[Kyle Hamrick] Hi there. I'm Kyle Hamrick, senior motion
designer for School of Motion. This session is Beyond
the Basics of Adobe After Effects,
Intermediate Skills. I'll be using a piece I
created for Adobe last year as a way to showcase
various parts of the motion design workflow. And hopefully, show you a
lot of cool and helpful tips along the way. We'll be talking about
several different stages of a good motion
design workflow, starting with concepting
and pre-production. I'll be showing you the ways
that I use other Adobe apps when I'm creating a piece,
and how a cross-app workflow can be helpful and efficient. Then we'll dive into
After Effects itself. And we'll look at some
ways to step your work up to the next level,
including tips for finessing your key frames in
the Graph Editor, navigating complex
projects using advanced features like
Master Properties, ways to artfully transform footage. And then I'll have a few cool
After Effects tips for you as well. So when Adobe first reached
out regarding this project, I was obviously excited
for the opportunity. It sounded like it would be
a fun technical challenge, as well as a creative one. As the project
developed in my brain, it became clearer I was
essentially getting to create a love letter to After Effects. And I have to say, it's one
of the cooler opportunities I've ever been given. So Adobe's specific request was
for a project that could serve as a benchmark in
a variety of ways and would also be aesthetically
pleasing, quote, "not just a science project". And helped showcase
some of the ways that you can use After Effects. As part of the
bench-marking process, it needed to include a piece
of footage, which meant an end user could also
potentially try out different sizes and formats. There was a desire to focus
on GPU accelerated effects, as that creates a pretty
easy A/B for users to see the speed gains
that those can bring. And lastly, it was
likely this project would be publicly shared. So users who wanted to
explore the workflow and structure of
such a project could download it and explore it. So let's take a look at
what I'm talking about. And then we can dive
into some of the process of how this was made. And I'll try to give you, as
I said, as many useful tips along the way as I can. I know you're excited
for me to dive straight into After Effects, and I am
too, but let's take a minute and talk about some of the
earlier steps in the process. It can be really
tempting to just hop into After Effects
and start doing stuff. And I definitely do that. But there's a time
and a place for that. Animation is a very
labor intensive process. So for an actual project, you
want to make sure you actually know what you're trying
to achieve before you think about animating anything. So let's take a look at my
storyboard sketches here. As you can see, I just drew
these on paper, which can be a good way to get the
ideas down without being too fussy about it. I decided to make this
whole thing a little meta. We'll start with a
key frame rolling in. A cursor clicks it, revealing
some other kinds of key frames, which all split apart
to expose a bunch of this cool internal
After Effects craziness. And then a pen tool pulls
a Bezier path across. And that pulls everything back
together for the logo reveal. This idea allowed
that middle section to be really flexible,
which is good, since some of those
technical specifics were still a little
bit of a moving target at this early
stage of the project. Going abstract allowed
for the wiggle room to pack in footage and
effects and variant versions and whatever and still have it
all make some kind of sense. It also made sense
to go ahead and just lay out my storyboard right
here in Photoshop, thanks to the Art Boards feature. It's really nice just to lay
everything out in one place, but still have it
all be editable. And you can make little
tweaks, duplicate elements between frames, and so on. I don't usually consider
myself as much a designer as an animator, but
I'll definitely come in here to create more refined
frames for a lot of projects, which you can then send
over to After Effects as individual layers. It just wasn't the case here. From there, I drove
into Illustrator and dropped in a couple
of screen grabs of the After Effects UI stuff
I liked and started creating some of
the hero elements I knew I was going to need. My intent was to be
converting all of these to shape layers once
they're in After Effects, so the final project
wouldn't be referencing any external files except
for the footage and audio. It's definitely way easier
to create this kind of stuff here in Illustrator,
especially some of the teeny little cursors and stuff. A few of these, like the Bezier
handles and other stuff where I realized I'd really just
probably be creating them out of parametric
shapes anyway, I just decided it'd be
easy enough to build those directly in
After Effects so I didn't bother with those here. So it does require a
little bit of file prep. And there are a few limitations,
but you can absolutely send your Illustrator files
over to After Effects and either work with the discrete layers
you've created in Illustrator. Or you can convert
some of those elements directly into shape
layers in After Effects. That gives you full control
over just about everything. But it also means
you're going to be dealing with a lot
more complexity in your After Effects project. So you do want to be
mindful about whether that conversion is actually necessary
or not because it often isn't. Even on the best
planned projects you're probably going
to have a few elements that you don't realize you need
until you're partway through. Or maybe you realized
that the thing you have isn't quite built in
the right way for how it ends up needing to be animated. So it's really good to be
comfortable hopping around between these
different apps and be comfortable with
the workflow sending things over to After Effects
in a clean and efficient way. To that point, I'll
also actually start most of my motion design
projects in Premiere. Especially for projects that are
driven by voiceover or music, spending a little effort to
get the timing ironed out here, where it's really easy and
fast to make those edits, and the audio tools
are much more robust, it's so much nicer than
trying to handle all of that directly in After Effects. You can import nice looking
storyboards, or even just the super rough sketches and
work through the timing here to figure out if you have any
gaps or maybe even places where you need to cut something. You can even key frame stuff
right here in Premiere, even if it's just in
a basic way to roughly do a couple of the big moves
and see how everything flows. The key frames are
the same anyway. And so then if you push this
timeline into After Effects, which you can do in a
couple of different ways, you can even just use
those, or copy paste them to another layer or whatever
if you like something that you built in here. Motion design is very
much about the process of iterating and refining. And anytime you have an
opportunity to catch problems earlier in the
process when they're still relatively
easy to fix, that's definitely a win in my book. Premiere is also my app
of choice for finishing most of my projects. While this bench-marking project
is pretty short, for anything much longer, it quickly becomes
a lot more efficient to be exporting an image sequence
or a ProRes file or something like that out of After Effects. And then marrying that to the
final audio here in Premiere. For longer or bigger
projects where you might have multiple sections or
even multiple artists working on the project,
trying to assemble all of that directly in After Effects can
really be a lot more trouble than it's worth. So again, you want to think
about using the right tool for the job, you know? Speaking of audio, I did
want to take a minute and give a big shout
out to Wes Slover at Sono Sanctus
and Joe Basile, who worked together to create
the awesome audio track for this piece. After Effects has two
really noteworthy sounds that every user knows-- that chime that tells
you your render's done. And that dreaded sheep
noise telling you that your render has failed. I handed these two audio files,
along with a super rough draft of my animation, and
a few loose ideas, and let Wes and Joe
just work their magic. If you listen closely,
you'll actually hear each of these sounds
used in several different ways in here. I'll play it again here so
that you can listen for those. One last thing before I
dive into After Effects, I also wanted to
take a second to talk about the color palette, which
is another of those things that you really want to try
to nail down at the beginning so you aren't later going
back and having to change 100 little individual elements
that you've already animated, right? I went through and pulled
colors from the After Effects interface and branding. But of course,
those UI colors were chosen either to be
unobtrusive or specifically to highlight things. And they weren't really
designed with a project like this in mind. So I reached out
to my friend Dorca Musseb, who has a much better
grasp of color than I do. And she helped me dial
in a color palette that really made sense here. I did want to point out that I
created this project in 2019, so you may notice
the older icon colors being more prominent here. I did update the logo at the
end to the new color scheme, but since Ae we had
that pink and purple for like the last eight years, I
felt it was appropriate to keep those in here. And let the new logo kind of
emerge from those at the end. OK, so I'm finally over
here in After Effects now. And the first thing
I want to talk about, in terms of really upping your
game here, is key frame using. So here's just one element
from my project here. I've got that first key frame
object that kind of rotates in and then splits here. Every one of these
actual key frames has been touched to some
degree to customize it. And if I start showing you
some comparisons to ones that haven't been, hopefully,
you're going to start seeing that difference really quick. So here's one where
I just set everything back to totally linear. So all these key frames you just
totally default at this point, OK? And you see how it just
feels stiff and mechanical and pretty clunky, especially
this kind of split and push in here? So let's take a look at
this Easy Ease version. To do that, you just
highlight your keys. And then you can right-click on
Key Frame Assistant, Easy Ease. Or you can press F9,
which is what I usually do because I like hotkeys. So all these key frames
now have been Easy Eased. So it definitely feels
smoother than that linear one. And I'll show you the side by
side comparison in a minute here. But this last bit
especially, it's still slow and kind of meh, right? Now that you've had
your eyes on those, here is that original again
with lots of customized easing. Now, watch in particular
the rotation here. It really has a lot of
snap to it at the end. And these little accent
lines have really nice swishes they go around. And the split and push just
really kind of wooshes into it here, really nice and snappy. So if you look at them
all side by side here, you'll hopefully really be
able to see those differences. Really just having the
eye, developing the eye to be able to see
these differences and kind of see where
something needs to go, this is really the key here. Because you can tweak
on it all day long. But if you don't know
where you're going then, you're not going to
get real far, right? There are, obviously, a
lot of animation principles and stuff like that
that you ideally need to learn to really be able
to hone this ability properly. But a lot of times, too,
you're kind of just feeling it. Like, does your project
call for something really crisp and snappy? There are times where
these linear key frames are totally appropriate too. I don't want to make it
sound like they're not. But when you start looking at
these here, even the Easy Eased one compared to something
that's been heavily customized, you can really feel
that difference, right? Feel the way it just
snaps apart there and kind of pushes
towards us, compared to this slow and boring
one here and here, right? So let's take a look at
some actual key frames that we can play with here. And I'll take a minute to
explain the Graph Editor and how it works. So this top one up
here is just linear. I've separated the
dimensions, which you can do right here by right-clicking. The way the Graph Editor
works with position is a little bit different than
some of the other properties. I'll be showing you the
value graph, which I think makes the most sense here. And that doesn't really work
with the unified position property, but
visually, I think this is the best way to
demonstrate this concept, OK? So right now, this green
one hasn't been touched yet, but you're going to see the
difference between the linear and the Easy Eased here. Again, I just highlighted that. Pressed F9. And they're Easy Eased. So watch the pink
versus the blue. And you'll see the difference. Pink starts off kind
of slow, and then it gets fast in the
middle, and then eases back to a stop, right? Whereas the blue one just
starts, and it's the same speed all the way across. And right now, the green
is just linear because I haven't touched it yet. But I have clicked this
little graph icon here, which is going to mean when
I open the Graph Editor, this particular property is
always going to be shown. You can also highlight
individual properties. And then when you
open the Graph Editor, they'll appear in there. So this little graph
button right up here opens up the Graph Editor. And in this case,
it's a representation of the changing value
of that x position of that layer over time. I think the best way
to describe a key frame is just a value at a time, OK? So if you want to change
something about that, you either change
the value or the time at which it occurs, right? So After Effects and
other computer animation applications, they also
give you the ability to change how that
change happens between those key
frames, all right? And in this case, we
have this one value here. It's 202 on x. And up to this point,
it's just a static value. And then when it hits this
point, this keyframe here, it starts changing
at a constant speed until it gets to its
second key frame. And then it just stops. And now, it's that second
static value, right? Just for comparison here, if
we also look at the eased one, see this nice little
s curve that it has? OK, I'm going to
click back off that. And we'll start
changing this one. Now, you can actually select
these key frames right here. And I can even press
F9 in here to go ahead and just Easy Ease them. And then what you
can also do is start pulling these handles around. These are just Bezier
handles, like they're a path or an illustrator
object or anything like that. You can pull these around. And if we did this here,
so we're going to be easing out of this value slowly. And then we start to
speed up because it still has to span the same amount of
change during this time, right? And then as we come
into this other one, we're going to be slowly
easing back to a stop. So right here, we're going
to have this really nice snap right around kind of this
first third of the timespan here. And then, there,
you can see it just really eases into that stop. If, instead, we wanted
this to kind of start very suddenly, and then have
sort of this really slow swoop in the
middle, you can kind of reverse this this way. So if you pull this
handle up, and then you'll kind of have this static
value, and then boom. It's just going to launch
into this movement, OK? And then I could
pull this one down. You can see here in the middle
it's going to be almost flat, which means it's
going to be just kind of creeping here in the middle. But it's also going to kind
of slam to an abrupt stop again here at the end. So you'll notice
in all these cases, it's still just those
same two key frames. But you can make such a world
of difference here by the way that they move. So tweaking these,
manipulating these, you can make it snappy
or smooth, or whatever is appropriate for your project. Just make it move exactly
the way that it needs to for that context, right? I know this topic isn't
quite as exciting. And hopefully, a lot of you
were already doing these. But honestly, simple
project organization is really one of
the biggest things that you can do to up your
game here in After Effects. So let's check out this
project panel here on the left versus the one on the
right, or these two examples of timelines. So imagine someone was
handing off a project to you. Which one would you want? Yeah. Here, in your After
Effects Project panel, you can create folders by just
clicking this little icon here. If you already have
a folder selected, it'll put the new one
inside it like this. So let's give this thing a name. And I'll drop my
video files into it. You can also grab something
or multiple somethings and just drag them down to
the folder icon and poof, we have a folder. Put this in here. There, isn't that nicer? In your timeline, taking the
time to properly label, trim, and color code your layers
makes a huge difference. You can rename any layer by
selecting it and hitting Enter. And we'll just give
this a new name here. Much better. Since it exits the
screen, there's really no need for the layer
to keep existing over here. So we can trim it by
dragging the end like this. Or you can also set
your ins and outs with hotkeys by
pressing Alt or Option along with the bracket keys. Now, we'll come
over here and click on this little color chip. I'll choose yellow just to
help it really stand out. Yeah, there we go. So let's take a quick look
at the before and after here. Now you're spending
your time being creative instead of hunting
through your own project. Yes. Since this is an
intermediate session I'm going to assume
that most of you know what a precomposition
or precomp is. But just in case, it's any
composition that's nested within another composition. Basically, the same
thing as using a Smart Object in Photoshop
or nesting sequences when you're in Premiere. You can take a bunch
of complicated stuff in your project and make
it function like it's essentially just one object. If you want to do it with
some existing elements, you can just select
them like this. Right-click one of them
and choose Precompose. And then you're going to give
this a meaningful name, right? The only downside
is that if you want to make changes
inside here, it can mean a lot of back and forth. But After Effects has
a solution for you. That solution is
Master Properties, which are one of my
favorite features and really helps with
project organization. They may be a little hard to
wrap your head around at first, but once you do, they
are so super powerful. So I'm just going to start
with a simple example here. And the way that these work
leverages the Essential Graphics panel, which
you can get by clicking Window, Essential Graphics. So I'm going to reveal
a property here. I'll just search for color. Yes, you have a search
bar right here that reveals stuff, another pro tip. And let's say that I want this
base color of the key frame to be something that I might
be able to edit somewhere else. So I'll just drag this up here. And I might go ahead
and rename that Base Color just so that I remember
exactly what I'm working with. So I'm going to go ahead
into this other comp and bring in my Build
Comp that I just created. I'll drop that right in here. Again, this is a precomp,
just like we were using before and just talked about. And you can see that I
already have some animation built in here as well. So it brought all that
animation in, just like you'd expect a precomp to. But if I open this up,
now I have not just my normal transforms,
like on any layer, but I also have this thing
called Master Properties. And anything that you've
dropped into that Essential Graphics panel
within that precomp is now going to show up here. And what that enables
is changing this thing without having to go back into
the precomp, which if you've worked in After
Effects much at all, you're going to start seeing
how huge this is right away. So I'm just going to change
this to a deeper blue. And you'll notice
that I didn't need to go back into the
precomp to change that. The other big thing is that
the original composition stays how it was. Interesting. I'll talk more about
that in a minute. So you also have these little
Push Pull buttons right here. If I want I could
pull from the original and reset it to
the original color. You'll notice now this
goes away because it's back to that default value, OK? I'll just undo that. I could, if I
decided this is what I want to be the new default,
push that value in there. And now, within
that precomp, that's the new default value, OK? So let's change that again
to something else here. And you can see in here, I also
have these position key frames. Maybe I want to add that
property up here as well. I'll get this little warning. In this case, just hit OK
and ignore that right now. It's not relevant. And looky there-- it just
automatically added it. And now, those key frames
are also visible here in this parent composition. And the big thing here
is that I can edit these. So I'm editing the
animation that's inside that precomp
without having to actually dive inside it. And yeah, this is
all super cool, but let me show you
something even better. I'm just going to
size this down. Kind of move it up here. And then create a
duplicate of this by hitting Control or Command
D so that I have a second one. I'll move this down here just
so that you can see both copies. So you can see that they're
doing the same thing, same key frames. But I can make this
one be different. I'm going to change the
timing on the second one here. And plus, I could change
the color on this one. Maybe we'll go with that. There we go. Wait a minute-- so these
are both referencing one precomposition, but
I've done two totally different things with them. And neither of them is messing
with the original, right? Right. These are iterative. You can actually create
iterations of a precomp using Master Properties. So if you can
think of a use case where you're going to use the
same thing but in a couple of different ways, like
say titles or lower thirds or coloring things
different ways, or even if you just
have one copy of a thing with some internal
complexity, and you just when expose a couple of key frames
so that you can align that time with other elements
in your project, Master Properties is such a
huge step for your workflow. It just keeps you from
having to jump back and forth a bunch of times. Keeps you from having to make
a bunch of useless copies of the same thing, right? It's awesome. Remember that one of the
intents of this project is that a user can
potentially swap out the video clip to
test the performance of different footage formats. That means that the included
clip needs to be properly licensed and also
that the project still needs to look reasonably similar
with other clips in its place. I didn't have anything
too specific in mind, but it turned out the small
library of footage Adobe provided me with was
mostly gardening clips. Not exactly what I'd
been thinking of. But this project is
all about figuring out how to be creative
within these boundaries. So I found this
clip of a dolly shot past some arugula, which turns
out to actually have a really nice motion and texture to it. And it's just the
right kind of abstract. I added in a few effects to give
it a more trippy kaleidoscopic look and ended up using
several copies of the footage, but all trimmed
and cropped in ways that make it very prominent,
but never really the star. Which means that it
still works pretty well with just about anything
you might drop in here. I think this is a great example
of taking an asset you might never have chosen
originally and finding a new way of looking at it
to turn it into something new and different. One other cool feature
in this benchmark project is this control layer
that actually has a couple on off switches
where you can toggle different color variations or
different effects on and off. Now, if you want to know how
to do something like that, it's actually probably a
lot easier than you think, especially if you're just
working with opacity, which is the case here. So I just have one layer here. And I've got my
opacity revealed. I'm going to right-click. Choose Effects, Expression
Controls, Checkbox Control. That'll add that right here. And I could work with that up
here in the Effect Controls, or open it right here
in the timeline as well. So the way a checkbox
control works, it's just an on off
switch, which means it's actually a binary
switch, zero or a one, in computer speak, right? And if you remember back
to like 3rd grade math, anything times zero is zero. And anything times
one is itself, OK? So if you want to make
a nice flexible on off switch that actually still
lets you adjust the property, all you have to do is create
a quick expression here. I'm going to Alt or
Option click the stopwatch to create an expression. And I'll type Value,
which references the original value
of the property without the expression. And then I'll say times, this
little asterisk key here. And then I'm just going to use
this little expression pick whip here. Push that right up to
the checkbox control. So now, it's taking this
value, whatever it is, times either zero or one, OK? So if this is off, it's
going to always be zero. If this is on, it's
going to always be whatever the value is. So I can actually adjust
this to 50 something here. And it still works as an on
off switch, which gives me a lot of flexibility
and means I can still easily turn this on and off. If you copy paste this
expression to a bunch of layers, then you could toggle
whole chunks of your project from one place, which
is really awesome. So wow, 25 minutes goes by
really fast, doesn't it? But we got a chance to go over
some important steps of the motion design creation process. Talk about ways to use different
Adobe apps at different stages of your projects. And hopefully,
learned some new stuff within After Effects itself
that'll make your next project that much better. Thank you so much
for watching today. Again, my name is Kyle Hamrick. You can find me on
Twitter or Instagram. And I appear regularly on the
School of Motion YouTube page. If something in
this presentation was helpful or inspiring for
something you're working on, I'd love it if you tag me
in a post and let me know. So long.
