I'll Teach You After Effects in 60 Minutes...

welcome to After Effects we're going to learn the very Basics by creating that animation from start to finish we have three short shots each covering the most common and fundamental techniques which will be most useful to you in After Effects there are about 100 ways to get the same result so I'll show you the ways that I think are best to those who are new to the software in order to get comfortable in it and if you are new it is okay to be overwhelmed you don't have to be confident with everything right away all of the amazing motion designers that I've worked with started as someone who is curious and intimidated by after effects so if that's you you're already on the right path this video is the first lesson from my motion Foundation course I'm releasing this one on YouTube as a preview and to teach you as much as humanly possible within one hour the additional nine weeks are available at pinmerit.com you can download this project file for free to follow along or to adjust to your own needs now this is the default view you'll see when you open after effects now like many other Adobe apps you can customize it which is very common and but I like to stick pretty closely to the default because it really is a useful layout now there are lots of panels but don't worry we don't need all of them we'll be viewing our work here in the composition window editing it here in the timeline like you would in any editing software but with a few more options managing our files and assets over here in the project window and searching for effects and editing our text over here in these collapsible panels and also accessing some tools up here in the toolbar now I think the best way to learn is by doing so let's start making our project the first part is this shot that says welcome first we need some footage to work with so let's import it I have a bunch of files here in an assets folder that we're going to use today and we have this video file here called ocean drone so the simplest way to import that into After Effects is just to Simply drag and drop it into our project panel or we can import it by going to file import file again and finding it in here so now this file is in our project window and if we scroll across we can see some more information about it it's frame rate its size just details about the file we don't really need to worry about that and if we double click it we can watch it over here now I've got this wonderful dream shot from a buddy of mine James Daly which he let me steal from one of his videos so do check them out but to edit this to make our animation we need to First create a composition to work in now a composition is where most of the magic happens in After Effects it is the equivalent of a sequence in Premiere and to create a new one we can just select this button down here create new composition now we have our composition settings first is our composition name and let's name ours sh01 welcome for shot one welcome we have a lot of presets here for common formats you might need for us we'll have a width of 1920 a height of 1080 which is full HD a frame rate of 24 frames per second is great down here we have common frame rates as well but 24 is a nice safe one down here the duration will edit from 10 seconds to be five seconds and these numbers here mean hour minutes seconds and frames at all of these settings we can edit later as well so let's hit OK and now we have a new composition and first let's zoom in in our composition window we can do that by using this menu down here we can go to 100 and we can also use the scroll wheel on her Mouse to zoom in and out too okay now let's grab our footage from up here in the project panel you'll see our composition is now added to that panel as well and let's drag that into our composition window release it and it is added down here in the timeline now we can click and scrub through the footage and you'll see that we have markers for one second in one and a half seconds two seconds Etc all the way up to five which is the end of our composition and anywhere you scrub to you can also see where your playhead is at over here on the left and do play it back we hit spacebar and it'll run through everything we have here in the timeline now right now it is playing back in real time but once we start adding some effects and Graphics it might take some time to buffer depending on how intense the effects are and how fast your computer is you can change the resolution from here from Full to Auto or to half to make sure you can view it faster at real time but for these animations we can keep it at full resolution and after effects lets you know what is ready to play back in real time indicated by this bright green bar here at the top of the timeline and that is called the ram preview so anytime we make changes to what's in our timeline this green bar will turn gray for a second and then fill back up with green Azure RAM and after effects creates a preview for us but when this is green it's ready to play back and in the timeline we can click and drag any layer to the left or right and that will change where this layer starts playing from so now our footage won't start playing until one second in so we get a second of nothing and then our footage starts and the start of this layer has a little black triangle in the top left and that lets us know that this is the very beginning of the layer but we don't need to start our layer at the very beginning we can click the start of it which brings up these two arrows and drag it to the right or to the left to trim where this layer starts so now we get two seconds of nothing and then our clip starts but into starting one second into that clip and to move it around we just make sure we're clicking inside of the visible area not where it has been trimmed let's move this back towards the start we also have our work area in our timeline and that is this gray bar with these blue handles on the right and on the left and within this area is the area that will preview on playback at the moment it is the full length of our comp we can drag this handle at the right bring it all the way forward to let's put it at one second and now if we play it back it will just Loop this one second in our play area which is very useful for when you want to focus on one area of your edit or animation and you don't want to watch through your whole composition we can also zoom in on the timeline here and we can do that using the slider and these icons down here clicking the big amount to zoom in and the smaller Mountain to zoom out and as we zoom in closer we can see the markers on our ruler getting more and more detailed and we can see it's almost showing every frame now we have a markup for two frames four frames six frames every other frame so you can get really detailed maybe we can zoom out a little bit though now let's add some text and animate it first we select our type tool from up here in the toolbar and to create a text box we can just click and drag anywhere in our composition and let's just type in the word welcome now that has created a new layer in our timeline now the order that your layers are in in the timeline is important for visibility we can drag our text layer with lower footage and now we can no longer see it because our footage is on top of it in the layer stack in the timeline and in the preview in the composition window as well so let's bring that back up to the top just by clicking and dragging and let's adjust our text to make it the way we want so let's click on it still with our type tool selected and highlight everything we want to edit which in our case is all of it now to edit the text we want to open up our character panel over here on the right and to do that we just click on it and it opens up and moves the other panels below it this is handy so we can close it when we don't need to see it and it's not too distracting now I am using the typeface swear display which is currently available on Adobe font so if you have an adobe subscription you should be able to activate and use this font now the first thing we want to do is change its color you might be familiar with the character panel which is in pretty much every Adobe app and if not you'll see similar things in here in the office suite or any text editor but to change the color we need to select the fill color over here we can click on it currently it is set to this dark blue but we can just drag this up to the top left to create a white and hit ok now let's make this text nice and big and we can do that by clicking and dragging the font size over here let's make that really big let's go all the way up to 450 and that is so big it's cut off some of our text so if we just click and drag the outsides of the bounding box we can adjust that there we finished editing our text we can deselect it just by clicking off somewhere in the timeline now to get this text in the exact center now we can do that by selecting that layer and then opening up our align panel which is over here on the right we want the layer to align to the composition which is already selected so that's excellent and then these buttons here are lined it to the left Edge horizontally in the center to the right to the top to the vertical Center and to the bottom so we want it in the vertical Center and the horizontal center now it's exactly in the middle now let's animate it and we're going to do a very basic animation of it moving down the screen and to do that we need to animate its position which we will do with the position property to access a layers properties we can toggle them open by hitting this Arrow here and the property we want is in the transform properties so let's open that up as well and the transform properties are properties that every layer has the Anchor Point the position scale rotation and opacity we want to animate its position and we do that by changing the value of this property over time which is very simple to do and we do that by telling After Effects at the start of the animation where we want our text position to be and at the end of the animation where it should change to so first let's tell it where to start now we are only going to animate this over a second because that is how long our shot will be so we don't need it to move much so we'll move our playhead to the very start of the composition and let's move our text up currently we still have our text store selected so let's select our selection tool which is Arrow up here and let's just drag it slightly up the comp and as we're dragging this if you look down here on the left you can see the values of the position changing now to tell After Effects we want to animate this property we need to click this stopwatch to the left here and this will toggle the ability of the property to change over time so as we select it and it's now turned blue and we have this marker over here on our timeline which is where our playhead was when we selected that property now this is a keyframe this is essentially a marker for artifex to know at this time the value of this property is this then if we move our playhead one second later into our composition and we move our text layer downwards it creates another keyframe After Effects now knows we want our text to start animating up here and at the end it needs to be down here and that is going to happen over one second so if we go back to the start hit spacebar and watch it we can see we've got our animation and if you've just created your first animation congrats Now using keyframes like this is the most fundamental skill in After Effects if you can understand keyframes that they work by changing values of a property across time you can do a lot of Animation in After Effects almost every motion you see is some variation of that now if we wanted to rotate our text we could change its Rotation by clicking and dragging it over here but that didn't create a keyframe and that is because we hadn't hit the stopwatch next to rotation so its rotation property is not animated its rotation stays the same but if we do hit the stopwatch on rotation now we have the keyframe and if we go back to the start of the animation we can try to straighten this out or angle it the other way and we can also click inside any of these properties and type what angle we'd like as well so let's hit negative 90. and hit OK so now it is at a right angle facing up and then throughout the animation it rotates to the right and because it's rotation so big we barely notice its position animation as well okay but we don't want to take the animated so let's undo that so we'll just hit Ctrl z a couple of times until both of those keyframes disappear and then let's reset this to zero degrees as well okay now we want to create an effect where the footage is only visible within our text and we want that to take up the second half of this first second of the clip so from 12 frames onwards so first let's duplicate our footage so we're going to select our footage layer and we can go up to edit duplicate or we can hit Ctrl or command D which is the shortcut and when we do that now we just have two copies of our ocean Drone footage now we want this second copy to be on top of our text layer and let's trim it at the start so it only becomes visible after frame 12. so we can't see this layer at the very start and then when we hit frame 12 and onwards it is covering up both our text and our footage layer underneath it now at 12 frames we also want our bottom footage layer to stop being visible as well so let's zoom out a little bit and we want to trim it and so it stops here now currently our footage extends way beyond our five second duration here so let's select our layer drag it to the left until we see the end and let's drag the end forward drag it back until it's start it's the very start of our composition and then drag the end of it here I'll move my playhead to make sure that lines up we need to drag it Forward one more frame there so now our first footage layer is only visible for the first 12 frames and then this footage is visible for the next 12. let's Zoom back in now we just need the second layer of footage to be visible only in the area shown by this text and we do that by using a track matte now a mat essentially hides part of a layer and we can do that through this column here which has track matte now if you can't see these columns for track Mount blending mode parent and Link you can toggle them on or off by hitting these icons in the bottom left we also have some extra ones for time codes which we don't need these are the two I like to keep visible but if they ever go missing you can bring them back by hitting these down here now to use our welcome layer as a mat all we need to do is Select this drop down menu and choose our welcome layer which is layer 2 or we can grab this pick Whip and drag that over the layer we want to use and release it and as soon as we do that we can now see our footage is only visible where our welcome text is and as that text animates we can still see our footage layer through it but something else has happened our text is now no longer visible at the start and that is because when you set trackmat in After Effects After Effects automatically hides that layer it toggles its visibility off and we can toggle it back on over here on the left so if we hit this visible icon it's now visible and you can use this to turn on or off any layer that you have on screen so if you can't see your layer anymore in the composition window you may have accidentally turned it off so make sure to check down here first all right so now we've got a text visible and then in the second half our footage over where our text is but in the second half our background is black and we don't want that we want it to be the color of our text in the first half which is white so second half is a bit of an inverse of the first half and one thing to know is that in this case even though the background appears black it is actually transparent and if we hit this checkerboard icon down here toggle transparency grid we can see that there is nothing behind this text at the start we have our full footage and our text but here we just have the text well the footage inside the text now in our timeline we can see that that makes sense because there is nothing below this layer the background only appeared black because it is set as a background color for this composition so if we go to com position composition settings we can see the background color that we had selected as black and the background color doesn't render it's not really there and it's just something for you to look at so you don't have to look at these transparency grids because that can become difficult if you had something that's all white or all gray or something very thin it can be hard to see what's going on so let's actually create a white background for this and the easiest way to do that is to create a new solid so let's go up to layer new and solid we have our solid settings let's select a color here drag it up to White hit OK and we want to name it not white solid one but background and hit OK and drag that below all of our layers on the timeline and there we have it our first shot is complete and if you are finding this video useful hitting that like button really does help me out a lot and the channel gets seen so that I can keep making more of this type of content if you've got the time to hit it I'd be ever so grateful alright now on to shot two where we'll be creating this now I designed this shot inside illustrator so let's import this into After Effects but first let's notice that I've separated a lot of the elements onto their individual layers and that is going to make it much easier to animate alright let's go over to After Effects and pull that file and while we're here we might have also noticed that artifacts has created a solids folder in our project panel and if we open that up we can see our background layer here so as soon as you create a solid or some other types of layers After Effects automatically puts it in a little solids folder up here but we don't really need to know about that just know that after effects is doing this no one is hacked into your computer and started creating folders so let's import our illustrator file go up to file import file navigate to where it's saved to here it is here and we want to make sure we import it not as footage because that will import it without any layers just as if it was the jpeg we want to import it as compositioned retain layer sizes and create composition we can tick because we need to create one anyway so let's just import it like this and as we do that we see we have a new composition in our project panel and a folder called shot 02 2 layers if we're opening that up we can see all of our layers that we created in illustrator we can preview them up here on the top left but let's close that and open the shot 02 composition and we can open it just by double clicking and if you double click welcome it opens that composition as well and down here we can also see our options for Shot 2 and shot one now by default the composition settings are the same as their most recently created composition which we did for shadow 1 and that is perfect for us here five seconds 1080p 24 frames per second now you might ask why are we using five second compositions when this shot and a previous shot are only one second long and that is because it's actually easier when you've got more room in the timeline to work beyond the area that you're actually animating for and you'll see why soon and it's also often better to create a shot slightly longer than you need it because you can always trim it down in the edit and you have a little bit extra buffer as well exactly like if you were filming a scene with a camera you always want to get extra footage because if you need extra in the edit and you don't have it it can be hard to work around okay so let's start animating the scene and we're going to start animating These Bars here which we're going to have this blue pink and yellow color filling up the bar repeating and looping now let's start with the Bottom bar which I've labeled bar bottom down here and for this particular animation it's going to be simpler to actually create it from scratch in After Effects using shape layers so we can do that by selecting our rectangle tool from the toolbar up here and if you also click and hold we can see all of our other shape tools as well here which come in handy and we have the pen tool to the right which we can also use to create different shapes but for now we just need a rectangle now before we start creating our shape let's actually first deselect this layer which is already selected we don't need that and that will just confuse things so let's click off this layer and now let's create our shape but first we want to choose its color so at the moment its field is this hideous looking brown color up here so if we click on that we can choose another color and let's eye drop this dark blue and hit OK and let's actually Zoom a little bit into our composition I'm going to do with that scroll wheel so we're a little closer to the shape and if we want to move around while we zoomed in we can hold A spacebar on our keyboard and click and drag to just move about okay now we're ready to draw our rectangle I want to be as close as I can to this shape so I'm going to start at the top left click and drag and just try to line it up at the bottom right and release when we're ready there now that creates a new shape in our timeline which is called shape layer one but let's rename that to keep layer tidy and we can do that by selecting it and right clicking it and we always label our layers because it makes it so much easier to navigate especially once we start having a lot of layers and especially especially when we're working on projects with other people it may seem like an annoyance in the short term but it saves you so much time having a clear and organized project and you'll be everyone's favorite person to work with I guarantee it it is a great habit for anyone at any level to have so you may as well start developing that habit as soon as possible okay we can call this a bar blue one and then just deselect it now we also don't really need this bar bottom layer so we can select that layer and then delete our backspace on our keyboard to just get rid of it now let's animate this layer filling up like a loading bar and like most things in After Effects there are many many ways to accomplish this but an easy way and one that introduces another key element of After Effects is to do it with a mask now mask Works similar to match like we did in our first shot they hide and reveal specific areas of a layer but instead of using another layer to reveal that with a mask we can just draw what we want to see directly onto this layer and we can draw what we want to see with the rectangle tool which we already have selected or with the other shape tools or pen tool so make sure our rectangle tool is selected but one thing that is important to change is we need to select this option up here currently we have tool create shape selected but we want to go over and select tool creates mask because otherwise we're just going to keep drawing rectangles on this layer which won't help us at all so if we click and drag we can see as we do that the rectangle that we're creating is revealing our layer our shape is only visible within the bounds of this mask that we're drawing and that's essentially what we want to animate we want to animate this mask revealing our shape exactly like that starting at the left and expanding to reveal the whole shape so let's finish drawing this mask by releasing The Click I have on my mouse we want to line it up at the very end on the right and release okay now we just need to animate it and of course we're going to animate that using keyframes changing a property over time and the property we're going to change is the masks path so down here on the timeline if we toggle open mask one we can see here we have a bunch of properties and mask path is one of them so one second in is where we want our shape to be completely filled so let's click the stopwatch on mask path and then at the very start of the animation we need to drag this all the way to the left now the easiest way to do that is to get our selection tool and double click our mask which will add this bounding box and now we can just drag it to right Edge all the way to the left just in front of where our shape starts there now we've animated our mask path and we have an animation wonderful now our timeline is starting to get a little crowded we have all these other properties visible that we don't really need to see and they're just taking up a lot of real estate and they will take up a lot more once we start having more and more layers so a great shortcut to use to hide that is you on the keyboard so we have this layer selected and if we hit you it is going to hide all of the properties except the one animated and if we hit it again it hides those properties too if you want to hide and reveal different properties select the layers you need and toggle hitting you on the keyboard next we're going to learn another trick for smoother and more appealing animation and to do that we're going to want a before and after comparison so let's duplicate this layer if you will remember from before the shortcut is Ctrl or command D so now I've got two Bar Blues so let's drag this one just below it and I'm going to hold shift on my keyboard so it stays vertically aligned and I'm also going to move the second one down below it in the timeline so it matches its position in the composition and you on the keyboard to bring up its keyframes as well okay so the moment the motion we have on both of these bars is a linear the bar is filling up at a constant consistent speed at every single frame the bar is filling up the same amount but we can make this animation a little bit smoother by adding some easing now easing is where there is some acceleration and deceleration the animation will start slower accelerate and then slows down as it gets to the end and we can do that by selecting both keyframes we'll do that on our top bar layer and we can select them just by clicking and dragging and drawing a box around them and then if we right click any of them go to keyframe assistant and easy ease the shortcut of which is F9 very common shortcut that is another one useful to remember and when we do that we'll notice our keyframes have changed shape they've now become a sort of hourglass shape and that means that these keyframes have easing applied to it so either coming into this keyframe or coming out of this keyframe and motion will accelerate or decelerate so let's take a look at both animations and we can see there is a slight difference on the bottom it is a linear consistent speed and on the top it is eased let's hide the top one for a second and we see straight linear motion and turn the other one off and we have a nice slightly eased animation let's drag the work area down to one second just so we can Loop that and the top more ease motion feels a little more natural and organic a sprinter or even a car needs to build up to their top speed and then decelerate to stop and if we look closely I'm just going to scrub through very slowly we can see the start our top layer is moving very slightly there's only a tiny amount of animation of it being revealed but by the time we get to the middle it is having to speed up and move even faster than the one below it because it has to make up time for being so slow at the start so it pulls ahead of our linear motioned bar and then as we get closer to the end it is slowing down and they will finish at the exact same time so adding easing doesn't change the time that it takes to get from one end to the other it just changes how it speeds up and slows down within that process it's a more familiar motion to us and is generally a bit more pleasing now if you are animating a robot or something that is already in motion linear motion is great but generally a little bit of eating is nicer okay now we can get rid of our second bar that we've made down here so let's just delete that and I think we can make this motion a little bit faster as well and we can do that just by pushing these keyframes closer together so let's select this keyframe and just drag it halfway until it's 12 frames in half a second so now it's doing the same Motion in half the time so we get emotion twice as fast okay now let's add the other colors of this bar to really bring this animation to life so let's duplicate this bar with Ctrl or command D and let's actually do that one more time so now we have three copies so for this top one let's change its fill color to Yellow so I'm going to select the eyedropper choose yellow the one below it select the eyedropper and choose this pink color and if we toggle them on and off we can see the different colors they're just stacked on top of one another and let's rename our layers from bar blue to bar yellow one and bar pink one I'm always renaming them let's change the label color these layers too at the moment they're blue which is the default for a shape layer but you can change what color they appear in the timeline and we can do that by clicking this box here on the left and we'll change this one to fuchsia and the yellow one to Yellow now it's just a little more obvious which layer is what at a glance in our timeline and let's select both of these layers and hit you on our keyboard to reveal their keyframes too because now we are going to offset their motion and that is just a bit of a fancy way of saying we're going to delay the motion of these to create a bit of a fun effect so let's drag our pink layer over about six frames so it is going to start halfway through our blue bars animation and then move the yellow one over another additional six frames from that so our blue layer is going to start then our pink layer then our yellow layer let's expand our work area two we don't need to be restricted to one second so here we are we have a bar filling up three times once with each color but we don't want them to fill up just once with each color we want them to do that again and again so the best way to do that is to select these layers and duplicate them so let's select them all I'm going to select the bottom one hold shift on my keyboard hit the top one and then hit Ctrl or command D and that will duplicate all of these layers now I do want them all on top so I'm going to select any of them and just drag them to the top of the layer stack and then we can drag them over to the right we can also hit you on our keyboard to bring up their keyframes just so we can line them up a little bit easier and now we have each one of them filling up the screen twice now we do want this to happen a few more times so let's again select all of these layers hit command or control D to duplicate drag them up to the top bring them over to the right to offset them now we've got a nice few seconds of this bar filling up and from one really simple animation just a mask path animating and a couple of creative duplicating moving LA's and changing the color we've got a pretty captivating little animation here now we still need to animate our top bar and our timeline is getting pretty full of these bar layers luckily we can do something in After Effects called pre-composing which essentially puts all of these layers in their own composition so I'm going to select all of these colored bar layers right click any of them and select pre-compose that prompts me to create a new composition name and I will call that bar color and hit OK and now in our timeline all of those colored layers have disappeared and we just have this one sand color layer called bar color which is in fact a new composition that we've made we'll find that up here in the project panel and if we double click into that we can see it contains all of our colored layers and only those colored layers and this is kind of the equivalent of nesting in Premiere like a kind of grouping or creating a symbol in other software now if we head back to shot O2 we can see the real power of pre-composing and that is that we can use this composition again and again and if we ever needed to make a change to this composition we can go into it make a change and that change will be in effect every instance of that composition that we've made all right so we need to use this for this top bar here so let's duplicate bar color with command D and we could just click and drag it to move its position up to the top and play it back but then we've got them animating in the same direction and we don't want that so let's undo that and I'm actually going to rotate this composition so it's animating in the other direction so let's open up its transform properties and let's increase its rotation and we'll try to line it up with the top and if we can't do it exactly by hand we can click and type which we know it'll be 180 degrees then hit okay there and we can also delete our bar top layer as well from illustrator so let's select that and delete it and now if we play it back we've got both bars animating in opposite directions wonderful all right now we do need to get this to work as well as we can for our one second animation that this shot will be used in and make this first one second the best it can be because at the moment the bars are appearing out of nothing which we don't really want and then at the end they're kind of just disappearing or just showing the last color that we have copied there filling up the bar which is yellow so let's grab our work area drag it to one second and we want our bars to be already filled up and animating by this point so very start of our animation let's select both of our bar color layers and then just drag these over to the left until when they start they've already completely filled the bar there we are so now it doesn't quite Loop but that's okay we don't need our animation to Loop we won't be looping it it'll just be playing one sandwich between two scenes so this will be fine for us but if we do want it loopable all we need to do is find the frame where it matches the frame at the very start so at the very start we have half pink half blue so the next frame where that appears we just scrub along is here at frame 18 and you can see the frame number over here on the left as well so if we drag our work area to this 18th frame and play it back it should Loop seamlessly wonderful or we can find where this particular frame appears again pink on the left blue on the right which should be here at one second 12 frames or the 36th frame so if we expand our work area to there it should loop as well not that we need it to Loop but it's handy to know as well alright now we want all of these elements to zoom in we need them to get bigger as our imaginary camera moves closer and the easiest way to do that is by animating their scale now I know that our middle rectangle is in the exact center of our comp so let's start there now we'll open up its transform properties again to get to its scale but instead of toggling down it transform properties like this we can use a shortcut and because all of these properties are used so often in After Effects they've got some really easy Shortcuts To Remember s is for scale R is for rotation p is the position and T is for opacity or opacity or transparency if that's easier to remember I guess Adobe thought that the shortcut o would be too confusing oh dear all right so let's animate at scale hit s to bring that back up and actually the bar cutter on the top we don't need any of these properties visible so let's select that layer and hit U alright now we're just looking at a middle rectangle we're just looking at a scale so one second in is where we want our animation to finish so let's keyframe it scaled there at 100 and then at the very start of this animation let's raise it to 95. it's only going to be a small scale animation we don't want to go crazy we don't need it exploding out of nothing over one second five percent scale increase will be more than enough playback we can see a yellow square is increasing in size and it's zooming in now we don't really want to have to do this for all about layers so what we can do is use another technique which is important in life and in animation and that is parenting so you'll see this column on the right in our timeline called parent and Link and with this we can essentially attach or link one layer to another or multiple layers to one layer so let's select all of our other layers our bar colors and our type I'm just holding shift and clicking on each of these and now in Parental link we can select from the drop down menu and middle rectangle or like with Matt's uses pickweb to select her middle rectangle layer and when we release we can see they're all linked to layer 4 middle rectangle and now when we play it back we can see now all of our layers are zooming in and that is because they are all attached to they are all linked to Middle rectangle middle rectangle is now a parent of those layers so they inherit its animation that's why it's called the parent and now anything we do to this rectangle layer will happen to the other layers as well if we hit r on our keyboard to bring up rotation and rotate our middle rectangle all the other layers rotate too let's undo that and even though we have our scale animation animated on our middle rectangle we could also scale up our other layers too we could scale up our type layer and that can happen independent of middle rectangle the children are free to do their own thing the rectangle is not an overbearing controlling parent okay there we have it Shot 2 is complete the one thing we should do is kind of tie tidy up our project now it isn't too bad over here we only have a few Assets in there but as we go to creating the last shot it is going to get a little bit Messier so the best time to organize a project is before it gets too chaotic and it is good practice to keep monitoring your project and making sure it's as tight as it can be really so the best way to organize it a bit more is to make some folders and organize elements into those so I'm going to create a new folder and I'm going to call this one zero one assets and I'm going to create another one called zero two comps now I like to add the numbers at the start and that is just so they list alphabetically in the order that I want and into the assets folder I'm going to drag our Drone footage and our solids and our layers from shot 02 and into comps I'm going to put our welcome our Shot 2 and bars colors as well let's open up that comps folder and then actually within that folder I'm going to create a new folder and call that one zero one precomps and in that folder I'm going to drag bar color there that is modernizer and is nice and organized now this isn't the only one true way to organize a project you don't have to use this exact structure but it is good that you have a structure it will go much much smoother than with no structure and I found this structure really works for me for small projects and for big projects as well now this is a natural break to let you know that I do have a course available that I've designed to be the resource I wish I had while starting motion design teaching the most foundational elements in depth across a whole bunch of fun practical projects I'm really proud of it and it's available on my website there's a link to that down in the description anyway back to it on to shot three where we will be making this a little more involved for this shot so get ready and first we will need to create a new composition so let's hit the new composition icon and let's call this shot 03 After Effects all the comp settings are fine so let's hit OK drag that into our comps folder and then we've got a bunch of assets that we need for this shot so let's drag all of those in we have the after effects icon so let's drag that into our assets we have this paper texture drag that in there too and then we also have this folder of lots of photos of hands so let's select all of those drag them all in and let's also create a new folder for these in the project as well that we'll call hand Stills and drag all of our hands into there now for a quick explanation as to how I made all of these hand images is I essentially took eight photos of my hand in different stages of opening up I took them into Photoshop removed the background from each one of them with a magic wand tool and then just save them out as transparent pngs alright now let's get started by dragging these hands into our comp now I'm going to select them all but I'm going to first click on hand number 8 hold shift and then click up to hand number one and that is because when we drag them in it will drag them in the correct order with the open hand at the top with hand 08 at the very top so the first layer you select will appear at the very top it's not that important you can always rearrange the them but why not do it the right way first they're all looking maybe a bit too big for the composition so let's scale them all down so while they're all selected I'll hit s on the keyboard and then scale them down to about to eighty percent there that's looking a bit better and let's make sure we are aligned to the middle so our line tab happens to be open again so let's align the layers to composition we don't want to align them to one another and there we are right in the middle okay now we need to put them into a sequence so let's actually hide their scale we'll do that by hitting U and put them into a sequence first we need to trim them down to the length of each frame so I'm just going to drag the very end to the right and drag them down and I want to make sure they're about four frames long so one two three four okay happened to drag correctly to four frames now what we need to do is just spread them out so one starts where the other one finishes starting at handle one finishing a hand 08 and we're essentially creating a stop motion animation let's see how that looks alright that is looking pretty good got a nice stop motion effect now I do think we want to make these last four layers last a little bit longer because it's not as much movement happening so I want them to just be a bit slower so let's select these all and I'm just going to drag them out another four frames and then push them out to be in a sequence again okay there we go so the hand opens up and then it's a little bit slower when the hand is open wonderful now at the moment our hand animation is lasting two seconds and we do want it to last more than that so we're just going to repeat the last four frames so let's select them all command D to D duplicate or Ctrl D move them to the top of the layers deck move them to the right and then I'm going to select all versions of that again duplicate drag to the top and offset those as well even extending beyond the length of our comp all right now we have a nice kind of long looping animation while opening over the start and then jittering slightly once they're open now again our timeline is just full of all these stills of hands which we don't really need to animate any more than that so you guessed it we are going to pre-comp these to make this comp easier to navigate so I'm going to select all of these layers right click pre-compose and we can call this hand stop motion hit OK and then move that comp into our precomps folder now we do want to have our hand black and white and have some more contrast so it looks a bit more like a newsprint or maybe that it's been photocopied and cut out of a magazine or something so let's now apply some effects to it which is another reason in itself to pre-compet so we don't have to apply the effects to every single layer now the effects live over here on the right and this panel effects and presets and as soon as we click on that we can see there are a lot of effects and these aren't even the effects these are just groups of similar effects if we open up the distort section you can see there is a lot of distort effects filling up the entire panel just of distort effects and that is the reason we have this very handy search bar on the top of our effects and presets because it is much easier to search for the type of effect that you need rather than going through all of these one by one now first we need to make this black and white and again there are a bunch of effects that we could use to achieve that now one is called Hue and saturation so I'm just going to type in Hue we can see there are a few effects have the word Hue in it but color correction Hue and saturation is the one we want now we can just double click on this effect because we already have this layer selected and it will apply it and we can see it pop up over here on the left and this is the effects control panel and you might be concerned where is the project panel gone but if we select this Arrow here we can see project panel is just over here it is just being hidden in the meantime while we adjust our effects and we can click back and forth between these to choose what we want to see all right so in our effects Hue and saturation you might be familiar with this from Photoshop or from other effect software and we have a few different properties we can effect here Master Hue we can adjust to change the color of our layer let's undo that Master saturation we can make it more saturated more colorful or less saturated more black or white let's leave ours at minus 100 and lightness is just how bright or dark it is let's undo that back at zero now we need to add some more contrast and we're going to do that with an effects called curves again just double clicking on that curves effect and it will pop up over here in our effects panel now the curves effect is a powerful tool that allows you to adjust the brightness and contrast of your footage now it works by mapping the input values to Output values using this customizable curve here so the x-axis the horizontal axis is the shadows and highlights of an image the y-axis is the brightness so at the moment on the shadow size the Shadows are not very bright at all our curves at the very bottom and on the right the brightness is at the very top so they're very bright and we can manipulate this curve to alter those so we can bring the Shadows brighter by bringing this curve up to the left we can make the highlights darker by bringing this down we can alter the mid tones by making them brighter or darker and we want to do both of those last two and we can do that by creating an S curve so we make the mid tones Close to the Shadows darker and click and drag it up to create the midtones closer to the highlights the brighter mid tones a little bit lighter that's maybe a little too extreme let's make it around this shape like an s and this is sometimes called a contrast curve and this is looking pretty good to me now we might need these effects controls so let's go back to our project panel I find it comforting to be able to see this and it's nice organized glory and now let's add a background layer just like we did before let's go up to layer and we can't choose anything these are all grayed out because this layer is selected so let's deselect it clicking anywhere else and then let's go up to layer new solid and we want to change its color let's make a bit of a dark gray hit OK and name that background and hit OK wonderful drag that below our hand and now let's add our After Effects icon that's over here in our assets panel we can close that folder with hand Stills we don't need them anymore drag that over here and of course we're going to need to scale it down so s on our keyboard and scale it down until it looks kind of like the natural size would be in that hand maybe 33 33 will be fine and maybe let's scale down our hand too maybe it's a little bit big so let's open up the scale of the hand and drop that down to maybe 90. okay now it's cutting off the very bottom so we can just drag that down slightly there we have it that it looks like a good fit for the logo in our hand let's actually select the after effects logo move it up a little bit more there we are now animating the logo now we want it to appear as soon as our hand opens so the first frame where our hand is open is here at 12 frames in so we're going to trim the style of that layer so it doesn't appear before then and there we are that kind of looks okay as it is considering this stop motion Style but we want to make it a little fancier and add a bit more motion to this logo or to the icon I keep saying the logo truly an icon but maybe both depending how you look at it alright so I'm happy with the final position of the icon here so let's animate a few properties of it getting to this place so scale is already open let's animate its scale I'll keyframe that but also want to add about its position and rotation so to bring up rotation and position we can hit R and P but that only shows one at a time but if we hold shift and then hit R and we'll now ask to bring up scale they are all visible so let's keyframe them all at this point one second in and then at 12 frames in let's make some changes to each of these properties so position let's just drag it down a little bit so it's going to look like it pops up scale drag it down a touch two not too much and rotation let's just rotate it a little bit to the left counterclockwise so now when we play it well it looks a bit floaty but it's popping up out of the end and a bit more of an interesting way okay so how can we make it a bit more interesting well we can add some easing so let's select all of these keyframes right click keyframe assistant easy ease now there's a bit more of an easing that looks a little better but not too great I think we can improve it by making it faster I think it's a little too slow to pop up out here so let's grab these last keyframes and just drag them over to about there so now it's going to be pretty quick popping up there that's a little better and I think it's going to get even better when we add some final touches which are coming up now to make this look a little more collagey let's add some of those border elements and we'll do that by creating some shape layers again with the rectangle tool I'll deselect this layer just to make sure we don't accidentally create a mask and a great way to create a rectangle or any shape that is the exact same size of your comp is to just simply double click the tool so if I double click the rectangle tool we get a shape layer with a rectangle the exact size of our comp which is what we want to create a border but we don't want a solid pink rectangle we just want the outline so let's change that the fill and the stroke of the shape layer are shown up here the feel is the color it's filled with if we click on the word fill we have our fill options and we can choose from no fill solar color linear gradient radial gradient we want no fill so let's hit none hit OK and for stroke we want solid color stroke then hit ok now this number right next to the stroke here is the stroke width in pixels now let's go nice and big for this one let's go all the way up to around 250 there and this shape is going to go behind our hands so let's drag it to the bottom of the layer stack I'll just close up its properties here first try to get below a hand a bit above our background and of course let's rename this border one and let's change the color of this Stroke by selecting that up here and let's eye dropper the dark color from the Icon here this dark blue hit okay there now for the thinner border let's duplicate this border layer drag it above our hand in the layer stack let's reduce its stroke width let's drag this down to about 100 or so and then let's change its color from this blue we'll eye drop the light lavender color from the Icon then hit OK all right this is looking a little more legit now that it has a nice colorful border on it now we just need to add a looping texture and some final effects to make our looping texture we're going to use this paper scan element that we have here let's double click on that and you can see that this is just a piece of paper that I have painted black and as a little bit of the paper texture in there now I have to scanned this in at pretty high resolution but you don't really need them to be that high of a resolution these are very easy to make your own you can even just take pictures on a camera and save it out and a decent file size texture is everywhere out there you can take photos of some concrete of an interesting wall fabric the options are really Limitless okay let's create a new comp rail looping texture so again we'll create a new comp these settings are all great let's just rename it texture Loop one in case we want to animate some more textured Loops later hit OK let's put that in our precomps folder and in this composition we'll drag in our paper scan I'm going to zoom out a bit because we can see that because of the high resolution scan this image is very big and a bit bigger than we need it to so let's scale it down s on that keyboard let's drag this down to around 70 just to where we think the size of the texture is going to look good what level of detail we want our texture to have now we're just going to drag this around to find a nice a nice group of scratches and Speckles that we like we don't want to go too close to the edge and get the Border in there here seems fine for us great now we need to make a short sequence just like we did with our hand so I'm going to drag again the end of this layer so that it is only four frames long let's see how good I did again four frames exactly I'm good at this now you could make this much faster by making these layers two frames long or six frame long or I think four frames long for each instance of the texture is this sweet spot for me okay then we're going to duplicate this Ctrl or command D drag this layer over and on this one let's zoom out again and we're just going to find another area of this scan texture we can go back and forth just to check that they look pretty different not try like this part in the left corner here so I'll drag it down all right they look different enough now let's do it again I'll duplicate it once more drag it over and this time to give me some more options I'm going to bring up its rotation and rotate it 90 degrees so now we have a lot more options so we can try different areas before we notice similar Speckles on landmarks repeating duplicate it once more and on the fourth version let's just move it around over here let's just go through all of those and check that they all look decent they all look pretty good to me let's drag the end of our work area to the end of that layer and play it back I'll zoom in that all looks good and seamless to me now I do think four layers are enough but if you do want a longer sequence you can do that and it will probably be more seamless you can do that with six layers eight nine images long whatever you like but four I think works good for us now at the moment this is just looping within our work area here so when we place this in another comp it will just show this Loop once so what we need to do is fill up this entire comp with this sequence now there are a few ways you can Loop elements in After Effects but the way I prefer to do it is the simplest one and it is to just duplicate these and fill up the rest of this comp so that's what we'll do I'll select these all duplicate with controller command D bring them up to the top move them to the right select them all again duplicate up to the top move them across and I think we should be able to get away with doing that just once more there now we've got five seconds of this looping texture now let's add it to our shot so in shot 03 After Effects let's just drag texture Loop one and place it over the top and well it's covering everything up but we can change that and we can change that with its blending mode blending mode is this column over here and we have options of which blending mode next to every layer you'll likely recognize these from pretty much any image editing software and these are just ways this layer can blend with the layers below it based on its color and contrast now the one we want is screen and what screen does is it removes all the darkness from that image just lets all the white the lighter areas show through so we can see the lighter areas of our texture and the black becomes transparent now this is lightening the overall color of our composition so if we turn on and off we can see that it's making everything maybe just a bit lighter than we'd like but we can adjust that with an effect and the effect we'll use is curves which we conveniently have up here because it is the last one we search for so let's double click it and this time we're just going to drag down the mid tones to give it a general darker appearance so the main areas that show through are the very lightest Speckles and paper texture there I think that is looking pretty good and there is one more thing to add to this scene and that is some subtle effects to add on top of the whole comp now I think the best way to apply effects to everything in this comp at the same time is use an adjustment layer so let's create a new one by going up to layer new adjustment layer and that creates a new layer and a timeline let's rename that to effects now essentially this is just a blank layer but if we apply effects to it those effects will apply to everything underneath now let's add some subtle noise to this shot so I'm going to search for noise and you can see there are lots of types of noise we can add let's just add plane noise the one that just says noise and I'm going to zoom in a bit so we can really notice the noise and increase the noise we can see that it's just adding lots of chaotic noise to our shot we only want it pretty subtle maybe around eight percent noise and we can turn an effect on or off up here by clicking FX and we can see that it just adds a little subtle noise I like the way noise looks on here you might want your animation really super clean but I think if we're going for a stop-motion collage you look a little bit of noise texture a bit of chaos just makes the whole thing come together and often you would get excessive noise and sort of a printed photocopied elements too and it just removes a bit of the digital Sheen that we aren't getting with this digital animation all right so we've added our noise let's add one more effect and that is going to help make this after effects icon animation just work a little bit more consistently with the stop motion style that we've got for our hand animation and our looping texture and that effect is called posterize time let's search for that post race time let's double click to add it and I love this effect and what it does is let you alter the frame rate of this composition so it's currently 24 frames per second which is what it says here but let's lower it to 12. so it's going to play back at half the frame rate and I love using 12 frames per second because it is a very common frame rate for traditional animation and it gives your work a slightly more handmade feel because of that so let's play it back and we can only really notice it during that previously pretty smooth animation of this of our After Effects icon because now it's reducing the amount of frames we're seeing so we're only seeing about three frames of Animation between these two points and that's kind of how you would animate it if you were doing it stop motion with a lot fewer frames and I think it works pretty well here we could even lower this to six frames per second just to see how that looks and that's not bad too that actually looks nice and choppy it maybe fits the style a little bit better so actually let's keep it let's keep it at six frames per second that way it's just a little bit more noticeable and now this shot is done the last thing to do is put all of our shots together and render them out okay let's go back to our project panel and we are going to create a new comp which will contain all of our shots so let's create a new composition and call that welcome to After Effects let's hit OK and now we just need to drag in all of our shots so we'll drag in welcome drag n two and we can drag them into the composition window or into the timeline doesn't really matter we want to drag this one over so it starts one second in so we have a Welcome 2 then drag in After Effects and have that start right here two seconds in and now we have welcome to After Effects excellent now just like regular layers compositions we can trim the start and ends too so say if we thought there was maybe too many frames of hand at the beginning here we could find where the maybe the second image of hand starts and click and drag to trim the front of that layer then drag it across so our icon would be revealed a little bit sooner there we are I think that works maybe a little bit better welcome to After Effects yeah I like the timing for that now we're ready to render so all we need to do here is go up to composition add to render queue and when we do that it opens up our render queue here and it is a queue because we can add multiple compositions to this hit render and it will render them all in whatever order we put them in now we just want to render one composition so no need to add any more now we have a few options here we have render settings currently says best settings we have a little drop down menu here where we can choose other settings we click on best settings it gives us more options now best settings sounds pretty good it sounds like the best settings to have and 99 of the time I render with best settings the only time I haven't is when I want to render at a lower resolution and I've only done that if I was working on a really big job that was going to take a long time to render and I needed to send a render to the client so instead of spending the last hour of the day rendering I would only spend the last half an hour of a day rendering so I'd get more time to animate and the client normally doesn't care if they're watching a half resolution video whilst you're still working on it best settings for us is okay so let's hit OK then we have output module and we have another drop down menu of some common output and you can make custom templates for your own here as well now for most cases I would recommend outputting a h264 hg64 is the name of the codec and it is essentially the best compromise for high quality with smaller file size the MPS at the end is the only difference between these three options that's the bitrate the higher the bit rate the higher the quality and the larger the file size for us we can choose 40 megabytes per second we probably don't need a bit rate that high but it's only five second animation it's not like the file size is going to be too massive now other options I do think you should know about is high quality that is a good one if you aren't going to upload this directly to somewhere like YouTube or online if you are going to be placing it into another edit which is then going to be rendered out and compressed you kind of want to have as few stages of compression as possible so you can render it out as high quality lossless will not compress it at all but your file size will be absolutely enormous I'm talking gigabytes for a few seconds so if you're on the highest quality possible will choose that and high quality with Alpha is great if you have any sort of transparency in your file that you want to keep if you have any sort of blank areas that you want footage to be seen under when you add it to an edit but for us let's go to hd64 match render settings 40 megabits per second and then output 2 it is not yet specified this is just the output folder so let's select this I'm going to render it into the renders folder and I'll keep its common name welcome to After Effects save it and then hit render you'll see the bar fill up and then we'll get a nice satisfying chime meaning we're done and if we go to that folder we can see our animation is here and we can watch it now we have learned a lot in this short time about the most important features in After Effects and we've only just scratched the surface of what's possible and a reminder that you can download all of the files that we use today in the project for free in the description and if you are looking to learn motion design I do have a course on my website that is in the description too and I've got plenty of videos on this channel all about learning After Effects motion design Motion Graphics fun animated stuff [Music] all right

Channel: Ben Marriott

Views: 231,148

Keywords: after effects beginner tutorial, after effects basics, how to use after effects, animating in after effects, adobe after effects tutorial, learn after effects, editing with after effects, basic after effects animation, basic after effects transitions, after effects tutorial, adobe after effects, after effects, starting after effects, after effects for beginners, after effects beginners, learning after effects, motion graphics basics, motion design, motion design foundation

Id: jFbRZZmMW7c

Length: 58min 41sec (3521 seconds)

Published: Mon Apr 17 2023