If you don't know where to start with motion graphics, check out my column "Quick Tip."  I'll show you how to create some awesome effects using Adobe Creative Suite and other tools.

Hey, everyone! I got a quick lesson on how to create the glitch effect, which you might have seen in cyberpunk movies like Ghost in the Shell.

Sure, the decision to cast Scarlet Johansson as Major Kusanagi was a bit iffy but we can still appreciate the movie's great visual effects, right?

Here we go, friends.

1. PREPARE YOUR LOGO AND STOCK FOOTAGE
The first thing you will need to do is to import your logo and glitched-out stock footage. Nothing too hard.

If you’d like to use the same assets as this lesson, you can download the velociraptor vector image through Pixabay and the stock footage through Shutterstock.

2. USE THE DISPLACEMENT MAP EFFECT
Import both the logo and the stock footage into Adobe After Effects, and drag them both onto the timeline.

You can hide and mute the stock footage, labelled "Glitch.mp4" in the image above, using the eye and speaker icons to the left of the layer. 

You will then want to create a new Adjustment Layer by clicking Layer > New > Adjustment Layer in the top menu bar. A new layer will appear in your timeline, which will be labelled "Distort adjustment layer 1" for this lesson.

Highlight "Distort adjustment layer 1" and add the Displacement Map effect by clicking Effect > Distort > Displacement Map ​in the top menu bar.

Highlight "Distort adjustment layer 1" in your timeline and you can see its Displacement Map options in the Effects Controls panel. Click on the drop-down menu next to the Displacement Map Layer option and select "Glitch.mp4" and change Displacement Map Behavior to Stretch Map to Fit.

When you preview your animation, it should look something like this.

You can see a little bit of that glitch effect, but you can do more to make it look even more random.

Duplicate "Distort adjustment layer 1" at least two times. Resize those layers to different lengths and place them at different points in your timeline, as shown below. 

Go into the Effects Control panel and mess around with the Max Horizontal Displacement and the Max Vertical Displacement for each of the adjustment layers. You can eyeball what the effects look like in your preview window.

3. CREATE A COLOR SPLIT EFFECT
The velociraptor vector image now has a wiggly effect, but what if we want to distort its colors?

To do that, you need to duplicate your velociraptor image twice. Rename the three layers — that includes the original layer — as "Green dinosaur," "Blue dinosaur" and "Red dinosaur."

Once you're done, set the Mode for the top two dinosaur layers to Screen. You can find this option in the timeline to the right of your layer's name under the Mode column.

You then want to create a Null Object, which will be labelled "Color Split" for this lesson. Highlight it in the timeline and create a slider for it by clicking Effect > Expression Controls > Slider Control.

Lock the Effects Control for this layer by clicking on the lock icon at the top of that panel, as shown below. This will allow you to see the Effects Control for your "Color Split" layer even if you select another layer.

Highlight one of the dinosaur layers — let's use the "Red dinosaur" layer — and open up its Position options by pressing P. 

Hold the Alt key and click on the stopwatch icon next to the Position option. This will bring up an Expression Control ​entry box, where you can type in some code. 

​It looks a little intimidating, but it'll be worth it. Trust me.

Type in "wiggle(10," in the Expression Control​, but don't press Enter just yet. Click and drag the pick whip tool — that's the little swirl icon under the Position option shown above — to the stopwatch icon next under Slide Control in the Effects Control ​panel. Close out the code with a round bracket or ")."

The code in your Expression Control ​should now look something like this.

Press enter and you will now have an adjustable slider for how much the red layer will wiggle throughout the animation. Mess around with it and set down several keyframes with different values throughout your animation.

It should look something like this now.

4. CREATE A BAD TV EFFECT
It looks good, but there's even more you can do make it look glitchy.

Create another Adjustment Layer and label it "Glitch 1" (at this point, I'm running out of things to call these different layers). Highlight it and select the Bad TV 3 - weak effect.

Selecting this option will give that layer four different effects, including Wave Warp, Color Balance (HLS), Noise and Venetian Blinds. Play around with these different options to create the glitchy effect you like.

With the "Glitch 1" layer highlighted, click on the Pen Tool — that's the one that looks like the tip of a pen — in the menu bar at the top of your Adobe After Effects window.

Use that tool to draw a Mask, as shown in the image above. Only the contents within the Mask you drew over the adjustment layer will be shown.

Duplicate "Glitch 1" a few times. Reshape the Mask for each of those layers to be at different angles. 

Resize the layers to different lengths and position them at random times throughout the timeline, much like what we did before. Once you're done, your composition should look something like this.

I'd say that's an awesome glitched-out velociraptor. Now go forth and find more stuff to digitally disintegrate!

If you don't know where to start with motion graphics, check out my column "Quick Tip."  I'll show you how to create some awesome effects using Adobe Creative Suite and other tools.

I'm a big fan of Laika's stop-motion films, especially 2016's "Kubo and the Two Strings." You have to respect how much time those animators take in creating each puppet and posing them in front of a camera.

If you're not working with physical puppets, there's a less painful way of animating characters in Adobe After Effects. It's through character rigging, which is the process of creating a skeletal frame for your characters so they can be easily manipulated later on.

You'll learn how to rig characters in Adobe After Effects using DUIK, a free plugin that allows you to easily animate movement.

​If you’ve gone through my previous lesson on the 2.5D effect, you might ask “why should we bother using DUIK when we have Puppet Pin tool in Adobe After Effects?”

That’s because DUIK can build a bone structure for your character and emulate the natural movement of limbs. It’ll make more sense as we go through this lesson.

1. DESIGN YOUR CHARACTER

​The first thing you need to do is create your character. I use Adobe Illustrator to design my characters because it can scale my illustrations without any loss in quality.

Make sure each of your character’s limbs and features — think hands and feet, eyes and noses — are in separate layers. Doing so will make them easier to manipulate in Adobe After Effects.

I downloaded this ready-made character from Shutterstock for this lesson. Let’s call him Joe.

Each of Joe’s features can be articulated individually in Adobe Illustrator. He's only going to walk in this lesson, so I’ve created layers for his upper body and each of his legs and feet.

2. IMPORT YOUR CHARACTER

Each of your layers should appear as separate Adobe Illustrator files when you import your character into Adobe After Effects. Drag these onto your timeline and arrange them.

3. CREATING BONES FOR YOUR CHARACTER

Click on the Puppet Pin tool in the toolbar at the top of your Adobe After Effects window. It’s the one that looks like — duh — a pin. In the Project window, click on the leg to place Puppet Pins. You'll need to set three down for the butt, knee and ankle as shown in the image below.

Twirl down that leg's layer and open up the Effects option, then the Puppet option, then the Mesh 1 option and then the Deform option. The three Puppet Pins you set down earlier should appear here.

Highlight those Puppet Pins and select Bones in the DUIK window. This should create three Null objects for each pin. Rename these objects to butt, knee and ankle.

You need to create Null objects for these pins so you can parent them to each other. Under the Parent column, make the ankle object the parent of the knee object and the knee object the parent of the butt object.

4. CREATING A CONTROLLER FOR YOUR CHARACTER’S LIMB

​The next step involves creating another Null object you can use to manipulate the leg without it contorting into weird, unnatural shapes.

Highlight the ankle null object and click Controllers in the DUIK window. Click Create in the window that appears, and it should create a controller you can move around to manipulate the ankle. It’ll appear as a white circle with arrows above the ankle in your project window, as shown in the image above.

5. ANIMATING THE WALK CYCLE OF YOUR CHARACTER

​Remember the Solo option I talked about earlier? Use that to make the controllers the only visible layers in your timeline.

Open up the Position options for each of these controllers and begin setting down keyframes. You can also click and drag on the circle controller markers in the Project window to change the positions of the legs and feet.

It can be a bit confusing at first getting a walk cycle that looks natural. I recommend looking up “walk cycle” in any image search engine for reference.

Remember that it’s not as simple as moving your character’s foot from Point A to Point B. If you do that, your character will just be sliding their feet back and forth.

Take a look at Joe. Joe needs to lift his feet up before he can set it down in front of him. Animate your character with that in mind.

Once you render it out, your graphic should look something like this.

That's all there is to building a bone structure for your character using DUIK. I recommend rigging your character's arms and upper body as well, so that she or he doesn't look as stiff as Joe does in the animation above.

There you have it! It's nothing compared to what Laika's done with their films but, for the beginner animator, this is a good place to start.

I'll be back again in two weeks for another lesson. Until then, have fun animating!

If you don't know where to start with motion graphics, check out my column "Quick Tip."  I'll show you how to create some awesome effects using Adobe Creative Suite and other tools.

There are two ways to slap an image or title on a wall in post production. You can either manually set down a million keyframes, adjusting its position and orientation at every fraction of a second, or get Adobe After Effects to do the hard work for you.

It might remind you of how we attached pictures and words to moving objects using the Tracker tool in a previous "Quick Tip." 

What makes this lesson different is that we will use Track Camera instead of Track Motion . It tells Adobe After Effects to analyze your video for flat surfaces, such as floors and walls, and create points where you can attach images or text.

If you'd like to use the same assets in this lesson, download this drone footage and this cat video from Pixabay. Both of these videos are free to use for commercial purposes, if you'd like to include them in any of your own upcoming projects.

Ready? Here's how to get started.

Step 1. Use 'Track Camera' on your video

Step 2. Select a surface in your video

Once Adobe After Effects is done with its analysis, you'll find a number of these colorful markers all throughout your video. These markers are used to identify the angle of surfaces in your video.

If you move your cursor over a marker or in between several markers, Adobe After Effects will attempt to emulate the orientation of the surface, as in the image below. Click on it to highlight that surface.

This will add a Camera and either a Text or Solid Shape layer. That text or shape will be at the same angle and position as the flat surface you selected throughout the whole clip.

Step 3. Tweaking your text or video

The text option should be self-explanatory, so I'm going to skip ahead to how you can attach an image or video to the wall. Precompose the layer labelled Track Solid 1 and name it anything you like.

If we go back out into our main composition, you might find that the video is really, really tiny.

All you need to do is to open up the Transform options for the precomposed layer and adjust its Scale. You might also want to adjust its Orientation if the video isn't exactly aligned with the flat surface.

If you play your video back, this is what it should look like.

That's really all there is to it.

Mess around with it. Use cat videos to vandalize the world's most prominent buildings in post production. That's the magic of Adobe After Effects.

I'll be back again in two weeks for another "Quick Tip!"

If you don't know where to start with motion graphics, check out my column "Quick Tip."  I'll show you how to create some awesome effects using Adobe Creative Suite and other tools.

Green screens are everywhere even if you've never actually seen one.

That's kind of the point.

It's been used in movies to bring practical effects and computer-generated graphics together, as in this VFX reel from Baz Luhrmann's 2013 film "The Great Gatsby." It's also used in television news, specifically when meteorologists deliver the weather forecast with moving graphics in the background.

If you're wearing the same color as the green screen, you can even disappear into a scene.

This technique is called chroma keying. It's the process of layering two images or videos together through the use of color.
​
First off, you need to get your videos together. I found the video for this lesson through Pixabay, though their options for green screen footage are limited. You can find more on Shutterstock, but you'll need to crack your wallets open to use any of their videos.

Create a Composition and drag your footage into the timeline. 

You will then want to look up Keylight (1.2) in the Effects & Presets window to the right of the screen. Drag the effect onto your green screen footage. Click on the color picker to the right of the Screen Colour option and click on the green section of your footage.

A black solid — if that's the color you chose for your composition's background — or checkered pattern will now replace the green parts of your footage. This shows that the background is now completely transparent.

If you'd like to have the checkered background, click on the checkered icon at the bottom of your composition window.

If you look closely though, you'll find that some of the presents are a little transparent. Mess around with the options in your Effects Control to do away with this transparency, specifically Screen Gain, Screen Balance, Clip Black and Clip White. 

For this footage, you'll only need to tweak Clip White. You can also play around with Screen Shrink/Grow to feather the corners of the presents.

That's it! All you need to do now is add a background image or video.

However, you'll need to do a bit more work to make the presents look as if they're part of the background. For example, you might consider the lighting conditions for the video or image. If it was shot under an incandescent light, you have to add a Tint effect to your green screen footage so the presents appear more orange.

It goes without saying that, as journalists, we shouldn't mislead the public by altering news footage. But, if you're going to make a personal video, why not set it to an explosion?

That's it for another Quick Tip. It's going to be a busy next few months for me, so I'll be only doing these lessons every two weeks from now on.

​Have a great October!

If you don't know where to start with motion graphics, check out my weekly column "Quick Tip."  I'll show you how to create some awesome effects using Adobe Creative Suite and other tools.

I want to start off this week's Quick Tip with a quick apology.

I wasn't able to bring you last week's lesson because I was in a small accident. One of my car's front wheels came off and ran for the hills of middle Pennsylvania. I wasn't injured, but I had to listen to my tow truck driver's take on the current political climate during the hour-and-a-half drive home.

"Please, go on."

Now that's out of the way, I thought I'd return with something fun this week. There's no real practical application for neon text in your journalistic work, but this exercise will help you familiarize yourself with Adobe After Effects.

Also, it's real friggin' cool.

​I don't say things like "ya basic," but it's something Kristen Bell's character says in the NBC comedy The Good Place. It's such a good show.

Create any design you like using bright, saturated colors and precompose all your layers together.

The first thing you'll want to do is to create an unlit neon sign. Start out by duplicating  your precomposed layer​ and hiding the top one by clicking the eye icon next to it.

The next thing you'll want to do is recreate the glow of the neon light. Unhide the top layer and make another duplicate of it. Add a Fast Blur effect to the middle layer and set its Blurriness to 150.

Right-click on the top layer and hover over Layer Styles, adding Inner Glow this time around. Select the layer again and twirl down to the Inner Glow effect. Open the drop-down menu for Source and select Center.

Once you're done with that, add a Glow effect to the layer.

If you want to add some extra details to your light, make a duplicate of the top layer and delete its Glow effect. Right-click on it, hover over Layer Styles and select Bevel and Emboss.

Twirl the top layer down. Under Inner Glow, set your opacity to 50 percent. Under Bevel and Emboss, set your Highlight Opacity to zero percent and your Shadow Opacity ​to 15 percent.

There you have it. A simple neon light. But what if you want to make it stand out against a background?

The first thing you want to do is find an image of a wall. I found the one above using Pixabay, which offers a lot of images that's free for commercial use. You can tweak it a little bit using the Curves and Brightness & Contrast ​effects to make it a little darker.

You'll then want to create a new Solid layer. It doesn't matter what color it is because you're going to add a 4-color Gradient effect to it. 

Using the color pickers in the Effect Controls panel, select the blue and fuchsia of your neon light. Set the fuchsia points just outside the outer circle and the blue point right in the middle of the text.

It should look something like this.

With that Solid layer selected, make a Mask around the graphic. Twirl the layer down, select Mask 1 and open up its Mask Feather option by pressing F. Adjust this to 400 or whatever you think looks best.

Once you're done with that, open up the drop-down menu under the Mode column and select Vivid Light. Readjust the layer's Opacity to about 50 percent, and your neon light will be lit against the wall.

You'll now want to make the neon sign blink on and off. To do this, you only need to adjust Opacity. Set down several Keyframes for the first three graphic layers and the lights layers, as in the image below.

Once you have it all rendered out, your animation should look something like this.

That's all there is to it.

​Now, granted that none of my other wheels decide to run away, I'll be back for another Quick Tip in a week.

If you don't know where to start with motion graphics, check out my weekly column "Quick Tip."  I'll show you how to create some awesome effects using Adobe Creative Suite and other tools. My column also discusses how journalists can use these graphics in their videos.

When I started out in motion graphics, I thought Adobe After Effects had to have a shortcut for making text write itself.

It's a really popular effect after all. Think back to the Looney Tunes animated series and you can probably visualize the words "That's all Folks!" being written on screen.

Well, there's no shortcut. However, a bit of creative thinking can solve just about any problem in Adobe After Effects. That and money for templates. As journalists, we don't have that sort of dough.

Let's get to it.

The first thing you'll want to do is, of course, start a New Composition and and use the Horizontal Type Tool to write something out. Here, our text reads "fin." like how I imagine a highfalutin French art film would conclude.

You'll then want to trace out each of the letters, making sure that the width of your lines covers the entire word. To do this, use the Pen Tool to make points all along the length of the letters.

Try it out on the first letter and name that Shape Layer "f." You will need to make separate Shape Layers for each word and symbol.

Since we only need the Stroke, go ahead and delete the Fill. To do this, click on the arrow next to the "f" layer. Then click on the arrows next to Contents and then Shape 1. Highlight Fill 1 and delete it.

Click on the arrow next to "Trim Paths 1" and you'll see End and Start. You'll find that these options determine how much of the "f" outline is drawn out. For example, only half of our "f" Shape Layer will be illustrated if we set either End or Start ​to 50 percent.

For this exercise, set down keyframes for just End at 0 and 100 percent.

Make sure your text layer — the one with your full "fin." phrase — is beneath the "f" Shape Layer. Click on the menu option under the Track Matte column and select Alpha Matte "[f]." It should now only show the part of the text layer we traced in the "f" layer.

If nothing appears in your composition, move the slider in your timeline a few seconds forward after the last keyframe you set for End.

Once we render the animation out, it should look something like this.

That's basically all there is to it. Trace out the rest of the letters and set down End keyframes for each of them. 

Once you're done, Precompose — that's taking layers and putting them in a separate composition — and name the layer "fin. trace comp." Then set the Track Matte for your text layer to Alpha Matte "[fin. trace comp]"​.

Once you render it all out, your animation should look like this.

It'll take a bit of work to make sure that your trace looks its absolute best.

If you need to adjust the width of your lines to fully cover the letters, click on your Shape Layers​ and adjust the Stroke Width.

If you need to reposition points in your trace, click on the arrows next to the Shape Layer and then Contents and then Shape 1 and highlight Path 1. This will show you all the points you set down for your trace, which appears as boxes in your composition. Click and drag the boxes to reposition them.

If you need to add new points, click and hold down the Pen Tool option in the top menu bar and select Add Vertex Tool. Click anywhere along the outline of your trace to add a new point. To delete a point, select the Delete Vertex Tool instead and click on any of the boxes.

That's it for this week's lesson. As always, I'll be back again next week for another quick tip.

If you don't know where to start with motion graphics, check out my weekly column "Quick Tip."  I'll show you how to create some awesome effects using Adobe Creative Suite and other tools. My column also discusses how journalists can use these graphics in their videos.

You never know when you'll need a countdown timer.

I mean, where would movie and television villainy be without a good ol' fashioned ticking time bomb?

​Dramatic pulling away of the hand for effect...

If journalists are going to be called the "enemy of the American people," we might as well learn how to make a good countdown... for our truth bombs!

As with all visual effects, its use depends on the context of the story.

You can use a countdown timer to give viewers an idea of how many hours or minutes have passed, as in this video of my former colleague Bill Beck and I in a speed-eating competition. You can also use it to let audiences know how much time is left before a live feed begins.

​Let's figure out how to do this countdown thing.

I take it you have a good grip on how to create a Composition and a Shape Layer but, for the beginners out there, here's a quick run through. Click Composition in the top menu bar and then click New Composition... 

For the purposes of this lesson, you'll name the composition "Countdown timer." You'll then want to set the Duration — that's the entry toward the bottom of the window — to however long you want your countdown timer to be. Click OK.

You'll then want to click Layer in the top menu bar, hover over New and then click Shape Layer. This creates a blank layer in your composition, but having a color or shape within it is not necessary.

The next step is to turn that Shape Layer into a number. Select the layer in your timeline, click on Effect in the top menu bar, hover over Text and click on Numbers.​

You'll be greeted with the Numbers window. The Direction option allows you to display the numbers in your timer horizontally or vertically. The rest of the options are self-explanatory. Click OK once you've decided what you want your timer to look like.

Now we need those numbers to display the time. Select the Shape Layer in your timeline and bring up the Effect Controls panel to left of the screen. If it doesn't appear, click on the double arrows to the right of that panel and select Effect Controls. 

Change the Type to one of the Timecode options, and it should now count up. From here, you can change the cosmetics of the timer, from its fill color to its size.

When you play the composition, you might notice that some of the numbers do not stay in place. To fix this, uncheck Proportional Spacing in the Effect Controls window. If it looks a little funky, adjust the spacing yourself using the Tracking option.

It's a whole mess of numbers, and you might only need the seconds. You can do this in one of two ways.

You can size up the Shape Layer so that only the seconds are displayed on screen. You then want to convert that layer into a separate composition. To do this, precompose the layer by right-clicking on it in the timeline and clicking Precompose... 

In the pop-up window, select "Move all attributes into the new composition" and click OK. You can now size that composition, which only displays your seconds, accordingly.

The way I do it though is through Masking, which you can think of as cutting out the parts of a composition that I want to display.

It starts out a little like the other method. You have to precompose the Shape Layer​ first.

With the newly-created Composition selected, use the Rectangle Tool — that's the icon at the top that looks like, duh, a rectangle — and draw a shape over the numbers you want to display. You'll notice that only the values inside of the rectangle will be displayed.

The numbers will count up, but what if we want it to count down instead? It's simple. Right click the layer in your timeline, hover over Time and then click Time-Reverse Layer. That's all you need to do.

From there, everything else should be straightforward. You can then size up the Composition so that the values all fit on the screen and place another Shape Layer beneath it to create a background.

Once it's all rendered, it should look something like this. I added a Drop Shadow effect to the numbers to make it look pretty.

There you have it. A simple countdown. As always, I'll be back again next week with another visual effect. Have a good Labor Day, everyone!

If you don't know where to start with motion graphics, check out my weekly column "Quick Tip."  I'll show you how to create some awesome effects using Adobe Creative Suite and other tools. My column also discusses how journalists can use these graphics in their videos.

Level with me. Have you ever pretended to crush a co-worker's head between your fingers?

​Yeah, me neither.

Let's say you have tried it before. Having your fingers follow your colleague is like tracking a moving object in Adobe After Effects. Using this technique, we can make text, shapes, images and even videos follow almost anything that moves.

Tracking does away with the busy work of having to set down a million position keyframes yourself. By highlighting an object in a video, Adobe After Effects will attempt to do it for you.

Journalists can use this effect to draw viewers' attention to a moving object, say, using a circular outline or a text box. It's something that I've only dabbled with in the past, but it's a cool trick to learn nonetheless.

Let's get started.

Keeping to our theme of animal friends, let's use this video of a headbangin' parrot. You can download the same footage through Pixabay at no cost.

You'll need to bring up your Tracker window. If this doesn't show up in your workspace, click Window in the top menu bar and then Tracker in the drop down menu. 

The window will appear to the right of your screen, as in the picture above. 

If you have trouble finding some of the options in the Tracker window, click on Window in the top menu bar, then Workspace in the drop down menu and then All Panels. This should show you all of its buttons and inputs.

Now it's time tell Adobe After Effects to follow an element in the video. Click on Track Motion in the Tracker window. It'll bring up a box labelled Track Point 1 in your Composition window.

Move the box over a distinctive visual element in your video.  You should highlight something that looks the same throughout the video.

This parrot has big, beautiful eyes, so how about we go with that? Hover over the box and, when a cross with arrows appears, click and drag it over the eye.

Notice there are two boxes? The smaller box is the element Adobe After Effects will attempt to track. In this case, it's the parrot's dark, round eye. The bigger one is where the program will search for the tracked element.

Since the parrot will be bobbing its head up and down, you'll have to scale the bigger box so that it'll cover all the spaces where the eye will appear. Don't make the box too big though as Adobe After Effects will take a longer time analyzing the video.

Click Analyze in the Tracker window and let the program do its thing.

Adobe After Effects did a pretty good job of tracking that eye, but that's not always going to be the case. There is a way to reposition its Feature Points — that's where the program thinks the tracked element is at that point in the video — so that it's more accurate.

You can either move the boxes within the Composition window itself or click on the arrow beside Tracker 1 and then Track Point 1 to find the Feature Points option in the Timeline window.

Now that we have these Feature Points, you need to tell Adobe After Effects to translate that into Position keyframes for another layer.

To do this, click Edit Target... in the Tracker window and select the target layer. In this case, it's the null object labelled Null 1. You don't necessarily need to use a null object though.

Once we've selected our target object, click Apply in the Tracker window. Null 1 will now have Position keyframes at the same times and positions as your Feature Points.

From there, it's pretty straightforward.

You can write up some text and set its parent to Null 1. To do this, click on the drop down menu next to your text layer's name in the Parent column of your timeline and select Null 1. You can also click and drag the layer's Pick Whip — that's the little squiggle in the Parent column — onto another layer you want as its parent.

The text will now follow the movement of its parent. Here's what the effect will look like once it's rendered out.

You keep rockin' to Disturbed, parrot.

That's it for this week's Quick Tip. I'll be back again next week with another lesson.

Have a great weekend!

Quick Tip is a weekly column that shows beginners how to recreate popular visual effects. I also discuss examples and best practices for journalists who want to use it in their videos.

Looking back through my newspapers’ archives makes me feel like a classic movie gumshoe.

I’ve spent the last few days looking at photographs The Patriot-News and Allied Pix have taken throughout the years. I mean actually pulling out folders and spreading the pictures out on a flat surface, not punching in a query in a search engine.
​
In the interest of time, I’ve panned and scaled these photographs in my video  — the Ken Burns effect, as it’s often called — to make them less static. However, there is a way to imitate depth and motion in these pictures with the help of our ol’ friends Adobe Photoshop and Adobe After Effects.

It’s called the parallax or 2.5D effect. You can use this technique on any photograph but I personally think there’s magic in bringing old pictures to life, as in this video from my talented friend and former colleague Sarah Welliver. 

However, journalists need to use their best judgement when it comes to manipulating photographs. I can show you how to make people flail their arms and fly off the screen, but you have to decide for yourself if that misrepresents the facts.

​If we’re all on the same page, let’s make some photographs dance.

Cutting and pasting

The first thing you'll need to do is — duh — bring up a photograph in Adobe Photoshop. This explanation will use a picture of a sleepy red panda because why not?

Now you'll have to take out the red panda.

It'll come back later though, so hold your tears. Use the "Quick Selection tool" — that's the icon with the brush over a dotted circle to the left of the screen — to select the fur ball and the branch that it's sleeping on. You'll want to zoom in really close to make sure that you've also selected all the edges.

Once you're done, cut out the selection and place it onto new layer. To do this, click "Layer" in the top menu, hover over "New" and select "Layer..."

You'll want to hide the red panda for this next step. In the layer window to the right of the screen, click on the eye icon next to the layer with the our furry friend.

What you're left with is an ugly white shape in the middle of the photograph. The next step involves recreating the scene as if the red panda was never there. To do so, you need to fill in the blank space by copying and pasting other parts of the forest into it.

That's where the "Clone Stamp tool" — the icon with the stamp to the left of the screen — comes in. With the "Alt" key held down, click on a part of the photograph that you want to copy. You will now be able to "clone" that section anywhere else in your picture.

​Once you're done, it should look something like this.

It doesn't look great, but our red panda layer is going to block out that nastiness in Adobe After Effects. Unhide the red panda layer and save the photograph as a ".psd" file.

Let's dance

Now that the hard work of touching up your photograph is out of the way, you can start to make it move.

Bring your ".psd" file into Adobe After Effects, and this window should pop up. Select "Composition" using the Import Kind drop-down menu and "Editable Layer Styles" in the Layer Options box.

This will create a folder in the Project window with all your layers. Drag these onto the timeline in the order you had them in Adobe Photoshop.

As I mentioned, you then have to place these different elements on a 3D plane. To manipulate your layers in three dimensions, you have to click on the cube icon to the right of your layers' names in the timeline.

You'll then want to see where these layers are in relation to each other. One way to do this is to get a top-down view of our project.

Click on the "Select view layout" drop down menu that reads "1 View" and select "2 Views - Horizontal." You can find it at the bottom of the Composition window, which is where your preview appears.

This will bring up a separate window in your Composition window, as you can see in the picture below. The reason why it appears to be blank is because we're looking at a flat layer at a 90 degree angle. You know it's there though from the dotted lines that runs through the composition.

You're now ready to position your images on a plane. Select your layers and press "P" to bring up its "Position" options, which should now have a third value for your "Z-index." Think of it as how close or far your layer is from the camera.
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Move the layer without the red panda farther away from the camera. You can manipulate the "Z-index" in the timeline or click and drag the blue arrow in your composition windows to move it along this plane.

What you'll notice is that the layer gets smaller the further away it is. To remedy this, just click the layer and press "S" to bring up the "Scale" option. Size it so that it fits the screen.

You can now move the layers by setting down keyframes. Have the red panda layer move toward and the forest layer move away from the camera. The final render should look something like this.

Taking it a little further

Sleepy red pandas aren't going to move a lot, so the parallax effect will do just fine. However, there is a way to make people, animals, plants — anything, really — move naturally in your photographs.

I'd like to introduce the "Puppet Pin" tool.

I recommend using action shots with the "Puppet Pin" tool, such as the picture below of Elvis dancing. It gives you an idea of how and where certain objects are moving.

Select the "Puppet Pin" tool — the one that looks like a pin — in the tool bar above the Project window. You can set down "pins" by clicking on the layer.

Build a skeletal frame for Elvis using these "pins." When you're done, it should look something like the image below.

Click on the arrow to the right of your layer's name in the time. You then need to click on the arrows next to Effect and then Puppet and then Mesh 1 and then Deform.

You'll find all the "Puppet Pins" you've set down for your image here. Animating these puppet pins is like setting the "Position" option for any layer. You can either set down keyframes or move the yellow circles in the Composition window.

Adobe After Effects will try its best to imitate how Elvis' limbs move by deforming the image. This part takes a little trial and error.

For example, you'll need to select and move all the "Puppet Pins" you've placed for Elvis' foot. By moving just the ankle, the heel and toes will remain at the same place. It'll end up looking something like this.

Here's what Elvis will look like once you've rendered out your animation.

Phew! That was quite a wordy post today, but I hope it'll get you started on animating your photographs.

I'll be back again next week with another trick you can use for your videos. Thanks for reading!

Several colleagues have asked me about how to create the wiggly text effect in my videos. It’s not that hard, really. I use the effect so often that I could probably mime the mouse and key commands in my sleep.

It's not this intimidating, I promise!

It brings motion to some otherwise very still scenes. There aren’t any hard rules when it comes to this effect, but I like to use it in more light-hearted videos.

So how is it done?

Let's get to wigglin'.

You will then want to use the “Fractal Noise” effect on the solid. Search for the effect in the “Effects & Presets” panel to the right of your window, and it should come up. Double click the effect while you have your solid selected or drag it onto the layer.

You will then have to do a little coding but, trust me, it’s just a few keystrokes. Highlight the solid and look at the “Effect Controls” panel to the left of the window. Click on the arrow next to “Evolution Options.”
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Hold the Alt key and click on the stopwatch icon next to “Random Seed.” It’ll bring up an entry in your layers window, which you can see in the image below. Delete its contents and type in “time * 10” and then click anywhere outside the entry box. If you play the composition now, the fractal image will move.

Great, now it’s time to create another composition where you’ll have your text. Follow the instructions above to create a new composition and then use the “Text” tool — that’s the T icon in the upper-left corner of the window — and click anywhere on the composition to start writing your text.
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Then drag your “Displacement Map” composition from your project window into the layer window. You can click on the eye icon to the left of the “Displacement Map” layer because we don’t really need it to be visible.

You will then need to search for the “Displacement Map” effect in the “Effects & Presets” panel. Use that effect on your text layer, which is labelled “Wiggle” in my project.

In the “Effects Control” panel for the text layer, click on the drop down menu beside “Displacement Map Layer” and select “Displacement Map.” When you play your composition, the text will wiggle.

If you want maximum wiggles, increase the values in both “Max Horizontal Displacement” and “Max Vertical Displacement.”

Oh, here's another thing to keep in mind. There have been times where I’ve mistakenly made the “Displacement Map” layer too small and only part of the text would wiggle. To fix this, click the dropdown menu next to “Displacement Map Behavior” and select “Stretch Map to Fit.” That should fix it.

​So what does it look like when it all comes together? A whole lot of wigglin’.

Thanks for reading this tip! I'll be back next week with another post on how to make your videos and interactives pop.