After Effects for Beginners: A 30-Minute Guide

1. IntroFinal: Welcome to your crash course in Adobe After Effects. In this course, we will do a quick walkthrough of the after effects interface. How to make new shape layers, and then how to animate those shapes. In the end, you will be left with a dancing flame and all the knowledge you need to make your own animated graphics. Anybody can benefit from this quick course? All you will need is Adobe After effects to complete this course. So let's dive in. 2. ProjectFinal: The project in this class is to make your own animation With a graphic you created, you can use the graphic that we make it in this course, or come up with your own and then animate it. Don't forget to post your project in the project section of this class. I look forward to seeing what everyone creates. 3. What is AE: For somebody who hasn't used after effects, you might be wondering what it is. Adobe After Effects is used for creating captivating motion graphics in videos. It allows you to add dynamic text, animation, visual effects, and even transitions, making your videos more engaging and visually appealing. Adobe After Effects is an industry standard software used by professionals and enthusiasts alike. 4. InterfaceFinal: In this section, we're going to do a walkthrough of the interface. First thing we're going to do in the menu bar that goes across the top of your computer, you'll see the word window. Let's click on that. Go to Workspace, and then make sure that you are on standard. These are other workspaces that help to be more efficient if you're doing different things and after effects like animation. So a good thing for you to do would be to play around with workspaces and see which one is best for you. But right now we're just going to go to the standard. On the left we have the project panel. It's like your digital library, where you organize and import all your media assets like video, images, and audio. We also have the effect controls in this panel, so we can oscillate in between those. When you add effects to a layer, this is where you will adjust those effects. Next in the center, we've got the composition panel. One thing that you're going to notice is this blue box around the panels. When you click on different panels, that is the panel that is active. When you do a shortcut back to our center panel, which is the composition panel, this is where the magic happens. You'll create and manipulate your compositions here, and this is where you'll also be viewing your compositions. Along the bottom is the timeline. Think of your timeline as a storyboard. It lets you precisely control the timing of your animations and the effects frame by frame. This is where we do most of our work in after effects over to the right. This is where you have the effects and presets. This is where you will add different things to your layers, like keying to remove color or if you want to add transitions. This is where you will find different transitions and effects to add to your composition. Don't worry about anything else, if it seems like a lot or overwhelming everything that we touch in after effects, we are going to explain in detail what they do and how to use it. 5. Step One FInal: Okay, so the first thing we're going to do is create a composition. A composition is like a container that holds all your visual elements, like video, clips, images and layers. Compositions define the settings for your project, including your duration, the frame rate, and resolution. Think of a composition as a canvas where you arrange or manipulate your elements to create your video or animation. To start, we're going to create a new composition. We're going to go to our center panel on the right. You'll see, I'm sorry. We're going to go to our center panel on the left, you'll see New composition. Click that and we're going to start creating. So we're going to name this composition. I'm just going to name it flame. Let's make sure our width is 1920 and our height is 1080. This is standard for video. If you flip that, it'll be standard for social media like Tiktok. Okay, let's make sure our duration is, let's just make it 5 seconds right here, okay? And let's just keep our frame at 25 click okay. And then on the left in the project panel, you'll see that we have a new composition that's entered our project. This is our flame composition. And every layer or image that we put in our timeline is going to be in that composition, okay? And if you look in your time line right here where it says flame, that's how we know we're working in that flame composition. 6. StepTwoFinal: Okay, the next thing we're going to do is we're going to create a shape layer. Now there's two ways to do this, and I will show you both ways. The first way is we are just going to go up to the top in our tool bar, and we're going to click on that circle. But we are going to go down to the ellipse tool. And you do that by holding down your left mouse button until the options pop up and click the tool. If you go to your composition spanel and you click and drag, you'll see you get an ellipse. Now if you hold down shift while clicking and dragging, you will have a perfect circle and you just click and drag to alter the size. Let's make a tiny circle. Let go. Okay. You'll see down in your timeline that you have a new shape layer. What we're going to do is we're going to rename that shape layer because you always want to name your layers so you don't get confused and you can work faster to do that. We're going to make sure our timeline is selected. That blue box around that time line. Go to that first shape layer. Hit Enter, and we're just going to name at the bottom of the flame, because we're going to have 22 different sections of the flame to make it easier to animate. The next thing we're going to do, we're going to hit V on the keyboard. And that's going to bring up the move tool. Now we have an arrow and we can click and drag and move that circle around. We can also move it around by going to our time line going to transform. And if you go to position, if you drag, you can see that you can move it up and down or side to side. If you click and drag in the composition, you'll see that those coordinates change on your position. Let's just put it somewhere in the middle. Leave it there. If you want to make it bigger or smaller, you can just go to the scale in your timeline and click and drag to make it bigger as well. If you see that it's scaling up and down awkwardly, it's because our anchor point is all the way off to the side transformations that you make to this circle. It's going to go off this anchor point. Let's say you want it to rotate it, instead of it rotating where it's at, it's going to go off this anchor point and rotate from here as this as its center. Let's see if you move that, it's going to go around that anchor point. Hit command or control Z To undo that, let's change that anchor point so it's in the center of our graphic. All you have to do is go up to the tool bar. This little square right here is your anchor point. Let's you alter your anchor point. Just click on your anchor point, move it to the center. That's good for right now. Let's go ahead and close up these options. All right, and that looks good. Hit V on your keyboard again. To give that move tool back. I'm going to center mine a little bit better. There we go. 7. StepThreeFinal: Okay. If you wanted to change the color of your flame, all you would have to do is go up to where it says, Phil, click on this little color box and then just click and move around to see what color you like the best. I'm going to stick with orange because I like it. Okay. The next thing we're going to do is we're going to add the top of the flame. We're doing this in separate layers so that it's easier to animate. And you're not messing around with all these points on the circle as well as all the points on the top of the flame. So to do this, we're going to just go to Layer. Go to New Layer and Shape Layer. Now let's go ahead and name this layer by clicking on it. Hit Enter, and we're just going to name it Top Flame or whatever you would like. Hey, click off and now you see it's set. Let's have that layer selected again. Okay, we're going to go to our pen tool this time, which is next to the rectangle tool. Click on that and you'll see you have a little pen. The way a pen works is you basically click and drag and it's going to make different points, and then you're going to have a fill for that point to show you. We're going to start making the top now. It's not going to be perfect the first time you do it, so don't worry where you can adjust the points and the roundness and the sharpness of the shape. Just click and play and get to the top of the flame that you like. I'm going to click on the side and click and drag. And you'll see some handles come up. These handles help you manipulate the line of the shape, which we'll do when we're done creating the top. I'm just going to go here and click and drag. Go right here. Click and drag, because I want to have a tiny portion of the flame go right click and drag, But I want this to be more pointed, which I will fix. After we're done, go right here, Click and drag, and just keep clicking and dragging until you have a shape that you think you like. Then once you're done at the top, just go ahead and close off the shape by clicking on the first point you've made. Now if you hover over one of those points, you get a black arrow that helps you select that point. And then the handlebars come up and you can click and drag to manipulate those lines. However, how long you bring the handle bar is where that portion of the line is going to manipulate it. If I go right to the middle, you'll see that the middle of the line is coming out. If I go up to the top, you'll see that mostly the top of it is being manipulated. I want to line up this to match the curve of my flame. The bottom of the flame, that looks right there, but I want this to be a little bit thicker. So I'm going to bring this point out a little bit. What you're going to do is just you're going to click and drag and make the flame shape however you want. You don't have to have it look just like mine. Yours probably might look better than mine, because I'm not that great of a artist, to be honest. Let's bring this down a little bit, all right? I think that's good enough. And to click off of it, just hit V on your keyboard and then click, and you'll see the Shape. And then I'd see some things that I need to fix. If you want to grab multiple points, if you want to grab multiple points to move like the whole top, which I want to do right now, just go to a point. Click it. Sorry, that's not what I want to do. Go to a point on your shape, click on it, and then hold down Shift and click on the other points that you want to move. I want to move all of these top points. So I'm going to click them all. And then I'm just going to move them over. I forgot one, so let me go back. Click on it. Move over. Okay. Now I'm just going to adjust these sides again. Okay? And I think that's okay for right now. Once you're done with the top of your flame, don't forget to save your project. Because you never know if something happens to after effects in might crash. So always name your layers and always save your projects. 8. StepFourFinal: The next thing we're going to do is we are going to animate the path of the top of the flame. Basically, the path is the shape of your graphic, and you can animate that shape. Let's go ahead to the top of the flame, make sure that's selected. We're going to open up the contents right here. Open up the shape, and you'll see path one. Let's open that up, and you'll see that there's this little stopwatch next to path that's going to create a key frame for you. Let's go ahead and click on that and you'll see a key frame come. Let's move forward in our timeline. Maybe a few frames. 123. If you don't know how to see what frame you're on, on the left hand side, you'll see a counter. Okay, now we're going to animate the path. What you're just going to do is you're going to move those points around to a place where you think a flame would flicker. I'm going to take this larger point. If you want to zoom in, all you have to do is scroll in on your mouse or go here and click 200. And to move around, hold down your Spacebar and you can move your view around to get a closer look. Back to animating the path we're going to take. Make sure your pen tool is selected. Go to those points and just move them around. Play around with the shape, and it's going to automatically create a key frame for you. Once you move that around, if you want to go and drag your playhead back, you'll see it move from one point to the other. Okay? And let's move this little one around as well. Let's see what that does. I accidentally made two keyframes, so I'm just going to delete one of them. I'm going to go back to the beginning. I want this point to be sharper, so I'm just going to drag those handles in and make that a sharp point. And fix this so it's a little straight. Needs to be a little bit straight that looks out to see how that looks. You could see that moves a little bit. I don't want a lot of movement in this animation because it's just a flame flickering. Okay, and the easy way to do this now is we're going to copy the first key frame, so make sure that's selected. Hit commander control C. Let's go forward to our next key frame. See how many frames is in between there. 123, it should be three. I made a mistake, it had more. Let's go forward three more after the second key frame, 123 and hit commander control V, and you'll see that that has been copied and pasted. Okay, let's shorten our timeline to see how this animation looks when it's looped. Drag this little bar at the top and drag it to your last keyframe. And now you're just going to be playing where that bar is. If you hit the Spacebar, you'll see that you have a little dancing flame. I think this is a little bit too fast. So we're going to space out the key frames. Hit Spacebar to stop, let's drag that back out, and let's put five frames between each key frame. Let's dragon select those last two key frames and pull them over two frames. 12, go ahead and click off, let's grab that last keyframe and do the same thing. 12. Okay, let's go ahead and replay this. Dragging the playhead over, hitting the space bar. I think that looks a little bit better. Feel free to make it as fast or as slow as you want, but now you have an animated shape. The next thing we're going to do is we're going to ease these movements. Basically easing just allows your animation to be a little bit smoother. What we're going to do, we're just going to do a very basic way of easing. We're going to select all of these key frames. Now you can either hit F nine on your keyboard, that will easy ease all the key frames. Or you can write, Click, go down to key frame, assist it, and then hit easy Ease. Okay, let's see how that looks now. It should be a tiny bit smoother and it is. All right, the next thing we're going to do is we're going to copy and paste these keyframes for the entire animation. There's other ways to do this, but they're a little bit more advanced. You can use expressions to loop in or loop out your key frames. Doing it with a path is a little bit more advanced. So we're just going to go with the basic route and copy and paste the key frames for the entire animation, for the entire 5 seconds. So let's go ahead and do that. Let's copy these last two frames. Dragon select or you can select one of them and then shift select the other one. Hit Command or control C. Let's go to that last keyframe. You can do that by dragging your playhead, or you can use these little arrows on the side that also jump you from key frame to key frame. Okay, we're going to go forward five frames, 12345. We're going to hit command Paste command V, I'm sorry. Okay, we're going to go forward ten frames. You can do that easily by hitting command or control shift. And then the right arrow key on your keyboard. That could take you forward or backwards ten frames. Then we're going to command or control V again. Now let's go ahead and click and drag and copy all the key frames except for the first one. We're going to hit Command or control C. We're going to copy all of those. Make this a little bit faster. Go to that last keyframe. Go forward five more frames. 12345 command V. Just keep doing this until you get all the way to the end, okay? 12345 command or control V. Do it again. 12345 command er control V. We are pretty close to the end. Since we want this to be a seamless loop, we want our first key frame and our last keyframe to be the same. Let's take our layer and we're just going to shorten it. Okay, And we're going to need to do that for both of our layers. I'm sorry, let's hold down shift. Make sure our top layer is selected. Make sure our bottom layer is selected. And you can do this by just clicking and dragging those layers over to that last keyframe. The next thing you want to do is take this play headed at the top and click and drag that over. Then we're going to go to the center right click and trim comp to work area. And that's just going to clean up this end. All we have to work with REs key frames. Now if you go to the beginning, hit space bar or play, you see that you have a dancing flame. All right, let's hit space and let's save our project. 9. StepFiveFinal: The next thing we're going to do is we're going to add a little highlight to the flame. This should be pretty simple. What we're going to do first is we're going to take this bottom flame and we're just going to duplicate it. The way you duplicate a shape layer or a layer in general, is you hit command or control D, and you'll see you get a new layer. We're going to have this B on top our orange layer. Let's take this layer that we just created, click it, and drag it to the top. You can see that blue line shows up. Go ahead and release, and now it's on top of everything. Let's rename this. Let's hit Enter, and we can just call it bottom highlight or whatever you want to call it. Okay, now you see it's still orange and we can't even tell that there is a new layer there. We're going to change the color to a lighter color than what you have. If you have like a dark blue, go ahead and change it to a light blue or a lighter hue color, whatever you want to do. I'm just going to go with a yellowish color. I think that's good. Click Okay. You can also see that's way too big. I'm going to zoom in maybe go to 50. Bring this up tiny bit by hitting space far and dragging it up. I'm going to go to my timeline. Click on that layer. We're going to scale this down. Easy way to scale. Step down. Instead of opening your layer and finding scale, you can just hit S on your keyboard and it will bring scale up for you. Okay, just drag either one of those numbers down and you'll see that you're scaling your highlight down. Okay, once we have that done, let's bring up our position. If you want to leave your scale up, you can hit Shift and you'll see that your scale and your position show up. If you just want position, you just hit P on the keyboard and position will pop up. I'm going to bring it down some, maybe like right there. All right, now we have our bottom of the highlight done and the next thing we want to do is make a top. And we can do that by just duplicating the top flame. Let's click on that. Hit Command or Control D. Do the same thing and drag it to the top. Okay? And you'll see that the layering changes on your composition. Bring it down to the bottom. It goes below everything and bring it up to the top. And now it's in front of that highlight. What we're going to do is we're going to hit Enter on the keyboard again. To rename this, I'm just going to name it Top Highlight again. Name it whatever you want. When you copy a layer, everything that is on that layer is copied with it, including key frames. An easy way to see all the key frames on the layer is to make sure that that layer is highlighted and hit you on your keyboard. And you will see that all of those key frames are there. Okay? If you want to do it for all of them, hit command or control A and hit you on your keyboard. And you will see all the keyframes on every layer. Let's close that up. What I'm going to do is go to my bottom highlight layer. We're going to open up the scale and then hit Shift and Position. We're going to select those two attributes. Go to the beginning of our playhead. We're going to copy those attributes. And then we're going to go to our top highlight. And we're going to paste those same attributes. And we're just going to take the position of that and bring it up a little bit. Basically, we just scale it down to match the size of our highlight on the bottom. Let's go and hit on our top highlight, and bring that up a little bit. Then we also need to change this fill so that we can line it up correctly. Let's hit the pill. We want to match this yellow to the top. Let's just hit our eye dropper, which allows you to select colors on anything. Really, if you see when I drag it around, the color is changing. Let's go to yellow. Click on that. Okay, then let's move the top of this flame in place. And I think right there is pretty good. Let's click off and hit Play and see how it goes. We have a dancing flame. Okay, now we have all that set up. Let's just close everything up on our timeline and let's save our project. 10. StepSixFinal: Okay, the last thing we're going to do is add some finishing touches. Let's add a background and we can scale it up to size, so the flame isn't just a tiny little flame in the middle. And we can also add maybe a flicker coming out of the flame. So let's first add a background. And we can do this by adding a solid color layer. Let's drag our play head to the front. Go to layer, new and solid. Okay, and you can go here, make sure, make sure the size of your solid is the size of your composition. And choose a color. I'm just going to choose like a dark gray, but choose anything you want. Click Okay. Okay. And you see that it's been imported at the top of our timeline. All you have to do is click and drag. Bring it to the bottom. Okay? All right. The next thing we're going to do is we're going to make a little flicker coming out of the top. And the easiest way to do this would just be to copy the shapes that we already have. Let's take that, highlight the top and the bottom. Hit Control or command D to copy that. While those things are still highlighted, let's drag them right above our solid layer. And then hit on your keyboard and drag them to the left or right. Just so we can manipulate the shape tiny bit. It looks a little bit different than the highlight. Okay, we can also rename these layers because that's important. Let's just name this flicker top. Go to the other one, Flick bottom. Okay, let's go back to the flicker top, make sure that's selected. Let's open up the content. You can see we still have all these key frames. If we change the path now with all these key frames, it's going to mess up the animation. We don't really need this path to be animated, because it's going to shoot out the tap so fast you're not going to really see it. What we want to do, actually make sure that that layer is selected. Hit you on our keyboard. We are just going to delete all these layers by clicking and dragging, making sure they're all selected. And hit Delete. Now that path isn't animated anymore, we're going to take that path. And we're just going to change it a little bit to make it different. Let's select our pen tool. I'm just going to take these points and drag them up so that it just looks like like a cone, If that makes sense. You can also delete points. If you want to make it easier, just select a point and delete it. I think this might be good. I need this to have some handles so I can make it rounder. And to do that, go to your pen tool, go to the vertex, the convert vertex tool, click and drag. And now you'll see you'll have handles here to make this shape a little bit smoother. Okay? And if you want to move a shape while you have that tool selected, hold down command or control. And you'll see your black arrow appears and you can move the shape. Get rid of that shape. Okay, then we're going to take this and just make it a little bit wider. Make your flicker however you'd like. It doesn't have to be perfect, because it's really going to go really fast. Okay, let's click off and see how that looks fine. Now the next thing we're going to do is we're going to create another composition. We're going to basically take two layers, precomp them together, which is basically just putting them into one layer. And then we're going to animate that composition. Okay, let's do that. Let's take this top flicker and this bottom flicker, let's right click on your mouse, and you'll see where it says pre comp. Let's click on that. All of this is going to do is basically make it easier for you to animate. We can name this Flicker click. Okay, now you'll see that we have a composition here. If we double click on this, you'll see a new composition shows up in your timeline. And this also looks a little bit different. If you wanted to change the shape of your flicker, you would come into this precomp and alter it. But if you wanted to animate the flicker as a whole, now you can move the composition without having to move the top and the bottom independently. The first thing we want to do is we want to take this anchor point and put it in the middle, so that when we animate it, it's a little bit cleaner. Let's go to our Anchor Point tool and just drag it over and try to find the middle that looks perfect. Okay, the next thing we're going to do is we're going to take the flicker and we're going to move it. Hit V on your keyboard to move to right behind the flame. Now next thing we're going to do is we're going to take that position. Actually, let's open up all the transform tools. We're going to create a keyframe for scale opacity, which is the transparency of your layer and the position. We're going to go forward, let's say three key frames, because we want this to go pretty fast. What we're going to do now that we have those key frames, let's just hit our layer hit so that we only have those keyframes to look at. Make sure your forward three frames. Let's move that flicker up. You can do that by clicking and dragging in your timeline, or moving in your composition. This is actually too big to start off with. We're going to change the size. Let's just make it a 75, because when it comes to this next key frame, it's basically going to disappear. Let's make this scale maybe 35. This is where basically the transparency is going to go to zero and it's going to flicker out. Let's just see how that looks. Okay, now that that has ended, that layer is basically gone. We want to have more than one flicker throughout this animation. So what we're going to do is we are going to duplicate this composition and we're going to stagger it throughout the animation. We can basically reduce this layer size to where the last keyframe is. Okay? You can just click on that and then drag it all the way over to that last keyframe. All right, now the next thing we're going to do is we're going to duplicate this composition just the way we've duplicated layers before command or control D. Okay, and then just drag it to where you want the next flicker to be in your composition. And keep doing that as many times as you like. I'm going to do it one more time and that's it. Okay, let's hit, commanding control to save our project. And let's play it and see how it looks. I actually think that the flicker can come up a little bit higher. I need to delete these and go back to this first composition. And I'm just going to raise the position a little bit higher. We see it a little bit longer. Then I'm going to redo what I just did by duplicating the composition and staggering it. Save again. And I'm going to play it one more time. I think that looks great if you're at this point in your project and you want to make a change to the size of one layer or the size of your composition as a whole. An easy way to change everything is with null layers. What we're going to do, just so I can show you how to do this, I want to make my entire animation a little bit bigger. Besides the background layer, I want to move everything and make it larger. Maybe move it to the left or the right. But to do that I would have to change the position of everything. But you can do this with a null layer. Let's select our top layer. Let's go to layer null object. Okay, this is basically like an empty layer and you can attach other layers to this layer. And then animate that null object on its own. And it'll animate and it'll alter your entire composition. Let's take the top high light and then hold down shift and select every layer except for your solid layer. This is this little squirrely thing is called a pick whip. And this allows you to connect things to other things. If we drag one of those pickwips to that null layer, you'll see that all of these layers are now parented or linked to this null layer. If we select that null layer and hit P on our keyboard, then move the position, you'll see that everything in our composition, except for our solid layer, is moving with it. If you hit play, you'll see that the animation is the same. Just the location of the animation has changed. You can do this with your scale as well. You want to scale the project up. Everything is going to get scaled up. Hit play. Everything is the same except it's bigger. Null layers are a great thing to use if you want to change the position or the size of your animation as a whole. 11. ExportFinal: Okay, the last thing we're going to do is we're going to export our project once you have everything where you want it, the background done, let's go to file. And then export. And we're going to add this to render Q. Okay, the next thing you're going to do is you're just going to go to output two and you're going to select where you want this to be rendered to. Okay, I'm just going to render mine to my desktop. Click Safe, and then you're going to hit Render Okay. And once you hear the noise, it is ready to go and will be saved wherever you output it. Two. 12. Thank You Final: And we've reached the end of the course, I just want to say thank you for taking the class. I hope you enjoyed it. If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to post this. It's the discussion section. Don't forget to post your projects in the Project and Resource section. I'll look forward to seeing what everybody creates. Take care. Thank you.