[Music] [Nol Honig] Okay. I'm going to start.
Hello. This is session 6612, as you all know. Get It Together. Building Your Brand's Motion Design Arsenal. Can everybody hear me okay? Headphones working all right? Awesome. I will ask you all to give me thumbs up and laugh out loud and try to remember to give the appropriate social cues back to me because it's weird if nobody reacts at all while I'm doing this, okay? Thank you. My name is Nol Honig, and let's get on to part one of this talk, which is my very favorite part.
Right, my name is Nol Honig and I have been motion designing, is that the right term? I've been a motion designer now for many, many years. I learned After Effects in 1996, and I started working professionally at that time because if you knew the software at that time, you could get jobs. It's a different time, right? Now I am blessed because I have been working in motion design a long time and my career has two different paths. And just as a way of introducing myself to you, I do want to take you down these two paths really quickly. All right, if you've been to my other lessons, you've already seen this spiel, so you can tune out for a second. Anyway, hello. My career has these two different paths, and people know me for two different things, generally speaking. I was a part-time faculty member at Parsons School of Design, teaching motion design for about 20 years in classrooms, which I think was really, really helpful for me to learn how to teach better. But in 2017, I did start teaching online at School of Motion. I teach the basic class there, After Effects Kickstart, as well as Expression Session with Zach Lovett. Yes, which is a great class. And also the good folks at Adobe have asked me to speak at Adobe MAX five years in a row, so a lot of people know me this way. And probably most of you know me from this kind of stuff. But in the industry, I'm also somewhat well known for the work that I've done and I've done some title sequences for some shows and won a bunch of those awards and so on and so forth, which we don't need to talk about. So I'm out there in these two different ways, all right? So that's me. Now if you've never heard of me before for either of those two things, you might have encountered me this way in the last six months, which is, I was very fortunate enough also that Adobe made a luminary ad about me, which of course is for Adobe, not me, but I'm lucky enough to star in it or unlucky enough depending, because every one of my friends kept saying, "Hey, stop popping up in my Instagram feed." I was like, "I can't control it." Anyway, enough about that. So what are we talking about today? Well, what we're talking about is very, very sexy, I hope, to all of you, okay, which is how to take your branding assets and put them into the world of motion design, okay? How to bring them into After Effects, how to set them up well so that things can't change, how to set them up using best practices, all right? That's what we're talking about today. I think it's a very sexy topic. Now why am I talking about this other than the fact that it's obviously a popular topic and sexy? Well, I'm talking about this for three basic reasons, all right? You ready? The first reason is, oops, I put pictures of my cats in my deck. Sorry, this is Frankie and Sebastian. Anyway, the three reasons are, one, I really want to save you time, okay? If you can do this kind of work and set up a template like I'm going to be doing now, which I probably should have said, I have a fake company that I made up and fake branding assets, and I'm going to set up a template for you all to watch me do this right now, and I'm hoping to inspire you, okay? Once you set something like that up, I'm hoping it would save you a lot of time, okay? It would probably take you a bunch of time to do it, but once it's done, I think it's a time saving thing, all right? And most importantly for me, I want to help you reduce the kind of quality control headaches that can easily come with branding projects, in particular with colors. I don't know if you've noticed this, but I worked on a job once where one of the animators took a screenshot of the color palette and just eye dropped to it, and then every color was wrong for every comp for the entire commercial, and then somebody had to go through and change all those once it was already done, and boy, that was uncool, and I don't think that guy got hired again. Anyway, so I want to help you reduce those kind of quality control headaches that plague branding projects, quite honestly, all right? And finally, I've been hired a million times by companies to animate branding assets and sometimes it's a real mixed bag what I've gotten, okay? You get an EPS. I don't even know what that is, okay? I get a PNG of one thing. I get some weird color palette that's like an old JPEG that somebody made 10 years ago and all these weird branding assets that are different sizes, and it's just a real grab bag, and I have to spend a bunch of time at the start of my-- I've just spent a bunch of time at the start of the project just putting everything together in a way that makes sense, right? Essentially, it's costing your company money to hire me to do that, which is silly as well, right? So I just want to make things easier for either you if you're an animator at a company or if you're an art director and you have a team of animators, whatever it is to make things just easier for everybody involved. Great. So as I said, I made up a fake client and branding assets and stuff. And let me just walk you through the client because I'm going to pretend that they're a real client from now on, okay? So this is actually a real client.
They are a civil rights advocacy group in Washington DC, okay? And they've got a young upstart vibe. They were founded by two friends who've met at Georgetown Law School, Jose and Roxanne, okay? And they took the first letters of their first names, J and R, and they came up with the name Junior for the company, right? And they really like the name, it highlights their vibe and everything, right? So cool. Then they hired me to make a logo for them, right, and here's the logo mark and word mark that I made. Now basically, what I was trying to do here, the intention was that this tells the story of the founding of the company a little bit, okay? We've got a J and we've got an R, and they've come together to create something new. And in addition, because they're a civil rights advocacy group, they really like the idea of this transparent overlap point because they're really into the idea of transparency, okay? So that's quite important to this logo as well.
And also because this is the real world, they asked for a gradient logo because Roxanne really loves gradients, Jose really likes the flat ones, so we definitely have to have both of those in there. And then also, as you all know, there's a black on white version for various reasons and a white on black version for various reasons. Now, one of the cool things is is that the person who designed this logo was a motion designer. So they built in a motion system into this logo, okay? So this is the way this should animate. The J and the R come together and form a new thing, all right? It's very important to the ethos of their company, and it reinforces the idea of the logo mark. Great. So I'm going to build a template out of all that stuff. All those colors, all those shapes, right? And this is what the template needs to do, and I'm going to do this right in front of you, okay? Some of this is going to be fairly easy and followable, some of it's going to get a little bit more advanced because I'm hoping to inspire as well as educate, all right? So I'm going to try to explain everything very, very carefully, so even if you don't have so much After Effects experience, it'll make sense hopefully. All right. But what does it need to do? First and foremost, translate all of the brand assets flawlessly into the world of After Effects, okay? We want the brand assets to look exactly the same in that program as they did wherever they were made, right? Also, I want the animators who work on this to have an easy ability to switch between the different logo mark states even while it's animated, okay? We have four states, flat, gradient, black and white, and white on black. I want that to be really easy. I don't want them to have to have a whole separate project for a different logo or a different comp for a different logo. I want it all in one place so that it can switch easily, all right? Also, those will all animate, and then we have a word mark, which could either be black or white, or off in case we don't want the word mark on screen, and also that's animated, right? Now, this is, to me, my most important part is 100% accurate brand colors. I do not want that shift or that mission creep on the colors to happen at all and I want to set this up so that can't happen, okay? Finally, I also show at the end how we can use this template that I'm going to make to set up some social comps, 9, 16, 69, 1x1, or whatever it is, okay? Because in this world, we know we all have to do that all the time. Let's make a template that's flexible in that way, okay? So the first issue that you're going to run into with this is that nobody in the history of graphic design has ever, as far as I know, designed a logo in After Effects. I do know somebody that designed a business card in After Effects once, which is a heroic act. I guess there were some plugins they really loved. Anyway, enough about that. But everybody designs logos in Illustrator, basically. They want vectors. They want that kind of control, right? Illustrator's vector based. After Effect is pixel based, okay? So there's automatically a little bit of an uneasy handshake between those two pieces of software, right? Now I'm going to go over the three ways that you can bring vector assets into After Effects, okay? Three ways. The first two are terrible or limited, I should say, and then the third one is what I'm going to recommend, which is Overlord. Does any of my animators in the house ever use Overlord? Okay. It's a very popular plugin. I'm going to explain what it does, and you'll see how cool it is, all right? Great, so let's go to After Effects, and first, I'm going to walk you through those three methods, so you could see how the first two are terrible. Oops. And then we will talk about the good one, Overlord, all right? So here we go. I'm in After Effects and I've got my Illustrator layers here, okay? You can see the little Illustrator logo or icon or whatever that is there, right? And they look pretty good. Now what I will say about these is that Illustrator logos in-- Sorry, Illustrator layers in general in After Effects, they only have one particular advantage over any other kind of layer, like anything you bring in for Photoshop or anything, is that you could scale them up above 100%, okay? That is not necessarily useful in this case. So that one advantage isn't that big of a deal. Maybe it would be, maybe it wouldn't be, okay? But other than that, if you look up here in the Properties panel, you can see that I just have the same transforms that I would have for any other layer like something from Photoshop or whatever, and this is a bit of a bummer because what I always feel like is with these Illustrator layers, I want it to act like Illustrator. I want to be able to click right on this purple color here and change that color with one click of a button, right? If I actually want to change this color, I'd have to open it in Illustrator, change the color there, save it, and then it would update in After Effects, which is a slow, terrible workflow that nobody really wants to use, okay? Also, if you import things into After Effects, like Illustrator layers, and then I pass my After Effects project to you or you or whoever, I would also have to include the Illustrator file, okay? Otherwise, this would come up as missing, and then the animator that you hired would be panicking because they can't do their job, whatever. So this is the oldest method of doing this. When I first started working in After Effects in around 1875, this was the only method, okay? But luckily, over the years, the engineers have developed another method, okay, which is definitely better than that, all right? And that is if I-- Here are my Illustrator layers, again the same ones. If I select these, I can right click, okay, and then create shapes from vector layer. Anybody ever do this? Yeah. That's fairly common thing. All right. So when I do that, boop. Now okay, I'm going to delete out these Illustrator layers that are unnecessary because After Effects has converted those vector layers into After Effects' internal vector system, which are called shape layers, okay? Shape layers are vectors, but they're in After Effects and they're native to After Effects, and they're just-- They offer you a lot more animation possibilities right off the bat. Like for example, here we go. This is the purple overlap bit. I could change that color to anything I want, right? Not that I want to because they're brand colors, but I could. I could animate it to get into brand color, and I could also even grab the path itself of this and animate the shape. I could do a lot of stuff. And I also have additional properties for animation that I wouldn't have any other way, like this skew or whatever, okay? So shape layers give you a lot more animation possibilities in After Effects. They're definitely preferable. However, unfortunately, the system is not perfect, and the ways in which it's not perfect don't work well with branding assets in my experience, okay? Because the two things that this doesn't do so well converting is complex shapes, like if a shape is cut out of another shape or whatever, it has trouble with that, and also gradients. It can't handle gradients at all like here's our gradient logo that Roxanne loves and if I try to do the same thing and create shapes from vector layer, it makes them gray. Hey! And nobody loves gray. I mean, actually, I do.
Anyway, so let's talk about Overlord, all right? If you've never heard of Overlord, that is the URL. Maybe you take photo of it or whatever. It is a third-party app that costs $75 I believe. So make your companies pay for it because this will save you so much time, right? I'm not hooked up to the Internet right now, so that's the URL. But there's a great company named Battle Axe who makes this, and they make lots of other great tools.
And everything that Battle Axe makes are perfect. So I'm laughing about this weird noise that's going to happen the whole time. Anyway, so let me show you what Overlord does, all right? So here in Illustrator, I've got the gradient logo, right? I'm going to select these layers, and here's my overlord panel up here. And the first thing that I need to do is press this button here, okay? Well, and that's the only thing I need to do because now it has pushed the art perfectly over to After Effects. Put it down here. And when I say perfectly, I mean perfectly, okay? And let's verify this. If we look here at the-- This is my overlap, the purple, okay? Let's just double click on the fill color and look at these colors, okay? Help me with this. Memorize these. The first one is 6a0ac6 and the second one is 9519f7, all right? Go back over here, select this, select that color here. 6a0ac6, right? And 9519f7. It really pulls the colors perfectly accurately back and forth. And in addition to that, when you have a gradient situation, okay, if I press G, you can see that the gradient start and end points are here and here. Now obviously, you do not want those to shift because that'll make the gradient look different. So did it do it perfectly? Well, let's check it out.
All right. Little bit hard to see here, but yes, it did it perfectly. There's the gradient start point. There's the gradient end point. I promise you, it really translates your assets perfectly. Get this third party app called Overlord. It works really, really, really nicely, okay? Battle Axe.co. All right. So now I'm going to build the template. Now that we've got the assets here in After Effects and they're perfect, I'm going to start building out this template, all right? So the first thing that I want to figure out and show you how I would do is how to make this overlap part, okay? Because I don't just want this to be a layer right here like it is now. This is more like a reference in my mind. I want this to be built by actually overlapping the R and the J so that I can make this animation the way that I want. Right. So how would I do this? Well, I would take my R and I'm going to duplicate this, Command + D, and I'm just going to rename this O. Okay, O for overlap. And I'm going to parent that into the R, okay? So in case that's not clear, I just have made an identical copy of the R and right now it's called O, and if I move the R, that moves with it, okay? I think everybody here gets that, right? Great. So now, I'm going to do the tricky part, which is I'm going to take this and I'm going to track Matt Pick Whip this into the J, and when I do that, boop. It's now got this shape, right? Because it's the R cut out of the J and that's all we're going to see, okay? So, that's the right shape and when I move the R, I can reveal more or less of this, okay? Because it's just moving over the J and revealing more or less of the overlap, okay? Does that make sense to everybody? Basically. Cool. Great, so we have that done but if I unsolo this and put the O on top, you'll see that it's still pink because it's still a copy of the R, right? It's got the R colors in there. So what do we need to do? We need to take the colors from the thing that I pushed over from Illustrator because those colors are perfect as we've just established. Now the way it works in After Effects is if I've got shape layers, I have all these folders down here. I've got a Contents folder and in there I've got the overlap and I've got a Path and the Gradient Fill and then all this transform stuff, which is just for that folder. And this gradient fill has the information that we want, right? It's got the colors and it's got that start and end point. So I could just copy that whole folder, command c copying it, right? And then if I paste this now into the O, okay, I'm going to solo that. You have to remember that the O is two different groups still, okay? Because it's got this circle shape here from the R and it's got the R shape there as well, and I want both of those to still be there just in case some animator ever needs that information there, okay? So, each of these groups has its own gradient fill, and what I'm going to do is just get in here and paste that information in there and then in here, okay, to get the right colors. Now unfortunately, it does not put the start and end point of the gradient in the right place when I do it that way. I couldn't figure out a way to get it to do that, so this is what I would do in that case is just go back to my original one, pull this up and get the start and end colors by clicking on this and I'm just going to get in here and drop guides for those, okay? And actually, you want to do this really, really precisely, especially with your branding assets. Right. Again, I'm just doing this because if the gradient start and end point shift, it'll be noticeable that there's something different, right? So I do that there and now I can turn this off and I just need to make this adjustment really quick. I wish there was an easier way to do this, but this is the only way that I could figure out, all right? So as you can see here, the start and end point for the circular shape is way up here, so I'll drop that down there, drop that down there. I'm going to do this quickly. Again, if this was you, I would do this incredibly, incredibly precisely so that your logo doesn't look any different. All right. Let me just do it. Great.
It's hard for me not to do something very precisely, honestly. I'm very OCD about these things. Anyway, okay, great. Okay, so what does that mean? Now this is the right color, right? And let me just-- I can now delete out that other gradient and turn all this off. Okay, so check this out. If I move my R, now we get this.
And it's really a nice illusion of transparency, right? Isn't that sweet? I totally love that. Okay, cool. Going to put that back and so okay, we've done the overlap part of this, all right? We've set that up. Now I need to animate that, right? We need to animate this because part of this logo system is that it's animated, as I showed you, right? So I'm going to do that for you now. And if you think about this, there's two pitfalls right away with this animation that I could see. One's fairly obvious, and one I'm going to have to explain a little bit more. But the most obvious one is that we want the J and the R to move the same amount of pixels, okay? It would be weird if Jose moved more than Roxanne or vice versa, right? These are equal partners. We want to emphasize the equality. They should move the exact same. There should be symmetry of this, right? So that's easy to understand. Now the other thing that's slightly more difficult is if I press P and then separate the dimensions of the position into X and Y, just because I know that this is only going to animate on the Y like this, and so I could separate out the-- Sorry, the X rather, so I cannot have to deal with the Y. But the pitfall that I see here is, right now, this is my lockup position for the logo. Every animator, if they're animating this thing, they'll need to make it move back to this exact point. Both of those have to be in this-- Both the J and the R have to be in the exact same place for this to lock up and be our logo. But if we look at the values here for X position, they're really bad numbers for animation, okay? They have four decimal points, both of them. This is 832.8053. I don't even know if I could set this at this point, quite honestly, ever, right? Okay. These are ugly numbers. And if I am as an animator, I have to remember these two weird numbers with four decimal points to get this thing to lock back, that's a nightmare for me, okay? So to solve both problems, the equal distance and that issue with the position, I'm going to apply one, hopefully elegant, solution to this to fix both of those, okay? What I'm going to do is I'm going to make a null object. Any null object fans in the house? Yes. Yes. Those are my people, all right? If you don't know what a null object is though, a null object in After Effects is a blank layer, okay, that has an anchor point on it and also you can put effects on, all right? For those people that raised their hand a second ago, who knows the shortcut for null object by heart? Yeah. Yeah. This is one of the longest keyboard shortcuts in After Effects as far as I know. It's like you mash every hot key and then press Y kind of, but I have this in my muscle memory so hard that I can't even remember what the hot keys are anymore. I just do it. Boop. Like that, all right? So I made a new null object here, okay? I'm going to call this my control. I'm going to turn this off. I don't need that to be visible. That's a blank layer and what I'm going to do now is I'm going to think about that like, if I was building a marionette puppet, that layer there would be the wooden handles that I can control the puppet with, and now I'm going to attach it with the strings and the metaphor to that, okay? That's my control layer there. Great. So in order to do this, I'm going to go up here to Effect and go down to this category of Effects that some of you have probably used and some of you probably have not used. Anybody used Expression Controls? Yes. I really love Expression Controls. Now, if you're afraid of the word expressions, just don't look at that word, okay? You don't necessarily need to know expressions to use these in all at all times. Though, morning, I am going to use expressions now. Okay, anyway, I'm going to pick a slider and sliders are really friendly, I always think. Sliders look like this. Whee! Okay. I love sliders and basically, when I look at sliders now, what I think are this is just a way to animate values, okay? Basically, you could keyframe some numbers. That's what this does. So how am I going to hook this up? I've got this slider here, and then I've got my logo elements. Let me turn off these swatches.
Okay, so what I would do, all right, is first lock my control up there so that when I click on another layer, that stays there, okay? And I have to hook the X position up to this slider somehow. If I were to just property Pick Whip that up there, okay, boop, just as a start, it would move this over here, okay? It's a little bit similar to something I did in my other lesson, if you guys saw that one, a session I should say. Okay, so right now, this is over here, and I don't want it to be over here. I want it to be where it was while this is 0, okay? So this is not right, but I could get in here now and adjust the code that just got written, okay? What does this code say right here? All this code is trying to answer is what values should we put in here, okay? And what it's saying now is whatever it says on this slider, put in there. And you can see the slider's at 0, and this exposition value is at 0, and this is now over here at 0. But if I slide this, it will move, okay? So it's started okay. Now for best practices, even if you don't know JavaScript, I'm going to write this the way that I think is best, which is I would first define the slider this way, okay? Let me give you a little bit more room to see this for crying out loud. Oops.
Right. Great. And also what I would do is get in here and copy this ugly number for just one sec to explain this to you, okay? So I've just defined what the slider is and then if I were to say that weird ugly number minus the slider, okay, that would now stay in that position because that weird number minus 0 is still that weird number, okay? So nothing has changed, but we've now rigged this up to have a relationship with this slider so, that it will move when that slides, okay? It's a little advanced, but I'm hoping you guys are following. Everybody following me so far? Okay. Cool. Great. So now actually, that number is still ugly even in the code. I hate that number. Okay. There's a function in JavaScript for After Effects. It's called value, and value as a word in this case just means put whatever values were already in there before I wrote an expression on here, okay? So that in this case is going to help me. If I type value minus slider and I click out, it's still in the right place because it still knows that value means this weird ugly number here, okay? And what's even easier is I've made this code more modular. Now I could paste this into another layer, and it'll just take that position value, rather than having that weird ugly number coded in there, okay? So, if I right click on this and copy the expression only from this exposition, I can now paste this into my R. And you can see, because this is red here that there is something going on under the surface, right? Now, right now, they'll both move in the same direction because they're both being subtracted from that value. But I want the one on the other side, those slider numbers to be added to that number. Subtracted from one and added to the other so they move in opposite directions, okay? So I would just have to get into this code and change the minus to a plus, so it's value plus slider. Okay, so it's this number plus whatever I dial up in there, okay? And now they will move like this, right? And they will always move completely symmetrically the same number of pixels, and just in case it's not clear, any animator can return this back to 0, and it will lock up into the logo position, all right? We definitely love that for animators. Great. Got rid of those ugly numbers. Now let me go ahead and animate this really quickly according to the motion system, which should now be really simple. I'm just going to make a keyframe here for the slider at 0, here at one second and then I'm going to roll back and I'm just going to put a value in here for now. And this actually doesn't matter and I'll show you why in a sec. Now I'm going to take both of these and just ease them because I'm that kind of person. It's hard for me to look at a bad ease. So, I'm going to do this, okay, which I think is the best way for this to go, all right? Which is they move quickly at the start and then they drift together nice and easy, right? I love that animation. Cool. Let me jump out of the graph. Now that I've done that, I'm going to show you something that for some of you might be a little bit magical. Anybody here ever used Essential Graphics? Oh, okay, great. Good for you. Essential Graphics if you don't know is a workflow feature of After Effects that, in this case, allows you to make great templates, okay? So I find it's a little hard to describe what Essential Graphics does, but if I just show it to you, I think it'll make more sense, right? So, I have an Essential Graphics panel up here, okay? And basically if I put things into that panel, they will show up in the top level of the precomp. Like here, actually before I do that, let me show you what this would look like first. Just say over here, right? Right now when I twirl this open, I've only got a transform folder here, okay? But if I jump in here and take this slider and I want both of these keyframes highlighted as well, and I take that and I put that up here, okay, I would give this a more precise name like distance or something like that or logo mark animation, whatever it is. Then I could jump back over here, and now check it out. I've got another folder in my precomp, okay? And in there are those keyframes that I just made, right? It's like you don't have to go into the precomp to animate it. You could just do it all from the top level here, right? So we're just going to make things way easier for anybody who works on this, and also if they don't go into the precomp, they can't accidentally really change anything or break anything, okay? So control, right? And what's cool is I said it didn't really matter what values I put in there because I could still-- Anytime I have a copy of this now, it's an independent copy that could be different from any other copy of this precomp, so I could change this here, make this wider, or I can make the animation happen later or I can make the animation faster, I could put different interpolation on it, whatever I want, okay? Essential Graphics is super useful for these kind of template situations, and I'm going to roll everything through Essential Graphics. If that didn't make total sense to you, I think it will by the end, all right? Did it make sense to most people though? Yeah. Okay. It's a little funky. Right. So let's work on the colors next, all right? As I said, the colors are the place where this can really go wrong, and let's set this up in a way so that just can't happen. All right, let's make this bomb proof, all right? Let me close all this down. Okay. So one thing I didn't explain about Overlord is it also has a very nice feature, which is I made a color palette with all the colors and then I turned that into a swatch folder, I think that's called, right? Check this out. If I just press this one button, it opens that swatch-- those swatches right over here at the press of a button. What's even cooler is like, even if you just look over here in the Properties panel, for each of these swatches, they are named the RGB values of those layers, all right? That's pretty convenient and makes me always feel good about things. Okay. Anyway, here is what I'm going to do is I'm going to make a new null object, Shift Option Command Y, okay? And I'm going to call that my palette, all right? I'm going to turn that off too. Then go back up here to my Effect controls, and I need to unlock my other control and then lock my palette. And now, I'm going to put another very useful expression control on here, which is color control. Anybody ever use Color Controls? One person. All right. The color control is just a color field, right? You can choose colors and put it in there, or you can eye drop to things, right? And then link things to these colors, which is what we're going to do. So if I take my color control up here on my palette, I'm going to call this C1 because I need nine copies of this. So I'm going to duplicate this, and After Effects will give those all unique names. And then I'm just going to eye drop to these colors. Now I know at least one person in the house right now is wincing. Who's wincing? Who's the wincer? Because you're saying to yourself, "Hey, Nol, be careful with that eye dropper there. That's not always totally accurate. What I found is that sometimes colors go really wrong just a little bit and it's really hard to tell." And I would say you are 100% right there. In this case, I think they went right, but what I would urge you to do if you're setting something like this up for yourself is triple check that those colors are right. So let's just do that with a few of these. So the blue color is 4e23ff, or I could just look right here at those RGB values. But I like to go all the way back to Illustrator just to make sure also that Overlord push those colors the right way. So 4e23ff.
4e23ff. All right. So I would, if I were you, check to make sure all those colors, if you're doing something like this, are 100% perfect. I'm not going to do that now because it'd be boring. Let's just assume they're perfect, okay? Don't do that in real life. Anyway, there's another thing that I'm going to do right now because I'm smart, okay? And that is, I've been around the block on these projects and for setting up templates for companies, and I know if I build these colors exactly right and I make a lockbox system with these colors, at some point, it's going to be Halloween or Thanksgiving or Pride or Saint Patrick's Day or some other holiday, and they're going to need a seasonal version of this logo, right? Who knows what I'm talking about here? Okay. And they're going to say to me, okay, I got that fancy template. We got this guy to build it. And unfortunately, with this, we wouldn't have the ability to do that so easily, okay? So I'm going to build that in now as a-- In case it happens in the future. So what I would do is I'm going to duplicate this three more times. I would call this J Alt O Alt, and R Alt, just because I like to really name things, and then I'm going to give these dummy colors red, green, and blue, okay? And I will know that that means that these could be changed in the future to something else, okay? So we're going to build that in, which I think is pretty clever of me. All right. I could close those up. I don't need to look at those, those are just for the future. Great. So now, how am I going to make it so that we can have the animator easily switch between these color states? I'm going to use, that's right, a dropdown menu.
Okay. I like drop down menus. Who here likes dropdown menus? Anybody ever use dropdown menus other than this one gentleman who I already asked who uses dropdown menu? So show of hands. All right. Excellent. Oh, another hand. Went up after. I'm not sure. Does that mean yes or no? Yeah. Okay. All right. Cool. I love dropdown menus. They're one of the newest expression controls that have been built into After Effects, and I find them very useful, all right? Let's switch back over here to my, marionette controlling layer, which I should probably put on top, okay? And I'm going to lock that up here. Now, with that selected, Effect and Expression Controls and dropdown menu control, all right? We've all used the dropdown menus. It's just like what state do you live in? You drop. Obviously, New York should be on top of that list. I don't know why I have to go all the way down alphabetically for New York. Anyway, what I'm going to do is edit this. No New Yorkers in the house, I see. All right, well, all right. You should've laughed louder at that joke. Anyway, okay. So I got these states here, okay? And I'm going to define them now. Flat, and I'm going to call this one gradient, and I'm going to call this one white on black or WOB. I'm going to make a new one that's called BOW, black on white. And because I'm mister clever guy, I'm going to make another one called Alt, okay? Now, technically, when After Effects sees this dropdown menu, it does not see flat gradient, white on black, black on white. What it sees is one, two, three, four and five, okay? That's the way it sees it numerically under the hood. So I'm going to ask you to just remember that for a sec. One equals flat, two equals gradient, right? I want you to think about it like that if you're ever using dropdown menu. Great. So this is here and right now, nothing's linked up to it, so it's just a blank drop down menu, but I could call this my logo mark states, if I want to be precise about this. Great. How would I set this up? Well, the first thing I need to do actually is get the right colors onto these layers before I can use that dropdown. So let me do that first and this is going to be a boring moment for you potentially, though if you don't know that much about shape layers, this will be a little bit instructive, right? So if I just select my O, right now these are still those two groups, those two pieces of the R that I originally duplicated it from. And inside both of those are these gradient fills, all right? I need to do a little bit of organization here. I'm going to add a new group, okay, from this Add menu that's right here, and I'm going to call this gradient. Let me see if I spell that right, and I'm going to copy that, okay? And then I'm just going to put group one and group two in the gradient. I'm just organizing things here, right? Great. So now I've got it all in one folder, so it's easier to look at. I'm just going to duplicate this, Command + D, and I'm going to call this flat, okay? And now I'm going to get back in here and make this into my flat color. So I'm going to go into both groups. Now I can delete the gradient from both of those, okay? And select the word Flat, and I'm going to go up here to Add and pick a fill, okay? That drops one fill onto both of those paths right now, okay? So I don't need one in each of the folders, and I could pull this down, and I've got a very similar color picker right here to my palette, which I should probably open up separately right here, okay? So what I could do is hard-- Oh, and I got to lock that.
Okay, what I could do now is hard code this fill color into my brand colors, right, using Property Pick Whip, all right? Property Pick Whip, super useful for this kind of thing. It's like a little very specific parenting, right? I'm going to Property Pick Whip up here to my purple overlap color. Now that is locked into that color, right? Even if I or the animator you hire or whoever it is clicks on this, it can't change, okay? No matter what I do there, it always stays locked into brand purple, right? Which is very, very, very useful, okay? So I got two folders in here and now I unfortunately I have to do that same boring process for the J and the R, but maybe it'll be fun for you to watch. I don't know. Okay. Select the word Contents, Add, new group, paste the word gradient in there, and now I'm going to take group 1 and group two, and boop, do that. Command + D, duplicate that, call that flat, okay? And I'm going to get in here again, delete those gradients from those two groups, all right? Select the word flat, add a fill, it's obnoxious red to begin with, but then I just need to Property Pick Whip from that color up here to the blue color. Boop for the J and now that is locked into brand blue. And then finally, let me do that again for the R. Wow, my voice got really low there.
All right. Do that again for the R. I could do like an ASMR session if you're wearing headphones. I could really like whisper this out. Yeah. Anyway, I'm going to duplicate this, and now you make this flat.
Get in here. Just leave out the gradients. That would be really weird.
It's already weird enough that you're wearing headphones, all right? Select flat, get up here. Obnoxious red, and now finally for the last time, I'm going to hard code this to brand pink. Great. Now we have two folders inside each of these shapes for the two different color states, all right? So let's hook this up to our drop down menu, okay? How am I going to do that? Actually, I could turn this off now. And I can actually lock my palette now so that really those colors can't change. Because the only way somebody could change those colors is to unlock the palette and open it up and change the colors by doing this. They'd have to go far out of their way to do that, but if I locked my palette now, I could even shy that away so that it's not even visible on screen anymore. So those are just in a locked box that nobody can access, right? If you like control as much as I do. Anyway, so I'm going to turn this off. Got my logo mark states, dropdown menu all ready to go. So when I did that whole stick with the folders, something that got made down here is this other folder, which is called transform. Anytime you make a new group, it automatically makes a transform folder for that folder, okay? And what that means is these influence only things inside that folder, okay? Now, what that means is we have a handy dandy opacity property for that folder. And if this goes down to 0, now we don't see the flat state, okay? And if it's at 100, we see the flat state. So that's essentially how I'm going to hook this up to my dropdown. Now I am going to use a fairly common JavaScript expression here, which is I'm going to write an if/else expression, okay? Do we have any JavaScript people in the house who know even just a little, like who know what I'm talking about if/else? Yeah. Okay. We got some people here. Essentially, I'm just going to say in plain English, if the dropdown menu is one, AKA flat, right, then the opacity of this flat folder on all these layers should be 100%. Otherwise, that should just be 0, okay? Now it's not going to look that simple in JavaScript code. It's going to look a little funny because the syntax is really what trips people up in JavaScript, basically, because it's a little weird. But anyway, in my flat folder in the transform, I'm on the overlap, all right? I'm going to Option click to make a new expression, okay? And first thing I'm going to do is define the dropdown menu for the expression, just to make things easier to read. So I'm going to say menu equals this, all right? That's just saying, anytime I say the word menu, I'm referring to that menu there, okay? And then all I have to do is now write my if/else expression. I'm going to write it first and then you're all going to be like, that's weird, and then, yeah, you can take pictures of it and I'll talk about what it means again, all right? If (menu == 1). (100) else (0). Okay. And then click out. Now I do a thing where I put spaces around the parenthesis and brackets because I think it makes it a little bit easier for you to see, okay? But you don't have to do that as part of the syntax.
So what this says in plain English again is the menu that I'm talking about is this logo mark states, okay? And if that menu equals, equals 1, okay? I had to put two equals in there because in JavaScript, as far as I know, equals, equals means mathematically equal to, as opposed to, like, what I wrote here which was menu equals. This equals is more like language equals, like the word menu equals that, okay? Well, this is like a mathematical equals, all right? So if the menu equals 1, set the opacity for this, the layer that I'm writing-- The property rather that I'm writing the expression on at 100%. Otherwise, if it's set at anything else, set it at 0 because that basically makes sense in theory what I'm doing here. Okay, even if you're not a JavaScript person, you get that. So what I could do now is make this slightly more modular because in real life, I would have five different states, okay? One, two, four, five and three different layers and a whole bunch of different folders in there, and I want to make this as modular as possible, so I don't have to change a lot of this code. So the only thing actually that needs to change in this code for any of these states is just this one number, right? If it's gradient, it should be if menu equals 2, it's 100%, otherwise it's 0, right? So I'm going to define a variable called number, oops, number, and put that in there, and then up the top, I'm going to write number equals one, okay? Oddly, that doesn't have to be equals, equals whatever.
JavaScript. Anyway, so right now, all I've done is I haven't changed anything. If I click out, it's going to be the exact same. If I pull down here remember, we're just looking at the purple one here. And if I put this on gradient, now we would see the gradient, not because I've coded that up, because I've just made the folder on top of it invisible for the moment. It's just displaying the one that's underneath it, okay? So all that I've done there is I've just put the one thing that I need to change on top, so it's just like a little bit easier for me to access, okay? So I'm going to right click on this property, copy expression only, all right? And I'm just going to paste that same code into the transform of opacity for this. All right. Flat in my J. Okay. Paste that in there, and also in flat here.
Boom. Okay. So now they all appear to be off because this is set to gradient. If I change this to fill, they all turn on, okay? Very, very elegant solution. Let me now go into the gradient folder and I just have to find that opacity on that folder, paste that in here, okay? Now this is why I changed this to be on top. So I could just get in here easily without reaching to that whole code and just change this to two, all right? You don't have to do that, I just think that makes it a little bit easier. Now I'm going to right click on here, copy expression only, and close this down. Open this, close this. There's a lot of folders when it comes to shape layers. Paste it here, okay? And then again, close this down and paste this in here. Okay. Great. So now, this works for both states, flat and gradient, all right? And if I pull it down to any of the other states, it's off, okay? Now I don't want to sit here for 20 minutes and do all the rest of the colors because I think it'd be hell of boring for you. So I'm going to do my very favorite old school baking show thing, where they're like you mix the cake and then you put it in the oven, you wait 45 minutes, and look, I have the finished cake right here, okay? So I have the finished cake right here, all right? And so check this out. I've got my full color menu, and I can set it on black on white, white on black, or even those horrible dummy alt colors that somebody could change in the future if they ever wanted to, all right? Great, so this is all now set up with the colors and still animated here. Okay, and to change between those color states, the animator would just change this here. Okay, and it'll all stay animated and stuff for whatever color state that I've just picked, right? It's so amazing to me because they really-- there's very little chance of having any color creep when it's set up like this. You'd have to intentionally go in and mess up the colors in a very difficult way that I've locked off in several ways, okay? So I think this is a really smart system for setting up colors for branding projects, okay? I hope you find it inspiring. I do want to show one last thing here, which is how I could set up the word mark. And then I will have hit all of my template needs that I talked about earlier, all right? So let me jump into this precomp, and actually, I now have to switch to a different Essential Graphics here, okay? Great. Just because this is now the finished, the baked cake precomp that I'm in. Okay. Here's my word mark states. I've got, as I said earlier, a black one and a white one, and sometimes we just want that off, okay? So I'm going to make another dropdown menu for this because it's got three states. If it had two states, I would be tempted to use a checkbox, which is a binary switcher. It's like either on or off. That's great for things with only two states, but this has three. So effect, and I'm going to go down here to expression controls and make another dropdown menu. Okay. And I will call that logo mark state-- Sorry, word mark, totally wrong. Word mark, try to be fancy.
Word mark state, great. Okay. And now this dropdown menu has three items in it, natively. I only need three states. Okay. I've got white, I've got black.
Thank you. And I've got off, okay? Great. So this is going to be a much easier thing to hook up, I believe. I'll lock my controls up there now, all right? And all I need to do is use the regular opacity of these layers. Now I don't have to dig through a million folders to get there. However, I do have to write that same weird code. If you hate JavaScript code, sorry, I got to do this again, all right? I'm just going to do this again. I'm going to say number equals one. Say it along with me, if-- Just kidding, nobody's going to say it along with me. If (menu == 1). (100) else. (0) Great. Oh, sorry, I wrote if menu equals one, so I should have said If (menu == number). Right. Great. So right now, that is displaying white. Oh, I did this totally wrong because I put that on the black. Sorry, for number equals one, this is the white one. Okay. If menu equals, equals-- Oh, I know why. I didn't define what the menu-- Okay. Sorry. Okay. Undo that.
That stupid cart, blaming everything on the cart. I'm going to say menu equals-- Let me Pick Whip up here to my word mark menu. Great. Yes. If you forget to define the term, it doesn't know what you're talking about. I did that on purpose just to show you that, okay? It was a very tricky mind game I'm playing you on there. I actually hired that person to roll the cart down the hall at that exact moment, okay? White and black. And off. Okay. I don't need to define a whole other thing for off because it's either not one or two, then they're both off, okay? Sorry, that was a weird anticlimax the way that worked out, but actually-- Oh, no. Sorry. I've got-- Damn. I'm way off my game now. I still have to animate the logo mark as well, and that's the last thing that I have to do, okay? So let me turn this so I can actually see it, and I'm going to come up with just a simple way of pulling this on and off screen, okay? I'm going to make a track matte, essentially an alpha matte using a shape layer. Okay, I'm just going to put this over my word mark here and drop that there, and I'm going to, for the sake of organization, call that matte.
And I can lock that and turn that off. Right now, if I track matte, the two-word mark states into that, they're on screen. But if I move them down, they're off screen, right? So I can just do a simple animation that pulls that on, right? Anybody ever done anything like this before using track mattes? I use this a lot with type, and I talked about it yesterday in my other lesson. So I'm going to make a new null object here. Just move it up on top of those and call that word mark, okay? And I'm going to animate them using that word mark logo-- null. So I'm just going to select these and parent them to that, all right? And then press P. And because I'm fancy, I'm going to separate the dimensions. I know I only want this to move up and down. Great. So I'm going to-- Let's see. Let me find the other animation that I did. I want this to be parallel, so I'm going to make a Y position keyframe for that there. Go back to the beginning, and I'm just going to move this down. Okay. And so that it matches and because I'm that guy, I'm going to also ease these the way that I want.
All right, great. So now if we look back over here, we could see that this should do this, right? And because-- Oh, and if I actually put those in the Essential Graphics, which I didn't, we could see it over there too. So let me do that. Okay. Select my control, press E, find my word mark. Oh, sorry. Find-- Actually I got to put both of those in there. So find my Essential Graphics and I'll put my word mark state menu up in here, okay? And I'll take the Y position, and actually let me copy the keyframes as well, get out of the graph. Just click on this to copy those keyframes, and now I could drag this up there. And I'd probably call this something better like word mark animation, a word that I can never spell right. Okay, great. And now if I go over here, we will see that the template is essentially done, okay? I've got all the things that I promised that I would put in here, and I can still change all these things at the top level, which is very, very nice, okay? Let's actually just very quickly go back over here and review to make sure that I did everything correctly, all right? Did we translate all the brand assets flawlessly? Yes, we used Overlord, and we feel really good about that, okay? Do we have the ability to switch between four different-- actually five different logo mark states? Yes, we do. Very easily dropdown menu, okay? Those all animate identically. We could turn on or off the word mark, that's also animated. We have 100% brand accurate colors, all right? Everything except for this last little bit is done. Great, so I will show you how to do that now, okay? Hope everybody's very inspired and I do want to point out again that we can change all this around, I could change the timings of the word mark animation. As an animator, I still have control over these things. It's not like I'm just handing them this locked thing essentially. For example, the animator could choose to have this start up and then move down if that's the way he or she really saw this, okay? So they still have some control over this, but not the ability to change the things that you don't want them to, all right? So here we go. I'm not going to jump too far into this version anything because I think it should be obvious, but just in case it's not, when you make copies of this template that I just made, it's just this one layer and because of Essential Graphics, I can iterate on this and make different states of all these things now. I could change the animation timing. I could change the way it all looks and so on and so forth, right? Each one of these is now an independent thing that's not related to one another, even though they're technically the same exact thing, which is very nice for versioning. So let's just say that for this one over here, we're going to make a social media and it's 916 and we want this to be black and white, not have the logo mark on, okay? So let me turn off-- I'm sorry, the word mark. Mix those two things up. Okay. But I put this to the black and white state already, and I can just move this down here, pretend I'm working in a whole different comp, right? And scale this down to whatever size that I want and stick it down there, and then that might be done. Or you might notice that the J sticks over the edge of the precomp, so you could just get in here and press U, and then you could just adjust that if that's what you wanted to do. Sorry, that's the word mark.
This is my logo mark animation. So I could change this so the J doesn't stick off the side of my precomp there, but it still animates, and you could still make this loop if you knew how to do that, if you wanted that for your bug as well, right? Super simple. Or if I want to build an end page for commercial, right, and I want to do that 69 or whatever, you can use this to do that as well, all right? Let's just say we want the flat state. Okay, we want the word mark white, obviously, if it's going to be on a black background. So let me pull flat and white. I'd love a flat white right now, but I'll pull this up a little bit, right? And then, yeah, I've got that going. I could scale it down. That took me about five seconds to make, right? I mean, once this is set up, you can version it out super, super easily and save yourself a ton of time, all right? And it all still animates and those animations could still be adjusted, made longer or shorter, or faster or slower, or you could change the order of them, bunch of different things, all right? So that is basically my spiel for today. I have set up the template. Yeah, we're going to get to Q&A. We're going to get there. But let me first jump back over here before I forget, okay? And just say officially, thank you for being here, all right? Thank you for being at MAX. Thank you for coming to this lesson and listening to me. Thank you very much. Thank you.
I appreciate all of you, especially the people that know about null objects.
Here's my Instagram and portfolio. Yeah, take a photo of this. I break down some of my projects on my website if you're into that kind of thing, thank you. And also in here, let me just mention this slightly awkward, slightly uncomfortable thing that I want to mention here, which is that in here I have links to the classes that I teach online, which are not free. And right, in here I have affiliate links, okay? Because I'm a human, and what that means is if I've enticed you on my own efforts to take those classes, you should use those affiliate links because I get paid a bunch more for that, okay? So sorry to talk about teaching and money at the same time. I know that's an awkward thing. But also if money is an issue, I have free tutorials and a bunch of other previous MAX sessions that I've done in those links as well, so you can experience me as much as you want for free too, okay? Thank you so much. [Music]
