Tutorial: Kinetic Typography in After Effects | Part 1

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

‍

Tutorial Full Transcript Below 👇:

Cartoon Voice (00:00:04):

No, he's a rock biter! A rock biter!

Joey Korenman (00:00:22):

Joey here at school of motion and welcome to day 16 of 30 days of after effects. This video is part one of a three lesson series, and I'm pretty excited about it. I'm going to walk you through nearly every single step that it takes to create the kinetic type piece that played at the beginning of this video. I wanted to do that because I thought it might be interesting to walk you through an entire project step by step, because there are so many things that have to come together when you're sinking audio. And you're trying to get typed to pop up at the right time and you're thinking of how to animate. And then you've got tons of layers and camera moves. There's just a lot of stuff. So I want to show you how I deal with the complexities of a normal motion, graphics, job, kinetic type jobs have been around for a long time, and they're probably not going away anytime soon.

Joey Korenman (00:01:08):

Now, before we get started, don't forget to sign up for a free student account. So you can grab the project files from this piece as well as assets from any other lesson on the site. All right. Let's hop into after effects and let's get going on the first part of our kinetic type video. So, first of all, if you guys don't know what movie this quote is from then, um, then I feel old. Um, but anyway, what I want to try to do with this video, uh, is a little bit of an experiment to see, uh, how this is going to work. And, um, when this is all over, if we're all still alive, I'd like to, uh, maybe get some feedback from you guys. Let me know if doing tutorials this way works for you. If you learn something from it. And what I want to try to do is literally over the course of, I'm guessing two to three videos, uh, I want to try to recreate this entire thing for you.

Joey Korenman (00:01:58):

Um, and I might fast forward through some parts and, and, and gloss over some things, but I want to walk you step by step through it, um, because doing a video like this, especially, you know, when you're starting out as an after effects artist, it can seem kind of daunting. Cause there's just so many things happening. There's, you know, there's all these animated pieces. Um, there's a ton of camera, movement there's effects. And how do you manage that? Um, and sync it all up to audio and get it to feel the way you want and all that stuff. Um, and you know, really there's, there's not a trick to it. It, it just takes a lot of work, but I want to sort of train unless you into my head a little bit. So I'm seeking, you can kind of see how I go about setting stuff like this up.

Joey Korenman (00:02:42):

Um, so, uh, so I'm going to come back to this a lot and reference it, but, uh, here we go, let's dive in and start doing this. So, um, the first thing I wanna show you is a sort of the pieces of this that we have. Um, so all of the pieces of this animation, um, you know, the, the sort of big graphic pieces, they're just black and white illustrator art. Um, and I just did this real quick, uh, just so we had something to work with. Um, and you know, I won't go too far into like the illustrator part of this, but, um, just know that doing your artwork in illustrator, uh, it's always a good idea, even if you end up like bringing into Photoshop and, and tweaking it more there, if you create it in illustrator, you always have the option of, you know, making, I mean, you know, I've got these tiny little footprints, um, you know, but then if I want to, I can turn on the continuous rasterize button and I can just make them enormous and they don't pixelate.

Joey Korenman (00:03:44):

So, um, that's something that, you know, almost every little video like this, uh, the artwork has done an illustrator first. Um, and also I want to take you guys back in time, um, because you know, I'm sure a lot of you have seen this before. Um, but this type of video is called a kinetic type video. It's one of the, it's one of those things that just you'll have to do at some point. Um, and you can think MK 12 for that. So this video came out in 2002, which is very hard to believe that it really was that long ago. Um, but as far as anyone can tell them, and this is, and I don't know, maybe I'm wrong, but this is always cited as the first kinetic type video. So I just want to show you guys a little bit of it if you've never seen it.

Speaker 4 (00:04:35):

Well, a machismo is part of the culture and in Brazil, it's not just, you know, uh, it's actually, it's a whole,

Joey Korenman (00:04:47):

So, I mean, it's, it's kind of funny to watch now because you know, it's in, it's got a standard definition frame and, uh, you know, it's it, I mean, you know, the animation's good, but it doesn't have that slick glossy feel that a lot of things have now. Um, but you know, this thing is, is 12 years old and it, it holds up surprisingly well, which is a Testament to how good M K-12 wasn't how way ahead of their time they were. Um, but there's a lot of things in this video that are just, you know, like standard kinetic type sort of, you know, the chaise now, the camera rotates, um, you know, and, and the, the main gag is that the words are synced up to the voice, right. And there's little icons and all that kind of stuff. Um, so anyway, so if you haven't seen this before, you should probably watch it because, you know, motion design is a very new field, but we're actually at the point where there is some history that, you know, to it a little bit.

Joey Korenman (00:05:50):

And it's kind of interesting to go back and look at the things that, you know, that sort of came before. And, um, I don't know, I can help you, especially when you're, if you end up working for motion design studio, um, and there's, you know, people in their thirties and forties working there, um, they're going to remember these things and it helps to have a common history to talk about, all right, so here's our artwork. Uh, and then on top of that, uh, we have the audio clip, um, that you, you heard playing, um, you know, and that's the quote from the never ending story, which, uh, I don't know. It makes me, it makes me feel like a five-year-old every time I hear that quote. So first thing I want to do, uh, you know, whenever I have a kinetic type thing like this, the first thing I do is I'll bring the audio clip into a new comp.

Joey Korenman (00:06:40):

All right. And, uh, let's bring this down here and let's just call this, uh, audio setup for now. All right. And here's what I want to do. I want to play the audio, and I want to basically mark out where the, where the sounds are and where the words are that I want to animate to. All right. And so, um, on your keyboard, if you have a full-size keyboard and you have that number pad on the right side of the keyboard, there's a period right next to the zero on there. And if you hit that

Joey Korenman (00:07:16):

After festival instantly play your audio without rendering the video. So this is a great way to preview audio. Um, another trick is if you select your audio layer and you hit L twice, it brings up the wave form. Um, and so then, you know, the wave form, if you guys are unfamiliar, this is sort of a visual representation of your audio file. So I can kind of see where words are being spoken. Um, and you obviously can't see, you know, as it gets louder and louder and things just sort of pick up here, you can't really tell what's going on, but it gives you a good kind of starting point. Um, so first I just want to listen to the whole thing.

Cartoon Voice (00:07:57):

No, he's a rock biter rock. [inaudible]

Joey Korenman (00:08:04):

All right. And so when I heard this and I thought, okay, I'm going to animate to it. I tried to pick out some little details that I thought I might be able to pick up in the animation. And so the first thing I heard was the footsteps. And I thought that would be kind of cool as a way to get into the animation, you know, like you're following these footsteps and then, you know, they kind of stop and then the conversation starts, okay. So there's some footsteps here. I knew I wanted to animate to, and I want to, um, you know, I wanna, I want to have a visual reference of where those footsteps happen. So let me zoom in on my timeline here. Uh, I'm using the plus and minus key on the top row of your, the, you know, where the numbers are and you keyboard the plus and minus keys, zoom in and out of your timeline.

Joey Korenman (00:08:47):

And when you have the wave form open, you can actually zoom in and out of the way for them, which is cool. Um, but what I want to do is zoom in, and then I want to put a marker where each of the footprints are, and you can kind of see them here, right. If I preview this, you can kind of see there's one there, there, there, there, and there. Okay. Um, now just to be sure, another audio trick you can do, you can hold command, and then if you click and drag this, you can kind of scrub this called scrubbing the audio. So I can sort of grab the, grab the playhead and pull it forward. And right there, I hear footstep. So I wanna put a marker here and I don't want to put the marker on the audio layer. Okay. You could do that.

Joey Korenman (00:09:34):

Um, by the way, the hot key for that is the asterisk key, uh, on your number pad. Um, at least that's what I use. I use the Astro ski and your number pad. Um, and so you just select the layer, you hit it and adds, it adds a marker, but I don't want it on the layer. I want it on the comp. So I'm going to make sure I don't have anything selected and hit asterisk. Okay. And now I have a marker here. And the great thing about that is if I accidentally move this out of sync, um, you know, or if I pre-com something I'm still going to have markers here. All right. So then I'll go to the next one, add a marker, right, right there. Yep. Add another one, add another one, add another one. Okay. Um, and then, you know, it's always a good idea to stay organized, especially, you know, if, if you were setting this up and then two other people were going to help you work on it, um, you know, they may not know what these markers are. So what you can do is double click the marker and type in footstep start. Right. And now you get a little note and then you can say, you know, like last footstep or something.

Joey Korenman (00:10:47):

Cool. All right. And so now, I mean, if you zoom out, it's going to start to get, um, you know, a little, little crowded up here, but that's okay. Because you probably, when you're, when you're laying out the footsteps and sinking them up, you're going to be in close like this. Cool. So now we have markers for those. Um, all right. So now let's do the, uh, the speaking. Okay. Now I'll show you one more cool audio trick to, um, it's not really something that like for this, I would probably just manually step through and put a marker up here. Um, but this is a cool trick. If you're doing something that, you know, goes to music, or if there's just a ton of dialogue and you, you kind of want to rough out where the words are before you actually go in and sync things up. Exactly. What you can do is you can hit that, uh, period button on your keyboard. The one that's on the number pad, and while it's playing, you can hit the asterisk key, um, to set a marker in real time, as the audio is playing, I'll show you what I mean,

Cartoon Voice (00:11:56):

No, he's a rock biter

Joey Korenman (00:11:59):

And you can see as I tap that Astros key as the audio is playing, it's adding markers for me. So that's pretty cool. Um, but it's, you know, it's much harder to do that with dialogue cause that, you know, it's like hard to remember the timing of it. So I'm just going to step through this and do this real quick. So is he, and I want to be very specific and have a marker for each word. So is he starts to say is here. So I add a marker. I double click it. I'd say is he is right there. Okay. And this is just a tedious process, right? There's that little because he's laughing. He thinks it's funny. All right. So I'm going to go through, and I am going to, uh, I'm going to set this up and I won't make you guys watch. And when we come back, all of this will be set up. So now I have marked out every single word and sound effect that I want animate to in here. And you can see that, uh, you know, everything's synced up nice.

Cartoon Voice (00:13:10):

Is he? No, he's a rock biter rock by now.

Joey Korenman (00:13:17):

All right. And you know, I, I tried to really catch every little word. No, he's a rock writer. Um, and this will just make it easier to animate. So now that we've got that set up, um, let's start actually building the comp. So, um, you know, if we go back and we look at this, um, you know, what what's going on is there is a world with a camera moving around the world and, and layers carefully placed. So the camera sees them right. And makes a nice composition. And there's a lot of different ways to do that. And after facts, um, knowing what I, what I'd considered doing was making a giant pre-camp and sort of animating all of this stuff inside of that pre-camp and then just moving a camera around, you know, kind of in a different comp and, and that's, you can totally do it that way.

Joey Korenman (00:14:12):

Uh, I sometimes don't though, and in this case, I didn't, I actually just moved to move the camera around and placed things, um, and just did it all inside of the comp that, that had everything in it. And the reason I did that was because I like to be very, very specific with like, compositions, right. So I w I knew I wanted to zoom in and see this, like we're leaning in and then zoom way out when he goes a nutcase. Right. And I wanted like, you know, I wanted this type of composition and, and, but then I wanted to do this rotation and zoom in and see this. And the problem is if you're trying to place all these things in a giant pre-camp, it's kind of hard to tell how that's going to look when you eventually put a camera over it. Um, and so sometimes it's easier to just kind of do both animate the camera and start placing things in the same comp, and it can get really, really messy.

Joey Korenman (00:15:11):

Um, I mean, I can, I can show you here if we dive into this actual thing, um, and then we come, let's see here, see, it starts, it starts to get a little bit messy. So here's actually the timeline, um, of my animation. And I'll talk about what all this stuff is, but, um, you know, there's, there's a bunch of layers, a bunch of pre comps, and this actually isn't too bad. I mean, I've had columns with hundreds and hundreds of layers in it, so it's actually, it's actually fine. But, um, you know, sometimes I just like to keep everything in the same comp and animated it all. Um, and it makes it a little bit easier to make specific framings. So, um, all right. So there you go. So now we are actually going to start making picture. So, uh, the first thing that I did was, you know, I, I picked my colors, um, and just to make sure that I kind of use the same colors.

Joey Korenman (00:16:05):

I'm just going to come in here and actually grab my background right out of this. Okay. So here's, these are just two, I'm gonna copy the middle, then I'll explain them. So all these layers are, I have my, my base color, and then I kind of have a highlight color in the middle. And there you go. That's it. That's my background. Okay. Um, now I want to make a point, I wanna make a point to you guys. Um, so let me, let me come back here and let the screen preview again. So one of the things that, um, you know, that you sort of learn once you start moving a camera around and after effects, is that in order for your viewer, whoever's watching your piece to realize, Hey, a camera's moving around in order for that to work, there has to be some kind of reference, right.

Joey Korenman (00:16:56):

And what I mean is look at the texture on the ground. If that wasn't there wouldn't have, as it wouldn't feel as grounded, right? You wouldn't have this visual reference at all times to tell you, Hey, the camera's zooming in the camera's zooming out, moving, obviously words and things that pop up, um, you know, that, that would give you some of that reference. But here's what I mean, right. Let me make a new comp real quick and I'll, I won't even name it. Um, if I put, you know, if I type in, you know, rock biter, right. Like this. Okay. And I make, I make that a 3d layer and I add a camera. Okay. And I won't, let's not get into this yet, but I just want to show you if I, if I have a camera and I move the camera left and right.

Joey Korenman (00:17:50):

Okay. Without any reference, right. There's just this black background. I don't know if the camera's moving or if the words moving okay. As a viewer, I don't know that. Um, you know, and so then, you know, it just gets confusing. And if you had a ton of these on screen, you know, like if, if you had like one here and one here and one here, um, you know, it might be a little bit better for your viewer, you know, maybe, but it's still, it's still impossible to tell. Right. Um, and what helps in this situation is some kind of texture, just a subtle thing. And so I have a, I have a couple of textures I got here, I got this off of CG textures.com, which I'll link to, which is an incredible free resource protectors. Um, and if I'll just stick this in here, turn the opacity way down for a minute and make it a 3d layer.

Joey Korenman (00:18:44):

Okay. And just by having a little bit of a texture to it right now, we can tell that the camera's moving. Okay. So I knew I was going to need a texture, and this is actually the texture I used. All right. So let me, uh, let me just cut that and now we can delete this comp. All right. So you, a lot of times when you do a kinetic type piece, um, and let's go back and look at that Brazil one again. Now they didn't do that. Well, what they did have was at all times, some things on screen to give you a reference that looked the camera's moving. I mean, their design was super duper busy. Um, and so there was never really a point where you're confused. Am I moving? Or is the, are the words moving? Right. Um, so let me, let me paste that texture in there.

Joey Korenman (00:19:36):

And let me scale this down too, because you know, one of the things I really don't like is when, uh, I can see like a ton of detail in a texture, that's just supposed to be a background thing. I mean, I really want it to be like, you know, I want it to be like this size. Now this texture, we crank it up for a minute. This texture, I actually prepared ahead of time in Photoshop. It didn't look like this when I downloaded it. And what I did was I made it into a seamless texture that you can tile. Right. So if I duplicate this layer and I move this copy here, right. There's no, there, there shouldn't be any seam if I landed up perfectly, which didn't didn't really do, but yeah. So you can see there's no seam. And then, you know, that also works on the top and the bottom and the left and then everything.

Joey Korenman (00:20:26):

So, um, this is a seamless texture, um, which is pretty handy because I knew the camera was going to be zooming in and out. And I didn't really know where this texture was going to have to be at all times. So I needed to make it sort of flexible. Um, and I don't want to jump into Photoshop in this tutorial, but, um, if you guys don't know how to make a seamless texture, it's very easy to do actually in, in if I'm sure if you Google it, you'll find it, but I'm happy to do a video about it if you guys would like to know that. So, um, so let me add the camera here. Right? And we can kind of feel what this is looking like. So really quickly, um, the camera that I use for kinetic type pieces is always a one node camera.

Joey Korenman (00:21:11):

And there's really only two options in this tight box. One node to node to node camera has a focal point to it. So let me just quickly make a two-in-one camera. And if I look at, let me open up the, um, let me open up the position settings here. Let's see here. So the a two node camera has a point of interest. Okay. And it always looks at that point of interest. So if I move the point of interest, the camera turns to rotate and look at it. And if I move the position, but I don't move the point of interest, the camera does this weird kind of angling thing, right? Like it's always looking at the point of interest. Um, this might actually make a little more sense if I go into a custom view and zoom out, uh, so you can see that this point here, that's the point of interest and here's the camera.

Joey Korenman (00:22:04):

Uh, and if I move the camera without moving the point of interest, it always looks at it. Sometimes that's useful. But when I have the, when I want a camera, that's going to be moving around really quickly and doing tons and tons of camera moves and, and looking at different places all the time, a two node cameras, much harder to control. Uh, so I'm going to use a one node camera and the one node camera does not use the point of interest. Okay. So if I, now, if I move this camera left and right, it just moves left and right. And it doesn't rotate. And so if I zoom in and out and move left and right, you know, obviously we're seeing the scene, we're seeing, uh, the edge of this texture, which is no good. Um, and so there's, you know, there's a bunch of different ways to deal with this and, and what I did in this case, um, this doesn't always work and I'll talk a little bit about why, but, uh, I used an effect called CC reptile.

Joey Korenman (00:22:58):

This comes with after effects and all it does is it lets you easily repeat your layer. Okay. So this, uh, you know, expand right property. If I crank that up, right. It, it just literally copies the texture off to the right and it does it perfectly. And it's, and now it's, since I made this a seamless texture and Photoshop is now going to be a seamless tile in after effects. And there's different ways to, to tile repeat is what I want. I just want it to copy and make another one, but you can switch this. In some cases, it works better if it's unfold, which, uh, that basically mirrors the layer. So, you know, it, the, the texture goes this way and then it sort of happens again backwards. It's like a Rorschach test, all right. But I'll set it to repeat and I'm going to expand it to the left.

Joey Korenman (00:23:49):

I'm gonna expand it up and down. And you can crank these settings really, really high, and it will start to bog down after effects. So you gotta be careful. And this is one of the problems I ran into when I own it when I was animating this. And this is kind of the only big issue with using CC reptile is if you have a massive, massive comp and you need to like set this up to like, you know, you know, like 15, 20,000, um, eventually after effects is not going to like this layer anymore, it's going to start chugging. So what I actually ended up doing, um, was I sort of, you know, moved my camera on animated and then I would duplicate this layer. Right. And sort of hand line up it just where I needed it. Right. So I would sort of build this patchwork of textures that were only really existing where the camera was looking.

Joey Korenman (00:24:47):

Um, so I didn't have to have some massive, massive numbers up here. All right. So, uh, you know, you, you, you set the up the CC rapper tile. This is not what I want the texture to look like. Um, if you come look at the final render here, you can see that you basically just get little white specs. Right. Um, you're just seeing, you know, just a little bit of detail in this, in this comp here. So, uh, the way I did that was, um, I did some color correction, so I first inverted this. Right. And so now all of the details turn white and the rest of it turns black, and then you can just use a transfer mode so you can use ad or screen. Okay. Um, and then I'm going to use a levels of fact, and you know, what screen is doing is it's basically knocking out the dark pixels and it's only showing me the lighter pixels.

Joey Korenman (00:25:43):

And so if I use the levels of fact here, and you can see that, you know, where, where we're seeing this, this big spike in the histogram, that is all of these very dark pixels, but there's, you know, what this is telling me is that those pixels are not black. So that's why we're seeing all this muddiness, right. But if I move this input arrow to the right, it makes them black. And if I just push, push, push, there we go. So now I've stripped out everything except, you know, just the harshest details of this texture. Cool. Uh, and then you can just play with the opacity, right. And then I don't remember exactly what I had it, but I mean, that's all you need. You don't need a big honk and texture. All you need is a little bit so that when you zoom in and out, your eye has something to look at.

Joey Korenman (00:26:28):

Um, and I kind of like not seeing very much of it because one danger that you can, you can easily have with something like this is that, um, you'll start to see a pattern to the texture and in your eyes, very good at picking up patterns. And then that'll give it away that you've kind of just used a little texture and copied it a bunch of times. All right. So now we've got this kind of a setup, um, and now we're actually ready to start animating stuff. So the first thing that needs to animate are the footsteps. Okay. So let's go take a look at the footsteps. Okay. And, you know, these are really simple kind of doodles. It did. Um, so let me copy those. I'm just going to grab them. I'm gonna copy them. Let's come back to our audio set up. Now what I, you know, the way I was thinking about this was I want to just animate one footstep and then be able to just copy it and sort of put it where I want it and put in, in, you know, adjust the timing of it.

Joey Korenman (00:27:27):

Um, and so the easiest way to do that would be to, to make a new comp animate a footstep in that comp, and then I can just sort of hand place them. Okay. So let's do that. Let's make a new comp, let me close this up. I'm going to try to, I'm going to try to keep this organized as we go. Um, so I'm going to make a new folder in my comps folder. Um, this little underscore PC stands for pre comp and that's how I just sort of keep my, my after effects projects clean as I throw all the pre comps in there. So what do we make? Um, let me make a PC demo folder. All right. And so now with that highlighted, if I make a new pre-camp and let's call this footstep single, right. It sticks the pre comp in there for me.

Joey Korenman (00:28:13):

So that's a cool little trick. All right. So I'm going to paste the footsteps in there, uh, and you can't see them because they're black. So let me hit command. K. It brings up your composition settings and just change the background color to something, or I'll be able to see these. And I don't need to animate both of them. I can just animate one cause they're mirror images of each other. There are no difference. Let me delete that one and I'll grab this one and I'll scale it up. And I w and, you know, because I don't know exactly how close I'm going to be to the footprint. And I don't know, um, you know, I don't really know how big I need this to be. I'm just going to make it bigger than it probably is ever going to be on screen. And that way I can always scale it down and still have all that nice detail.

Joey Korenman (00:28:57):

Right. Um, if I animated it at this size, and then in the next comp we resumed in this closer, it would look really pixelated. Okay. So here's my footstep. Let's make it about this big. And what I wanted to do was actually, um, make it feel like the foot was landing, right. And if you think about the way a foot lands, you sort of land when you're walking, especially if you're barefoot, you land on the forefoot, um, and your toes kind of come down and, and then it kind of, at the same time, the toes are coming down, you know, the outer part of your foot kind of rolls around and then your heel hits last. Okay. And so I kinda wanted to mimic that, um, and I wanted to do it quickly. So I just did it with a mask. So let me select the layer and I'm going to grab the ellipse tool, uh, and actually, let me, let me duplicate this.

Joey Korenman (00:29:51):

Um, and the reason I'm duplicating it, let me show you what happens if I don't duplicate it, I want to draw a mask around a bunch of different pieces of this foot. So if I draw a mask around it, that's great. Now I want to draw a mask around the big toe. Well, I can't see the big toe anymore, so it's easier if I just have a copy sitting underneath it and maybe turn the opacity down a little bit, and then I'll lock that copy. And that can just be kind of my reference. So on now on this copy, I'm gonna, I'm gonna use the ellipse tool. Okay. That's kind of the first part of the foot. That's gonna, oh boy, here we go. That's the first part of the foot that's going to appear. So let me adjust that. All right. Uh, and now I want a mask around each toe.

Joey Korenman (00:30:34):

Okay. So I'm gonna hit Q Q is the hot key for the, the mask tool. Make sure it's in ellipse mode. And what I want to do is just draw a mask around each, each toe and adjust it and make sure that the mask is pretty precise. Like it's not accidentally overlapping this toe or something like that. Okay. Um, and I could easily now just duplicate this mask. Right. Move it over, double click it so I can transform it and just line that up. Okay. Duplicate it, move it over. Double click it. All right. And do it again.

Joey Korenman (00:31:20):

And then one more time. There we go. Okay. And now I need the heel, so I'll hit Q and now I need the midfoot. All right. So I'll just draw another, another lips like this. Now, why did I just draw a whole bunch of masks? Um, when you have a bunch of masks like this, you can, you can actually animate them on and off. Um, and there's some cool mask settings. Um, for example, if I open up this mask, this mask expansion is what I'm going to be animating. And if I, you can see if I just animated it sort of, you know, it, it eats the mask away and then I can reveal it and I can do that in sequence for each piece of this foot. Um, and you know, if you wanted to, you could even add more pieces. I just did this in very broad strokes, cause it's going to happen very quickly.

Joey Korenman (00:32:12):

Um, and now I can delete this little reference footprint back there. So let me, let me hit em and open up all these masks. And actually, if what I want to see is the mask expansion for all of these. And by default, when you hit em, it only brings up the mask path property. So if you double tap em, it brings up all the mask properties. And so now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna use my, uh, my Tilda key. Um, if you guys don't remember, Tilda is the it's to the left, the one on the top of your keyboard, it's a little squiggle. And when you hit it, whatever window your mouse is over, will temporarily take up the whole screen. And so I use it all the time when I want to like, you know, turn on the stopwatch for a bunch of properties, but I can't see them because the screen isn't big enough. So if I temporarily do that, I'm going to hit mask expansion on each of these.

Joey Korenman (00:33:06):

Okay. Uh, and now I can just hit you. And now I have, I can just see those key frames. Um, and I want this to happen pretty quickly. Let's say maybe, you know, four frames, I'm going to go forward four frames and I'm choosing page down to do that. Uh, and I'm going to move those key frames to that point in time. And then I'm gonna go back to the beginning and one by one, I'm going to change the mask expansion until that piece of the foot goes away. Okay. So I'm erasing the foot using the mask expansion. There we go. Okay. And I want this to have a little bit of a sequence to it. So, um, like I said, I want the forefoot, right? The sort of top MIDI part of the foot to animate on first. Right. So that's this mask. Um, all right, so that's going to happen first, so right.

Joey Korenman (00:34:02):

That'll start to happen as that happens, the pinky toes going to land first, and then the, each toes going to land a split second later going from right to left. So let's figure out which mask is which so mask six is the pinky toe. I can tell. Cause when I selected it, um, you know, sort of the, the points got a little bit thicker, right. Um, so that's first, so I'm gonna grab those key frames and just nudge it forward a couple frames. Then I'm just going to go to the next toe and move it one frame further than the pinky toe. And I'm just going to do that for all of the toes real quick.

Joey Korenman (00:34:43):

And this might seem like a cheap animation trick, but, and, and I assure you, it is, um, when, excuse me, when, uh, you know, when you're animating something like this, uh, and you know, a lot of times you're trying to go really fast. I, I, a lot of times look for ways to animate that don't take a ton of manual labor. Um, and, and I mean, a lot of that is because I'm a freelancer. I don't generally work with a huge team. Um, if you did, you could have one person spend all day on this footprint and make it look amazing and do some really cool stuff. But in general, that's not the situation I'm in. Um, all right. So you see how the, uh, this mask here, um, I may have expanded it too much and it's sort of showing the toes off before I want them to, to, to appear.

Joey Korenman (00:35:31):

So I need to, I need to go back and adjust that a little bit. There we go. Okay, cool. So now the toes land, and as the toes are landing, I want the heel and this mid foot to land. Okay. And that's these masks down here. So I'm just going to scoot these forward and maybe, maybe have the, uh, the mid foot be the last part. Okay, cool. Um, and I'll just easy ease these just so it's not such a linear looking thing. It won't really make a huge difference, but let's Ram preview that. Okay. So there's our foot landing. Okay. Pretty simple. Um, and it's got this hard edge to it. Right. Which is fine. Um, and so now looking at this, I'm thinking, uh, and I, and, and I'm doing this in a specific order because I want to show you guys what happens if you sorta change your mind.

Joey Korenman (00:36:23):

So I did this and then I realized, Hey, you know what? It would be really cool if, um, you know, instead of having these super, you know, just hard linear edges, I could actually give this a little bit more of a, of an organic edge, organic. Um, and so what, what would be helpful is if I could actually adjust the contour of those masks, and it's not going to be very easy to do the way I've set this up, so what I'm going to do, I'm going to make a new layer, right. Command Y and I'll just call this mat. Um, and it's actually the same color as my background. So I can't see it. Let me, uh, let me just make a different color. Okay. There we go. Cool. And I'm going to temporarily make it an adjustment layer. And then, uh, I'm going to copy all of these masks, just going to grab all of them and copy them and paste them onto this layer.

Joey Korenman (00:37:21):

All right. Let's zoom out and see where, where did those masks and up there, super-duper small, a way up here in the corner, because you know, the, the eye mask, these things out on a, on an illustrator layer. Um, and so you can see that, you know, I basically get useless mask information here. Um, and so I sort of ran into this problem. And so what I ended up doing was, and this is just sort of, you know, necessity, breeds invention. Um, so here's my foot and I'm just going to duplicate it and I'm going to have the bottom copy. I'm going to turn all these masks off. I'm just going to delete them all.

Joey Korenman (00:38:08):

I don't need them. And I'm going to have this bottom copy, use the top copy as an alphabet. Okay. So this is going to be my foot, and then this is going to be the mat, right. And by doing that wonderful, um, now I can actually manipulate the mat and mess with those edges. And I just used a, a, an effect called Ruffin edges. And it's sort of like a turbulent displace for edges. Right. You can see, just kinda messes up the edges a little bit, and you can mess with the settings if you want it to be more or less kind of, you know, eaten away like that. Right. Um, and then the only problem is that if you roughen the edges too much, then you actually don't get your whole image back at the end. So I may have to key frame, um, may have to key frame something, or what you can do is, uh, with this matte object selected, I could use an effect like a, um, like a simple choker.

Joey Korenman (00:39:11):

And I could actually just expand that output a little bit like this, right? So if by, by going negative with the choke mat, it's expand here. Let me actually, let me turn this layer on so you can see what it's doing. Right. I'm actually expanding that mat out like this. And I probably want to do that before the rough edges, right. There we go. And now let's use that as an alpha mat, turn that back on, and you can see that I, you know, this is still probably the borders set too high. There we go. Let's take a look at that. Cool. Okay. I mean, it's not the most amazing thing in the world, but, you know, it's, it's, it's more interesting than just like cutting the foot on. Um, you know, and, and I don't know, I might play with these and just kind of see what other little, you know, like what other kind of little effects you can get just by messing with the settings.

Joey Korenman (00:40:03):

Right. That's kinda cool looking. And then, um, you know, just to, just so it's not the, the problem is that it happens so fast that you know what, my, I really notices this gap kind of in between the forefoot and the heel. And it's just a little bit too harsh. Um, so what I'm gonna do is grab both these layers pre-camp them and say, footstep pre-camp, and I'm gonna duplicate it. I'm gonna offset one, copy, try two frames, and then the bottom copy, I'm just going to set to 50%. Okay. And so now you get sort of the ghosted, you know, sort of version of the footstep that happens just a few frames before. And I think it might even be cooler if I duplicated that again and had another one. So I basically have a 50%, uh, transparent footstep here, and then one frame later, another 50%, and then one frame later, a hundred percent. Right. And it's just going to sort of very quickly build that footstep on. Um, and I that's actually what I did for the, for the test, but now looking at this, am I, you know, I'm always curious, like, what would happen if I, you know, then just like blurred one of these a little bit and maybe only blur it vertically. Right. What if I blurred the middle one? Right.

Joey Korenman (00:41:26):

And then, but I need to get rid of it and take the blur away by the time this thing, otherwise, you're going to notice it. That's kind of interesting. Right. I don't know. I don't like it. I'm going to get rid of it, so, okay. So there's our footstep. Cool. And again, keep in mind that it's going to be, you know, most of the times it'll be very small on screen. Um, but there's your footstep. And then I thought to myself, well, it's a footstep and it looks super victory. So why not throw a little texture on it? Right. And give it a little grit. Um, and so to do that, I used one of these texture images. Um, I think I used this one, this dry earth texture from CG textures and, uh, what you can do, um, if you're going to make a pre-camp and then just use the pre-com somewhere else, you can put a texture on the very top of the comp, like this, and set the mode to silhouette, uh, Luma.

Joey Korenman (00:42:28):

Right. And that will sort of knock out pieces of that, of whatever's underneath it. Okay. And so what I can then do is I can put levels on that texture. I can put a color correction levels effect on the texture, and I can just push it. And the further black I push it, the more foot you see. Right. And then the more white that I sort of crank into it, the less foot you see. And so what I can do is sort of eat away some of that foot, and I can play with the scale of that texture too, you know, something I'm there and that's kind of cool. Cause you see how there's like a pebble in here and it's sort of eating away a little chunk of the foot. It's kinda cool. I like to play with stuff like that. It's, it's always kind of nice when you can get the edge, not to be so perfect.

Joey Korenman (00:43:15):

Um, and then I'm going to push, here we go. This, uh, output white arrow, um, this sort of is the, the maximum brightness that this texture will be allowed to be. And if I make that lower, I can still see the texture, but it's just bringing back some of the opacity of the foot. Right. So let me turn on the transparency groups. You can really see what it's doing, right. I'm just bringing back a little bit of the, of the foot by, by pushing this arrow. Cool. So now that foot is got some texture to it and it's actually transparent, um, which is cool because if I put it on top of my nice purple color here, I'll be able to see that purple through it. All right. So here's my single footstep, uh, and that's in my PC demo folder there. So got a single footstep.

Joey Korenman (00:44:02):

And what I want to do is now line up, you know, a bunch of those footsteps and have them in sync with the audio. Okay. So what I could do is I could just take my footstep single and place it here and then line it up to that, that nice marker. Right. I could do that. Um, and you can see, I have to change the color of the footstep, but you can still see through it a little bit. Right. It's kind of nice. And I might, I might adjust that a little bit, so you can see through it a little bit more, um, yeah, it's a little bit better. So, uh, but what I thought would be cool is if they kind of animated in an arc, um, you know, when you're animating stuff, a lot of times, you know, things moving in a straight line doesn't look right, and it helps if they're moving in an arc, uh, it's one of the animation principles.

Joey Korenman (00:44:54):

And so, uh, I figured that would be easier to do if I pre comped all of the footsteps together. So I've put one footstep in this comp, um, so why don't I just pre-camp that one footstep and we'll call this footsteps arc and there it is. And I'm going to stick it up here and PC demo and let's dive in and here's the problem. The problem is here. I don't actually have, um, I don't actually have any audio to sync this up to. And so this is a, this is a trick I do constantly when I'm doing kinetic kinetic type stuff is I will grab this audio clip here. And first thing I want to do is just transfer just the footstep markers onto it. So I'm going to hold shift in. And when you hold shift and you move your play head, it sort of snaps to your markers.

Joey Korenman (00:45:46):

So I'll snap here and I'll, we'll make sure this is selected and hit my asterisk snap to the next one. And I'm just going to quickly transfer footsteps on there. And then I'm going to copy the audio clip, jump in here and paste it. Now, one thing you gotta be careful of is when you copy and paste an audio clip and it's in a pre comp and that pre comp is being used in a comp that has audio in it. Also what's going to happen is you can see how there's two speaker icons. Now in my footsteps, art pre-com I have audio I've copied this. So it's actually going to play this audio clip twice, which is going to make it twice as loud. So there's two solutions. One is you just make sure you turn that off. Right. But I always forget to. So what I do is if I copy and paste an audio clip, I control click it and I set it to be a guide layer.

Joey Korenman (00:46:38):

Okay. And if you've never used guide layers, they're super useful. A guide layer has this little icon next to it. And what it means is in this comp, when I'm working on this comp, this layer exists, right. I can hear the audio. Um, if you can put it on a, on a layer, you're looking at two and it, while you're working on it, it will show up. But once you use that, pre-com it, that audio doesn't exist anymore. Okay. So even though you see the speaker icon, no audio will play on the Slayer because I've made the audio guide layer. All right. And now I've got my, I've got my markers for the footsteps. So let's, uh, let's grab a single footstep, place it in here. Um, change the background to something that was command K by the way. Um, I accidentally dragged two in there.

Joey Korenman (00:47:26):

All right. So, um, you know, here show, here's another cool example of how to use a guide layer. So I want to line up, you know, you're gonna have 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 footsteps, and I want them to kind of arch. Okay. And I could just sort of eyeball that, but why eyeball it, why not give myself a reference? So I'm gonna, I'm going to grab my pencil and I'm just gonna kind of draw the path that I want, these things. I ha I'm in, Rodo busy mode, which is fine. We can use that. Uh, and maybe just kind of give myself a little bit of a reference path. So I made a shape layer and I don't want to fill, so I'm gonna click on the word, fill up here and turn off the fill. All right. And I'm just using this as a reference, so it doesn't have to be perfect, but that's going to be the path that I want those footsteps to follow.

Joey Korenman (00:48:19):

Okay. And I obviously don't want to see that. Right. When we come back here, I don't want to see that line. So I'll just turn it into a guide layer. Okay. So I can see it here, but when we go back, now it's gone. Right. And that's, that's the beauty of the guide layer. And so now what I'll do is, uh, let me, let me scale this down a little bit. Oh, and here's a good, here's something good to think about. So at this point, I'm already starting to think about how I might want the camera to follow this movement. And I'm thinking, you know, the, I probably want to start zoomed in and then the footsteps begin and I sorta pull back and follow them. Okay. So how close am I going to be to the footsteps when this comp starts? And I didn't know.

Joey Korenman (00:49:10):

Right. And you know, I might be this close and if I'm this close, but in this comp I'm animating them very small. Like this will, then I'm going to lose detail. So what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to make my comp twice normal size. Okay. So you could just hit command K and adjust your width and height, um, and do that. But the problem is I've already kind of set down this shape layer is my guide. Um, you know, and what if, you know, what if I want to keep it where it is? Well, after effects has some built-in scripts. If you go to the file scripts menu, and one of them is scale composition. And if you select that, you get this cool little box and you can just say new scale factor too. And it just doubles the height and width of your comp.

Joey Korenman (00:50:00):

Um, let me go back in here. Right? So now if I hit command, K, you can see it's double HD, but it, as it scales, it, it keeps everything in exactly the same spot. So it's just a cool shortcut to, to scale your comp up. Um, and so now I can, I can scale my footstep down, right. And animate a bunch of footsteps here, but this footstep is actually pretty big it's, you know, cause the, the comp is so big. All right. So let's rotate this one and let's start lying in these, up with the audio. Okay. So there's one footstep and then I'll duplicate it and I'll move this layer. So it lines up with the marker and I'm going to scale it. I'm just going to add a negative sign on the X scale. All right. So just flips it and then I'm gonna hit w w a brings up your rotate tool and I'm just gonna click and rotate it. Okay. And then I'm going to command D duplicate it, sorry. No, I'm not. I'm gonna click this one when I'm moving really fast. Um, you know, and I'm just trying to like click and didn't duplicate and rotate. I want to make sure that I don't accidentally do what I just did and select that shape layer. So I'm gonna lock it. So now I can click this duplicate, move it here. Hit w rotate it a little bit, right? Grab this one, duplicate it, move it here, rotate it a little bit.

Joey Korenman (00:51:28):

Okay. And make sure that I'm lining these up too. So this is the third footstep is the fourth footstep. And then this last one here is going to be this one. So put it over here, rotate it a little bit. Right. And then what I, what I wanted to do was once that last foot lands, I want, I then want sort of the, the other foot to sort of stand next to it. Okay. So then, you know, a few frames later, we'll have two feet saying next to each other like that. Okay. Um, and let's turn off that shape layer for a minute, so we can see, and you can see that now we've got this nice kind of arc, and I might even want to cheat this a little bit more. Right. And really give it, give it some curve. Um, all right. So let's play this real quick with the audio. Cool. So it's in sync, but I've actually sinked up the beginning of the animation with each footfall sound. Um, so this might visually look more in sync. If I take all of these and I just nudge them back two or three frames, someone to hold option and hit page up and just nudge them all. There you go, Ram preview that that's better.

Joey Korenman (00:52:53):

Cool. So that's, I mean, that's looking okay, but I feel like the animation of the footsteps takes too long and I kind of want them to disappear once they, you know, so like, I want that first one to land. And by the time this one's starting, I want this one to be fading off. So I'm just going to now go back into my pre-com here. Um, and let's go back into this pre-camp and let's do this. Um, let's hit, let's select the mat and hit you, bring up all the key frames. Uh, let me hit the, till the key. And I'm just going to select all of these. And I'm going to look for the last key frame, which looks like this one is the one that's furthest to the right. And I'm gonna hold option and click and just nudge these in. So the footsteps happen about twice as fast now.

Joey Korenman (00:53:43):

Okay. And then I want them to animate off, right. So let's go back to our footsteps arch. So they animate on, and then here, this one starts to fade off. So if I want that one to fade off, maybe what I'll do is all, let's think what would be a neat way to do this. Um, what we can do is, uh, got an idea. I'm going to use an adjustment layer here. We'll call this fade off and make an adjustment layer. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to actually use an effect to get rid of this foot. So it doesn't just like fade out. It'll do something slightly neater than that. Uh, we'll go to fact, and in transition, there's this effect called gradient wipe, um, which sounds kind of lame, but what it actually does is the gradient wipe takes another layers, brightness values, and it can then basically fade off the darker or lighter parts first.

Joey Korenman (00:54:44):

Right? So it looks a little neater. So if I, if I set the gradient layer to this cool dry earth texture fade off dry earth, then when I animate this, you see how it, it sort of animates in this kind of neater way and you can play with the softness. So it's not a total hard edge. Like that can be a little bit soft, little bit more maybe. Yeah. Something like that. And so now it all sort of dissolve off and to look a little bit cooler, right. And you can play with inverting the gradients. See if that looks any better, actually do like the way that looks better. Cause you get a little bit of that foot kind of left at the end. Um, so right there, that's where the fade offs going to begin. So I'm going to put a key frame on transition completeness, make sure it's zero and then let's just jump forward eight frames and we'll animate this and it looks like I only need to animate it to about there a hundred percent.

Joey Korenman (00:55:46):

How about that? Who would have guessed sometimes? Uh, it depends on the image. If it doesn't have any true black in it or true white, sometimes you don't have to go all the way to a hundred percent in this case we do so a hundred percent. Um, and then I'm just going to easy ease the key frames and a man I'm going to go to the curves editor and I'm going to take this last key frame and pull the Bezier handle out like this. The reason I'm doing that is because I want it to sort of start fading out, but then like linger, um, it's happening so quickly. You can't even see it. So let me pull that out a little bit further. There you go. And I just want like the, the last bits of that foot to just take a little bit longer. Um, and let's see what happens if I pull this busy handle out to cool. All right. So that's, you know, it's a little bit neater than just fading the thing off. And now if we go to footsteps arc and we play this Cool, and now these last two footsteps, you know, if I didn't want them to fade off, um, I could just put a time remap key frame on them so they don't fade off, but the rest of them do so there we go. There's our footsteps.

Joey Korenman (00:57:06):

Cool. Um, and now we can actually use the footsteps arc pre comp in our main comp here. Right. And it's already in there and you can see how big it is. Um, so let's, let's kinda line this up here where it's going to start. All right. And let's pick a different color for it. Um, I actually used, uh, I used, uh, the Adobe color tab over here to pick out some colors for this. Um, and so I'm just actually gonna, I'm just going to sort of cheat and just pull the colors right off of this. Uh, here's a trick I like to use. Um, I want to, I want to grab this purple color, but this layer is actually buried a few pre comps deep, and I don't really feel like going in and trying to find it. So what I'm gonna do is I have my character tab open.

Joey Korenman (00:57:51):

This is, you know, your text settings and there's a color picker that just hangs out there. And sometimes I'll use it just as like a storage, you know, just a, just a way of remembering a color. And so now what I'm going to do is put a fill effect on those footsteps. And now I can use this color picker to pick this color way over here. So now I've got that and I think I need to make it a little bit brighter. There we go. Cool. All right. So now looking at this, you can see you get all this nice texture to it. Um, and you know, now I need to start animating the camera, right. And this is, this is one of those did not mean to open nuke. Hey guys, this is what nuke looks like if he didn't know. Um, so you know what, um, this is where I need to, I need to really start framing things and, and you know, it, it's actually, I find easier to do this kind of all at the same time.

Joey Korenman (00:58:51):

So I've got my camera. Okay. Um, and I'm going to sort of start diving into the camera animation a little bit here. Um, let me rename this camera. So it's not camera one. And I generally, unless there's just one camera move happening. I generally don't put the key frames right on the camera. Um, and, and you'll start to see why, but what I do is I make a null null object and I'm going to call this cam oh one, right. Or actually maybe more appropriately move. Oh one. And the general trick is you use the Knowles to move the camera and every time there's a different move, you, you, you make a new Knoll and that Knoll does that move. Okay. So let's, let's figure out where we want the camera to start. Okay. And so we'll put the camera in the start position. So I'm gonna select the camera.

Joey Korenman (00:59:43):

I'm gonna hit P and I'm going to move up. And of course the footsteps need to be a 3d layer or none of this will work. There we go. All right. So we're going to start kinda zoomed in like this, and there you go. Right. So we're going to be sitting here and this footsteps going to happen, and the camera's going to zip off and sort of follow the footsteps around. And maybe we'll be a little bit further away. Cool. So this first, no, I need to make it a 3d layer and I'm going to parent the camera to it, and then I'm going to figure out, okay, here is where I kind of want it to start moving. So I'm gonna hit P on the Knoll. I'm going to separate the dimensions, right? This is something I pretty much always do when I'm animating position.

Joey Korenman (01:00:32):

So I can adjust those, those animation curves individually. And I'll just put key frames on all of these for now. Um, I'm also gonna put a key frame on zero station, cause I'm going to want to probably rotate that camera a little bit. And now I'm going to go forward to where that last, uh, where the marker is for the last footprint. And I'm going to adjust the Z position of my novel. And here's, what's cool. If you parent a camera to a novel and the novel is visible, you can click and drag that NOLA and actually use it to move the camera. And it's just kind of a neat little, well handy shortcut there. And one thing I'm already seeing as my texture is now not extending far enough. So I need to extend that with the reptile effect.

Joey Korenman (01:01:20):

Cool. There we go. And it needs to come down and you can see the numbers of getting humongous already. So I probably need to make those numbers a little smaller. All right. I don't want him to get too big and then actually scale the layer up a little bit. Okay. So I'm making the, the texture a little bit bigger overall, but since the camera just did a big zoom out move that I think that's going to be okay. Um, cool. And then I'm just gonna put easy ease on these and let's just take a look at that. Right. Let's just kind of see what's happening.

Joey Korenman (01:01:58):

Okay. So timing wise, it's sort of doing what I want, but movement wise, it doesn't feel very good at all. Um, and so what I may want to do is actually have that know rotate at the same time, so that we're sort of turning with the footsteps and, you know, the next thing that happens, there's this line of dialogue. Right. And so I, you know, I kind of need to leave some room in the comp for that dialogue. And so if I sort of center the footsteps here, there's no room for the type. So why don't we land somewhere like here? Right. And you can see now it's kind of neat how we, we kind of rotate over it, but we kinda need that camera to go in an arc around it. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to use my, um, let's see here. I want the camera to actually in the middle of this move, kind of be up here. I want it to kind of arc around like that. Um, and so now I can select all these and control, clip them, um, and say key fame, interpolation. That's good. It's already Bezier. Uh, and I need to now, because it's defaulting to an easy E's key frames. So what'll happen is it'll get there. [inaudible]

Joey Korenman (01:03:13):

well, it's actually looking okay. But, uh, if you have an easy east key frame in between two other key frames that are easy ease, it can sometimes add a little hitch in your animation. So I'm just going to go into my animation curves and just make sure that it's not doing that. And it actually looks pretty good right now. Let me just look at the X. You see how there's, what I was worried it was going to do is this a and it didn't, which is awesome. So, um, and so now I've added like a nice arc to my camera move. Um, but it ends really abruptly. So this is where you gotta get in there with the animation curves and, and just tweak them, make them do what you want. And so what I'm gonna do is grab this last key frame here, and I'm going to pull it out a little ways and I'm going to go kind of one by one with my properties, and maybe I can try to do them all at once. Let's see if this works, I'm going to select all of the animated properties and I'm going to grab all of the end key frames, and I'm going to pull those Bezier handles out. And that's just going to make that last ease in take longer.

Joey Korenman (01:04:17):

Cool. All right. Now this feels a little bit different than the, uh, than the example animation, but I don't mind it. It's kind of interesting. Um, and I might want to end a little bit more in this area, right? Yeah. Maybe like that. It's kind of cool. Have it be kind of lower? Um, let's play that. Interesting. Cool. Um, now one thing that I feel like we are starting to miss is that nice animation of the, of the footstep, cause it's going so fast. So what I might want to do is slow down the animation by pulling these key frames out this way. Right. Um, and doing the same thing, like having that animation ease out a little bit longer. And you know, when you, when you adjust all the curves at the same time, you gotta be careful because sometimes yeah, you can get stuff like this, right.

Joey Korenman (01:05:13):

Where I've actually pulled this, you know, this Bezier handle out and it's going down below what you don't want. You don't want this Bezier handle to be below this key frame because now the values are doing things you don't want them to do. So that's why sometimes you have to go in and check each little property manually, but that looks good. There we go. That's better. All right. And there's a little weird hitch. Some things like doing some things, doing something funny animation wise. So, um, let me use my Tilda key for a minute so I can really check these values and make sure we're not getting something let's see here.

Joey Korenman (01:05:58):

Yeah. These all look pretty good. So what's probably happening is you've got a value that's out of sync with another value. Like if, you know, if the, if the speed that the exposition is changing is different than the Y position and different than the Z position, then you can start to get little hitches in your animation. Um, let's see if that adjustment made any difference. It was like a little bit of a wiggle to it, but I might not worry about that for now, cause I don't want to torture you guys. Cool. So that's our first camera. And then once we land, I want that camera to slowly zoom outs. Okay. I kind of want to hang there. Um, and this is when you're going to see the power of using Knolls like this. So move one, right. Is this big arking move. Okay. I then want the camera to slowly zoom out and I've, I've animated four things on this Knoll.

Joey Korenman (01:06:53):

And if I then want to smoothly transition into a slope, pull-out, that's going to be kind of tricky to do on this layer, but what's, it's going to be easy to do is duplicate that novel. Uh, and I'm gonna use the left bracket key just to, just to quickly, if I, if I was good at doing it with my mouse, I would do this, but I use the left bracket key. It just brings it forward. Um, and actually before I do that, what I'm going to do is hit you and remove all the key frames from it. So now that second Knoll is in exactly the same spot as the first Knoll. It has no key frames on it. And so what I'm going to do is parent the first move to the second move. And then the second move, I'm only going to animate Z position and I'm going to just do a slight pull-out me move forward in time a little bit and do a slight pull out like that. Okay. Um, and stretches that now. Here's why this is awesome. It's awesome because let's, let's see what it looks like first off.

Joey Korenman (01:08:00):

That's really interesting. I would love to, I want to know why this is happening. It's like this weird, like it's right there. You can see it. You can actually see what's going on there. That's awful. Let's fix it. It's got to be the Y I think that's what that is. I think that Y position is doing something really funky. Let's set that to auto Bezier. Let's see if that fixes it. There we go. Much better. This auto Bezier button down here, it sort of attempts to smooth out a key frame that's in between two other key frames. And sometimes when you have a little hitches like that, it can help sort of figure it out. Okay. But now look how that, that zoom sort of just happens. Right. And, and it's not really that smooth of a transition yet. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to set that first key frame to easy ease on the second move, and I'm going to scoot it back a little bit. And I sorta like to keep these move Knowles trimmed. So I kind of know where the move begins and ends. Um, there we go.

Joey Korenman (01:09:10):

And what's cool is okay. I want that zoom to start a few frames earlier. I can literally just grab this note and move it over a little bit. And what's happening is this move is now overlapping with this move and sort of you sort of blending between them, right? So you've got this complex moving rotating camera, and then you've got a slight zoom out happening. And because they're on separate Knowles, it's so easy to control. If I, if I need to make the zoom quicker, I can just go like this. Right. I just move that key frame. And then the next move is just going to be on another Knoll that's over here. Right. And we're basically just going to stagger all of the moves and when they're on NOLs, you can move them just by sliding the Knoll. It makes it so much easier.

Joey Korenman (01:10:01):

So that's a really good little trick. All right. So now we've built up an environment. Uh, we've built our first animated piece and we have the camera animated and we've actually got a couple of moves happening. Um, and we're off to a great start. Um, so why don't we stop here and in the, in the next segment of this, in the next video, uh, we're actually going to start animating the type. Um, and I'm gonna show you guys some type tricks. So thank you guys so much for watching this and I'll see you next time. Thank you so much for watching. We will continue this in part two. And then in part three, we will finish up the animation. I hope you learned a lot from this lesson on how to start a more complicated after effects project like this kinetic type piece. Don't forget to sign up for a free student account to access the project files from the lesson you just watched. Thank you so much. And I will see you next time.

‍