[music] [Kyle Hamrick] Good morning, everyone. Good early morning on the last day after, you know, very long days. My name is Kyle. I'm going to be talking to you this morning about motion and all kinds of little details about that. I'm a motion designer, video creator, blah, blah, blah, blah, other things.

I mostly do stuff in After Effects and teach other people to do stuff in After Effects. Then, you know, other apps as well. So hopefully, you learn some things. I'll put this up again at the end, if you miss it now. Okay, so let's talk a little bit about what we'll be doing today. Let's cheer some my way right now. I need to nervously pace and also keep myself warm. I'm assuming a lot of you are designers who are looking to add motion to what you can do, maybe are being asked to add motion to what you can do, right? So hopefully, I will give you some good concepts and a little bit of practical techniques here.

So motion, in my opinion, is just another form of design communication, just like contrast, or, you know, whatever else, you know, other fancy designer terms, right? We're going to add some motion concepts into that, and some of them don't have to be scary and intimidating.

I'm going to give you some, you know, key technical stuff that you need to be aware of and just some of the ways that you need to think a little bit differently about when structuring your designs, for example, just things to, kind of, you know, do that.

And then I'm going to show you a couple techniques and a few different apps that just, kind of, good ways to do things that can be pretty effective with a relatively low lift. For those of you that have taken my lab or are taking it this afternoon, you'll see just a little bit of overlapping content and, like, similar examples and stuff. But if you taken that, it's like, some of the conceptual stuff, I try to cram into, like, the first eight minutes there. This is accordioned out. So-- Oh. And I use a bunch of cookies in my examples because everyone likes cookies. They're delicious, and they're pretty easy to design with because they're just circles. So yeah, whatever.

All right, so motion is pretty much everywhere, right? Every time you pick up this little magical device and you scroll through whatever, you know, Tik Tube or whatever that we got now, you're just constantly being bombarded with stuff, and most of it moves. When you walk into the convention center, you got all these giant screens flashing at you. It's all over the place. And so if you're not making stuff that moves, you're probably starting to feel like you are falling behind, right? So-- But motion branding isn't new. It's been around for-- I don't know, a couple years or so, right? Yeah. This is from, like, 1930 something. I mean, it's got sound, so you can ballpark it there. But, you know, like, movie studios and then later TV channels and stuff like that have been branding themselves with motion for a very long time.

So a thing about motion is that, obviously, you know, the ways things look can set your brand, or your work, or you as a person apart. But the way things move, the way that you use time to bring those designs to life or use video or other multimedia elements that can be a big component too, okay? As I'm sure most of us know, templates have their place, but if you're trying to make something that says something very specific, they're not always that great. They're not very flexible. And particularly if you're looking at templates for motion, if you've ever opened up, like, an After Effects template that you bought, it can do exactly what it's built for and not a whole lot else. So the biggest thing is they can't capture anything special about what you're trying to do. They can do one thing, but, you know, they can't get the essential flavor there. So we're going to do a little thought experiment here. Let's say that you have this shoe brand that you have started. I was going to say that you work for it, but you're all clever entrepreneurial people, right? And you're putting out your first promo for this. So you can make this still that you're going to post online to get people excited about your shoes. But what if instead of just one still, we have a couple of product shots of these shoes. And we're just going to say we have three shots of them. And so you could post this as a little animation, just a little, like, do, do, do, do, do, do, do little frame sequence, right? What could these shoes be doing? You could have them just, sort of, dance around, and, you know, that's good. It gives some motion, it grabs people's eye. What if they're walking, or running, or dancing? Like, already with just three little frames, you can communicate so much about what these shoes do, what people who want to buy these shoes might, you know, who those people might be. It gives personality to your brand and to this product. A little bit of motion can communicate so much about your product, you as an artist, whatever it might be, okay? These are the kinds of things we're talking about today.

How many of you would classify yourself as a designer primarily? Okay, yeah, most of the people in the room, sort of, figured. So you all have a great head start. I came from being a video editor, which is great 'cause I know how to think about time but now I call myself a motion designer, but it took me a long time for my stuff to not look like crap.

And something that looks good with very simple animation typically is going to be way more effective than something that is really well animated and looks like crap. So you're starting in a good place.

Whether you're using Express, or After Effects, or anything in between, if you have just some layered artwork and you think about structuring it properly, and I'll give you some tips later. It can be pretty approachable to just bring that to life even you're just like animating a texture in the background or something. So some of these don't need to be that hard.

And you're probably already pretty good at using visual metaphors. And a big part of motion or animation or whatever you want to call it is capitalizing on some of those visual metaphors and motion metaphors, I guess, to communicate something without having to just put all the words on screen, right? It's just more of the same.

So you can just leverage a lot of the stuff you already know, and then we're going to add time as another tool in your toolkit, okay? Like anything, you know, I've been doing motion stuff for something like 18 years now. And I still learn new things all of the time, okay? So just like anything, you know, I'm not going to be able to teach you how to paint beautiful paintings in an hour, but this is a start. And if I can get you thinking on the right track and all these tools are more approachable than they've ever been, so we're going to get you there. But start simple. If your boss sent you to MAX expecting you to learn how to animate so that you can make a five-minute video next week, it's probably not too realistic. I've totally had people, maybe there's someone in this room that's like, you know, that's me. You can tell your boss that's not realistic, Kyle said so.

So here's a thing that I want to get in here. Again, start simple. Look at this. What's moving? Nothing. Two textures. But it's already more interesting, right? It can grab your eye. It starts kind of communicating something even if it's just that something's moving here.

So be patient with yourself, you know, you're learning new skills.

And again, remind your boss, your team, whatever, animation, motion, anything involving time might be more time consuming than just designing one frame, right, 'cause you're kind of designing a whole bunch of things that have to work together over time.

And a thing-- Anytime you're working with time, be that video, video editing, there's a lot of experimentation involved. Kind of, like, music where you have rules that, sort of, dictate what's going to work and what won't, but at the end of the day, it has to feel right. And, you know, especially if you get into more complex animation, you could spend an hour looking at the same little two seconds of stuff and tweaking something and watching it over and over until it feels just right. If that's not for you, that's okay, you can do simpler stuff, but-- Okay, so, let's talk a little bit about, like, why motion matters, both for your audience and for us, the cool people that make it, right? So some of these are, kind of, the crude level, and some of these are more interesting and especially, more interesting for us. So at a base level, like, we're nominally talking about stuff for social media, right? Most of the social media algorithms favor video content now. And if you make stuff that's still, even if you make the most beautiful photos ever, just no one sees them anymore, right? It's kind of a bummer. Like, Instagram doesn't show the thing that it was made to show.

And so if you want your stuff to get seen, it, kind of, has to move now, it seems for whatever reason. So I've been seeing a ton of this from big brands. This is Adidas, right? Like, by the end of this hour, you could all make this. And no shade, it does what it needs to do. It's a video file. So for algorithm purposes, it's accomplishing what it needs to accomplish, right? But also it just grabs your eye, like, obviously, this is a story format. But, you know, if you see this when you're scrolling through, it makes you stop for an extra half second because you go, "Oh, that thing moved. What was it?" Okay, and then you scroll on. Mission accomplished.

Again, seen a lot of this from big name brands. This is literally one thing moving. You could make this in Express in about five seconds now, okay? But it gets the job done...

Which also means this is very approachable, right? Maybe not very creatively exciting, but, you know, here it is. But we can get a lot more interesting with it, right? And this is where it gets more interesting for us because with something like this, we're telling a story now. And not only are we telling a story, but we, the designers, are controlling that story. So for something like this, somebody sees this in their feed, they're going to stop because they want to read what you're telling them. And because we're telling them one word at a time, we get to control how they get that information. And, oh, nice bonus, they see all our cool hats in the meantime, right? So you get to, kind of, drive the car now.

And, I mean, there's a lot of great examples of this kind of stuff. You give people enough that they want to follow along, and you can tell a story like this where you're giving them visual information and words and all of this and giving them a lot of flavor and personality in the meantime, right? Keeps them hooked 'cause they want see the payoff.

I really like this one. This is clearly like an Instagram story or something like this. And this one isn't quite as linear, but I really like the way that they have this consistent little in and out thing you can, kind of, see every time they hit that length limit on here and they, kind of, come back. So they could probably make a ton of these and interchange them, very clever little technique there.

So once you start dealing with time, all right, you get a new form of hierarchy. I'm sure most of you are aware of that term. You take, you know, something to make it big, or make it more contrast, or whatever it is. And you help communicate to the person looking at your design that that's the most important thing. When you have time to play with, you get to decide what's the most important by how long it's on screen, how prominent it is when it is on screen. You can change that over time. You can have this thing be important and then pump this thing up. And you can help direct people's eye around the screen at different times during the piece, okay? And something like this, you get all of this flavor, but what's the one thing you take away from this piece? Is that iconic cup and that you, kind of, wish you had a hot cup of coffee now to keep you warmer in this icebox room? Here's the thing that I really love, okay? Motion communicates emotion in a way that static stuff often cannot. I really love the stuff that Headspace does. They have all these little mini meditations. And the way that these move, like, the designs are usually pretty clean. They're cute, but they're, like, fairly simple in terms of just what's going on, right? How many of you are already starting to notice you're breathing in time with this little globe? Probably a couple. That's pretty fucking effective, isn't it? Yeah.

This can give emotion. It can create character. You can have a little flat-colored square and you can make people feel that that's cute, right, by the way it moves. You can communicate tone. You can communicate urgency.

This one's not very urgent, right? This makes you slow down.

It's also just really effective. It tells a little story.

Zoom rebranded their logos and other Zoooooom.

And, like, sure, you can just see this new logo and say, "Okay, these are all the things." But they're physically showing you, like, look, a couple years ago, we were just a video calling service, and now look at all the things we do.

That movement really tells that story, doesn't it? This is by a designer named Mat Voyce, who's super great. You should absolutely follow him. And he does a ton of great stuff, but he does a lot of these little fun stickers and stuff for a big name clients. These designs, you know, they're colorful and fun and wacky and stuff, but they wouldn't have nearly as much personality if they were just static, right? Look how much life these things bring. They're just fun, they're wacky, it brings a ton to the table.

All right, so if you were in my lab, don't cheat.

Big prize to anyone who can tell me the difference between these two things.

Okay, you're not going to get it because one is rotated two degrees, but they're otherwise identical. I wanted to make sure they weren't absolutely identical.

How about now? One's lighter.

There are two circles on a flat video screen, Right? But one is lighter. I've just communicated something about the relationship between these two otherwise identical circles by the way that they move. And you know what else? They're in a universe that has physics. That yellow line at the bottom of the screen isn't a yellow line, it's a table, or a floor, or it's a surface that is hard and they bounce off of, right? Look how much we communicated with some motion.

Here's another little example. Let's say I want these two shapes to just change places.

There's a lot of different ways to do that, right? Well, here's, like, 15 different ways that they could change places. And just, kind of, watch these. And, you know, these don't necessarily have to be, like, explicit communication. But look how different these feel and what they say about these shapes and the relationship between them. These are just two flat shaded, you know, shapes, right? And it, really, like, this one, they're literally, like, trimming off of one into the other. They're just some conceptual ideas to think about how much power there is here to communicate in ways that maybe you've never really thought about before.

Of course, you can incorporate this with video content, very common, even if you're just, like, making stylish titles. But notice, I really like this little bit. I trimmed a lot out of the middle of this piece, but look how much this communicates, like, the same energy as this piece. It's all about her working out and how much the Nike is, you know, help her do what she does, right? Look how energetic they are, and they really just like right off the bat and they help communicate, like, this is going to be a high energy thing, it's going to be fun, bright colors, you know, whatever.

Okay, huh.

So we've, kind of, talked about some of the what and the why, and now we're going to put some of those ideas into practice. Going to give you, you know, somehow but you're going to get some more concepts, while you're doing this. Okay, so, I'm going to do a little bit of stuff in Express. How many of you are using Express? Okay, how many of you are using the new video and animation features in Express? Couple folks. Hopefully, we get a lot more hands after this. So I've been an animator using a much more powerful piece of software for, you know, almost two decades. I think Express is great.

Not everything needs to be this painstaking thing that gets, you know, sweat it over for days and whatever. Like, if you need something-- I mean, you saw that Adidas and The Washington Post and stuff, like. Sometimes you just need to slap a thing together, make something move and ship it, or make something that's very easy for someone else to, like, update the text on it every week, or something like that, and Express is awesome for those things. I'm totally starting to use it even just like as a delivery platform, even for things that, you know, I'd make in After Effects.

So, you know, it's, kind of, been billed as, like, streamlined for simple stuff, but, like, I really think that we, as designers, should be looking at it as a streamlined solution for the things that don't need to be scrutinized quite as much. It's not as precise as our, you know, big boy programs that we love. But it does have a lot of really valuable stuff.

And there are, of course, a lot of templates. And as you saw, like, now we can just type in and create whatever template we want or that's coming soon or something. But as of August, it got a timeline in it. So you can use it-- It does a lot of different stuff. You can use it just as a quick video editor if you want. You can use it to put videos in there and edit multiple scenes together. You can add audio, and you can animate stuff in here now, okay? So I have...

A very simple example, but you can, kind of, extrapolate from here.

Let me come over here, actually wake up my mouse. All right, so when you come to Express, you have, you know, a million things, but you do have video here. You can use templates. You can also just start from your own stuff. So if you have a video file, you can just drop it right on here and then edit it. I'm just going to do something, excuse me, that just has a couple static layers to start.

But this is actually really straightforward. So I've got, you know, this logo layer. I've got some background stuff, and I've got a piece of text, all right? Obviously, we want this to move a little bit just so that people look at it. All you have to do is just select a thing, and then over here on the left, you have this little animation box right here. And look how easy this is. You can animate things on to screen, you can animate things off of screen, and then you can give them looping animation while they're here. Let's just start with that, kind of, see how it feels. You know, not all these are going to be appropriate for everything, of course. But these are, like, really easy to apply and really easy to add. Let's give this one just a little bit of, like, breathe here. We'll just, kind of, pulsate. And I think subtlety is underappreciated in animation. I think most of these are a little over the top, but you can just dial them down, right here, the speed, you can dial down the intensity. And then you, kind of, get these little previews. Okay, that's not bad. Maybe, kind of, ripping off the Headspace thing. Cookies are coming, right? They're comforting.

And then we'll just let that be. If I don't want that, I can just click on this. It turns into a little trash can and get rid of it, right? If I want this to animate on to screen, we'll go ahead and just, like, totally undercut our soothing animation by adding this crazy bungee. You just have a little play button down here and you can see what it looks like in motion, right? But you actually have a whole timeline that you can do right here. You can see it you can trim it. Since these are all stills, I could make this longer if I wanted to. If you have video content, it'll have a, you know, fixed length. But there's a little switch right here so that you can show the timing of each layer as well. So if you don't want everything to just be on screen forever, you can actually have any layer selected, and you can just drag in the start. So that's probably a long time. Let's have it start around here. And so you could see some stuff and then have things drop in at specific times. I'm not going to be too precious with this right now, but, you know, you can actually start doing some interesting stuff. We'll have that happen. I'll grab my text here, scroll down, Animation, and, you know what, let's use that same thing, bungee. But look, every single one of these, even though it's like a drop in, you can just tell it to be from that direction. So these are pretty flexible. And a lot of them have-- Looks like I picked one that doesn't here, but...

Let me see slide, maybe. Okay, a lot of these have, like, this little personality thing. We're going to talk about some of this a little bit later. But the way that things move, remember, communicates a lot so you can have something come in real fast, or real snappy, or even bouncy and gives it a lot of life. So just play with these, kind of, see which one feels good. But I mostly just want to point out, like, there's actually a lot in here. And if you've never touched animation before, something like After Effects may feel very intimidating. This is so approachable. Like, my 12-year-old has been playing with this, so I think that all of you can probably do it.

And again, you can just, kind of, decide when you want stuff to start. You get these little dots right there. Do you see that? You can kind of see when the other layers are starting. It's a nice little reference. And then you can just watch it and feel like, "Oh, yeah, there we go. Great." The cool thing about Express if you do know how to make more-- Oh, yeah, question. Did you make this on another Adobe application-- I made this one right here in Express. I imported this logo file, I imported this texture, and the other stuff is just created, like, a shape and a text created right here in Express.

This however, that's actually the best segue ever. Thank you.

This one is something that I created in After Effects, and then I just turned off one of the text layers so that I could recreate it here in Express, okay? So you could make something that's a little more complex. And then, like, if this was something that needs to get updated all the time, I could make this, and then I could click this little button right here and hand it off to my marketing person, who can come in here and update this text every day to say Monday, like, BOGO Snickerdoodles, if that doodle is it-- You get the idea.

And so they can do that and then take it from there, right? And the cool thing about Express, you know, you can publish directly to any of these platforms, but you can schedule stuff too. So if I'm doing it myself, if they're doing it, whatever, you could come in here, and you could line all these up, set them up on your calendar, and never think about it. I'm not like a social media person that does a lot of this stuff. But, you know, you got to play the game a little bit at least. And this helps make it easier, and you don't have to pay for yet another third-party thing. So take advantage of it, even if just as a delivery platform.

I'm totally starting to take advantage of this for things, like, I do a weekly live streaming show, and we're doing our thumbnail in here so that either of us 'cause there's two of us, can edit the thing and easily export it. Just think about taking advantage of what's here, right? And also, you saw him-- Oh, well, there we go. You saw him do some cool stuff on stage yesterday. Paul Trani posted this a couple days ago. This is something he built in Illustrator and imported into Express. And, you know, seeing the workflow, you can realize this probably takes a while to, like, select each layer, pick the animation, dial it in. Select the layer, pick the animation, dial it in. It's a little painstaking in there, but you can make some really cool stuff, and again, it's pretty approachable, right? So this is a great way. If you want to take a cool design that you've made and just have some stuff float around, give it some life, start doing stuff in here, please, please.

Okay, how many of us love Photoshop? Probably everybody, right? So it's probably a place that you're already pretty comfortable, right? Photoshop has actually had a timeline for, like, decades. And I don't love working in there, but it can be really valuable for the right stuff.

I know there are folks that like to do hand-drawn animation in Photoshop. I don't think that timeline's great. I'm going to give you a better solution in a minute. But it's really great for one specific thing, and that's making little like stop-motion-y GIFs, and, yes, that's the right way to pronounce it.

And especially if you're working with photo elements already, why go somewhere else? Things like this can be really super effective, right? They again, kind of, tell a little story, and if you're already doing a lot of photography, a lot of photo work, you know, there's a lot of planning involved to like, get all of these frames correct, and that's I'm not going to discount that. But doing the post on it can be pretty straightforward. Something like this, or maybe you just have a bunch of product shots already, like, you didn't need to plan this so much it's just, like, make sure you size the things correctly. And I don't know what this is necessarily-- Keep playing. Come on, on PowerPoint.

You know, I don't know what this is communicating so much, but it's fun and it gives us some energy.

Okay, so let's hop over to Photoshop and just do a really quick little thing, got another cookie for you. Just in case you've never done this in here, you can come up to Window, and there's a Timeline panel right here.

Okay, this-- I kind of like this thing, but it's somehow always in the way, right? Yeah, I'm not alone in that. Okay, so when you're creating an animation here, you get to choose between a frame animation or a video timeline. The video timeline is the one that I think is, kind of, clunky. I don't really care for it, but you can create a frame animation, all right? And so I'm going to go ahead and just click that, and it makes one frame for me. And the first thing I'm going to do is say, how long I want this frame to exist. So a frame when you're talking about animation is video, really, or anything that moves is just a bunch of images, kind of, crammed into one thing. So frames is what you call each of those images that's packed into a little piece of video.

And in this case, you get this little drop-down here, and you can say, how long you want this thing to exist. I'm going to choose 0.2, that's 0.2 seconds, okay? And then all we have to do is make more frames and, kind of, decide what you'd want each one to do. In this case, you can just, kind of-- This is pretty simple, I've prepped it. But I'm going to make it so that it's the full cookie. I'm going to click this little thing to make another frame, and then I'm just going to go to the next image, okay? So you get to watch me do this a couple times. It's not the most exciting thing, but I think it'll be okay.

And I'll keep talking through it even though it's completely meaningless, but you get the idea. And clearly, you can see, you know, I did some prep here. I rotated the cookie a little bit, as I was doing it. So we have this little series, and then we get to the end of our little story. I'm going to go ahead and hold on that one a little bit longer 'cause, like, we want the payoff, right? We've got it, and then we want to, like, give people a breath to absorb what just happened. So I'm going to set this one to be 1 second. We can just play our little timeline here.

All right, done. That's pretty good, but we need to remind them whose delicious cookies they're thinking about eating. So I'm going to go ahead, I'm going to click on my first frame here, and I'm going to import my beautiful Kyle's cookies logo. I'm going to size this down just a little bit...

And then I'm going to stick that below my cookie here. And you'll see by the little thumbnails because I did this after I built the animation, I actually put it in every frame, little time saver, and then Kyle's Cookies. There we go. How long did that take me? Like, a minute, maybe? Plus all the time to, you know, shoot it. But...

Wink! But you get the idea. This was super easy, right? And if you're just doing, like, three images or something, you can set this up, like, this is so approachable to do.

I will say, like, saving gifts at a Photoshop is still a little bit of a bummer because it's Export, Save for Web Legacy because GIF is like 30-some year old format. Someday, people are going to find a way to replace it, but today's not that day. So you come in here and you can futz around with your settings. I'm not going to do that. And then, you know, you get this fun little thing. And remember, this has transparency. So we could use this in a variety of ways. You can stick this in an email or on the web somewhere, or this can be an Instagram sticker that you give people that can be used on stories and stuff. But really pretty approachable, right, especially if you're already a Photoshop user.

If you are someone that likes to do hand-drawn stuff, I'm sure some of you make beautiful illustrations that I would be extremely jealous of. Are you doing stuff in Fresco? Because Fresco has animation features. I don't have time to demo them today, but you can draw stuff in there and have a very similar little frame timeline where you can do frame by frame animation. You can set the frame rate how fast it goes. You can tell things to loop or boomerang. A thing I've really been loving doing is just like, do something fairly simple like this, and then you can create an animated background texture by, like, grabbing a watercolor brush or something that's a little bit transparent and just do, like, 10 frames of just, like, you know, kind of, a random scribble like this, right, and just keep making frames of that. And then do one other one and maybe, like, do a different color, or go a different direction, or something. And then see how these textures are looping in the background. Like, it brings so much life, and it seriously takes, like, 30 seconds to just, like, throw some cool textures together. So check out the animation stuff in Fresco. You can also move stuff along a path, which can be really neat. So play with that.

How many of you are doing video stuff? Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, yeah, a lot. And maybe Premiere is more than a lot of people need, but if you're already using, I just want to point out a feature in case you're not aware of this.

Obviously, as I showed, you can do video stuff in Express and, you know, it can be great if you just need to do quick edits and stuff. If you need a little more precise control, Premiere is that place. I don't love Premiere's animation features. They can get the job done, but as someone's been using After Effects for a long time, it feels, sort of, clunky. It's kind of similar to Express where you have to select one thing, do the work, select the other thing, do the work, and it's hard to, like, work with multiple things in conjunction. But a thing that's really, really great about Premiere is that it can use this thing called Motion Graphics Templates. And you can create them directly in Premiere, you can buy them from Adobe Stock, or you can make them in After Effects, or have someone make them for you, okay? Let me make sure-- Okay. Yeah. When you say Motion Graphic Templates, is that Mogrt file? It's Mogrt. Yes. The Mogrt is the shorter name that Adobe definitely didn't want people to use, and then they started using it, and it just has stuck. Mogrt like yogurt, yeah.

So we're going to just take a quick look, just in case you've never used one of these...

There are a ton that come preinstalled. And so, you know, I threw some shade at templates earlier, but I make templates for a lot of people. Templates are great when they're made to do what you want them to do, right? But you can also make your own. I'm just going to quickly show a very simple one. We can dive more into later if you want. But you have a ton installed. There's a ton of them for free on Adobe Stock. So you have this panel called Essential Graphics, you can always just find it under Window, Essential Graphics.

And you can click Browse, you can click Adobe Stock, and you can search. There's like hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of things on here. You can buy some too, but there's a lot of good ones.

You can make your own. You can sort these into libraries, by the way, which is a great way to share these with your team. But all you have to do is just bring one of these onto the timeline. It takes just a second to load up the media. Then this looks, kind of, familiar, right? So this is a thing that I built in After Effects. If you took my lab, you built this with me.

But look at this. So it's just a clip on my timeline, right? Except, I can highlight this. And now I have a few spots that are editable because that's what I set up when I built this template in After Effects. And I'll show you how to do this if you want. It's pretty straightforward. After Effects is scary, I know, but so again, I can say Monday, like, BOGO Snickerdoodles, and I can change the box color to something beautiful like this Adobe red.

Sorry about your eyes. I'll undo that. You saw that it works. And so now all the animation that I built into this template still works. But I have editable properties. And so, you know, if you don't know how to build this, that's okay. But maybe you could just think about this as another possibility. You could have someone build this for your specific purposes, and then you could very easily update this or have your marketing people update this if they know how to touch this. But another cool thing about Premiere, okay? Yes, you make and edit and export videos stuff, and you can just export video files. This has actually been around here for a while. Look over here on the left. You can export directly to a bunch of platforms from Premiere without having to export the file and then find it in your file browser and go to the website, whatever. So I could just click Twitter. I noticed how they haven't updated this yet, which is probably for the best 'cause the new name's dumb.

And so you can say, like, when I export this, I want it to go directly to Twitter, and YouTube, and Facebook, and whatever. And you can just be logged into these services and then distribute it from here, okay? Pretty cool, right? How many of you knew that existed? A few. Okay. Yeah. So again, if you're in here, if you're using it already, very useful.

Yeah, we may have time to tinker with some more of these if you want, but-- All right. So I'm going to shift into talking about After Effects. And, you know, if you're not going to be using After Effects after this, that's okay. But understand that if you want to, like, really do cool stuff, this is kind of-- You're going to hit a ceiling in Express, you know, soon enough. And maybe you want to be able to do more complex things.

After Effects can accept pretty much any multimedia filetype, audio, video, images, layered artwork. And in the beta right now, still you can bring actual 3D models in and manipulate those directly in After Effects. So you can use it for a lot of different stuff, like, motion design, and character animation, and visual effects, and please don't use After Effects for video editing, use Premiere for that, pro tip. And it does have a little bit of a learning curve. But hopefully, some of you who have taken my lab or are taking it this afternoon, you know, maybe it's more approachable than you had thought it was, okay? Before we talk about that, I'm going to give you some tips about designing for animation, okay? And these all apply too if you're pushing a layered thing into Express, which you can absolutely do. You saw Paul's example. So I'm going to stand up again because it's absolutely freezing in here.

So when you are designing something that you want to move, okay, you really want to take advantage of the layers that you have, you also want to be thoughtful. Like, if you're one of those people that does, like, 1,000 adjustment layers of little beauty touch-ups on something, those you probably don't need that flexibility for animation. That's a good example of, like, smash all that down. So it's just the one thing that you need to be able to manipulate. But maybe you have your cookie, you have your text, and then you have your background and your background texture. And you want to make sure those are all discrete layers so that when you bring them into whatever you're using to animate, you have the ability to move them, right? But you don't need 900, you know, beauty layers of cookie polishing touch-ups. That you can smash down. Generally speaking, you want to stay as non-destructive as possible, okay? Because you want to give yourself options. I'm going to show you some stuff in a minute. Remember that slide I showed you before that had just two moving textures? Those are each just stills of that texture that are big enough that I have the ability to, like, move them around to random spots, okay? So if you think about stuff like that, have textures that are much bigger than you need them, have layers that maybe are bigger than they're going to look because you want to be able to scale them up in animation, think about what you want the thing to do and, kind of, plan for that a little bit, all right? So again, this is what I was talking about. I jumped again a little bit. This thing is just two still textures that are just being animated. They're positioned to animate it around. That's all it is. Okay, so if you were making this circle in Photoshop, you might make the circle shape and then select it, and then, you know, on another layer, you would, kind of, paint this texture in, but, like, within that circle, right? That's not an uncommon thing because if it only needs to look good for one frame, like, you don't care where else it exists, it just doesn't need to exist outside the circle. So your layers are probably going to end up looking something like this, all right? If I was designing this, I would do it something like this. I would make my circle and then every one of these brush strokes is a completely separate layer, and it exists both inside and outside the circle, okay? And then you can, you know, do your layer masks for the group or whatever so that, you know, it looks right.

But that setup is the difference between these two things. And boy, what a difference it makes? Because again, just doing, like, very simple little position movements on each of those brush strokes gives you the ability to add so much life. And if this is like your hero element...

You've added a ton of personality and character that you're, kind of, communicating stuff about it already, right? That's just more interesting too.

If you're building stuff in Photoshop that you want to push into After Effects or Express, well, this is After Effects specific, but every Photoshop layer can become an After Effects layer, okay? If you put them inside of a group inside a little folder, they'll still be layers, but they'll, kind of, be nested within what's called a pre-composition, but you still have access to all of it. Photoshop text can become editable in After Effects. Good stuff. You get-- You mostly get Layer Styles and stuff, there's a few exceptions. And if you work with Smart Objects, which I love, but those will effectively come in as just a flat layer when you import it. So you just need to, kind of, be aware of that.

So just to, kind of, reinforce, every one of these layers will become an After Effects layer if you were doing that, but some of them will be, kind of, nested away in another thing.

If you're working in Illustrator, which I also love...

It's only the top-level layers. And I don't know, I assume this is similar for Express, but I don't think I've tried that specifically yet.

Only the top-level layers become editable layers, like, separate layers in After Effects, okay? All of the little pieces inside one of these layers they're all just kind of treated as a big sandwich for that one. So like, in this example, everything, all the little pieces inside Cookies 01, those are all just going to be one thing called Cookies 01. But the cool thing is, and this can be a little daunting, but you've got all these vector paths and information, right? If you push those into After Effects, you can actually convert those to a thing called shape layers, and then you can edit or animate all of those vector paths. But let me say that again. You can edit or animate all of those vector paths. So, you know, how some of you probably like to work with nine million little shapes that, like, mean nothing, but it all looks good? You probably don't want that if you're going to be animating, right? This is another case where you want to be thoughtful and strategic about, like, some things you do want to smush down, some things you want to keep editable 'cause you don't want 900 tiny little triangles when you just need one thing to be able to move around.

Really big thing, if you're also designing print stuff, After Effects and any video app cannot take CMYK files. They often just won't import. And if they do, they'll just, like, not look right. So don't do that. Video apps have just a low resolution. If you're doing print stuff, again, you often want to down res it before you bring it in. 'Cause you don't get anything from extra resolution, except just a slower experience, okay? Same thing if you're working, like, crazy high, you know, 10,000-pixel things like video screens actually have a pretty low resolution. What you're looking at right now is probably 1920x1080. Maybe this is a 4k feed, I don't know. But video is not super high resolution, so you don't need all of that. You just going to have to smush it way down and be, kind of, weird to work anyway.

In terms of, like, video formats for social, it's the same sizes if you're making still stuff. And whatever they decided-- Instagram decides to change it to next month because it seems like it's always something different, right? And so again, just this is, kind of, you know, you know, what dimensions are. I will tell you-- I'm going to show you some stuff in After Effects in a minute here. After Effects has a coordinate system. It's actually the same one that you've been working in, in Photoshop and Illustrator forever, where 0,0 is the top left. You might need to be a little more aware of it in After Effects, but it's the same thing...

The annoying story format that I hate. Okay, so I talked a little bit about frame rate. It does become more relevant as you're starting to deal with video content. Frame rate is the number of images that make up each second of a piece of video, okay? These all have the exact same animation on them...

But they're being shown to you at very different frame rates. And what a difference that makes, right? If you're doing hand-drawn stuff, or, like, the stop-motion thing that I showed you earlier, would you want to do 30 of those little cookie images every second to get a 30-frame rate? That's like what you watch on TV. Maybe you'd get really smooth motion, but boy, that would be a lot of work, huh? So you could go a lot lower, but it has a very different feel. So just, kind of, be aware of the implications there. And, you know, if you're doing hand-drawn stuff in Fresco, you probably don't want to do 30 frames a second. You know, 8 or 12 probably feels good, but it's going to have a choppier feel.

As you'll see in After Effects, there's a lot of presets for all this stuff, so you don't have to worry about it too much. Just like, you know, Photoshop has, you know, you can choose your size and dimensions and how many artboards and stuff. After Effects has similar presets to get you started.

Okay, who's terrified of After Effects? A lot of you, okay? How many of you have been to my lab or are about to come to my lab? Okay, yeah. I have one more session of it this afternoon. I'm just going to try to show you a few things in After Effects, hopefully, make it a little more approachable for you and show you that some of the stuff doesn't need to be too scary, okay? So quick little tour. Here's the After Effects interface. Over here on the left, you have a thing called the Project Panel. You put your stuff here, okay? Any of you InDesign users? This is-- Honestly, After Effects and InDesign don't talk to each other that well, but they have more similarities than some of the other apps, actually. The way After Effects works is you have an After Effects project, and then you can make a bunch of what are called compositions. These are the containers in here. It's basically a page with time, okay? So you can create stuff directly in here, like, text or shapes, or you can import things like images, or videos, or sound, okay? And you can, kind of, in this case, you can put all of that stuff here in this panel, all right? I have a bunch of assets in here, like, the sound file, and you can kind of see some stuff about it. So when you import things, you put them over here, and then you can put them into your compositions, your containers. Down here, we have what's called a timeline. You already saw one of those, and this is layers plus time, okay? And so now you could have things. You see how, like, this pink layer only exists until a certain point. And then there's a fuchsia layer that starts existing. And so you have this little, weird robot looking thing. This is actually the icon for a composition. You might see them over here. And once I get past four seconds, you can't see that anymore 'cause I trimmed it off, and now you see a cookie. So obviously, this is a very simple thing, but you have Layers + Time. If I started extending these, now you'll see how these overlap, but they're in the same place on screen, right? So now you're going to see that thing over the other thing. It's just layers just like, you know, anything else. I believe this actually does have a little bit of animation on it. Woah! Pretty complicated.

Up here on screen, you look at your stuff, all right? And you can also grab things and move them around just like you're used to. Like, this isn't so scary, right? And you might notice over here on the right side, you have a Properties panel. They finally gave us a Properties panel in After Effects, which is much friendlier for you design folks. And if you click on something like text, you'll see it looks almost identical, right? You've got your Layer Transform things. You can adjust the position or the scale or whatever. And then you've got all your Text properties. It's pretty much the same.

There's, like, a lot of other panels in here. And a lot of them are special case, just, like, you know, you have special case panels in the design apps.

Okay, so we're going to take a minute, and we're going to talk about a magical thing called keyframes. And that's what makes most computer animation possible. Express is effectively using these just not showing it to you, okay? So a keyframe is a value at a time. Because we have the ability to use time now, we can set specific values at specific times. And when we set another value at another time, that's what creates animation, okay? So if I take this cookie and I put it over here, I'm at the very beginning of my timeline. You can see I'm at frame 0:00:00:00. That's hours, minutes, seconds, frames, okay? And so right here, I'm going to go ahead and tell After Effects to hold this position value at this time. I'm going to do that, appear on this Position Property, I'm going to click this little round thing. It's called a stopwatch, okay? See how it changes, and that gives me a little thing down here in my timeline. That's a keyframe. So if I go to a different time and I give this a different value, some new position, right, see how it created another thing. These are each holding different values at different times.

So I'm going to press the space bar and do a little preview, get ready to be blown away by this.

Okay, yeah, not bad, huh? So at this time, this position value. At this time, this position value, okay? If you want to change this animation, you could change this value, right? And now I've made something a little bit different. But you could also change the time at which it occurs, okay? So if I drag this key frame way later in the timeline, almost to eight seconds here, it's going to be the same animation, but much slower, right? Or I could drag this really close to the front. And now it's going to be the same animation, but really fast. And then it's just going to sit there for about seven seconds because I have not given it another value to go to, okay? That makes sense to everybody? Okay, cool. And remember how in Express, I showed you there's, like, strong and smooth, there's some of those different types of movement? So you can do all that stuff here in After Effects as well. See this little line that this is created this is called a motion path. And you can actually dictate to After Effects how you want to move between these two values, okay? So this motion path right here-- Look at this, it's a Bézier path. Yeah. So you can edit this. And now I've completely changed this animation, but do you see any more key frames down here? No. It's still holding two values at two specific times, but I've changed how it moves between those. And I could also start changing temporally the way that it interprets that, okay? You can have this thing called a graph in here, and so I could move it differently over time. And the way that those feel can be vastly different. Again, like my frame rate example, these all have the exact same values, okay? But the way that it moves between those values, super different. And it really communicates different things by the way that it moves, right? One second.

Three days of talking after, like, yelling at people at parties. No, thanks. Just in case, you're a person who likes to see proof, I'll show you. This is the location of this cookie on every frame of this animation. Up top here. Look at that. It's like completely consistent and moved the same distance every time. Down here on this bottom one, it's all clumped up to the beginning, and then it goes phew!

If you start getting an eye for this, watch cartoons and watch the way that they use this concept to do all kinds of really cool stuff. They also start using things like overshoot where instead of just moving from here to here, you move from here to here, and then back to here. So then you go, boom, like that. And then you start using speed like this too. And you can do all kinds of really effective stuff. And not just overshoot, but you want to charge up for that move, okay? And so you go, boop, boo, boom. And, like, you start adding so much life by the way that something moves.

After Effects also even if you animate nothing in here, it has hundreds of super cool effects that can actually be really useful for designers. There's another speaker here named Chris Converse. And I don't know if he's doing it this year, but he has a really great session on just using the effects in After Effects to make a designer's life easier. Like this one right here, this is, you know, a flat Illustrator graphic of the world, right? So I'm just going to-- I've already applied this one effect called CC Sphere. And look at this, Instant Globe. I did almost nothing. I just set the radius of it. Obviously, I added some rotation key frames here, but, like, I applied one thing and now I have a globe, and it's got lighting on it and all the stuff. Stuff like this could be super useful. There's all kinds of, like, cool generative stuff in here as well.

Not like AI generative stuff, but, like, you know, creating cool patterns and whatever, you can stack up all kinds of neat stuff.

I'm going to show you just here. Let me show you this. So this is an example from my lab. And in this case, we have another-- Yeah, yeah, yeah. I want to share this real quick.

All right. Let me close this, sorry.

Okay. I'm sure some of you have been and maybe still are designing, like, carousels for Instagram, right? So you might have three static images. You're already, kind of, thinking like an animator because this is a little story, right? You have a progression of animation and you're deciding what's visible at each point during that little story. Well...

If you have access to something like After Effects, what if instead 'cause, you know, we could take these and have each of them scale a little bit or something. That's not very interesting. But what if instead you like, made a background plate that was three times this width and thought about moving that at specific times, and you can just bring those hero elements along for the ride. And now you can control that story and present the animation to your audience as you desire. So right here, I have that background plate, and you can see it's three times the width of what's visible on my canvas here, right? And I just have a couple of position keyframes just like you saw me make with the cookie. So I'm going to play this. Okay, it's not the most exciting, but you can see how we're moving through something, right? After Effects has this neat feature called parenting, where you can link layers together, and that's especially relevant when things can move over time. So I'm just going to go ahead and turn on these hero elements. I've got fresh baked. And, well, right now, it's not going along for the ride. But there's this little thing right here called Parent & Link, and I can just tell that you follow this thing. And so now when that moves off screen, it goes with it. I get up here to this next part. I can turn on that all natural, and I can link that to the background. And, hey, look you there. It's going along for the ride. And get up here to the end, turn on my logo, link that to the background...

And, you know, how long that take me, like, 20 seconds or something while explaining it? And this isn't the most exciting thing, but, like, it's already telling a little story and presenting the animation in an intentional way. Information, okay? Here's the complete version where, you know, we've fancy things up a little bit and added some background animation, and added a little bit of color and life to it. Sorry, it's building the preview one time before it plays it smoothly here. But in-- We do this in my lab, and we build it from scratch. But honestly, for me, if I weren't explaining, I could build this in, like, four minutes or something in After Effects. It's pretty straightforward just using, like, mostly basic features. And, you know, it's fairly effective. And look at that background texture.

I've just got some movement there. Again, it's just an image that's much larger than my Canvas, and it gives me the ability to just move it up slowly over time. Kind of, looks like steam rising, and it, like, tells you these cookies are hot and fresh and delicious, right? And if you get really crazy, you can get way into After Effects and make bonker stuff like this if you're so inclined, okay? Enjoy. You know, you can probably make this by next week. Maybe not. Maybe not.

I actually got hired by Adobe to make this a couple of years ago, and it was, kind of, a love letter to After Effects. So it was pretty cool. Okay, so we just have a few minutes here, but I just wanted to kind of give you a little taste of a bunch of different things. I believe that's the end of my slideshow, but I want to, kind of, like send you away with some thoughts, okay? I want every single one of you to promise me 'cause I know how to find all of you, whatever, that you're going to try at least one of these things. I want you to make something move, like within the next couple of weeks, take a thing that you've made that you like and look at it and say, what could I do to, like, make aspects of this move, even if you just take it in Express and make something drift around, okay? Just try it out. Please.

Remember, start simple, don't do something crazy ambitious because those are the things that get too daunting and then you get down in the weeds, all right? And share it with people. I know it's fucking scary, all right? Share it with people and ask for feedback, and you'll get feedback, and you'll get better over time. And other people will make suggestions, like, I really like what you did. What if you also added this thing and had some movement, or what if you slowed everything down? Don't be afraid to ask people for feedback. It's like the most powerful thing ever, even though it's terrifying. I know we as designers all are, like, introverted weirdos, and we don't want to, you know, whatever but-- Okay, again, think and then after you've, like, tried one thing, you can start thinking when you're creating something, think about ways like, well, instead of just trying to put all of this stuff into one frame, how could I space that out? How could I say this thing and then move to this thing? How can I make this into a progression of animation? How can I incorporate music into this and start setting a tone in a mood with that? How does that complement the visuals, right? Just keep going. And what is the goal of emotion? It's okay. I'm just making it look a little more interesting. That can be a goal. But you can start thinking, like, what is this saying about my brand? There's a lot of big brands now that have, like, explicit motion guidelines for the way that things are allowed to move in their design system. So this is becoming a really deep rabbit hole. You can find some of those. Uber, for example, has some really good ones. Google has some I'm sure they've revised them several times at this point, but, you know, all of these fancy devices, these have motion systems for the way things are allowed to move when you interact with them. And when they do the little loading animations, when they're listening to you talk, or whatever.

Okay, so thank you for your time. We have, 30 seconds left, but I'm happy to answer any questions at all. Of course, this is me. Again, you can take my information. Please feel free to ask me questions. If you make something, you know, if you're inspired today and you want to make something, please, please, please tag me and say like, "Hey, thanks for the tips." And ask me for feedback, you know? I'll totally give you some.

You can find me every Monday. Go ahead and stand up for this, but you can find me on every Monday on a show called Motion Design Hotline. We're on Adobe Live with my friend Evan Abrams, who's also a person who talks about After Effects a lot. We have a ton of back episodes and project files. So if you want to dig into our project files and play around, you can. I also have-- I'm running out, but there's a bunch of stickers here on the speaker if you want a sticker.

Among my many titles, I'm an Adobe Community Expert, which means, you know, sort of, like, an ambassador for the software and I help people and, you know, do community stuff and whatever. If you want to know more about that, you can ask me. There's folks down in the creative park with signs or badges or something like that, you can ask them. Here's the slide again so that you can get my information. Thank you so much for your time. Thanks for being here early in the morning.

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