8-Bit Color Cycling in After Effects

Joey Korenman : Hey there, Joey here at school of motion and welcome to day 13 of 30 days of after effects. Today, we're going to talk about something that's kind of one of these niche little effects that maybe is useful, maybe not, but what I really hope you learn from this video is how to approach problem solving in after effects, because that is a far more useful skill than what we're actually going to be creating, which is eight bit color cycling. If you were born in the seventies or eighties, then you have probably played computer games that used eight bit color cycling because back in the good old days of adventure games, you really could only have 16, maybe 256 colors on screen at a time. So this was a technique that programmers used back then, and it looks really interesting. So I'm going to show you how to do it in after effects.
Joey Korenman : And hopefully you'll learn a little bit about the process of problem solving in motion design. Also, don't forget to sign up for a free student account. So you can grab the project files from this lesson as well as assets from any other lesson on the site. All right. Let's hop right in and get to it. So this is color cycling. And before I get too far into the tutorial, I want to just point out that, you know, this technique I've never actually had to use it for any sort of paid work. Um, it's, you know, I can't imagine really that many situations where you need to know how to do this. Um, so the reason I'm making this tutorial, it's not just to show you a neat trick because sometimes that's fun too. It's fun to just learn a neat trick, but what I'm hoping you'll get out of this is you'll have a little bit of a framework, um, when it comes to figuring out how to do effects that you don't know how to do that.
Joey Korenman : You've never done before. Um, this effect I had never actually done an after effects before. Um, but I've sort of, you know, I don't know, after years of using after effects and a lot of practice and kind of banging my head against it, I've gotten pretty good at figuring out how to make effects. So I want to try and teach you guys a little bit about how my brain goes about doing that. Hopefully, uh, this'll help you when, when you have to do something like this. All right. So, uh, the, I got this idea, actually, my friend, Joe Russ, he posted something about monkey island today. And if you don't know what that is, Google it it's one of the greatest computer games ever made. Um, and it got me thinking I've seen, I had seen this website before. I can't remember when I saw it.
Joey Korenman : Um, but I'll link to it in the, in the description and what this is, this is this artist, uh, mark Ferrari, who created this artwork and it looks like it's moving, right. But if you look at the pallet over here, you can actually see the trick that's creating the movement. Um, and here, what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna turn this cycle speed down to a quarter. And so now what you can see is that this artwork has all of these little layers to it, right? It's very deliberately created in such a way that when you cycle specific parts of the color palette, it creates this illusion of movement. And there's a whole bunch of cool examples here on this website. Um, let me turn this back up to normal speed and you can kind of see here, it looks like there, the water is moving.
Joey Korenman : Um, if I come down here, it looks like a, you know, like a rippling pond, right? Like there's a little rain drops and this is all done with the same trick. If you look at the color palette, that's what it's doing. Okay. It's cycling the palette. And so I said, okay, well, how do I do that in after effects? Um, and so what I started with, I'm going to try and get through this part quick, cause this part is not the interesting part, but what I started with, um, was I just made a gradient. Okay. So I made a new layer. I used the generate, uh, and it's called gradient ramp. Now it's kind of the new word for it. It used to just be called ramp. So a gradient ramp, right. Just creates this gradient. And then this is the trick and the key to the whole thing really.