[Joey Korenman]
Look to your right, now to your left. One of those people
won't make it out of this presentation alive. I'm just kidding! Howdy! My name is Joey Korenman and
I've been a motion designer for 15 years. I've worked on all kinds
of project, commercials, explainer videos, TV shows,
digital campaigns and along the way, I've worked as a staff
animator, I've freelanced, I run a studio in Boston,
Massachusetts and I've even taught motion design at one
of those fancy art schools. These days, I run
School of Motion, an online school that teaches
artists from all over the world, the ways of motion design. In short, and I am short,
I'm kind of obsessed with motion design. So, in this presentation, I will
teach you some of the basics of motion design and show you why
it's an incredible time to add motion to your toolkit. I'll also go over the process
that I use when designing for motion, teach you some basic
principles of animation to get you started. Talk about how to make money
doing motion design and show you how to get started if any of
this actually sounds like fun. Sound good? Great! Let's start by answering
a really easy question, "What is motion design?" If you're older than 30, you
may have heard the term MoGraph, which is short for
motion graphics. That term isn't as
widely used anymore. Now, we say Motion Design and
what the heck is Motion Design? I used to say something
corny and vague like, "Imagine if you stuck a
designer and an animator, in a blender." So then, I went the other way
and I'd say something boring like,
it's "Two parts graphic design, one part animation and three
parts conceptual thinking." That, my friends, is a terrible
description of anything and it doesn't really
capture it either. So, what if we don't define
motion design as one thing, or one field, but
instead say, wait for it, "Motion design is a collection
of overlapping skills. A tool set that can include
graphic design, animation, visual effects, editing,
2D and 3D illustrations, interactive design and even
augmented and virtual reality. These tools allow you to
communicate a message through the magical combination of
design and motion." Hence, Motion Design. If you're ever hired
to do Motion Design, what you're actually doing
depends a lot on who is hiring you to do it, but we'll get
into that more a bit later. First, let's talk about
the motion design process. Being that this is Adobe Max,
you're probably thinking that Motion Design happens mostly
inside of Adobe After Effects, you know, that app that you
opened that one time and then panicked, and then closed it,
then hid in the bathroom eating an entire sleeve of Oreos. The truth is that the process
of making Motion Design is very similar to every other
kind of design out there, it takes planning, it takes a
process, iteration, polishing, things like that. The same way that knowing
Photoshop doesn't make you a designer. Knowing After Effects
doesn't make you an animator, the secret is in the process
and here's the process in five easy steps. So why don't we look at
an example of a project, every project starts with some
sort of Brief and in this case, the Brief came from me. This was an internal project for
School of Motion and the Brief went like this. Create a short intro for
the video course the Path to MoGraph, which covers the
basics of Motion Design. The intro should touch on the
themes and techniques taught in the class, while leading
the viewer on a journey. If you've ever worked for or
at an ad agency, by the way, this may have triggered you. What with the vague, bland,
mealy mouthiness of this generic brief, but in truth, this
is often what we're given as creatives and it's often up
to us to fill in the gaps, which brings us to step one. Building out a Concept. Every creative has a different
process for coming up with ideas. One of my favorite techniques
is called Mind Mapping. If you have never tried it, it's basically
a free association exercise. You start with the basic idea. In this case,
the Path to MoGraph. Then, you start riffing
on that core idea. So what if I take the word
MoGraph and type out the first thing that pops into my head. I think of software, which makes
me think of all the Adobe apps that I use in my work, but
MoGraph also makes me think of techniques like animation and
design principles, drawing, 3D. I can also riff
on the word Path, which makes me think
of a literal path, so maybe you need directions
and directions are for going from A-B. Maybe you need a map, oh,
maybe you're on a tour. Like a path, that takes you on
a tour through a Motion Design project need, but a path can
also be a technical thing like a path you draw inside
of illustrator, or Photoshop and those paths
can have strokes and dashes, and other designing things. They can animate and almost
act like a trail or a map, and all of these ideas start to
connect together into something that triggers a visual
concept in my brain, and that is why Mind
Mapping is useful. You uncover as many
ideas as possible, making sure to get the bad ones
out of the way to discover some that actually work and you
generally end up with a specific idea that would have been a
challenge to conjure up without doing all that work. Next, I like to take that
concept and blow it out into Thumbnail sketches. As you will see in
about five seconds, I am not a great illustrator,
but this is actually a good thing. It forces me to ignore the
prettiness of the design and to just focus on the overall
concept and story that I'm telling. Riffing on this tour of a
Motion Design project idea, I figured I'd start in a very
meadow way by drawing a pencil and paper which could in
turn be drawing something. The logo is what we
need to end up with, maybe the pencil sketch version
of it animates on first. Then, we follow a path into the
digital world where a cursor can be tweaking shapes and
making things more precise. I started sketching in elements
from the apps I used to do motion design and trying to vary
the compositions in each shot. Some are wide,
some are close up, I don't have every single
transition and beat thought out fully, but I'm starting to find
a thread to get from pencil and paper to Illustrator,
to After Effects. All the way through to the final
render and here is where I ended up. I know, underwhelming,
but it's a start, a blueprint to the next step
where we make it pretty. Step two. Style Frame and Design Boards. If you're already a designer,
this part is old hat to you. The only thing that's really
different here is that your designs will
eventually be moving, so you have to think about how
you get from one frame to the next, and how technically
difficult the animation will be to execute. The design stage is where you
figure out exactly what your piece will look like. What's the art direction? How big are things in the frame? How much detail is there? In the end, you'll create
a set of design boards. Essentially, storyboards
that are designed to give the animator a visual guide for
the important moments in the animation. For these boards, I used a
combination of stock imagery, screen grabs from After
Effects and Illustrator, Shape Layers and other
built-from-scratch elements, and I used my crappy story
boards as the blueprint to build out every frame. It took a while, but
here's where I ended up. Ta-da! By the way, don't say "Ta-da"
when you present work to your clients. For some reason,
it's frowned upon. Now, there's a cool thing about
these boards that you may not have noticed, when you get
some practice doing this, you'll be able to design
boards that imply animation. If we flip through the boards
in a sequence, it almost looks like stuff is
moving and your brain kind of fills in the gaps. This is very, very
helpful for the next step, which is step three. Making an Animatic. You may have never seen
that word before, Animatic. It sounds a little
dangerous, but don't worry, it's a simple concept,
but a very powerful tool. See, here's the thing, you now
have these beautiful boards that spell out how you want the
animation to look and what the story is going to be, but you
don't really have any idea how long each shot needs
to be on screen. How long things are going
to take to move from A-B, what's the pacing
going to be like? How about music? I was told there would be music. These are all decisions that
editors are used to making, and like I mentioned earlier,
editing is part of the motion design bag of tools. So, the Animatic stage is where
we roughly edit together these boards to music. To figure out the general
pacing and timing of the piece. I do this in Premier and I
try to keep it really simple. I'll cut the boards together to
figure out roughly how long I think the animation
needs to be. Then, I'll pick some music and
start cutting it together to find a nice rhythm. A nice little
build-up with pay-off. I'll tweak the timing
until I'm happy and then, here is where we end up. Now, at long last, we get
to open up After Effects and actually make things move, and
it's going to be so much easier to do now that we have a really
detailed scaffolding for what the animation is supposed to be. We know what it
should look like, we know roughly how long
each shot needs to last, how much time it should
take to transition. We're ready to go to step four. Production. I call this step Production
because it may involve live-action, animation, more
editing, voice-over recording. Anything necessary to
put it all together. In this project, all I needed
was After Effects and a few plug-ins and some experience
using the principles of animation, but we'll
go to that soon enough. Now, inside of After Effects,
I'm using my design boards and Animatic as guides. I'm building the entire
animation from start to finish, using a variety of tools. I'm using shape tools, I'm
bringing in images that I've captured, stock imagery,
and even using parts of the Photoshop file I built
while doing the boards. One fancier element
is this pencil, which I want it to feel more
realistic than everything else. So I used a 3-D model of a
pencil and a plug in called Element 3D to animate that
sucker directly inside of After Effects. I spent a lot of time tying
different scenes together through similar movements,
a concept I like to call Reinforcing Motion. It's a great way to keep energy
moving throughout a piece like this. Though, it can take some
finessing to get it just right. I also called something
called a Luminance map, to make the final logo reveal
seem a little more analog. There are images or videos that
contain luminance or brightness information that you use a
million different ways inside of After Effects and at
the end of it all, I have a beautiful timeline
with all of my shots laid out in sequence and in a minute, you'll
get to see what it looks like, but first, step five. Finishing. We need to add the finishing
touches to this masterpiece. That's pretentious. I usually do this
step back in Premier. First, making sure the
music is edited perfectly. Trying to get as much
drama out of it as I can. Then I do some sound design,
using various libraries to build up a soundtrack that syncs with
different beats, movements, and transitions. For this piece, I even recorded
the sound of a pencil dropping and rolling across a table, so I
could time things out perfectly with the animation. Then I do some mixing, a
little light mastering, double check everything and
time for the big reveal! So, maybe that intro animation
didn't just change your life, or did it? In any case, it's a real and
very common example of the types of things that motion
designers are asked to do. The process may have seemed
a little overengineered, or cumbersome at times, but I
can tell you from experience that even simple projects
like this one requires a strong process. Especially when you get clients
involved and have to manage all of this while getting
approvals along the way. I also hope that there were some
animated moments in that intro that you thought were cool,
where the movement really helped propel the piece forward
and to keep you engaged. Animating could be
pretty technical, but creating the movement
that does those things I just described, that's basically the
art for the animation and that's what I'd like to
talk about next. I mentioned earlier that being
good at Photoshop does not mean someone is a good
designer, and hopefully, that's obvious why
that's the case, but I do find that artists who
want to start incorporating motion into their work often
fall prey to the idea that the tool you use is the
most important thing. So let me smack that out of you
right now and don't tell HR. Animation is an art, and there
are principles behind that art. Often, animators are taught
that there are 12 principles of animation, but a bunch of those
principles only apply when you're talking about hand
drawn animation or character animation. One of the best After Effects
animators out there is Jorge Estrada who runs Ordinary
Folk in Vancouver. He came up with these 10
principles of animation that are geared towards motion designers. I think he's onto something and
I want to teach you three of these principles. So that you can use them
for sport and profit, when you start down
the road to motion. That was a terrible sentence. Before we get to the principles,
I need to make sure that you know what this word means. Keyframe. What's a Keyframe? Well, to help
illustrate the concept, we're going to need your new
best friend After Effects and this little dot. Let's say you have
a design element, the dot and you want some aspect
of that dot to change over time. A simple example would be
changing the position of the dot, to do this, we open up the
position property of that dot and set a Keyframe. Basically, a store of the dot's
position value on the very first frame of the animation. Then, we can move our playhead
forward in time, say one second, and change the
position of the dot. When we hit the play button,
that dot will now move over 30 frames of animation, but we only
define what that dot is doing in two frames. The first and the last
frame of movement, and those frames that we, the
animators define are called, Keyframes. Keyframes. Almost all animation in After
Effects is determined by Keyframes, which let After
Effects know how you want your composition to look on
this frame and this frame, and after that, the magical
computer machine will figure out all the rest of
the frames for you. Sort of. More on that in a second. To really get the most bang
for your buck out of Keyframes, you need to understand the
two most important concepts in animation, and they
are Timing and Spacing. Timing is pretty easy to get,
remember our little dot friend? I guess she needs a
name, how about Elliot? So, we gave Elliot two Keyframes
on his position property. Those Keyframes were
set one second apart, creating a movement that
takes exactly one second. So the timing of this
move is one second. Pretty easy, right? Now, let's move on to spacing,
which is where a lot of the magic happens. Watching this animation
play a few times, you're probably noticing that
it feels very stiff and robotic. Maybe sometimes
that's what you want, but I think Elliot would be much
happier and confident in his dotness if he moved in
a more interesting way. First, though, let me explain
why he's moving in such a stiff manner right now. If I select the two Keyframes
and click on this button, After Effects can show me a
graph of Elliot's position as it changes over time. Notice that the graph is a
straight line that goes up into the right, telling us that the
X position is changing the exact same amount on every single
frame, in a linear manner, which is why these Keyframes
here are called Linear Keyframes. If I select these two
Keyframes, right click them, go to Keyframe assistant
and then click easy ease, something has
happened to our graph. When I play the animation now,
you should notice a pretty drastic difference. Elliot the dot is moving
much more naturally, taking some time to pick up
speed and then requiring a little time at the
end to slow down. There's a sense of
physics being in play now, and it's just sort
of more interesting. But notice that even though
Elliot seems to be moving faster in the middle of this animation,
the Keyframes are only still, only one second apart. The timing hasn't changed,
something else has. To clear up what's
going on here, let's look at the original
linear Keyframe version of the animation. If we take all 30
frames of this movement, and overlay them on
top of each other, you can see that the spacing
between each frame is consistent, but when we
use that easy ease command, it changes the spacing
between each frame. The spacing is more bunched up
at the beginning and the end, and more spread
out in the middle. When frames are closer together,
it feels like Elliot is moving slower and when things
are further apart, Elliot is moving faster. The spacing is what's
being affected here, but the timing
remains unchanged. You can really exaggerate
the spacing in animation, getting more contrast between
the slow and fast parts of a movement, and this is a great
way to make animation more appealing. Same timing, different spacing,
completely different feels between these three options. Using good timing and spacing
in your animations can take you really far, but of course, you
probably want to learn a few other tricks. So let's talk about,
wait for it, wait for it... When Eliot the dot moves from
left to right with some nice spacing, it feels good, but
we're not giving the viewer any hints that something important
is about to happen and this can sometimes make
movements feel abrupt. Notice the way the animation
graph looks right now. Reading it from left to right,
you can see that it's flat at the beginning and the end, while
Elliot is picking up speed or decelerating. And it's steepest in the middle
where he's gotten up to speed. I'm going to tweak
this graph a bit, and I want you to try and
predict what will happen when the animation plays back. I'm going to add another
Keyframe towards the beginning of the movement, and I'm going
to tell Elliot to move in the opposite direction, just briefly
before moving to the right. Notice that the graph now
has a little dip in it, and when we play the animation,
there's a nice little head fake, before the main move happens. In animation, we call this an
Anticipation and now that you're aware of it, you'll
see it everywhere. Every cartoon that you have
ever watched uses this technique extensively. And if anticipation
is peanut butter, overshoots are
marshmallow fluff. What if we added an extra
Keyframe at the end of the animation, symmetric to what we
did in the beginning, like this. Now, Eliott the dot in his
youthful eagerness goes a little too far and has to settle back
once he reaches the end of the movement. This is called an overshoot and
it really helps to make your animation feel like there are
some physical rules that it follows. Many of the principles you'll
learn about if you start doing animation are there to help you
make your movements feel more natural. Human beings are used to seeing
things move in real life and when we see animations, it tends
to just feel a little better when what we're seeing follows
similar physical rules, which brings up to the last
principle I wanted to show you. Follow Through. Also known as
Overlapping Action. This concept is, again, designed
to mimic the way things move in the real world. If I flap my arms up and down
like some sort of deranged eagle, probably, a bald eagle. You'll notice that my arms,
like most arms, have joints. The flapping motion may
begin at my shoulder, but then it travels down my arm,
hitting the elbow and the wrist, and finally, my fingers and
there's a bit of a delay as the movement travels down the chain,
giving my flaps a wave-like appearance. In After Effects, the easiest
way to demonstrate how this works is to invite Elliot's
band mates to help out, Leila, Emiline, Elliot and Dani Carey
are in a progressive metal band, they call their fans, Dot Folk. It's a whole thing,
but anyway, right now, all four dots are moving exactly
the same way at exactly the same time. Nothing in real life
moves like this, so to make these
actions overlap, all we need to do is shift the
Keyframes for each dot so that the movements have some
delay between them. If I shift the Keyframes over by
one frame of animation for each dot, it now looks like this. That wave-like motion I
mentioned is already very clear, and we can exaggerate it more
and make this feel a bit looser and more stretchy by adding
another frame of overlap. Follow through can get much
more complex than this, but the basic ideas are
extremely simple to execute and adds instant visual appeal
to almost any animation. And now, you know how to do it. Come to think of it, you
actually know quite a bit now, so let's talk about how one
goes about getting paid to do motion design. The number of companies who
need motion design in one form another has grown exponentially
since I started my career. You got Motion Design studios,
traditionally found in large and medium-sized markets,
but actually, more and more found everywhere,
and these types of companies often attract top talent and do
some of the most creative work. You've got tech companies who
have been scooping up motion designers as fast as they can
be minted, and by the way, paying them a lot, and the work
they need done is usually pretty different than what
a studio needs. At Google, for example,
motion designers might work on interactions that
happen inside of an app, or even on a physical
device, pretty cool! And then you've got everybody
else who does anything and I'm serious. Companies you would never
imagine doing motion design have multiple Motion
Designers on staff. Real estate companies, colleges,
start-ups, car companies, cable networks,
product companies. School of Motion alumni
work at more than 5,000 companies all over the world. Earlier in this presentation, I
suggested that maybe we should think of Motion Design
as a set of skills, not a specific discipline and
if you think about it this way, the number of job opportunities
or clients you can work with, becomes practically infinite. We live in an age where
everything is on a screen and if it's on a screen, it's likely
moving and if it's moving, a Motion Designer made it move. So, how much can you
make doing Motion Design? This, of course, depends
on a lot of variables, but we have done
surveys in the past, at School of Motion and I want to
share some of the data with you. Freelancing is extremely common
in Motion Design and it does seem like the average freelancer
brings home a bit more than a full-timer, although, of course,
there are trade-offs to that. However, if you like
the digital, nomad, freelance artist lifestyle, that
is definitely a thing in Motion Design, and if you are
the super ambitious type, this next data point might
be interesting to you. Motion Design, even after a few
decades, is still a new field. From what I can see, it
hasn't been commoditized, the way that some other creative
fields have and even with the advent of sites like
UpWork and Fiverr, that service the lower end
of the budget spectrum, there's significant financial
upside if you can serve your clients well, and so,
how to get started? I'm going to keep it simple. Step one, open After Effects
and play around with it. Since you're watching this
Adobe Max presentation, you likely already have or at
least have access to an Adobe Creative Cloud account, so start
playing around with timing, spacing, anticipation and the
other tricks I showed you today. And it's going to be pretty
uncomfortable at first. You know? Like going too heavy
on the Tiger Balm, but like anything else, you'll
get the hang of it and start to see just approachable
animation can be. Step two, practice. You may not have clients paying
you to do Motion Design right away, but that should not
stop you from making stuff. Animating is like
any other skill. You can have the tool, but if
you don't practice with it, you won't be very good. There are lots of great
resources out there to help you learn and practice Motion Design
and you can take advantage of any, or all of them. Step three, once you're
comfortable doing simple Motion Design,
put together a portfolio. Nobody, and I mean nobody
cares how you learn to do Motion Design. You don't need a
degree or a resume, you need a portfolio of work,
even if it's all student work or personal projects. Everybody starts somewhere and
your first portfolio will look nothing like the portfolio
you have in five years. So use BeHance or take advantage
of that Adobe portfolio account and put something together. Step four, never stop learning. Motion Design software,
technology and even techniques are being improved and
invented all the time. There are new tools out there
that make it easier to add animation to software. New renderers to make 3D
animation easier and faster, and plug-ins that can
automate really tedious tasks, so you have more
time to be creative. You can plug into Motion Design
communities on social media, through friends or even through
structured programs like School of Motion to keep your finger
on the pulse of the industry. This isn't a field where you
can rest on your laurels, you need to embrace
the process and growth, and get out there
and go get after it. Yes! Sorry. And step five,
thank you very much. I know that's not a step, but
thank you for watching this presentation. I hope I was able to transfer to
you some of the passion that I have for Motion Design. The field is just an incredibly
welcoming place and there's always a new challenge
and from what I'm seeing, there's also plenty of work. So good luck and
happy Keyframing.
