Speaker 1: Welcome to how to add free animations to a live action video using Adobe After Effects. Hi, I'm Jonathan Lam, a digital artist with over 10 years of experience. And in this video, we'll show you step by step how to download and add these free cartoon animations and then add them to a live action video within 30 minutes. So before we begin, make sure to check out Envato Elements, with just one subscription, you'll have unlimited access to a wide variety of professionally made assets, millions of creative digital assets with simple commercial licensing, and you can cancel at any time. Subscribe now with the link in the description below. So let's start by going over what assets we need to complete the tutorial. You'll find links to all the assets you need to follow along in the description down below. First, we'll need a live action video for the background of our animation. For this tutorial, we'll be using this music band performance from Envato Elements. Next, we'll need some disco lights, which we can download for free here at Pixabay. And lastly, we need to download the free animations from Reallusion's own website. To download your free animations, first we need to head over to the Reallusion website and create an account. Click on the My Account icon located on the top right of the website here, and then follow the instructions to do this. Once your account has been created, log in and enter the Cartoon Animator For section on the website. So let's go to Products, and then select Cartoon Animator, which is under 2D Animation. Once you've done that, all we need to do is click on the Free Sampler button located on the bottom left of the screen here. And then that will take you to the Cartoon Animator Free Assets page, where we can just have a look at all the free animations that are included in the pack. And then to download them, just click on the Sign Up to Download button on the website to sign up if you haven't already. And then you can access all the free transparent animated videos, which we can use for our project. Once you've done that, let's head over to Adobe After Effects. In After Effects, let's go ahead and create a new composition here. And we can rename this anything that we want. So I'm just going to name this singing. And over here, we want to use certain composition settings for your project. So I'm going to use a width of 1920 by 1080, a frame rate of 30. And for duration, let's go ahead and change the duration to something like 10 here, like so. Awesome. So here you can see in our timeline, we've got a 10 frames for us to use. And from here, we want to just go ahead and import all of our animations and videos to use for our projects. Now to do this, we can go to File, Import File or Multiple Files here and then choose the files that way. Or we can simply go ahead and click and drag the files that we want from our Windows Explorer into the project panel here, like so. And then that will go ahead and put the videos in our project panel. Now for the free videos here, I've chosen a few videos. So I'm just going to go ahead and select them and just click and drag them in here like so. And these will be the characters that I'm going to use and you can see a small little preview in the window here of all the different characters from our free sampler that we can use for the video. Next, let's go ahead and put a video into our composition here. So the first one that we're going to use is the band video. So we can click and drag it from the project panel into the composition. And then that will appear in our preview window here. Just going to remove the sound from this video. And we're going to open up our transform options and then just scale it so that it fits inside our composition like so. Next, we want to go ahead and click and drag each of our characters into the scene like that. So you've got one character here, another character here. And then just click and drag each of them Until they populate your scene like so. Awesome. And then once you've done that, all we have to do from here is, again, just going through each of these and then just placing them where you want them in your composition. So for these particular characters here, I'm going to use them as foreground characters. And for some of them, we may actually need to go into the transform options and then just scale them up or down depending on how you want to use them. So for foreground characters here, we want to just scale them up a little bit so that they look like they are closer to the scene. And then for our singing character here, let's go ahead and scale her up a little bit as well. Oops, not the position. Just using the scale options here so that she fits closer to the scale of the background characters here as well. And then once you've done that, the next thing that we want to do is we want to go ahead and sort of place a shadow underneath this character here. So in order to do that, let's go over to the shapes tool here, click and hold the shape tool and then select the ellipse. And then just go ahead and click and drag, Making sure that we have no other layer selected, otherwise we'll create a mask. So click and drag the ellipse underneath our character like that. And then we can change the fill color here to black and then make sure the shapes layer is placed underneath our character like that. So that the shadow appears underneath her feet. Next, we can go into the shape layer transform options, go over to the opacity and we can lower the opacity to something like 50%, which allows it to blend into the background video. Next, we want to give our scene a greater sense of depth by making our foreground characters a little bit darker. So let's go ahead and select all of our foreground characters. So from here, let's go ahead and move our shadow down here. And then we want to move our singer down here. And now we can easily select all of our foreground characters like so. Right click, and then we want to pre-compose these and name this foreground. And this will create a new composition with all of our foreground characters in them. Next, we can go ahead and add an effect to this composition by going to effect, color correction. And we want to increase the brightness and the contrast of this. So let's decrease the brightness here, like so, all the way down. And we can even increase the contrast a little bit, like so. And then we can also blur these characters out a little bit as well. So go to effects, and then go ahead and select a blur and sharpen, and then find Gaussian blur. And we're going to blur these characters by about, say, 17, like that. And we can just move these characters down slightly. As you can see, they've been cut off a little bit here. So you can just move them down to remove that empty space. Excellent. Next, let's go ahead and go back to our project panel here. And we're going to add the disco lights on top of our whole scene. So find our disco lights animation, click and drag it on top of all of our layers, like so. And then from there, we want to change the mode of this layer from normal to screen. And you'll see straight away that it has added our lights effect to this video. Next, we can go into the transform options here, scale them up slightly, like so. And then just generally move them around so the lights look like they fit the actual scene. And then we can also lower the opacity here to about 85, so that blends with the scene a little bit more. Excellent. Next, let's go ahead and add some final adjustments to our project. Now to do this, let's go to Layer, New, and select a new adjustment layer, which is placed on top of all our layers here. And then we want to go to Effect, Color Correction, and then choose Curves. Now we're going to plot a standard S shape curve here, just to increase the contrast and the brightness here, like so. And then you can also play about with the individual red, green, and blue channels here to affect the overall color of your animation, like so. Just going to go to the red channel and just increase that a little bit here, like that. And then finally, the green channel, and bring that down slightly, like so. Excellent. Now to give your animation a little bit more emphasis, the last thing that we'll do is dim the live action video behind all of our characters, and to do this, we need to go to Layer, New, Solid. And we're going to create a black solid, like so, and then place this on top of our background video, like that. And then from there, let's select our black solid, go into the Transform Options, and we want to decrease the opacity here to something like 20%. Excellent. And this will make it so that our cartoon characters here, which is placed on top of the video, stand out a little bit more. And then once you're happy with the way that it looks, go over to the Preview panel here and hit the Play Preview button to see what it looks like. So that's it for this video. Feel free to experiment with the different free animations available in the downloadable pack from Reallusion. And make sure to take advantage of any offers that are available so that you can try out Cartoon Animator. If you liked this video and would like to see more, go ahead and hit the like button, and subscribe if you haven't already. And don't forget to hit the bell icon to be notified of any new and inspiring videos. If you're looking to learn even more, check out some of our other tutorials in the channel. Have fun, and I'll see you next time on Tuts+. Thanks.