After Effects – Season Greetings with Motion Graphics

There’s is something about the Christmas season that always seems to inspire people to work harder towards accomplishing their goals. Perhaps, its because they need the extra cash for the holidays or maybe its simply the idea of not completing ones goal before the end of the year or even having something special to share with others at the end of the year.

This year I decided that I would create a special Christmas greetings video using Adobe After Effects. The idea for the video first came from watching Eran Stern’s of SternFX.com Shapes from Vectors video made using After Effects (you can watch the actual tutorial here: http://www.sternfx.com/tutorials/114).

I thought it was pretty cool, relatively simple animated motion graphic and just right for an intermediate After Effects user experiment on. However I didn’t want to simply recreate the skull animation in the tutorial, I wanted to use a different theme although, with the same motion effects. After much thought I decided a Christmas tree would be just the right asset to use for the animation as I required a graphic that had numerous aspects that formed a whole.

After some research I decided on this Christmas tree which is vector file and a free resource that can be found at All-free-download.com  http://goo.gl/8eQAaT

Before diving right into After Effects I had to make some slight modifications to the actual tree. This involved inporting the file into Photoshop and using the pen tool to trace an overall outline in white to act as a container for the tree. After which i then imported the trace into illustrator, converted it to a vector object and placed it around the original tree asset making sort of stroke container.  After this I pretty much went with the SternFx’s tutorial.

This process is covered clearly in the tutorial so I theres no need to reiterate. You can find the link above.