Motion Graphics
Motion graphics might be the purest form of creation in film - at least when it's human made. AI motion graphics can't be a pure form of creation, though it can still be very useful.
Since it generally has no dependency on realism, it's free to find its own language, using abstraction and symbolism to carry meaning. It's often technically easy to create, but demands a solid understanding of visual storytelling - the underlying principles line up closely with traditional animation, as you'll see in our animation cheat sheet.
What motion graphics actually is
Motion graphics can be whatever you want it to be. In its simplest sense it's just text coming onto screen to carry information. At its most complex, it's a full Disney-level animation.
The driving question is "What do you want to convey?" followed by "How do you want to convey it?" For most of your work, the thing you'll want to convey will be the beat of the shot you're delivering, and the way you'll convey it will be as a photoreal representation of reality.
But realism has its boundaries. Titles naturally fall to motion graphics because words are symbols, not representations of reality - and once you free yourself from the need to be literal all the time in your storytelling, you'll find a lot of openings for motion graphics!
Design
Understanding design will help you everywhere. You'll be a better filmmaker, and maybe even a world class lover. IT WORKED FOR ME ASK ANYONE.
The core concept is that you need to communicate your message visually as simply as possible. Everything that doesn't communicate exactly what you want needs to be killed with prejudice.
Learn to see everything from a zoomed out perspective. Is your idea immediately impactful? If not, iterate and simplify.
Timing
Timing is where motion graphics stops being graphic design, but like all areas of design, it comes down to simplicity and storytelling. What does the movement need to convey? Fun? Urgency? Nothing is good or bad, it just communicates or it doesn't.
Meaning
Spikey shapes are threatening, soft shapes are sensuous. Purple and deep blue sync with low-pitched sounds, yellow and light green with higher-pitched ones. Form, colour, sound - all carry meaning, which to some degree is universal.
Everything comes back to the same, urgent question: "What do you want to convey?"
The three questions to ask of any shotFramework
- What should the eye see first? If the answer is "everything", nothing reads. Rank your elements before you keyframe.
- How long does the viewer need? Screen time is measured against reading speed, not against how nice the animation looks. You'll read it faster because you made it - show it to other people and read their response.
- What is the piece's attitude? Sharp and mechanical, soft and organic, heavy and plodding, bouncy?
“Design is thinking made visual.”
Saul Bass - title designer, Vertigo, Psycho, The Man with the Golden ArmTiming and spacing
Timing is how many frames a move takes. Spacing is how the distance is distributed across those frames. Imagine that the famous race between the Tortoise and the Hare was a draw - they cross the finish line at the same time. They have the same timing. The spacing is totally different though: Hare starts fast, stops for a sleep, and goes fast again. Tortoise goes slow the whole time.
The timing testDrill
The move plays on real frame boundaries, exactly like your timeline. Watch it, then call it. Guessing frames trains the unit you actually work in. Naming the spacing trains the thing that makes two identical durations feel like different objects.
The easing lab
Easy now. Easing is a concept you'll come across a LOT. In motion graphics and animation, it's a must, but it applies to everything that you move digitally.
The idea is that generally most things don't move at a constant speed. You start your car, and even if you go pedal to the metal straight away, you're still easing into the movement. Then for a period of time you might be at a constant speed, but when you want to stop, you'll probably ease out of the movement - unless you crash. Stopping a movement in graphic design without easing it out will also feel like a crash. That doesn't make it bad, it just means it has a certain kind of energy - you need to be aware of the energy that you're using.
When we're animating digitally, we work with keyframes - but the movement between them is handled by a curve. Let's come back to the car example. Pedal to the metal is your first keyframe. Hitting your maximum speed is your second. If you don't want the transition between them to be linear, you either need a third keyframe in between (but one animation rule is that you want as few keyframes as possible), or you want to play with the curve between them. Which is EXACTLY what we're going to do here.
Anticipation, overshoot, settle
Get on your desk and jump off (not a real suggestion, don't sue if you break a limb). Here's what's likely to happen:
- You anticipate the jump. This could be emotional anticipation - you shift your weight nervously, flex your knees a couple of times to practise the action - or physical: you bend your knees to a crouch so that you can spring up.
- You fly like a bird for a couple of milliseconds.
- You land, and your knees bend to absorb the shock. This isn't where you want to end up, you're not going to stay in a squat position, so this is technically overshoot. If you don't bend your legs, your knees snap and you fall over. Still overshoot.
- You stand back up and mop your brow. This is the settle. Or, if your knees went, you writhe around for a bit and then curl up. This is also the settle.
Animators explore these principles from day one, starting on a bouncing ball and moving onto a flour sack. That's because they apply to anything that moves, including simple shapes, and therefore including motion graphics.
Anticipation
A small move in the opposite direction before the main move. It tells the eye where to look a beat early. Two to four frames is usually enough. More than that reads as a mistake.
Overshoot
Travel past the target and come back. Gives weight and confidence. Keep the overshoot small: 5 to 12 percent of the total distance for graphics, more only if the piece is deliberately cartoonish.
Secondary settle
A second, much smaller bounce after the first, then a third smaller still. Suggests mass. It needs an overshoot to be secondary to, so turning it on alone will add a small one. Every extra oscillation must be dramatically smaller than the last or the whole thing reads as jelly.
“Few movements in real life occur without some kind of anticipation.”
Frank Thomas & Ollie Johnston - Disney animators, The Illusion of LifeStagger and offset
I was once at a talk where a DreamWorks animation supervisor said that if you animate a blink and both eyes close at once, "you're dead." The lesson stuck with me - organic movement naturally staggers.
- Two to four frames per element is the workhorse range for a small group.
- Direction carries meaning. Because everything does. Left to right reads as sequence, centre out reads as an event, random reads as texture. Different cultures probably read left to right or right to left differently, based on the direction of the language they read in - I just can't prove it.
Hierarchy and read order
Motion is the loudest signal in the visual hierarchy. Anything that moves outranks anything that does not, regardless of size or colour. That makes motion a hierarchy tool and a hierarchy hazard at once.
The squint test
Simplicity at all costs. Ideally you'll watch your work from the other side of the room, with your eyes half closed. If it doesn't land from there, no details matter. Details aren't bad, but they're small beats. The small beats depend on the big beats working.
The flip test
As an art student I'd use a mirror constantly, to review my work with a fresh eye. Flipping does the same thing, and it's a button press in most software, so use it. By the way, a black mirror works as a flip AND a squint, it's magic.
Ranking tools, strongest first
- Movement. Beats everything. Use it once per beat, not everywhere.
- Contrast in value. Light against dark reads before any colour difference.
- Scale. Reliable, but only relative to its neighbours.
- Colour. Weaker than people expect, and it fails first on bad displays.
- Position. Isolation creates importance. Space around an element is a hierarchy device.
- Weight and width. Type weight is a hierarchy tool that costs no screen space.
Kinetic typography
Type is the majority of most motion graphics work, so it's worth knowing the basics.
Hold time calculatorInteractive
Set how long the shot holds, then see how much of your line a viewer actually gets. Drag it to zero and watch it become a subliminal flash.
Read the line as it plays. If you finish before it leaves, the hold is generous. If it goes before you finish, it is too fast. Character count, not word count, because long words cost more time than short ones.
Non negotiables
- Never animate the tracking of body text. Letters spreading apart while you read is the single most common beginner tell.
- Animate the container, not the letterforms, unless the letterforms are the subject. A word can slide, mask on or fade. It rarely needs to warp.
- Set the type still first. Kerning, tracking, leading and line breaks, all resolved before a single keyframe.
- Line breaks are design. Break for meaning, not for the edge of the text box.
- Motion blur on fast type is mandatory. Without it, fast moving text strobes and becomes unreadable.
- Two typefaces maximum for most packages. Weight and size give you more variation than a third family ever will.
Tracking
If in doubt, just add tracking to titles. It's a dial in most editing packages, and it gets you a bit of ooohh for free. JUST DON'T APPLY TRACKING TO WORDS THAT ARE ALREADY MOVING UNLESS YOU WANT A VERY SAD AUDIENCE.
Dial it up and the title gets its ooohh. Then hit animate to spread into that setting, and try to read the word while it moves.
The frame: composition and safe areas
Graphics live inside a frame that will be cropped, letterboxed, overlaid with platform UI and viewed on a phone. Composition decisions have to survive all of that.
- Action safe is roughly the inner 93 percent. Anything important lives inside it.
- Title safe is roughly the inner 90 percent. All legible text lives inside it.
- Platform UI eats the bottom and right of vertical video. Design for the safe zone your delivery platform actually uses.
- Check on a phone at actual size before you sign anything off. Type that is comfortable on a 27 inch monitor can be unreadable at hand distance.
Sound and rhythm
Music and sound FX are a magic glue that holds visuals together, and a secret sauce to make you look 10 to 15 times better than you are. If you're using music, start with it and match the visuals to that, rather than starting with the graphics and trying to find music that fits. If you have moving shapes, even basic sounds that ting or bang or whoosh with them will make a world of difference (just keep the decibel levels low enough that these secondary effects aren't competing with your main messaging).
Beat grid playerPlays sound
One bar of four, divided into sixteenths. Press play, then move your graphic events between beats, half beats and sixteenths and listen to what changes.
Some software (like the Studio version of Resolve) will autodetect beats in your music, to make your timing easier.
This tempo lands cleanly on your frame rate.
Key reveals go on beats. Smaller accents go on half or quarter beats. Sixteenths on everything is the classic overcooked version: listen to how quickly it stops meaning anything.
Working with sound
- Choose the track before you animate. Retro fitting motion to music you were handed later is far harder than the reverse.
- Land on the transient, not just near it. The impact frame of a move should sit on the attack of the sound, not a frame after.
- Whooshes need lead-in. A transition sound usually starts several frames before the visual move so it arrives with it.
- Silence is a device. A pause before the logo does more than another sound effect.
Practice drills
Short, repeatable and deliberately constrained. Constraint is what makes a drill teach something.
The one shape drill
Animate a single rectangle moving from left to right, one second long. Make ten versions with different easing and timing. Name the emotion of each one. This is the highest value hour a beginner can spend.
The rebuild
Pick a ten second title sequence you admire. Rebuild it frame for frame from scratch. Learning without trying isn't really learning at all.
The lower third set
Build one lower third in three tones: a news channel, a fashion film and a horror trailer. Same information, same duration. Only the design and motion change.
The five frame limit
Build a full logo reveal where no single move lasts longer than five frames. It forces you to work with cuts, holds and stagger instead of hiding behind slow transitions.
The music cut
Take fifteen seconds of a track. Place a graphic event on every beat, nothing in between. Then remove half of them. The second version will be better.
The silent version
Take a finished piece and mute it. If it falls apart, the motion was leaning on the audio. Fix the motion, then put the sound back.
We'll feedback on anything you do, so get working and submitting!
Submit for feedbackFurther reading
- Motion Graphic Design: Applied History and Aesthetics, Jon Krasner. The standard course textbook. History plus composition and craft principles.
- The History of Motion Graphics, Michael Betancourt. The deep lineage: abstract film, visual music, John Whitney, title design from Bass to Cooper.
- The Animator's Survival Kit, Richard Williams. Character animation, but the timing and spacing chapters are the best explanation of the concept anywhere.
- Art of the Title and the SelectShow / Watch the Titles archives. Study sequences shot by shot with the sound off, then with the sound on.