- Hi everybody.
This is Evan Abrams from the ECAbrams tutorial channel.
In this After Effects tutorial,
we're going to be making some curly bouncy paper.
It'll look kind of like the thing
that's on the screen right now.
It's perfect for lists or scrolls
or lists of scrolls, so just pay attention
up in that top corner where you see that curly part
of the paper kind of going boing when it comes up on screen
or moves around or leaves the frame.
It kind of shows us that this is really paper,
and it's kind of floopy and whatever.
Even if something is kind of rigid and geometric,
it should still kind of behave like we expect,
and that kind of behavior can really elevate your pieces.
So, let's tick this technique off the list,
and since I've made another pun, then it's time
to open up your After Effects and get it going.
All right, so, we could do everything in After Effects.
We totally could.
We could use the pen tool and the rectangle
and the ellipse tool, and we could draw
all of the assets we need right in After Effects.
And if you don't have Illustrator, you might wanna do that.
You can use the grid tool to make it precise and all
this stuff, but I prefer to draw things in Illustrator.
So we are in Illustrator.
If you have Illustrator, follow along.
This'll be great.
Illustrator has some great tools, for example,
the shape builder, that make this really easy.
So to start, I'm just gonna make a rectangle.
Wee! I'm making a rectangle.
I did it.
And then I'm gonna make some spirals.
I'm gonna just set this
to be the standard white and black thing,
and the spirals, let's do a radius of like 50,
decay of 80, segments of six, okey doke.
We end up with this nice, wonderful spiral,
and now we put the spiral over here.
Maybe we duplicate that,
making another spiral.
I'm duplicating by just holding down Alt when I drag things.
Pretty great, pretty quick.
And now I'm able to draw some geometry around this.
Like a rectangle starts at the top here,
and it goes down, you know, however far you like,
and then I need a rectangle that starts at the top
and ends sort of at the bottom of the spiral.
And I'm using the smart guides to kind of make this possible
so that I'm snapping to features that are out there.
Now I'm gonna make a rectangle that kind of goes
from the termination of this spiral
up to like the top of this inner thing here,
you know, the inner radius of that.
So let's see here.
How's that looking?
Eh, it's a little bit under.
Let's actually snap it then to...
There's an anchor mentioned there.
Let's snap it to that.
See if that's doing it.
Oh, yeah, that's flawless. Good.
And now the final piece I need
is gonna go from this rectangle to that rectangle.
So, we all of these terrible rectangles and spirals,
then you'd think, what a mess!
But what an excellent mess,
'cause now I can use the shape builder, Shift + M,
to add and subtract parts from each other
to make the things I'm interested in.
So, for example, I select this path,
I select this path, Shift + M,
and then I hold Alt or Option,
you know, the key on the keyboard,
and that gives me the minus version here.
And I go minus this, and then it leaves me with this shape.
So I can...
I don't know, so a shape can be.
It's gonna be like sort of a dark thing here.
Take the stroke off of it,
and I'm gonna move it to its own layer.
Let's make a new layer of this here.
I'm gonna call this Curl 3, because it's the third
and innermost curl that we're making.
And let's not look at it.
Let's see.
Now let's make the next one,
which is kind of in this space,
so I'm gonna take this, take this, M + Alt,
boop boop,
and I'm left with this wonderful thing.
We're gonna call that Curl 2,
and, you know, Curl 2 is similar to this curl,
except it's actually a little bit lighter.
Probably, probably marginally lighter, kind of like this.
Maybe it's a lot lighter like that.
And Curl 3 is actually under Curl 2.
And we don't need to look at those.
These last two things, you know, hittin' M, making this
go away, leaves us with this resultant piece here.
Let's put it on its own layer.
Very good.
And now it's got these two things to contend with,
so what its deal?
Is it darker or lighter?
Yeah, darker, probably.
So it goes like that.
Perfect.
Don't look at those.
The final thing we need is this page out here.
So let's select everything we got,
and now, rather than holding down Alt
to get the minus there,
we're gonna just add this, plus this, plus this,
plus this, plus this, is this,
minus this, minus this.
Cool. So that is the paper.
We just put this on its own layer, call that Paper,
and what's left over, a bunch of garbage we don't need.
So, we end up with, hopefully,
we get some curls, and we get some paper.
So, what's this one?
This one is curl, Curl 1.
Paper goes above all that,
and it should be probably brighter than most of them,
kinda like this.
Yeah, that looks correct.
So, we've pretty much got all the parts, right?
We just need to hit A here and get your direct selection
and just kind of draw these things into alignment,
get them out of the way, hide them.
And, there you go.
You get all the paper parts,
and I think that actually went pretty quickly.
You know, if I had to say, that was pretty fast.
I'm doing a tutorial and I have to talk through all of this,
but I think that was pretty fast,
or you can go into After Effects and draw it all.
It's up to you.
So we're gonna save this,
save it as something you can find later.
We're gonna go into After Effects, and we import that.
You're ready to go.
Import it as a composition.
retain layer size,
'cause then you can go into the composition.
You can enjoy these things
that are retaining the layer size.
And we're going to select them,
right-click, create shapes from the vector layers.
Take all the old stuff.
Make it shy, so shy that we don't get to see it, bye.
And we're ready to proceed.
The first thing we need to do
is add some more stuff in here.
Let's get a new solid.
Wee!
That's a fine color.
Okay.
Put it below everything.
It's a background.
I'm gonna make a new null object.
Yay, done.
And we're gonna parent things to each other.
We're sort of setting this up to be a kind of character,
so paper as a character.
It's kind of a boring, kind of a one-dimensional character.
All right, that's enough.
The character, though, is important, that analogy.
Just the same way if you had a hand connected to a forearm
to a bicep to a shoulder
or a foot to the leg to the hips,
this is the same kind of chain that we want.
The innermost curl connected to the next curl
connected to the next one connected to the next thing,
and then connected to something that controls that.
And that is because, as we start to scale these,
we want that to transfer into the rest of the stuff
so that it all stays together and we still have individual
control over each of the things.
Part of setting up these relationships, though,
is making sure the anchor points are in the right spot.
All right.
So if these are all meant to flow together,
the anchor points should be where they logically intersect.
And in this case, we wanna use the pan behind tool,
go to Curl 1, and move that anchor point to this spot here
where the paper ends, right,
and that curl begins.
So then when we go to Curl 2,
that anchor point is coming in down here,
where this ends and it begins,
and same with this last part
where that curl ends and this one begins.
I'm holding down Command here,
just so that it snaps to features, and on the paper here,
I wanna snap to where its final point
is when things stop being a straight line
and they start being a curved line,
and that's gonna be right around here.
Now I'm just gonna call up the rulers so I can find
that real easily when I hit the pan behind tool.
Right there, brilliant.
And that's because if I wanted to, say,
scale this up and down, you know, that's not very,
that's not very useful for the bottom edge here,
but if I did need to scale it up and down,
I wouldn't want everything collapsing kind of weirdly.
So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna take this.
I'm gonna double-click down here and grab this
and pull it down so should we need to scale this,
we're not going to see the bottom of it when it scales up.
It's just not gonna happen,
'cause I don't get down like that.
So, I'm looking after the future me with this kind of stuff.
The paper is then parented to the null
so that I can scale the paper, but I can also put things
on the paper when it's moving up and down that don't scale.
'Cause I'm using the scale to make this curve do stuff,
I'm not interesting in scaling stuff that I put on there.
Like, if I was to put some text in there, like,
PAPER IS FUN, if I were to put that out there,
maybe stretch that up, wee!
Paper is fun!
I would want that parented to the null,
so if I started messing around with the paper,
that doesn't get messed up, all right?
But if I go like this, PAPER IS FUN is still moving.
So, I can't tell you paper is fun
if we don't do something fun with it.
We're gonna first make the position of this null change.
So I'm going to set a key frame going into the position here
and move ahead, like, nine frames, set a key frame there,
move ahead eight key frames from that, set another one,
and, sorry, just eight frames.
They're not all key frames.
So these are just regular frames.
Now, here I am on frame 17, I guess,
and this is the end.
This is where I want it to come to rest.
Where I want it to start is off the screen,
goodbye, and it's gone.
Here at the point in the middle,
I would like it to be up a little bit too high.
Oops.
Went up too high.
It happens.
When you start doing that, though,
you can kind of this little dotted line.
What's that's gonna do is it's gonna cause it
to go up too high and then come back down.
That's because After Effects seems to think
that when I do these things, the key frame interpolation
of the spacial interpolation here should be Auto Bezier.
I don't think so.
It should be Linear.
Let's just change that.
Okay.
So you just select your key frames, right-click,
interpolate, fix it up.
Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to start
fixing up this motion, 'cause this is not good.
That is lame.
That is some lame motion.
And some people use scripts or panels or something.
I use the graph editor, 'cause I'm old school like that,
and I'm just going to take those key frames
and we're gonna easy-ease them.
You can hit F9, you can do that.
Except for the first one.
I think the first one should probably,
it can remain linear like that,
and I'm just gonna pull this influence handle here,
which makes it accelerate here at the start,
and then boom, bob.
So kind of like this.
And what this is showing us,
since we're looking at a speed graph.
You might be looking at a value graph.
Change it to look at a speed graph.
It's telling us that it's going super fast.
It's fastest right here.
If this paper is going fast,
shouldn't this curly bit be doing something?
I don't think it would just be rigidly hanging out there.
No way.
We didn't go through all this work
to not do something with it.
So, hit S, call up the scale of all these things.
If you've set things up the way we have,
this is gonna work perfectly.
If not, it's gonna fall apart like a house of...
Usher?
I don't know.
I don't really know what that's a reference to.
So, in the scale, call up that property by hitting S.
Unlink from each other,
and then, here where it's going at its fastest,
we know we wanna key frame there,
but we also know that in the future,
we want this to return to 100%.
So let's push those key frames in the future.
Save 'em for later.
Set some new key frames here, though,
and let's get to it.
And what we're gonna do is we're gonna take this
and we're gonna stretch this out a little bit.
So maybe stretch it out, I don't know, 120, 130, 140 even?
Ooh, boy, that's getting crazy.
If it's stretching down like that,
maybe it wants to squish in a little bit like that
so the curve is getting a little bit narrower,
but in the future, in the future time,
it's not going to be long.
It's going to be squished.
It's going to be squished up like this,
and maybe pulled out like that.
So it's gonna be squished together.
And then it'll return to normal sometime.
But what's gonna happen,
and we're just working with the outer part for now,
is it's going to come up,
and I think it's gonna keep squishing as it comes up,
so even though it's vertically stopped moving,
let's keep it going.
Let's keep it squishing.
All right.
And we're gonna just ease all of these.
That'll make it nice and smooth.
It's gonna come up, squish,
and then it's gonna relax down.
It should relax down a little bit less.
All right.
So a little bit further in the future.
So it stops moving, and then one, two,
and then it's at its apex,
and the paper is already coming back down,
and so one, two, three, four maybe?
Yeah, that works.
So it's coming up,
and it's kind of got some momentum behind it.
And that's pretty good, right?
I mean, you've got to admit, it's better than it was before.
Sure, why not.
It's got a little bit of this stuff poking out over here,
and that's easy to fix up.
That's just pads, man.
You can just go in there,
you can grab those pads,
and then we'll never see those again.
Easy like that.
So if that happens, that's what you do.
But let's say that if this is stretching that way,
wouldn't it be kind of unraveling this a little bit?
So, maybe what we would do is we could have this thing here
kind of squishing down a little bit, maybe.
Maybe squishing down and thinning a little bit.
And we can have this thing kind of squishing up,
'cause we're taking that away.
This material is now being pulled back this way,
so this should be getting shorter.
So it's like this is hanging down,
and it's pulling, widening this gap here.
That makes sense, right?
I'm not crazy.
But then when it goes up to the top, you know,
this should be bouncing back up, bounce.
So scale it, bounce, up like that,
widening perhaps, perhaps widening.
I don't know.
I don't know, maybe not.
And this part here
should be sort of widening as well,
should be widening out,
and maybe expanding down a little bit.
I don't know, should be doing something.
It should be doing something,
before returning to 100% like that.
So let's have a look at how this goes.
This should be moved into the future.
This should be moved into the future a little bit as well,
'cause the motion has to come around,
you know, the mountain when she comes,
so this'll happen,
and then this one'll happen, and then this one'll happen.
And if we go even further into the future,
then that should be delayed even more.
This should take twice as long.
This should take twice as long again.
So we'll have a look at how that's coming through,
kind of like that.
Eh, it's kind of causing an unfortunate
kind of fattening up at the top,
like it's made out of jello or something.
So maybe we just shrink that down a little bit,
and this one here could stand
to be a little bit less extreme.
Come on.
Reign it in, all right.
Boom.
But you get the idea,
that this is...
Yeah, that still is way too extreme, right?
And a lot of that could be also down to the curves
that are now looking totally wacky.
So you'll wanna reign those in as well.
Let's have another look at that.
Yeah, still pretty wacky, if I had to say.
So let's kind of just bring this back a little bit closer
to where it needs to be, somewhere in like the 90s.
Kind of like that.
Let's have a little peruse.
Awesome.
So yeah, now let's get that going.
Then this goes.
This is coming up, and it's billowing up at the top.
You could make the argument that maybe there's some airflow
or there's some whatever, but stuff is happening.
Stuff is happening, and you're able to control all of it.
If it's thick paper, if it's thin paper,
if it's heavy paper, if it's light paper,
that's gonna change what you're gonna be doing with this,
but the general idea is you want the weight of it,
you wanna feel that weight.
when it's coming up, you want the audience to think
there's something weighty going on,
and it'll take some tweaks to make that happen.
But, I'll tell you this.
You have to keep it consistent.
So, if, when the paper is moving like this,
it's squishing and flooping all over the place,
if someone kind of pokes the paper,
if someone makes a check mark on the paper,
if someone shifts the paper,
then we need to translate that into other things.
That means, if I say, you know,
do a little bump to the paper here.
Let's say I do a little bump, kind of like this
where it goes bump, like maybe someone's
making a check mark on the paper,
then I should have things scale.
Starting from the outside, it should scale, you know,
to stretch down, and then it should boing back up,
and then it should return.
Kind of like that, ease 'em up,
so that if it goes boom, it goes boing.
So if it gets poked, it bounces.
It's important to maintain your consistency
throughout the piece that,
if you're telling the audience,
this is the sort of thing that bounces,
then make sure that it's consistent throughout,
unlike this tutorial, which has been
kind of hit or miss, I guess.
(trip-hop beat with distorted vocals)
So that'll do it.
If you've had trouble with this tutorial,
please, let me know in the comments
and I'll try to get you through it,
and if you're really stuck,
you can download the project file from evanabrams.com.
Links to that are in the description.
And also in the description,
links to @ECAbrams on Twitter, that's me,
and the Facebook page.
If you have questions about After Effects,
motion graphics in general, ask them on there.
Suggestions for new tutorials.
I'm always looking for more things
that people are actually interested in,
and if you don't wanna wait,
check out some of the tutorials
we currently have on the channel.
There are a bunch of them,
and there should be some things popped up around here
that you can enjoy checking out right now.
So, all that being said,
I've been Evan Abrams.
I hope this has been a good experience for you,
and if you subscribe to the channel,
then I'll see you around the internet.
Thanks a lot, and have a great day.