Create the Squid Game Intro Animation ( Plus Template)
In this week’s episode of Kashu Academy, we created the Squid Game Intro.
If you haven’t watched Squid Game just yet, you should check it out. It is a South Korean drama by Netflix. It is a fascinating story that you don’t want to miss.
The Squid Game intro
We don’t know if the original creator of the Squid Game intro created it in After Effects, but it is not so hard to re-create it yourself, even if you’re a beginner.
The process
The process that we followed in the tutorial is relatively simple, and we mostly used a couple of effects that you can easily apply in your animation in After Effects.
Step 1: Create the shapes
Our first step in the animation was to re-create the shapes they used at the start of the title sequence. They use simple forms- a square, circles, and a triangle.
In After Effects, you can achieve this by clicking on the shape icon and creating your shape.
Step 2: Add the Stroke Width expression
If you create a shape in After Effects that has a stroke and scale it, the stroke will change with the scale. However, changing the stroke width every time a scale keyframe was applied to the shape would’ve taken forever.
Luckily, there is an easy way to automate that. Simply add this expression to the stroke width:
value / length(toComp([0,0]), toComp([0.7071,0.7071])) || 0.001;
Step 3: Organize your composition.
In this After Effects tutorial, we created a bunch of shapes, lines, and animations. It would’ve been a disaster to find layers later on in the process if we didn’t organize our compositions first.
It is always best to organize your layers before you start your animation. That would save you a ton of time later.
In this case, we made all the layers connected to each different shape a different color to recognize them later.
Step 4: Apply the Trim Path Effect
We used the Trim Path effect for almost every shape. Follow these simple steps to create your beautiful trim path animation in after effects:
- Open your Layer
- Click Add> Trim Path
- Animate the End property
And boom, you’re ready.
Step 5: Change the color of the shapes
In the original sequence title composition, the shapes turn pink at the end. The way we accomplished that was by animating the stroke color.
We then connected the animation of the stroke to the other stroke properties, which saved us a lot of time copy-pasting keyframes.
Step 6: Add Drop Shadow effect
We then added the drop shadow effect to every single shape. So we can make it very close to the original title sequence.
Step 7: Apply the Shift Channels effect.
We pre-composed the whole composition to make a cool glitch effect and then added the shift channels effect. We did that by turning on and off specific colors. That helped us create different color channels and play with the keyframes to get this awesome glitch.
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