Creating a Countdown in After Effects | PremiumBeat.com

hey how's everyone doing today this is Josh Noel with premium beat and in this After Effects tutorial we're going to create an exciting top 10 countdown I had a lot of fun trading this tutorial because there's so many ways that you can create this motion graphic asset and essentially we're gonna be looking at particles mixing backgrounds together looking at actual countdown expression and working with 2d motion graphics to make this entire element come together so it doesn't matter what you're doing there should be a variety of helpful tips in this tutorial so let's go ahead and get started it's go to composition and click on new composition and I'll just call it Tut and I'm using 1920 by 1080 23 frames per second and we'll do a duration of 15 seconds it should be at least 10 if you're gonna actually use 10 seconds click OK so the first thing we want to do is start thinking about this in a graphic design perspective we want this to look nice right I mean we don't want to put it on you know a black background maybe you do but let's go ahead and start mixing in some backgrounds so I went ahead and found a few images online you can of course Google some or you can also download our project files and I found a nice gradient background here for just to ask some elements in here so go ahead and bring this into our timeline we can test on a keyboard for scale and we can bring this down to kind of fit our composition and that looks good okay so we have our background and obviously I want to get to the meat of the tour over at the start so I'm gonna grab the textile tool and I am going to type out any number usually one right because all this is would come down to an expression for the actual you know countdown to want the ten to one so make sure you have your design I'm using typeface beef as new for our typeface and if it makes a little bit bigger as well and then go to the line tab and I'm gonna Center that up so I have this expression right here that I want us to copy we're gonna put this into After Effects so there's a link in the description if you're watching this video and this expression is on our blog I premium beat and you just go here and copy it and then just go back to After Effects and we'll open this up we'll go to the text layer here we'll alt click the stopwatch for source text and we're gonna paste this expression into this box so now we run through this boom we have our countdown all the way down to zero and if we can just cut it right when it goes to zero so come right here and bring in the in point to this point and that was good and I would even set the clock start to 11 just so you have a couple of frames here so you have a full second with the 10 and what you can do is just move this over a little bit and like I said you can copy this expression it's on our blog I prima beat the links in the description if you're already watching this on our blog page it should be below the video so here's our top 10 right here it looks really good so I want to go ahead and start creating more elements in here and how you can enhance this countdown look and of course mixtures in the centre of everything so before we start to add amazing elements in here it looks like a look what happens so you have 10 and then it goes to 9 the problem with this is that this is not centered the tennis center but when we get to the single-digit numbers they're not Center so what we need to fix this very easily is go to the last frame of the 10 appearing keyboard for position and move over by one frame and then make sure that this is going to be centered up as well so now pretty much a seamless fix that you can't even tell the difference completely centered no problem at all now that we have the base idea of this tutorial out of the way we can start diving into all the other elements of this awesome tutorial so we'll start creating depth in the background and I have these bokeh images in which I downloaded remember you can download the project files you know I want to add these in here to create a cool background so I'll start with this bokeh image just drag it on top of your current background and when I ask for a keyboard for scale and we'll bring this in here and this allows us to you know be creative with what we're doing right so go to the blending mode and we'll set this to overlay and you can toggle switches the modes until you see the blending mode and we got another bokeh image which I want to put on top of this and I'm gonna of course scale that down as well it's nice to have some big elements in here and then I'm gonna hit then I'm gonna set the blend mode to screen so we can get rid of that dark background and I'm gonna hit T on my keyboard for opacity and lower the opacity of this bokeh layer just by a little bit I should spell 40% and now we have a little bit depth in here but we need to animate it so let's say P our keyboard for position for the top vocal layer let's all click the stopwatch and let's type in wiggle open parentheses point 5 comma 40 close parentheses and now we'll have this nice wiggle in here and of course we might need to scale this up by a little bit so we don't see the edge of the photo and that looks good so now we have a little bit of depth in here and maybe for the other bokeh layer what we can do is hit a certain keyboard for scale add a keyframe for it and move it to the end of our animation in which I'll just say 11 seconds at the end of everything and we'll just kind of scale it up by a little bit and this way just maybe a little bit of parallax to it and just add more motion and depth to our entire image here and that looks really cool and now we can start adding more design elements to our text and then we're going to be looking at some 2d graphics here and also the particles which will really make this thing pop so what's coming here to do a 2d first let's grab the ellipse tool and what we want to do is just draw a perfect circle so you can hold down shift on your keyboard and you have a perfect circle like this and then go to the aligned tab if you don't see the alignment I'd go up to window a line and go ahead and center that up and make sure this layer is underneath our text of course and hits here in keyboard for opacity and we'll lower the opacity by a touch actual plus it's lower the opacity to 29% and then let's duplicate the layer by going up to edit duplicate and set here keyboard again let's raise the opacity on this layer to maybe 60% and go to effect transition we'll add a radio white and while keyframe for transition completion we'll move forward by one second exactly and we'll set it to 100% and what you are keyboard to bring up the keyframes and we'll make the last keyframe an easy easy frame by hitting f9 on our keyboard and that'll kind of slow it down before it comes to a complete finish and that looks good and now we want to do is loop this entire circle animation every second so this is very easy to do what we want to do is first of all trim the end point to the you know one second here so this clip is one second long and we keep track of the entire timeline and come over here we'll duplicate this layer and we'll bring it forward to one second so basically this is not what we want to do and what we're gonna want to do here is just kind of just start the animation back over as one the circle delete the keyframes no big deal alright and then make sure the transition completion is at 100% as he the keyframe at the first frame there go to the last frame and set it to zero percent and once again make the last keyframe and easy East keyframe by hitting f9 on your keyboard so now the first one kind of wipes off like this and then the second one or fills back on and then all we have to do here is very easy grab both these layers could duplicate them bring them forward to kind of build a staircase like this and of course we'll run through this all the way to the end of our countdown all right and that looks really good and then of course grab all these circle layers go to layer pre-compose and we can call this layer circle animates and click okay perfect so now I want to take a look at particles and it's a lot of fun but go up to layer new solid and we can call this one call it burst particles go to effects simulation see see particle world okay so it's gonna be very easy if you don't know anything about particle systems here and you're overwhelmed don't worry this is a lot of fun easy to do so what we're gonna do is we're going to go into the physics and we're go to the gravity property and you see all the particles are falling down because of gravity is making that happen so click on gravity set to zero all right so now all the particles are shooting out from the center and that's exactly what we want so I want to animate so I want to animate the particles so only emit after each number has been transitioned on so it's going here to the first you know frame of the timeline add a keyframe from the birthrate move forward by one frame and set it down to zero so now we scrub through this will get just a few particles that burst out here to start the animation so then hit you and keyboard bring bring up the keyframes here and right before it goes to 9 or your next number add a keyframe for it and then move forward by one frame and set their birth rate back up to two or even more and then move forward by one more frame and set it back down to zero so very simply it bulges bursts on a few particles at every animated point and all you have to do from here is just copy them and go back to a second move back one frame paste it in there go to three seconds move back one frame paste it in there and just repeat this process and actually you can copy all them now and save some time all right awesome and if you want to play up the particles you can go into the particle layer and you can set it do any other object in here still like you can do a motion square I really like that one you might want to actually add more particles into that and you can do that by increasing the birth rate so you might want to really determine your birth rate before you paste all the keyframes and you or you can even do what I like and you can add a cube and I think that's really interesting click off that you know that's really cool but I'm gonna keep it at line because I really liked you know the kind of sparks or you change the color of it by changing the birth and death color but I really like what the settings are right now and I'm not complaining about it but go ahead and add some more particles in here and we'll also add those cubes like I talked about so coming here and add another solid and we'll call this one cube particle go to effect simulation particle world all right so we'll hide the original particles so we don't get overwhelmed here and the first things first I'm gonna set the particle type to a cube boom there's our cube we can change the color a little bit maybe I'll select the eyedropper tool and I'll select some of these background colors for the birth and death color so maybe we'll do like a nice blue I'm not really getting that deep rich colors hoping for something all right okay that's fine I'm not going to try to write this so let's go into the producer layer at the top and let's set the radius X to be all the way across increase the radius Y and also maybe a little bit of the radius Z and this will give us some particles here and we'll come here to the position Y and we'll position this above pretty much our entire scene and then what we'll need to do is move our layer forward in time so it'll be as if particles are already flying down and then come here to the physics and we'll set the gravity to I don't know point zero for falling down nice and slow and increasing longevity so it will stay up a little bit longer they won't die right away like four should be fine it looks good and let's go ahead and put this cute layer underneath our first bokeh layer so we'll continue to add some more depth in here or if you really want you could keep it on top of everything it's really your choice what you want to do with that composite I'm pretty much happy with his animation but I want to top it off with one more wiggle effect and I want to wiggle the entire screen here so it's not just static so let's go to layer new null object let's parent all of our layers to the null object and then go to new all object get peer and keyboard I'll click it the keyframe at least and type the wiggle open from zero point five comma I will do like 30 so this will give us a little bit more wiggle and of course you might need to scale up some the background accessors by a touch and then the last thing we'll do is kind of complete the animation so once the one goes away obviously you might want to do something else and what I want to do for our circle here just kind of animate this out we'll go into our animate circle here and we'll turn on the transparency so we can see the background go to the long full length circle hit asulearn keyboard and also shift T the ring up opacity out of keyframes for both of those parameters move forward to 11 seconds so you give yourself a one second animation and come here and scale this up you actually might need to Center your anchor points so what you can do is you can hold down control on a PC or a command on the Mac and double-click the Pan behind tool up here at the top and I'll Center up the anchor point and you can scale this up all the way like this and increase the opacity to 100 so we go back to our main comp we have this here and obviously it's being cut off a little bit because the wiggle expression so you can come here in the original comp and just fix that with a scale animation as well so I'll push that up just by a touch and before we render everything mushara motion blur for all your layers and turn it on for your circle animate and after a quick render this is what we have we have our beautiful count down from 10 to 1 and of course you're gonna expand that to whatever length that you want where you can even make it smaller so 1 2 5 so hope you guys found this tutorial insightful and are able to take a lot of techniques away from this so you can create your own YOUnique countdown for more tutorials please be sure to check out our blog and if you're the need for royalty-free music we have a huge library full of great music for your projects and once again thank you for watching this video and this has been Joshua Noel from premium beat com [Music]

Channel: PremiumBeat by Shutterstock

Views: 67,380

Keywords: after effects, countdown, timer, editing, graphics, shutterstock, premium beat, tutorial, how to, adobe, opener, time

Id: ksuLW96cdJI

Length: 14min 31sec (871 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 07 2018