Intro to Adobe After Effects: Motion Design for Beginners

1. Intro: [MUSIC] Listen, I know there's already a lot of After Effects tutorials, and intro courses out there. Here's why this one is different. This course isn't geared towards learning After Effects for visual effects, or making goofy Instagram edit. I'm going to be walking you through the fundamentals of After Effects, especially for motion design. I'm going to teach you everything that I wish I knew when I was starting out. I'm Chris. I've been a professional motion designer for the last 10 years, and I've been working in After Effects for longer than that. I currently am a full-time animation director for an agency called Authors. I've worked on all shapes and sizes of projects from direct client, agency work, freelance, you name it. I've also been sharing educational content around After Effects. Basically, I like After Effects, I like motion design and I'm here to make your life better. [MUSIC] In this class, I'm going to be teaching you how to make this animation, which I specifically designed to teach you the fundamentals, and the principles that you'll use throughout the rest of your motion design career. I want to break down the After Effects interface for you. Show you exactly how to use it, show you it's not that scary, but I also want to teach you why most beginner animations are really stiff and bad. I'll be showing you things that a lot of people wait, until way too long into their career to really learn. With everything we do, I'll be walking you through step-by-step, so you can recreate this and learn for yourself how to make work look like this, and to take something simple, but make it look very professional and polished and well executed. Now that you're fully brought in, let's get over into After Effects. [MUSIC] 2. Our Class Project: [MUSIC] Before we jump into everything, I'm going to tell you a little bit about the class project for this series. We'll be creating an animated logo reveal that looks something like this. You can reveal your own logo, you can reveal some text or whatever you want. It's beginner friendly but not beginner quality. It has smooth and snappy motion, which comes from using the principles in animation, it has transitions between shapes, it uses shape layers, which you'll be using a lot in After Effects and it has an extra layer of compositing which adds polish and lighting and makes it look way more pro than you might feel like you are. We'll be building this from scratch in After Effects, so there's no project files, nothing you need to download. As long as you have After Effects installed, you'll be able to recreate this because I'm going to walk through it step-by-step and show you how. Now before we begin one last time, just remember you're learning a new software and that is hard to do. There's going to be times where you might have to pause, you might have to rewind and that is okay. That's actually a great way to learn. You should try to pause and understand what you're doing as I'm teaching, and don't get frustrated if you get behind or if you have to try things more than once. If you get stuck, Google is your friend, I'm also your friend, we'll figure it out together. One last pro tip on how to learn stuff like this, something that really helped me was doing tutorials twice. The first time I would try to recreate what the teacher was doing and the second time I would try to apply the same things to my own idea. It would stretch my brain a little bit and since I was already familiar with what was going on, I'd be able to learn a lot better that way. That being said, I'll be walking you through how to create this specific animation, but feel free to make changes as you want. [MUSIC] 3. The After Effects Interface: You ready to learn some After Effects? [MUSIC] We'll talk over in and we're going to go ahead and boot up After Effects. [MUSIC] Once it's done loading, you should get a splash screen menu. They'll have something like this. I'm using After Effects 2021 for using something slightly different. Don't worry, it shouldn't really affect what we're doing today. If you've already opened up After Effects and your interface already looks different than this, we're going to go ahead and reset our workspace to the default by clicking up here, clicking this little dooblydoo, and click "Reset" to save the layout. Then it should look something like this. Over here we have the project window. This is where everything that you use in your project is going to stay. You'll have your images, you will have video, you'll have your compositions which we'll learn about later. It's all going to live in this panel. Now inside a project, you create what is called a composition. You can do that here at the beginning of the project by clicking "New Composition", or later on, you can go down here to this little button down here and click "Create a New Composition." This is where all of your animation is going to happen. It's like a little tiny mini-project inside your main project. You can have lots of these inside one project and you will often use a lot of them. We're going to go ahead and set the settings here. We're going to call this My First Animation. We're going to make sure the width and height are set to 1080 by 1080, we're going to set the frame rate to 24 frames per second. The start time code, we'll leave it at zero, and the duration, we're going to just make this 10 seconds by changing here and make sure this matches here. The last thing, background color, make sure yours is set to black. That won't really affect anything. But if yours is different, it might look different than mine and you might get confused. Now we have a composition. Our composition shows up here in the composition viewer, and then we have down here what is called the timeline. With everything, you can click and drag and move these things around. But this timeline space is where your layers for your composition will go. Everything that is in here is going to show up, up here. Now, what does that mean? I'll show you. We're going to go ahead and create a text layer by right-clicking in here, clicking "New" and "Text". Then we're going to type your name. My name happens to be Chris Zachary, but your name probably is not that so you should type something else. We have now a text layer that shows up here, and you can adjust your text settings over here in the character panel. This is another area of After Effects where you can have all these different settings. The character panel is where you adjust your text. Paragraph, you can left, center or right align and then adjust your text type. We're going to make this bold Helvetica and make it look nice. Now we have a nice clean text layer. We're going to create a background layer now. If we right-click, we do new shape layer and it's going to create a blank shape layer. Now a shape layer is just a container for shapes, and I'll show you what that means by clicking this rectangle tool up here, and this area is called the toolbar and it's where your tools are. Excuse me, dog. If you hold "Shift", it'll make a square. We're going to draw out a nice big rectangle. Now, this isn't a perfect background yet, but we're going to make it that. If we click our shape layer, we can go up here and we can change our fill color to something that is nice and blue. Now we have a blue box and it currently is blocking our text. This is how After Effects works. It uses layers that are stacked in a certain area and then layer on top of each other where you see them up here in the composition window. This layer order, this 1,2, it goes from top to bottom and it's very important. Anything that is underneath in the timeline will be underneath in the viewer. If that sounds confusing, don't worry about it. If you just poke around an After Effects, if you just follow through this course, it will make sense pretty quickly and you'll start to get more familiar with this currently unfamiliar territory. Now that we have this rough background layer, if we hit "Enter" while the layer is selected, we can rename it, Background. As you can see inside this shape layer, there is the contents and there's this rectangle. This rectangle is this rectangle. If we twirl down, we can see the settings of the rectangle. Here inside rectangle path, we have this size, and I'm going to go ahead and change this size to 1080 by 1080. If you remember, we set our composition, our project to be 1080 by 1080. This makes it the same size as the background. Then we're going to go down here into the transform for rectangle 1. This is basically the position settings for this actual box. We're going to go ahead and set the position to be 0, and then tab over, hit tab to go to the next property and hit 0 again, hit "Enter" to close that, and you'll see our rectangle perfectly fits the background. That might have been a lot of work to get a simple background in here, but I wanted to show you how shape layers can have a shape inside them, and then the shape has its own settings, and then the layer itself has its own settings. If we look at this text layer, we're going to go ahead and do our first animation. We'll twirl down into the transform properties here. We can see we have scale, which adjusts the scale of the layer. We have position, we have the y position on this side and the x position on this side. We have rotation, and we have opacity, which shows the opacity. I'm going to reset all of those, so it goes back to the beginning. We're going to set some keyframes. What are keyframes? Keyframes are how you animate in After Effects. It's basically a little shape that says, at this point in time, equal this value. Now, what does that actually mean? I'll show you. If we go down into our composition, we see this play head here. Now this scrolls across time. Here we're at zero seconds. Here we are at three seconds. You can see that right here, and you can see that right here. You can also see that right here. I'm going to go to one second here, and I'm going to click this little stopwatch next to scale. Clicking that stopwatch turns on animation for that layer. Now we have a little diamond shape that showed up right here at one second that says the scale equals 100 percent. Now if we go ahead to two seconds and we drag this up to say 191, whatever number you pick, it will automatically create another keyframe that says at two seconds equal 191. Now if we drag between these, you can see the After Effects animates the scale between 100 and 191. If we grab our play head, a little play head bar here, and drag it to the beginning, we can hit spacebar. You have just animated your first animation. I know this seems a little simple, but it's really all that there is in After Effects. There's a lot of obviously additional complexities and things that we'll continue to learn and things that you will be learning for the next 10 years. But the essential basics of After Effects are layers and keyframes and saying, do this at this time, then do this at this time. One last thing before we stop talking about interface, this is the most important thing that I'm going to show you today and the most important thing that you'll learn in the rest of this series, and that is the graph editor. If we click this little icon here, we see this weird-looking area called the graph editor. Now the graph editor is how you take your animation from being stiff and ugly to being smooth and professional. Now, this might look a little weird and scary and all this stuff just feels bizarre. But don't worry, I'm going to show you how to use the graph editor and exactly how to make your animations feel smooth in a later video. Let's recap. We learned about the basics of After Effects. We learned about the workspace. We learned about the project panel, where you store everything, the composition window where everything shows up and the timeline where you animate and make all your layers. Then there's all the different toolbars and panels throughout. That's what you need to know. You also created your very first After Effects animation, so congratulations. If you want to keep clicking around and familiarizing yourself with the interface, feel free to do that. You could try animating something like the text position, having it go off-screen and then onscreen, something like that. But if you're ready, let's head over into the next video where we're going to start working on our class project. 4. Starting Animation: It's time to get started on the class project [MUSIC]. Back in After Effects, we're going to go ahead and save our file. If you haven't done that already, you can do that by going to File, Save or Command S, Control S, the normal stuff. We're going to navigate to where you want to save it. I'm just going to plop this on my desktop. I'm going to call it my first animation and hit "Enter" or "Save". Now it's very important to always save your files because After Effects can crash and it will crash, and you don't want to lose a lot of work. So make sure you're always hitting "Control S" or "Command S" to save things. Remember how I told you that you can make multiple compositions. Well, here we're going to go ahead and create another composition by clicking this button. We're going to call it [NOISE] "Logo Reveal." We're going to use the same settings as before, 1080 by 1080, 24 frames per second, and ten seconds long, and hit "Okay". Now you should see both my first animation in Logo Reveal in your project. I also have this old project folder right here, which you shouldn't have in yours. Don't worry if yours looks different, mine just has my example project that I did earlier. Now we have Logo Reveal and my first animation. We're going to go ahead and double-click, make sure logo reveal is selected down here. We can toggle back and forth between these. We want ours to be this blank new composition. The first thing we're going to do is create a background layer like before. I'm going to show you a quicker way to do it by going to new shape layer. Once you have this selected, you can go up to the rectangle tool and double-click on the rectangle. That will create a shape that fills the whole background. You're probably like," why didn't you show me that earlier?" It's because I wanted you to learn. Get over it. We're going to rename this layer to background by hitting" Enter", hit "Enter" to confirm that and we have our background. The next step we're going to add a circle, or ball, or hero shape. If you look at our finished example here, we have a circle in the middle. It flies over, it turns into a square, and then it reveals our logo. Let's go ahead and create a circle by right-clicking new shape layer, just like before. We're going to name this layer hero shape. Hit "Enter". Then we're going to go up here and we're going to create a rectangle. Now, why would you create a rectangle to make a circle? I'm going to show you by adjusting the rectangle settings. If we twirl down here into the contents rectangle path, we see the size. We're going to go ahead and drag this down, and let's type in maybe 200. Since these are linked, it will automatically set both. We're going to change our fill to a light blue color like this. Now you might be saying that is the worst circle I've ever seen. It is a bad circle, but that's because we have not yet adjusted the roundness. If we drag this roundness up, we will get a circle. It rounds those corners out and we have a rectangle that is actually a circle. The reason we're doing that is because later on, we're going to transform this circle into a rectangle again. If we do it this way with that roundness setting, it's easy to animate between those shapes. We have a shape, we have a background, let's start to animate. Here I'm going to teach you a couple of keyboard shortcuts which are important to learn as you go. Don't worry, if you keep working, they will become muscle memory eventually. We're going to hit "S and that stands for Scale. What we want this to do, if you look at the beginning example, it scales up from zero, our circle becomes a big circle. We're going to go here and we want this to scale in probably over 12 frames. We'll go in here to about the 12. We're going to click the stopwatch to set a keyframe as you remember and we'll scroll back here and we're going to change this 100 to zero. Now if we hit Spacebar to play, [NOISE] oh yeah, we got an animation. Our circle now scales up from zero to 100 percent. Another thing I'm going to show you is you can drag this bar is called the work area. You can drag this in so your preview will play only during that time. It keeps it from playing through the full 10 seconds. You can set this little work area and adjust that as you go. Now that our shape is scaling, we're going to animate the Position. Let's start animating the position by clicking the stopwatch on the Position property. We're going to go ahead to maybe here. We're going to hold "Shift" and drag our layer over to the side. That'll create another keyframe. Now we can drag between, we can see, we scale up, we slide over. Let's go forward about another second. We can drag our ball over to the other side of the frame. That shows you can move things around up here, or you can move them around with these numbers down here. Now we have three Keyframes. If you hit "U" and [NOISE] U again, you can see all of your Keyframes that are currently set. We have an animation where balls scales up and moves from left to right. Why does this look so stiff and disgusting and ugly? That's because we have not done any easing. What is easing? Easing is how you smooth the motion in an animation. It's also the difference between poo poo garbage beginner animation that looks like this and very polished, beautiful, smooth animation that looks like this. How do you do that? Click on the next video and I'll show you. 5. The Graph Editor & Morphing Shapes: In this video, I'm going to show you the secret to make your animation feel nice and smooth instead of stiff and ugly like this. I'm also going to show you how to transition from this ball into a square. Let's get to it. [MUSIC] We left off with our balls scaling and going side to side like this. But our animation still looks gross and ugly. We're going to fix that by going into the graph editor. So "click here", make sure you have one of your key frames or your position or your scale selected, and "click" on this button to go into the graph editor. You'll see this mysterious chart. Now what does the graph editor do? If you press the "plus" and " minus" key on your keyboard, you can zoom in and out, and if you don't see anything, make sure you have one of your properties selected. We're going to look at the the scale property first, because it's simpler, it's only two key frames. We're going to see what's going on. If your view doesn't look like this, you might be looking at either the speed graph or the value graph. If you "right click", you can see that we have edit value graph and edit speed graph. I'm going to switch over to edit value graph, and you should see something like this. What we have is a visual representation of our animation. Right here, it is very mechanical straight line between zero and 100 percent, and that's why the ball feels like it's very rigid. If you hold out your hand in front of your face, just move it in front of your face back and forth, and notice how things move. It actually starts slow, goes fast, and then ends slow, and that is easing. Anything in the natural world doesn't move in that rigid, perfect same speed the entire time. It moves with this curve. Like with a slow in and slow out. That's what we can recreate using the graph editor. I'll show you how to do that. If you go in here and you "drag" to select both of these key frames, you can "right click", go down to key frame assistant and it goes off screen, but you'll see "easy ease",and that all of the sudden smoothes out our straight line. If we hit ''Play'', you'll see that that animation is actually pretty smooth now. So I'm going to "zoom out" using the minus key on my keyboard and drag our work area in so we don't see the rest of the animation. We'll zoom back in and hit ''Place''. You can see that a few times. Now we see that we have a smooth animation. You can drag these handles and adjust how that curve works. I actually want this to start fast, so It's going to go from zero to 50, really fast. Sorry about my dog. Then I'm going to drag this key frame. If you hold "shift", it'll stay flat. I'm going to drag this handle out so that it has a nice smooth finish. This animation should be something like this. It starts really fast and then it ends really slow, and if you hit ''Play'', you'll see that it does that. Congratulations, that's easy. That right there is the most important thing that you'll learn to do in after effects. If you can master the graph editor, if you can master these animation curves, you can make your animation feel very pro, while a lot of other people who start in animation don't learn this until way too late and It's the first thing that I look for when I'm reviewing someone's real whether or not to hire them for a project. All right. We're going to click the graph editor button to get out of that view. We're going to continue to use those shortcuts, the minus to zoom out. You can see now our key frames have this little hourglass shape. That just means it is no longer a linear key frame. A linear key frame is that robotic mechanical motion, and these nice hourglass key frames are smoothed key frames. As you can see, our scale is now smooth and our position is still ugly. Let's work on that. We're going to select position. We'll click here to go back into our graph editor. You're going to see another view that looks confusing. This is because we have our x motion. On the red line, is the left to right motion, and the green line is the up and down motion. Because we aren't moving up and down, it just stays flat and the red line is moving from one side to the other. We're actually going to "right click" here and go to the speed graph because it is going to be easier to see what we're doing. We're going to drag to select all of our key frames. Then you can go down here and hit this little button, which will do the easy ease curve setting again. If you click here, now you have smooth motion again, and this curve looks different than before. This one's a little harder to figure out, but I'm going to walk you through it. Real quick, if you click the graph editor button, you can see that now we have those smooth animation key frames and we have a result that looks better than it did before. This is the default easing. Again, this is where a lot of beginners stop. They learn, oh, linear key frames, bad, easy ease, good. That's a better place to be but if you want to be taken seriously, if you want to have animation that competes on any sort of professional level, you need to learn the graph editor. You can't use the default settings. You got to get into the graph editor and learn to tweak things. Let's go back into the graph editor. What do we want our motion to do? I want this ball to scale up, and then it moves to one side and then it moves to the other side. It's actually a drifting motion, goes really slow and then it moves faster the other side. The reason I'm acting things out with my hands isn't because I'm trying to show off my insane dance moves, it's because animation is all about feeling and the timing, and the spacing, and the flow of motion. It actually is very helpful to animate or to act out your motions with your hands or with your body, and then try to recreate that motion on the computer project. All right. Let's start tweaking these position key frames. I'm going to hit ''Space'', so this stops playing, and I want this to start really slow. I'm going to drag this out. Now what the heck does this do? This graph is showing the speed of our object. At the beginning, at this key frame that has no motion, so it's starting at zero and then it's speeding up, and at one second, it's at the fastest it will go. Then it's going slow again, and then it's speeding up and then going slow again. The more we pull these in and the more intensive a spike we have, the more intense the slow and then fast and then slow. You can picture that where it's right now, if we drag all of these yellow handles, we'll get these two mountain peaks here, and that will make our ball go slow, fast, slow, fast, slow. Let's hit ''Play'' and see if that works. It does. Okay. That's working a lot better and It's really exciting for me to be sharing this with you you I wish I learned the graph editor so much earlier in my after effects career because it might intimidate you, but just by pulling those yellow handles out, just by adjusting those curves a little bit, we have this animation that went from super ugly and robotic to really smooth and polished looking in just a few clicks. Keep messing around with it. If it feels scary, don't worry. If you need to re-do this section a few times, don't worry about that either. I really want you to nail this motion, nail the feeling of this before we go on because this is going to affect the rest of your after effects career. The last thing we're going to do here is we are going to transform our circle from a circle to a square. How are we going to do that? We're going to use the speed of motion to transition. This is actually one of my favorite transition techniques, and we're going to look for this fast point in the motion, and we're going to switch the shape while it's happening. You can trick someone's eyes by doing things like this where you can actually take one shape, and then while it's moving really fast, swap out a completely different shape, and it will feel right to your brain because it's happening during the motion. Techniques like this are used all the time in movies to hide edits during a whip pan. Also, if you've seen any of the transition videos on Instagram or tik tok or whatever, that's all just because you're cutting or you're swapping out an object during the fast part of motion, we still have the graph editor open over here, so I'm going to click here to go back into our animation. We're going to click this little toy leaderly and go into the contents, the rectangle path, and their roundness. I told you this was going to come back. It's right right. We can key frame any one of these properties. It doesn't just have to be the scale or rotation or whatever. We can set a key frame here on roundness, then we'll go ahead and scrub forward to here and set our roundness down to, I'm going to set mine at like eight because I actually want my square to have rounded corners. If I click away, you can see that we have a nice square and then if we scroll back, we have a nice circle. I actually made this key frame way too early. I'm going to go here to maybe here, where it's in the middle of its journey, and drag this key frame over. Now as our animation gets fast, it becomes a square. Let's go over into the graph editor to see where the peak of that motion was. We'll click on the position and we can see the fastest point and the motion was about right here. Let's put our play head there. We'll go back into the graph, click on the graph editor button to close that. Let's make our key frames divided over that point. Now if we hit ''Play'', boom, we have a circle that becomes a square and you barely even notice it. I'm also going to select both of these, right click on those, go down to the very bottom which unfortunately is off-screen here, key frame assistant, easy ease to make those key frames smooth. Hit ''Spacebar'', to play, and you can see that we have a really smooth, polished animation. Just think back to the beginning of this video when you started with that really robotic motion and compare it to how it looks now. As I said before, that's the biggest difference between good animation and bad animation. It's the easing, and you do that easing in the graph editor. In this video I showed you how to use the graph editor, how to get the curves using two different views of the graph editor, and then how to do a sneaky little transition by changing something during the peak of the speed of motion. In the next video, we're going to be using these same techniques to continue our animation and to reveal a logo. Let's get to it. 6. Revealing the Logo: In the last video we learned about the graph editor and we made our animation feel nice and smooth. In this video, we're going to reveal our logo. [MUSIC] Make sure you have saved your project sometime recently. You can hit "Command S" to do that or "Control S" if you're on Windows and let's review what the video looks like. We currently have this back and forth animation and we're going to start out by actually polishing this up just a tiny bit. You might notice at the beginning of this and this is something that you'll get as your eye trains more to see animation. We have a little bump at the beginning of the animation or at the point when it comes over here, you can see there's a little bit of overshoot where our ball goes past this end keyframe. That's due to something called a keyframe interpolation, which I'm not going to get into in this course, but I'll show you how to fix this bumpy motion by right-clicking on the keyframes so you have to zoom in here. We're going to go down to keyframe interpolation click that and then we will change this spatial interpolation to linear. Hit "Okay" and those little extra handles should be gone and we should have a smooth motion again. I'm going to go back into the graph editor and play with these peaks and valleys a little bit. I want this to be a little bit more dramatic. Oh yeah, that's looking nice and dramatic. If you forgot how to do this, if you hold space bar, you can drag around or if you use your middle scroll wheel and click down, you can drag around in here or use your scroll wheel to zoom in and out. Now that our motion is cleaned up a little bit more, let's figure out how to reveal our logo. The first thing we want to do is we want to animate our box so it goes back to the other side. There's this back and forth motion because as it slides back to the other side, it's going to reveal your text or your logo, whatever you want it to reveal. I'm going to go to maybe 4.5 seconds here and drag the X position of our box all the way until it's off screen. Now you'll see again these little handlebars showed up and we're going to get rid of those the same way by right-clicking "Keyframe Interpolation", "Spatial Interpolation", "Linear", hit "Okay". Quick note, if you want to not have to do that every time, this is a setting that I like to set. If you go up into After Effects, you include preferences, I think on Windows it might be edit preferences and we're going to go to general settings. Now there's a ton of stuff in here, but I just want you to go in here and check default spatial interpolation to linear. That's really the only thing you need to do in here. Just hit "Okay" you don't have to think about it anymore. We have a pretty smooth animation of it flying back across the screen. I'm going to go into the graph editor and make that a little bit more of a dramatic hill, but not as crazy as these other ones because it's a little slower. We have a really nice basic animation here. I'm going to make sure nothing is selected. I'm going to click in my timeline window and then go up here and click the "Type Tool" and then click here in the middle in type out my name. That's another way of creating a text layer without having to do right-click new text layer. Then I'm going to show you how to align this to the center, so I'm going to scroll out with my wheel to show more of our box here and then over in these panels you should see a panel called align. These aligns are layers to the composition. If you've used Illustrator or Photoshop, this will probably look familiar. If not, it's new. Click "Align Horizontally" and "Align Vertically" to center our text layer. I'm actually going to go into the character panel here and make our text a little smaller. By the way, if this align panel is not showing up or any of these other panels aren't showing up at anytime, you can go up to Window and then you'll see a big list of all of these different panels and just make sure align is checked and character is checked. Now our text is little smaller and the box wipes over it. The first thing we're going to do is drag our text below our hero shapes. We want it between the background and the shape and this is what I meant by the layer stacking earlier in this series. Now we're going to reveal our text as the shape passes over it. I'm going to introduce you to a new concept called pre-compositions. Precomposing is essentially taking a layer or a group of layers in our current composition and it packages them all up into their own composition, which then is nested inside our current composition. With the layer selected, I'm going to go up to Layer and then go all the way down to the bottom, Pre-compose. That's going to give me this new menu where I can enter a new composition name. I'm going to call this Precomp_Logo and move all attributes to the new composition, check that and leave that and then you can check Open New Composition. Hit "Okay". You should have a blank composition with just that text layer that you had selected earlier. Then if you go back to your logo reveal composition, you'll see that your pre-comp logo is now inside your animation and nothing looks like it's changed. Why do we do it this way? This is actually something that is very handy for replacing assets later on in a project. Because we're doing this logo or this text in its own composition, we can swap out files in there. We can put whatever we want into the logo comp and then it will show up in our animation comp without having to make changes and readjust our masks or readjust the revealing animation from our shape. Again, this doesn't have to make complete sense right now, but just know that pre-composing is something that you'll probably run into and it's a really useful technique for keeping things organized and efficient. Back in our logo reveal composition, we're going to select the "Pre-comp Logo" and just scroll to zoom in here a little bit. I'm going to teach you about masking. I'm just throwing new concepts at you all the time in this video but this one is pretty cool. If we click here on the rectangle tool and we have our pre-comp selected, we can draw a box around our layer and you'll see as we draw, it's actually revealing our text. A mask is basically a shape that you draw around a layer or a composition and it can tell After Effects to either keep this area or ignore this area. You do that by going down into the mask settings and changing this from add to subtract. That makes it disappear add makes it show up. It's saying crop this layer by this box, or crop what is inside this box. I'm going to return this mask to add mode and I'm going to show you how you can key-frame a mask. What we're going to do is twirl down and select the "Mask Path" property, which is basically the property that controls this shape. We're going to scroll through here and see. Our box is going to start about right here. What I'm going to do is drag to select these two points so they should be solid while these points are unsolid, that means they're selected and you can drag this around. We're going to drag this to be over here by the edge of the box and then we're going to set a keyframe. Remember, keyframes just say do this right here and then later on we'll do something else. Let's scroll forward to where this our boxes off the edge of the screen and we're going to select the two sides there again and bring our box over to the edge. Now, if you drag through, you should have a box that animates and reveals our text as time goes on. Now it's not matching the timing of our box because we did all that custom easing earlier but we can keyframe this manually to follow that. I'm actually going to set another keyframe back here. We'll just go through and select those points and line it up so it's in the middle of our box throughout the whole animation. Let's drag this one back. Now we have quite a few little keyframes, but that's just another way of roughly matching our mask so that as the box moves over our text it reveals our text. Here's where I'm going to show you why we made this pre-comp. If we go into this pre-comp by double-clicking, it should open up in here, we're going to add a logo in here. This is the first time we've imported something into our project. You can do that by clicking up in the Project panel and just double-clicking. A Finder Window should show up on your computer or Explorer if you're on Windows and you can navigate to a logo file. If you don't have a logo file you want to use, you can pick any file from your computer or I will be providing the project file for the final result here in this project so you can download that and grab the logo that I used if you want. I'm just going to quickly navigate to where I keep my logo. I'm going to select that file and hit "Open". Now we have an image here in our Project panel. Now we have our composition with our text in it and I'm going to drag this image into the timeline of this composition. Now we see our logo on top of the text and if I go back into our logo reveal comp, you'll see that our box now reveals both the logo and the text. That's pretty cool. We didn't have to redo all that work to just to update something. We don't have to swap anything out. We can literally just put anything in this comp and as long as it's within the same size, then it will be revealed by our animation here. I'm going to turn off this text layer by hitting this little eyeball icon and then we have just our logo. I'm going to hit "S" and adjust the scale just to make it a little bit smaller and then go back into the logo reveal and see how this is looking. Let's zoom out here and just play through this whole thing. [NOISE] That's a good animation. You should be really proud of yourself right now if your animation looks anything like what I've created here. This might not feel like much, but the fact that you've done something with custom easing and pre-compositions to swap footage in and out, you're leagues ahead of how much I understood After Effects and what I was able to do when I first started. If you keep practicing these things, if you keep trying out different ideas, you'll be well on your way to becoming a professional quality motion designer that can get hired to do some pretty cool stuff. We're getting pretty far into this and we have a really good start in blocking of our animation. In the next video, I'm going to show you how to add some extra polish, some secondary motion and accents, and do some compositing to make it go from a flat style like this to a stylized gradient lighting style like you saw in the example project. Hopefully you're still having fun. I know I am. Let's go to the next video. 7. Adding Secondary Motion & Flourish: In the last video, we revealed our logo. In this video, I'm going to show you some of my favorite techniques to add some extra polish and motion that will make this animation look a little more fancy than it really is. [MUSIC] Back in after effects. If we look at the example project that I made, you can see that there's these extra circle bursts going on. There's this whole curving motion that seems really difficult to animate. I'm going to teach you a few ways to do that without actually a ton of effort. I know watching that it might seem like if animating this was this hard, then animating something that's going from side to side might be even harder. I'm going to show you some ways to get around that stuff. The first thing we're going to do is create a null object. A null object is yet another new after-effects thing that I'm going to teach you about. We can create one by right-clicking "New", "Null Object", and we'll get this blink shape that actually doesn't show up. It doesn't do anything in your project. However, you can use it to control another layer. If we take our hero shape, and we go over here to parent and link, you can see this little spirally thing called a pick whip and you can drag it and point it at our null layer. You'll see that your parent drop-down now says null. Your null number might be different than mine, but that doesn't really matter. We can select our null object and hit "Enter", and we're going to call it [NOISE] Hero NULL. Now we have a null object that is the parent of our hero shape. What in the heck does that mean? Let me tell you about parenting. I'm resisting and making some stupid joke right here. I'm just going to start getting into it. If you parent an object, you have the parent object and the child object. The parent object controls the child object, so the child can move independently but any motion that the parent does will add on to that child's animation. We can grab our null object, which is the current parent of our hero shape. We can drag it around and you can see that the ball moves with it. If we scale this, it'll scale that ball. If we rotate it, it'll rotate it, and it will include all of the animation. Now we don't have a side to side we have a diagonal motion. With our null object, I'm going to show you how you can use animation layering to get some really complicated looking motion without actually being too complicated. I'm going to make sure that all of my transform properties are reset. My scale and everything is back to normal by hitting this reset button. Then I'm going to look through this animation and decide what I want to do. I think I want this to actually start by going up and then it curves down and ends up going left to right. We can do that actually by going here, so we can see what's happening. We're going to go here to where it's at the peak of the motion. We're going to adjust our rotation property, so it's at the top. I'm going to slide this number until it says 90 and make sure you slide in this number, not this one. Otherwise you'll get some crazy results. I'm going to set a keyframe right there. Now we have an up and down motion. I'm going to go here before our logo is revealed. I'm going to drag this back until we get back to zero and it should set another keyframe. Now if we hit "Play", you'll see we have some rotation now, but it feels really weird and stiff. That's because we have our linear animation. [NOISE] We got to get into the graph editor and make this better. I got my keyframes selected. I'm going to hit this button to go into the graph editor. It's going to keep my selection, so I'm going to re-select here and go over here and click this button to get an easy ease motion. Already if we play this, it's starting to look a little better, and we just need to play with these curves until we get the results that we're looking for. Just to show you again how the graph editor works, if we right-click and go over to the value graph, you can see that we have our keyframe at 90 and then our keyframe at zero, and we go smoothly between those. Then if we go to the speed graph, we have a speed that starts slow at the beginning and at the end, and then it's fast in the middle. We can make that a little bit more extreme by dragging these yellow handlebars out a little bit, and we'll see how that looks. I think I actually want more of this motion to happen earlier. I'm going to drag one of these keyframes back a little bit, drag this one out a little bit, and then make it smoother here at the end and faster at the beginning. That's looking cool. It's like this swooshing effect. Again, animation is all about the field. It's not about anything precise. Every time I've recreated this video, it's been a little bit different [NOISE] and that's okay. We're trying to make art here. It's not a science, it's an art. I've tweaked this around until I got a nice smooth motion. Just like that by adding a no in animating that and parenting our hero to that, we have a complex rotation and smooth curve without having to do a lot of custom work. We now have a good back and forth with a curve. We're going to add some circle bursts like we have in our example. We're going to do that by creating a new shape layer, will go up here to "Layer", "New", "Shape Layer" and we're going to hold down when we click on this rectangle and go to the Ellipse tool. Because these ones are going to be perfect circles, they're never going to be squares. We're going to go ahead and use the Ellipse tool, and we can just double-click to get a perfect circle there. I'm going to change the color of this to maybe dark blue. I'm going to rename our layer by hitting "Enter" and type in [NOISE] Circle 1. I'm going to hit "S" to get our scale. I'm going to click this property and change the scale to zero. Our circle disappears. I'm going to hit a keyframe there. I'm going to go forward to about 12 frames and drag our scale all the way up to where our circle fills the entire screen. I'm going to trim this layer to the edge by going to the end of our timeline, dragging the edge of this. Now our layer just disappears after it scales up. Like that. Now we have a circle that scales up and fills the screen. We're going to make these linear keyframes easy ease by selecting them. We can either right-click or we can go up to enimation, keyframe assistant, easy ease. You can also hit F9 on your keyboard if you want a shortcut version of that. Now we have a smooth animation and we're going to go and adjust those curves a little bit. By going in, we're going to right-click and go to the value graph and zoom in with the plus key on your keyboard. I'm going to make this a little bigger so I can see. I'm going to drag this up and get a curve that looks something like that. That feels a little too fast to me. I'm going to maybe drag this so it looks more like an S curve. I'm dragging this last keyframe out a little bit. Again, it's all about the feeling here. We want to make sure it feels balanced, feels nice and smooth. The last thing, we have our circle on top of everything, we're just going to drag it to be right above our background layer. Now as our circle grows, we have a big background circle that fills the scene. Now watching that, I want to be more dramatic. I'm going to pull this back like that and see what something like this does. That was a little too dramatic. Maybe we'll drag this keyframe so it actually starts a little bit after. Still feels too fast. Again, a lot of just tweaking until things feel nice. We're going to just drag these things around. Yes, that feels much better. We have our first circle. Now we're going to just duplicate that layer, so we don't have to do this a bunch of times by hitting "Command D" or "Control D" if you're on Windows. We're going to take that. If you hit "U", you can see your set keyframes. We're just going to offset this layer a little bit in time and just drag it forward a little bit. We're going to change the fill color to maybe a mid-tone blue. We're going to do that again. We have three circles now and we're going to drag that blue into more of a tealish blue, you can pick whatever colors you want here. I'm just going with what floats my boat. I'm going to hit "Control D" or "Command D" again to duplicate one last time. We are going to actually make this layer be the same color as our background layer. I want these circles actually disappear after they fill the screen. We're going to select all of them and then go out to the end of the timeline. Then just click and drag on the edge to trim those layers. Now we have four circles that explode out behind our main shape. [NOISE] I think we can make these be a little faster. [NOISE] What do you think? Maybe even a little faster. Drag them back on keyframe. Yes, that feels nice. Right here you can see that our last shape is not matching our background shape. We're going to just change the color of this one by selecting fill, but we're going to move our play head here till we can see the final background color. We'll make sure our fourth circle is selected. Click the "Fill Color" here, and then use the eyedropper tool to just pick that same color. Now it will look like we have these circles and then the last one reveals the background again. But it's just showing the same color. It's a little hacky [NOISE] way to do that. Hit "Spacebar", play through our animation. You can see that we have this new reveal. I'm going to move the end of this work area to just fit that. We're starting to get some more complex motion. That's some good stuff. Let's recap. We used a null object to add some extra rotation, some layered motion to our animation. We learned about parenting. We added some shape layer circles to add some extra accent, some extra motion at the beginning of our animation. We have this result that is a much more eye-catching and complex looking animation with really only a few extra minutes of work. In the next video, I'm going to be showing you how to take this animation, add some extra style and effects and lighting to make it look extra nice and polished. Then we will be exporting our final animation and finishing this project out. See you over there. 8. Compositing Effects & Polish: Welcome back. What you should have at this point is a really solid animation that reveals your logo or your name. I'm going to show you now how to polish it up and do some compositing to add a little more style. [MUSIC] Compositing, what is the deal with all these weird words and After Effects? To be honest, I don't know, but I can tell you what composting is. It's basically a technique where you are combining different elements together and adjusting the way they look together to get a desired effect. An example of visual effects compositing would be you have a video of a muzzle flash and you add it on top of a video of someone shooting a gun, and then you adjust the way it blends into the scene by adjusting the lighting and adding lighting falloff on the character, adding smoke, whatever it is. It's about adding together all these different elements, adjusting the way they blend together to get your desired result. Compositing for animation is a similar technique where we're going to be using effects and different layers to add lighting and make our flat animation look a little more stylized. Quick side note, After Effects is actually a compositing software designed to add effects after video. It wasn't originally designed to be animation software, which is why some of the current ways you do things are a little weird. But it is very powerful for both things and the fact that it can composite and animate in one package means you can create stuff like this without having to go into another software. That's enough background. Let's get into After Effects again. Now make sure you have saved your project. You should hit ''Control S''. I'm going to keep reminding you of that because I've suffered through many data loss issues. We have our animation and we have this flat blue color in our box here. The first thing we're going to do is we're going to add a little extra style to our hero shape. I'm going to select this layer and I'm going to show you about layer styles. Layer styles are very similar to layer styles in Photoshop. I'm going to right-click except for this, it goes off-screen. I'm going to go up here and click on layer with my layer selected. Go to layer styles and add a gradient overlay. This gradient overlay adds a gradient on top of our shape layer and we can get some custom lighting-looking effect. The nice thing about this is it actually maintains the direction of the gradient. If we added a gradient directly to our shape layer, it would change with our shapes. We want to actually look like lighting. We're going to hack this a little bit. If we click on this arrow and we close up the contents and the transform because we don't need to see those, you now see this new little section called layer styles. I'm going to go down into gradient overlay and we're going to click ''Edit gradient''. Now here we can change these two colors. Now I'm going to reverse this so we have light on top and dark on the bottom because generally the light is above and the shadow is below. I'm actually going to cancel out of here and go to a frame where we can see our circle because it's a little easier to tell what we're working with. Hit ''Edit gradient'' again, and let's change this color stop here to be maybe a bright blue color. Let's change this one, click here on this little box, to be a dark color. Now we have this almost 3D-looking sphere instead of our flat shape. We'll probably be changing these settings throughout as we figure out exactly what we want this to look like. For now, I'm going to go into the gradient overlay settings. I'm going to change this from normal down here all the way at the bottom of the screen to overlay. That actually made our colors almost disappear. That's because overlay is just another way of blending the colors. This is something that you'll just have to play around with. There's tons of little stuff like this in After Effects. It's just like Photoshop. It's a really powerful software. To be honest, I don't really get all these things all the time, I just click through until I find something that I like. Then sometimes I can't quite repeat it. We're learning this together. I'm going to adjust the opacity down a little bit and then go up here to the original fill color. This is the color underneath the gradient. Let's see what happens when we change that. As you can see, we get a slightly different color depending on what color is at the base. I'm going to make this a mid-tone color so we get a little bit more of our gradient back in there. Now we have a little bit more of a subtle color difference. Let's start playing with these colors. Let's go down into the background color. I'm going to make this, I like that, darker, midnight blue look. I'm going to adjust that. Then I'm going to click here on circle 4 because remember this needs to be the same color as our background. I'm going to eyedropper pick the same fill color for circle 4. Now we have this new look. This is a whole different style. I like having this dark background because you'll see we're going to add some glows later and that's going to look a lot better with this dark background. If we go back and we look at this original one that I did, you can see that we have this actual rim light effect on our ball. I want to go ahead and recreate something like that. Let's go back into our logo reveal and we're going to go to our shape layer. One last thing that I want to do before we do that is I think I want to make this shape a little bigger. I'm going to go in and click down into our contents, into the size of the rectangle path, and just drag that up a little bit. Then because I made that, let's go up to 250. Because I made that a little bigger, let's go to our first keyframe on roundness. I would drag that and make sure we've got a perfect circle, about a 150. Well, let's close that backup and get back to compositing. Again, that's a reminder. It's all about just tweaking things, and playing with things, and changing things. No matter how many times I do this, I always run into something that I have to go back and fix. That's just the way the world works. Let's close up our gradient overlay and let's add some extra lighting here. I'm going to go to a nice clean frame. We're going to add our first effect. We haven't gotten into effect yet, but effects are a big part of After Effects. Make sense given the name. We're going to go up to the Effect panel. You're up to the Effect menu up here and go to generate CC light sweep. This is one of my favorite effect, it's a random one, but I'm just showing you there's a billion things you can do in this. You can see there's so many different plugins. There's lots of ones that aren't even default with After Effects that you can do some crazy powerful stuff with. I'm just going to show you CC lights sweep because I like it. You can see that there is this little weird controller here that we can drag around and it adjusts this light sweep that goes across our ball. That's actually how I created this effect. I did it by just putting this up here in the corner and then messing with these settings over here in the Effect controls panel to get the look that I was looking for. I'll leave that at like 30 percent. I'm going to change this from sharp to smooth. I like the way that smooth sounds. I'm going to make the width a little bigger. Then I'm going to leave this sweep intensity around there. The edge intensity you can see is that edge light there. I'm going to leave it where it is and increase the thickness a little bit. Maybe just going to play around with these numbers until you get a cool result. I'm also going to change the light color. Let's say we're playing with blue. For thinking about the color wheel across from blue, it's a yellow maybe. We can find a color that looks nice in contrast. Although let me just drag through here. We can drag through our wheel and find something, that pink is looking cool. We're going to go with pink. We've got a cool pink light there. Look at that. You've got a sweet ball that has these extra colors. You did it in just a few clicks. That looks like it's a complicated effect, but it really isn't, like you manage to pull that off. You've never used After Effects before. That's pretty cool. Let's play through this and look at that. You've got a cool, awesome pink gradient ball-shaped thing that was way more difficult to do than it really was. Now that we're working with this more of a neon-looking color, I'm going to change some of these circle colors to make sure they fit the new style a little bit better. I'm going to change this circle to a purplish. Still keeping it in the mid-tones, changed circle 3 to more of, that looks nice, bluish. Now we have something that looks a little more stylistically congruent, I love that vocabulary. What's next? Adjustment layers. We can create a new adjustment layer by going up to Layer, New, Adjustment layer. An adjustment layer is basically a transparent layer that adds effects to everything beneath it. Whatever you do to this layer, it will affect all of the layers beneath it. When we added the light sweep earlier, it only affects our hero shape and that's why it only shows up here. If we do something on this adjustment layer, it will affect everything beneath it. If I go to Effect, Color Correction, hue, and saturation down here, then we can actually play with this hue. You can see we can change the color of our entire animation. Now, you can actually set keyframes on this. If you wanted to have this like strobe through all of these colors, you do that if you want, but that would be a little wild to come down. Now I'm going to turn this effect off and by clicking this FX button. Now we have that hidden effect. We can use it later if we want. We're going to hit "Enter" while selecting this adjustment layer and call it CC for [NOISE] color correction. We're going to add another effect on here. I'm just going to right-click in the Effect controls panel, which if you don't see that you can go to Effect Controls. I'm going to add a stylized all the way down here, sorry, It's off-screen again. Glow. Now, this looks bad, but we're going to make it look good. That's my goal here. We just got to play with these numbers because I can never quite remember what they do. But let's play with the threshold here and lower that down a little bit, or bring the number up. It isn't quite so dramatic. We're going to bring their radius way out. It's more of a subtle glow. Then the intensity, I think we can increase that a little bit and feel free to copy these numbers or just play with them as you see fit. Now you can see that we have this awesome glow on our layer that especially looks nice with this dark background. I'm going to just play with these numbers a little bit more, maybe something like 87, a radius like 300 something, and an intensity 1.5. Let's hit Play. [NOISE] It looks nice. I didn't see it actually made our logo glow too. It's a little bit much of a glow so I'm going to turn the intensity down a little bit. The last thing we're going to do is we're going to add some noise on top of this by going to Effect, Noise and Grain, Noise and make sure that's going on to your CC adjustment layer. We'll make this like three percent. That'll help break up this a little bit and make it a little bit more of a stylized render. Then we can play around with this threshold a little bit. I like how it looks a little lower and then a little bit lower intensity. so it's more of a soft glow. We've got our logo at the end. You have just composited your first animation. You took it from something that was flat and simple and made it something really stylized and glowy and with gradients. As you can see, by piling up different lighting and effects on a simple animation like this, you can get something that looks a lot more pro and a lot more visually interesting than you thought you might be able to this early on in your After Effects adventure. In the next video, I'm going to show you how to export this animation in a format that's easily compatible with your phone and with social media, all that good stuff. I'll be giving you some closing tips and some further resources about where you can go from here. 9. Finishing Up & Exporting: All right. We're getting to the end here. I'm going to show you how to export your animation in a format that's good for social media and will be buttoning things up in this last video. [MUSIC] Back and after effects, I noticed one little thing on my project that is weird, but the box never quite goes off screen, I think this is because we adjusted the scale or earlier in. I'm just going to click on this and I'm going to hit U to reveal the keyframes. I'm going to go over, my play head is right on this last position keyframe. I'm just going to scoot it out a little bit further. Now if we play, you'll see that the box continues all the way off the edge. You've probably been screaming at your screen wondering why I hadn't fixed that yet, because I didn't notice. That's good teaching. Let's export this video. Select your composition, and there are two main ways to export. You go up to composition and you can either add to Render Queue or add to Adobe Media Encoder Queue. Add to render queue will export your video inside after effects and then Media Encoder Queue opens up a separate piece of software that will actually allow you to export an MP4 file, which is my preferred export format for something that is going to social media. We're going to go ahead and click add to Media Encoder Queue. Now, Media Encoder can be notoriously slow to open up, while you're waiting, and especially if you have an older computer, feel free to go get a drink of water, eat a snack, follow me on Twitter, anything beneficial like that. Then once it's opened, come back here. When Media Encoder finally opens, you should have something that looks like this. You should see your composition showing up here, logo reveal and then it will have an output file destination. Now if this says blank, just keep waiting. It really could take awhile, just be patient. But the nice thing is we can export directly to H.264, which is an MP4 format. If you click this little triangle, select H.264, I'm just going to leave Match Source- high bitrate here. Then I'm going to select my destination, my render destination. Since I'm feeling risky, I'm just going to export it to my desktop. Call it logo reveal, hit Save, hit the little play button to export. While it's explain owner recap a few of the things that we've learn in this video and tell you about where you can go from here. The primary goal with this course was to teach you the fundamentals of after effects for motion design specifically. I wanted to approach this in a professional mindset, teaching you the skills that you need if you wanted to potentially go into motion design as a professional career. Now, motion design isn't actually flourishing, creative career. You can do things from working on a movie titles to creating Instagram ads, to creating your own motion brand, to doing UI animation for apps, There's a million different ways to apply your skills. You can start your own business, you can freelance, you can work on staff. It's really a flexible in quite promising and creative career if you enjoyed this series. Now that this is done rendering and you can click on this link and it should open up on your desktop or wherever you saved it. You can open your file and you can play your finished animation. Nice. Now if you want to share that with yourself, I tend to AirDrop things to my phone since I'm on an iPhone and a MAC. You can also convert it to a GIF using a site called ezgif.com. All that being said, I hope you had a great time. I really enjoyed getting to teach you and share with you some of the things I wish I knew when I was starting out. If you want more resources, I'll be posting up some other stuff in the description. If you want to follow me and see what else I'm up to, the best place just follow me on Twitter and I share a lot of the stuff I'm working on there. If you share your video on Instagram or Twitter, please tag me there. I'd love to check it out and you can also upload your project here on Skillshare and I would love to check it out there too. I hope you really enjoyed this. I'm glad I got to share it with you. I'll catch you next time. Peace.