Google Captions

Can you Make an After Effects Template?

Tony Lee has been an advocate for Captions and Subtitles standards across Google. In early 2021 I was approached to help build an After Effects Template to speed up the process which typically involve a designer laying by hand in illustrator and outputting PNGs..

A few caveats:

Many NLEs (or editorial programs) have captions tools, but do not support per line bounding boxes.
I did not know how to use advanced expression in After Effects which would be needed to make a user friendly Motion Graphics Template [MOGRT]

The bounding box is the rectangle bounds of a layer corrected for text or shape layer content.

Our intent was to have per line bounding boxes generated automatically.

Background

I was very fortunate to work with Tony Lee and the Brand Studio team on A CODA Story.

It was one of two videos we made to air during the Oscars.

As we posted a version with burned-in captions, I started getting familiar with subtitles and captions.

I had read several posts by Tony and had reviewed the internal Standards site and Captions Playbook, so I got to work making an After Effects template. Learning expressions is a steep learning curve, but I would make several tools and revisit the Captions MOGRT a few times as my understanding has improved.

Motion Graphics Template

Step by step:

Develop static guidelines to establish rules and all the use cases
Layout in Illustrator or Figma to lock down designs to the pixel
Build a Control Layer in After Effects to drive functionality
- Several expressions were handy, including sourceRectAtTime() and if/else
Build an interface with Essential Graphics to generate a MOGRT
Rounds of testing with in-house Editors, refine the interface and refactor code
Share with Editorial partners through Playbook, and Google Video Chat demos

Reception

The MOGRT has proved helpful on several projects, and because it is a tool, I have only become involved when a feature is requested. One update required a UHD aspect to be supported, and based on my enrollment in an expressions course; I had shared that update within a few days to the editor.

My journey with creating brand tools is still early, but this Captions template is something I am proud to have been a part of my time with Brand Studio.