After Effects - Motion Graphics & Data Visualization

All right, first things first, is to download the exercise files. There'll be a link just here, go and download those. Also know that there's something called the completed files. All they are is, at the end of every video I'll save my After Effects file to where I'm at, and you can download it. There'll be a link on every video screen for that. And it's just, if you get a little lost, you can check mine and see how yours is different.

Hey there, in this video we're going to look at Inspiration. So when you're starting your project you're going to need places to go and get ideas for your projects.

Now this site here, informationisbeautiful.net, remember the .net, the .com is a weird site. You're going to go and check it now, I bet you. But informationisbeautiful.net is… this is more of the Data Visualization site. There’s some really beautiful stuff going on here. Kind of pushing the boundaries of how to communicate really complex data.

So we're going to begin our first project. I am going to hit Play on this project and we're going to listen to it, and watch it all the way through. This is what we're going to be making for the first part of this course. Icon animations, all sorts of amazing Infographic type things. Let's give it a watch, and at the end we'll hit Stop, and we'll go off and create our new document, and get started.

Hi there, in this video we're going to bring in some audio. We're going to put it into some folder. We're going to bring in some music and look at where to get some of that for free. And then we're going to balance it so that my voice isn't so low, and the music is down a bit so you can hear underneath me, let's hit it. The Value of Sleep for Creatives. It's made me sound a little more like I know what I'm doing. Anyway let's get on with the chorus so I know what I'm dealing with, most of the time.

In this video we're going to bring in a background image, and lock it. It's going to be easy, let's go do it.

It's a weird feature of After Effects, we talked about it before. If I make a new Comp, and I pick a color, doesn't really matter, when I export it, it goes black. It's just, there is a background color. So, we're going to turn ours back to black. I'm going to click on it, go back to black. So that's most of the Comp start life like. 

Hi there, in this tutorial we're going to look at Type. And then we'll look at bringing in new fonts from Typekit which is free as part of your Creative Cloud license. Let's go and do that now in After Effects.

Okay, so you need to find some icons, and you don't want to pay for them. There's a couple of cool sites. iconfinder.com is a great one. They have a mixture of paid and unpaid. So let's say we need a picture of a woman, an icon of a woman. Now by default yours will be set to 'Any', 'Any', 'No License Filtering'. And you'll start with these ones here, you can see, they're not expensive. So 1 USD for some of them. And what we want do though is, I want vector ones because I want them to be scalable. In After Effects, you don't want 'Any', most of them are all Vector. Then I want to go for 'Free', because I want it cheap. And I want to go down to 'Licensing'. I want the ones that say 'For Commercial Use' but I don't need to put a link anywhere.

Hello, beautiful people. In this video we are going to look at CC Libraries and why they're awesome for your Infographic and Data Visualization work. You can seem them over here. We're going to bring in colors, and icons, and all sorts of cool stuff. We're going to work a little bit with Illustrator. Let's go and check out the awesomeness now in this video.

Hi there, in this video we're going to do this where it fades in, and then, goes for a little bit, and then, this guy appears. We'll play with the Scale. We're just going to do some basic animation, it's quick, it's easy, let's make it happen in After Effects.

Hi there, in this video we're going to look at Easing. Basically it's going to turn boring animation into something a little bit more lifelike, and interesting. So the bottom one is going to be boring, the top one is going to be nice, with Easing. Boring, nice. Boring, nice. See? Easing just adds a little bit of life to pretty much any animation in After Effects. Let's go and do that now.

Okay, I'm going to show you this one now because you probably, if you haven't got lost already, you're going to get lost at some stage, especially if you're new. And the main culprit is this.

Hi there, in this video we're going to add little noises behind our animations to make them feel more real, like this guy. Creatives. Now there is an ongoing debate in our household-- There he is. See that little blop noise? Let's go figure out where we can find them, and how to implement them. So let's first of all find our sound.

Hello world, in this video we're going to look at doing a little Star Burst. Watch this, icon up here, watch the little Star Burst. It's this little effect we see, that little star bursty ray thing that appears at the same time as the Icon. We're going to make that in this video.

In this video we're going to look at Motion Blur. Motion Blur makes everything look more awesome when it's moving. See the top one, Motion Blur, bottom one, boring, no Motion Blur. Let's go and learn how to do that in After Effects.

In this tutorial we're going to look at Overshooting the mark. You can see this one gets bigger but then needs to get a little smaller, and bigger again, a little bounciness. We need to do it to this, to learn, then we're going to jump to our 'Value of Sleep'. And we're going to do it to our Icon there as well. All right, let's go and learn how to Overshoot.

Video Transcription

Hi there, in this video we're going to apply a Vignette. A Vignette looks like this, around the outside. Turn it off, boring Vignette. Awesome. Let's go and do that now.

It's not really an animation trick. Just looks cool when you're dealing with Motion Graphics and Infographics. 

In this tutorial we're going to look at Anticipation. When things go up before they go down, or left before they go right, or they get big before they get smaller. We're going to learn it, and we're going to learn how to use this Graph Editor down the bottom here.

Hi there, in this video we're going to look at Offsetting our Animation, so that two separate guys can follow each other in, and they kind of look like they have a cool little relationship. Super easy to do. Let's go and do that now in After Effects.

In this tutorial we're going to look at what happens when we scale something up nice and big. It rushes towards the screen, and it gets all pixelated. I'm going to show you how to make it like this. All vector and clean. And basically we just turn that button on. But, let's do it in our little tutorial. It seriously is, just doing that button.

Hi there, in this tutorial we're going to make things all floppy and real, like this, using the Puppet Tool. Let's go in there.

Hi there, in this video we're going to look at something called Precomping. It's not part of the animation tips but we need to do it about now before we can carry on with the rest of them. We're going to do it because we're going to start bringing in all of our Icons. Can you see that all start appearing now? They all do the little animations. But what we don't want to do is have a big messy Time Line. We just want every Icon to be on there by itself including the little noises and the Pops, and the Circle Burst, all together. Let's go and learn what a Precomp is.

Hi there, in this tutorial we're going to look at cameras where things start moving around, and zooming in, we can make it look cool, I don't know. Cameras, let's go and look at how to do those.

In this tutorial we're going to look at Playback in After Effects for previewing. I'm going to hit 'space bar'. And you might find that with all the stuff we've done so far it's done the Playback pretty slowly. You can see, it's trying to keep up, and trying to redraw but it just can't keep up anymore. So, the easy things to do is, in the previous tutorial I changed to this, I have a habit of doing it. Don't do this. This changes the output of the actual Comp when you export. In some instances, most of the time it doesn't. So, we were set to 'Auto'. And what we're going to do is open up the Preview window. 

Hi there, in this tutorial we're going to look at actually animating the Icon itself. Like, you can see here, we're animating the lines. Up until now we've just been animating the Icon's Position and Scale. So let's go and learn how to do that now in this video.

Hey there, in this video we're going to look at Color. Now color is obviously important in any kind of project. Just a little tips to help you out. Go to color.adobe.com Sign in with your Adobe password. And go to 'Explore', go to-- by default it's at 'My Themes' but I find you get the best stuff from 'Most Popular'. And it's just here to give you some colors that you might choose to work from. I find that I end up leaning on the same colors. So I like to jump in here and pick some new fresh stuff.

In this video, we're going to look at adding Video Backgrounds but also, watch, he faded out a little bit. And the Icon's along the top. Even better, this video is not long enough so we're going to extend it at the end so it covers the whole video by freezing the last frame. All right, let's go and do that now in After Effects.

Hi there, it is time to visualize data. We're going to start with Bar Graphs. We'll start with this one where we manually do it in After Effects. Then we're going to switch out and do it from Illustrator using its graphing tool, making it a little more accurate. And then going out to Excel for the Excel people who want to animate charts directly from Excel in After Effects. All right, let's go and make these beautiful graphs.

Hi there, in this tutorial we're going to use Illustrator's graphing tool to build our Excel spreadsheet out, in here, style it, then switch it out to After Effects, and animate it. I find this is the easiest way to get data, any sort of data into After Effects and animate it. Let's go and learn how to do that now.

Hey there, in this tutorial we're going to take this data over here, we're going to turn it into a Graph. Then we'll do some basic Styling, then fire it into After Effects. And make it look like this. And it looks amazing. You're impressed, huh? Let's go and look at how to do that in After Effects now.

Hello everyone, we are going to make this. A nice little Line Chart. We’re going to use Illustrator to get the bits going, then we're going to animate it in After Effects. Let's go and learn how to make this.

Hi there, in this tutorial we're going to make this, where Pie Charts kind of spin around, and pop out a little bit. All right, now let's go and learn how to do this in After Effects.

Hello, welcome to the Number Counting thing where it goes up from 0, in this case it goes to 53%. All right, let's look at how to make that now.

So first up, I've got a project I kind of started for us. You can obviously use your own, go to your Desktop find your Exercise Files, there's one in called 'Pie Charts', and it's called 'Number Counter'. 

Hi there, in this video we're going to use Excel to build this kind of relationship model here, plus look at the hundreds of other ones it does really amazingly, and then look to animate it in After Effects, like this. Look at us. And they pop up. Still going. Wait for the last bit, because it's good, watch. And watch him go. So that's going to be it. Let's go and make that now in After Effects.

Hi there, in this video we're going to look at 2-Node cameras where we get this kind of like pan in, and zoomy, turny thing. We will also look at adding backgrounds, but now that I've finished this tutorial. actually I don't like the video background. We can do away with the playing background as well. All right, let's go and do it.

Hi there, in this tutorial we're going to look at Masking. We're going to cut a hole in our doughnut. Hey, we've already done that before with the big circle. But this time, look it's an actual hole in there, not just a red circle that matches the background. So let's go and learn how to do that in After Effects.

Hi there, in this tutorial we're going to do this where this kind of image white thing goes. And we've even brought the percentage counter back. It's an easy one, let's go and do that now in After Effects.

Hi there, in this tutorial we're going to look at masking that inner liquid. We're also going to try and do that little liquidy bounce thing that's part of that as well. So let's go and do that now in this tutorial.

Hi there, in this tutorial we're going to get aligned to follow the building here, and we get that Text to type on as well, look at that. So, nice and easy one, let's get into the tutorial.

Hey there, in this video we're going to do some Tracking Motion. And I'm going to track part of my glasses here, and get some Text to attach to it. You can see, little dots, likely, we don't have to do them manually. So what happens when I preview it, let's go to full screen. Look at us. Hey, it attaches to my face and moves around, and it's pretty automatic. All right, let's go and do that now in After Effects.

Hey there, in this video we're going to do the last one of this kind of Tracking. This one, we're going to do it manually, frame by frame. It's going to be monotonous. I'm going to show you some tricks to speed it up. But there are just times when you just manually need to Track things in After Effects rather than try to rely on things like Motion Tracking. They work some of the times, but not all the time. We'll also do, see the red box there, we're going to do that where we're going to use Layer Modes instead of Opacity and of course, we'll use the Typewriter effect. All right, let's get in there, and start making.

Hey guys, this video is going to be about exporting mp4s, in particular. The universal sharing video file. We're going to do a really super-duper high quality version, and then we're going to do one that is really low in file size but still really good quality. All right, let's go and do it in this video.

Hi there, in this video we're going to look at creating this. This is an animated GIF that can go out via Social Media and be shared by Facebook and Instagram. It's not a video, so it just plays by itself. We love them. This is the way to do it to keep the file size nice and small. We're going to look at the way to do it. And you don't want bending like this, the file size is huge. Let's go and look at all the tricks and tips to make a GIF. And to make it super small where you're sharing social goodness.

All right, so it's Class Project time. What I've done is, in you Exercise Files there's one called '11 Class Exercise', and there is a mp3 in here. It is a voice over for a company named Craft Espresso; it's a fictional company. I'd like you to create an Infographic for that.

So we're at the end, and what do we do next? My advice is don't forget to do that Class Project. It's amazing what you'll learn by doing that. You'll learn more doing that Class Project on your own than following another 50 kind of course led videos, I promise you. And drop me your results, see what you do. I'd love for you to post them on something like YouTube or Vimeo, and share the link with me, I'd love to see what you're up to.

Hey, welcome to this Motion Graphics Cheat Sheet for After Effects.

We're going to go through some tips and tricks, and cheats. We'll be getting started with Motion Graphics. All right, let's go. Tip no. 1 is Easing. Easing is when things look pretty when they're new. I've made a little animation, it kind of slides in from the side there. Mine's very Power Pointy. What we need to do is sex it up with some Easing to make it slide in really pretty.