Enhance Your Videos with 2D Animated Elements: A Comprehensive Guide (Full Transcript)

Speaker 1: When you're looking for a new effect to liven up your videos, look no further than adding 2D animated elements into your scene. It's a popular and easy way to incorporate something different into your projects that catches people's eyes. Here's how you do it. These elements are typically hand-drawn vector animations with an alpha or transparent layer allowing you to just drop them right onto your footage in the timeline. It can be as simple as a quick effect for emphasis or a detailed full-screen transition. These can be created in a program like Illustrator, or you can easily find thousands of them available in the Pond5 Marketplace. Most editing or compositing programs will work with these animations, and it helps if your program also allows you to create and move masks. Once you have your animations, all you have to do is place them into your scene. Use the basic scale, rotation, and position controls to put them exactly where you want them to be, then play the clip through to make sure it looks right, and export if you're happy with the result. However, if the animation doesn't look quite the way you want it, it could be an easy fix or something that takes a little more fine-tuning. An object or person in your footage may occupy the same spot in the frame as your animation, and you may need to create a mask around either the animation or the object to fix it. If you want the object to be in front of the animation, all you need to do is click on your element in the timeline or sequence, then create a mask around it. Adjust the mask to match the shape for best results. Now it should look much more naturally incorporated into the scene. Your animation elements may also need to move along with an object in the video. This is where keyframing comes in. You can not only keyframe the scale, position, rotation, or opacity of the animation, but you can keyframe any mask you've created. In Adobe Premiere or After Effects, simply go to the spot in the timeline where you want the animation to start, open the controls, and click the stopwatch to create a new keyframe. Then move to the spot in the timeline where you want the movement to end, and create another keyframe. Adjust the keyframe values to get the movement exactly the way you want it, and play it back. These two keyframes may work, but you may need to add a few more throughout the clip if your subject moves around a lot. If you end up making a keyframe for every frame of the animation, then you're rotoscoping. Rotoscoping is a more advanced and tedious keyframing technique. Again, this is when you go frame by frame and adjust the animation or the mask's position or shape to get exact movement. It takes a lot more time, but it's great and necessary in many cases when your animations need to seem like they're behind something that's moving in the frame. Another way to enhance the animation's placement is to track the footage with the point tracker in Adobe After Effects. Create a new composition with your footage, double-click the footage layer, open the tracker, and select track motion. Move the tracking point to the exact spot in the scene that you want to track, and track the motion forward or backward. Create a null layer, then apply the tracking data to the null layer and parent your animation to that layer. It should move perfectly with the spot you tracked. If not, go back to your tracker and adjust any keyframes that are off. If you've gone through and done all of the previous steps, the only thing left that still may need to be adjusted is the animation's 3D perspective to make it fit perfectly in the video. Swivel, tilt, or rotate the animation using your program's effects or any available 3D controls so that it appears on the same plane and lives in the same space as the rest of the scene. Just use your best judgment here, since rotating and tilting a 2D element in a 3D space has limitations. Adding 2D elements in video is a simple yet interesting effect that adds a lot of energy to a project. You can add them in very small instances, or they can make up your entire visual effects aesthetic. Either way, they're easy to work with and can reflect your personal style. If you liked this video, check out our YouTube channel and subscribe for more tutorials. You can also read the Pond5 blog for an in-depth companion piece, as well as other filmmaking tips and tricks. And as always, head over to Pond5.com to get millions of video clips and other assets to use in your next project.