Drama, action, boom. Your motion graphics are only as powerful as the story behind them.
[music] If you have After Effects, you’re holding one of the most cinematic storytelling [music] tools on the planet. So, here’s the secrets to creating the best visual content. All right, we got the camera flipping around, the wind blowing, crazy depth, and explosions. Well, maybe not so dramatic like that, but you know, a little fire here and there didn’t hurt anyone, right? So, to start any type of cinematic scene like this, we need to start with depth in mind. So, this begins by drawing out a very large rectangle with the shape tools and making it 3D. And at this time, let’s also add a gradient ramp to this layer and set the colors to, you know, two darkish tones. Then set this to a radial ramp so that the middle is the brightest point. Now, as any good floor does, set the X rotation to 90°. Lower the position down by a bit and scale it up. And finally, create [music] a background solid within, you know, the same color palette of that floor. And now, it’s time to collect that pension. I mean, it’s time to collect assets, as we just need a few graphics to build out a master scene from nothing. The best method is to search for free vector graphics of what you need as they’ll usually come in EPS or Illustrator formats which can be opened in Adobe Illustrator. And you know this is part of the creative cloud. But here in Illustrator we just do some very basic stuff like you know drag select the element that we want copy it on your keyboard and [music] then create a new 1080x 1080 document. Then just paste that element in size it up to fit and just center it. And finally, save this as an Illustrator document because now back in the good old AE, thankfully we can import this as footage and drag this bad boy right into your timeline. [music] And if you click continuously rasterize to add that cog right there, you can essentially scale this up without losing an ounce of quality. You can also [music] use the fill effect or the gradient ramp effect to dial in your own color and make it match with your palette. But now you have the ability to collect what you need for your masterpiece. But that masterpiece continues with [music] the concept of depth. So firstly, I highly suggest using the pan behind tool and set the anchor [music] point of your objects to the bottom of their contents. This will make resizing so much easier as you develop the scene and keep that vein in your forehead from popping [music] out. Or, you know, maybe that’s just me, I don’t know. But once that is all done, make your layers 3D and then lower the Y position until your assets start to clip or sit onto your floor and feel free to duplicate and set their Z positions back into the scene to harness the full power of depth. Now, feel free to scale, [music] add in new objects, but most importantly, create a scene where you populate the background and even the foreground with objects. As [music] you create your depth, think about changing the color of your objects as this concept can further enhance the depth of your scene. Now, with that said, I highly advise as a pro tip to keep your master object like you know this character here at a Z position of exactly zero to [music] keep them centered directly in the middle of the scene. But when you’re happy with your overall design and your depth, we’re ready for success and some full grown beards [music] and easily produce beautiful visuals and save time by free After Effects and Premiere Pro templates. drag and drop transitions, animation presets, and cinematic motion graphics that you can customize with a few clicks. You can access thousands of templates directly in After Effects and Premiere [music] Pro, where you can edit them to fit your vision in seconds, allowing you to build cinematic masterpieces in no time with the link below. And if you do pick up anything, you will be supporting my channel. [music] So, thank you very much. All right, now that we have some graphics set up, I like to set up a quick camera layer and use the dolly torch cursor tool to essentially [music] close up on the scene. So, I know roughly where my final stopping point is at. Also, since we moved the anchor point to the bottom of these layers, well, at least I hope you did. You can easily animate the rotation to have these animate in, say, the wind. But we’ll revisit all this later. For now, let’s add some physics and drama to this spectacle with particles or in my case, blowing leaves. So you can use any graphic you want to turn into particles. Though I would pre-ompose it and call it anything you like. Now create a solid layer and use the famous CC particle world effect because you know I am crazy but I’m not crazy enough to duplicate a leaf myself straight away. Let’s go to the particle tab and set the type to a textured quad polygon. Then set that texture drop down to your pre-mped layer. And absolutely great. Here I would set the size variation and the max opacity to 100% just to get that out of the way. And from here, let’s go ahead and increase the producer size of all the values to spread the particles around the scene. And most importantly for the physics, we’ll use a jet sideways animation. We’ll set the gravity to a small negative amount so that the leaves will fly up. And we’ll dial in the velocity and the resistance just by a touch. Lastly, let’s increase the longevity and set your birth rate to finalize the amount of flying leaves that you have. Keep in mind, anytime you’re working with particles like this, it’s just a process of figuring out the right settings and the final look that you’re going to get. So, you know, don’t stress about it and smash a keyboard like I usually do. [music] I really got to get help. The next big animation concept is wind blowing on your character or any graphic that you may have. So, for that windy animation, let’s take this character or any layer and pre-ompose it and make it 3D again. Then, inside of that composition, let’s go straight away to composition settings here at the top and let’s make sure that the comp is the same size as the image. This is actually kind of important. Now, let’s grab the pen tool and create a mask around the things that you want to have blow in the wind, like the hair or the clothes here. Though, most importantly, again, make sure there’s an absolute straight edge with your mask. Then duplicate your layer. Set the bottom mask to subtract and [music] set one the mask on the top layer to none. From here, we can use the wave warp effect and set the pinning to right edge. From here, let’s dial in the wave height and width until you know you’re cool with that animation. But we need to fix this terrible cut. So to fix this, we’ll throw in the transform effect and place it at the top of the effect stack. From here, we’ll use the position on that transform effect to move it over to the right side of the composition. Then we can use the regular transform position on the layer to set this all back in place. And that looks great. Now, if you have multiple mask like I do here, duplicate this layer and switch the mask back to add and none. Just switch it like that. And of course, fix the transform position [music] and the regular position to finalize the wind animation. Now, back in the main composition, be sure to resize this as necessary. And also, you can get this fire asset with the free project in [music] the description below. But now we’re off to the final steps where everything just comes together. Now there’s a lot that we can do with camera movement just by adding key frames for position and point of interest. You can dolly into your [music] scene with the camera tools or you can use the pan under tool, which I like to call the [music] XY tool. I know it just makes more sense in my head to have our camera like track in like this, but you know, hey Josh, you know, there’s nothing there when [music] we do this. Okay, for simplicity and so we don’t have to create like a million layers, let’s preompose like our groups together. So like our background trees here, I will pre-ompose those together in one composition. And for rocks and these bushes, I’ll pre-ompose that into their own composition. But make sure that you click continuously rasterize and I would add the 3D cube in there for good measure. Now when you duplicate, you can reposition all these assets to fit in the empty areas and you’re just so much more organized. And on top of that, this scene is just so much bigger than it previously was. But if you really want to lose [music] your mind and have the camera spin around the scene, this is how you do it. Firstly, create a null object, make it 3D, and parent the camera to the null. Oh, and by the way, I would remove the key frames on your camera unless you know you’re just pushing in with the camera movement. But now, let’s add a key frame on your null object for Y rotation and have [music] this spin by one time. And again, we have a lot of emptiness here. So now that the scene is so much bigger, we should go to two views here and use [music] the top view. And from here, we’ll go ahead and duplicate and start to fill the scene behind the camera layer and also on the sides of the scene. But as an important note, you don’t need to rotate any of these layers because when everything is ready and your scene is surrounded by your asset, here’s the biggest secret. Select all the assets in your scene [music] except for the floor and background. go to layer, autoor orient, and select [music] orient towards camera. And for some extra good measure, I would do the same thing to all the layers inside of their comps. And of course, turn on motion blur. [music] Now, if everything is done correctly, you will now have this spinning scene. And I promise [music] you, you will impress some people. Even my wife was impressed because she said, “Cool.” H, thanks. For the absolute final touches, I would enable depth of field inside the camera layer. And I like to increase the aperture and the blur level [music] to kind of really pop out that out of focus look. You might also have to key frame the focus distance to keep [music] your character in well focus. Uh for lighting control, I like to use the CC vignette effect on an adjustment layer and throw in a low noise effect. But do what you want [music] with the camera movement to make something awesome. Subscribe to be the best and always be creating.