Hey there, Joey here for School of Motion,
and in this lesson we're gonna talk about one of the principles of animation follow
through. Now in the video I call it secondary animation,
which as I found out later is not correct. So when you hear me say secondary animation,
just replace that in your brain with follow through. My mistake. If you've watched one of our other lessons
about animation principles you know how important they are to make your animations look great. They're that secret sauce that makes everything
look better. We only have so much time in this lesson to
go over follow through so if you really want so in depth animation training that will give
you a foundation to create truly outstanding work you're gonna wanna check out our animation
boot camp course. It's a very intense training program, and
you also get access to class only podcasts, PDFs, and critiques on your work from our
experienced teaching assistants. Every moment of that course is designed to
give you an edge in everything you create as a motion designer. Also don't forget to sign up for a free student
account so you can grab the project files from this lesson as well as assets from any
other lesson on the site. Now, let's hop into After Effects and get
started. So here is just a couple of layers and this
is sort of where I started when I built this last animation that I just showed you guys. So the first thing I wanna show you is how
I got the main part of the logo, this kind of greenish square. I wanna show you how I got that to come into
the frame and bend as it came in, okay? So sort of like the, the body of it is lagging
a little bit behind the rest of it. So the first thing I did was I tried to think
about a cool way for this to animate on and I thought that if it came on like a long thin
rectangle that would give me a cool opportunity to have it bend. All right, so what, the way I made this box
was with just a layer and then I made a mask for it, right? And you can see that the mask, it was just
a rectangular mask but I added points at the mid point between each side knowing that I
was gonna wanna, you know, possibly have this thing bend. This makes it a whole lot easier, okay? And I'll show you how to do that in second. So I started out by, by stretching it out,
so let's have it be maybe 150 on X, maybe 20 on Y. So you just get this long thin rectangle. Maybe it could even be a little bit longer
than that. Okay, cool. So let's start by having it fly into the screen. All right, so we're working in 24 here and
actually we're not working in 24. We're working in 30. I'd rather work in 24. There we go. All right, so let's go forward 12 frames,
hit P to bring up the position, and I've already separated the dimensions here, and if you
haven't watched my intro to curves in After Effects tutorial, I highly recommend you do
that, 'cause I'm gonna kind of fly through it on this. So I'm gonna put a keyframe here, go down
here, drag this guy down, and I'm gonna have this guy overshoot just a little bit. So I'm gonna go back two frames, and drag
him. Oh boy, my, you'll notice my tablet tends
to double click a lot more than it should. All right, so it goes a little bit too high
and comes down. Hop into the curve editor. Let's take a look at this. Okay, I'm gonna have this thing shoot in really
fast, hang at the top, hang there, there we go. All right, let's do a quick read and preview
and see what we got, okay. Nice. So it's, it feels a little bit stiff and that's
because even if this was a piece of wood or something it would bend if it was shooting
into the frame that fast, and that bending, that is actually secondary animation, even
though it's not technically a separate object. It's animation that is caused by the primary
animation which is this movement, okay? Now how can we get this thing to bend? You could do it with effects and you might
be able to make that work, but sometimes the best way to control this is to just get in
there and do it manually, by animating the mask. So that's what we're gonna do. So let's first go to the end here, and open
up the mask properties and put a keyframe on mask path. All right, now I'm gonna hit U so I can see
all of the keyframes at once. So when, when it's flying up in the air, okay,
at its fastest point it's gonna be dragging the most, okay? So what I can do is look at the curves and
the Y position and you can just kind of figure out where is it the steepest? Well, it's kind of the steepest at the beginning,
and then it slows down just a little bit. It probably really slows down right about
here. So that's where I'm gonna put the mask keyframe. All right, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna hit period
so I can pop in here, and I'm just gonna grab these two points and I'm gonna hold shift,
and knock them down a little bit, okay? Now, obviously that doesn't look right. We need, we need these to be curves. We don't want them to be stiff like that. So if you hit G which brings up the pen tool,
and you just hover it over two points, over any point that's selected, and hold option,
you see how it changes to this kind of hollow upside down V shape? If you click that it will then sort of set
these beziers to be either completely sharp or stretch them out quite a ways so that it's
really curved. If I do it again you'll see it'll, it'll snap
them back. In other programs this is called cusping them,
and this rounds them out. So let's just take a look at that. That actually looks okay. I, what I'd like to do is adjust the, so if
you think of this as the outside of the shape and this would be in the inside of the shape,
this point here, the inside I would tuck these in just a little bit. So it's shooting up and then when it gets
right before it stops it's gonna basically come back to its resting position and then
it's gonna overshoot it at this point. All right, so now we need the, the overshoot
keyframe. So let's come back up here, and let's push
it the other way, and I'm just adjusting these. All right so it comes in, overshoots, lands,
and I think what I'd want to happen is for it to overshoot and overshoot the other way
a little bit and then land, all right? So I'm gonna put one more mask keyframe over
here, and this keyframe I'm gonna have it overshoot back down just a little bit, all
right, and now I'm going to, I'm gonna easy these keyframes in, and let's see what it
looks like now. Okay, so it's actually working fairly well. Now, with secondary animation generally keyframes
shouldn't line up like this because secondary animation generally happens a little bit after
the primary animation, okay? So I'm just gonna take these keyframes, and
I'm gonna slide them forward in time two frames, all right, and let's see what that looks like. And you can see now it feels a little bit
more jiggly, you know, and it, and it kind of was a little more cartoon-y, and the bigger
a delay between the primary and secondary animation, the cartoon-ier it feels. So I just move everything back one frame,
all right, and now it's starting to feel a little bit better, okay, and I could, I could
nitpick this. I would kind of want this, I would want it
to come back down a little bit further here, but you get the idea that it's actually working
pretty well. All right, so then the next part of the animation
is this long thin rectangle sucks in and becomes a square and as it does that the side of it
kind of pucker in and bloat out, do interesting things like that. So let's move forward three frames, and then
let's look at the scale. All right, so we're gonna put a keyframe on
scale and let's go forward eight frames. So I'm gonna jump forward 10 and basically
the way I'm doing that if you guys don't know hold shift, hit page down. It goes 10 frames forward, and then back two
frames, page up twice. So first I want, I want this to turn into
a vertical rectangle. So right now the scale is 175 on X, 20 on
Y. I'm gonna just reverse those, 20 on X, 175
on Y, all right. Let's easy ease those, and let's just see
what that looks like. All right, so on its own, it looks like that,
okay. I wanna mess with the curves a little bit. I just want them to, I want them to be a little
bit more exaggerated. So I'm gonna pull these handles out, okay. So we've got the beginning of something kind
of interesting here. Okay, now as this shape is coming in I want
that same secondary animation to happen, okay? So, what we need to do is adjust the mask
again. So, let's open up the mask keyframes, and
you do that by pushing M. That brings up your masked path. So let's put a keyframe here, let's hit U
so we can see all of our keyframes, and when we get to the end here, the mask is gonna
go back to normal. So let's put a keyframe there in the middle. So what you gotta kind of think about what's
actually happening. So if this thing is sucking in this side and
this side are flying inward very quickly, so these points here are gonna lag behind
a little bit, kind of like that, and because we have already pulled these bezier points
out over here, you can see that it actually already looks like a nice curve. So as it sucks in and then it finishes, and
so we want it to kind of overshoot a little bit. So let's see here. Let's just preview this and see what it looks
like. And as I said before, the secondary animation,
which is this mask path should be offset, maybe one frame. Okay, so now if this was, if we were gonna
overshoot the secondary animation we could fake that by animating, we could animate this
point and this point in a little bit. So why don't we do that? Why don't we instead of, why don't we take
this keyframe here, scoot it down a little ways. Let's copy this keyframe, and I'm gonna take
this point and this point and scoot it in, and then I'm gonna take this point and this
point and scoot it in, so that it, it overshoots in a little bit and then has to restretch
itself out. Okay now if we jump out and look at that. Now you can see how it makes that really simple
scaling move feel a lot better and there's a lot more going on, and this doesn't take
very long. I mean, it'll take you a little while to get
the hang of, of you know thinking about motion in these terms, but this is an easy way to
make a very simple move feel pretty cool, all right? So, so let's finish this move now. We're gonna go forward four frames and now
we're gonna scale this to its correct size. So let's go eight frames, we'll do 100, 100. All right, so let's take a look at this part
of the move. All right, pretty boring. So let's adjust the curves. I'm just gonna pull these way out like this,
so now it's a little more of a popping move, okay, and I'm not gonna deal with the, the
mask on this part of the move 'cause I wanna get to the next part of this tutorial. So when this pops out, all right, what I wanna
have is the little triangle logo appear in some cool way, so what I did was I took the
box and I animated the scale from small to big. So let's look at the scale keyframes here,
just by hitting S. So put a keyframe here. Let's go forward. Let's do six frames, okay, and let's make
this thing grow to 150, and I'll see, I'll see what that looks like. Okay, it feels slow. We're gonna have to adjust the curves, but
another thing I wanna do is let's actually move this down two frames, go forward two
frames, and, and we're gonna do a little bit of anticipation keyframe here. So we're gonna go from 100 to 95 to 150 and
it's a simple little thing but what it does is it, it especially when we get in and we
make the curves feel better, it makes that movement feel a little bit more deliberate,
because the square is gonna kind of set itself up for this big move. It's kind of nice to sometimes have things
shrink just for a couple frames right before they grow, and it works the same way if things
are moving left to right. Have them move, you know, have them move right
just a little bit and then shift left, and shoot off to the right. You can kind of have, it almost feels like
it's taking a step before it, you know, comes forward. Just a nice little, a little trick. All right, so once this thing shoots out,
I want the triangle to do the same thing. So I'm gonna turn this triangle layer on here,
and it's already parented to the box. So what I'm gonna do is put a keyframe here
on the scale, so it's right in line with the box's keyframe, then I'm gonna come back here
and I'm gonna set this to zero, all right, and now I'm gonna hit option and the left
bracket to clip that layer to right there so it doesn't exist in time before then. Those are great hotkeys, option left bracket,
right bracket. It basically trims your layer to wherever
your playhead is. Okay, so now let's adjust the curves on the
scale for the triangle, all right, so we get that nice pop on that, all right, and you
can see right now the triangle scales up at the same time as the box, okay? If we're using secondary animation all we
gotta do is delay that one frame, all right, and maybe it needs to be a little more, let's
do two frames, and all of a sudden, now it's starting to feel like the box is kind of throwing
the triangle at us. All right, that's, that's secondary animation
right there. The, the triangle's animation appears to be
driven by the square's animation. Now we can help this by adding a little bit
of an overshoot so let's go forward two frames and let's add scale keyframes on both of those. And then let's just go into the curve editor. Let's see if we can do these there. So let's go to the box, and just have this
keyframe overshoot just a little, and then we'll do the same thing with the triangle. This is what I love about the curve editor. You can really see exactly what it's doing. Okay, so now if I scoot this forward two frames,
you could even, you could even go more here, because it's so quick, there you go. All right, so now it feels like a little bit
it's almost a little bit springy, all right. Compare, compare this where everything happens
at once to this which has a three frame delay. It's just a little bit more interesting to
watch, and then you know, there were a couple times I think in my animation where I did
things like this. I would have the box rotate, just put a rotation
keyframe, to have it rotate, let's have it just you know kind of shake itself back and
forth. So it's gonna go three frames back this way,
and then six frames this way, and then we'll go just kind of eyeballing this. We're probably gonna have to adjust this. But let's say we did something like this,
right. All right, so it kind of shakes itself, like
that. All right, I'm not gonna mess with the curves. That's actually gonna work fine for this. But what if I just copy and paste these keyframes
onto the triangle? All right, so now we've got the rotations
happening in sync, and then I delay this just a frame. You see what it does? It now feels a little bit springy, like, like
that triangle's on like a loose screw or something, and if you delay it another frame then it
starts to feel really jiggly and wobbly, all right? That is secondary animation right there folks. And it's a really easy trick. All you're doing is, is kind of offsetting
keyframes. But really quickly you can build up animations
that feel like they have a lot of life to them, and you know, I'm a big proponent of
sound design. I think that, you know, sound is literally
half of, of a motion graphics piece. Sometimes the more important half, frankly,
and with, with animations like this they are just ripe for sound effects because there
are so many little nuances of movement that you could, you could catch and do little things
with with sound. So, next time someone asks you to animate
a logo, or do something with a simple little design, you saw how fast we put this little
piece together. You could very easily do something like this,
and you're gonna find that especially when you're starting out this type of detailed
animation work isn't really being done, you know, especially, especially when you're talking
about the, those lower end jobs that don't have huge budgets to put big teams of people
on. But this is stuff you can do to make those
projects look awesome, and look like the things you see on motionographer. So, I hope you guys learned something today
about secondary animation. Thank you guys so much, and I'll see you next
time. Thank you so much for watching. I hope this lesson gave you a good understanding
of how to use follow through to make your animations look a little better. If you have any questions or thoughts about
this lesson definitely let us know, and we'd love to hear from you if you use this technique
on a project. So give us a shout on Twitter, @schoolofmotion
and show us what you've been up to. And if you learned something valuable from
this please share it around. It really helps us spread the word about School
of Motion and we totally appreciate it. Thanks again, and I'll see you next time.
