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 from Envato Elements, where everything is included in a subscription.
Update for Lunar New Year 2023
You might still want to follow along with our how-to tutorial below, but if you then want to use what you've learned to make something for this year so we've included some additional templates, updated for 2023, that you might find useful. You'll find them after the tutorial.
Resources Used in this Tutorial
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! Although these are for 'year of the ox' we've kept the original resources here the sam so you can follow through with the tutorial.
Template
Stock Footage
Music
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 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 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.
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.
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 Final Composition (or whatever you titled it) from the Project Panel into your timeline to make it part of the larger composition.
Drag any footage you want to include into the Project Panel.
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.
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.
Render!
When you're happy with your video, go to File > Export > Add to Render Queue.
Here's the example which also includes a Vietnamese wish of Happiness and Prosperity for the new year:
Update for Lunar New Year 2023 - Year of the Rabbit
After Effects Template
Chinese New Year Opener 2023
A full HD Chinese New Year opener for After Effects, new for 2023. You'll need After Effects 2019 or above to use this template. Text placeholders are compatible with Chinese and Mandarin fonts and it's easy to edit.
Stock Footage
Happy Chinese New Year 2023 Background Decoration
A colourful animated background with Chinese calligraphy that translates to 'may you attain greater wealth'.
More After Effects Tutorials
How to Add Adobe After Effects Animations to a Web Page
How to Duplicate a Layer in After Effects
How to Make a Diwali Greeting Video With a Template for After Effects
How to Animate Text in After Effects
About This Page
How We Picked
We looked at projects and considered all kinds of variables, including organization, complexity, experience required and overall difficulty, minimum hardware specifications, included versions and options, formats, resolution, file size, dependencies and required plug-ins (if any), language options, software versions supported, style, design, and cost. You can read more about how we select items at How We Pick Templates to Feature on Envato Tuts+.
About The Authors
This page was edited by Jackson Couse. It was written and updated by Marie Gardiner.
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