- Hello everyone, this os Evan Abrams. And in this after effects tutorial, we're gonna animate on
this script font logo here. And in this case, we're
gonna animate this logo on using a right on technique. Now, this has probably happened to you. We have a lot of variable stroke widths, we have a lot of overlapping parts. It is a mess. Script fronts are a mess. So in this tutorial, I'm gonna show you a couple of techniques to kind of make sense of this and hopefully, make the process
a whole lot more manageable. And speaking of making
things more manageable, the logo we're gonna be animating is for company called, Wipster. Wipster make a terrific
app for reviewing video with clients and teams. I use it in pretty much
all of my client projects where I need them to review or
make notes, or give feedback. Wipster lets you upload video and clients can just
comment right on the frames to highlight specific parts or times that they're interested in. It really makes the
communication a lot smoother. If you wanna give Wipster a try, use the link in the description, and start adding Wipster to your workflow. Now let's over the after effects and try to get this logo animated. That's a pretty natural segue, right? So we're here at after effects. Let's look at a couple of techniques that can help you with complex, script-based fonts and logos. It doesn't have to be words. Anytime you're emulating kind of a pen moving scriptd kind of thing, you're gonna run into
these kinds of troubles when you try to write them on. What troubles am I talking about? Well, if you're familiar
with write on techniques, all this next few minutes
is gonna seem pretty normal. We've got our layer, that is
our complex beautiful object so we would probably draw a
path over top of it like this. We just wanna cover up the
path that's really over doing in the sort of basic method, you know. And everyone tells me that I'm very basic so this is a good fit. Now, I sure you'd notice,
I'm gonna be accelerating some of these steps 'cause you
don't need to watch me draw a path to understand drawing a path. Basically though, you wanna
make sure that your path is as in the center as you can. So you might need to tweak
your path just a little bit to get it where you want it. Now the next move is pretty simple. We're just gonna go to the
shape layer, twirl into it, we're gonna add a trim paths here. Trim paths allows us to
animate paths on and off. We're gonna set a key
frame here at the start where the end at 0%. And then we're just gonna
move ahead a little bit, add a little bit more of it in, move ahead a little bit more, drag this along to maybe there, and then finally, move ahead
and finish the whole thing off. We're gonna grab the key frames
in the middle and ease them. And this is gonna be the
motion that we want this thing to animate on. Now we have to do ism thicken this up so it covers everything. And oh boy, do we have to thicken that up. And then we would probably
go into the stroke. We change it from butt cap to round cap and into round joints. And then the next step is just changing the track matte option of the layer below to be track matte, alpha matte. So layer below is looking
at the layer above, and you get this kind of thing happening. What's the problem with that? Well, right off the jump, you have this kind of thing happening, where it's revealing too much. It's revealing disconnected
parts of this logo. Obviously, you can go in here
and you can just grab the path and try to shift it's points around to try to make little
errors like that go away. But there are gonna be
parts that happen like here, like this middle part here. And this is a pretty simple letter where this is totally unacceptable, where this kind of overlap
is not what we want at all. It wouldn't make sense that
a pen would write this on. Well, since this traditional
method had failed us, we might as well quit. But nope, there's a lot
more in this tutorial, so I'm gonna show you how
to fix this kind of thing. We're gonna use a few masks
to clean up this matte. So this layer on top is a matte layer. We're using it to define the
visual area of what's below it. Now, we can use masks on that layer to add and subtract form it. So, I just click up
here, tool creates mask. And now, when I draw on this shape layer, I'm gonna be drawing a mask. And the mask I'm gonna draw
is gonna be cutting through this part right here. I wanna try to match the
curve as close as I can. It doesn't need to be perfect, so that I isolate just that area. I'm gonna hit M to call up the mask, and we're just gonna
change it to subtract. So as you can see, now I have successfully cut that part away. So even though this is
animating up, whoosh! I don't have to worry about it too much because you know, there it goes. And I don't need this to
hang out all the time. It's not super necessary that
this path always be there. In fact eventually, this is
gonna come out the other side, bloop, right there. And then I no longer need
this masks to be hanging out. So, on the set of key frame,
there, pinch this one up so that on this frame,
the mask is in place, and on this frame, I'm
just gonna drag it away because we don't need
it to be cutting holes, and making things complicated. It's a bother. Now, we need to clean up
the other side of this. So, as this is coming up, it
shouldn't splay out in this way we need to add a second
mask to make that go away. So, I'm juts gonna go ahead
and grab the old pen tool, make sure that I'm creating
masks on this layer. I'm holding down space bar
so I can move the points, so I'm alternating between
waggling my handles and moving points, and then we can go
change this to subtract, and we have got this cut happening. And again, this doesn't
need to hang out forever. I'm gonna change it to none,
and I'm gonna scrub through to see when is that no
longer gonna be useful. Now, I guess this gonna
need to hang around for a little while. So I'm gonna set a key
frame here, key frame here, where the path is going to be gone. Set it to subtract, and then
it goes away, all right? So this is gonna come up. And now we just need to
shore up this little point through here. What is going on during that period? Now we do that by using yet another mask. So, at this point, everything's cool. And then at this point,
we're gonna start to have some more mask action. So I just go up here, and
I use the ellipse tool, and again, I'm making
sure I am creating masks, and I'm just gonna put,
draw a little circle, trying to make a circle
that's roughly the same size as the stroke size, right? So I can go in here,
maybe put this like here. I'm gonna go in key frame its path. Now we're just gonna
move ahead a little bit. Now we're gonna try to
make this follow that edge. You can tell this is the edge of that mask as it's coming down. So we're gonna try to make it follow. And you can see I am moving
ahead a few frames at a time 'caus I don't wanna
necessarily put key frames on all of them. I'm trying to make this thing
follow as close as I can to that edge. Now you'll notice, I still need
to fill in some of that part so I'm gonna make sure I am
dragging up this point here to cover it. So it's going from a circle
to kind of a weird bean shape. And you may just have to scrub through and make sure for example,
this is an ugly thing. That's not a good look. So again, you gotta tucks that up. All right. So once you're done, all
of your mask fiddling, you should end up with something
nice and smooth like this. And you haven't really
created that many key frames. I know it seems like
a bunch of key frames, but sometimes there's no avoiding work, and it can really help you
get that manual control over these tough knots
that you really want. However, there is another
way I wanna show you that relies on you,
opening up illustrator. Whoow, whoow, please stay with me. We are gonna up illustrator. What I wanna do is break
this complicated logo up into many simple little
parts that I can understand and animate a lot easier without them interacting with each other. How do I do that? Well, like I said, we are
gonna open up illustrator. And usually when you get
these kinds of logos, they are all one thing. If you start by using text
in breaking it into shapes, this will be a little bit easier. But sometimes, art work
comes at you like this. Now what I have to do si convert
it into many more shapes. So for example, I've got
the first part of the W. The second part of the W, this I part. The first part of the P,
the second part of the P. And I carve this all up in illustrator. I take this big thing,
I take the whole thing. I like to duplicate that layer so I can preserve the original. Then I'm gonna go in
here with the path tool. You hit P to call up your path tool. That makes sense in illustrator 'cause it make a lot of
sense in after effect. And we're just gonna draw some
nice bright lines out here. And I'm gonna draw some lines. So I'm drawing my line, I
don't know if you can see because the color of
my anchor points here, or the thickness of my line, but I'm trying to draw a
line that describes the curve that I think the pen stroke
should be taking up through here so it's gonna go pshhh. Now I also wanna draw a line
that describes this curve here. So I wanna describe sort of
the curve that's missing. All right? So this might require you to
zoom in, and move points around if you're having trouble
with pint snapping, you might have to turn snap to pixel off that makes sure that you are
indeed snapping to points. And again, I wanna try
to describe this curve. Usually, you want these
handles be kind of halfway between here and there, so
it kind of makes the tangent of that. I need one more, I need
to cut this part up here. But this should give me most
of the parts that I require. So, now I can select this thing. Usually, I end up having to duplicate it. I'm just holding down alt or option to drag it down like that. And now I'm gonna select all the stuff. Go shift M, and that's gonna
call up the shape builder tool then I'm gonna build a shape. So I'm gonna just drag between these two. I'm gonna add those two shapes together. And then we're gonna hold down alt, click these two shapes
and make them go away. So now I've got the first part up here, and then the second part
is gonna be without here, and yes, to these two. So that's gonna make my two shapes. Now I've got enough points
that they can stick back on top of each other, and you'll notice, they're exactly the same. That's the rest of the stuff. Then I like to move these to
be on their own separate layers so you end up with this
part, and then this part, ad then this part. So you end up with all
these separate parts. Then, we're just gonna import
those into after effects. You just save this in illustrator file, import it into after effects, and you end up with something like this that I've prepared earlier. We're getting really into
the cooking show territory. So I have all of these layers
and I've got them organized, and ordered, and named. If I wanted to animate this
on, I would start animating from one side to the other. And really, if you want to
just stagger all these layers, that gonna get you halfway
to where you wanna go anyway. Something that can
really help you out here, here's a little tip that
I learned a while back, is using a pretty garbage
line to describe the motion. So just like we did at the beginning, we create this path, this mask path, we use the trim paths to animate it on. And all we're doing with this line is describing the motion. So I'm gonna make this you
know, a nice bright white so you can see what's happening. We're only using this line
to describe the timing that we want. It's really only here to show us how quickly things come on, how much of a thing we
wanna reveal at a time. Now we can use this line
by observing where it is, at what parts of the animation, when do we actually need to
bring on the different layers. So for example, W two, doesn't
need to start until here because the line hasn't touched it yet. As soon as it touches it, that's when we can bring this layer on. Now we can move ahead and
the I, this I stick part really doesn't come on
until, 'til right here. That the only time when
it's getting overlapped, so that's gonna happen. So then I would just
go through all of this and shift all of these layers in time so they only start when the
line is going to touch them. I'm just going to do that now
while the video speeds up. And once you're done, your layers would look kind of like this. They have this kind of a shape to them. So now you don't need
to look at this layer. In fact, I've made a guide layer. Now you can kind of see the
rough timing that's gonna happen from there, you can use various techniques to bring these parts on. If you wanna use track mattes,
if you wanna use masks, you can do that. I personally like the
fine control of masks. If you already use masks like I did, you would end up with something like this. I think a pretty good looking thing. One of the tricks I use
to make masking this on and off a lot easier
is I draw the final shape, I go around the whole thing, and hen I key frame backwards. So I start here, and then
I work my way backwards. It allows me to have
really nice fine control over this leading edge. So I can have it be wavy if I want, I can have it be concave
or convex if I want. It really gives you some nice fin control. And I like to go through, and
really just hit the main beats and then try to fill in the middle parts. It doesn't take as long as it looks. But overall this technique,
hopefully should help you get where you wanna go a lot faster. I can't take away all of the labor, good work always takes effort. But hopefully, these can help
you solve your more complex write on problems. All right, that's it. Hopefully these techniques will help you animate on your script logos that you throw a bunch of blocks of text. It can really save you a lot
of time to plan this stuff out and hopefully, this gives
you the tools to do that. If you've had any trouble
with this tutorial, please let me know in the comments. I know there are a lot of
specific edge cases that come up. And there isn't always
a clear, straight line to get you to where you wanna go. It's like there's no straight
lines in script fonts. And if you wanna find
out more about Wipster, please use the link in description and start improving your
review process today. If you've enjoyed learning
about this kind of thing, you like learning about motion
graphics, after effects, please subscribe to this channel. We got new tutorials up every week, or at least I try to. Make sure you subscribe
and turn on notifications so you can be notified
when things come up. It's pretty helpful. I Evan Abrams, I'm on Twitter at ECAbrams. Ask me any questions, comments you'd like. Just tell me what you
wanna see on the channel, and we'll try to make it happen. Thanks a lot for watching and I'll see you around the internet.
