After Effects Expressions

I'm very comfortable writing expressions in After Effects. Over the years, I’ve created a range of After Effects expressions to streamline workflows and enhance my animation and motion graphics. Some of my previous setups include trails that dynamically follow movement, buttons that apply preset effects with a single click, and text boxes that automatically resize to fit their content. I enjoy finding ways to make animation more efficient while keeping the creative process flexible.

For this project I wanted to make a reusable bullet point list that our video editors could use to create consistent lists to show up alongside a presenter. The editors were not necessarily that familiar with After Effects so I wanted to make something which would be easy to use.

Because it's controlled entirely with Essential Properties it can be easily converted into a Motion Graphics Template for Premiere Pro, which means the editors never even need to open After Effects.

Things like the size of the panel and the distance between bullet points are controlled dynamically using expressions, which means the user only has to type in the text for each bulletpoint in the Essential Properties text fields.

When the user types in the title everything adjusts depending on how long the title is. If it spreads over multiple lines the panel and the bulletpoints adjust to compensate keeping the look and feel of the design consistent regardless of the design ability of the video editor.

Not all lists have the same number of bullet points, obviously. So there is a drop down that you can select how many list items you want. Through the power of expressions everything adjusts to the right size.

I made it so that if the number of list items is 6 or more the panel stretches to fill the full height of the screen as it looked weird if their wasn't enough space at the top and bottom.

Brands usually have colour schemes so there shouldn't be that many colours to choose from. For this list creation tool I just had a simple selection of colours, which ensured that they were all a part of the brands colour scheme.

Slide to the left, slide to the rights criss-cross! Depending on which side of the frame the presenter is standing you might want the bullet points on either the left or right of screen. The checkbox adjust everything to align to the other side of the screen. It's a little cut off in the example, because the right hand side of the screen is behing the menu. The coloured bar on the edge always stays attached to the edge of the screen, so I had to have the position of all the text adapt depending on what side of the screen it was on.

Other adjustments are built in for those unforeseeable scenarios. If something is just a smidge too wide for the panel you can adjust it with a handy slider. You can also adjust things like the spacing between each bullet point.