Hey guys Yannick here for cinecom.net and welcome back to the best youtube series on the world wide web Copycat Friday. And today we are going to recreate something I find super cool and use very often and that is ... these liquid motion design assets. This week we were searching for a new idea and we came across the newest music video of Kim Loaiza or something like that but anyways, the music video is called
"Bye, bye" and in this music video you can see multiple of these liquid motion design assets. This reminded me of something we did not so long ago. A month back we made a video about the new rotoscope tool on After Effects. And in our example, we made Gilles dance while he transitioned to a different place but to give it that extra - oomph - we added some extra cool motion design assets to it. And guess what? You guys really like the assets and asked us how we made them. I have to be honest guys, and I hope you won't be mad at us but We didn't create the assets ourselves. It was our best filmmaker friend Storyblocks Video who provided us with these awesome assets. Like every filmmaker we have tight deadlines each week and with the help of storyblocks video we can make these deadlines. In their huge library full of stock clips, overlays, transitions, After Effects templates, you will always find something you need. And well this is also the place where we find these awesome motion design assets. And there are a ton of those assets available in different styles. So you will always find something that suits you. Now, besides having the most awesome library The best thing about Storyblocks Video is that you only have to pay one single price per year for unlimited downloads. So if you want to start downloading right away go to the first link in the description below. And now that you know our horrible secret of cheating please let us redeem ourselves. Please! So let us show you how you can easily recreate such liquid assets in After Effects. First, you will need some footage to work on. By coincidence we had some laying around so we are going to use those but you can really use whatever you want. Now let's drip into After Effects. Of course you already have your footage in the timeline so we can start right away. And we will have two cool techniques to show you on how you can create your own liquid assets. The first one will be a liquid swirl. And to create such a swirl you are going to need the pen tool. And with this pen tool we are going to create a random pad, but make sure that you don't have your clip selected otherwise you will be making masks on that clip. Okay, nothing selected, so let's create that pad. With doing this you will now create a shape layer. And first thing we are going to do is set the fill to none. The second part will be the stroke. You can of course go for the plain and simple solid color or you can go wild just like us and go for the gradient stroke. So select that radial gradient stroke, set the beautiful colors you want, and crank up the stroke width. Now, let's put on some magnifying goggles and let's look for the gradient handles. With these handles you can now set the position of your colors. And we are going to set them in such a way that the beginning will have one color and the end will have another color, giving that swirl something extra. Next up is animating the swirl. Open up the properties of your shape layer and open up the content property. Now, on the right side you have an add button, click on that and select the trim pad option. Then open up the trim pad option and we are going to animate the start and the end. So enable the animation for them. Set them both to zero and now you can go one second further in time and set them both to 100. But... Now the line is gone. However, you only need to offset the keyframes from the start value a little bit And of course give them ease out and ease in: This will bring back your line and animate it. Look at that! We already have an animated line. Now, let's make it even better. Open up the gradient stroke option and here we will adjust some options. First set the line cap to round cap, then open the taper settings and set the start length to around 75% and the end length to 100%. Then set the end width also to 100% and this last property we are going to animate at the end of our swirl. So enable the animation for it and animate it
from 100 to 0, making the line disappear smoothly. And that's how you make an animated swirl. Of course now you can go super far with it by for example duplicating it, giving it that 3D feeling. Or you can mix it up and add some extra little swirls and droplets to it. It's really your own choice and you can go as crazy as you want. Now, for the second technique we found a very interesting tool the - Autotrace Tool. And with this your life will become so much easier. What you can do is take stock footage of whatever you want and trace certain parts of it. Sounds complicated, But it's not. Let me show you. First thing you need is stock footage of something in front of a black or a white background. Like this Milk stream footage or this flame. Then you just place it in your timeline, select the clip next go to the menu on top and select layer tab. Go all the way down and select the auto trace option. Now inside the controls set the time span to work area, then set the channel to luminance and enable the preview option on the bottom. And the only thing you now need to do is play around with the threshold and the corner roundings, so you select everything that you want. Enable apply to new layer and once you have that, just press OK. And look at that! We now have animated masks in the shape of flying liquid. Super cool! And this technique you can use for multiple assets. Like for a dancing flame or an exploding bubble. The possibilities are endless. ♪ And now it's time for Yannicks Fun Fact FOOOOOUUUNNNTAAAAAAIIIIIINNN! I was looking for some fun facts and I stumbled on something huge. Did you know that they used After Effects for the post-production of Rick and Morty? How cool is that?! So, this means I could also make something like Rick and Morty. And that was it for today guys. Thank you so much for watching. Thank you Storyblocks Video for the support. And like always Stay creative! My work is done here, so now I can leave on a two week holiday. But don't worry guys, I got you covered for next week. Look at that! It's about tiktok transitions. And I also have a surprise, In two weeks lorenzo will present the Copycat. Maybe. Maybe... Who knows? Who knows...
