For my first blog post, I wanted to do a tutorial about After Effects. In this tutorial I want to give a couple of tips about how to add a few small changes that make all the difference when editing an animation.
First, after opening a new project and and new composition (Composition>New Composition) you then create a solid layer by going up to Layer>New>Solid. After doing this, you have a solid color. You can choose to edit the color here if you want, but you will be changing it pretty soon so I would advise against getting attached to the pretty shade of coral that you discovered in the color picker.
Next, what you want to do is you want to to the toolbar and choose Effect>Generate>Gradient Ramp. This will bring up a new panel on the left in your window. This “Effects Panel” is where you will be editing the background to get a cool gradient look. If you look closely at commercials and professional ads on television, you can see the gradient that they used in their after effects files. The way it looks leaves a distinct ripple in the background that adds some depth to the layer, which creates the illusion of a 3D space almost.
After getting the Effects Panel, you’re going to go to where it says, Linear Ramp and click the drop down menu so you can select “Radial Ramp” instead. The linear ramp looks pretty awkward in my opinion, but I honestly am biased towards circles for everything visual so take my advice for a grain of salt.
Anyways, then you want to choose your start and end colors with the color pickers that are in your effects panel. I typically like to choose a lighter color in the middle and a darker color outside because that gives a little depth to the background. Then, you can adjust the radius using the value changer or by clicking and dragging the little circles that look like targets on your active camera preview. With this, your circles will grow or shrink depending on how dramatic you want your gradient to be.
Viola! There you have a clean background to edit and create. But now you want to make your animated text look professional and interesting, right? So how in the world do you go about doing that??
Well, one way is to adjust your keyframes to have “Easy Ease” which will give them the smooth and natural movement that makes animations pop and really impress. As that is something that we already discussed in class, I’ll give you another quick tip for improving your animations and making them look more dynamic. The motion blur tool is one that many people unconsciously notice when watching animated text or shapes. The tool adds that motion that we see when something moves quickly, and definitely works to add some interesting flair to your movements when editing.
In order to get the motion blur tool up and running on your shapes and text alike, simply go to the timeline where your icons for 3D, parenting and the names of your layers are. For example, if you want to add motion blur to say, a rectangle, you would go to the rectangle layer, and click the box under the icon column with the 3 circles that I tried to point to below:
Click this, and it will add a motion blur to the layer and any keyframed effects that you have on there.
Hope this helps with adding some interesting and easy edits that make all the difference when animating something. Happy creating!
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