4.3 How to Create a Focus Blur Animation

Hi everyone and welcome back to the rainy window effect course. In this lesson we'll learn how to create a focus blur effect for our animation. So before we get started on that, let's go ahead and set up our neon the timing of our neon lights. So we want the neon lights to start appearing or start switching on about the halfway point of our animation. So let's select all of our key frames here by holding shift on the keyboard to select both key frames on both of our layers. And we're going to drag them out to about let's say four seconds in or between four to five seconds in. As our animation is ten seconds long this will come in about the half way point. Cool. Now if we go back to our rain animation composition, you'll see now, if we move to the four second point here, our neon lights would have turned on. And you can see how the lights works with the raindrops here and how the lights has been refracted inside the rain. The next thing we wanted to do now is to create a focus animation which will blur out the background and focus on the rain and then animate a switch around as it blurs out the rain elements in the foreground and refocuses back on the sign. So let's start by blurring out the background. So let's go to the background here and select the Effects, Blur and Sharpen, and let's go to Camera Lens Blur. Now in the effect controls here let's find edge behaviour at the bottom and sledge repeat edge pixels. And then at the top here, we wants to increase the blur radius and set it to something pretty high. So let's go to about 80% and see what that looks like. Cool, and you'll see how that how it doesn't affect the raindrops as it's on a different layer. And how it makes you focus more on the water. Cool. And let's go ahead and click on the preview button to see what it looks like. Great. Now let's go ahead and select these other two there. So the raindrop map and the water adjustment layer here. And we want to right click and precompose these so that move or attributes. And let's call this composition rain and then hit okay. And now let's go ahead and add a camera blur on this as well so go to effect go to blur and sharpen. And let's go to Caroline's blur and let's change the blur radius here to zero as we want the rain to be sharp at this point. And we want to time the focus change just as the neon lights are starting to turn on. So let's drag the timeline until you see the lights just about to turn on like so. It's about just in before the middle of our timeline here. Just going to increase this here, just so we can see the rest of our composition let's go ahead and open up our layer here, go to Effects, and we want to create a key frame for the blow radius. So let's click on the blur radius key frame here. Again, just where the lights are about to switch on. We're going to go forwards about. Two seconds here, then let's go ahead and create a new key frame. And let's set the blur radius to around ten like so. Cool. Now let's go to the background layer here. And we want to do the same. So let's go the the effects camera lens blur, so we can see the blur radius. And in our background layer, we want to create some key frames for the camera lens blur effect as well. So making sure that it's around the same point as our previous key frames. Let's creates a blur radius key frame here. And in fact let's bring that key frame further forward to where our first key frame is like so. As you want to start off with a blurry background. And then as the focus turns into our sign, we want to bring the blur radius down all the way to, zero like so, so now you can see here it transitions from a sharp rain blurry background to a sharp background and blurry rain. Great. So let's close these down. In fact, let's bring the key frames back in. Let's highlight both key frames. Right click, go to key frame assistant and select easy ease. Excellent, now let's go to our rain, glass window texture here. Open this up, and we want to add a blur effects to this as well. So let's go to effect, learn sharpen and let's slate Gaussian Blur and create a keyframe for the blurriness, and we want to start of with a nice, sharp window texture. And then at about two seconds in, let's bring the blurriness up to about five. Or let's see what it looks like at ten like so. Let's bring it to about ten and you'll see now that everything is blurring together at the same time, and we want to open up the Gaussian Blur keyframes, select them both, right click keyframe assistant and select Easy Ease. Cool, and now we have the focus animation on our window texture as well. Excellent. Now for the texture, let's add a little bit of fine effects for it. So with the dirty glass window texture selected, go to effect, go to color correction, and now let's go ahead and select curves. Now we're just going to adjust the curves a little bit just to bring out the detail of our window texture like so. And now go to effect and go to color correction. And let's add a tint to this as well. Cool, now let's go ahead and collapse all our layers here. And we can take a look at it by clicking on the play button on our preview panel here. Great so we have a nice subtle focus blur effect for animation. If we wanted to increase the contrast of this effect, all we have to do is come over to our dirty glass window texture here and duplicate it. So press Ctrl+D on the keyboardaAnd duplicate the texture a few times. And you'll see how it gives the window foreground greater focus. We can also play about with some of the layer properties here. So, instead of giving it a screen, we can go over here and in this menu, we can give it an overlay. Or we can go over here and experiment with some more of these options here, something like a Color Dodge. And this can bring out some extra texture detail, just a little bit more. Now the great thing about this is that now that we have a brighter background we have enough contrast to create some brightening on the window. So let's go ahead and grab the text towards the top here. And create some writing. So make sure that the color of the text is set to black. So let's go over here, click and make a black color. And also here you'll see that we've got the stroke color here as well, so we can also put that to black if we want a thicker text or we can just go ahead and select no stroke color. And now, just click on the composition here, and let's go ahead and write out some text. Rainy Window, like so. And I'm just going to go ahead and change some of the text properties here. So let's go ahead and transform this. And make this slightly bigger, so scale it up a little bit. And then maybe place it in the middle like so. So I'm just going to bring up this title action safe here again just to give us a little bit of a guide. Cool, that's bring that up. And maybe play about with the opacity settings as well, so maybe set it to about 80%, and let's set the text mode, text blend mode, to something like soft light, which will give the text a translucent appearance of being written on a window. It's a little bit too late for me. So let's bring this back up to about 95 like so. And we can also go ahead and create a new solid here and make it so that it's white, like so. And let's go ahead and bring it to a background. Just above our background, and we can add a little bit more contrast here by going to the opacity and then just bringing it back just a little bit, like so. So maybe to about 8% or 5%. Just so that we can see our text a little bit more so maybe about 8%. Cool, and then lastly we want to add a blur effect to our text. So let's go ahead and select our rainy window text and then go to Effect. Blur and Sharpen, and then let's select Gaussian Blur. And then we want to paste these same key frames as in our window texture. So let's go ahead and open up our window texture. Go to Effects and see where it says Gaussian Blur here. Let's open that up. And we want to make sure that we're in the same timeframe on our timeline here. So it is going to be at four seconds over here, just about four seconds. And you can also zoom in here just to make sure that you're in the right place. Let's go ahead and select both of these key frames here. Press Control C on your keyboard, and then we're going to select a rainy window, and then making sure we're still in the same timeline. Press the control V to paste. And if we open up our rainy window there you see that in the effects on the Gaussian Blur, we have successfully pasted in the exact same key frames for our Gaussian Blur. From here, all we need to do to complete this effect is select the final, the last key frame here. So let's bring our timeline all the way down here and we want to make sure that our window text doesn't clash with our neon light text, so you want to go ahead and rank up the blurriness all the way up so that it starts to disappear. So something like 200, like so. So now we can no longer see our window text and if we scroll backwards and forwards in our timeline. Hopefully you should see how our text sort of blurs out and refocuses to our neon lights. So to test this out we can go ahead and click on the preview button. Awesome. So that's it. We now have a very nice rainy window animation that you can use for your own projects which you can fully control within After Effects. In the next lesson, we'll go through how to render your animation. See you all there.