How to Create an Anime Explosion in After Effects

Sound Effects : [explosion]
Joey Korenman : Well, hello again, Joey here and welcome to day 22 of 30 days of after effects. Today's video is really cool. What we're going to try to do is replicate the look of a hand drawn sort of anime style explosion done totally in after effects. I sort of became obsessed with this thing. This effect when Ryan Woodward, who's an amazing traditional animator came to visit Ringling college, where I used to teach and showed how he could just sort of draw these things. The only problem is I can't draw very well. So I decided to try to do the whole thing in after effects. And I'm going to show you every single step that I did to get this result. I'm going to be using a lot of the tricks that I showed you in some of the other videos from 30 days of after effects. And it's going to be cool to see how these building blocks can start to work together, to create something really unique looking, don't forget to sign up for a free student account.
Joey Korenman : So you can grab the project files from this lesson, as well as assets from any other lesson on the site. Now let's hop into after effects and I'll show you how this works welcome to after effects people. Um, so this tutorial, I'm going to try and do this a little bit differently, and this is kind of an experiment. And, uh, I want you, I want you guys to let me know how well this works, this little animation here. Um, I sort of forced myself to figure out how to make this, and I've never actually really made anything like this before. Um, and it took a long time. Uh, it took a few hours and, you know, really had to rack my brain to get it to work. And, you know, one of the things that always happens in these tutorials is I just, I don't, you know, I'm assuming you don't want me to make a four-hour tutorial where I go through every step.
Joey Korenman : So what I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna kind of walk through this comp and I'm gonna sort of try, I'm going to try to show you every little piece and just kinda talk about it. Maybe show you a couple of things rather than build something from scratch. And then I'm going to give you this project file and let you just tear it apart and we'll see how well that works. So hopefully you guys will dig that. So this is sort of the Anna May, you know, explosion. Uh, we had, when I was teaching at Ringling, we had a guest speaker come named Ryan Woodward. I will link to him in the, uh, in the description to this amazing traditional animator. Um, and he can draw stuff like this. Uh, and actually this particular explosion was inspired heavily. You'll you'll know, in a minute, um, by this artist and he's got his two defects compilation up on Vimeo, which I'll also link to and you can see, I tried to sort of replicate the feel of that and then his reel goes on and it's all really, really cool.
Joey Korenman : Um, and I'm pretty sure that most of it is hand I'm sure. You know, when they're straight lines, he's probably using, um, you know, a line tool to do that. But a lot of this is just hand drawn. Well, I'm not that good at drawing people. Um, and I can tell you a dry hand drawing effects. Like that takes a lot of practice. It's very tricky. So I wanted to see how to do it in after effects. So let's start diving in here. Um, this is my final comp, so why don't we just dive all the way back to the beginning here? Um, I've got a lot of layers, a lot of color correction going on. Um, but this right here. Okay. This is a giant oversized comp that I've made, uh, it's 2,500 by 2,500. And I'll explain why it's that size. And this is where I actually built up all the layers that make this explosion.
Joey Korenman : Okay. And you know, what I kind of wanted to have was like this initial, um, sort of spark and then, you know, this little like, and then it sucks back in and then there's a pause and then it starts to build and build and build and boom, there it goes. So let's walk through this layer by layer. Um, all right. So what's the first layer I'm going to solo these, this first layer. All right. Actually, let me not show you that one first, that one's a little trickier and I want to, I want to go through some easier ones first. So first let's look at these lines initial lines. Okay. So at first we just have some lines sort of shooting out from the middle of the screen and then the, uh, you know, the last couple sort of sucked back in. Okay. Um, and you can see that there's, you know, some perspective on them and they've got a nice angle to them.