How to use AI in Animations (After Effects Tutorial)

in today's video we are going to be looking at how to use AI generated images to help your storytelling and how we can turn that into a nice little piece of Animation using some simple techniques we've covered before but using them in a slightly different way first off we're going to start off with creating our images in this case I'm going to be using Adobe Firefly one thing to remember when doing this effect is you 100% want a foreground and a background in this example I have a little idea of a person I want to stand and looking out a at a city kind of like he's dreaming he wants to go there we're just going to type in a simple prompt and see what it gives us so let's say person standing and looking out over a big city and then we're just going to hit generate and see what it comes up with since we are using this for video we're going to go into the ratio and make sure that we have a wide screen and then we can go in and tweak some of these settings to get a little bit more of a look that we want to let's open up all the effects we want to make this as realistic as possible you want it to look like a real photo cinematic is always a nice look just to give it a little bit of stylization before we get into it I'm not going to use too many stylizing elements in this part cuz we can always do that later in off the effect we just want to get a general look down let's add a composition we're going to go wide angle so we get more of like a dramatic scene and then we just hit generate and see what it comes up with again you can even do this in Photoshop using the generator fill and then adding elements one by one these are pretty good I like these two the most I think this one looks the most cinematic like it's not perfect but we can get this little crop out here and then have this little city and and do a little bit of that and once we have our generated image we want to open it in Photoshop we can start cutting out the elements that we want to separate in this case we want to keep in mind that we want to create a almost a 3d effect or a 2 and a2d effect where we want some separation to happen between the foreground and the background if you just click W to bring up your quick selection tool you can click select subject and most of the time like here it'll do a very good job right click and then lay it via copy and that'll just make sure that it's nondestructive that we don't delete anything in the middle the better of job you do of cutting out the better the end product is going to look additionally I also want to cut out the foreground here just to separate the city from the little Hill as well now before I cut out this Middle Ground here I want to actually remove this lady from the background itself so that we have all the layers separated by command clicking on my cutout it's going to select everything around this lady and then we can go into select and then modify expand and then if we just expanded by let's say five pixels and then we can generative fill just click that and just click generate it should remove the person in the frame and that is a pretty good result it's not perfect we have a couple different options we can scroll through I think I like this one the most so if I just click that one select both of these layers the Genera fill and then the regular one I'm going to right click and then I'm going to convert to Smart object and just name this background and we can name our lady just name it lady so in our background I'm just going to mask out this little bit down here you just want to make sure that you do a fairly decent job in this case I'm not too worried about it because it is just for the sake of the tutorial and then we are going to right click and layer via copy and just name this hill save this and then we will take it into Alix and start animating now that we have Alix open I'm just going to take my PSD file that I saved and drag it into a composition which is just a 1920x 1080 composition hit okay and then we can open up this pre comp open it up again and then we have all our layers this effect is super simple if you watch the magnets media tutorial you will have a pretty good idea of what we're going to be doing essentially we just want to add a little bit of movement to bring this to life a piece like this would go really well if you're trying to tell a story about how this young entrepreneur or this young woman in this case uh set out to conquer the world she wanted to be a business lady she wanted to make a whole bunch of money and then you can use this to help tell your story instead of having to go and find a super specific image we're going to start off by turning all these layers into 3D and we want to make sure that we we have the classic 3D selected just so we can add that bit of dep field if you don't have this little tab you can hit command K and then go to 3D render rot and select the classic 3D first of all we're going to open two View mode just so we can see you know the different planes we are going to position these so that the background is the furthest back so I'm just going to select my background and I have left view selected so you can just pick whatever you want here I just have left I just prefer it that way drag this back while holding shift just all the way to the back then we want the lady all the way in the front just just like that and then we can scale down these you could even if you wanted to create a much larger version of this background in Photoshop with generative fill on the background I'm going to hit s and I'm just going to increase the scale until it covers the whole screen and then the lady scale and then scale her down until she is fitting the screen just like that so far we have them in the exact positions that they were before but we've added that layer up there easiest way to see what we've done is by right clicking in your composition go to new and then add a camera from the presets I'm going to select a 50 mm camera and then just set the f- stop to something like 2.8 just to create a little bit of depth of field if for go back to just one View mode open up and then let's have a look at the focus distance so if I drag this around you can see that it shifts a little bit you can see the lady Go slightly out of focus and in focus for a more exaggerated look you can take the aperture and the more you crank it up the more depth of field you're going to be getting and one thing you do have to keep in mind is that when you increase the focus distance some of these edges will become blurred so you can always just take these and scale them up or just zoom in with your camera a little bit so if you go to zoom and then just zoom in a little bit to cover those edges command Z that you can add an adjustment layer instead and add a transform and then go into that transform and you can just scale it up which will get rid of that as well instead of having to mess with the camera settings so just set that to something like 101 you can either animate the the three layers or you can animate the camera so let's open up 2v mode again right now I want the focus to be in Del lady just like it is and let's set that to about 2 seconds so I'm going to open up the transform and the camera options and for the focus distance I'm going to keepy frame that right there while the lady is in focus and you can see our line right here which is our Focus distance you just want to line that up with the lady perfectly which is at the very front and we also want to key frame the position now if we go back to zero or at the very beginning of our composition we can move the camera forward or backwards so if move this forwards we can go through the lady we just want to maybe go in a little bit more and then adjust our Focus distance to be on the background if we play that back you can see we zoom out we go through the lady and then she'll come into Focus if we move this first Focus distance if we move this forward and then drag this out so that it's a bit blurry when it first starts you can drag it a little bit closer that way it's going to catch focus and then as it zooms out we're going to see the lady and then we can focus back to the background we put it everything into perspective close the 2v mode take your key frames and just drag them out a little bit make it a little bit slow we don't want this to be too fast of an animation we want it to be a pretty smooth animation select your key frames in this case I'm just going to use six0 speed as my base so I'm going to apply that ideally I want to move these a little bit more forward so just it's a little bit slower of a Focus pull in the end just to smooth it out a little bit and we can even take these key frames and just make them not as Steep and that will help with the speed of it as well so going back now we just get a little bit more of a smoother look so that's a cool little way of animating this but it still feels a little bit empty there's not much going on yet we can add a couple more tricks to spice this up a little bit one way of doing so would be to add maybe a little bit of camera shake to it just to make it seem like the camera is actually there we can add an adjustment layer and then we are going to add a transform again so we're just going to leave this for this is just going to be a camera adjustment and then this will be camera Shake we have the transform added already I've covered this before but I want to add sliders to this so just make a slider and then duplicate that and then in the position of the transform I'm going to alt click and then I'm just going to do a wiggle expression we're going to take the pi whip for the expression and pick with it to slider control one and then do a comma and then pick with again to slider control to it's just going to let us control the frequency and the amplitude of the shake so let's set that to 10 and 10 as a as a baseline And if we play that back you can see it's pretty aggressive so maybe even 2x two will work a lot better just be a little bit more of a smooth movement 2x two is maybe just a little bit too slow so let's set the slider control the second slider control to 10 and just like that we have a good bit of sway just makes it look a little bit bit more handheld and as it comes as it zooms out and we get the full picture I want to decrease the amount that it shakes So at around 2 seconds I'm just going to key frame the slider controls both of them and go forward to about let's say 3 seconds we will just decrease the first one to one and then maybe the second one to two which is just going to make it a lot more subtle then playing that back we get that initial little and then it'll slowly ease in to a more a softer camera Shake if you could say now there's still more elements that we can add to it and maybe even refocus on this lady down the line so maybe move that up copy this key frame and paste it in just so we go back to her just get a little bit of a focus pull one thing I just realized I forgot about was our little Hill that we cut out I wanted to be a little bit closer to her but not as close so I'm simply going to take the hill and just move it pretty close to where she is just like that and then we are going to scale this down as well and until it just about fits the screen just like that and then we can go back to one View mode now how can we add more details to this well we have a little bit of sunlight over here and I feel like we can exaggerated a little bit so if I select my background layer and precompose it and just leave all attributes in outboard one we can open that up it won't have changed anything in here so we still get the same look it won't mess with any of that but we can open it up and add a little bit to it so if I select my shape tool and then create an ellipse this able the stroke and then add a slight yellow orangey color and let's draw circle out here and I just want to make sure that the opacity is at 100% I'm going to add a deep glow to it which is just going to get a little bit more light in there increase the radius a good bit and then maybe decrease the exposure ever so slightly and then play around with the blend modes maybe an overlay blend mode will work pretty good or a soft light maybe that looks pretty good so we have WID and without it and I want to make sure that we don't get any of that weird line right there so maybe me just increase the exposure a little bit you can always change the color um to something War more if you want I want to keep it pretty similar to what we've got already and then we can add a little bit of a flicker to it so if you hit T to open the opacity all click it and then just do maybe a wiggle 10 by 10 and that'll give it a little bit of an opacity flicker that'll just look a little bit like some some lighting is is going on in there another thing we can add to this is a little bit of texture in this case I'm going to be using some dust particles that I've got from atas we can drag those in and scale that down and then change the blend mode to let's do try add that looks pretty good maybe decrease the opacity just a little bit and place that underneath our little glow layer and then we get a little bit of that particle look in there and then maybe even add another one maybe this one as well which looks pretty cool scale that down a little bit and set that to add as well and decrease that a whole bunch and as you can see it just adds a little bit of atmosphere in there just makes it feel a little bit more lively without having to add too much it's a super simple way of stylizing it now I'm empty so we can even add a little bit of atmospheric fog in the foreground as well just to make it feel a little bit more ethereal so I have this this AET from artless as well which is just a little fog type thing in the foreground set that to add and then put it down below the camera and then if we open t view mode and put that into 3D space I just want to put it up with our foreground maybe even a little bit in front of it and then turn that off and then just scale that down to fit and just like that we have a simple little sequence with a little bit of atmosphere created this is a super easy technique to turn photos into video especially if you are working on a project that is more storytelling based you know you can use AI for this so you don't even have to go and look or take the so you can just generate whatever you need and this is one of the ways where I think AI is going to be really helpful and useful in Motion Graphics I'm not scared of it I'll just use it to the best of your abilities and use it to make your work easier but that's pretty much it for this video I hope you enjoyed learning how you can use AI in your videos and I'll see you again next week I just want to say like comment and subscribe peace out

Channel: Mapal

Views: 19,757

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Id: Aec9mb8dPQ0

Length: 13min 20sec (800 seconds)

Published: Tue Oct 17 2023