Effect experiment in After Effects

(intro jingle) - Welcome to this special episode of Video Post-production Weekly. Over the past few month, we've accumulated together important knowledge about post-production, and we thought that this is the time to put it to the test. And we'll do it by introducing a mograph challenge that we can critique in our live stream. So the first challenge will be a short experiment in After Effects. The brief is quite simple. You should use up to three built-in effects, which are not commonly used to create an interesting background animation. What do I mean by this? The idea here is to generate something from nothing, using rare effect combination and come up with a unique result. Now, I urge you not to use common effects, like fractal noise or turbulent noise, that we've already seen a million times. Try to avoid the popular 4-color gradient effect or the radial waves one, and go with effects you never used before. The purpose here is to ignite your creativity by limiting you to only three effect and to help you get more acquainted with the unfamiliar parts of After Effects. To help you get started and show you what we are expecting to see, here are two examples of effect combinations that I came up with. So this is the first one. First I'm going to play it for you. You can see that we have some animating cells that pause for a moment. And we can, of course, inject some graphics here and there. Now, the way that I did it is by starting with the cell pattern effect, then adding the color offset, and then finally I'm using Colorama. So this is the first effect on its own. And you can get a sense that I'm using the Pillow settings here, and I'm also animating the invert option. This is what's causing this flickering. And of course I can press U so you can get a sense of the keyframes I'm using here. I'm animating the evolution. And on top of it, I'm using the CC color offset, which helps to create this kind of a colorful background. And then I'm returning to the black-and-white version. And just to make it look as if it was designed with the same color scheme, I'm adding the Colorama effect, and under the output cycle I'm using the granite preset. So, this is the result. Another example here is this wavy lines, which are changing their colors. And this one is made with the Venetian Blinds effect, the Wave Warp, which is animating on its own, and then an instance of the color balance, in parenthesis H L S. So again, I'll switch off the visibility of the two effects so you can see this is what the Venetian Blinds are doing, just orbiting around the screen using this direction animation. I'm setting the transition completion to 50%, and then by adding the Wave Warp effect and making sure to pin all the edges to the corners, I can create this very interesting animation. So again, I changed the direction here, played with the wave height and width, and just changed the default speed to be a little bit slower. And to colorize the entire thing, because right now I'm using this deep cyan solid layer and the black bars are the result of the Venetian Blinds, so to colorize everything, I'm adding this color balance effect and just shifting the hue over time. So you can do this challenge on your own, but we would love to see what you can come up with and also offer our 2 cents as a critique. So please consider sharing your results with us in our live stream, that shadows this show every couple of weeks. You can follow Nick's LinkedIn profile or mine to see when the next show is airing and join us there with your submissions. Good luck and see you soon.