Streamers can be made in After Effects.

It's a big year for the University of Missouri! It's MU's 175th birthday and it's the Trulaske College of Business's 100th birthday! Since I work at the Business School, I got to make a fun birthday themed animation.

Step one for any good birthday themed anything is streamers. 3D-looking spirals are actually much harder to make in After Effects than you might think. Lucky for me my boss sent me a link to this tutorial about how to begin, starting with a single skinny line.

I animated this one line, added a cylinder effect for the spiral, and duplicated it to create several different spirals. The only problem is the effect I used doesn't create more than one twist, which can make for some pretty lame streamers.

Those doesn't look like a super exciting centennial AT ALL. So, I duplicated all of them and shifted the time over to make the duplicates into an extension.

Much curlier, longer and overall more fun-and-exciting-birthday-party-looking! Next step was the confetti. That was the easy part, as the confetti is just a rather simple particle effect. I had to adjust all the settings about a million times to get the amount and speed of my confetti just right, but I did it!

The final step was to add a grand entrance for the main happy birthday message! Here's the final product: