3 Powerful Tips for After Effects Beginners - Instant Look Upgrades

hey there I'm Noelle Hoenig freelance motion designer award-winning teacher and occasionally a guy who wears ties in this quick video I'm going to show you three tips to instantly improve your work in After Effects if you're just starting out this is definitely for you [Music] learning the tricks of the trade and After Effects is super important if you want to be a professional motion designer I teach workflow tips like these and a bunch of other good habits in my After Effects kickstart course so check that out if you really want to understand the fundamentals of After Effects also you can download the project files that I'm using in this video to follow along or practice these techniques after you're done watching details are in the description my first tip is using easy ease and the speed graph to make your movements and After Effects feel more interesting and or more natural so I've got this scene here which is just a beach ball that kind of gets thrown up and then falls back down again alright and right now this feels super weird and stiff because by default After Effects puts linear keyframes into your animation so basically if I select one of these keyframes and I click here on this button what we can see here is that the speed is constant throughout both of these moves it doesn't accelerate or decelerate and this is why it just doesn't feel very natural and why it feels super stiff and After Effects has a command built right in that fixes this and it's called easy ease so I'm gonna take the keyframes that I want to put easy ease on I'm gonna right click on here and go down to my keyframe assistant and here you can see here easy ease and the keyboard shortcut is f9 which is a really good one to remember because you'll probably be using this a bunch ok so I'm going to do that right now you can see that it's converted the diamond-shaped linear keyframes into these hourglass shaped keyframes or ease keyframes and if I press this button and jump back into the graph you could see at a glance that this is now very very different looking so the way this works is that the speed here is starting at zero and it's getting faster and faster and then it's decelerating or decreasing back down to zero right away this is gonna feel much more naturalistic than the linear keyframe so let me show you what this looks like so it's not perfect but it's definitely feeling better and what you can see is like what I was just saying it's sort of speeding up and then it's pausing and then it's speeding up again and pausing as it gets back down right toward the end and actually it's that end bit there that for me makes it look very non naturalistic because as things fall they increase in speed or at the very least stay at a constant speed once they start falling so I'm going to show you how I would adjust this and give this a much more naturalistic feel so when I con these points and these points in here correspond exactly to my key frames by the way when I click on here I get these handles okay and the handles allow me to adjust how fast the speed increases and decreases as it comes in and out of these key frame points okay so what I want to do is set this so that at the top here it's got a nice big pause okay because this is a light object and it's changing direction it's going from moving up to now it's starting to move down right so I want to put a big pause right here so what I would do is I'd pull these handles out a whole bunch and that would essentially create the pause all right so I got to do this on both ends going into the key frame and coming out of it and I'm going to try to keep this basically symmetrical and then right here at the beginning I don't want this to start slow and then get faster I want it to be moving quickly right away like somebody just let go of it out of their hand and the force of their arm moving up is making this move really quickly okay in fact it's at its fastest part right at the start so I'm gonna select this and I'm gonna drag this back until this peak is starting right here at the beginning okay I'm going to go here to the end and I'm gonna do the same thing so that this again is roughly symmetrical as well right now you see I've created this shape and if we read this in the graph it starts out fast gets slower and it's got a nice big kind of pause to it and then it gets faster at the end right and I'm kind of exaggerating this a little bit more just to look at it this animation looks like now yeah and it's completely different right just because of those adjustments and now it actually feels kind of like a beach ball it wasn't hard you just kind of had to consider how it should move and then make these adjustments accordingly my second tip is about using adjustment layers which are super useful in After Effects in this case in particular I want to talk about using an adjustment layer with two effects on it posterized time and rough and edges to give my animation a kind of instant look upgrade so I just made this animation and here it is it's got some kind of stretchy boxes and type that moves around right and as we all know After Effects is great for creating animation but if you're just getting into this what you might not realize is that people also use After Effects for creating unique looks for their animation once they're already finished or once the animation is done and a great way to do that is by using adjustment layers okay so here's the animation in its default state and let's just say I want to make this entire thing feel more like old-school and hand animated so in this case I only have three layers here but in most projects I have more like a hundred okay so it would be pretty inefficient to apply a bunch of effects to every single layer instead I'm just going to go up here to layer and new and adjustment layer and if you're into keyboard shortcuts like myself you'll notice that this is option command Y okay nothing's release you know changed basically except for that it's made an adjustment layer and it's put it up here on the top and the Keene after-effects observer will notice that it's put this sort of half you know like a black and white cookie Halfmoon button on here which means that it's an adjustment layer okay and basically now this is a place where I can put effect right so I'm gonna start out by going up here and putting a time posterized time effect on here posterized time is super good it basically allows you to create a kind of false frame rate for your composition that's different from your original compositions frame rate right 12 frames per second is a kind of very traditional old-school animation frame rate right so I'm hoping that that will give this a different feeling which feels a little bit more like that so check that out yeah and you can see right away that it's got a different feeling it's kind of got like a jittery sort of stop motion field basically what it's doing this is just displaying each frame a certain number of times rather than changing on each frame it's like holding each frame in this case like three frames and then it changes and then it holds and the new changes right so it gives it more of this kind of staccato jittery feeling which is actually quite pleasant I really like the way it looks and I should point out by the way about adjustment layers that they only affect things that are below them in the order stack and not things that are above them so now just to keep this nice and tidy I'm going to name this posterized time okay and now I want to create a new adjustment layer certain layer new adjustment layer okay and I want to put this one in fact I have to underneath the posterized time like I was just talking about because I want the next effect that I'm gonna put on here to be affected by the posterized time and that effect is here under stylize roughen edges when I put this on right away you can see that it's given the type and the boxes here instead of the kind of hard lines that they originally had it's given them a nice kind of organic weirdness to them all right so it's sort of aged them are kind of weathered them a little bit so in this case it's gonna give this plus the post rise time it's just gonna give a really nice kind of handmade quality to this right and so automatically it looks like I don't know some like 1890s weather-beaten ship animation or something I don't know so you know even in the parts of this animation where nothing's moving like at the beginning in the end we can create some little kind of motion in there which will make it feel even more kind of handmade okay and the way that I'm gonna do that is to get in here to my rough and edges and this evolution right here okay this basically as you twirl this dial here it just creates a kind of a different look for the rough and edges each time you change the number here a little bit right so what I could do is set this back to zero and go back to the beginning of my comp and make a keyframe for this and then go somewhere here after my animation is over and just change this to some big number I don't know like ten whole rotations or something okay and remember because this is underneath the posterized time adjustment it won't be that crazy right and in fact I should also name this rough and edges just to be nice and neat okay and let's check out what this looks like yeah and that looks super cool just has this like a very handmade feeling and it really wasn't that hard it's just a matter of you know basically putting a couple of effects and making a few adjustments and it really changes the feeling of the animation quite a lot tip number three isn't really an effect or a technique or something kind of cool like that instead I want to talk about an idea the idea is basically that if you need to hide or finesse an abrupt change on screen the best time and the best way to do that is to do it while the objects are moving quickly just say you have the word yes and you want to change it into the word no let me demonstrate to you how one way that I think you could do this and kind of hide that change all right so first I'm gonna do is I'm just gonna make a quick animation with the word yes and I'm gonna kind of have it start over here and I'm just gonna I don't know go 15 frames and I'm gonna move this over here okay and then I'm gonna take this these keyframes and I'm gonna copy it here and I'm gonna paste it onto the No so right now they're just both moving together okay and I'm actually gonna press you to show my keyframes you can move this back little bit so there's a little bit of head and tail on the animation and then I'm going to press f9 to put easy ease on those keyframes you remember that from earlier and then basically I'm gonna jump into the graph editor again by pressing this button and now we could see the familiar hump of the easy frames in the speed graph right as I was saying before the best place to hide this change that I'm gonna animate is while it's moving the fastest and so the way to really emphasize that or or to hide that even better is to have this move even faster here in the middle so what I'm gonna do is take this handle here and pull this so that this is I'm not gonna crank it up to a hundred percent but to like 90 percent influence there something like that I'm gonna do the same on the other side okay a 90 percent influence now you can see here that sort of between this frame and this frame it's moving the fastest because as you remember from before in the speed graph the bottom line here is zero and it just gets faster as it goes up so it's slowed or stopped here and then it's slow faster and faster and faster and here is the peak of this animation if I take my you word yes now and trim this right here at that peak and then move one more frame and then trim the word no so that it starts right here right I've now trimmed this right at that point where it is moving fastest as you remember right now it should look like this and that's pretty seamless I mean you could animate the word yes morphing very quickly to the word no but I think this is pretty much just about as effective and obviously if you pulled these handles more and it was moving faster or if this animation was quicker the change could happen even kind of faster so I think this is a really really good thing to think about when you're first getting into animation or motion design and I just want to point out that this isn't only with position here ok so I set this other comp where I've already kind of got it animated but I used rotation I kind of did the same thing I just switched it from one to the other while it was at the fastest rotation point in the animation and you know it's just really really seamless so I just want to point out it's not only with position it's when it's moving at its fastest in whatever the animation is that it's doing hit subscribe if you want more tips like this one and make sure to check the description so you can download the project files from this video to practice with and if you really want to understand After Effects and get experience using it with the help of industry pros check out After Effects kickstart from school of motion thanks for watching everybody and don't worry you do not have to wear a tie if you take the class

Channel: School of Motion

Views: 169,949

Rating: 4.967689 out of 5

Keywords: Motion Design, Motion Graphics, After Effects, Tutorial, Tips, Tricks, Technique, Learn, Basics, Design, MoGraph, beginner, rookie, adjustment layers, speed graph, graph editor

Id: Tl8Vb6ZRoC8

Length: 13min 58sec (838 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 13 2020