Spinning globe & star effects

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Course contents
SECTION: 5
Inspiration 4:15
SECTION: 13
Swinging text 10:36
SECTION: 14
Puppet tool 5:54
SECTION: 15
Effects & presets 6:56
SECTION: 17
What now? 3:56

Questions

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Course info

53 lessons / 6 hours

Overview

Motion graphics are an essential part of video creation and editing. From moving titles across the screen to stabilising your footage to smooth out the bumps or replacing a sign in the background. Ubiquitous, subtly powerful, and for the beginner, a bit mystifying. You need to learn motion graphics. You need a tutorial that will help at every step of the way, without leaving you drowning in details.

If you’ve ever made a video, you’ve probably already discovered that it’s all the little extra infographics, titles and animation that make your project look professional – and you’ve probably already wondered which is the right After Effects tutorial that will let you access the potential.

After Effects is the industrial strength tool for putting the motion in your graphic designs and content. It can also appear to be pretty deep, so getting guidance from a pro that understands how to teach, as much as how to use, After Effects is going to be the key that unlocks your potential.

How about a motion graphics tutorial taught by a working professional who just happens to be great at teaching too? Daniel Scott has been working with animation and motion graphics for over a decade and is the founder of Bring Your Own Laptop - they've been helping people learn design and animation all over the world for just as long.

 



 

Daniel, an Adobe Certified Expert and Instructor, will take you one manageable step at a time through motion graphics in a series of small practical projects that come together to unlock Adobe After Effects, animation, and infographics. These tutorials give you the complete foundation that you can build on for years to come. Learn the principles and the specifics of producing content, in a way that you'll understand and remember. And stay awake.

Just 3 hours long, and very hands on, you’ll take on specific tools and techniques one at a time so you can easily comprehend each aspect of the tutorial, and see all the parts of creating motion graphics before you get intimidated by the scale of what you can do. From zero to hero, as we like to say.

You get downloadable exercise files that match the course, so no time wasted trying to match project settings or finding material to work with. And you can use the end results in your own projects or portfolio – you can customise them to suit your needs as you grow in understanding.

To learn motion graphics is to unlock the door on the magic that makes your video or web content stand out in the crowd. Daniel is going to provide you with the motion graphics tutorial you’ve been looking for to get more than your foot in the door – you’re going to be able to create beautiful animation and infographics. You’ll be empowered to use After Effects the way it was meant to be used, and to create your own creative content, even during the tutorial itself.

What are the requirements?

  • This course is for absolute beginners

  • You'll need a copy of Adobe After Effects CC 2015 or above. A free 30 day trial can be download from Adobe here.

What am I going to get from this course?

  • Create beautiful motion graphics

  • Animate compelling infographics

  • Choose the correct video settings.

  • You’ll learn how to exporting your video easily.

  • You’ll be able to create slick type animations.

  • Rendering your video for Youtube & Vimeo.

  • Create titles for interviews.

  • Add music to your motion graphics.

  • Trim & editing video.

  • Add watermarking your video.

  • Fixing shaky footage.

  • Color correct & fix any bad footage.

  • Add a vignette to your video.

  • Learn how to use your skills from Illustrator & Photoshop

  • How to use green screen footage

  • How to mask like a pro.

  • How to animate infographics like bar graphs, line graphs & pie charts.

  • How to use camera to make 3D type.

  • Animating static images using parallax

  • Plus basic character animation.

  • + More…

What is the target audience?

Yes:

  • This course is for people who want to start earning money as a motion graphics designer.

  • This course is for beginners wanting to learn to use After Effects for motion graphics and infographics.

  • No previous After Effects or animation skills are necessary.

No:

  • This course is NOT for people who have a good understanding of After Effects already. This is for new people only.

Course duration 5 hours+ your study.

Daniel Scott

Daniel Scott

Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor

instructor

I discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.

Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.

Downloads & Exercise files

Download Exercise Files

Transcript

All right, we're getting to the end now. This video here is going to be about Effects and Presets. And we're going to make this the spinning globey thing, with some stars in the background. I know it's not the most exciting thing but I guess what it helps demonstrate is that we've now gone through and learnt all kind of the fundamentals of After Effects. There are cameras, and precomps, and key frames. Now that you understand those things there are a zillion Effects and Presets that you can go and use. We've just used a couple in this Effects and Presets window. There are loads.

Now those are ones just built into After Effects. There are lots of third party stuff. There are free ones, and paid ones. I just want to show you this example because I want to show you how quickly you can get to something like this. It's only about 4 or 5 clicks to make this thing. I exaggerate a little, but you know, you can get this going in 1 minute, if you hurry. Based on Effects that other people have done. So there's lots out there. So hopefully now, we got the basic After Effects skills, we'll be able to go off and—

I taught you how to fish, maybe, and you can go off now and do your own stuff. So let's build this. Let's go to 'File', 'New', 'Project'. Let's make a 'New Composition'. And this one here is going to 'black' background, it's going to be '5 secs' long. It's going to be 'HDTV'. We should give it a name, I never do. Let's bring in - double click down here - let's bring in 'World Map.ai'. It's an Illustrator file. It's got a vectory, globey thing, drag it in.

Now what we want to do is turn it into that globe. So over here, in 'Effects & Presets', there's one in here called 'CC Sphere'. All these ones, the CC, it's nothing to do with Creative Cloud. The company that license the Adobe license from them is called something core something like that, anyway, CC. So that's been around a while, and that's the effect. These are third party ones that Adobe have decided to pay for themselves and put in to After Effects for you. So there's loads in here that start with CC. We'll use lots of them in this one.

The cool thing about it is we got a globe, hey, how about that? Now let's play around with the 'Radius'. It's at '200', I'm going to get mine to '400' just so you can see it. The other cool thing is, under 'Rotation' here, watch this, I'm not going to use the first one, I'll use the second one here. Oops, wrong rotation. You can see, hey, look at that. We got a 3D globe. So put it back to '0'. And what I'd like to do is let's get it to spin 360°.

So at the beginning here, we're going to set a key frame for 'Y rotation'. You'll see down here, if I hit you, there he is there. Okay, it's key frame all the way to the end. And instead of dragging this, like we normally do, I'll get it to go completely around. So instead of typing 360 over here, this first little one, this means one time around. If I type it in three times, it's going to try and spin three times around in my little time here. So it's going to spin a bit fast, watch.

So actually I'm going to go here, and I'm going to say just one times around, even that's a bit fast. One of the things in here is that you can see the inside, which is kind of-- depends on what you want, right? Can you see, you can see the back of South America there, What we want to do is, we want to-- I said South America, I didn't mean it. That's Africa, good work, Dan. That's embarrassing that my geography is that bad. The big one.

So, let's look at getting rid of this inside. At the moment it's rendering at full, we can say, just the outside. Now it will just have the outside bits. What we also can do, let's put an ocean in. Now to put an ocean in, actually just go to 'Layer', 'New', let's put in a 'Solid'. Pick the color of the ocean. I'm going to have kind of a light blue color. Nice. And then add that same 'CC Sphere'. Now we could just drag this across and add it, and adjust it, however we want it to, but actually let's just click on 'World Map' and up here, where CC Sphere is you see this, there he is there, click on him. Just hit 'Copy' on my keyboard, jump to this guy, and hit 'Paste'. You can see, it just sucks in the same radius, and has the same rotation. Rotation doesn't mean much because it's on-- because it's one solid mess, but let's play around with the layer order.

So let's drag this medium royal blue thing here. I'm going to rename it, let's call this one 'Water'. And you can see now, we have a globe with some water. So you can see, just how by using some of these presets here, just one of them, actually to get this going. Just dump it on a layer, I've dumped it on two layers, it's got it to spin with some key frames.

Let's look at one of the other CC ones. Let's look at something called star, or something like that. 'CC Star Burst'. So this one here is going to give us that star field effect. So what we need to do is, for this one I'm going to have nothing selected, 'Layer', 'New'. You see, although mine was grayed out it's kind of half way through fixing one of these bits, sometimes it's easier to click off in the background. Comes back to life, let's go to 'New', 'Solid'. This one's going to be my 'Stars'. What color my star's going to be? I'm going to give you white. And that's all that it is, and then we go to 'CC Stars', and add it to it. Cool thing. Watch this. It's already animated, ready to go.

This looks like-- it has been blown up though. So, let's look at-- I'll just pull this down so it just renders a bit faster. Now it's just a matter of playing around with some of these bits. So, 'Scatter', can you see, I can-- How far they're apart: Speed, I'm going to slow it down, maybe '0.2'. It's just a matter of playing around, how much do you want this? Maybe a bit big. The size, keep it down to '50'. So small, like dots. There's lots to play around with. Just experiment.

The other thing I might do is put the layer order. Can you see my stars are above everything. I'm going to put below my water. There's my globe at the front there. Can you see, just with a couple of little effects and a couple of little adjustments we've got something reasonably high value. And I guess that's what I wanted to show you for the last thing.

Now it's time to fish and go off, and find other things to do. What I'll do for my website as well is I've got some other more advanced projects or smaller projects that you can do. So check out those as well, have a look through the course list. Let's move on to the last thing. We're going to look at some advanced exporting. All right, see you in the next video.

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