Workflow Show: Expressions Extravaganza with Zack Lovatt & Nol Honig

[Music] okay take three uh third time's a charm here uh thanks so much to youtube for making my day um a little more stressful than i was hoping for but hey we are here now uh i am kyle hamrick senior motion designer here at school of motion and uh technical genius of live streams uh as well i actually started this a minute ago and i went through my whole intro spiel and even took a minute to like stall a little bit so people could come over from the other uh thing and then i realized that i wasn't actually live so um here we are this time great thank you so much for being here with us uh for jumping over from the other event uh etc without further ado i'm gonna go ahead and introduce my guests today who um have not already spectacularly failed twice that i'm aware of uh but you know there's plenty of opportunities for that to happen i'm sure so i have we're going to be talking about expressions in after effects today and i have two very smart gentlemen here that are going to help me talk about that since i'm on such a roll already so uh i have noel hoenig and zach lovett here hello guys hello hey everybody and we're here for real this time so that's good yeah yeah good are we sure we're totally i'm still wondering who these like two geniuses are like i just see nola and i and i don't think that's what you meant yeah that's fair uh well i have two more people that um are hiding that i'm gonna reveal later in the show oh okay yeah well that's fine yeah pop out about that we're just standing in for now yeah i hope you have a hat handy because i don't so uh by the way if you're not familiar with the three of us uh there's gonna be a lot of really bad awful terrible puns and a lot of chest hair apparently this is like the chest hair club today oh my um unintentional i don't know um okay so for uh anyone unfortunate enough to not already be familiar with you two fine gentlemen um could we maybe just take a second and you can kind of tell us a little bit about yourself uh what you do where you come from why we should listen to you uh those kinds of things i don't know um noel i'm going to go ahead and start out with you if you don't mind hey everybody uh yeah so i'm noel uh i'm an animator and a designer and a director and i live in new york i i have a cat uh i love expressions i'm not sure what else we need to know but i'm super psyched uh to see everybody here on the chat and uh it's great to be here with you kyle and zach you're also like a big time teacher right oh yeah i forgot that yes i've been teaching a long time for about 20 years uh so yeah i basically teach basic after effects and mid-level after effects motion design stuff it's kind of been my specialty yeah and i teach after effects kickstart also at school of motion awesome yeah busy guy it happens yeah um getting getting back in our role and yes i know noel's noel's skype quality is a little bit weird here it was perfect before the show and then it got weird so we're just going with it that that's the theme of today um all right yeah uh it's a little better now we'll see uh all right how about you zach what's what's your story what's uh you know what do you have going on yeah uh well these days i so florida's worth viewers we're both a little like i guess all three of us are just like ah with the stream starting and stuff but i i call myself a technical director i'm like a 2d technical director for motion design and it pretty much means i do the nerdy that you don't want to do and you might not want to learn how to do so a lot of the time it's like building scripts and pipeline and tools for studios or like setting up data driven design and animation projects or building expression rigs and templates and toolkits and all this like workflow optimization stuff that is a little less making art and more making art work smoother inside of a bigger system but this is like coming from a you know after 10 years of being a motion designer and compositor on all sorts of stuff so it's just like art and art forward or art artist friendly nerdery and that's that's what i do here in l.a i think that's a great way to describe it um yeah i mean you do a lot of things that uh help other people make their job more easy um or yeah yeah yeah or things that uh maybe people even really wouldn't be able to do um you know automation and and stuff like that all the things that our industry demands nowadays it's really gratifying to just like be able to build something that all of you get to use and just excel with yeah yeah um awesome uh his problem solve skills are out of control folks he just he knows the solution to every like little problem that you might have it's pretty amazing i mean to lend evidence to that he's the one that told me like kyle i don't think we're actually broadcasting here [Laughter] for example just yeah for example um so obviously i can see a lot of you um are very active in the chat already uh rightfully so since we've had such an interesting start um uh i have uh frank and ella helping us out in the chat today so um we are really looking forward to any uh questions that you have for us um and uh we especially would love to know like uh if you're a school of motion uh student or alumni or if you're currently taking you know one of the courses that either of these fellows taught you know we'd love to hear what you think or if you have something you want to ask them so feel free to put those in there i'll kind of pepper them in whenever they feel appropriate or i have a couple times when i'll specifically uh be looking at those too so guys before we like really dive into it here um just because i know there's probably a few people watching that don't even know what expressions are um can we just take like a quick second and say what is an expression and why should i care how about noel you take this from like an artist's point of view what should an artist care okay i'm put on the spot uh uh artists should care about expressions i think because it'll i mean just for one it'll just make your workflow go faster so you have more time to focus on the art and less you know focusing on the nuts and bolts of after effects and the way it's working uh so if you can set up for example really great rigs for your shots using expressions sometimes that'll save you a ton of time and it'll also sometimes it'll open up animation possibilities that you didn't even realize that you had which is an artistic thing i guess it can it can really change the way you approach the shot uh depending on what you're working on so i think you know that's something that i like to think about plus you know one of the things that we talk about an expression session is just using random to create art which is one of my very favorite projects in the whole class so it's like just like letting things be randomly picked out by the code and then composited together and and i really love that kind of like beautiful mess so but maybe we should give them a technical description zack so why don't you take that yeah well like uh short of the description just yet it's like uh expressions i mean like no saying it's sort of a you can do everything by hand but a lot of the time doing everything by hand sucks and you've definitely been there you need to like take these keyframes and use them again and again and again to loop something or the exact same key frames and apply it to a million layers or like offset every layer by a few frames and so you're duplicating and copying and pasting and it's a pain in the ass especially if you need to go and then update that first set of animation you're like oh crap now you've got to go and update all the keys redo all your work and well expressions just to like help create these relationships between layers and properties and animations so you can do the work once and have it just work for everything else i'm i'm a huge fan of just using them uh for a bunch of you know like just daily little things that um you know instead of 10 clicks to to do that thing that you have to do all the time you know make yourself a little preset with with a slider or something like that and then you can apply that real easily and just have it be like a easily modifiable thing so that you don't need to dive in quite so far if it's something that you do 10 times a day you know use use the tools to make yourself you know be more efficient and you can spend more time being creative instead of worrying about rebuilding the thing every time right right then there's the rabbit hole which is a totally different thing yeah i think a good way to uh you know describe it too so uh just for those that aren't familiar so expressions are written in javascript code and so i know some people are afraid of code that sounds like a scary thing um and you know obviously it's okay to just kind of start small um and you are you know quite literally i think you guys say this in the class you're quite literally learning another language so it's okay that it like takes a little bit to get comfortable with it um but uh you wouldn't expect that you could learn spanish in like two weeks right whatever right yeah not without moving to l.a um but uh you know we're gonna show you a couple examples in just a minute here actually of of ways that you can um you know i think some really accessible stuff that uh will just be helpful in your your daily work and and hopefully make it a little more friendly too and know that like you don't have to be expecting to write you know 50 lines of code for stuff like you can literally write one word and like link a thing or not even that much sometimes and just knowing how these can help you is such a great uh boost right you don't need to be good at math to be good at expressions no like math can play a role but most of the time math has nothing to do with it like it's a whole separate domain yeah where the math you're doing is like third grade math that you you can get into complicated stuff but most the time it's like plus or divided and it's yeah yeah it's it's way less scary than a lot of people think it is yeah um cool well noel i know you have a little uh demo that you're gonna start us off with if uh are you ready for that yes okay that's right cool well i'm gonna come over to noel's screen here so you know close whatever incriminating stuff you have and then we'll uh we'll grab your screen here okay i've uh yeah i've got you up and uh my screen here yep cool yeah right on um well basically i kind of figured that i'd started a really basic place uh and probably the most you know basic expression that everybody learns first is the wiggle expression i'm assuming that most of you actually have played with the wiggle expression before but if not um to make any expression on any layer you would just option click on the stopwatch which opens this dialog box here and then if you type wiggle basically in the parentheses we're gonna put two uh arguments in the parentheses the first one is the frequency uh so that's just like how many times per second it happens so let's say like four times a second then let's have it the amplitude be like 100 or something okay so i think you've all done this before and basically just looks like this right it's just wiggling right super cool now one thing that actually came up recently somebody wrote me and was like okay i'm learning expressions and i learned wiggle but i don't know how to like have the wiggles start and then stop and you know because they just kind of hard-coded these values in here and so you know that kind of brings up this other thing which if if all you know is the wiggle expression i did want to mention expression controls which are super awesome in particular um sliders so if i select this layer and i go up to effect i could go to expression controls and then slider control now there's a bunch in there and if you're just learning after effects you might have um tried putting these on some of your layers and been like this does nothing so that's actually a pretty common thing i think i did that too myself but let's see if we choose the slider control basically what it does whoopsies i already have that on there for when i was practicing ignore that uh basically here's my slider and i can rename this something like amplitude or whatever and right now it's just you know a blank slider that does nothing but it's cool the way it works and it looks fun but let's just say if i want to set this to 100 right and then get here into my expression it's like this and like what kyle was just saying i don't need to write code in here i could just use this little pick whip which is familiar to you and click on over here to this value and now whoops i did something wrong no pressure oh i think i forgot a parenthesis at the end yeah okay so so now it's the exact same right so it's it's just taken that 100 and it substituted this number but what we could do now is animate this slider all right so let's just say over one second we want it to get up to 100 and then we go back to the beginning and set this down to zero and now it'll kind of gradually start wiggling right so uh that's just one thing that you can use sliders for but i find them to be amazing amazingly useful i like i use sliders in like every thing that i do basically i love sliders same and the other expression controls too are useful angle control the newer drop down menu is actually really useful um they're all great i would definitely recommend you checking those out awesome well thanks so much noel that i hopefully that was a great little intro for anyone that hasn't used those before and like you said i think it's probably really common um you know there's a handful of effects in after effects even some that do things where you apply it and it you're just not really sure and sometimes you just need to understand what it's actually for to be able to see what see what the purpose is but um expression controls only exist to control other things so by themselves they do nothing good point yeah um i am yeah so i i always found it interesting like early on in life learning expression controls like you have the smile slider and that's that's i don't know okay that was really bad i just i mean i kind of loved it yeah thank you uh i have nothing else for this joke it was just that one uh so i feel like one of the bits we should have planned is uh the long cane thing so that we could uh you know like do that between windows oh that would have been amazing that would be really good or some mini hamburgers while i'm talking about sliders i kind of thought about that together everybody so so good oh yes there we go okay back on track look at me with my serious face on so i'm going to tell you some more uh useful stuff here people and um while we go over to my screen now which is what's happening i'm going to close this youtube chat and then we're going to secretly behind the scenes change who's screen sharing uh on on my thing uh so hopefully everything will look right when we come back but uh we'll see okay so um i'm gonna tell you about a little function called value okay um and apparently my bar wants to be here we'll just move that great um so value is this little uh function that and zach if i say function it's not actually function feel free to yell at me that allows you to look at the value of the property before the expression and that can be really really useful especially with expression controls and stuff like that so i'm going to show you just like a real quick example you know you could take two layers and parent them together like this so that now you know every time i'm moving this one the other one moves with it um and then i could keyframe uh you know this green one and and do things with it right but sometimes you don't want those parented together because if i were doing something like changing the scale or rotation then you know that affects that thing and maybe that's not what i want so instead you could use value uh in in an example like this to link just the position property of a couple things so i'm going to type value v-a-l-u-e and then asterisk not not asterisk plus just value plus and then i'm going to use this little pick whip thing here and link it to the position of that uh yellow and red square okay so as soon as i click this you're going to see this move because the math works out now that it's taking its values plus these values so you know it just moves it to that area of the screen position because the way the math works but i can move it back here and if i needed to be perfect i would but now what happens is anytime i touch the position of this red one the green one's going to follow it because of the the way that that's getting masked out to that position but it gets to ignore all these other properties like scale and rotation so if you ever just want to link one property like that that's a good way to do it and i'll just show you another quick example of how value works to bring in the expression controls null was talking about if you add a check box control to this layer right here this is just a null that just a null that exists only to hold some controls and i'm going to just put a quick little expression on this one value times and then i'll pick what to that checkbox so what's going on here is a checkbox control it's a binary switch 0 or 1. and so anything times 0 is zero and anything times one is itself so if it's off it's always zero if it's on it's always itself and that means i can still change this opacity value here and still have this be an on off switch and so i could like easily copy paste that to a whole bunch of layers here and they could have different opacity values as you can see but it still like works as an on off switch for this whole big chunk of my project right um you want one more i'll do one more sure uh i wasn't sure how much time to fill so uh this is a nice little example that uh you know let's say you've already built this cool little little pop-on scale expression here or uh just keyframes um but uh your client says hey that logo needs to be bigger um because that's what clients do right so i'll just add a slider control and we could rename this if we want call it like scale adjust okay and so i already have this scaling from 0 to 100 but if i want to be able to change what that looks like i could take value times and then just pick whip it up to this slider right um okay well zero times anything is zero and then whoa what happened well remember that this is scale so it's already like a hundred so if we just do a little bit of real quick math here if you divide anything by a hundred now it's a percentage right and so this slider is now going to take that existing animation and multiply it by whatever this number is so that you can use this like scale but without messing with those skill scale keyframes that you already had right so hopefully that's a useful little thing i have this kind of thing built as a preset and i use it probably in every project so hopefully those were a couple cool little examples of ways that you can use you know i think that's pretty accessible it's just a couple little uh basic math functions and some pick whipping uh that you know should make your your day easier hopefully yeah and like most of the time all of the expressions you're going to use are be will be that level right like just a little bit with a little bit of something time something and you're already working so much more efficiently than the person beside you and you know in a freelance environment if you have that little bit of an edge like that that really helps it adds up people notice it's true we hear this a lot from people in expression session who are like you know i just started doing the class and already the knowledge i'm getting i'm being kind of put on different things at work you know because i have this knowledge so that's kind of cool um so zach do you want to show us your little demo here see what we got i know you have some really cool wizardry mostly because it rolls around you but yeah all right well uh i've got you up here so let's see what see what you have going on okay so here we have this super familiar little lower third that kyle made and kyle's name is there how'd you get that well we hacked it's all hacks and so this comp is set up and it's exposed some properties um some master properties rather and the thing with master properties is that you get these little toggles out here in your timeline for things like you could show the logo or not or we can come in here and fade the title bar or we can change the name to bananas are wonderful and everything just resizes and maybe the title here is i hate so it's this idea of giving yourself some little properties and this is an expressions right here this is just kind of some after effects stuff what is expression driven is to have this bar auto magically extend stretch whatever or if we change the name to hi well then it's not going to shrink because it knows that the subtitle is longer well all of this work of building a lower third and setting it up all of this we actually go over in expression sessions so if you're uh if you're looking for somewhere to learn all this just hypothetically right just just if you want it but part of the annoyance or frustration with uh with master properties is that changing the text is kind of a pain in that you've got to right click here and go enter into this little window or you can come into the expression and type in something here like hello everyone and it'll update but this is kind of slow so what i want to show is a really kind of easy way to set text based on something you can control easier in after effects which is the layer's name so in this case this layer's name is wfa workflow show lower third template and what we can do is if we hold alt and click name to enable the expression well if we just pick whip up to the layer itself it says this layer and that means this layer but layers have this handy property called name and so if we just have dot name and we click away now we can see that oh i had the wrong name showing the layer name is template kyle and now the text inside of the master property inside of the template is the slayer's name so what if i were to say jaw or kyle hamrick you can change this here super easily and it's going to update whatever's there now i know this did take a few steps one to set up the lower third and another to expose it as a master property and set the sizing but this idea of just linking it to the name of the thing is really handy and because layer names are dynamic and they increment every time you duplicate this and this number changes it changes up there so i'm gonna delete those and let's see this other one uh let's not see that one actually so this one's kyle hamrick let's duplicate it and say we're seeing two of them another one to say no koenig and so that's a really kind of quick way to set this up but we actually have a few pieces of information here we have the name and this little subtitle like this makes no sense despite yeah this makes no sense i had to read to see if it did make sense somehow so there's this other more expressiony thing and we go into this in a ton more detail in expression session but this layer dot name it's a piece of text and in the expression engine in javascript text has this fancy function this method called split oh like bananas wait i think we made the banana split show and it did shut up it's a good joke i said so what split will do is you give it some character and this is like something in your text like the letter k or in my case a space and what it'll do is it'll say okay look at the text you're giving it so kyle space hamrick and break it into two parts the stuff before the space and the stuff after it or if you had three spaces then it'd be like kyle space hamrick's face something else okay that that's neat and what this gives you is something called an array and you see arrays a lot it's like position and scale in after effects or arrays it just means a single thing that holds multiple items like the x and y scale position well the way we get arrays is with little square brackets and then number to say what part of the array and you know starts at zero and that's weird and that's just a javascripty thing but this kind of technique like this is something you can look at and copy and paste without needing to know too much about it and when i click away we're gonna say take the name of the layer break it into little chunks based on anywhere you see a space and give me the first object it starts at zero and so now it's kai and so if we come down and change this to one and the one here is going to take the the next chunk so now we have kyle as the first one hamrick is the second and that works here you're like look now i can duplicate this and say set up let's say we want this a little bit more interesting we say kyle hamrick senior motion designer you definitely want it to be more interesting than just kyle hammer i don't know if they can get more interesting than just kyle and here instead of splitting with the space let's split by the hyphen and so when i let that go it says okay kyle hamrick everything before the hyphen is his name and so that appears up here if we change this one to a hyphen now that's in the bottom and so when you're doing a lot of thirds we can duplicate this out and say cat man there uh i can't tell despite that and it's just a really easy way to like do all your versioning without needing to go and modify a million fiddly properties now uh do i have a few more minutes if you want them yeah yeah so take them there's one more little thing in that okay how often are you going to need 10 different lower thirds in one cop that doesn't that's not a great example what's a lot more likely is that your whole comp will be set up and in this case i've dropped in my little lower third template and i've got a simple little scene here so here's where you have your footage or whatever and because you don't want to render out this little comp with a bunch of lower thirds you want to render out your full shot so using this exact same trick you'll notice here the expression doesn't say this layer name it says this comp dot name and so this you might guess instead of pulling from this layer it's going to pull from this comp and so it's a little different because i've written shot one kyle hamrick senior motion designer but the rest is the same thing we take the name we break it apart and then we get the certain objects in this case it starts we're not using zero because zero is shot one if we need to like um if we're doing slating or like time codes maybe we do want that that little shot one value but we don't hear and so here what i can do is i take my whole comp we're going to duplicate it uh let's name it shot two we don't need to we're just going to do it zach love it not so clever and now when we open that comp it's just updating everything here my lower third is pulling from the comp name this background text it uses the same technique exact same idea pulling from the comp name and we can just duplicate this all the way down for each one of your piece of footage now you might want to like drop in different actual footage into each one but this saves you a whole lot of time in going and modifying all of that text and then you just go and add all these to render queue spit them out and you've done all your versioning in a fraction of the time it would have taken you to do this by hand awesome so that's name split awesome one one more thing hit it yeah do it uh this idea of like word dot word dot thing this can be really hard to remember and so this little tiny arrow here really helps with that so like next time you're coming to find this if you don't want to find this video and watch the stream well you can go down into this little fly i'd be like hey i remember that we're talking about the comp and so what items does the comp have okay well the comp has something called main i'm assuming this fly out showing on the stream actually uh not a hundred percent but i hope it is and so if we click this it just gives us that word now we don't have the word this comp that it's a little we do have to type that by hand but we're like okay what can i do with my call oh well i can get layers in the comp and get the markers the number of layers you know how many layers are in this call oh there's three you're hiding but this little flyout menu is a great way to look up what you can do with every object what do layers have what it comps and so on reset that and that's that for name and split awesome are you actually done now i'm sorry wow that was amazing and i think that's that's such a great example of the kind of stuff that um you know if you're making one of these there's absolutely no reason to do that but if you have to make 500 of these hopefully it becomes really clear why spending the time to set that up once and then you could just you know there's literally ways to feed this with a spreadsheet that someone who doesn't even know after effects could have built for you and you just like do a couple clicks feeds the whole thing and now you spit out 500 of them with maybe without even touching after effects if you have set this stuff up properly yeah it's cool and a lot of this work is is these ideas like you do a little bit more work up front but it just pays off in the long run because it saves you all that minuscule tweaking time yeah uh i just so hopefully we got a great um you know we got some beginner stuff just you know like ways that you can kind of ease yourself into these and maybe see how you can use these in your everyday work to just make it easy and then a great like um hopefully still accessible example of how you can start leveling this stuff up for real power but it really depends on what you need to do with it so um you don't always need to dive into the real scary stuff um all right i think i'm gonna take a couple questions here uh i saw a really good one that i think would be great to address um where'd that go so someone asked about the difference between javascript the web dev might write and the javascript that is in the after effects expression engine yeah uh no i'll take this um so there's one thing to note in that in a recent version and john colombo in the chat can say which the after effects added a second expression engine so traditionally it was this old language called extend extendscript which was like javascript but it was like a 20 year old version of javascript that they kind of that adobe took and then did some little tweaks to it and put it in after effects and scripting still works in that world both expressions there's now this new engine called javascript and it is the exact same as what you'll see in a web environment um there's a few differences in that they've sorry the helicopter it's an la problem there's a few differences in that they've added all the after effects stuff so you still get i believe you get like arrow functions and proper array um dealing with arrays good ways to like filter through a ton of data and effectively you get 20 years of javascript web dev enhancements and upgrades and optimizations that never existed in after effects before and so now after effects expressions are so fast to write and work with and modify it's it's great awesome i agree obviously after effects has some specific stuff that doesn't exist elsewhere but um you know if you already know web programming uh javascript you're you've got a pretty good start right yeah sorry i was replying to the chat um yeah yeah but it does help a lot um but at the same time you don't need to be like a huge crazy programmer because a lot of the time you're using like this layer name or value times time or stuff like that where you don't you don't need any of that and unsure if it'll help but like i have zero training in like programming like i'm a motion designer i came from graphic design motion design and picked up expressions and then scripting like i i'm coming from the same point everyone hear it so yeah anyone you can do it too like ratatouille right anyone can perfect um all right so you know i think i feel like we should just kind of keep this role in here we obviously got a little bit of a late start but um noel i know you have a cool example uh that you built uh this this rig that you built a couple years ago um that is i think a great example of like the kind of um recipes that you can think of for doing things with after effects that rely on expressions for part of them and just rely on like good after effects knowledge for part of them too um so uh we'll we'll keep it short but i want to i want to showcase this because i think it's a really clever thing and uh it's also something that um it's very similar when the assignments in expression session so i thought it'd be good to just kind of showcase the way you think here so i uh i've got your screen up so it's all you yeah so uh i want to show you this uh we actually rebuild this from scratch as part of expression session and then ask the students to build a different kind of system but this is all about creating kind of on-screen controls which is really fun for me and this started out uh because i was working on a project and i loved the tilt shift blur in photoshop but there's no equivalent in after effects and i was like i wonder if i could build one myself and then you know days later i was a sweaty unshaven nervous wreck but i had actually managed to do it uh thanks to zach in a lot of cases too but let me demo this for you as you can see here got this photo and right now um it's a little hard to see but what i'm going to do is turn off the ui you can kind of see how this is working it's got this nice tilt shift look to it um and let me put this back on basically i built all this functionality in this you know control up here so you can kind of like rotate the blur and then you know the fun part about it is that you can adjust all of these so like basically the blur is defined by like right here would be the non blurry edge and right here would be the the fully blurry edge and so you're kind of creating a range between those two points and so you can kind of drag this out to make that blur wider or kind of suck it in to make it you know shorter that area um but it's nice because you know this control can move independently it can move from uh all the way up here and then it stops automatically when it hits this here i believe yep yep and then this uh controller here controls that one as well so you can kind of set the distance and then you can kind of like move it in and out which is really fun to set up and this is all set up if you are an expression person just using clamp basically uh like as kyle was just saying it wasn't really that hard to set up it's just really cool and it gives you a lot of functionality and i did a couple things like building in this like the you know opacity of the of the controls and stuff so you can make this really like faint if you want to still work on it or you can turn it off altogether um it's all a guide layer so none of it would render on there but uh yeah i just had like tons of fun and look there's a slider up here that i used as well hey which controls the blur amount so you can like crank it up and then be like super blurry yeah so i don't know i had a lot of fun building this actually uh and i think it's one of the most fun projects to work on in expression session i agree i think it's very cool and so it's a great uh you know use case thing too where um it's it's something that just doesn't exist in after effects maybe there's a third-party uh plug-in that can can handle that but um sometimes if you think about the way things work and you've obviously got some effects going on behind the scenes to to drive that stuff as well but um you know so very few actually yeah i mean just a camera lens blur and a gradient ramp basically that's it so it's all effects that come with after effects as well so that's kind of cool and and you know this isn't too far away from the way that um you know even a lot of uh tools like duik or something where you provide all these screen controls it uses a script to build those on there and then the setup of what the on-screen controls are is basically what you have right here and can be a really nice way to work so that you um you aren't just like fiddling with little numbers sometimes it's nice to just be able to touch things and move things around in a more tactile way yeah that's something that i really learned from taking character animation boot camp actually that like on-screen controls just give artists and animators it's just a more natural way to work basically you know touching and grabbing things rather than adjusting values like you were just saying so yeah cool shout out to morgan for teaching thank you awesome um and then zach you were going to tell us just a little bit we kind of mentioned um i mentioned scripting a minute ago and i know some people sometimes get confused about expressions and scripts and plugins and just like what the differences are between some of those so um do you want to maybe briefly talk to that yeah i i have a handy dandy slide and it is up so i yeah the all right i'm just like pulling my version of the you're a little quiet here oh well that happened i'm sorry so there are oh there's a lot of confusion around this and a lot of the time people will say one word and mean the other which me being uh well me being me kind of annoys me but they are different and it does make a difference in that expressions are what we're talking about here it's what expression session goes into it's what you know dan ebbert's whole thing is and expressions are contained in after effects on single properties so you'll have an expression like we showed on on scale or position or opacity or master properties and they just exist in that little bubble they don't they don't affect anything outside of it unless that also has an expression so it's like they'll take data in and do stuff and they only live in that little world and that's it and those expressions are written in javascript or the old extend script engine but that's it they're just like in after effects they run every single frame and do some calculation and output something scripts don't live in after effects they like live on after effects so a script will be something like like do it or you know explode shape layers if you're into that sort of thing yeah as an example and as an example just throwing it out there and the idea of scripts is that 99 of the time everything a script can do you can do yourself by hand like it might take you a million years but scripts just automate actions in after effects so something like doick it's a script that applies expressions and builds layers for you like yes it gives you a rig but really all it's doing is making nulls and writing code you could do that yourself but scripts are written outside of after effects and they apply to after effects as software and those are still written in an extend script this like 20 year old version of javascript with own uh adobe miss to it and then this whole third thing are plugins and those are like changing the the how everything works so like if an expression is some piece of oh this analogy is about to break an expression is like something you buy for your house a script is something you hang on your house a plug-in is like tearing down a wall or adding a whole extension like a whole new thing plug-ins they change after a whole whole a whole hole yeah some of some plugins add new effects like all the trapcode stuff those are plugins or or the video copilot stuff but some plugins also add new behaviors and like big change aspects as a whole like uh the i can't remember what it's called video copilot has this launcher tool uh that yeah yeah i'm blanking too i use it every day right about but also things like adding new codecs and stuff where they don't give you graphic effects but they're changing the way after effects works inherently and those are written in c plus plus and that's a whole other crazy beast now of course the question is why should you care so the thing is if you're trying to look up like how do you do how do you randomly move a layer well if you type in randomly move after effects script you're going to get something that somebody's created and maybe is up for sale or you're gonna find like deeper programming things when really all you're looking for is the word wiggle and so that's sort of why it's good to know the nomenclature the the names of things because if you're looking for expressions you you'll have a lot easier time searching up expressions or scripts and like if you bought some scripting training but really you want expressions training like that's not really going to help you out yeah and there's there's a ton of great resources online for expressions and you can ask uh people uh there's a ton of people in the after effects community that are very helpful uh you know when you ask about this stuff but yeah understanding what you are asking is definitely a crucial thing there yeah um yeah effects console is what all of that is yes shouting at us uh yes that one sorry when you're when you're trying to do all this other stuff sometimes little things like that just disappear from your brain i love effects console i the only time i don't use it is when i'm doing a demo like this and i have to like use the vanilla after effects effects menu um okay so let's keep rolling along here i want to get to some questions too but i want to make sure i cover the things that i need to cover so uh speaking of things like scripts zack actually has quite a few uh scripts and and tools available which is uh if you go to ae scripts you can uh find his stuff i believe we have a link that will be dropping uh here as well that will take you directly to his stuff lots of really handy things there and uh you know zack uh somebody told me that you have a birthday coming up yes um i don't remember when it started but i guess a few years ago i discovered capitalism and decided to start offering a discount code on my birthday for all of my scripts which is a little uh no it's a lot obnoxious but lucky for you uh this year everything is 31 off and on sunday august 30th with the code that will toss up on screen what's up now and um well that's handy yeah so it's like a one day only thing for a discount on stuff and yeah i mean i don't think it's obnoxious it's your birthday and you're giving back to everyone else i i think that's so difficult i'm giving to everyone the opportunity to give me money yes so i i hear you but we'll see excellent excellent um and you know noel i know you actually have several uh awesome tools uh available as well um i've got those up here uh you've got a couple of these great texture packs and wiper packs and stuff and then obsessive layers which is actually one of the things that's in my after effects um interface every day just great for keeping everything tidy uh so i just wanted to call those out too and um yeah shout out to kyle martinez who developed uh obsessive layers with me yes for me or with me he did all the coding and you know i think a lot of people who uh you know when you when you work way up you start figuring out all these these ways to improve your own workflow and uh you know sometimes you're smart enough to make those products available to other people too and ideally make a little bit of money off of it but uh yeah maybe you know sometimes at 31 off it's about the love it is okay i feel like i should take a question or two here and then uh we'll hop over and talk about expression session a little bit um and man the time just flies when you're doing this huh um i see a couple questions about markers using markers and expressions and i feel like maybe we should just kind of quickly say that is something that you can absolutely do you can use markers to trigger expressions or drive them different ways and if i recall correctly there's actually a a lesson late in expression session that's uh all about doing that yeah yep the magic of markers yeah no do you want to talk a little bit more about what we do no not right well yes okay for example one of the things that we demo which i love is using markers to flip between different mouth states so that you can animate a character talking um which that's the kind of thing that like i could see being super useful you just like add a marker and then type like the letter basically and then the mouth forms into that shape so that was really useful um yeah yeah then there's the beast [Laughter] yeah that's a super fun one uh i i think in general the the exam the projects in the in the course are super fun i i was one of the teaching assistants for it for the first few sessions so i'm pretty familiar with it myself um i i like this comment i didn't actually see who it was from but uh it's always a fun trade-off do i make this easy for future me or do i just go heads down and get this faster now uh which i think is a great encapsulation of some of the stuff we've been talking about like um sometimes you won't realize that futureyou is gonna have to deal with the thing but um especially certain clients sometimes you start realizing that it's good to make life easy for future you by you know giving an extra 10 minutes now to set things up yeah uh this idea is something that noel kind of mentioned early on um and that he mentioned like the rabbit hole and this is this idea of like it's so easy to you know just just add one more feature add one more protection or one more thing to your code and then you know you spent three days on something where really you shouldn't have yeah and it's really hard to tell because like sometimes you think this is going to be worth the effort and then you get into it you realize actually this was a misstep but in my opinion every one of these is something you're learning for the next time and so it's like you're still learning the skills you're still learning the habits you're learning what does or doesn't work and maybe you can never use this one super specific expression ever again but you can learn you can use what you've learned for the next one so there's still some value there but yeah absolutely i won't pretend that um you know sometimes i just enjoy doing those things as thought experiments but you can fully acknowledge that that's why you're doing it and uh is this thing possible i don't know and then a day later sometimes the answer is no but um okay so oof time time time there's never enough um so let's take a second here and talk just a little bit about expression session which is of course that you if you want to just really dive deep into expressions and learn you know useful ways to use them that are uh easy uh all the way up to really advanced upper level stuff um school of motion does have that course available uh does either of you wanna just you know give me a couple sentences about who should take this and and maybe what they're gonna learn why they would wanna take this well i'll start uh first of all like if you know nothing about expressions you could still take this class so we ramp up from like literally like how do i like even just press option and click on the stopwatch kind of beginning and like talk about the the idea of expressions and stuff all the way up to really complicated you know tasks so i think anybody could take it i think definitely if you're going to take saunders uh advanced advanced motion methods yeah amm uh you should definitely take this class first i think because he goes he uses a lot of expressions in what he lectures about and expects you to have some knowledge of them already um so um yeah i just think it's not probably for somebody who's a complete beginner but if you're at that kind of animation bootcamp level i think the class would be great for you um yeah anybody who really just wants to save time i think yeah yeah uh from like a little bit more technical point of view if you're if you've played with any sort of javascripty stuff before but like maybe you're new to expressions in after effects there's still value there in that yeah we do spend a good chunk of time teaching what like teaching the basics of javascript what are objects and properties and arrays and how do you access this stuff and nice syntax and formatting and so that yeah okay it'll start a little slow but what it really excels is that expression session isn't a course on coding it's a course on expressions and part of expressions and technical rigging in after effects is learning the workflows and when to use things and how to break down a problem into steps and so if you know the answer is i need to create markers and then have my animation loop every time we see a marker in the timeline well then it doesn't the coding part is only half the battle what you really need to know is how to break down that skill separate into components and then work on each one until you're building a bigger thing and so a lot of this like problem solving and different way of thinking is what expression special expression session spends a lot of time going into absolutely it's it's very much like a creative problem-solving uh course that um just happens to use javascript code as the the solutions for a lot of those uh questions but um it's very much uh like i said as someone who has been a teaching assistant for it um it's it's very much about figuring out how to think about these problems and then using these tools that you're being provided incrementally more and more complex to to offer solutions and you get all the way to the end of the course and you make this really complicated um ui thing that actually has no key frames at all which again you know maybe it's just a fun thought experiment but um all the stuff that you're doing in there is so super useful for all these other ways that you're going to be using it all the time in my opinion which is obviously amazing i mean i i get it's maybe a little biased but even if you're not i feel like a lot of the stuff that we teach as far as this problem-solving and workflow-based um kind of systems not systems but like workplace workflow-based approaches will help even with your non-expression projects because like you i everyone on the stream you have definitely had comps where you have like 300 layers half them are off half are shy and you don't know what's going on and so just learning the value and benefit of breaking things up into more modular components like there's there's so much to be said for thinking about how you're working both before you start and like once you're actually in it and so i don't know i find that really valuable i uh yeah and we do a lot on master properties as well if anybody's interested in really doing a deep dive into that stuff we cover that a lot uh and even things about like shape layers and how to set that up that i didn't even really know before we started so like the problem solving is really out of control on the class that's really good out of control in the absolute best way um i've been using expressions for many years i teach expressions at conferences and stuff like that and i definitely picked up a ton of stuff by going through the course so um you know props to you guys for putting together something that uh is very informative for people of a bunch of different levels i've i've seen a couple people in the in the chat here talking about how much it uh they took it and it's just like super accelerated their workflow and stuff like that so i think that's a that's a great thing um and we did bring in great artists as well yeah art for the class as well jimmy simpson lisa virtudez um some really fun people john flores shout out uh so yeah thanks to you all and i think the arts are really fun for this class i agree uh in in general it's just a very fun class and uh for some of those asking yes the level of puns in that course is like if you think today is ridiculous it's it's just off the charts yeah um okay i want to keep moving here because uh we probably need to be done in just a few minutes which is crazy uh real quick noel you also teach after effects kickstart uh do you just want to give me like a you know super quick uh summary of that and who might want to be taking that absolutely the answer to that question is that after effects kickstart is i'm slightly biased slightly but i believe it is the best most fun way to learn after effects that exists in the known universe so like i said i'm biased but if you don't know after effects and you're listening to this now which i find pretty strange if you are but if you are you should definitely take after effects kickstart which like starts at the very beginning of your after effects life and just takes you and like basically you learn how to make a keyframe and then by the end of it you're animating a 30 second commercial that ariel costa designed it's kind of an amazing thing to watch every session how much people learn actually it's a great it's a great class if i do say so myself um you know i i will also agree with you um i mean obviously you're a guest here on my show so i'm gonna be nice to you but um as something that's also as someone who's also been teaching after effects for i think like eight years or something like that um i just think it's an excellent course and honestly i'm jealous of the people that take it now because when we were learning after effects 15 years ago uh i wish courses like this existed back then because it probably took me three years to learn the stuff that people are getting in like eight weeks now right yeah it's totally true it's really true so um okay speaking of learning things uh you both have some uh conference appearances coming up and i want to give those some shout outs um trying to keep rolling quick here because we're almost at uh time even though you know it's a little squishy but um i wanted to give a shout out to uh here where are we going here we go um adobe video world is coming up in just a couple of weeks here september 12th through 17th and uh zach i believe that you are appearing there is that right i am i'm giving three talks one on introduction to master properties where like the kind of behind the scenes stuff you didn't see today we'll go into that kind of showing how to set up projects use the master properties and then use expressions to links to make a dynamic there'll also be an intro to expressions which is like you know a little bit this whole world we're talking about and an intro to scripting as well in case you do want to see what it's like to be building tools for after effects so those are my three little talks awesome school of motion has a big presence there there's actually four uh instructors presenting there as well as a handful of other like noteworthy alumni and stuff so uh we're sort of just slowly taking over um okay so i know that our time is short but um i actually have a couple of passes the uh to give away to adobe video world um let me bring this back up real quick but um so if you want an opportunity to go to this uh it's in about two weeks here we have a form that we're going to drop into the chat in just a second here and between now and the end of the show you can uh drop your name and email in there and we won't use it for anything except just contacting you if you win but um uh yeah we have uh i believe three passes to give away so um yeah if you are available for that uh sign up for that real quick there it is i see it in the chat um and we're going to keep moving on to some other stuff while we talk about that but um yeah uh there's there's a ton of really great content there for you can learn about premiere you can learn about after effects you can learn about cinema 4d uh there's stuff about freelancing and the business side of things as well as general creativity a lot of really cool sessions there i'm one of the speakers as well but i'm always excited just to watch all the other sessions because even when you're more advanced that kind of stuff is great for just like seeing how other people think and how they approach stuff so um i really i really like conferences looking forward to when they can actually be in person again hopefully someday soon um okay so i've uh you know there's also another really big conference coming up pretty soon that uh a little birdie told me that you are presenting at knoll so uh i'm gonna show that on my screen here it is adobe max which uh this year is all online and all free which is pretty amazing that adobe is doing that um obviously you know it's a pretty big pivot to take like a 14 000 person conference and put it online but um so adobe uh october 20th through 22nd adobe max is is there you do need to sign up so that you can like register for the classes you want to you want to watch but noel do you want to tell us a little bit about what you're going to be talking about there yeah definitely um and everybody here should join keanu and myself uh when we're hanging out uh so you know so what i'm doing is i'm doing a four-part lab with the amazing sarah beth morgan she takes the first two where she talks about design and concepting she creates an illustration based on like a client brief and then i take it over from her i teach people how to animate in after effects real quick and then i show them how i would animate uh her drawing and it's a really fun two hours uh we worked really hard on it so i think uh yeah you guys should all check it out it's gonna be good awesome yeah i i got just a little sneak peek uh sarah beth and i were talking a little bit as we were setting up for my last live stream and uh it looks really cool i'm really excited to to watch what you two do together and how that works out yeah it was a great honor to work with her honestly cool and um uh our our fearless leader joey is also speaking at adobe max um about the basics of motion motion design and then some other dude named like kylie hermione or something like that yeah he has a couple sessions too but they're probably probably not that they're probably boring yeah probably wow um okay so uh i i feel like we need to go ahead and wrap up here um so frank and ella if you haven't already if you want to go ahead and pick a couple winners and i'll announce those in just a minute here but while we kind of wrap stuff up um do you guys want to just kind of quickly no we'll start with you if if people want to you know know more about you or follow you on the socials or anything like that where can they do those things well everything is on my website so you go to tdr.nyc and everything's there but you can follow me on twitter i'm at drawingroomnyc and on instagram i'm at noel honig and i'd love to see you all there so so definitely follow me yeah awesome how about you zach uh usually twitter at zed love it or see love it few americans um also reluctantly instagram at the same just love it everywhere you look uh feel free to reach out with any expression or scripting questions i spend a lot of my time helping folks and answering questions so i'm around if you need to get a hold of me what a nice guy it's a canadian thing like you're obliged to you lose citizenship if you're just not nice oh i didn't realize that was a requirement oh it's a good thing um okay i am looking to see if okay it looks like they're they're picking winners so i'm gonna take a second and go ahead and um let you uh let you nice folks know uh in two weeks here um i will be back with another episode of workflow show and we will be talking about cavalry the the newly released uh just like two weeks ago maybe three weeks ago um they were an open beta for quite a while and it's just released um where uh cavalry is a new motion design app that has this really cool like procedural workflow um works quite a bit different than uh you know obviously we've been spending a lot of time talking about after effects today but um you know they they took a very different approach to solving some of the you know kinds of things that we were solving today with expressions so um i'm really interested to dig into that and uh see what they have to say no comment from anyone else all right well if you want a point some people are like hey cavalry's like 2d houdini which to me just makes it might as well call it toodini i don't like that i'm stalling just for a second because i would love to announce these winners here on um here on the thing and uh but you're so good at stalling kyle it's amazing good you are at that that is great um your skills are amazing do uh while i'm waiting for that do either of you have um no i think you said you actually had a couple of uh projects that you just finished up be cool to like plug those to drive people to your site if you like i don't know sure yeah um are you showing my site or uh no i just talk it up for a second uh i can probably show your site though you start talking i just finished i'll talk slowly uh yeah so i just finished up uh a couple of worked on this campaign for golden wolf um where i did animation and it's really fun and i just put that spot which is like their wii uh the old navy we are wii campaign you might have been seeing it on tv and stuff so i did a lot of the 2d animation in there with uh creative direction from golden wolf and some other animators as well but i just put that on my site love for you to check that out um it's really actually a fun spot and it kind of addresses specific 2020 things uh so check it out there was also a canadian version that was made i know so zack maybe you want to watch that one maybe and uh also just put up some work that i worked on for verizon i just did a little bit of a quick update on my site so definitely check it out awesome cool well let me see if i have some winners here i see uh i can see cursors somewhere moving around i don't know you know we could probably also just announce it in the chat if maybe i'm just not seeing it on my big disorganized showboard no i got it i got it okay great awesome so i have three uh three people here i have a lindsay bist line maybe um and arbnor hezerage sorry for probably butchering that and then also coralie legrand whose name i recognize i know she's a school of motion alum from at least a course or two so um that's really great congrats to you three and we'll get in touch with you with a code so that you can attend adobe video world uh virtual conference for free and hopefully learn all kinds of amazing stuff from uh zack and myself and a bunch of other smart people uh okay well man i feel like we could just keep doing this all day um but you know we're already running late since i uh messed a bunch of stuff up at the beginning so we should probably unfortunately uh end this show do either of you have anything else that you want to give us as parting thoughts here thanks everybody for watching really appreciate it thanks congrats on the winners and um yes have a great friday yeah and thanks for the patience everyone thanks for hopping over here into a different stream uh i'm gonna figure out what happened there but um uh and i actually just saw a question pop up from todd are there any adobe employees in here and yes i think we talked about this earlier our our buddy john is here there he is waving um which you know also functions as a nice goodbye wave which i feel like we should maybe all do here and then i'll press this little button to send us out and that'll be the end which is sad but you know what we're we're on to other things and yeah have a great friday have a great weekend everyone uh thanks to both of you for you know coming and talking with me today and putting up with my technical nonsense and thanks to everyone in the chat for hanging with us um and sending us your questions i always get way more than i ever have a chance to ask but um yeah thanks everybody and we'll see you in two weeks [Music] you

Channel: School of Motion

Views: 9,744

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Id: J1GODucgRSE

Length: 70min 5sec (4205 seconds)

Published: Fri Aug 28 2020