ChatGPT has been a breakout moment for several industries over the past week. It can literally turn ideas into reality, but is it good enough for creating motion graphics in Adobe’s After Effects?
In case you’re not familiar, openAI recently released a chat bot. It’s based on their “big language” AI model and deserves a lot of the hype. It can write college essays, manuals, and generate code convincingly.
Now, while it’s not built for creating images, it can still turn your regular language into JavaScript code that After Effects understands. This can be an incredible tool for motion graphics artists who struggle with expressions. The best part is that ChatGPT also explains what each piece of code means and how to customize it—much better than scrolling through the Creative Cow forums.
Basic test
The expression “Wiggle” in After Effects is extremely popular. This is the first test I do, and it doesn’t work. That’s because ChatGPT confidently gave me the wrong answer and the code broke. Ok, so you might not trust this with your client’s most important project right now.
However, hitting the “retry” button and rewriting my question changed everything. This is a common problem with AI modeling, and it’s what led to hiring the first employee. “quick engineer” at Scale AI this week.
After a few minutes of trial and error, we had the wiggle function. Now we can move forward to do more interesting things.
Complex test
These are the prompts I used and the results I was able to create in After Effects. Sometimes I used customizable parameters to make the animation more beautiful.
Can you create an Adobe After Effects expression that blurs a shape layer when its position is on the right half of the composition, using the Gaussian Blur effect
Can you create an Adobe After Effects expression that places the cursor blinking at the end of a text field
Can you write an Adobe After Effects expression to make a shape layer wobble when an empty object is within 50 pixels of the shape’s anchor point
Can you make an Adobe After Effects expression to rotate a shape layer around its anchor point, with a radius of 100 pixels
More to discover
I tried getting the JSX script out of ChatGPT, unfortunately not working. This would be the obvious development of this idea. The After Effects expression engine is powerful, but it’s also limited by the parameters you’re trying to change. You can’t create new objects, nor can you affect multiple objects at once, like a script can do.
However, whether I find scripting issues or not, this is still a powerful tool. I was completely taken aback by its logical approach to my organic language. People are starting to believe that we will have a path from natural language to editable animation in the next few years. Adobe’s Sensei AI is just the tip of the iceberg of what will be available for advertising.
