How to Animate Shorts Like Ali Abdaal (After Effects Tutorial)

[Music] today we're working with paper to start you can download everything I made in this video to use in any project and I'm even giving an entire font and some of the image assets for free and you don't just need After Effects these can easily be used on their own in Premiere resolve Final Cut or any other editing app I'll get into that later in the video but for now let me show what we're actually going for Al AB Doll's YouTube shorts are notorious for having these paper uncrumpled assets to showcase the topic he's discussed the assets themselves are really unique and they're actually pretty hard to find online they work really well together especially when combined with background and overlay textures well as a personal challenge I set out not only to make my own but to demystify the process for you as well for both creating the assets from scratch and actually animating like Oli after we make the assets I'll show exactly how I made the Tuttle screen you're about to see right now everything starts with asset preparation there's a few tips I have depending on what you're creating for fonts I used Google fonts and lat everything out in a simple Google doc one major thing to make sure is that your assets are big enough so that when you cut them down and Grumple them you have enough real estate to work with for images you can find them literally anywhere or even take them yourself I went to unsplash pixels and I even use some Adobe Firefly for AI image generation on a few of them but keep in mind two main rules the images should be relatively simple to cut out so nothing with ridiculous gaps and lines and they should be unobstructed by anything in the foreground you can take your images and print them out directly but I went with an extra step of processing them in Photoshop to crop unnecessary pixels and to do any image touch-ups that were needed next is to print out your assets as we're about to start cutting them out this can be tedious depending on how complex your images are for the fonts I went with rough rectangles around each letter in my opinion imperfections are what really make these special getting perfect 90° Cuts all the way around wasn't something I was too worried about for the images however I wanted exact cutouts and this definitely takes more time and having something like a craft knife definitely helps a ton but just like digital masking the more time you spent and the more effort you put the better to the final product you know if you think about it this is like masking in real life now that we have our assets cut out we need to capture and process them this is where controlling your variables can be very helpful I've seen some tutorials on how to make these crumple animations where they cut everything out in Photoshop but because I have so many to do and I want to avoid any extra steps I bought a couple colored paper backgrounds this is so when I bring everything into After Effects I can easily key out the background think like a green screen having different colors allows me to swap the background in case I'm working with an image that blends in too much I set up my light and camera on my cand but you can definitely do this with way less it could be just as simple as a light and a tripod or even actually holding your camera for each shot if you're really steady and when we get to processing later you'll see an alternative way to prep your images that actually doesn't require any green screening okay got the lighting set up got the green paper set up and just doing some Focus tests I got to make sure it works first for camera settings I set my camera to shoot only jpegs no raw it isn't necessary for this kind of photo shoot and would only give me more files to swim swim through later also everything is set to manual including white balance this will ensure consistency across all the images with exposure and color when we're processing later then it's just a matter of actually crumpling everything this took a really long time for me since I had so many assets to process for the pack but if you're doing just a handful for a specific project you can get it done in a pretty short amount of time start with the subject un crumpled take a photo crumple the edges slightly take a photo and repeat until you can't crumple anymore you should hopefully be able to get about four to six frames per asset and that's it it's time to take the rest of the steps into after effects all right we have quite a lot to get into so let's get right into processing these images so what I have here is the already finished processed project file but I'm going to use this we're going to do a couple from scratch just so you can see the entire workflow of how I did it and some tips and tricks on how to actually process this the first thing we're going to do here is make a new composition so I'm going to click the little new comp button down here and we're going to call this example 1 a just like so so and I'm going to make the composition 1200 by 1200 and the frame rate doesn't really matter uh I'm going to go with 24 because that's what I did the whole pack in but you could do 25 you could do 30 whatever you want what really matters is the actual images which we'll get into in a moment but for this we're going to do 24 and I'll just set it to 3 seconds for this composition I'm going to click okay and we'll have our new composition made here I have them organized by subfolder here so each of the fonts by alphabet numbers and the special characters so if we toggle down here you'll see all these different images and and for these I did five frames so I know every five frames like this will be one letter so we're going to start actually with the a here I'm going to select the first five and drop them into our example one right here now what I chose to do was have it be three frames per image and then the last one holds to the end you could do two frames but you'll see later when we actually use it in the animation that it kind of doesn't really matter because we can adjust the speed to make it faster or slower if we want but for this I'm just going to stick with what I did in the actual pack which is three frames per so after I drag all of these in uh what we can see here is if I just drag all of these to the side you can see it's frame by frame each is what we captured before what we want to do here is chop these down here and leave the last one at the top because this is our first frame this is our last frame so I'm going to select all of these I'm going to hit shift control D or it be shift command D on Mac and I'm going to delete these right here so now we have three frames for each of these and then our final frame like this now you can manually click and drag so I could click and drag this over here and then hold down shift and select this and click and drag it over here and do it like this you could do it manually that's totally fine but in my case since I had a lot there's two different slightly faster ways to do it so the first way is just built into After Effects where if you select from the bottom to the top and you right click and come to key frame assistant there's a sequence layers option if you click this it'll bring up a popup all you have to do is click okay make sure overlap is uncheck just click okay and it'll sequence them just like so and if we play through we can see we have our little stop mode motion animation done on the a now the way that I did it it's a little bit faster is using a free plugin from the creative Dojo I highly recommend getting it I always have it docked over here in my bottom right it's essentially the same thing and it has a couple other benefits included which we'll use later in the uh in the animation part but for this it actually has a sequence layers option so if you select sequence layers and go by select it and set the offset to zero which is the amount of space between each layer we want zero frames between each layer and then we do it again so if I just select like this and click stagger it'll do it and it's a lot faster than the other option so either works you can do it manually or that way anyway we now have this laid out and again if we play through we can see we essentially have our a pretty much done here the only thing we have left to do is a little bit of clean up here on positioning sort of like stabilizing the animation because if I play through you can see it kind of moves around a bit what I'm going to do here is just go frame by frame and kind of adjust and click the frames and just kind of move it as needed so I need to move a little to the right here we can see that it needs a little bit rotation so I'm going to hit w for the rotation key and just rotate it slightly to the left and we can see now we're a lot closer than before and if I hit V to go back to the normal Mouse tool we can go to the frame before and do the same thing kind of drag it over and you can see that this is just a matter of messing around you don't have to be this picky but uh yeah now we're looking a little bit more stable let's do this last frame over here that's pretty good and then the middle one doesn't really matter as long as it's centered so there we go now when we hit play we can see we have our animation and now we're actually ready to just get into cutting out the back ground so you could do that fully in this composition you could make a new adjustment layer like this and use key light or any other keying software to get rid of the green but what I'm going to do here is actually pre-m this and we're going to work on the composition and you'll see why in a little bit why I did that so I'm just going to select all of these the top one to the bottom I'm going to right click and go to precompose and we'll call this example 1 a pre and just click okay and now we have a pre- comp the keying plugin that I use regularly is called primat K it's from Red Giant but in this case I want to show that you can do it totally in in After Effects with key light it's just a little bit less control but it is definitely possible uh along with some other helpful tools that are built into after effects to help clean up the key so yeah let's just get right into doing that so the first thing is let's bring up key light and when I do this we can see that nothing happens all we need to do on the screen color here is select the eye dropper and then select our green here and we can see that it's keyed out the green now if I toggle transparency we can see that we actually have a transparent background but if I zoom in here you can see there's some issues on the edges over here there's like a little bit of a shadow on the side and it's actually not the perfectly cleanest key so if we go to the screen mat we can see that there's actually if I zoom in really closer there's actually some artifacts in here so we have to do a little bit of cleanup and we can see that also the a is here it hasn't fully selected this what I'm going to do is bring on a levels and toggle down from RGB to Alpha and we can see here as I start to clamp it in the edges get a little bit sharper if I pull this over you can see the edge is getting sharper and so there we go now we have a little bit of a cleaner key on the edges here um but it is still a little fuzzy and I'm not loving that so I'm going to do a couple more adjustments on the edges here but I'm also going to bring on another effect which is well there's two actually that you could use here there's simple choker and there's matte choker and simple choker all it does is just expand or contract your edges but the one I actually want to use here is essentially the same thing but with a little bit more control called matte choker and it has a few more options and you know there's no specific value that I could tell you to do for this it's mostly just messing around with the uh the first and the second set of options so you can see there's three ones and three twos here it's just a matter of messing around with the softness and how much you want to actually bring it in and uh I think that's pretty solid we have a pretty solid cleanup here you could also bring on something else like roughen edges if you want to add a little bit of extra roughening to the edges so toggling this on and off we can see we have a little bit of a different look I'd rather not I think it's good as is but now when we scrub through we got to make sure that all of this is clean now there's a couple things here on the beginning if I turn off the effects we can see where chopping a little bit into the actual paper just because there's some green spill on the side here so you know we can do some manual tweaking change uh in the screen mat in key light we can actually change this to be a little bit wider and then make sure that the rest of it looks okay so in here I'd probably go back and change the matte choker that's essentially the workflow for this if you are using the green screen or any color key in the background I'll get to in a moment using Roto and masking it out in case you want to go through that route but looking at the actual final example from the a that I did uh which you can also add at the end like what I did here is I added a levels just to increase the contrast a little bit bring in the white make it look a little bit nicer and then finally a tint to remove any color cast on the image so if I turn this off you can see there's a little bit of a green cast on the edges but if I turn on tint because this is all black and white it gets rid of that I want to show one more thing here with the butterfly asset uh which is how to fix some problems you might run into so I'm going to turn on the king but we still have that blue and so there's a couple main ways that you could get rid of this there's actually an effect built in After Effects called spill suppressor so if we bring this up and type in spill suppressor you can change the color to whatever it is that your background is so if I just sample this to the background and turn our effects back on we can see that it's kind of getting rid of the blue what you could also do which I think is a little bit better in this case is just throw on a hue and saturation effect right here and then select whatever Channel you need to so if you're doing a Green Key you could select the greens in our case this one's blue so just select the blue and then just bring the saturation down to zero and it keeps all the other colors intact so all the oranges and stuff from the butterfly here intact but removes that blue so we're at a nice clean neutral black and white on the paper with all the colors here and this is why it's important if you are keying to make sure you have a nice contrasty background so in this case I made sure to use a blue background because the butterfly is orange just so it's way easier to key in the processing step here and then finally what I have here is just the levels to increase that contrast all right I have here the actual Da Vinci resolve asset from the pack and what I actually did for the final is use Roto for this because if you noce notice here even though I had different options for the color backgrounds this has kind of a greenish tone blue and red so I couldn't use any of the backgrounds and so instead I went with a dark background so I just use my mouse pad as the background but you could use anything else just something that's dark and contrasty and did the same layout that I did before with the a uh what I then did is just brought it into another comp and did a little bit of a different workflow for this and I'm going to remove the Roto brush we're going to do this from scratch so this is basically just pre-c comping it I'm then going to come up here to the Roto brush tool select it and make sure that we're set to full because is important to be on full when you're using the Roto brush and I'm going to double click on the layer itself and it'll bring up the actual Roto menu here I'm going to start from the end and move backwards so we're going to start with the first one right here I'm going to click and drag inside here and try and keep it as clean as possible just going around the circle we can always add more after but just doing our best to stay inside the lines and we'll see that we need to add some here in the middle and we can see here over on this preview with the transparency toggled on if you have the transparency toggled on we can see the edges now we can just move backwards and see if we need to do any cleanup you can see here there are some chattering edges here some dark edges from the background that's not a big deal we can fix that later with matte choker or some of the actual rotor brush effects here so I'm not worried about that too much I'm just going to try and do a little bit of cleanup uh holding down alt or option on Mac just doing some general cleanup doesn't need to be exact uh on this Frame we can see that there's quite a bit so I'm going to hold down that uh ALT key now if you don't see the freeze button just click and drag this over to the left and you can see the little freeze button here this will essentially lock in what we just did so I'm going to click this and I'll fast forward and we'll come back after this finishes all right and if I hit play we can see we have the animation we can go ahead and close this out cuz we don't need the Roto anymore swap back to our normal Mouse tool and hit play just to see this I'm also going to swap to full quality so we can see this properly and we can see that it looks really solid like I mentioned before we still have these edges to clean up but that's no big deal because in the actual Rota brush effect here we can shift The Edge negative to the left and that'll kind of eat in those little edges is you could also feather it more if you want so if we turn off the transparency we can see like if I crank this up a lot you can see it's very feathered I think was actually good at default just a five so you can see that you don't actually need to do the king you could do Roto and you could even do this with masks if you take the mask tool instead so I delete the rotor brush tool you know you could manually do some masking around the edge obviously that takes a lot longer but a couple different options for how you could isolate these that's really it for processing them what I want to show briefly is just how to Output these because that is important of course if you're doing this in an animation you could just bring this composition into your animation but if you want to save this for later like you're making assets for yourself or something like that then all you need to do is in your composition select contrl M or command M on Mac to add it to the render queue you can see I have a ton already done in here we're going to leave it on best settings and we're going to open this here and drop it down to Quick time and if we open the format options I'm going to change this to prores 4444 right here the reason we're choosing this codec is because it's the perfect balance between quality and it allows Alpha where where is like MP4 you can't preserve Alpha in that this one you can and it doesn't get to astronomically large file sizes so I'm going to click okay and then under video output make sure that RGB plus Alpha is selected not just RGB cuz we do want to save this Alpha select that yeah we'll just turn off the audio as well cuz there's no audio it doesn't really matter but that's it and then click okay and then you can select where you want to render it and just click the render button and you're good to go you have your asset Sav okay just before I get into recreating this which I'm going to show from the ground up how I made all with assets from the pack I want to show just a couple cool tricks that you can use with the actual assets to get more out of them the first thing I think is probably the most important one to know which is how to extend out the layer Beyond just the 3 seconds that we rendered so if I hit play here we can see that it holds for up to 3 seconds but then disappears now of course you could just duplicate this and kind of trim this and and do it this way there's a much more efficient way to do this what I'm actually going to do here is just right click and come to time and then freeze on last frame and what it'll do is it'll let it play out and then extend out for Infinity for as long as you want all in the same layer so you need to pre-compose you don't need to do any extra freeze framing on this it's all on one layer which makes it really nice also if you want to reverse it so if you want it to uncrumple and then maybe go back down and crumple again is if you just select these and we hit contrl C and contrl V to paste or command C command V on Mac and we rightclick the key frames here and come down to time reverse we can now see that it unrumples and we actually don't need the key frames to be this long we could actually just make one right before it starts right here like this and delete this one and now these two key frames right here we can click and drag to wherever we want and it'll now uncrumple so if I bring this over here let's let it play out it'll hold for a bit and then once it crosses this key frame it'll start its unan animation so yeah really easy way to control this and after effects let me show the exact same thing in Premiere it's slightly different but the concept is is pretty much the same what I'm going to do is just hit my c key to cut I'm going to cut this section right here and then I'm going to right click this and just add a frame hold and now we can extend this out to however long we want and of course now it'll be frozen for as long as you want and it's the same thing as before we just take this beginning bit I'm going to hold down alter option on Mac and click and drag and let go here we've now made a copy of the beginning if we come over here we can see that it just starts again but if we right click and go to speed SL duration and just select reverse speed like this it'll now do the same thing that we just did so if I hit play we can see that it now crumples out so opens holds and then at the end here crumbles down lastly have the same thing here in resolve where it just opens up I'm going to do the same thing I did in Premiere I'm going to hit B for the cut tool click it here and then rightclick change clip speed and then select Freeze Frame and now of course we can do this just extend it out and it'll be Frozen and it's the same thing as before just holding down alt or option on Mac to make a copy drop it over here here then we right click change clip speed and we can select reverse speed and it'll do the same thing we just saw so by play we'll see it crumples down and there you go you have your reverse and freeze frame on all of these now we're going to be mostly focusing here in After Effects because this is where we're animating we have the most control but yeah that's the way to do it if you're using another editing application and not after effects a couple more things that we could do here is of course if we right click this and we go to transform we can flip it horizontal so we want the car pointing left instead of right or any of the other ass there's some pencils and pens you could flip those you could also hu shift this so if we bring up the normal Hue and saturation effect built in After Effects select our science here and we shift the Hue we can see we're changing the color of the car so now we have a greenish tone car we can change the saturation as well as the Feathering if you want to bring this over this will just you know select more of the colors might make a little bit of a nicer selection also really important to the alab doll look for his shorts is the wiggle and so I'm going to show a couple ways to do this the first way is to do it directly on the layer controls so if I hit P to open up the position and I hold down alt or option on Mac and click the stopwatch we're going to bring up our expression here and I'm going to type in just the basic you've probably seen this before but I'm going to type in the basic wiggle expression we're going to do something really really high like 200 and something like five if I hit play we can see it's shaking quite a bit it's shaking every single frame the amount that we set so I'm going to bring this up to 20 so we can still a little bit more clearly we see that's ridiculous we definitely don't want this look but if we go to the beginning and hit return and add a line here posterized time and then set it to something like four and add a semicolon to make sure that our line breaks and now we hit play it'll do it every four frames and now it looks a lot more like the Alli look more that handdrawn kind of imperfect look um you could of course change the frame amount so this is how many times a second that it does this so if we set it to 12 you say that's a lot faster definitely too fast but you can do something like five or six whatever you feel fits for your animation I'm going to set this back to four and then I'm going to right click the position right here and select copy expression only this is a nice little hidden thing that makes it easy to copy expressions and then let's go to our rotation so I'm going to hit shift R to also bring up our rotation and then just select our rotation and hit contrl +v or command V on Mac and we'll see that we've now pasted the same expression on a rotation now the reason it's rotating too much is because if we toggle this down we can see that we're rotating at 20 but in this case it's not 20 like position it's 20° which is way too much so I'm actually just going to change this 20 down to something like three works and there we go we have a little bit of a Jitter here now we could leave it as that right and this totally works and that's a great way of doing it but I'm going to show one thing that will make this a little bit easier if you're working with a lot of assets and you want to copy and paste it a little bit easier because of course like I said you could rightclick the position and copy the expression and then paste it to other layers as well but there's a slightly simpler and easier way once you set it up and you could save it as an animation preset which we're going to do right now so I'm going to hold down alt and just deselect these take off the Expressions entirely we're back to nothing at all and I'm going to bring on the transform effect we're going to set up a couple expressions in this so if I hold the alter option key and press the position here we're going to add an expression here now what is this expression that we're actually adding well if we look at the value here this number right here we can see that this value is actually half of our actual car so if I go into our project panel over here where the car is and we look at the actual value we see it's 2382 by 914 well this this value here 1191 by 457 is exactly half that the reason we're adding an expression here is because every asset is a little bit different but we know that the transform effect will always place the position marker in the middle which is half of the width and the height so we're going to write an expression to always do that so this is the expression we're going to type we're going to type h for height is equal to this layer. height / 2 and add a semicolon and this will be our first variable and then W for width we going to do wal equal this layer do width / two at a semicolon so we're basically again calling half of the width and half of the height here I'm then going to go down to and I'm going to open the brackets and just type w for width because that's the first comma H when we click away we'll see that nothing's happened because it's actually just set it to this so if we do plus 100 you'll see that we've added 100 so it's actually it is driving this exactly as we want next what we're going to do because we do want to add the wiggle is next to our brackets here I'm going to go plus our wiggle expression so we're going to do the same wiggle expression from before we'll do something like 200 and maybe 20 should work and then if we click away we can see that it kind of jumps over here because what we still need to add is subtracting the value and then add a semicolon and it'll put it back to the middle and so now we have our wiggle expression in the Middle with the width and height automatically determined based on the actual layers width and height of course we're missing that posterized time so I'm going to add it right before here let's do our posterized time and set this to four make sure we had that semicolon and now we have that wiggle on this as well so the last thing I'm going to do here for the position part is just make sure that the Anchor Point option here in transform is the same without that wiggle expression so I'm going to hold down alt or option on Mac select our Anchor Point and what we can actually do here is if we just toggle open our transform and go to our position we can just copy all of this click right here and paste it and then just remove our wiggle option and even the post R time we don't actually need that all we need to make sure is that this is set to half the width and half the height because again it depends on the layer that that we're using that all sounds great but it would be nice to actually see this in action so we bring in our sunflower here I have the other asset here and I copy over our transform and paste it onto our sunflower we can see that the values are completely different this one is 800 it's in the 800s right whereas our car is in 1100s and 400 but because we said it to half the width and height of the actual layer instead of set values it auto adjusts depending on our actual layer and this is really great when you're working with a lot of different assets especially from the pack just so you can process it a little bit faster back to just our car we're going to finish this up here we're going to add the same expression to the rotation but a little bit simpler we don't need to do actually that much of a setup on this I'm going to hold down alt or option on Mac and click the stopwatch on rotation it'll bring up our expression and all we need to do is this just the same default one there's no position or variables needed in this we're going to do posterize time set to four add our semicolon bump down a line and type in wiggle 200 something like two and there we go now we have a little bit of rotation on this as well as the position and so again you could copy paste this onto any other asset but what's even easier is if you don't want to have to go back and forth to copy paste what you can actually do here is if you select the effect here so I deleted the Hue and saturation but I'm just selecting the transform effect I'm going to go up to animation at the top and I'm going to select save animation preset and in our user presets here we can actually save this as whatever we want so we can call this up from our effect panel later and it'll just instantly drop on exactly with our Expressions so I'm going to name this transform and we'll just add something like crumpled paper reset like that just so when we call it up we know exactly what it is and hit save and there we go now the way to make sure that this shows up in your effects panel if we open our effects and presets panel over here if you click the little hamburger icon over here and refresh the list and go into our animation presets in our user presets we see we have the transform crumpled paper preset now in my case I use FX console which is that free third party plugin to bring up effects which you've seen a couple times in this video if I hit control space here to bring it up and I hit this the gear icon to refresh it click okay and then do it one more time and we type transform like that we can see at the bottom we have our crumpled paper preset which if I click it'll bring up that exact same transform thing we can see that our actual uh Expressions were baked into this now anytime that we added onto an asset it has that already made we don't have to retype that every single time all right I think that's enough of the explanation of how to to actually process these let's get into actually making the animation finally our goal is to recreate this here so let's just get right into it so I already made a new composition here the first thing I brought in all the fonts in here and we're going to work with font one for now so I brought in the alphabet and what I'm going to do here is just select the letters that I need we're going to drag all of these into here let's go to the end here and I'm going to right click and do what we did before we're going to go to time and freeze on last frame and this will just give us extra Freedom after those 3 seconds let's also select all of and scale them down to let's say 30% and now we're going to start laying them out now we could just randomly guess I could bring these over and start guessing where they go but a really easy way to do this is actually just to right click and let's make a new text layer and type in asset creation and we can't actually see this let's set this just a color this is just going to be a placeholder for now the font itself doesn't actually matter but this is just so we could space out our letters at the beginning so I'm going to scale this up to something like this and centered in our composition and now let's bring this to the bottom and we can actually just drag our letters over and so this will just help spacing a little bit so let's actually duplicate our s space this out and you can see all I'm doing here is just kind of placing them roughly where they go we're going to adjust that in a minute anyway so we now need another E so I'm going to go to this first e and copy it and paste it here and just continue this until we have all our letters placed okay we have the letters roughly placed I'm going to delete our actual reference layer and then I'm going to hold down alt or option and select the quotation mark key and this will bring up our green grid I use this all the time and we're actually pretty centered already I don't think we need to change it too much but this might help in case maybe your character is a little bit to the side or not perfectly centered this is just a really nice way to uh to Center your elements here let's also maybe adjust these a little bit let's move this one up this one down a bit kind of make them imperfect we don't want this to be exactly perfect that's that's not the whole point of these uh paper letters again we're going to add that transform Jitter that we made before so it'll kind of do that for us anyway but this just kind of starts us uh in that direction if we take off our grid and we hit play we can now see that we have this playing but in my opinion it's a little bit slow and I would actually rather this be a little bit faster what I made for the pack here is have it be three frames before the next frame but I actually want to make this faster so I'm going to select all of them holding down shift and select all of them and I'm going to open up this button in the bottom left which is the expander collapse the inout duration stretch option this one right here and I'm going to select just any one of them here where it says stretch and set it to 2/3 of the speed and this will B basically shrink it in to be faster so I'm just going to type in 66.6 a whole bunch of times and hit enter And now when we go frame by frame we have two frames each so this just makes it a little bit faster all right I'm clicking this to toggle that down cuz we don't need it for now okay that's good let's actually start changing the colors of these and so if we go back to our reference what I made already we can see I have these kind of like random colors for each of them which is very reminiscent of like a sort of like old Ransom note uh which is actually where I got the reference from so if I pull up Google here and I bring this over you can see this is actually what I used as a reference I just used Google image for the colors and all I did is just sample some of the colors from some of these different notes you could choose any two colors for them the easiest way to do that is with just a tint effect so I'm going to bring up FX console and type in tint and now we can select for the black color and the white color anything and what I'm doing here is if you notice I have the window open on the left all I'm doing is I'm selecting the ey dropper hovering over the color and hitting enter or return on Mac instead of clicking cuz if I click it then it'll actually click over to Google but if I hit enter it'll select the color without me swapping over to Google it's just a quick way of selecting your colors if you're using the eye dropper with reference outside of After Effects let's do the same on the white here so I'm going to select the white and select our color and then I'm just going to repeat this for all the different letters here okay after some selecting and swapping colors I think this is pretty good of course we could always change it later but I'm going to just leave it like this for now but if we go back to here you might notice that I used some of the other fonts as well to kind of mix it up and give it a little bit more variation which really helps sell it so I actually have the other fonts from the pack as well from the full pack here and I'm just going to go through and swap them there's actually a really easy way to swap assets and to keep the effects without having to redo everything so what I'm going to do here is Select our first s and go into our second font and find the S here and before selecting this I'm going to hold down alt or option on Mac and I'm going to click and drag still holding alt and drop this onto our s and you can see that it auto swaps the S but it keeps the tint it keeps the scale it keeps the position keeps everything and I'm just going to repeat that for some of the different letters mixing up the third font as well and I'll just repeat this for the rest of the letters so comparing the two uh they're slightly different it shows slightly different colors and the different letters but it kind of goes to show it doesn't really matter um just as long as you keep that variation and mix up the colors and everything it should look pretty good so we're off to a good start here if I hit play we have our animation in but uh not a lot of uh characters to it yet except for the color well it's time we bring in that Jitter that we made before that actual preset that we made so I'm going to select our first one our a and I'm going to bring up our FX console and type in transform we can see we have our preset down here and if I click this it auto adds it with the updated Anchor Point position and rotation that we said before if I hit play we can now see that the a is jumping around so all we need to do here is just select our transform hit contrl C and select the rest and just hit contrl V it'll Auto paste them and now when we hit play we have this on our animation we have these nice little Jitters um and of course if you want to change the values it's actually really simple so I'm going to select our a right here maybe I want to add a little bit more more rotation to this so I'm going to actually select our a and hit uu twice to bring up all our expressions and come down to our rotation expression and I'm going to update this from two to actually let's make it five for this I think five would be better for this to get add a little bit more character to it well it's only updated one of them but what we can do is just easily override our transform effect by selecting in our A's transform copy it again and select the rest and paste and it'll override those with that new expression updated and now when we hit play we have a little bit more rotation on this and so if you want to go back and forth and kind of update maybe the position or whatever else that's a great way to quickly update it and that's also part of why I use the transform effect instead of the actual layer controls because it'd be a little bit more time to go through and update those let's zoom in here and let's change the scale a little bit let's scale this one up maybe scale this one down just to add a little bit more variety on them when we Zoom back out here we now have a little bit more variation on this and again of course you can always just change the actual position of these so you want to space them out a little bit more there really are no rules to what to do here it's really just a matter of experimentation but let's actually bring in a background here I have a 10K scan of a piece of paper an actual just plain white piece of paper now we have a little bit more of a paper Vibe going on I'm also going to drop this down to chord quality just so that it loads a little bit faster as we're working let's also color code each of our words here so I'm I'm going to select asset and change this to green and select creation and set this to fuchsia just so that we see it a little bit easier in our timeline here now one thing I did here for this is I actually offset them randomly so if you look here for the different letters they're kind of like shifted randomly and the way I did that is actually with Dojo shifter the plug-in I mentioned before the free one from creative Dojo I highly recommend it they actually have if we change the options to offset layers and change it from selected to random and then input a value something like one when we select all of our layers and click stagger it'll offset them randomly so when we hit play we now have them kind of come in randomly and I didn't actually love how it randomized this so I'm going to actually undo this with contrl Z command Z on Mac and just click stagger again it'll give us a new Randomness and you can just keep doing that until it comes up with something you like of course you could also manually do it just kind of Shifting the layers but this just kind of helps automate that a little bit faster okay next we have our part one text right here so I'm going to go over here and select from our font two I brought in a couple couple of the numbers as needed a p r t as well as the one for part one and I'm going to click and drag this and drop this on top we're going to do the same thing as before I'm going to right click this time freeze on last frame we can now scale this down to something like 15% cuz we want it to be a lot smaller and bring this up and start spacing these out now before we do that I actually want to just invert this so I'm going to click invert and now we have this as the opposite colors and then let's also add a levels effect to make this a little bit brighter on the letter just so it's a little bit more like white and I'm going to bring over this bottom one here to make it more of like a grayish tone rather than a straight black I think a grayish tone looks a little bit nicer we can select both of these the invert and the levels hit contrl C select the rest of ours and hit contrl V and it'll paste them underneath and now we have this color font so we can start to lay these out now if we Zoom back out and we bring up that grid again so holding down alt or option and hitting the quotation mark button you can see we're not quite centered so I'm going to select all of these and kind of just shift this over until the spacing on this side matches roughly the spacing on this side so coming back out to the full screen let's get rid of our grid and let's make sure that we actually paste that same transform I'm going to copy this from one of our letters and I'm going to paste this on our part one as well and so now when we hit play we can see that it has it on part one as well we can also add the randomizing on the Staggering so select all them hit stagger and there we go we now have them staggered out like that the last main thing we're going to do with the assets here is add those butterflies and the trails behind the butterflies before we do some final stylizing overlay textures and some extra bits at the end like a vignette but first the butterfly so I'm going to go over here into our project panel and select the butterfly and just drag this down here and let's change this color label to purple just so we can see it a little bit easier in the composition and do the same thing that we've been doing with all of these I'm going to right click this go to time freeze on last frame and let's scale this down to something a lot smaller something like that should be pretty good and our goal is to kind of have it explode out from the middle let's just start it somewhere like here so I'm going to hit P to open up the the position properties of the butterfly I'm going to add a key frame right at the beginning of it move forward a bit maybe like roughly a second or so and let's drag this up over here like that let's also hold down shift and R to open up rotation as well I'm going to add a key frame on rotation bring this back to the beginning and then let's rotate it roughly something like that should be pretty good doesn't need to be exact right now if we solo our butterfly and we hit play we can see that it just kind of goes really linear and it looks pretty terrible but we're going to fix that let's actually select all the key frames here and hit F9 to easy ease we're going to come over to our speed graph and make sure we're on the speed graph here I'm going to select the beginning ones bring it over so it starts fast and kind of eases out like so when we hit play we can see that it kind of explodes out more like that so let's add a little bit of an arc to this path as well I'm going to hit the g key which is actually the pen tool but it works on position key frames when I hover over it you can see it's a little carrot uh icon right now if I just click and drag this we can actually change the bezier of our actual uh curve here to something like this we can do it on the other point as well if we want to do something like an S curve but in this case I think something like this is pretty good and maybe also increase that rotation just a little bit more so it lines up like so and now when we hit play we have the butterfly coming out just like that we're still going to add the Jitter preset that we made before but in this case the only thing I want to add on position and rotation is a little bit of a posterized time so I'm going to hold down alt or option and I feel like by this point you probably know what we're about to do let's click position and let's just add a posterized time and let's set this to six and add a semicolon now if I click away you'll see there's an error because it doesn't actually know what it's posterizing so all we need to do is just add another line and type in value and it'll fix it and so let's copy this right click position copy expression only go to rotation and paste it and now when we hit play we have that go a little bit more jittery it kind of lines up better with the style that we're going with one more trick that we could do here actually is if we select our position key frame the second one right here and come over to our speed graph and lift this off from zero to something like 37 is pretty good and then we change our expression from value to instead Loop out continue like so when we hit play we can see that the butterfly actually continues in the direction that it was already going and that's a cool little trick I actually use all the time loopout continue is a nice little trick where if you add the modifier continue it'll take the velocity of the last key frame and continue it out for all infinity and if you want a little bit more control and actually changing that value instead of just guessing the speed graph here is if you actually right click the key frame and come over to key frame velocity you can see that number is right here we can change it to whatever we want so we could change it to I'll just change it to something like 100 so you could see a little bit more extreme and we can see that it's going a lot faster now I think 37 was pretty good we'll just leave it like that but it kind of adds a little bit more ambient motion after it finishes out okay let's add that preset that we made before I'm just going to select the a select our trans transform and copy it and then paste it on our butterfly layer and we'll see that all of that Jitter and rotation kind of adds in there and let's actually unsolo this and see what it looks like in the rest of the composition so when we hit play we have the butterfly kind of coming out from here all right let's duplicate our butterfly and we're going to scoot this over a little bit and we're going to adjust the values here so I'm just going to spend a little bit of time and kind of scoot things over I'm going to move the butterfly over here change some of the position values and when I hit play we can see that we have two different butterflies I'm going to do one more butterfly and I'll see you after adding that okay you can see we have the three butterflies done I just want to point out one thing is that when you are actually changing the values of the position and everything just make sure that the playhead is over the key frames cuz if you're not and I try and move this it'll actually add a new key frame which is not what we want here just a little tip in case you're having some issues with that if we clean up our composition here and click play we can now see we have the three butterflies coming out just like that what we can do next now is actually change the color of these which is what we did before with the car so I'm going to bring bring up a hue in saturation here and I'm just going to select the Reds and let's just shift the Hue over to something like this pinkish tone this maybe pink purple tone looks pretty good let's copy this hu in saturation and do it on the second one and let's make this one green instead so just shift this over to green and now just like that we have three completely different butterflies with literally just one effect it takes 2 seconds to do next thing I'm going to do is add those Trails all I'm going to do here is right click and make a new shape layer and I'm going to use the pen tool and select roughly the position that we had before so if we look at this Arc here it starts over here at the E and goes over to this point if I bring up the grid we can have that as kind of a reference when we draw our line so I'm just going to start it here at the E and bring it over to here doesn't need to be perfect we can adjust it later let's rename this to Trail one and let's actually open this up and go down into the contents into shape we can delete the fill open the stroke here and we're going to click on dashes we're going to click the plus icon twice if we zoom in over to our dashes and we set this to full we can see we've actually made a dashed line so if I make this a little bit thicker we can see it a little bit easier I'm going to increase these values until it's something a little bit closer to what I want I think that's pretty good so let's drop this back down to something like four and now all we need to do is add a trim paths to this and trim paths just draws out our line so on the trim paths if I open this we're going to set a key frame on end and if we open up our butterfly the one that we're actually referencing if I select this and select you to open up the key frames we're going to move this End Key frame over to this spot right here where it actually ends so we have the same exact timing and I'm going to come back to the beginning here and drop this end value down to zero so we have it kind of drawing out with it and so if I click away and let's hide the grid because we don't need that anymore if I drag through you can see the dotted line is kind of following the butterfly but of course the pacing is wrong because we need to do some easing in the speed graph so I'm going to select both of these and hit F9 come over to our speed graph here and do the same easing that we did before in the butterfly it's pry bring it over to the left and then bring this one all the way over to the left like that so it has a really nice strong easing and when we follow it through here I click away you can see that it pretty closely follows what we still need to add is that posterized time that we did on the butterfly so I'm going to hold down alter option and do the same thing as before just type posterized time six and then value and now when we scrub through we can see that it keeps up with the butterfly just like so and I have it as red here which I kind of like I did Black in the original but you could select a color I think for this just for consistency sake I'm just going to set it to something like a gray to keep a little bit more subtle coming back to full size and we hit play we can see the dotted line follows behind it uh we can also adjust here if we select our layer and hit G for the pen tool we can adjust it a little bit maybe scoot it down a little bit so it's more centered with the butterfly the last thing we need to do on this is just select our end press contrl + C and then select our start right here and paste it and it'll do the same exact key frames with the expression already baked in the one we just made and when we hit play now we we can see that it draws and then UND draws cuz we don't want that trail to be there forever what we need to do now is just add the trail for the other two but it's the exact same process so I'm going to fast forward while I do that trails are done and they're all animated all we have to do now is just a little bit of extra stylizing just a little bit left to go so I'm going to do this in a little bit of a different way than the way I actually did it in the animation before this way is actually a little bit more efficient if I hit play let's find a length of the composition that we like something like that should be pretty good so I'm going to hit n on my keyboard to set the end time of the actual work area and I'm going to right click in this work area and trim the comp to that work area and it'll just kind of Clean Up Get rid of the excess at the end and it'll also clean up the ends of all of our layers here so selecting all of our layers except for the trails I'm going to pre-compose all of these and we can call this paper assets pre and click okay and now we can add a drop shadow to this now there's two main ways to add a drop shadow either way is totally fine just depends on how you want to do it there's the drop shadow effect and you can change the distance and the color and everything and this totally works the way I normally like to add drop shadow is actually through layer go down to layer Styles and add drop shadow and they're slightly different it kind of has to do with the order of operations the after effects processes these in our case it actually doesn't make a difference but I'm just going to use this one but again feel free to use either it doesn't really matter I'm going to change some of the values increase the distance a little bit let's also lower the opacity to something like 35 and maybe drop the size down to zero and let's change it to a nice bright blue like we had before maybe something like this when we hit play we have all those drop Shadows automatically added to our layers let's start adding in some final motion and some overlay textures so we can wrap this all up so first I'm going to right click and make a new adjustment layer and we're going to bring on the transform effect and let's start the scale a little bit wider because we have so much room from this gigantic paper asset we can actually zoom out to something like 90 and let's start the scale right at the beginning so let's key frame the scale move over to something like 3 3 seconds and increase this to like 112 if we open up our key frames let's select the both of them hit F9 go over to our speed graph and let's ease this in just like so so we want it to ease in and ease out so we get a nice Snappy motion when we hit play we have that now it looks kind of funky because it's way too smooth for this style of Animation you can definitely guess what we're about to do I'm going to alt click our scale and type in posterized time let's set this to six add another line make sure we have value when we hit play we can see we now have that choppy zoom in that matches the rest of our animation uh what I actually did is the same Loop out continue so I'm going to type in Loop out continue just like so and then let's go back to our graph here and let's lift this a little bit off of the graph and now we have that kind of scale up that continues through to the end of the animation just it's a little bit more ambient scale looks really nice for this all right let's add those Textures in so I'm going to bring in those textures from the pack I'm going to use a couple of these let's bring in the first one here and let's set this to Overlay and you might be like why would you do that it just makes this really funky because what we're going to do is first solo this and add a levels effect to this and scoot over the left Arrow all the way to the right so that we have the full range here cuz we have nothing over here in information we want to make this as contrasty as possible I'm then going to bring in these two points towards the middle so we're basically making this kind of like a middle gray uh type of texture which is really good for overlay so now that we've done this if we unsolo this we can see once it updates we now have this overlay texture on top of our letters and on top of everything and it adds that nice little grit and grunge to our composition let's add another texture let's go to O2 and drop this in and I'm going to set this one to Overlay and do the same thing I'm going to actually copy the levels from before paste it onto this and make a couple adjustments now we have this middle grade texture that adds a little bit more overlay variation to it let's also bring this below our adjustment layer so it scales up with everything and scale this up as well and there we go we see we have some some of that nice overlay texture on top of everything we're going to do one more here I'm going to bring in 05 drop it under here let's make sure that we scale it up I'm actually going to set this one to multiply and bring up our levels again but instead this time we're going to make it a little bit brighter we don't want to overexpose it too much and just kind of change the gamma a little bit and then lower the opacity so hit t for opacity let's drop the opacity down to like 40% so it's a little bit more subtle now we have this paper texture here as well all right finally the last couple effects we're going to add to the same adjustment layer that we made from before I'm actually going to use a vignette now I use normally the sapphire plugin vignette but you could use CC vignette which just adds a vignette like this and you could change the amount so let's drop it down to like 50 a little bit lighter as well as a displacement map and the reason we're adding a displacement map is we're going to actually use one of the textures here to drive a little bit of the displacement so by default it's actually displacing kind of weird because we actually need to select the layer that we wanted to look at so I'm going to select the first one one and I'm going to make sure that it reads the effects and mask we wanted to see the levels that we we adjusted and we can actually if I increase this to a lot higher you can see we're actually displacing based on the texture so I'm going to drop this down to maybe something like 10 and 10 just to add a little bit of uh paper grunge on the edge and we could even add one more if we duplicate this and set it to one of the other ones like O2 just adds a little bit more displacement and if we zoom out and play you can see our final title animation for our video very similar to the one that I made from before that's it now you know how to create this look from beginning to end and as mentioned at the start of the video there are a couple of links in the description to purchase the entire pack which directly supports me however if you prefer to try it out first one of the fonts is available in its entirety with a few of the images added in as an extra bonus either way I hope you learned something from this video and if you make anything definitely tag me on X or Instagram @

Channel: Skymography

Views: 16,371

Keywords: animation, motion graphics, animator, after effects, design, designer, tutorial, how to, Ali Abdaal, Shorts, Paper animation, Crumpled paper, Stop animation, Green screening, Rotoscope, Title animation, Free assets, Asset pack

Id: 0JwsimH5GPE

Length: 48min 52sec (2932 seconds)

Published: Tue Jan 23 2024