In this tutorial, I'm going to show you how I
made some of the really cool effects in my music video that just premiered called "Insomniac."
If you haven't seen that music video, check out the link in the description below. This is a
creative-based tutorial and we're going to go way over the 7 minutes. Now I've included a table of
contents so you can easily jump around or maybe you don't have time to check out everything in
one viewing. Please like this video, share it, and don't forget to
subscribe. Click the bell
for notifications and join my channel today for membership perks - it's just $4.99. Support us by
getting your 7 Minute AE merch at our online store and check out our affiliates: Envato Elements
and AE Juice. Links for all of that are in the description. I really mean it when i say: "There's
a lot to get through so let's dive right in!" Okay, so the first thing we need to do is create
our background. So CMD/CTRL + N to create a new composition. We're going to call
this "BG" for
background. 1920x1080, I'm gonna go 30 frames per second, and then I'm going to make this
14 frames, And just click "ok." Now I got this metal texture from one of my affiliates, Envato
Elements. Right now they're running a special: 7 free days of Envato Elements. Link's in the
description below. I highly recommend you check it out. I want to create this kind of flashing
background to get our film look, and the way we do that is every 2 frames, I'm going to split the
layer and
then move my background. So just split at this frame, which is 4. Go to 6, split. Maybe
you'll go this direction. You want it to look as random as possible, you don't really want it to be
cohesive or anything that's like really organized. The more random, the better. And then we watch
this play back. We can see we get this kind of random kind of flashing effect, which is exactly
what we're going for. Now I need to add in a solid so CMD/CTRL + Y for a solid. I already have
mine set, it's go
ing to be this hex code: AFAFAF. Click "ok." Now bring that underneath all of our
metal textures here. Now let's just select all of our metal textures - "T" for opacity - and bring
those down to about 65%. We just want it to be a little bit - actually, maybe we'll go 50%. Just
a little bit lighter. Okay, so now we need to create our Image precomp, so CMD/CTRL + N for
a new composition. We'll call this "Image 1." Okay, now the reason I like to precomp these
images is because you can swap out
the images super, super quick. I'm going to use images of
my wife. This is what I used in my music video and this tutorial is in relation to that music
video, as I promised in my last announcement. So you can put in whatever images you want.
By precomping the images, it makes it so much easier to just to swap them out. This
is my first image here. I'm just going to bring up my scale and position to fill up the comp
here, so that way it looks just like this. You want to make sure that the e
ntire comp is filled
up. So now I need to create that film strip, so right-click in this area that's to the left of
your timeline. Go to NEW/SHAPE LAYER. Let's open that up and we want to add in several things.
First we want to add in a rectangle, we want to add in a stroke, and we want to add in a repeater.
Let's start from top to bottom. We'll just open all of this up here. I'm going to pull this up
so we can see everything. Okay, so first our rectangle path - let's change our size settin
gs to
250, 200. I'm going to change the color to black. And then for our repeater, we want to make
6 copies of our repeater. And then open up the transform settings for your repeater, and
it always defaults to 100 pixels on the x , 0 and the y. Let's change that to 0 (x) and then
200 on the y. The reason we want to go 200 is because notice our rectangle path size
is also 200(y), so this will offset our rectangles perfectly. So it's just like that.
And we need to actually fatten this up a l
ittle bit. So our stroke width is 2 - let's make that
actually 75. So now we have this film strip here. I also need to add in a fill, so let's go up here
and add in a fill. And make sure your fill goes underneath your stroke. So let's just close
this stuff up here, bring the fill underneath the stroke, change that red to a white, and go
down to our fill opacity and make this opacity, we'll say maybe, 40%, so it's just a little bit
lighter so you can kind of see through it. Okay, so let's ju
st bring up our position on this film
strip and we're going to move it over so that way it's over here to the side, but we also want
to be somewhere in the center vertically. Okay and then let's just make a copy of this so
CMD/CTRL + D to duplicate, and then we have our position pulled up on this shape layer, so
just move that one over to the other side. Okay, one last thing I want to do here is if you select
this image here, and go to LAYER/NEW/ADJUSTMENT LAYER it will put the adjustment l
ayer above your
image. Okay let's go to our effects and presets, and we want to type in "fast box" for Fast
Box Blur. Change our blur radius to 8, and we want to repeat those edge pixels. Let's
go up to our shape creation tool, make sure you have the rectangle tool, and just put a rectangle
around the film strip, so that way the only thing that's being blurred out is within these film
strips. Okay, so that's perfect. And let's make sure we have this set to the right length, we want
to make
sure this duration is actually 5 seconds long, so click "ok." And then make sure you just
stretch this out all the way to the very end, so you can select all of these, go down the very
end. ALT/OPT + right bracket to pull those all the way over. Okay so there's our first image.
So now we need to create our main composition, so CMD/CTRL + N to create a new composition
and we'll call this "Main Precomp," and 1920x1080, 30 frames, but we want to
make this one 15 seconds long. So click "ok." A
ll right, so now we can bring in our background.
And first let's go ahead and kind of tweak this background. So we want this to stretch for
the entire duration of this 15 seconds, so let's rightclick on this, go to TIME/ENABLE
TIME REMAPPING, and notice how you have these two keyframes that get put in there automatically
for you. Well now you can stretch this all the way out. Go down to this last keyframe, you'll notice
it goes black, so what we need to do is go 1 frame before the last fram
e, put another keyframe there,
and then delete this last one. So basically we're just going to be using these frames right here.
Now ALT/OPT + click on time remap - loopOut() - and then if you watch it play back, you can
see it does that flashing kind of background forever. Okay, so let's bring in our first image.
We have this Image 1 here. Let's put that right on top. And then now I need to add in some effects
to kind of give this the look that we want. So first let's go and type in "tint:
- just drop
that right in there to make it black and white. Then we want to add in a "curves" and we're
looking for COLOR CORRECTION/CURVES, so it's this one right here. Double-click that and now I'm
going to pull this up so you can see a little bit better. And i'm just going to kind of give it some
contrasty punch, and kind of up the brightness like that. Okay, so now, in order to get this
to move the way that you saw in the example, I used an effect called "Offset" - so let's type
in "o
ffset" and double-click to add that. So the way offset works - I'm going to close up these
other effects here - notice that our "shift center 2" is at 960x540. It puts the center of this
effect into the center of the size of your comp, so this Image 1 precomp is 1920x1080. The way
that this offset will be spinning is going to be relative only to the y value, so let's put a
keyframe at the very beginning of our animation. Hit "U" to bring up our keyframes, Shift +
Page Down 1, 2, 3 to go for
ward 30 frames. We need to move in increments of 1080 because our
comp is 1920x1080. If you just type in +1080 that will make this go 1 rotation as you can see. If
we scrub through this it goes just 1 rotation. Well, if you go through 2 rotations, then we
just add in another +1080 like that. And we have two rotations like that. Now that movement's a
little bit boring, so let's just kind of mess with these keyframes. Go to KEYFRAME ASSISTANT/EASY
EASE IN and then if you type Shift + F3, it g
oes to our graph editor, and just pull this
handle all the way to the left. One of the things I like to do, too, is add in some motion blur.
If you add in motion blur here, you won't get anything. That's because the movement is coming
from this Offset. So it's not actually moving because of the position or scale, it's moving
because of this effect. But there's a way to work around that. So if we go back to our effects
and presets: "cc force" and add in a CC Force Motion Blur, now we will ge
t some motion blur
that's added to this. So whenever you use offset, make sure you add in CC Force Motion Blur in order
to get the motion blur that you're looking for. I'm going to set this to quarter quality, so
that way it moves through a little bit quicker. I'm going to kind of play around with some
of these keyframes. I'm going to pull this a little bit closer together, and this is
all personal preference. There is nothing on here that's set in stone. It's just based on
the way that yo
u like things to look. So I'll put another keyframe for "shift to center". Go forward
a little bit, now maybe I want to go back in the opposite direction. So right now our y value is
2700. I'm gonna go -1080, just to go back up one rotation so that way it'll kind of go back up like
that and then maybe we'll do one more sizeable move. Go forward a little bit, +1080+1080 to go
forward 1080 twice. So we watch this playback... Okay, and again you can play around with these
keyframes. Maybe you
want to make these Easy Ease, open your graph editor, you know, just kind of
play around with how you want these to animate in. Again, there's no set rules for this. You can
kind of just play around with this - honestly, I made mine just completely random. Okay, and I
think what I'm going to do, actually, is we'll put this last animation at about 3 seconds and
15 frames, and we'll make that start there. Okay, so let's make some more changes to this layer. Hit
"P" for position and we're goin
g to put a wiggle expression on our position, we're going to say:
wiggle (2,20). So that way we get this movement where it kind of bounces around like that. But
now notice how our comp - whenever it's sitting still - it kind of has these edges. So to fix that
we want to go to our effects and presets: "motion tile." Add in motion tile and then we want to
mirror our edges, output width and height to 125. So we kind of have that kind of a movement.
Okay maybe we want it to go even faster, so l
et's say: wiggle (3,20) to
really kind of give it that shake... Maybe we'll say: wiggle(3,15).
You know, you're just going to play around with these settings to see
what it is that works for your aesthetic. Let's duplicate Image 1, so now we have two
images like that. Hit "U" to bring up our keyframe, and now let's move this second one down so that
way this keyframe here on Image 1, the bottom one, is lined up with this image. Now you want the
number of rotations between these 2 keyframes
to be the same number of rotations between these
two and in the same direction. So let's take a look at this this keyframe here. The Offset is 1620, the
second one is 3780. So that's 2 full rotations. So now we can go back, click all of these off and
start over from the beginning, right? So we'll make this first keyframe here 960, 540 and we go forward
2 full rotations, which is actually 2160, so that's 1080 + 1080 is 2160. We take these
keyframes and let's see what we did with that. Okay,
so we start off slow and end fast so, we'll do
the same thing with this make those. Easy Ease, select this first keyframe, start off slow and end fast.
Take this Image 1 and hit CMD/CTRL + D to duplicate it, and notice how After Effects renames
this for you sequentially, so now we have "Image 2." So we have to do, we want to keep in our film strip
and this adjustment layer, iIm just going to grab a different image. So I'm going to grab this "sheila2,"
and holding down ALT/OPT, drag that so
that way it just goes right on top of the other image. Now, I
need to resize this because it's a different size from our other image. I want to center it up.
And if we go back out to our Main Precomp here, we can see we also need to add in our
Image 2 precomp onto this Image 1, so again holding down OPT/ALT, drag
Image 2 on top of Image 1 so it replaces it. I'm going to bring over my layer
so it starts about right there, and we want to end the first image about right
there. So see we're mo
ving somewhere in between these 2 keyframes and at some point you want
the second one to pop on. And you can see where it changes right there, but when you watch it playback
it's hard to tell when it actually does it. Okay, so now I'm going to go ahead and add in some
of these, like, little movements here, so we'll put a keyframe here, go forward a little bit and maybe
we'll go back 1080 so that way it's like: "Boom." It just goes up one time. Maybe we'll go forward 1
long time, so we'll sa
y +2160, that way it's gonna really flip through pretty hard for us like
that. And i'm gonna take maybe this keyframe, go to our graph editor, and just pull that handle over,
so that way it comes in really fast and ends slowly. And then the same thing that we did for this
this first transition we're gonna do for this next transition, so go to about the 8
second mark, put a keyframe there, and maybe go forward about 10 frames. And we just want
to go backwards 1080, so -1080 like that. Let's
take this Image 2 comp, duplicate that, and
then let's just pull this down. "U" to bring up our keyframes, and then if we go to this first keyframe
and then click on "shift center to," we get rid of all those keyframes. Now remember what we're trying
to do is mimic this movement, so that's just 1 full rotation, and it goes up. So for our keyframe
here, what we can do is put a keyframe for 960, 540, go to this next keyframe here, I'm going to go
up - or a -1080 - so that way it goes up. Just
click on those, KEYFRAME ASSISTANT/EASY EASE,
and then let's make our Image 3 comp. So just take this Image 2 - duplicate. Now we have "Image
3." Select that image, and I'm gonna pull in a different image of my gorgeous wife, and the one
I've selected is "Attachment2" here. So we'll bring that right in like that. "P" and "S" to adjust
our position and scale, and again I'm going to kind of resize this to get the look that I'm
going for here. And so once you have these image precomps, like I
said, it's super easy to change
out whatever image you want - you just do that and all the effects will be applied to it. So let's go
back out to our Main Precomp here, and we're going to select this top Image 2. Now select our Image
3 up here, and holding down ALT/OPT, drag it so that way it overwrites that and see how it
pops right on. Hit "U" to bring up our keyframes, and again we're going to move the beginning
of this layer over, and the end of THIS layer over. So that way, somewhere
in the middle it's
going to intersect, and see how they both go up. So, maybe we'll go +1080 - so always, you're
gonna go + and -1080 constantly. That's how this is going to move, and actually I
want to go another 1080 - minus another 1080. Okay, and then maybe this last one, I'll put a keyframe,
go forward a little bit, and now i'm going to go + 1080 + 2160, that way it's three rotations.
I can't do the math in my head that quickly, so for me it's easier just to + 1080 + 1080 +
1080. Okay
, so that's the basic look that we're kind of going for. Okay, so I'm going to loop
this so that way it ends about right there. But then now I added in a bunch of little things
to really kind of give it a really, really cool look, so we're gonna do that real quick. Okay, so
let's go back to the beginning of our animation, go NEW/ADJUSTMENT LAYER and then we want to go
to our effects and presets and type in "fast box" for Fast Box Blur, set that to 15, repeat our edge
pixels. Now, this is a
trick I've done before, too. If you just want to add in some like quick flashes
of things and this throughout the entire video that I created, and just make this like maybe 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 frames, so as you're playing it, you kind of get these like little blips of
blur, so just just kind of like that. And just randomly place these throughout your composition,
make them shorter or longer. You can, you know, it's really up to you how long you want the blur to
last and exactly what it is you want
to do with it. So I like to kind of add these in and
make it as random as possible, depending on how you want it to look. So there are no rules, just
completely up to you. So those are our blurs! And then another thing that I did was add in
little splotches of color, so let's do a new adjustment layer, and actually I'm going to just
grab these. I'm going to make this a certain color - we'll make that yellow. You don't have to do this,
but I'm going to do it real quick just so that way it s
atisfies my OCD. These are all "blur" layers.
Okay, and now I'm going to make this a "Color" layer and let's say - I'll make this - we'll say orange. Okay,
so to make the color layer go to effects and presets, "hue" for Hue and Saturation, then we're going to
colorize it, increase our color saturation all the way up to 100%, and again we're just going to
kind of do these like little 5 frame little color things, you know. And you want to randomize
this, so you can adjust your color hue, you
know, like maybe you don't want the the color to be
quite 100%, you can make the color saturation, you know, 50% to kind of give it a little bit of
a different look, you know. Again just things that you can do to kind of add something a little
bit unique and different to your animations. And just kind of add these throughout the entire
thing like that. Maybe add in a couple more. Like I said, completely random colors and just
kind of sporadically and different durations - and, we'll see, we
'll make this one 150 degrees just to
kind of get something a little bit different. Decreases color saturation - that's a bit much - make
that 50%. And so we're kind of starting to get this like really cool collection of these,
like, little effects, it really kind of gives it something that looks really, really cool. But I'm
still not done yet because I want to add in a few more things. So now let's go to LAYER/NEW/ADJUSTMENT LAYER and we're going to call this "Comp Blur." Take our ellipse t
ool, double-click, and
then we want to go to our effects and presets - "fast box" for Fast Box Blur. I'm going to make that
10, and repeat edge pixels. And then make this mask subtract, and we want to feather this out, we'll
say 250, and just kind of bring these handles in because what we're trying to do is just kind
of get this kind of blurring around the edges. You don't really want it to be perfect, you want it
to kind of have a, you know, a damaged kind of look. And then let's just add i
n a few more things, so
LAYER/NEW/ADJUSTMENT LAYER and we can call this "Vignette" and we can, just super quick, go to effects
and presets, type in "CC Vignette" and that adds in a vignette for us. Okay, and then let's add in
another adjustment layer so NEW/ADJUSTMENT LAYER and let's look for "Tritone" and add in the Tritone,
and then let's "blend the with original," maybe 35 %. So we got to get this old school look. And there's
one more effect that I did that I think is really cool that I'
ve not shown you yet. So go to LAYER/NEW/ADJUSTMENT LAYER and we're going to call this "Film Burn," and this one is really cool. Go to your
effects and presets and type in "burn," you get CC Burn Film. Okay, so now the way this is going
to work is, as you increase the burn amount, you can see how it kind of starts to burn. Well, what
I did, which i thought was really cool, is you can move the center of the burn all around your
comp here. And the thing that's going to animate it is actually t
his "random seed." So OPT/ALT + click on
random seed, and you want to type in: time*10 - so that way you kind of get this where the burn,
you can kind of see it, kind of moving like that. And, again, like with the other effects what we're
going to do is just do these like little, maybe, 5 frame little snippets in here. And you want
to make sure that you move it around every time so when it resets here, bring the center of
your burn film, you know, somewhere else. You can increase the burn a
mount, maybe you want
to put it down to like 8, just so you kind of get these imperfections. That's really what
we're looking for is, like, these imperfections to kind of give it that old school film,
kind of like there's something wrong with it, you know. Just something that's, like, not quite right,
you know. Kind of spread these out a little bit so you can make it a little bit bigger and you
can actually do something like this - you can keyframe the burn from 25, maybe go forward 10
fra
mes, down to like 10, and then chop that off. So you have something kind
of like you know like thats So i'm going to make all these
the same color - we'll say red. Aand then there's one more thing I want to do - so
one last thing. NEW/SOLID - I want to make this white, and we want to set this layer to "Overlay." And, like with the other ones, we're going
to do just these quick little 5 to 10 frame little segments here, so throughout, we'll
have just little kind of flare-ups like that. Let's
take our images here, bring up our opacity,
and let's just lower this down to about 65%, so that way we get that background that comes through.
So see now ,we have this old school kind of look. I think it looks pretty cool, you know. You can always
add in more things, for example if you wanted to go up here to - we'll call this "CC" for "Color Correction" -
this is where we added our Tritone, maybe you want to add in another Curves to really give it some
punch, so that way we really kind of
has some more contrast, but we can still see the background. So,
see now, as you play it back you get all these like little imperfections, maybe you want to increase
them, maybe you want to lower them, you know just something that kind of gives this "something"
that looks cool and unique and different and unexpected. Now I put a lot of effects in here,
you may want to use about half of these or maybe about three-fourths of these, so that way it's
not quite so much. But this is the effect t
hat I use throughout the entire music video with that
background that kind of flashes in and out and the color overlays and things like that. And that's how
you make this effect that i used in my music video for "Insomniac!" If you haven't seen that yet, make
sure that you check it out - the link for that video is in the description below. I'd like to thank
the good folks over at AE Juice for sponsoring this video. If you haven't checked them out at
aejuice.com, I highly recommend you do ju
st that. Right now, get tons of free plug-ins from AE Juice
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r cool - these elements would literally take hours to create, but
with AE Juice you get them absolutely free and they can be dropped into your project with the
click of a button. Some of my personal favorite free plugins include Copy Ease, which allows you to
copy the speed graph of your keyframes and paste them so you get identical keyframe speeds. I also
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the click of a button, which saves a tremendous amount of time.
In addition to these impressive free plugins, you can also purchase advanced products at more-than-reasonable prices. Take advantage of AE Juice's bundles. My personal recommendation is that
you get the "I Want It All" bundle, which includes everythingIi just showed you. I've been approached
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g product and company, and in my opinion it's a necessity for
any serious motion graphic designer - aejuice.com! I hope this tutorial helped you out and
that you learned something new and useful. Make sure to come back next time for another
tutorial that will expand your knowledge of After Effects, while also teaching you some really
cool tips, tricks, and shortcuts. Please comment, like, share, and subscribe. And click the bell so
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r channel by getting your 7 Minute AE
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and the project files for this episode are all in the description below. As always, thank you so
much for watching, and I'll see you next time!
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