hi I'm Ben Marriott I make weekly motion design tutorials and this week we're gonna
talk through how I made that 2d cell looking transition effect all in After
Effects let's begin
let's start a new comp called spread and we've got our
transparency on and the first thing we're gonna do is draw a little blob in
the middle so let's turn our title action safe on to get a little crosshair
so we know where the middle is and zoom in a bit and with that pen tool selected
I've got it on no fill and then on a sort of very dark gray stroke set to 6 pixels
we're just going to draw a rough sort of
blobby shape in the middle there we go I'm gonna select the time line down here
or anywhere just to click off of that shape and then I'm going to draw another
shape which will create a new shape layer and I'm just gonna draw around
that shape again in another rough sort of blobby fashion and from here you can
move the anchor point to sort of you know finesse the shape a bit to your
your liking because this is you know gonna be such a loose sort of look that
we're after I'm not gonna worry too much about that and then I'm gonna repeat
that process again and each time just drawing fairly close to the original
shape and you know not being too precious to follow the original curves
in that shape either just sort of get it getting a rough shape on there all right
and I'm gonna continue to do this until we've reached the whole edge of our
frame it won't take that long I think this will take probably less than 15
minutes but lets them let's let's meet back here in that time
all right now I'm gonna draw one last layout which is just gonna cover the
complete composition all right now they didn't take too long but it was very
tedious perfect time to you know put on a podcast or audiobook or little Mars X
on repeat now I'm just gonna go through and make sure if there's any areas in
here that I want to clean up maybe this area down here has just a little too
straight so I'm just gonna make some slight adjustments to that but otherwise
I think I'm pretty happy all right now we're happy with all our shapes
let's sequence them so we can see them animating to do that I'm going to select
them all with control a and move my playhead to the second frame calls all
to option and click the right square bracket and that's going to trim them
all to play just two frames in that sequencer you want to select the one you
want first in the sequence which in our case is the bottom one hold shift click
the top one right click and select keyframe assistant sequence layers and
click OK and that's gonna play them and if we
play that back look at that got our animation going might need to extend our comp
a little bit as well there we are and for our last frame I'm gonna spread that
out a few more frames and let's trim that comp to that length there we are now
this is the point where you want to adjust any frames you have if it's going
too slow you can delete some frames if you don't like some of the shapes you
can get rid of those but I'm pretty happy with this for now so I'm gonna
select all of our frames with the ctrl a and I'm going to select that palette
over here that I've already created in Illustrator and then select the fill on
these select the eyedropper and I'm just gonna hover over till we get this dark
orange perfect and I've got this in orange actually let's rename
its comp to calm spread orange one duplicate it with command D we'll do
that twice so we got orange one orange two and orange three and I'm gonna
select orange 2 select them all choose that palette select that lighter orange
there we are and do that for the third one as well
all right now with those three comps selected I'm gonna drag them down to a
new composition window click OK and that's going to create a new composition
with all of those inside let's go through and recolor these to make it a
bit clearer now we're gonna sequence these layers but I think this time it's
really best to do it manually so when I drag this one 4 frames across same
with this one nothing playback we should be able to
see the basics our animation look at that alright starting to take shape
you know let's duplicate these three layers by selecting them press command
D or command right bracket to bring them all up and then I'm going to shift them
across four frames so now it repeats more do Matt do that one more time with
them all selected again and I'm going to do that one more time and extend the
comp a little bit as well now we've got pretty much the bulk of our animation
made now we could have sequenced our layers using the keyframe resistant
sequence layers but because we have these in a very specific order of the
different colors thought it'll be easier to do them manually without reshuffling and it
doesn't really take that long so now that we've got this sort of psychedelic
tunnel sort of opening we want the end to be transparent so to do that I'm
going to duplicate this last layer I'm gonna color that a different color and call
that spread end I'll change its blending mode to stencil
alpha which is just going to play like an alpha matte for all the layers there we
are notice we don't have a stroke on this
last shape here so to do that I'm just going to duplicate another one of these
comps over here call it spread stroke inside that and
select everything hold alt and just click on fill until we get no fill and
then back in our transition I'm gonna add that stroke layer on top over here
there we go and that these two comps we can drag them anywhere to close off the
comp a little earlier so if we drag them across here that's just going to close
up and eat all I composition there where we have it you can even drag them
right up to the front here to where the second composition starts and then you
just get this one ring of animation happening and you can even use that for
some sort of like energy blast or something if someone punches or makes an
impact radiating outwards but for us I think we
want to have at least one frame where the whole composition is filled with
this sort of animation which should be around here
there we are and I'll just trim these comps at the back here and now if we play it
the transition fills up the screen and then wipes it away now you can also set
this up by only using one comp instead of these three and to do that you could
make one comp and let's just call this
black white and in that comp you keep everything a white fill and a completely
black stroke not that dark gray and then in a new comp with that layer you
duplicate it a few times and then you can add the tint effects
from over here in the effects presets panel and then map the white or whatever
color you want copy that effect apply it to another
layer and then you can change the color from here as well
and there you go but the benefit of using a separate comp for each color is that we
can add something like a texture to that comp so that to preserve underlying
transparency and now you've got a texture over all that comp let's
change its colors with the curves bump that up quite a bit gets a nice contrast
let's invert that as well and we're gonna change the blending mode to
multiply there we are and when we go back into our transition comp you'll see
that all instances of that color have a texture applied which can give a neat
look if you want to apply that to all the different layers but let's turn that
off for now now let's trim this transition comp to where everything is now
transparent which is here press n on our keyboard right click trim comp to work
area now if you've got an edit where you've got two pieces of footage that
you want to transition between you can simply drag that transition over your
comp play it back your this nice little psychedelic transition the project for
this is available for download down in the description if you've used anything
you've learned in this tutorial please tag me on instagram at ben_marriott_
so I can take a look and to give you lots of compliments I
can't wait to see all you make please let me know down in the comments what
else you'd like to see from this channel would you like some more tutorials some
more process videos a breakdown of the tools I use I'd love to know and don't
forget to subscribe share hit that Bell icon and like I'll see you next week