Reusable Motion Graphics for Video: From Adobe After Effects to Premiere

1. Welcome: If you create a video content of any kind, chances are you've needed to overlay graphics or text onto your footage. Doing this manually for multiple different versions can be time consuming and tedious, especially if you have to adjust the animation each time. That's where motion graphic templates or Mgarts come in. Welcome to reusable motion graphics per video from Adobe After Effects to Premiere. I'm Mcenfres, and I'm an explanator. I write, illustrate, and animate educational animations, mostly focused on health and environmental topics. I also teach motion design, and I use a lot of title cards, lower thirds, and pointers in my classes and tutorials. By turning these motion graphics into templates, I've saved myself countless hours of work. In this class, I'll show you my exact work flow from creating animations and after effects to customizing them in premiere. You'll learn how to create a title card that automatically centers the text, whether there's one line or two, and the lower third that dynamically adjusts the size of its text boxes based on the content. Plus, I've heard three examples where you'll make a template with selectable icons, a movable pointer, and more. Adding custom motion graphics isn't just about asthetics. It's a way to add additional information and make your content stand out. Well, it's easy to buy pre made Mbards. Creating your own allows you to add a personal touch or align them with your branding. Plus, you can share or sell your motion graphic templates. This is designed for video editors who want to add motion graphics to their video projects, even if you've never opened after effects before. Bob will explore advanced topics like the essential graphics panel and Expressions. I'll guide you through every step so you can recreate the examples. Expect to be challenged, but guided. So if you're ready to create your own custom motion graphic templates and streamline your workflow, then let's get started. 2. What to Expect + Class Project: In this class, I'll show you how to animate and set up a template for five different motion graphics using After Effects. I'm going to assume you know the basics of premiere, but at the end of class, I'll show you how to use the motion graphics we create in a video project in Premiere. For the class project, post one or more motion graphics. It can be exactly like my examples, or you can use what you learn in class to create something unique. For the title card and Lower third, I'll show you how to create every part of the motion graphic from scratch inside of After Effects. For the Bloom timeie indicator plant fax and pollinator pointer, I've provided you with a single after effects project file with comps containing all the graphics you'll need. I'll show you how to animate these and then make them into a template. Also welcome to create your own graphics. If you want to create your graphics in Illustrator and import them into after effects to animate, I have a tutorial explaining how to do that. But this is totally optional. For the videos I use in the class project example, I've used stock videos from Pexels. I've included links to the videos that I used, but feel free to take your own videos or use other stock videos that you have access to. You'll find everything you need in the resources section of class. If you have any questions along the way, feel free to post them in the discussions tab. One quick disclaimer. I've tried to be as accurate as possible with my theme of Colorado native flowers, but I know there are some small inaccuracies. So if there's any botanist out there watching, please forgive me. 3. Tour of After Effects: In this video, I'll give you a tour of After Effects in case you've never used it before or need a refresher. I have opened the After Effects project file that I've provided you that contains the graphics, I'll show you how to make into templates in this class. You can download this project file from the resources section of class. Like other Adobe programs, you can customize your workspace. If you go to Window workspace, you can see some of the default workspaces. I'm on the workspace that's called default. If your workspace doesn't look like mine, you can set it to default and it. Also under the window menu, you can see other panels. We're going to be using essential graphics a lot in this class, but I'm not going to open this yet because it takes a lot of space. I am going to go up to character to open up that panel and it's docking it over here, which is fine. The properties panel, which is here is really useful and I'm going to be using it a lot, so I'm going to move it to a more convenient location. I'm just going to select where the name of properties is, and then I'm just going to drag it over here. Up into these tabs. I just find it easier to work with when it's over here. Also over here is the project panel, and this is where anything that you import into After Effects is going to be stored and where all of your compositions, which is a sequence in premiere. That's where these are going to live to. In the project file that I've provided you, we have three compositions for the different graphics, and I've opened all three of these in the timeline. To open a composition, you just double click it from the project panel. To create a new composition, you can click this little new composition button down here. In composition settings, you can name your comp and then change the dimensions, frame rate, duration, and background color. Here's the new empty composition, and let's practice adding some things into it. If you go up to the top toolbar, there's a shape tool, which if you click and hold, there's other shape tools in here. I'm just going to grab the rectangle tool and then just click and drag in your composition viewer to drag out a rectangle. You can create a lot of graphics right inside of after effects with the shape tools. Once you create a shape, make sure that you switch back to the selection tool by going up here, or the keyboard shortcut is V. If you want to change the color of your shape, you can do that up here with the fill and stroke, or you can do that in the properties panel, and you can even change it in the timeline. If you click on the color box, it'll bring up the color picker where you can change the color. If you want to add a stroke, an easy way to do that is in the properties panel, and I already have a stroke, but I just need to increase the stroke width. One thing to keep in mind is that if your shape is selected and you add another shape, it will add it to the same layer. I'm just going to delete this rectangle two. If you have nothing selected when you create a new shape, it will create the shape in its own layer. If you want to close up the layers on the timeline or see all of the keyframes on the layers, you can hit the U key on the keyboard. There's also a pen tool, which is good for drawing lines. You can also use the pen tool to draw unique shapes. If you click and drag, it'll bring out handles to make curves. Then with the selection tool, you can adjust these points on the path or the curves. I'm going to delete all of these shapes except for the first one. It's a good idea to always label your layers. To do that, you want to select the layer and hit return or enter, and then you can type the name. And then hit return or enter to save that name. The last tool that you need to know about is the text tool. If you grab this and then click anywhere on the composition viewer, you can start writing text. To get out of the text tool, you want to go back to the selection tool. You can adjust the font and any of the character settings in the properties panel or with the characters panel. Now let's move down to the timeline. Wherever layers bar is on the timeline, that's where it's going to be visible. If you go to the beginning or the end of a layer, you can get these double arrows to drag the layer back. Now the text layer won't be visible until it gets to here on the timeline. To move an entire layer, just select it and you can slide it along the timeline. I'm just going to delete this text layer. On this box, notice this crosshair. This is the anchor point. This is where the shape is going to transform from. If you were to rotate it, it will rotate around this point. If you want to center the anchor point in a layer, make sure the layer is selected, then holding Commander control, double click the pan behind tool. Also with the pan behind tool, you can move the anchor point anywhere you want without moving the layer. If you hold down command, it will snap it into place. I'm going to command Z to undo that and put that back in the center. Then go back to my selection tool with V on the keyboard. Let's toggle open the layer in the timeline and then open up transform. Any property that has a little stopwatch icon next to it is something that you can animate. Let's animate the position of this box. To start setting keyframes, first, you need to click the Stopwatch icon. Then I'm going to move my playhead, and there's a few ways to set the next keyframe. You could drag the layer in the composition viewer. And you can see the new keyframe on the timeline. What key frames do is they tell after effects where you want something to be at a specific point in time. Then in between keyframes, aftereffect figures out how to get from one keyframe to the next. It's interpolating from one value to the next. I'm going to move my playhead again and show you another way to create a new keyframe. That's by clicking and dragging over these values here. Then I'll move my playhead again and show you one more way is that you can type in values by clicking and then just entering in a value. Now we have a really simple animation and you can play it back by hitting space bar. You can also layer animations on top of each other so I could scale this at the same time as it's moving. You'll get a lot more practice setting and animating key frames throughout the class, but this is just the basics. If you want to adjust a key frames value, you can just go over it with your playhead and then adjust that value. If you want to delete a keyframe, just make sure that it's selected and then hit delete. If you want to delete all the keyframes on a layer, you can hit the stopwatch. I'm going to switch over to the pollinator pointer composition, and then I'm going to switch over to the project panel. You can import different types of files into after effects, including image files, artwork from Illustrator, video files, and audio. I'll show you how to do that. You can go up to file, import file, or use the keyboard shortcut, which is Commander Control I. I'm just going to grab one of my flower videos and hit open. You can see that that's imported in the project panel, and then let's bring this into a composition. I'm just going to drag it into the timeline. You can see that the layer order in the timeline matters because this is on top of everything else. I'm just going to drag this video to the bottom of the layer stack so I can see the graphic on top of it. We're not actually going to import any of our videos into after effects for this project. We're going to keep all of the video stuff in premiere. I'm just showing you that you can import files. This could also be useful if you're designing your own graphics and you want to see what they look like with the video underneath. If you design your own graphics, then it's important to consider the video clips that you'll be using and what those graphics will look like on top of the video. I'm using a lot of white and thin lines, but I know that all my video clips have nice blurry backgrounds with open areas where I can put these graphics. Know there was a lot of information. But if you ever need to go back and quickly remember how to do something in after effects or learn a little bit more about something like how to work with shape layers, I created a video series exactly for that purpose. It's called AE fundamentals, and it's completely free. Definitely check that out if you feel a little bit lost or you can always refer back to this video. But also, don't worry because throughout the class, I will explain every step to complete the examples. You'll get much more comfortable with after effects by practicing throughout this class. 4. Create Title Card: First, we need to create a new composition, so you can do that by clicking this new composition button right here. I'm going to call this title card, and I'm going to make it 1920 by 1080 and make sure that you have square pixels selected. For the frame rate, I'm just going to use 30 frames per second because that's what I normally use for animation and that's what I'm comfortable with. But you want to make sure that you match the frame rate of your video. Then skipping down to the duration, I'm just going to set this to 6 seconds. I'm going to leave the background as black because it'll be easier to see the things that I'm working with. But it doesn't really matter what color this is because it's not going to show up in our final video project. But if you want to change the color, you can just click into this color box here and you have the color picker. Once you have all of these settings looking good, then just hit. The first thing I'm going to do is create a background color. To do that, I'm going to use the shape tool, which is right up here. Now, if you click and hold, there's actually multiple different shape tools in here, so make sure that you select the rectangle tool. Then to make a full screen shape that's the same size as the composition, you can just double click the shape tool. From here, I still have the shape tool for my mouse. I'm going to go up here and get the selection tool. The keyboard shortcut is V. The first thing I want to change is the fill color. I could do that here or in the properties spanel. It doesn't matter. I've just copied a Hex code from my design where I was brainstorming what I wanted to look like in illustrator. But you can use the color picker or just paste in a Hex code or adjust the numbers here, however you want to do it. Then once you have your color, you can just hit. And make sure that you don't have a stroke, either click on the word stroke and say none. You could do the same thing here in the properties panel or just make sure that the stroke width is zero and that's essentially the same thing. Now we have the background collor, but one thing that's really important to do is to label your layer so that you know what's what. To rename a layer, make sure it's selected and then hit return or enter, and then you can type your new name. I'm just going to call this BG for background and then hit return or enter to save that name. Now let's animate this background color moving into and off of the screen. I'm going to go ahead to 1 second, and I'm going to toggle down the transform properties to find the position property. I'll just set a position keyframe here by clicking the stopwatch. That says that at 1 second, this background color is going to be right here in the center of my screen. Then I'm going to go backwards to the start of the timeline and just take this value, click and hold over it to drag this layer up. You'll probably have to repeat that to get it all the way off the screen. You could just move it in the composition viewer, but I find this way to be easy sometimes. From here, the shape is going to move down into place. But this animation is really boring. These diamond shaped keyframes are linear keyframes. That means that it just moves at a constant speed the whole time. Let's make this animation a little bit more interesting. What we need to do is click and drag over the keyframes to select them both. Then you want to right click, go to keyframe assistant and Easy Es. You can also use the shortcut, which is F nine. Now what it's going to do is start off slow, then move a little faster, and then end slow. This is a little bit more interesting, but we can push this even further. If you select the key firms again and then go into the graph editor, which is right here. You can actually adjust this graph to adjust the motion. What we're looking at now is the speed graph. This is mapping the speed over time. Time is on the x axis, speed is on the y axis. Then if you click on either of these points at the edges of the graph, you will bring up the yellow handles, and you can click and drag these to adjust the curve. Now I'm also holding down shift so that I don't accidentally move the curve up or down. I want it to stay at zero, so it stops and starts at zero speed, like it slows from zero all the way up and then all the way back down to zero. That way, we don't have a weird abrupt stop. I'm just pulling these handles to make a more interesting looking curve, that's going to make this animation more snappy. Something like that. Now I'm going to leave the graph editor by clicking the graph editor button again and let's animate this shape off. Let's go over to 5 seconds. I'm going to click this keyframe button over here by the position, and that'll set a keyframe for this value, but at 5 seconds, where my playhead is at. In between these two keyframes, nothing is going to happen because these keyframes have the exact same value. Then I'm going to move my playhead to the very end of the timeline at 6 seconds, and I'm going to move this layer off. I'll just show you a different way than I did it at the beginning. I'm just going to take the layer, hold down shift to make sure I'm only going in the y direction, and then just drag it all the way off of the screen. Let's select these keyframes and go into the graphitor and adjust their motion. For the animation out, let's change it up and make it go in the opposite way. Instead of going fast and then slow, I'm going to make it go more slow and then fast. Once you're happy with the motion of your animation, you can click out of the graph editor. And now let's duplicate this background layer to make some accent colors. To do that, just make sure that the layer is selected and hit Commander Control D to create a duplicate. Again, you can rename this. Then I'm going to go into the fill color, and I'm just going to use a darker fill color. Then let's bring the accent below the original ay so that the original layer is the one that shows up. Then let's drag the original layer one frame to the right. I'm just selecting the entire layer and moving it over one frame. Now you can see that as this animates in, we have the accent color coming first and then the original background on top of that. I'm going to do this one more time. I'll go into the fill color and change this color. Now let's select the background and the first accent and bring those both over one frame to the right. Here's what I have so far. For the animation out, these keyframes are going to be in the wrong order, so we won't actually see the accent colors. To quickly bring up all keyframes on all layers, I'm just going to make sure no layers are selected and then hit you that actually closes up that one layer that was showing keyframes and then it'll hit you again to bring up all the keyframes. I need to reverse the order of these keyframes, so this set of key frames will be the first one to happen, and then this one, which is already in the right place, and then these ones. Then since these keyframes are getting pushed off of the timeline, I'm just going to click and drag to select over them and then just bring them so that they don't fall off the timeline. That way, all the shapes will move fully off screen. Now let's create the title text. Go up to the text tool and then just click anywhere in the composition viewer and start typing. Then to get out of the text tool, you just want to go back up to the selection tool. If you need to change any of the styling of your text, you can do that in the properties panel or in the characters panel. I'm using an Adobe font. If you want to use the same font as me, you can go to adobe fonts to get that, and you can see all of my settings here. One thing to note is that I've added a stroke, so you probably don't have a stroke to start with. Just check this button, and then I've made it two points. When you're making any reusable motion graphics template, you want to consider other versions. In another version, I might have shorter text here or longer text, but I'll always want the text to be centered. To make this work a little easier, you can go over to the paragraph section in the properties panel and just center align it. Then let's use the align tools. If you don't see any of the panels that I'm using, they can all be found underneath window. Then let's just center this horizontally and vertically. To animate this text, I'm going to use text animators. But instead of going into a long explanation of how to set up this text animator, I'm just going to give it to you as a precept, so you can install the preset and then just apply it to your text. I have a whole class on text animators and this is one of the examples. If you want to learn how to animate with text animators, then check out that class. To download the text animator preset that we'll be using, go to the resources section of class. Once you have that FFX file downloaded, you want to find the presets folder, which is usually located under documents and then Adobe. And then the version of after effects that you're on. Then user presets. You can see I already have a bunch of stuff in here and I've also created subfolders to organize things. You can do the same thing if you want or just bring that FFX file into this folder. I'm going to put mine in my text presets folder. Now we can go back over into after effects and go to the effects and presets panel. To make sure that the new preset shows up, I'm going to go to this menu and choose refresh list. And then toggle open animation presets, user presets, and then it should be in here or in whatever folder you saved it in. I'm going to move my playhead to the beginning of this layer because when I apply the preset, it's going to apply the keyframes starting at wherever the playhead is. To apply the preset, I'm just going to drag it onto the layer. If I hit you on the keyboard, you can see that that sets some keyframes to animate this text. The last element that I'm going to add is the background text. To do that, I'm going to go to the text tool, type out my text. And then I'm going to go over to the settings and make this really big. Let's make it all caps. Then I'm also going to get rid of the fill and change the stroke. I want to use the background accent color for the stroke. I'll just move my playhead so I can use the color picker to grab this color. Then once you've clicked the color, sometimes you need to hit return to get rid of that eye dropper. Then I'm going to move the Colorado text behind the title text. Then let's just move this into place. Then I'm going to duplicate this text by hitting commander Control D, and then I'll just drag the duplicate to the bottom. To animate the background text, I'll have the top layer slide in from the right and the bottom layer, slide in from the left. I'm going to go to 1 second on the timeline. Select both of these layers and hit P on the keyboard to bring up both position properties. Then I'll just set a keyframe by clicking the stopwatch. Then I'm going to go to the beginning of the timeline and then just drag the bottom layer all the way off to the left. Then I'll drag the top layer all the way off to the right. Then I'm going to click and drag over these keyframes to select them and then do F nine to ease these keyframes. Then from here, I can go into the graph editor and adjust this motion curve. If you have both sets of position keyframes selected, you can adjust both of the graphs at once. I'm just going to click and drag over one of the ends to grab the handles, and then I'll just adjust this graph to make it look similar to the graph of the background layers coming in. That looks pretty good. To get out of the graph editor, just click this button again. After the background text animates in, I wanted to keep drifting in the same direction it was going and then just animate out more quickly. To do that, I'm going to move over to 5 seconds, and then I'm going to go into the x value for the position property and just arrow over. Then for the bottom, I'll do plus 300. Then for the top, I'll do -300. That way, I know that they're both moving the same amount. Then at 6 seconds, I'm going to animate these all the way out in the same direction that they've been going. Here's what this looks like. This movement looks a little bit awkward because when it reaches these keyframes, it reaches a speed of zero, so it stops moving, and then it starts again, which is weird. What I want to do is make this a continuous fluid movement. To do that, I'm going to where it says position on both layers to select all the keyframes, and then I'll go into the graph editor. We need to move this point on the graph that represents the keyframe up so that it doesn't reach all the way to zero. But you can see that when I do that, it splits the incoming and outgoing values of the keyframe. Instead of doing that, I'm going to click and drag to select both of those keyframes because remember we have two different properties here, and then I'm going to right click and go to keyframe velocity. I'm going to continuous, which locks the outgoing to the incoming. From here, you could select okay and then just this up on the graph editor. But this is small, and so what I'm going to do to make this even easier is to just enter in the speed and it's going to automatically change it for the incoming and the outgoing. Let's try 300 pixels per second. Then let's do the same thing here. Now let's play this back. You might have noticed that right about here, the text slow to almost a stop. If you zoom in on the graph by hitting the plus key, you can see that the line is dipping all the way to zero. I'm going to zoom back out again and then just select this key frame, and let's drag the handle back towards the left. This will actually raise up the center of the curve here. Let's do the same thing for this key frame. I'm just shortening those handles. Now if I zoom in, you can see that that curve is not reaching the zero line anymore. Now if we play this back, it should look a lot smoother. The last thing to do to finish creating this title card is to adjust when the layers come in. The only layer that I think needs to be adjusted is really this title text. It comes in a little bit too soon. I'm just going to drag the entire layer back to maybe about 20 frames. I think that looks better. Then let's check where the key frames are and let's check the animation out. I think that looks good too. That's it for the title card. In the next video, I'll show you how to make this into a template. 5. Template Title Card: Let's turn this title card into a reusable motion graphics template or Mogurt file that can be used in Premiere. This way, you or the premier editor can make versions of this template with different colors, text, or whatever you decide you want to make customizable. First, you'll need to open up the essential graphics panel. The quickest way to do this is to just right click in an empty area in the timeline or the composition viewer and choose open and essential graphics. That way it'll open this exact comp in the essential graphics panel. The first thing is that you need to name it. This is important if you're going to export it as a motion graphics template to use in premiere. If you're just going to use it in after effects, this name isn't as important. I'll just name this title card. This thumbnail here is what you'll see in the preview in premiere when you're looking through your templates. To set that, just move your playhead to wherever looks like a good frame. Here is fine and then just hit set poster time. The next step is to drag in any properties that you want to be customizable. If you want to see all of the properties that are supported, you can choose sol supported properties, but this is going to give you a lot of different things. Let's just close this backup and I'll show you which ones I'm going to make customizable. First, I want to be able to change what the title text says. I'm not planning on making the Colorado text customizable because that would add a little bit more complexity since we've animated the position of it and longer text would make that position a little bit different. I'm just considering that part of the template. To make this white title text customizable, I'm going to toggle it open in the timeline underneath text, to find the source text and then just drag this in. Let's give this a different name. We'll just call this title text. Then there's this edit properties option here. You can allow people that are using your template or maybe that's just you to be able to choose a different font, a different font size, and you can even allow people to do different styles like all CAPS or fo bold. It's up to you if you want to allow that, but keep in mind that if you enable custom font or custom size, then people are going to be able to adjust the size of the text, which you're going to need to accommodate with the template. You'll need to make sure that if the text size changes, it doesn't look terrible. I'll show you how to do that. Keep in mind that any of the properties that you have in the essential graphics panel are going to be the defaults. Now that we have the text in there, if you were to make this text longer, Say we added to this text. Now it's getting cut off on the edges. There's different ways that you can accommodate for things like this, but I'm going to show you the simplest way first. That's going to be to go over to the properties panel and find the paragraph section and then hit the more button. This text right now is called point text, which just means that all the text is going to be on one line. You can also have box text, which is going to fit the text into a box, and so it'll create new lines when it gets cut off on the sides. I'm going to click this button to convert the text to box text, and then I'm going to double click on the text to bring up that box, and Let's resize this box. So that the text isn't going to get cut off. Now I'm going to need to realign this with the align tools, and I'm going to actually make this box just a little bit more narrow. You also might want to adjust the letting, which is the space between the lines of text. I think this looks a little bit too far apart. I think that looks better for a title, and let's realign this one more time. Now I want to make sure that the anchor point is in the center. A quick way to do that is to have the layer selected and then double click the Pan behind tool, which is up here, while holding command or control. That should center your anchor point. Now if I shorten this text, It stays horizontally aligned because it's center justified. But vertically, it's not aligned when I only have one line of text, but it was when I had two. To fix this, I'm going to use an expression on the anchor point. With this layer selected, I'm just going to hit a to bring up the Anchor Point property. I'm not going to go super in depth right here about how this expression works. I'll cover that later. But for now, you can copy and paste this expression from the resources section of class. Then to enter the expression, you want to option or I click on the stopwatch, and that'll bring up this expressions field. I have it copied and I'm going to paste it in here. Then let me just expand this so you can see it. What this expression is doing is using a function called source ret at time. What this function does is figures out the size of the layer, and with that information, we can grab the width, find out where the left coordinates are, and find out the height and where the top coordinates are. Using that information, we can figure out where the anchor point needs to be so that no matter the size of the rectangle, when the size changes, the anchor point will always stay in the center of the shape. That way, when we have multiple lines of text, it will always stay vertically aligned. Now if we add more text, It stays vertically aligned. Let's make the background and accent colors customizable. So I'll select these layers and go into this search bar here and search for color just to bring up the color property. We want the fill color, so I'll bring the background fill color up into the essential graphics panel. Let's just name this, and then we'll do the same thing for the accent and the second accent. I'll hit you on my keyboard two times to close up all the layers. Now let's make the text colors customizable. There's no color property on the text layer, even though it obviously has a color. What we need to do is add a text color. First, I'll open up the title text and then come over to this animate button and click that and find fill color and just go to RGB. This will add a fill color and we can change this back to white. That's also added a new text animator, so I can just name this color just to be really organized. Then to add a color property for the stroke, I'll just click this ad button here and choose stroke color and RGB. Let's change this to white. Now I can drag these two properties into the essential graphics panel, and rename them. Now let's add color controllers for the Colorado background text. For this, I'm going to again, go into the layer, click the Aime button, go to stroke color RGB. I want this color to always be the same as this accent color. I'm going to open up the color on the accent. I'm going to take the spiral icon, which is called the pick whip and drag it onto the color of the background accent. This way, these properties will always be linked. Whatever this color is, This color will be the same. I'll undo that. Since I've already brought this color into the essential graphics panel, if I change this accent color, then it will also update the color of the text. To quickly apply this to the other Colorado text, I'll just select the stroke color, copy it, and then paste it onto the second Colorado layer. Now, just to double check that this is all going to work correctly. I can change this color, and it works. If you want to, you can make your template a little bit more organized by adding formatting. In the bottom corner of the essential graphics panel, underneath add formatting, there's an option for adding comments or groups. I'm going to do a group, and let's name this text. Then I'm just going to drag this all the way up to the top. Let's drag this text layer into that group. Somehow I lost the name that I had here. Then let's also drag the text colors up into this group. In premier, the user will be able to collapse this, so it keeps everything nice and organized and together. Let's also add a group for the background. Let's just add all of these colors to that group. Once you have all the properties that you want to be customizable in the essential graphics panel, and you've done any formatting that you'd like to do, then you're ready to export the motion graphics template. To do that, you just want to click this button right here. It's first going to want you to save the project. Then it's going to ask you, where you want to save this motion graphics template. I don't like to save it in the default location because that folder is a really hard folder to find in your computer. So if you wanted to share the template with somebody else, you have to go digging for it. So instead, let's save it in a better place. So I'm just going to hit browse here, and you could save this dot mograp file anywhere on your computer. I'm just going to save it in this adobe folder. This is where After Effects saves its preset, so this makes sense to me. But I'll find for here, and then the current version, and then you can make subfolders in here. I've already done that, but I'll make a new one for this class. A. Then I'll just save this Mogret file into that folder. If you want to, you can add keywords. I Premier, you can do a search through your templates, and if you put in keywords here, it will come up when you search those keywords in premiere. Then just hit. I'll show you how to use this title card in Premiere, so you can get a feel for how the entire workflow goes from Adobe After Effects to premiere. But I won't cover the premier part for the other examples until the end of class because otherwise, this would get too repetitive. I'll show you how to put together all of the examples of motion graphic templates we create in a video project and the putting it all together video at the end of class. In Premier, I'm going to create a new project. Then inside of Premier, you want to make sure that you can see the essential graphics panel. If you don't see this panel, you can find it underneath window. You can tell Premier to automatically look for motion graphics templates in certain folders. To do that, you want to go to local templates and then hit the plus button. Then you want to navigate to where you saved your motion graphic templates, and I just saved them in this folder called motion graphics class. I'll select that folder and hit choose. Now you can see that it's found my title card in there. If you toggle open the local templates, you can check which locations you want to be visible. Now let me create a new sequence to show you how to use the template. I'll just go to a new sequence. Then I'll just drag this template in. If you select the motion graphics template in the timeline, it should automatically open the essential graphics panel to the edit side. There's a brows side and an edit side. From here, you can go in and change any of the properties that we've set up. You could even change like the font and the colors. Now if you want to add another version of the same title card, you can go back over into brows, drag it onto the timeline. Now this one is going to have the default settings again. You can again go in and change them and have as many different versions of the same title card as you want. All of the animation will stay the same. 6. Create Lower Third: To create a lower third, first to lead a new composition. I'm just going to make this 1920 by 1080 again, square pixels. 6 seconds is good, and the background will be black. First, let's create the text. I'm going to go off to the text tool, and first, let's show our title action safeguides. You're going to do this by hitting the quotes key on the keyboard. And I'll line up the text with this outer guide. To get out of the text, remember to go back up to the selection tool. I want this text to be left justified, so I'm going to change that in the properties panel. Then let's also make this a little bit smaller. Now let's add the subtext. I'll grab the text to again and then I'm just going to paste in the scientific name of this flower. Let's change the style of this. I'm going to change this to medium, and let's make it all caps. Let's make the font size smaller. Let's give the letters a bit of space in between them. Something like that. Now, let's create the text boxes. To do this, I'm going to use the rectangle tool. Just click the tool and then click and drag in the composition viewer to drag out a rectangle. Now I need to change the layer order so that it's below the text. Let's rename the layer by hitting Enter or return. Then I'm going to grab my selection tool again. Now instead of having a fill, I want this to just have a stroke. You can do this up here or in the properties panel. Instead of solid color, I'm just going to do none for the fill. Then for the stroke, I'm going to do a solid color, and I do want it to be white, and then let's increase this to five points. And then you can adjust the positioning if you need to. Now I'll close this layer up and let's create the second box. I'm just going to grab the rectangle tool and drag out another shape around this text. This time, I want it to have a fill, but no stroke. Let's make that white. Let's bring this layer below the subtext and rename it. Then let's also change the text color so that it's black. I don't want a stroke on this text. So I'm going to take that off. Let's just double check. I don't need a stroke on this text either, so I'll take that off. Then I need to grab my selection tool. Let's line this box up better with a text, and I'm going to just nudge it with my arrow keys, and then let's move the text down a little bit. I don't really need the title action safe area anymore, so I'm just going to hit the quotes key to get rid of that. Now let's animate this in. I'm going to start with the bottom box. Let's have this scale in from the left side. The first thing that I need to do is move my anchor point over to the left side, so I scales from the left. To do that, you want to grab the pan behind tool, which the keyboard shortcut is y, and then grab this anchor point and bring it over to the left side. If you hold down command, it will snap into place. Then I'm just going to hit V on the keyboard to go back to my selection tool. Then I'll hit S on the keyboard to bring up the scale property, and let's key frame this. I'm going to bring my playhead over to 1 second and then set a keyframe for the scale to be at 100%. Then I'll go back to zero, and I'm going to unlock the constrained proportions and then just set the x scale to zero. Now it'll scale up from the left side. There's a couple of things we can do to make this animation more interesting. I'm going to add an overshoe to this. At 20 frames, I'm going to make the scale value 105%. It's going to extend past its final point and then come back. But these keyframes are linear and boring, so let's select them and then do F nine to easy ease them. Let's go into the graph editor and adjust this motion curve. I'm going to select this point and bring the handle to the left. Maybe bring this one to the right. Just making this a little bit faster in the middle. Then this part is for the overshoot. Let's make it come to a slow stop. Maybe something like that. For the bottom text, I'm just going to have it animate in from the bottom. I'm going to move over to 1 second again, and I'm going to hit P on the keyboard to bring up the position property, and then I'll set a key frame. Then let's go to zero on the timeline and just drag this so that it's all the way off the layer. Let's add an overshoot to this animation too. I'm going to move my playhead to 20 frames and then just copy and paste this last keyframe, and then I'll use my arrow keys to bump this text up just a little bit. Now it'll do an overshoot as it comes into the box. Let's select these keyframes, add Easy Ease, and then go into the graph editor. I'm going to adjust this in a similar way to the other graph for the box. Now, you'll notice that where the box graph went below zero, this one is going above zero and that's just because of the coordinate system of after effects. But remember, this is the speed graph. You can just look at how far the graph is from zero to be able to tell how fast it's moving. Something like that is looking pretty good, Let's move on to the top text. For the top text, I'm also going to have it move up and do that overshoot. Starting at 1 second, let's hit P on the keyboard, set a position key frame, and then go back to zero and bring this down outside of the box. Then I'll go to 20 frames and copy and paste this last keyframe and then just the text up. Again, let's select these keyframes, easy ease them and go into the graph editor and adjust the graph. On the bottom text, you can't tell when the text is outside of the box because it's the same color as the background. But if you click this button here, it shows you the transparent areas, so you can see that the text is going to be visible outside of the box. What we can do to fix this for both the top and the bottom text is to create mats. If you don't already see the matt options on your timeline, you want to click where it says Toggle Switches, slash modes. You'll see this track Mt option here. If you still don't see this, click on these toggles until you see it, or you can also right click here and find the columns like this. For this scientific name, all I need to do is take the pick whip next to this track mat and drag it onto the bottom textbox. That's going to automatically hide the bottom textbox, but I still want that box to be visible. I'm just going to turn the eyeball back on. Now if I turn on the transparency again, you can see that when the text is not inside of that box, it's not visible. I'm going to end up doing the same thing for the top text, but how it is now, this box only has a stroke and no fill, so the mat won't work. First, I'm going to animate this box and then I'll show you how to make the mat work. To animate the top box, if we were to animate the scale property that's underneath transform. For one, the anchor point is in the wrong place, but you can also see that it squishes the stroke on this box in a weird way. I'll show you a way to animate this to avoid that. These transform properties affect the entire layer. But if you toggle up open contents and then rectangle one, there's going to be another set of transform properties, and these ones only affect this rectangle. You can have multiple shapes within the same shape layer, and these transform properties are specific to individual shapes. But even if we animate this scale, how it is now, it's still going to squash the stroke. What we need to do is take this stroke and make it be applied after the transforms have taken place. I'm going to move this stroke out and below these transform rectangle one properties. The easiest way to do that is actually just to bring it up to contents and then it will place it below. Now if I change this scale value, it doesn't affect the stroke width at all. Now let's set keyframes for the transform rectangle one scale value. But you'll notice that that's going to scale from the center, even though the anchor point for the layer is in the center of the composition. Even if we change where this anchor point is, the scale is still going to be scaling from the center of that shape. That's because this is scaling on the transform rectangle ones transform properties, and this anchor point is in the center. You can see if I zoom in here, there's a really small anchor point right in the middle of this shape. We can adjust this anchor point to make the scale scale from where we want it to. With the pan behind tool, I'm going to take this anchor point and drag it over to the left. Now this text box is going to scale from the left. But actually, let's change this up a little bit, so it doesn't animate in the exact same way as the bottom box. I'm going to click where it says, transform rectangle one and then go up and grab the pan behind tool, and then I'm going to take this anchor point and drag it up to the top left corner. I'm going to delete this first key frame and then go back to about ten frames and set the y scale to be zero. Then at zero frames, I'm going to set the x scale to be zero. Now it's going to animate out as just a single line. And then the box will open up from the top down. You could also add an overset to this. I'll go back five frames and set the y value to be 105. Then maybe I'll just move the last keyframe over five frames. Something like this. Then let's easy ease these keyframes and adjust them in the graph editor. Maybe something like this. Then I'm going to hit you on the keyboard, D slog the layers and hit you again, and then hit you one more time to bring up all of the layers that have keyframes. From here, let's stagger these layers so that they don't all come in at the same time. I want the top box to come in first, but the text to come in a little bit later. I think it would make sense to line up these keyframes and maybe even line up this keyframe. Then just to make my timeline neat, I'm going to hover over the start of this layer and then just get those arrows and drag that back to the key frame. Then let's move the bottom layers back. Maybe they'll start about here. The last thing to do is to create the mat for this top text. To do that, select the top text box, go up to edit, and then copy with relative property links. Then hit paste by doing Commander Control V, and that's going to create a duplicate version of this box with all of the properties linked to the original box. Let's rename this. And let's give it a fill color. Here I'm going to choose solid color, and it doesn't matter what color it is. Then I'm going to take the text and drag the pick whip next to the track mat to that mat. That should automatically hide that text box, the mat version. Now if we play this back, you can see that that text is going to be only visible inside of that mat. Again, the reason why we needed to create the duplicate mat for the top box is because the original top box only has a stroke. It doesn't have a fill. This one has a fill. That way, the text is only visible inside of that filled in shape. The last thing to do is to animate this out. I'm going to move over to 5 seconds, and let's animate the top and the bottom boxes. I'll just hit you on the keyboard to see those keyframes, and let's animate it out with the same scale properties. I'll just select both of these buttons to create a new keyframe with these exact values. Then I'm going to move to ten frames, and I'm just going to copy and paste this keyframe for the bottom box. Then for the top box, I'll need to set this keyframe to 105 to make it stick out more to the right. Then at 6 seconds, I'm just going to set both of these to zero in the x value. It'll animate out like this. It has a little bit of anticipation with these first key frames that I've set. But let's go into the graph editor and adjust the motion curve. I'm going to hit the plus key to zoom in and then slide over to see this graph better. Since these graphs are all weird, I'm just going to select like this to grab all of those key frames and then just reapply easy, that'll just make them all nice and together so that I can adjust them all at once. I'm adjusting both of these different scale properties. Let's have it start out slow. And then animate off pretty quickly here at the end. Something like this. So once you're happy with your lower thirds, in the next video, we can make this into a template. 7. Template Lower Third: Let's make this lower third into a template. First, let's open the essential graphics panel and I like to do this by right clicking in an empty area in the timeline and choosing open and essential graphics. I'm just going to name this lower third. Then I already have my playhead at a pretty good time in the timeline to show what this looks like. I'm just going to hit set poster time to generate that thumbnail. Obviously, I want to be able to change the text in the lower third template. I'm going to open up each different text layer and drag in the source text. I'll name this one text. Then for the scientific name, I'm just going to name this one subtext. Now, if I go in and pretend that I'm using this template by typing in a different word. If the word is longer, it's going to get cut off. I want to make this box automatically resize to fit the size of the word and then same thing for the subtext. I'm just going to undo that for now. Let me show you how to use expressions to make the boxes automatically resize to fit the size of the text. Let's start with the top text. I'm going to go into the top box and toggle open to find the size property. To start writing an expression, just option or I'll click on the Stopwatch. The first thing that I need to do is define a couple of variables. A variable is just a name for something that you're going to use later. To write a variable is just VAR, and then you create your own name. I'm just going to name this text layer. I'm using camel case just because this is standard in writing code, but you don't have to do that. You just need to make sure that you choose a unique name. If you choose something and it turns yellow or a color other than white, that means that you've chosen a word that is already assigned a task in coding, so you need to choose something else. Then from here equals, and then let's define what this text layer is. I'm going to take the pick whip icon, which is a spiral right here, and I'm going to drag it up to that top text layer, that will grab basically the address of this layer. I don't have to type it out. Then at the end of every line of code, you need to put a semicle in just like you'd put a period at the end of the sentence. Then let's go to the next line just to keep things clean and organized, and I'm going to create another variable. I'm going to call this text width. This one is going to be equal to the text layer. I'm using that name that I created in the first line. Dot. Now I'm going to be using a function called source ret at time. If after effect guess is what you want, then you can just hit Enter. Then inside of the parentheses, I just want the default, so I don't need to put anything in there. Then after that, source ret at time is going to grab different information about the size of a layer. I want the width of it so I can do dot width. Then again at a semicolon. Then I'm just going to go down two lines. Again, this is just for clarity, and I'm going to define the x and y values. One thing that's really important with expressions is that you always give the expression the number of values at the end that it wants. The size property has two different values, x and y. We need to give this two different values. The way that you define a list of values, which is called an array is in brackets. I'm just going to type in a bracket and then for the x value I want the text width, This is going to make the box the same size as the text, and then I need to define the y value. There's a couple ways that you could do this. You could just pick whip to the y value like this and it will write out that address. You could also create a variable for this and then put in the variable, or another short way to write this is just to write value. That will grab the value that's entered in here, but I need to specify if I want x or y. To do that, I'm going to put a bracket and then the number one. Number zero is x and number one is y. This grabs the y value. Now if I click out of this, now you can see that the box has re size to the size of the text, but it's not quite aligned. That's because the size property is always sizing from the center of the box, no matter where the anchor point is for the layer. You can see that the anchor point for the layer is over here on the left, and the anchor point for the shape is also over here on the left. But no matter what, if I just disable this expression for a second to show you, the box sizes from the center, regardless of where the anchor point is. What we need to do to counteract that I'm just going to turn back on the expression is to set up expression in the position property that's here. There's other position properties. Remember underneath transform or underneath this transform, but we're going to set the position expression here right underneath the size property. To do that option, I'll click the stopwatch, and then let's define a variable for x. Then with the pickup, just grab the x size here. And then semicon, then I'm just going to do brackets to define x and y, so it's going to be x. And then remember that this position at zero, zero is in the center of the shape. If I just put in x, x is set to the x size, so it will push the shape over by the entire width of the shape. Since I only want to push the shape over half the width of the shape, so it changes size from the left, I need to put in x divided by two. Then for y, I can just do the same thing as I did here, just grab the y value, which is zero, that works. Value brackets one. That's again, move the box over. Now if I manually move the box, you can see that it's perfectly fitting my text, and I I type in longer text, it's also still working. But this doesn't look like my original design. What I need to do is go back into the expression on the size property and just add some pixels to the text width so that I have that padding that I originally had. Let's just go in and right next to text width. I'm just going to add plus, and let's try 150. Then again, I need to move this back into place. Then let's try making this word longer and see if it works. Looks good. Also, if we made it shorter, that's working too. Let's just double check that the animation is working. Perfect. Now what we need to do is apply the same expressions to the bottom box. To do this a little bit faster, you can copy and paste the expression, so I'll copy this go up to the bottom box, find the size property. Then I'll paste it. But this first line defines the text layer that it's getting the size for. Instead of this layer, I need to make sure that it's the right layer, so this one here. I'll just highlight that and then pick whip to rewrite that, and now that's looking good. Then let's grab the position expression. And then paste that in here. Then we'll need to put this back in its place. That looks good, and let's try making this longer. Looks pretty good, and let's see if it works shorter. Looks good. When I set up the rectangles to be resizing, the anchor points for these layers has gotten bumped a little too far to the left. I'm just going to use the pan behind tool, which is y on the keyboard to move this back into place because the placement of the anchor point affects the scale animation that we have on this box. Then for the top box, remember the anchor point for the layer doesn't really make a difference, but the one for rectangle one does. Let's just grab that one and move it back into place. Now, that way, the animation should all still be the same. Let's put in like a shorter word and a longer word and just try it and make sure the animation still looks good. Cool. I think that still looks good. I'm just going to undo just because remember that whatever text you have in here is going to be the default values in your template. The last thing that I want to do is just add the colors to the essential graphics panel so that they can be customized in the template. To quickly bring up the color properties, I'm just going to type in color in the s bar and the timeline. The bottom box has a fill color, so I'll bring that in. The color for the mat doesn't actually matter because the mat is not showing up. Then the top box, the stroke color is, what matters, and so I'll name that. Notice that a color property didn't come up for the text layer, so we need to go and add that in. On the bottom text, I'll toggle this open. Go to the animate button, choose fill color and then RGB, and then I'll drag this property up and name this subtext color. Let's recolor this to black and then do the same thing on the top text. Animate fill color RGB. Bring this in. Name this text color, and let's change it to white. I also want to organize this a little bit. I'm going to go to add formatting and add a group and let's just stay in this top and bring it to the top. Then let's put the top text in there. The top box color and the top text color. Then let's add formatting a group for the bottom. And then add in the subtext, the bottom box color and the subtext color. For this particular lower third, I'm not going to go in and do edit properties and then enable any of these options because that's going to make the resizing function a little bit more tricky. It's definitely possible, but I'm just going to save that for a more advanced tutorial. There's one more optional thing that you can set up. This lower third animates in And then it waits on screen for a while and then it animates out. But what if we want it to wait on screen for a longer or shorter amount of time in our actual project? We don't know that amount of time right now, but let's say that we need to make that amount of time adjustable. What we can do is go to the start of the timeline and first I'm just going to hit you on the keyboard to bring up all the key frame so I can see exactly how long that starting animation takes. It looks like it finishes at 1 second 25 frames. I'm going to go to the start of the timeline and do Control eight to make a marker? You can also drag out markers from here. Then once you have that marker at the start of the timeline, just double click on it, and then you want to enter the duration of that starting animation. That's going to be 1 second and 25 frames. Then underneath responsive design, time, you want to make sure you check protected region, and then hit okay. That should give you this blue shaded area on the timeline. That's going to be what's called a protected region, which means that we can resize the length of this composition, but this region won't be affected because resizing the length of the composition actually time stretches it or shrinks it, and this region won't be affected by that. The timing will stay the same. So Let's also do the same thing at the end of the timeline. From 5 seconds to 6 seconds, I'll do control eight to create that marker, and then for this, the duration will be 1 second, and then it's a protected region and hit okay. Now I have these two blue protected regions on the composition. I'm just going to take this composition and drag it onto the new composition button just to show you how this works. You can see here those blue regions on the composition. If I go to the end of this layer, make sure you see the double arrows, then you can drag to shorten this composition. If I play this back, the animation at the beginning still looks the same, and the animation at the end looks the same, but it just holds on screen for less time. You could do the same thing if you want to extend the composition We could do the same thing, make this longer, and then it's going to stay on screen for a really long time before animating out. I'm just going to go back over into the original composition and let's save this as a motion graphics template. Hit this button. I'll need to save the project first. Then make sure you're saving this template in the same place that I showed you in the title card template video. For me, that's going to be right here and then hit. Then in Premiere, if you follow the steps in the title card template video, you should see this new template automatically imported if you saved it in the same folder. You can drag this lower third into the timeline. Then you can customize any of these properties that we've set up. Although you can't see those blue regions, the responsive design time is still working. You can stretch or shrink this, and it will update the amount of time that the lower third stays on screen. It animates in, stays on screen a little shorter and then animates out. 8. Animate Bloom Time Indicator: For this example, as well as the plant fats and pollinator pointer, I've provided you with the graphics. We can start animating them right away. First, let's make the text curve in a circle. Starting with the bloom time text, I'm going to make sure the text is selected and then go up and grab the ellipse tool, which is underneath the rectangle tool. Just click and hold to get this menu. Then make sure that the icon for your mouse looks like mine. This means that it's going to draw a mask. I'm going to click and drag holding down shift to create a circle. Then I'm going to switch back to my regular selection tool and put this in the right place. Then in the timeline, toggle down next to text and then path options, and then next to path, choose the mask that you just drew. I want this to be on the other side of the circle, so I'll just reverse the path, and then you can use the first margin to align this where you want it. If your circle isn't quite the right size, you can always double click on it to get this bounding box and then you can resize it, and you can also reposition it. Then just do the same exact thing for the bottom text. This time, you don't need to reverse the path because it looks better on the inside, and then I'm just going to resize this a little bit and adjust the positioning. Now let's animate this graphic in. First, I'm going to take all the layers except for the background shape and then grab one of the pick whips and drag it onto the background shape. What this does is parents all of these layers to the background shape. Now, whatever adjustments I make to the background shape, the rest of the layers are going to go with it. I'm going to animate the background shape in from this pointed corner. First, I need to make sure that the anchor point is in that corner so that it scales from that corner. You can see the anchor point is in the center right now. I'm going to grab the pan behind tool and then just drag that up to the corner. If you hold down command, it'll snap into place. Then just go back to the selection tool with V on the keyboard. I'll animate the background shape scaling in. I'm going to press S on the keyboard to bring up the scale property, and then go to 1 second and set the scale to be 100%, and then go back to zero and set this to be 0%. Let's add a little bit of an overshoot animation. At 20 frames, I'm going to set this to be 105%. That way, it'll go 0-105 and then back down to 100 to create an overshoot animation. Let's add easy to these key frames by selecting them and doing F nine. That looks pretty good, but you could select these and go into the graph editor and customize this motion curve to make it look even more interesting. This is the Swede graph. I'm just going to maybe make this a little bit more exaggerated, so it goes a little bit faster. Then after reaching 105, let's make it go a little bit faster and then ease into that final value a bit more. Maybe something like this. To exit the graph editor, just click this button again. Let's also animate the flower scaling in. I can actually just copy these keyframes by clicking and dragging to select them. Command C to copy, and then I'm going to go over to the flower icon, go to the start of the timeline, hit S on the keyboard, and then hit command V to paste those keyframes. Let's also stagger this animation, so maybe this layer should come in at ten frames. We could also make this a little bit more interesting by adding a little bit of rotation to the flower. I'm going to hit shift R on the keyboard to bring up the rotation property as well as keep the scale keyframes visible, and then I'll set a rotation key frame for zero. Then back at the start, let's animate this to negative 30. Then I'll just easy ease these keyframes. To animate this circle in, I'm going to use trim paths, which is a good way to animate lines drawing in. Let's just close up the other layers, open up the circle layer, and then I'm going to click this Add button and choose trim paths. Okay Then let's open that up. I'm going to hide this bloom time indicator line, that's the darker line that's on top just so I can see fully what I'm doing with this circle. First, let's go to 1 second on the timeline and set the end value to be 100%. That'll be when the circle is all the way drawn in. Then I'll go back to zero, and I'll set the end value to 0%. Let's also stagger this layer so that maybe it doesn't come in until about here, 15 frames. Right now, the circle just starts drawing on from the bottom and then comes all the way around. But I think it will be more interesting if the start point of the line is also moving. To do that, we can animate the offset value. I'm just going to move my playhead just here so I can see the start of the line. I'm just going to slide this offset value, and I think it would look better if it started more at 90 degrees and I'll set a key frame a of this layer to be 90 degrees. Then as it reaches the end, let's have that start point of the line have moved maybe that much around. Then tase these key frames and see what it looks like. To animate the text, I'm going to use text animators. Let's start on the Bloom Time text. First, I'm just going to move it over to start at 15 frames. This way, this shape is mostly scaled in, so it'll be easier to see what I'm doing. I'm going to toggle open the layer and then go to the animate button and choose position. This is going to create a new text animator with a position property in it. I'm going to click this ad button here and choose scale, and then click it one more time and choose opacity. I'm going to animate all three of these properties to animate the text in. If you use text animators. You want to set the properties here and then animate them on and off with the range selector. Again, I have a whole class on text animators. If you want a more in depth explanation of how to use text animators, definitely check out that class. For this, I want the letters to come up from the inside of the circle. By moving the position down, it'll look like that. Maybe like 30, and then I want the scale to be zero, and the opacity to be zero. Then I'm going to use the range selector. I'll toggle this open, and I'm going to also go into advanced and set this from square to ramp up. And Again, all of this is explained in more detail in my text animators class. Now I'm going to animate the offset value. First, I need to make sure that none of my text is visible. So I'm going to take this offset value all the way to negative 100 and then set a key frame. This is at the start of that layer. Then let's go forward 1 second, so to 115, and then I'll bring this offset value all the way up to 100%. You can see how that animates the text on. Instead of easing the key frames, to add easing to a text animator, you want to adjust the ese high and es low. I'm going to set both to 50%. Let's animate the spring summer fall text in a similar way. What I'm going to do to save time is just select where it says Animator one on the Bloom Time text and hit command C to copy this. We can close up this layer, and then on the spring summer fall layer, I'm going to hit command V to paste it. But first, I need to make sure that my keyframe is where I want it pasted. Then if I togo open this layer, you can see that it's added that animator with the key frames. I'm going to drag this layer over. Maybe let's have it start at 1 second, just so that all of the different things that come in aren't coming in all at the same time. They're all staggered. Now instead of having this come from the outside in, I want it to come from the inside out. What I'm going to do to change that is just to set the position to negative. That doesn't move all that much. Maybe let's do a little bit more like negative 40. Also, instead of having each letter animate in like it does for the Bloom text, this is quite a lot of texts. Instead of having each letter animate, I'm going to have them animate word by word. To do that underneath advanced under the range sector, I'm going to change this from characters to words. Now it'll animate in one word at a time. I'm going to hit you on the keyboard twice to close up all the keyframes. Here's what we have so far. Now let's animate this graphic out. I'm going to go over to 7 seconds, and let's see the keyframes on the background shape, and let's actually just reverse them. I'll copy them first, copy and paste. Then with these three keyframes still selected, I'm going to right click on one of them, go to keyframe assistant, T reverse keyframes. Now this will play that animation that we had at the beginning, just in reverse. Let's also fade out all of the other layers just because I don't like when they get really small and it's hard to read. What I'm going to do is just select all of these layers, hit t on the keyboard to bring up the opacity property, and then I can click the stopwatch to set all the key frames for each layer at once, and then let's move over ten frames and then set all of these values down to 0%. Now it'll just fade out as it's scaling down. 9. Template Bloom Time Indicator: For the customizable component of this template, I want this bloom time indicator line to be able to be customized so that the user can mark if the flower blooms in the spring, summer, fall, or combination. Let's set that part up. First, I'm going to open up essential graphics by right clicking in an empty area, and going to open and essential graphics. Let's just name this. Let's also set the poster time. This time on the timeline looks good, so I'll just hit this button. Then let's toggle open the bloom time indicator line and then click the Add button and choose trim paths. Now, just like you saw on the circle that's behind this line, this is a way to animate the start and end values of the line. If I adjust the starter end values, it can show that this flower blooms just in the spring or whatever we need to show. If I just drag in the start and the end values into the essential graphics panel and then rename them. Then this is now customizable for the user. But everything else is going to animate in, and this line is just going to be there. We need a way to animate this line in, but use the values that the user has set in the template. To do that, we can use an expression. I'm going to start on the end values, just option or I'll click the Stopwatch, and then I'm going to use the ease expression. This is a function that's very similar to the linear function, if you're familiar with that one. But basically what it does is that it maps a set of values onto another set of values. It'll make more sense when we actually input some stuff into it and then I'll explain more. The first thing that it's asking for in this function is what's driving this expression? In this case, it's just going to be time and then put a comma after that. Over time, I'm going to map the end value from zero to whatever the user sets, starting at a minimum amount of time to a maximum amount of time. That's how we can make this animate. The minimum amount of time is the next thing that the expression wants. Let's set that to be wherever the layer starts, and that's called the endpoint of the layer. To do that, you just put point and then a coma, and then we need the maximum amount of time. If we want this animation to last like 15 frames or half a second, then you can just put in point plus 0.5, and then a comma, and then the minimum value for the end value, that's just going to be zero, and then whatever the user sets here. To grab the value that the user set, we just need to put in value, and then click out of the expression. I'm going to click this layer and drag it back to let's say 125, and then let's see how this looks. The n value is animating in, but the start value is not. That's why it does this little flip flop right here. Let's just copy this expression and then option click the stopwatch and paste it in. This is going to work as is. Now let's see what we have. Now the start and n values are animating to the values that we set here. If I change these values, You can see that the animation still works. One thing about this template that's a little bit finicky is that if you move your playhead before the animation plays, these numbers are going to reset themselves to zero because that's what the expression is telling it to do. Even though this does work, it's not the most user friendly design, because if you pass this off to somebody else, they might not know that you need to move your playhead after the animation happens in order to adjust these numbers. There's a better way we can set this up to make it more user friendly. Let's do that. Let's use a controller layer, which will be a null. To create a null, go up to layer, new null object. If you've never used a null before, basically, it's just an invisible layer that you can use to parent other layers to or to control things. First, let's just name this. Then we need to add an expression control to this null. An Expression control is a property that you can add to a layer that doesn't do anything on its own, but you can connect things to it often with expressions to control other properties. Expression controls can be especially useful for controlling multiple layers or properties at once. We'll use more expression controllers in upcoming videos. For this example, we need to add a slider control to this null layer. To do that, right click it, go to effect, expression controls, and then slider control. Then that should open up the effect controls panel. If you double click here, it'll automatically open that in the timeline, or you could also just toggle down until you find it. I'm just going to select where it says, slider Control it return to rename this, start bloom, and then hit return again. Then let's just duplicate this and rename this one end. I'll to pen the end bloom and then I'm just going to bring up the timeline a little bit so we can see everything. From here, what we need to do is go into the expression. Instead of having the expression choose the value that's set here, we needed to choose the value that's set here. I'm just going to go in, double click where it says value and then take the pick whip and drag it up to the start bloom value. And then we can click out of the expression. I'll do the same thing for the end. Grab, grab that pick with and drag it up to the end bloom. Now in the essential graphics panel, we can delete the start and end blooms that were these trim path values and then bring in the new sliders. Now I'm able to set those numbers no matter where my playhead is, and they stay. The last thing to do is just stagger where this layer starts, at 1:25, let's have this layer start. That way we'll be able to see the animation and let's preview it. One more thing to do on this layer, I had those opacity keyframes to animate everything off. I'm going to hit T on the keyboard to see those opacity keyframes. I can see that keyframes have been set because the stopwatch is activated, but the keyframes have been pushed off of the layer when I staggered the layer. I'm just going to drag my layer back. Grab these keyframes, just move them over, bring the layer back to where I want it. Then let's hit T on another layer, so we can line up these keyframes with the other keyframes. All right. Now our whole animation should be complete and the template is set up. If you want to, you can set up color controllers for the different elements in this template and or responsive design time. If you don't remember how to do this, you can go back to the lower thirds template video. From here, we can export the motion graphics template, and make sure to save it in that folder that we set up at the beginning of class. I'm not going to go over how to use this template in premier right now since this could get repetitive. Instead, I'll cover the premier part for all the examples in the putting it together video at the end of class. 10. Animate Plant Facts: Starting with the graphics that I've provided you, let's animate this plant fax graphic. First, let's animate the box in. I'm going to use the size property to scale this box in, and I'm using the size property because if I use the scale property, it will affect the stroke weight, and I don't want to do that. I'm just going to set a key frame at 1 second for the size to be this size. Then let's change the vertical size. I'm going to constrain the proportions and set the y value down to zero. And then I'm going to go to the start of the timeline and just set x to zero. I'm also going to just slow this just so we can just focus on the box. It will start out by expanding into a horizontal line and then expand into the fool box. Let's add easy Es to these keyframes. Then let's go into the graph editor and just make these graphs a little bit more exaggerated. I'm just pulling the handles in to make the graph steeper, which will make it go slower and then faster and then slower more dramatically than it was before. Something like that looks good. Next, let's animate these two lines with trim paths. I'll just start with the top one. Open it up and then click the Add button and choose trim paths. I'm going to go to ten frames and just set the start and end values to be zero and 100. I want this line to animate in from the center. I'm going to set the start to 50 and the end to fit. That way it'll animate from the middle out. I'm going to click and drag to select these key frames, add easy, and then go into the graph editor and just make this a little bit more dramatic. Then I'm going to select where it says trim paths one. Command C to copy that, and then go onto the bottom line and just make sure that my playhead is at the start of the layer and then hit command V to paste. Then if you hit U on the keyboard, you can see that it's pasted those trim path keyframes. Now let's stagger these layers so they don't come in at the same time as the box is opening up. Let's bring it back to maybe start around 20 frames. I think that's going to look good, and then I'll hit you to close up all those layers. Next, let's animate the suns. There's three of them all on top of each other. Let's just sol one of them to focus on that, and then I'll do the same animation on all the rest. I want to animate this scaling in, but if I just use the regular scale property, it'll affect the stroke weight. Instead of doing that, I'm going to toggle en the layer and then under content sun transform sun, I'm going to animate this scale property, but if I do that right now, it still affects the stroke weight. What we need to do to fix this is to take the stroke and make it be applied after the scale property happens. The easiest way I find to do that is just to drag the stroke up to where it says contents and that'll move it below the transform values. That way, this stroke is applied after the transforms. Now if I set a scale key frame for 100 and then back to zero, Now the stroke weight is not affected because the stroke is being applied after the scale property, based on the layer order here. Another thing we can add to make this a little bit more interesting is to animate the rotation. It doesn't really matter if you animate this rotation or the rotation on the entire layer. I'm just going to set a keyframe for this to be at zero, and let's rotate it backwards, maybe 30 degrees. And then I'm going to hit you to see both of those keyframes, select them, and then easy ease them. And then rotation, let's just leave those at easy ease, but make the scale a bit more dramatic at the beginning. So it'll scale in faster and then slowly ease into its final 100% scale value. That looks good. Now I'm going to do the same thing on the other two sun icons. Let's stagger these sun layers so that they don't come in until maybe starting about here at 25 frames. Now let's animate the water droplets. I want to animate this scaling in, but I don't want to adjust the stroke weight. So I'm going to do something very similar to the suns, and I'm going to toggle this layer open, find this stroke and bring it below the transform properties, and then I'll animate the scale value underneath transform water one. Let's make this take about 15 frames, set a key frame and then go back to the start and set a key frame for zero. Then I also want this to scale from the top point instead of the center. To do that, I need to move this anchor point, that's the one that's specific to the shape. It's this lighter anchor point here. I'm going to grab the pan behind tool and then just move this up to the top point. And now this will scale from that point. Instead of easing these values right now, I'm going to save that, tele I animate all the other waters in the same way, and then I'll adjust all of the easing at the same time. So I'm going to repeat those same steps on the other water droplets. Now I'm going to hit you and the keyboard to see all the key frames on the water droplets, and then just select all of them at once, easy ease them, and then go into the graph editor and make this a little bit more dramatic at the beginning. It'll scale in faster at the beginning and then ease into that final 100% scale. Now let's stagger these layers. The first water maybe could start at 20 frames. Then I'll just make the second one come in two frames later, and then the third 12 frames after that. Something like this. L et's animate the size icon scaling in, but again, without adjusting the stroke weight. I'm going toggle open the icon, and then take this stroke and bring it below the transform size icon, and then let's animate the scale property. Let's easy ease the key frames and then adjust in the graph editor. Then let's stagger this layer so it starts maybe at 1 second. To animate the text in, I'm going to use one of Aftereffects default presets. I'm going to go into effects and presets, and I know what it's called, so I'm just going to search for it. It's called opacity flicker in. It's going to be under text animate in opacity flicker in, and then make sure you move your playhead to where you want the key frames to start and then apply the preset. I'm going to move this layer back, so it starts maybe at 1 second. Then let's see what it looks like. I'm going to hit you on the keyboard to see all the key frames, and I'm going to delete the second set of keyframes here where it flickers again. All of this and that one. Then let's do the same exact thing on the size text. This time I'm going to stagger it, so it starts maybe at 1:05. Now that everything is animating in, the last step is to animate it out. I'm going to move over to let's say 9 seconds, and let's start animating this out. I'm going to animate the lines out in the same way that they animated in. An easy way to do that is just to copy and paste the keyframes. If copying and pasting keyframes across multiple layers doesn't work for you, you're probably on an older version of aftereffects and you'll just need to copy and paste one layer at a time. Then from here, I need to reverse these keyframes. With them all selected, I'm going to right click on any one of them. Then go to keyframe assistant T reverse keyframes. Now this will animate out in the opposite way. I'm going to do basically the same thing with this box. I'll hit you on the keyboard to see those size keyframes, then I'm just going to copy and paste them. Right click, keyframe assistant T reverse keyframes. Now the box is going to scale down and then into a line and then out. Instead of animating everything out individually, I'm just going to mat them out with this box. But since this box only has a stroke and no fill, I need to duplicate the box. Command D. Let's rename this Mt. Then I'm going to toggle open this layer. There already is a fill in here, and I'm just going to turn on the eyeball for that. If you didn't already have a fill, you could always add that by going to the Add button and choosing fill. I'm going to hit you to close up all the layers. Then I'm going to hit Toggle Switches slash modes to see the track Mt options, and I'm going to select all the layers except for the box and the lines, and I'm going to make the track mat, this box Mt. Now, as this box is animating out, all of those other layers will be hidden when they're not inside of the box anymore. One nit picky thing that I don't like is how this box closes and there's one frame where the lines are outside of the box. I'm going to go into those two lines and then just move this key frame, one frame to the left. In the next video, we'll make this into a template. 11. Template Plant Facts: For this template, I want the user to be able to decide if the plant needs full sun, part shade, or full shade. That should update the icon and the text. I also want the user to be able to determine how much water the plant needs, whether it's one, droplet, two droplets, or three droplets. Then I'm also going to let them update this text for the plant size. First, let's create a controller to hold some of those expression controls that we'll need. I'm going to go to layer, new, null object, and let's just rename this controller. Then I'm going to right click on the Controller, go to effect, expression controls, and then drop down menu control. I'm going to use this for the Sun icon and text. Let's rename it Sun. Then to update the different items in the list, I'll hit edit, and then you can double click on these items to rename them. If you need to add or takeaway options, then use these plus and minus buttons here. Then once you've got the options that you need, hit. I'm going to write an expression on the opacity of the sun icons in order to turn them on or off based on what's selected in this dropdown menu. Before I do that, I'm going to hit the lock icon here to make this stay in place, even when I click away from the controller. Then I'm going to find the opacity property on the first icon and hit Option or all to start writing the expression. Then let's set up a variable for this dropdown menu. I'm going to just call this selection. Then pick whip up to this menu. Then semicolon, then we're going to use an FL statement to figure out what's selected. I'm going to do if and then in parentheses, selection. Using that variable that I just created. Then we need two equal signs to check if this is equal to the items in this menu. Item number one is going to be number one. Just type one here, and then outside of the parentheses, create a bracket. Then inside of the brackets, we want to set the opacity if the selection is one. If the selection is full sun on this full sun icon, I want the opacity to be 100%. I'll just type 100 and then semicolon. Then after the second bracket, we need to define what happens if this is not the case. First write, and then another set of brackets. Then in these brackets, we need to put what the opacity is going to be if the selection is not one, so it'll be zero. This layer will not be visible. Then make sure you've got that other bracket and then you can click out of the expression. I'm just going to slo this layer so we can test if this is working. Right now, the menu is set to full sun, so this is visible. If I change it to part shade, then the opacity is zero, so this layer goes away. Now I just need to repeat this on the other sun icons. First, I'm just going to copy this expression. Find the opacity property on the second icon, and then paste in the expression. But instead of the selection equal to one, I want it to be equal to two. Then the same thing on this one. But this time, the selection should be equal to three. Now let's check if this menu is working. Right now, full sun, now part shade and full shade. Next, let's make this text update automatically based on what the drop down menu selection is. I'm going to go into the text layer and find the source text and write an expression. First, we need to define a variable for the selection, and then pick whip up to the menu. Then semicolon, we can use an IL statement again. We'll just need an extra if and else. It's going to be if and then in parentheses selection. Equal equal. The selection is equal to number one. Then in brackets, we need to define what the source text is. To do that, it's going to be text source text, and then equals, and then in quotes, we can write what we want this text to say. It's going to be full sun. Then to get to a new line, you want to do backslash. Make sure it's the backwards one, n, that gets to a new line, and then we can do six plus hours. Then after the quotes, you need a semicolon. Then after the bracket, I'm going to do else if. I'm defining another situation. This is going to be in parentheses, selection, equal equal two. If the selection is equal to two, in other words, part shade, then we need to define what we want the text to say in brackets. Text source text equals, and then e Part shade, and then backslash n four to 6 hours. Then semicolon. Then after this bracket, I'm going to do else. Since the selection only has three options, we already define what's going to happen if it's one or two. For this one, we can just put nothing and assume that that's going to be option three. I'm going to do brackets, and then this is going to be text source text, equals quotes, full shade, backslash and less than 4 hours. Then semicolon and then make sure you have that last bracket there and then click out. Now if I change the menu selection, it should also update the text. It looks like I missed the dash here, so let me go back and add that. Let's work on the water droplets. If the plant doesn't need a lot of water, I just want one of the droplets to be full opacity and the other two to be partial opacity. Then if it needs a little more water, then both of these will be full opacity, and the third one will just be lighter and so on. To do that, I'm going to first right click on the Controller, go to effect expression controls, and grab a slider control. Let's name this water. I'm going to right click where it says zero and choose edit value. By default, sliders go 0-100, but I only want zero to three. I'm going to change this to three and then hit. That'll just make the slider easier to work with. We don't need to change the opacity for the first water droplet because I don't have any plants that don't need any water. Then we just need to go into the second and third water droplet. Hit T on the keyboard and then start writing an expression. First we need a variable for that slider. Then I'll pick whip up to the slider, and then semicolon, then we can use an if statement. I and then in parentheses, water is greater than or equal to two. Then I want the opacity of the second water droplet to be 100%. And then else. That would mean that the water slider is less than two. I want this to be 20% opacity. That way, it's still visible, but not at a full opacity. Here's what the full expression looks like. Let's copy and paste this onto the third water droplet. But this time, I want to put if water is greater than or equal to three. Now if you adjust the slighter, it goes in decimal places, but as soon as you get above two, but less than three, then you have two water droplets, and when you get all the way up to three or higher than all three are going to be full opacity. You could also just type in numbers here and that might make it easier. Now let's open up the essential graphics panel. We'll give this a name. Let's set the poster time. Then I need to bring in these controllers. I'm going to double click to open them in the timeline so I can drag them into the essential graphics panel. Then for this size text, I'm just going to find the source text property and drag that in. If you want to, you can set up color controllers for the different elements in this template and or responsive design time. If you don't remember how to do this, you can go back to the lower thirds template video. The last thing to do is export the motion graphics template, and just make sure to save it in that folder that we set up at the beginning of class. I'll cover how to use this template in premier in the putting it together video at the end of class. 12. Animate Pollinator Pointer: Starting with this composition that I provided you, let's first animate everything in. Then we'll make this into a customizable template where the user can adjust the text and select one of these three different icons for Bs, butterflies, or moths. And the user will also be able to move the position of this dot to update the look of the pointer. Let's start by animating in the dot. I'm going to hit S on the keyboard to bring up the scale property. I'll go to 15 frames, set the scale to be 100%, and then at the start of the timeline, set this down to zero. Let's also animate the circle scaling in. But if we use the scale property, it will actually change the size of the stroke weight, which I don't want to do. Instead of doing that, I'm going to toggle open the layer, find contents, circle, and then ellipse path one, and let's animate the size property. This way, you can size it to whatever size you want, but the stroke weight will always stay the same. I'm going to go to 17 frames because this layer starts at two frames and this will last 15 frames, the same as the dot, and I'll just animate the size property to be that value and then zero at the start of the layer. And then I'll hit you on the keyboard to just show those keyframes. Let's select them hit F nine to easy ease them, and then go into the graph editor and just make these motion curves a little bit more interesting. I want this animation to be faster at the beginning and then slower towards the end. To do this, I'm going to click and drag over these handles here and then drag them holding shift to the left. This will be a more steep curve. That looks pretty good. Now let's animate this line. There's two segments of this line, this part, and then the horizontal part. The reason these two lines are separated is because the horizontal line will need to update based on the size of the text. For the line connection, I'm going to toggle open the layer, click the Add button and choose trim paths. Then let's open that up. I'm going to set the end value to be 100% at 20 frames. Then at the start of the layer, I'll set this back to zero. Now that part will animate in. Let's easy ease these keyframes, go into the graph editor, and let's make a similar looking graph that we did on the dot. Something like that. I'll animate the horizontal line in the same way. A shortcut to do that is just to copy the trim pass from this line and then paste them onto this line. Then I'm going to open this up and just adjust the key frames. Let's have it start at the start of this layer in last 20 frames. Here's what we have so far. Let's animate the text in with text animators. For the attracts text, I'm going to use a preset that's a default of after effects. I'm going to go into the effects and presets panel. Toggle open animation presets, go to presets, and then text, and then animate in, and I'm looking for opacity flicker in. Make sure that your playhead is where you want the keyframes to be pasted and then you can just drag or double click this effect to apply it. I'm going to hit you on the keyboard to show those keyframes, and let's just see what it looks like. I like how this animates in and then flickers, but I don't think I need this part here. That's a bit too much. I'm just going to click and drag over all of these key frames and delete them. That's looking good and I can just close up this layer. Then for the name of the pollinator, I'm going toggle open the layer, click the animate button and choose position. Then I'm going to adjust the y position so that the layer is below that line. Then I'm going to animate this with the range selector. But first, I'm going to go into advanced, and for the shape, I'm going to choose ramp up. Then I'm going to animate the offset value. Starting at the beginning of the timeline, I'm going to drag this offset value all the way down to negative 100 that way, all of the text is going to be below the line. Then I'll keyframe the offset from negative 100, and then 20 frames later to 100. Now each letter will come up in a waterfall. Instead of easing these keyframes, because this is a text animator, I'm going to adjust the ease high and ease low, I'll set each of those to 50%. Again, if you want more details on how text animators work, that's all covered in my text animators class. One more thing to do for this text is to make a mat so that the text is not visible when it's below the line. To do that, I'm going to grab the shape tool, the rectangle tool, and then I'm going to click and drag to create a rectangle. And Let's name this. Then I'm going to click Toggle Switches slash mode so that I can see the track mat options. If clicking toggle switches and modes doesn't show that for you, then toggle these icons until you see it. Then I'm going to take the pick whip next to the track map for the pollinator text and drag it up to that map. Now the text will only be visible in that area. Later, we're going to need to come back to this met to make sure that it's resizing properly based on the size of the text. But for now, let's just work on the animation. Now let's animate the B, butterfly, and moth icons. Don't worry about the fact that all three of these icons are overlapping right now. In the template, we're going to make it so that the user can select one of these. You'll only ever see one at a time. I'm going to make this animation take about 15 frames, right here, and then I'm going to select all three of these layers and hit P on the keyboard to bring up the position property and click one of the stopwatches to set all three key frames at once, and then I'll go to the start of the timeline and just drag all of these down so that they're going to be below the line. I don't want these icons to be visible when they're not above the line. I'm going to go to my toggle switches slash modes to find the track matt options and then drag one of the pick whips to the text matt, and that way, they won't be visible below the line. Let's also select these keyframes, easy ease them and then go into the graph editor and adjust this graph similar to how we animated the.in the circle. Something like that. You may have noticed that on this text layer, the preset that we applied, had some hold keyframes on the opacity property. This just gives it a little bit of a flicker, I like how that looks, and I think that could be a little bit of a theme that's applied to other layers. These key frames are called hold keyframes and they're square shaped. What they do is just jump from a value to another value with no interpolation in between. In this case, it's just turning the layer off and on. I'm going to select these keyframes, command C to copy them. Then on the dot, let's see where the key frames are and also on the circle. After the dot animates in, I'm going to paste those opacity keyframes. And then same thing for the circle. This is going to give both of those layers just a little bit of a flicker. Now let's animate everything out. I'm going to move my playhead over to about 4:20, and then I'm going to select the.in the circle and hit you on the keyboard to show those keyframes. I'm going to animate these out in the reverse of the way they came in. I'll just set a size and a scale property and then go to the end of the layers and bring these down to zero. And let's stagger these ones so that they end at the end of the layer. Then right before these animate out, let's have the opacity, do that flicker thing again. I'll copy and paste these keyframes. Something like this. Let's also animate out the lines in the same way they came in. I'm going to show those key frames, and then I'll set another keyframe for this to be at 100%, and then at the end of the layer, I'll set it back to zero. And then same thing for the line connection, 100% down to zero. For these icons, let's animate them back down. I'm just going to hit you on the keyboard, then let's go over to about four oh five. I'm going to hit this keyframe button to set a keyframe at the exact value here. Then I'll go to the end of the layer and then just copy these first keyframes and paste them onto the end of the layer. If you're using an older version of after effects and copying and pasting duplicates the layers, then you'll just need to copy and these keyframes one at a time. I'm just going to hit you on the keyboard to close everything up and let's animate the text out. I'm going to select the pollinator name text and hit you on the keyboard. Then let's go over to about four oh five and just animate this out in the reverse way. I want to make sure that the text is animating out before the line. I think I need to just make this happen a little bit faster. This will change when we make the line responsive to the size of the text. But for now, this is going to be good. Then for this top text, I'm going to toggle open the range selector and animate the end value. Starting about here, let's set the end value to be 100% and then move over and set this to zero. Let's also add a little bit flicker before that happens. I'll just copy and paste these key frames. Maybe drag them over just a little. So something like that. Now that we have this animating in and out, let's make this into a customizable template in the next video. 13. Template Pollinator Pointer: The first thing to do to make this into a template is to create a controller. I'm going to go up to layer, new null object. And let's rename this controller. I want the user of this template to be able to select between the B butterfly and moth. Let's set that up. I'm going to select the controller and then right click and choose effect Expression Controls, and then drop down menu control. In the Effect Controls panel, you can see this is added this drop down menu where you can select different items from the list. Eventually, we'll bring this into essential graphics, but for now, let's set it up to show the B butterfly and moth based on the selection. I'm going to hit the edit button. You can just double click on these items to rename them according to your layers. If you need to add new layers, you can just click the add button or the minus button to delete layers. Then once you've got that set up, hit. Now in this drop down menu, you have your customizable options. We need to connect these options to these layers. To do that, I'm just going to use the opacity property to turn on or off the opacity based on the selection the user has made here. In the effect controls panel, I'm going to click this lock button right here, which will keep the controller visible even if I click over to another layer. Then I'm going to click over to the B layer and hit T on the keyboard to bring up the opacity property. In order to turn this layer on and off, based on this dropdown menu, we're going to use an expression. Option or I'll click the stopwatch, and then let's set up a variable for this dropdown menu. It'll be V and then you can name this whatever you want. I'm just going to name it selection. And then equals, and then I'll take the pick whip and drag it up to this menu. Make sure you're dragging right here where it says menu. Then that will grab that menu and then semicolon for the end of the line. Then I'm going to do if and then parentheses. Then inside of the parentheses, I'm going to use that variable selection. And then two equal signs. This is going to check if the selection is equal to something. To do that, you need two equal signs. If it's equal to one, which is going to be the first thing in the selection, the B, then I'm going to go over out of the parentheses and do a bracket and then tell it what I want it to do if the selection is equal to one. What I want it to do is set the opacity to 100%. I'll just type in 100 and then a semicolon. And then I'm going to arrow down, and then we need to say what to do if it's not 100. To do that, put else, and then a bracket. Then if the selection is not equal to one, in other words, a butterfly or moth is selected in the dropdown menu, then I want the opacity of this layer to be zero. I'll type in zero and a semicolon. Then it should already have filled in that last bracket, so we can just click out. Then just so we can see what's going on. I'm going to hide the butterfly and moth. You can see that because the dropdown menu is selecting the B, it's visible. But if I select the butterfly, the B is no longer visible. Same for the moth. This is working, I'm going to turn back on the butterfly and moth. Let's apply this expression to those layers. To save some time typing, I'm just going to copy this expression and then go into the butterfly, hit t on the keyboard, Option, click the stopwatch, and then paste that expression in. Then I'm going to go back into the expression and just change the selection number to two. This way, if the selection is two, which is the butterfly, then this layer will be visible. Then let's do the same thing for the moth. This time, if this selection is equal to three, then this layer will be visible. Now let's test to make sure this is working. The selection is on B and that's working. Now showing the butterfly, and now showing the moth. Now let's set this up in the essential graphics panel. I'm just going to close up all these layers by hitting u and the keyboard twice, and then I'm going to go in an empty area and choose open and essential graphics. Let's name this. Let's set the poster time. I also forgot to name the drop down menu control. I'm just going to hit return and name this. Now we need to drag this menu into the essential graphics panel, but you can't actually drag things from the effect controls panel into the E central graphics panel. We need to open this in the timeline. An easy way to do that is just to double click it and that'll open it in the timeline. Then from the timeline, select next to where it says menu. You can drag this into the essential graphics panel, and everything should still be working. Next, let's make the pollinator text customizable. I'm going to toggle en the layer, go down to text and then just drag the source text into the essential graphics panel, and I'll name this pollinator name. Now let's make this horizontal line automatically update based on the size of the text. I'm going to close up the text layer, and then I'm going to use this controller for another use besides just adding these expression controllers to. I'm going to use its position. Let's position it in the point of this line. Right about there. That way we can grab the left position Of the line by grabbing the position of the controller. Then we can just add whatever length we need based on the length of the text. This will all make more sense when we actually write the expression. Let's do that next. I'm going to go into the horizontal line, toggle open until you find path. Then we're also going to need the position of the controller and the position of this text layer. I'm just going to open those up on the timeline so I can see them. I'm also just going to bring my timeline up so we have a little bit more room to work with. Then option or I'll click on the stopwatch to start writing an expression. First, we need to define a few variables. We need to know which layer we're looking at for getting the size, so that's going to be the text layer. I'll grab the pick whip and just drag it up to this text layer, and then semicoln. Then we need to know the text layers position. An easy way to get this position is just to pick whip up to the position property here, and then semicolon. We need to know the text layer size, so text size makes sense. Then we can use that variable text layer. Then dot and then we'll use the function source ect at time, which we've used before. This is a function that gets information about a layer size. Source ect at time, and then we don't need to put anything in the parentheses because the defaults are fine and then arrow over dot width because we need the width of that text layer. Then another variable for the left most position of this line, and that's going to be the controller's position, and then semicolon. Then we need to create two points for the start and end of our line, and then we can use a function to draw a line between those two points. To make those points, they're actually a variable, so we can just call this points. This is going to be a list of values, so we need to define them in brackets. The first point is going to be the left most point where the controller is, so we're going to just use that left position that we've already defined. And then put a comma between points. For the next point, we need to define the x and y value separately. For the left position point, this includes both the x and y coordinates, so we don't need to specify. We can just put in that variable. But for this one, we need to use brackets and then define x and y with a comma in between. First, we need the text position. This text position variable gets the x and y value. We need to specify that we just want the x value. To do that, you put brackets with a zero in the middle. One is for y, zero is for x. Then let's add to that the text size. That'll be the x coordinate and then put a comma and then let's define y. We can use the left positions y coordinate because this is going to be a flat horizontal line. I'm just going to do left position and then brackets and specify that we want the y value. Then I'm going to arrow over at a semicoln. Then let's use a function called create path. First, this function wants to know what the points are to create this path, so I'll use our points variable. Next, I want to know the tangents of those different points, but we don't need any tangents because this is just a flat line. We're going to just put empty brackets for the tangents and there's in and out tangents. You need two sets of brackets. The last thing that this function wants to know is whether or not this is a closed shape. Since this is just a line, it's not a closed shape, so we're going to put false. Now, if you click out of the expression now, the line is not appearing where it should be. If I zoom out, it's actually way down here. The reason for that is because I skip something that's really important for the positioning of this line, but it's the most confusing part of this, so I wanted to save it for last. What that is is that there's two different spaces for positioning in after effects. There's the comp space and then there's the layer space. You can think of it as relative to the composition and relative to the layer. We need to take the text position and the left position and take this from the comp space into the layer space in order to get this line to be in the right spot. To do that, click back into the expression. And then next to text position, we're going to write from comp. Then that's going to put two parentheses, but we need all of this text to be in the parentheses. I'm just going to delete that second one and move it to the end here, and then the same thing for the left position from comp, and then move that parentheses to the end of this text. Now if you click out, the line should be in the correct position. Now if I go in and change what the text says, to make it shorter, the line is updating, or if I add more text, the line also updates. But you can see that some of these letters that I just added are getting cut off and that's because this mat layer is not updating based on the size of the text. Let's go in and fix that. First, I'm going to copy some variables from the expression on the line. I'll just copy these first three variables to save me some typing. Then let's go into the Mt and toggle open until you find the size property. Then option, I'll click the stopwatch and paste in those variables. Then I'm going to define x. This is going to be the text position. But this text position variable gets both the x and y positions. We need to specify that we just need the x position, so in brackets, zero. Then let's add to that the text size. Then you're going to want a little bit of extra padding just so that the box doesn't end right where the tex ends, that might cause something to look a little bit cut off. I'm just going to add plus 20 just for some extra padding. Then let's define y. For this, we can just pick whip up to the y value, and then semicon, and then in brackets, just define x and y. That's resize the box, but it's also messed up the position. I'm just going to drag it over back where I had it, but it's still not getting the full length of the text. That's because of the way rectangles change size. If I disable this expression and then unconstrain, you can see that when I resize this box, it sizes from the middle, no matter where the anchor point is on the layer. To fix this, you can write an expression on this position property, the one that's right underneath size that will compensate for this. Option, I'll click the stopwatch, and then let's define x, and that's just going to be the x size, and then y. And pick with up to the y size. Then in brackets, I'm going to do x divided by two because I just want half of that so that it changes size from the left side, and then and then y is going to be negative y divided by two, because I want it to size from the bottom left corner. That's going to move the position of the box again. We can just move it back into place. If it bothers you that the anchor point is over here, you can move it back into place, and now the box is resizing to fit the length of the text. Now if I add to this text, the line and the mat are updating size. Same thing if I were to make the text smaller. I want the user of this template to be able to adjust the position of this dot to point out different things in the video. To do that, I'm going to find the position property of this dot and just drag it up to the essential graphics panel. Let's just name this dot position. I want this circle to follow the dot, so I'll parent the circle to the dot. Now the dots position can be adjusted, but this line needs to stay connected between the dot and the horizontal line. To do that, we can write an expression on this line's path property. We're going to need to set up some variables and one of them is going to be the position of the controller, and the other one is the position of the dot. I'm going to go into the line connection and find the path property. Then let's start writing the expression and set up some variables. Left position, just like we used before is going to be the position of this controller. And then another variable for the dot position, and this is going to be equal to this dots position. Then we need to create a variable for the points on this line and define them in brackets because this is a list of values. It's going to be the left position, and then the dot position. And then semicolon after those brackets, and then we can use the create path function again. First, we need to define the points. Then it wants the tangents, but we don't have any because it's just a straight line, empty brackets, two sets of them, and this is not a closed shape, so we can put false for that, and then just click out. Now we're having that same issue that we had before that the line is not exactly where you'd expect it to be. That's because of that comp space versus layer space thing. We need to go back in here, and this is going to be from Cp and then move this parenthese to the end. Then again, from Cp, move this parenthese to the end, and make sure that you have the semicolon at the very end of the line. And now that line is in the right position. I know that comp space and layer space can be confusing. If you're ever unsure if you need to switch from one to the other by using the from comp or two comp function. What you can do is just what I just did right there, is do nothing at first, see what happens and then go back in and try to add from comp or two comp and see if that helps. Now, one more nit picky thing that I want to do is that this line reaches all the way to the dot, but in my design, I wanted this line to just reach that circle. To fix this instead of trying to update the expression or something like that, that could be pretty complicated. I'm just going to duplicate this circle. Toggle it open underneath contents, and then circle. I can see that this just has a stroke. I'm going to click the Ad button and add a fill. It's going to add probably a red fill. It doesn't matter what color. Then I'm going to rename this Mt. Then I'm going to click toggle switches and modes, and then take the line connection and make the mat this circle. That's going to make the line only visible within the circle and I want the opposite. I'm just going to click this button to invert the mat. That way, it'll only be visible outside of the circle. Let's just double check that this is still working. We can update the dots position and everything is looking good. If you want to, you can set up color controllers for the different elements in this template and or responsive design time. If you don't remember how to do this, you can go back to the lower thirds template video. The last thing to do is export the motion graphics template. As always, make sure that you save it in that folder that we set up at the beginning of class. I'll cover how to use this template in premiere in the putting it together video at the end of class. 14. Putting it all Together: Now that we've created five different motion graphic templates, let's use them in a video project. Hopefully, you've been saving the Dot Mgerts in a folder on your computer and set up premiere to watch that folder for any new templates added. If you haven't set that up, go back to the title card template video to learn how. If you've already done all that, you should now have all of your templates in the essential graphics panel in premiere. One of the nice things about motion graphic templates is that no matter what premier project you're in, they always show up in your essential graphics panel. You don't need to import something every time you open a new project. Here I have a new premier project and I've already imported my video clips. First, I'm just going to create a new sequence. 1920 by 1080 is going to be good, and 29.97 frames per second is also good because that's the same as all of my video clips. First, I'll drag in the video clips. Because I don't want the audio of these video clips, I'm just going to select them, right click and choose on Link, and then I can just delete the audio. Later, I can add music. Some of these videos were shot in four K, so I have a little bit of extra room to work with. I'm going to go in and resize and reposition them. Now let's add the motion graphic templates. First, I'm going to use the title card. I'll just drag that in. Then I want it to actually start from black. I'm going to move the video clips back. The title card will come in and then reveal that video behind it. Then from here, I want to add the lower third. To edit what the lower third says, If you select it, it should open up automatically in the essential graphics panel, but you can also just switch tabs like this. Then I can rename this. I'm going to leave everything that's white, white, but then for the bottom text color, let's grab a dark green using the pick whip from the video. Another thing that I want to do is move this lower third up here because this is a better space for it. It'll be more legible. I'm going to make sure that the temple is selected and then I'm going to go over to the effect controls panel and just move the position of this entire thing up. Something like that looks good. Then moving on to the next clip, let's add the bloom time indicator. For this, I want it to be positioned in this corner, so I'll just adjust the position in the effect controls panel. Then keeping this selected, I'm going to edit the Bloom times, but remember, this indicator line is animating in, so I'm going to go towards the middle of the clip so I can see when it's already fully animated in. For this clip, I'm going to add the plant fats in this nice open area, but I think it will look better if the plant fats are on the right. I'm going to flip this video and to do that, you can just go into effects and then search for flip and then just drag horizontal flip onto here, and then you might need to reposition depending on your video clip. Then let's go back into the brow section of essential graphics and bring in the plant fats. Then with the plant fats selected, I'm going to go to effect controls and drag this over. Maybe I'll move the video just a little bit more. Now, with the plant facts selected again, you can go into essential graphics and update any of these things. This is actually going to be full sun. Coopss is pretty drought tolerant to just one water droplet, and then I'm going to adjust the height text. Now that one's good to go. For this last clip, let's add the pollinator pointer. From here, I can update the pollinator, but this is actually a B. And then I'm going to change the pollinator name. Sorry if that's not accurate, I'm not an expert on bees. Then I'm going to first move this entire graphic using effect controls. Just make sure that layer is selected. I'm going to move it up into the corner. Then let's move the dot position using this dot position here. Something like that looks pretty good. I'm going to trim some of my video clips a little bit. If you set up responsive design time on your templates in after effects, which is the blue area at the beginning and end of the composition that you see here. Then in premiere, you can adjust the length of this template and the animation will update automatically. Here I have the plant facts animating in and then out, but say I wanted this to be a little bit shorter. I could drag this clip back and it will still animate in and out, but it'll just animate out a little bit sooner. From here, feel free to add any more adjustments that you like, including adding music. If you want to share your motion graphic template with others, you need to share the dot Mogret file. You can find that Mgret file wherever you saved it when you were saving from Aftereffects. Mine is saved under Ado Premier Pro, and then the latest version, and I saved it in this subfolder. These are the Mgret files that I would need to share with somebody else. For somebody else to install your motion graphic templates, they just need to find a place on their computer to store them, and then in Premiere, they need to go to the local templates folder, click the Plus button, and then find that location on their computer. 15. What's Next: S. If you've followed along and made it this far, you've accomplished a lot. I hope you feel much more comfortable in after effects and are excited to work more efficiently by making templates for all your motion graphic needs. I'd love to see what you've come up with. So whether you've created something unique or recreated my examples from class, please post a class project. If there's anything in particular that you want feedback on, please include a note to let me know. To keep learning, check out the other classes that I'm teaching. If you like to this class, you may also like these. And make sure you're following me on Skillshare, Instagram, and sign up for my e mail newsletter to hear when I have a new class for you. Thanks so much for watching and tell next time happy Animating.