[music] [Nol Honig] All right. All right, well, officially, hello, everybody. Welcome to S6602. Yeah.

Yes. Thank you. Whoo! Right on, yes. Love the enthusiasm.

We're talking today about Starting Complex Branding Projects in After Effects. I know we got a bunch of designers in the house, some branding folks, some animators, so I think this is a really great crowd for this, right? This is my social info. I'll put it up at the end as well so you don't to copy it down now. Yeah. And I think I'm going to start. Yeah, cool. All right. Let's start here. Let me introduce myself in case you don't know me, even though I'm obviously internationally famous. My name is Nol Honig and I am a Designer, and a Director, and an Animator and an Educator. Okay, so in my mind, that means that I'm pretty good at doing stuff, and I'm also fairly good at talking about the stuff that I do, all right? So think you're in good hands here. Yep. Come on in, everybody.

Thank you.

So basically, I have, like, 25 years of experience, working as an animator and as a teacher. So I think you're definitely in good hands here. And let me just say about how impressive I am, okay? So impressive, I've worked with, like, all the big branding companies and on a lot of NDA projects that I'm totally not allowed to talk about today, so all right, so that means I'm hella impressive, right? All right, so what you're asking is, "All right, wise guy here old, and you've got a lot of experience, right? So, you know, what have you learned and what can you teach us here today about Starting Complex Branding Projects in After Effects?" Well, all right, here's the answer that I'm going to give you, which is that every time I start a new branding project, it's completely different. And the solution then I come up with is completely bespoke, essentially. So each time I start this, I, kind of, feel like I have no idea what I'm doing. So I don't think that gets better over the years just in case that's how you feel sometimes. What I will say is that I have a general approach, okay? And that's, kind of, what I'm going to show you today. So it's not necessarily like I'm going to teach you everything, but I think this will be instructive to hear my approach, okay? So what are we talking about today? Yeah, we're talking about three projects that I worked on, that are of increasing complexity, okay? So I'm going to roll you through three projects. The first one's relatively straightforward. And I'm going to use that one to show you the method, my approach to these, kind of, situations. And then I'm going to take you through two more that are fairly complex. And the third one, I'm going to try to demo live for you. I'm a little bit nervous about that, but it's fairly complex. So I'm hoping you'll definitely be inspired by that. I want to just say for one second that I'm not really talking about animating wordmarks here. Okay, so if you're not a branding person, the wordmark in these three logos are the words that say Warner Records or Airbnb or Square. Generally speaking, I am brought in to animate this, which are the logo marks that go with wordmarks, okay? Let's just call those shapes 'cause I don't like to use fancy terminology so much. And the fact is that these shapes tend to inform the larger branding system of the whole project much more than the wordmarks do in my experience. And yeah, I'm just usually asked to come in and, sort of, work on these shapes and iterate through them, and animate them, and see what they can do, okay? So that's, kind of, the situation I'm talking today, not so much animating, like, the words Coca-Cola or something like that, okay? And just to show this, like, just here's an example of a logo that I really like. All right, Pentagram rebranded Mohawk paper in 2012. I did not work on this. But I really think this is a great example of what I'm talking about because I'm sure that if I was asked to come in and work on this project, I would have been working on animating circles and rounded rectangles with these colors and these angles, right, because that made up the larger branding system for the whole project. For example, the word Mohawk here is nice. It's beautiful. It's nothing that I would write home about, though, right? But this branding system that they made out of these shapes and these colors, right, the whole system is absolutely beautiful, right? But it doesn't really include the word Mohawk a lot in it, if you notice. This is from the Pentagram website, okay? So this is the, kind of, thing I'm talking about. I would usually come in and be working on the circles, the colors, whatever it was that made up the system that they wanted me to work on. Does that make sense to everybody? Okay, cool. So another thing here is that this is not a lab, okay? And I going to be doing some complex stuff up here and it is, you know, I'm going to call out all the steps and I'm going to show you as best as I can, but there's definitely going to be some times where I'm pretty sure I'm just going to be going fast and I don't know if you're going to exactly be able to do what I did it, you know, after this lesson here today. So I'm, kind of, thinking this is like half very much educational, but also like half inspirational, okay? I just want you to see my method. And if you're in this situation where you're working on something that's complex, you're like, "Okay, I have this thing to go back on," right? But I can't really guarantee that you're going to walk out of this room knowing everything that I know. Sorry.

Okay.

I know that some people are uncomfortable with math, okay? And sometimes this is me too, all right? So I just wanted to shout this out at the beginning if you're, you know, uncomfortable with this. When it's coming up, I'll tell you and you can like, la-la-la-la, or whatever it is, okay? But just to assure all the people that feel that way... Oh, shoot. Sorry. Oh, my God. This is so embarrassing.

I accidentally put pictures of my cats, Sebastian and Frankie into my presentation here as a way of humanizing myself. Oh, thank you. Anyway, back to math. Okay, so the kinds of math we're talking about today are basic algebra. Okay, so if you're not a math person, follow with me here, okay? Who in this room... Do this in your head now, can take a number like 100, okay, and multiply it by 2, all right? Most people, all right. Trick question, who can divide 100 by 2? All right. Okay, great. So I think you know all of the basic algebra that you're going to need to know for this lesson, all right? So don't worry about it too much. Now I'm also going to be talking about JavaScript coding, okay, which in After Effects is known as Expressions, which I'm really into, and I think it really helpful for this. But JavaScript is, kind of, funny. Like, you might know a ton about JavaScript. Does anybody in here know JavaScript pretty well? Yeah. Okay. So there's a bunch of people that know way more than me, I'm going to say, okay? And then is there anybody that knows nothing about JavaScript in this room? Yeah, okay. That's my thought. So I'm going to mostly just walk you through everything that I do and try to explain it as best as I can. But I think there'll be a few times where you're just going to have to be like, "Yeah, okay. That's just a JavaScript thing," right? So but again, you don't need to be able to do this after I do this, and I'm going to try to make this as easy as possible, right? So I think that's enough of a warning about math. Does everybody feel okay about that? All right, great. All right, so let's move into this. Let's talk about my first case study. And this is a relatively straightforward example, like I said. I'm not allowed to reveal the names here, okay? So I was working for... Let's just say, the most famous branding company in the whole world, whatever you think that is, okay? And their client was one of the most famous entertainment companies in the world, and there was a major rebrand that they were doing, okay? And it was a year's long project, and they brought me in early in the process, right? And they had these two logo marks that they were playing around with, okay? They had a bunch of stuff, but they brought me in to, sort of, work on animating shapes like this to see, like, what I could do with them, essentially to make, like, sizzle reel of, like, crazy animation of what I could do with these shapes just to, kind of, play in a meeting and be like, "Hey, this is something that we think we could do it," all right? Now when they give you these shapes, I think what's probably pretty obvious to almost everybody in this room is that nobody designs any of this stuff in After Effects, okay, right? It's always designed in Illustrator and some vector application, basically, right, because the designers, they want the control, right? Right. But what's possibly less obvious if you're not an animator is that Illustrator layers in After Effects just give you a lot less animation possibilities, okay? So basically, let me show you what I usually do in this case, right, because you always get stuff from Illustrator and you really don't want Illustrator layers, okay? So here we go. Here's a circle just like the one that they gave me. And in fact, this is exactly what they gave me, all right? And this is an Illustrator layer as you could see down here. Hello. Now if we look up here in the Properties panel, you could see that it only gives a relatively small amount of options. Okay, I can change the anchor point, the position, the scale, the rotation, and the opacity. And that's it. That's all I can change here. So for example, if I want to animate the stroke width of this circle, I can't do it, right? I could change the stroke width by, like, editing it back in the Illustrator and then saving it again, but that can't allow me to animate it, right? Even if I wanted to change just the color of this shape, I'd have to apply an effect to it rather than just get in there and, like, change the vector or whatever. So take it from me, Illustrator layers just offer very few options for animators, okay? However, After Effects does give you something to help with this. So if you right-click on your Layers, you can Create Shapes from Vector Layers, okay? So if I do that, it creates circle outlines and turns off my circle. Now this already is way, way better, okay? 'Cause look up here in the Properties panel. Now I got, like, a ton of options, including this. I can animate the stroke width of that thing, right? Way easier, way better. I can change the color with one click of a button, right? So that's hella ugly on that green background, so I'm going to hit Cancel. I'm going to do it, right? So it gives you a lot more options here, including all the standard, you know, anchor point, position, scale, everything else that we had with that Illustrator circle, we also have here. Now actually, when I made this project, I did not do this though, okay? I took it one step further, and this is, sort of, my method, okay? It's the highest risk, highest reward method, but it's, sort of, what I like, okay? What I do is I remake the shapes myself in After Effects, okay, which...

Yeah, I see some faces out there. If you're a branding person, you hear me saying that you're like, "Shit, don't do that." Right? Because branding systems are absolute, right? Like, if you change something about it and you're like, "Yeah, I thought it should be a thicker stroke or whatever, you're basically fired, like, right away, like, they don't want to deal with that at all." They want to give you shapes and have you animate those shapes, and they always want them to be able to go back even if they're changing while they're animating, they need to be able to go back exactly the way they started. Otherwise, you get fired or at least reprimanded or whatever, okay? So if you don't want to get fired, you have to be very, very, very, very, very careful you're going to remake shapes in After Effects, right? Again, high risk, high reward. But I will say that the new Properties panel in After Effects is very, very helpful for this, right? So it's, kind of, your best friend, as I'm saying here. Let's look at this here in Illustrator. Okay, this circle is... If I look in the Properties panel in Illustrator, 800x800 pixels circle, okay, with a black stroke of 20 points, so yeah, that's really easy for me to recreate in After Effects, once I know that information, 820-point. All right, great. Now what I actually did in this case is recreated it using a rectangle in After Effects. Okay, so check this out. Basically, you've got your Shape tool here. And if you double-click on this, you will make a... In this case, 1920x1080 rectangle. Okay, I just happen to have, for some reason, 98-point stroke up there, which I'm going to change to 20, all right? But you can, kind of, see, when you double-click what's really nice is that it puts everything in the center of the composition for you. You don't have to think about that. Okay, so let me make this 800x800.

All right? So it's still a square. But here's a really neat trick. You have a Roundness property here, okay? And something that I've learned over the years is if set the Roundness to half of the height of the circle, it will be exactly circular. So if I set this to 400, that is now exactly circular, okay? And again, it's 800x800. Right now, it's white. Okay, who cares? But it has a stroke width of 20 and no fill, all right? So I can be very confident now that if I compare this, for example, with my original circle that I got, that it's really the same and that I won't get fired basically, okay? Of course, right now, it's white, you know, I know some of you were saying, "Well, that's white." But whatever, it doesn't really matter. Okay, so in this case, I think that was a pretty good... I wrote "surround" but whatever. Circle. Imagine that says circle there, right? So this is a pretty good case for, like, just remaking in After Effects, right? And let me show you why I would do this and what the advantage is over just right-clicking on the shape, okay? So let me open the shape that I made by right-clicking. And what happened is After Effects made this from the vectors from Illustrator, okay? So right here, what I have is a Path. That's what makes this shape in After Effects. So for example, I have points that are exactly laid out in a circular space and then Bezier handles that are perfectly pulled to make an exact circle, okay? So if I want to animate this and change this and have it go back to being a circle at any point, this is an effing nightmare to deal with, okay? Because if I move this the littlest bit or this tweaks that way... Oops, like the Bezier tweaks, okay? I can never, in my whole life put that back to being in black circle if I needed to, right? That would just be impossible, right? So okay. So don't do that. Check out the circle that I made in After Effects, okay? I have values here for the size of that thing, all right? So I could easily make this bigger or smaller, or... Oops. Wow. Oh, yeah, I just clicked on there. Or, for example, I can do something like this, right, and just widen that out, right? I can separate the dimensions of this circle but I can always just type 800 in here, and it clicks exactly back to being the circle that they gave me, all right? So this is the start of my method. I always remake the shapes in After Effects because it gives me the most animation possibilities, okay? Now this was a really simple, simple example. This is just a circle, all right? But let's look at this. At first, I thought, "Okay, this is going to be much more complex. How am I going to remake this, right?" But if you look at it in the Properties panel in the Illustrator, it's an 800x800 circle with a 20-point stroke. The only difference between these two shapes is they put a Zig Zag effect on here. Okay, so if I look at the Zig Zag effect, you see that it's got size 15 and 15 ridges per segment and it's smooth, okay? Again, the Properties panel is really your best friend in this case. So what's really cool is either way, okay? Either way, if you right-click and make shapes from an Illustrator layer or if you make it whole cloth in After Effects, you have these other animation things that you can do with it in this little Add menu, okay, that you do not have from Illustrator layers. You only have this Add menu right here with shape layers, okay? So this gives you a lot of interesting possibilities, including Merge Paths, which we're going to talk about in a bit, the Repeater, which I'm definitely going to mention and Zig Zag in this case, all right? Wow, they've got the exact same effect here and After Effects. So if I click on this, right? I can easily twirl this down and set this to 15. And I could set this to 15. I could set this to smooth. And now I've got that shape. It was really, really simple, okay, in this case. I need to say, right? Right. So now that's the start of my method. I always recreate shapes, okay? But what do I do next? Next thing I do is I create a rig, all right? This is a two-part approach, right? This is the second part as I create a rig, okay? Remake the shapes and then I create a rig. This is for the animation, okay? So when I say rig, what I mean is like one control layer where I could put all the things that I need to animate these shapes right there, okay? It's very useful rather than digging through, like, a whole bunch of properties to find something if I could just put everything that I did in one place. And what's nice about this is can, kind of, determine ahead of time, like, I think I want to animate this about this, and I think I want to animate that and then I can just separate those things out and have them in one place, okay? So I'm going to demo how I would do this in this case. All right. So... Right. Got my shape here. And what I usually do to begin with is I create a null object and I just call it a control layer, okay? And then, here, actually. I'm going to show you this first. Sorry, I lied. Let me jump in here. All right, so...

All right, I jumped ahead of myself. Excuse me. I'm going to make a null object, right? Shift-Control-Option, Shift-Option-Command-Y, all right? And I'm just going to call this my control, all right? So I'm going to turn that off. Does anybody know what a null object is? Yeah. Okay, it's just a blank layer essentially in After Effects that I can put stuff on, all right? It just contains no other information in it other than what you might put on it, all right? So what I like to do is use these to rig, and I like to use Effect Controls, I mean, Expression Controls, rather. Sorry. Effect and Expression Controls. So in this case, I'm going to grab a Slider Control. Has anybody ever used a slider in After Effects? Yeah. Okay, some people, right? In case you have not, a slider is essentially just a thing like this. That has values on it, which is the fancy way of saying numbers, okay? And I can animate between those different numbers, right? So in this case, I could set this to 15, right? And find my circle, which I typed cirle. Okay, close this down. Thank you very much. And get my Zig Zag in here. All right, so right now, my Zig Zag is set at size 15, okay? And I'm going to take this and lock this.

And actually, I'm going to call this size up here. You can rename these things. I'm just going to call this size. Oops, terrible typist. There we go. Right. So looks like I need to also do this and pull my Parent & Link on, okay? And then I'm going to close this down just so I have everything a little bit smaller for you. All right, so does anybody ever use this? This is the property pick whip, okay? If you like the control of expressions but do not like writing JavaScript, this property pick whip is your friend, okay? So what I could do is grab this and link this up to this slider here, okay? Now there's no change that just happened because I had set this at 15. But if I do this, now I can easily animate between the two shapes that they gave me, right? I can make it a circle if it's at zero, and I can make it that zigzaggy shape if it's at 15. Additionally, now I can, like, go beyond that and do this, right? I would never want it to, like, lock up in this position 'cause it's not the shape, but if it's animating from this into the shape or something, that could be really cool, or really dynamic, or whatever, right? So let me put this back at 15, all right? And I'm going to duplicate this, and I'm going to call this ridges, okay? And guess what I'm going to do with that, right? I'm going to property pick whip from the ridges up to this slider as well, okay? Now again, nothing's changed because they're both set at 15. But now if I, kind of, click down from this, I can, kind of, like, put fewer ridges on there, which creates, kind of, like, shapes that feel like they're part of the branding system, but which are a little bit different as well. And I could, like, again, animate up or down past this and just do some really dynamic stuff with this, right? So this is the start of how I would make a rig, all right? Control Layer with a whole bunch of Sliders and Expression Controls on there that I can use to animate this thing, all right? So let me actually show you now what I previewed a little bit earlier, which is the more like the actual rig that I used. I need to unlock this. Okay, so I put all of this stuff on there, right? Including the things I was just talking about, like, this Ridges per Segment or whatever to do that, right? But, you know, I also worked the Repeater in. Remember, I showed you in that menu, we had something called the Repeater. The Repeater is going to allow me, in this case to do something like this, right, and create like an infinite tunnel of those shapes just by twirling this one value, all right? Another thing that the Repeater has in it, it allows you to change the X position. So I can do, like, stuff like this with it now, all right, just by sliding this one thing, or like this. Whoo, all right. It's a pretty complex stuff is coming in here. You could see if you gave me those shapes and I'm starting to animate stuff like this that they're like, "Okay, this guy knows what he's doing, right?" I don't know. I can also do stuff like this. Whoa, holy shit.

We're all sorts of crazy stuff here. I can rotate this thing. Man, I've done all sorts of fun things on here. Now what's again, super nice about this is I can just easily dial this back...

To the base levels of everything. And... Oops, I should set that at 100. And this will give me my exact shape again, right? So super nice, super easy always just to set it back or animate it right back to wherever you want it, all right? This is the idea of creating a rig, all right? And I could do lots of things with this. I totally love this rig that I made. Like, for example, I can, like, animate stuff like that, or I've even put the stroke thickness on here so I could do this, like, thing where it, like, goes like that, you know, and becomes like the negative circle, like, really quickly. I got really into this, and I did this really fun, sizzle, really, for them and they didn't wind up using any of these shapes, and so it didn't matter for anything at all, but I got paid. And I had a lot of fun with it. Right now thank you so much, everybody. Good night. Yes.

All right, so that's my basic method, all right? I know I keep saying this, but I think this is what I'd want you to focus on. If you're ever in this cases like remake those shapes to give yourself more animation possibilities, and then try to think about how you can connect the things that you want to animate to simple sliders and things that you can have the animation possibilities in one place, all right? Okay. Good. I'm going to move on to case study number two. All right, this was a fairly complex job that I worked on this year, and it was... I was hired as a director by a production company, and they were hired by a branding agency, who had been hired by a financial company, all right? All right. And they were making a series of commercials. They had already rolled out a whole print campaign. It, kind of, looked like this, sort of, again, I can't really show you what it actually looks like, but it was super, super beautiful, actually and precise. That was the whole thing about this system is that they had rolled it out for a print campaign and they'd worked it all out on print first and then they wanted TV commercials that looked exactly like the print campaign, okay? And that involved bunch of complex things, okay? Definitely, some specific challenges here that I want to call out. For one, a quarter circle is not like a parametric shape that has a button that I can just press, okay? And there's no quarter circle button, right? So I had to figure out how I wanted to make that. And in addition, I had a team of, like, four or five designers and maybe three or four animators working on this. And the designers were designing it in Photoshop, believe it or not, because I know this looks like an Illustrator project, but all those shapes, a lot of them were filled in with, like, photos and stuff. So we had to do it in Photoshop. But then I didn't want to use Photoshop shapes to animate with. Those are even worse than Illustrator shapes, right? So I had to have my team recreate them all in After Effects, right? And in this case, because I had so many people on the team, the animation team, fourth floor. I wanted to make them a template so that I knew they just couldn't screw it up as much as possible because, all right, the branding team that we worked with were insanely anal about every single thing, okay, which is, you know, they should be. I know that's their job, but they wanted, for example, an eight-pixel margin always exactly between all the shapes always, all right, which is not something I'd ever really dealt with before. Usually in motion, it's, like, a little looser than that. Okay, so they came to me and they were, like, "We have 60x60 grid with gutters of 8 pixels and a margin of 4." Blah, blah, blah. And they even started talking about shit. I had no idea what they were talking about. I was like, "Yeah, okay, great. We could do that. No problem. No problem. No problem." And then I'm, like, freaking out because I...

Grids like that are not something you ever deal with in motion. That's... I think it's more of a print thing. Okay, so I was a little bit confused about that, but I decided I'd fake my way through it as always. And then also this got into some ugly math as well. So warning to those people that raise their hands on the math, I'm definitely going to be talking about math here, all right? So let's break this down. The first thing then I did was I started just by wanting to make this quarter circle. And it was very, very important to me that it was exactly, mathematically one quarter of a circle, okay, because they literally told us they were going to be measuring the eight pixel gap off the screen, okay, on every shot. And there were so many quarter circles on every... It was made me really nervous. And I knew that. If this quarter circle was, like, one pixel off from being a perfect quarter circle, it was going to cascade down the whole project. And at some point, we were going to discover this after we'd already animated and everything, and we was going to have to change it all, and it was going to be a total nightmare, okay? So I really wanted to make this good. So let me show you the system that I came up for making this quarter circle, all right? Here in After Effects, I started by making a square. Okay, here's a nice trick. If you choose your rectangle tool and you Shift and double-click on this, it will make a square that fits into the constraints of your composition. Okay, so in this case, it's made of 1080x1080 square, right? And that's all good. What I actually wanted was 100x100 square in this case. And actually, what I'm going to do is turn the stroke width off and just turn this on to, all right? Now you're probably wondering why are you starting with a square in this case, all right? That's just for the math. So let me get in here, okay? Right now this is 100x100. Okay, so what I want to do is put the corner of this in the center of the composition, okay? So the way that I would do that very, very precisely is by sliding this over minus 50 pixels that way, and minus 50 pixels up, okay? I wanted to use really simple whole numbers that I knew. I could definitely make this one quarter of a circle, right? So I made my square there. Now I'm going to get back up here and select this, and now I'm going to make my circle, okay? And I'm going to Shift and double-click on this to make perfect circle right in the center of the composition. It's very important in this case. It's exactly in the center. So this is the way to go, all right? So now what I'm going to do is make this a 200x200 circle, okay? So if... I think it's probably easier, if I were to drop this down like this, you can, kind of, see that right now, this square, if it cut out that circle, because of the numbers 100 and 200 essentially are so simple and basic that I know that this will be exactly one quarter of that circle, right? So as I mentioned earlier, there is a Merge Paths here in this Add menu. And if I merge these two things together in such a way, which is to say by choosing Intersect, I can do that, right? And now... Okay, now I know mathematically that this quarter circle is fitting into 100x100 box and it started out as 200x200 circle. So it's exactly one quarter of that circle, mathematically, all right? Okay, so far, so good. I felt confident that I would not cascade a million problems further down the line if I passed this quarter circle shape itself to my old team, okay? So far so good. Let me call this my quarter circle in my QC, right? Now the other thing about this job was that they had, like, 20 colors. It was a very specific color palette job as well. And I was pretty sure that the colors were not going to be changing 'cause they already rolled out a whole print campaign using colors. But again, I wanted to make sure that my animators had those colors exactly and in a way that was very easy for them to access. They weren't always, like, pick with, you know, like eye-dropping or whatever to a color, which I don't think is actually that accurate, right? So is anybody at my tips and tricks lecture in the last two days? All right, so I, kind of, demoed this there, but I'm going to show this again, which is I wanted to make... The reason I demoed this there is 'cause I did it for this project, and I thought, it's so cool. Anyway, what I want to do is I want to be able to give my animators the ability to have a drop-down menu on this shape so that they could just pull the different colors with the drop-down menu, and they never have to worry about finding the exact text values or whatever it is, right? So I'm going to demo this for you guys, how I did this. And I totally love this trick.

So but it involves JavaScript, a little bit, okay? So I'm just saying. All right, so I've got my colors up here. Now what it's probably obvious to you guys with Shape layers in After Effects is that I have a Fill property on here and it's right now, its set to white. And if I change this to a different color, that shape changes color, right, I think you all get that, right? But what might be less obvious is if I property pick whip, for example, up to a color here in my palette, which is just a control layer of a different sort that I made here, that will now turn blue, okay? It's choosing... I hard-coded it to choose this color for that shape, okay? Even though that's on a different layer and stuff, and still can do it, right? Now I know I don't want to talk about JavaScript too much, but what does it say here if I twirl this down and look at this code? All right, and I'm going to translate this into English for you, okay? It's like, "Hey, which comp were we talking about?" This comp right here. "Okay, well, what layer are we talking about?" The layer known as palette, okay? "And which effect are we talking about on that layer?" The effect known as color 1. Can we get that music turned down in another room, like, at all here? Is that distracting anybody? I'm, like, at a disco right now trying to do my lesson, all right. Anybody, anybody, anybody? No. Okay, great. All right, so anyway... "So what effect are we talking about?" We're talking about the effect color 1. "And then what property are we talking about?" We're talking about the property color that's on that effect, right? So what's cool to know is After Effects sees this stack of effects as 1, 2, 3, and 4. Okay, not as color 1, color 2. It just sees it as the index number of that effect. There's 1, 2, 3, and 4, okay? So if I get in here, that is really loud. And I type, for example, three, right, it now knows to pick the third effect in that stack, all right? So it changes it to be yellow, all right? So that's nice. I could just use that little number here instead of those numbers, right? Instead of pointing to that effect and calling it color 1 or whatever. All right, so the cool thing about this is if I look at my... I'm going to open my Effect panel for my quarter circle now. And I'm going to apply a Expression Control and a Dropdown Menu Control. Anybody ever used Dropdown Menu? All right. Yeah, one person, two people, maybe. Yeah. Dropdown menus are awesome. If you don't know what they are, actually, you do know what they are, okay? 'Cause it's like this, it's like, what state do you live in? I live in Hawaii or whatever. You have to pull down a thing on a list, right? So it gives you this, kind of, setup. Right now, this is blank, okay? But I can change that. What I can do is, right now I have four colors up here. And so I want to edit my Dropdown Menu so that I have four items in here, okay? And this is another little behind the scenes After Effects thing is I could name these, like, you know, after my cats, Sebastian or Frankie or whatever I wanted, but After Effects will always see these as 1, 2, 3, and 4. These numbers right here, okay? I know this is slightly confusing, but if I hit OK, what that means now is I can...

Warning JavaScript. Okay, I can define a variable just by saying var, and I'm going to call that drop. And I could just expression pick whip up to my dropdown menu, okay? Now all I did there was just tell After Effects when I say the word drop, I mean this dropdown menu right here. That's all that that means, okay? That means because After Effects sees this as 1, 2, 3, 4, when I pull down on that, I can put that here where I had put that number, right, and just type drop.

And now I get some, sort of, error.

I don't know what I just did. I'll undo that.

Okay, let me do that again. This is why everybody loves JavaScript so much. So var drop equals... All right. You know, I'll pick whip up here to my dropdown. I must have just done something wrong. And I get in here and type drop.

Yeah. Okay, huh.

Almost went to hell there for one second, okay? So now, hey, this is so awesome, okay? If I pull down here, it chooses the second color on the list. If I pull down here, it chooses the third color on the list, right? Etcetera, etcetera. So now I've got a perfectly, mathematically perfect quarter circle that will not cause me interruptions down the line in quality control. And I know that if I pass this shape out to my animators, they can do like this, right? They can duplicate this shape. All right, move it over here, and then they can choose a different color from it right off the list with the exact hex values that the client wants, okay? Now just in case the client never comes back, it says, you know what? That orange is not working for us on screen. I can change it here, and it will universally change all of the shapes that I did this with, okay? So this is... Thank you. Thank you. Wow. Thank you.

I mean, this isn't that hard? I know you probably didn't follow that exactly, but you could probably Google all these steps if you ever need to and do this yourself. It's actually not that complicated.

Right. So okay, I was, like, pretty good. And then I remembered that I had that grid that I had deal with, okay? 60x60 grid with an 8 pixel gutter. I don't even know what a gutter is. And then, like, a margin... I don't know what a margin is either of four pixels. And I'm like, "Yeah, okay. I can do that." And then, you know, I tried making it After Effects. I was like, "All right, let me make 60x60 square and like put it in the corner and I'll drop a guide and then they move that over 60 pixels and drop another guide." And I was like going crazy trying to do this and finally, this designer, named Bryan Louie, thank you, Bryan. I was like, "You know, you could do this in Photoshop really easily." And I was like, "No, I didn't know that." Do you guys know that? All right, so who's got... We got some Photoshop people in the house right on. Okay, so do you ever work with this? I think what I'm going to do is just clear my guides real quick 'cause I got some on there. Now what I could do in this case is I went to New Guide Layout, something I knew nothing about, and I've never used for, okay? But this allows you to add in columns and rows and dial it in exactly as you want, right? So check this out. I knew they wanted 60x60 grid of some sort. So I took 1920 and I divided it by 60, all right, and I got 32, all right? And I took 1080. Okay, I'm working on 1920x1080 composition in case that's unclear. And I divided this by 60 and I got 18, okay? And, well, right now, this has a gutter on it that I don't want it to have. But now if you check this out, I have a perfect grid 60x60 grid, okay? All of those shapes are exactly 60 pixels. Now I could also get in here and type 8 and 8, all right? And now if I hit OK, this has given me exactly what I want, all right? Anybody ever used this feature before? I mean, this is so good if you ever need to do that. One person was like, "Yes." Cool. So and then through a complicated series of things, you're able to import that into After Effects. Basically, you would need to save that project to Photoshop, import that project, even though it's like just an empty project. And then you'll have guides. Okay. Guides, which I hope I have. Oh, oops. I'm in the wrong comp, right? So here's those guides, okay, in After Effects. And slightly arcane, but if you're an After Effects animator, I want to also point out that you can export and import guides like this from After Effects. So what I was able to do is export this and name this, like, such as such whatever we were working for guides. And then I was able to just hand this file out to all of my animators, and they were able to import this and have the exact same grid in there, okay? So I was like, okay. We're all working with the same shapes. We're all working with the same grid. I think I'm getting good here, okay? And then, of course, I hit the big snag that really effed me up for, like, the whole time, right? I was so close, but I realized that there was some ugly math in here that I needed to think about, which I hate, right, which was.

So if you recall, I started by making this 100x100 square, and I filled the quarter circle into there, which meant that this was essentially... Let's just think of it as 100x100 quarter circle, okay? Now I had 60x60 grid with an 8 pixel gutter. So okay, when this was at 100%, it was 100 pixels, okay? But I had to, like, scale this down to fit this into this grid now, okay, so it would fit exactly into the grid. So as it turned out, that was 52% of the scale, okay, right? Then I was like, "Okay, great. That makes sense." So when I make this 104, when I double it, it'll just fit into this next shape up here, right? So I made it 104 and, well, that didn't work. Okay, oh, darn, now there's math involved, okay? So I was like, "Well, what does fit in there exactly?" All right, so it turned out it was 112. Okay, 112, all right? So what if I double 112 and make that 224, what does that do? That makes it bigger than the next size up than I needed to be. So I would have to, like, get in here. Okay, what is it? It's 172. Okay, now if there's any math geniuses in here, which I am not one, they might be seeing a pattern here. I did not see this even though it's actually really obvious when you think about it later, but whatever. I was mystified, okay? And it didn't really matter if I was mystified or not because if I had to pass this out to my team and say, "Okay, when it fits in 1, it's 52%, when it fits in the next one up, it's 112, and then it's 172." They have to remember all these, kind of, odd numbers. I know at some point one person's going to type 173 in there. It's still 113 or 111 or something, or they're going to eyeball it, and it's going to be one pixel off, and it's going to cascade and make quality control issues all the way down the line for me, okay? So I was like, "I need a better system. I need them to use obvious whole numbers here, okay, so that they could just, you know, dial one to two and it jumps up to the right shape, all right? That's what I wanted to make this completely obvious for them." So before I could do that, I had to understand what the math was going on here. Okay, and I'll explain this to you 'cause I eventually did figure it out with help of my nerd friend, Zack Lovatt. Thank you so much, Zack, all right? Who explained to me that any... Does anybody know the answer here of why this is 112, 172, and 52? All right, okay, we have some smart people here. I'm going to explain it. All right. 'Cause I want to brag about this, not you guys. I just want to see if you knew what it was, all right? So look, 60 pixel grid, okay, 8 pixel gutter, okay, that meant that to fit in there, it had to be 52 pixels, all right? Right? Now when I make it bigger, I'm not making it bigger by 52. I'm making it bigger by 60. Okay, 52 plus 60 is 112. And 112 plus 60 is 172. So it was just starting at 52. That was our base size, and it was just increasing 60 from there. Okay, I can't believe I had to ask a friend to help me with that afterward. I was like, "Yeah, that should have been really obvious." Right? And it was obviously with some people here who are smart and studied math and are intimidated by these things, all right? Nonetheless, I still had to hook up this system to make this work for my animators. Okay, so what I did is I chose a slider from my Expression Controls.

Okay, and here we go. This is what I did. I called this sizer...

Okay, 'cause I like snappy names like that. And I got in here to my Ellipse properties, okay? And actually, I'm sorry to my Scale, what am I talking about? All right, let me set this back to 52 for one sec. All right, so that's my base size is 52. So here I'm going to make an expression on scale like this. All right, I'm going to first define that slider up there as sizer. Okay, I'm going to say var sizer equals this slider up here, okay? Those values, right? And I'm just going to say I'll just make another variable because it's one of those JavaScript things in After Effects you're just going to have to take my word for is that I need to return two values because scale has an X and a Y coordinate. Don't let that bother you too much. Just think about the math here, okay? So I'm going to say X equals check this out 52, which is my base size, okay, plus and then I'm going to put a parenthesis, and I'm going to say 60 times sizer.

Okay, right. And then I'm just going to say X, all right. And don't worry about that part, all right. So now what does this mean, okay? This means if this is at 0, this hasn't changed because 52 plus 60 times 0 is 52, right? Because anything times zero is zero, right? Okay, how about if this becomes one? Now it jumps up to the next one because 52 plus 60 times 1 is 52+60, which is 112, okay? I think at this point, I'm just bragging, but, yeah, so, like, yeah, I figured this out, and I was really proud of myself. And it made it so much easier for the animators to just work with these whole numbers and not think about that. And that basically meant that this was pretty much done, and I could now pass this out as a template. And I got to say we did not have any quality control issues on any of the four spots that we made, right? And they measured those pixels on the screen, and it worked out.

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. I was so relieved about that. I can't tell you. I jumped through a bunch of myself. Here we go. All right. So we're going to talk about case study number three. And this was one of my favorite projects I, kind of, ever worked on, I got to say. It was really complex, but it was really fun. I just, like, really wanted to share this with you guys today, right? So I did this job. I'm actually allowed to talk about 'cause I got permission from the design team. So it was for The New York Times Food Festival. And I was made by Base Design company, it was a great, great branding company, great company. If you don't know Base Design, you should definitely check them out. These people were all geniuses. Anyway, it was like a food festival. So they came up with a system that was like ooey and gooey like this, right? And they wanted me to... The way they saw this is like this to stretch, kind of, like, you know, when you, like, pull two halves of the sandwich apart and the cheese, kind of, like stretches between them, right, and I was like, "Oh, this is great." But again, I was like, "Sure, I'll do that. Uh-huh. Yeah. I definitely could do that. But I'd, like, no idea how I was going to do that, right?" Additionally, they wanted me to make this as a template for the in-house team at the New York Times because they were going to be rolling this system out to a ton of different things. And what they wanted was something that was animated and still had this bounce animation that they wanted, but where they could put different words in there, which meant that they, sort of, shapes on the top and the bottom, had to be able to be made wider or taller. And the cheese in the middle needed to be able to, kind of, move back and forth to suit the design needs and whatever they wanted. All right, so it needed to be very customizable, but still be animated so that they couldn't, like, screw that part up. I'm sorry. If there's anyone from the New York Times here. So this also had some, kind of, specific challenges, right? Definitely, unique art. I mean, again, like, this is definitely not a button you could just press to make this shape. Like, I was like, this is a complex shape, okay? And additionally, it's all perfect circles and perfectly rounded rectangles, which meant I couldn't do this when it got bigger, right? It needed to stay circles, right, because otherwise, I would get fired, right? Okay.

Whoo! You couldn't do that, right? In addition, this point in the middle here that connected the top and the bottom is a little bit ugly to try to work out. And I'm like, "It had to cut the circles exactly in the center and work very, very, very precisely." And I wasn't really sure going in and how I was going to do this, right? So that connection point gave me a few nightmares. Now this is the truth about this.

We had a very short timeline, actually, for me to do this. And they were like, all right, so in two days, let's... You know, I want to see this thing animating that they had been working on for months. And I was like, "Okay. No problem." But I did not know how I was going to do this at all. And I just brute forced it using, like, masks and, like, put it together however I could, and it was really ugly, but it did give them an idea of how it could work. And then I knew because it was perfect circles and perfectly rounded rectangles and, like, straight lines that eventually I would come up with an elegant solution to this thing, but I'm like... And I didn't tell them that, I just tinkered with this math behind the scenes, like, the whole time while, like, giving them a bunch of crap essentially, until I got it right. Yeah. And then finally, I did ask my nerd friend, Zack Lovatt. Thank you, Zack, who also explained some things about this to me as well, all right? So let me jump into After Effects. I'm going to try to demo this what I did live, all right, which I was slightly nervous about, but I think I could do this for you all, all right? Practiced a few times, all right? So I'm going to try to recreate that system here. Oh, boy. So okay. I'm going to choose a rectangle and I'm going to take my fill off.

All right. And I'm going to set this stroke to five.

Yeah. Okay. And I want a rectangle, so I'm going to double-click there and that made a rectangle, full screen rectangle. And now what I'm going to do is make this, like, 550 and 100, okay, just starting to replicate one of those shapes. Now remember earlier, I did mention something about roundness, okay, which is I need this to be perfectly rounded, all right? So I want the roundness to be. Is anybody remembered? Half the height of this shape. Exactly, right? So if I set this to 50, I can rest assured that that's completely rounded, right? Well, no, not in this case because I'm making a template and if they do this, then that's not rounded anymore. If they expand the height, it's not rounded anymore 'cause it always has to be half the height of half of that height, right? So I need to code this. Okay, this is pretty simple. Getting here into my rectangle, I've got my roundness and my size, right? So I'm going to property pick whip, not to the property, okay, but to the height, which you can, sort of, expression pick whip to either of those, right? And right now, if I do that, it makes this 100 'cause I just directly linked to it, which will round this, okay, but I'm the, kind of, person who likes to be very precise. So I would get in here and just say, divided by two, okay? So now I can be assured that no matter how big this is, it's always completely rounded at those edges, okay? Huh, that's one problem solved, okay? Let me put this back to on 100. Okay, great. And you can see that there is a After Effects bug in the Properties panel that I discovered yesterday that I actually talk to the development team about, which is that it's not displaying the roundness correctly in the Properties panel. It's displaying it perfectly down here. It says 50 down there, but it says 30 up there. Yeah. Lots of code in this Properties panel, those guys are still going through. That people, I should say, and it's not just guys, all right. So anyway, that's a little bit of in a side. So what I'm going to do here is take my rectangle and I'm going to call this top, okay? And unsurprisingly, I'm going to duplicate this and I'm going to call this bottom, okay? And then because I'm that, kind of, person, I'm going to move it to the bottom. Otherwise, it wouldn't make sense to me, all right? Now here on the bottom, I'm going to make this, this one was a little bit bigger on the bottom, so I'll make it like 700 or something, okay? So the next thing that I need to do is adjust those so that they're ones on top of the other precisely, okay, and that they are one up is on top of the other directly in the center of the composition, all right? I want to keep everything very, very, very even here, right? So I need to move the top one up, and I need to move the bottom one down. So people that got that it was 60 plus, like, the math people here, how much do I have to move the top one up? They're 100 pixels high.

Thank you. Yes. All right. But in this case, I actually need to move that to minus 50. Oops. That was the bottom. Sorry. To minus 50. I thought I was being all clever there because in After Effects, minus is the way you go up from the center, okay, right? So then I'll take my Shape Layer, select on the bottom, and then I can move this one down to 50. Okay, so now I know because all of the math involved on the special people that these are kissing exactly on their vector line right in the exact center of my composition, okay? Right, which I went in too far, but that's the center of the composition right there, right? So that part is set up. Okay, cool. So now I'm going to make my Control Layer. Shift-Option-Command-Y, and I'll call this control. And I'll turn my null object off, okay? And I'm going to put a slider on here. And this slider is going to control all of the animation, and it's going to be called distance, okay? Or maybe distancer, that's a little snappy here, right? Right now, the distance between these two shapes is zero pixels, okay? So this is, kind of, cool. All I can do is get in here, all right? Now I'm going to have to make an expression or where the position of the top and the bottom, okay, so that when I slide this slider, the top moves up and the bottom moves down equally, all right, symmetrically, okay? So a little bit of JavaScript in here, I'm going to also have to say var what did I call it? Distancer equals... Oops. And I got to click out of this for one second, get an error so I can lock this, make this easier for myself, get back in here. I get var distancer equals this slider right here, those values, okay, which is currently set to zero. And now I'm going to say X equals... And in this case... So the X is the horizontal axis on screen. I don't want this to move horizontally ever, ever, ever. So I could just hard-code zero in here for this example, all right? And then I'm going to say Y equals distancer, okay? But because numbers go up from the center, and this is the top, I need to make this negative... Oh, actually, I defined this as a term already. So I could just type distancer in there. What am I doing? All right, and I could just say negative distancer. Okay? All right, great. And then hit return and just say X comma Y. JavaScript thing, right? Great. So now nothing changed, but when I tore this up, that moves up. Okay, great. So let me copy this code now 'cause I could pretty much put the exact same thing in the bottom and just get rid of that minus there, right? So I get in here in my position, and I'll just paste this in here, okay? And if I left that minus in there, they'd both move up. Okay, just saying. So I have to get in here and just get rid of that minus, okay? All that would do is make the values negative, right? So click out of here now I've got one slider that I can do this with, all right? Yeah. Okay, so you're starting to see where this is going, all right? It's going to go, right? Cool. Let me put this to something even like 50, all right? 'Cause now I need to make some more shapes here. I need to get in here. Well, I'm going to call this? Ooey-gooey, okay? And what I need is a circle. So I'm going to grab my Ellipse tool. And with this selected, I'm going to Shift and double-click here to make a perfect circle, that's the size of my comp. And okay, now basically, how big do I want this circle to be, all right? Well, I want this circle to fit exactly in between the top and the bottom shapes, all right? So in this case, this is set to 50. So I want the circle to be... Yeah, thank you.

In case that was weird, I need this to be 100x100 pixel circle to fit exactly because... And let me make this the same stroke width so that's not going to... I wrote 50 instead of 5.

All right, so we've moved the top shape up 50 in the bottom shape down 50. That means that there's 100 pixel gap there. Okay, right. But I want this circle to get bigger and smaller as I slide my distance slider up, okay? So how do I do that? Well, actually, now I realize it. The first thing I want to do is get into this Add menu and make a new group, okay? Group is like a little folder. Oops. I didn't mean to have that selected. Let me just select my top layer. And then add a group, okay? This is like a little folder that I can put stuff in here, right? So I've got that group. I'm going to call that my connector, okay? I'm going to drop this circle or my ellipse in there, okay? It's going to, kind of, make things easier to organize. And additionally, I'm just going to call this Left, okay? Cool. So let me code this so that it works correctly now. So I get in here to my Size, and I'm going to make an expression. Again, I'm going to just say, var distancer. I probably could have copied and pasted this from the other one, but is this okay? So I'm just defining what that is, colon. Now I could just say that X equals distancer times 2. Did I type that right? Yep. Times 2. Okay. And now I could just say X, X, right? When I click out of that, nothing has changed, but now let me zoom back. Now I can do this. Oh, that is so nice, and it's always there. And when I go below that, it just disappears together and never reappears again because it's zero pixels at that point, right? Cool. So I love this. Even if I just did this, I'd be like, "Oh, this is super cool." I love this, okay? Right, anyway, 50, let me do this again. I'm going to take my Left and I'm going to duplicate this, right? I'm going to call this Right. Okay. Oops. Great. So now I want these two shapes also to be kissing on their edges right in the center, okay? So I need to set these are 100x100. No, so I need to move them all over 50 pixels each, okay? So Right move this, this way.

Yep. Positive 50 pixels. Okay, and then grab my Left and move that negative 50 pixels.

Cool. So now they're like that. And just in case it's not clear, now this is like this. Oh, you see how close we're getting here, right? And I don't know if you can start to see it already, but I'm like, "Okay. I'm like, oh, this might work. This might work." Okay, set this back at 50. All right. I still need to make one more shape here in my connector, which is-- I need to now make a square that's going to cut the circles in half and also be the exact same height as that distancer times 2. So when it gets bigger and smaller it connects perfectly, all right? So I'm going to double-click this and make a square, okay? And right now, I would want that also to be 100x100. So it fits. That's exactly what I wanted to do, all right? Because this is that tricky connector point, I need this line here to turn exactly into this curve right here, okay, which means I need to cut it exactly where it's touching, which is exactly right in the half of the circle, okay? Oh, it's got really ugly when I did it with masks. Let me tell you. All right. And speaking of, I'm going to call this my mask 'cause that's, kind of, like the feature that I feel like it's going to do. I'm going to pull it into my connector folder, all right? So I've got that here, and I'm actually going to put that on top, all right? So what I want to do is remember I said in this Add menu, there's this Merge Paths thing here. Okay, so I'm going to put that on, and-- Oops. That was not what I expected to do. I'm going to click this and put on my Merge Paths. Yeah, okay, there we go. So right now the Merge Paths is doing this, okay, which is, kind of, cool. I mean, if that's what you want, but that is not what I want, okay? What I want is for this to be intersected. No, what do I want? I always forget this part. Subtract. Yeah. Okay, I want it like that, right? So now I'm really close. So check this out. Whoa, it's doing that. Oh, I forgot to code the square. Oh, my goodness. I'm messing up left and right. Oops. I set it, but I forget to code it. So that's instructive, all right? So let me get in here. And once again, say var distancer equals and pick whip up here to my distancer. Sorry about that. I went out of order. Silly me.

You can see how confusing this is. Okay. X, in this case, the X, the horizontal-- I want to leave that at 100. So I'm just going to hard-code that. When I made the template, I needed that to be adjustable, but I don't need that for this and now that was a bunch of ugly math. So I'm just going to say Y equals, yep, distancer times 2 just like with the circles. I keep defining that and then pick whipping up to it. Well, whatever. Who cares? And great. And then I just need to return X, Y, and I'm all good. All right, so now when I do this, it's doing this, right? Okay, so I'm so close. You see, I'm basically one step away. At this point, I'm, like, jogging around my office out of happiness because I've been working on this for, like, weeks, knowing that I could reach a solution, but not getting there, okay? So I was like, "All right. Great. I think I know what to do." If I now get in here to my contents and just add one more merge paths that should just merge the whole thing together, right? And I should get rid of these two lines here. And I was like, "Oh, it didn't work. It should work when I just dropped that on." And I was like, "It's not working. It's not working." And it was like that 10 minutes before the meeting where I was, kind of, like, "Hey, I finally got this work in here." And I was like, "Oh, shoot. Okay. Great." And it turns out that I just made one small miscalculation in my mask square here, which is right now that is connected exactly perfectly to the top and bottom of these shapes, which means that it's displaying that line anyway even though it's merging them together. So I would just need to add one more pixel in here, and it did that, which meant that I had this. Oh, exactly what I wanted, right? I figured it out. Yeah, it took me a heck of a long time, but I did it, and I actually demoed it for you live here and everything. So I guess I really learned how to do that. Okay, thank you so much.

Oh, it's so good.

Yeah, and then here, this is actually what I gave to The Times, all right? So let me do this. Oops. I don't want to do that. Right. And it just allowed me to-- Okay, so, for example, if they typed like a new word here, right? What a weird font that is. All right, but I'm going to-- No, I'm not going to go with that, that's weird. Which I make it Helvetica? Great. Okay, Helvetica Bold. Let's just say, okay, sorry. Right, so if they typed a new word in there, I wanted them to be able to put it into this system, which by the way was already animating just the way I wanted it to, okay? So how did I do that? Well, I made them these null objects here that they could take the type and just, sort of, click it right into the center there. And it, kind of, like, clicks into the center of this null object there, right? And then if they just parented that to that null, okay, it would animate with it as I wanted too, okay? And then they could just use the controller that I made to, kind of, like widen this out or whatever they needed to do to fit those words in there, all right? So yeah, and I was able to give them stuff so that they could, like, adjust this so they can make this wider and they could move it, like, over here. And the nice thing about this is it's always still animating even though they make those changes. Yes. This was like the most complex thing I've ever done. Thank you so much.

All right, so let's see. Yeah. Demo my final-- All right, great. So okay, I guess I'm pretty much done. Thank you so much. If you enjoyed this, before you go. Thank you. Appreciate you all.

This is my Instagram stuff. If you want to follow me, I actually have a pretty good breakdown of that last project on my Instagram page. I run a studio in New York City called The Drawing Room, tdr.nyc If you can't remember that, it's also nolhonig.com will take you there. Also, if you enjoyed my teaching style here, I will say that I do teach two classes online that you could take, both at School of Motion, which is like the best place ever to take classes in case you don't know that. Lot of nods, I see. I teach their basic class After Effects Kickstart. If you know anything about After Effects, if you've never used it at all, that will teach it to you in what I promise is humbly the bestest and most usefullest way of learning After Effects in the entire known universe extent to mankind ever permanently. Thank you. Also, I teach a more advanced class about expressions if you're into what I was doing here, that might be your bag as well. We do a lot of stuff like that. Right on. One more thing, rate me highly. Okay, 10 out of 5, and you could still win on this gizmos and stuff. I want to hear all your feedback. If it's positive, thank you so much. Otherwise, yeah, don't rate me. Thank you. I appreciate you all. Thanks. We can do Q&A if anybody has questions. Thank you all for being here.

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