Make VOX Style Maps in Adobe After Effects

so when it comes to creating map animations Vox is the gold standard now if you've ever watched their Vox Atlas series the motion graphics for the maps are just incredible they're always so visually impressive so if you haven't already seen that stuff be sure to go over to the Vox channel subscribe go check them out in today's tutorial I'm gonna be trying to emulate that style more specifically I'm gonna be creating this World War 2 map this is the liberation of Paris now this is not historically accurate so let's not focus too much on that I'm just focusing on the elements and how can we can try to recreate this using both Google Earth studio and Adobe After Effects now if you'd like to follow along with this tutorial all the elements I'm using in here are available for free download and there's really a lot of cool assets here so for the first step I need to create my base map animation and I'm gonna do that using Google Earth studio now this is a really cool browser-based animation tool that allows me to animate Google Earth and then export it with 3d data which I can then bring into Adobe After Effects and they really custom built this to work with After Effects so it's really really cool to use it simply go to earth google.com slash studio so first thing I want to do is name the project will call this Vox World War 2 map so I'm doing this little liberation of Paris and I want to set this to Ultra HD 3840 by 2160 I'm gonna switch the frames to timecode and I'm gonna set the duration to 20 seconds and now I'm gonna click start now as long as you know how to use After Effects you're gonna have no issue here because they design the interface here to look kind of exactly like After Effects it's got the keyframe editor down here with attributes and you also have speed and value graphs you can add different attributes here and really make the customization options go pretty wild and if you've ever used Google Earth it's the same kind of deal you can move the earth around just by clicking and dragging you can zoom in so it's pretty it's really cool if you've if you're unaware of it the first time using it's pretty fun so I'm gonna go and search the location I'm going to type in Paris and that'll take the map straight there and now I'm going to use this altitude attribute - zoom way in and I want my animation to start you know somewhere around here let's bring it pretty closer as you saw in the in the animation it's gonna kind of stay paused here with that main title and then at the two second mark it's going to zoom out so I'm gonna add some keyframes here for altitude longitude and latitude and this it's a slow zoom that goes on for about four seconds so let me just go ahead and move the altitude parameter and zoom it out to the position I like here and then that's gonna hold for about four seconds so add another keyframe at the 10-second mark and then starting at ten seconds we're gonna have a nice long slow zoom out so I'm gonna move my playhead to that and we'll zoom out a little bit more for that as well I'm gonna add a little camera pan starting at that second zoom out so right down here I have the pan options I'm gonna grab this and add a keyframe then I'm gonna go over here and let's just make that last the entire time here there we go and now to smooth things out I need to add my easy ease so simply right-click here he's out this is gonna ease in he's out he's in and once again if I right-click I can show the speed graph and then if I click on the altitude parameters now I can tweak how I want you know these to move so we'll make the animation look a little smoother there we go okay very cool I'm gonna right-click switch back to show keyframe editor now what I need to do is that I need to add some track points so that when I export this map along with the 3d data I'll have some track points where I can attach various elements to so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to view here guides safe margins and now I have that center point so I'm gonna go straight to the center here and I'm gonna right click and I'm gonna set track point and now it brings up this map here it's a cool another way to look at the animation here and I also have the track points panel if I open this up it's showing me the specific parameters of this track point which is all fine and dandy and I only need one track point for this and now everything's ready to go I'm gonna click on this render button and over here it's given me a preview it has the watermark which I can't remove by the way I need to apply this attribution but if I go to advanced right now you're gonna see a 3d tracking section if I drop down this menu I have these two options the After Effects script file as well as a JSON file so I want to do the After Effects script and I'm gonna leave everything else set as is and I'm gonna go ahead and start this render and once again this is gonna render out as an image sequence you can see here it's rendering it out frame by frame and this will be a total of 600 frames okay so for some reason I could not render out the Ultra HD version it kept getting hung up and I think it's due to the fact that my Internet's a little too slow right now so I went ahead and did 1920 by 1080 but once you render out here's what you come out with you have a zip file which contains all of the image sequence here in this footage folder I have all 600 frames I have my script file for After Effects and I have the earth studio project file so I'm gonna go ahead and move these all right so now I'm gonna go into After Effects and I'm gonna go to file scripts run script file and here's the script file and as soon as I click on that script file it's going to automatically create my comp and let's see what we got going on here so it brought in the 3d data it has a camera setup and if I open this up you can see all the key for here for that I'm going to keep that locked off it's added the image sequence here and you can see my animation is going just fine and it's also added this track point here which is a null object and it has the text which is parented to that null object track point so I don't need this text I'm going to go ahead and turn that off but that's pretty cool that that automatically brings that in if I want to use that it's there and available alright so now I want to start compositing some other elements that I've created but to do this I first want to you know make my project a little neat so I'm gonna come to these parts where I have my animations and I'm just gonna put some markers on here kind of as a reference so I know that we have that slow zoom out from two seconds to six seconds then at ten seconds we have that longer zoom out someone to just put these markers on here let's see where it stops here okay I'll go up to my comps folder here I have a Flags comp and I have this Paris France title graphic comp so if I open up the title here this is a really basic title with a little box and the text animating on has the date in the name of the city so all I'm gonna do for this one is simply drag it drop it over the top here and I'm not really gonna attach it or do any tracking or anything like that looks perfectly fine when the camera starts to zoom out the text element animates sounds so this is looking good so I'm gonna go ahead and lock this one off and now for my flags comp let's open this up and see what we got here so I have two flags here I have the Nazi Germany flag on the top layer and the US flag underneath that so I'm gonna bring this comp in and as you saw in the animation before this one's gonna slowly animate onto the map as the map zooms out so I'm gonna lower the opacity here so we got going on just so I can reference the map so I want the flag to kind of animate on here and I want it to be attached to the map so as the map moves I wanted to you know stick to the map and I'm gonna blend it in so the first thing I need to do is I'm gonna hit this toggle switches and modes button and then I'm gonna turn this to a 3d layer and as soon as I turn it to a 3d layer it gets lost and that's because in this Google Earth studio project when you know you export this from Google or studios it's essentially converting Geographic 3d data to those Cartesian coordinates and it puts your numbers in like the millions so it's real easy to lose elements and it's almost impossible to move them around if you don't know what you're doing so there's a couple things you have to know to do inside of After Effects to make these elements work and to be able to even see them so the first thing is you switch it to 3d and then I am going to parent this to the TrackPoint layer this null object here ok now I'm going to open this back up for the transform properties and to be able to see this element get it where I want it I'm gonna have to zero it out so I'm going to zero out the position and the orientation so I'm just gonna add zeros here now I can see it but the orientation still off so I'm going to zero out the orientation and now it's right where that track point was now I'm just gonna scale this up now if i zoom out here and I scrub along the timeline now you're gonna see as the map moves the the flag is moving with it so those two are attached now now I can start to work on the blending of this so for the blending I'm gonna grab the comp here I'm gonna grab my pin tool and now I'm gonna mask this out so I'm just gonna do a real basic mask something just on the inner edges here and now one hit the F key to bring up the mask feather and let's feather it out like maybe 400 pixels and let's see how this looks okay I'm gonna bring the opacity back up let's bring the opacity to 40 I'm gonna toggle the switches again and I'm gonna set the blend mode to overlay okay that's blending a lot better with the map here okay now what I wanted to do is I want this to animate on so I don't want the flag to show up right here I want to animate as soon as the zoom starts that's why I put these markers on the comp so I have a reference here so I'm gonna go open up the comp again and I'm just gonna open up the mask element and I'm gonna put a keyframe on mask expansion and that's our end so we want to put the end keyframe here kind of when the zoom ends maybe a little bit after it and for expansion I'm just gonna bring it down I'll probably need to bring it down by like 400 negative 400 and I'm might even want to do a little opacity animation as well because I don't know if this is still gonna show up there it is so let's have it go zero to 40 just in case okay so that's looking pretty good it's kind of dissolving on there slowly so the next step I want to do is show the liberation of the city by dissolving from this flag to the flag underneath so the way we can do that so I'm going to open up the flags comp and I'm gonna do this with just a real easy mask animation so I'm gonna go back to the main comp actually and we want that to start we wanted to start right about here at the seven second mark so I'm gonna move my playhead there and then when I open up the Flags comp the playhead is pretty much in the same location I'm gonna add a quick marker that'll help me give me a reference to where I want to you know do this animation here I'm going to add a quick mask I'm gonna grab the top flag here and I'm just gonna add a simple mask and now I'm going to open up the mask I'm gonna add a keyframe for the path and then I'm gonna go to maybe 16 seconds where that zoom out ends and I'm gonna grab this and simply you know move it over actually I can grab the whole thing here let's just do that and now we have this here maybe move it back just a little bit and then halfway maybe chain just so that it's kind of staggered here something like that and I'm also gonna bump up the feather quite a bit let's do have 400 pixels okay now that's looking good now one other thing I want to composite in here is if you have ever watched a lot of the Vox series sometimes they'll do little explosions and I've downloaded some explosions here these elements you can get these from premium beat these are free I'll leave a link in the video description and I was playing around with some of these and I actually think one of them is the same exact one that Vox might be using so I have some shockwave elements and I have some explosion elements and a few of these are from top view which is perfect for this so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to create a quick comp here that we could quickly duplicate and add a couple explosions and I want these explosions to be you know maybe taking place right here just makes it a little more dynamic and not historically accurate I'm gonna bring my plate back to the beginning first I want to grab this shockwave top you I'm just gonna drag and drop it over here and if I play that you can see here's the shockwave and there is also a explosion large top view drag that over and okay that's looking good so I'm gonna grab both of these now both of these layers right-click pre-compose we'll call it explosion and then I'm gonna change the color just for reference change to read okay so now I have an explosion here now I'm gonna time it to right here so that it kind of starts maybe right around here right when that flag starts to come in okay but it's not attached to the map so to attach it to the map I'm going to do the same exact thing I did with the flags comp which is turn on the 3d I'm actually going to lock the flags comp so I don't accidentally grab it so activated 3d I'm gonna parent it to the track point and then I'm gonna zero it out so I'm gonna open the transform properties I'm going to zero out the position now I can see it I'm a zero at the orientation so now it's flat with the surface of the map and go ahead insert all of your flatter jokes here in the comment sections please okay so now it's locked right to that track point I think so I can just simply grab it and move it and it's gonna stay you know moving with this cop here so and now that I have that I can simply duplicate it and you know make a couple of different ones and I can just rotate you know and change the scale to give them their own look so that they don't all look exactly the same duplicate another one I'll put this one over here I'll scale it up and we'll do like for sure we could go crazy with this but you know for the sake of brevity I'll go to this one around okay now let's see what we got here again not historically accurate at all I don't think I don't even know if Paris was actually bombed I don't think it was so yeah my wife is chiming in here it was bombed and also the French Resistance had a lot to do with liberating Paris I'm sure my wife has given me the stink-eye because she's French but that doesn't matter I'm making the map okay now what I want to do is I want to add some final touches well first in this explosions pack there's actually some sound effects so I'm gonna go grab the sound effects and I'm just gonna kind of line those up here I'm gonna hit the L key and I'm gonna turn the volume way down 18 and then what I'm gonna do is I'm going to duplicate these real quick and line them up with their explosion and then what I can do just to get those um you know to get all of the same volume levels real quickly now what I can do is just highlight and then click in alt drag and then that's going to replace those sounds just grab a couple of different explosion here another explosion here I have no idea what these are gonna sound like okay sounds good everything's pretty much in place I just need to add a few final touches to really sell this animation so the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to desaturate this map it's a little too colorful so I'm gonna go to the effects and presets panel and grab the hue/saturation and I'm gonna drop this right over my image sequence clip and then I'm going to bring this down to negative 75 so it has you know some of those very light greens are still going to pop out okay that's looking much better already now I'm going to add an adjustment layer I'm gonna go to layer new adjustment layer and I'm gonna make sure that this is at the top and then we go back to the effects panel I'm gonna grab luma tree color drop that on my adjustment layer I'm gonna use this to add a quick vignette and you know I can tweak the settings of this vignette to make it I want it and I'm gonna also open up creative and there's a faded film section here and just gonna bump that up to maybe 25 don't know what it does but hey sounds cool I'm gonna go back to my project panel and this is another set of freebies that I picked up here if I go to my graphics I have this film grain 16 millimeter scratched film grain overlay this is another freebie from my friends at premium beat there's actually a pack of five freebies so I'm gonna link that in the video description but this one it works perfect for this now actually before I drop it in I need to right-click on it and click on interpret footage main and right down here there's a loop section so I need to set this to loop and I'm gonna have it loop I don't know 20 times because it's quite short how long is it will wait is that two minutes maybe it is long enough I don't know actually I think that's just two minutes because I just looped it let me see you undo yeah so the original is 6 seconds so I'm gonna go ahead and redo that and now I'm gonna just drag it and drop it over here now we can see what it looks like now I'm gonna change the mode here the blend mode and if you don't see this just toggle this switches button here switches in modes and I'm gonna switch this to overlay and it's doing quite a big change here so I'm gonna grab the opacity I'm gonna bring the opacity way down to like 35 and that should be just enough okay for the last step I want to change the frame rate to make this look like older film so to do that I'm gonna add another adjustment layer here and then I'm gonna go to the effects & presets panel and look for posterized time I'm going to drop that on my adjustment layer and then I'm just going to bring my frame rate down to let's say 10 frames per second now let's take a look at the final animation [Music] okay so they have it I hope you enjoyed the tutorial if you did be sure to hit the thumbs up button if you want to see more content like this subscribe to my channel and hit that notification bellow so you can get all the future updates and I'll see you in the next one [Music] [Music]

Channel: Boone Loves Video

Views: 127,023

Keywords: boone, boone loves video, make maps like vox, vox animations, vox motion graphics, vox style motion graphics, vox maps, vox atlas maps, vox atlas animations, make vox atlas maps, Make VOX Style Maps in Adobe After Effects, How to Animate Maps Like Vox, vox map style, vox map style animations, vox style map motion graphics, vox style video, vox style after effects, vox style animation, vox style graphics, monday maps, vox style editing, vox atlas intro

Id: 3N9iNrsaujU

Length: 21min 58sec (1318 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 23 2020