I downloaded all of Ben Marriots Project files...I’m SHOCKED by what I learned!

I downloaded all of Ben Marriott's project files and here are 10 things we can learn but this is a warning for the faint of heart the first thing I learned was so shocking your whole world might just crumble okay so this is Ben marot gumroad and he has 54 products on here so we're going to download all of them and I'm just realizing that this is going to take a really long time starting timer name a fair price nothing Ben and now I feel a bit bad about paying him nothing so let's pay him something this time $5 fair price oh come now what cuz I've been downloading so many you think I'm a robot those stairs maybe I am a robot can't be stairs ah guess I'm not a robot these verifications were really annoying you can even see in the time lapse just how many of these I was hit with it was over and over and over but I pushed through because the goal was worth it so there we have it the last project file $10 there you go Ben here is oh they I'm paying I'm paying money and they still want me to verify we're on 31 minutes plus- 30 minutes and $15 spent I call that a deal so the only thing left to do at this point is to dive into the project files and see what they have to offer I had no idea how big a task it was going to be after just a couple of hours of this I was starting to fade fast so in desperate need of a performance enhancer I grabbed a coffee so I could keep my my eyes on the prize ah yes the engraving effect well we around with some things here boom XP money let's go oh that's stupid okay what else can we put in here I think we got to put in the man himself also got another little idea here boom there we have it sorry Ben cool well that was fun totally worth the $10 that we spent on this so now that I've downloaded all of the files and look through each one thoroughly and carefully it's time to get into what I found starting with number one we've all heard Ben's gospel right we always label our layers we always always so what's this Ben and this shape layer 1 layer 4 shape layer 2 isolation Mode 4 what does the word always mean to you we believed in you Ben you were our Messiah but you let us down and now it's time for a new Messiah who and I'll be honest about this labels his layers 60% of the time every time it's called Sex Panther 60% of the time it works every time that doesn't make sense and now that we've all had our worlds rocked to the core it's time for number two experiment with mixed media Ben creates some really interesting work by combining different types of media with after effects in this project for example he made a looping eye animation in After Effects printed out each frame and then traced each frame by hand in pencil and imported those back into After Effects then he just messed around with duplicating and offsetting the eyes in a bunch of different ways to get different results and I would say there is a big payoff for the effort he put into combining handdrawn and after effects animation another example is this melon where he created this rotating melon using a stop motion technique and then added the walking legs and background in After Effects the learning here is to mess around with other types of artistic medium and combine them with techniques and visuals in After Effects number three use texture here are some examples where Ben uses animated texture layers and in each one the texture overlays add more visual interest and break the clean flat vectors which can sometimes feel a bit sterile and a bit of texture just livens them up he often uses the same texture for his projects which you can download for free this light texture video as well as a high quality scan of the texture used to create this video number four put eyes on objects Ben puts eyes on everything he can think of a pencil a mushroom a gradian circle an avocado a waffle a watermelon even eyes on eyes and the result of this obsession is really charming and playful it turns something ordinary into a character and that's good because as humans we connect with characters and so the animations become more relatable I wonder what else you could put eyes on you tell me number five put stars on everything so going through all these projects I've discovered Ben's two obsessions putting eyes on objects and stars here are some Stars some more stars even more stars and you may have noticed the Holy Grail eyes on object and stars and I must say I'm getting thirsty vibes from this avocado especially with that tongue actart which I'm sure was intentional so let's just enhance that a little bit do a bit of this do a bit of that there we go I'm pretty sure this is close closer to what Ben was going for number six add frame by frame elements the highlights on this melting text are a good example the splashes in this coffee animation are a good example as well and the eyes on this Halloween project then in the melon example to get the Run Cycle he created a rough frame by frame animation first and used that as a reference in After Effects to get a better result and I saw this a couple times these frame by frame additions Elevate the quality of the work work and the fact of the matter is that some things make more sense to do frame by frame and combining handdrawn animation in After Effects creates some more Dynamic results number seven preserve underlying transparency this is a technique I only learned recently from the man himself so let me just show you how it works so with two objects in a scene if we click this t button for the top object it only shows up on the object or objects below and you can actually keep stacking layers with this button checked so this this can be a great replacement for mattes when adding textures or Shadows for example and I thought this technique was used in a clever way in Ben's shape morph tutorial where we have the two base shapes that are separate layers and then The Preserve underlying transparency button has been used on the two layers above so that they apply across the animation and you didn't have to create two separate mat and texture layers for each shape give this video a like if you've never seen this technique before and if you have seen it before give this video a like and share it with your Ben married fans number eight good illustration trumps complicated animation you might have heard this before from professional motion designers but very often you can get away with very simple animation if your illustration is very good and this is a good example of that so the actual animation is very simple the eyes are just scaling up the stars are twinkling and for the head there are just a bunch of layers with wave warp applied to them but the quality of the illustration including color and style are the hero this project is another good example each scene looks awesome as an illustration so the subtle animation just brings it all to life again look how basic the animation is for the psychedelic mushroom but the result is great and of course our thirsty avocado is another great example so if you didn't have a reason to practice illustration before this should be it number nine start in grayscale and color after a great way to illustrate and animate is to start with grayscale so that you are focusing on the values and contrast instead of going straight into color which can add an unnecessary layer of complexity and slow down the process in Ben's coffee project we can see he animated the whole project in Gray scale and then used an adjustment layer with a cc toner effect to color it he did something similar with the tint effect in this project and once again he used a cc toner effect in the Loki title project many professionals use this workflow and I would highly recommend giving it a go number 10 the hand of the artist artist the hand of the artist is a term used in the art world and here is a definition the hand of the artist refers to the evidence of authorship in a work of art identified by any evidence of the artist's Mark in the piece for example the brush Strokes left in paint the delicate modeling of a sculpture and even the general emotive qualities of a piece can all be described as the artist Hand this is the proof left behind that reveals or provides insight into the artist's role in creating the art this is something that Ben reminds us that in the world of motion design with all the Slick vectors and digital production we can still remind the viewer that an artist created this and leave behind evidence of this fact we've seen examples of this in the melon and the pencil eyes but I would also like to point out that the texture Ben uses is a texture he created himself on paper and then scanned in to use in After Effects and he uses this texture all the time it's his artistic Mark as motion designers we should think about our own Mark and how we can bring back the hand of the artist into our own world work now as a bonus I just want to point out a couple things in some projects that I thought were very clever and interesting so in this project I just want to focus on two of the backgrounds so look at this one looks pretty awesome and satisfying right but look at how it was created so this is what we have in the child comp a simple position animation then that comp was duplicated masked a bunch of times and animated to the left then a mirror effect was used to finish it off and that's it this is a deceptively Simple Solution very nice then this background look at the child comp this dude is just stacking and animating a bunch of color paletts and then he uses a polar coordinates effect on a bunch of duplicates to create what looks like a tear in the SpaceTime Continuum very dope then there's this chrome text and why you would ever want to create Chrome anything is beyond me but the way Ben created these shines is interesting to me and it's a solution I never would have thought of so on a duplicate of the text comp he added a 45° directional blur and then used a curves effect like a magician to get this and the second duplicate is the same but with a 45° directional blow and I think this is clever because it's all driven by the content of the same composition so even if you change the font it still works then with the lowkey title animation I found it really interesting how he created the text randomization using time displacement so if we hide the effects there is just a bunch of Loki text cycling through different fonts then the displacement map adds a wiggle to each character and the time displacement effect randomizes the text and both of these effects are being driven by these noise layers it's a very clever solution and it's definitely worth watching this tutorial and adding these techniques to your motion toolkit if you enjoyed this deep dive into how a professional motion designer gets things done you'll enjoy this playlist where I reverse engineer some Pro animations take it easy ease and subscribe for more motion XP [Music]

Channel: MotionXP

Views: 73,759

Keywords: after effects, MotionXP, motion design, how to after effects, after effects tips, motion design tips, animation tips, animation tips for beginners, animation tips and tricks, Mograph

Id: ElXAQGoxLi8

Length: 11min 5sec (665 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 21 2024