Quick stop motion style with Tickler - After Effects Tutorial

- [Instructor] Let's just state the obvious. Stop motion animation is awesome. But we don't always have time to actually print materials, shoot photos of something frame by frame, moving it slightly for an animation. Luckily, there are plenty of ways to simulate stop motion animation in After Effects. In fact, I have three entire courses all about it that you can seek out, but I know you're busy and you just don't have time to watch all three of those courses. So, instead, I'll showcase how you can do this using the script Tickler, available for pay what you wish on aescripts.com. Go ahead and download and copy this script into your ScriptUI folder. Then, restart After Effects to complete installation. Got it? Good, let's continue. Here in my project file, I'm in chapter 5-01, Stop Motion Style with Tickler. And I want to quickly make my scary, paper style evil peanut monster have that staggered stop motion look and feel. Why? Because let's face it, peanut allergies are dangerous, and despite how dangerous this animation already looks we want it to look even more dangerous by adding some choppy constant motion to pretty much everything on screen. That's right, I said everything, pretty much. So let's bust out the Tickler script by going up to window, and scrolling all the way down to where all of our scripts are located. And I'll keep going down all the way to the T, where Tickler is. I'll select it, and it comes in this pop out window. So I need to select Tickler right here, and I'm going to drag it and just dock it here in my effects and presets. And I will need to extend this window, and bring it down, and here are all of the controls for the Tickler script. Under object properties, we have speed, movement, precompose layers and precompose each layer. The speed is how fast the movement will go. The movement is how far or how extreme the movement will be. So, let's go ahead and work on the peanut head right here. I'll pause playback. There we go. Peanut head is selected. I'm going to bring the speed down to six, so it feels kind of like it's going six frames per secondish. I'm going to bring the movement up to two. So, about two pixels or so. I'm leaving these precomposed layers and precompose each layer unchecked, because I don't need to do that, and I'm simply going to hit apply. Now, I'm going to click back on my actual timeline, because I want to make sure I don't hit the space bar with the apply button marked or it will try to apply it again. Now I can hit the space bar for preview. Whoa, that is extreme. Way too extreme. I'm going to hit command + Z to take that down, and let's go ahead and play with movement here a little bit. Let's try 1.3, and I'm going to go back to the beginning of this, hit apply and ooh, 1.3 looks pretty good. Yeah, I'm into that. It's a little bit staggered, not too noticeable. Alright, you know what? Let's go ahead and select the peanut body. Let's make this 1.3 about 1.6 and then apply. Let's take a look. Yeah, that's not so bad right there. I'm likin' that. It's a little bit wonky. You know, it's a little too wonky. I'm going to hit command + Z. I'm going to bring the 1.6 down to 1.3 to match the other one. Make sure I have peanut body selected, apply, click back down here. Yeah, that's a little bit better. I'm into it. Now, if for some reason I want to undo it, I can go ahead and click on the peanut head and I can go to undo. And then if I preview, the peanut head is back to normal. So, just 'cause I used that as an example, let's go ahead and bring this 1.3 up to something like 1.7. Go back to the beginning, hit apply, and now there we go. A little more extreme, I'm likin' how it looks. This is what I want. Alright, let's move onto these paper boom, yellow, red, and blue. Now I keep going back to the beginning, just 'cause I kind of want to base it on where it's at the start. And I want to do all of these three at the same time, so I'm going to select paper boom yellow, hold down shift, select paper boom blue, and let's go ahead and move this movement up to something like three. Let's see how that works with an extreme movement at about three. Now it's great as long as I have all three selected it will apply it to all three layers. Let's hit apply, and come back down here, and let's take a look at how that looks. Oh yeah, I'm all about it. Now if you want to undo, once again, all you have to do is click the undo, and you're looking good. Alright, let's move on. We want to get this Stop Motion Style with Tickler title moving, but since it's all supposed to be on the same piece of paper, we need to get them all moved into the same precomp. Because if I move each one of these, they will move separately. So, I have a track matte that's giving it it's actual texture. I have this texture right here, and I've got the text and the back shape for the text. So I'm just going to go ahead and select that first track matte up at top. I'm going to hold down shift and then select the bottom one. This one, I'm going to go ahead and select the precompose layers in there. Now I can precompose each layer separately, but I don't want to do that. I want to precompose them all together. So, let's think about what should I use for the speed and the motion? I'm going to keep speed at six. I'm going to take movement down to 2.5, and now if I click apply it has put them all in a precomp together. Let me go ahead and click down here and hit the space bar. Oh, I like that. It's weird, it's staggered. I like that movement. I like that style. This is perfect, 2.5 was great. I'm going to pause playback. If you see in my chapter five, it created Tickler 1-4 layers. This is the actual precomp down here. I can rename it if I want, but I know what it is. But I'm going to drag this into the precomp's folder, just to leave it as is. Alright, let's preview. It's lookin' good, but we need one more little detail to actually get this perfect. And that's creating a glow light. What the glow light does is it creates like a flicker over everything. It creates a brand new adjustment layer, and it adjusts some effects to make this glow light happen. Let's pause playback. Now, let's look at this glow light. It has speed at seven. I'm going to take that down to six to be like everything else. Brightness at three, let's test it out. I'll click apply. Please select composition you wish to add effect to, okay. I accidentally did not select the composition over here. There we go. Now I'll click apply, and it has added it. If we hit E for effect on here, we have the Tickler glow, and it uses brightness and contrast to do this. So, I'm going to go ahead and preview now. And you can see it's got a little bit of flicker. But you know what? I want more. I'm going to hit command + Z to get rid of it. Make sure I have this composition selected. I'm going to bring the brightness up to eight. I'm going to hit apply. Ho, it's already more extreme. Let's take a look. Yeah, I like that. I am digging that. So there we have it, and that's all there is to do. Quick and simple stop motion style using the Tickler script. All with a few clicks, all taking no time at all. Enjoy, everybody.