Motion Design Process: From Concept to Finished Animation

Todd from School of Motion explains the intricate process of creating a professional motion graphic, from concept to design and sound.

### The Process of Creating a Motion Design Animation
* 📝 Every motion design project begins with a brief, which provides **direction for the work to be done**.
* 💡 Developing a concept is crucial, as it serves as the **driving force behind every good motion graphic piece**.
* ✏ Translating the concept into a visual idea often involves **sketching rough ideas on paper**.
* 🎨 Designing key frames using tools like Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop helps **finalize the visual details**.
* 🎬 Adobe After Effects is a popular tool for **animating designs in 2D**, with hand animation and third-party tools like **Trapcode Particular** being commonly used.
* 🔊 Audio is an essential component of motion design, with **custom soundtracks** often created by sound designers to **complement the visuals**.
* 🏁 Once the final render is complete and the audio is synced, the motion design animation is **finished and ready to be shared**.

hey, how's it going? Todd here with School of Motion, and for this video, we wanted to show you a clip that Joey recorded some time ago that just does a really good job of sort of explaining the thought process of a professional motion designer, kind of going inside his head on what it takes to make a really good motion graphic. So yeah, let's roll it. [Music] School of Motion to walk you through all of the steps involved in the creation of a piece of motion design, specifically this one. [Music] This animation was created to play before all of the free tutorials we put out. It may look pretty simple, but even short little bits of mograph like this can take a ton of work. So sit back, grab some coffee, and let's start at the beginning. Every project starts with a brief. Sometimes that brief comes from a client and gives you some pretty specific direction, but in this case, the client is me. Now, you might think that would make things easier, but in reality, doing projects with no clear guidelines or direction can be very tricky. So I made

up a brief. Create a 10 to 15-second branded animation that reveals the School of Motion logo while hinting at the type of things we teach. Animating on a logo is one of the most common tasks a motion designer will have to tackle, and there are a million ways to do it. So, to narrow down the number of options from, say, infinity to something more manageable, it helps to develop a concept. A concept is the driving force behind every good mograph piece. Sometimes concepts are very concrete, but sometimes you just want to hint at things being a little subtle. I did an exercise called Mind mapping to come up with some options for the concept. I wrote down all kinds of words, phrases, and ideas that relate to what we do at School of Motion. Each idea leads to other ideas, and you can keep digging until you find something that sets off a light bulb in your brain. I eventually landed on this idea here: show, teach, reinforce. This is the philosophy behind all of the teaching that we do here at School of Motion. We

show you something cool to pique your interest. Then we explode that thing open and show you how it works. And then we reinforce that knowledge so it sticks in your brain. So using design as sort of a visual language, I translated that basic concept into a visual idea. I usually work out rough ideas like this the old-fashioned way, with a pencil and paper. And here's what I came up with. I'll show something concrete: a ball bounce. I'll then explode, literally, the idea of the ball bounce into a bunch of cool-looking visual metaphors. And then everything will combine back together as our logo. But what exactly will that look like? Using a combination of Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop, I designed a few key frames from the sequence so that I could really nail down all of the details. I used basic composition rules to create frames that were balanced and felt right. And I used our brand's color palette for the colors. Simple enough. I made sure that the value, basically the brightness, was different enough to have lots of contrast. And I figured out what the

final frame of this piece should look like so. Now I basically have a blueprint for how this animation works, what everything needs to look like, and where we'll end up. Now, after all of that, we finally hop into Adobe After Effects, my animation tool of choice for 2D animation. After Effects has all the tools I need to take my designs and bring them to life. Starting with the bouncing ball, I hand animate the path, the timing, and the spacing of the animation to make it feel right. There are lots of rules to learn about animating, but once you have them down, this sort of thing becomes intuitive. Next, I needed an explosion, and stuff like this can be kind of a pain to animate by hand because there are so many little pieces. Luckily, there are tons of third-party tools for After Effects that give you new capabilities. Like this particle generator plug-in, Trapcode Particular. Using Particular makes it really easy to add things like bursts of shapes and little effects for each bounce. The most tedious part of this animation was setting up the shapes that swoop.

around the screen a few times before recombining into our logo. After Effects has amazing tools for generating shapes and animating them, but in this case, I decided to make the shapes distort and bend around a bit, so I had to use a little bit of code called Expressions to rig up my shapes to be animated the way I want. Finally, I did some simple masking and animation on our logo itself to create a cool looking reveal, which locks into place at the end just the way I designed it. And we're done, right? Not so fast. Although it often gets shortchanged in the production process, audio is, in my opinion, equally as important as the visuals. I wanted this animation to have a cool sort of futuristic feeling and to have some music that's synced up to the action. Later on in this course, I'll show you how you can handle audio all by yourself using the great tools included in Adobe Creative Cloud and some stock providers, but for this animation, I called in the big guns. There are folks out there called sound designers, and they

specialize in creating custom soundtracks. I worked with one of my favorites, Wes Slover, who built a soundtrack for this piece that fits it perfectly and totally nails my vision for it. Once the final render is complete and the audio is synced up to it, we have a finished piece. [Music] Yeah, and that's it. Now depending on what you're doing, there can be more steps. Sometimes you can skip steps, and sometimes you do things in a different order, but for the most part, this is how the motion design that you see on screens all over the world gets made. I really hope you dug this lesson, and there's plenty more coming your way. So if you watch that and you liked it and you'd like to see more stuff just like that, I have really good news for you. That entire course is actually completely free right now, so you should go watch it. And there's also a download below that's sort of a reference for all the different pieces of software that motion designers use. That is kind of really nice to reference as you start a

project so go check that out as well. Anyways, thank you so much for watching, and we'll see you next time. [Music] Thank you. [Music]

The 5 Stages of a Motion Design Project

School of Motion

Inside the Mind of a Professional Motion Designer

Joey's recorded clip provides insight into the thought process of a professional motion designer creating a graphic.

The creation of a brief and development of a concept are crucial steps in the design process, especially when working without specific client direction.

Mind mapping is a helpful exercise for generating ideas and finding the driving force behind a motion graphic piece.

Visualizing the Creative Process: From Idea to Animation

The creator uses design as a visual language to translate the concept of a ball bounce into a visual idea, working with pencil and paper.

They then use Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop to design key frames, following composition rules and a specific color palette.

Finally, they bring the animation to life using Adobe After Effects, hand animating the path of the bouncing ball and using third-party tools for the explosion and swooping shapes.

Creating a Motion Design: From Shapes to Soundtrack

After using After Effects to generate and animate shapes, the next step was to use Expressions to bend and distort the shapes for the desired effect.

The animator also emphasized the importance of audio in the production process and highlighted the role of sound designers in creating custom soundtracks.

Finally, the importance of syncing the audio with the visual elements for a finished piece was emphasized.

The video project is completed, and the viewers are encouraged to check it out.

The audience is thanked for watching, with a hint at the next upcoming event.