Exploding Logo Effect In Apple Motion

Apple's Motion app lets you create all sorts of video special effects. In this tutorial, we'll take a graphic logo and make it explode into 10,000 particles in 3D. The particles will fit the shape and color of the image. Then we'll look at how to reverse it so that the particles come out of nowhere to reform the graphic.

You can also watch this video at YouTube (but with ads).

Video Transcript: Hi, this is Gary with MacMost.com. Let me show you how to explode a graphic in Apple Motion.
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So recently I redesigned that intro there for the show.
One of the ideas I had was to have the MacMost logo kind of come together from a bunch of particles like a reverse explosion.
I built that in Motion and I didn't quite like the effect for my show.
But it is a really cool effect. So I'll show you how to build it.
So if you're not familiar with Motion it is an app from Apple that only costs $50 and it's basically a companion to Final Cut Pro that allows you to create motion graphics. In other words it's Apple's version of Adobe AfterEffects.
I'm using version 5.4.3. The most recent one.
We're going to start off by creating a Motion project.
The first thing we want to do is we want to get the graphic in here.
I'm going to shrink the view area here so I can see the entire thing.
I'm going to drag and drop the MacMost logo in here.
I'm going to lock it to the center using those guidelines there and I'm going to shrink it a bit since I don't want it to be so big.
So I'm going to hold the Option and Shift key and drag a corner to shrink it.
In the Timeline here I want to shrink this.
I want to grab the right side and drag it down so it's just about one second long.
Next I want to create a new group.
Everything is inside a group.
So I have a group here with the MacMost logo that was created automatically.
I'm going to make sure I don't have anything selected and I'm going to create a new group so it's an equal level with this other group.
It's not inside of this first group.
So now I've got Group 1.
In Group 1 I'm going to draw a circle.
So there's little drawing tools here.
I can click it and select circle.
I can draw a circle if I hold down the Shift key it will lock it to be a circle and not
an oval.
I'll drop it there.
So now I've got Group 1 with a circle in it.
With that circle selected I'm going to go to the Inspector here and I'm going to make
sure the Fill Color is set to white.
So if it's not you can click on it and change the color to white.
I'm going to go to Geometry.
Here I can change the radius.
So I don't want it to be this big circle here.
I want it to be a small one.
I'm going to change that to 3 to make just a nice little dot there.
Then I'm going to go to Properties.
I'm going to reposition it here to the center.
I can also drag and drop it just to the center but I'm going to set it to zero, zero so it's
in the center of the screen.
Now with that circle still selected I'm going to click the Make Particles button.
It's also under Object and Make Particles.
So now Group 1 has an emitter that's a particle emitter.
What does a particle emitter do?
Well, let's go and move the timeline forward and we can see what's happening here.
It's emitting all these particles.
Particle Emitters are one of the key ways to create special effects.
So the first thing I want to do is instead of having this just emitting particles from a point I want to change that so it explodes from a point.
So I'm going change the birthrate to zero.
In other words don't keep adding new particles to it.
But instead I'm going to set the initial number to an amount.
I'm going to keep it at 1000 right now.
Notice it's a circle.
What's happening is a 1000 particles are being born from the center initially and they're expanding out and they're doing it uniformly.
I'm going to change that so that the speed is a little bit faster.
I'm going to change it to a thousand.
Now you can see it's going to move faster here, less in the timeline.
I'm going to give it a speed randomness of 500.
What that's going to do is basically say it can be anywhere from 500 to 1500 in terms of the speed of each one of these.
So you get a ring of particles exploding from the center.
Now I'm going to change the shape of the explosion from a point to an image.
When I do that I get an Image Source here and I'm going to drag the logo into that Image Source.
Now instead of exploding as a point it's going to do so in the shape of the logo.
I need to change the Arrangement to Random Fill.
Now, if I view this, you'll see at the beginning come out of the shape of the MacMost logo.
You could see this a lot better if you increase the initial number.
The amount you use is going to depend on the size of the logo in its general shape.
You might be able to use less than a thousand.
For my logo you're going to have to use a lot more.
I'm going to go to five thousand here and now I can see how the particles really are kind of clinging at the beginning there to the exact shape of the MacMost logo and they explode outward from that.
Now these are white particles exploding from a logo that has multiple colors.
I can fix that by changing the Color Mode from Original to Take Image Color.
Now the particles will explode with the same colors as the logo.
So you can see the red particles coming from the m there in the middle and white coming from the outlying outside.
We want this explosion to be a 3D explosion like it was happening in space.
So I want to checkoff 3D here and I'm going to have it explode with a latitude and longitude of zero and zero.
So in other words coming right at us and exploding in 360 degrees, so all around.
So now it's basically a space explosion exploding from the middle.
Now what I would like to happen is I would like the particles to start off large and get smaller as they fade away.
So with the Emitter selected her I'm going to go to Behaviors and I'm going to add a particles behavior for Scale over Life.
That's going to immediately switch me to the Behaviors tab here with that Scale over Life
selected.
I don't want it to start at zero and go to 100.
I want it to start at 100 and go to zero.
Start off with big particles and get smaller.
Now if I move the timeline here you can see the particles get tiny and disappear.
So now let's cut the time for this explosion down because you can see if I go out far enough, kind of around here, it's all gone.
But the explosion continues here in the timeline.
I'm going to select the entire group here and I'm going to hit the O key for Out and it's going to trim off the timeline here.
Now if I look here in the timeline you can see I've got Group 1 and I've got this original group here that has the logo.
I don't want the logo to be hanging around in the background like that.
So what I'm going to do is I'm going to select Group 1 and I'm going to position this timeline here just at the point where the logo disappears.
I'm going to move Group 1 so it starts at that point.
Now you can see, by going left and right with the arrow keys, one frame I've got the logo and the next frame I've got the beginning
of the particle explosion which is almost a perfect outline of the logo itself.
As a matter of fact if I were to go back to the emitter and change the number of particles, the initial number, to something more then it would look almost exactly like it.
For instance if I were to change this to 10,000 you can see how it fills out the logo even better.
Now I can click here to go back to the beginning.
Hit Play and see what it looks like.
So that looks good.
That's what I want.
But what if I want that in reverse.
One thing I could do is I could just export it as is and in a lot of things, like in iMovie, I can just then reverse the clip.
But I could also go ahead and select this group here and then Command click to select both these groups here.
Then I could go to Object and Group to group them together.
Now I have my explosion as a single group.
I could go to Object and then Make Clone Layer.
So now I have Group 2 which is a clone of Group 1.
I can take the clone layer and move that further along in the timeline.
So now basically I've got the explosion one time and then the explosion again.
Clone layers, though, can be reversed.
I can select this clone layer here and then under Inspector, Properties, Timing I can show the timing and here I've got the ability to reverse it.
I can't do that with the original.
I can only do that with the clone.
So if I reverse this now if I move the playback head here you can see the second one actually does the entire thing in reverse.
I can deselect everything and then Play to get a nice effect there.
There's the explosion and there it is in reverse.
Now note the speed might be a little off because it has to process everything in real time.
When you go to Share, Export Movie, all that processing will take place as it's building the video clip and the resulting clip will play at full speed.
(Demonstrating video).Then if you only want to use the implosion you can just clip to use the second half of the exported video.
It will work with any graphic you want to put in there.

Comments: 6 Responses to “Exploding Logo Effect In Apple Motion”

Lou Adzima

6 years ago

Gary, Loved this, great step-by-step and explanation of what you are doing and why. Please do more.

Seth Rosenblum

Excellent tutorial Gary, Thanks! BTW, what is the model of the curved monitor you use? Like it?

D. Sands

I would like more Motion videos also! This was great!

Gary Rosenzweig

Seth: Not using a curved monitor. I've got three screens: a 27-inch 4K in the middle and two 1080 screens in portrait mode on the sides.

Frank

I think the tutorial was excellent. I had not thought of doing this.

Bruce Stasiuk

I'm going to have to get an engineering degree, then I'll be back.
You did a fine job. It's way beyond my skill level.

Comments Closed.

Exploding Logo Effect In Apple Motion

Comments: 6 Responses to “Exploding Logo Effect In Apple Motion”

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