Animation in 3D can be confusing but Apple Motion has easy to use controls that help you create professional grade animation. In the next few tutorials, we will build a simple intro with a message for the holiday season.

This Motion^R project has a little of everything for the season. The Bokeh background image is a composition of several royalty free photographs. The animated text is created in Photoshop^R and animated in Motion. The animated lights are added using Motion's Shape tool and some behaviors.

Except for the lights animation, all other design elements can be created in one layered Photoshop graphic which can then be easily imported into Motion, maintaining the layer hierarchy.

The Animation

The animation will begin with the holiday text rising from the snow, leaving the indentation in the snow. The text will continue to rise until it is vertical and then continue moving backward until it almost touches the snow behind it. Finally, it will rise again until it is vertical and then stop. The tricky part of the animation will be to synchronize the movement of the text with the movement of the shadow letters. As the letter's movement must be reflected in the shadow. Another challenge will be to create a few colored circles, matching the color of the Bokeh light underneath, and animating the circles to blink realistically. The last part of the intro will be the company name fading in to view next to the green bell.

The Graphic Elements

This type of animated text can be created with several options in Motion. You can use the Text tool to create the text inside Motion or import text graphics. Because the letters in this project's holiday message contain some evergreen and berries and those elements must move with the text, it was easier to create in Photoshop and import the graphics into Motion. However, if your project can be created with the Motion Text tool and you want a challenge, another option would be to use the Text tool to create the text and tracking to sync the text with the berry sprig graphic.

The background image was made from two photographs. The Bokeh type lights with the layer of snow and the green bell. Because the animation happens on top of the snow, the 'horizon' of the snow with the Bokeh was important when choosing the image. The green bell was isolated from its original photograph and the bottom edge was erased with a soft edge Eraser tool, giving the illusion that the bell is setting in the snow.

There are four text layers: the red letters, the shadow letters behind the text and the 3D indentation letters in the snow make up the holiday message. The fourth layer contains both the company name and the shadow of the text. The text layer style has a red Color Overlay and an Inner Shadow adds a slight 3D effect to the text. The shadow graphic was made from a copy of the message text layer, which was changed to a black color, rasterized and then a Gaussian Blur filter with a Radius of 2.5 pixels was applied. The layer opacity was reduced to 32%. Finally, the text snow indentation was created with a combination of Bevel & Emboss, Stroke, Inner Shadow and Color Overlay.

Once these four text layers were created, it was time to place them on top of the background layer. The message was placed first and the shadow text was placed on a layer below and the indentation text on a layer above, with only the bottom edges of the y's touching. The Perspective tool (Edit - Transform - Perspective) was used to flatten the shadow and indentation text, giving the illusion that they are laying on the snow.

Tutorial Example:


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