on the rectangle tool up here and then drag and hold to create our very first Now, as you can see, that did not just create the rectangle up here in our composition window, but it also created a shape layer down here in the timeline. This layer in the timeline actually holds all of the properties that we will then be able to animate. For example, if we open up the transform, we can see the position here, the scale here, the rotation here, and we can even change these values. To actually animate these values, we still need a way to tell after effects when it's supposed to show which value. So to do that, we're going to use a so called keyframe. A keyframe is essentially exactly that. W, where and what value. To create our very first keyframe, we simply have to click on the stopwatch icon here, which will create this small diamond shape, which is exactly what I was talking about, a keyframe. Now, this specific keyframe tells after effects at the zero second mark, we want the rotation to be, for example at I don't know, let's say, -20 degrees. If we then go for example to the three second mark and set this to 40 degrees, it creates another keyframe, and now after effect snows, at 3 seconds, we want to have this at 40 degrees. And if I now quickly scrub through the timeline, you can see, ah ha, there is actually some movement, and we can even play this, and you see our rotation starts. And then suddenly stops. And there we go. We have our very first animation. Thanks for attending my course. I'm just kidding. We're not done yet. Now, this animation still, of course, is a bit choppy because it suddenly starts moving, and then after 3 seconds, it just suddenly stops moving again. That's because this animation is a linear animation. After effects is simply interpolating the values between these two keyframes. And we can actually see that this is a strictly linear animation by opening the graph editor with this button. Now, we don't have a value selected at the moment, but if we click on the rotation, you can see, h ha, there is our animation. It suddenly starts here, and then it suddenly stops here again. Now, we can make this a bit smoother by applying something that is called easing to automatically apply easing, we simply have to select both key frames and then press F nine. You can see this change this animation from a strict linear animation to this smooth S curve, which means that the animation slowly starts, then gets quicker, and then gets slower again. Let's quickly have a look at this. Now, as you can see, this already looks much smoother. But we can actually customize this exactly how we want it. For example, if we want this animation to start very quickly and then slowly fade out It would look something like this. Already looks pretty cool, right? For most cases, the auto easing that you can apply with F nine will produce very decent results, though. Now, of course, keyframes are not limited to a single property, such as the rotation in this case. We can actually create as many key frames as we want on as many properties as there are. For example, if we quickly close the graph view again and then create another key frame for the opacity and another one at exactly 3 seconds, protip, by the way, if we hold the shift key while moving over here, you can see our timeline actually sticks to existing key frames. So we want another key frame at 100%. I can create one by clicking on this diamond shape. We actually want to set the first one back to zero. Then we're simply going to select both our keyframes again and press F nine to apply the auto easing, and then we have this cool fading in animation. To be honest, this is actually the base of almost any animation. Just by creatively creating keyframes and then easing them, you can actually create tons of very, very cool animations. Let's recap what we learned in this lesson. There are four main windows in After Effects. Project window to structure your assets, the composition window to see what you're actually doing, the timeline to stack your different layers, and then a window with a bunch of other settings. We also learned what a composition is. It's the container for your individual animations, and we also learned how to create one. We also learned how to create basic shapes, such as, for example, a rect. Last but not least the most important feature of after effects, we learned what a keyframe is and how we can use it to animate basic properties. Then I showed you what easing is and how we can apply it to our animations that we created with our keyframes. Now, before you jump into the next lesson, I would highly suggest that you open up after effects yourself and play around with all of this, because as I've already said, you can actually create super cool animations just with this basic knowledge. 4. Preparing Assets with Adobe Illustrator: Right. Welcome back, everybody. Today, we're going to cover how you can create assets for your animations with Adobe Illustrator. The very first question we should ask ourselves is, why do we even want to do that? There are two main reasons why I specifically choose to prepare my assets with Adobe Illustrator instead of any other program. Because you could, of course, also prepare assets with another image editor, such as photoshop or even put everything together with shapes directly and after effects. Although that would be very cumbersome. Reason number one, Adobe Illustrator is a vector based image editing program rather than a pixel based, such as, for example, Adobe Photoshop. What the hell does that mean? Say, we have a very basic shape, such as a triangle a pixel based image editing program would save each single pixel of that triangle. So if you were to enlarge that triangle, you would simply enlarge all of the pixels, and thus you would get kind of a stairs effect when zooming in a lot. A vector based image editing program, on the other hand, saves a vector for each path of our triangle. So if we enlarge that vector, we still get a perfectly smooth edge for our triangle because that edge is saved as a vector. That means if we prepare our assets with the Dobie illustrator, we have much more freedom in scaling our assets without sacrificing quality. Also, simply saving three different vectors takes up less space on your disc then save tons of pixels individually, and reason number two. This reason does not hold true in comparison to Adobe Photoshop, but in comparison to image editing programs not by the company, Adobe. But Adobe Illustrator just seamlessly integrates with after effects, which can save you tons of time. I will show you later when we get there. But the importing workflow from Adobe Illustrator to Adobe After Effects is really Chef's kiss, I just love it. It's so simple. Okay. Once again, as a reminder. This is the animation we're trying to recreate. So let's actually jump into Illustrator and prepare our assets for this animation. Shall we? Once again, the very first step, the same as it was in Adobe After Effects is, of course, to simply click on new file. Now, differently than in Adobe After Effects, we actually get a couple of presets, and we can actually simply go to fill and Video and choose the four K UHD template because this already has the exact dimensions. We want 3840 pixels by 2160 pixels. Also, super important, we want this to be in RGB color mode and not in CM K color mode. So we can simply click on Create, and there we have our very first base Canvas. Now, the very first thing I'm going to do is import a background image by simply dragging and dropping it just as a reference image on how our final animation is actually going to look like on top of what we're going to put it on top of later. All right. Now let's go to layers and create a new layer, which we are going to call a background box, and we're going to call this layer background. Image, and we can already lock this layer because we won't change anything just on the background image. Let's also make this slightly bigger so that we can properly see the names as well. All right. First, let's create our rectangle, which is like the base rectangle that we're going to put the animation on top of, which is going to be 38, 40 pixels white, so the full width, and we'll give it a height of 600 pixels. Let's move this into position. Go back to the properties and select a full color of pure black, but reduce the opacity to 30%. Also, we don't want to have a stroke, so we will simply set this 20. Now, this is barely visible now, but it's like the base layer for our animation. Now the next thing we're going to do is to create the white line on top and on the bottom. For that, we once again go over here. Now, this is the rectangle tool, as you can see, but if we right click on here, we can choose a few more tools, and for this, we're going to use the line tool. Then we go exactly on this anchor and just drag over here and by pressing shift. We can ensure that this is exactly a straight line, and we want this to end over. Here. Now, this does need a stroke. We want a stroke of about ten pixels probably, and set this to a pure white. Okay. Ten pixels looks a bit thick to me. Let's reduce this to seven maybe. Now, we of course need the other line at the bottom as well, so we can simply select our line, press and hold the old key, and then just drag everything down here that will duplicate the previous element. Now, I have already prepared a social media icon, which we can simply paste in here. Make it a bit smaller while holding the shift key that transforms it proportionally. If I don't hold the shift key, you see the dimensions change. So I want to hold the shift key, make it a bit smaller and somewhat move into position roughly here. Now, when you are searching for the social media icon or whatever icon, you want to insert here because it doesn't have to be a social media icon, I would highly suggest to look for an SVG file instead of, for example, a PNG file. B that is exactly the difference I was talking about earlier an SVG file is a vector file while a PNG file is a pixel based While Illustrator can work with pixel based files, we want to retain the full quality of the file, so it's better to take an SVG file. But I still think this is a bit too big, so let's probably make it. Even a touch smaller. Yeah. Something like this looks good. And then last but not least, we still need the text. So we're going to select the text tool, write the name of our social media platform here. Make all of this much bigger, make it even more bigger. Here again, I'm holding the shift key while resizing otherwise, it would look like this. That's not what we want. Move it into position. That's very big now, but first, we're going to select another font. I'm going to use Proxima Nova bold that is actually the very same font that TikTok is using. So I'm using this font in this case, but you can select whatever font you want. Let's also make this a pure white so that it's better visible and deg a bit smaller. Yeah. Something like this looks good. Now let's once again select the rectangle tool and down here, draw another white rectangle, something like this. Go to the text tool again and create our text. And move that text into place. The top text looks a bit big, and the bottom text is a bit small, so let's make the top text a bit smaller. We can also reduce the size here of the rectangle and make the bottom text a bit bigger. Yeah, probably, something like this. Now we also need to resize the rectangle again. Yeah, something like this looks good. Now, we are actually going to replace the texts again in OB after effects because we want to have them as native text layers in after effects, but I've also created them here to have a visual idea of how everything is going to look in the end. Well, I have to admit, this was actually a very simple case. The assets for this animation could have been easily reproduced directly in after effects, but I wanted to show you the whole workflow because in my opinion, it is actually very, very beneficial to prepare your assets in Illustrator and then move them over to After. Especially when creating much more complex animations with way more assets than in this case. Now before we jump back into after effects and actually import our assets into there, we still need to separate all of this into separate layers so that we have everything as different elements, and we can, for example, move the top line from the right and the bottom line from the left and all of that fun stuff. Let's create a layer for the top line and select our top line. That's the bottom line. This is the top line. Create another layer for the bottom line and move the bottom line in there, create another layer for the social Media icon. Let's move that total media icon in there. And then last but not least a text layer. And we can simply put all of our text into our text layer because as I've already said, we're going to replace those later and after effects. Anyway. All right. Let's click on file and save. Yes, I want to save it on my computer, and then select the correct folder. We want to save it in as our acids don't AI file. Save it with version 2020, not one of the old versions, so we can simply hit. Okay. Now back and after effects, we can simply drag and drop our assets.ai into the project window, and then we'll ask us how we want to import this Adobe illustrator file. Now, we could, for example, import everything as merged layers. This would merge everything together again, or we could, for example, choose specific layers to import, but we're actually going to choose composition up here and retain the layer size as the dimensions of the footage, and then simply click. Okay. Now, as you can see, this automatically created a new composition called assets. And it also imported a folder with our assets layers. And if we open this, you can see all of the different layers that we created as different elements that we can use and import into other compositions as well. If we open the assets composition, you can see this is exactly what we created in Illustrator, also as different layers. And it automatically retained the dimensions from our artboard in Illustrator, which we specifically set to four K. Before we actually going to start working on this composition, I'm going to retain project structure, select all of these assets and move them into the assets folder, then we can delete this one and move the composition into the compositions folder. Now, you might think that we're done, but there are actually two more things I'm going to show you before we end this lesson. The first thing is, we actually have to tell after effects to treat these layers as vector layers. I really do not understand why After Effects doesn't do that automatically, but for some reason, they don't. So, for example, if we were to take our social media, I and scale this up tons, you see that it actually gets pixelated because right now it treats this as a pixel layer and not as a vector layer. To tell after effects that this is actually a vector layer, and it should be treated as a vector layer, we actually need to tick this box right here. So this small little star, if we tick it, you can see, ha, suddenly, everything is crisp and clear and not pixelated. For some reason, you cannot see this start check box here. You might have other modes enabled right now. Down here, there is a button to toggle switch modes. If we click on here, you see everything changes. There is now other configurations. If you have this configuration and you don't see like the check box for treating layers a vector layers, just click on toggle switch modes, and There it is. And let's also set back the scale on this. We don't want the social media icon to be that huge. And second of all, as already mentioned, we want to replace the text layers with actual Adobe After effects text layers. So we're going to choose the text tool up here. Just click in here, re create our text. Once again, we want to have this in Proxima Nova. And the size can be much bigger, something like this, probably. Move it over here. Create another rectangle down here, which should not be red, but should be white instead. Once again, select the text tool and write our text in here. This should be black of course and much smaller, move it over here. Then we can actually just remove our initial text layer by hitting the remove key, and there we go. We have all of our assets ready to actually start animating. All right. What did we learn in this lesson? I told you why I specifically used Adobe Illustrator to prepare my assets. First, because it's a vector based image editing program rather than a pixel based editing program. Second of all, importing assets from Illustrator to After facts is actually super super simple. Also, I briefly showed you how to actually use adobe Illustrator to prepare your assets. Then I showed you how to get these assets back into AB After Now, before we can actually fully recreate this animation, there is still one more thing we need to learn about. That thing is what is called the expressions in the W After Effect. As you might have guessed, that is exactly what we're going to cover in the next lesson. 5. The basics of Expressions: B, everybody. I have the feeling that this is the class that some of you might be kind afraid of, at least if you have heard of the expressions in After Effects before. But let me assure you, I was also afraid to start working with the expressions when I first started working with After Effects, but they are absolutely not as scary as they look. Now, to be honest, this whole animation could actually be done without ever using expressions. But by now, I actually love them so much that whenever I can solve something with an expression, I tend to go for it because it turns out to be much quicker, and in many cases, even much more stable to later on refine and rework the animations. Okay. Now that actually everyone is afraid of the expressions, because I made so much drama around them. Let's actually jump back into after effects. Shall we? Previously, I've said that the only thing you need to know to create animations and to modify values in after effects over time are the so called keyframes. But that is actually not true. There is another way to modify values and even animate them over time, which, as you might have guessed, are the expressions. You can create an expression very similarly to how you would create a keyframe. But we don't simply click on the stopwatch icon, but we hold the old key, and at the same time, click on the stopwatch econ. Now as you can see, doing so, open this small text window down here. Now, this text window expects a value in the exact same format of the value that you're trying to modify. So if for example, in this case, we want to adjust the rotation, which is a single numerical value, this text field expects a single numerical value. So if for example, we just write a ten in here, Then close everything. You see that rotated our rectangle by exactly ten degrees. But the great thing about this window is that you can actually input code in a programming language in here. For those of you that have already worked with programming languages before, this is actually a modified version of Java script. I could, for example, create a variable called R for rotation and then assign a value of let's say 90 to this variable. And if we then return this r at the end, You can see that rotated our rectangle by exactly 90 degrees. This actually opens up a lot of possibilities to modify values in very creative ways. Because for example, we can suddenly make calculations and then define the values based on these calculations. There are also some predefined variables, such as, for example, the variable time. If we simply return time that you can see if it looks like nothing changed, but if we scrub through the timeline, it will slowly rotate the rectangle because the time is actually variable of the time at that point in time in seconds. So at 10 seconds, for example, our rectangle would have rotated exactly by ten degrees. Now, if for example, we think that this rotation is too slow and we wanted to make it quicker than we could, for example, just multiply it by two. And then at 10 seconds, of course, ten times two is 20 degrees. This is already at 20 degrees, and thus the whole rotation is still very slow, but at least a bit quicker. We can also, for example, access the original values by typing the variable value. Now, this will simply return the original value and we could do calculations on the original value. If we set the original value to ten degrees, for example, then this would be rotated by ten degrees all of the time. All of this gets a tiny bit more complicated when working with values that need two numbers such as, for example, the position. Let's once again, hold the old key and click on the Stopwatch icon here, and there we have our expression for the position. Now, since the position needs two values and not a single one, we need to return what is called an array in programming. An array is essentially just a list of values, and in this case, we need two values. Before we actually create the array, let's quickly set this to zero. Now to create an array, you need to write it in square brackets as such, and then separate the values by a coma. If for example, we type 00 in square brackets. You can see that moved our rectangle to the position zero, zero. This principle will stay exactly the same even if you need more than two values. For example, when working in three D space where you don't just have an x value and a y value, but also a value, then you would need to return an array with three values. But the great thing about the expressions is we can also, for example, use some certain mathematical functions. For example, let's quickly define a variable call. X, which we set to zero for now and another variable called y, which we also set to zero, and then we return these to an ray. Actually, let's not set them to zero, but back to their original value. Which we can do, as you already know by using the value keyword. Now, the value keyword, in this case, of course, also returns an array. To get a specific element from that array, we once again need the square brackets, which we can simply put after the value. If we now want to get the first value from this array, which might be a bit confusing, we need to write zero, because actually the indices of arrays always start at zero. So with zero, we get the first item with one, we get the second item, and so on and so forth, might be a bit confusing at the beginning, but it actually works like this in almost all programming languages. As you might have guess, if we want to get the y value, we once again use Value keyword and then write one. Now, you can see, this moved our rectangle back to its original position. So as I've said, we wanted to use some mathematical functions here. So for example, the sine function that most likely all of you will already know actually simply goes up to one to minus one, then back to one and just continues this until eternity. If we add the math dot sine based on the time in here. This will add a wiggle movement because it will add one, subtract one, add one, subtract one, and so on and so forth. Now, since the sine function only goes to one, and then to minus one, we will always only add and subtract a single pixel. So if we play this You don't really see anything. Moving a single pixel is not that much. Let's actually encapsulate this again in brackets and multiply this by 100. This will already move everything by 100 pixels, which is a lot more than just a single pixel. If we now play this, you can see, ah, our rectangle is moving back and forth 100 pixels on the x axis. Now, if we add the exact same thing for the y value plus But we want to use the cosine instead of design. Again, multiplied by 100. If we play this again, you can see that our rectangle is suddenly moving exactly in a perfect circle. Now, this might look very, very simple, but creating a perfect circle movement just with key frames is actually almost impossible. Creating it like this with an expression actually wasn't that complicated. Now what we are actually going to use an expression for for this animation is to do this part of the animation. Because we want to have the rectangle exactly around the text at all times, even if we adjust the text. So if for example, my name on social media was not Fogel Fog, but I don't know. A Mr. Best impersonator. You can see our rectangle does not adjust its size to the new text. Now, to accomplish this, the first thing we're going to do is actually rename our layer, because as you can see, right now, the layer name always reflects the actual text. So first, it was Fogel Fok and now it's a Mr. Best impersonator, but we need this name later, so we call it a box text. And like this, the name won't change anymore even if we set this back to with the layer is still called box text, which is exactly what we want. Now, for the rectangle, we're actually going to remove this rectangle for now, but create a new one by using the rectangle tool and then simply double clicking on it. Now, as you can see, this created a rectangle that actually takes up our whole canvas. But since we want to define the size of the rectangle with an expression rather than predefined it, that's actually perfectly okay. The first thing we're going to do is move our shape layer once again back below our box text, and then we're going to open up the contents rectangle and then the rectangle path, and right here, we have our size, and if we drag this, you can see it actually adjusts the size of the rectangle. Now, we don't want to adjust this manually, but we once again want to create an expression for it. So we're going to hold the old key and once again, click on the Stopwatch icon, and there we go, we have our expression window. We are going to need two variables, one for the width, which we are going to set, let's set it to 100 for now. Then another one for the height, which we're also going to set to 100 for now, and then we're going to return these two, the width and the height. Once again, in an array, as I've explained earlier, and there you can see, we suddenly have a very small rectangle here in the middle. Now, of course, we don't want the width and the height to be just 100 pixels, but we want it to follow the size of our text layer. The next thing we're going to do is actually get that text layer and save it to another variable. So we're going to call it text. Layer, and we can get the layer by writing this comp, which references this composition. Out of this composition, we want to get a specific layer, and then in these brackets, we can define which layer we want. And the layer we want is, of course, our box text. And this is exactly the reason why we renamed the layer so that it doesn't change its name all the time, but we always want it to be called box text so that we can reference it here. And then we end our line with a semi colon. So our text layer variable now references, well, our text layer. Now to get the actual size of our text layer, we need another function, which is actually called source wrecked at time. Sounds a bit complicated, but we're just going to type it source wrecked at time. You can see after facts already suggests that this is probably what we're looking for. So yes, it is. And this is a function which will get the size of a layer at a certain time. So since we want to follow the size precisely and always match the exact size of the text layer, we will just input our time variable. So this is always the size at the current time. And if we now set our width, Not to 100, but to text layer dot width and the height to text layer dot height. You can see. Our rectangle suddenly has exactly the size of our text. But you also see the position does not fit so far because we also want the rectangle to be at the exact same position as our text layer, of course. So we can tell the position of the shape layer to simply follow the position of our text layer. To do that, we're going to click on our shape layer and then press P, which will automatically open up the position, and also our box text. Once again, click on P to open the position. We could now, of course, solve this again with an expression by simply copying the position of the box text to our shape layer, but there is actually a way to do this much quicker, by simply using this picket tool here. You can see this creates this blue line, and if we pick that to our position, there we go, it automatically follows the exact same position as our text layer. Well, not really the exact same position, but the anchor point of both layers is now at the exact same position. If we click here, you can see the anchor point of our rectangle is right here in the middle, and the anchor point of our text is also right here in the middle. But since the text is aligned to the right, it still grows out of the box, but we can quickly fix this by simply clicking on aligned. Now, usually the anchor point of the layer is by default exactly in the middle of the layer. For some reason, the guys at Adobe chose not to do that for text layers. But the anchor point will, as you saw actually follow the text align, and on the lower edge will be at the lower edge of our text, minus characters, of course, that grow out of the bottom of the text, such as A G, for example. Now to perfectly align this and make sure that our text is actually exactly on top of our shape. We could, of course, open the anchor point of our box text by clicking A and then roughly move it so that it fits the exact position of our rectangle. But as you might have guessed, we don't just want to do it roughly, we want to do it exactly precisely, and we can do this with another expression. Once again, we hold the old key and click on our stopwatch icon, create a variable. X, which we're just going to set to zero for the moment, and variable y, which we're also going to set to zero for a moment and then return these two variables x and y. Now, since on the x axis, we are already in the exact same location. Actually, for the x axis, we don't have to set this to zero, but we can just follow the original value, and they're the first one in the array. For our second position, we once again want to get the height of our layer and divide that by two, which will make sure that we are exactly in the center. So we can easily do this by getting this layer. Then once again, we're going to use our source wrecked at time function. We also always want to follow the current time, so we input our time variable again. Then we want to get the height, and all of this, we're simply going to divide by two. Now if we click on our layer, we can see Woops. This moved our anchor point, but in the wrong direction because it moved it out of the box instead of into the box. So we can fix this by simply adding a minus right in front of here. And then we realize that I think I made a mistake. I know what I did wrong because our anchor point is initially not exactly at the bottom of the layer, but at the bottom of our text, when we then move it by half the height of the layer. It actually does not end up right in the center of the layer, but well, half of the height above where it originally was. So what we actually want to do is quickly define a new variable, which we're going to call layer size. And then apply this layer source. Wrecked at time to this new variable. And then what we're going to do is actually get the layer size dot top. This would be exactly at the top of the layer, and then add the layer size dot height divided by two, which will then move it down by half the height of the layer, which should be right exact in the center of our layer. And there we go. Still, this is not exactly what we want because it is actually super super close, because the size of our rectangle matches exactly the size of our text layer. And we wanted to follow that size, but always be just a slight bit bigger. So we're quickly going to go back to our shape content rectangle, rectangle path size. And here we are going to define another variable, which we are going to call padding, and we're just going to set that padding tube. Let's say 50 for now. And then if we add this both to the width and the height, there we go, we have a slide paddy. Now, let's go back to fit our composition size, and now we can get the position of our box text, and as you know, our shape layer will follow that position exactly, and we can move this back to where it's supposed. Yeah, I guess by now you can understand how incredibly powerful the expressions are, and that it is possible to do very, very advanced things with them. But let's quickly recap what we learned in this lesson. We learned that we can modify the values of a property not only with a key frame but also with expressions. Now, when writing in expressions, properties that expect a single value just expect a value of this type to be returned. For properties that need multiple values, we need to return an array. A array is simply a list of values, which we need to encapsulate in square brackets, and then we simply separate the different values with a comma. We also learned that there are some specific predefined variables, such as, for example, the time variable, which will get the current time Or for example, the value variable, which will get the initial value of a property. If that initial value is an array, we can access the values of this array with square brackets once again. Always remember, the indices of an array always start with zero. Then there is this comp variable. This will actually just get the current composition, and then you can use, for example, the layer function to get a specific layer. Or if you were trying to get the current layer that you are working on, you could do that with this layer variable. Then there is the source wrecked at time function, which we used a couple of times. This function will get the width and the height of a layer. We also briefly touch the two mathematical functions, math dot sine and math dot cosine. But as you can imagine, there are tons more of mathematical functions. You could, for example, get a variable that roughly matches Pi with math dot Pi. We then applied all of this knowledge to create a box that exactly always fits around a text and will follow its size, even if the text changes. With this, we actually have all the basics, we need to put together our final animation. If you feel adventurous, you can already try to put together the animation yourself and then jump into the next lesson to see how I did it myself. 6. Putting our Animation together: Getting exciting in here, Let's put together our final lower third animation. Shall we? Since we already imported all of our assets in our illustrator lesson, let's get started with the actual animation. So let's make our text, our shape layer, our other text, and our social media. I can invisible for now and start with the animation of the lines in the background box. Now, our top line is supposed to fly in from the right. So if we click P four position, we get our position value, go back to the start, and then go ten frames forward. Set a key frame for our final position here. Then go back to the start and then move it out to the right like this so that it is exactly off screen. Now, this we'll move in the line, but this is still a linear animation, so we want to make this look cooler by selecting both key frames and pressing F nine, which will apply the auto easing. But let's quickly open up the graph editor. By the way, you can perfectly center your key frames in the graph editor by clicking this button down here. You see this automatically centered the graph editor on our current animation. And as you can see, as well, since we have two values that we're animating here, the X and the Y value, there are actually two lines in the graph We did not change anything on the y coordinate, so this is a perfectly straight line, but we only changed something on the x coordinate. Now, unfortunately, after eats does not show your handles to modify this as you want when working with two values. I have no idea hy, but we can quickly fix this with a right click and then a separate dimensions. Now we have a property for the x position and a property for the y position. If we go on the x position, once again, select both our p frames and press F nine. It will once again auto ease them. And there we go, we have our handles to adjust the easing. So the way we want to adjust the easing is we want it to come in very quickly and then slowly fade out, something like this, which if we then have a look at it, will look something like this. Looks pretty cool, I would say. Now let's do the exact same thing on the bottom line, but just from the left side. So close the graph editor. Go to the bottom line, click P again for opening the position property. Scroll all the way back to the beginning. Let's quickly make this a bit bigger again. Then once again, if we hold the shift key and move over here, you can see it automatically sticks to the keyframes. Now we want the final key frame to be here and the initial key frame to be back here. Then once again, we're going to separate our dimensions. Actually, we can remove the key frames from the y position, since we don't change anything there, and we can do the same thing for the top line. Then select our x position, open the graph editor. And I just realized I did not even change anything about the position so far. So, of course, we want to drag this all the way out to be offscreen as well. So once again, click this button here to center our animation, select both key frames. And press F nine to apply the auto easing. And then we basically do the same thing. We want this animation to start quickly as well and then slowly fade out, something like this. Let's compare. Yeah, it looks pretty similar. Just that one is going down, the other one is going up because they are moving in from different signs. And if we have a look at our animation, Lo is good to me. Now, at the same time, while these two are moving in from the sides, we slowly want to fade in our background box. Once again, we're going to close the graph editor, click T for opening the transparency. Let's quickly open the position back up by pressing P so that we can position the key frames at the exact same position. Our final position is here. There our opacity should be 100%, and it should start with 0%. For these two, we will simply apply the auto easing. Select both press F nine, and that's totally fine for the opacity. Looks pretty cool. I would say. Now the next thing we want to do is move the social media icon into position. So let's quickly make it visible again. Zoom a bit in. And I just realized this is not really perfectly centered, so let me open up the position and move it a bit up. Yeah, that looks good. And something like this is supposed to be our final position. So let me quickly go here. Then once again, click on the next frame button to go ten frames forward. So click it ten times. Actually, let's go forward. 20 frames. So we can either once again click on the next frame button or we can adjust it over here. We want to go two frame. 30. This is supposed to be our final position, so we're going to set a position key frame here. Then go back ten frames, set another position key frame, and for this one, we want to move it exactly into the center of our composition, which we could do by dragging it here or we use the lin option. We want to align the layer to the composition and center of the composition. Then we go back To here and also open up the scale property, which we can do by clicking S. Create a keyframe for this, and if we now press U, it will actually open up all properties that have keyframes on them. So in this case, the position and ended the scale at the same time. And then we can go over here, create another scale keyframe, go back to the first one and set a base 20. If we now select all of our keyframes and press F nine, and have a look at how this looks. Let me quickly go back to see everything. This looks pretty cool. I would say. Now to animate our text in the way we want, we actually need a tool that we have not talked about so far, which is a so called text animator, because if we would open the properties, let's make the text visible again, and then adjust the position. This will, of course, adjust the position of the whole text. But we want to have a way to animate each character separately, and we can do this with a text animator. To create one, we're going to click on the Animate button here and create a text animator for the position property, and then add another property for the size. No scale it is what it's called. Now, these two values is what we are going to start a. Because our text animator will animate our text layer from these positions that we set here back to their original value. So at the start, we want to have the position right at the top here, and then slowly move in all of the layers. All of the characters, I mean, sorry. Because at the beginning, we want to have the text up there, and then character by character move them back down. And we also want them to slightly scale up. So we're going to set the scale down to I don't know, Let's say 60 probably. If we now open up our range selector and start playing with the start value, you can see a ha. There individually, all of our characters are actually moving down. If for some reason, this does not work for you, but it moves the whole word at the same time, you should check that in advanced, this is set to based on characters. Because if we were to set it based on words, Then adjust it, it will actually move the whole word. But we want to have it for characters, so I'm going to set it back to characters. Then I'm once again going to move back to our last key frame of the social media icon, set the start back to zero, create a key frame. Once again, go ten key frames forward, and set this up to 100. Then once again, we're going to select both our keyframes and press F nine to apply the auto easing. Looks pretty cool. Now, I would actually like to have this a little bounce here. We're going to select our property and then once again, open up the graph editor. I'm going to select the bottom one and drag it a bit more over here and do the same one for the top one which is basically the same as the auto easing, but more extreme. It starts much more slowly, then gets much quicker, and then slowly fades out again. Now, of course, initially, we don't want the text to be visible and flying there in thin air, but we only want it to be visible inside of this rectangle. What we're going to use for this is a track mat. To do this, we are actually simply going to duplicate our background box, which we can do by using control D pork Man D, if you are on a MC, and then move this box all the way up on top of our text and make it invisible because we don't actually need it. We just need it shape. If we then toggle our switch modes down here, we're going to see that we have our track mat, and we want to set the track mat of the TikTok layer to our background block. Or two. Now what this does is that it makes sure that our text layer is actually only visible if the layer that we set as the track mat would be visible as well. But I just now actually realized an issue with this because our background box is of course, slightly transparent, which means that our text is slightly transparent in this case as well. So to fix this, we're actually not going to use a track mat, but at least we talked about them, we're going to use a mask instead. Let's quickly set this back to no mat, and we can also remove this layer again and slightly zoom in here, select our rectangle tool, select our text layer. If we then drag and hold from the upper line down to the lower line. This will actually create a mask, which means that everything that is outside of this mask is visible. If we set back our composition to fit the whole size of the canvas, you can see, ah ha, there it is moving in only from inside the box because the mask restricts everything that would be outside. Our animation that we put together now looks like this. Now last but not least, we need to add our bottom text back in. This one, we are going to mask out as well, but this time we're actually going to animate that mask. The first thing we're going to do is select both of these, do right click and then precompose. This will move these two layers into a new composition that is then part of this composition, and we actually want to move all attributes into the new composition. And we're going to call this box text. Because we always label our layers and click. Okay. Now, what we did with this is we essentially merged these two layers into a single layer, which we can apply a mask on now. So let's go to our last keyframe here. Go to this layer, move a bit down, once again, select our rectangle tool, and with the layer selected, draw a mask that just barely ends up. Here. So now everything that is outside of this mask is once again invisible, which is basically everything on this layer. But we want to animate this mask now as I've said. What we're going to do is open up our mask properties and animate our mask path. Once again, we create a key frame for this go ten frames forward. Then we can simply select these two dots over here and move them all the way over to the side. You can see we can adjust this however we want, and if we press and hold the shift key, it will actually move them on a line, and we want to animate this in, so let's move this over here. Then once again, select both our key frames and press F nine to apply, the auto easing. And if we then go back and have a look, There we go. We have our final lower thirds animation. Let's recap what we learned in this lesson. We basically applied the knowledge, we learned in all of the last lessons to create our final animation. But not just this. We actually learned about a few new things as well. We learned what a text animator is and that we can use it to separately animate the characters of a text. We also quickly talked about track mats, but then ended up not actually using them. But we used a mask instead, and we also learned how to animate a mask. But how do we now actually use our lower third in our social media content? Because right now it is just on top of an image file and not on top of our actual video content. As you might have guessed this is exactly what we're going to cover in the next lesson. 7. Exporting our Animation to a Motion Graphics Template: Okay, so we learned how to create our lower third animation. But one of the most important parts is still missing. How do we get our animation onto our actual footage so that we can use it in our social media content? Now, you could of course, import your footage directly into after effects, overlay your animation on top directly in after effects, render everything and call it a day. But imagine you would have to do that for every little animation that you want to add to your social media content? Very quickly become very cumbersome. Now, as you probably imagined after this introduction, there is actually a better way to do this by leveraging a so called MOG RT, which is short for motion graphics template. MOGRT is essentially an animation template for Premier Pro, which allows you to use your animation directly in Premiere and still be able to adjust some settings such as, for example, replacing texts and things like that. Now if we open up premier and go to the essential graphics window directly in Premiere, you can see that there are already some predefined MOGRTs. Now these MOD RTs actually come directly with Premier Pro, so they are pre in If we open up one of these such as, for example, the modern title, I mean, I personally would not call this modern, but super duper ultra ugly. But that's just my opinion. The question is, how do we get our very own animation into the essential graphics window here in Premier. To do this, let's quickly jump back into after effects, and in After Effects, as well, go to Window and open up the essential graphics window. Now in this window, we first have to select a composition that we want to export as a MOG RT. Now the one we are going to export is, of course, our assets composition. And by saying this, I just realized that we did not properly name this composition. So before we selected, let's go back to our compositions folder. Right click name and call this Social Media. Banner. This is a much better name. Now select our social media banner composition and called the MOG RT. The exact same thing. We're also going to name it social media banner. Now the only thing we have to do is drag all of the properties that we want to be editable in Premier Pro into this window up here. Now the most important part, of course, is the text. So for example, if we want the top text to be adjustable, we're going to open up the properties of our top text layer, and then drag and hold our source text up here. This makes our text adjustable in here, but it will also make our text adjustable later in Premier Pro. So for example, if we were to change this to I don't know. Let's say Instagram, it will automatically update in our composition. But so far, it will actually only make the content of the text adjustable. Now, what if you wanted to change, for example, the font or the size of everything? To enable this, we can click on edit properties and allow enable custom font selection, enable font size adjustment. And enable fo styles. If we now click, you see aha, it now added also a fun selector and all of that fun stuff. Now, what if we wanted to adjust even more, like, for example, the color of the text? As you can see, so far, this is not possible. There is no adjustion option here to change the color of the text, and we also cannot dragonhld the fill color over here and drag it over here. That simply does not work. But we can make this possible with a little trick. For this, we're actually going to use the fill effect. So we go to the effects and presets, search for the fill effect, and then dragonhld the fill effect onto our text. You can see our text is suddenly red because the fill effect actually just enables changing the color of a layer. Let's quickly set this back to white. And then open up our effects down here, our fill effect, and then drag and hold our color up here. Now, currently, this is simply called fill color. When using it later in Premier Pro, how would we know which layer this would fill? Actually, let's give both of these properties more precise names. We're going to call this one top text and this one top text color. We can actually even adjust this further by adding some formatting options such as, for example, a group. We could, for example, call this group top text, and then dragonhld our top text into here and also our color. Now we have a folder that we can simply close, which will be visible in the exact same way later in premier L et's add some more properties. Of course, we also want the lower text to be adjustable. To do this, we can simply open up our pre comp by double clicking on here, and then we can simply drag and hold our source text from this one into the same essential graphics. Now we're going to call this bottom text, and we will add another group that we also call bottom text and move this property in here and then close everything. So we have everything clean and tidy. Now, we could, of course, also use the fill effect again to, for example, change the color of the shape or of the text, but I'm not going to do that now because you already know how it works, so if you want to do it yourself, please go ahead. But there is actually another thing I wanted to show you, because what, for example, if we wanted to adjust the size of the padding of our box. Now, it's, of course, also not possible to drag an expression into our essential graphics window, because if we go in here and then drag the size up here, this property is controlled by an expression. So changing the property itself will actually not change anything because we overwrite it with an expression. So let's remove it again. The only thing we want to adjust Is our padding, which we have currently saved in a variable right here. Currently, it is set to 50 pixels. Now, once again, we can make this possible with a little trick. Once again, we are going to use a specific effect, which is the slider effect. We're just going to drag and drop the slider effect onto our shape layer, and then we have a slider up here. This slider currently does absolutely nothing at all. But we can connect it to an expression. We could do this by getting the specific effect. Or a little trick. I wanted to show you as well, if we just go in here, and then once again, select our pick whip icon and pick whip it to the slider. It will automatically write the code to select the slider. Now our padding variable will automatically take the value that is in our slider control effect on the slider, which, for example, currently zero, but if we set it up to I don't know, 500 pixels, then we suddenly have a huge padding. But let's set this back to 50 pixels for now, and then open up our effects, our slider control, and then we can dragonhld this slider into our essential graphics. Now let's rename this to give it a better name than slider control. Let's call it a box. Adding and move it into our bottom text group as well. Probably below the text. Now the last thing before we actually export our MOU TRT is that I'm going to go back to our social media banner composition and make our example image invisible because we don't want our example image to end up in the actual final animation. Now, let's say we are happy with all of the things we added to our essential graphics. These are the only values that we want to be adjustable in premier pro. If you want any more values to be adjustable, you can of course simply add them as you wish. But let's say we are fine with what we have right now. Now to export this as a motion graphics template, we're going to click on the Export motion graphics template button. Who would have thought? Then After Et tells us the project needs to be saved first. That's fine. Just A After Effects will open up this dialogue on where we want to save our motion graphics template. Now MOGRT files actually need to be placed in a very specific folder so that Premier can actually pick them up. So if we choose the local templates folder, then after effects will automatically put the file into that specific folder, and Premier Pro will automatically pick it up. But if you wanted to, you could, of course, also select local Drive, and then click on Browse to select any folder that you want to save it in. And then you could take the MODRT file out of that folder, and for example, share it with colleagues or other content creators or even sell it, such as I do with my essential text pack. But we're going to choose a local templates folder for now and click. Okay? And if we switch back to Premier Pro now and in our essential graphics window, look for our social media banner. There is our social media banner. And if we now drag and hold it into our composition, yes, we want to keep the existing settings and play everything. Tada, there is our social media L third, and in the edit tab of our essential graphics window, we even have all the properties we added to our MOGRT. For example, if we wanted to change the top text, we could open up this group and change our text once again, and it automatically adjusts in our animation. And that's it. That's how you can easily export your animations to make them usable directly in Premiere. 8. Conclusion: Congratulations, everybody. You can now call yourself an Adobe After Effects expert. Okay, Maybe expert is slightly exaggerated, but at least you're now able to build this beautiful lower thirds animation. And you can also apply this knowledge to create tons more motion graphics yourself. You also know why it's beneficial to create your animation assets with Adobe Illustrator. You know how expressions work, and that you can do very, very powerful things with them, and you even learned how to create a MO GRT out of your animation that can be used and customized directly in Premier Pro. So if there is one main thing to take away from this course, it is that motion graphics animation is not as hard as a T. Three. Almost all animations are just a bunch of key frames. Maybe with some expression sprinkled on top, but oftentimes not even that. I really cannot wait to see all of the amazing animations that all of you will create. Once you have them fully animated, feel free to upload them to the projects and resources tab on the class page so that we can engage and give each other feedback and possibly get a discussion about animation voting. Oh, and if you would like to get the After effects project file that I created while filming this course for you, I will upload and link that down in the project description. Or if even after this course, you are still too lazy to build the Lower 30 yourself, I have a fully fledged out version with tons more customizations as a pre made MOG RT file. Able either on my Patron as part of my membership or in my shop as a one time purchase. Now, all I have left to say is, thank you so so much for watching this course all the way to the end. If you are interested in even more, I love if you check out my socials. So see you over there.