Transcripts
1. Introduction: [MUSIC] You ever sometimes feel like you're stuck in a rut. A need to be inspired. The fresh eye. Well, you're not alone. While traveling isn't accessible
to everyone right now, this is when I turn to music. Music has been a part
of my everyday life. Whether it's walking
down the street, or part of my dance journey, or a way to quiet my
mind when I'm working. I thought to myself what would happen if I bring
two things that I love together, music
and typography. I started experimenting with these typographic music
posters about three years ago. I probably made
about 50 of them. I even had some of them
selected to be on display in an open call exhibition
for poster design. I have a couple of
them hung up right here behind me in
my creative space. Hey guys, I'm Khadija, but everybody calls me Dija. I'm a top teacher here
on Skillshare and a freelance graphic designer
based in Cairo, Egypt. I've been working in the
field for five years now specializing in branding
and packaging design. In this class, I'll be teaching
you how to create one of these typographic music posters and even how I animate them. We'll be covering
what song to pick and looking at some helpful
poster examples. Then pulling out
some references into the mood board to help us
lock-in our main direction. Jumping into this design
where I'll be showing you some basic tools on
Illustrator to achieve this. Then learning how to add some final touches to your poster on Photoshop and prepare
your file for animation. This class is perfect
for anyone who has a basic understanding
of Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, and After Effects. But no worries if you're a total beginner
in After Effects, I'll show you how to do
a very simple animation step-by-step as I am personally completely self-taught
in that program. For your class projects, you'll have the chance
to recreate and reinterpret the song that I
chose for today's poster. Or you can choose a song of your own and create
your own poster for it. By the end of this class, you would have learned
the basic skills of manipulating and experimenting
with typography, adding textures and
masking on Photoshop, and the know-how to begin your friendly animation
on After Effects. You can later apply
these skills to any of your graphic design
projects to level them up and experiment, like I did. This class is fun, quick, and short, but it's
also very important. I believe it's important
as a designer to just sometimes step
aside, take a break, do something for fun,
do something crazy, something to experiment with and something to just expand
your imagination. Take this class as
an opportunity to regularly exercise
your creative mind. You'll find that it'll help
inspire you later on in your work and add some flair and personality
to your portfolio. Grab your playlist,
your headphones, and let's get started.
2. Pick a Song: [MUSIC] We're starting off with what may be the
funniest part of the whole class and
that's picking the song. When I'm about to create
any of these posters, I spent a bit of
time looking through my playlists or even
discovering new songs. What I'm looking for is a
striking song title that I can envision a visual striking interpretation for
it in my head. Sometimes it's a song title, sometimes it's a
one-line lyric from a song, it just depends. [MUSIC] I just want to go through a couple of my
previous posters as examples of how you can go about this and just my personal
approach on how I pick a certain song title and I transform that into
something visual. The first poster here is
called Mess by Noah Kahan. It's a very simple
idea as you can see. But because when I first
heard the song which I absolutely love when I
first saw the song title, and I thought of the four letters because
it's a short song title. I felt there's a lot
to work with that. I wanted to create this
huge random mess with these four letters but it's still a calculated
mess if you will. I made sure that I picked
a very neutral sans serif, but yet bold chunky font. But I didn't want
a font that had a lot of bits and bobs over here because I knew that
I was going to duplicate so many
of these letters. I just wanted to make
sure the font is so simple and let the
idea speak for itself. But I still wanted the font
to have some personality. I liked this condensed
but yet wide style. I think that also helped with the overall image of the poster. As for the colors, I
just made sure that most of them are neutral
monochromatic tones. But yet you have this pop
of yellow come about in certain quarters in areas of the poster that really
balances things out. Then I wanted to write the
song name just Mess and Noah Kahan is seeking through the letters so they're just not slapped on the poster. They're also a part of the
mess underneath the S, underneath the M
peeking through. That was the overall idea. I like how the letters
look like typography, but they can also look
like objects from afar. That was also the idea when picking the
typeface for this, I just wanted something that
was bold enough and didn't look typically like
a letter from afar, than obviously
up-close it tests. Yeah, I just did this very
simple animation for it. Super simple, it was not even done on after effects it
was done on Photoshop, but I just wanted to show you a very simple way of how you can convey your idea with
something like this. [NOISE] That's it. I think having sound in
this particular poster helped as a way to envision these little
bits and bobs dropping, and then making this
huge mess in the end. It's super simple. Nothing too crazy about it, I think it just depends on
your song and your poster, what your approach is, and then that will assess
the animation idea for it. Moving on, the second poster is called Invisible
by Zara Larsson. I also wanted to
convey this idea or concept of invisibility
by playing around with the letters extruding
from the poster and then going back again into a
blank canvas, if you will. It's just as simple as that. This was actually
done on Cinema 4D because I was just
experimenting with the program. But you could easily
achieve something like this on Illustrator using the
3D or extrude option, or you can do it on illustrator, then shade it on Photoshop and animate it later
on after effects. There are tons of
ways you can do this. That was the idea, super simple. The next one is The Less I Know The
Better by Tame Impala. For this poster, I
wanted to really strip it down and
keep it so simple. No animation, no illustration, nothing extra as just pure type that reflects the
meaning of the song. I wanted to choose
a typeface that was slab serif for this specific
poster because I knew I was going to be cutting
up parts of the word to decrease with less and then reappear
again with better. Slab serif is perfect for
this because you have these bars of the letters and the legs and the
feet and everything. I think that worked better
with slab than sans serif. That could also work
with a serif font, but I just went for a slab
serif as I knew it would fit the overall vibe
of the poster better. The idea that I got for this
is listening to the song. I had a lot of ideas of how I could convey that
meaning and actually had so many trials before in this poster of adding
too much and then making the entire word disappear
and then adding illustrations and
making it crazy. But sometimes in
certain song titles, you realize that really
the less you do, the more. I just sat down and
figure it out how can I convey this meaning in
a much more simpler way. I realized that I
could just keep removing parts of the
letters by the less I know the better and just have better fully
legible at the last line and seeing it at the last
line and then seeing it just situated
[LAUGHTER] above it, you understand this is called better and same for no as well. But yeah, you get the idea
when you see the poster. But this was my thought process
when I was designing it, and I just wanted to show
you three different posters, a minimal one and something
that was more on the fun, simple, experimental but
maximalist stick side. Then something in the middle
between both of them. It's minimal, but also it has a little bit of an interesting
animation approach. Yeah, I'm definitely going to be uploading all of my posters for your reference later
down below so you can go through them and they're
pretty self-explanatory, but they will act like
a guide for you to help you when you're
thinking, what do I do? What can I do with this song? I think that will help a lot. The song I picked out
for today's poster is Fix You by Coldplay. Funnily enough, I actually designed a poster for
the same exact song. I think about a couple of years ago or three years ago maybe, and this time actually I used a part of the lyrics
and not the song title. Just want to show you
what that looked like. [MUSIC] Yeah that's it. I use part of the
lyrics that said, lights will guide you home. For this specific poster, I needed to use illustration
to help me convey that idea. Now that I even look at it, there are so many ways
that you can recreate this using just typography or using illustration to
help you or animation. I think even me as designing
this poster three years ago, I can re-interpret this a lot differently today than
I did three years ago. I think that's the most
interesting part about it. But yeah, when I
came to design this, I wanted to draw the
type as a shadow. I just typed in these lyrics. Then I played around with their perspective on
Photoshop and the opacity. I actually animated this
again on Photoshop. This is just all sequence layers basically and super simple. I just wanted to create
this movement with the light because the lyric say, lights will guide you home. I just wanted to
create this movement, and not have a
static light only. I thought a street
lamp post was most appropriate to convey
that as there are several street lamp posts when you're walking down
the street and they're all guiding you towards
a specific direction. Not to get too
philosophical over here, but I think to each their own, and everyone has different
way of interpreting songs. I think the key exercise here is tap into your imagination. Everyone has a specific way of interpreting something so
subjective like music. That's the best part about it, I think because
when you don't have certain restrictions of
right or wrong or yes or no, your imagination tempts to just go wild and that's perfect. That's the raw material that
we want to use to be able to transform certain
word into a visual. This is my approach to transforming Lights
Will Guide You Home using these keywords as a way to transform it into
a visual language. Same for invisible as
you saw earlier or less, these certain keywords,
they pop off. If I asked you to recreate
what these words mean to you, what the song means to you, your mind will
automatically have a certain visual
pop in your mind. This class is just
a way to hone in this imagination and
use certain tools and tips and resources to
bring that idea to life. I think the sweet spot as defined song title that's
short enough so you can have enough room to play
with a type without cramming all the letters and
the words in your poster. But also something
meaningful enough to be able to produce an
interesting visual for. I already have an idea
in my head of how I want this to look like and that's
how it always starts. I just have a light bulb [NOISE] light up when I see a
certain song title, but I would need some
visual mood board to help me lock in
exactly what I'll do. That's something I deeply recommend before starting
the poster is just some gather some visual references
for you to be inspired by, to know what style
you want to go for, and help you really
imagine it in your mind. That's what we're going
to do in the next lesson.
3. References & Moodboard: [MUSIC] The idea I have in my head for this
poster is a little bit inspired by the movie
Argo, if you've seen it. There's a scene in the
movie where they're trying to connect
the identity of the hostages by putting together paper shreds of their faces. Me interpreting
that, I want to use the song title "Fix You"
by shredding the type into long pieces of paper and then have
it look like someone is fixing them by putting them back together,
if that makes sense. The best thing about
these music posters is that their interpretation
is entirely up to you. There's no right or wrong. Your interpretation could
be different to mine, and honestly, that's the
best thing about music. There's something in it for
everyone, don't you think? With that said, I want to
hop onto Pinterest for a quick minute and start gathering references
for my poster. I want to start off by
typing "paper shred art". I know this is a popular craft, so I'm just hoping to
find something that's visually striking to
help inspire me, maybe. [MUSIC] I also want to try typing "paper shred typography" just to see if anyone's toyed with
this idea before, and that could help me visualize what that would
typically look like. [MUSIC] This is what I came up with when I went through
Pinterest and I just pulled out as many
references as I can to reflect the idea
that I have in mind. What I have in mind is exactly like the reference
in the middle here, where I would cut
up the type, very, very simple type toys
and cut it up into these shreds where
they become visible, separate paper
shreds, if you will. Then I'm imagining that I want
it to be really colorful, like the colorful
references over here. I like really the
idea of having it, each paper shred like a
pop of color somehow, and then they would animate and move in together and
formulate the word at the end. This interpretation
is completely subjective and it's up
to everyone and how they feel about a
certain song and how their mind conveys that
into a visual composition. This is just my visual
interpretation and I think what really helped me from the beginning is that
movie reference. That just gave me a very clear
guide on what to look for. Your references don't
have to come directly from Pinterest or the Internet. It can be a movie you saw, can be a park you went to, can be another song you heard. It can be from a
book cover you saw. The sky is really the limit. Yeah, I think I'm
just ready to take this mood board and start
designing my poster. [MUSIC]
4. Design Your Poster: [MUSIC] Now that
I've picked my song, and in my case,
it's the song title and not a part of the lyrics, now I can start
designing my poster. I always want to make sure that my mood board is
somewhere next to me, either printed or opened
in another window. Just something that has quick access so I can
always refresh my mind, and I can always
refer back to it. You want to jump into
Illustrator and make new file, and we just want to set the
music poster into an A4 size. So that's 21 centimeters
by 21.7 or millimeters, whichever you feel
comfortable working in, and just rename it to
whatever you want to name it. I'm just going to name
it music poster for now, and click "Enter", and here go, we have our artboard ready. The first thing
that I want to do is just work in black and white, and then we're going
to add color later. But as I always say in
all of my other classes, working black and white is
so important just because you can see the skeleton of
whatever you're designing, and then adding color later
will really bring it out, so that's what you want
to start out with first. Now, my song title is Fix You, so the first thing
that I want to do is just type out the
word right now. I'm just going to go to Type, convert to point type, and really make this thick, and then I'm just going
to go to Command T, it's going to bring me
the Character panel, and I'm just going to
pick a random font, just a nice neutral bold
font, like maybe Impact. I don't really like to
stress on the font choice, especially with
music posters and typography because you're going to manipulate the font anyways, so it doesn't really
matter which font you use just as long as
it's a good base. I always like to start with
something that's neutral, bold, and it's
easy to work with. What I want to do is start taking each character,
each letter, and start relaying
it out on my poster, and I want it to really
fill out the entire poster. I'm just going to break
this apart right now. Then I want to start out by
playing with the sizes maybe. I'm just going to play
around with each letter. Maybe play around with the
scale, move it up a bit, move it below it
until the letters fit the poster in a
well-balanced way and then we'll move
on to the next step. For example, I want
to bring up the U a little bit here so
what I'm going to do is just going to press A, and then select a half
top part of the U, and then just press
Shift and drag it up with my top arrow, so bars of the U can
really keep going up and fill that
space for me without distorting the bottom
part of the U. You watched what I
did right there, and it's just all basically
pulling anchor points, pulling them up,
pulling them down, making letters a bit thick, playing around with the
proportions, the ratios. Don't be afraid to
really go crazy, you're creating an experimental
typographic poster. It's meant to really expand, stretch your imagination, so break the rules if you will. It's meant to really
push your boundaries and really test what
you can do with this. This is what I wanted to do, is just basically fit
all of these letters, space them out, squeeze them in, tighten all the spaces until I reach
something that I like, and it looks like one
cohesive block, if you will. There's so many ways
you can do this, you don't have to do
this approach only, but for the sake of this class, I'm showing you what I'm doing
with today's song title. Now I'm going to
move on to the next step where I'm going to start shredding these letters and basically moving them
around as if someone's trying to put the pieces
back together and fix them. What I want to do is, I want to take a copy of my artboard so I can go back to the original
step if I need to, but always make a copy of everything just so you
don't lose your work, and of course save your work. What I want to do
now is I'm going to go to my Line Segment tool here, and I'm going to draw a line but I won't have any
stroke color to it. I'm just going to
copy this line and moving it around just
a little bit, there, and I'm just going to press
Command D and it's going to repeat those shreds
of lines all across. You want to group all of
the little stroke lines, and then select all, and then go to Pathfinder
and press "Divide", and that's just going to cut up everything up into
these little shreds. Now you want to ungroup them, and as you can see, they're now individual
little shreds of lines. I'm just going to make the
size of this a little bit smaller because when we
move the lines up and down, and here and there, it's going to hit the corners. I think that's good for now. Let's just play and see. I'm going to experiment
right here with you. If I move this line a bit up, and this one a little bit down, and just start playing around with how these lines formulates. Somehow, this is okay with
me for the time being, and now I just want to start
adding some color to it. I'm just going to create like I have color palette here and
see what we can play with. I'm thinking, I want
it to be really colorful just so these
lines can really standout, and the background
can be a little bit darker so the
colors can pop out. Now that I've
shredded the pieces, what I'm trying to do now
is just make sure there's a fine line between it
looking like a cool poster, but it not being legible. Right now I'm just
trying to space out the letters little bit, maybe play around
with the lines just so Fix You can still be legible, maybe not at first glance, but when you look at
it really closely. That's the goal I'm
trying to achieve. I'm just going to keep playing
around with these lines until I reach a result
that I really like. I just play around
with the colors, and I think I like this
color combo more than this, and it's more legible this way, and I just want to
show you that trick because it will save
you a lot of time. If you want to change colors and see what it looks like without having to select all of them, you just want to group
this poster for example, and then click on it, go to Edit Colors,
Recolor Artwork. Then you have all the colors in the selection
that you've made, and you just can click
on something and then play around with the colors and see
what they look like, or rearrange the colors. If you want the orange to
be instead of the red, you can rearrange them until
you like how it looks. This is just a much faster
and more efficient way than selecting each color and then
seeing what they look like. I think I like this option
a lot more than this one. I think the high contrast here is making it a little
bit harder to read. When I spaced out the
letters a little bit, it did show a lot more, but I just want to play around
with it a little bit more. Maybe refine it a little bit, tweak it here and there, and then we can move
on to the next part. I like this composition so far, and then just give it a
little bit of kick and spice. I just want to add
little bit of pieces of paper that are just flying about here as if they were
cut off with the rest. I'm just going to place
them randomly all over. Now that you're happy
with what you have here, what I want to do is
write the song title, and the artist's name, and we're going to
put that in there. I want it to be in a
very neutral font, just so it doesn't clash
with everything else , and there we go. I like that it looks like
paper shreds at first, but when you look closely, you'll find the
words fix and you, and it does fit well with
how I interpreted it in the beginning of how someone is trying to
put pieces together. You can stop here and be very proud of yourself
that you just created this beautiful still
typographic music poster. I remember I did so
many still posters before I could learn
how to animate them, so that's perfectly fine. However, if you're eager to
learn how to animate it, or you're primarily
well-versed in After Effects and you're
comfortable using it, then I'll show you in
the next lesson how to prepare your file
for After Effects, and how to add some final
touches here and there to add some flair and
personality to the poster. I'll see you in the next lesson.
5. Prepare Your File: [MUSIC] Already right, so this is where we left
off from our last lesson. Now I want to show
you how to prepare your file for After Effects. After Effects works with
layers and right now our illustrator file is all
into one combined layer here. What we want to do is
copy and paste each of these paper shreds into an individual layer so we
can be able to move them, play around with them and
do everything with them. I'm going to start
with my background here's just like that. Then cut it out, command
X and then go down here, create new layer and paste
that in its place so "Shift, command, V" and
just drag it below. There we go. Then I want to take one of the
paper shreds here, "Command X" onto a new layer, paste in its place
and simple as that. I'm just going to
repeat that for all the other layers until we have every single thing in
its own separate layer. That's pretty much it. As you can see everything now is on its own individual
layer and that's just going to make our
lives so much easier. I just renamed the layers
for a fix you, Coldplay, and my background as BG just so I can find them
easily when I'm animating. There's one final step, I just want to export
this to Photoshop because I want to add
some paper texture to these paper shreds
and some shadows beneath them just to make it
look a bit more realistic, make it look a bit
more interesting, have some dimension
and complexity to it. But you don't have
to do this step. You can just export
this straight onto After Effects
if you'd like, depending on your poster, but this is what I
want to do in my case. I'm just going to go to File, Export, Export as, and I'm just going to
leave it named as it is and for the format I'm just going to choose
Photoshop and export. Make sure it's clicked on
right layers not flat image so it can preserve all of our layers here
and click "Okay". That's it. You want to open
your Photoshop file that we saved from Illustrator
and you want to grab any paper
texture like this. I just typed in on Google, free paper texture and this
is what came up there. Tons like this
online. No problem. Now, what I want to
do is I want to mask this paper texture onto these letters and there's
a very easy way to do this if this were a still
poster and that's just to copy all of your layers
over here and paste them, and group those and
then merge them. Then you'd just
click on the "Paper texture" and select
this layer over here, the Group 1 by clicking Command and then pressing on
this Window and then just mask it from here and then click "Linear burn"
and that's it. However, because
we're animating this, I want the paper texture to be individually linked
to each paper shred. This is perfect
for still poster, but if we want to animate it, we're going to do
a little bit of a tedious task over here by individually linking or masking this texture onto each layer. This is how we're
going to do that. I'm just going to copy and
paste my paper texture and bring it down to the first layer that I
have here, Layer 56. I'm going to hide the
copied one on top. I'm going to select
my paper texture and then command select
the layer beneath it, which is this guy right here. Then I'm going to
click "Add layer mask" and that's going to
mask this guy over here. I want to select both
of these layers so the paper texture layer and the original
vector file layer, select both of those, right-click and
then click "Merge layers" That's just going
to be one combined layer, my vector layer, and my paper texture layer. Then I want to add
some shadows to it so I'm just
going to go to add layer style down at fx
and click "Drop shadow". I want to select the color of
the drop shadow as close as possible to the
background color just so it can look like it popped
off of the background. I'm just going to make it a
bit darker and play around with the distance and the
spread and that's it. You have one combined layer
of the paper texture, the vector, and the shadow. I'm just going to
repeat this process all throughout all these layers. But for the effects, I can just right-click
and click "Copy Layer Style" and then if I were to
go to the layer underneath, which is this guy right here, I'd right-click
"Paste Layer Style", and I'd have the exact
shadow properties as the one above it. I'm just going to
repeat this step for all these layers and have these individual paper textures and shadows for all of them and then they'd be ready for
animation on After Effects. That's pretty much it.
You see how that added a lot more complexity and
realism to the poster. This is just something
super simple and easy you can do to level up
your poster designs. Now each one of these layers
are individually selected, and they're good to go for After Effects to animate
them individually. I'm just going to save this and I'll see you
in After Effects.
6. Animate Your Poster: You want to go ahead and open
Adobe After Effects. This is the first thing
that you're going to see. What you want to do is press "Command I" to import your file. You want to import it as
composition-retain layer sizes, and that's just going to retain all the layers that
we did on Photoshop. Then make sure it's clicked on editable layer styles,
and click "Okay". Then you want to
just double-click on where it says
composition next to it. It's just going to come up in your timeline
here down below. You want to go to
the View and just click "Fit" so you
can see everything. Now, right now, my composition
is set to eight seconds, which is a good duration. If I need to change it later, I could just go to Composition, Composition Settings,
and you could just enter the number of seconds
you want to as duration. But I'm going to keep it
at eight seconds for now. My idea for this
composition is that I want all these papers shreds
to start in the middle, overlapped and stacked
like a messy mess. Then spread out to the edges
and then come back into the middle and
then spread out to the where the word is going
to formulate in the end, so as if someone is looking
through shreds of paper trying to find the right one
to put together and whatnot. The basic techniques
that I'm going to show you today is just playing around with keyframes
of positions and rotations. We're just going to change
their positions and rotate the pieces so they're not perfectly straight all the time. The first thing that
I'm going to do is take my playhead
here and place it all the way at the eighth
second where I want the animation to end at. I want this to be
the final result. Then I'm going to
take my layers here. I'm going to store
it at this one over here and go all the
way at the end, press "Shift" and have
them all selected. Then I'm going to hit a
shortcut on my keyboard for P, P for position. Then just click on the
stopwatch at any layer. That's just going
to put keyframes on all my layers here
at the eighth second, telling it this is where
I want it to end at. Then I'm going to
do the same thing, but this time I'm
going to press "R" for rotation and just click
on the stopwatch. This also tells
us this is what I want the rotation to end at. Then I'm going to
take my playhead all the way to the beginning now where I'm going to start to mess them up and bring
them all to the middle. While they're all selected, I'm just going to press "P"
again and then click "Out", so I can de-select
all the layers. I'm going to go to my
first layer over here, which is this guy over
here. There we go. I wanted to start in the
middle of the poster. While I'm pressing the layer, I'm just going to drag
it out to the middle. Then if I want to change
its rotation and not have it at its exact
rotation here, I'm just going to press "R" and where it has the
property for the degrees, I'm just going to change the rotation and make it a
little bit slanted like that. I'm just going to move on and do the same exact thing
for all the layers. My second layer here is the long blue shred of paper
on the very right here. If I drag it to the
middle and then press "R" and rotate it a little bit and
press my stopwatch, I'm just going to
make my resolution to a quarter, not full, just so this can easily
preview quicker because this is quite a heavy file and we don't need to see it at
full resolution right now. If I press my spacebar
right now just to preview what happens when
I place those keyframes, this is what it's
going to look like. That's just the gist
of the animation. We're just going
to keep repeating these steps for all
of the layers here, just putting them
all in the middle first and then having them span out till the very end where
it originally looks like. I'm just going to go
ahead and do that. That's basically it. As you can see, just they all start out messy, just to them randomly,
kept rotating, kept changing positions
until it looks like a nice random
mess, if you will. Then they just overlap each other until they get
to the very end here. Now, if you'll notice, I haven't touched Fix You or Coldplay. I'm going to leave these
till the very end. I just want to turn
them off for now by clicking on the eye
here at the very left. Now, this is all
unwell and we can just call it a day from here. But I want to give it a
little bit of a kick and a spice and give
it a little bit of a nice seamless transition. I think right about maybe
the fifth second here, what I wanted to do is I want to again select all my layers, hit "P", select out. Right about here,
I want to actually change their positions
again and make them scatter around to the edges a little bit before they come in again to
formulate the word. For example, I'm just going
to take this one over here, which is the blue one here. I just want to push
it up a bit, like so. I just want to repeat this
for the rest of the layers, scatter them about
towards the edges. Then we'll see what
that looks like. You see they started out but shuffled and
then they scatter a bit to the edges and then come back again and
formulate the word. I want to do this
same thing again, but I'm going to
go to second 6:15 right before it reaches
to the word again. I want to do the same
exact exercise again, but this time instead of
scatter them to the edges, I want to bring
them a little bit closer to the middle
just so we can have an even more seamless
transition when it goes back into its
original formation again. I'm just going to again play around with
the positions here. Let's give this a preview. You see the hesitation a little bit when it
goes out to the edges right here and then
collects back in the middle and then
goes back out again. I just want to drag these middle key from second 6:15-6:00. I'm just going to select all
of them and track them out. Now as I'm looking at it, I feel like it's a little bit too slow for me
at the beginning. I just want to speed
it up a little bit. What we can do to fix that is
maybe add the third second. I can just drag all my keyframes here and track them out
to the third second. That's much better. Something else that I'm
noticing is that there's not enough time at the end to
actually look at the word, it just starts back up again. I want actually the end
results here to not end at the last second that
may be at the sixth second. There is at least time, two seconds at the end
to look at the word. I'm just going to drag
all my final keyframes here and just drag them out
here to the sixth second. Then I can go to the fourth
second here and take all of the penultimate keyframes
and drag them right here. At least they're just
spaced out like that. Now that I'm looking at it, I'm thinking we can have a few random paper
shreds here and there, and at the very last second
leader than other pieces, just so they don't all
end at the same time. It'll add a bit of visual
interests to the animation. Then see what that looks like. I'm thinking I want to just prolong this
composition just a couple more seconds because it's not staying as long as I'd
like it to be at the end, so I'm just going to
make it to 10 seconds. You're going to find
that these blue bars for the layers are cut off
at the eighth second. I'm just going to select all, and just drag them out. That way it can stay beyond
the eight seconds and just pause before it
starts to back up again. I'm happy with that. I just want to add one final little tweak where
the paper shreds move about ever so slightly just
before the composition ends, and I would place that right about the seventh second here, just before the composition
ends at the eighth second. What I'm going to do is
select all my layers, and then make sure it's
on P. Then I'm going to go to the diamond at the left. Then I'm just going to place
all my keyframes here. Then the same thing with R, click on the diamond. Then you want to go to
the seventh second here, right before it just comes
about to the word again. I just want to play around with these shreds
a little bit more, and maybe bring them up a bit, just a very slight movement,
nothing too pronounced. I want it to be a
very subtle shuffle. I'm just moving it
one point above, one point under, so that it almost
looks like Fix You, but not quite yet, just until the very last
second it looks like Fix You. Then let's see what
that looks like. That looks good. Now a top tip to do for something
like this is Easy Ease. I'm going to select all of my keyframes here all
the way to the top. I'm going to go
to ''Animation'', ''Keyframe Assistant'',
and then ''Easy Ease''. That's just going to
literally ease out all of the smooth transitions, and it slows it down
at certain parts and then speeds back up again
to its normal speeds. It just makes things look a lot softer and not too much
of a rigid movement. You see what a world of a
difference that just made. You see that pause and that smooth transition all from Easy Ease,
which is perfect. Last but not least is our
Coldplay and Fix You names. We had hidden them
in the beginning. I'm just going to unhide them
now by clicking on the eye. What I'm going to do
is that I want to push their positions at the beginning away
from the poster. For Coldplay, I'm
just going to drag it down so it's not visible. For Fix You, I'm going to drag it up. That's where they're
going to be for the majority of the
poster animation. Then I'm just going to
click on the stopwatch. Then I'm going to go to maybe right about here in the middle of the seventh
and the eighth second. I'm going to click on
the diamonds again, just to tell it that
this is where I still want it to be at the
seventh and a half second. Then at the ninth second, I'm going to have Fix
You come down here, and then Coldplay come up here. They're just going
to appear just as the poster is
finally formulated, and I'm just going to
just push in there. Let's see what that looks like. That's pretty much it. We are done with this animation. That is the idea
that I had for it. I know this may seem like a lot, but it's just because we have a lot of layers going on here. But this is all just placing keyframes of positions
and rotations, and just changing them around
as we go along at the time. The basic techniques
here are super-easy and easily transferable onto
anything you'll do later on. Imagine you have only
like five or six layers here and you're just changing their positions
through rotations to have that effect at the end. I'm just going to collapse
all my layers here. You want to click out and just shortcut on your
keyboard, press ''U''. That's just going to collapse all of the layers nice and neat. You don't have to
do it individually. You can do the same thing, just press ''U'' again to
expand them. There you go. I think we're ready
to export this file. You just want to go to ''File'', ''Export'', ''Add
to Render Queue''. Then this window is
going to come up here. We want to go to ''Lossless'', next to ''Output Module'', and double-click on that, then we go to
''Format Options'', and I believe the default
will be animation. You just want to
drop down that menu. I like to use Apple ProRes
422 or high-quality, it's just a higher
data version quality, and then we're going
to compress it later. I'm going to go ahead
and click that, and click "Okay",
and "Okay" again. Then you have here
the option to save it as whatever name you want to name it and wherever
you want to save it as. I'm just going to save
it to my desktop, and click "Save".
That's pretty much it. We want to go to that
pretty little button over here and click "Render". Now my friend we wait. You're going to hear that beautiful
sound of rendering. Here we go. Love that sound. You just want to save this. I'm just going to go to my
desktop here and you're going to find the
file as an MOV file, which is a typical
format for QuickTime. But this is usually a
very heavy file format, so what I like to do is
head over to Handbrake, and this is free to use, free to download off of Google
for both Mac and Windows. It basically just
compresses any videos to MP4 and there are tons of other options
that you can play with. But I'm just going to drag
it into the window here, and it's just going
to be scanning it. You can save it as whatever
name you want to save it as. Make sure you put it to the destination that
you want to put it as. It's going to save it as an MP4, which retains the same
high-quality of the video, but just a very
smaller file size. You're going to go ahead
and click "Start". That's it. You're done. You can just preview the file. Everything is good to go. We're done.
7. Class Project: [MUSIC] It's time for
your class project. You have one of two options. You can either recreate
and reinterpret the song that I've done
for today's poster, or you can pick your own song and create your
own poster for it, whether it's the song title or a part of the lyrics,
it's up to you. I'll be uploading
in the resources for you this guide to picking a song and guided questions on how you can transform
that visually. I'll be picking at your brain with some questions
that will spark certain images,
references, emotions, ideas that will help you
make that connection with the song title and hopefully
a poster idea for it. Feel free to publish it as a still poster or
an animated one. It's completely up to you, whatever you feel
comfortable in. Make sure your poster
is in A4 size, which is 21 by 29.7 centimeters. If you'll animate it
then export it as a MP4 uploaded to either
Vimeo or YouTube. In the class project, paste that video link
in that section. Also include the artist's name and the song title
in your poster. Don't forget to just
have fun with it. Make it striking, make it crazy, make it minimal, it's up to you. When you're done, I highly
encourage you to share it in the class project
gallery so that I can see it along with
everybody else. If you need any
help, just ask me, I'll be more than happy to
answer any of your questions. That's it. I can't wait
to see your posters. [MUSIC]
8. Final Thoughts: [MUSIC] On a final note, I want to leave you the
key key from this class. First one is to pick a song title or part
of the lyrics that's relatively short
enough to give you enough room to
experiment the type. But also something that holds meaning so it can help
inspire you create an interesting
visual composition that reflects that meaning. Then you want to
plot references that help bring your idea to life. This can be anything
from movie references, or nature, or
illustrations, etc. Anything visual that
can help you transform this idea into a tangible,
visual interests. When designing your poster, don't be afraid to
experiment with a type. Make it big, make it condensed, scale it up, scale it down, change its fonts, any basic tools from Illustrator
will help you do so. In light of that being said, when you're done with the
overall vector composition, I highly encourage you
to add some textures, shadows, highlights if it's
appropriate for your song. These little details will
help take your boosters to the next level and add
some complexity to it. Then when you're done
and ready to animate, make sure you layered your
file on Illustrator or Photoshop so you can easily play and move them around
for animation. Then head-on to After
Effects and use some basic techniques
like you learned earlier to animate your poster. Or if you're feeling
more adventurous and confident with the program, then by all means, give it your best shot. Finally, just remember to have fun, experiment and explore. Treat this class as
a palate cleanser in-between your
work or schoolwork. It's meant to serve you
as a creative exercise that I personally use on a regular basis to expand
my visual vocabulary. Use these posters to build up your portfolio or as a tool to inspire you for
your next project. That's pretty much it. Good luck. [MUSIC]
9. Thank You: [MUSIC] Thank you so much for
taking this class. I really hope you enjoyed it just as much as I had making it. If you found this class
helpful or interesting or fun, please let me know
what you thought of it in the reviews as it could help someone else know what
to expect from this class. I'll be uploading all of my previous music posters down below for your reference to help inspire you or
guide you or just giving you an idea of how
you can go about this. When you feel refreshed
and inspired again, I'd encourage you to hop
onto my other classes, whether it's my logo design
class for how to create a unique word mark or if you're
a packaging enthusiastic, then I'd recommend taking my packaging design class
where I walk you through my entire detailed
process of how I re-brand a famous
Swiss chocolate bar. You may or may not get
hungry after that class, you have been warned. Also, feel free to follow me or tag me in your
work on Instagram, I'd love to see it, I'd love to connect, I'd love to give you
feedback or just chat or exchange
music playlists. I'm always on the lookout
for new music anyway. Thank you again and I'll
see you on the next one. [MUSIC]
Khadija El Sharawy, Graphic Designer & Storyteller
