From the course: Creating a Mograph Title Sequence: 2 Animating in After Effects

Adding glow and swipe

From the course: Creating a Mograph Title Sequence: 2 Animating in After Effects

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Adding glow and swipe

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- [Male] Because those titles are going to be on top of a very busy background, I want to make sure that they will stand out. For that I'll create a glow effect and also prepare the end animation, so they will integrate nicely to the background. So this is what we came up last time. I'm going to pause the playback, go somewhere over here to the middle, where the title is fully visible. Select the title and then I'll go to the Effect menu, and under blur and sharpen, I'll apply the Fast Box Blur effect. I'll set the value to eight and then I'll return to the same menu, this time I'm going to go to the Channel category and add the CC Composite effect to bring the original back on top. So to do so, you only need to uncheck the RGB Only and this is going to copy the content and place it just above. Now I want to exaggerate the blur effect just a touch. So to see what I'm doing, I'm going to hold down the Option key, this will be the Alt on the PC side, and using my mouse scroller, I'll scroll up one time and this is going to zoom the viewer to the place under the cursor. Next, I'll return to the Effect menu and now I'll go to the Color Correction category and apply the Levels effect. Now I need to drag the Levels and place it between the Blur and the CC Composite effect. And then I'll make myself a little bit more room, so I can see the entire Histogram, and what I would like to do is take the Input White and start to drag it to the left to around 128. So this is the before and this is after. Hopefully, you can see that now we are getting some more colors that are showing through the effects chain that we've created. Basically, what we're doing here is we are changing the Levels of the Blur after applying it and only then composite back the original. So we can see more of the original colors of the text. Now, I'm going to close all of those effects because I need to make room to add additional one and this is going to be under the transition category and it's going to be the CC Image Wipe effect. Now I'm just going to show you what I'll do with this, but I'm not going to keyframe it because each one of the titles will need a different kind of treatment. But basically, we're going to use the CC Image Wipe effect with the Gradient option that we have here. In this case, I'm going to use the layer underneath and then if I start to scrub the completion, we can get a sense of what it does. It uses the pick cells from the layer to create this nice wipe. And once again, each one of the titles will need a different treatment in terms of the settings of these effect. Some of them will need additional border softness. Some of them will need a different blur settings. But now I'm just going to leave it here under those three effects because later we are going to save everything that we did so far as an animation preset, so we can reuse it for the other titles. So from the beginning, I'll play what we've managed to achieve in this movie, which is a nice glow, consist of three effects as well as adding an additional one, which will help us to create a nice swipe effect later down the line.

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