Hey, so I'm coming at you again on another new microphone, so no idea if this sounds good. But let's do it. I haven't talked to you in a while because, well, I'm not at home and my work is really weird. And I work from the table in the kitchen of an Airbnb now.
yeah life is weird you're gonna probably hear from me more in mid-april but also um i haven't had like many clear thoughts lately it feels like i've actually hit record a handful of times and i'm never happy with the clarity of the things i'm saying so i finally have a clear thought just kidding i'm just gonna actually publish this one i just want to talk about motion graphics so random fun topic um so i just tweeted this little
animation thing i made for flux um it's just a throwaway project and i burned a solid single day i know that i only fully truly wasted one day half of another one and then some you know like scrolling on my phone at night like learning and talking with chat gpt and whatever but I tried fairly hard to time box myself because I know how these things go. I get addicted. And once I start pulling a thread, I just don't stop pulling it.
And I never stopped to think if this was a good idea in the first place. So I decided to pull the After Effects motion graphics. I didn't even necessarily need to start with After Effects, but I was just like, I want to...
know i'm making all these flux components and i'm writing up blog posts and whatnot and like wouldn't it be fun if i had little intro videos for these tweet threads that i do just little splashy you know kind of like versell launches something and and it looks kind of sexy sort of thing you know
i was like well i used to use after effects i used to do a lot of video stuff and um like you know how hard could it be well i know how hard it can be but i wanted to see you know so i dug in and it was it was a day of bliss actually um like i spent like the first half day just googling for two but okay so here are the interesting things that maybe first let me intro you well let's talk about how how you learn a piece of software
this is a really fun experience go do it if you haven't done it in a while like when's the last time you actually learned a new tool like in and out like a new software tool if you've never learned how to use photoshop or illustrator or figma or sketch or after effects or premiere or final cut or cinema 4d or sketch up or 3ds max or blender or zbrush any of these tools like just something in a media discipline something not programming um go learn one it's it's a ton of fun
For me, like when I was a kid and I was learning all these tools, I didn't know how to learn, you know?
i sort of knew um we've talked about this and this is a story for a lot of people as i it really started with photoshop that was the first complicated piece of software that i actually ever like dedicated myself to learning and i found the key which is just mimicking people on youtube building stuff um and then you learn a ton and you learn all the shortcut keys and whatever um and then after effects i didn't learn to the same degree but i used to just absorb this creator video copilot
Andrew Kramer and I used to just like watch everything he did and follow along and I would be really excited every new video that came out and they were free and I was a kid so I didn't have any money and I torrented After Effects and I would just follow along with his tutorials and make like lightsabers and explosions and muzzle flares and lens flares and stuff you know just whatever so
um it was kind of cool to dive back into after effects but having mastered other things you know in the whatever 15 years since i've tried any of these things um yeah like it's just cool how so maybe that's the first interesting thought is like how how i learned something now versus how i learned something then what i'm doing now is i'm trying to go fast like so what are all the shortcuts and so i'm immediately
trying to figure out what are well i'm chatty between things like who are the main players in this space who are the top youtubers you know who are the the taylor and adams and dhhs and people that i want to learn from you know so give me those people um
And then go right to their YouTube channel, sort by most popular and just start seeing what's up and watch like a 15 minute view. Start with YouTube shorts, see if I can get a bunch of like tips and nuggets and whatever. Then I want to know the tools that they use and swear by because. I'm assuming a lot of people aren't just raw dogging after effects because that's kind of a hard thing. It's like, we'll talk about a little bit of the mechanics of motion graphics in a second, but.
I know there are tools that people are using. Like, for example, in my little stint in After Effects, I downloaded the Video Copilot's, like, lens flare package. And now, and muzzle flare, like... toolkits and sound effects packages like things that are kind of essential add-ons after effects doesn't come with them but creators build these things and
And then you download them and now you can easily add a cool gunshot, you know, to a video or add an explosion and whatever, like that type of thing. So I was like, what are all the tools that they're swearing by? The things that I need to be using that I can just like start out of the gate with, you know? And then like...
What are, give me all the best practices. Give me a high level best practice. Give me high level areas where people get tripped up. Also asking it to do any mental mappings. Like I know Figma and Photoshop, like give me all the mental mappings and the areas where things.
don't exactly map that are going to confuse me like compositions are kind of like layers you know but they're not exactly but that's something that that trips me up it's like wait but in photoshop i would make a new layer and like or in figma i might make like a new frame um and i'll make like 50 frames you know or something it's like our comps frames and how anyway okay that type of thing um so
But one thing I did learn is that like AI is kind of helpful, but with programming, AI can generate you code and then you can paste it in. With After Effects and other like software tools like this, it's not the same. You're asking it questions and it's telling you like how to navigate the interface. And about half the time, it's just wrong. I think it hallucinates randomly just because. I also think it's telling you things.
uh for after effects like you know 2021 version or something or you know like adobe creative suites like like yeah um so you remember that cs1 cs2 or like c right it was like cs's after it was like a i remember using photoshop like seven or something is that they were numbers and then it was cs and now it's cc all right so
Oh, you got to get some little tea refresh here. So just interesting, trying to learn something, having already learned things. Tell me the top people, tell me things, tools they swear by practices that they remind you in videos.
all that stuff you know and then give me uh give me common areas people get tripped up and give me mental mappings give me all the map give me help me build a mental model um okay but yeah ai really stinks for after effects it wasn't nearly as helpful as i want it to be it still is incredibly helpful let's be real but it's not like programming you can vibe code or whatever they're calling it um i don't think you can vibe video edit
yeah i'm sure ai will disrupt motion graphics in some way but at least right now it's not in making nobodies who don't know how to use something like after effects create stunning stuff it's just not what it is Okay, so let's talk about motion graphics really quick because it's just really fun. Yeah, I, well, okay, here's, let me just tell you.
what after effects is so you know photoshop like you create a new layer then you can like or let's say figma create a frame you can draw a shape inside of that frame and then you can give it attributes like a border you know background color you can group things you can mask things you can intersect things you know that's figma or sketch or any of these um
and photoshop is i guess fairly similar a lot of them have similar concepts some concept of a layer some concept of a group thing like opacity levels of opacity colors strokes or borders shadows blending modes like a lot of these things you see across tools so once you kind of learn one like rotate and scale and skew you kind of learn those fundamentals um you carry those with you to all of these things
so after effects is in a sense it's no different you're in a canvas sort of and you can draw shapes or write text and move them around and change positions and whatever it's just when you want to make something move that's when it that's when things get interesting that's the after effects part so how does that work well so after effects uses a timeline just like any that's another fundamental concept like i guess there's like fundamental graphics concepts like
The difference between vector and raster, path drawing, Bezier curves, again, intersections, all that stuff. Well, there's... you know the fundamental concept of a timeline that exists in any audio or video editing software tracks and timeline you know and so after effects is no different except it's sort of an intersection of the two it's there's the whole world of graphics with
Again, you're dealing in that realm with all those things and then the whole world of a timeline. And you're dealing in that realm with all those things and things like timeline markers and splitting a track. i don't know what else moving things around in a lot of time-based stuff you know that's all that it's a timeline it's time-based stuff audio video uh what else i mean volume and things okay yeah that type of stuff
Turn your audio off, Caleb. Okay, so that's interesting. But that's like, so if you like opened up, you know, Adobe Premiere or Final Cut and tried putting a video together, it would be fairly simple. Like it's very intuitive. You can drag a video onto the timeline. You can play it. You can drag other videos on top of that. You can cut them up and snip them and put audio beneath them. And that's simple and easy. And you get that. After Effects, this is, it's kind of similar how when I learned.
Photoshop it felt very real like because it's just like pixels you know I could just use a brush and paint on top of something when then when I went to Illustrator it was jarring to me it was like wait so I can't paint there's no paint there's no pencil it's this tool with curves and lines and i didn't get it i'd say after effects is simp similar in in a shift
from like raster to vector it's very similar shift from going to like premiere to after effects where it's like we were working in the simple world of video and tracks and you know as if you're in like uh you know, a film, uh, like a dark room and you're manipulating something with your hands. It's very intuitive. Now we're in after effects and it's not intuitive. It's not that way. Things aren't as simple.
so all right but you get the idea here's here's the the thing about after effects that makes it so powerful and what it is but also scares me off and makes this is i don't know this is the thing the key if you will to after effects is key frames it's there's parameter everything has a parameter so if you have a track it has a position it has a scale it has everything everything is a parameter
If it's a shape, it's how rounded are the corners, what's its size, its scale, its height, its width, its background color, it's everything, all those things. Blur, whatever, okay? All of those things are parameters and they... can be animated over time and you do that with keyframes so in your timeline you sort of set something you set a stake in the ground like the i want the position of this shape to be you know 100 at this point in time
and then you scrub through like a little two seconds later and then you change the position i want it to be now i want to be 500 at this point in time and after effects this is the magic of after effects it will fill in between It will make that thing now move 400. I'm not saying pixels because they don't use the word pixels, but 400 pixels.
over the course of two seconds. And that's the magic of After Effects. Everything you see, all that motion is just keyframes. It's simple parameters and keyframes. The problem is...
You can do this in a very rudimentary way. You can move things around, but it looks like crap because all of the movements are robotic. It uses linear curves. If you look at the values changing over time, those changes... happen in a linear way so if something is static it's just standing still and then if it moves over 100 pixels it goes me you know and then it moves over 100 pixels it's very static and robotic So if you want something to feel natural, a fluid motion.
you need bezier curves you need it's similar to animations in css or whatever where you say ease in or ease out like those you probably encountered bezier curves at some point like instead of just a linear curve you have a bezier curve where that that motion there's a little ramp up and a ramp down so that now that motion is like
So you can do that. Like After Effects has ease in and out functions. You can look at the curve for that keyframe animation and you can manipulate it like a vector path or something in Illustrator or something. You can click on the points, grab little path handles, little... handles and change them so that it looks smooth but even that it's difficult to make that really premier looking stuff like the stuff that you see the stuff that gets shared and used like
I don't know, or even something like Kurzgesagt or Crash Course. You ever watched any of that stuff? All that motion is very smooth and fluid. And that was my first kind of difficult challenge is like, how do I make motion smooth and fluid without killing myself with these Bezier curves? So this is where I'm like, what are the tools people are using?
Okay, there are plugins for this. Here's another, actually, this is where After Effects becomes incredibly powerful. What I just told you about, like those properties and how they have keyframes over time. You can use the interface to modify stuff, but you can also use code. Simple JavaScript expressions that control the value over time. And it's just simple functions that have an input and an output, sort of.
and so this makes it so that you can make the position dependent on some other property of that element and it also means that plugin authors can write javascript and then expose that JavaScript through little simple plug-in interfaces or windows or panels in After Effects. And there's really cool stuff.
So I quickly learned like motion is the popular one, motion three, motion four, and now motion studio. I bought a subscription on day one and I'm going to cancel it because I spent one day on this, but I was like, who cares about money? Like, get me into this stuff.
So I bought a subscription to Motion Studio, downloaded it, and this gives you all these stock easing curves. And I was like, oh, this is it. This is what the pros are doing. Either they have their own set or they're using something like Motion. But they're highlighting two keyframes and then they're clicking a button and now they're getting a really pro modern looking curve. And they're using different curves for different use cases. And they're not sitting there tweaking these handles by hand.
you know so that's cool there's also things like picture if you have like a tent like a ball that kind of animates into like 10 balls that are like following each other and then they all come back and converge at the same time you could animate one ball like one ball's position around like a circle. But if you want every other ball to follow it in like a staggered way, there's no like easy way to do that.
So this motion thing has a utility for that called stagger and you just highlight all the layers and you hit stagger and you tell it, I want to stagger these layers by, by a 0.5 seconds. So there's all these types of things that make.
your life easier and give you some of the tools there's another thing called um i don't know whatever it's called but it introduces some randomness so literally you just point it at any property and tell it how random you want it to be over time and within what parameters so you can take something like picture oh so in after effects there's a concept of a camera as well
you can do things statically just on the page but you can also look at things through the lens of a camera and every layer or composition can be in 3d space once you enable it to be and now you can get that night one of the principles i learned really early on in my single day was like things look crappy if there's not motion everywhere like you just want motion everything has to be in motion and an easy way to do that without killing yourself and moving everything around is moving the camera
around even ever so slightly but just drifting the camera whooshing the camera others to other places by the way motion blur makes everything look great in after effects and this is an easy win it's an easy gimme there's a single button and you can make any layer motion blurred and now it gets now it looks really nice when it moves instead of just i don't know it gives you an effect that you can't easily achieve on something like like a web animation okay
So now you have a camera, which again, the camera is just another thing with parameters. There's a position. in xyz you know rotation whatever and you can say i want the camera here at this point and there at the other point and then animate it in between by just setting keyframes and now you can use a tool like this motion thing i was telling you about and apply some randomness to
the position or to the xy rotation and now it can just subtly kind of be like a handheld camera and you didn't have to do anything and those are the things that you could write a script for that by hand but that's probably way too high level there's nothing in the interface that lets you do this It's a plugin that has an interface that applies the code to allow this thing to happen. But that's the fundamental thing to understand about After Effects is...
It's a bunch of things in 3D space that have parameters. That's what dictates everybody's position and state. And you can change position and state, whatever, between... uh two keyframes and then you can modify um the bezier curves or whatever just between those two keyframes and use plugins to apply like scripts and things that um that would otherwise be too difficult so anyway
that's a after effects crash course but why am i abandoning it why is this going nowhere why i'm oh and then i was like There's so many things that I lack. Like I didn't start with sound. I started with my own storyboard of what I wanted to do and a plan of how to achieve it all.
But then I realized, like, I'm like, how do I get the timing right? I don't, I feel like I'm swimming in an open, I don't know, I need something to grab onto. I don't know the right timing, the pacing for things. Then it kind of hit me as like, oh, sound.
Music, your beat, dictates timing. Of course. This was a key that I learned when I first started video editing. I'll save you the long story, but the guy that I learned from at the summer camp I worked at... his his edits were awesome and mine were junk and and all the only difference like this was like big huge lesson day one every cut happens on a beat and his videos looked so much more energetic and cool because he had a fast beat and he cut on the beats and i was like wow
That's an easy way to make your video. It's subconscious, but you're watching a video and cuts happen on beats like montage type videos. Or these type things. Everything's got to happen on the beat and be melded in with the sound. And that's how you get your timing. And that's how you add another dimension to your motion graphic is with sound.
Of course, and every little animation should have a little foley kind of sound with it that also makes it more impactful and the audio will tell your brain that something is whooshing.
as well as the video and the audio will make this is another just trick of video is like good audio can really enhance video even crappy video like a lot of like that's kind of like a saying it's like you'd rather have good audio than good video which is counterintuitive but it's true it's like if you have to have one thing be low quality If the audio is incredible quality, you need both to be incredible quality. But audio matters just as much as video.
I'm in motion graphics. It's the same. So I realized, oh crap, like I can't get the timing of this because I don't have music. I don't know what the vibe is. I don't know. The music drives the thing. Where do I get music? Royalty free music. Spend way too long searching. YouTube has royalty free music.
it's pretty cool and there's hundreds of songs that are completely free and royalty free you can just download them and but now i have to listen to like a zillion tracks i don't even know the vibe i'm looking for i never do this i don't even know what
So eventually I found one that's like, okay, this is a groove, but it's a three minute song and I'm making a 30 second video. So, okay, now I got to... edit this thing and go in premiere and put it in and how long okay get the audio then i'm building now i have to redo all my animations to go to the to the to the audio so that's just one thing that i learned like halfway three quarters through it's like start with the sound start with the music that's going to dictate the timing then animate
over the music let the music kind of tell the story and and you're telling a story you have an like an intro and then you have like the features you know this kind of like middle section and then you know you have like uh the showcasing like examples and then you have like an outro a punchy outro and those four parts need different music different beats and different vibe for each of them
I only made it to the first two parts because by the time I had achieved something of a vision of what this should be, I had already truly burned a day and a half. And I just realized like this is a ton of work and I don't enjoy the tedium. I enjoy that final product. I enjoy some of the optimizations. I enjoy the process of like. building and making art in general but media and video and audio but there's tedium involved
And the mouse is so heavily involved. And it's a lot of clicking and positioning and tweaking ever so slightly. It's just like, wow. Yeah, to make something that I'm actually proud of would take me too long. And what's it for? You know, it's just like, okay, Caleb, trash this, move on. So that's what I'm doing. Maybe eventually I'll return to it or give myself a little vacation day or something. It's like build something else in After Effects for fun because it really is a lot of fun.
And I think I could use it for static stuff too. Like Figma doesn't have 3D transforms, but I could take something in Figma, I could export it, and then I could very simply just change a camera position in After Effects and not... After Effects actually ships with Cinema 4D now, which is the only 3D software that I ever actually learned.
So I could maybe just use Cinema 4D to do this. But yeah, I don't know. I want to up my media game for fun because it's fun. And I've always loved this stuff. Yeah. And it's fun to learn new tools and software. You know? Alright, this is a long one. I'll be seeing you.