Web Development: How to Make a Lunar New Year Celebration Video from a Template for After Effects

Thursday, February 4, 2021

How to Make a Lunar New Year Celebration Video from a Template for After Effects

If you’d like to celebrate Lunar New Year by creating a video for your friends, family, clients, or anyone else then we'll walk you through how to make one quickly and easily in After Effects, with a template and stock footage.

Resources Used

All of the following are available from Envato Elements; with one subscription you can use as many templates as you like, as often as you like!

Template

Chinese New Year

Stock Footage

Music

Lunar New Year

For more options and an alternative tutorial, check out our quick showcase of templates for 2021.

Video

3 Top Lunar New Year 2021 (Ox) Video Templates for After Effects

Marie Gardiner

How to Make a Lunar New Year Celebration Video for After Effects (With a Template)

Open the Template

Download and install the template and assets.

Open the template up in After Effects and you’ll see four folders: Edit Here, Final, Other, Solids. You’ll need Edit Here to make changes to the text and logo. If you also want to change the animations then you’ll find the relevant bits in the other folders.

Change Text and Add a Logo

Now let's personalize this project.

Open 'Edit Here' to change the logo and text

Open Edit Here and you’ll see three placeholders, one for a logo and two for text.

To change either the logo or text, just double click onto the placeholder and it’ll appear in your editing timeline. To demonstrate, I’ve changed the text from "2021" to "Lunar New Year."

Depending on what you change the text to, you might need to adjust the size and position in the Text Edit panel.

Check changes back in Final Composition — Check changes back in **Final Composition**

Check your changes by going back to the Final Composition tab and make sure that your text isn’t crashing over another element like the logo.

Add Additional Text

If you'd like extra text, simply copy one of the existing placeholders by either right-click, Copy-and-Paste or by pressing Control-D on the placeholder you wish to duplicate. Then as before, double-click on it to edit. Here, I've added 'Happiness and Prosperity' in Cantonese. You'll need to check which fonts support additional languages and characters.

Adding extra text and supported characters

Add Stock Footage and Other Elements

To make this template become part of a larger composition and to be able to add in things like stock footage, you need to create a new composition.

In the Project panel, click on New Composition, which is the third icon from the left that looks like a film slide. When you click it, a new window pops up asking for some settings.

Add your stock footage or other elements

I’ve gone for a standard HDTV 1080 setting, but if you’re working in 4k you can choose one of those instead. In Duration, make sure the length is enough – better to make it longer and trim it down later on.

Drag your composition from the Project Panel into the Timeline

Drag Final Composition (or whatever you titled it) from the Project Panel into your timeline to make it part of the larger composition.

Import assets into the Project Window and drag and drop into Timeline

Drag any footage you want to include into the Project Panel.

Insert footage and adjust size and length

Now drag and drop each piece into the Final Comp timeline and position it as appropriate. As I added 4k video into an HD project, it needs resizing, which is done by dropping the Transform menu under the footage and adjusting the scale.

Repeat with any other footage or motion graphics you want to include.

Handy Side Note

If you want to use the intro template again as an outro, just drag it back into the Timeline from the Project panel again. It’s worth noting that if you want the outro to have a different message you’ll need to copy the template files and have them as a separate folder. This can end up getting confusing and making the Timeline really messy. In our experience it’s actually easier to just make your intro and outro separately, render each one out and then pop them back into the composition that way.

Add Music

Now add music of your own, or from stock.

To add music to your video, drag your track into Project Panel if you’ve not done that already when you did your footage, and then drag it into the Timeline.

Adjust the music to fit the rest of the project

You might need to trim the music or reposition it to fit.

Trim Project for Rendering

In Timeline, drag the Work Area End to the end of your composition. Where this ends is everything that will be rendered, so if you have lots of empty space after your last element and your WAE stretches across this, it’ll be rendered into your video.