The Secret to Creating Dynamic Bends in After Effects

hi in this video I'm going to show you how to create this animation and some other cool stuff in Adobe After Effects and not only that I'm going to show you some very powerful shortcuts to get it all done fast and all the project file assets are available for download in the description if you want to follow along with me all right let's get right into it all right before we hop into After Effects I just want to run through very briefly what it is we're going to be covering in this tutorial so the main star of today's video is the if else expression now if you've never used Expressions before don't worry about it I'm going to show exactly how they're written exactly how to use them and a couple examples including that Big Bend animation towards the end of this video once we get through how they work to start though what is the if else expression well in principle it's actually fairly simple it's like making a decision based on a condition if something is true do one thing otherwise do something else so for example if it's raining outside I'll take an umbrella otherwise I won't take an umbrella it's basically that concept and that can be fully applied in After Effects in your animations in any number of ways we're going to jump in now and I'll show exactly how it works here in the first composition I have a very basic Square shaped layer with a simple fill effect on it and we're going to use the color of this fill effect to really showcase how the IFL statement Works let's add it right now I'm going to hold down alter option and click the stop AR right next to color and it'll open up our expression editor down here in our timeline now I've gone ahead and made a couple color variables so we can plug them into our expression and you can visualize a little bit easier how the expression works I'm not going to run through how color variables are written cuz that's not the focus of today's tutorial but having these two variables here will make a little bit bit easier to see the structure of the expression all you need to know is that these two variables are going to be our end results meaning if we do one thing the scare will turn red if we do another it will turn blue so let's actually write our if else expression now below our variables I'm going to type if and an open parenthesis and it'll make both the open and close for us I'm then going to press the right arrow key and press shift left bracket to make a squiggly bracket when I hit enter or return you'll see that it autom makes a second squiggly bracket and on the right side of this squiggly bracket I'm going to type else and once again the same thing open a squiggly bracket and then hit enter or return and we'll see that we now have our full structure for the if else expression anything that goes inside this parenthesis here will be our condition that drives the output on these two lines here I'm going to use the scale of our shape layer here as the condition that drives the output color of our Square so to do that I'm going to open up the transform toggle down here and clicking in here we're going to write a variable for scale so I'm going to type VAR s is equal to and with our cursor right here after the equal sign I'm going to use the in expression Pi whip which is this one right here and click and drag to the first value on our scale which is the x value for this case that totally works I'm then going to add a semicolon to end the line so after effects knows that that's the end of the variable we can now use this scale variable to see how the different logical conditions in the if else expression work I'm going to click in here and start with the equals to condition so I'm going to type S is equals to with two equal signs and let's put in a value like 50 and then in here our results for this one I'm going to put red and for this one I'm going to type blue so what we're basically saying here is that if the scale is equal to 50% the color of our Square should be red otherwise it should be blue now right now the scale is 100 which is our otherwise output so right now it's blue but if we click this here and type in 50 we can see that when it's set to 50% scale the color of our Square turns to red and we can see this a little bit easier if we click and drag on our scale anything that's not 50 is blue and then as soon as we cross through 50 you can see it flash is red as soon as we stop on 50 it's now red so that's the equals to logical condition the next one is less than so I'm going to change the two equal signs here to a less than sign just like so when I click away it changes to Blue and that's because we're set to 50 we're not less than 50 but if I drag below this just like so we can see that it changes to Red so now anything that is less than 50 are square be red and anything that is above 50 our Square will be blue the same works with the greater than sign so I'm going to change the less than here to a greater sign and now anything above 50 will be red like so so all the way up to here will be red and then anything below 50 will be blue now we can make a slight modification to both of these with an equal sign so I'm going to add the less than sign again but add an equal sign after and when we set this to 50 we can now see that it also includes 50 in our expression so before when it's just the less than it doesn't include 50 because we're saying it's less than 50 but by adding an equal sign we're saying less than or equals to 50 will be red and once again the same is with greater than so we can do greater than or equal to 50 will be red otherwise it's blue so now if it's 50 or greater it's red if it's less than 50 it'll be blue the next logical condition is not equals to which is just the opposite of our equals to so to write this I'm going to delete this and add an exclamation mark right here with an equal sign right after so anything that is not equals to 50 will be red and then as soon as it's equal to 50 it'll be blue it's again the opposite of our equals to so if we type in 50 here we can see that changes to Blue but anything that is not 50 will be red as defined by our expression here so those are The Logical conditions that you can use but we can actually take this a step further you can actually have the expression look at multiple conditions to then Define the output so I'm going to add a variable here right below our s I'm going to add a VAR R for rotation I'm going to type equals to and then once again use the in expression Pi whip here and drag to our rotation value and let go we'll see that it autofills in transform. rotation we then want to add that semicolon to end the line and then hit enter to separate it there so we now have a rotation variable and a scale variable what we can do is use the and or the or modification to have it look at multiple conditions at the same time so I'm going to change our scale one just back to equals so scale is equals to 50 and then I'm going to put two ERS sand for and so we're basically saying if the scale is equal to 50 and another condition then our outputs will happen the second condition that we're going to put here is our new rotation variable so I'm going to type R and then let's put it equals to 45 so if our scale is equal to 50 and a rotation is equal to 45 then it should be red let's actually do that now let's change the scale to 50 and then in rotation I'm going to change it to 45 and you can see as soon as we have both of these values as soon as both of these values are true then our Square turns red but as soon as one of these is not what's written in here then it'll go back to Blue an alternative to this is instead of and we can set it to or which will mean that if only one of these conditions is true then the red output will happen so for example we can set this to 50 but our rotation is still zero as long as one of these is true then the first value happens alternatively if we set this back to 100 and our rotation to 45 once again we have our condition met and is now red if both of these are not true then it'll default to the else output which is in this case blue you don't always have to use two different variables to drive the and or or statements you could use the same variable so in this example I wrote If the scale is greater than 50 and the scale is less than 100 which basically means the scale is anywhere between 50 and 100 then our output should be read if it's below 50 or if it's above 100 it'll be our else output which is blue so we can see here I have it set to 75 scale as soon as I start to change this as long as we're in between our defined 50 and 100 it'll stay red but if it goes below our 50 it'll go back to Blue and if it goes above our 100 it'll go to Blue as well now if we swap these so the first one change it from greater than to less than and the second one change it from less than to greater than well this condition can never be true the scale can't be less than 50 and also be greater than 100 that's not possible but if we change our and in here to an or statement now if our value is less than 50 or greater than 100 it'll be red as we can see here so in between 50 and 100 is now our else output but below 50 and above 100 is our if output that is how this expression works I'm now going to jump into a more practical example oh and don't forget to like the video and subscribe to school emotion if you want more tutorials like this okay a little bit more of a practical example of using an IFL statement is to put a little bit of control on another expression so in here I just have a basic text layer that says flicker with the font instrument serif which is in the downloads if you want to use this specific font I'm going to select the layer and hit t for opacity and move forward to about 2 seconds I'm going to set a key frame at 100 and then move back to about 1 second and drop this down to zero so if we play through we can see that this is just a very basic fade in what I want to do is have this flicker a little bit as it's fading up so it kind of has a little bit of Randomness maybe like a light bulb or something that's flickering before we add our if else expression we're going to use another expression to drive this Flicker and that is the wiggle expression now the wiggle expression is very simple if we hold down alter option and click our stopwatch here and we type in wiggle like so and we open parenthesis all we need to do is fill in two values the first value is the frequency or the amount it Wiggles per second so I'm going to put in something like 100 and the second value is the amount that it actually Wiggles so I'm going to put for this second value again 100 and you can mess around with the values for this case these are the numbers that I'm going to use when I click away and hit play we can see that it's flickering before our key frame and also after our key frame well we don't want this we only want the flicker to happen between our two key frames to do this we're going to use the if else expression to help drive this so I'm going to turn our wiggle expression into a variable I'm going to type VAR flicker is equal to our wiggle expression and then I'm going to add a semicolon at the end to make sure that after effects knows that that's the end of our variable I'm then going to hit enter or return a couple times and let's write our if else expression so let's type if and our open parenthesis and then our squiggle bracket else squiggle bracket and return let's make an opacity variable we're going to type VAR and just put o is equal to transform. opacity and of course our semicolon in our parenthesis we can now add The Logical condition so that it only flickers between 0 and 100 so to do this let's do what we did before I'm going to type O to reference our opacity variable and I'm going to say that if it's greater than zero and so using our 2 Amp to also say and our opacity is less than 100 so we're basically saying if it's above zero and below 100 then we want our output to happen and our output in this case is the variable flicker that we wrote so I'm just going to type in flicker here now for our else statement what should we put for this well the basic way to say in an expression for nothing to happen is just to type value so once again if it's above zero and below 100 it will flicker otherwise no flicker will happen and when we click away and press play we can see that we now have no flicker before a key frame and no flicker after the flicker only ever happens between our key frames which is exactly what we want finally if you want a little bit more control on the actual randomness of your flicker with the wiggle expression if you add a line before with the seed random like so and you put in any number here so we can say 1 2 3 and then we add our semicolon after we've now changed the actual flicker so if I play through here we can see that this is the flicker for 1 2 3 but if we change this to something like 111 or any other number the flicker will now be slightly different pause for a second we're using Expressions to help make more Dynamic animations but if you want to make your animations more Dynamic across all of your work I recommend diving into animation boot camp from School Of Motion this course teaches you the art and principles behind great animation and how to apply them in After Effects one of our most popular guided courses for taking your work to the next level or if you want to dive deep into Expressions check out our course expression session where you'll learn to write understand and use expressions and after effects to improve your daily workflow check it out at school of motion.com all right let's get right back into animating that Big Ben title card finally onto our Big Ben animation now that we understand the if else expression as well as the wiggle expression we can use these in some really cool ways to make a very fun setup with our chained Tower like in the original example what I have here is a blank composition and I'm going to hit control K or command K on Mac to open up the composition settings I just have it set to 4K at 24 frames per second and 5 Seconds to make a new composition you can always just click this button and then set up your composition here in this window I already brought in the files that are available for download with a big Ben folder right here this is the original photo taken from photographer Henry B now what I did in the animation is split it up into sections so we can control each of the different pieces of the tower that takes quite a bit of time of masking so to save everyone time I already went ahead and prepped each of the pieces of the Tower so you can just drag and drop them in so let's go ahead and assemble our tower now in our composition I'm going to close this out here and I'm going to bring in Big Bend 1 through 4 into our comp I'm then going to select Our Big Bend one and click and drag and hold down shift so that it drags perfectly vertical straight down until it roughly lines up with our other Tower piece I'm then going to hold down shift still and click the next one and do the same thing click and drag downwards until lines up with our Tower piece here and then once again with the last piece until we line up just like so now everything is off frame but let's chain these together and we're going to use parenting for this so I'm going to select the four and I'm going to use the parent pick Whip and parent it to three and then going to use three and parent it to two and two to one we've now made a sort of chain between all the layers so anything that we control with one if we zoom out here they're now all chained together if we drag the one all of the falling ones are controlled as well so I'm going to drag this to about here and then I'm going to grab the corner right here and hold down shift so that it scales proportionately until we got our Tower roughly in a good position like that we can always change this later so we have our Tower chain set up here but we don't actually have the underp parts of each of our Tower pieces if you look at the example animation here you can see I put this sort of like dark brown shape to make it look kind of fake 3D but if we solo our first piece here we can see that that's not there so let's actually add that right now I'm going to zoom in and I'm going to go right here and select the pen tool right up here I'm then going to add a mask in the rough shape of what it should look like we're trying to fake a little bit of perspective now when I close the mask we can see our layer disappears because it's actually masking it out but if we select our layer and hit M to open up the masks and we set it to none then our mask is just on our layer not controlling any of the visibility CU we don't actually want it to drive the visibility of our layer so I'm just going to tweak the corner point until we get it to roughly the right perspective and then I'm going to throw on a fill effect now this little pop-up window here is FX console it's a free plugin I use all the time and this is how I'll be pulling up effects I highly recommend you get it once again it's free and it just makes searching for effects a lot easier so with our FX console pulled up here I'm going to type in fill and select our fill option here and then I'm going to set it to all masks so now it's reading our mask here then taking the eyedropper tool I'm going to click this and click one of the dark spots of our Tower and if we click away we can now see that we have a sort of Underside to the tower I might want to make this a little bit darker so I'm just going to open this up and maybe make it just a little bit darker something like that looks pretty good but we can see that our fill is actually covering some of the details of our Tower so to fix this all we need to do is add another effect CC composite and when we do this we can see that the little bits of details that were lost so I toggle this on and off those little bits of details are now on top of our fill effect when we go back to 100% scale we can now see that we have the under part of our Tower and of course at any time we can zoom in and adjust the perspective of this to whatever we like I'm not going to repeat the steps for Big Ben 3 and big Ben 2 there we go I have all three done now we don't need to do it on Big Ben one one because that part is not part of our Tower so we don't need to worry about adding the underp part to that specific layer so if I turn these off one by one we can see that we have the underp part of each tower that gives it kind of a fake 3D look let's zoom in here on our top Tower piece what we're aiming to do is have it rotate just like in the example if I hit R for rotation and I start rotating it we can see that it doesn't rotate around the right point it's rotating around the Anchor Point which is in the center of the layer if I undo that and hit Y for the move Anchor Point tool and we click and drag our Anchor Point here down to our bottom corner just roughly close to here and then we start rotating we can see that we're rotating just like in the example on the corner point of our Tower piece but there's a problem that happens when we try and rotate it to the left when I try and rotate it to the left the Anchor Point is still over here so of course we could move the Anchor Point here and then rotate it to the left but the problem is now if we try and rotate to the right we have that same issue so we basically need to have the Anchor Point jump to different locations depending on the rotation and this is where an IFL statement can work really really well if our rotation is greater than zero we want the Anchor Point to be over here on the right side corner and if it's less than zero we want it to be over here in the left side corner I'm going to hit shift a to open up the Anchor Point so we can see both the Anchor Point and the rotation I'm going to press alter option and click the stopwatch right next to Anchor Point to start our expression we're going to write our if else expression in the Anchor Point and use the rotation as our condition so let's start with just the variable for our rotation because we know we're going to use this I'm going to type VAR R is equal to two and then we can use our in expression Pi Whip and drag it onto our rotation and then hit a semicolon to end the line then down two lines I'm going to type if and our if else statement expression setup just like so and we can put in here the start of our expression so I'm going to type in here if rotation is greater than or equal to zero then we want our Anchor Point to be this one otherwise we want it to be the other spot so how do we Define the actual Anchor Point coordinate this is actually relatively simple we just need to make two Vari Ables for each of the coordinates of our Anchor Point so I'm going to add right before here two variables I'm going to do VAR a is equal to and VAR B is equal to and we're going to fill this in with two simple sets of coordinates so our VAR a will be our first variable the right side corner and what I'm going to do here is hit space and add a Open brackets and I'm going to just type in the two values that we have here with our Anchor Point set on the right side here I'm not worried about the decimals cuz it doesn't need to be that precise just close enough so for our first one we should type 673 and then add a comma and 1513 and then for B what I'm going to do is move our Anchor Point still with the Anchor Point move tool selected I'm going to select our Anchor Point and move it here to the left side and do the same thing this time with the new coordinates so once again open the bracket note our value which is 105 comma 1475 and then of course at the end of both of these I want to make sure we have a semicolon to end the line so now we have both of our coordinates set what I can do now is just plug these in really simply into our IFL statement if our rotation is equal to or greater than zero then we want the Anchor Point to be on the right corner so I'm going to set it to a otherwise we want it to be on the left corner which is B when we click away and zoom out we can see that the actual Tower piece seemed to jump away from its proper position but when we actually mess with the rotation we can see that something is happening where the Anchor Point is jumping all we need to add to fix this sort of jump is add a very simple expression to the position to kind of counteract that movement so with our layer selected I'm going to press shift p to also open up our position right here and I'm going to add an expression to this holding out alter option I'm going to press the position stopwatch right here and I'm going to type in Anchor Point we're basically having the position reference the value that is our anchor point and when I click away we can see that the layer sort of disappears even though it's right here it's not in the right position and we can't seem to drag it if I go back to the mouse tool and try and drag the layer it doesn't let me drag it and that's because we just need to add a simple extra bit to this expression so after Anchor Point I'm just going to add a plus value just like so and once again our layer seems to move a little bit but now we can actually move it where we want it to go so I'm going to zoom back in here and I'm going to place it roughly where it goes like that on the top of our tower now when we mess with the rotation if we Crank It Up above zero we can see that it rotates to the right on the right corner but if we drag it to the left we can see that the Anchor Point moves and the position counteracts that movement and we're now rotating based on the left corner so we now have our perfect setup without any key frames that is completely procedurally driven by our IFL expression and that position expression that we added with that set on the top Tower piece we can now go ahead and use the exact same system on the other Tower pieces to build out our chain I just finished setting all of them up so we can see here if I solo this layer and I hit rotation we can see that now rotates based on this corner and if we go to the left the Anchor Point jumps and then the same thing over here with rotation goes over here to the right and on the left but something that's really really cool and the reason we chain them together is that if we select all of our layers and hit R for rotation and then click and drag to the right we can see that they add the rotation from the previous layer so we get sort of this like opened chain look from both the left and the right what we can do to make this a little bit easier to control is if we right click and make a new null object and we name this null object just by hitting enter or return on the layer we're going to name this master control like so I'm going to add a slider control effect on here and this basically is just an empty effect that lets us tie any other attribute to this number and control it a lot easier with the master control selected I'm going to click and drag this Pi whip right here all the way up to our slider control just like that and then I'm going to right click the rotation and click copy expression only and then select the other layers and hit control or command V to paste and it'll Auto paste that same expression onto the rest of them so now basically what that did is we can control the rotation of all four of the layers with just a very simple slider control right here instead of having to key frame all of them if we want to key frame our rotation we just come come to our master control and change our slider controls value we can also of course rename the slider control to rotation so we know what it controls all right the hard part is done we can now finally start adding some of the fun animation to this whole setup the first thing I'm going to do is have the tower fly in from the bottom I'm going to select the bottom piece right here and press P for position and I'm going to set a key frame position right here and let's drag this forward just a little bit like that let's then drag this down until it's completely offscreen we want our entire Tower to be offscreen for the start of this animation so now we see if we scrub through our timeline we can see that the tower slides up let's adjust the key frame a little bit so it goes a little bit faster if we play we can see that it comes in fully linear it's a bit abrupt to have it just kind of come in like this so what we can do is add a little bit of momentum transfer to the other pieces right here at the end of our position animation from the first piece I'm going to select the other three layers and hit P for position I'm then going to click one of the key frames and it'll automatically make a key frame for all of the layers I'm then going to move forward a little bit maybe like a second or so and add another key frame pressing this button here and we can see that with all our layers selected it automatically makes a key frame like that I'm going to go to the middle now of these key frames and click and drag one of the Y value positions to the left and you can see that they proportionately all move together the value doesn't really matter it's just up to you so I'm going to go with something like that and now when we press L it has this really kind of clunky linear animation so let's fix that with some easing I'm going to select all our key frames here and rightclick key frame assistant easy ease or the shortcut is just F9 then with these selected I'm going to go to the graph editor with this button here and and make sure I'm on the speed graph so clicking this drop- down button here make sure edit speed graph is selected let's then click and drag our first key frames and move it to the left so that it starts really fast and then click and drag our middle one and ease it out and do the same thing over here let's start it east and have it ease out so this is a really good starting point if we press play we can see we have a little bit more eased and has a little bit more character this needs some tweaking so I'm just going to do a little bit messing around of moving the key frames maybe left changing the easing a little bit kind of adjusting these a little bit until it gets to something I like this part just takes a little bit of trial an error okay after some tweaking of the values this is what I ended up with and when we press play we can see we get this nice sort of momentum transfer to the top pieces then they drop and settle all right let's actually animate that rotation that we set up before so I'm going to select the master control and move the play head to somewhere like right here right when the position ends I'm going to add a key frame on that slider control that we made before and move forward a little bit and just increase the value to maybe something like that looks pretty good let's then hit U on our keyboard to open up the key frames here and move a little bit more and let's do the opposite direction let's push it over to the left and then once again let's move forward a little bit and then set it back to zero so we have sort of this rotating to the right to the left and then back and just like before I'm going to select all of them and hit F9 to easy ease and then just start messing around with the actual easing of this until we get something that we like so I think I like this what I did is have it start slow and ease in and ease out so we get a nice Snappy motion pushing over to the right same thing moving to the left kind of get that nice ease in ease out look and then the same thing for the end right here but if I press play we can see that it's a little bit slow it's it's a bit slow for my taste so what I'm going to do is exit the graph editor and select all these key frames and then hold down alter option on the keyboard and click and drag the last key frame over to the left and this will just proportionally scale our key frames so that we can make it a little bit faster so let's test out this let see what that looks like that's a bit fast now so I'm going to actually make a little bit slower and just tweak it until I find something that I like and I think that's pretty good now something I noticed when I play through here is that the bottom piece here is rotating around the center we never actually moved the Anchor Point for this so a really easy fix for this is just to go to our second position key frame make sure the playhead is over it and then with our move Anchor Point tool pressing y on the keyboard we can just click and drag this down to the bottom of our layer and when I press play we can now see that it rotates around the bottom of that so that was something I forgot to do before but a really easy fix for something like that okay let's go over to our flicker composition and select our flicker layer and copy it and go over to our main Big Ben composition and paste it here and let's drag this below our Big Ben let's also change the text I'm just going to double click the layer and type in Big Ben now the text is a little bit covered so I'm just going to go between where the space is and just add a few more spaces just like so and that'll just help space it out we can also click and drag and move it a little bit maybe to the right until it feels about centered that looks good to me let's then bring in a couple textures now these textures are again provided in the project files I'm going to bring in this paper texture here at the bottom and we can scale this down there a really big paper texture I'm going to scale this down so we get the texture a little bit smaller like that let's also change our Big Bend text here I'm going to change the color over here in the character panel now if you don't see the character panel you can go up to window and select character and it should show up and with the layer selected clicking this color box right here I'm going to change it to a nice blue like this somewhere around here looks good and we can even change the blending mode from normal to something like multiply to get a little bit of that texture to pass through our layer just like so so this is normal and this is with multiply so now when we press play we can see that we have the tower come in and our Big Bend flickering in right there but I want the flicker to happen after our Big Bend has kind of settled so I'm going to hit U with no layer selected to open all of our key frames and then I'm going to click and drag the two flicker opacity key frames and move them forward to near the end of the rotation somewhere like here should be good and let's also make it a little bit faster by bringing in the right one when we press play we now have this animation with the flicker in I think another great detail to add here is to have the two words flicker in slightly offset from each other so I'm going to duplicate with contrl D or command D on Mac and I'm going to select the rectangle tool up here at the top now if you don't see the rectangle just click and hold this and select the rectangle tool with this selected on one of our layers I'm going to select big just like that and then on the other layer I'm just going to click and drag and select Bend and so now we have our words easily separated then on the bend layer I'm going to select the opacity key frames and just scoot it forward a couple frames like so so now when we play we get a slightly offset flicker on big and Ben it kind of adds a little a little bit more Dimension to our text layers let's add in our overlay texture as well so this is also provided in the project file I'm going to click and drag this here on top and set this to Overlay and when we press play we can see that we have a little bit of an overlay texture on our actual Big Ben but it's not really showing up too much on the background so what I'm going to do is make a duplicate of this so hitting control or command D and then changing it from overlay to linear light this is a much too strong version of this so I'm just going to hit t for opacity and drop this down to something like maybe 15% so we can see that we have a little bit of nice texture movement around the edges as well as that nice texture on top of all of our assets here all right next let's add a vignette so I'm going to right click in here and make a new solid and make sure it is a fully white solid just like so click okay and I'm going to add on the CC vignette effect just like so now a great way to control this is if you add on a levels effect after this as well and we can kind of tweak these sort of controls on our vignette as well as the actual scale of our layer so if we grab one of the corner scale points here we can change it to be a little bit taller or we can do a little bit wider flatter like this so I think something like this is good maybe tweak the levels a little bit like this so we get a little bit more control on the actual look of the vignette then changing the blending mode on this layer to multiply we can see that we have this nice vignette kind of shaping our composition so without it we have this with the vignette we have this for our final layer we're going to add an adjustment layer to add just a little bit of extra motion to our composition so I'm going to right click right here and make a new adjustment layer and I'm going to rename this to final effects just so we know what it is I'm going to bring on here a transform effect and I'm going to duplicate it so we have two transform effects the first one we're going to start with a nice fast and eased out scale on our first transform effect here I'm going to key frame the scale and then I'm going to move forward to about maybe 2 and 1/2 seconds and just increase this to something a little bit larger like 130 should be good let's select both of these key frames hit F9 to easy ease and go to our graph editor and then I'm going to select the first point and move this to the left and have it ease out so what this will do is have it start really really fast we can see the velocity is really fast and it'll lose its velocity over time in a nice eased motion when I leave the graph editor and press play we can see we have that happening with our animation the second transform is to add a little bit of ambient scale throughout the whole thing so again on the scale but on the second transform effect I'm going to select the scale key frame button right here and move to the end of the composition and just increase it to something like 110 and when we press play we can see we have this sort of ambient SC scale happening at the same time to add a little bit of extra camera movement to our composition I'm going to use a wiggle expression on the first transforms position effect so on our transform here on the first one I'm going to hold down alt or option and press the key frame button next to position it'll open up our expression editor and this time we're just doing a really simple wiggle expression so I'm going to type wiggle with a value of two and seven I like those values for this but feel free to mess around with it and use whatever values you like now when we press play we can see we have a little bit of an extra camera movement that goes left to right finally to add a little bit more sauce to this animation and make it a little bit choppier we're going to add a posterized time effect so I'm going to bring up the FX console and type in posterized time and set this value from 24 down to 12 and now when we press play we get this cool kind of like stop motion almost uh more jittery choppy animation which I think just kind of ties it all together I think it really sells that final look and of course remember that if you don't like the flicker of the text here maybe with the post rise time the flicker doesn't look quite right to you you can go into your Big Ben layer into your opacity here and change the seed random to whatever you want so let's change this to something like 1 2 3 4 and now the flicker is a little bit different on this again feel free to mess around with it however you like and with all of that done we have our final animation here built on the foundations of the if else expression pretty cool that's all for this video thanks for watching and remember you can download all the files from the project in the description make sure to like subscribe for more school of motion tutorials and if you're interested in taking your animations to the next level don't forget to check out animation boot camp on the school of motion website see [Music] you

Channel: School of Motion

Views: 36,151

Keywords: Motion Design, Motion Graphics, After Effects, Tutorial, Tips, Tricks, Technique, Learn, Basics, Design, MoGraph, expressions, learn motion graphics, school of motion, visual effects, how to, explainer video, animation, animator, vfx, mograph course, learn mograph, learn vfx, online course

Id: RxHu807Z7No

Length: 31min 26sec (1886 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 27 2024