Beginner's Guide to Adobe After Effects 2023: Learn Motion Graphics

1. Introduction: Hi, I'm home shoe and this is a complete beginners course on After Effects. I haven't been using Adobe After Effects for almost ten years. The clients I worked for include Adidas, PayPal, Walmart, and many more. After Effects is a robust tool and you can probably do 1 million different things with it. If you take a look at my other courses, there are a lot of different topics that I teach using After Effects and hundreds of special effects you can learn online. In this course, I'll give you a complete and comprehensive introduction to After Effects to help you get started with this software and start making animation right away. This course is comprehensive and not easy if you are someone who is interested in getting into motion design industry and want to learn how After Effects works in the real-world projects. This class is for you. It will take you from zero experience with After Effects to being able to comfortably using the software to make your own animation. For the class project, I'm going to take you through a real-world project and animated personal intro and show you how to animate this entire animation so you can customize it an animated for yourself. Through this project, you will be learning all aspects of After Effects with real-world practices, from navigating to this complex software and all the different windows to customizing your own workspace and only working with the tools you need without being overwhelmed. But this massive program will cover how to make things move in After Effects. How to take full control of your animation and bring life to your movements like a professional will cover how to apply special effects, animation, and graphics to give its style, let's look how to animate transitions, how to animate vector artworks, how to easily animate typography to make it look fun and exciting. Some animation principles and also how to use simple keyframes and Graph Editor to achieve complex animation. Tons of keyboard shortcuts, workflow, tips and tricks that you can start using right away. Like I said, this class is not easy and it's for those who are serious about learning After Effects animation and want to get into motion graphics. By the end of the course, you will have a complete understanding of how this program works and how to make your own animation. Once you're done with this course, you can check out my other courses and start diving deep into motion graphics and After Effects animation on various topics. This class is for total beginners, so you don't need to have any previous experience with After Effects or Adobe softwares. To follow along, you can download the artwork that I'm working with in the resource section. So you don't have to worry about the design part of the process. You'll be using the asset that I already designed and start animating right away. This is a complete and comprehensive class, but don't let it scare you. I'll explain everything you need to know to get you up and running with After Effects animation and conquer this program once and for all. If you have any questions going through the class, don't hesitate to reach out and I'll be here to help you. So are you pumped up and excited to get started with some awesome looking after effects animation. I can't wait to see you in class. 2. Getting Started: Welcome to the class before we get started and even open Adobe After Effects. I want to talk about what we'll go through in this course and the class projects. For those of you who are not familiar with After Effects or never used any of the Adobe software before. The program itself can be intimidating and there are probably 1,000 buttons and tools you can click on. Each one of them will do a different thing. However, we will not cover all of them at once. So don't be so overwhelmed. We'll figure this out together and I'll give you a complete overview of the program while working on a real-world project. So you get an understanding of how animation works in real practices to be honest, after Effects is the industry standard when it comes to 2D animation. But it can also do a lot of other things like calibrating motion tracking, slow motion, and all kinds of special effects. In this course, we will only be covering the 2D animation aspect of After Effects, which is the foundation for motion graphics. For the class project, will be creating an animated intro video so you can use it as a part of your demo reel or portfolio. You can download the project file in the resource section to follow along. The artwork is already pre-made so you don't have to worry about the design part and can focus on the animation, start animating right away. Another thing, if you don't already have Adobe After Effects on your computer, I will show you how to download a free trial version of Adobe Creative Cloud so you can use it for the project and decide if you want to keep this subscription later on to download Adobe After Effects, or you need to do is to go to the browser, type in adobe.com, and then it will bring you to the Adobe websites. Start here with a free trial. Click on that. For the individual version is going to be 54, 99 per month after the free trial. And if you're a student or teacher, if you have a student ID, you can click on this version as well. It's gonna be way cheaper, is going to be 1999 per month after the seven day free trial. After that, you can just click on Continue. Say if you want to do a yearly plan or a monthly plan after the free trial, say if we want to do the monthly plan, Let's go to continue. Now it's asking you if you want to add the Adobe stock, which is going to be a stock footage websites. It's gonna be also a subscription model as well. It's 49, 99 per month. You can say no thanks. Type in your email and continue and putting your payment method is going to be free for the first seven days and make sure the ones you get is the Creative Cloud all apps version. You're not downloading just only one suffer. You're not only downloading After Effects, after you download this software and then you can install it on your computer. After you install it, it's gonna show up on the top bar over here. This is a Creative Cloud icon. Click on that and then you can go to the top-left corner here, all apps. These are all the apps you can download navigating this panel over here and just find Adobe After Effects. If you haven't download anything yet, It's going to show up at the bottom here and then click on Install if it's after effects. And also you might need Adobe Illustrator as well. I already have them installed, so that's why it's showing up in the installed panel over here on the top. So that's how you can download Adobe After Effects and Creative Cloud. In this course, I'll be using a lot of keyboard shortcuts and it will be reflected on my screen once I hit on the keyboard. But I will also say mouth so that you know what the key is pressed. Keyboard shortcuts are great ways to improve your efficiency and workflow is separately amateur animator from the professional ones. So if you wanna do it the professional way, make sure you use a keyboard shortcut the way I do. And with practice, it will become natural and intuitive. That's it with the class project. Once you have After Effects installed, we'll talk about how to navigate within After Effects in the next class. 3. Panels : Now let's talk about Adobe After Effects. Let's go ahead and open After Effects. This is gonna be the panels that we're seeing first when you open After Effects, There's a lot of button, lot of function, a lot of tools. But don't be intimidated by it because not a lot of these are necessary and we won't be using all of them. So in this class, I'm just going to show you how the panel works and what they are as an introduction. So later on you know where to find the tools you need or the panels you need. After we opened, After Effects, this is what we see already. Reset my aftereffects to the default version. So yours should look exactly like mine if you're using the in 2020 to Adobe After Effects. The newest version, the latest version. Right now in the middle here you can see there is this new composition and from footage. So this is the composition panel here. If I click on it, you can see it's highlighted in blue color. Whichever panel we click on, it's going to be highlighted around the border. So that way you can tell which panel we're on and what tools were accessing. Right now, I'm clicking on this composition panel. This is where the live action is going to be happening. This is where we're going to see all our design footage, everything. This is a live preview of what we're doing. On the left-hand side, you can see there is this project panel, and this is a manager of our project. You can actually organize files, import files, do anything. This is like a folder structure in here where you can just access everything, all the files for the project. And on the left-hand side of this project panel, there's this another button that says Effect Controls. And this actually correspond to on the right-hand side, effects and presets panel. Once we add an effect to a layer, the actual effect is going to show up in this Effect Control Panel. Let's say if we add drop shadow effect to a text. And over here you can actually adjusting the value of the drop shadow, like how hard the shadow is or color the shadow is all the details of the drop shadow. You can access over here and change the values over here. On the top here you can see there's a lot of tools over here. This is similar to all the other Adobe software like Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, where you can access all these different tools to do different tasks. And you can see right now only a couple is active. All the other ones are grayed out because I don't have any files open yet. I haven't created any new composition or new file yet. I just want to show you all these panels first in this lesson so that you know where to find stuff. And after all the tools, we can go down here where it says Render Queue. And let's click on the button beside the Render Queue. This is actually our timeline and layer panel. It says nine right now because I don't have anything open. On the left-hand side. These are going to be the layers where you have all the files open and then you have different layers in this panel here. And these are the timelines. We're going to have the zero second all the way to whatever, maybe 1 min. This is where the animation, the keyframe, the work is going to be happening. We're going to animate the objects within this section, the timeline and using the layers over here. On the right-hand side, you can see a lot of stuff going on over here. If I click on this character, this is where you can change the fonts, anything to do with character funds. And then there's this library. There's Preview audio info. And we got paragraph where you can change the paragraph settings. And then there is this alignment where you can align things together or left align, right align, center line. We can also distribute layers. If you're familiar with other Adobe software, we have all these features in Photoshop or Illustrator. There's this tracker. These different panels are all little function that you can use within After Effects. And you can access them by just clicking on every one of them. And you can see this one here, this effects and preset panel. You can search for a lot of different effects in here, Let's say Drop Shadow, and then you can choose the stroke shadow one. Another thing is that you can actually arrange this panel however you like. Let's say if I click on this setting button here and then go to the panel group setting. And this is where our setting is right now, it says stack panel group. If I check off this stack panel group, what I can do is that I can rearrange these panels. Let's say the audio. If I don't need the audio panel, I can just click on this setting and then close the panel, the preview. If I don't need the preview, I can click on the setting, close the panel. But after I turned up that stack panel option, what I can do is I can change, maybe put the paragraph panel, click on this, and then drag. And then you can see there's a couple of places I can put it I can put it down here at the bottom. And this way I can have the paragraph panel as well as the character panel open at the same time. And then this alignment panel, I can just drag this alignment panel, maybe put it down here. And then I can arrange the size of it, just drag it up a little bit. And now you can see if I don't need the tracker, I can close it. The Content Aware, I don't need a closed sets, the library, I don't need it. Close it, and then the info, I don't need to close it. So right now I got four panels open. I got the character panel, the paragraph panel, that alignment panel, and then the effects and presets. These four panels. I opened the same time. It's very accessible. Whatever I do, whatever I need, I can just go here and then do anything right away. Based on what you need within your project. You can open certain panels and keep it there all the time so that you can access it very easily. You don't have to click on it and look for it. It's gonna be very time-consuming if his clothes all the time. So these are only the four panels that we have right now. If we go to the window option, you can see under the Window drop-down, we have the align checked, and we have the character checked, we have the Effects and Presets checked, and we have the paragraph checked. And as you can tell, these are the four panel that we have open on the right-hand side. And it also shows up in this drop-down menu within the Windows if you want to turn on something else, let's say if I want to find the audio panel, I click on the audio and you can see the audio shows up over here underneath. I can also hold this down a little bit to give him more room. All these panels, I can adjust the size of it so that it's more accessible and it's helping me through my project. Let's go back to the windows and we can turn on all these different panels based on our needs for the project. And that's it about the panels. In the next class, we're going to briefly talk about the workspace. I'll see you in the next one. 4. Workspace: In this class, Let's talk about workspace. What is workspace? If we navigate to the top of the panels over here you can see there's this default workspace. And then there's learn standards, small screen library. And if you go to the arrows on the right-hand side, there's all these different workspace. The setup by Adobe After Effects, what it does is actually saved the layouts to a specific workspace so that you can access it easily. Let's say if I want to click on this animation workspace and you can see our layout changes. And this layout based on Adobe is very helpful when you are doing animation. And this is called the animation workspace. And if I click on the OLED panels, you can see over here on the right-hand side, it changes again. It's got all these panels open and stacked on top of each other so that you can access all these panels at the same time. And this is called the old panel. And if I go back to the default, let's click on the default. And you can see this is the original works with that we set up in the previous lesson. And it came back to us again. If I go to the Windows button on top here, and I can go to the first menu workspace. You can see all these different workspaces. What I can do is I can actually, one option is to reset default to save layout. Going to reset the default to the previous saved layout, which is the same layout when we first opened Adobe After Effects. But I can also save as new workspace. Let's click on the save as new workspace and we'll call this home shoes workspace or as Toulon say hong shu. And then click on Okay. Now I've got this hong shu workspace. And if I go back to the defaults and then I go to Window Workspace, Reset Default to saved layout. This is the same works with when we first opened Adobe After Effects, we lost our four panels and then we got all these original panels back, which is what we don't want. But then if I click on this home shoe and you can see we are back to the exact workspace that we wanted that we set up from previous lesson. If you're doing different type of animation, let's say if you are doing character animation, you can set up a workspace as specific for a character animation. And you got the panelists you need for character animation. And then later on, if you're doing like motion tracking, Let's say I go to this motion tracking. I got all these panels open. That's helping me with motion tracking. This is a tracker and this way is going to be easier for me to work on specific projects. I can access different workspaces. And this is about workspace. I would just keep this whole shoes workspace for now for our project. And I can also edit on the go If I don't need certain panels. And I can also turn off certain panels when I need it. That's it about workspace. Now, in the next lesson I'm going to talk about how to set up After Effects files. 5. AE File Setup: Let's navigate to this middle section where it says New Composition. Click on that. Now we have a composition settings. First, we have the composition name for me all the time. I always name my composition name to be the main comp. And as you can see, whatever I type, there's this key casts showing up on the left corner so that when I'm doing a shortcut, you know what I'm doing and you know the keyboard shortcut that I'm using, I will also try to say it out loud whenever I use this keyboard shortcuts, but you can always refer back to this corner here to see which I pressed when I'm doing something. The main comp is gonna be the main composition where the working space, where we're going to be animating our videos. And there this preset section here. If I click on the drop-down, you can see all a ton of presets that's been made when you first get started. This can be very intimidating, but don't be because most of the time you won't be needing all of these. You will only be needing just one or two of these. And as you can see for the widths and heights, It's set to 1920 by 1080 pixels. This is a standard pixel size for a HD high-definition video, and the aspect ratio is said to be 16 by nine. This is the industry standard. Whenever you are doing something for broadcast or for a screen TV formats is going to be in this height and width. It's going to be 1920 by 1080, and the aspect ratio is going to be 69. For Instagram stories, the aspect ratio is gonna be nine by 16, which is vertical. And you just swap these two numbers. The pixel aspect ratio. Let's keep it two square. Then the frame rate. What is the frame rate? The frame rate is, how many frames per second do we have? Our video for the broadcast standard is going to be 29, 97. So if you're doing anything for broadcast, for TV is gonna be 29, 97, that's the standard. But since we're doing social media or like we're working on online videos. So that doesn't matter as much we can choose. We can round it up and choose 30 frames per seconds. And for traditional drawing animation, traditional animation where you have to draw frame by frame. They typically do 24 frames per seconds. The difference between 24 frames per second, 30 frames per second is that the more frames per second, the smoother the animation is going to be. Instead of seeing 24 frames within 1 s, you are seeing more frames. You're seeing 30 frames, which makes the animation smoother for us. Let's just try to do 30 frames per seconds because this is where now doing the drawing or a by frame resolution we can choose from, this is gonna be the displayed resolution. We can choose full, half, third quarter, or custom. If you have a very large file and it's going to slow down your computer. If you put it on the full resolution, you can actually reduce the preview resolution so that when you are actually working on the animation, it doesn't slow down your computer that much. For now, let's keep it at full resolution. And here is a timecode. Timecode. We can leave it as this. And for duration, our animation is going to be around ten second. But for now let's do 15 s. Just make sure we have enough time to do the whole animation. And then you can also choose the background color. You can choose to read the blacks, the whites for now let's just keep it black. After we go through everything. Now we have in 1920 by 1080 HD video is square pixels, the frame rate at 30 frames per second, full resolution. And then the video is gonna be, the timeline is going to be 15-second. The background color is black. Let's click on, Okay. Now you can see our main composition over here. It's already set up and we have a timeline that goes from 0 s to 15 s. Over here on the timecode. If we drag this timeline indicator, you can see when I'm at one seconds, it shows exactly 1 s over here. And this, it's not only 1 s, it's also the 30th frame. If I hold down Command click on this. It's going to give me a timeline based on certain frames. So right now we're on Thursdays, thursdays frame, and then if we keep going, we can animate based on frame preform me. I always animate based on the timeline. So hold Command on Mac, Control on a PC and then click on this again. It's gonna go back to the second and men and timeline. If we go back to the project panel, you can see within the project we only have this main composition setup. This is the working space of our animation. And that's it on how to create a file in Adobe After Effects. 6. Import & Move around: Now that we have our file and composition setup, let's go ahead and import our artwork. To import the artwork, we can go to the Project panel on the left hand side here, and then we can right-click Import File. Let's navigate to our storyboard. This is storyboard that we designed for the class. And the bottom here, Let's go to Composition Retain Layer Sizes. So this is going to keep the layer within the Illustrator file the same size as it was made in Illustrator. Make sure you don't check on this Illustrator CC or PDF EPS sequence. Because if you check on this one is going to give you a lot of problem later on. Make sure this one is checked off, nothing is checked on. We already have the composition so you don't have to create a new composition right now. Just make sure we click on this composition, retain layer sizes and then click Open. Now you can see within the project panel we have our STB storyboard composition, and then we have a folder that says storyboard layers. Within the folder we got all these different layers that we have in Illustrator. They're all broken up as an illustrator, so we can animate those individually. That's how you import the file. Another way you can import it as to double-click on the project panel, just double-click on here, the empty space and then it's going to bring up the window. And you can do the same thing, go to storyboard and then go to Composition. Retain Layer Sizes, make sure you don't click on this one and then click on Open, since I already have it open. So I'm going to cancel at this time. After I have the artwork important, I want to organize this layer a little bit to create some folders within the project panel to help me organize the space here. So let's go to create a new folder here. And let's create a pre-comps folder which will need in the future lesson. Now, let's create a outputs. Now let's create a music folder which will host our music. And then let's create a render comp. So the render comp is going to be our main comp. Let's drop the main comp in the render comp, this is going to be the main working space. And after we finished everything, we're going to render this composition. And the pre-comp is going to be the small pre-comp that we are going to be creating. The pre-comps will host the small pre-comp that we'll be creating when we're organizing our layers in the future lesson. And the last one I want to use as the assets. For the assets folder. Let's just drop this storyboard layers into the assets folder. Now you can see I've got all of these different assets within this assets folder. And this storyboard, we can drop into the pre-comp. And to expand everything. You can see I have the render comp. This is our main composition where we'll be working on the animation and then the storyboard. This is a precomp. We got music, we haven't imported it, and then we got assets, which has all these Illustrator files layers. Another way I want to do output 00, dash underscore. I'll put zeros, zero and your score so that this render comp is always on top. Whatever folder extra eight, this render composition is going to be always on top. And I knew this is gonna be the one that I'm working in and that will be rendering after I finished animating. That's how we'll organize our project panel. After we have it organized, Let's go to the pre-comp. Let's double-click on this STB. This is the composition that has all our layers. Let's copy all these command a, select everything command C, copy, and then go back to main composition. I'm going to paste everything in here, command V. And as you can see this artwork here, if I de-select, it shows up exactly like how we designed in Illustrator. Which means all these layers are in the correct order. Let's say if I have the last layer, which is the backgrounds, all the way on top. Because put the last layer, just drag it on top. You can see the background layer is covering everything underneath it. This is exactly how the layer order works, same as Photoshop. Whatever layer you have on top is going to cover everything below it. As you can see, the first layer we have is the background, which is the blue layer. Solid color is covering everything underneath it. If I turn off this icon here, I can hide it. Once I hide it, you can see everything underneath it is still in the correct order. That's just a check on this icon again and then put this layer, drag it all the way down to the bottom, to the correct place. Now everything is in order. Right now we're selecting everything with the selection tool, which is the first tool you need, is a selection tool. You can select everything within this composition. I just hit Command Z to go back to the last step. If I accidentally changed the position of the background, I can hit Command Z, which is undo, is going to go back to the last stage of the composition so that I can undo what I did. Just to go back, command Z is a great shortcut. We're going to use it 1 million times within the course. Whenever we made something wrong, we can undo Command Z, go back. So as you can see, once I have the selection tool selected, I can click on these little elements within the scene to select them and then move them around. But you can see once I move them, the screen becomes blurry and it says adaptive resolution on the top right corner over there. In order to turn it off. Before we do that, I need to make sure the stars go back to their original place. Just command Z, command Z two times so that they go back to the original design. And then in order to turn off the adaptive resolution, Let's go to the button over here, fast preview and then turn off. That's once we have that turn off, when I click on these things and drag them, you don't see the screen become blurry anymore. It's going to show the final resolution. And the quality is always good. If you're a computer slows down, you can always go here and change the preview resolution to maybe half. If I change it to half, you can see it becomes a little blurry. And then if your computer is even slower, you can change it to quarter, but then if you use quarter, it's a bit hard to see. So for me, I would always try to use the full resolution for the preview whenever possible. If my computer is now giving me a hard time, I'm just keeping it to the full resolution preview. I can click on the layer. And then once I click on the layer in the layers panel, that's going to select the one layer that I clicked on in the layers panel. And let's find this demo reel. If I click on this demo reel layer, you can see this layer. This is the boundary of the layer. If I zoom in and then use space bar to navigate around. If I hold down space bar, I can drag this panel here and move it around. Or I can commence plus sign, zoom in and then Command minus sign, zoom out. Right now I just want to zoom in on this demo reel, Command Plus Command Plus and then hold down spacebar, drag it down. This is my demo reel. You can see once I click on it, it has a boundary of the layer. So that means the size of this demo reel layer is like this page. You can see the boundary. It's not taking up the whole art board. And each one of these letters have a smaller boundary. You can see it's just the same size, almost as letter. And then these little circles, the boundary of these little circles, it just the same size as the little circle. With the selection tool selected. I can click on it and then drag it to anywhere I want. Drag leads to anywhere I want and make a mess wherever I want. I can always Command Z. Command Z to go back. Yeah, and that's how we navigate through the layers panel and also the live preview. 7. Organization: In this class, Let's talk about how to organize layers panel, and also how to make pre-composition. Let's go down to the Layers panel over here, we can see all these different layers that was imported from illustrator. I got this first one that says Motion Graphics 2022. This is my text over here. So the way I want to organize this, I want you to color label it and also put the same elements into the same composition. Let's just go through this from the top to the bottom. Right. Now, I got this text here. I can change this label color in the front here, click on this and then maybe change it to red. So this one has a red label. The top circle here belongs to this top section. And then the base belongs to overhear these trivial group. Right now, what I wanna do is I want to find this handle here. Click on this handle layer and then hold shift on the keyboard. Select all these other layers. If I go down, I can see these three layers are selected as well. I just want to move them all together. Just drag one of them and then you see this blue line here. I want to drop the four of them underneath this top circle. If I release it, you can see these four layers all came together. After I have these four selected, I want to create a composition that host all these four layers. Composition is like a folder where you have different layers within one composition. The way to do that is the keyboard shortcut is Command Shift C. Once I have these four layers selected, I put command Shift C, and then it brings up the pre-composition window. Let's name this handle. Click. Okay, now I have a composition created. If I go to the Project panel over here you can see this handle composition is created over here underneath the render comp, which is not correct. I need to move this to the pre-comps. And now we have this pre-composition within the pre-comps folder. That's our handle. That's good. And the next thing I want to find all these little dots here. One way is I can just click on the first one that's on top and then hold down shift, click on the last one. You can see all of these little dots are selected. I also want to separate the top dots and the bottom ones. So I need to figure out which ones are the top ones and which ones are the bottom ones. I'm just trying to click through all these. It seems 27. This layer 27 over here that says Layer 27 is the first one on the bottom. So I'm going to try to select the 27 all the way to the top one over here. Now I'm just missing this middle one. Just hold down Shift and then click on, try to click on this one. It doesn't work. Well. I'm just created a creek composition with all these and then find this one, put it within Composition I created. After I select all these dots Command Shift C. Let's name it dots one on the base. So like dots one base. Clear now, okay. Now I got the stars. Then need to find this middle one here. Last one is the middle one here. Command X, cut it and then double-click on this composition, and then command V, paste it. Now I've got all these dots within this composition. Let's go back to the main comp. I can hold down this mini flowcharts and then hold down it and then go back to the main composition. If I toggle between this icon here, you can see I can show and hide all these dots. And I also want to put this motion graphics 2022 texts within this composition as well. So I'm going to Command X, cut it, and go inside here, copy. This is my border over here. Go back to the main composition. Now I want to do a preComp with all the little dots on top. So same thing. Command Shift C dots to the top. That's good. Now we got the demo reel here. These are my name letters and these are the gray rectangle underneath the letter. This is a black base. So what I wanna do is I want to group this base altogether within with everything. So I want to try to find all these layers. Has got the base blue, not the star, not the top. Yeah, something like this. If I do command shift C, this is a base toggle between the eye icon. You can see I've selected everything other than the letters and also the dots. I can group all of these letters together, which is my name, Command Shift C, home shu. Okay. Now I've got a named pre-comp. I've got a base pre-comp. I've got the the dots over here and then I've got the dots top. I also need to group the top together. So I need to find the correct layer, top. These are the top layers. And then the top circle. You can actually hold down command to select the one that you want. Say if I have these three selected and then I'm holding down command and there's like this one so that I got four layer selected command Shift C. This is going to be the top click. Okay. I just need to put the top underneath this one here. So the base is actually covering the top. Because if I have the top on top of the base layer, base composition, gonna show this border. It's going to show this edge, which is what I don't want. You just need to put it down there. I've got this star here. I can change it to yellow color. I've got two starts. So the two stars are going to be the yellow color. The three portfolio line. It's going to be changed to aqua. And then I've got one line here. Can change it to blue color and the grid and the background color. I'm going to group these two together into a new composition command Shift C. Name it background. One thing we forgot after we worked on everything, we forgot to save the file. So make sure you save the file as you go so you don't lose anything. Just go to File and then we can do a Save As go navigate to the layer. I can change it to Animation. Let's do like an intro animation and click on Save. Now I've got the file saved, and also I need to go back to the project panel and make sure to move all these pre-comps into the pre-comps folder. Yeah. Now, I've got a lot of pre-comps in the pre-comps folder. And then still one main comp in the render comp folder. That's how we organize the layers. Now, if I toggle between these icons, you can see we grouped all of these things together. Later on, we can easily animate them individually. That's it on this lesson about how to organize layers panel, and also how to do pre-composition. And the next class we can start animating the background. 8. Basic Properties: In this class, Let's start by animating the backgrounds. To get started, we can first hide everything on top of the background so that it's not distracting us. Let's go to the Layers panel here. We don't need the handle, we don't need anything on top of the background. So after I select all these layers on top, I can toggle this icon here, turn it off. And now we only have the background and also this line here at the back and also the portfolio text. First, to start with something simple, let's start animating the position property of the portfolio text. To get animation started, we can click on the first portfolio, which is last one, layer 12 here. Let's click on this drop-down menu here, and then click on this arrow transform. There are essentially four different basic values that you can animate within the layer. The first one is going to be positioned and then their scale, which controls the size of the layer and also the objects. We have the rotation. Then we have the opacity, which is the transparency. It goes from 0% to 100 per cent for the position is very easy to understand. Right now, I have the selection tool selected. And then if I drag the position of this layer, you can see the position value is changing. So that's how we change the position. Let's go back command Z. If we want to change the scale, it goes from right now is 100 per cent, we can change the scale to more than 100 per cent, which is going to enlarge the object, is going to make the object larger. I can change it to 200 per cent. So that's going to make the text 200 per cent. Let's go back to 100 per cent. And then if we have the rotation, when we change the rotation value, we change it to a certain degree, like 25 degree. This object is going to rotate from the center of this anchor point here, where the anchor point is, it's going to rotate 25 degrees. If I put in -25, negative 25 is going to rotate the other way, 25 degree. So that's how we rotate the objects. One thing I need to point out is whenever we change the position scale and rotation, There's always a base points is based off of this anchor point in the center. If I zoom in, you can see this anchor point here. If you don't see this anchor point, it might mean the anchor point is not in the center. You can either zoom out and see where the anchor point is around your art board. Another way you can center the anchor point is to right-click and then go to Transform Center Anchor Point in layer contents. This way is going to put back your anchor point in the center of the layer. Right now on the top toolbar here there's a pen behind tool. This is the anchor point to essentially, when you want to change the anchor point position, you need to select this tool, click on it, and then drag the anchor point to a place where you like it to be. Let's say if I have the anchor point at the bottom here, then when I change the rotation, you can see the rotation is now based off of this anchor point at the bottom beneath the text is not in the center anymore. So right now the text is rotating around the anchor points. If I change the scale property, you can see the text is also scaling based off the anchor points underneath over here. This anchor point is the point where these position scale and rotation value is based off of. Normally we would have the anchor point in the center of the layer. So we need to do is right-click and then go to Transform center anchor point in layer contents. Now you can see this anchor point is centered, but we still need to go back to the original state. So I need to command Z, command Z. Make sure this portfolio is straight up. Like this. This is our original state. We already have the anchor point in the center. So that's the power of the anchor point. Once you are done with using the pen behind tool, the anchor point tool, you have to go back to the selection tool, make sure your mouse cursor is always on the selection tool. That way you can navigate around the area, working space. It's not going to mess everything up. Now we have this, I already explained the position scale and rotation to you. And you can see this anchor point value here. We can also change the position of the anchor points by changing the value over here. There's a couple of different ways to change it. This is one way, but it's also going to mess things up. So normally we would just keep the anchor point in the center of the comp. The last basic property we can animate is the capacity right now is at 100 per cent. We can change the opacity to, let's say, 40 per cent. So the whole layer becomes transparent a little bit. And then if I change to zero per cent, it's going to be turned off. If I change it to ten per cent. You can see a slightly, but not very much. And I can just turn it on all the way to 100 per cent, which makes this layer completely visible without any transparency. So that's the four different basic property that we can animate within Adobe After Effects. In the next video, I'm gonna show you how to animate these properties. 9. Position: In this class, Let's start by animating this portfolio text within the composition. Let's identify the first one. This is the first layer, 12 is the first top portfolio. And let's go down to the transform and then go to the position to animate anything in After Effects. This one important rule is that you have to animate backward because right now on the screen you can see my portfolio are all in position. And this is a final state of my animation, which means I want my animation to be like this at the end, not at the beginning. At the beginning. I don't want anything on the screen. I want anything. I want them to come off of string flying in and then finally stopped there like this. So what I need to do is I want to have, let's say, let's go to right now I'm at zero second with my timeline indicator. I want to go maybe ten frames forward. Command Shift right arrow. This is ten frames, right now you can see over here timecode ten frames, ten frames forward. I want to set a keyframe. To set a keyframe you just need to, to the position property. Click on the stopwatch here. Now it's going to add a point which is a final state of this layer. So at 10th frame, this is a position that I need and then go back to 0 s. Now what I can do is I can drag this layer. Right now I'm holding down Shift to make sure it's not moving up and down. It just goes straight to the left. I'm only changing the x position of the layer. So right now, after I drag this position to outside the comp, there's this one keyframe that set automatically. I didn't add another keyframe myself once I drag it, Let's see, Let's go back. You can see over here in the timeline, once I click on this and then I drag it back, There's this one keyframe automatically set up, which means at 0 s, my layer is all the way outside. And then tens frame my layer is inside. Let's play the animation. Hold down spacebar. Essentially this is an animation we have the layer goes from left to right. This is the animation we got. And right now we only animated one position, which is the exposition. And then there's value change from negative 909 to positive 978. This is the only change we have, the position change. And this is called an animation. However, this is pretty boring because there's nothing else to it. To be a professional animator, you not only need to know how to set up keyframes, these are going to be the linear keyframe, which means there's no interpolation. Everything is moving in a linear fashion. The same speed, It's got the same speed, is pretty boring. Well, what we need to do as a professional animator, we need to learn how to use the keyframe and how to add lifelike movement to the animation. I don't want to go so deep on how to make the animation a masterpiece. Or there's another course of mine, this dedicated on how to use the graph editor and animation principles to make your animation come to life. You can check out my other class, but this is a beginner class. I want to keep everything simple. So right now we're just gonna do a very simple easing to these two keyframes. What I need to do is I need to select both keyframes, right-click and my layer is outside, so I need to drag it up. I just want you to see what's going on. So I just need to click on these two layers. Right-click Keyframe Assistant and then choose Easy Ease. After I choose easy ease, you can see these two keyframes changed shape. Then if I select the two, turn on graph editor, fit the graph to view. Click on this icon here. You can see we've got an S curve go-to position property, right-click and then click on the separate dimensions. Now I have the x position and y position separated. Y position is vertical axis up and down. And the exposition is horizontal axis, left and rights, right now we only have value on the left and right. We don't have any value change up and down. So I can turn off this Y position. Just click on the stopwatch, turn off the Y position, go to exposition. Now what we can do is we can add a bit of easing to it, drag this curve, make it a S curve. So what that does is Let's see the animation. You can see there's a bit more easing to it. And the animation goes from slowly starting and then faster. And then when it stops, it slowly stops. There's a speed change to the animation we had before. This way you can add a bit more energy to your whole animation. Another thing we can do right now is let's go back to the timeline here. Since I already have this last keyframe set at 10th frame. I can drag this key point to 12344 frames forward and then add another keyframe here. I want this animation to overshoot a little bit. Meaning when it reached the end, it goes over and then comes back again. You can see this is my animation, start from left to right, and then it goes all the way over to match to the right and then comes back to the left. If I select the three keyframes, go to the Graph Editor. This is a graph regards. So all we need to do add a little bit of overshoots, okay, that's about it. Only three keyframes. Let's see what the animation is looking like right now. See that there is this overshoots that goes too much to the right and then it recoils back to the left. Once you add that, it's going to give you our animation more energy and more life. So that's the feeling I'm trying to make. And this is my first animation. That's the animation on the position. After I have this position animation, all I need to do is copy the three keyframes command C, and then go to the last one. Make sure your timeline indicator is all the way at 0 s. And I can pull up the position property, click on the arrow, click on the transform. One important thing is when we paste in the keyframe, we need to make sure we separate the dimension of the position property. Let's go to the position property and then right-click Separate Dimensions. Make sure we have the y position and exposition separated. And now I'm only copying the exposition. Double-click on the exposition Command C and then go to this layer Command V. Now I have the exposition value copied to this new layer, but the y position stay the same. If I play the animation, you can see these two layers are coming in at the same time. And it bounces a little bit at the end when it settles. That's pretty good. The last thing I wanna do is to work on this middle layer here, the short key for position animation is if you pay P on the keyboard, is going to show you the position property right away. If you hit T on the keyboard, is going to show you opacity, which stand for transparency. And then if you put S is going to be scale, and then if you put r is going to be a rotation. These are very simple to understand, just the first letter of that word of that property. So I want to hit P on the keyboard to bring up position and then right-click Separate Dimensions. Now, I don't want this line to go from left to right anymore. I want this line to reverse to coming in from the rights. One way I can do it is to copy. Make sure I double-click on the exposition and then Command C, copy the keyframes. Go to this exposition value of this layer Command V. Now I have all three layers performing the same thing. However, I want to change the animation of this second layer to be going from right to left, all I need to do is I need to change the starting point of this animation all the way to the right. I need to drag from zero second. I want it to come in from the right. And then when it recoils, when overshoot, I want it to overshoot on the left a little bit. And then when it settles, is going to settle in the middle position. Let's see what the animation looks like. Let's see the graph editor. Go to the Graph Editor and on this, yeah, so that's, the graph is similar to what we have. If I hold down Command T to bring up the three exposition, you can see it's almost symmetrical. That means I'm having a similar animation between the three different layers. Let's play the animation here. See that? So that's the first animation I want to teach you in this lesson, we only managed to animate the position property. We only animated the exposition, and we use three keyframes, each layer to achieve the effects we have now, which is looking pretty good. And that's it for this class. In the next class, I'm going to show you how to animate opacity in these three layers. 10. Opacity: In this class, let's add a bit more variety to our animation, and let's animate the opacity change of the three different layers. In the last class, if I select the three different layers, hit on U on the keyboard, is going to show me all the keyframes as animated. There's only three keyframes on each layer that's controlling the x position of the layer. And this is the animation we got. Next, what I wanna do is I want to animate the opacity change of these layers. Let's go to the first layer. The first top layer is actually layered 12th. Let's bring up the opacity. If you hit T on the keyboard, is going to show you the opacity. However, I want to bring up both opacity and exposition. So what I need to do is if I hit U is going to show me anything that's changed. And then once I hold down Shift hit Shift R is going to keep the exposition and show me the rotation property. Once we have these animate in, what I wanna do is I want these to flicker a little bit. So let's say if I have the opacity, set a keyframe on opacity is going to start from 10th frame. Opacity is 100 per cent. Let's go forward ten frames. Then I want to set the opacity to maybe 20 per cent. Maybe that's too low. 50% regards from 100 per cent to slowly fading 50 per cent. Maybe, you know what, I wanna do 30% from 130. And then if I want to go forward ten frames again, I wanted to go to 80 per cent. So what I wanna do is I want this layer opacity to flicker between 30% to 80 per cent. I want you to do is I want to copy these two keyframes. Go forward ten frames. Command Shift right arrow, go forward ten frames. Again, it's Command V. Now have the exact same keyframe as the previous two. It goes from 30% to 80% to 30% to 80 per cent. And that's my flickering animation. If I play this, you can see my portfolio texts is actually flickering and it might be too fast. I feel like it's too fast. So what I need to do is drag the five keyframes. After I select all five and then hold down Option on Mac, Alt on PC, drag the last one. So it's going to space them out proportionally. Let's say if I drag it to 3 s, Let's play this. Yeah, that looks better to me. Now. I have three second animation that's flickering. I just want to copy these four keyframes, paste them again, just to make sure I have a even flickering animation. I'm just keep copying the keyframes that I have. So the tax is always flickering. See that if I play, this is going to keep flickering all the way to almost 14 s. And this is the effect I want. Through copy and paste, we are able to flicker this text from 30% opacity all the way to 80 per cent. And then it's just going to Flickr back-and-forth, 30-80% opacity. This is the fact that we achieved through copying those keyframes. After I have this, I need to select all these keyframes. Command C, copy. And then I want to apply to these two layers. Make sure the first keyframe over here is all lined up. Otherwise, they're going to flicker at different pace. We actually want them to flicker at a different pace, but we also want to do that in a controlled way. For now I'm just going to copy the opacity keyframes to these two layers. Command V paste. And then if I hit you, you can see all these three layers have the same exact opacity keyframes. If I play them, you can see they're all flickering with the same speed, at the same pace. Let's save the project and then S. That's it about the opacity animation. In the next class, I'm going to show you how to animate the scale property of these texts. 11. Scale: In this class, Let's animate the scale property of these backgrounds texts to give it more variety to our animation. Last class, we already animate the exposition and opacity, and this is the look we're getting. Now what we need to do is to animate the scale property. Let's go to the middle one first, this time. Make sure we are seeing them on the screen over here. And let's bring up the scale property. Hold down Shift and then hit S. We have scale here. For scale property, what I wanna do is right now, if I change the scale, let's say to 125% is going to proportionally scale the whole thing up. And that's now what I want. What I wanna do Command Z, go back is to disproportionately scale only the heights of the text. In order to do that, I need to unlink this constraint property. I need to unlink this so that the x and y scale is not linked together so that I can individually change one of them. And as you can see, if I change this x value of the scale property is going to stretch things out or squash it. However, what we need to do is to animate the y value. To stretch it out like this. Up and down. Once we have the animation come in. And I can choose maybe around 1 s, I want this text to come up. So remember we talked about the anchor point right now. If I scale the property, is going to scale everything based on the center anchor point. And in this case, this is what we need. So make sure we set a keyframe here at once. I can downscale. Everything is 100%. Then let's go forward. Maybe Command Shift right arrow, ten frames and then go for another five frames. Command right arrow. That's for one frame and then two frames, three frames, four frames, five frames. Over here. Let's add a keyframe on the Y scale value. It's changed as something like this. Drag it all the way up. That's weird enough. However, that's exactly what we're looking for. Remember we did a overshoots on the exposition in this time. I also want to overshoot that. So basically as go back four frames, maybe Command, Left Arrow, 1234. I wanted to go further too much and then comes back. Maybe further, more like this. Then we need to right-click. And then we need to select the three keyframes. Right-click on it. Select the keyframe assistance. All the way down. It's outside of my screen recording, but it's a keyframe assistant all the way down. The last one in the menu. And then we choose easy ease. We have ease the keyframes. Let's select the three. Go to the Graph Editor, make sure fit everything to the graph. And then I want to drag these curves to give it more energy like this. Let's go back to the timeline adjusted, and let's preview and see what it looks like. If I solo this layer right now, it's a bit distracting because everything is on the layer. I want to turn off these two. Only seeing the middle one here. So I want to see what it looks like. Yeah, it looks pretty good, although it's a bit slow. I feel like I need to select all three keyframes. Hold down Option on the Mac, drag the last one, bring them closer together. Yeah, that looks cool. However, I might want to go even further. What I want to do is I want to add another overshoots. Let's say this one goes over too much. And then when it comes back, I wanted to come back too much. Let's say right now, the last stage is to 84. So I want this to go pass to 84, let's say to 64. And then it comes back to 84. What I mean is if I show you the graph. This is exactly what it looks like. So the value goes up and then too much comes back down, and then it comes back down too much. And then it recoils itself again to go to the final states. And you can see this as a bounce curve. It gives a balance to this layer, this animation. Let's see what it looks like now. Yeah, that gives more energy. You can see there is a balance. And you can see I only added two keyframes here, so it gives it a pretty good balance over here. There's a lot of energy on this animation now. That's good. And that's what we need to do is to animate the first top one and the bottom one. I want this bottom one to shrink in the y-axis. Let's bring up the scale property, Shift S to bring up the scale property. And then make sure we click on this link here to unlink the x and y scale. Right now, if I change it, you can see it's changing based off of the anchor point in the center, which is not what we want. We actually want to scale the property based on the anchor point at the bottom here. So I need to change the anchor point. And in this case, in order to change the anchor point, I need to go back to these position keyframes, the exposition, select all of them, and then go to the pen behind tool. Make sure you grab the anchor point and then hold down shift, move it all the way down to the bottom baseline of this text. This way you're not changing the animation that we already have. But now you can see the anchor points, if I click on this layer is already at the baseline of this portfolio text, and the same thing goes to the top one. Let's go back, put the timeline indicator on these exposition layers. Select all three, and then make sure I grab the anchor points, hold down Shift, and then put it all the way up. And now we have these two anchor points changed. One at the top of the texts, and then the other one at the bottom of the text. Let's go to 1 s. As the scale of the middle text changes, I want the top and bottom changes with it. So I already have the scale property turned on. And then for the top one, for the bottom one, set a keyframe here. And then add the last dates. We need to shrink the text down. Something like this. But also make sure we have this little balance for this bottom animation as well. I need to go back to selection tool for now. And then the final state of the scale property is 25. So at this point, I need to align these keyframes together. At this point here I want the scale to change it to 15. And then at this point here, I wanted to change to 30. This is going to give it a pretty good balance animation. Let's select the four keyframes. Right-click, go all the way down to keyframe assistant, the last one in the menu, and then choose easy ease. Another way to change these four keyframes to easy ease keyframes is to hold down the function key on the Mac. And then F9 is going to change all four keyframes to the easiest keyframe. Let's go to the Graph Editor again, see what it looks like. Now, I also want to drag these handles to make sure I have a smooth S curve to give the balance more energy. Something like this. Let's go back. And now we can preview the animation for this little one here. Yeah, you see that we got a bounce animation for the bottom layer of there. Now we already have this bottom animation here. All we need to do it just to copy and paste and make sure I select the keyframes on the scale property Command C. And then I need to move the timeline indicator to one seconds. Click on this top layer Command V. Now F paste in the scale Property Animation, and let's see what it looks like. I don't want the middle texts to collide with the top tax over there. So what I need to do is go to this frame here and then make sure I make this smaller. Change the percentage of the scale property here make it smaller. And the final state might need to be even smaller. Another thing I wanna do is to maybe move the y position. Let's hit Shift P on the keyboard to times. Make sure there's our y position as some moved up a little bit. So we get even spacing between these three lines. Something like that. There, this little bounce animation, that's pretty fun. That's it with how we animate the scale property of these three texts layers. Now we've covered all three basic property animations. First, we talk about the position change with the portfolio coming from left to right. And then we have the opacity change. And in this class we added the scale change. The only one missing that we didn't have for this animation is the rotation change, which we'll cover in the later lessons for other elements. Before these three lines of text. I think the three property changes are good enough. And it's a great demonstration on how to use this basic property to animates and give them energy, bring your elements to life. In the next class, I want to show you how to stagger these keyframes to get a more complex animation. 12. Offset Layers: In this class, let me show you how to stagger these keyframes to get a more complex animation. We already have the position scale and opacity difference in. So now what we need to do is to give them a different pacing so that we can get a completely different animation. First, what I need to do is to figure out who comes in first. I want to have this first line portfolio comes in first, which is layer 12. And then within a short delay, maybe two frames. Go. For two frames. I want the middle one to come in. I just need to drag this layer forward two keyframes. And then for another two frames, I need to drag this third layer over. And now we have a staggering animation. Let's see what it looks like. I think it's still too fast. I need more delay between the three. Maybe give it two more frames. So right now there are four frames apart. The coming in looks good. But then the scale property is messed up. We need to realign that as well. But the coming in looks good. And then we have this almost like a waving opacity change effects. So let's make sure our scale changes lined up. All we need to do is to move these keyframes to align with one another. Now I got three aligned and then let's see the animation again. Yeah, It almost looks like it's blinking. With the opacity change. Flickering. That's good. If we want to achieve even more flickering effect, we can delay the keyframes of the opacity as well. Maybe by a couple of frames, 1234, maybe by four frames. Just go four frames forward 1234 and then move all these keyframes over here. So right now the opacity keyframes are separated, apart for frames from each other. Let's see what it looks like. Yeah, I like that better. So in this class, I showed you how to stagger the layers by separating them and delay the animation so that we get a staggering effects. And also I stagger the keyframe as well within the layer so that they're not animating on at the same time with the same speed or same pace. So we get a much more complex animation. I'm happy with that. In the next class, I'm going to show you how to animate the lines on the backgrounds with a couple of different masks. 13. Trim Path: In this video, let's talk about a simple layer effect that we can animate the lines in After Effects. In the previous class, we have already animated the portfolio text. Next, let's animate this line in the background. First, let's go to the line layer, which is layer 13, that's labeled in this blue color. We can hide these three layers on top so that they're not distracting us. Just select all three and then hit the icon in the front to hide them. Now we only have this line layer visible. Now you can see this layer is in Illustrator file is.ai as we imported the file Australia from Illustrator, well, we need to do is to convert it to a shape. To do that, we can right-click and then go to Create. And then there is Create Shapes from Vector Layer. Click on that. Now we got a shape layer created on top of the previous line layer, and the line layer is turned off. The eye icon you can see we don't need this anymore, so we can delete it, hit Delete on the keyboard. Now we can work on this line layer, as in a shape layer. Click on this arrow and then go to Add. This is where you can add a layer effects we want to use today is called trim path. This is a typical layer effect that we can use to animate the lines. It's very versatile. We can click on that for now. And then we added a trim path Effects. Let me show you what the trim path do. Go to this arrow here. If festival like, you can see there's a start value of 0% and then the n value of 100%. If I toggle this 100% and value is only a part of the line that's left on the screen. Essentially, what we're doing is we are kind of like a drawing effects. One, the end value reached 100%, it'll be a full loop. But if I say, if I do like 20% of end results and value, you can see there's only a part of the line which is equals to 20% of the whole loop. It's a little bit hard to see. But if I animate this, if I add a keyframe on the n value first starting from zero. And then we can do ten frames forward command Shift right arrow. And then we change it to 100%, which is going to add another keyframe at 10th frame. Now we have two keyframes. We can see the animation, what it looks like. Play this. You see there's this line that's drawn on. It's a bit quick. I can drag this further. So it's going to take up 1 s, the whole animation. Let's see what it looks like. Yeah, we can see this line drawing on this ago. The trim paths effects. You can animate the lines as if he's drawing on screen. And you can see also over here there's a offsets value as currently sitting at 0%. And this offset value can control the starting point of the line right now, if I go forward a little bit, you can see the line starts from the bottom right corner. But if I change the offset value to say 180, now, the line starts from the top left corner. And this is what I want. I want the line to start from the top left corner. So I'll also want to dial this one back a little bit so that it starts from that corner right there. Something like this, maybe 170 degrees. This is what I want. And remember whenever we have keyframes, Let's just do a keyframe assistant. Easy ease. The shortcut for that is function key F9. Just hit Function key F9. Yeah, that works. Let's bring back the portfolio three lines over here. Want to have that thing. And then right now you can see the lines are intersecting with my text layers. That's not what I want. What I need to do is I need to do a mask on top of this line so that only the part that's not overlapping with the text layers are visible. To do that is click on this line layer and then go to the rectangle tool. Normally when you draw a rectangle tool, it's going to draw inside this shape. Let's say if I want to draw a rectangle, and when I draw it, It's going to add another rectangle inside this shape layer. Right now, it's in red in color, but that's not what I want. I don't want to draw another rectangle. I need to delete that. And then what I need to do is I need to click on this mask over here to create a mask. So let's draw a mask here around the same size as the text layer. And then let's go inside this mass right now the mask is set to add. What I need to do is to set it to subtracts. One, I set the mask to subtract. You can see everything that unmasks just now is gone. Subtracting the original layer with mask, that a draw and then the only thing left, that's everything outside the mask. And that's exactly what I need to do. I just need to have the heart that's not overlapping with the text layer to be visible. Let's play this animation. And now we have a line animation here. Although it's not that visible, but it's those simple details that matters. And that's one kind of mask that I want to teach you today. That's how we enemy trim paths, effects and draw a mask on layers. 14. Transition: In this class, Let's start animating the transition of this animation. If you remember what I showed you before, we open the scene with a very bright yellow color, and then we transition from the yellow color to this blue. So the blue color is actually our end-state of the animation. The latter part of the animation. To get us started with the bright yellow color, what we need to do is we need to change this background color to a yellow. In order to change it to a bright yellow, we can hate on this background layer, go to our effects and presets panel. If you don't have the Effects and Presets panel open on the right-hand side. You can go to Windows and then click on this effects and presets. We need to bring up a hue and saturation effects. With the layer selected, I can double-click on this hue and saturation. Now it's going to add a hue and saturation effect to my layer. What I can do is I can adjust this value master hue here to get a different color. If you don't like the bright yellow that we use at the beginning, you can choose different one, maybe a purple one that looks good, or even the pink one that looks good. So for me, I'm just trying to get that yellow color that we like. This is a yellow that I want, but the saturation is not there. So I need to dial up the saturation to make it more saturated and even change the lightness down a little bit. Yeah, that's bright enough for me. So this is the yellow color that I like for the beginning part of the animation. However, as you can see, our portfolio texts line doesn't work anymore because the color is blue and then it's generating this weird effect as hurting our eyes. So I need to change the color of the three layers as well in order to change the color of these three texts, Let's go to the Effects and Presets panel again. Let's find a fill. Try this, select one of them and then double-click on the fill. Now it's changed to red color, which is not what I want. I wanted to change it to a pure whites. And then click on this filter command C to copy and then click on these two layers. Command V paste. Now we got a bright white color on top of those three layers. Let's see what it looks like. Yeah, that looks good because remember we had opacity change on these three layers. So it's just going to keep it very subtle in the background when it's animating the opacity, which makes it very subtle and nice. I guess. Yeah, that works for me. Just change the three layers to a white color. The next thing I wanna do, I want to draw a circle, a dots in the layer to animate the circle coming from the left-hand side to the right-hand side. And as if the circle is dragging something to pull everything to the right and then reveal the blue color background at the end, just like the previous example I showed you. Let's go to this top toolbar here. Right now we have a rectangle tool, hold down the Rectangle Tool, and then click on this ellipse tool. We can draw an ellipse with nothing selected in the layers panel. I can draw a less hold down Command and Shift to constrain the property. So that is a perfect circle. I'm thinking maybe this fake. And then now you can see the anchor point is not at the center of the circle. Remember I told you how to move the center point to the circle. All you can do is go back to the selection tool and then right-click. Go to transform, and then center anchor points in layer contents. Now we have the anchor point in the center of the circle. All I need to do is to animate this circle as name, this main dots me. I want to have this dots goes from outside. Let's pull up the position property. Hit P on the keyboard, right-click Separate Dimensions. I just want to animate the exposition. When the text comes in. Maybe the header stopwatch at a keyframe and then go forward. Ten frames, 1512345, 15th reins, go over here that the circle come in and then stay there for maybe 1 s. While it's staying there. I don't want to stay there still. I wanted to travel very short distance and then go forward another 15 frames, 1234515 frames. Let us shoot out of the frame. Well, this is the animation I want. However, we haven't added any easing yet. So what we need to do is click all of them. Hit function key and then F9. Or you can go right-click. Keyframe assistant, easy ease. This is what we are doing all along. We need to first easy ease those keyframes. Right-click Keyframe Assistant, Easy Ease. Let's see what it looks like. Now. It's got some easing to it. Now bad. But still we need more energy. What I want to do is select all four, go to this graph editor, fit the graph to view. Give him more as a more exaggerated curve so that it's traveling faster with more energy. This is a curve we have currently, let's see what it looks like. I'm thinking more of a easing curve here. Let's see what it looks like. Maybe not so much in the middle. Yeah. I think that looks good. Another way to adjust this one, it might be easier. I want to show you the click on this button here and then show the speed graph. I think what I want to do is that's one option. You can choose that option and I'm going to give you another option that you can use. This might work better. So I want to go to the Speed Graph instead of the value graph, which is where we were before. And I want to give it more of a exaggerated curve. Pull this handle all the way in and then pull this one all the way out, give them more speed. And then even this one here, pull this one in, and then pull this one all the way. And I'm trying to make the two graph the same heights to give the same speed. Some like this. And let's see what it looks like. Yeah, that's more exaggerated and see that. That's I think that looks better than before, but I want to give it more speed. Like I want to drag this curve even more. Maybe I can't, It's already this one. I can still drag it even more. So this one is much faster than this one. Let's see what it looks like. Yeah, that looks better. I like what it looks like right now. So the first part, when it comes in, it's easing straight. And then the one that comes out, it goes really fast. This is exactly what I'm looking for. Make sure you go to the speed graph and then adjusted the speed graph like this. If you want to know more about sleep graph f, another course that's dedicated to teaching you exactly what you need to do with the graph editor and all the animation principles to have full control, total control of your animation. You can do whatever you like. You can check out my other course in the profile. But for now this is a beginner class, so I don't wanna go too deep into the graph editor. Let's move on. This is exactly what I'm looking for. I got this circle here. The next thing I wanna do is I want to add a kind of a, another circle that goes around it. So that gives a like a glow effects. So the first thing I wanna do is I want to change the circle color to a blue color, to change it to blue color. And it's very easy. We can use the fill effect, but I want to get the blue color from the background. So I go to the background and then we can turn the effects on and off. We can turn off the effects of that. We can see the original blue color that we have in the background. Now I just need to add a fill effect in the Effects and Presets panel, put it in, fill, and then drag this fill effect to my main dots. I can use this color picker to pick the blue color. Now we have the.in blue color. Go to the background and turn it back on. So we have this bright yellow at the background. Next, what I need to do is I want to have another dot underneath this main dots command D for duplicate, and then change the size of this dots. Hit S on the keyboard to bring up the scale, change it to 120%, and then hit Shift T for opacity, change it to 40% and change the original main.out to 80%. Now, I have two dots at the same time. They're traveling together. However, what I want to do is right now, if I hit U on the keyboard, it's got some keyframes on the second dot as well. I don't want these keyframes. I just want them to travel together. If I delete all the keyframes, this main.out two is going to stay on the screen. But over here what I wanna do is I want to use a, another oxygen, which is called parent layers. I want to parent this second layer. I want to parent the second door to the first dot. So the second dog is traveling with the first dots. Let's use this pick whip and then parent the first layer to the second layer. Now we have the two layers traveling at the same time. If I go back to the non option is very important when you parent things together. Let's say if I have the second layer and the first layer position like this, almost like an eye position. If I parented at this time stamp. These two layers are going to travel together like an eye shape all the time. And this is not what we want. So what we need to make sure is we need to make sure when they are aligned perfectly in the center. That's why we need to parent them like this. Choose this pick whip, and then parent to the main dot. Now we have the two dots traveling at the same time. That's good. The next thing I need to do is to draw a transition mask. Let's go to the top layer over here toolbar. Let's select the Pen tool with nothing selected, I can draw a shape from the center of these dots. Let's draw a shape like this. Something like this. It's got a sharp points at the right-hand sides. And then I want to move this shape underneath the dots, rename it to transition mask. And make sure I parent the transition mask to the dot as well. So they're traveling at the same time. Let's see the animation here. Yeah, that's good. However, I need the mask to cover the whole thing, the whole screen at the end of the animation. So I need to move this position property of this main.out even further at the end so that it's covering the whole thing. Yeah. That's exactly what I need. I feel like the latter part of the speed is gone. So I need to maybe drag this closer to give it more speed. Yeah. Yeah, that's what I need. Okay. That's good. We have the transition over here. Remember we need to bring back the blue color as the background. And in order to do that, we need to add an adjustment layer, go to layer on top and then new adjustment layer. Let's choose a hue saturation effects on the adjustment layer. The way adjustment layer works is that whenever the adjustment layer changes, it's going to affect everything underneath it. You can see if I change the hue and saturation, It's changing all of the color underneath the adjustment layer. And in this way, we can bring back our blue color from the background. Remember, something like this? This is our original blue color. We can use the adjustment layer to bring back the blue color in the background. And the logic is like this. Right now we have this transition mask going on. If we have the adjustment layer in the same position and the same size as the transition mask is going to affect everything underneath it to bring back our blue color in the background. In order to do that, we need to move this adjustment layer to the left, to the position where the transition mask is, and then change it, make it bigger than the transition mask. And the next thing we need to make the adjustment layer travel with the transition mask, make it travel with it. And the last thing we need to do is move this underneath the transition mask and add a alpha mats. You see over here, this is this track matte option. If you don't have it, you can click on the second button on the left corner here to bring up this track matte option. Make sure the adjustment layer is underneath the transition mask. Go to this option here, hit on alpha matte. And this is what we get. You see that the way alpha matte works is that we're using the visibility of the first layer to control the visibility of the second layer. Meaning, you remember, we have this red color transition mask. Wherever this red color is visible, we're using that red color to control the visibility of the second layer, the layer underneath it, meaning you see the shape of this adjustment layer, becomes the shape of this transition mask. And the adjustment layer is still keeping the same function as an adjustment layer, controlling the color of everything underneath it, which makes the background become blue. Again. Let's save the project in order to demonstrate more on the track mattes. Let me do a track matte demo here really quick. Let's put in a solid color. And then let's add in a demo text. Let's draw a rectangle. Let's draw a rectangle shape over here. And then we can set the demo layer to alpha matte. Now we have this rectangle on top that's controlling the visibility of this layer underneath it. Meaning wherever this rectangle is visible, this is going to make the text underneath it visible. If I move this rectangle down, you can see wherever this rectangle is visible, it's going to make that layer underneath the visible. This way, I can control the visibility of one layer with the layer above it. Another thing you can do is you can change the alpha matte to the Alpha inverted, meaning wherever this rectangle is visible, now you can see the demo is now showing inside. The rectangle is showing actually outside because it's inverted. And that's how Track Matte works. Because using one layer to control the visibility of the second layer. This is a very unique concept to After Effects. And if you don't understand it, you can go back and watch it again, but once you get it, it's actually pretty easy. Now this is our animation here. That's it on how to do the transition. In the next class, we're going to talk about how to add effects on the transition. 15. Transition Effects: In this class, Let's add some effects to the transition. This is the animation we have for now. I just want to add some wave effect on this transition mask. Remember we have this transition mask at the shape of the adjustment layer. So we need to click on this transition mask to add a turbulent displace effect, go to Effects and Presets, search for turbulence displace. Double-click. And now you can see we already got this kind of wavy effect to this transition mask. Let's adjust some of the settings here for the amounts. I want to pull it up a little bit, maybe 60. And then the size, I want to shrink it down as I'm shrinking the size, you can see the wave effect is actually moving. I want to animate this size effect like I want to maybe add a keyframe here. Put a 240. Then when it comes in, before it shoots out around here, I'm going to change it to 60. So the size of this transition mask is going to animate 40-60 while the, well, it's traveling to the right and then something like this. Let's preview and see what it looks like. It's moving a bit too fast. Maybe I want to change it back to 40 for the amounts. Yeah, that looks good. That's what I need. The latter part, I think I felt like the animation is kinda too quick. I want to pull this keyframe out a little bit, something like this. So I'm adjusting the exposition of the main dots to make it travels slower. So the transition is not that dramatic. This is the animation. In fact, I get, okay, that looks good for me. And then next thing, we need to add some lines. I can go to the pen tool from the center of the dots, click on it and then click the outside to draw a line. We can turn off the fill, hold down Option key and then click on the felt 123 times. And then make sure the stroke is thicker. I change it to 15 pixels. Now the stroke is thicker. We have one line. And then I'm going to duplicate this one command D for the second line. Still I want it to come from the center of the circle. But for this one, with the pen tool selected, I can select this dot and then I can drag it down to make sure it's going downward. Now all I need to do is to parent these two lines to the dots so that they're traveling with the dots. Something like this. But now it doesn't have a wavy effect, so we need to add some wavy effect to it. Let's go to effects and presets. Let's add a Wave Warp. Drag this wave warp to the first line. And then you can see if I don't change anything as lying, just going to waive all the way like this, which is not what we want. We need to adjust the setting to make it bigger. And then we're going to keep the sign with and then change the height to 40. Try to change the width to maybe 200. And let's see what is going on. Right now, the waving is going from left to right. In order to reverse the direction, we need to put this to negative 90. So that is feeling like it's going from right to left. And this is the effect we want to have. Copy this wave warp and then go to the second line, paste it. This is a way work we get, but I don't want it to be too symmetrical. So maybe go to the second line. I want to change the height maybe a little bit more or less. And then change the width a little bit more. Just give us some variation. I don't want the two lines to be exactly symmetrical. Now you can see the line is on top of the dots, so we need to move these two layers underneath the dots. This is the effect we get. That's good. So the next thing I want to do is to add some glow effect to the line, the wavy line search glow in the Effects and Presets. And then make sure we have the wavy line selected. Double-click on this stylized globe has changed the radius two, maybe 30. And you can see there's this slightly glow effect around this wavy line, which is nice. It's adding some more character to it as copy this glow, put it on the second one as well. Yeah, That's good. Now we got the glow line over there. That's gonna be our transition. Another thing is as the DOD is traveling out of screen, I also want the lines to move out as well. Right now the way we live is just staying there in the screen, which is not what we want. So I need to manually change the position as it's going out. Maybe around this timestamp here, double-click, select the two layers and hit P on the keyboard, set a keyframe, and then go forward as the stops. I want to move this one down and then move this one up so that they're outside screen. Like this. If I play the animation, this is where we get nice. Another thing we need to pay attention to before we move forward is that remember when we were animating the scale change of the portfolio text, we did around 2 s. But I actually want the transition to happen before the scale changes. Meaning when the transition happens, it's almost like the transition. Bring the text up. So that's affecting the text to make them move. All I need to do right now is to adjust the timing of the scale. Over here. As the transition comes in, I need to find the portfolio text. Select all three, hit U on the keyboard. I need to change these keyframes, move them forward a little bit so that they're still staying at the same size. But then when the transition comes out, I want them to become bigger. Like this. Yeah, that looks nice to me. See, the transition is affecting the size of the text. Let's play from the start. Yeah, that's exactly what I need. Command S for safe. That's it for the transition of the animation. In the next video, I'm going to talk about how to animate the slot machine. 16. Base of Slot machine: In this class, Let's start animating the slot machine in the center. Remember we had these layers turned off so we're not seeing them when we are working on the background. Navigate to the slot machine layer and turn it on. Now we got this base here. We've got the top here and the handle. So for now, let us animate the base first, I can double-click on this composition, go inside. And let me move this base layer to the center. Select everything, move them to the center. I want to keep it simple. So the way we're going to animate this is just the scale property of most shapes. Let's find one of them first. So this is gonna be the main base blue shape. In order to animate it, I'll pull up the scale property, hit S on the keyboard. Then we need to unlink the x and y scale so that I can modify them individually. First I want to add a keyframe and 0 s. Then we can drag this keyframe to maybe 1 s. I want the whole animation to complete new 1 s and then move the cursor back to 0 s, change everything to zeros, zeros, so there's nothing appearing on screen. Another way I can do it as I can solo this layer, this dot here, click on this dot. So this way I can single this one layer to work with it without any distraction. So I wanted to complete animating vertically first and then horizontally, meaning from zero second is gonna be zero per cent x and zero per cent y. And then around half a second is going to be 100% wide scale and then 46% x scale. After that, it's just gonna be growing horizontally. Let's right-click keyframe assistant, easy, ease. And then let's go to the graph editor. Fit the graph to view, make sure you're in the speed graph. I just want to drag these curves to give them more of a mountain like curves so that it's going to have more energy to the animation. Let's try this and see what it looks like. So what I wanna do over here maybe is to keep this even smaller, maybe 20%. So at half a second it's gonna be 20% x and then 100%. Why? Something like this? Yeah, That's the animation I like. That's good. And then make sure you copy these three keyframes and then go to un-solo this layer. Go to this one, hit S and link the scale and then paste the keyframes. And then go to the black one, hit S on the keyboard and linkage command V paste. And then even these, all these hit S on the keyboard and link all the scale constraints. Links. Click on all of them and then Command V. Now we have the exact same animation on all of them. Something like this. This is what it looks like now. And now I just need to stagger them. Maybe have this one comes in first and then two frames later have the very last layer comes in and then have the black one comes into friends later, one to one. The black one comes in. I want the center and comes in first. So that everything is staggered. They're not coming in at the same time. So the center run comes in first. I wanted to stack or even more. Right now there are five frames. 12345. So I'm, I'm putting in five frames in-between all these different dots. This, this way we can make the animation more complex. Maybe six frames. 12 345-612-3456. Yeah, that's good. This is the animation we have here. That's nice. Alright, that's it with the base animation. Let's go back to the main composition. Whoops. What happened since we have this base layer, underneath the adjustment layer, the colors have all changed. So I need to move all these layers on top of this transition mask so that we still keep the original color, the original blue color of these slot machines. Now I have the animation of the main base. I need to animate the top and also the handle. Let's go into the handle first. Zoom in. It's very easy for the handle. Let's do the same thing. All I need to do is first of all, I want to have this anchor point to the left hand side of the square. And then let's animate the size. Scale property. Go to scale and then unlink this one, hit a keyframe, go for 15 frames, 1234515 frames. Now we have this keyframe at the 15th frame and then go back to zero so I can change the x scale to zero. Now we have an animation like this. See that? That's good. Now we just need to right-click keyframe assistant, easy, ease. Go to the graph editor. Drag these curves, give it more energy, give it more speed to the animation. Like that. That's good. And once they hit there, I want this blue block to come up from maybe same side. I can just copy this one and then command V paste. Now they're coming out at the same time. So I want to move this blue block all the way to the back. So there is triggering the purple one is triggering the blue one to come up. Something like this. Like this. But I don't want to see the overlap parts, so Like this. Yeah, that's good. We have these two come up and then we have the handle. I want to have the anchor points of the handle all the way at the bottom here. So I can change the scale property here, go to scale and linkage, put a keyframe, and then change the White House way to zero. Double-click keyframe assistant, easy, ease. Go to the Graph Editor. We're doing the same thing. So I'm speeding things up a little bit because they're all the same animation. I'm just repeating it right now. All we're doing it just to changing, animating the scale property and also time them properly so that they come up one after another. This one comes in and then we have this one comes in. This one comes in. And then once this one come in and we can have a scale change. But for the circle, we don't have to unlink it because we can just have the circle and the median from zero proportionally to 100 per cent. Now we have the state comes in and then the circle comes in. And for this one, I still need to change the speed of the animation, give it more speed. For this circle. I can even add in a little bit overshoots, maybe change it to 110%, and then back down to 95. Something like that. Give it more energy. So there's a balance for the circle. I just added in a bounce. Yeah, that looks nice. Let's go back to the main comp. Once we have. So it's a bit distracting in the background. So I need to solo this handle, and then I want to solo the bass over here. These two comes in. I want the base coming in. First as this finishing. I want to move the handle to the right-hand side. So the base come in first and then at this point here, the handle comes in like this. Okay, Let's preview the animation. Yeah, that looks nice. That's how we animate the base of the slot machine and the handle. Next video, I'm gonna show you how to animate the top of the stack machine. 17. Top of Slot machine: In this video, let's animate the top of the slot machine right now. And this composition, I have the handle, the base and top isolated. So we're only seeing these three layers. And now we already have the base and the handle. Animate it. We just need to animate the top right. Now, let's double-click the top composition. Go inside. We can also move it to the center a little bit. It doesn't have to be exact. We can change the position from the outside comp. For this one, I actually want it to have the same animation as the base, the slot machine. So let's go back to the base one. I want to see if I can copy some of the keyframes over here. Let's go to the base blue. Copy that. And then let's go back to the top. For the blue one. Yeah, pull up the scale property and link it, go to zero second command V, paste it in. I want to see if this, yeah, that looks good. We don't even need to do anything. We just need to copy the keyframe from that base animation that we did before. And then make sure all the gray and the black is the same thing and link the scale property. Go back to 0 s with the timeline indicator at 0 s. Click on the two layers command V, paste it in. Now, I just need to stagger them a little bit so that they're not coming up at the same time. For the circle, we can do the same thing. Let's go back to the handle. We can copy this circle animation from the handle. Select all the keyframes command C, and then go back to the top layer composition. We can go to zero second command V, paste it in. So we still got that bounce animation going on from the top. I just need to move it back a little bit so that the animation is staggered. Yeah, that's exactly what we need. Command S, save. Go back to the main composition. That's time this correctly. We have the base coming in to handle come in, and then now I want the top come in as well. Taught. Just move it back a little bit. So we have this base come in and then top come in. Yeah, let's play that. We have this slot machine buildup Command S for saving the project. That looks nice. Next, I need to worry about the dots. Let's turn on the icon and the Solo button here. Remember all these dots that we have? I just need to position it properly. Now that I'm thinking about it, I can Command X, cut the dots and put it inside this base composition command V, and then undo the isolation. Now we have this dots layer within this base composition for the daws, I can double-click and then go inside to animate it. I want to do very simple animation. I just wanna do a opacity change. Just hit T on the keyboard, put in a keyframe, go forward 15 frames, and then make sure it's going 0-100%. It just say opacity change. Then maybe keyframe assistant, easy, ease. Go to the Speed Graph. Drag it like this. Yeah, that's good. Then copy these two keyframes. Make sure to paste it on all the dots. Now they all have the same animation. Just like a opacity change. Maybe it's too quick. So I need to know what it's too quick, so I need to move it out little bits so that is occupying the whole 1 s and copy again, paste it in, so everything is appearing in 1 s. That's good. Now, all I need to do is to stagger them. I just want you to stagger this animation so that they're not coming in at the same time. Let's try to do four frames separation between each layer. These two, I'm holding down shift to select the two and then make sure four frames 1234 and then hits square bracket, left square bracket to move the layer to this place where the timeline indicator is. Then these 21234, this. And then I'm thinking these two, right? Yeah, 1234 hit the left square bracket, move them 1234. Change these two. And then 1234. These two. Then select these 212-34-1234. I want this motion graph is 2022 coming last. So after we change everything, this is the animation we get. All we did is to animate the opacity change 0-100 and then stagger them so that they are coming up one after another. And that's good for now. Let's go back to this base animation. Once we have this come in and we can move the dots, pre-comp forward a little bit. So to time it properly. I want this motion graphics coming last. So as last das comes in, the motion graphics will come up. And this is the animation we get. That's good Command S for saving the project. We got this one now. That's good. And now we just need to worry about the dot on the top here. The top here. We can do the same thing Command X, cut it, and then go to the top composition command V, paste it in. Try to align it over here, and then go inside. Let's just change the opacity. Just animate the opacity 0-100. And then copy everything, paste everything. So everything is going 0-100. And now I just need to do the same thing again to stagger them. To do that, I need to select the first two and then make sure they're the first one that appears at 0 s. And then make sure I select the second and go to zero second, go forward. 12344 frames. Move these layers to this point here. The shortcut with that is left square brackets. You can move the layer to where the timeline indicator is. Now I need to select the third one. Move forward four frames, 1234, and then left square bracket, select the next 21234, move forward, and then left square bracket, select the Next to move forward, 1234, and then left square bracket. Then select the next 21234 left square bracket, and then select the last 21234 left square brackets. And now you can see the animation like this. As I have, the layer builds up. I want this to come in like this. Okay, Cool. That's it. With the dots animation. We now have a complete slot machine buildup Command S for saving the project. 18. Handle animation: In this video, let's work on the handle animation for the slot machine. Let's go back to the handle composition. Remember we had the handle buildup. But then after it builds up, I want the handle to slide down. A bad too, just like someone pushed it so that we can reveal the name of the slot machine. Within the slot machine. To do that, we can go to maybe 2 s and then make sure for the handle on top, we can set a position keyframe, hit P on the keyboard. Right-click Separate Dimensions. I only want to change the y position. So hit wipe position, set a keyframe, and then go forward. Ten frames. Move it all the way down like this. After it's being pushed, it's gonna go back up again. So another ten frames and then move it back up again. Like this. Not only will this circle change, I also need to have this bar go with it. So go to the Scale property. For the bar, I need to animate the scale property. Hate this diamond icon here. Make sure we have a keyframe over here. And then change the y scale to negative 64. And then once it completes, go back up to 100 again. Now this is the animation I got. However, it's true linear. I need to change it and make it more dramatic. Select the three right-click keyframe assistant, easy, ease, and then go to the graph editor. I want to drag this one out. So we're at speed graph right now. Make sure at drag this one outside. Let's see what it looks like. Yeah. That's good. I want this handle to hang at the bottom over there. So to make a similar animation, Let's select these three keyframes. Go to this graph editor. This is not the curve. I want. I want a curve similar to this one here. I also want to make sure the stick is not sticking out like this. So I might want to change it manually. Go frame by frame, like this point here. I just want to make it slightly smaller. That's good, That's good. That frame is good. That frame is good. Good, good, good. I'm just going frame-by-frame to make sure this stake here is not sticking out. Go back. And even here, this part here cannot stick out. I have to move it up. And over here, it has to be connected. So I'm going to move it up here. Yeah. So I added a bunch of keyframe to make sure they're connecting. This is animation we got yeah, that looks cool. Command S save the project. And that's it on how to animate this handle. In the next video, we're going to animate the text on the top of the slot machine. 19. Text animation: In this video, let's animate the demo reel text on the slot machine. Now I have the demo reel text icon turned on so we can see it visible in the screen. Also, I have the Solo button turned on, so we're only seeing these four layers that's been soloed. I need to click on this demo reel layer and then Command X and drop that into the top slot machine pre-comp Command V. Make sure I have the oscillation turned off. So I want to position this demo reel over here. Now, in this case, we can animate this demo reel texts layer. I want to show you a very fun and easy way that you can animate text in all scenarios. This is the number one go-to method for me when I animate any kind of text that needs to be fun and Bull of character. So in order to do that, let's go to the position property. Hit P on the keyboard, right-click Separate Dimensions, and then we can do the animation on y position only. Go forward 15 frames, 112345. You know what? I think we can also solo this one because we don't have to see the background. The top part of the slot machine, a solo, this one only. Then add a keyframe on Y position, go back to 0, s, move it all the way down. So the whole animation is that this text coming up. I want to add some overshoots like this. I didn't have better overshoot and bounce like this. Yeah, that looks good. And then right-click keyframe assistant, easy, ease. Go to the Graph Editor. Let's make sure we add in some energy to our animation. Where in the speed graph right now, just drag a shape like this. So that's going to give more speed to our movements, but not too much speed. Let's see what it looks like. So I need five frames from this keyframe to this keyframe and then 1234. Yeah, that looks good. I need to drive these three keyframes back a little bit. Something like this. Yeah, I like the energy of this animation. That looks good. That's what I want. And then the next thing I wanna do, I want to separate each letter individually. In order to do that, I need to duplicate the layers 1234567 times. So hit the layer and then duplicate Command d1234567. Now I have eight layers of this one single elements. Now let's click on the first layer, go to the rectangle shape, draw the d, and then click on the next one, draw the E, and click on Next one, draw the M. Click on the next one, draw the 0. Click on the next one, draw the R. Click on the next one. Basically I'm separating each letter. Then every single layer, It's consists of only one liter. Now, if I turn off and then if I solo each one of them, you can see the first layer is only one letter D, and then the second layer is the one letter E. Each layer is only one letter. The next thing I wanna do is I want to go to 0 s and then select all of them. I want to cut the layer to only one frame. So with the timeline indicator at one, at 0 s, with all the layer selected, I'm going to click a keyboard shortcut option, right square bracket on PC is also respire brackets. Now everything is kept to one frame. And then make sure you select the last one first, hold down, Shift, select the top one. You have everything selected. Right-click, go to keyframe assistant, go to sequence layer, and then click on, Okay. Now I have a sequence layer that's coming up on screen, one frame apart. I just need to drag the backside of each layer and then drag them all the way out so that they are occupying the whole space. Now, let's play the animation and see what we have. That's exactly what I'm looking for. It's very fun, springy texts animation. The next thing I wanna do is select all the layers. Command Shift C to create a pre-composition called demo reel, pre-comp, or even just demo reel. Click. Okay. And next what I wanna do, remember the Track Matte lesson that we taught before. I just need a track mattes to control the visibility of this layer. Basically, what I need to do is I need to draw a rectangle, go to the rectangle tool and then draw a rectangle. Now, I don't want to solo these anymore. I just want to make sure the rectangle is at the part where I want the demo reel to be visible when the top of the slot machine stopped building up. This is a part that I want the demo reel to be visible. And then with the rectangle on top of the demo reel, I need to click on this track matte, set it to alpha matte. Now I have a Alpha Matte that control the visibility of the demo reel layer. Let's play the animation and see what it looks like. I need to move these two layers all the way back. So when the slot machine builds up, that's when I want the demo Rio to start animating in like this. Yeah. This is the animation that I gets. But our shape layer is not big enough. So I want to hit S on the keyboard, maybe make this shape layer bigger. Move it down a little bit. Maybe even a little bit more bigger. Yeah. Let's see if it works. So we have this demo reel springy texts animation on the top part of the slot machine. As full of energy. That's good. That's exactly what I'm looking for. Let's go back to the main comp and see what it looks like. That's it for this lesson, you can use this kind of fun texts animation on any kind of texts you want. This is also my number one go-to text animation or whatever. I need to do something fun and springy. In the next class, Let's work on the name animation on the slot machine. 20. Name Animation: In this class, Let's animate the name animation on the slot machine. Let's turn on my name layer over here that's called hong shu. Make sure I have the isolation icon selected. Otherwise, it's not going to show up. So I want to move it all the way here. I also want to cut this pre-comp and paste it into the base slot machine precomposition. So Command X cut and then go to the base and then Command V. Click on this isolation icon. Now we have everything within this composition now that we can time things properly. As you can see, my name is pretty long. If you've got a shorter name, you can use the template that I provided within the file to use a shorter version of this middle section so that you have your name on the slot machine as well. For this name animation, I need to go inside this home shoe pre-composition. And I want to do this as simple as possible. So basically, I'm just going to animate one of them first and later on I'll just replace the same animation for all the other letters to make it simple, let's animate this h first. Zoom in. In order to make the H editable, I want to put in the H myself. So let's put an H with a text layer and then make smaller. The font we're using here is called go to Character panel. If you don't have it, go to Windows and then select character. The font we're using here is called knockouts. H t, f 69, full light weights. So select this one and then make sure we have the yellow color. And also we have a slight outline of black color. Just wanted to see if our outline is over there. Yeah. Even a gray color outline. This is a color code. So the outline is actually one pixel. And then make sure we have the anchor point in the center, right-click Transform Center Anchor Point in layer contents. I just want to make sure this H is similar size to the one that I have in the art board. Yeah, that's about it. That's good. And this is my h. Now I can delete this for now. I'll use this one only. Animate this. I need to copy this H, duplicate it, command D, and then move it on top. And then Command D, move it another one on top, and then maybe Command D move another one on the bottom. So for h in the alphabets, the ones after h is gonna be, it's gonna be, I want to keep it in the center like this. And then we've got G, F. That's based on our alphabetical order. The FGH. The way we want to animate this is we want to just animate the H and then have these three layers parent to the H. Like this. Let's try the position property. Hit P on the keyboard, right-click Separate Dimensions. This is the final position of the h. By the way, I want to set a keyframe for the final position. Go forward, 15 frames, 12345. This is the final position and then the original initial position. I want the f to be there. Maybe. That's the original position. When someone pushed the slot machine handle, I wanted to start rolling. So go forward two frames. Before I moved up. I want it to go down first to anticipate the movements like this and then move up. Now, I want it to move too much like this and comes back. The animation like this. You see that? Let's see if that's going to work. Right-click. You know what? Function key F9. Easy, ease. Go to the graph editor. Drag some speed graph to make sure it's got some energy. Let's see if this animation is going to work. This is our animation for now, let's go back to the base. Move this one further. We got this one comes up. In order to show the animation only within these little squares, remember, we need to add a alpha matte. So basically, we need to draw another rectangle similar size to these little buttons in the center. And then make sure I set the hong shu layer to alpha mats. Let's see if the animation is going to work for the first one. Yeah, I think it works. That looks good to me. Commence safe and then go to home shoe. Again. What I need to do is select the four layers command Shift C. Make sure I have a composition called H. And then click Okay, this is gonna be my first composition. And then right-click go to reveal layer source in projects. This is our h composition. The next thing I need to do as I need to duplicate this composition and then make sure I have a couple of different ones over here to represent the different letters in my name. Now let's duplicate the age composition pre-comp in the project panel. Let's do duplication command D. And then we've got this while we name it to 0. And then let's do another duplication. Can put got an n and then Command D, rename it to G. And then Command D, duplicate, remain to S. And then Command D duplicate to H2, and then Command D duplicate it to you. Now I got all my letters within my project panel. Now what I need to do is I just need to drag all these. I got the OH here and then drag the OH over here. And then we have, let's see the end. Put it here, drag the end over here. And then the G, where's my GI tract? The GI dao. Put the G over here, directly, S down. But the S over there, drag the H2 down. Put this one over here, and then the last one is you drag you down with this one over here. Now we got all our names. I just need to delete all these illustrator layer. And you can see they're all the same. But I need to change, go inside each composition and change the letter, right? So for this one it's going to be the 0. And if you want to do the alphabetical order, you can do the 0 and then the p and M and 0, right? You this and then go back to the home Shu. For this one, we can change it to the end. And then for this one is going to be the g. If you want to do the alphabetical order, that's fine. You can also do like a random letter as well if you want. So as long as you have the name over here, it says hong shu over here, it should be fine. So I'm going to just change the necessary ones over here. The last one is gonna be the u over here. Now if I play the animation, they're all coming up the same time. However, this is not what I want. I want them to stagger a little bit. So what I wanna do is maybe I can drag them, stagger them. Let's see. When I staggered them, what happens in the outside? Yeah. I still want the letters to be on top of the blocks. Right? I don't want the letter to appear. All of a sudden. I think the randomness works in this case. I like how random they are. Maybe what I wanna do is just give him more frames so that they're all coming up at the different time. Maybe give them more randomness. Let me give him more randomness. Let me see what it looks like now. This is a randomness that I like. So I need to delay the animation within the composition. Let's say if I delay the animation for 1 s, Let's go into each composition and then select all of them. Hit U on the keyboard. Delay. This animation. The start of the keyframes starting from two-second. Askew, the same thing as change all the keyframe to 2 s. 2 s. Go back to the G, to the n. Just need to make sure they're not animating from the starts. So I'm changing everything to two second. Double-click on this one, change it to 2 s. Okay, that's good. So they're all animating from two-second. Also want to make sure there's not a lot of F over there. I can't use that many F. So this one has changed it to w. W has changed it to see there's too much F going on. It's changed to k. Yeah, let's go back to the base. So when they come in, we got this like this. This is also the timing issue. We need to time them properly to make sure the center letter goes in first. So this is gonna be the G is going to be the first one that comes in. Then the S is going to be like this. This one comes in. This one comes in. Yeah. Something like that. Let's try to see if that works. Yeah, that works. Then that's nice. So as the blood comes in, we have the letter coming in and then after 2 s, it starts animating. Let's go back and see what happens over here. Yeah, that works. And that's how we do the center named animation. In the next class, Let's add some extra elements on the slot machine. 21. Extra animation: In this class, less time slot machine animation to the transition and also add some extra elements, extra animation on the slot machine to make it more fun. If I turn off the solo icon here, we can see the whole animation going on. So we just need to time the slot machine with the background once we have the transition happening. And then that's when we have the slot machine coming in. We can move them forward a little bit so the transition happens and then we have the slot machine coming in building up. And then we have the demo reel texts, and then we have the animation of the name. Let's save and see what it looks like. That's how we time. It. Would just need to move everything forward, the slot machine animation forward in time to time and with the transition. That's nice. Another thing I wanna do is I want to group all these three layers of the slot machine Command Shift C to make a new composition called slot machine. In order to know where it gets started, I want to cut this layer option left square bracket over here. That's the time where the slot machines start coming into the scene. Next, I want to add some extra elements on the slot machine to make it more fun. Let's try a position change to hit P on the keyboard and then go to separate dimensions. So this is going to be the end position of the slot machine when it builds up. So I want to add a Y position keyframe. But from the start, I might just want it to go from the bottom over there and then comes up as if it's being thrown into the scene. So at this point here, I want it to come all the way to much come up like this. So from outside of the scene, go up too much and then land into the middle of the screen. Let's go to right-click the three Keyframes. Keyframe Assistant, Easy, Ease, and then let's go to the Graph Editor. In this case, I want to use the value graph has hit Value Graph and then fit the graph to view. In this case, I want to have more of a throne effect. I want the slot machine to be thrown into the scene and then maybe land in the center. Accelerating like this, a curve like this. And then maybe bounce 12345, balanced a little bit, hold down command, add a keyframe over there. So what I did is I can add keyframe on the graph editor. Now, I have this timeline indicator at 3 min, 3 s, 17 frames. And then I can hold down command, add a keyframe over here. And that's how you add a keyframe. In the graph editor. I want to drag these curves, make sure I have a balanced animation for my slot machine. Go forward three frames, maybe add another bounce, just make sure I drag these, just make sure I drag these handles. Then if the handle doesn't break up, just hold down. Option key is going to break up the handle. This is what I want. I also want the slot machine to hang in the air over here. So yeah, I think this kind of curve works better. If I have the curve like this, I want the slot machine to be strung up into the air and also hang in the air for a little bit and then dropped down with the bounds in the center. Something like that. Right now, it's a little bit too dramatic. I want the balance to be more subtle. Let's reduce the size of the balance a little bit and see what happens. Yeah, that works better. I think Command S for save and then Shift R. I also want to add a rotation. So when the slot machine being thrown up in the air, it's going to rotate first like this. From a negative 30 degree. Wrote it like this. And then it's going to rotate this way. And maybe do some overshoots. And then 30 thrown up in the air, turns, land overshoot, balance a little bit. Let's go to the Graph Editor, keyframe assistant, easy ease go to this graph editor and then drag these curves a little bit to give it more energy. Like I said, I don't wanna go too deep into the curve in this class because this is a beginner class. You can, these are very simple keyframes that you can do and follow along if you want to know more about the Graph Editor and how to make your animation lifelike. Bring life to your animation. You can check out my other class on graph editor, how to use Speed Graph, how to use value graph to bring life to your movements. So that's gonna be a more in-depth class and you can learn from it. For now. We're just touching base on how to use graph editor in a simple scenario like this. So this part is a little weird. I might need to adjust like this. Or I can delete this one. Let's see. Yeah, I think that works. It's been thrown up and then and then comes up like this and then drops, bounce a little bit. And then like this, That's what I like. That's good. The bouncing animation is good. And then we have the demo reel comes up as soon as someone pushes the handle. I also want the whole thing to kinda wiggle a little bit. So all I need to do is bring up the scale and rotation, shift S, set a keyframe on scale and set a keyframe on rotation. Go forward, maybe 123455 frames, and then negative 512345, positive 512345. So I just wanted to wiggle back and forth. Let's see what it looks like. It's too subtle. Instead of negative five, let's do negative ten. Then five, maybe five frames chew. So basically I'm doing a rotation back-and-forth from negative ten to positive five and negative ten to positive five. And need to bring these keyframes closer, select all of them and then hold down Option, bring them closer so that the wiggle is more dramatic. Yeah. And then after the positive five would do another negative ten, and then come back down to zero. Let's try this. Yeah, that works. We have the wiggle when someone pushes the handle. Now, we not only want the wiggle, we also want the slot machine to grow bigger like this. And then we want the slot machine to shrink down to 100% like this. That's good. And then all I need to do is to add a easy ease go to the Graph Editor. Make sure we're in the speed graph this time. Do this. Change the speed graph to a curve like this? You know what? I wanted to hang in the center a little bit. So that's why I need to, I need to drag this curve all the way out and then drag this curve all the way out in the speed graph, makes sure it's got the most extreme easing to it. This is extreme ease. You see in the middle here is like a super flat curve. So we got a very extreme easing to that curve. I see what it looks like. Yeah, that's good. We've got that. Now let's preview the animation with the extra slot machine animation. We've got that transition slot machine comes up, build up, and then you got that. Okay, that looks good. That's it with this class. In the next class, I'm going to teach you how to animate the stars, as in the secondary animation. 22. Final Touch: In this class, Let's animate the final elements in the scene, which are the stars. Let's go to the Layers panel and turn on these two stars. We got two stars in the scene. What we can do is very simple. We can just animate these two stars. Put it out of here, and then do a rotation. Set a keyframe in the front. And then let's do like to round full rotation. Let's see how fast the rotation is. Yeah, that that looks good. I think as two or three round full rotation. Maybe that's too fast. So let's try keep it to two full rotation and then double-click on the rotation word here to select the two keyframes. Command C, copy and then go to star one command V, paste it in. Now we got the two stars rotating all the time. And then I just need to put the first star beneath this slot machine over here. I also want to animate a scale change to bring them up. So Shift S for scale, add a keyframe Backward 15 frames and then at zero, so it's going to be 0-100 and then keep rotating. Similar to this one. I want this one to come in around here. I just paste in the rotation keyframe that I copied from star one. And then now we got two stars rotating. Let's see what it looks like. We get to the transition and then starts coming in. Now that I'm thinking the backgrounds is a bit distracting. I feel like after we put everything together, I feel like the background is a bit distracting. Let's try group these three together. Command Shift C for portfolio. And then what I can do is I can change the transparency, hit T on the keyboard, change it back, maybe change it to 50%, or maybe change it to 75%. I just don't want the background to be too distracting. Yeah, I think that works better. And we got the stars rotating which is not interfered by the background. You see, I didn't put any easing to these two scale changes which make it very linear. Now I wanna do an easy ease to it. And make sure I go to the Graph Editor. I select the speed graph and then change the curve to something like this. So there's more energy to your animation. Give it more speed. Yeah, I think this time it should look better when it pop up. It should have some energy to it. Another thing if you want to do, if you want to parent these two stars, chooses slot machine. So when the slot machine becomes bigger, the star is bigger as well. Let's see if that works. Maybe. Alright, That's our full animation. Let's add some sound to it and take a look. Just double-click on the project panel over here and then go to our music folder. Hit on this music, click on Open, and then drag the music to the timeline. Let's hear the music. Can see what it looks like. We can change maybe the audio level to negative ten to make it not that loud. And then at the end, we can slowly fade it out to 50. 50. This is going to be our full animation. Now let's take a look at our final animation. 23. Congrats!: Congrats on finishing this course is not an easy course, but now you've made it. Now you should have a great understanding of after effects and how to animate within the software. This is such a great first step. From here, I hope you can finish your project and upload it to the project section of this course to share with your fellow student and get some feedbacks. Hope you had a lot of fun learning this class and feel confident now with this program, my goal for this course is to give you a great overview and insight into what it's like to work on a animation project within After Effects. And it'll give you confidence with this program and inspire you to learn more about motion graphics animation in general. Please go check out my other courses. I also have other classes on topics like professional workflow between Illustrator to After Effects, how to make explainer videos, how to make stop-motion animation, and also courses I animation principles, which is the most important thing if you ever want to become a professional animator. Again, thanks for taking this class and if you can drop me a review, it will be really appreciated. If you have any question going through the class, don't hesitate to ask me, and I'm here to answer all your questions and give you guidance along the way. Thank you so much for taking this course and I hope to see you in the next one.