Now these After Effects techniques that I love fall into two categories; quick and quicker.
So let's not mess about if it fits the style this can add a lot of extra movement and depth to
your animation these are made by creating four similar brush Strokes with the textured brush
in Photoshop then looping them in After Effects so they change every four frames or so and then
applying them where the Shadows or highlights might appear in your design and using a map or
a mask to confine them to just that layer now you'll have to do this a few times depending on
your design but good things come to those who in the olden times printers used to mess up sometimes
not like the reliable bastions of Technology they are today if I want a retro printed feel
I like to misalign the line art of an animation first we need to separate them so we'll take
our finished animation add the extract effect and drag the histogram over from the left to
remove the dark colored line art and just leave the colors remaining then duplicate that layer
with controller command D and then on that layer adjust the histogram in the opposite direction to
believe just the line art then we can select any of these layers and move its position about
and misalign it as much or as little as we want and some looping texture over the top for good
measure too here's an animation I made with some fancy gradients but I like the ball to
really feel shiny and reflect the colors on the other layers so we can do that by duplicating
the layer we want to reflect dragging that over closer to our object a little bit and adding the
set matte effect to it then we're going to take the mat from our Circle layer and add a gaussian
blur and we'll pump that up a fair bit now you can put the gaussian blur above the set mat and that
creates an interesting more stylized effect but if you want it to look more realistic we'll drag
that below our set matte effect and to remove the blur that is going on outside of the circle
we can just duplicate that set matte effect again with controller command D and drag that below the
gaussian blur to restrict it just to that Circle again and now if we increase the blurriness and
maybe just move the shape back a bit we can see it isn't as visible on the very edges of
our Circle which creates a nice realistic effect and looks like it's wrapping around a 3D sphere
now you'll probably be fading things on and off a lot by keyframing its opacity so let's
spice it up by animating its color at the same time so to do that we will add a fill effect
and where that layer is transparent let's keyframe its color then move it along to where it is fully
visible and change that fills color to white so now it changes color as it fades on and
it's a little more interesting that same spice pairs very well with gradients too and I'll do
this by adjusting our gradient fill so instead of going from black to white or any other two
colors we'll add a new color in the middle which would normally be a 50 Gray but we can make it a
bit more interesting just by adding a slightly warmer gray into the mix and you can do this as
subtle as you want and I think it works better the more colors there are so we can even add a
darker cooler color to the darker gray and keep the lighter gray a bit warmer it won't work for
every project but if you want to add a tiny bit more life and color to your artwork that
is barely perceptible this is a great way to do it okay we're halfway through I hope you're
finding these techniques helpful if you're up for it living a like really does help these videos and
me out a lot and if you're new to motion design in After Effects for the last year I've been creating
the ultimate beginner's guide to motion design called motion Foundation which is coming out next
month that is all I can share at the moment but uh please stay tuned for updates about that shortly
you want to transition from a circle to a square or rectangle don't mess about editing the path and
getting yourself all tied up in bezier handles just create a new shape with the rectangle tool
open its rectangle properties its path and then animate its roundness and you can go from Circle
to square seamlessly shake your animation around a bit not too much like a camera Shake but like
the subtle shake that I've been using on all of those titles now I love this because it reminds
me of Legacy Media like a film spool not perfectly aligned or a tape head in the VHS I'm not 100 sure
why but all the stuff shakes around a little bit so on a new adjustment layer on top of everything
we can add the transform effect and alter option click the stopwatch next to position to enter in
the wiggle expression and we're going to add in a frequency of 12 and an amplitude of one so that
12 times a second it will randomly move one pixel in any direction and we get a tiny subtle Shake
we can see more if we zoom in this will shake your layer away from the edges though so let's
increase the scale just by one percent to cancel that out I also love the blooming highlights of
film and old media that you can replicate by stacking some glows in After Effects but they
can very easily overpower the image and be kind of finicky to a shelves using the threshold and
the radius properties and you can't always get a good result reliably very quickly so what I like
to do is add a glow effect to an adjustment layer on top of everything we can keep the default glow
I'll duplicate it increase the radius a little bit more then duplicate it and increase the radius
again and I'm not worried about how ludicrously bright the image is I'm just looking at how nice
and realistic the fall off is how the glow kind of dissipates then I like to add a curves effect over
the top of all of those glows and then drag the brightness down so the glow is starting to look
a little more like what I want now if we toggle that adjustment layer on and off we do see that
it is losing a lot of the contrast of the image so if we do want to keep that we can change the
blending mode of that adjustment layer to screen so this is just adding glow on top
and now we can just adjust this curves effect to decide how bright our glow is and what the
threshold is which areas of our image how bright it needs to be to glow and I just find this a
little more intuitive to to adjust then trying to balance a handful of different properties across
three different glow layers to tweak around now putting eyes on anything instantly turns it into
a character is this a cheap trick absolutely is it overused impossible I use it because it
creates a connection between the audience and the character I'd mainly do it to get a bit of
strangeness or humor to the scene a pencil is a little bit interesting but when it becomes a
living thing and they're visibly loving it it kind of makes you think what kind of perverse sentience
is happening within this universe and that's the kind of question I think we should all be asking
not everything has to be an optical Sugar Rush with flashing colors and shapes zipping around
hijacking your dopamine to keep you glued to your screen for that sweet sweet engagement
as our ability to focus shrivels up and turns into dust in the gutter now I've
animated plenty of work like that and when I do it's usually compensating for a lack
of substance now I'm finding Stillness more and more refreshing and having that contrast
will make your intense motion more impactful now I love this three minute sequence from
Ghost in the Shell it doesn't move the plot forward it's just establishing shots of the
city setting the tone most of the shots have very subtle animation and some are just stills
of course fantastic design Sound and Music help enormously with this
and obviously in motion design we're working to a
brief where we often have to capture attention quickly but it is helpful
to remember that more animation isn't your only tool to make better animation
tomorrow