Intro to Motion Graphics: Explainer Videos From Storyboard to Animation
Hongshu Guo · Motion Designer
A tight, technique-dense walkthrough of one real explainer video, better suited to After Effects users polishing craft than true beginners.
This course teaches exactly one thing well: how a professional animator turns a storyboard into a finished 15-second explainer video in After Effects. It does not teach motion design theory from scratch, and it does not pretend to. The teacher, a Canadian motion designer with agency credits including Adidas and PayPal, walks through a single project called SmartCity.io from the first sketch to the final export, and the entire course is structured around that one build.
The opening lessons cover ground most Skillshare courses skip: what to do when a client hands you nothing but a script. The teacher shows a real process using Freepik for royalty-free vector art and Coolors for palette generation, then demonstrates how to lay out a storyboard template scene by scene. This is a small but genuinely useful piece of professional workflow that many animation courses take for granted.
Where the craft lives
The middle of the course is where the actual value sits. Preparing the Illustrator file for animation gets real attention: releasing a flattened master layer into a layers sequence, regrouping dozens of building-window elements down to a manageable number of layers, and releasing clipping masks so a globe graphic can be redrawn for animation. None of this is glamorous, but it is the unglamorous work that separates an animatable file from a flat picture, and few courses bother to show it.
The animation lessons build on animation principles rather than just software mechanics. Overshoot and anticipation are demonstrated concretely: a building rises past its final position before settling back, camera pans are faked by shifting an entire composition's Y position rather than using an actual camera, and a trim path plus a repeater set to full rotation produces a ring of radiating lines around a globe. Track mattes get a clear demonstration too, used to constrain a logo reveal inside a colored bar. Keyframe velocity is used repeatedly as a shorthand for shaping the graph editor curve, which is a practical habit for anyone tired of dragging handles by eye.
What holds it back
The course leans hard on the word "intermediate," but the blurb calls it introductory, and that mismatch shows. Menu paths and panel locations are described quickly and assumed familiar, and viewers without prior Illustrator or After Effects experience will likely lose the thread within the first setup lesson. There is also a sponsored plug for the teacher's membership community dropped mid-course, which breaks the pacing without adding technique.
The project itself is narrow. A single 15-second video with one storyboard means the techniques, however well demonstrated, are shown only once each, so viewers do not get repetition across varied scenarios. There is no voiceover-driven timing example, an omission the teacher acknowledges is a real gap in the approach, since most professional explainers are cut to a scratch VO track first.
For a viewer who already owns the software fluency and wants to see how a working professional actually assembles an explainer video, start to finish, this delivers. For anyone hoping to learn After Effects itself, it will move too fast.
The standout
The line-accent-and-repeater technique for animating the opening globe scene, using trim path plus a repeater set to 360 degrees, is a reusable trick worth the price of admission on its own.
What you will learn
- How to turn a client storyboard (or build your own from Freepik/Coolors) into a production-ready Illustrator file for animation
- How to release layers to a sequence and reorganize/group elements in Illustrator so After Effects can animate them cleanly
- How to apply overshoot and anticipation using keyframe velocity and the graph editor to add energy to motion
- How to build scene transitions (position shifts, alpha mattes, track mattes) that disguise straight cuts as camera moves
- How to use repeaters and trim path effects to build accent animations like radiating lines and orbiting circles around a globe
- How to stagger keyframes across multiple layers and apply wiggle expressions for natural, non-uniform motion
Best for: Motion designers or illustrators who already know their way around After Effects and Illustrator and want a real end-to-end explainer-video workflow to copy.
Skip it if: Complete beginners to After Effects or Illustrator, since the course moves fast through interface actions and assumes fluency with panels, effects, and keyboard shortcuts.