Here are five motion graphic tricks to make anything cinematic in After Effects. As you know, we’ll be using a handful of buffoonery effects to create light and shadow, which will allow us to produce an infinite amount of motion graphics. All right, my first and favorite motion design trick is turning random shapes into gradient masterpieces. So, firstly, create any shape of your choice with the shape tools. Though you could use the rectangle tool to create a large shape in the corner, maybe rotate it or even use the ellipse tool to create a basic circle or stretch it all out to create an oval for some variation. Now for some quick animation right off the bat, we can use the wiggle paths property inside the shape layer. This is a very simple effect if you will, as you only need to increase the size, lower the detail, set the points to smooth, and maybe use a low wiggles per second. And this can also be copied and paste to your other shape layers as well to create that $1 million animation. But to give this scene some life, go ahead and add the four color gradient effect and move the points to the edges or the sides of your graphic. And finally, you’re going to want to use two colors of the similar tonality to create a very nice blend. Now, to help blend this into the background, let’s use the gaj and blur effect and set the amount to, I don’t know, around 10. And most importantly, let’s use a CC radial blur effect to set this to a fading zoom. This effect is going to allow you to move the center origin of the blur with the anchor point right here, which should be placed on the side of the shape. Then all we need to do is increase the amount to make the side scatter with a blur. Awesome. We can also alt click the stopwatch here to use the wiggle 0.520 expression to add a little bit more animation. And of course, you can copy and paste these effects to your other independent shape layers. But now let’s go ahead and add some character with our cinematic effects by creating an adjustment layer. The first effect to add is noise, which we’ll set to 12%. The second effect is glow, which all we need to do is nearly max out the glow radius and maybe adjust the threshold if needed. And finally, try the posterize effect to create some grit. And if you like, use the curves effect to add some extra contrast. And most importantly, to make sure that these effects actually work, you’re going to need a very dark background underneath your cinematic gradient shapes. Now, go ahead and make those millions. The next cinematic motion graphic is creating pockets of light and shadow with a single effect. Looks great on almost anything. And that effect is CC spotlight when you apply it to a white, maybe bluish solid layer. The color doesn’t really matter. Now, wasting no time, we should set the blend mode of the layer to either add screen or lighten. and set the intensity of the effect to 100. Doing this will allow us to visualize the spotlight correctly. And all we need to do is move the anchor points of the spotlight effect to help angle this in the direction that you want. Then make sure that the height is set to zero, allowing you to accurately adjust the cone angle and the edge softness. Now, we could add the wiggle expression to the cone angle to add, you know, a little flickering animation. Very cute. Now, to help fade the light beam into the background, let’s go ahead and use the linear white transition effect and set the angle to match your current beam direction and then adjust the completion and then truly go crazy on the feather. Awesome. But to boost the darkness of the scene, let’s go ahead and duplicate this spotlight layer and then set the bottom blend mode to darken. Cool. But to take this even further, we can use the same adjustment layer effects from that previous technique without maybe the posterize effect. And awesome, you can also add some new spotlights by duplicating the top layer and moving it around. Also, you can animate the from and two values to actually move the beams of light to create something cinematic. A quick technique to add a simple refraction effect to anything is by drawing out a thin straight line horizontally or vertically in an empty composition. Then, right click this layer, go to layer styles, and add a gradient. Just make sure that the black and white colors will stretch from side to side like this. And finally, create a lot of duplicates. And I mean a lot lot. And when that’s all done, from here, just select everything and hit P on your keyboard for position. Then hold control and alt or option and command on your keyboard to proportionally spread this across the entire composition. Like so. You know, this won’t look great or anything, but now we can take this composition and place it over any body of work that you have in another comp and turn it off. Now all we need to do is create an adjustment layer and add the displacement map effect. We’ll set the map layer to that you know composition that we created and adjust the displacement values to create a glassesque refraction effect. And remember you can create this vertically as well. So it can be horizontally and vertically. With that said, my next favorite motion graphic is creating curved light streaks like this. So we can start off by creating a very large white stroke only circle with the ellipse tool. Then we can contain the line with trim paths. As you may have guessed, all we need to do is adjust the end and the offset. You can even key frame the offset to rotate the line by a bit. Now to smooth out those hard edges, go to taper and max out the start and end length just like so. Perfect. Now for the effects, use the gaj and blur effect and set it to 10. And then use the CC radial fast blur effect. increase the amount and set this to brightest. Now use the glow effect and increase the radius. And for a stacking, you know, technique, duplicate the glow effect and increase the radius even further. Now, finally, to give this some color, go ahead and create an adjustment layer and use the trionee effect. And just set that midtone color to any color that you want. And again, use the noise effect at 12%. Pretty recurring theme in this video. And then use the glow effect once again for some good measure at around 300 points or so. Then of course make sure that you have a background and you can animate the streak however you want. Maybe cough cough. Use the trim paths to bring in your glowing cinematic streak. Just awesome. But okay, the next and final technique is creating colorful motion graphics in moments with the techniques that we’ve already used in this video. You know, kind of tying everything together to Aura Farm. So, for instance, you can create any shape that you like. And I’ll set this to a, you know, radial gradient for this specific shape. You’ll typically want to set your points for the gradient off the bat so that we can actually see the colors as we edit the gradient with a bunch of different, you know, tones like so. Now, if you have a stroke object, we can animate it in with trim paths, right? But back to the basics again with an adjustment layer, we can use the noise and the glow effect several times to compound the overall glowability of everything. And of course, you can use posterize to add some grit to your object. Also, since the blur effect is a massive key to this cinematic theme, try the camera lens blur effect on your actual shape. And then use the wiggle expression again to pop this in and out of focus. But now you have the tools to create cinematic motion graphics. Subscribe to be the best and always be creative.