Animating My Logo | After Effects Workflow Tutorial

hey it's jake and today i'm going to walk you through how i made my logo animation take you step by step through the entire process and break it all down so that by the end of the video you'll know exactly how i made it [Music] i think one reason why a lot of people like my logo animation is because they think it's a lot more complicated than it actually is and that's just because i layered a bunch of emotions on top of each other and a bunch of different colors so that it does look more complicated than it is so i'm going to walk you through every step of this process how i created it and how i think you should approach something similar if that's what you want to do so the first step of this whole process was just making my logo into paths that i could then use the trim paths shape layer operator on to reveal the logo so let's take a look at the first step of this process these are just the paths that i drew in illustrator brought them into after effects and then added trim pads on top of now the ending of that logo does look a little weird the text that says jake and motion gets smaller and then thicker that'll make more sense in a little bit but what i want you to see in this first step is it's just trim paths there's nothing complicated to that if you've used trim pads before then you know how this is done i just have three separate paths making up three different sections of my logo if you look at the logo as a whole there's one for the hair two for the face and then i have this one little shape right here for another strand of hair and then the eyes are not trim paths animations they're just simple shape layers and i just kind of scaled them up so nothing complicated there same thing for the wink it just scales down slightly and goes back to normal but as a starting point that's all there is to my logo animation trim paths coming in now it is a little bit more complicated because i have these pads going off the screen with that selected you can see the entire path it goes off the screen so what i did was just took my logo in its final form right here and then i just drew paths made a couple of loop-de-loops and then just went off the screen so that i could animate it in from off-screen and then i just animated the trim path's value so that it ends where it's supposed to be right here so that at this point of the animation we see the logo as i designed it and the same thing goes for the other two strands we've got this one that goes off to the right this one that goes off to the bottom i just extended the shapes out from where they already were but for this red line right here that wasn't enough because i didn't want it to animate off in the same way that it came on i actually wanted it to transition into the letter j if you look at this really closely you can see that this line right here that's kind of like the eyebrow animates up and around does another little loop and then ends up being the j of the jake in motion so i did the same thing there i just added some paths to extend that shape out do another cool little move with this little loop and then end up in that j position using the trim paths to have it end in the exact spot that i needed it to and i believe the other two lines just animate off the way that they came in yep it looks like that's what i did so they just go back off in the same direction that they came and i just have the start and end values of the trim paths ending up in the same space so that it just disappears instead of moving all the way off screen now at the same time all of that is happening the text jake and motion is coming on but again it's nothing complicated if i solo this pre-comp it's just a bunch of straight lines coming in and i did that on purpose anything that was a straight line i just had come in at the same angle that it was already going to end up being so this k right here for instance that comes in at the same direction that it ends up as in the final form of the logo the only two shapes that didn't come in a straight line were the o's those just animate on in a circle after i keyframed all those properties i just staggered all the motion now i should mention that i was using a preset that i actually created for school of motion called super stroker and i'll link to it in a card above so that you can check out the feature video of why i made that and how it works but you don't need that to do this animation at all it did make it a little bit easier i think i even modified it a bit specifically for my logo but for the case of this tutorial i'm not going to even cover it because you really don't need it it's just a workflow enhancement basically so go check that out if you're interested but trim paths on its own will get this job done if you see super stroker on any of these like uh the hair right here if i press e to bring up the effects there's super stroker and a bunch of other effects that's how i originally drove this animation but the fundamental backbone behind super stroker is the trim paths operator so don't get confused by that if you see super stroker but now that we understand how step one was done let's go to step two and this is where it gets a little bit more interesting so i'm gonna give myself a little more room here so we can see all the layers and i'll just play this back okay so pretty similar but there's a little bit of movement to the paths now and the way that i got these paths to move is by using a script that ships with after effects if you go up to window and then down to the scripts section there's one called create nulls from paths and what this allows you to do is generate null objects that drive paths on a shape layer so what i'm going to do is just dock this really quickly so i can show you exactly how this works i'm just going to make a new composition real quick and just draw a path it doesn't have to be anything fancy but just something like this okay and then i'll go into the contents of my layer select that path and make sure that i'm actually on the path and then i want to create nulls from these paths so if i say points follow nulls i'll just click that after effects generated three null objects for me that are in the exact same spot as the points on my shape layer and if i grab any one of these it's going to move that path around exactly the same way as if i was just manipulating the paths the benefit of this is that i can now have separate layer controls for each one of those points instead of just one keyframed property to drive everything in it so if i just undo back to before i added those points and say i wanted to keyframe the path of this property i'm going to set a keyframe there on the path go forward just a little bit and then manipulate this point here and this point here maybe rotate it move this one here then it's just going to linearly animate between those two points i can't control the motion path of any of these points and they're all moving at the exact same time let's say that i wanted this point to come back down at this point i do that it adds frame but they're still all happening at the exact same time i don't really have any real control over how this motion is happening but if i get rid of those keyframes and again say points follow nulls now i could add individual position keyframes on each one of these nulls maybe move that forward a second and then say push this one down move this one up and over and i'm getting motion paths for each of these so i could switch back to my pen tool curve out this motion path so it moves completely differently and i could make this one go a little bit slower and have complete control over each one of these points motion paths if i play that back now i have something that's completely different so that's the added benefit of using this script and that's how i drove the animation behind this second step of the process where you can see these paths are not only being animated in using trim paths but just watch the red line as it comes in the pads are also moving and i did that just to give it a little bit more life and make it look just slightly more interesting and with this blue path right here it happens even a little bit more strongly than that red line if we take a look nice and close you can see that the individual loops are kind of shrinking and moving in to kind of fold into place so it's not so static otherwise this is identical to step one it just added a little bit of movement and on this path right here that ends up being the smile if i grab that path i want to point out that these nulls can actually be parented to each other as well and that's what i did in this process to animate them so let me solo that and i have layers shied because there are a lot of points in all of these paths and it generates a null for every single one of them so if i unshy my layers and just maximize this for a second you can see there are tons and tons of nulls and i color coded them so that i could easily select all of them at once just by clicking the label color and saying select label group now i actually want the face blue path up here so i'll select that label group enable it and solo it and these are the nulls that are uh driving the animation for this particular path and i'll show you what i mean by parenting these nulls together if we take a look at the animation as it plays through you can see that all the nulls are moving and it seems a little bit complex but it's just because i've parented every null to the null before it so there's a parenting chain all along the path animation so this one down here is the very first point in my path if i go up one layer at a time you can just see the progression of that path throughout the entire thing and basically each one of these has a rotation keyframe set so what i did was i went to the final form of the the animation after trim paths it happened and i set a rotation keyframe at zero at that neutral rotation and then i just basically cranked it back a little bit all the way down the line so this null right here is parented to the first null and the null after it is parented to it and all the way down the line i just parented the next point in the path to the previous one so if i rotate this first one it's going to rotate everything because it's the master parent if i go to the second one which has some keyframes on it already i could rotate it forward or backward as well which doesn't have too much of an effect at this point because i had the rotation happening as the line was being animated on i didn't want it to be all crazy and spaghetti-like i just wanted to have some subtle movement so that you could see this wasn't a static path but combining this all the way down the parent chain and staggering the motion kind of made it look like this line was just gradually moving into place as it got to that final state and i did that with each of these paths the same concept through each one they were all just parented in a chain and then slightly rotated it doesn't take a lot of rotation to get a lot of movement so i tried to be as subtle as possible and honestly it doesn't look all that good in this state i mean it's fine but i wasn't happy with it i knew that i needed more and that's when i moved to step three which is where i added a little bit of camera movement it's not really camera movement it's fake but basically if we play this back you can see that now the logo is not only animating in the paths have some movement to them but the entire scene is rotating like a camera is flying through it's rotating into place it's scaling in and out and that gives a lot of life to the entire animation and i did this very simply just by using a null object which i labeled scene control and if i press u to bring up the keyframes we can see that there's just scale and rotation keyframes since these are shape layers i was able to crank this up to 300 percent scale without any loss in quality because they're being continuously rasterized you'll always see nice crisp clean pixels that way and it just scales down while rotating to that final state but then it rotates in the opposite direction scales up a little bit to kind of give this breathing motion and then scales back down now this is where that text that we saw in step one and two the lines got thin here and then thick there you can see how it kind of just changes scale that was happening because of an expression that i was using to maintain your stroke width regardless of scale so because the entire scene is scaling in i didn't want those lines to get thicker i wanted them to stay the same thickness and i did that with an expression written by a guy named adam plouffe who actually runs a battle axe that made rubber hose and overlord and a lot of other tools that are just essential to my workflow but if i go to stroke with property of any of these shape layers there are a lot of expressions that are part of super stroker but right here the stroke itself has an expression that i just copied and pasted and this is actually an outdated version of it there's an even more updated version that works when a lot more scenarios but basically it's taking the scale of that null object the scene control that's scaling everything up and down and then it's factoring in the stroke width that we have it set to to maintain that size regardless of the scale of that null or the scale of that layer and i applied that to every single stroke width on all of my shape layers including this pre comp where the text comes on in its own comp i just had to reference the other comp so that it knew to look at the null object in the other comp so that's how that's built so let's take a look at this step three one more time now the trim path is happening the create nulls from paths is driving the motion of those pads and then we have a little bit of scaling in rotating so that camera movement adds even more visual interest finally we have step four and this is where things look a whole lot more complicated because i have multiple trim paths multiple strokes happening all overlapping and giving a lot more visual interest and this was the final step of the process getting it all to work like i said i used my super stroker preset that i wrote to drive this entire animation but i'm going to show you right now how you can do it without super stroker using the exact same concept so i'm again going to just make a new composition and we'll just leave it 1920 by 1080 at 24 frames per second and we're just going to draw another path so again i'll just kind of do like a loop and what i want to do is just make a white stroke then i'll just add a solid in the background and we'll fill that with a color maybe one of the colors from my own color palette grab this one right here and then move that to the back and lock it and that's super hard to see so let me just bring those colors out one more time and i'm going to make that for starters this blue color and i want my caps and my joins to be rounded so i'm going to change that to round cap round joint all right there's my path i need to add a trim paths to it so let's go into the shape layer and add a trim paths okay the contents of my layer are just a shape group with a stroke i don't need the fill there's the path and then the trim paths is what's going to drive this part of the animation okay so i'm going to add an end keyframe there bring it back down to zero put a starting keyframe at zero and then one hundred percent and just move these ones forward so what we have is this shape animating on and then animating back off okay so that's the basics of trim paths if you didn't know it but now that i have these keyframes animating on and off i want to ease them i did not realize how long this comp was so i'm going to make this much shorter really quickly and just bring this nice and tight zoom in so that we're just dealing with a couple of seconds and now our line animates on and then animates off okay we can go even faster than that just tighten this up one more time and then preview that okay so our line comes on and our line comes off but this is still a little bit boring so i'm going to easy ease all these keyframes with the f9 key on the keyboard and go into my graph editor and then just make this a little bit more extreme so i'm going to pull these handles out and now it's going to animate much quicker all right now i'm going to grab the second keyframes of both the start and the end and pull them forward so now they're overlapping and now it starts animating off before it's completely on and i can even exaggerate that a little bit more if i just extend those keyframes out a bit more and then maybe change the influence of these handles a little bit so that my shape is a little bit more like this with a gap in the middle now i have something that's just a little bit more interesting obviously this is just an example there's nothing crazy complicated about this but i'm going to change the stroke with maybe to say 20 pixels just so we have this nice thin line okay now the next step of the process was to give the path a little bit more motion with those nulls so let's grab that shape layer and go into that path and then go up to our scripts again and grab create nulls from paths and say points follow nulls okay i can close that panel up and now i have a null for each one of my points so i'm just going to quickly rename these to be 0.1 0.2 0.3 and point four and i'm going to do that parent chain again really quickly i'm just gonna parent four to three three to two and two to one so now if i grab point one and rotate it it rotates everything and we do get a little bit of weirdness here because this isn't actually rotating the bezier handles on the path but we're not going to be messing with that too much anyway so it's not a big deal but if i go to point two that's going to rotate everything after it and point three will just rotate the last point all right now that we have that let's actually add some rotation keyframes uh point one is gonna move everything uh point four will not move anything because it's the very end so we just need rotation on one two and three and then i'll move those forward a little bit in time and then maybe just rotate these back slightly it doesn't have to be a whole lot i could even just grab maybe point two and rotate in the opposite direction and point one could even be in the opposite direction so we've got different rotations of different directions to make a shape that's completely different than the final which is right here i actually don't really like that movement i think that i want this point to be curled in more like this so i'm going to just rotate that and the other thing about this is you don't only have to do rotation i could grab this point if i don't like where it is and also add a position keyframe so i'll press alt shift p or option p on a mac to set a position keyframe and move it forward and then i could say bring it down a little bit so now we have even more control over the shape of this motion all right with all those keyframes set i'm going to easy ease them all with f9 go into my graph editor and i'm looking at the value graph right now and i'm just going to ease all them out now this is a little hard to see so i'm going to maximize it really quickly and i'm actually going to separate the dimensions of the position property for that point four so i can use the value graph and actually easy ease those again but then i'll select all of those keyframes all at once and then just bring the influence out here while holding shift bring the influence in a little bit here and now we need to work on the timing of those keyframes so i don't want them all happening at once and i don't want them happening at that point in time the line starts animating on right here so that's basically where i want this first set of keyframes to start happening i want some movement as that line is coming out and then at this point that's where it's hitting the next point in my null parent chain so i can grab those keyframes and bring that back because we're going to start seeing the influence of it right around this point i don't want these keyframes happening before we can see the results of what they're actually affecting so i'm just starting them about where the line is on that trim paths so i'll continue down the line and that right there is the third point so i'm going to grab those two keyframes and drag it back a little bit maybe not quite so far back and then finally we have these last two keyframes which are controlling the position of that last point i basically want those to be in sync with the rotation of the previous null so that it all kind of resolves at the same time so now if i play that back we get that motion and it is a little bit drastic this is where you can spend a lot of time tweaking keyframes and the timing of things to see how it affects the overall motion maybe everything is happening a little bit too quickly just spreading out those keyframes gives it a different vibe and you can also play around with the easing of the trim paths maybe everything is happening a little too extremely in here and i could ease off of those influence handles so they're not quite as quick now i'm not going to pretend like i knew exactly what i wanted my logo to look like on the first try it was something that i had to tweak and go back and forth with and play with the timing and see what worked for what i had in my head once i was happy with the motion then i moved on to duplicating that stroke and having it go on to multiple colors so let's take a look at how i would do that since it's all controlled by nulls and driven by expressions i can now duplicate this shape layer so let's call this line one and then duplicate it so we have line two so now i have a second copy of this line that's being driven by the exact same keyframes and if i bring up my color palette and change the color to being this yellow color so let's grab that change it to say yellow or actually maybe even red we'll just go straight with the red color now i have those two pads directly on top of each other what i want to manipulate now is the trim paths keyframes for that red shape layer so that they're happening just behind the blue line so the blue line is going to be the one that leads the path but then the red shape comes on top of it so with that line two selected i'll press u to bring up those keyframes and then just select all of them and shift them over one frame in time by pressing alt or option on a mac and the right arrow key and just like that i now have a blue leader that's quickly followed up by that red line and i could do this again if i duplicate the line maybe change the color to the yellow color and then offset those keyframes forward one more frame and now i have three lines that make it look a lot more complicated than it actually is now i actually think that the colors should be reversed so i'm gonna quickly just reverse my layers so line one is on top line two is in the middle line three is on the bottom and then i need to reverse the staggering of these keyframes so i'll back these ones up to the start of the layer these ones are staying right where they are and then this set of keyframes will move two frames forward so that now we have the yellow leader followed by the red and ending up with the blue now what you'll notice is that when it animates off we're not seeing those other lines and that's because the blue set of keyframes was all set symmetrically so the animating off should actually be happening two frames sooner than the first layer rather than two frames after it so i need to back this up two frames this is just the start property here again the second line can stay where it is because i only have three shapes and then i move the starting value of the last layer two frames forward so now it overlaps in the same way it starts with the yellow and it ends with the yellow and that red line is right in between the whole time all right so there is an issue if we pause say right about there and zoom in especially on the edges of this blue you can see that they're just some unwanted pixels and colors showing up because all of these shape layers are exactly the same width so the edges of those pixels that are getting anti-aliased they have very semi-transparent pixels to soften it if i turned off the anti-aliasing which you can do on any layer by the way if i select these click on this switch right here now there's no anti-aliasing everything is 100 transparent or 100 opaque and it's jagged it does not look good that is why you want anti-aliasing it's just that you have the side effect of semi-transparent pixels so being able to see two shapes that should be exactly the same size they are the same size can blend together with those edges so what i need to do to fix that is grab lines two and three and just back the stroke off ever so slightly i don't need to go you know super far like this but maybe just a half a pixel even 19.3 is a little more than half a pixel and that gets rid of those stray pixels that we're seeing on the outside edges and at 100 resolution you can't really even tell that you've taken away any width from that stroke so now that that's done i have my line animating on the same nulls are driving the shape of each one of those paths and then i offset the stroke now i can take this even a step further because currently it's all just animated one frame apart from each other but i want to say tighten up the way that these three colors are meeting at the end so that they end much closer together and to do that i can just again bring up those keyframes and i'll grab the end value for each one of the trim paths make sure i don't move them around and i just want to tighten them up now they are already pretty tight they're just one frame apart but to make this more dramatic i'm gonna actually spread everything out by three frames real quick so i'm just gonna grab these keyframes up here which are offset by one frame each and shift them forward two frames deselect this layer and go two more frames forward so now everything has more space between them and we have bigger segments between each color now like i said i want these lines to be closer to each other as they end so i'm going to grab the end value the second keyframe of each end value and with each one of those selected instead of having them one two three frames apart each i'm going to hold down the alt or option key and grab the first or last keyframe and then just click and drag inwards and that's going to compress proportionally the distance between each one of those keyframes so i can just back that up to where they're not even a whole frame apart you see this keyframe right here is halfway between a frame so these lines are coming together much more quickly at the end or a lot more close together and it's a pretty subtle thing but it again adds to the visual interest of the animation rather than just having them each segmented at that whole one frame apart that we had before and you can even take this a little bit further if you go into your graph editor and then under this menu right here you can say allow keyframes between frames and what this allows you to do is grab these keyframes and shift them around freely between frames they don't have to be on any single frame if i just grab one of these and move it around you see that it's not snapping i'm holding shift to snap it horizontally but i can go if i zoom in nice and close between any one of these frames at any point it's completely unconstrained and gives you a lot more precise control over the placement of those keyframes so if i wanted to say grab the start value of each one of these trim paths and bring these ones even closer together they're all one frame apart i can now do that with even more fine-tuned control than using that proportional spaced method that i was using with the alt key in the regular timeline but now that it's moved within that graph editor they show up in the exact same place in the timeline moving them around is going to snap them to whole frames here because there's no option to move keyframes between frames in the standard view but going into that graph editor allows you to modify that however you want but that's really the core concept behind how i animated those keyframes and now that those are offset it's all messed up it's not showing the the layers below it anymore so i'd want to reverse this so it's more like that but again i can bring that closer together so that those lines end up very compressed and just aligned to disappear much more closely but that's the core concept behind how i animated my logo and how all of those paths and overlapping them and controlling them with the nulls all really worked to bring me to this end result of my final logo animation so i hope that you got something out of the breakdown of my logo animation it really again is not that complicated it's just a lot of layering steps a lot of tweaking animation curves so that we get really nice motion and adding layers of motion to it just to create more visual interest than we would have had all the way back here at step one with just basic trim paths so that's really all there is to it if you use this technique at all be sure to tag me on instagram jakenmotion so i can see it and give you a like and please share this video if you liked it it really helps get my channel a little bit more attention and i want to be able to just share as much of my knowledge with as many people as possible so it really helps me get the word out obviously if you like this type of content be sure to comment like and subscribe to my channel if you haven't already and if you want to give back in a monetary way and help support the channel even more check out my patreon thank you so much to all the patrons over there i'm incredibly grateful for all the support that i receive over there and i just want to again say thank you for watching this video and i'll see you in the next one

Channel: Jake In Motion

Views: 7,026

Keywords: After Effects, Animation, Motion Graphics, Mograph, Motion Design, Tutorial, Adobe, Adobe After Effects, Logo

Id: 7znw7vPlM2E

Length: 28min 17sec (1697 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 10 2021