[Music] [Eran Stern] Welcome to Type and Title Motion Design the Easy Way with me, Eran Stern. So I'm dating After Effects for the last 30 years now, still not ready to propose. However, I do want to share with you a few things that I've created using AI and After Effects in the next session. So most of the day, this is what I do. I watch progress bars, not to be confused with the bars which are progressing. So I'm going to help you to harness the power of Adobe Firefly and Adobe Stock to create dynamic type animations inside After Effects, hopefully, to reduce those progress bars. So we're going to do it using five different examples. In the first one, we're going to use a built-in effect to morph between different animal titles that I've created using Firefly. The second example is going to be all about creating parallax. And you're going to get a free script, which will help you in your future endeavors. Then I'll show you a couple of methods to reveal an auto-paint titles on screen. We're going to move to track titles to video, as well as creating emojis using Firefly. And last but not least, we are going to create this very scary but funny animating letters using effects and expressions. So let's start by double-clicking on the After Effects icon to fire the application, and here we are inside the first composition. I'll preview it so you can see what we are starting with. I've already took the time in creating this lovely background with this giraffe walking past us, and there are a few titles and a logo. So I'll go to the beginning, and I'll show you just to save some time. I've captured my Firefly screen. So I'll double-click and open it in the footage monitor here, and press the tilde key to maximize the screen just so I can run you through the prompt and what I got out of Firefly. So it's very simple. I just type in the name of the park, which is Kruger, and the prompt is just a single word. In this case, snake. I got four different variations, and then I repeated the same thing for the other animals. So I have this file over here. This is a Photoshop file. Notice it's still a flattened image. I'll show you in a moment how to convert it to a Comp. But let's just take a quick look at it by selecting it here in the timeline, going to the Edit menu, and then I'll select Edit Original, and this is going to open it up in Photoshop. So this is the snake version. I'll hold down the Option key and click on the other layers, so I'll solo them. This is the hippo, the zebra, the monkey, the panther, and the birds. And what I would like to do is to morph between those titles. So back inside After Effects-- Again, I already have this as one single file on the timeline. I want access to all the different layers. So to do so, I'll right-click on the image, and then from the Create options. I'll select Convert to Layered Comp. And this is going to create a composition out of it. It's also going to bring everything to my Source Files folder. I'll close it for the moment. And I'll double-click on this composition to show you that indeed, we have everything that we need. However, we need to do some housekeeping here to get the desired effect. So first, I'll go to the Composition menu, choose Composition Settings, and I'm going to change the Duration here to 6 because I only have 6 frames. I'll click OK. It will make sense in a moment. For now, just follow my madness here. Then I'll select all the layers by marking around them, and I'll press Option+Alt on the Windows side and the closing bracket, and this is going to trim all the layers to one frame. And then I'll deselect, and this is very important because I want to sequence the layers, and sequence layers in After Effects is sensitive to the selection. So I'll make sure I'll select the last layer here, the Snake. This is the layer I want to begin with, and then hold down Shift and click on the Birds. And After Effects is remembering the order of the clicking here. Then I'll go to the Animation menu, and from the Keyframe Assistant, I can only select this single command, which is Sequence Layers. I'll click OK, and you can see that we are starting with the snakes, and then the hippos, the zebras, the monkeys, of course, the panthers, and the birds. So now we have what we need to do in order to stretch this composition and morph between the different images. And the way to do it is to close this guy and return to our main Comp. Now I'll go to the Layer menu, and from Time, I'll Enable Time Remapping. And this is going to create two keyframes which will help us to stretch this layer until the end. This is something that we need to feel to the next effect that we are going to use. So we can actually close the layer here, go to the Effects & Presets, and I'll open up the Time category just so I can show you where I'm picking this effect. This is the Timewarp. You can, of course, just look for it from this index search, but just to save some time, I'll double-click to apply the effect. Now the way that we need to set it up is a little bit different from the default settings. I'll change the Adjust Time By from Speed to Source Frame because I want to sample those frames that are living inside this composition. I'll start, by the way, from one second because I just want the first frame to be on screen for at least one second. It will be enough time for people to process it. So I'll create a keyframe over here for this Source Frame. And by the way, if I press 1, we can see this is the snakes. If I'll change this to 2, it's going to switch to the hippos, and 3 is going to be the next image which in our case is the zebra and so on, and so forth. So this is the mechanism. So let's start with 1 over here, and then I'll move 1 frame forward, and you can do it by pressing Page Down or Shift and right arrow, whatever works for you, and I'll change this one to 2. I'll move to the next frame, change this value to 3. I'll move to the next frame, change this value to 4, and then I'll repeat it another frame. This one 5, and the last one is 6, which is the Birds. Now if I'll press U while the layer is selected, I'll see all the keyframes here. Let's just zoom in so we can take a closer look. So again, this is the first keyframe that I've set. This is the second, the third, and so on and so forth. What I would like to do here is select all the keyframes, so I'll marquee around them and then I'll zoom out. I'll take my current time indicator and place it on the 9 second mark, and then I'll hold the Option key. This will be Alt on Windows, making sure that I'm selecting only the last keyframe, and now I'm just going to drag it. I can also add Shift to the mix, so it will snap to the playhead. Effectively, I'm stretching the distance between those keyframes. So if I'll move over here to the center, we can see that this effect tries to solve the in between information from one frame to the other, actually, one keyframe to the other, but as we can see, the default behavior doesn't really gives us the desired look. So under here, we have few Tuning options. I'll start by lowering the Vector Detail. I know it's counteractive, so lower values actually, will give you smoother or nicer result. So my recommendation is start with 5, and then I want to limit the effect so it won't render outside of the bounding box or the alpha channel of the letters, and we can do it using this Matte Layer. So we can tell the layer to use itself as a matte. And now you can see that it doesn't try to escape out of the contours of those texts. What we can do to make it even more smoother is select all of these keyframes and press F9 on the keyboard, which is the keyboard shortcut for Easy Ease. And this is just going to give us a nicer animation in between all of these frames. Now to preview it, we actually need to go to the beginning and press space bar, and this is going to cache all of those frames.

So this is how it looks, and, of course, you are more than welcome to fiddle with those sliders to get an even smoother result. But I want to share with you a third party tool. If you're ready to invest some money, you can even get better results out of the box. And to save some time, I'm going to open up this Kruger Park final, which has the same animation, but this time, I'm using the Twixtor plug-in from RE:Vision Effects. And this is a more advanced algorithm that can help us to morph between those individual frames and get much nicer and smoother results. So I'll maximize the frame by pressing on the tilde key, and I'll preview this composition.

Really, really nice. So this is at least one way that you can morph between different Firefly titles, in this case, animals titles to create a lovely introduction to the Kruger Park National Resort in South Africa.

The next part is based on a free script that I'm sharing with you. I'll give you all the details towards the end. So let's bring After Effects back to the front. And first, as always, I like to share with you the prompt that I'm using. So I'll double-click on this image, and I'll maximize it. I wrote down the word outside and ask Firefly for help using these four words. So compass, sunglasses, backpack, map, and hat. And, of course, I ran this prompt a few times until I was satisfied. Once satisfied, you can just download it as a PNG file, and then I brought it into Photoshop and merge it on top of a Stock image, and then separated the layers so I can travel using the camera between them. Let me show you how I did it. Select the layer over here in the Project panel and press Command-E. This is going to open it inside Photoshop where we can see all the layers. So this is our main hero, the outside title generated by Firefly. And underneath, we have the sky image and then the fields. Let's just bring everyone, one on top of the others, the hills, their rocks, this lovely lady, and there's another vegetarian layer on top of it. The outside title, and finally, text Just to give some context to what we are trying to create. All right, so again, I'll switch back to After Effects. I'll close the footage monitor, and notice that this is a 4K image. I'm actually going to create an HD Comp. Now I will need those extra detail so I can travel inside the Comp or basically go closer, get closer to the layers without losing resolution, so this is why I'm working like this. As before, I can select the flattened Photoshop file that I have over here. And this time from the Project panel, I'll do the same thing. I'll right-click and I'll ask After Effects to replace this footage With Layered Comp. And I'll double-click on this Layered Comp just to show you how this looks. The first thing that I want to do here. Again, go to the Composition, Composition Settings, and I will change the dimensions. So I can actually, select one of the built-in presets. Let's go with the second one, the 1920x1080, 25 frames per second. In this case, instead of 6 frames, I want to extend it to 5 seconds. So I'll type 5 period, which is going to create the desired amount. Then I'll click OK, and I'll zoom out. Because the first thing that we need to do is go to the end and just take all of these layers and stretch them so they will reach the end of the comp. Now I'll go to the beginning, and I need to scale them down before I'm doing any fancy animation. So I'll make sure nothing is selected, and then I'll select all the layers except of one of the layers. So I'll leave the magazine outside, and I need to get access to the parenting column. In my case, I can't see. So I'll right-click over here, and from the Columns list, I'll select Parent & Link. And then I can just marry all the layers, so this magazine layer is going to control everything momentarily. So I can do it from the timeline by pressing S. This is a force of habit, but I can also work with the Properties panel. So instead, I'll highlight the scale value. And since the X and Y are constrained, I can just type in 50 for one of them, and everything is going to be scale down for me. Now I want to disconnect the parenting hierarchy. It's an optional thing. I just recommend if you don't need it, maybe you want to disconnect it. And the easiest way to do it is to select all the layers, hold down Command, this will be Control on Windows, and click on this Parent and pick whip icon, and this is going to switch it off. You can also hide this column if it offends you. Right-click hide this. So now we are ready to create our fancy animation. Now I just want to articulate the problem before I'll show you the solution. So first, I'll select all the layers and convert them to a 3D layer. Now let's say that we want to push each one of those layers to a different point in 3D space. I'll start, for example, with the title, and I'll do it from the Properties panel. If I'll click and drag to the right or to the left, I'm moving it on its z-axis, so you can see that when I'm doing this, I'm changing the appearance, and this is going to be true for each one of the different layers. For example, if I'll take the rocks over here and I'll do the same number, I'm going to immediately jump this layer and change the appearance. So this is not the best way to work. Of course, I can reconstruct it, and it's going to just take me a lot of time. So I'm just going to undo the last few steps coming back to the point that everything is still 2D, and then I'll deselect. Instead, I'll go to Window, and on my machine, I already have the script installed. There are instructions how to do it. You can also watch the full tutorial. But for now, I'm just going to open it up. I also want to credit my dear friend, Liran Tabib, which helped me to develop it. This is his website, VDODNA. You can click on it. And this is my website, so you can visit us from here. For now, what I want to do is just prove that this is indeed a One Click Parallax by just clicking on this big button over here, and all the layers are going to be dispersed in 3D space, a new camera was added to the Comp. And by the way, this is the default After Effects 50 millimeter camera. You are more than welcome to change it, or if you already had a camera in the scene, the script is going to use this camera. So I just want to show you what happened. And to give you a hint, I'll switch my views here from 1 to 2 views. For the right one, I'll select the Parallax Camera. And for the left one, I'll click and select it. I'll change this to the Top orthographic view. And then because this panel is still selected, I can press the comma key few times to zoom out, and then press and hold the space bar key to get a temporary Hand tool. And you can see this is the camera, and these are all the layers automatically separated in 3D space. And again, if I'll select the sky layer and move it, you can get a sense of how this works. But again, you don't even need to visit this dual view setup. Return back to one view. I'll make sure nothing is selected, and I can press 1, 2, or 3. So let's press 1. This is going to bring us to the Orbit Camera tool. I can click and move across the scene to show you how the separation is looking. I'll undo this. I'll press 2. This is the keyboard shortcut for the pan under the cursor key, which is also sensitive to where you are clicking. So if I'll click on this image, it's going to pan from this anchor point. I'll undo again. And finally, I'll press 3 and show you that we can track in and out, and, of course, everything is going to work as expected. All right, so let's do something interesting with it because after all, we want to see how we can make this title look a little bit more interesting. So I'll return to the Selection tool, and I'll select the outside layer. This is the title itself. And what I'll do is Pre-compose it. Basically, put it in its own isolated mode so I can create something interesting with it. Let's go to the Layer menu and choose Pre-compose. I'll name this one outside title so I can keep track on it. Make sure to leave all the attributes, as well as open the new composition, and then I'll click OK. So right now, we are inside this Composition. I'll select the layer, and I'll press Command-D, which is the keyboard shortcut for duplicate 19 times, so I will have 20 copies. Let's see how well I'm doing. I'll maximize the frame by pressing the tilde or graph key so I can follow my duplication numbers, I almost got it, so another one, and then I'll return back by pressing again the tilde key to the regular interface. Now I will use the script to create another parallax, but this time, I'll change the parallax amount which is how furthest apart those layers are from 50, which is the default to 0.1, and then I'll click again on Create Parallax. We can now close the script. It looked like nothing is really happening here because all the layers are stacked together one on top of the other with a very minimal distance between them. However, if I'll close this composition, return to this master comp, and over here, I'll check the collapse transformation, which is going to register all the 3D qualities of this layer. And to illustrate how this looks, I'll go to the Properties panel. I'll dismiss the connection between X, Y, and Z. I'll click on the Z, and then I'll drag to the right or to the left so you can get a sense of how it's going to duplicate all of these copies. I'll undo this last operation, and let's put it to good use by going to the end of the timeline. And now I'll press S to see the scale, as well as Shift+P to see the position of the layer. I'll create keyframes for both of them. Actually, I'll change the scale Z to 300 just to create a full depth for this lovely Firefly title. And while I'm at it, I'm also going to record keyframes for the parallax camera. So I'll open it up, and usually, I'll start with point of interest and position. Now I can press u to see the keyframes that I'm working with. And if I want to reframe it, I can press the 1, 2, 3 digits. So let's go with 2 first and drag everything a little bit over here, and then press 3 and go a little bit further into the title so it will be massive on screen. And then I'll go to the beginning, and first, what I would like to do is separate the scale. So we are going to travel through all of those duplicates. I'll highlight this value and type in 15,000, and then because I'm still armed with the camera tool, I can click on the top of the hill here and start to move into this location, and you may need to do it in few steps, so something like this looks really nice. And then since the title is still selected, so I'm moving the camera, but I am still on the title. I can lower it only on its y-axis. And, of course, we can still move it, or we can move the entire camera. So maybe we want to push or pull further. Totally, up to you depending on what you want to create. This is just for the sake of illustration, so let's see what we have generated so far. To make it a little bit more faster to render, I'll switch to draft 3D and then press space bar, and After Effects is going to use the GPU to render it in real-time. And, of course, we can stop the playback, select all the keyframes, Press F9 to Easy Ease the animation until we are happy with what we are getting. So just to save some time, I'll open up the outside final comp where I spent few more minutes on the same animation, as well as edit several lights, and because those are 3D cards in space, they can cast shadows. So you can see the title is casting a shadow on the mountain. I also want to give a shout out for the new Roto Brush tool, which is this layer that I'm using. So I've replaced the lady with video image. And after this very long build-up, I'll maximize the frame and preview this composition. And you can see how nice it looks. And again, you can get the One Click Parallax script for free by visiting my website or YouTube channel.

The next example is going to be all about revealing layers. I'll show you a couple of examples of how to use three instances of the Linear Color Key effect and masks, as well as the stroke effect. So this is our starting point, a special offer slide, but nothing is really there yet. I want to show you what I was working on while you didn't look. So I have two Firefly examples. The first one is this very simple prompt. I just wrote down the word flowers, and I got this really crazy articulated Firefly title. I'll double-click on the second one. This is a little bit more of a moderate version of the same thing with a different font. And let's say that we want to animate them. So we'll head back to the Composition panel. I'll turn on the visibility of the first title over here. It's already waiting for us patiently in this timeline, and we want to reveal it, but we want to reveal it in stages. So I'll go to the Effects & Presets. I'll open up the Keying category, and I'll use the old school Linear Color Key effect. I'll double-click to apply it to the layer. And what we can do here is use the Key Color and each time sample a different color and then animate the Matching Tolerance, so we can create an interesting reveal of each one of the colors separately. Let me show you how this works. I'll click on the eyedropper and start with this teal color, so I'll try to sample something from the flower here. And by changing the Matching Tolerance, you can see that I can make the entire layer disappear. So I'll drag it until I won't see anything in my case around, I guess, 60 or 65%. Let's try. And then I'll create a keyframe for this value. I'll move to 4 seconds in my timeline, and I'll set it to 0. So now we are actually exposing all the colors nicely and gradually except of the colors that we are keying out. So we'll need to find a way to bring it back. However, before we'll do it, I'll select the layer in the timeline. I'll press U to see the keyframes. I'll marquee both of them. Press F9, and this is just to Easy Ease the animation, so it will be even more smooth than what we just saw. Then I'll make sure nothing is selected. This is very important because you want to duplicate entire layer, not the effect itself. So I'll select the layer over here, and I'll duplicate it. And notice that right now, after the 4 seconds mark. So I can change to a different color. I'll click on these oranges over here, which is going to bring back the teal colors of the flowers, but it's going to key out the oranges, and we are going to check it in a moment. But for now, let's continue with this mission of duplicating another instance. So again, make sure that you are selecting the layer in the timeline and then duplicate it. This time, I'll sample the pink color from these flowers, and then I'll reselect the layer in the timeline, duplicate another copy, and this one will be something from the whites over here. All right, so now if I go to the beginning, we'll need to modify those keyframes or actually the values for each one of them. So I'll switch off the visibility for all the layers, and I'll do it one layer at a time. So this one apparently needs to get a higher value for the Matching Tolerance. Enable this one. This looks almost good, but I will give it a little bit of a push towards the 70s, and then I'll enable this one. And sometimes, you actually need to take it in the opposite way, so something along those lines should work. Now if I'll enable all the visibility for all the layers and preview them together, it would look like this. But what we can do is cascade the animation. And to do it, all you need to do is just move the beginning of each one of these layers to a different point. And now each one of those colors is painting in after the other, which looks really nice.

Now there is another way to work. And to show you this, I'll switch off the visibility of all of these instances and turn on this layer, which has another variation of a Firefly flowers title. Now to this variation, I already took the time and created masks. So you can see that I'm describing the shape of the layers with different masks. You can press M, by the way, to see these masks in the timeline just in case you want to, but the cool thing is that we can use the Stroke effect. So let's just hunt for it by typing in the word Stroke. We'll close the Animation Presets. And in this case, this is the one that I'm after, so I'll double-click to apply it to the layer. And instead of applying it to just a single mask, I'll tick all masks, and then I'll change the paint style to reveal original image, which means that it's going to hide it. Now I need to play with the brush size, so I'm just going to take it to a value which is going to reveal the entire illustration. Let's go with 100 in this case. And then we can also play with the brush hardness. So I lower it to 50, which I think is going to give us a good start. And then we can use the end or start values to draw this animation on screen. So I'll begin by setting the end value at the beginning to 0, create a keyframe over here, and then I'll move to 4 seconds. Set it to 100. As before, I'll press U and make sure to Easy Ease those two keyframes as I work on them. And then let's just preview the animation which looks very interesting, but not as natural that I would like it to be, and I want it to be more of a natural reveal with the texture and detail of all of these flowers. And to make it happen, we can use another effect which is the Roughen Edges. So I'll start to type in the word rough, double-click to apply it after the Stroke, and then this is basically like a fractal noise on the alpha boundary, so it's going to use this Edge Type. You can play with those different variation. What I'll do here is just place my current time indicator somewhere in the middle so I can see how this affects the layer, and then I'll play with the border size. I'll start to drag this value, and if you look at the screen, you can see how this eats towards the inside of the alpha channel of the layer, which gives a very natural look. So let's settle with 125 for the Border, at least at the beginning of the animation.

I'll animate this value as well. I'll take the current time indicator all the way to the end and over here. I've set it back to 0, which will effectively cancel the influence of this effect. But if we're going to take a look at it right now, we can see the contribution of the Roughen Edges working in concert with the Stroke effect. To finalize this, I'll click on the shy layers. I have few other stuff that I want to expose, so let's go to the beginning, and I'll bring the word sale that I've created ahead of time, as well as a little bit of a kiss of love, take a look at it on top of the eye here. So I'll maximize the frame and I'll preview this animation. And there you have it, two methods of revealing and auto-painting titles in After Effects.

After Effects also offers you a nifty set of tracking tools. Some of them are very advanced, but there are few which are easy to master. One of them is the 3D Camera Tracker effect, and I want to show you how to integrate it with the titles that you created using Firefly. As always, I want to show you the results that I got from typing in a very interesting prompt. I'll start with this icon title, and notice that I've replaced the C and O letters with the copyright symbol as well as a smiley. And then my prompt is graffiti. So you can actually use emojis in the text field. And this can give you some very interesting results as you can see from this example. I'll double-click on this general sign warning that I've used for this text, and my prompt is red thick paint spray. And I got four different options. So those options, if I close the footage monitor, are already here. This is the icon Firefly graffiti layer, and this is the paint spray. And what I would like to do is match them to the moving camera motion of this construction clip. So I want to place one of the titles over here, another one on the column. So I already took the liberty and applied the 3D Camera Tracker effect. You can do it by selecting the layer, go to the Animation menu, and then choose Track Camera. And this is going to apply the 3D Camera Tracker effect. It will analyze your clip, and after a while, it will give you those colorful axes, which are trackers. And if I'll move my current time indicator, you can see the trackers are coming and going, but there are, for the most part, sticking to the desired or the correct planes. So what we want to do right now is hover on top of the plane that we want to match to. So in this case, this wall until we see a target which looks like it is in the right perspective. If you see this, just click on the target. It's going to highlight it, and you can actually move the center of the target, and this is going to be important because when we are going to match it or create a layer, a synthetic layer with the camera, the center of the layer is going to be the center of the target. So to do this, you can right-click in the middle of the target, and you're going to be presented with few options. For the sake of simplicity, I'm just going to select the first one. But if you want to learn more, there are in-depth tutorials on my YouTube channel, so make sure to watch them. For now, we are going to settle with Create Text and Camera. And this is going to use the last text that you've used with the same alignment, and it's going to place it in the middle of this target. So if I switch to this text, you can see that on my machine, it is set to Myriad Pro. The size doesn't really matter because it is scaling to fit the scene, but notice the Paragraph alignment is centered, and this is why I'm getting this result. By default, After Effects is going to do a flush left center. So your result may look something like this or maybe something different. So I urge you to change it to center, which is going to give you a more expected result. To check how this looks, we can just drag the current time indicator, and we can see that it is sticking to the plane. However, we don't want the text. We want the icon graffiti Firefly image. So to marry this layer, to the coordinates of this 3D layer, we first need to turn its eyeball on so we can see it then. We'll need to convert it to a 3D layer. And finally, we'll need to hold down Shift and drag the Parent & Link pick whip to the parent. And notice that when we are holding Shift, this layer is going to move to the location of the parent. So now the layer is exactly where the text layer is. Now in some cases, it's going to just blow it up. So I'm going to use the Properties panel, and let's start to scale it to maybe 20%, maybe even lower, 5, or maybe 3. I'll switch off the visibility of the text, and we can see that now the icon layer is exactly where we want it to be. However, it still doesn't play nice with the column above it, so we'll need to find how to fix it. I also want to scale it just a touch, so I'll press s to see the scale. I'll hold the Command key, which is going to divide my mouse motion by 10, give me a little bit more of a smoother slider, so maybe something along those lines. And then I'll change the blending mode. From trial and error, I found out the Color Burn seems to work really nice here, but we may want to also reduce the opacity, so let's reduce it to 85%. And this is going to look really nice. However, we still have this problem with the pillar not hiding it. So we can return back to the clip that has the 3D Camera Tracker effect. We can reselect it. Notice that I'm at the beginning now, and I'm going to hover on top of this pillar until I found the target that looks like it is registering correctly. And then I'll right-click in the middle of it and Create Solid. And now I can move this solid so it will touch the edge of the column, and I'll need to compensate for the Z rotation. So I can use the Properties panel. I can click and hold down Command, I can drag to the left or to the right. And again, by holding down Command, which will be Control on the Windows side, you are getting a more smoother result while you are scrubbing the values. So I'll use this track solid as a holdout matte. First, we need to make sure that it is hiding the edge of the pillar here. So I'll start by creating a keyframe for the position, and then I'll move one second. And if there's a need, I'm just going to manually fix it, so I'm moving it back to where it needs to be. I'll do the same after another second, and then I'll move to 3 seconds, and I'll compensate manually. Let's do 4 seconds and check how this looks.

And I think that by 5, we are good. Not really. So I'll zoom out by pressing the comma key, maybe a couple of times, and then I'll move this so it will hide. Maybe also take it a bit more down, and then 6 seconds, I think that we out of the woods. All right, so now this looks like it is following the motion of the column here. Let's feedback the viewer. And now all we need to do is ask this title to use this layer as a Track Matte. So make sure you can see the mode and track matte, and then you have this option to pick whip the layer that you need. So I'll do this number, and, of course, I need to invert it. So I'll click over here to take the opposite side. And now if I'll play the result, you can see how we are using the same data from the tracking to help us to reveal the layer. And, of course, we can do the same thing for the paint spray layer. But as usual, just to save some time, I'll open up the final comp because you obviously understand now how this works. I'll maximize it, and I'll preview the result. And I think it's really great that you can use emojis inside the text prompt of Firefly to create some very artistic and unique titles. And then, of course, stick them on top of buildings, or streets, or whatever you need.

The last example is all about bringing cute furry animals to life using effects and expressions. So here it is. This is the word that I type scary, and this is the brief or the prompt, hairy cute monsters. Firefly is really a great engine to create those cute monsters. But as usual, you may need to run it few times until you get a satisfactory result. And in this case, what you are seeing on screen is the best of the best. So I run it at least four or five times, and then using Photoshop, I married the best scary monsters from the word scary into this image. Escape out of full screen, and I'll open up the scary monsters timeline. And you can see that I've already separated each one of them to a different layer. So we have the S-C-A-R and Y. And now let's animate them because as thing stands now, the only thing which is moving in this comp is the background image of this very scary hands. So I'll pause the playback. I'll select the first letter here, and I'll go to the Effects & Presets and start to type the word bender. This is the one that I want to start with. I'll double-click and show you that by moving the amount slider, we can create this kind of an animation which is based on the top and base target. So first, I'll take the base target and place it all the way down. I'll take the top one and place it, I guess, all the way up. And now what I would like to do is start with a negative amount, so I'll set it to minus 20. Create a keyframe and go to one second here in the timeline and drag the amount to go the opposite way. So maybe 40 in this case. Now what I would like to do is loop between those two keyframes. So I can press U, which is going to show me the properties with the keyframes. And then I'll type in a simple expression that will help me with the loop. So I'll hold down the Option, Alt on Windows and click on the stopwatch. This is going to show us the expression field. I'll start to type the word loop. After Effects is going to offer you four options. I'll select LoopOut and then press Return to accept it, and then I'll add the quotation marks. And inside those quotation marks, you can type in four different strings. So you can go with continue, cycle, offset, or pingpong. I'll use the cursor key, the down one to select pingpong. And as before, I'll press on Return to accept it, and then click somewhere else. So this expression will be accepted and After Effects will start to evaluate it. So this is how it looks. It's going to go back and forth between those two keyframes, and we can also select those two keyframes and press F9 to create a smoother and nicer animation. All right. Let's do something similar but different to the other one. And in this case, I can see that I have a pre-comp, which was started its life inside Photoshop. So anytime that you are creating folders in Photoshop, when you bring it to After Effects, After Effects is going to create a composition out of there. And the reason that I have a folder here, if I'll double-click on it, is that I want to animate the pupils separately. So if I just select this layer and move it, we can see that this is what I'm after. Now to animate it automatically, we are going to use the wiggle effect. And because I want to move the position, I can press speed to see the position in the timeline, and then hold down the Option or Alt on Windows and click to enable an expression. I'll start to type the word wiggle, and After Effects is going to help me, and then I need to give it at least two values. So the first one is the frequency, which is going to be 1 in my case, and then separated by a comma, the second one is how much or the magnitude. So in this case, it's going to be 7. And in this case, I'm also going to add another value, and this is the time samples, or in other words, how frantic I want it to be. So I want it to be a bit hysterical, and this is why I'm giving it an additional value. Clicking outside and pressing space bar is going to render this, and we can get a sense of how this looks. So this is just the eyes, but now we want to animate the entire body with the eyes included. So I'll close this composition. I'll go to the beginning and to the main C letter. I'll clear the search, and I'll tap the word bulge, and double-click on the Bulge effect, which is going to create a spherical distortion that we can animate. And I'll start by changing the horizontal and vertical radius because I want this one to capture the entire dimensions of the layer. So something like this should work, and then I need to animate the Bulge Height. So I'll start by changing this Bulge Height to 0 at the beginning, and I'll create a keyframe over here. And then I'll move 1 second into the future and change this to, let's say, 0.3, I think, it's going to be enough. I'll repeat the steps that I did previously to loop this animation. So I'll press U to see the keyframes, and then Option and clicking on the keyframe, and then I'll start to type the word loop. I'll select LoopOut, and then inside the quotation marks, pingpong. This is the one that I want. And I can also Easy Ease the keyframes. And now we have two characters which are moving and brewing. For the rest of the letters, we can actually use another method. We can add puppet pins, and we can animated in real-time. Let me show you how this works. I'll select the A layer, and then I'll click on the Puppet Position Pin Tool. And I'll drop some pins on the legs, so over here and over here, and maybe one over here on top of the mouth. Now notice that if I click and hold on the Command key, Control on Windows, and then I'll move closer to one of these keyframes. I'm getting a little stopwatch here, meaning that After Effects is ready to record the animation. And all I need to do to start the recording process is to click and drag left and right, up and down depending on what I want to do, and this is exactly what I did. So now we have this motion from the A. Really cool. And we can do the same thing for the other two characters. But just to save some time because it's the same process. I already applied the Puppet Pin effect to the R, and you can see that what I did here is did some number with the leg, which I think is really good and funny. And then for the Y, I did some animation with the eyes or ears depending on how you want to call them. So this is it. We can now maximize the frame. Go to the beginning, of course, and preview the animation to see how it looks. Very easy and very fun animating those characters created using Firefly with simple effects and expressions.

So this is it. I hope you enjoyed it, and I also hope it will help you with your own work. I want to thank you. This is all because you are so talented. And if you want to keep on learning, well, all you need to do is tune in to my YouTube channel. I promise to deliver every week a new tutorial. It will cost you nothing. I will highly appreciate it if you will subscribe. If you want access to everything that I did, including the full length courses that I've created over the years, I've got more than 30 waiting for you over at LinkedIn Learning, then just scan this QR code, and you are there. Thank you so much for your time, and I hope to see you in another tutorial or maybe in real life. Who knows? Until then take care, stay creative, and stay immersive.

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