Is he ... A nutcase? No, he's a rock biter. A rock bite-- A rock biter! Here at School of Motion, and welcome to day
16 of 39 Days of After Effects. This video is part one of a three-lesson series,
and I'm pretty excited about it. I'm gonna walk you through nearly every single
step that it takes to create the kinetic type piece that played at the beginning of this
video. I wanted to do that because I thought it might
be interesting to walk you through an entire project step by step, because there are so
many things that have to come together when you're syncing audio, and you're trying to
get type to pop up at the right time and you're thinking of how to animate, and then you've
got tons of layers and camera moves. There's just a lot of stuff, so I want to
show you how I deal with the complexities of a normal motion graphics job. Kinetic type jobs have been around for a long
time, and they're probably not going away anytime soon. Now before we get started, don't forget to
sign up for a free student account so you can grab the project files from this piece,
as well as assets from any other lesson on the site. Alright, let's hop into After Effects and
let's get going on the first part of our kinetic type video. So first of all, if you guys don't know what
movie this quote is from, then ... Then I feel old. But anyway, what I want to try to do with
this video is a little bit of an experiment to see how this is gonna work. When this is all over, if we're all still
alive, I'd like to maybe get some feedback from you guys. Let me know if doing tutorials this way works
for you, if you learned something from it. And what I want to try to do is literally
over the course of I'm guessing, two to three videos, I want to try to recreate this entire
thing for you. And I might fast-forward through some parts
and gloss over some things, but I want to walk you step by step through it because doing
a video like this, especially when you're starting out as an After Effects artist, it
can seem kind of daunting 'cause there's just so many things happening, there's all these
animated pieces, There's a ton of camera movement, there's effects, and how do you manage that
and sync it all with the audio and get it to feel the way you want and all that stuff? And really, there's not a trick to it, it
just takes a lot of work. But I want to sort of try and let you into
my head a little bit, so you can kind of see how I go about setting stuff like this up. So I'm gonna come back to this a lot and reference
it but here we go, let's dive in and start doing this. So the first thing I want to show you is the
pieces of this that we have. All of the pieces of this animation, the big
graphic pieces, they're just black and white Illustrator art. And I just did this real quick, so we had
something to work with. I won't go too far into the Illustrator part
of this, but just know that doing your artwork in Illustrator is always a good idea, even
if you end up bringing it into Photoshop and tweaking it more there. If you create it in Illustrator, you always
have the option of making, you know, I've got these tiny little footprints but then
if I want to I can turn on the "continuous rasterize" button and I can just make them
enormous and they don't pixelate. That's something that almost every little
video like this, the artwork is done in Illustrator first. And also I want to take you guys back in time,
because I'm sure a lot of you have seen this before, but this type of video is called a
kinetic type video. It's one of those things that you'll have
to do at some point, and you can thank MK12 for that. So this video came out in 2002, which is very
hard to believe that it really was that long ago, but as far as anyone can tell, and this
is ... I don't know, maybe I'm wrong, but this is always cited as the first kinetic
type video. I just wanna show you guys a little bit of
it if you've never seen it. - [Male Voice] Well, uh, machismo is part
of the culture in Brazil, it's not just, you know, a male behavior. Actually, it's a whole ... - [Joey] So I mean, it's kind of funny to
watch now, because it's got a standard definition frame. The animation's good but it doesn't have that
slick, glossy feel that a lot of things have now. But this thing is 12 years old, and it holds
up surprisingly well, which is a testament to how good MK12 was and how way ahead of
their time they were. But there's a lot of things in this video
that are just standard kinetic type sort of cliches now. The camera rotates, and the main gag is that
the words are synced up to the voice. And there's little icons and all that kinda
stuff. So anyway, if you haven't seen this before,
you should probably watch it, because motion design is a very new field, but we're actually
at the point where there is some history to it a little bit, and it's kinda interesting
to go back and look at the things that sort of came before. It can help you, especially when you're, if
you end up working for a motion design studio, and there's people in their 30s and 40s working
there. They're gonna remember these things and it
helps to have a common history to talk about. So here's our artwork, and on top of that,
we have the audio clip that you heard playing. That's the quote from The Neverending Story,
which, I don't know, it makes feel like a five-year-old every time I hear that quote. So first thing I want to do, whenever I have
a kinetic type thing like this, the first thing I do is I'll bring the audio clip into
a new comp and let's bring this down here. And let's just call this "audio setup" for
now. And here's what I want to do, I want to play
the audio and I wanna basically mark out where the sounds are and where the words are that
I want to animate to. So on your keyboard, if you have a full-size
keyboard and you have that number pad on the right side of the keyboard, there's a period
right next to the zero on there. And if you hit that, After Effects will instantly
play your audio without rendering the video so this is a great way to preview audio. Another trick is if you select your audio
layer and you hit L twice, it brings up the waveform. So then, the waveform, if you guys aren't
familiar, this is sort of a visual representation of your audio file. I can kind of see where words are being spoken. And you obviously can't see, as it gets louder
and louder, and things pick up here, you can't really tell what's going on, but it gives
you a good starting point. So first I just wanna listen to the whole
thing. So when I heard this and I thought "Okay,
I want to animate to it," I tried to pick out some little details that I thought I might
be able to pick up in the animation, and so the first thing I heard was the footsteps. And I thought that would be kinda cool as
a way to get into the animation, like you're following these footsteps, and then they kind
of stop and then the conversation starts. So there's some footsteps here I knew I wanted
to animate to and I want to have a visual reference of where those footsteps happen,
so let me zoom in on my timeline here. I'm using the plus and minus keys on the top
row, where the numbers are on your keyboard, the plus and minus keys zoom in and out in
your timeline. And when you have the waveform open, you can
actually zoom in and out of the waveform, which is cool. What I want to do is zoom in, and then I want
to put a marker where each of the footprints are, and you can kinda see them here. If I preview this ... You can kinda see there's
one there, there, there, there, and there. Now just to be sure, another audio trick you
can do, you can hold Command, and then if you click and drag this, you can kind of scrub,
this is called scrubbing the audio. So I can sort of grab the play head and pull
it forward, and right there, I hear footsteps. So I want to put a marker here, and I don't
want to put the marker on the audio layer. You could do that. By the way, the hotkey for that is the asterisk
key on your number pad. At least that's what I use, I use the asterisk
key on your number pad, and so you just select the layer, you hit it and it adds a marker. But I don't want it on the layer, I want it
on the comp, so I'm gonna make sure I don't have anything selected and hit asterisk, and
now I have a marker here. The great thing about that is if I accidentally
move this out of sync, or if I pre-comp something, I'm still gonna have markers here. So then I'll go to the next one, add a marker. Right there. Add another one, add another one, add another
one. And then it's always a good idea to stay organized,
especially if you were setting this up and then two other people were gonna help you
work on it, they may not know what these markers are, so what you can do is double-click the
marker and type in "footstep start" and now you get a little note and you can say "last
footstep" or something. And so now, if you zoom out it's gonna start
to get a little crowded up here. That's okay, because probably when you're
laying out the footsteps and syncing them up, you're gonna be in close like this. Cool, so now we have markers for those. So now let's do the speaking. Now I'll show you one more cool little audio
trick, too. It's not really something that, like for this
I would probably just manually step through and put a marker up here, but this is a cool
trick if you're doing something that goes to music, or if there's just a ton of dialogue
and you kinda want to rough out where the words are before you actually go in and sync
things up exactly, what you can do is you can hit that period button on your keyboard,
the one that's on the number pad, and while it's playing, you can hit the asterisk key
to set a marker in real time as the audio's playing. I'll show you what I mean. And you can see, as I tap that asterisk key,
as the audio's playing it's adding markers for me. So that's pretty cool, but it's much harder
to do that with dialogue, 'cause it's hard to remember the timing of it so I'm just gonna
step through this and do this real quick. "Is he," and I want to be very specific and
have a marker for each word. He starts to say "is" here, so I add a marker,
I double-click it, I say "is." "He" is right there. And this is just a tedious process. Right there's that little "tssk." 'Cause he's laughing. He thinks it's funny. Alright, so I'm gonna go through and I am
going to, I'm gonna set this up, and I won't make you guys watch. When we come back, all of this will be set
up. So now I have marked out every single word
and sound effect that I want to animate to in here. You can see that everything's synced up nice. I
tried to really catch every little word. "No, he's, a, rock, biter." And this will just make it easier to animate. Now that we've got that set up, let's start
actually building the comp. If we go back and we look at this, what's
going on is there's a world with a camera moving around the world and layers carefully
placed so the camera kind of sees them, and makes a nice composition. And there's a lot of different ways to do
that in After Effects. What I considered doing was making a giant
pre-comp and sort of animating all of this stuff inside of that pre-comp, and then just
moving a camera around in a different comp, and you can totally do it that way. I sometimes don't though, and in this case
I didn't. I actually just moved the camera around and
placed things and just did it all inside of the comp that had everything in it, and the
reason I did that was because I like to be very, very specific with compositions. I knew I wanted to zoom in and see this, like
we're leaning in, and then zoom way out when he goes, "a nutcase." I wanted this type of composition, but then
I wanted to do this rotation and zoom in and see this line. And the problem is if you're trying to place
all these things in a giant pre-comp, it's kinda hard to tell how that's gonna look when
you eventually put a camera over it. So sometimes it's easier to just kinda do
both, to animate the camera and start placing things in the same comp. It can get really really messy. I can show you here, if we dive into this
actual thing. And then we come, let's see here ... See,
it starts to get a little bit messy, so here's actually the timeline of my animation and
I'll talk about what all this stuff is. There's a bunch of layers, a bunch of pre-comps. This actually isn't too bad, I've had comps
with hundreds and hundreds of layers in it, so it's actually, actually fine but sometimes
I just like to keep everything in the same comp and animate it all. It makes it a little bit easier to make specific
framing. So there you go, now we are actually gonna
start making pictures. The first thing that I did was I picked my
colors, and just to make sure that I use the same colors, I'm just gonna come in here and
actually grab my background right out of this. So here's, these are just two, I'm gonna copy
them and then I'll explain them. So all these layers are, I have my base color,
then I have a highlight color in the middle and there you go, that's it, that's my background. Now I wanna make a point, I wanna make a point
to you guys. Let me come back here and let this RAM preview
again. One of the things that you sort of learn once
you start moving a camera around in After Effects is that in order for your viewer,
whoever's watching your piece. To realize, hey, a camera's moving around,
in order for that to work, there has to be some kind of reference. What I mean is, look at the texture on the
ground. If that wasn't there, it wouldn't feel as
grounded. You wouldn't have this visual reference at
all times to tell you, hey, the camera's zooming in, the camera's zooming out, the camera's
moving. Obviously, we have words and things that pop
up that would give you some of that reference, but here's what I mean. Let me make a new comp real quick, I won't
even name it. If I put, if I type in "rock biter," like
this and I make that a 3D layer and I add a camera ... Let's not get into this yet,
but I just wanna show you, if I have a camera and I move the camera left and right, without
any reference, there's just this black background, I don't know if the camera's moving or if
the word's moving. As a viewer, I don't know that. So then, it just gets confusing. If you had a ton of these on screen, if you
had one here and one here and one here, it might be a little bit better for your viewer,
maybe, but it's still impossible to tell. What helps, in this situation, is some kinda
texture, just a subtle thing. So I have a couple of textures I got here,
I got these off of CGtextures.com which I'll link to, which is an incredible free resource
for textures. I'll just stick this in here, turn the opacity
way down for a minute, and make it a 3D layer, and just by having a little bit of a texture
to it, now we can tell that the camera's moving. So I knew I was gonna need a texture, and
this is actually the texture I used. Let me just cut that, and now we can delete
this comp. So a lot of times when you do a kinetic type
piece ... Let's go back and look at that Brazil one again. Now they didn't do that, what they did have
was at all times, something onscreen to give you a reference that look, the camera's moving. Their design was super-duper busy, and there
was never really a point where you're confused, am I moving or are the words moving? So let me paste that texture in there, and
let me scale it down too because one of the things I really don't like it when I can see
a ton of detail in a texture that's just supposed to be a background thing. I really want it to be like ... I want it
to be this size. Now this texture, let me crank it up for a
minute, this texture I actually prepared ahead of time in Photoshop. It didn't look like this when I downloaded
it. And what I did was I made it into a seamless
texture that you can tile, so if I duplicate this layer and I move this copy here, there
shouldn't be any seam if I line it up perfectly, which I didn't really do. So you can see there's no seam, and that also
works on the top on the bottom and the left and everything, This is a seamless texture,
which is pretty handy because I knew the camera was gonna be zooming in and out and I didn't
really know where this texture was gonna have to be at all times so I needed to make it
sort of flexible. I don't wanna jump into Photoshop in this
tutorial but if you guys don't know how to make a seamless texture, it's very easy to
do, actually. I'm sure if you google it, you'll find it
but I'm happy to do a video about it if you guys would like to know that. So let me add the camera here, and we can
kind of feel what this is looking like. So really quickly, the camera that I use for
kinetic type pieces is always a one-node camera and there's really only two options in this
type box, one-node and two-node. A two-node camera has a focal point to it,
so let me just quickly make a two-node camera. If I look at, let me open up the position
settings here. Let's see here ... So the two-node camera
has a point of interest and it always looks at that point of interest so if I move the
point of interest, the camera turns to rotate and look at it, and if I move the position
but I don't move the point of interest, the camera does this weird kind of angling thing. It's always looking at the point of interest. This might actually make a little more sense
if I go into a custom view and zoom out. You can see that this point here, that's the
point of interest and here's the camera. If I move the camera without moving the point
of interest, it always looks at it. Sometimes that's useful, but when I want a
camera that's gonna be moving around really quickly and doing tons and tons of camera
moves and looking at different places all the time, a two-node camera is much harder
to control, so I'm gonna use a one-node camera. The one-node camera does not use a point of
interest. If I move this camera left and right, it just
moves left and right and it doesn't rotate. So if I zoom in and out and move left and
right, obviously we're seeing the seam, we're seeing the edge to this texture which is no
good. There's a bunch of different ways to deal
with this and what I did in this case doesn't always work and I'll talk a little bit about
why. I use an effect called CC Repetile, this comes
with After Effects, and all it does is it lets you easily repeat your layer. So this expand right property, if I crank
that up, it just literally copies the texture off to the right and it does it perfectly. Now since I made this a seamless texture in
Photoshop, it is now gonna be a seamless tile in After Effects. And there's different ways to tile. Repeat is what I want, I just want it to copy
and make another one, but you can switch this, in some cases it works better if it's unfold,
which basically mirrors the layer. The texture goes this way, and then it sort
of happens again backwards, like a Rorschach test. But I'll set it to repeat, and I'm gonna expand
it to the left, I'm gonna expand it up and down. You can crank these settings really really
high and it'll start to bog down After Effects, so you gotta be careful. This is one of the problems I ran into when
I was animating this, and this is kind of the only big issue with using CC Repetile
is if you have a massive, massive comp and you need to set this up to 15, 20,000, eventually
After Effects is not gonna like this layer anymore, it's gonna start chugging, so what
I actually ended up doing was I moved my camera out, animated, and then I would duplicate
this layer and sort of hand line up just where I needed it, so I would sort of build this
patchwork of textures that were only really existing where the camera was looking, so
I didn't have to have some massive, massive numbers up here. You set up the CC Repetile, this is not what
I want the texture to look like. If you come look at the final render here,
you can see that you basically just get little white specks. You're just seeing just a little bit of detail
in this comp here, so the way I did that was I did some color correction. I first inverted this, so now all of the details
turn white and the rest of it turns black, and then you can just use a transfer mode,
so you can use add or screen. Then I'm gonna use a Levels effect. What screen is doing is it's basically knocking
out the dark pixels and it's only showing me the lighter pixels, so if I use a Levels
effect here, you can see that where we're seeing the big spike in the histogram, that
is all of these very dark pixels, but what this is telling me is that those pixels are
not black, so that's why we're seeing all this muddiness. But if I move this input arrow to the right,
it makes them black, and if I just push, push, push, there we go. So now I've stripped out everything except
the harshest details of this texture. And then you can just play with the opacity. I don't remember exactly what I had it, but
that's all you need. You don't need a big honking texture, all
you need is a little bit so that when you zoom in and out, your eye has something to
look at. I kinda like not seeing very much of it because
one danger that you can easily have with something like this is that you'll start to see a pattern
to the texture. Your eye is very good at picking up patterns
and then that'll give it away, that you've used a little texture and copied it a bunch
of times. So now we've got this kind of a set up, and
now we're actually ready to start animating stuff. The first thing that needs to animate are
the footsteps, so let's go take a look at the footsteps. These are really simple kinda doodles I did. So let me copy those, I'm just gonna grab
them, and I'm gonna copy them. Come back to our audio setup now. The way I was thinking about this was, I want
to just animate one footstep, and then be able to just copy it and put it where I want
it and adjust the timing of it. The easiest way to do that would be to make
a new comp, animate a footstep in that comp, and then I can just sort of hand-place them. So let's do that, let's make a new comp. Let me close this up, I'm gonna try to keep
this organized as we go. So I'm gonna make a new folder in my comps
folder. This little underscore PC stands for pre-comp. That's how I just keep my After Effects projects
clean is I throw all the pre-comps in there. So let me make ... I'm gonna make a PC demo
folder. So now with that highlighted, if I make a
new pre-comp, and let's call this "footstep single," it sticks the pre-comp in there for
me. That's a cool little trick. So I'm gonna paste the footsteps in there,
and you can't see them 'cause they're black so let me hit Command+K, brings up your composition
settings and just change the background color to something. I'll be able to see these. And I don't need to animate both of them,
I can just animate one, 'cause they're mirror images of each other, they're no different. Let me delete that one, and I'll grab this
one and I'll scale it up. And because I don't know exactly how close
I'm gonna be to the footprint and I don't know, I don't really know how big I need this
to be, I'm just gonna make it bigger than it probably is ever gonna be on screen, and
that way I can always scale it down and still have all that nice detail. If I animated it at this size, and then in
the next comp we were zoomed in this close, it would look really pixelated. So here's my footstep, let's make it about
this big, and what I wanted to do was actually make it feel like the foot was landing. If you think about the way a foot lands, you
sort of land when you're walking, especially if you're barefoot, you land on the forefoot,
and your toes kinda come down and then kind of at the same time the toes are coming down,
the outer part of your foot rolls around and your heel hits last. So I kinda wanted to mimic that, and I want
to do it quickly so I just did it with a mask. Let me select the layer, and I'm going to
grab the ellipse tool. Actually, let me duplicate this, and the reason
I'm duplicating it, let me show you what happens if I don't duplicate it. I want to draw a mask around a bunch of different
pieces of this foot, and if I draw a mask around it, that's great. Now I want to draw a mask around the big toe. Well, I can't see the big toe anymore. So it's easier if I just have a copy sitting
underneath it and maybe turn the opacity down a little bit, and I'll lock that copy, and
that can be my reference. So now on this copy I'm gonna use the ellipse
tool. And that's the first part of the foot that's
gonna ... Oh boy, here we go. That's the first part of the foot that's gonna
appear so let me adjust that. And now I want a mask around each toe, so
I'm gonna hit Q, Q is the hotkey for the mask tool. Make sure it's in ellipse mode, and what I
want to do is just draw a mask around each toe and adjust it, and make sure that the
mask is pretty precise, like it's not accidentally overlapping this toe or something like that. And I can easily now just duplicate this mask,
move it over, double-click it so I can transform it and just line that up. Duplicate it, move it over. Double-click it. And we'll do it again, and then one more time. There we go, okay. And now I need the heel, so I'll hit Q, and
now I need the mid-foot, so I'll just draw another ellipse like this. Now why did I just draw a whole bunch of masks? When you have a bunch of masks like this,
you can actually animate them on and off. There's some cool mask settings. For example, if I open up this mask, this
mask expansion is what I'm gonna be animating, and you can see if I just animate it, it eats
the mask away and then I can reveal it. And I can do that in sequence for each piece
of this foot. If you wanted to you could even add more pieces,
I just did it in very broad strokes 'cause it's gonna happen very quickly. Then I can delete the little reference footprint
back there. Let me hit M and open up all these masks. What I want to see is the mask expansion for
all of these. By default, when you hit M, it only brings
up the mask path property, so if you double-tap M it brings up all the mask properties. So now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna use
my tilde key. If you guys don't remember, tilde is to the
left of the One on the top of your keyboard, it's a little squiggle and when you hit it,
whatever window your mouse is over will temporarily take up the whole screen. So I use it all the time when I want to turn
on the stopwatch for a bunch of properties but I can't see them 'cause the screen isn't
big enough. So if I temporarily do that ... I'm gonna
hit mask expansion on each of these, and now I can just hit U and now I can just see those
keyframes. And I want this to happen pretty quickly,
let's say maybe four frames, I'm gonna go forward four frames. I'm just using Page Down to do that. I'm gonna move those keyframes to that point
in time, then I'm gonna go back to the beginning and one by one, I'm going to change the mask
expansion 'til that piece of the foot goes away. So I'm erasing the foot using the mask expansion. And I want this to have a little bit of a
sequence to it. Like I said, I want the forefoot, the top
meaty part of the foot to animate on first, so that's this mask. That's gonna happen first. That'll start to happen, as that happens the
pinky toe's gonna land first, and then each toe's gonna land a split-second later going
from right to left, so let's figure out which mask is which. Mask 6 is the pinky toe, I can tell 'cause
when I selected it, the points got a little bit thicker. So that's first. I'm gonna grab those keyframes and just nudge
it forward a couple frames. Then I'm just gonna go to the next toe and
move it one frame further than the pinky toe, and I'm just gonna do that for all of the
toes real quick. This might seem like a cheap animation trick,
and I assure you it is. When you're animating something like this,
a lot of times you're trying to go really fast. I a lot of times look for ways to animate
that don't take a ton of manual labor. A lot of that is because I'm a freelancer,
I don't generally work with a huge team. If you did, you could have one person spend
all day on this footprint, make it look amazing, and do some really cool stuff, but in general
that's not the situation I'm in. So you see how this mask here, I may have
expanded it too much and it's sort of showing the toes off before I want them to appear,
so I need to go back and adjust that a little bit, there we go. So now the toes land, and as the toes are
landing, I want the heel and this mid-foot to land. That's these masks down here, so I'm just
gonna scoot these forward and maybe, maybe have the mid-foot be the last part. And I'll just easy ease these so it's not
such a linear-looking thing, it won't really make a huge difference but we'll just RAM
preview that. So there's our foot landing. Okay, pretty simple. It's got this hard edge to it, which is fine. So now looking at this, I'm thinking, and
I'm doing this in a specific order 'cause I want to show you guys what happens if you
change your mind. So I did this, and then I realized, hey, you
know what, it'd be really cool if instead of having these super-hard linear edges, I
could actually give this a little bit more of an organic edge, organic. And so what will be helpful is if I could
actually adjust the contour of those masks and it's not gonna be very easy to do the
way I've set this up. So what I'm going to do, I'm gonna make a
new layer. Command+Y, and I'll just call this matte. And it's actually the same color as my background
so I can't see it, yeah. Let me just make it a different color. There we go, cool. And I'm gonna temporarily make it an adjustment
layer and then I'm going to copy all of these masks. I'm just gonna grab all of them and copy them
and paste them onto this layer. I'm gonna zoom out and see where those masks
end up. They're super-duper small, way up here in
the corner because I masked these things out on an Illustrator layer and so you can see
that I basically get useless mask information here. I ran into this problem, so what I ended up
doing was ... This is just sort of, necessity breeds invention, so here's my foot. I'm just gonna duplicate it, and I'm gonna
have the bottom copy, I'm gonna turn all these masks off. I'm just gonna delete them all, 'cause I don't
need them. And I'm gonna have this bottom copy use the
top copy as an alpha matte, so this is gonna be my foot and then this is gonna be the matte,
and by doing that, wonderful, now I can actually manipulate the matte and mess with those edges
and I just use an effect called Roughen Edges. It's sort of like a Turbulent Displace for
edges. You can see it just kind of messes up the
edges a little bit and you can mess with the settings if you want it to be more or less
eaten away like that. Then the only problem is that if you roughen
the edges too much, then you actually don't get your whole image back at the end. So I may have to keyframe something, or what
you can do is with this matte object selected I could use an effect like a Simple Choker,
and I could actually expand that output a little bit like this. So by going negative with the choke matte,
it's exp-- Actually, let me turn this layer on so you can see what it's doing. I'm actually expanding that matte out like
this, and I probably want to do that before the Roughen Edges. There we go. And now let's use that as an alpha matte,
turn that back on, and you can see that this is still probably the border's set too high,
there we go. Take a look at that, cool. It's not the most amazing thing in the world,
but it's more interesting than just cutting the foot on. I might play with these and see what other
little, what other kind of little effects you can get just by messing with the settings. That's kinda cool looking. And then, just so it's not ... The problem
is that it happens so fast that my eye really notices this gap in between the forefoot and
the heel and it's just a little bit too harsh. So what I'm gonna do is grab both these layers,
pre-comp them and say "footstep pre-comp," and I'm gonna duplicate it, I'm gonna offset
one copy, let's try two frames, and then the bottom copy I'm just gonna set to 50%. So now you get kind of this ghosted sort of
version of the footstep that happens just a few frames before, and I think it might
even be cooler if I duplicated that again and had another one, so I basically have a
50% transparent footstep here and then one frame later, another 50%, and then one frame
later, 100%. And it's just gonna very quickly build that
footstep on. That's actually what I did for the test, but
now looking at this, I'm always curious what would happen if I then just blurred one of
these a little bit, maybe only blurred it vertically? What if I blurred the middle one? But I need to get rid of this and take the
blur away by the time this thing finishes, otherwise you're gonna notice it. That's kinda interesting, right? I don't know, I don't like it, I'm gonna get
rid of it. So there's our footstep. Cool, and again, keep in mind that's it's
gonna be, most of the time it's gonna be very small on screen. But there's your footstep, and then I thought
to myself, well, it's a footstep, and it looks super vector-y, so why not throw a little
texture on it and give it a little grit? So to do that I used one of these texture
images. I think used this one, the dry earth texture
from CGtextures, and what you can do if you're gonna make a pre-comp and just use the pre-comp
somewhere else, you can put a texture on the very top of the comp like this and set the
mode to silhouette luma. And that will sort of knock out pieces of
whatever's underneath it. So what I can then do is I can put levels
on that texture, I can put a color correction Levels effect on the texture and I can just
push it and the further black I push it, the more foot you see, and then the more white
that I sort of crank into it, the less foot you see. So what I can do is sort of eat away some
of that foot, and I can play with the scale of that texture too, something in there. That's kinda cool, 'cause you see how there's
like a pebble in here, and it's eating away a little chunk of the foot. It's kinda cool, I like to play with stuff
like that. It's always kinda nice when you can get the
edge not to be so perfect. And then, I'm gonna push, here we go, this
output white arrow. This sort of is the maximum brightness that
this texture will be allowed to be, and if I make that lower, I can still see the texture
but it's just bringing back some of the opacity of the foot. Let me turn on the transparency grid so you
can really see what it's doing. I'm just bringing back a little bit of the
foot by pushing this arrow. Cool, so now that foot has got some texture
to it and it's actually transparent, which is cool because if I put it on top of my nice
purple color here, I'll be able to see that purple through it. So here's my single footstep, and that's in
my PC demo folder there, so, got a single footstep and what I want to do is now line
up a bunch of those footsteps and have them in sync with the audio. What I could do is I could just take my footstep
single and place it here, and then line it up to that nice marker. I could do that. And you can see, I have to change the color
of the footstep but you can still see through it a little bit. It's kind of nice, and I might adjust thAt
a little bit so you can see through it a little bit more. Yeah, that's a little better. But what I thought would be cool is if they
animated in an arc. When you're animating stuff, a lot of times,
things moving in a straight line doesn't look right and it helps if they're moving in an
arc. It's one of the animation principles, and
so I figured that would be easier to do if I pre-comped all of the footsteps together. I put one footstep in this comp, so why don't
I just pre-comp that one footstep and we'll call this "footsteps arc," and there it is. I'm gonna stick it up here in PC demo, and
let's dive in. Here's the problem, the problem is here I
don't actually have ... I don't actually have any audio to sync this up to, so there's a
trick I do constantly when I'm doing kinetic type stuff, is I will grab this audio clip
here and the first thing I wanna do is just transfer just the footstep markers onto it,
so I'm gonna hold shift and when you hold shift and you move your play head, it sort
of snaps to your markers, so I'll snap here and I'll make sure this is selected and hit
my asterisk, snap to the next one, and I'm just gonna quickly transfer footsteps on there. And then I'm gonna copy the audio clip, jump
in here and paste it. Now one thing you've gotta be careful of is
when you copy and paste an audio clip and it's in a pre-comp, and that pre-comp is being
used in a comp that has audio in it also. What's gonna happen is, you can see how there's
two speaker icons now. In my footsteps arc pre-comp, I have audio,
I've copied this, so it's actually gonna play this audio clip twice, which is gonna make
it twice as loud. So there's two solutions, one is you just
make sure you turn that off, but I always forget to so what I do is if I copy and paste
an audio clip, I Control-click it and I set it to be a guide layer. If you've never used guide layers, they are
super useful. A guide layer has this little icon next to
it, and what it means is, in this comp when I'm working on this comp, this layer exists. I can hear the audio, you can put it on a
layer you're looking at too, and while you're working on it, it will show up, but once you
use that pre-comp, that audio doesn't exist any more, so even though you see the speaker
icon, no audio will play on this layer because I've made the audio a guide layer. And now I've got my markers for the footsteps,
so let's grab a single footstep, place it in here, change the background to something. That was Command+K, by the way. I accidentally dragged two in there. Here, here's another cool example of how to
use a guide layer. I want to line up, you're gonna have one,
two, three, four, five footsteps, and I want them to kind of arc. I could just sort of eyeball that, but why
eyeball it? Why not give myself a reference? I'm gonna grab my pen tool and I'm just gonna
draw the path that I want these things, I'm in roto-bezier mode, which is fine, we can
use that, and maybe just give myself a little bit of a reference path. So I made a shape layer, and I don't want
a fill, so I'm gonna click on the word "fill" up here and turn off the fill. And I'm just using this as a reference so
it doesn't have to be perfect. That's gonna be the path that I want those
footsteps to follow. And I obviously don't wanna see that, when
we come back here I don't wanna see that line, so I'll just turn it into a guide layer. So I can see it here, but when we go back,
now it's gone. That's the beauty of the guide layer. So now what I'll do is, let me scale it down
a little bit. Oh, and here's something good to think about. At this point I'm already starting to think
about how I might want the camera to follow this movement, and I'm thinking, I probably
want to start zoomed in, and then the footsteps begin and I sort of pull back and follow them. So how close am I gonna be to the footsteps
when this comp starts? And I didn't know, I might be this close. And if I'm this close, but in this comp I'm
animating them very small like this, well then I'm gonna lose detail. So what I'm actually gonna do is I'm gonna
make my comp twice normal size. You could just hit Command+K and adjust your
width and height and do that, but the problem is I've already kind of set down this shape
layer as my guide, and what if I want to keep it where it is? Well, After Effects has some built in scripts,
if you go to the File - Scripts menu and one of them is Scale Composition. If you select that, you get this cool little
box and you can just say "new scale factor two," and it just doubles the height and width
of your comp ... Let me go back in here. So now if I hit Command+K, you can see it's
double HD but as it scales it it keeps everything in exactly the same spot, so it's just a cool
shortcut to scale your comp up, and so now I can scale my footstep down and animate a
bunch of footsteps here, but this footstep is actually pretty big, 'cause the comp is
so big. So let's rotate this one, and let's start
lining these up with the audio. So there's one footstep, and then I'll duplicate
it and I'll move this layer so it lines up with the marker. And I'm gonna scale it, I'm just gonna add
a negative sign on the X-scale. So it just flips it. And then I'm gonna hit W, W brings up your
rotate tool. I'm just gonna click and rotate it. And I'm gonna Command+D, duplicate it. Sorry, no I'm not, I'm gonna click this one
... When I'm moving really fast and I'm trying to just click and duplicate and rotate, I
want to make sure that I don't accidentally do what I just did and select that shape layer,
so I'm gonna lock it. And I can click this, duplicate, move it here,
hit W, rotate it a little bit. Grab this one, duplicate it, move it here,
rotate it a little bit. And make sure that I'm lining these up too,
so this is the third footstep, this is the fourth footstep, and then this last one here
is gonna be this one. We'll put it over here, rotate it a little
bit, and then what I want it to do is once that last foot lands, I then want the other
foot to sort of stand next to it. So then a few frames later we'll have two
feet standing next to each other. And let's turn off that shape layer for a
minute so we can see, you can see that now we've got this nice kind of arc, and I might
even want to cheat this a little bit more and really give it, give it some curve. So let's play this real quick with the audio. Cool, so it's in sync, but I've actually synced
up the beginning of the animation with each footfall sound, so this might visually look
more in sync if I take all of these and just nudge them back two or three frames. I'm gonna hold Option and hit Page Up, and
just nudge them all. There we go, RAM preview that. That's better. Cool, so that's looking okay, but I feel like
the animation of the footsteps takes too long, and I kinda want them to disappear once they
... I want that first one to land, and by the time this one's starting I want this one
to be fading off. So I'm just gonna now go back into my pre-comp
here and let's go back into this pre-comp and let's do this. Let's select the matte and hit U to bring
up all the keyframes, and let me hit the tilde key. I'm just gonna select all of these, and I'm
gonna look for the last keyframe, which looks like this one is the one that's furthest to
the right. I'm gonna hold Option and click and just nudge
these in. So the footsteps happen about twice as fast
now. And then I want them animate off, so let's
go back to our footsteps arc, so they animate on, and then here this one starts to fade
off. So if I want that one to fade off, maybe what
I'll do is I'll ... Let's think, what would be a neat way to do this? What we can do is, ah, got an idea. I'm gonna use an adjustment layer here, we'll
call this "fade off." And make an adjustment layer. What I'm gonna do is I'm gonna actually use
an effect to get rid of this foot so it doesn't just fade out, it'll do something slightly
neater than that. And we'll go up to Effects, and then in Transition
there's this effect called Gradient Wipe. Which sounds kinda lame but what it actually
does is the gradient wipe takes another layer's brightness values and it can then basically
fade off the darker or lighter parts first. It looks a little neater, so if I set the
gradient layer to this cool dry earth texture, fade off dry earth, and when I animate this,
you see how it sort of animates in this kind of neater way, and you can play with the softness
so it's not a total hard edge like that. It can be a little bit soft. A little bit more, maybe Yeah, let's look
at that. So now it'll sort of dissolve off, and it'll
look a little bit cooler. And you can play with inverting the gradient
and see if that looks any better. Actually I do like the way that looks better. 'Cause you get a little bit of that foot left
at the end. Right there, that's where that fade-off's
gonna begin, so I'm gonna put a keyframe on transition completeness, make sure it's at
zero, and then let's just jump forward eight frames, and we'll animate this. It looks like I only need to animate it to
about there. Oh, 100%, how about that, who would've guessed. Sometimes it depends on the image, if it doesn't
have any true black in it or true white, sometimes you don't have to go all the way to 100%. In this case we do, so 100%, and then I'm
just gonna easy ease the keyframes. Then I'm gonna go into the curves editor and
I'm gonna take this last keyframe and pull the bezier handle out like this. The reason I'm doing that is because I want
it to sort of start fading out but then linger. It's happening so quickly you can't even see
it so let me pull that out a little bit further. There you go. I just want the last bits of that foot to
just take a little bit longer. Let's see what happens if I pull this bezier
handle out too. Cool, that's a little bit neater than just
fading the thing off. Now if you go to footsteps arc and we play
this ... Cool. Now these last two footsteps, if I didn't
want them to fade off, I could just put a time remap keyframe on them so they don't
fade off but the rest of them do. So there we go, there's our footsteps. Cool, and now we can actually use the footsteps
arc pre-comp in our main comp here, and it's already in there. You can see how big it is. So let's kinda line this up here, where it's
gonna start. Let's pick a different color for it. I actually used the Adobe color tab over here
to pick out some colors for this. So I'm just actually gonna sort of cheat and
just pull the colors right off of this. Here's a trick I like to use, I want to grab
this purple color, but this layer is actually buried a few pre-comps deep and I don't really
feel like going in and trying to find it, so what I'm gonna do is I have my character
tab open, this is your text settings, and there's a color picker that hangs out there,
and sometimes I'll use it just as a storage, way of remembering a color. So now what I'm gonna do is put a fill effect
on those footsteps and now I can use this color picker to pick this color right over
here, so now I've got that. And I think I need to make it a little bit
brighter. There we go, cool. So looking at this, you see you get all this
nice texture to it and now I need to start animating the camera. This is one of those ... Did not mean to open
Nuke. Hey guys, this is what Nuke looks like if
you didn't know. This is where I need to really start framing
things and it's actually, I find, easier to do this kind of all at the same time. So I've got my camera, and I'm gonna start
diving into the camera animation a little bit here. Let me rename this "Camera" so it's not Camera
1. I generally, unless there's just one camera
move happening, I generally don't put the keyframes right on the camera. And you'll start to see why, but what I do
is I make a null, a null object, and I'm gonna call this "Cam 01." Or actually, maybe more appropriately, "Move
01," And the general trick is, you use the nulls to move the camera, and every time there's
a different move, you make a new null, and that null does that move. So let's figure out where we want the camera
to start, so we'll put the camera in the start position. I'm gonna select the camera, I'm gonna hit
P and I'm gonna move up and of course the footsteps need to be a 3D layer or none of
this will work. There we go. So we're gonna start kinda zoomed in like
this, and there you go. We're gonna be sitting here and this footstep's
gonna happen and the camera's gonna zip off and follow the footsteps around, so maybe
we'll be a little bit further away. Cool, so this first null, I need to make it
a 3D layer and I'm gonna parent the camera to it. And then I'm gonna figure out, okay, here's
where I kinda want it to start moving, so I'm gonna hit P on the null, I'm going to
separate the dimensions. This is something I pretty much always do
when I'm animating positions so I can adjust those animation curves individually. And I'll just put keyframes on all of these
for now. I'm also gonna put a keyframe on Z-rotation,
'cause I'm gonna wanna probably rotate that camera a little bit. And now I'm gonna go forward to where that
last, where the marker is for the last footprint and I'm gonna adjust the Z-position of my
null. And here's what's cool, if you parent a camera
to a null and the null is visible, you can click and drag that null and actually use
it to move the camera. It's just kind of a neat little handy shortcut
there. And one thing I'm already seeing is my texture
is now not extending far enough, so I need to extend that out with the Repetile effect. Cool, there we go. That needs to come down and you can see that
the numbers are getting humongous already. So I probably need to make those numbers a
little smaller. I don't want them to get too big, and then
actually scale the layer up a little bit. I'm making the texture a little bit bigger
overall, but since the camera just did a big zoom out move, I think that's gonna be okay. Cool, and then I'm just gonna put easy ease
on these and let's just take a look at that. Let's just kinda see what's happening. Okay. So timing-wise it's sort of doing what I want,
but movement-wise it doesn't feel very good at all. What I may want to do is actually have that
null rotate at the same time so that we're sort of turning with the footsteps. The next thing that happens is there's this
line of dialogue so I kinda need to leave some room in the comp for that dialogue, so
if I center the footsteps here, there's no room for the type, so why don't we land somewhere
like here, and you can see now it's kind of neat how we rotate over it. But we kind of need that camera to go in an
arc around it, so what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna use my ... Let's see here. I want the camera to actually in the middle
of this move, kind of be up here, I want it to arc around like that. Now I can select all these and Control-click
them and say keyframe interpolation, that's good, it's already bezier, and I need to now,
because it's defaulting to a easy ease keyframe, so what'll happen is it'll get there ... Well,
it's actually looking okay but if you have an easy ease keyframe in between two other
keyframes that are easy ease, it can sometimes add a little hitch in your animation, so I'm
just gonna go into my animation curves and make sure that it's not doing that, and it
actually looks pretty good right now. Let me just look at the X. You see what I was worried it was gonna do,
is this. And it didn't, which is awesome. So now I've added a nice arc to my camera
move but it ends really abruptly, so this is where you've gotta get to know the animation
curves and just tweak them to make them do what you want. What I'm gonna do is grab this last keyframe
here and I'm gonna pull it out a little ways and I'm gonna go kinda one by one with my
properties. I can try to do them all at once, let's see
if this works. I'm gonna select all of the animated properties,
and I'm gonna grab all of the end keyframes and I'm gonna pull those bezier handles out. That's just gonna make that last ease in take
longer. Cool. Now this feels a little bit different than
the example animation, but I don't mind it, it's kinda interesting. And I might want to end a little bit more
in this area. Yeah, maybe like that, that's kinda cool. Have it be kinda lower, let's play that. Interesting, cool. Now one thing that I feel like we are starting
to miss is that nice animation of the footstep, 'cause it's going so fast, so what I might
wanna do is slow down the animation by pulling these keyframes out this way. And doing the same thing, having that animation
ease out a little bit longer. When you adjust all the curves at the same
time, you gotta be careful because sometimes, yep, you can get stuff like this, where I've
actually pulled this bezier handle out and it's going down below. What you don't want, you don't want this bezier
handle to be below this keyframe, because now the values are doing things you don't
want them to do. So that's why sometimes you have to go in
and check each little property, anyway, but that looks good. There we go, that's better. And there's a little weird hitch, something's
doing something funny, animation-wise, so let me use my tilde key for a minute so I
can really check these values and make sure we're not getting something ... Let's see
here. Yeah, these all look pretty good, so what's
probably happening is you've got a value that's out of sync with another value. Like if the speed that the X-position is changing
is different than the Y-position and different from the Z-position, then you can start to
get little hitches in your animation. Let's see if that adjustment made any difference. There's a little bit of a wiggle to it, but
I might not worry about that for now 'cause I don't wanna torture you guys. Cool, so that's our first camera move, and
then once we land, I want that camera to slowly zoom out. I kinda want to hang there. And this is when you're gonna see the power
of using nulls like this, so Move 1 is this big arcing move. I then want the camera to slowly zoom out,
and I've animated four things on this null. If I then want to smoothly transition into
a slow pull-out, that's gonna be kinda tricky to do on this layer, but what's gonna be easy
to do is duplicate that null, and I'm gonna use the left bracket key just to quickly,
if I was doing it with my mouse I would do this, but I use the left bracket key, it just
brings it forward. And actually before I do that, what I'm gonna
do is hit U and remove all the keyframes from it. So now that second null is in exactly the
same spot as the first null, it has no keyframes on it, and so what I'm gonna do is parent
the first move to the second move, and then the second move, I'm only gonna animate the
Z-position, and I'm gonna just do a slight pull-out, let me move forward in time a little
bit and do a slight pull-out like that. And it stretches that, now here's why this
is awesome. It's awesome because, let's see what it looks
like, first off. It's really interesting, I wanna know why
this is happening. It's like this weird ... It's right there,
you can see it, you can actually see what's going on there. It's awful, let's fix it. It's gotta be the Y-position, I think that's
what that is. I think that Y-position is doing something
really funky. Let's set that to auto-bezier, see if that
fixes it. There we go, much better. This auto-bezier button down here, it sort
of attempts to smooth out a keyframe that's in between two other keyframes. Sometimes when you have little hitches like
that, it can help figure it out. But now look how that zoom sort of just happens
right there and it's not really that smooth of a transition yet, so what I'm gonna do
is I'm gonna set that first keyframe to easy ease on this second move, and I'm gonna scoot
it back a little bit, and I sort of like to keep these move nulls trimmed, so I know where
the move begins and ends. There we go, and what's cool is, okay, I want
that zoom to start a few frames earlier, I can literally just grab this null and move
it over a little bit. And what's happening is this move is now overlapping
with this move and sort of ... You're sort of blending between them. So you've got this complex moving, rotating
camera and then you've got a slight zoom-out happening, and because they're on separate
nulls, it's so easy to control. If I need to make the zoom quicker, I can
just go like this, I can just move that keyframe, and then the next move is just gonna be on
another null that's over here. And we're basically gonna stagger all of the
moves, and when they're on nulls, you can move them just by sliding the null, it makes
it so much easier. That's a really good little trick. Alright, so now we've built up an environment,
we've built our first animated piece, and we have the camera animated and we've actually
got a couple of moves happening, we're off to a great start. So why don't we stop here, and in the next
segment of this, in the next video, we're actually gonna start animating the type, and
I'm gonna show you guys some type tricks. So thank you guys so much for watching this. I'll see you next time. Thank you so much for watching, we will continue
this in part two, and then in part three, we will finish up the animation. I hope you learned a lot from this lesson
on how to start a more complicated After Effects project like this kinetic type piece. Don't forget to sign up for a free student
account to access the project files from the lesson you just watched. Thank you so much and I will see you next
time.
