Design and Animate a Vintage Badge in After Effects

Pathfinder is one of those tools that you can't live without once you start using it. This cursory explanation doesn't cover everything, but it does contain the basics you need to follow along.

In this course we cover making basic shapes in Adobe Illustrator. 

A lot of people make creating a ribbon in Adobe Illustrator trickier than it has to be, in this lecture we cover one way of doing it.

Using my sketch(that's in your Badge Files.ZIP) we create two mountains in Adobe Illustrator. 

Again, from one my sketches(that's in your Badge Files.ZIP) we design a simple Axe in Adobe Illustrator. 

You can get a lot of life out of a tree without having to be too detailed about it. In this lecture we discuss creating a simple tree in Adobe Illustrator.

We have most of the elements done, here we'll start piecing them all together.

Continuation of the previous video. We'll still getting all of our elements fitting into the badge.

In this video we'll finish off the assembly of our badge, making sure everything looks right. From here, we can start adding color.

Here's the font used in this lecture:

http://www.fontfabric.com/sunday-font/ (scroll all the way down from the download link)

We quickly color our project using the color library in Illustrator. 

Roughening the edges is not required, but does add a beautiful hand-drawn quality to your project. If you want to skip this section, please watch "Cleaning up Layers" before going on to animate it.

Like roughening the edges, this is not required unless you want that grain gradient that you saw in the final. If you want to skip this section, please watch "Cleaning up Layers" before going on to animate it.

Continuation from previous lecture.

This is the most simple, yet one of the most important lectures. You'll learn how to proof your layers in Illustrator, making sure they're ready for After Effects.

Before editing in After Effects, always make sure your project and layers are nicely organized. In this lecture, I'll show you a simple way of doing it.

Parenting in After Effects adds a lot of power to what you can do and control with your layers. We'll discuss some of the techniques here.

It's important that your animations don't interfere with the parented animation you created earlier. Always make sure you animate AFTER the final parented animation.

Using Masks, we animate the ribbon on as if it's unraveling. 

In this course we learn how to pop the mountains from behind the ribbon using Masks.

Like the mountains, we pop these up from behind the ribbon using Position.

After scaling in the Base2, we bring in the Sky by duplicating itself and making a mask with the original position of it. 

The stars are the moon are brought in behind the mountains, and we delay some of the animations on the moon so that it swings in.

Using a simple wiggle expression and glow effects, we can make the stars and moon(if you want to) twinkle!

Here we discuss the timings of making the axes look like they are hitting together.

I'm sorry in advance for all the masks. We take our explore layer, cut it up, letter by letter, and animate them all in, using a mask to make them stay on the ribbon.

While you could use scale to bring in the lines, a Mask and a Simple Choker add a much smoother effect.

Simple color effects are used to get the background to a more appropriate look.

Using Trapcode: Particular, we create realistic snow.

Moving the background with Wiggle adds incredible amounts of realism to the finished project.

Like the moving background, we add smoke to look like fog with blending modes.

Round 2 on Particular. Using methods we learned with Snow, we can create a simple glowing spark.

Image Sequence rendering is underused and very powerful. 

In Premiere, we discuss techniques for adding sound to your project to bring it to life.

Thanks again for taking the course, if there is anything I can do to improve the experience, let me know!