Fast Fable vol. 3

Hey guys, welcome to a new Fast Fable. Today we're going to be animating some type and a short game of pong.

In order to create these quick transitions between words, we're going to be focusing on curves, and towards the end, we're going to stylize everything by adding a few effects.

We're going to start by making a dark gray background and creating a new text layer. I've picked Roboto black, but any type face will do, except for Papyrus. I'm sorry, but Papyrus won't do.

We're going to move, rotate and scale this layer for about two seconds. And then we'll change the curves to exponential. This type of curve will create a very slow acceleration and deceleration, but a very high-speed in between.

This is the sweet spot to transition from one word to the next. All we need to do now is duplicate and trim the layers at their fastest point, transitioning seamlessly from one word to the next.

Now we'll use the rectangle tool to create a couple of very accurate tennis table paddles. We're going to transition from the last text layer game into the left paddle by using the same technique.

We'll first apply the same animation to both layers and then trim them, so they switch at the exact moment. We're also going to draw a line down the middle and animate it using trim pads.

Now for the ball, we're going to create a circle and have it animate parallel with the text. All we need to do is match our previous keyframes and animate the circle in ways that fill the composition.

Quick tip, if you hold command and alt and click on the path's anchor point, you can create a Bezier and curve the paths.

To create the game of pong we'll animate the ball first and then reposition the bars accordingly. This way we can create an interesting ball animation without being restricted to the bars movements.

To loop this animation, we're going to match the last frame with the first one by transitioning one of the paddles into the first word, and by bringing the ball back to its starting position.

Finally, to make this look a little more retro, we're going to apply a pixelate and motion blur effect. Within the motion blur, we are going to bring the chromatic aberration way up to get some nice colorful blurs. Overlaying everything with a rectangle with grain effects applied will give these blurs a nice texture.

We can also add a CRT effect to make this game of pong feel a little more authentic.

And that's it. Remember to use the speed of animations to your advantage when transitioning from object to object. You can even use it to switch up entire scenes. Catch you guys on the next one.