Stretchy Text // After Effects Tutorial

hey it's jake and today i'm gonna be showing you how i made this title for my effects of after effects series let's get started [Music] all right let's jump right in and start by making a new composition and i'm going to make it 1920 by 1080 with 30 frames per second and i'll give it the name let's just say title and click ok and i need to start by actually making the text that says effects of after effects so i'm going to type that out effects of and i know the second line is going to have after effects and obviously this is not what it looks like in the actual title so let me change this to white for now and we need to change the font as well as this letting so i'm going to change the letting to auto and i'm going to change the font to one called abolition and then i'll just make that a little bit smaller so i can see it all in my comp now normally if i was doing a title lock up i would want to do something like make both lines the same width so it's nice and clean but in this case i actually want them both to be the same height and make the width spacing by stretching the characters out that's how the animation plays out so i just stretched out each character so that this first line is as wide as the second line but the second line has some stretching in it too so we're going to get to all of that first i'm just going to start by separating the two lines so i'm going to select this line of text with the text tool control or command x to to cut that and then press the backspace and enter to apply that then i'll just duplicate the layer with controller command d click and drag that down while holding shift and then double click on it to edit it and paste what we had in the clipboard and i'll hit enter again by the way that's enter next to my number pad on the keyboard if i were to press enter in the center of my keyboard it's going to drop down a line you don't have that enter keyboard on the right side just click on a different tool and that'll exit out of the text and i just noticed i had a missing e right there so there we go i've got the text typed out now i just want to scale it up so that the bottom line is close to the same width of the comp that way it's just nice and big and i can scale it down from there but the next step is to make shape layers out of these so if i right click on the text and go down to create and say create shapes from text now it's a shape layer it hides the original text layer and i'll do the same thing for the second one create shapes from text all right now if you follow ben marriott you know that we need to label our layers so i'm going to just clean up the name of this effects of and after effects we don't need to say outlines i'll drag down the two text layers and save them as a backup but then i want to pre-compose each one of these individually so i'm just going to do the keyboard shortcut of ctrl shift c or command shift c on a mac and i'll name this effects of and at the beginning actually since i'm i'm going to be using a lot of precomps i'm going to put type and then that little divider bar just to keep the organization nice and clean in my project panel move all attributes that's all fine click ok and then i'm going to do the same thing for after effects ctrl shift c or command shift c and then get rid of that comp one and put in type and that divider and this is just again for organization so i know that these comps are the type or the text since we're going to be adding a lot of effects later on we're going to do a bunch of organization with those labels all right click ok and now i have two comps but they're sized to this comp so the next step is to go inside of each of these and i'm going to center up this layer by opening up the align panel so just go up to window align and then with the layer selected i'm going to align to the composition center horizontally and vertically and then i just want to bring the height of the composition down so i'm going to go up to composition composition settings and bring the height down to be closer to the size of that text so why don't we just round it off at say 450 maybe even 425 i would like this to be pretty close to the text that looks pretty good 1920 by 425 and click ok and then i'll do the same thing for this precomp i'll just center this up horizontally and vertically and then go into the composition settings which keyboard shortcut for that is control or command k and change the height to 425 click ok and now i have two pre comps that are sized to the text layers which are now made up of shape layers and what this allows us to do is access the path properties within each one of these shape layers for every single character and that's what's going to drive the bulk of the animation for this title so let's go back into one of these let's start with effects of and twirl open the shape layer and look at the contents it's made a group that has a path and a stroke and a fill for every single one of these characters now i'm not going to be using strokes i don't really need these to be in individual groups so i'm going to quickly clean this up so that i'm left with one fill and one group of paths i'll do this really quickly by switching to the pen tool which is g on the keyboard and clicking on any one of the points then i'll switch to my selection tool v on the keyboard and all of my path points are still visible and i'll click and drag to make a selection around all of them now that they're selected i'll just cut them controller command x and we only need one of these shape groups so i'm going to delete everything in this shape layer except for that first e group so just select them press delete and now i have one shape group which i'll name paths you rename any group by pressing the enter key on the keyboard and then i'll just paste them controller command v now all of those paths are in that single group and i can take that fill and actually just take it straight out of that group and put it into the contents delete that stroke and now it's much cleaner i have my paths in one folder my fill in the main root folder of my contents and it's styling all of those paths because it's below the paths if it was above it wouldn't because it's trying to apply or style something that comes before it but it's the first in the list so it needs to go after those paths but now i have one fill control for all of my paths and all my paths nice and clean in here the first thing i want to do when animating this text is set a keyframe for every single path now i know that i don't need to get back to this state of my text because the resolved version of the logo is not going to be the way that it was when i typed it out as a text layer it's going to be distorted and stretched so in this case i'm not too worried about having a backup set of keyframes but if you need to get to this final result of your text so that it looks exactly like the actual font then set a keyframe on these paths and use it as a backup just in case you ever mess something up but like i said i don't need that backup i do however still need those keyframes so that i can start animating it so i'm just going to search for path in my timeline right here and that's going to bring up all of the path properties so i'm just going to press the tilde key to expand the timeline and i did that with my mouse over the timeline pressing the tilde key will expand whatever panel your mouse is currently over so i'll press tilde with the mouse over the timeline to expand that up and then just click and drag down these stopwatches to add a keyframe for every single path and i can close out that search press tilde again to get out of there and now when i press u on the keyboard it's going to bring up just the keyframes for those paths now if you remember on how the actual title animates it has multiple states of stretchiness and the characters are all different widths and stuff and it also starts out as just these little dashes basically the way that i went about animating this was starting at the end so creating the final logo lockup the way that i wanted it to look at the end of the animation and then i went back and made the other states ultimately getting to those dashed versions but i didn't exactly know what i was going to do with my animation at this part of the process so what i'm actually going to do now is just stretch out this text so that it looks like the final state of the animation and then go through this the same way that i did originally so that you can see my process now working with pads in after effects is a little weird the way that you select things and start manipulating things but i'll do my best to explain as i go so i know that i need all of this text to basically be the width of the comp there's a little bit of a margin on the sides just like there is on the top and bottom so i want to start by just moving all these paths to the left side so with my shape layer selected i'll press g on the keyboard to switch to my pen tool click on any one of the points press v to switch to my selection tool and then click and drag to make a selection of all the paths then i can click and drag while holding shift on any one of these points and move it closer to the left side of the comp now i'm going to be referencing the actual logo so that i make this as close to the final as possible so if you see me looking over there that's what i'm doing but i'm basically going to just start making selections of points and then shifting them around horizontally and i'm going to be doing this process of switching to the pen tool clicking and then switching to my selection tool very quickly but that's what's happening so you know so i don't have to keep explaining it but i want to grab these points right here on the e and then hold shift always hold shift so that it's not going up and down it's only going left and right and i'm just going to squish this e up a little bit and then i'll grab this f i know that's going to be stretched out more like this and i'm just going to continue manipulating these paths until everything fills out this comp and i'll time lapse through this a little bit and stop whenever there's something that i think is worth sharing all right so this is roughly what that line of text looks like in the final version of the animation now i have keyframes set for this state of the text what i'm going to do next is jump back into my type after effects comp and do the exact same thing except this time i don't need to fill the width of the comp i just need to manipulate the the characters of this text so that it looks a little bit more unique and original okay so i've done the same thing for the after effects line and this is roughly more or less what it actually looks like in the final version of the animation i set all my keyframes and at this point i went back to the title comp and i then slanted the text using the cc powerpin effect so let's grab the cc powerpin effect and apply it to the first line as well as the second line and the way that i use cc power pin was to make this distortion this slanted distortion so if i grab the cc power pin click and drag on one of the handles while holding shift then i can just freely distort this however i want so it's more or less something like this and i believe that i even took off the perspective shift so that the text over here wasn't getting so bunched up and stretched out so i took all that perspective off and it looked something like this now i'm doing all of this by eye just trying to get this slant to match up between the two uh instances of cc power pin but that looks pretty good that's pretty close now obviously i didn't want the title to take up this much of the comp so i'm just going to go ahead and scale this down to say 50 percent and then reposition these so they're closer together again so that's about where i had my design for the title and i was like okay this is the final state of the logo from here is when i went back into the pre comps with the shape layers and started making the other states and in the original version there were five states if you include those dashes at the beginning so what i did was grabbed all these keyframes and then just shifted them forward in time let's say to about three seconds and i'll back up one second from there and i just started manipulating the paths which automatically added more keyframes in and actually just to be safe i clicked on this keyframe button right here so that it adds a new keyframe on every single one of these paths that way every new state has a keyframe for it and when i go to say do the previous one it won't interpolate from this one to this one it'll always go between those two and actually let's start with the first line of text so we'll grab all the keyframes in here drag this forward to around three seconds and then back up to say two seconds all right so now i just start manipulating the paths the second state of this had a much wider f and the o was actually a lot wider too so i need to squish up this c to be much closer to what it was originally and then grab this o as well as the f and just bring it out quite a bit and then do the same thing right here in fact i think all of this effects text was pretty small so it's stretched out really far like that and i need to make sure there's a keyframe on all of these pads there we go and now it's going to interpolate between those two states so that's what i meant by the word state it's going from state a to state b and this is our final state now we'll worry about all the easing and smoothing and making it look a little bit more fun a little bit later but now i'm just going to time lapse through the other states now that you've seen how i manipulated the paths you should be able to do it yourself alright so i have these four stretchy states of my text and all that's left is going collapsed back up into that original state of those dashes so i'm going to select all these keyframes by clicking and dragging a box around them and then shift them forward another second and from here i basically just collapse them all down to the center where these little parts of the text on the e's and the f's are so that's what i used as my reference and i'm going to zoom in nice and close just so i can be precise here but i'm gonna do one character at a time and just bring these paths down now sometimes when you overlap multiple paths you're gonna get weird intersections and stuff but the way that we've set up our shape layer it should all appear the way that we want it to now the second line might have a little bit of issues but we'll get to that in a second so i'm just going to keep on moving along in fact i might even be able to do some of these at the same time just to make this whole process a little bit quicker and i'm sure that i'm going to be offsetting some of these paths to align a little better anyway now this s is a little bit more tricky but i'm going to do my best to basically make a bunch of rectangles out of the existing pads and i'm really going fast here i'm not trying to be too crazy precise but doing my best to make these nice horizontal lines i can already tell i'm not doing a very good job of keeping all these consistent so i'm going to make a guide really quickly press controller command r to bring out my rulers and then drag a guide down to about where i want the top and bottoms of all of these dashes to be and that way i can be much more precise with this and i don't need to be so precise that it's snapping so i'm going to go up to view snap to guides and turn that off and then lock my guides under the view menu as well just so i don't accidentally move them around all right so all these points on the top line are obviously not in the exact same space so what i'm going to do is make a selection of just those top points and then zoom in nice and close double click on any one of them with the selection tool and then click or drag on this transform handle while holding control to scale these all down to basically zero so they're all in line press enter and then drag them back up to my guide and then i'll do the same thing for this bottom row of points so make a selection double click zoom in nice and close and then hold down control while clicking and dragging and that scales them all down press enter shift click and drag down so now i have pretty symmetrical rectangles for every single one of these that will expand out into that first state of key frames now i just cheated and looked at my original project file to see what the timing of it was so i know that at 3 20 is where this last state is the resolved version of this text so i'm going to select the last state of the keyframes hold shift while clicking and dragging to snap it to 320 and then i put every state 20 frames apart so i'm going to hold shift and press the page up key two times to jump back 20 frames and just align all of these keyframes 20 frames apart so 20 frames back that's the next state 20 more frames and shift those keyframes to that point in time so between these four states where you can actually read the text that's the timing of them but now we need to work on the actual easing and spacing of these interpolated keyframes so i'm going to hide my guides i don't need to see that anymore and what i did for basically all the motion in this animation is kept the easing consistent and there are lots of ways of managing all of this easing but i'm going to start by just making a selection of all the keyframes and press f9 on the keyboard which is easy ease you could also right click go down to keyframe assistant easy ease but now it's just going to be smoother between each one of these states but i want to make that a little bit more exaggerated so i'm going to go into the graph editor because these are path values i cannot use the value graph so i'm going to have to view this as a speed graph but i'm going to select these four sets of keyframes right here and just increase this side until it's around 66 percent and then grab this side and pull it around 88 and now it's going to look a lot more like what i have in my final animation so it's much smoother a lot quicker in the middle where all these peaks are but that's how the text moves around i'm going to do the same thing for this first set of keyframes actually so i'm going to do 66 and 88 now i can't be very precise just by clicking and dragging on these handles i could go in manually double clicking on these keyframes and changing the outgoing velocity to 66 and the incoming velocity to 88 click ok and in fact i could even do that all at once with all of my keyframes 66 and 88 but there are lots of scripts and plugins that allow you to do this much quicker i prefer to use motion 3 from mount mograph that's an extension so i'm just going to open that up right now and show you how quickly and easily you could do it with this extension i've actually made presets of those values right down here so you can use the sliders but you can also make your own custom presets so actually let me bring this first state of keyframes 20 frames in just like the rest of them i'll select all of them and then click on this curve which you can see up here the preview of looks very similar i've got 66 and 88 if i click on that it's going to apply that to all of these or if i wanted to reverse it change it up i could use any one of my presets and apply all of that all at once and now i've got that same looking animation with the click of a button like i said there are other plugins and scripts that can do this motion three is almost always open in my workspace so that's why it's usually what i'm using but i also like flow and ease copy i actually have not used but i know for a fact it's fantastic at doing just this i'm just going to close that for now for screen real estate for the sake of this video and the last thing that i needed to do in this comp is bring these dashes in in an offset way the way i'm going to do this is by hand it's a little bit tedious it's manual but it gets the job done now i want to make sure that i grab the right set of keyframes these should be in order the first set of keyframes is the e second one is the f's and so on so this should be in order but make sure that before you start editing these that they are actually in the order you want i want to grab this first set of keyframes the first two keyframes for the first path and just back it up one frame so i'm going to hold alt or option on a mac and press the left arrow key then i'll shift click and drag on the next two set of keyframes and do the same thing alter option and the left key and i'll just continue this down the line all right now each keyframe is offset by one frame so it comes in in more of a staggered way but i want to make that staggering even more dramatic so i'm going to expand the spacing between each of these two sets of keyframes so i'm going to select all of the first keyframe for every single path and then i'm going to back up to around maybe 18 frames hold down option or alt and then click and drag on the first keyframe and as i do this you see that it's going to proportionally space all the other keyframes around actually let me undo and show you this in full screen so you can see it a little clearer i'll hold down alt or option click and drag on the first or last keyframe and that will evenly distribute all the keyframes between it as you click and drag so i know that i want this to start on frame 18 so i'll line it up there and then i'll do the opposite on the second set of keyframes compressing it rather than expanding it so again i'll hold down alt or option click and drag and bring that in and i'm actually going to bring this nice and tight so let me zoom in here and i'm going to just put three frames between these keyframes so there we go now we've expanded these keyframes to be offset more and compress these to be offset less so going from this state here if i play this back now is a little bit more slow to start and quick to finish but it's all still staggered and then it returns to the rest of our keyframe so let's play this back and here we go expands out goes through its different states and ends on its result state so that's how i animated the first line of text now quickly animate the different states of the second line of text it doesn't need those dashes at the beginning this is all just review so i'm just going to time lapse through the whole thing now on this state the word after is the only one that's out not effects i had those two words come in separately so i'm actually going to shift all the paths for the second word off to the side outside of the comp's view now this a is a little bit unique because it doesn't have two points here for me to expand out but what i ended up doing was just adding another point and moving it to basically the exact same spot as the first point so that when i expand this out it'll actually be a horizontal line and not just a centered point so i'll show you what that does if i select this group of points right here and move it over and then go in here and just click and drag i'm going to grab one of those two points and i can align it with the same angle and now i can expand that a out however much i want and then finally this first state is just the text pretty close to what it was before it was stretched and pushed all the way off to the side of the screen again so it comes out instead of just appearing so i'm just going to make these all roughly what they were before i did any kind of distortion to them and then just shift all these paths all at once off to the side and it's okay that they overlap the other ones since we have keyframes with the position values of that second word so now this comes out and does its four states and ends up where it should now all i need to do is apply the same easing to all these keyframes since i know the timing is the same so i'm going to select all of them and this time i will use the help of motion 3 from mount mograph and i'll use my preset that i have right here so with those keyframes selected i'll add my 6688 and now this is going to be nice and snappy but more importantly it is in sync with my other comp which is timed in the same way with these 20 frame increments now if i close out of that close out of this and look at my title comp it's starting in the wrong state but it is animating and it's preserving that cc powerpin slant that i incorporated so from here all i need to do is sync up the two comps because they're not aligned right now as well as animate that slant but let's start with just the timings so i'm going to find the point where after effects should come in which is i believe right here at one second 20 frames that's where this text has expanded out fully and then it's going to transition into the next state so that's the point in time that the after effects comp is going to start so i'm going to shift while clicking dragging that layer over so it snaps to that point and now it comes in right when it's supposed to and all the other animation is synced up but we're still missing the slanting animation from the cc powerpin effects which adds a whole lot of personality to the overall animation now again i'm going to start at the end of the animation because this is what i want the resolved logo to look like so i'm going to start by finding that last frame which should be right here at two seconds and that's actually two seconds in the after effects comp but it's 3 seconds 20 frames in the main comp and in the effects of comp so i'm going to set keyframes for all four points of the cc powerpin effect on both layers at that point because i know that is where the final resolved logo lockup will be then i'll just back up 20 frames again everything is staying in sync and just like with the keyframes for the paths i'm going to make four different states of these power pin points to slant and distort this text in this state so for this first one i want to make them not angled but i want to squish up the top so that it's about there it's the same height as the right side and then i'll just mirror that same distortion on the lower line of text now if you wanted to you could use expressions to link up these points so that you would only have to move basically one point you could have a null controller to move both of these points at the same time but this is fairly straightforward it's not that difficult to get precise since you have access to all of these values so i'm not too worried about it but i do want to make sure to set keyframes for each one of these properties on each instance of the effect for each state again and for this first state it's actually not distorted at all so i'm going to reset the power pin effect at that point in time for both layers so that they are starting in the undistorted state and then stretching out alright so if i play this back it looks like hot garbage because none of this has any easing so i'm going to select all those keyframes again go into motion 3 and apply my preset and then it should all be synced up nice and buttery smooth i did just notice that somehow the perspective got set back to 100 that happened when i pressed the reset button since there wasn't a keyframe on that it didn't preserve that obviously so i'm going to reset that and now we have the nice looking stretchy animation it's all in sync and eased exactly the same but that's how i did that portion of the animation the only other part left out of this is how i got all these dashes basically on screen but before i even get there i know that this should be starting right in the center of the comp so i'm going to press the apostrophe key to bring up my guides you can also find that right underneath this menu right here title action safe so alt shift p on a pc to add a keyframe on the position property or option p on a mac and i actually want to align that with the first expansion of this text here so i'm going to find that one second and 20 frames point right there shift that keyframe over while holding the shift key to snap it to that playhead and then back up 20 frames and shift that down to the center of the comp so there we go now that's going to shift up as it expands out i just need to apply my same easing preset to it so that it's all synced up and actually that's the wrong timing i need it to move up as the second line comes in which would be right here so play that back now it starts off centered on the screen and then moves up now to get all these dashes coming on i had them staggered in one at a time and to do that i actually broke this layer up so i split it at this point where it is resolved or where we can see the effects of as a whole so to split a layer i'm going to have it selected at the point in time i want it split at and then press ctrl shift d or command shift d on a mac and that splits the layer then i'll just get rid of the position keyframes by selecting them and deleting them and go back to the first frame what i need to do is break this one layer up into individual layers for each one of these dashes so i'm going to do that very simply with the mask tool grab the rectangle mask click and drag here and now i have my first dash so i'm just going to rename this layer dash 1 duplicate press v to switch to my selection tool and then click while holding shift on the left point of the mask the actual left path so that it moves both of these points and just shift it over so that it's aligned with the next dash then i'll make sure to click on the layer so i'm not having that mask selected again and press ctrl or command d again to duplicate it click and drag on this left side and move it over and just repeat this process again selecting the layer so that it duplicates the actual layer and not the mask every single time and i'll just continue this for the whole design okay now i have individual layers for each one of these and i want to put their anchor points at the center of each layer so to do that i'm just going to right click and go to transform center anchor point in layer content which the keyboard shortcut on pc is ctrl alt home so i'll click on that and now my anchor points are all aligned to the center of where those masks were and i'll go to frame 20 and set a position keyframe for all of them alt shift p or option p on a mac and then come back to the first frame and just shift them all down while using the selection tool click and drag while holding shift so it only moves vertically and get them outside of the view of the comp and now i'm going to do something very similar to what i did with the paths which is just shift each one of them each set of keyframes one frame at a time so i'm going to grab all but the first layers keyframes and hold alt or option and press the right arrow key and continue that for each one of these layers now that they're all offset i can do my little trick of expanding this set of keyframes while holding alt or option and compressing this set of keyframes again alter option and it will now come out in more of a staggered way there's no easing on it so i need to select those keyframes and let's add my easing preset and see how that looks all right not bad but there's obviously an issue i forgot about the height of the masks being important so i'm just going to fix that really quickly all right now i've got my dashes coming out nice and staggered buttery smooth they expand out and it transitions into the rest of the animation very nicely the one mistake i noticed is right here the after effects line is intersecting with effects of and one really easy way to fix that is to just go to the final lock up and then parent after effects to effects of since effects of has those position keyframes now it's just going to follow it and it's not going to overlap so that is fixed and that's it for the actual animation of the text from here i stylized it a whole bunch so that's what we're going to take a look at now so let's jump back into here and stop the animation and we're going to just pre-compose everything that we have in this comp so i'm going to select all with controller command a ctrl shift c or command shift c on a mac to pre-compose and i'll call this title and put that bar and say animated okay so now this is a single comp and i can start stylizing things i'm gonna close out motion three i don't need it for now and let's add some chunky grain some nice big bulky gritty goodness and i'm gonna do that by just starting to duplicate this layer and we're basically going to create an inner shadow but using effects instead of layer styles i just like the way that i can control it a little bit more this way and to do this i'm going to use a drop shadow so i'm going to type in drop shadow bring that out and i'm going to make this a little bit easier to see by changing my composition settings going to composition composition settings and changing the background color to be 50 percent black or gray rather so that it's easier to see what's going on and i'm even going to shut off the background layer let's rename this top layer inner shadow and i'm going to start by making it the shadow only so we're just producing a shadow here turn my opacity all the way up to 100 and just increase the softness a little bit maybe the distance a little bit as well next i want to constrain this to be within the actual logo so that it's not going outside of it at all so i'm going to use a cc composite effect to do that what this effect does is basically takes the original unaffected layer and re-composites it on top by default i want to uncheck rgb only so that it ignores what's been applied by these effects and just takes the original alpha channel and instead of compositing this layer in front of the drop shadow i'm going to change it to all the way down near the bottom you can't see it it's off the screen but stencil alpha this is exactly the same as the stencil alpha blend mode in your layers right here but now you can see that drop shadow is being contained within the alpha channel of the original unaffected layer next i want to invert this so that the shadow is actually the transparent part and the rest of the text is filled i can do that very easily with the invert effect if i bring that out just before cc composite and instead of affecting the rgb channel i want to change it to alpha channel and that will invert the alpha so i can now see that there is opaque pixels around the outside edge that is that's black and then on the inside is where it's semi-transparent so we've effectively created an inner shadow using effects instead of the layer styles i'm just going to back this up and maybe put it at an angle of negative 90 and now i'll turn that original layer back on and i'm going to make a new adjustment layer so layer new adjustment layer and i'll rename this noise because this is where we're going to generate the noise and i'm going to add an effect called noise hls which stands for hue lightness and saturation we'll change the noise type from uniform to grain and increase the lightness to be somewhere in the 70s so that gives us this nice big chunky grain we can even control the size so if we make it bigger or smaller i'll probably put it around 1.25 but it's a little bit soft for my taste so i'm going to add a levels effect right after that and i'm just going to crush the contrast a little bit so it's a little bit sharper and this is all completely customizable just using these different effects to control how it looks you can use the levels to adjust the contrast you could go back into your drop shadow and change the distance or even the softness and we could even use a cc composite to bring back some of that original white of the original logo and that way it'll basically just tone back everything all at once uniformly that looks pretty good but what i want to do next is define the edges just a little bit more so the grain doesn't go all the way to the edges basically we're going to make an outline or a stroke and i'm going to do that by using the same inner shadow layer so i'm just going to duplicate it controller command d and rename it outline and then move it above the noise and i'll solo this layer so that we can focus on it basically i want to change it from being a black shadow to being white i'm going to turn the softness down and also turn the distance all the way down so now we just have this kind of feathered stroke around the outside edges but it's still only contained within the original alpha channel of the layer i'll turn that cc composite opacity all the way back up to 100 and then i'm going to add another levels effect right at the end and change the channel from rgb to alpha that way i can crush the alpha channel and make this a lot more dramatic a lot more noticeable so somewhere around there and then i can just unsolo that layer and you can see what a difference that made it just gave it that nice edge around the outside which i think makes the whole thing a lot more readable so there we have our textured version of our logo it does take a little bit more time to render obviously there's a lot of effects stacked on top of each other here but we've got that nice thick chunky grain that works with the rest of our animation next let's add some color so i'm going to select everything again ctrl shift c or command shift c to pre-compose and i'll call this title textured click ok and let's add a tint effect to generate some colors so i'm going to drag that out and i'm going to change that background color back to black so command or control k all the way back down to black click ok and i'm going to cheat just for a second i'm going to bring out my colors that i used for the final logo and i'm going to change the black to be the same as the background color that green and then the white to be this yellowy gold all right so that's what the textured logo looks like colored now i want to distort this a little bit by adding a turbulent displace effect so turbulent displace apply that on top of my logo and this one i want to be really small size i want it to be super tiny so that we're just going to generate this rough edge around all of the text basically next i'm going to duplicate that one more time and this one will be a lot larger probably in the 80s so we have this nice big distortion but the amount is going to be turned pretty far down but this distortion is completely static right now and i want to animate it so let's go into the evolution options for the first instance and add an expression by holding alt or option and clicking on the random seed value and i'm going to type in an expression that's simple it's just random and then in between two parentheses i'm going to type in the number ten thousand what this does is generates a number for every single frame between a value of zero and ten thousand so basically we're going to get random distortion on every single frame and remember this is just the first instance of the effect so we're only seeing animation happening on the smaller roughen edges version of the turbulent displace you can see that vibrating edge now or that a lot of times is referred to as a boil now i think this is happening a little bit too quickly the animation of this edge is just way too fast and another thing if you noticed my final version of this animation was not at 30 frames per second this whole time we've been working in 30 frames per second but it's a little bit too smooth for me i want to make this a little less computer generated a little bit more hand done and to do that i'm going to half the frame rate and you can do this a number of different ways through effects through expressions but sometimes the simplest way is to literally just change the frame rate of your comp so that's what i'm going to do i'm going to composition composition settings and change the frame rate from 30 to 15. i'll click ok and then play this back and just like that we have a different quality to our animation and i like that quality now the boiled edge is still happening every single one of those 15 frames per second and i think that's too fast so i'm going to double tap the e key with that layer selected ee and that will bring up any expressions in your layer and i'm going to add one more line just before this random expression so i'm going to drop down a line and i'm going to type in posterize time and it will autofill for me what posterize time does is allows you to choose how often this expression is actually evaluated so currently it's generating a unique number between 0 and 10 000 for every single frame of my composition but i want to half that so half of 15 is 7.5 so i'm just going to say posterize time at 7.5 frames per second and finish that line off with a semicolon and just for good measure add a semicolon at the end of the second line too and now every other frame is going to get that boiled edge vibration so it's going at half the speed now and i think that looks a little bit better since we're happy with the way that that looks let's just copy this expression to the other instance of turbulent displace by right clicking on random seed and going down to copy expression only i realize that's off my screen but copy expression only and then press e to bring up all the effects open up the second instance of turbulent displace go into the evolution options find that random seed and control v to paste now that larger version of the turbulent displace is also going to be animated on every other frame or at 7.5 frames per second and i'm even going to change the displacement type from turbulent to bulge smoother and this is just a little bit less of a dramatic turbulent displace and now you can see those letters aren't moving quite as much so i think that's at a pretty good place the outside edges might be a little bit extreme i could turn the amount down a little bit on that if i wanted but it's completely up to you how extreme you want that to be the only other thing i did to this logo originally was slant the text as it's transforming from the straight line of dashes into this first line of text so i'm going to go right around say 10 frames add a transform effect which will allow me to skew the layer so i'm going to leave that at 0 to start and set a keyframe right there and then go forward to 110 which should be right where that line of text resolves and i'm gonna skew this by a factor of maybe negative six i'll press u to bring up those key frames open up motion three one more time and apply that ease preset that i've been using throughout the entire sequence so i'll grab that 66 and 88 close that back up and now it should slant out very seamlessly you hardly even notice that it's happening because everything is so in sync so that's the last of the effects on this title but we're going to do one more thing to it so i'm going to just pre-compose it one more time and call it title final make sure to move all the attributes into the new composition so it brings the effects with it and click ok and then let's bring in a background so i'll make a new solid layer 1920 by 1080 it's already got the green color for me and i'll move that to the back and rename it bg for background and i want to add that fake extrusion in the back now i've already explained how to do this effect in my mini max tutorial but if you haven't seen it here's how you do it so first i'm going to add a mini max effect and change the channel from color to alpha and color and this will basically allow me to expand my mat so the alpha channel i want to do this only on the vertical axis so that i'm basically stretching it out vertically and then i'm going to add a cc composite effect again so that i can bring the original unaffected layer back on top so i'll uncheck rgb only and i'll add a fill effect between the minimax and cc composite effects now obviously i don't want it to be this bright red color so i'm going to bring those colors back in and sample that darker green color right here so this is what we're working with so far mini max changing it to dark green and then re-compositing the original back on top next we need to shift this minimax drop shadow basically behind it so that it's aligned with the text and we're going to do that with the transform effect so bring the transform out right after minimax and what we're going to use this to do is shift it down but we're going to link it up with expressions so that we don't have to manually adjust this so i'm going to double click on the position property to bring it up here and i'm just going to maximize this so that we can see it more clearly and alter option click on the position stopwatch to add an expression i'm going to define two variables x and say that equals the value of this property the value i'm looking at is x the first value here in the position so zero the zero within this array is calling out the first value in this position property then i'll drop down a line and add another variable y equals value 1 which targets the value of the y property plus and then i'm going to twirl open the minimax effect and go back into editing my expression and use the expression pick whip to select the radius value and i'll finish that off with a semicolon then i'll write an array with an open square bracket x comma y closing square bracket and semicolon so we're taking this variable plugging it in to the first value of this array we're taking the y variable and plugging it in to the second value of this array in layman's terms we're just using the same controls we already have of this x and y position but we're adding the minimax value to it so if i leave this at 540 it will add the minimax value and now i can change that minimax value and it'll always be attached to the text it's like a long shadow but we need to rotate it and to do that we're going to add another transform effect but prior to the mini max effect so we're going to rename this effect rotate 1 and then we're going to duplicate it it'll automatically rename to rotate 2 and i'll double click on that rotation property again tilde to expand this and i'll collapse the effects that i don't need to be concerned with i need to now link the rotation of this second transform effect to the rotation of the first transform effect so using the property pick whip right here i'm going to click and drag to select that rotation twirl that down and i need to modify this just really simply i'm going to add a minus before the entire expression so that it inverts whatever this property is so if this goes forward 51 degrees this one's going to rotate negative 51 degrees and why exactly did we do that it's because this will allow us to rotate the layer prior to the minimax effect and then rotate it back effectively allowing us to rotate the long shadow so if i grab this rotate 2 and i drag it just below the transform effect my minimax long shadow is now rotated and if i go to this rotate 1 and change the value i can easily control exactly how that is positioned and with the radius of the minimax i can control how long that is and with that the animation for this title sequence is complete so that was a lot more than i planned on going into in terms of depth i really didn't think it was going to take me that long to explain how i animated this but i hope that gives you a little bit of a picture into how much i actually put into what i'm creating and sending out to you it's what i really enjoy doing i love teaching i don't like leaving anything out and i don't like putting anything in that isn't valuable that's my entire approach to teaching whether it's here on youtube or on skillshare so i hope that if you haven't checked me out on skillshare yet you would consider doing that you can check the link in the description and if you want to see more content like this one here on youtube please consider supporting me on patreon thank you so much to all the patrons that are already supporting me i'm so grateful to all of you thank you for watching this tutorial like comment subscribe and i'll see you in the next one

Channel: Jake In Motion

Views: 123,881

Keywords: After Effects, Animation, Motion Graphics, Mograph, Motion Design, Tutorial, Adobe, Adobe After Effects

Id: zorqDUC-aVc

Length: 45min 12sec (2712 seconds)

Published: Mon Aug 16 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/whale_kale]

brilliant work. I learned so many small things - like holding alt to drag and evenly distribute a bunch of keyframes! also love the tiny AE panel labeled 'jake'