Kinetic Typography in After Effects

Complete the final scene of a kinetic typography project in After Effects with advanced techniques and finishing touches. Learn to create flickering torch effects using clever shape layer manipulation, add visual interest to flat compositions, and finesse the overall animation. Apply previously learned methods to efficiently complete the project while exploring new tricks for enhancing the final product. Download project files and follow along to master kinetic typography techniques in this concluding tutorial of a three-part series.

Joey Korenman : Joey here at School of Motion and welcome to day 18 of 30 days of after effects. This is our final kinetic type video where we are going to finish the project that we started two videos ago. If you haven't watched the first two videos, stop what you're doing, don't be silly and go watch those right now. Now in this video, I'm going to kind of jump around a little bit more so we can get it done, but I'm also going to show you some cool tricks. Like some of the finishing touches that I did to really finesse the video and add some of the cool effects that you saw in the preview. Don't forget to sign up for a free student account. So you can grab the project files from this lesson, and then they set the whole thing yourself now into after effects. We go, well, here we are with part three of kinetic type.
Joey Korenman : And if you guys notice that I sound a little different today, it's because I'm using this new vocal technique called strep throat, which it might make me sound a little bit older, maybe, maybe a little more mature. So today we are going to finish the kinetic type project, and we're going to do it a little bit differently than we have in parts one and two, rather than just keep plodding forward and literally recreating the entire thing. What I'm going to do is start to jump around and show you specific things. And the reason I'm doing that is just because yeah, if you remember from part two, we got as far as, is he a nutcase to finish the rest of this? Most of it is going to be just using the same techniques we've been doing. Right. Um, and let me show you my final campier, excuse me, if there it goes, my first voice crack of this tutorial.
Joey Korenman : Uh, so looking at this, I wanted to show you guys, this is the actual comp that I animated everything in, and you'll notice it looks just like the comp we've been building, you've got your comp markers up here to help me sync everything. And you've got a lot of different move Knowles for the camera moves and everything else has just built out the exact same way. So I'm going to dive into some of these pre comps and talk about specific pieces of this animation, uh, that I did. And that way we can sort of speed the process up a little bit. So here we go. First thing I wanted to talk about are these strange, glowing fireballs that you may have noticed kind of sprinkled around the animation? Uh, so the reason I put those in there was because, and frankly, this was probably not a smart thing to do, but it's, it's maybe a bad habit of mine.
Joey Korenman : Um, you know, just looking at the composition, it felt like it needed something to kind of help draw your eye around the composition. Sometimes when a composition feels flat to me, what I like to do is put a contrast ING design element somewhere, um, to kind of help give it a little bit more interest in and make it not feel so flat. So, um, what I thought might be cool would be to create these sort of flickering torches or fires, um, in this scene in the movie takes place in the woods, it's dark. Um, and so I thought it maybe made sense to kind of have these little torches kind of sprinkled around and they just help give it a little bit of visual interest. So here's how I made those I'm going to jump in. Um, and so this is what they look like.
Joey Korenman : All right. They're very simple. Um, but I want to show you guys how I made them just because this is, I think this is a good example of how you can just sort of be clever and it's better to be clever than good, I guess. So this is how I made these, um, each one of these, there's basically just four circles. So if I solo one of these and I preview it, it's just a circle moving in a circle. And the way I did that was I made a shape layer. Um, actually this is a solid with a mask on it, but you use a shape layer. It doesn't matter. And I offset the anchor point. You'll notice it's not in the center of the circle. And the reason I did that is because now by rotating this, it appears to kind of shift around instead of just not doing anything, which is what would happen if you rotated a circle with the anchor point right in the middle.