Dynamic Backgrounds in After Effects

Video Transcription

Hey, everyone, this is Tziporah Zions for Noble Desktop, and in this tutorial, I'm going to show you how to make a dynamic animated background in Adobe After Effects. So I'll show you what the finished effects looks like over here.

So we're going to be starting with animating like this text layer here. And after that, it's just a lightning effect animation, a light burst. And then we're going to be adding this cool reflection at the bottom using the previous layers all together.

And like, this is a really good way to have your animations appear super bold, impactful, and based on some careful keyframing in the parenting technique. The reflection at the end, like over here, is it's a great detail to add to any animation, and it's just super easy to accomplish.

And like this, you know, this effect is all about like play and experimentation. So like, you know, change a font, you can have a different reflection. You can parent different kinds of effects to it, but you'll see more as we get on with the project.

So let's get started. Oh, by the way, you can find the project files in the video description below. So let's go. So the first thing we're going to be doing with the play head at the origin we're going to hit Sfor scale to open up like the size and stuff.

And by the way, this font is called horizon. It's free for download and it's set to bold. And like the paragraph settings are right here, they're pretty standard. Nothing unusual over here, but I just wanted like a nice, thick font to stand out within this effect.

There's quite a bit going on. So first thing I'm going to be doing, we're going to be entering the scale, so we'll scale open the stopwatch of your stop, start keyframing that stuff, and we're going to be, you know, let's set the scale to I want to put it around like 285.

I want it nice and big, like you see how huge it is. And I'm also going to open up Position with shift P. On my keyboard to open up position. I'm going to hit a stopwatch, in position, I'm going to pull it up out of the frame.

Reason being for this is because I want it to look like it's kind of slamming down into the frame, getting smaller with impact. We move about 17 frames in ish about that now. 19 frames and you can see and I'm going to be changing, I'm going to shrink the text to be in the middle.

So before I was about 90, so I'll put it back at 90. It's a good idea, and let's get that position to be down about in the middle over here. All right. I've got mine at 43 here and I'm also going to be marqueeing

Both of these, I'm going to select all my keyframes when I right-click go to Keyframe Assistant, Easy Ease, and that's just going to smooth out the motion of this text animation. So you can see it looks like it's coming from outside the frame and slamming down into the middle.

Now I'm going to be heading over to some presets. I'm going to type in glow. And I'm going to grab glow, drag it on to my text. Great. Now I'm going to start keyframing the effect. So let's see.

I'm going to put this around one second and 19 frames-ish about. There we go. And I'm going to increase the glow to 50. I want to get that radius to about 50, basically. And I'm also going to go from low intensity, so radius is basically, as you could probably guess, how spread out is the

glow and the intensity is like, how bright is the glow? And I want this pushed up, pushed up, pushed up. I like the way it looks. Let's put it at three. I think that would be a good idea.

So it's not too bright, but it's a nice, good-looking effect. Actually, I'm indecisive. Dial back to 2.5. I like that. Perfect. All right, next thing we're going to be doing is click on the text layer, we're going to hit Ctrl on a PC, or Cmnd on a Mac.

There we go and we have a new layer now we're going to hit enter on a PC, return on a Mac, and we're going to rename this layer to lightning. And what we're going to be doing is we're going to be typing in lightning in Effects and Presets over here.

Drag and drop it onto our lightning layer. And the reason why we duplicated the layer as opposed to using an adjustment layer or anything else is because I want this new layer to have like an alpha channel and also be able to match the movement of the layer beneath it.

And we're also going to make sure that, going to parent this to really make sure that it follows along with the motion. But for now, that's that's what we're doing. And what I want this lightning to do is, we can grab is like these little plus signs and we could drag them

around and I want them to go over the word radical. Next, we're going to be doing we're going to take the lightning type we're going to put into to Two Way Strike so it doesn't get cut off the edge of the composition, actually pull this one out a little bit more.

We're going to be getting into Glow settings over here and we're going to change this blue color to be a yellow color just like that. That's all we need. And now we are going to be key framing it.

So with my Playhead at one sec and 19 over here, I'm going to hit alt left bracket on my PC and on a Mac.... It should be option left bracket and that's going to cut this layer to just start around here.

I don't want it appearing beforehand. And then let's head out to effect controls. So we're going to set conductivity state radius and go to zero and keyframe all three. So, you know, that's a zero. I want to put you down to zero, please.

Thank you. And I want my core glow. And then we're going to change my glow radius. I said core glow before, I apologize I meant glow radius. We're going to put that down to one because it's as low as it can go.

And I want to hit the key frame on that stopwatch and then start keyframing that. And then I'm going to move my play head to about like. one second. A little later in. So I'm putting it in like one second and 25 frames and and I'm going to be changing these these settings, I'm going to be

bumping them up a bit more so my core radius and my glow intensity. So I want to put it at like 9.5 and my glow. I'm going to bump that up to, let's say, 70. I think I want to be quite intense at this point.

And then I think I'm going to let's see a move down a little bit more and then I want these two values to be one to to kind of settle down a bit. So my core radius are going to be three over here and I want it to be less than 70.

So I'm going to nudge it down to 55 for me personally. We want this lightning effect to start up and it's going to be kind of quiet and then those values are going to burst up, you know, get very intense.

And then we wanted to kind of settle down a little bit more, you know, and just kind of like, go on its way. Still be there, but not be too intense. And then last thing, I'm actually going to extend this quite a bit out.

We're going to be putting my playhead at the very end of my, you know, animation over here. And I have mine at like three seconds in, and I'm going to be changing my conductivity state to ten.

And the reason being for that is because I want, you know, this lightning effect to kind of wiggle all over and conductivity state really controls that. But I don't want it to stop moving while my animation is still playing.

So I'm putting it all the way at the end. So it's got a reason to keep on moving, keep it moving, keep it moving till the very end of my animation. The last thing we're going to be doing is we're going to be pick whipping the lightning, over here to the lightning effect, to the text

effect. And the reason for that is whenever you parent something with the Pick Whip, it basically it follows the initial movement of the, you know, the parent layer. So you could see that there's a bit of a wiggle effect on that text effect over here, and the lightning effect is just going along with it.

It's fine. All right. Next effect, so we're going to be making an adjustment later, so go up to Layer New just layer in a new adjustment layer. It's basically an empty layer and you could just dump all sorts of effects on it.

And it's going to, you know, pass down that effect onto every single layer below it. And you'll see what we mean once you start working with ours. But they're super versatile. They're great. So I'm going to rename mine.

This is going to be a light burst effect. So let's just name it first. I'd like to capitalize my stuff and we're going to type in light burst from the Effects panel. And of course, first again, grab it on to this new layer.

Then here is that I want this effect to really start slow and burst onto the scene and then settle down till it's, you know, not really there anymore. So let's see. Let's get the Playhead to around 14 frames in.

That's fine. We're here and I want to keyframe my intensity in ray length to zero. So hit the stopwatch on both these guys, change them down to zero, down to zero. You don't really see these guys. Sorry about that. I'll just type it in over here.

OK? It's not really noticeable. Then let's head over to about one minute, ten seconds frames in. What? I'm sorry about that one second, ten frames in. I have it at nine, it's fine. And now I want this effect to get super intense like, like, you know, really burst onto the scene.

So I want my intensity over here to be, I'm going to bump it up. I want it to be more than 13 hundred and 13 hundred and 50. I mean, ray length over here. Let's see. Ten is a pretty big number for this really, whoa, like that's crazy intense, but that's what I want right over here and I'm

like a few frames later. Yeah, maybe I'll make it an even like, you know, 20 frames after one second. And let's let's take these things down. Let's get them back down to zero. Alternatively, you could just copy and paste your initial key frames over here and hit U.

Toggle these up, you could press these frames over here. I just randomly put it in 00, was quicker for me that way. All right. Last thing today, we're going to make a reflection. So let's shift. Select all of these layers, like first lightning and the text effect.

I'm going to right-click. I'm going to pre-compose them, and I'm going to name these. Let's see, text effects. The reason being for this is you'll see this. I'm going to duplicate all these guys all together, and that is going to help me do that.

So I'm going to hit control d on my PC or command on the Mac, and I'm going to actually grab the bottom layer. I'm going to rename the original one Reflection. And I'm going to hit. Let's see. S for scale, and I want to unlink these values, my X and Y, so normally, you know, these guys have change one of the value changes on X, Y, X and Y plane, but I just want to change one of these values. I want to flip this guy upside down, so I am going to reverse it. So I'm going to go over to my y values over here and I'm going to make it a negative 100.

Right. And I'm going to grab this layer down, down over here, and I want it to kind of cut off over here because again, this is going to be the reflection, so we're not going to see the whole thing.

And last thing, we're going to change this layer mode to soft light now, if you don't see layer modes over here, you're going to hit toggle switches and modes. If you if you see this layout, you know, just press this button and I want my reflection to be Soft Light.

So Soft Light is going to blend in this layer with the, you know, the background that's under it underneath, you know, the layer stuff over here. All right. That's it. So like glow effects and light bursts are awesome for transition effects and for like plussing up preexisting effects.

And like I super, you know, I super recommend changing up the font changing of the background. You know, you don't even have to use the lightning effect. You can grab any effect, any preset. Maybe you can get one of those simulation effects.

You know, you could try to get a bubble effect, you know, any particular effect and learn how to parent that to any other layer, like a text effect layer instead of the scale starting out really big and have it really small and have it pushing out from like the the far off in the background and adjustment layers

are super useful. You know, you can put pretty much anything into them instead of having the lightning effect, you know, to to the text effect, you could put the lightning effect and the light first. You know, for instance, you know, for an adjustment layer.

So like play around with this sort of effect, drag and drop, you know, whichever changing font ultimately, you know, it's all about careful key framing, knowing what to parent and which kind of layers do y and also, you know, playing with your layer modes over here.

Um, so yeah, and knowing how to reuse text and background effects like the reflection technique is also, like, super important as well. So they're very good for like redirecting the eye and highlighting and, you know, reusing your assets that you made.

So that's all for this tutorial. I hope you've enjoyed learning how to make a dynamic background effect in Adobe after effects, and this has been Tziporah Zions for Noble Desktop.