Cyberpunk Glitch Transitions in After Effects | Animation Tutorial

this video is sponsored by in photo elements a huge library of creative assets textures stock photography and video music sound effects fonts motion graphics elements and templates everything you could want and best of all absolutely unlimited downloads with a very affordable subscription I'm gonna show you how to make this hyper colored cyberpunk LED looking glitch all in After Effects and we're gonna learn a bunch of useful techniques and effects along the way [Music] I saw a few similar effects in a bunch of glitch based After Effects templates on invader so I downloaded them reverse engineered them a bit and learnt how to do it from scratch let's start in the new comp called glitch main and credit text box in the center and that's pre combat with ctrl shift C and call that text and now let's create a new solid and add the effect fractal noise the key to any great glitch and we're also going to pre-con this layer and call it fractal noise comp so now we've got three comps over here a fractal noise comp a glitch main and a text and let's put the text and fractal noise in a pre gums folder we'll be jumping around between these a fair bit in this video let's start in our fractal noise comp and animate our fractal noise to be nice and chaotic which is going to drive our glitch effect so first let's set the noise type over here to block let's increase the contrast around 400 looks good let's pivot up the transform menu uncheck transform scaling and let's push the scale width really high right up to 600 and then push the height down a fair bit down to maybe 50 and now we've got a bunch of random black and white strips and we can come back in and tweak all of these settings later but to animate it we're going to add an expression to the evolution property down here so if we hold alt on our keyboard click the stopwatch that opens up our expression window and we're going to type in a simple expression time-pass drakes 500 and with that expression applied it is just going to increase the value of that evolution constantly so our evolution is always growing and now we've got a lovely animated fractal noise now we can make our glitches back in our main comp let's hide our fractal noise layer because we don't need to see that we're going to use it as their displacement map so we're going to click on a text comp and add the effect displacement map and over here where it says displacement map layer instead of choosing text we're going to choose fractal noise comp and you can see we've already got some glitchyness happening so what a displacement map does is usually color information from our fractal noise layer to distort or displace our type layer the darker it is the more displace is it to the right and the lighter the more it displaces to the left and these values up here for max horizontal and vertical displacement set the maximum amount of pixels they will shift horizontally and vertically so if we crank up the horizontal displacement you can see it displacing more and because our fractal noise is animated it is changing constantly so about one second in let's click the stopwatch next to both the horizontal and vertical displacement here to create a new keyframe let's press you on a keyboard to see those and let's have them both to zero so we have no glitchyness here at all and then at the start of a comp let's stretch the max horizontal displacement to something huge let's go up to 500 so now a text is styling really glitched out and then comes back to normal now just before it comes back to normal let's actually increase that horizontal displacement back up to maybe 200 or so so we just get a bit more time with it really glitched out of the start and then let's add some vertical displacement too let's keyframe it at zero here and then a few frames later let's increase this a little bit so goes from 0 to 35 and then back to 0 and I do prefer having a much smaller vertical displacement just to add a little bit of a kick so it kind of snaps into this final position here and maybe let's move this last horizontal displacement keyframe a bit over to the right and then here maybe lower this one to something like 30 so we get this last little moment of a horizontal glitch yeah there that's looking pretty good and this glitch is gonna look a whole lot better in a few moments once we start adding the effects but let's quickly animate a text glitch transition so let's go into our type comp and at two seconds in let's split our top layer by pressing ctrl shift + D on our keyboard and on the second type layer let's change the text to say effect and then let's drag down the end of this layer so it stops at three seconds and for the last few seconds calm I am going to drag in my logo and scale that down that's to show you that you can apply this effect to anything it doesn't need to be a type layer this is a PNG with a transparent background so now we've got our text cutting at two and three seconds in let's get back into our main comp and with our text layer selected let's put our playhead over the two second mark now I'm going to press Asterix on my keyboard the one just above the nine on the number pad and that's gonna create this marker here and let's do that again at three seconds in so now we can tell at a glance when that transition needs to happen so what we need to do is up a glitch effect to hide this cut here so a few frames before that cut let's add some more keyframes for max horizontal and vertical displacements both at zero we can copy these and Pacey's just after that transition and then in the middle here on the frame where it transitions let's crank up the displacement let's go to about a hundred and fifty and let's see how that looks there that cuts completely hidden in the glitchy chaos let's increase the vertical displacement a touch as well and I think I might want to spread out these horizontal displacement keyframes just a touch so we get a bit more of that glitchy action when we change to our second word now we can select these keyframes copy them paste them over here near our second marker and just aligned the middle keyframe with our marker here so now we get the transition into my logo and of course we can edit these values you can even set some negative values as well and that will just push the displacement the opposite way for the black and white values in our fractal noise layer and then I want this to glitch back out at the end here so I'm gonna keyframe the horizontal displacement at zero and then at the end crank that up to 500 there the logo gets completely glitched out at the end now let's add all of those tasty effects and first we are gonna add the effect cc ball action which is the best name for any effect in After Effects what ball action does is turn that layer into a collection of spheres and you can do crazy things with this effect you can scatter all of those spheres and you can also twist it in 3d space but that's not what we want to use it for Riggin easier to create our LED grid so let's zoom in a bit and turn our ball size download down to maybe 55 and none of the grid spacing down now you can go as low as you want I'm gonna go right down to zero so to really fine here and even though these are technically round spheres when you get down to this size they just look like square pixels and now we've got this cool LED looking effect first some quick info about this video sponsor and video elements I use a lot of textures overlays and additional elements and my motion design projects so it's amazing to have access to a library where I can type in texture and thousands of texture packs show up that I can download and start using instantly it can be really tricky and time-consuming to create these all yourself look at this 8k denim texture where am I gonna find jeans that big I only have a 4k waist and it's not just textures it's unlimited fonts After Effects templates stock video and elements that are perfect to add to your motion design projects and there were 43,000 new assets added this week alone you won't have to weigh up whether to buy this element or those textures for your project a subscription to invite o elements takes away all of that headache because you've got access to all of them click the link in the description to subscribe today and now let's add our trustee effect poster as time and said that 212 and that just lowers the frame rate so it doesn't seem as smooth and we get a bit more time on each of these frames and now let's add some glows I'm going to add a first glow effect and I'm going to turn the threshold down to 20% the glow radius down to 3 and the glow intensity down to 0.5 and if we turn on and off that is just adding a really tired glow to the edge of our pixels here but of course we're not stopping there I'm gonna duplicate that glow with control D and then this one I'm going to increase the radius let's go to 12 and turn down the glow intensity down to 0.3 so the second copy is a lot softer and let's do that two more times increasing the radius and decreasing the intensity and you can do this as much as you want I think about three or four gives a really natural glow and we've got a lot of effects on this layer so let's go up and hide all of our extra information to each of these because we don't need to see any of that now if you just want a one color glitch this is pretty close but let's add some subtle glitching to the type in between the transitions were ecstatic here so I'm going to select our fractal noise comp copy it and then go into our text comp and paste it let's make that visible and I'm gonna select preserve underlying transparency here so only affects our text layers and isn't visible on our transparent background and then I'm gonna turn its opacity down to 50% so now it has this constant glitchy motion and it's a lot of contrast here but if we jump back in to our main comp once all of our glows and effects are applied it's really subtle and we can see in between our transitions there's just a little bit of action happening where it looks like some of the LEDs in this panels up you know fading and glitching out a little bit and that just helps to give the animation looking alive when there's not much movement happening now at the beginning of our comp our text is glitched all to heck but I would really like this to glitch in from nothing at all so the start of this comp will be completely transparent a simple way to do that is to go into our type comp and then on our first piece of text add the effect a simple choker at 1 second in let's keyframe the choke Matt let me turn off our transparency grid so you can see the big clearer and then at the very start let's crank up this choke map until there is nothing left of our text there so here's what our effect looks like in this layer but if we go into our main comp we can see it pulled together these glitchy particles out of nowhere to format text let's add that same effect to the logo at the end there we are now let's add some of those insane colors and we're going to do that by adding the effect Colorama now as soon as we add it we can see that this does not look right that's because we're adding the effect on top of all that glows and we want to apply their color effect first so let's drag this up to the top of our layer stack there that's looking much better now what the Colorama effect does is map the black and white values of a layer to a color spectrum if we open up the output phase we can see the colors that it's outputting but we're not really seeing any of these colors on the right here no greens yellows and oranges and that's because this text layer is mostly white and light gray if we go down here into an hour effect off for a second we can see that this sort of medium gray is as dark as our text layer ever gets and we want all of these colors we need to go from white all the way through to black but luckily we've got our trusty fractal noise camp already in this composition which has the full spectrum of black to white let's go and hide that and turn our effect back on this layer and then if we go to input phase and view add phase we can choose where to input those values from so we can choose our fractal noise comp and now we get this full color spectrum and here's what that looks like when we zoom in and look at any individual frame I just think the colors and the glows look so good it really feels like some cyberpunk feature where all the LEDs are just scrambled and outputting as many colors as they can and we can also choose colors from a number of preset palettes so if we select up here we can choose wraps of red green and blue and they all look great and there's some more interesting ones as well like fire and sunset which you can use to some really specific moods and of course there's also mold lead down here so you can get that moldy glitch look that everyone's after these days but let's take it back to our hue cycle and there are a couple more awesome effects just by changing our fractal noise combo slightly so let's go back into our fractal noise comp and on this black solid let's add a Gaussian blur effect and let's put that up to maybe 15 and we can see if we look closely that these sort of sharp blocky edges once we had the blur become a little bit more rounded and when we go back into our main comp that translates to these really curvy glitches and you get a bit more of an analogue psychedelic looking glitch which can be really interesting and if we go back and delete that blur effect and add a noise effect instead and let's increase that to 10% and we can even be pretty subtle it's hardly noticeable in this comp but if we're going to add village mein kampf when we start glitching it's a lot more granular we get a lot more of these little pieces these individual pixels floating out which can be a really cool effect as well and get some really cool looking individual frames here I also downloaded a whole bunch of VHS glitches from invader elements as well and if we drag that over our fractal noise layer you can see this really analog glitch and let's add its blending mode to screen so you can see a bit about fractal noise underneath as well and this is just gonna have a little more variance to this fractal noise and what that translates to in our main comp is we get a lot more variety in ad transition glitches here we get some areas that are really granular here we've got lots of individual pixels and then a few areas where it's bigger chunks and then in our static frames we've got a few more areas where we've got all these vertical strips happening here and I always love adding a bit of analog elements where I can to my animations whether it's overlays like this or textures I also got a bunch of glitch sound effects Ehrman vital as well and place them over the top to help sell the effect a little bit more please take a deep dive into this project file which you can download for free down in the description there's a lot of glitch tutorials out there and two YouTube channels that have inspired me and taught me a bunch of these ideas Video Copilot of course and workbench who cover loads of digital distortion techniques so definitely check them out I made a short playlist of some related videos that'll think you'll enjoy if you've made it this far I'll see you in the next video and please consider subscribing if you'd like more of these videos every week [Music]

Channel: Ben Marriott

Views: 338,182

Keywords: after effects glitch transition, glitch tutorial after effects, ben marriott, after effects glitch effect, glitch animation tutorial, cyberpunk glitch effect, led glitch effect, glitch transition after effects, Fractal Noise glitch, text glitch effect, after effects tutorial, cyberpunk, glitch, glitch transitions, after effects glitch, after effects LED, adobe after effects, after effects, after effects distort, glitch transition, glitch animation, best glitch, future glitch

Id: YjgfuUxfgqU

Length: 13min 6sec (786 seconds)

Published: Wed Apr 15 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/GrannyGrinder]

Great tutorial, thanks for this!