Speed Up Your Workflow With Motion2 From Mt. Mograph

This is a plugin demo dressed up as a course, and it is upfront about that from the first lesson. Jake Bartlett spends the opening minutes making the case for why efficiency matters in motion graphics, then hands the rest of the runtime to Matt Jylkka's Motion2 plugin for After Effects, walking through ten of its tools one at a time. There is no theory section, no history of easing curves, just tool, demo, next tool. For viewers who already know what they are trying to speed up, that structure works well.

The strongest stretch is the opening on the Speed Sliders. Bartlett sets up a simple ball animation, eases it by hand through the graph editor (select keyframes, hit F9, drag influence handles, eyeball the match), then shows the same result achieved by dragging one slider. He pushes the comparison further with a scale-and-position mismatch that is nearly impossible to sync manually and shows the slider matching both properties' easing in a single action. This is the best kind of technique demo: a real before-and-after, not just a feature listed on a slide.

The tools past the sliders

Excite and Jump extend the same logic to overshoot and bounce. Excite reads the velocity of the incoming keyframe and generates a spring-like overshoot with independent Overshoot, Bounce, and Friction sliders, and Bartlett is careful to explain the rule that makes it work (ease the first keyframe, leave the second linear) rather than just showing the result. Jump does the same for a dropped-object bounce, with gravity and stretch controls standing in for what would otherwise be a physics expression written from scratch. Both segments show the tool applied and then adjusted, which is more useful than a single static example.

The middle section covers organizational and rigging conveniences: a Null tool that generates and parents a centered null in one click even on top of existing animation chains, an anchor point tool that relocates a pivot while preserving motion paths, a batch Name/rename tool, a Clone function for looping keyframes across multiple layers, and a Rope tool that draws a thickness-preserving line between two objects in 3D space. Burst, the shape-based secondary-animation generator used on a pie slice illustration, is the most fiddly of the set, with a dozen interlocking sliders that take longer to explain than to use.

Where it falls short

The course never explains what happens without the plugin beyond a single graph editor comparison early on, so newer editors may not fully appreciate what problem each tool solves. The closing lesson admits outright that features like Orbit, Spin, Stare, Warp, and Blend exist but get no coverage at all, which is honest but leaves real gaps in what "the plugin" actually contains. The class project, an animation based on the four seasons, is mentioned once and never demonstrated step by step, so it functions more as an assignment prompt than a guided outcome. None of this changes what the course actually delivers well: a fast, concrete tour of the tools Bartlett personally uses daily, aimed squarely at someone who already owns or is about to buy Motion2.

What you will learn

• ·Use the Speed Sliders to ease, match, or reset keyframe velocities across multiple layers and properties in one click instead of hand-adjusting graph editor handles
• ·Apply Excite to auto-generate a customizable overshoot (via Overshoot, Bounce, and Friction controls) driven by expressions rather than manual keyframing
• ·Use Jump to add a physically decaying bounce with gravity, max-jump-count, and stretch controls
• ·Generate a centered null parented to multiple layers instantly with the Null tool, including on pre-animated chains
• ·Reposition a layer's anchor point via preset bounding-box locations while preserving existing position and rotation keyframes
• ·Build a radiating Burst accent and connect objects with a thickness-preserving 3D Rope line for secondary animation detail