Mastering Animation Techniques in After Effects

There is an informational part. It says informational animating and after effects. It outlines the steps of animating something.

Whenever in the book you see a section that starts off with the words informational, all caps usually, unless I screwed it up. It's a section of, it's not step-by-step instructions. It's a section of extra information.

I couldn't put it in the call-out box because those don't run page to page. It's like really strange. Okay.

So, it basically outlines the steps of animating something. Okay. To animate something.

Oh, yeah. By the way, it's like, by the way, you can't move a layer, by the way, if it's locked. If you turn on the lock switch of a layer, you can't move it or interact with it.

Okay. Keep that in mind. So, if you're trying to adjust something and it's failing, check the lock.

Okay. And sometimes, for the record, the program just freaks out and doesn't work the way it's supposed to in the first place. When that happens, save your work, restart the program.

It's like, it is, the program sometimes gets really wonky with stuff. Okay. Now, animation.

The background will not be animated. The background will stay where it is for now. But the photo, I would like to have the photo start off screen and then come onto the screen.

That is my goal. Okay. So, it's going to fly onto the screen.

I'm thinking it's going to fall from the top. I mean, whatever you want is fine. Okay.

Now, animation and programs like After Effects, After Effects, Adobe Animate, Premiere Pro, Photoshop, and then any other program that animates, mostly have the same concept. We create what are called keyframes, and then we make multiple keyframes in the program, changes, animates from one to the other. Okay.

Keyframes are like poses. Pose one, pose two, and the program will animate between them. Okay.

Technically, the word the program uses for what I just described is it'll interpolate the change between them. That really is some helpful, I'll say, by the way, I'm not lying. So, basically, position is what I want to animate for this.

I want two keyframes. One where the photo is off screen, above, below, whatever, I don't care. And the second where it's right there where it is now.

The program, the moment you get those two keyframes, will animate between them. It'll animate from one keyframe to the next. In order to animate, you need at least two keyframes, and they got to be different.

They got to have different values. Okay. Now, in this program, you can add keyframes to anything that has that stopwatch symbol.

If you see that stopwatch symbol, it's an old style metal stopwatch. You can animate this. And again, animate something means you change it over time.

Okay. When the stopwatch is gray, there is no animation for that property. When the stopwatch is blue, there's animation.

So, blue indicates, yes, we have keyframes. Yes, we have animation. Okay.

When I changed the scale before, I had not enabled animation. So, the change is for all of time. Once I enable animation, the change is now only wherever on the timeline you did it at.

Okay. Now, you can only see keyframes in the timeline itself down here. So, normally, you do your animation with the timeline.

So, I want to animate the photo's position and its rotation. If I use the little arrows to open everything up, I am going to have alt transform, and then I go to transform, and I see the five properties. So, I only want to see position and rotation.

Okay. There's two ways to do this. One, there's a keyboard shortcut.

It was in the beginning. P-A-R-T-S. Position, anchor point, rotation, opacity, and scale.

Those letters are the keyboard shortcut to reveal them in the timeline. P reveals position. Okay.

Here's the other way. In the properties panel, if you double click on the name of the property, it'll reveal it in the timeline. So, if you don't want to remember the keyboard shortcut, double click scale up here, it will reveal it to you.

So, you'll see the stopwatch, by the way, in the properties panel, and you'll see it when you reveal the properties in the timeline. To the stopwatch, that means you can animate this. Only things that have a stopwatch can be animated.

And for the record, most things have a stopwatch. Couple things you cannot animate. The layer order, which layers above the order of the others cannot be animated.

That's not an animatable property. Changes to things like blending mode, if you use blending modes, are also not animatable. But most things are.

Okay. A lot of them. In addition to the ones that are built in, there's a series of effects in this library called effects and presets.

Most of these have tons of properties you can animate. Okay. So, you can animate a lot of different things.

Okay. But animation is always in the same way. Those are the two properties I want to animate.

So, those are the only two. See, I have a little space it takes up now. See? Let's see.

It's economical. Here's my thing. There are two ways to animate.

And there is a section at the end of this, by the way, about animation order. Okay. It's like at the end of the... Okay.

So, basically, the photo is where it's supposed to be at the end of the animation. It's supposed to start off screen and end right there. Okay.

I'm gonna make two keyframes. I'm gonna make the keyframe that's the finishing of the animation first. Because it's already where it's supposed to be.

It's already the rotation it's supposed to be. Okay. So, I make that one first.

When I'm finished, as long as I have two keyframes at least, I'll get my animation. So, the instructions have you go to one second on your timeline. One second on my timeline.

Okay. Like that. And this is where I'm gonna start making my keyframes.

Okay. You can animate forwards or backwards. This is called animating backwards.

We're animating with the last keyframe of the animation first. Okay. Here's how you create keyframes.

Click on the stopwatch. That is a keyframe. That is a keyframe.

You only have keyframes for the properties you click the stopwatch on for. So, if there's no diamonds, the no blue stopwatch, it's no animation. Your changes are forever.

Okay. Here's the first error people make with this. They forget to turn on the stopwatch.

They make changes and don't turn on the stopwatch. Without the stopwatch being enabled, there's no keyframes. There's no remembering.

It's no recording of its changes. Okay. This is the keyframe at the end.

The end of the animation. One second. I'll go back to the beginning.

I'll drag it to the beginning. If you have an extended keyboard, home, H-O-M-E would jump the current time indicator to the beginning of your timeline. And if you don't, drag it.

Okay. Now, here's the thing. Don't ever touch the stopwatch again.

Turning the stopwatch on enables animation and creates a keyframe wherever the current time indicator is. Clicking it again, however, deletes your keyframes. And it didn't warn me it was going to delete my keyframes.

It just did it. It assumes I knew what pressing that button would do. Hence, I said not user-friendly, right? So, turning the stopwatch from gray to blue enables keyframes.

It's a toggle. Keyframes can now exist. Don't touch it again, unless you want to delete your keyframes.

Okay. Now, so how do I make new keyframes? When the stopwatch is blue, anytime you change that property, the program automatically makes a new keyframe. And it will make it wherever the current time indicator is, that wedge.

So, if I just grab this with my selection tool and drag it over there, new keyframe. Okay. If I take my rotation tool and rotate it, new keyframe.

And now, I'll just drag it over a little bit so you can see it. The program animates from one to the other. Okay.

That's what it does. I'm going to undo that there. Now, if you want to move something perfectly horizontally or vertically, if you want to drag it, drag it and press and hold shift.

That'll make it move perfectly horizontally, vertically, or 45-degree diagonally. Okay. I'm not going to do that, though.

I'm going to use the numbers here. I'm going to hover over in the position property. I'm going to look at that first number.

That first number is left and right. Okay. I'm going to click in one motion and one motion.

Click and drag, and it's going to scrub this number. And if I hold shift while it does that, it moves faster. Okay.

This is scrubbing a value. You can also, if you know the number you want to put it, just type it in. But normally, I don't know what that's supposed to be, so I just click and drag.

Always nice. Position has two numbers. The first is left and right movement.

The second one is up and down movement. So, if you just want to make sure something moves only horizontally or vertically, very often doing those numbers is great. If you want to move it diagonally, pick it up and drag it.

Okay. Arrow keys on your keyboard. They move a layer one pixel at a time.

So, if you want to like nudge it over a little bit, you can use your arrow keys, which is borrowed from Photoshop and other programs. That's kind of cool. So, now I have that keyframe.

I'm just going to take rotation and type it zero right there for rotation. Zero. Okay.

And now when I press spacebar to play that, it does that. Okay. But the instructions wanted me to have it fall from the top, not the side.

Okay. I'm going to zoom out a little bit so I can see a little more space around this. Okay.

Look, if you use Photoshop or Illustrator, those keyboard shortcuts do work here. However, here's the actual zoom commands. Comma zooms out.

Period zooms in. Slash is 100%. Option slash is fit.

So, I'm going to tap comma on my keyboard a couple times to zoom out. If you have a scroll wheel mouse or a magic mouse, the Apple one, rolling the scroll wheel will also zoom out. Okay.

So, notice I'm on top of my first keyframe with my current time indicator. I'm just going to drag that with my move tool up there. It updated that keyframe.

Wherever the current time indicator is, you make a change to one of those two properties, you get a new keyframe. So, if you're over here between two keyframes and I drag, new keyframe. But if I'm on top of one that already exists, updates the keyframe.

Okay. How do I make sure I'm on top of one? Those arrows jump from keyframe to keyframe. Okay.

So, I'm on top of that exactly. Move it over there. That becomes the new keyframe value.

So, simply changing the property, in this case position, that's what I'm doing, gets a new keyframe the moment that stopwatch is on. Okay. You cannot disable the stopwatch without deleting the keyframes.

So, what's going to happen is you're going to accidentally make new keyframes when you don't want them until you get used to that. Sorry, that's how it works. So, it's not like you can, I want to make keyframes now.

Now I don't want to make keyframes. That's not how it works. Once enabled, it's got to stay enabled.

Otherwise, your keyframes are deleted. Okay. If you want to make sure you don't change that layer, you can lock it.

But then you wouldn't be able to change anything. So, be careful about that, doing that. Don't lock it here.

I don't want you to do that, by the way. Okay. Now, one more thing and then it's all your turn.

This is very slow. I don't like that. That annoys me.

I want it to be faster. I want to fall faster. Okay.

So, this is one second between my two keyframes. If there was less space between the keyframes, less time, it would fall faster. It would happen faster.

Okay. The speed of an animation is controlled by the distance between your keyframes. Okay.

Keyframes can be copied and pasted. They can be deleted. I just highlight, delete.

And they can be moved. You can drag them around. Okay.

The instructions want you to drag the second set of keyframes to 15 frames instead of one minute. Sorry, one second. Okay.

I can't see that on my time. I don't see 15 here, though. That's annoying.

Okay. So, sorry. Wait one second.

I'll turn hiding on. That little zoom bar. Zoom in.

I can now see smaller numbers. That's 15 right there. Okay.

That's a scroll bar. Zoom. Zoom out.

Zoom in. Okay. There's also a keyboard shortcut if you want, plus and minus.

I'll go to 15 frames. For the record, I don't need to see it in order to do this, but it's helpful, I think. And I'm going to move these two keyframes.

I'm going to click on empty space and drag to make a selection box so they both become highlighted. I could drag them individually, but it's less trouble if I drag them together. And let's drag them over here now.

See? Like that. That's the beginning. Now it falls faster.

Because now it's happening over half the amount of time. So, the speed of an animation is always the distance between the keyframes. Okay.

One more thing. I'd argue this doesn't make any sense because it's falling down, but I don't care. I would like it to slow down as it falls.

Logically, it doesn't make any sense, but I don't care. It looks nicer. To do that, I'm going to add easing.

Notice they're both still highlighted. I'm going to right-click, keyframe assistant, easy ease. The keyboard shortcut, by the way, is F9 if anyone cares.

Okay. Notice the shape changed. They were diamonds before.

Now they are hourglasses. The hourglasses tell me there's easing here. What does that mean? It means as it falls, it slows down.

Okay. Slowly enter this keyframe. Ease in.

Slow into this keyframe. So, now it's moving faster at the beginning and slower at the end. Which, again, I'd argue logically doesn't make any sense, but I don't care.

It just looks cool. Okay. I admit that.

There is a note in here if you want to get rid of easing. Command, click on keyframes with easing. They go back to being diamonds.

Yes. So, to add it? To add easing? Oh, yeah, to add the easing. So, these are, by the way, diamonds have no easing, which means it's moving at the same pace the entire time.

Okay. Easing. Easy ease is an automatic one.

The keyboard shortcut for it is F9, or when a keyframe is highlighted like this, right click on it, keyframe assistant, easy ease. It tells you the keyboard shortcut over there, by the way, if you care. So, to undo it, at the bottom of page 30, by the way, there's a box that tells you.

It's command, or if you're on Windows, control and click on the keyframes. So, eased keyframes look like hourglasses. Command, click on them, turns them back into diamonds.

Okay. And then to get easy easing back, I got to go back to the menu again. Okay.