I'm going to break down the animation techniques and copious amount of effects I used to create
this animation and how to embrace limitations in order to create that warm vintage feel,
I found this tattoo design among some of my sketches from over a year ago and thought
well this is a bit dumb let's take this idea and give it a much grander animation than it deserves
I created the main artwork in procreate to keep with the Retro aesthetic I knew animating the door
opening frame by frame would be my best option to make it look convincing and because frame by frame
animation is more time consuming I was conscious to keep the palette really restricted on the
fridge to just three colors and let a bit of brush texture do the talking for the detail I animated
the door opening in calipeg my favorite animation app on the iPad I first set up some guides for the
Arc of the door and then roughly sketched in how the door would open there's two frames of
anticipation of the door being pressed in then six frames of it opening and easing into the
final position where the draw drawings get closer together as it slows down to the final pose and
this is all at 12 frames per second or animating on twos in the old tongue and then it was just
a process of coloring the sides for the cleanup I did them on separate layers and that probably
wasn't necessary but as they say better to have layered and lost than never to have layered at
all I also did a shadow of the door on the inside of the fridge to add to the illusion and the door
handle which was only three drawings but for one frame I did adjust the shadow so it would be more
accurate which can make or break a freezer door animation so do be careful last of all I animated
the star sparkling just getting bigger and smaller then I imported all of the animation and procreate
layers into After Effects first I animated the skull coming out of the freezer just with position
and I obscured the bottom half just using an alpha mounted drawn out of a shape layer then I animated
the skull to have a bit more of a fluid bouncing motion where it moves up a little further than
it needs to and settles after a few subtle bounces this is all done with a lot of tweaking inside the
graph editor and I added some offset rotation to the jaw as well then sometime a little bit
later I abandoned this animation because it just looked too fluid and well too after effectsi so I
went for a much simpler more ominous raising of the skull straight out of the freezer it's much
less flashy but I think it's got a bit more charm to it that's reminiscent of some of the limited
animation techniques that compositing tools used in the first motion graphic elements back in the
70s and 80s now for the background I tried some fancy 3D rendered space stock footage but that
didn't work this needed to look authentically vintage without actually him being that so I
rated NASA's website for some real space picks the real candid shots of stars in their natural
environment not these obvious fake ones I settled on this one and then gave that back background
image a subtle scaled down animation now to the effects and I am going to add all of the final
effects in this comp to take this to this now the first effect we're going to add is a bit
of drop shadow to all of the separate animated elements here to the skull to the fridge and
the stars now this might seem a bit out there but I do have a sound logical explanation for
it before digital animation most animation was done on transparent Celluloid sheets or cells
and each rain was layered over a background and those cellular sheets were thick enough that the
paint and ink on them left a shadow and you can see that clearly in older cartoons if you look
closely so I'm going to make these ones a little bit subtler at 25 copy and paste that onto the
jaw and the stars and fridge as well now on its own this may not do much but it's this and many
other subtler touches that altogether will really help to sell this animation that it wasn't done
digitally when in fact every step of the way it is next I am going to drop a looping texture over
everything this is one that I use all the time and I have a separate tutorial for how to create
your own ones here we're going to add a curves effect to just darken it a touch we're going to
set its blending mode to screen certainly the white show and drop its transparency to 50 so
now there's just these tiny subtle specks that mimic some damage to the film or Magnetic Tape
or whatever we're pretending this animation was printed on now I love these traditional animation
techniques and looks but certainly not exclusively modern digital looking animation is equally as
incredible and if you want to see just what's possible at The Cutting Edge of Animation just
in your browser you want to check out this video sponsor Rive is an amazing browser-based design
and animation tool but what really separates it is that you can use it to build interactive Motion
Graphics that transition and mix animations based on events and user interactions those
interactive Graphics can run on just about any platform you'd need them to one of the biggest
drawers to arrive is its state machine which is a really into way to create those interactions you
can create different states of the animation and link up what interactions will trigger those to
change in this really intuitive flowchart here's an example by JC tune we've got a couple of states
of Animation where it's often idle and then also blinking and here it is in the state machine we
can see to transition between them the condition is set where the mouse is pressed or not and we
can click to see it progress through each of those animations in real time and in this one
we have three walk Cycles beginner intermediate and expert and each one is just one button press
that morphs between them all which is really satisfying and surprisingly clear from the state
machine flowchart you can find a lot of animations like this in the Rive Community where you can also
publish your own and if you like what you see you can click open and arrive and see exactly
how it was put together try it out for free at revive.app there's a link in the description and
from here we have very good news all the remaining effects are on a single adjustment layer we'll pop
that on top of everything and we're going to rename that to effect because we always label
our layers and you should be warned this is a 4K comp so you might need to tone down some
of these effects if you're doing it in a 1080p comp now the first set of effects we're going
to add I showed can be used together in my last video on blurs which is a blur and sharpen combo
so we're going to add a gaussian blur and give it about an 8 pixel blur pretty subtle and then
we're going to add sharpen and sharpen it up to around 300 until it's essentially undoing that
blur and as the sharpen is undoing that blur we get some really interesting artifacts left
on the image there are some changes to the color and brightness around the edges of objects which
is reminiscent of some old screens and we're still keeping this pretty subtle because we've
got a few effects to go and the next effect we are going to add is deep glow and yes this is a
paid plug-in but you can replicate this with just after effects regular glow stacked on top of one
another increasing the radius as you go but deep glow is a reasonably priced plugin that I find
a lot of use for and it just saves me a lot of time again there'll be a link in the description
now we need this subtle because right now it is anything but so let's reduce the radius from 500
down to 250 and let's decrease the exposure from one to around 0.4 there now we can at least make
out what's going on and this is still lighting ending up our image a lot so what I like to do
is to add a curves effect and place that above our deep glow in the effects stack and then just drag
down the white values to essentially counteract the brightness that our glow is giving somewhere
around here now you will need to continually adjust your curves and maybe your exposure to
find a balance that works but I was really pleased with how well this worked I love a
soft diffused blooming look and this is great for that without just blowing out all your highlights
now you can try moving the curves below the Deep glow effect so it will darken it after the glow is
applied they're kind of really mutes the image which actually doesn't look too bad but maybe
it's a bit too much for what we want so let's put the curves back above the Deep glow and you
know what let's not be afraid let's add another curves again after the Deep glow and just drag
the highlights down a touch and of course you can tweak these and adjust these to find a look
that suits what you want and we're also going to enable the chromatic aberration on deep glow
by checking it here chromatic aberration is where the color channels split slightly and we get some
colorful fringes on the edges of shapes now if you're not using deep glow I've got a tutorial
on how to create chromatic aberration just using stock afx2 and my number one tip for chromatic
aberration is that a subtle touch is essential too often I see it being used and feel like I
need those blue and red 3D glasses to actually see what's going on so I'm going to take the
amount down to 0.15 and that is much much subtler here's it off and here's it on we just want to see
a slight bit of color in these edges with a lot of these effects we really just want to feel what
they're giving to the image rather than seeing it and registering consciously that oh this image is
having its color channels split or this is being blurred and sharpened we want them to be subtle
enough that whoever's watching this isn't going to be able to sort of break them down instantly
as they're watching it they're just going to feel oh this looks warm and vintage this effect is all
about this small touches there's design and animation decisions that collectively build
up to a believable result not just one effect that you can lather on thickly and call it done
now I've got a lot of effects here so I'm going to close them all down so we can have some more space
here now we're going to add one of my favorite techniques which you may well have seen me use
before we're just going to add a tiny subtle shape to the whole composition and we're going
to do that by adding the transform effect and that gives us in our effects panel all of our favorite
transform properties Anchor Point position scale rotation all the hits and we essentially just want
to shake its position property a little bit so we are going to add a wiggle expression so let's
alter option click the stopwatch next to position which will bring up our expression window here
and we're just going to type in wiggle and then in parentheses six comma two and those numbers
are the frequency and the amplitude so six times a second it is going to move up to 2 pixels and now
there's just the tiniest subtler Shake That kind of mimics a slightly loose film reel or a playhead
in a VCR again this is a 4K comp you might want to take the wiggle position down to a one if you're
doing it in a 1080p comp and this is just one more thing to remove that digital Sheen from the
overall image and because this is moving around the whole composition you might get a one pixel
thick black Edge at the top or bottom of your comp so we can just increase the scale to 101 and that
should be fine and then we are going to add some film grain which we're going to do with noise hls
Auto we're going to set the noise type to grain let's actually zoom in quite a bit here so we can
really see it happening let's put the lightness to five which is pretty subtle considering let's
move the green size up to two and the animation speed down to 12. so here it is on here it is off
and now let's see it in action and with all these effects it will take a while to Ram preview so you
might need to pop out and grab a cup of Earl Gray here it is close up and zoomed out to 100 as well
grain is so nice it's just that icing on the cake and the very last thing which might be the
most important is to add some suitably Icy synth jams to really set the mood
and if we toggle this effects adjustment layer on and off we can really see what a big difference
those make honestly I don't mind how it looks before but all of these effects together really
work to bring that vintage retro animation feel and I can't emphasize this enough these
effects work best if you are subtle with them and adjust them to suit your subject matter
but if you want to start by just grabbing these effects straight out of my project you
can you can download this project file for free using a link in the description and if you find
yourself with an unquenchable thirst for more motion techniques I have got an advanced motion
design course with a whole lesson dedicated to just using effects breaking down effects you see
to build your own recipes and effect Stacks to create your own unique results a link to
all of that is in the description thanks for watching I'll see you in the next one
foreign