Create Explainer Video Animations in After Effects

this video is brought to you by premiumbeat.com [Music] so i'm going to take a perhaps a not so obvious prediction here and say that explainer videos and motion graphics are only going to take off because of chronovirus currently right now a lot of people are not working their offices and companies still need commercials so i believe this is a great opportunity for motion graphics hey what's going on internet this is josh noel from sunday film welcome to our channel if you're new here be sure to hit that subscribe button so we're going to talk about how to create explainer videos from scratch and three easy tips so anyone can follow along whether you never touch animation or if you have you know some really awesome experience with it and i think right now is a very important time to pick up on this motion graphics skill set where you can create fully detailed animated videos with or without voice over and animate to what your client needs i'm really excited to bring this tutorial because i think it will be profitable if my prediction is right if motion graphics tend to outweigh video production so there definitely could be some opportunity in the realm of motion graphics looking forward so without wasting more time let's jump into our tutorial let's get started so in our first technique we're going to talk about how to get graphics and set them up inside of after effects alright so first thing we need graphics like this and how do you get them one way we get them for free is off a website called freepix.com and i'll link to this file specifically so you can follow along with this video and there's literally i think millions of free files on this website you go to topping and typing like vector characters and then you can download any of these files for free which are vector files and i'll tell you what those are in a second the only downside to this if you're doing commercial projects is that you have to give them credit so now when you have your graphics downloaded there will be something either called an illustrator file ai or a esp file encapsulated postscript what you're going to want to do is open up either one of those files in adobe illustrator so i have this open up here in adobe illustrator and all we have to do is select our certain layers and put it into its own files so first thing you want to do is go to your layers icon you don't see the layers go to window layers and go into layer one and start seeing where everything is separated you can hide things it's pretty easy to use as software just like after effects or photoshop in a way and when you find the group that you want you can hide everything else and what we can do here select our graphics go to object ungroup and we'll open up our group here and we can start hiding the stuff that we don't want so i want to keep all the clouds but i want to hide say the text and obviously the background here in a second so i'll go ahead and do that and then we'll select everything and then we'll copy it and then we'll go to file new and we'll make this 1920 by 1080 pixels and click create and simply we'll just paste this in here and we can hold down shift our keyboard and grab this corner right here and make this bigger and we'll just move this and kind of get everything where it needs to be all right so that's good for now so all we need to do here is put everything into its own layers and then we go over after effects and animate this so what we'll do is open up layer one and you can see that we have all of our groups and paths here and we need to put this into his own layers so we can easily animate these in after effects so we come here to the bottom where it says create new layer create a handful of these so just keep clicking them bam so what we can do is bring each cloud into its own layer by bringing that path up and putting it into its own individual layer bring the buildings in there and we'll just keep doing this for every path and group bring it into each layer and this will allow us to animate it inside of after effects cool and everything else that was hidden we won't add that to its new layer so we can go ahead and just delete layer one with the trashcan icon and click on delete so then all we're gonna do here is everything else is clouds and we have two building groups i'm gonna rename our buildings to building one and building two or graphic one it doesn't really matter and if you wanna have more information on how to work like this in adobe illustrator i've done a handful of tutorials on this workflow that go a little bit more in depth into this process so i'll link that in description if you need some more help on this but when everything we want to animate is in its own layer we can move it over to after effects so all you have to do is go to file save as and we can save it as whatever and before we move on to our next technique i want to say thank you to premiumbeat.com for sponsoring this video premiumbeat is a royalty free music provider for your creative video and motion graphic projects they have an extremely popular library with thousands of songs to choose from and they have a very easy in-depth search and menu filter system that allows you to quickly find the best songs for your video so for your next video project be sure to check out premiumbeat.com for your royalty free music so now we can move over to after effects and we can get this thing started so what we'll do is click on this create new composition icon and we'll make our composition 1920x1080 and i'll call it tut and we'll click ok then we'll go over to our folder we'll go ahead and grab our illustrator vector save file and import it into the project window all right we'll be asked how we want to import this click composition and layer size is good click ok then what we can do is open this composition copy all of our layers go back into our main composition that we just created and paste them in there so now we have all of our elements in here and have after effects into individual layers you can see we can click around and move them so that's really cool so obviously we're going to want to add like some sort of background so we go to layer new solid and i'll call it background for bg and click okay bring that layer underneath everything fine then let's go to effect generate and we'll grab like a gradient ramp here just to break this up and i'll select our first color here and i can go like find a blue color click okay and i'm going to end a color and i can just set this to like a darker blue and now we have a really cool gradient in here i went ahead and added an animated background for our motion graphics starter pack but if you want to learn how to create animated backgrounds we have actually some really cool tutorials on this and it would be like a 10 minute tutorial if i showed how to create these so go ahead and check the link in the description if you want to learn how to create animated backgrounds like this you can also check out our motion graphics starter pack that link will be in the description so what we need to do is reposition everything and make this look nice so we'll grab all of our vectors and we can like move it over here you know rearrange some of the clouds maybe i'll put some over here actually that's pretty cool and we can grab this building and duplicate it and i can just kind of move it off frame like this so now we're going across the composition it's just kind of our goal here depending on what you're working on is to fill the composition just make it look interesting so think about positioning duplicating elements whatever it kind of just draws attention uh to keep people's eyes on the screen because you perhaps you're gonna have voiceover over this um or the text is gonna be explaining the story it's very important that you just keep people's attention by using colors uh and by and by having good placement and graphics on screen keep people's attention so overall we have a good placement and we're ready to go into our next step so now that we have our layout down let's go ahead and talk about how to add titles and make everything look great so here we'll grab the text title tool and we type out our first title and we want to keep this clean so we grab the text tool and the font i'm going to use here is beep baths new and beep bass new is a really cool just in your face typeface i love it so we can come here and type out any text that we need to have in here and i always suggest if you're doing explainer videos keep it simple you know obviously you're going to be limited to what the client tells you what needs to be done but you know just keep it clean uh and simple because you know really the graphic should help tell what the narration is saying obviously you don't want to have people reading a lot so you know kind of get your main core text in there and just put it in people's face you can bring up the title action states by going to title action safe and kind of put it right there in that corner or actually go right here that looks good and then you know we can easily duplicate this text and bring in make it a little bit smaller and change it out to wherever we need to say and then we can grab both of our titles and go to the line tab and make sure this is left aligned perfect if you don't see that line tab just go to window align and it's just making your text easy to read um and simple and i'll go ahead and make my title you know maybe a different color perhaps this could be like a brand color uh consistent with the entire video just kind of keeping people's face on the screen which is very important so now we have everything laid out text and graphics but of course we have to animate it and animation is really fun and easy so let's go ahead and do that now we have everything laid out and we just have to animate everything um and honestly it's a pretty simple process because you're probably gonna be creating a handful of these different slides but you want them to look good but you also want the animation to be amazing so we're gonna keep the animation simple so you can do a handful of these slides for your explainer videos so the first thing i always like to start with animating with is with the graphics you know these all all these vectors so what can we do how can we make this animation simple but ready to go so obviously we're going to want to animate everything in so what we can do here is just kind of animate from the bottom up we'll grab the pan behind tool and we'll grab like one of our building layers grab the pan buying tool and bring that anchor point say to the bottom and then we can grab say building one bring the anchor point to the bottom you know and grab the big one and we can just bring this to the bottom and simply grab all three of our building layers hit s or a keyboard for scale and then we'll add a keyframe for scale and we'll bring these keyframes forward in time and so the scale down to zero percent then what we'll do is we'll pass the last keyframes and we'll select all of them again and we'll bring them down just by a little bit you know maybe to like 90 and this is gonna create an overshoot animation but then what we'll do we'll select our first keyframes hit f9 on your keyboard make them easy easy keyframes and select your last keyframes and make them easy ease keyframes by hitting f9 or keyboards and now we'll have an overshoot animation which is a really nice subtle technique and of course let's go ahead and offset these layers in time by a little bit this way they're not coming in at the same time awesome very cool a little bit mixed up so now we just have to animate all the other graphics in here which are just the clouds in our case so just for simplicity state since i'm going to assume you have a lot of graphics to bang out let's keep it all the same let's go ahead and add a keyframe for scale and we'll move it forward in time and so scale down to zero percent and then make all the keyframes easy ease keyframes for your clouds then let's go ahead and also hit shift p on keyboard ring a position we'll add a keyframe for that and we'll move forward to the end of our animation we'll say six seconds and we'll just randomly you know animate the x positions of these clouds um you know maybe doesn't make sense from a physics perspective but honestly i don't really care so um you know that's really up to you actually for this one i want this one to actually flow up in the sky so and then of course we're done just offset your layers by a little bit this way you know it adds a little bit of randomness to your animation so now we have all of our graphics animated and you know we have our graphics ready for our explainer video now we just animate the titles and i'll show you some quick cool unique ways you can animate titles uniquely so i'll go into our main title called factories and we'll come here to animate and we'll add say like a rotation and we'll also go to add and add in opacity and then click on animate again turn on enable per character 3d so from here what we'll do is we'll set the y rotation to 90 degrees so the letters will be facing us and then we'll go to opacity right here and set it down zero percent then we'll open up range selector one add a keyframe for start we'll move forward by like say a second or so and then we'll set this up to 100 percent and then of course make them easy keyframes so now we have a very simple title animation and it's unique to our video so let's go ahead and animate the second title do something a little bit different i'll show you another technique we'll come here to animate and we'll do a position and then we'll do an opacity and you know we can just begin our timeline and what we'll do is we'll bring the position up so it'll be right there and then set the opacity down 0 then add open range lecture 1 add a keyframe for start move forward in time by a second or so and it says up to 100 then we'll offset the layer a little bit and we'll hit u on keyboard to bring up the keyframes and we'll hit f9 to make them easy ease keyframes so before we go ahead and see what we got let's go ahead and enable motion blur for all of our layers make sure it's turned on at the top and after a quick render this is what we have and it's all come together with some voice over or with some more strategic text you can be able to showcase the graphics and the information that you need to show for your explainer video or an infographic video it doesn't really matter you're just you're just displaying information explaining something to the viewers and there's many tools out there that help you speed up this process because when you're working on you know very long projects like this this does take a lot of time so i highly suggest taking a look at some of my favorite templates but also be sure to check our links in description and this will send you over the video hive and there's many explainer videos already done for you if you're looking to save time because like i said it takes a lot of time and also i'll link some of my favorite templates that i use very often to help me save a ton of time so i can get done days worth of work within you know a few hours so go ahead and check those things out if you're looking to save time but if you're in the process of learning this that's awesome so i hope you guys enjoyed this tutorial and remember there's always opportunity out there no matter what's happening you just have to you know go out there and create it's not necessarily easy but you know you are in control of your own destiny that's something i truly believe so if you did enjoy this video be sure to hit the subscribe button because we post multiple post production tutorials like this every single week you can also hit me up on my social media networks those links are in the description and always be creating [Music]

Channel: SonduckFilm

Views: 452,605

Keywords: Tutorial, After Effects Tutorial, After Effects, Explainer Videos, Create Explainer Videos, After Effects Explainer Videos, AFter Effects Tutorial Animation, Video Animation, Video Animation in After Effects, After Effects Explainer Video Animation, After Effects Motion Graphics, After Effects Motion Graphics Tutorial, Motion Graphics, Animation TUtorial, Animation Beginner Tutorial, SonduckFilm Tutorial, How To Create Explainer Videos, How TO Do Animation

Id: lAUAVwYWFdI

Length: 13min 54sec (834 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 23 2020