Playing with Shape and Type for Motion Graphics - Adobe After Effects for Funsies

1. Introduction: G'day! I'm Alyssa. I'm here to show you how I like to play around with shape and type in After Effects. So that means creating assets directly in After Effects, completely natively. So you don't need any other tools and you can make some cool, funky dunky little animations. I'm an illustrator, animator, teacher, designer, just general creative dabbler. I've been working in the industry for many years, and one of my favorite things to do when I get a bit of downtime is some quick shape and type animation. There's just something completely freeing about that kind of animation where you're not restrained by your drawing abilities or all the other boundaries that Adobe can sometimes create, and other creative tools. It is just completely exclusively in After Effects. In this class we're gonna be looking at the basic tools for shapes in After Effects. So we're gonna be looking mostly at the shape tool itself. So all of your classic geometric shapes. And then from there we're going to create a little background that animates on a loop. So I'll show you how to make sure your loops, do indeed loop. It involves a bit of maths, soz gang. Then we're gonna look at animating some type. So I'm going to break down what I think are the most useful tools for type animation in After Effects. And that doesn't mean making it complicated and doing all the coding and scripting and *SHUDDERS* no no no. None of that. Type is a layer. And we're going to treat it as such. And we're gonna do some funky stuff to make it look cool and really engaging without going too deep and complicated. We're going to keep everything as simple and as fun and funky as we can. Do you need any experience to do this class? No, none whatsoever. A bit of understanding of how to type a word would be great. That's it. If you have done my last class in After Effects, you're going to have a very straightforward time. It's going to be beautiful. But I have designed this so that you should be able to jump in without any experience whatsoever. So again, a little bit of understanding of how Adobe's programs work isn't going to hurt you, but you're not going to be missing out on anything if this is your first time in After Effects. That's absolutely fine. At the very end of this little class, you should have a little looping animation. So we'll do it in a few different formats. So you can do it as 1920 by 1080, your classic HD. And we can also do a square format for Instagram. And we'll do a vertical format so you can pop it on TikTok if you want to. But you can play with those options as well so you don't have to do to the settings that I create. If you want to make it a little email gif, we'll show you how to do that too. Now if that sounds like something that's totally up your alley, let's jump on in and play with some shapes on type, shall we?! 2. File Setup: Welcome back to After Effects gang. We're going to dive straight on in and we're going to click on this big old button in the middle and make a new composition. If that button's not there, remember, you can go to composition, new composition. Now, first thing we're going to rename our composition. We're going to call it something that you'll remember. I'm going to go for Hellow - animated, done. Now. I'm going to play around with some settings here. I'm not going to use my presets, just personal preference. I'm going to type in those settings that I want manually. So this at the moment is not correct. First thing, width, I want 1920 by 1080, and I'll see when I type that in the preset updates to HDTV, that's what we're after. I'm going to use 25 frames per second. And we always want to make sure we've got square pixels. The resolution. Not a worry, we can leave that as is, this totes fine. And that will change as we work. The duration, thirty-seconds is a bit overkill. I'm going to drop this on down to 6 seconds. So it's really important to remember how these numbers work. So we've gotten here, hours is your first number, minutes, seconds and frames. And always remember that frames refers to your frame rate. So these two work together. So if you set this number to 24, that'll be 24 frames. If you send it to 25. And it's going to round up this number here. So just keep that in mind. Whatever your base rate is, that will depend on what numbers you can put in your final frames. Then the second value is seconds So we're going to put 0:00:06:00. And the final thing is our background color. And again, it means nothing, nothing at all. Because that is just for transparent videos and for previews, we are almost immediately going to change the color. So this is just irrelevant at the moment. So I'm going to leave it as it is. Then when I'm happy, I'm gonna hit. Okay. Now we can see that we've got a new comp. So we've got a comp in our project window. We've got a, something visible in our composition window now, there isn't just those two big grey buttons. And our timeline is now accessible. Quick check that you've got Ss on your screen, not Fs. So if you zoom in. If I zoom in, I'll say F's, that's for frames. If you zoomed all the way out on this little toolbar down the bottom, then you should be able to see S's up to 6 seconds. If not, you just need to update your composition timeline. That's fine. So comp, composition settings and you can change the duration there. So you can change the duration at anytime, that's not a problem, but it's a pain to be animating and then realized, Oh gosh, that's fast. Now that we've got our comp set up, we're gonna do one more very important thing. We're going to save it. We're going to save our file gang. I'm going to go up to File and Save As save that. And then navigate to where I want to save it. Call it something clever. So I'm going to stick with my Hellow. That's all I need to do. So give it a name and then Save. And now I can see I've got my file, file extension there so I know that I've saved it. And whenever you make a change, for example I'll just change this for a second. You'll see you've got a little asterix up the top, that's how you know you haven't saved it. So just keep track of that. Because sometimes you'll be working away for an hour and then go Oh my, good golly, I haven't saved this at all. So just Control S to save something else you may want to set up while you're here is your autosaves. So Edit Preferences and Autosave. You can set up how long you want the intervals to be between saves. So it will automatically save in the background mine's set to every 10 min. That should be fine. If you're working with something a lot more chunky, then you may want it to be shorter than that. Totally up to you and your preferences. And we can also set where you want it to save. So by default it will save next to your After Effects working file. It'll make a little folder and put everything there. 3. Backgrounds: We've got our comp setup and now we're going to make the background. So there's a few ways you can do it, but what we're gonna do this time is we're going to use a shape layer because we're all about shapes today. So if we go up to your toolbar, you will find this guy. This is your Shape Tool. And under there you'll find all of your different shapes. But first up, I'm going to click on either the timeline or the composition. You can see the blue box. Make sure that I'm in the right scene. And then I can double-click on my rectangle, and that will make a shape the full size of our composition. So we don't have to worry about scaling it or anything like that. Now, if we wanted to adjust the color of this background, my goodness, we can, but it's important to know the different options you've got. There's two places you can adjust these things, is up the top and your utilities and your tools. And there's also down in the timeline. My preference is up the top, and I'm going to show you why. Up here you've got four buttons. Looks like two, but it's actually four. This first one this word fill represents the button for the options. And then you've got the colour for the colour. Same with stroke, you've got stroke options and stroke colour. So if I wanted to change the colour of this rectangle, I just click on the colour itself and I can change that to whatever I like. You can also use the Eyedropper so you can pick something that's already in the scene if you would like. If I wanted to change the type of fills that I have, I click on the word fill. And then I can see I've got no fill at all, solid, linear gradient or a radial gradient. So with those, you get a whole bunch of other options. We're going to keep it simple for now and just look at solid colour. If you'd like to play with gradients, be my guest. But for now, I'm just going to stick with some solids. Now for a background, I want to make sure there is no stroke at all. So we've got stroke options here. I'm going to turn it off. So make sure it's there. And not a stroke that's set down to zero width. You can do that, but I've had issues pop up and I've done something silly. So it's safest just to turn it off entirely. And then hit OK, now you can do all of those exact same things in your timeline. So down the bottom, I've got this is automatically opened up because I've been playing with those settings. So if it's not open for you, you can twirl it down. To get to your rectangle, you've got your stroke and you've got your fill. We can see our stroke is turned off. There's no eyeball there. Turn it on and we've got fill turned on. So that's how you turn them on and off. We've also got here you can change your colour under the fill. We've got opacity, we've got all those kinds of things. And under stroke we have all sorts of other options as well, which we'll have a look at later. But for now because it's the background, it doesn't need a stroke. And then what I'm gonna do is I'm going to name my layer because I'm organised. Hit Enter to name it. I'm going to call this one background. I'm also going to colour the label. So if I click on this little grey square, I can pick a colour. I've gone in, spent a very long time picking my colours. So yours will not look the same as this, but that's fine. And then I'm going to lock it with the little padlock icon there. That just means I'm not going to bump it. So I've got a nice solid background colour and that is going to render out. So unlike our background preview, this will actually render. 4. Rectangles Gallore: Now that we've got a background, Let's jump in and start making some more rectangles. So up the top we'll click on that little shape layer tool, which is set to rectangle at the moment. And then you'll see the cursor changes. So you've got a little star. So that's means you on the Shape Layer tool. Before I draw anything though, I'm going to change the colour so that I can actually see what I'm doing. Because if it's the same color as the background, I'm not going to notice a darn thing. Now, it doesn't matter what colour you choose, you can change all of this later. To make our first rectangle. I'm just going to click and drag. Shablammo. I've got myself a little square guy. If I keep going. Oh my goodness. Look at the possibilities. It's endless. Amazing. Now, for those with a keen eye, you may have noticed that in our layer stack, we haven't got multiple layers, we've got multiple shapes all in one layer. Twirl that away, It's all one layer. That is indeed how After Effects can work with shape layers. It's up to you how you actually want to use it. But I'll show you the possibilities. So basically, if you are on your shape layer and you stay on there while you click and drag and make new shapes, they will stack inside your contents of the Shape Layer. If you imagine shape layers as living inside little ziploc baggies. Like so. So you can animate around that whole ziploc baggie or you can animate what's inside it. Right? That's great. But the thing about a ziploc baggie is you can put heaps of stuff in it. So if I've got other shapes, I can also go inside my xiploc baggie. And again, I can animate them all individually inside the bag. Or I can close it on up and animate this whole thing on it's own, right? So I can grab the layer and move everything. Or I can double-click to grab one object and move it independently. Now for people who like a nice organized layer stack, animating the little layers inside of the shape layer, may be your preference. I personally find it irritating just for the pure fact of getting to the tools. So to twirl down to multiple layers to get to the right shape, I find quite annoying. Because if I want rectangle three, which is this guy here. I need to twirl down all these layers to get to the transforms for rectangle three. And in there I've got anchor point, position, scale, skew. That's a new thing for sharp layers. Rotation and opacity. That's just with this guy. But my main layer also has anchor point, position, scale, rotation, opacity. That's everything. So you can get.. I find it, personally, very confusing when I've got lots of the same thing. Obviously I can rename stuff by hitting Enter and call it something memorable, like banana, because obviously banana. But it's still a little bit tedious sometimes. The other thing, the other way that I like to work is using keyboard shortcuts to get to the properties I need. So if I hit P on the keyboard, I'll open up position. But it's positioned for my whole layer, not just the shape that I want to animate. So again, totally up to you and your preference. And as you keep working your way, you decide which is your preference. For now, and for the rest of this class, I'm gonna do everything on multiple layers because it's just, it'll be easier to explain. But feel free to experiment and see what you vibe. For now, I'm going to delete this layer entirely and start again. So this time, rather than create all of my shapes on one layer, I'm going to make them all individually layers. So backup with my Shape tool, I'm going to click and drag to make my first one. Then I'm going to click off to make the next one. Now I can click off anywhere. Anywhere in my timeline is safe. If you want to click in your comp window though, you'll need to switch to your normal selection tool, which is this guy. And then back to your Shape Tool. I find it easiest to select down in my timeline. And sometimes like at the moment, my timelines full. There's no where free for me to really click this section here though. There's nothing going on here. This is not a menu, there is no timeline. This little column is a safe space. So whenever you are creating shapes, you can always click in there and know that you're going to not select anything new. Because if you've got some properties animated, you'll have keyframes and different things going on here. And you don't want to click on the name of the shape because then you'll be making it on that shape layer. So I can see. So clicking in this little column is 100% safe all of the time. Now I'm going to delete all of that again and have a little bit more of a look at what I'm actually doing. So if I click and drag and just loosey-goosey, I can make any proportions. If I hold down control, it will expand from the center of the shape. Whereas just by default it will expand from the corner that I first clicked. If I hold Shift, it will retain proportions. So it will stay to a perfect square. If I let go of Shift, it'll go whatever which, why am I so choose control to expand from the middle, nothing to expand from the corner, and then shift to constrain. You can combine those, if you so choose. You'll notice when I click off, my little cross hair moves to the middle of the shape. That's a preference I have set. It's not something that is default. It's up to you if you want to do that. If you would like to have your anchor points sit into the middle, I'd recommend it just because shape layers, you can make something in the corner. And if you haven't got that set, it'll be set to the center of the screen, which if you want to animate things, can be a pain. You just have to manually reset it. So to make it a permanent thing, go to Edit Preferences, and General. It says center anchor point in new shape layers. If you tack that, the anchor point will automatically be in the middle of your shape. Now what we're gonna do next, now that we know how to make a shape and then different ways to set it up. We're going to have a look at the specific shape properties. Because if I have a quick squizzy here, you can see you've got a bunch of different settings, but there's a whole bunch of different shapes and they all have different properties available. So we're going to have a look at that next. 5. Making Shapes: So let's have a look at this rectangle first. When we twirl it down, we can see rectangle one is the first shape that we've got. We have a rectangle path. We've got path properties that you can access. So we've got the size, we've got the position. We've also got roundness on rectangles. All rectangles have a roundness option. So if I scrub that up, I can see I get a very drama looking shape. It's very Motion Graphics kind of moment. There's no magical number to scrub through. It will hit peak, then you can keep scrabbing and it makes no visual difference. If I go back to zero, I've got my pointy edged square or rectangle. So that's your rectangle, path, size, position, roundness. Inside our rectangle, we've also got our stroke and our fill as we set it to not have a stroke up the top here, the stroke is unticked with the little eyeball there. But the fill is turned on because the fill is turned on up there. So they work in tandem. I turn the stroke on my default stroke, apparently I was making something massive last time. So my stroke, if I make that much smaller, I can see what's going on. My stroke width. And then I've got my stroke colour. I've got opacity. All your classics. I've got a line cap and a line join. So line cap, if you've got a straight line, you'll see the end of it is either square, round or projecting. Projecting means it's still square but it doesn't end right at the dot it moves a bit forward. The join is the corners. So if I wanted to round off those corners, round join. I can see, look at those lovely round corners compared to a miter join or I've got bevel. That's what they do. Miter limit is how much point you've got. We're not gonna go too deep, but there's heaps of stuff. We've got dashes, we've got taper, we've got wave, play with those to your heart's content. They are relatively new additions to After Effects. If you're working with an older one, you may not have all of those options. It's not gonna let me scroll any further. I've also got fill. So I've got my fill based on the colour that I set up here. What colour I've got opacity. Fill rule, I completely ignore composite, I also completely ignore blend mode is sometimes handy. But really if we're doing our own individual layers, we wouldn't really be messing with that here anyway. That would be on the main layer. But there's heaps of little settings on every shape layer. It's just extensive. Now while I'm here and I've got my stroke set, I'm going to show you the benefit of having the size property available. Because if I just tab some of these away so we can see it better. If I want to scale up and down my rectangle. I can do that, that's fine. But you'll notice the stroke is getting smaller and bigger depending on whether I'm getting smaller or bigger. If you want your stroke to stay the same size, which sometimes we do. Instead of animating the scale of your overall object, you can animate the size and the stroke stays the same. So that is one super-duper handy thing, when you're doing motion graphics animation with shape layers is you've got multiple properties that technically do the same thing, but slightly differently. Cool. So that is our rectangle. That's the rectangle property. Let's have a look at some of the other ones. I'm just going to delete this. So we've got a bit of room. So my rectangle tool, that was number one, rounded rectangle. Let's have a quick squeezy and see how it's exactly the same as a normal rectangle. I straight up, don't see the point of it because roundness, all the only difference. The roundness setting is already pumped up a little bit. That's it. So rectangle and around rectangle, are the same. Other than this is set to roundness is set to zero on a normal rectangle. But the properties there, so you can add it. As far as I'm concerned, no offense After Effects, but rounded rectangle: waste of space. So let's move right along to the Ellipse tool. Now, again, we've got the same controls as we do with rectangles. We can control to go from the middle and Shift to constrain to a circle. If we don't constrain, it will just be a ellipse. And now if I have a squizzy at my contents, I've got the ellipse then the ellipse path. And again I have size and position. Then I've got stroke and fill stroke and fill are consistent on all shape layers. So I'm not going to dig into those. They are exactly the same on all of them. Ellipse path is size and position. And just a reminder, our rectangle. Is size, position, roundness. So if I make my rectangle a square and then pump up my roundness, I've got another circle. So my rectangle can be used to make a circle. And now that, why would you do that? Because you want to do a motion graphicsy style stretch potentially. Because if we do that with the size on our ellipse, it stretches out to an ellipse. So again, very similar tools, slightly different results. Then next up we have our polygon tool. Now, just like the rectangle and round rectangle, Polygon and star are basically the same polygon. Then I'll go up and I'll make a star on this side, which for some reason, by default is making a like nothing space in the middle. That's weird, but that's fine. So if we look at our layer stack, we can see both are called a polystar. So a polygon and the star - polystar. Same same. I if I twirl down their properties, got polystar path, polystar path Twirl down the path properties. I've got heaps of options. But you'll notice one key thing. There's a type for both. One is set to star, one is set to polygon. Would you believe you can switch them? So once again, this, there's two tools doing the exact same thing. After Effects, I don't know what you're thinking, but here we go. So if we look at the polygon first. First up, we've got the type which we've already looked at. You've got polygon or you've got star. Points. Five points is what we have at the moment. You can pump it up, reduce it. It's the best way to make a triangle is to use the polygon. Yes, again, different tools to do the same thing. If I give it four sides, boom, I've got a square. If I give it like a thousands sides, I've got a circle. So again, it's up to you and what you're animating as to what you use. So that's points. We've got position same as everything else. Rotation. We've got outer radius. So in this case that's kinda like size on a square or a circle. We've also got outer roundness. Again, we can go to a circle or fully passed it to like a flowery type thing. And if we go the other way, you can do an inverted one. So you can completely break them to make something funky. But yeah, the polystar has type, points, position, rotation, outer radius, and roundness. And then of course, stroke, fill. Then if we move along to the star, we have again points. So it starts with five points. Can do as many as we like, or as few as we like. We've got position rotation, the classics. Then we've got, so on polygon, we only have outer radius. On a star, We have an inner radius. That is the key difference. So that is the radius between these inner points. Whereas the outer radius is the points on the outside. Inner radius, I can get a nice chunky lookin' star, a really fun one. Then if I pump up the outer radius, you can see that's going to do the same kind of thing. Then because we have an inner and outer radius, we have an inner and outer roundness. So if I pump up my outer roundness, can get little starfish moment, and my inner roundness, is dealing with these points. Again, you can twist it till you break it. Kinda cool. And then of course we've got stroke and fill. So I'm going to delete all that. And then if we just have a quick look at our options. So these are our four key shapes that we can work with inside of After Effects, we can play with all sorts of different settings to get them looking unique. What we're gonna do next is use all of these sweet, sweet shape tools to create a bit of a background. We're going to lay it out around the edges of the frame, basically leaving a space in the middle where we can animate our funky dunky text. The next video is going to be very much a follow along with me as I go through my process. I really do encourage you to play and experiment and break it so you can fix it, that kind of thing. There is no right or wrong in this. It's just it's just having a crack and getting comfortable with the tools. So I promise you, I very rarely go in with a plan, even though I've done this thirty times before, it is safe to go ham on this and just really mess around with it. 6. Setting a Layout: Now that we know what some of the shape tools do and how we can use them. I'm just going to have a play basically. So I'm going to delete all this and I'm just going to jump in with whatever I'm vibin'. So I'm working on making a layout that's just basically the boundaries. And I'm going to leave room in the middle for some text. So whatever you feel is right is what you can do. I'm just going to plonk stuff in, try some different shapes. Make sure that you try some shapes that have fills and some that have strokes, maybe both! Up to you, see what you're vibin'. So this circle is just a stroke. There's no fill in it *oopsies*. There's no fill in it. So I can overlap stuff if I wanted this guy just to fill, that's cool. Maybe I want something with both, so maybe I'll make another circle and give it a fill. I'm going to have both gone. That's cool. Definitely going to pop in some triangles. So remember how we do those without Paulista is the easiest. And I'm going to undo path, change the points to three. This case, I reckon this guy, she is going to be a solid. That's cool. Oh, yuck. W2 prices about the colors, but make sure it's something that you like. We can keep adjusting this. So this is all going to be animated eventually. But at the moment, I've traveled play, just create a bunch of shapes and then put them in a layout that's kinda working for you. A couple of handy shortcuts while you're doing this, I'm going to keep switching between my Rotate tool and my Selection tool. So the rotate, it remember is W for low-tech W vote rotate and then change back to selection is V. The first elections kind of pointy shape is a v. So v and w you use all the time. Gonna kinda, they're sure if I want a second square Control D to duplicate, so you make a second version of it. And then I can adjust it, make it slightly different up somewhere else. I'm going to make this one bigger. Now, I could just adjust the scale, so S for scale. But if I do that, my numbers are no longer nice, clean, 100%. That's not disastrous by any means, but it is best practice to adjust the size with the size property. So when you're setting things up as much as you can do it in the contents and in the shape, because that means look bigger. But if I go to my S for scale, it's still on 100, which means that it's really easy to animate them. Really easy. And also with this guy, if I did it with scale, e.g. my stroke gets really small or really big. Whereas if I do it with the size ellipse path and then size, the stroke size design. So again, not a rule if you want to adjust things with scale because it's quicker and more efficient. Girlfriend, my friends. But just as a best practice note, sometimes it can be cipher to adjust things with the size property. Couple more shapes, alright. Something like that kind of works out a couple of other shortcuts to twirl all your properties away. If you select everything and click U on the keyboard, that will hide everything. If you click you twice, that will open every property that you've adjusted. So if you've gone into the stroke settings and play around with those and got to dig down and find it. Double. You will do it. You again to tap it all the way. Keep your layer stack nice and organized to adjust the order of things. If I want this on top, I can just grab it and drag it on top. Sure. I can use my keyboard shortcuts, control and closed square bracket to move up, open square bracket to move down. Move one at a time. And if I add shift to that combo, I can shove it at the bottom or at the top. Next up we're going to start animating it. So we're getting some ambient movement there. So make sure whatever layout you're working with, you've got enough real estate in the middle for your text. This isn't going to be a particularly distracting or focused animation. This is just gonna be ambient for some bonds. Next thing we do before we're going to jump into the next one. I want to keep my layers organized so I can tell what everything is before I start animating because that's going to bug me. I'm just going to quickly name stuff. So if I click it in my comp window, it'll highlight in my layer stack. Then I can hit Enter and name it. This one's a square guide. This is also a square. So I'm going to name it. And then the easiest way to be able to tell the difference, I'm going to color them. So this square is my Marone one. So I'm going to click something close to that. Spray. This one is orange. All right, triangle like that, orange and intimate. So Enter on the keyboard to change the name. And click on the tiny box to change the color. So you will have different color options. That's absolutely fine. But do something that makes sense to you. Whatever it wouldn't be like, maybe also equal to the same color. Whatever. I just recommend from a very early stage, organizing your layer stack. It will just make things easier in the long run. 7. Loop Animation: I'm happy with that kinda layout, so I'm going to start animating it, ambiently. So it's just kinda constantly moving. So a couple of easy ones. I reckon this square can just rotate. So I'm going to open up my Rotate property with R for rotate. And I'm going to hit the stopwatch at the very beginning. And if I want it to loop, easiest thing to do is go to the very, very end. And on this first value here, I'm going to click on that and type in 1. So it's gonna do one full revolution. Now it may be too fast so we'll have to see how this looks. It's not bad though, but it's probably too fast. Now the thing about squares is that if you rotate it 90 degrees, it's back to being A nutural squared. So let's see if this works, shall we… So if I make this first value is zero again, then what I want to add is half of 360, which is half of a full rotation. So I want it to do 180 degrees. So what I wanna do is I want to add 180 degrees. So I'm going to put a little plus symbol and 180. And you can see when I click OK, it looks exactly the same. So in theory, this is going to look great. Look at that. So when it plays all the way through, if I go to the very end and watch the little loop back, stunning. That works! So for my rotation on squares. If as long as I work with 90-degree angles, we should be getting a nice consistent loop. So I'm gonna do that on this one as well. So I'm going to open up my Rotate property. I'm gonna get this to rotate in the opposite direction. I'm going to set the stopwatch there, go to the very end. And in this case, rather than add 180, I'm going to minus 180. I'm just going to check my loop by playing it from the very end. If I wanted this to go slower, totally could do that. Rather than minus 180. I could do -90. I quite like that because it's bigger. I think I want it to be slower. That’s cool. With these circles. I might try something else rather than rotation because I don't know if you know this about circles, but you can see when it's rotating because it's a circle. So what I'm gonna do instead is I'm going to animate the scale. So it's kinda pulsing. Now. Again, for the loop factor, I want it to do a little bit of math. If this whole comp is 6 s long and my base is 25 frames per second. What I need to do, open up my calculator and I go 6 seconds times 25 frames per second equals 150. So whatever looping action I do, as long as it's divisible neatly into 150, we should be good. An easy one would be every second I've got a full action happening and that will continue six times. That's a simple way to do it. So if I start with my scale here, I'll go to around the middle kinda action and I make it a little bit bigger. And then I go to 1 second and go back to 100%. That's like enough, that's enough movement I think maybe. And of course, a little bit of easing always. So select everything and F9. That looks smoother. To get it to loop, that's another thing. So what I could do is grab all my keyframes and copy/paste. But obviously this is a bit tedious. Works though, but it’s tedious. Now if I want to make a change to it, I have to go and do it to every keyframe, which is a bit annoying. So what you might want to try instead, just going to undo all that just with my three keyframes. So my first, my extreme, it's in the middle and then back to neutral. So the first and last are the same, really important. So both of those are 100%. This one is 105%. As long as your first and last are the same, this little expression will work. So I'm going to hold Alt on the keyboard and click on this stopwatch. Then I'm going to type in, loop Out with a capital O bracket bracket. That's it. Lowercase l, capital O. Really important. Then if I hit enter on the numpad rather than normal enter, that will close that little box for us. And now if I play it, it'll go forever. Because say my text is red here, That's how I know there's an expression on it. And that also means that if I wanted to, I could extend this out so that’s here… it goes for twice as long. If I wanted. And checking that loop, that looks mighty nice. Well done, well done me. Good mathing. I might make that a little bit more extreme because it's Going for longer. And then that loops. So I'll do that again on this guy. I want that one to scale as well because I think that's kind of funky lookin’. So I'm going to open up the scale property with S on the keyboard. Then I’m gonna click on the stopwatch. Go to halfway between my nice neat looping number. In this case, I'm gonna, I think, making the whole loop in 1 second was too fast and 2 seconds is too slow for this one. So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go to 15 frames. I'm going to make it bigger. And then I'm going to go to 1 second plus 5 because that is 30 frames (25fps + 5 = 30). So if this is 15 frames, another 15 later makes it 30 frames. And 30 divides nicely into 150. So we’ll get 5 loops. So I'm going to copy and paste that property. I could just type in 100, but who doesn't love a copy paste? A bit of easing with our F9. And then Alt click on the stopwatch, and we'll type in loopOut(). Then you can click off, Enter on the numpad or click off to close that textbox. Now we can see it happening. Now they're not in sync with each other, which is always nice. If you want kind of ambient and randomized action. You don't want it to all be happening at the same pace. And then I'm gonna do a bit of rotation on our little triangles as well. So here I'll start with this little guy because you can see that better. This one, the maths is going to be a little bit harder and we may need to play with our anchor points if we want to rotate it. So I've, I've decided I'm going to give rotating it a crack. Let's see if I can get some loops working. Easiest thing to do, I'm actually going to set the rotation back to zero and then work from there. So I'm going to click on the stopwatch. Then what I'm going to put in here at the very end is 360/3 because we've got three sides. So the with the square it was divided by four. That's how you get 90 degree angles. And these case it’s divided by three. And it would be lined up. You can see it jumps. So that's our anchor point, that's the problem. But if I have a little play that speed’s lookin’ pretty good. Boonk. But that’s. That's not in the right place. So the thing about triangles is it doesn't know where the middle is. But what I'm gonna do is I'm going to use my anchor point tool. So Y on the keyboard or this, click on this icon here. Then I can see when I go to the very end, my anchor point, my whole shape has moved up, which means I probably need to move the anchor point down. And I can already say that wasn't too bad. If I go back to the end there, it's much closer. I'm going to go back to the beginning and drag it down a little bit more. Now gone too far. So I can use End and Home on the keyboard to quickly snap between the two. And I always want to be making the changes from home from the very beginning. Because if I make the changes from the end, I'm changing once it's already rotated, which is not what we're trying to do. Here we go. So on this triangle, if I go and apply that, Aww! That’s very nice! So triangles, pain in the bum. But if I want rotation, boom. That'll work, I'm gonna do that same thing again. I'm going to open my Rotate property, start back at zero. Rotate was at 360/3, which is 120, I guess. Shoves over a lot. That's not what I want. So I'm gonna grab my anchor point tool again, and I'm going to shove it down. That's pretty good. So it doesn't have to be pixel perfect. Not going to notice a single thing because it's like a single pixel because it's rotating the whole time anyway. But that works. Now the thing that I don't want though, is it to start on the exact same angle as this guy up here So now that I've got the animation happening, what I can do is if I click the word Rotation, that grabs all my keyframes. And if I scrub that second value, that will change both of them in relation to each other. So if I play that now, it's still maintaining that animation speed. And if I go to the end, I can see my keyframe has changed here too. So selecting all your keyframes and animating the properties together is how you can quickly adjust the whole thing. Now I don't think I'm quite happy with that rotation yet. I'm going to keep nudging that. I'm going to do the same here because I don't like that starting straight. I want to start a little bit out of s.. Out of sync. That’s better. Kewl. I reckon I actually want that one to rotate in the opposite direction. So what I'm gonna do is set this back to zero for a hot second and go negative 180. Nope, negative 120 because it was 360/3. Check that that works. Loops nice. And then do my reset angle, *oopsies* reset my angle. Really important when you're adjusting keyframes together, That your timeline marker is on top of one of those keyframes. Doesn't matter which one. But as long as there's one of them, because if you're in the middle, you'll make a new keyframe. I don't want to do that. And make sure I'm on top of that first keyframe. There we go! A little bit, a little bit action. So next thing we'll do is I'm going to show you how to do some trim paths on the circles. So you've got lines drawing on and off. 8. Meet Simon and Eddy: Something cool about shape layers is that you can add extra properties that are exclusive to shape layers. And that's exactly what we're gonna do for these guys. So if I grab one of them, one of the rings, I’ll work with this guy. I'm going to bring them into the center of the stage so we can see the whole time what's going on. I can pop it back later. But now if I twirl down my layer, I'm going to see this little button here, Add. So if I click on Add, I can add another property. Properties are like your transform properties. Anything that you can animate, it's the properties of that object that shape that layer. So I can add a new property, trim paths, and that will apply it underneath my ellipse. If I twirl this guy down, I'm going to see a bunch of things that don't make any sense. So I've got my start, end and offset. So to explain this, the way that I like to think of it is too little dude's runnin’ a race. So we've got Simon and Eddie. Simon and Eddie, are running a race. If I think of Simon as my Start and Eddie is my End. Because it's confusing because the race has a start and an end. So we need to think of it as two separate identities anyway. So, if Simon is at the very beginning of the race, that's at 0% and Eddie is at the very end of the race. That's end. And they've holding a ribbon between them. We can see the ribbon all the way round. Whereas if Eddie hasn't made it to the end of the race yet, if we go back to 33%, we only say 33% of the whole ribbon. Now, the same would work if Eddie was at the beginning of the rise of zero per cent and Simon was at the end. So we'll go to 100%, same same. So that's why I like to think of them as Simon and Eddie because Start and End, it's really the percentages. So if I want to have it drawn, what I need to do is I need everybody to start at the beginning of the race. Simon and Eddie go back to the very beginning. So that's 0%. And I'm going to keyframe. It doesn't matter who you want to go first. Simon or Eddie. I prefer to go Simon because he's the first one. I like to go in order but it doesn't matter. So Simon is gonna go first for me. I'm going to move along in time. And then he's going to scrub through it 100%. Amazing. If I play that back. It's animating on. Cool. But I don't want it to just draw on. If I want this to loop, I need to draw off as well. So what I'm gonna do is Eddie is also going to be running the race. So the very beginning he starts at 0% and the very end he gets to 100%. But now, if I play that back, nothing happens because Simon and Eddie are running at the exact same time. They running right next to each other holding the ribbon, you see nothing. So what I need is Eddie to start a little bit after Simon. So then I'm basically seeing this much of the ribbon the entire time. The difference between the two. If I want to see even more variation, something that we can do is put a bit of easing on it that is different from each other. So Simon and Eddie run differently. So Simon, he's going to slow down at the very end. He's going to get real puffed out. So I'm going to put some easing on with F9. Whereas Eddie, he is going to because he's giving his friend Simon a headstart, he's kind of jogging along. So he starts slower and then he ends full pelt. The play that now we see a lot more variation in the line. So I'm just going to make a quick copy of this so we can see the difference. So the one in the middle is just linear. The one on the outside is Eased. You can see the difference. The one that's just linear keyframes. This length of the ribbon that's revealed, this length of the ribbon that's revealed is the same the whole time. Whereas the one that's eased varies. Depending on the look you're after. There's two different options. I'm gonna go with eased because I think it looks Jazzier. And that's how you can get the drawing on, drawing off look. So key things to remember is the both running a race and they are holding ribbon between them. So you need a difference between their speeds and between the start and end points. You can have them completely lined up now that they've got easing on them at different ends, they're not running at the same rate. I can have them quite close together if I want to. Or I can still have them staggered. So either offsetting the keyframes, That's what I mean by stepping them apart or varying the easing or both. That's how you can make sure you can see your lines. I'm going to make this a little bit slower. And I'm going to keep in mind that I want it to loop six second*. So that means it needs to, the action needs to fit into something divisible by six. Now one of the other settings that we've got here that we haven't looked at is offset. That's this guy here. That is basically telling you where the start of the races. So a circle will always be at the very top. If I scrub through, you can see that that can move. And obviously that's got a little stopwatch, so I can keyframe that as well if I want to have the start moving, That's how I can get them. So it doesn't look like Simon and Eddie are not moving at the beginning and end. That's one way to do it. What I would actually prefer to do. I'm going to tighten this up a bit. And I'm gonna get Simon and Eddie to start and end at the same time, but come in with different easing. So I'm going to stretch Simon out at the end and get ready to start earlier. So if I play that through, It's a bit more constant, which I don't quite want. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to grab my last keyframe. I'm going to go up to my graph editor. And just something really simple. I'm going to drag out this handle, drag it in just a bit. And I can save I play that back. The loan gets longer. So what that means is the shallower, this curve is, the slower, this is, this is Simon coming to a slow decrease in speed. Whereas if I then click on Eddie, I can do the same at the other end. So click on this keyframe and drag this handle, and he's going to gradually gain speed. So if I have both selected, we can see the opposites of each other. So Simon is going to slow down and Eddie is going to ramp up. If I play that back now. Get a nice big stretch circle. There's no points where nothing's moving, which I prefer. To get these looping. We could use the looping expression that we had before, particularly because we've got the keyframes, they're doing the same thing. But I want them to overlap. So I don't want it to have to get to a full end before the new one starts. So I'm actually going to duplicate my layers. That's the easiest way to cheat the system, is just stack a whole bunch together. So I'll show you how to do that next. Do one thing, well, once and then duplicate it a whole bunch of times. 9. Offset and Stagger: So we've got a circle doing its thing, but it just does it once, that's boring. Now rather than doing a loop expression. So it starts and ends and starts and ends. That's kinda boring. I want it to overlap. So what I'm gonna do, first thing, I'm going to tidy it up a little because this part of my layer is doing absolutely nothing. So I don't need it. I'm gonna clean it up because it makes it easier to see visually how long my layers are. So I can do that with the keyboard shortcut, Alt and ]. That'll move the end, Alt and [ moves the beginning. Or I can do the classic hover and drag. That's also fine. But Alt + [ ] is my personal life. And now if I play that back, OK, nice and tidy, now I'm going to duplicate it with Control D. That makes a second instance of it. Now what I wanna do is I don't want it to happen right at the end because that would be the same as a loop expression. What will be the point? What I want to happen is I want it to overlap a little bit. So I'm gonna do like half a second kind of thing. So that is not in the same spot. Yeah there we go. But I don't want it to keep popping out at the same point. So I could adjust the offset or because we're working with sweet, sweet circles, I'm going to use rotation. So R for rotate, and I'm going to change it by 90 degrees. Let's see how that looks. Yeah, great. So kind of the opposite side of the circle. So depending on the speed of yours, you may want it to vary. That's cool. It's all about experimenting at this stage isn't it? But cool, so there's one. I'm going to duplicate that again. So Control D and again about half a second before the end. Now quick way to move a layer to where you are in time, so this is a timeline marker. If I want it to start from there, I can just use square bracket. [ . ] moves the end. [ moves the beginning. Adding alt, cuts it. Without Alt, you just moving it. And then this one, I'm going to rotate another 90 degrees. So that'll be 180. So it should start on the other side. Good, great look at that. And then I'm gonna go halfway before the very end. Duplicate, shove it over, rotate. This will be 270. And because I've nailed my maths, purely by coincidence, the next one would be 360, which is back to neutral. Awesome. So if I play that back now, it's constantly moving and it looks kind of cool. But we still get a glitch at the end. Why might that be? Because we're missing one. We need a.. ah.. basically this beginning, we should say half of this one still going because this one is still on screen, right? So make sure you're at the very end. You want to be on the blank screen and then control shift D to split. So that will duplicate and split so it'll make a copy of this layer, but will also cut it exactly where you are in time. And then I moved back to the very beginning. And I use my open square bracket to shove it on over to the in there. And now that'll be overlapping together. So if I play that back... ...seamless loop. Now, I've got this kind of situation. It's a bit messy. So what I'm gonna do to tidy it all up is pre-compose. So if I grab all of my maroon ring layers, right-click and pre-compose or Control shift C. And then go.. "Ring". Always make sure adjust composition, duration to the timespan of selected layers is ticked. That just means that if you have a layer that is only a couple of frames long and you precompose it, you'll comp wont be the whole length. We will make it easier to see where everything is. So that probably means nothing. That'll come up later, does stress. And obviously move all layers, great. Now so it's nice and tidy. I'm going to make it to raspberry again. Now I've got one layer that represents everything. If I want to go and make a change, I can double-click and find my layer. So now that that's done, I can pop it back in place. Beautiful. So then I'm going to go through that exact process all over again on this guy, this white one. So feel free to follow along or have a crack on your own if it's not a circular one that you're working with, see what different looks you can get. You may want to use the offset rather than rotation. That's cool. But see if you can get the hang of this process. So trim paths. And we're gonna get Simon and Eddie racin'. So something else that I forgot to do on the first one that I remember on the second one is putting a round cap on. You don't have to, but I want to. If I go into my ring and I grab all my layers, I can search cap. And that will show you where all the caps are, so I can change them all. There's no way to change them on mass, I don't know why. You will have to ask After Effects. But at least this way you can search it and you don't have to dig down contents, ellipse, stroke, line cap for each one. That takes too long. So if you just search cap it'll open them up for everything. That's handy. So now both of my curvy circle bois have a round cap. Now I'm just playing with the rotation of this top guy because it's cropped off, we see some funny artifacts. Which if I bring it into the center of the screen, we can see the loop is working. It's just because you only see a section of it that some of it looks a bit weird. So I'm just cropping it so that it seems purposefully weird rather than unintentionally weird. Yeah, that looks good. Happy with that. That's our background done. So next up, we'll do how to do a little WIP render so we can share with each other and see how we're goin'! 10. WIP Render: So now that we've got a background and doing a funky thang, what we're gonna do is render it out and pop it, in the little discussions, I'd love to see what we've all done for our backgrounds. So what kind of shapes with played with. I've been relatively restrained here, so feel free to absolutely go ham on yours. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go up to Composition, add to Media Encoder Queue. I'm not going to render it through After Effects. I'm going to render through Media Encoder because it's my personal fave Media Encoder open. I'm going to wait for another hot minute for my comp to pop up - There it iiiiis! Now for us, for a little WIP render. What I'd do for a client is an MP4. What we're gonna do for the internet is a gif. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to click on this blue text. I never use the arrows because that just opens up presets. I want to see every detail. If you get comfy and use your presets fantastic, mine are always different so I always prefer to jump in, in full show. So I'm gonna go to my format. H264 is an MP4. That's fine if you want to render a video. Absolutely cool. I'm going to go for a gift though. Now it's going to compress it and look nasty. But we're working with geometric shapes. So I'm not too stressed about low quol. Animated GIF with transparency. There's no transparency. I'm just gonna go Match Source. So hopefully that will make it a smaller file size too. Don't make it think about transparencies if you don't need to. So I'm going to scroll down to my video settings. And what I'm gonna do because it's on Match Source. That's great. I want all of these settings to be copied across except for size. I don't need 1920px by 1080px sized GIF. That's huge. So I'm going to untick that. I'm gonna go 420px or something because that's linked, the other number will automatically update for us. So you can see it's already quite pixely. But if I scrub through it's clear enough what's going on and that's what we need. We don't need it to be fancy pants. If we want to go a bit bigger, we could go 620px. There's no science to these numbers, just nice numbers. Apparently I like things with 20s at the end. That looks good enough to me. Scroll on down. There is nothing else interesting that I want to tick there. Everything else seems pretty hunky-dory to me. So I'm gonna go, OK. And then I'm going to tell it where to save to. Just in my main folder* "Hellow Animated" GIF and then hit play. So then I can click on this text for it to show me where it is. So we've got to 2mb basically. That's fine. Crisp. I think Skillshare likes things to be under 5mb. Definitely under 8mb. So 2.25mb has got 620px sounds like it will be perfecto! So that's my little, that's my little background WIP. Now we've all got a WIP render of our background, I'd love us to upload it to the discussion boards so we can see what everybody's crafting and creating. No pressure on it being the most whiz bang thing ever, it's all about learning from each other and sharing what we're sharing, what we're making. At next up, we'll start looking at animating the text. 11. Creating Text: A little bit of admin here first, because I don't need to mess around with any of this stuff now. It's pretty set. I'm just going to precompose everything, so it's nice and tidy. So I'm going to grab all of my layers, Control Shift C, and I'm going to call this "Background". Now, I can also open that up and I can open up my ring. All of that is still very accessible. And you can see they're now in my project window too. So I'm gonna do a little bit of tidying up here. I'm gonna go Comps. And then in the Precomps. So that's things that have precomposed, the things that I want to.. I often do it so I have scenes and so I have my main elements. It's just so that I can find everything. So this is what I'm going to render at the very end. This is all the bits that make up, this. So you don't have to do this. You probably don't need the parent comp one. But look, I've got a system that I've been using for a long time and I'm going to stick with that. Cool. So now we're going to bung in some text. So I'm gonna go up to my text tool, which is this T. I'm going to select that. And then if I just click, I can type in a word, "g'day". Beautiful! If anybody wasn't sure, Yes. I am Australian. There we go. There's been a bit of text. Now, there's two different ways you can use the text tool. So that way is a click and type, or I can do a drag and type. And that'll give you a textbox. Still exactly the same options. That's fine. But you'll notice there's a big ol' bounding box for your text. If you're doing like a paragraph of text, if you're doing quotes, that kind of thing, I'd definitely use this bounding box so you have control over the.. the boundaries basically. But we're just doing one word. So we are going to keep it simple. And we're going to simply click once and type our thing. You can type whatever you please. Once you've got some text, your text properties. So your character tools should open up automatically. If they don't go up to Window and Character. There's character and there's also paragraph. So you can change your fonts ..obvy! So anything that you've got through Adobe should be accessible here. You can add more fonts there as well. And you've got your types, all the usual stuff. You've got your colours. You can switch it to an outline if I wanted. Ew.. It's hideous so no thank you. I can pump up the size. Feels better to me. You've got your line spacing. You've got your text spacing, kerning, *blerp* and height, you know, heaps of stuff to play with. You can do all caps, you can do mini caps. You can do italic. So it doesn't matter what font you have, even if it doesn't have italic available. After Effects has figured out how to slant stuff. Genius, subscript. Type stuff, guys. Have a play. We've also got our paragraph which mostly all you're doing is, is it gonna be left, right, or center aligned? Now as far as texts that you're bunging in the middle of the screen, it doesn't change much because you can just move it, right? But what it does change is where your anchor point is. The anchor point by default will be the baseline of your text. And depending on your alignment, it'll be either the middle, the left or the right. I'm going to have it in the middle. Keep it simple. So with my text here, Something that I would recommend you use rather than eyeballing where the center of this frame is. If I go up to Window and Align, I can use these tools. It's way better. So I've got set to composition or selection so I have got a couple of things I can align them to each other. Again, just like classic Adobe stuff. Something that's good practice for video. Rather than having it smack bang in the middle. Nudge it a little bit higher. As if you're kinda.. imagine you're in the cinema. Text isn't usually right in the middle, it's usually like a little bit up. So you're looking up at it. So give yourself a little bit of drama. So there we are. We're ready with our first bit of text. I'd really love you guys to have a play with the character options, the paragraph, the alignment, get it lookin' shmicko. Make sure you play it all the way through and check that you haven't.. your background isn't like gettin' up in your business, for example this guy is possibly a little bit too low. I'm just going to nudge it a little bit. It's fine, but get out of it. So give it a bit more space. But yeah have a little play it, get comfy with it. And then we'll start looking at how we can animate this bit of text. 12. Position Keyframes: I'm going to start with some really simple animation for this, for this first one. Now, because we're working with text, there's heaps of text, specific animation. If I twirl down my text, I can see there's loads of specific properties. And I've got this whole other animate section. We're not starting there, we're going to start with, this is a layer. I can treat it like a layer no matter what, Texts can be simple. It can be super complicated, but it can also be really simple. So I'm going to go back to our OG, type of animation, which is using our transforms. So in this case, I'm just gonna get my little guy starting down here, overshooting, come back into a settle. So I'm going to animate the position. That's how I'm gonna do that. Now when I'm doing an animation and I've already set up what I want the final frame to look like. That's this one. I've used my lines, it's all beautifully in place. What I wanna do is kinda animate in reverse. So rather than forward animate and then just have to realign it at the end, if I set where my keyframes are to start with, it makes it easier. I've got that recorded. So to do that, I'm going to make sure I'm at the start of the timeline and click on the stopwatch for position. And then I'm going to use shift page down to move forwards ten frames. Hit the stopwatch, shift page down another ten frames. And that's gonna give me my three keyframes. They're stupidly spaced, it doesn't matter. I just need them to be separate so that I have space to adjust what's happening. So this is gonna be my final frame. This is where it ends. First one is gonna be way down here. This one in the middle. We're gonna do an overshoot, so it's going to shoot up. So it's coming in so fast it misses the target, and it has to come back and settle back in. So if I play that now, it looks extremely stupid. But trust the process team. Trust that the keyframes, That's the action that I want to happen, the timing of it ludicrous. So let's play with that. Firstly, I'm going to set some easing on these because this first one is coming in at speed. I don't need to see any easing on that. I can just have that linear as it is. But these two, It's kinda settling down. So I'm gonna go F9 on them. If I play that back, it's already looking a little bit better. But it's not coming in with the impact, it's just floating. I'm going to speed it all up. Oo. That's too much. Goodness gracious. What I need is this bit to kinda hold for a second. Not like proper hold, but this needs to be the slowest point because we've.. we're trying really hard to put the brakes on. I'm going to select my position keyframe. And I'm going to jump into my graph editor. And I'm going to, all I'm gonna do is play with the handles. I'm not moving the points themselves, I'm just grabbing these handles and making the curve around this keyframe shallower. So that means it comes in slower and goes back out slower, which in turn speeds up these points here. So if I play that - Aww there it is. Quick interjection. If this is not the graph that you see, you'll want to go down to this little menu here and switch it on up. Which has your x and your y, which I find to be confusing. So if you prefer to see what I'm saying, go to Edit > Speed Graph just on this little menu box there. And then you should see the same with me. So make sure you're on position. Then you can see the keyframes. But that with a little bit of slow down up here, Oo that's some cool impact. But I reckon, I actually want because it's coming in so fast, I want a little bit of an undershoot. If this is my overshoot, I want it to come back in for a bit more of a settle. So I'm actually going to add another keyframe, this little diamond. Then go back to the previous one. And this guy is gonna be down here a little bit. Not as much as the overshoot, a lot less than that. That's cute. A bit aggressive. So I'm just going to reset my easing on that, with F9. Cute. Alright. There we go. I'm going to jump back into my graph editor and put a little bit of softening on this. So obviously no plans here, just having a red hot crack and feeling it out as I go. There's no a magical numbers, whatever works for you. I want that first bit to be faster I reckon, There it is. *Shwing Bonk* Yeah! I reckon that looks kind of funky. Have a little play with yours. See what feels right. You'll have a different word, we will have a different vibe. I reckon, G'day is a pretty aggressively bonky word. Next up, I'm going to show you similar to what we did with the rings. How making one thing happen once is fine. But making it happen a bunch of times, super cool. So we're going to make it, each letter come in slightly offset from each other. So you get like a fluid bounce rather than one big chonk of text. 13. Duplicate and Stagger: So you've got your text, swoopin' in. Now we're going to stagger it so that they're all split up. Now, there is a way to do this with text tools, but you don't have complete control. So I'm going to show you the hack job way to do it, which I think is better. Purists on the internet will tell you otherwise, but do whatever works for you. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to go to old mate Duplicate and I'm going to Control D for as many letters as I have. So I've got G already. Apostrophe, D, A, Y. That's how many layers I need. So Control D to duplicate as many times as you need. Then I'm going to use my pen tool up here. I'm going to draw a mask around each letter. So to start off with, it's gonna be confusing because they're all stacked on top of each other. So you won't be able to see what we're doing. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to solo, this little icon here, this one. And I'm going to mask just really roughly, it doesn't matter as long as you don't get an extra part of the next letter, the Y, as long as I've got that layer selected, it will mask and create a mask when you close the shape. So I'm gonna move on to the next one. I'm going to select the fourth one. And just clicking and making a mask shape around the A. Then continue on to D. That was a white mask so we couldn't see it, I'll just do that again. Then we've got the apostrophy. And finally the G. Beautiful. So now we've got G, ', D, A, Y. Amazing. If we play it back, It's exactly the same! 'cause it's all playing still perfectly together. So what we need to do is grab our layers. If we hit U on the keyboard, that'll open up all of our keyframes. We can see that they all perfectly aligned. That's why applies exactly as if it was one layer. But if we grab this last one and shove it over a keyframe and then Shift to select the next one. Shift + select, drag one frame over, Shift + Select drag one over. Now you've got them staggered. Those keyframes are all offset from each other. If I play that back. Oh my goodness, you guys. How much cooler is that? Heaps cooler. Heaps cooler is what you're all screaming. Woohoo! It's the best! Ermagherd! G'day! G'day indeed. If I find that that's losing some punch because it's offset, that's fine. I can grab all my keyframes and shove them together. Totally cool, no wozzies. I can also add one other little feature that is real nice, because it's coming in so fast. This funky little guy called motion blur. Oh what's that? Oooo! Look at that action. Look at that bouncy little buddy. So if I go through the frames, you can see it's putting blur on those really fast parts, and not so blurry near the end because it's not moving so fast. Motion blur is these guys. I had all selected and then ticked it. And that will automatically turn on this one, which is your preview. So motion blur can be really chuggy on your machine. So sometimes it's handy to turn it off, even though it's on via layers here. It's turned off for your preview makes it quicker to see. So if you find as soon as you turn motion blur on After Effects is like, WOAH! What did you do?? That's fine. Just turn it off here. But I think it looks funky, while you're working, you can have it turned off and then when you're rendering, turn it back on and it will look funky as heck. Don't apply to everything. Just the really, really funky necessary stuff like these feels right. And then again, we're going to organize our layers. I'm going to grab it. All these G'day layers, and I'm going to Control Shift C and call it G'day Now something else I can do, so I don't see the text just like right there, is I can pop a mask. Because I've now precomposed everything into one comp. I can go up to my Shape tool. So right next to the Pen tool, back to the rectangle. I could do it with pen tool, but I like a nice clean rectangle. And then with my comp selected, I'm going to click and drag. Then if I scrub back through.. it disappears. But because I've put motion blur on it, that hard edge, it looks a little bit silly. So I'm going to twirl down my mask and open up feather and just pump up the feather *bloop* then it's coming out of nowhere. oh ma gawd. Kewl. So there is our first word. We've done at gang, we've done it. Next up. We're gonna do the next word, woah, what a process. 14. Ciao: Now we've got our one word happening, I'm going to bring in another word and we're going to animate that one on and this one off together. So I'm going to grab my text tool and click. And for this one I'm going to type in, Ciao. I don't mind what words you use entirely up to you. Now, what I'm gonna do is I'm going to animate this boy off. These are just a few different tools that you can use to animate text off in After Effects. These aren't rules. This isn't the only way you can do it. Feel free to experiment and try different things. It's all about just getting comfortable and experimenting as, as ever. Working with transitions to get one object, off and bring in another one is a really great way to get comfortable with tools inside After Effects. So I'm going to transition. G'day off after it's animated. So let it play, right about there. I'm going to use spoilers scale. That property is already open and to animate it off. So first off, I'm going to actually adjust my anchor point. This one, I'm going to pop it on the side because I'm going to scale it down to squish off onto this side. I don't want to down the bottom, I want it on the side. So I'm going to click the stopwatch to activate the property and then move forward ten frames. So that shortcut is shift page down. Then I'm going to unlock this property and change that first value because that's my.. Is that right? Yeah good. I always get those wrong. The first one is the horizontal. So I'm going to make that zero. So he gets to I super skinny boy, it squishes all the way off. Which if I turn this Chao off looks ridiculous on its own. But if I animate another one coming on at the same time. So turn Ciao on, and again, scale. So S for scale, I'm going to move my anchor point this time to the right hand side. But I'm using the reference of G'Day, for how wide it needs to be not to Ciao because I want it to be one big side. So there'll be a bit of buffer. So this time, rather than scaling down, I'm going to scale up. So the easiest way to do that is go to the last keyframe, click the stopwatch there because that's our end frame. And then move back to this first one and time it with that. Then again, we'll unlock this scale property and type in zero. This one is going to start skinny on the left and fill up. This one's going to start full and then gets skinny on the right. So it should look like they're pushing each other out omg you guys! *boonk* And then of course, a little cheeky bit of easing on both. *bloonk* Look at that. That's a nice simple one innit?? 15. Salut: And before we bring in the next word, I'm gonna do a little bit of file tidy up. So something that I like to do when things are yet to be done. The layers are grey, when they're done, they coloured, which is why my background is coloured. Now G'day is done, right, so it comes in and it goes out. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to colour that. I select the little colour box and then give it a label color. In my case, I kind of go up the stack. So I'll got orange and Ciao is only part done so I'm going to leave that grey. That's fine. Soo I'm also going to clean up the layer lengths because this is dead space. There's nothing happening with ciao up until here. I'm going to use Alt and open square bracket to chop 'er. That just makes it easier to see where things happen. Visual cues are really helpful so you don't have to constantly keep playing. Alright, and now I'm going to play through about here, about the three second mark is where I want my next word to come in. So I'm going to grab my text and I'm going to type in Salut I'm going to use my align tools to center it with the comp and then I'm going to line it up holding Shift. So it lines up with the base line of this text. Then this one, I'm going to move it to this point. So I can use just open square bracket, no alt and it'll shove on over. I'm not going to worry about animating these one off yet. I'm going to leave ciao for now so I'm going to turn it off. And this guy, again, I'm going to stick with basic animation tools here. So just position, so P for position, and then click the stopwatch. So I always like to mark out my positions when I can. So rather than having to realign, I will put in a bunch of blank keyframes. That's my preferred process. Everyone has their own process though. So up to you to figure out what's vibin' for you. So in this case, I'm gonna go sidewise. So my first keyframe, I'm going to plonk it over here, out of the way. And then it's going to come in. And we'll do the same masking that we did with G'day, but we'll do that after. So *shwoop* that's cool. That's fine. But hasn't got much oomph to it. So this is when we start looking at the additional properties afforded to us by text. So with text, there's not a lot in here to play with by default. And they're really technical kinda things that aren't particularly useful off the bat. But what we are gonna do is we're going to add a property that you can only add on text, which is skew. So we've got all their normal transforms and skew. That's something you can do with text. So I'm gonna *boonk*, apply that. And what that will do is it'll give us an animator - range selector. Don't worry about that for now. And we're going to animate the skew. So if I just scrub through the values, you can see it basically adds a italics kind of slant. So if I go, -40. If I go all the way.. *bleh* it'll only go so far. Now what I want is while it's moving fast, it's gonna be slanted this way. And then when it hits, it's going to swing over and then come back to neutral. So that's what I'm going to use the skew for to add emphasis to the action. Start with, skew here looks fine. I'm just going to eyeball this. I don't need to be particularly precious. And it's going to swing back. So we're not going to go straight back to zero yet because it was quite a fast action. So we want to give it, the faster the action, the more kind of bounce back you tend to have. But also depends on the style of animation you want. Do you want it to be super springy or do you want it to be fluid? So a bit of easing on there. Now the thing is I want this to stay slanted this way until right near the very end because it's not until the impact that we should swing forward. So if I play that now *bonk*, Aw that's quite nice. Something else that we could add if we wanted, which is in our, under our animate. But because we've already gotten 1 animator, we don't need to just go straight up there we can just do it here. We can go to add instead, which is another property. And in this case, we could add tracking if we wanted. This means we can extend out ooooh, extent out our text. So what I might do is make them quite stretchy. Here. Until the impact. I'm just lining up the keyframes. And then I'm gonna do the same just basic easing. It's alright. But the issue is because the paragraph style is centered. It's.. the tracking is coming from the middle. We need it to happen from the side. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to change my tracking, which ruins my alignment. But that's fine. Because what I can do, I turn on my ciao text so I can see what to line it up with. And grab both of my position keyframes and pop it back over here. And of course, old mate motion blur, *bloonk*. Great. Now that we've got this animating in. We've got the timing to animate the other bit out. So I'm going to turn my ciao back on. Play it through, see how the timing feels.. I reckon a beat earlier. Because I've sped that up. Now that I've got the timing of solute, I can go to the beginning of this action and scrub through until the T kinda hits the C. And that's when I want this one to animate off. So I'm just gonna go to the position on ciao and keep scale open, just because I like being able to see it I'm going to hold Shift and hit P. And then click on the stopwatch and then go through to the end, like the big impact, that is where ciao needs to be all the way off. It's going to slide in and push ciao away. Now to actually get rid of ciao, I can't use a mask this time because I'm animating the position. So masks move with position. What I need is a separate layer that ciao is going to hide behind. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to grab my rectangle tool. And I'm going to draw a box like this. And it's got some mad settings based on the shapes I made before, so I'm going to turn the stroke off because I don't need that. Now as long as it covers up where ciao goes to, not where ciao was, where ciao goes to. So now I'm going to grab this shape layer and pop it directly above the text ciao. And then in this little drop-down box section here where it says TrkMat, that means Track Matte. I'm going to tell my ciao layer, that the layer above is what I am hiding behind. So that means go to Alpha Inverted Matte. So on Ciao, where it says none, I'll go to alpha inverted matte. And you can see that you can't see it. But if I scrub back in time, oh, there it is. Hello. So it means that wherever this box is, it's hiding the text. That's a track matte, track mattes we'll use all the time. They're super handy because they aren't independent line that you can do whatever you darn well please with. But yep. On the text layer, as long as you say the layer above, as long as they are in the correct order, they need to be together. Think of it like a window. You're either revealing what's in there or there's a poster in the way and you can't see behind it. So in this case it's a poster And that's why it's inverted. Because if it was matte, we'd only see it when it was behind the box. So we want an inverted. Quick note here on track mattes. This is exclusively for versions of After Effects before 2022*. I'll make a little bonus video on doing track mattes in later versions. It's gotten better, you guys. But we're not all working on the same version. So this is the traditional way to work with track mattes, but they have they have advanced After Effects has learnt. So that's cool. But yeah, I'll show you how to do that in a separate video. Then if I play that back through. I've got G'day, Ciao, Salut I'm noticing when I do that, I've got my timing a little bit off, so I'm going to fix that and I'm also going to add some skew to these texts so it matches that. So it's twirl that down, animate, skew and go from nothing to a bunch relatively quickly. But then it needs to move more because it's obviously sticking back. So that's fine. And that's why you never need to nail it the first time, keep adding to it, making it better. *boonk* Now, the only other thing I wanna do is add some blursy blurs to my ciao because we missed that bit. Now they're all matchy, matchy. Shwingidy, shwoopidy, doop. And of course, a little bit of layer management. I'm going to name this layer. It is my Ciao Matte. And these guys go together. So I'm going to make them pumpkin. Good. Now I've got Solut, but I need to then animate it off. So I'll do that with the next word. So I'm gonna get Salut, animating down, sliding off into the bottom of frame. About hereish So again, there'll be a position, jobby and slide it on down. I'm going to add a little bit of drama to it though. Because drama, is important. That's pretty good. Now something that's really powerful in motion graphics and all animation, is anticipation. A little bit of anticipation. So this here is the partner to anticipation. That's called follow-through. That's the overshoot. That's the "Whoopsies, gone too far, come back." Anticipation is the crouch that you do before you jump. It's the warning, something cool's about to happen. So in this instance, if I'm gonna go down, it'll be an opposing action. So a move down, I'll probably do a little stretch up first. So that'll just be a scale. Shift S to open the scale property. And then I'll *boop* and *boop* And I'm gonna make this slightly taller. So I'm only gonna go in one direction. That's fine. Then I'm going to chop it off. So another great trick is you don't have to animate stuff off gang. You don't, you can just cut it because we're also going to have something else interesting coming in on top. So the focus will not be there anymore. Similarly, over here it's hidden by some stuff. I'm not too fussed by it. If I want to tidy it up, what I could do in this case, this one, for Ciao, we made a matte to disappear behind this case I can make one to reveal. So if I go.. like.. here. And because this shape layer is directly above salut, I can go alpha matte, so will only be visible in there. Did I make it tall enough? Yes I did, well done past me and it will scrub off there. That's fine. It's a little bit harsh on the edge which I'm not living for, but that's fine. Just make it a bit wider. Go to here. And then something that I do, if I want to make it a bit blurry here, get a little bit of a softened edge, and go into my effects and I'm going to just search for a blur. It doesn't matter which one you use. We've all got our personal favourites. Look at how many there are. Gaussian blur is my favourite. I don't know if that's how you say it. It's how I say. It only needs to be horizontal because it's just this guy. I'm just going to blur that. And that's going to blur the box. So if I turn my box and I can see it's blurring on the edges. Need to turn off repeat edges because it's trying to make nice crisp edges for us, which is entirely not the point. Cool. Now that looks like it's working. I can turn the eyeball backoff because this is still set to be the Track Matte. Bish Bash Bosh. Beautiful. And then that's pretty cute too. I might make this slightly taller. If I wanted that to be blurry, I could obviously blur it in both directions, but I like the crisp edge personally. So I'm going to keep it. Actually. Another thought... Yeah, I'm gonna go right there instead. So it's hiding right from where it, right from that baseline. I think that's a cuter. Then again, I'm going to name this. And now that is done. I'm going to colour it. Bish Bash Boshitty Boo. 16. BONUS - 2023 Track Mattes: Quick bonus video for anybody working in After Effects 2023 and beyond for Track Mattes, they've been updated. They're fundamentally the same, except better. So here we've got ciao and I need to animate it off. So it comes in looking shmazing. In previous versions, you need a box to be directly above the text that you want to hide or the object layer, whatever, that you want to hide. The matte has to be above, right? In the new version of After Effects, it can be anywhere. That's basically the main difference. So if I treat it the same as the old versions on my Ciao text under my Track Matte menu, I'll go to the layer above, which is Ciao matte. But it works exactly the same. Slides off. Great. But what I can do is I can move my layers around now You can see that it automatically updates. Now why is this helpful? Why is this important? And that's because you can have multiple layers referencing the same track matte. That's never been a thing before. There's been convoluted ways to do it, but it's never been something that's been inbuilt cleanly. So now you can tell After Effects that three words are using the same track matte, absolutely unheard of. But just in case you are in the newest version of After Effects and it doesn't look the same as what I've been doing in the previous videos. This is why it's just been updated. So you'll have lots of different options there. The other thing that's changed is we've got alpha and inverted in the previous versions. You still have that. It's just these tick boxes here. I never remember which is which, but just click it and see which one looks right. That's, that's my solution for everything. Try them and see what works. But that's what they represent. Alpha and Alpha Inverted. Thanks, team. 17. Hallo: Alrighty, it's the last word. And this time we're going to do something a bit different. So with text, you can actually convert it into shape layers. And then you've got all sorts of other options of how you can animate, move it, morph it, change it. First up I need to make a word. So I'm going to just plonk one hereish. Hallo. And I'm going to use my Align to get it center stage and line it up roughly here. Now this time, I'm not going to worry about timing yet. I'm just gonna, I'm just gonna go ahead and animate it. So I may want to turn Salut off while I do this. But I'm going to nudge it on over. So what I can do with a text layer is right-click on it and go create shapes from text. So I've got masks from text and shapes from text. That's a special thing you can do the text. That's why it says from text. If I do that, if I click that button, it will see I've got my texts layer that's now by default turned off. And I've got the exact same thing, but now with a little star icon, which means it's a shape layer, just like our track mattes, we made those with rectangles. We've got the outlines to our shapes. If I twirl down, I've now got contents for each individual letter. Amazing, which means I can go and adjust the points on these letters to do all sorts of different things. And if I twirl down to H, to path, that's what I'm on. The path properties. You'll notice it's got a stopwatch. That means I can animate it. Ermagherd. And that's exactly what we're gonna do. I'm going to twirl down all of the properties. It's a lot of twirling. So bare with us for a ticky. You may wonder why some letters have two paths, like, O for example. that's because we've got the outline and the inner line. We've got two separate shapes. So what we need to do is we need to keyframe these paths. If I just click and drag, that'll keyframe all of those And the reason I do that first, even if I'm only animating one letter at a time. So I can hit U on the keyboard and tab everything away. Because working with that, chaos, on one little screen. is real hard. So I just need to remember that the first one is my H, second two are H third is L. But you can always click it and double-check. Alrighty. So what I wanna do is I want this text to be like a real stretchy. So it's going to stretch up from really tall down to this. So if I kinda work backwards again, so add ten frames and this will be my final resting place. I'll go back to the first one. What I can do is grab this keyframe here. And just marquee select. When I say marquee select I mean drag a box around, all those points. Those filled-in ones are the ones you have selected. The hollow ones are not. And just drag it up. Make a nice big stretchy boy. I can drag these ones all the way up. Again, I don't have a plan, never do. But if I play - oh - that's gonna do a thing, so that's cool. So I'm gonna do that with all the letters. I'm going to skip A for a hot second because that's going to be fiddly. So I'm just going to grab the simple ones first. And we're already done, we're up to the tricky ones. On O, we'll start here. What I need is two points. Because if I just stretch this now, it's fine, but you can see it gets a bit distorted. It gets a bit like egg shaped rather than O shaped. So what I wanna do is with one of the points selected, grab my pen tool. If I just quickly add. When I hover over the path and little plus symbol appears, it's going to make a new point on my path. I'm going to do the same on the outer. And now.. Oop, I missed. Let me just grab those ones and the top ones. There we go. Beautiful, nice, stretchy O. So you've got to add the extra points so that you can move it and it's not going to try and stretch it in a weird way. So for the final frame that kinda pointless, but for the stretchy frame they're necessary. So I'm gonna do the same on the a. I need one here. And here and I reckon there. And grab all those. And we're looking. And *weeeoo* that's workin'. What I might actually do is rather than just, just the hole, I'm gonna grab this bit, with you, this bit, gets stretchy too. Then it kinda matches the H situation. Cool. Now if I play that, that's fine. But we really need some follow-through we need some bounce. So that's my final resting. So I'm gonna move along, add another keyframe. Go back in. And on this one, I'm going to add my little squishy. If there's any that you think oh, that looks crap. That's fine. Well, we can do is we can copy the last one and pop it back, and have another go. So I've just copy- pasted that H. So I can have another go at squishing it because that didn't work out. Then what I'm gonna do is I'm going to offset, because we love an offset. Now I need to remember which are which. So this is O. I need both parts of the O. I've got to move them together. So I'm going to grab those and move it over same width, L. I'm just nudging over two frames at a time. Let's see how that looks. If it's too much, we can adjust it, that's fine. Both parts of the a. Then play that back. *bidleidleidle* aw that's nice. So we've got Hallo, animating in. That's kinda cool. But at the moment, and it's not sync up with anything, I need to get Salut back. And then I can animate the position in time with the drop. So where's my keyframes hit U on the keyboard, open those up. And this all needs to happen way over here. So P for position and line it up with this one. Actually lining it up with where it disappears. It needs to be at the top of the letters. And we can do a little bit of motion blur so that it all matches. Don't need this text layer anymore. So I'm gonna delete that. Now, playing that all the way back, which is really important to regularly play it all the way through. Not just scrubbing but playback. I feel like the timing is a little bit out. So I run out of time to do anything with the end frame. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to make this bit happen a bit sooner. So I reckon there. So this starts here. And I know that my position for this one lines up with this position. So I can just shove it over. I reckon ciao is going to happen like a hot second sooner too. So that will require messing with both layers. I'm just going to move.. make it happen like ten frames earlier. Nope. ahhhh Like five frames earlier. If I use page up 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, I can easily count five frames. And I like to do it by counting how many frames, so that when everything is like move a layer moves from keyframes. It's easy to figure out how much. Because they're both move over five frames and they should all be hunky-dory and in sync. That's punchy, that's nice. The last thing I need to do is get rid of this. And to do that, I'm going to just fade it off. So that is T for Opacity because of course it is After Effects. Thanks so much for your time. And fade it on down to zero. We're back to the beginning. Magic. 18. Bursts: I'm going to add one more bonus, bonus tip here for something that you can scatter some additional magic throughout your whole project. So this is, it's going to use the same tools that we used way back on those animated rings doing the trim paths. I'm going to, cos I've finished animating that I'm going to colour that first, of course. I'm going to tab everything away with U and I'm going to save good work, save well done. Now, what I'm gonna do is I'm going to turn on this little guy here. My title and action safe. It's not particularly relevant to anything right now. But what we're going to use, I'm going to go to a blank frame for a second. Here we go. Is this crosshair in the middle. Because when you create a shape layer, working with the center of frame is just easier. If you find you have weird issues that will be why right now it means nothing. So apologies that we start confusing. But I'm going to grab my pen tool. I'm going to turn off fill and I'm going to give it a stroke. I'm going to start with my maroon because I liked that. Now I'm going to zoom in a bit and I'm going to make just a tiny little line. Now, not quite right from the center, but maybe from the top of this crosshair. And if I hold Shift, it will make a vertical line. I'm gonna make that smaller. The stroke thinner. So what I'm gonna do with this is I'm making a line so that I can get it to draw on and draw off and have it rotated a bunch of times. So we make a little burst, a little pop. So if I use the anchor point in the middle of the comp, the easiest way to do that is working with the crosshair. So I'm going to twirl down my properties. I'm going to do what we did with the rings, with the circles. I'm going to go to add > trim path. And you know what? I'm gonna go to the beginning of the scene. Actually, I'm just going to solo it. So I'm not working with anything else. Just solo. If I twirl down my trim paths, I've got my Simon and Eddie, they're back, and I'm going to animate them on. So they both at the start of the race, they both going to go to the end of the race, both to 100%. But Simon is going to slow down at the end. And Eddie is going to very politely give Simon a headstart. And we get this kind of thing, which looks terrible. So I'm going to add some more drama to it. So Simon is going to slow down a lot. And Eddie is going to start real slow. Play that back *bloop* That's better. I'm also going to put a round cap on my stroke. Right now. The line cap, round cap. That looks a better. *bloop* Cute. Yep, happy with that. Now, one line, that doesn't do much. So what I can do under contents > add, we add a trim paths. We've got repeater. *ploop* There we go, there's a repeater. If I twirl that down, I've got the option to add multiple copies. By default it will give me three. For my burst, I'm going to put five in a love, a five-star burst. And it will extend them out in a row. But what I want is, I want them to animate from the center. So under transform for the repeater, so transform > repeater > position, you can see that it's automatically set to 100. If I scrub through, you can see that's what's spreading them out. So I want that to be zero. And it's the rotation that I want to be varied. So rather than at the moment they're all on top of each other. So what I can do is rather than ever do maths is 360/5 because I've got five lines. If I hit Enter *tadda* A little burst - just beautiful. That's it. I'm just going to quickly show you what happens if I do, do the line or the here. It's going to be totally fine. But if I just quickly copy the trim path onto there and then repeater can see it breaks. That's why I like to work with the shape in the middle of the comp when I'm creating it. Not because I absolutely need to, but because After Effects is only so clever. What it's trying to do on my shape, even though the anchor point of my shape is in the middle of the layer, the shape inside my shape is.. the anchor points here. So I'll move that around. Very chaotic. So I need to then line it up and nobody can be bothered doing that. So the easiest thing to do is to work in the middle of your comp entirely, create your lines, and then you can put it wherever the heck you like. So that's probably quite confusing and convoluted, but I wanted to make sure that you know, why we're doing it that way. And also, if you find that yours is breaking, it's because you are drawing it over here, and After Effects is trying to be helpful, but it's actually ruining everything. Cool. So the other thing I'm gonna do with this burst is I'm going to move the anchor point to the middle of the comp. So I'm gonna grab this here. Because what that does is it means I can also add rotation. And now that I've got a burst which I'm gonna call burst. I can plop that wherever I like. Kinda do it on the impact bits. So I'm gonna do one over the G, gonna make it a bit smaller because you're a bit over zealous. And then I'm going to add a second one because we said we love drama. And then a third, because the y is the last one to hit. So I'm just kind of timing it loosely around when a letter hits. Cool. Then I can add some more to this one. I can bung in another. So I'm just control D to duplicate popping in a new place, moving it in the comp. And then because it's just a single line, I can easily change the colour. I might go back and make some of these some accent colours so they're not like the same colour exactly. Cool! Adding a little bit of extra pizazz! 19. Rendering: Cool, so you've got this awesomely animated thing. Now we need to export it so we can show it to absolutely everyone we've ever met. So I'm gonna go up to Composition, add to Media Encoder Queue because I love Media Encoder, so because we did an animated gif last time, that's what we've got as our default setting again. So what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna jump in and I'm going to double-check they're right for some reason they are not. So if I click on Custom, that'll go back to what it was before. So I'm gonna do my rough one, which was 620. Everything else exactly the same. I'm going to have a copy that is that and I'm going to call it something else. I could just leave it that Hellow animated. That's fine because it's a different file type. Then I'm going to duplicate it. And this one is going to be our good one. So this is one that you can quickly stick in an e-mail or pop in the discussions. But I'm also going to do a H.264 and it will default to match source. And I'm going to use this one so I can put it on, on social media, pop it on YouTube, pop it on Instagram, wherever you see fit. Always double-check your settings. So it should be, should be perfect without having to do anything but always have a scroll and double-check. You've got 1920 x 1080 because that's our HD. And then 25 frames per second, square pixels. If they say anything other than that, that means you need to go back into your composition and change your composition settings, which is fine. It's not disastrous at all. Just a little bit of a faff. Because yeah, Match Source means if you say it's all throughout, it should be done. And then I'll go OK and select where I want to save that too. Which is the same place. Fantastic. I'm going to render two versions of the same thing at once. So hit Play when I'm ready and let it do its thang. And click on this to open up my folder. And I've got my animated GIF. I've also got my MP4, both around about the same size. Fascinating. Look at that qual, way better. Now that scale, you could definitely put that on the socials. You could also, if you do need to go back and change your settings, you can just Control K will open up your composition settings box or composition > comp settings. You can see Control K. So what I might do is make this vertical. So ideally, you will work with a design and figure out what dimensions you want first but, look, in this modern age, we can change it as we go. That's fine. So if I want to make it vertical, I can go 1080 x 1920px. And then because I'm a clever clogs, if I just rotate my background by 90 degrees. It's still the right size you guys. Look at that - ready for your Instagram stories, cute. So I am going to do another render of that because I'm absolutely going to pop it up my socials. So the other shortcut is Control Alt M That's how you get to Media Encoder Queue without having go to competition. Because who wants to click stuff when you can press the keyboard shortcut. Then I'm going to make this one vert. Woah. Vert for Vertical. And I'll just double-check my settings because I always do. A little click. Yeah, it looks great. On 1020 x 1920, amazing. Give that a little go. And I'll jump back to here. And then I've got my vertical one. Ready to go on your Instagram stories. *Owooowo* And of course, the other format that we may use would be square. *Boing* That works. You don't get to see as much of my shapes though. So I'd probably want to do a different layout for that. So I'm probably not going to render that as it is. But I could just shove a bit up. I have a bit more on the base. That can be a bit cute. But yeah, if you wanted to do a couple of different versions, that's all I'm sayin'. 20. All Wrapped Up: I hope you found something you can take away from this and bring it into your own animation practice. Whether that is just simplifying text to not be as daunting as it can be. It's just a layer, gang just treat it like any other layer with a little bonus features. That's cool and shape as well. There's so many things you can do with it. Play around. Just go ham on it, see what, see what you can make. And I'd love to see your finished projects in the project tab down on it, down the bottom there. And I'd love to see what we're all creating. I'll put mine in there and see you next time.