Behind the scenes of my viral motion template — the making of AI intro
Have you ever wondered how to create a a popular, good-selling After Effects template?
Introduction
My name is Roma, also known as MotionRam, and I’m a motion designer. I’ve been doing this for about 9, maybe even 10 years, I’ve been in the game so long I stopped counting; motion design and I are basically like Venom at this point. This year, I created an After Effects template called “AI Text Intro” which gained a lot of popularity and attracted a large audience. So I’d like to dive in a bit and share what guided me during its creation, as well as talk about the technical side of the project. I’ll also explain why AI-related design projects are such a popular trend right now.
The Inspiration: What Sparked the AI Theme?
So, to start off, I want to explain why I chose the AI theme for my After Effects template. I constantly analyze the market and try to understand what it needs, always keeping up with trends. Based on my deep understanding of the market, I noticed a rapidly growing demand for AI-related content everywhere. After analyzing the template market specifically, I realized that there were virtually no templates focused on the AI theme. I was convinced that there was a strong demand and need for this kind of product, but the market hadn’t yet caught up to deliver it. That’s why I decided to be one of the first to offer a solution and provide an animated template tailored to this trend. And spoiler alert — that’s exactly what happened. You could say I was one of the pioneers in creating AI-themed After Effects templates.
Designing the Template in After Effects
Since I’m a pretty experienced motion designer, I don’t usually start by sketching and then turning it into animation. Instead, I tend to kick off every project with a bit of writing — just a quick note or a short description for myself. I sketch out roughly what I want to see in the project, then dive right into making slides and animations. You could say it’s more of a freestyle flow, guided by vibes and intuition. Honestly, I rarely know exactly how the final project will turn out, but I trust my process and just get creating. And a little side note — this whole project was done completely without any plugins or outside software. I didn’t even touch Illustrator or Photoshop. It’s all pure After Effects.
Now let’s dive into the technical part. I want to share what animation graphs, techniques, and expressions I used, and how the internal structure of my project is built. I’ll start with the fact that I have a specific style — I usually work with fixed time segments, meaning a set animation timing. For me, this timing typically ranges between 1 second and 1 second 20 frames. I use this exact timing throughout the entire animation so the project looks cohesive and it’s easier to match it with music, since there’s a consistent rhythm used.
Also, one of the main techniques I use in most of my projects — and it’s a very basic, widely used one — is MatchCut. I think it’s one of the best techniques: it’s easy to use and helps create dynamic animations and smooth transitions between slides.
That’s why most of my animation graphs look the same, usually with a value of 80–100 on both sides of the keyframes.
And at the point of the animation’s highest speed — as you can see from this graph, it’s around the value of 3200 — a cut is made in the animation. The next animation uses the exact same animation graph, but reversed: only the second half of the graph remains, and the first part is removed. As a result, this creates a perfect MatchCut transition.
Text Animation Techniques
In this section, I want to break down the main text animation techniques that were used in this project. I want to note that for most of the animations, I simply used animation on the Position and Opacity parameters.
For the Typewriter animation, I used the built-in After Effects effect “Blinking Cursor Typewriter Console.”
Also, to make the first part of the text disappear, I used an Animator: Opacity and animated the “End” value with the parameter changed to “Index” so I could animate by the number of words rather than by percentage.
Echo Text/Shape Animation
The next animation is more complex and advanced, and here I used a variety of different tools. Specifically, I’m talking about the animation where the text smoothly transitions into an abstract shape.
So, at first, I used Animator: Opacity, animating the Start parameter from 0 to 100, with Smoothness set to 0 and Based on set to Characters. All other parameters remain unchanged.
Next, in the text composition, I drew a mask in the approximate shape I wanted the text to morph into. This shape would touch the edges of the composition, essentially making it look like the text is “bouncing off” different sides of the comp. In the Path Options of the text layer, I selected this mask and animated the First Margin to a certain value.
Then I created a small Circle shape and copied the Mask Path, pasting it into the Position of the circle shape. On the shape layer, I added a Gradient Ramp effect and applied the ToCompValue expression to both Start of Ramp and End of Ramp, so the gradient color stays fixed to the shape’s position and creates depth. This has to be done before animating the shape — if done afterward, it won’t work properly.
I also added an Echo effect with a very small Echo Time (about 0.0005) and a high Number of Echoes (around 320). This ensures the shape looks smooth and continuous, without visible gaps — because if there aren’t enough copies, it becomes obvious the shape was generated using a Circle.
Bulge Rolling Text
And now for the final interesting part I’d like to uncover a bit — the bulge rolling text effect.
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First, I created a text composition and placed identical text layers at the top and bottom. I applied the CC Repetile effect to all of them to create many repeated copies, which allowed for a smooth horizontal scroll animation from left to right.
To make the animation more dynamic, I used a small trick: the center text, which had a gradient applied, was animated with a slower position value, while the top and bottom texts moved faster. This creates a subtle optical illusion — making the whole animation feel more energetic and layered.
On top of all this, I added an Adjustment Layer and applied the Fast Box Blur effect with a blur value starting at 50 and decreasing to 10, using 3 iterations. Then I masked the adjustment layer to focus only on the central part of the screen. This way, the outer areas of the text got a dynamic blur while the center remained sharp, keeping the viewer’s focus on the main message and enhancing the depth and motion of the animation.
And then, also on top of all this animation, I created an Adjustment Layer, added the Bulge effect with Horizontal Radius 2500, Vertical Radius 2500, and animated the Bulge Height from 1.2 to 1. All other parameters remain unchanged, and antialiasing is set to high. This is so that during the transition there is more dynamics, as if the text is sinking inside, because when the bulge effect changes, the bulge will decrease.
Animation of Graphic Elements
I also want to highlight a few animated graphic elements that I used in this project. The first is a dynamic multicolored gradient. It is based on about 30 circles, which are animated by the position parameter using the expression wiggle: wiggle(1.5,1200) — for each circle these parameters are slightly changed so that all the shapes don’t move uniformly. And also, on top of the entire animation, I added an adjustment layer and applied the Gaussian Blur effect to it with a value of 750. Repeat Edge Pixels is enabled.
The next animation is the animation of a star, specifically the stroke. At first, I used an expression for the Stroke, which keeps this value from changing:
value / Math.max(length(toComp([0,0]), toComp([0.7071,0.7071])), 0.001);
When scaling the shape up or down. Because without this expression, the stroke value would change. I also added a Trim Path animator, where I set the Start value to the default 0, and the End value to 20. I animated the offset using the expression time*25, and for the next three stars the expressions are: time25+90, time25+180, time25+270, to create a phase shift, so basically the star consists of four separate animated parts through offset animation. In the parameters Taper, Start Length, and End Length, I set the values to 75%.
Adapting for Stock Platform
On a stock platform, there usually isn’t a clearly defined project structure, but for me, the most optimal one is the one shown in the screenshot below.
The Color composition is where the controller with all the settings is located, allowing you to change the project. There, for example, you can change colors, position, or some values using the Slider Control effect.
The Logo folder contains the logo placeholder where you can insert your own logo.
The Text folder holds all the text compositions, which are also easy to edit.
The Render folder contains the final composition with all the changes — this is the one you should render. It doesn’t have anything unnecessary so the user won’t accidentally break anything and can immediately export the needed part.
The third folder, Other Comps, gathers all auxiliary files: solids, null objects, extra layers, and other elements necessary for the full functionality of the project.
Impact & Results
Overall, on one of the stock template sales platforms where you can track the number of downloads, the project gained over 1600 downloads in 3.5 months. This made it the most popular among all projects uploaded to the platform in the last six months.
Also, because this project became quite popular, I decided to share it with my subscribers on my YouTube channel and recorded a tutorial on how to create a specific part of the animation in this project. In the video, I explained in detail how I performed each step. Viewers really liked it — in a relatively short time, the tutorial gained over 16,000 views and more than 1,300 likes.
Also, due to a high demand for learning and the desire to understand how to create cool projects and animations like mine, I decided to develop a training course. I started selling it on various platforms as well as on my personal website. As of the end of May, which is about three months, over 100 people have completed the course. Overall, it received a lot of positive feedback.
Insights & Recommendations
The most valuable thing I took away from this project is understanding the importance of balancing creativity and market needs. Creating just good animation is great, but it’s even better to create a product that resonates with the audience here and now. I could have made a regular animation without diving into market demands, but instead, I analyzed trends and noticed the growing demand for AI-related themes. The market hadn’t yet offered a quality product in this direction, and that became the strategic advantage of my template.
However, this alone wouldn’t be enough without quality execution, because finding a market need is only the first step. The second is to make a truly strong, quality product and present it properly. It’s this combination that delivered the result. If you’d like to see the full template (link on project)
