Tutorial: Kinetic Typography in After Effects | Part 3

Here's how to create kinetic typography masterpieces.

Ready to be a kinetic type master? This three part series will teach you everything you need to know to start creating your own kinetic typography masterpieces. In this tutorial you'll start your kinetic type animation by covering things like precomposing elements for re-use, synching up audio to animation, using layer markers intelligently, and working with complex camera moves.

There's a ton of info in this three part series, and by the end of it you'll have your very own kinetic typography video and a TON of new skills in After Effects.

Check out the Resources tab for a quick look at MoGraph History with the piece that started it all, MK12's Brazil.

Download the project files below

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Tutorial Full Transcript Below 👇:

Joey Korenman (00:22): Joey here at School of Motion and welcome to day 18 of 30 days of after effects. This is our final kinetic type video where we are going to finish the project that we started two videos ago. If you haven't watched the first two videos, stop what you're doing, don't be silly and go watch those right now. Now in this video, I'm going to kind of jump around a little bit more so we can get it done, but I'm also going to show you some cool tricks. Like some of the finishing touches that I did to really finesse the video and add some of the cool effects that you saw in the preview. Don't forget to sign up for a free student account. So you can grab the project files from this lesson, and then they set the whole thing yourself now into after effects. We go, well, here we are with part three of kinetic type.

Joey Korenman (01:06): And if you guys notice that I sound a little different today, it's because I'm using this new vocal technique called strep throat, which it might make me sound a little bit older, maybe, maybe a little more mature. So today we are going to finish the kinetic type project, and we're going to do it a little bit differently than we have in parts one and two, rather than just keep plodding forward and literally recreating the entire thing. What I'm going to do is start to jump around and show you specific things. And the reason I'm doing that is just because yeah, if you remember from part two, we got as far as, is he a nutcase to finish the rest of this? Most of it is going to be just using the same techniques we've been doing. Right. Um, and let me show you my final campier, excuse me, if there it goes, my first voice crack of this tutorial.

Joey Korenman (02:01): Uh, so looking at this, I wanted to show you guys, this is the actual comp that I animated everything in, and you'll notice it looks just like the comp we've been building, you've got your comp markers up here to help me sync everything. And you've got a lot of different move Knowles for the camera moves and everything else has just built out the exact same way. So I'm going to dive into some of these pre comps and talk about specific pieces of this animation, uh, that I did. And that way we can sort of speed the process up a little bit. So here we go. First thing I wanted to talk about are these strange, glowing fireballs that you may have noticed kind of sprinkled around the animation? Uh, so the reason I put those in there was because, and frankly, this was probably not a smart thing to do, but it's, it's maybe a bad habit of mine.

Joey Korenman (02:52): Um, you know, just looking at the composition, it felt like it needed something to kind of help draw your eye around the composition. Sometimes when a composition feels flat to me, what I like to do is put a contrast ING design element somewhere, um, to kind of help give it a little bit more interest in and make it not feel so flat. So, um, what I thought might be cool would be to create these sort of flickering torches or fires, um, in this scene in the movie takes place in the woods, it's dark. Um, and so I thought it maybe made sense to kind of have these little torches kind of sprinkled around and they just help give it a little bit of visual interest. So here's how I made those I'm going to jump in. Um, and so this is what they look like.

Joey Korenman (03:41): All right. They're very simple. Um, but I want to show you guys how I made them just because this is, I think this is a good example of how you can just sort of be clever and it's better to be clever than good, I guess. So this is how I made these, um, each one of these, there's basically just four circles. So if I solo one of these and I preview it, it's just a circle moving in a circle. And the way I did that was I made a shape layer. Um, actually this is a solid with a mask on it, but you use a shape layer. It doesn't matter. And I offset the anchor point. You'll notice it's not in the center of the circle. And the reason I did that is because now by rotating this, it appears to kind of shift around instead of just not doing anything, which is what would happen if you rotated a circle with the anchor point right in the middle.

Joey Korenman (04:33): So the way I'm rotating, this is with an expression. Uh, whenever I need something to rotate or move at a, at a constant speed, I use this expression time times a number, uh, and then in this case, I also added a number to it. Now, the reason I did that is because I have four circles here. They're all rotating at the same speed. Some of them are rotating at 300. Some of them are rotating native 300, but I didn't want any of them to line up and be in the same place. So that's why I added an extra number to it. That number is like an offset. You could just think of it like that. So now with two of these circles, let me de-select it. So it doesn't give you a headache, right? So now you can see these two circles, they're rotating in opposite directions in their offset.

Joey Korenman (05:20): So they're not, they feel very, they don't feel like they're in sync with each other. I also have an expression on the opacity of each layer and I have a very simple expression. It's just wiggle and the wiggle expression. This is a cool one. You can type this in, on any property in after effects that allows for key frames. And what this does is it basically takes whatever value you've put in there. So right now my opacity of this layer is set to 25. So when you type in wiggle and then in parentheses, you put two numbers, the first number is the frequency. So my frequency is eight and this is measured in times per second. So I'm wiggling the value by, you know, eight times per second, by a value of up to 10, it's sort of the maximum amount. So what this means is eight times per second, this value will change.

Joey Korenman (06:16): And because it's initially at 25 and my amount is 10, it could be as low as 15 or as high as 35. And if I move my play head around and you look at this number, you'll see that it really does fluctuate eight times per second by that amount. And so all that's doing is it's sort of making it flicker. Um, and just to show you, if I, if I turn this layer off for a minute, if I had the wiggle set to one time per second, you can still see it changes, but it's a lot smoother. If I set it to 24 times a second, it's changing every frame. So by setting it to eight times per second, it flickers, but there's still a little bit of smoothness to it. And I sort of just experimented with these values, um, to figure out which ones I liked.

Joey Korenman (07:02): And you do that four times and you get something like this. Uh, each of these circles is set to linear light mode, and I just kind of went through every single mode. Um, here's a cool trick. Maybe you guys didn't know this. When I made these, they were set to normal and I wanted to try each of these transfer modes to see which one was going to work the best. So, and I knew that it was probably going to be one of these modes here or one of these modes. So I could say, okay, add lighten screen. But of course there's a shortcut. If you select all these layers and you hold shift, and then you hit the minus or the plus key on the top row of your keyboard on the number pad, it will cycle between transfer moats. So this way I can quickly sort of figure out, ah, that one looks good, right?

Joey Korenman (07:55): And you can just quickly kind of cycle between them and, and see what works. So that's a neat little keyboard shortcut, and there you go. So now we have that. And then in the main comp, let me, let me find one of these here, like this one up here. So if I, uh, if I solo this, you can see, I have some effects on here. This is actually just my way of making a quick and dirty glow. Um, I don't actually ever use the glow fact and I have another tutorial called better glows and after effects, where I talk about this technique. So watch that if you, if you want to learn how to do this, um, but pretty much all I'm doing is I'm blurring my layer, right? And then I'm using the CC composite effect to composite the original back over the blurred version.

Joey Korenman (08:46): And it creates a, a glow. And so you can see if I move this here, this is what the layer looks like. And then you blur it and you CC composite and you get a quick glow. So very handy, very handy. All right. So those are the torches. All right. So then as we scrub through, we'd got to this part, uh, in the last video. And so all I've done after this is I have another copy of the footprints sort of start to walk over, and then you see the next character say, no, he's a rock biter. This type animation is very, very simple. So let's jump into that pre comp and I'll show you what I did. Um, so the words literally just pop on and sort of float up into place. And I animated these words a little differently on purpose because this character is not, he's got a different personality than the first character.

Joey Korenman (09:44): The first one who says, is he a nutcases, this cookie harebrained, mad hat or looking guy, uh, and this guy actually is dressed very proper and he's got this like long coat on. And, and so I thought he would speak a little differently. And so I was sort of trying to make the character of his animation match his character. That sounded really silly. So, uh, so to make these words do that, it's very simple. I literally just animated the white position with simple sort of, you know, no easing out of the first key frame, but a nice ease into the second key frame. And if you'll notice they just appear. If I go back one frame and then forward the words just appear. And, and you know, sometimes when you're starting out in after effects, you really want everything to animate on from nothing to fully visible.

Joey Korenman (10:37): And you don't always have to do that. You can sometimes just pop things on, especially when you're doing kinetic type and you've got characters or voiceover that's, that's talking really quickly. Uh, you can save yourself a lot of time by just popping things on. So, no, he's a, and then rock biter. Literally those two words don't even move. They just pop on. Uh, and I, what I did was I created in illustrator this rock and I created two copies of it. One is a full rock and the other one has this bite taken out of it. And I'll hop over into my illustrator file and I'll show you, right? So here's the whole rock. Here's the bitten bitten. Yes, the bitten rock. And then these are little shards of rock that I made. So if we pop back here, uh, if you look down here, you can see this layer here.

Joey Korenman (11:31): This is the rock, and it just sort of floats up into frame. There's a Y position in a rotation, key frame on it. And that's it, it just sort of floats up piece of cake when it gets to this frame where the word biter appears. I just swap out this layer. And if I look at this source name, uh, it's actually not going to show you. Let's see, it's not going to show you which one. So right here, you can see that this layer ends. Another layer begins. This new layer is the rock that has the bite taken out of it. And then at same time, I turn on a pre comp I made with these shards and all I'm doing is animating the position, scale and rotation of them. Now you'll notice that the position property, I have not separated the dimensions on these and the reason I didn't, I will them in straight for you.

Joey Korenman (12:24): Let me turn off all the key frames on one of these. Okay. So here's what I wanted to do. I wanted all of these shards to sort of fly off into space and then scale down to zero and rotate a little bit. So it was rotate this a little bit like this. And actually before we scaled down to zero, uh, I want to show you the reason that I haven't separated the dimensions on the position. And that is because if you leave the position, property locked X and Y you gain the ability to bend your position curve like this and create curved animation paths. Uh, and you can even do it. If I kind of move the play head to the middle of the animation, I can do it and sort of see interactively where my layer is going to be. At that moment. I can even use my pen tool and grab this last key frame and pull the handle out of that one.

Joey Korenman (13:21): So this makes it a lot easier to get things, to move in a curved path. If these, if the X and Y dimensions are separated after flexible, it should do this. Now, the only caveat to this is that now you are locked into using the, uh, the speed graph editor. So here's my value graph for my position, key frames. And you can see, I can select the key frames, but I can't adjust the curve at all. So you can use the speed graph and the speed graph I don't like to use. Another option is you can create your curved path and then separate the dimensions, but it's going to mess your curve up a little bit. And you can see now I can't actually change the shape of this curve. So this is one of those crummy things about after effects that I don't know, maybe someone out there knows a better way, but what I usually end up doing is I'll leave the, the X and Y locked, and I'll just suck it up and I'll use the speed graph editor.

Joey Korenman (14:23): And the basic way it works is if you select a bunch of key frames and you pull this out, it's, it's making all of these values ease in more strongly into this key frame. And if I select these and I push the busy handle in, it's creating less easing out, um, so you can sort of get the same result. But if you go in and you look at the value curve for these, you see that it doesn't work perfectly. It doesn't work as well as just editing the value graph. So actually I'm going to fix this for the scale and rotation and the position you're going to see you get this crummy little, this little elbow here that you don't want, but what, what are you gonna do? So it's good enough. It's a short little burst animation, and that looks cool. So that's how we created the shards.

Joey Korenman (15:16): And there is your a no, he's a rock biter animation. All right. So let's hop back here. And after that line, now we have the, the, uh, the crazy guy, crazy character. He says a rock bite are kind of under his breath. And so I animated those words. So they would kind of feel like they were being spoken under the breath. Nope. That's not the right layer here it is. Uh, if we look at this, you can see that they just sort of lower and settle into place very softly. And I was trying to animate that. That was the word I was thinking of was softly. So all that's happening is why position no easing and then ease in same with rotation. And they just sort of land in place. Visually. I, I made it small and kind of in a weird spot on the screen so that it really did feel like, oh, he's just muttering under his breath, but then here's the big moment a rock biter.

Joey Korenman (16:13): So first let's talk about this big camera move. So it looks like the camera's pulling a hundred miles backwards to sort of allow for all the room that this line is going to take up on screen. And the truth is it's actually not moving that far back. It's moving back, you know, a decent amount and it's rotating a little bit, but I'm actually faking a lot of it because one issue that you're going to have, if you have a really big camera move and you have a texture like this, that we're creating, remember this background texture here, this is being created with the rep a tile effects and, you know, the rapid tile effect works great. And actually, if you look when we're, when the camera is here, this is the actual size of the texture. Rapid tile is repeating it over and over again, to create this seamless tile texture behind us or behind the cop.

Joey Korenman (17:10): But if, but already the numbers are very high. I've had to really make a lot of extra kind of texture. And the problem is if I really moved the camera, as far back as it looks like it's going, I would have to crank these values so high that it would probably crash after effects. So what I did was I moved at a decent amount, but at the same time, so here is our no, he's a rock biter. At the same time I did that. I scaled that layer down to zero and I rotated it to kind of match what the camera's doing. So that's sort of fakes more distance. All right. So S you know, simple little, just slight of hand. So let's take a look at this type. This type is animated very much the same way a nutcase was animated, just big bouncy animation.

Joey Korenman (18:06): Um, you know, each word gets a little bit bigger. Like, you know, like his emotion is getting bigger as he finishes his sentence. I duplicated that layer, offset it a little bit, made one a different color. So a lot of the same techniques we've already used. And then at the same time I created these rocks. So each of these little rocks is, you know, one of my illustrator rocks. And I realized as I started doing this, that actually left the inside of them empty. So I took a white solid, and I masked it just like this to fill on the rock. And so then as a rock biter appears you get all of these little rocks that kind of spray out. Um, and so I just animated the position in the rotation of them, which is very simple. Cool. Now let's talk about the crack.

Joey Korenman (18:56): So the crack, this is something that, um, I spent a little more time probably than is even necessary, but one of the things I wanted to do with this crack was have it animate on so that it's thinner as it's coming on. And then it thickens up the way a real crack would. And there's always this leading edge of fineness that gets filled in. And so let me copy this crack layer into a new comp. So I'll paste the crack layer and, you know, the normal way that I would reveal something like this on would be to make a shape layer, you know, that kind of traces the path of it. And you see the crack disappeared because I have it set to have an alpha matte, which I don't need yet. So let me delete that shape layer. Uh, so what I would do is I would just sort of use my pen tool and draw a shape.

Joey Korenman (19:47): That's, you know, roughly the same shape as this crack like this, uh, I would turn off the fill, crank that stroke up. So it covers up that shape, right? And I'd be very precise. And then I would add a trim pads modifier to the shape layer. And I would just animate the end like this and white, and sort of reveal it on and then use that as an alpha mat. Uh, there's a whole tutorial day, one, a 30 days of after effects, where I go over this technique. The problem with it is that you can see the leading edge of the stroke is a uniform thickness. It never gets any thinner or thicker, and there's no way to make it taper. So a shape layer, doesn't give you the control you need here. So what I'm going to do is a new technique. Um, so I'm going to make a, make a new layer.

Joey Korenman (20:41): We'll just call it mat, oh one, I'm going to temporarily make it an adjustment layer so I can see through it. And then I'm going to do this full screen, make this easier. Now I'm going to trace that crack. And this technique is actually a, another way of writing something on that. Um, I didn't go over in the right on tutorials. So this is kind of another tool now that you guys will have. Okay, here we go. So now I've got, I've got a mask on a layer. Now, the reason I did it on a layer is because I'm going to use an effect called trap code 3d stroke. Now I apologize for using an effect that you have to buy, but the trap code plugins are just so universal in they're everywhere and anywhere you work is probably going to have them. Um, so it's just a good idea to learn how to use them.

Joey Korenman (21:39): Uh, and 3d stroke is one of these sort of older effects. I mean, I think it's probably 10 years old, but, um, it's just, it's really powerful. It gives you some cool options, uh, that you don't get from normal path. So one, so when you apply the effect, it's going to take whatever mask you have on that layer, and it's going to draw it for you and you can animate the end like this. Okay. And it'll let you draw it on. So that's fantastic. So let's adjust the thickness, make it a little bit thicker, make sure it totally covers up the layer we want to reveal. Okay. And you can see there right now, we still have the same problem. The entire stroke is the same thickness, but there's a cool option here called taper. And if you enable that it's now, and actually I'm going to turn off this little switch right here, which is going to make our masks invisible temporarily.

Joey Korenman (22:30): They're still there, but you just don't see them. And now, as I animate this, you'll see you get this nice thickening as, as it moves through the path. Cool. So now I can just put a key frame here. Let's go forward like six frames, cause this is a crack. It should be happening very fast. And there you go. So now we have a problem, which is the beginning of this is now tapered and we don't want that. We just want the, uh, the leading edge, the end of the stroke tapered. So the taper, the end thickness, here we go start thickness. It's crank that up to a hundred percent. So now the star thickness will always be, you know, fully thick like this. And then, and then it will sort of taper along to the end. Um, and then here at the end, it's not thick enough now, so you could just increase the end thickness or I could turn my masks back on and I could just drag the end of this out.

Joey Korenman (23:30): And what that's going to do is it's going to mean that the mask actually goes out to here, and this is now the thinnest point. So it's still thicker along here. And so now I'm covering up the entire shape. Cool. And it's very, it happens very quick. It's very subtle. Maybe no one notices, but I thought it was kinda cool. So, um, just another trick for you guys. So I would also then make another mat and I would delete this mask. I would make this an adjustment layer. Um, let's turn off 3d stroke for a minute and do the same thing here on this piece of the crack. And I'm being very sloppy here, but you go, uh, let's turn that back on. And so now you get, let's see out and turn this off. There we go. All right. And then I would just delay this piece of the crack to like, there, there we go.

Joey Korenman (24:22): Cool. So now I've got this cool mat made up of two layers and I would select both of them pre comp them call this crack, Matt. And then I would set the crack to use that layer as its alpha mat. So now you get that. Okay. And it just, it just looks a little nicer. I think, you know, little details like this, um, you know, if you're working for a studio and you're trying to impress an art director or something, little details like this do stick out, so it's worth the extra time it takes. All right. So that's how I animated the crack. And then I used a texture in stensul Luma mode with some color correction to just give it a little bit of grit, kind of break it up a little bit. All right. So now if we come back here, you can see, I then took the crack into this composition, duplicated it, and the copy that's underneath.

Joey Korenman (25:15): I put this blue color on and I just sort of offset it a little bit just to give it a little bit of depth. All right. So that is the main part of the animation. So then what I did was I took this comp N E S underscore kinetic, and I put it in new comp and that's where I did all of this fancy stuff. Okay. So let's talk about each of these parts. So the first thing that happens is sinked up with the crack. There's this big jarring camera move, and then the camera shakes a whole bunch. So how do we do that? I used, I used an adjustment layer over the entire comp that has the transform effect on it. That effect is in the distort group, uh, right down there. And it basically just lets you apply a transform to your entire comp.

Joey Korenman (26:06): You could do this with a novel and parent everything to it, but this is a little bit easier. Um, and so what I did was I did two things. One, I animated the scale property of the transform effect. So when the crack appears, we zoom in and I did that by just scaling up this effect here. And since it's an adjustment layer, it scales up the entire comp. Okay. And then at the end here, it scales back down to 100%. I also put expressions on rotation and positions. Let's look at those. They're very simple expressions, the position and the rotation, they have the same expression and it's the wiggle expression. And we already talked about the wiggle expression. When we, when I showed you how I did the torches, this wiggle expression is slightly different. So remember wiggle takes two numbers, the frequency, which in this case is two.

Joey Korenman (26:59): So it's going to wiggle two times per second. And then it takes the amount. Now for the torches. I hard-coded the amount into the expression in this case. I didn't want to do that. And the reason is I wanted the wiggle amount to change and I wanted to be able to control that. So let me rewrite this expression. I'll show you what I did. You'll notice there's these two effects on my shake, adjustment layer, PML, and our amount, both of those effects are actually just slider controls that I've renamed. So PMO is positioned amount. Our amount is rotation amount. So this is how I made this expression on the position. Property option, click stopwatch type, wiggle, and print the seas. The two is the times per second. It will wiggle in that. I want to stay the same, but the amount is what I want to change.

Joey Korenman (27:55): So rather than type a number in there, I'm going to grab my pick whip and I'm going to grab this slider and it's going to type all this, inform me, then I'll close my print, the seas. And there's my expression. So now you see on this frame, the position amount is zero. So if the, if the amount is zero, the wiggle does nothing nothing's changing. But here, if I look at this property, my P amount, it changes on this frame and now it's up to 50. So now the position, this property here is wiggling by up to 50 pixels twice a second. So that's why we start to get a lot of motion. Now did the same thing on rotation rotation as the exact same property, except it's pointing to this slider. And this slider doesn't have to move as much because it's for rotation and rotation, you don't need giant values to get a lot of motion.

Joey Korenman (28:54): Okay. So that's it. That's how I'm moving the camera and creating camera shake. So then we've got these three pieces that sort of split and fall away. Uh, the way I did that was very, very simple. So here is my comp that has all the animation in it on a certain frame when the crack has fully formed. And I decided, okay, this is where I want the pieces to break apart. I just basically split that layer and made a bunch of copies of it. And if I show you here's one copy and you can see, I just masked it along the crack. Okay. This is a special piece here. Let me show you that in a minute. And then here's another piece. Here's another piece now I found was when these three pieces fall away, this top piece here felt weird to me because there's this really straight edge at the top and it didn't feel irregular enough.

Joey Korenman (29:53): So I duplicated that piece and flipped it and, and have that copy show up at the same time. So that just helped it. It helped it feel a little less regular. There we go. Sometimes you don't want to be regular. Hey, Ooh. Okay. So now that's how we got the pieces to fall away. Uh, and as far as the key frames for those, they're really, really simple. Um, let me pull up one of these here. If you look at the Y position, each of the pieces is going to have a curve, basically like this you're easing out of the first key frame pretty heavily. And then you're, you're accelerating all the way to the end. That is what an animation curve looks like when something is falling. Okay. They don't, things don't fall and ease towards the ground. They accelerate towards the ground. So now it looks like it's falling.

Joey Korenman (30:47): I'm also rotating them each a little bit and moving them on their X position. So they fall away. Cool. The, um, this sort of extruded looking piece that you're seeing on each one of them, that's just a radial shadow. So let me show you really quickly what a radial shadow does. So here's an ellipse. Um, I want to fill it with a color, get rid of that stroke. So if I wanted to fake an extrusion on this ellipse, you can use an effect like a drop shadow. And as long as you don't move the distance too much, it can sort of give it a 3d extruded look. But as soon as you move it too far, you're going to start to see the shadow come back in on itself. So draw and drop shadow. Doesn't let you adjust the size of the shadow. So it, this is kind of the limits of it.

Joey Korenman (31:39): If you grab the radial shadow effect though, you, it works a little bit differently. You move the light source around to change the shadows position, and then you change the projection distance. So you can make a really big shadow and then move the shadow. So it sort of lines up with the edges and you can get a totally different effect. And so that worked a little bit better for these edges. So that's what I did. He used a radial shadow on each piece, uh, and I moved the light source position on each piece so that this edge shows up on the bottom, right? This edge shows up on the top. This one's on the kind of just the right side. So, so those are the pieces. And now the big finale is how do we get all these nice little dirt particles to pop out?

Joey Korenman (32:26): So let me show you that. So the first step in doing that was I needed to create this layer here, crack alpha. Now that's a pre-com, let's go look at it. Crack alpha is an copy. I literally just duplicated this comp that has all my animation in it. I duplicated it, I renamed it crack alpha. And then I deleted every single layer in it, except for my camera, all of the Knowles that control the camera and the crack. And the reason I did that was because for this technique, I needed a pre-camp that had the exact same crack in it that we see at the end here. And because the camera's still kind of drifting backwards and it's moving, I needed to keep that camera in this comp too. Okay. So that this comp would have the crack in the exact same position. So here, let me make a new comp and I'll show you how I did this.

Joey Korenman (33:34): So let's copy our crack alpha layer here and let's turn it on. And you can see that no, there's nothing in it until the very end. And then the crack appears. So that's where we're going to preview from. Alrighty. So I'm gonna make a new layer and I'm gonna call this particles. And one more time, we're going to use a, we're gonna use an effect made by trap code. Um, these have to be the most widely used effects, uh, anywhere except for maybe optical flares, but particular is the plug-in. Everyone uses for particles and effects. Um, there are other ones, but this is, this is the one that just, you see everywhere. It's super duper powerful. It takes a little while to learn. Um, but if you're going to, if you're serious about being a motion, graphics artists, you have to learn it at some point.

Joey Korenman (34:26):

So the default thing it does is it just puts an emitter, particle limiter right in the middle and it spits out particles just like that. Not very interesting. So the first thing we need to do is tell particular, do not emit from a point emit from this layer right here. So I'm going to go into the emitter settings. And a lot of the settings in particular are named very appropriately. So once you learn a little bit about it, you, you, you'll probably be able to figure a bunch of stuff out on your own. So the emitter type, I'm going to change this to layer. And now that I've done that, I need to tell it which layer. So I'm going to tell the layer of Mitter setting down here that my layer to use is the crack alpha. So now if we scrubbed through, you'll see no particles, no particles.

Joey Korenman (35:11): And then when that crack appears, you get like four particles, not very many particles. So let's turn up the number of particles per seconds, crank that up. So now no particles. And then particles look at that and you can see that they actually animate on from top to bottom like that crack does. And what's happening is the plugin is the alpha channel of this. Pre-com to figure out where particles can be born from. And because it animates on it creates particles on this frame only here, but then on this frame, it's creating them down here too. So this is a very cool thing you can do with particular. So one thing you'll notice right off the bat is the particles do not line up very well to the layer. So what I need to do, the reason that's happening is because the particles are being born with velocity.

Joey Korenman (36:08): What that means is they have an inherent motion to them on the first frame that they exist, they are moving and I don't want that. So what I'm going to do is turn that velocity down to zero, turn the velocity random to zero, and then I'm going to turn the size to zero. If the emitter size Z basically lets you spread these things out a little bit. If you want to, I don't want to. So you go, so now you can see the particles are born perfectly synced to that crack animation. Okay? Now that they're, they're too big, they don't look very good and there's probably still not enough of them. So first let's go to our particle settings and let's turn the life of them up. So right now, when the part eat, when each particle is born, it will last for three seconds and then it will disappear. I want to turn this up to like 10 and this is just going to ensure that none of the particles actually disappear while I'm looking at them. So next thing is the size. So right now they look humongous. So I want to turn the size down. I'm gonna turn this to like two. So they'll, it'll just looks like little pieces of dust, but I don't want them all to be the same size. So you can also change the size random percentage. So I'll set that to 50%. Now they're all slightly different sizes.

Joey Korenman (37:30): And now I'm going to crank up a number of them maybe to like 30,000. Cool. Now we have a nice dense bunch of particles, but they're not moving. They're not going anywhere. And so I want them to fall, you know, like, like there's gravity in there and they're kind of being spawned from this crack and then they're falling. So now I can go into the physics tab and crank up this gravity setting. And I'm not sure what the correct setting is to mimic actual gravity. So I just sort of, you know, I just sort of play with it. Like if you put this at a hundred and you do a quick little Ram preview, you could see it already looks pretty good, but it they're falling very slowly.

Joey Korenman (38:16): So, you know, this probably needs to be higher. Why don't we try like 500. We'll see what that looks like. There we go. Cool. And I might bring that down a little bit. You know, the slower things are falling, the bigger that makes the scale of everything because it's like they have to fall further. Cool. So now we've got these nice particles and they fall very naturally, but they have no momentum. They're not moving outwards at all. So remember in the emitter settings, I turned the velocity to zero. And the reason I did is because if you don't do that, they sort of fly every which way. And sometimes that's what you want in this case. That's not what I want. I want them to look like the force. That's creating that crack is pushing them at us. So what I need to change is this direction setting right now, it's uniform and there's different settings.

Joey Korenman (39:11): Uniform actually means uniformly, whichever direction they choose. So it's kind of random. If I set this to outwards, that setting is going to make the particles sort of appear to come outwards from the center. So if I ran preview this, you'll see that the particles off to the side here kind of get hit and move off to the left. The particles here. They're actually moving towards us in Z space. And it's, it's kinda hard to see, but excuse me, boy, I am sick guys. So, but you can see that now it looks like there's some momentum to this and you can crank this up if you want to and really make it look like a burst. There we go. Cool. Now, one other thing we need to, uh, set is we, you know, right now this is just going to happen forever and we don't want that.

Joey Korenman (40:00): Let me turn this philosophy down because I don't like that. Let's try 200. There we go. Um, so what I want to happen is this, I want the particles to start forming here and then I want them to stop forming here. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to key frame this, the particles per second. I'm going to put a key frame here and I'm gonna hold command and option and click it and make that a hold key frame. Then I'm going to go forward. And me be right there. That's where I want the last particle to be born on this frame. I will set it to zero because these are hold key frames. This value will not change until it hits this key frame. And then boom, it's like a light switch going off and that's going to stop any more particles from forming.

Joey Korenman (40:49): And so if you play this back, you'll see particles form along the crack and then they stop. And that's it cool. It's a cool trick. You can do with particular as a million more settings you can play with, but that's the basics of how you use a layer, two mint particles. So that's what I did. Uh, and I turned them white. Uh, so you could see them over the background and then the whole thing falls apart and voila reveals the logo. So there you go. We have now walked through, uh, every single step. And here's what I, here's what I hope you guys got out of this. What I really hope is not that you just got some neat tricks that you can try, but what I really hope is that you're actually going to be able to use some of these strategies to navigate a kinetic type project a little bit easier next time, you know, the simple things that aren't super sexy, like using layer, markers and comp markers, um, you know, different ways of using expressions in different ways to manage background textures and things like that.

Joey Korenman (41:56): All of those little things, when you tie them all together, it's going to let you work really efficiently. And when you're doing a project like this, that is so key. So I hope you guys learned a lot. I'm going to stop talking now and, uh, I will see you guys next time on 30 days of after effects. Thank you so much for watching. I hope this series was really informative. I tried to just jam in as much info as I could and really let you see what it looks like when I'm just approaching a job with kind of a blank canvas. Now, if you have any questions or thoughts about this lesson, let us know. And if you learn something valuable from the video, please share it around. It really helps us spread the word about school emotion. And we truly appreciate it. Don't forget to sign up for a free student account to access all the project files from this lesson, plus a whole bunch of other good stuff. Thanks again for watching. And I'll see you next time.

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