I have been pretty productive last december, mainly because I wanted to experiment some animation ideas in Adobe After Effects.

The first is the one I prefer: it started by wanting to have some fun with the new tape properties in After Effects 2021. The first Christmas tree grows by animating the end of a line shape layer. The width varies along the length using the tape properties.

I have also used the a lot the internal Particle effects in AE. in the first shot, the origin of the particles is even linked to the moving end of the Christmas tree layer.

The second part is the darkest one, where the corona virus is killed by the vaccine. Here I just tried to transmit the creepiness of the situation and the fatigue of the scientists, who finally achieve the goal of killing the virus.

The third scene is where Santa is coming back, using the CC Scatterize effect, and wishes a safer 2021 to everybody 😉

This is the tutorial I made, where I am going through most of the main issues I had to face during the realization of the video:

The second one was inspired by a tutorial I found for recreating fake 3d tape animations, so I came up to use the 3D tape to build a very stylized Christmas tree.

Let me know what you think about these videos in the comments on youtube! I try to answer all comments :=p

It’s December, almost Christmas time, we are worried because of the corona pandemic and we are not sure if we will be able to spend holidays with our families and friends. That is the starting point of this Christmas Animation video card.

I have done it in Adobe After Effects in a couple of days, using 3d, camera movements and some particle emiters here and there. I have finally added some sound effects. The voices included are synthetically created.

Christmas Animation Breakdown

The Animations starts with a gray atmosphere, which I have obtained using an adjustment layer with a couple of effects:

• Vibrance: to set the saturation to 0 and obtain the gray scale sensation
• Uni.Grain 16 from Red Giant Universe: to add some subtle grains

After a few seconds we get into Christmas colorful mood. The adjustment layer is gone, and a quick camera movement is starting, to follow the trim path on the 2 paths depicting the Christmas Tree. I have created a null layer which follows the end of the trim path and attached a particle world effect to it.

At this point a new particle effect starts from the top of the tree to bring the eyes of the viewer to the bottom, where the text appears.

A moving background slowly appears, while the text adjusts to the final version with a stop motion style.

At the end the corona viruses are popping off and transforming to balls, while a third explosive particle effects fill the scene.

Let me know if you want me to publish a video to go through the details in the After Effects project.

We are back with an improved version of the Data driven Bar Chart Race in After Effects. This week we have added the possibility to limit the number of bar chart shown on the screen. So if you have 10 data sources in your CSV file, you can decide to show on the screen only the first seven. We have added cool animations when the bar chart moves away from the top ones and a specific change when the bar gets to the first place.

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As always, I am going to share the source code of the After Effects Project, so that everybody can learn something new.

I have also added more new configurable properties in the CTRL layer.

During the video I will discuss about the scope and limitations of expressions in After Effects, and quickly compare them to the scrips.

Enjoy the video! If you have question, either contact me on this site, or in the comments below the video on youtube.