Animate Iteratively: Handmade Motion With Procreate & After Effects

1. Class Intro: In this course, I'm going to show you how to combine two of the most epic creative apps to explore, iterate on and create animations really quickly. We'll use Procreate to create textured, illustrated assets ready for animation, and we'll use Adobe After Effects to rapidly explore, experiment, and play. All following your curiosity. I'll show you how to iterate on animations, how to reuse elements, and how to update your existing animations with new or updated assets. This course, we go on an animation journey. We follow our curiosity, we explore, we iterate quickly. We make a lot of animations, and I make mistakes. I forget things. I come up with new ideas mid lesson and I encounter problems, and then I show you how I get out of them. My name is Rich Armstrong, and I've been using After Effects since 2007 and Procreate since 2016. I've taught thousands of students how to make cool stuff using both apps, and for the first time, I'm showing you how to combine Procreate with After Effects and also the process of how I come up with my animation concepts. This course is a real look. Into how I animate by following my curiosity. So if you want to learn how to animate in an explorative way using Procreate and After Effects, then come take this course. All you'll need is an iPad with Procreate and a computer with After Effects. Alright. I'll see you in class. 2. What To Expect: Okay. Welcome to this class. I'm pumped that you're here primarily because I love Procreate and animating in Procreate, and I love After Effects. And so when I combine them together, it's like, Wow. Happy place for Rich, happy place for me who loves texture, handmade stuff and animation. And so I want to take you on an animation journey, how to use Procreate to create these textured hand drawn frame by frame assets, and then how to bring them into After Effects. But here's the thing. There are tons of illustration styles, tons of ways to draw, tons of ways to use Procreate and man. When you come into After Effects, there are bigillions of ways to do the same thing. So I'm not going to show you every single thing, every single way. But what we are going to is create something and then follow our curiosity. It's going to be a simple something, and then we're going to go on a journey to be like, What if we do this? What if we do this? How about we try that? And as we go through the course, through the class, we'll start adding more things, start animating some stuff in Procreate, bringing that into After Effects, it's going to be explorative. We're going to be led by our curiosity. So in the next lesson, we're going to start by creating our assets inside of Procreate. They're going to be static assets. We're going to start simply. We're going to bring them into After Effects. We're going to start simply there too, and then we're going to iterate. Right, I'm pumped your here. I'm looking forward to it. I'll see you in the next lesson. 3. Creating Assets in Procreate: If you haven't got Procreate open, it's time to open it. We're going to start here. And the first thing that we're going to do is create a document. So I'm going to go for an ultra HD size. This means that I can scale it down quite easily to an HD size, and this should give me enough space, enough size to create things quite comfortably at. What's really important to know here is that it's easier to make things smaller rather than drawing them small and then trying to make them bigger later. So rather go biggers you can and then make them smaller later when you need to. Okay, so if you don't have an ultra HD size Canvas, let's create a new one. And it is 384 oh by 216 oh. You could flip that to be portrait, but it's quite easy to make it portrait once we get into it. DPI 372 doesn't really matter. Color profile, definitely RGB. I like this first SRGB color profile. And, yeah, that's really great. Okay, Untitled Canvas. Let's call this UHD, ultra HD. But bang. Okay, so I could go for a horizontal or a portrait. I'm going to go for a portrait, so that means it works really well for socials. And what I'm going to do is go for a black color. You can go for whatever color you like. I'm going to keep my illustration and animation really simple in terms of color, in terms of layers, all that kind of stuff. But you can go as wild as complex as you like. You can use your style. Or what you can do is keep it simple in the beginning, and then as you explore more and more, make it more complicated, make it more complex, and bring in your own style. Okay, so Black. And then as a pencil, if you don't see this, I'm going to go for the Procreate library. Maybe you have classic library as well, but I'm just going to go for Procreate library. I want to use something that's quite textured, so these charcoals are really nice. The pencils are really nice. If there's something that you like to use, use that. I'm going to go for this Swansea pencil. It's fairly textured, but it's also fairly easy to use as a planning pencil or something like that. Okay, so a nice rough textured kind of pencil, not too textured, not too crazy, and it's black. So what I first like to do is just do a little bit of planning or sketching. So what I have in mind here is a flour, maybe with, like, deeper petals or something. It has a stem like that. And then it has some flowers or leaves, rather, something like that, maybe bringing a bit of quirkiness, their eyeball leaves. But also, maybe I can just keep them as normal leaves. Alright. So this is just planning. It's kind of, you know, how this might look in its final form or if it was an illustration. So what I imagine is going to work in balloon now so that you can see. So this would, like, shoot up. Then this flower would kind of just, like, maybe grow from over here upwards, and then the leaves would also pop out. That could be one way to do it. That's the way that I'm going to show you how in the next couple of lessons. So yeah, that looks good. I'm going to drop the opacity and then create the elements each on a separate layer. Okay. I'm going to go back to black and create my flour, create a new layer. Okay, that's really cool. It is black on white, but it is still transparent fill. So what I'm going to do is put a white fill in it now. And this is for two reasons. One, so that if later I want to change this color, I can. And it also means I can show you how groups come through in After Effects. So the reason why I'm not using, you know, just like popping in a fill color like that is because I still like this texture, kind of like see through in places. It looks like I've actually hand drawn it, which you're not going to get in After Effects. You can only get it here in Procreate. Okay, so I'm going to group these two layers. One, I'm going to rename as outline, the other as fill. Now, you don't have to name your groups. You don't have to name your layers, especially if you've only got three layers. But later on, things might get a little bit more complicated and naming is going to help you a lot. So you can name your layers here. You can name them in Photoshop, and you can name them in After Effects. If possible, name them here. It just means that there's less confusion in the next steps. And this group, I'm going to rename as flour. On some of the layers, I won't name them, and then I'll show you how to name them in later steps. Okay, so we've got our flour. What I'm going to do now is the stem. And remember, I'm just creating elements, so I don't think I don't need them to be like lined up exactly. So I'm going to create a stem like that. I don't want it to go all the way off the artboard because then if I move it, you'll see that then it's cropped. I don't want that to be cropped. I just want it to be like that. Okay, so we can move this up a little bit more if we want to create some more like stem up there, and then later on, we can reposition it. Okay, I'm going to leave that unnamed, and then I'm going to create just one leaf for now and reuse that leaf. And then later on, if we want to, we can create more leaves to then replace the duplicates of that one leaf. It's one of the big things that I like about After Effects is that you can duplicate an animation or an object, and then as you update it, it updates all the other ones. Okay, so I'm going to draw this quite simply. I'm going to draw this little part of the plant or the leaf. I think it's called a petiole, and then I'm going to create the leaf. Like so. Okay. And then I'll do the veins and press quite lightly. Okay. And then underneath here, I'll create the full for the leaf. Okay. That looks great. Now, if you use groups or if you use clipping masks or masks, all of these things will then end up as compositions inside of After Effects. I'm going to show you what that looks like, and I'm going to show you how to check it out when we get there. But you can use groups, you can use masks. You can use clipping masks if you want. If you want to keep things as simple as possible, you can just merges these layers into one kind of leaf object. You can then merge all of that into one flower object if you want. But let's just keep it like soap. I'm going to group these guys. Or maybe, maybe I'll keep them ungrouped and unnamed, and I'll show you how to process them when we get into later steps. Okay, I'm gonna rename this one just to be stem. And then we've got our leaf layers up above. Okay, I'm gonna hide this planning layer. I'll rename this planning. That will come through into Photoshop and into After Effects, but we don't really need to see it. So I've got my elements here. That is fantastic. They're textured. There's a group. There's some unnamed elements. Now I need to send this to my computer because that's where After Effects is. You should do this in a way that you're most comfortable with for me. I just press on this Cg icon, go to the share tab group here, and then I'm going to share it as a PSD. Now, you could share it as PNG files as layers, but that just means there's more files inside of our main project folder. PSD makes it really easy to get it into After Effects. It also makes it easy to edit inside of Photoshop, and there's going to be one more issue that I'll talk about in the next lesson. So let's go for PSD or a Photoshop document, and then I'm going to air drop it to my McBookP. You could use Dropbox, any other Cloud service, or however you're used to getting your files from your iPad to your computer. Okay. There we go. Alright. And the next lesson, I'm going to take you into After Effects and show you one issue, which we'll fix. And then in the lesson after that, we'll actually start animating these elements inside of After Effects. I'll see you there. 4. Please Trim Your Layers: Alright, in the previous lesson, what we did was created our assets inside of Procreate and then exported that document as a Photoshop document and sent it to our computer. But the problem with this is that Procreate does some weird stuff with the layer sizes that it exports inside of Photoshop document. So we need to fix that. And I want to show you why we need to fix that. So let's open up Adobe After Effects. And I'm going to create a new project. And in future videos, I'm going to show you exactly what's possible and where everything is in After Effects. Right now, I just want to show you the problem. So, it's got to find out dragon untitled artwork. Okay, let's go for composition retain layer sizes, editable layer styles. Okay. I'm going to double tap on that, go to composition, composition settings, change my background color to white. Okay. Now, if I want to select the flower, I'm going to then select the flour and try and move it, but it's selected the leaf. Okay, I want to select stem, but it's selected the leaf. And the problem with this is that this layer seven is actually the size of the whole document. It's not the size of its contents. Okay, problem. So we can select layer eight over here and move it around or flour and move it around. We can select it on the layers panel, but we can't select it visually, which is frustrating, right. So I'm going to delete that wrong button, delete that Okay, let's go back to Finder. I'm going to name untitled artwork as not Stem, plant. Okay, there are two ways to fix this issue. The first way is inside a Photoshop. So if you've got Photoshop, if you use it, this is really easy, really handy. So let's open that up there. All right, let's close the libraries. Okay, you can see here if I press Command yeah, it's really, really big. The size of the layer is the document size rather than the layer contents. Okay, so I'm going to undo that. If you've got Show Transform controls checked, uncheck it for now. Then select all of your layers, press Command T or edit free transform, and then just move your layers a little bit. There we go. Now everything will be the size of its contents. Which is fantastic. You can then save this. You can also rename and organize your layers here, which is what I like doing because it's easier to type on my computer and use Photoshop for this rather than my finger and trying to type on an iPad. So this is where I normally do all of my naming and organizing, but we're going to leave it for now and do it in After Effects so I can show you what's possible there. Okay, I'm not going to save this. I'm impressed Command W. Don't save. Because if you don't have a Photoshop, what do you do? Well, I made a little tool for you. It's got to Google Chrome. Go to rich.net slash PSD TIMER. And I built this with AI, and what it does is exactly the same. It converts your layers which are the size of the document into the size of their contents. Okay. So let's drag and drop here. Ta da, download a PSD, all the layers. But for our case, let's go for Download PSD. And if you want to do another, you just tap on process another. Okay. So plant trimmed. We can open this up in Photoshop, and yep, it did the job. Okay, so I'm going to delete plant dot PSD. And I'm going to rename plant Trim into plant dot PSD. Then let's go to After Effects and pop this in there. Okay. Double tap on that composition, composition settings, background color is white. Just makes it a lot easier to see what's going on. And now we can very easily select the different layers, which is fantastic. It makes our lives inside of After Effects so much easier. In the next lesson, we're going to jump back into After Effects. Do some animating. I'm not going to show you what's possible, not going to show you all the different things. You can follow along with me, create an animation, and then after that, I'll start to explain what's possible once you've seen a little bit and experienced a little bit of what it's capable of. Alright, so in the next lesson, we're going to get our hands dirty. We're going to start animating. We're going to start having some fun. I'll see you there. 5. The First Animation: Okay, in this lesson, we're going to get into animating. So if you haven't opened up After Effects, open it up. Might need to find it inside your apps folder, so like applications, Adobe After Effects. And then it is not the render engine. It's Adobe After Effects. 2026 is what I'm using. Maybe you have a later version because when I recorded this and when you're watching this is at different times, maybe you have an older version and you haven't updated. That's okay. Just open the one that's on your computer. Okay, so you should see something like this. If you don't go to File, well, File New and new project or Tap over here, new project. Okay. I'm going to double tap here or go file import file. This is your project panel. And I'm going to go for plant or PSD, Import as composition retain layer sizes. If you just drag it into here, you don't have to do this. Press Okay. So if you drag it in, you'll see this composition retain layer sizes, editable layer styles. Okay. There we go. Now, we need to save this. So file. I'm going to say save or save us. So I'm going to just save. I'm going to create a new folder called After Effects. And the reason I do this is because it creates extra files and stuff here, and I just want to keep things nice and simple visually in the root of my Download folder. You can create a project folder if you want, but I'm going to be working in the download folder. So there we go. I'm going to be calling it Clant animation dot AEP After Effects Project. Okay. We've got our plant composition, so I'm going to double tap on that. Going to go to composition or composition settings. You could press Command K here or Control K if you're on Windows and change the background color to white. The frame rate is 10 seconds. The duration is 30 seconds. So these last two numbers are your frames, and these are seconds. 30 seconds is great for now. If you want, you could change that to ten or something a bit smaller. Okay. Now, because of the previous lesson, all of these layers and compositions are trimmed. It's great. It's fantastic. Okay, so let's begin setting things up here. We've got a layer seven, which is I'm going to rename this by pressing return. So outline, we've then got this one. So I'm going to press this button here, Toggle Transparency Grid. Okay, so this is our fill. And this is our petiole. Is it called? Can't remember now. Okay, so these need to be put into a group called leaf. You'll see there's a group called flour, and a group here is called a composition or a comp. So if we double tap on flour, you'll see it has an outline and a fill. But you might be like, Yo, but look, it's huge. It's taking up the whole document again. Yes, that's okay. Because when you go back to this plant composition, we've got this little thing checked here. So if we take that off, it's then going to take over the whole composition or document again. So we've done a good thing, but now we still use this little sun icon over here. If this still bothers you, what you can do is you can select outline and fill inside of this document, go to composition, and then crop comp to selected layers bounds. And there we go. It'll make it really small, so then we go back to our plant. And then we can rearrange things at will. Okay, so things are looking good here. Now, what I want to do is just rearrange these a little bit. So I'm going to put this at the bottom. Going to turn my transparency grid off, so it shows the background color. Okay. So this goes off the screen, which is great. But you'll see here if I do a little bit of rotating, I'm just going to drill down to here to rotate and just do that. I don't want it to rotate from the middle of the stem. I want it to rotate from the bottom. So to press Command Z or Command Z. I'm then going to press this pan behind or anchor point tool or just press Y on my keyboard, and then I'm going to drag the anchor point down over here. That means when I do some rotating, it then rotates from that point. Which is far more natural in terms of, I don't know, like, if it was blowing in the wind, that's where it would rotate from. It wouldn't rotate from, like, the middle of the stem. That would just be super weird. Okay. I want to do the same thing for this flower. So I can select things quite easily here, then I'll move it over there. If you want to rotate something without drilling down to the transform properties, just press on this rotation tool or press W on your keyboard. Yeah, that looks pretty cool. And then I'll press V again to get to my move tool or selection tool, and I'll put that on top of the stem. Now if you're like, Yeah, but the stem is still on top, well, what you can do is move the flower up above the stem above everything, or you can press Command or Control and right brace or left brace to go up or down in your layers panel. Okay, that looks great. Then a leaf, which is not connected to anything at the moment. So what we're going to do is go outline, fill Petal selecto using the command key or the Control key, or if you go for outline, you can press Shift, hold that down, and it selects all the layers between what you first selected and what you last selected. Okay, now that we've got those three layers selected, I'm going to right click and go to pre compose. This puts it in its own composition. Let's go for precompose. We'll call this leaf. And we'll call it leaf number one. And I want to move all attributes into new composition and adjust composition duration to the time span or the selected layers. Okay. And let's open new composition. And you'll be like, Yeah, but now it's still the size of the whole composition. That's okay. So again, if we go to plant over here, we'll just tap on this little sun icon, boop, and it will then become the size of the contents of that composition. I'm going to press Y and move this anchor point to the petiole over there, and then rotate this a little bit, press V. Okay, that looks pretty good. Maybe we need this to be a little bit smaller. So I'm going to go for scale and then reduce that. And you can see it scales to that point to that anchor point. Okay, that looks great. Now, I want to move it slightly to the left, so I could select this one, move it to left, select this one, select this one, move it to the left, or I could select them all and move it to the left like that, using shift or command to select them all. Or what I could do is use parenting, which is just amazing. Alright. So let's select flower over here, and then you go to parent and Link. If you don't see that, tap this toggle switches mode here. You might then see it. So parent and Link, tap on that, and I'm going to go for STEM. And then tap on leaf one, go for stem. Now, if I move my stem, along comes this flower and along comes this leaf. Fantastic. All right. It also means that if I rotate this, so I'm just press W on my keyboard, they come along too, right? Or I'm going to change that back to zero or if I change the scale, Hey, they scale along too, which is fantastic. It makes animating so, much quicker, so much easier. Okay. So I'm gonna press Command Z. This is what it's going to start at. Maybe let's move it a little bit to the left. I just press Shift and right on my keyboard. Okay. I'm going to press Command minus, just to zoom out a little bit. Yeah, that looks good. Okay, now we can begin animating. This will be like the final stage of the animation. So I'm going to start with my stem. I'm going to scale up the scale. I'm going to change the scale or animate the scale 0-100. So I'm going to press Plus on my keyboard, and at about 2 seconds, I'm going to add a new keyframe. So these little diamonds are key frames. And then I'm going to change this to zero. Whoop. And I'm going to press Space bar, and there we go. It grows in quite nicely, and you might be like, Whoa, yeah. I just animated something. Yeah, hold on. We're not done here. We're still going to do a little bit more animation, but this is really looking really cool. And the reason I'm going for ten frames per second is because I really like this hand made kind of animation style. I don't like things to be super smooth. You can, of course, choose 25, 30, 60 frames per second, and using keyframes makes it really easy to animate between two points. But for me, I love this, like, jerky, handmade stop motion kind of effect. It also makes things quite visible when I start showing you things in later lessons. Okay. So this one, when it gets to the end here, I want it to slow down a little bit as it gets to the final point. So I'm going to select the keyframe. It's got this little blue highlight around it, right, click on it. Go to keyframe assistant, and then eases in. All right, it's easing into it. Like that. You can use EZ Es if you're like, I can't remember easy E's in or out. Just use EZ Es. And now you see how it gently comes into the final point. Lovely. Fantastic. Okay, so as this is going up, I want the flower to also do something similar. So I'm going to just press S on my keyboard, and it just shows that property. Okay? So let's go pop a keyframe here, and then as it finishes, let's go for a few more keyframes, add a new keyframe. Okay, so right now, it's not animating. It's the same size. But here we're going to start at yeah, let's go for 28 or maybe 30. So. Okay, so let's have a look at what this looks like. Shop. Okay, that looks pretty cool. Maybe let's drop it a little bit. Can't really see that zoom in here. Change the position slightly. Just pressing Command and minus and plus on my keyboard. Okay, so it kind of looks cool. And then I just press along this timeline at the top and then press space. Whoop. Okay. That looks good. Again, I'm going to right click here keyframe assistant, Easy Ease in or maybe what I do is Command Z. I go for Easy Ease, and this will be Easy E's in and out, so it gets to here, and then a few frames on it actually then settles at a slightly smaller size. So let's go for 11 Oh, maybe 11 instead of 111. So something like this. Whoop. Which is great. I like that. Okay. So Oop. But it starts out at, like, a weird color, and really small here. So what I want to do is actually make this whole thing black. And what's great about this is that we have that fill inside of our flower layer. Okay? So we've got this fill. Okay, so what we can do is we can add an effect. So let's go for effect, go down to color correction, and you'll be like, Wow, there's just so many here. Oh, my goodness. Yeah, there is a lot. So I'm going to go for hue and saturation because I know what I want to do. I'm going to check on colorize, and then colorization saturation saturatin. Okay, so nothing should change, S at the moment. What I want to do is I want to and I make this lightness. Okay, so under effects here, if you don't see it, just tap on this arrow again, then you'll see it all, colorize lightness. So when it gets to about here, I want the lightness to be as it is. And then before that, I want it to be super dark. So black. So it's coming up black the whole time and then sheep. Just like that. Okay, that's great. Maybe I want to change this to be a little bit quicker. So I select the keyframes, move them to the left. Okay. Shop. Maybe like that. Maybe a little bit quicker. And you can see how I'm just tweaking things, you know? It's not like an exact sign, so you just got to feel for it, and I keep on pressing play. Keep on having a look at what it looks like. So it's already moving because of the stem moving up. Then Whoop. There we go. So I like that. Remember to save. So Command S for me, or we could go file and save. So there looks good, Ls good. Let's go for A leaf now. Okay. So as it's coming up, maybe it starts to scale in over here, so I'm going to press on this little stopwatch to say, Hey, let's do some key framing. Move that keyframe. Okay. And then we go for Let's go for nothing. So it goes from shop like that. Okay, maybe a little bit slower, maybe a little bit faster. Okay, then right click Keyframe Assistant. I'm gonna go for Easy Ease in Okay, but it looks a little bit boring. So what I want to do is do some rotation as well. So let's do some rotation, put that at the end, create a new keyframe. And right now, I can't see it because the scale is really low. So we're actually going to do the animation for rotation over here like this. And I'm going to rotate it like from here, outwards, maybe go a little bit further. So I'm going to do some manual rotation here and then back like that. And I'll change these keyframes into es Es keyframes. Yeah, that looks pretty cool. Okay, so just select these keyframes, move them back. Okay, so maybe I'll change the position of these keyframes. Okay, that looks good. So. And maybe I want to do that effect with the black in the color too. So effect. Let's go to color correction, hue saturation, colorize, drop the saturation, colorize the lightness. Okay. Let's go on here. Colrize the lightness. So from here, let's drop the lightness to 100 and you can see how, like, nice and textured that is because we didn't use Procreate, like fill. We just colored it in with our hands with a brush. Okay, so that looks great. I think in the beginning the rotation could be just like that. Yeah. So whoo. Okay, space bar and drag around on this composition view. Okay, that looks really good. What I want to do now before we end this off is to show you something really, really powerful. Okay, so we've got this leaf. I'm going to select all just by pressing one of the layers and then going Command A and then pressing the little drill down arrow. Then everything pops in over here. I'm going to take out planning, gona take out background. Don't need that. Okay, now we've got this leaf, okay? And wow, when we drill down, there's a whole bunch of stuff. So I could just press U, and it shows me all the things that I've been animating, which just makes it a lot easier to see. Okay. So from here, what I want to do is I want to take this leaf one with all of its animations, and I want to create a new composition from that so that I can reuse it over and over so that I don't need to keep on animating new leaves. And I want to put a bunch of leaves onto this plant. So what I do is right click, Tap on precompose. I'm going to call it leaf one, ni Animation one. I don't want to leave all the attributes in plants. I want to move all attributes into the new composition. Adjust composition duration to timespan of selected layers. Yes. Open your composition. Yeah, that's fine. Okay, then you might be like, but where is Leaf one? And what is happening over here? It is up here because it was parented. So we might need to tweak some things in a bit. Yes, we do. So then we tap on this little sun icon for Leaf one num one, like that. And then we move it anchor point again, like that. And then we move it wrong button. Okay. So that looks great. And you can see how powerful this little button is what it is, collapse transformations. Okay? Doesn't really make sense, but that's what it does. Now we've got leaf one, anum one I just takes up that amount of space, and over here, it's in a very weird position. We could change the position here to be more in the middle and then change it back in the plant composition. So it's go to plant. Put it over here and change our anchor point again. Okay. So let's have a look. Okay, not quite right. I'm gonna just zoom in a bit. Let's change this. Okay. How does this look? Okay, fantastic. That means the animation exists within this instance. So it's inside of a composition. And inside your project panel, you'll now see Leaf one Anim one. Fantastic. I like it. Okay. So now what we can do is we can tap on Leaf one Anim one and press Command D or edit and duplicate. Okay, I'll duplicate it right on top. I'll name it the same thing, which I really like. I don't like copies being appended to my names. But maybe you'd be like, Okay, leaf one, num one, and we call it number two, and we'll call this one number one. Okay. Then we move it down a little bit, and tada we now have two leaves. Okay, this one's number one. This one's number two. But this one actually comes first, so maybe let's oh, I pressed into there. Let's close that. Close that, close that. I'm going to press Enter here again and just rename this as number one and this one is number two. Okay, so number one is up here, comes in at this time. So maybe for leaf number two, I'll make you come in slightly later. So I just drag the layer slightly to the right. Ooh. And that looks great. Okay. Now, I want to create one more duplicate, and you can create as many as you like. But for me, I'm just going to create one more duplicate. So I'm gonna press Command D. And because we've named things with ones and twos, it then renames us as number three, which is great. I'm going to press command and left bracket or brace, and instead of moving it down, what I want to do is flip it. So I'm going to go down into transform into scale. I'm going to check or uncheck this little lock icon and then on my X scale, change it to -100 and then lock it up again. Put that over there. So maybe we move that. Or, let's just have a look at what it looks like. Okay, that looks really, really nice. So we could change these around a little bit. Okay. Da da, da, da, da, da. Something like that. Alright. This looks amazing, and you can see how powerful re using compositions, re using animations is. Yeah, we've got three leaves, and we really only needed to use one leaf or animate one leaf. In the next lesson, I'm going to give you an overview of where everything is in After Effects, how to animate things, what can be animated, what file formats, After Effects. So ports, if you already know After Effects, you can skip this and get on to further animating in the lesson after that. But if you're like, Wow, this is all alike. There's a lot of stuff happening. Yeah, stick around, and I'll show you where everything is. I'll see you in the next lesson. 6. How to Animate in After Effects: In this lesson, I'm going to go over a few things. The first is an After Effects orientation so that when you come in and you're like, Oh, my goodness, this feels like an airplane cockpit. Where is everything, what everything is, blah blah blah? I'm just going to make it really simple for you. Then I'm going to cover what kind of files and file formats After Effects supports. I'm going to cover how to stay organized because it's really important in After Effects, and then what can be animated and how to actually animate. Alright, let's jump into it. We're going to do the overview first. Inside of After Effects, you've got your project panel at the top left. If you don't see it, let's go to window, scroll down, and you've got Project panel. You can hide them and you can show them really easily. Alright? You can then rearrange the different tabs in the panel by dragging them left or dragging them right. If you double tap onto a composition within your project panel, it'll open up its own timeline in the timeline panel. You can then open and close your different tabs in your timeline panel really easily. If you close them all, you'll be left with your render Q panel, and this is the ability to turn your composition into an animation file that you can find in your finder, something like an MP four or a dot MOV or an animated Jif file that you can then, share to other places that you want to. So let's go for leaf number one. Inside of each composition, each layer has a bunch of properties. All right? You tap on this little drop down arrow, you drill down to transform. You can then set anchor point position scale rotation opacity, and you can animate those properties. When you start adding effects, or for specific kind of layers, there'll be different kind of properties. Besides these transform properties, you'll start to see even more properties that you can animate. If you then select a layer, you may also see a properties panel at the top right. It's a fairly new addition. So let's go over properties, and it'll appear at the bottom here. If you want to drag it to the top, you can. There we go. All right. So here you can change the rotation just by scrubbing. You can change the opacity by scrubbing, or you can just enter it in. Because it's a new edition, I'm not that used to using it, but it might be like, Yes, I love that, and you use it all the time. But for me, not so much. So I'm going to close that panel, and I prefer to do all of my adjustments over here inside the layers panel or the timeline panel. And I also like to use these tools at the top. There's a lot of tools here. Most of them you won't use. In this class, you'll probably use this tool, your selection tool. You'll use your rotation tool and your anchor point tool or your pan behind tool. All right, so just three tools. Most of the time I use keyboard shortcuts. So this is V, this is W, this is Y. In terms of project organization, I like to make things as organized as possible from the start so that I don't like, accidentally delete things or edit the wrong compositions. So inside here, I've got plant layers, and I've got plant. So what I'm going to do is to create a new folder called compositions, or maybe I'll just call it comps, like that. I'll put in leaf one, and plants I could put in there, or maybe we create a new one, a new folder called elements. And because leaf one isn't really an animation, we can put it into elements. You could also call this pre Cumps or something like that, and Leaf one nim. Let's put that into a folder like that, and we call it elements animated. Animated Tis, press return if you want to then rename it. And so, yeah, we've got leaf one, which isn't animated, but then we've got leaf one animated, which is animated. Okay, and then plant layers. I'm going to drag that into a folder and call this imports. Okay, so you got comps, you got plant. Maybe we can call this plant one. Which didn't make sense there. All right, you got elements, leaf one. You might be like, Yeah, but is it just leaf? What about the flower? Where is that? Yeah, inside of here, we've got plant layers, we've got flower, so we could choose to leave it in there, or we could then bring it up and put it into elements. We can then rename that flower one. Okay? And, hey, it could be animated in the future. So we might end up with a flower one animated one because there could be different types of animation for each element. Okay. That's great. And now, if we go to plant one again, we've also got a stem here. I want to precompose this or create an element from it, because if we animate it in the future, then it's really easy to just swap out a composition for another. So I'm gonna right click on Stem and precompose. Or what I can do is go Command Shift C, and that does the same thing. I'm gonna say Stem one. Move all attributes into new composition. That could be then an animation. So I'm going to actually just say leave all attributes in plant one. Okay. There we go. That's Stem one. Perfect. And then here, if we tap on layer name, you can see it says Stem one, and that's a source name, and now this says Stem, so let's change to Stem one. Or if we want to make it the same as a source name, just leave it blank, press return. Okay, so sometimes it's really nice to be like, What actually is this composition? What does it look like or what is it named inside my project panel? Okay. And then this should now be Stem one inside of comps. Okay, that is fantastic. So that's how we stay organized or how I like to stay organized inside of After Effects. Now, in terms of what After Effects and file formats it can use almost everything. Like, if it moves, you can bring it in. If it's an MP four, MOV, animated Jif, Photoshop files, Illustrator files. It doesn't do Procreate files, but Procreate does export PSD files or Photoshop files. You can bring in images. You can create image sequences. It's really powerful. You can add audio inside of aftereffects. You can also create your own shape layers, which are vector layers, very similar to an Illustrator file or illustrator layer, piece of artwork. You can create solids, you can create adjustment layers. There's a lot of different things that you can do. So almost the sky is your limit. There are so many different options. In this class, we're going to be focusing on Photoshop documents. That have been exported from Procreate. That's it. We're not going to be exporting animated MP four files or MOV files. We're just going to be concentrating on photoshop files and then turning them into compositions inside of After Effects. Now, what can you actually animate? Okay, so let's check this out. This is our flower one. So we've got elements, flower one. Let's create a new composition. We'll call it flower test. The size, width, and height is going to be the same as what we have, which is ultra HD, and it's going to be in a portrait format. Ten frames per second, white background. Okay, flower test. Let's go and put that inside of comps, and then we'll add a flower one in here. Okay. So what can we do here? Let's go to transform the anchor point we can change, the position we can change. So as I'm moving this around, you're seeing that the position values for X and Y are changing. The scale, if I change this, you can see that they change. If I hold down shift, they're going to then change proportionately. Your rotation can go round and round and round. If I go more than once, you can see it says two X or one X plus 73 degrees. Sometimes that can get a little bit confusing, and then your opacity. Okay, we've talked about your anchor point. So here, if you change your anchor point, it's really awkward and slow. So that's why I like to use my anchor point tool, so just drag it over there. And once you've got an anchor point, it then scales and rotates from that point. So let's scale from that point. Let's rotate from that point. Okay, so those are the things that you can change. These are properties. Nothing is animated yet. This is much the same as Photoshop or Procreate, Illustrator, whatever. You're just saying, Hey, move a chair, change the opacity, change this setting for this layer. Thank you. But now with After Effects, you can animate between two values of a property using keyframes. So let's go for position first. I'm going to go back to my selection tool or move tool. And I'm going to tap on this stopwatch, which means I want to animate it. It creates a keyframe, which is this little diamond thing. Let's go to let's go 4 seconds, move our tool, move our rows or our flower. We can also then change the X and Y with this tool here or enter it manually. So just go for 100. There we go. I want it to be up there. Then we go back to the start, press play. And it moves to the new position, and it stops. And then I want to add a new keyframe over here, and you can see the little dots on these lines. It indicates how quickly it's going to be moving. So Bow There we go. We can then also change the opacity as it's going. Like so. So slowly, it's then getting less and less opaque. And we can also then change the rotation over here to something like that. You can see how quick it is to animate in After Effects. Okay, so that's a really slow animation. But I'm showing you what's possible. And then for our position, what I've showed you earlier is this keyframe assistant, you can change the easing. So let's go for easy ease, like so. So it's going to get up there and then slowly go back down. Okay, but here I also want this to easy ease in. So it gets slower as it comes in. And then it kind of looks like it falls over, which is great. But for my rotation, I want to say easy ease out, and then easy ease Okay, which just makes it feel a lot more natural. You know, things don't just, like, stop in real life. They kind of stop slowly. Okay. I guess the final thing that I want to show you here is the effect controls for a layer. So here, if we wanted to add an effect, you could see them here and change the properties here. So yeah, maybe we go for something like hue and saturation. You can either pop it on there or pop it over here. Maybe even over there. Yep, you can. There are so many different ways to do things in After Effects. And here, we can go for colorize. Let's turn the opacity up. Okay, saturation, let's turn this up. Lightness. Let's turn this up. Okay, so now it's red, which is fantastic. And then we can also then change the hue over time. So under effects now, the hue now has a keyframe, so maybe we then change this from purple and then over time, it becomes red. Okay. So now there's a whole bunch more properties that we can set and animate under effects, which visually, you can see up here. Okay, in the next lesson, we're going to cover our second animation, which hopefully will begin to make a lot more sense now that you've had an After Effects orientation. You know where things are. You know what's possible. I will take you step by step through things, especially if I haven't addressed them here, especially if they're new or if it's a new kind of effect. So don't worry, take things slow, explore, experiment. If you're confused, if you want to try something out as you're going, just pause the video, pause the course, and try it out. Experiment, create a duplicate of your composition. Try it there, come back to the original, and then compare with what I'm doing. All right. I'll see you in the next video for a new animation. 7. How To Iterate: What I'm going to show you in this lesson is how to quickly create a new version of our existing animation, and we're going to do this by duplicating it and then changing a few things. This way, we're able to create iterations and variations really quickly without altering the original animation. It's like, Oh, yeah, I have an idea. Let me quickly try something in a new composition or a duplicate of that composition as a starting point. So let's jump into After Effects. I got this flower test composition that we made in the last video. I also think that Stem one needs to go into elements and comps. That was a mistake. This is where it should be. And then we've got plant one, which is our main composition from earlier, and it's something like this. Great. So what I'm going to do is right click on it and either duplicate it there or go edit, duplicate here. Or just tap on it and press Command D, which I'm really used to. So plant two, thanks for renaming that for me. That's exactly what I want, and let's double tap into that. Go to close flower test and plant one, open up plant two. Thanks. There we go. Okay. So what I want to do now is instead of having three leaves, I want four leaves on each side. Okay? So I've got one leaf up here, one leaf up here. So I'm gonna delete this, delete this. I'm going to duplicate this one. And this is number one. I'll call it right I'll call it one. Write one. And this one, I'll call Left one. I'm then going to press S for scale, unlock this, say, negative 100, and it does an exact turnabout. So let's see what happens here. Ooh, very nice. Okay. So we've got left one, right one. I'm then going to press Command D to duplicate and then command right brace to go up and left brace to go back down. Now, these are all the same color, so I'm going to change the label color to whatever, just not sandstone. So maybe go for Cyan. Okay, command D again, and then up and down. Let's go for orange. Command D again, up and down, and let's go for green. So now I can kind of see the different ones. Okay, so let's go four. I'm just going to select them both and hold down shift and press the up arrow on my keyboard. Okay? These ones I'm going to move down a little bit. These ones are move down a little bit, and these ones I should move all the way down. Okay, so it makes sense in the timeline as well as visually. Okay. Yeah, I think that looks good. Perhaps we can say fit. Yeah. So right now, if this plays, all of these should come in at exactly the right time. So when they come in, the top ones come in, not so good. And the flower, perhaps we can move this all the way down. So command shift left brace, it goes all the way to the bottom. It's much like Photoshop. Okay, it's above the stem, but behind the leaves. So We. So let's do this. I'll take all of these a few notches down. There we go. Okay, so that could be a variation, right? If we had a client and they asked us for a couple of different variations with this flower and leaves, and they kind of like the first illustration that we've done, can be like, Okay, let's send them three, four, five quick animations to see which one they like before we proceed and make it more detailed and start swapping out elements and making it more handmade. Do you like this one client? They're like, Yeah, I love it. Okay, so this could be our first variation. Great. Maybe we just drag all these layers to the start again, so the leaves come in a little bit sooner. Cool. That's great. What I have noticed here, too, is that the parent and the links or the parents are no longer attached. So I'm going to say, be parented to Stem one. So that means that if we move stem one, they all move again. Okay. So this looks great. This is one alternative or variation that we've created. It's different from plant one. But now I'm going to select plant two, press Command D, or edit and duplicate again and go for plant three. And then each successive one here, maybe I can change this to aqua or pink. That's the flour. Maybe I can do the same here. Tu or fu chizia Here we go. And then we'll move these. I'll just zoom in a little bit. Zoom in out. Okay, let's go here. We're at 5 seconds. So I'll do that. Let's have a look at what that looks like. So whoop whoop. Okay. So let's change that to 1 second, and this one to 5 seconds again. So the gap between each one coming in is 0.5 seconds or half a second. Yeah, that looks pretty cool. I think it could be snappier. So the difference between them is one, two, three, so three frames each, one, two, three. And when you're working at ten frames per second, it's a lot easier to move things three frames than if you're working at 60 to be like, I just want to move things three frames. It's really difficult or tricky. It's one of the benefits. Okay, so that looks really nice. Shop, Jp, chop. Really nice. I like it a lot. Now, plant three. I'm going to duplicate that. I have another idea, so plant four. What I'm going to do here is go all the way up, and then the plant or the flower is only going to come in here. So I'm going to select flower one, press to see all of its animated properties, and then select them all and drag them over here. So it comes up. Okay, that looks really nice. But maybe we can animate these leaves in a bit sooner. So I'm going to select them all, drag them back by half a second. Okay, so that's really nice. And then here we can select the keyframes and have a look at what that looks like. So it kind of feels like this last leaf just, like, pushes out poop, like that. And I think the scale, it also could be an easy ease out. Let's have a look. Sh. Yeah, that's looking great. Okay, so you can see how I'm beginning to iterate on this animation. We've got four versions now, and we haven't created any more elements, any more animated elements. We're simply re using. And this could be for multiple reasons. We're wanting to iterate prototype and animation really quickly. Maybe this is exactly what we want to do. We've got all the elements that we want. And now we're just trying to find the exact right version that we're happy with that we're happy with that we want to send to the clients or just coming up with a bunch of different options that we can then go back into Procreate to create more hand drawn elements, more frame by frame elements. Take the whole thing back into Procreate and hand draw the whole thing based on this After Effects render. And the next lesson, what I'm going to take you through is creating a variation of the leaf animation and then replacing some of the leaf animations with this new leaf animation. It's pretty much what we've been doing here, but now we're starting to iterate on the elements and not just the main composition itself. I'll see there. 8. How To Replace Elements: Alright. In this lesson, what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a new leaf animation based on our old animation and then start to replace some of our existing leaf animations with this new leaf animation. Alright. So I've got elements animated folder, leaf one, anim one. I'm going to press Command D to duplicate that. Let's go in here. Now, we don't really know how this looks like on the actual stem. So I'm going to add a stem in here temporarily, just to have something to work with. I'm going to lock Stem one. Okay. And now, this animates in, like, Whoop. Pop. Okay, so let's try something maybe a little bit different here. So it goes jup and maybe it goes all the way down here. So I'm gonna press U. So does the hue saturation scale and rotation. So scale. That's great. Maybe I zoom in here a little bit. You can scale to 120 and then settle down to 100. Maybe there's no rotation at all. So let's just tap on this. Stopwatch, removes it all. So just who or maybe it comes back over here to, like, 90. And then it goes to 100. So it's like he. Oh. This is actually 82, so 90 wouldn't work. So let's go for 70. So it's a nice little bounce. Like a op. Okay, maybe, maybe we can add some rotation again. Let's start off it down here. So it goes hoop and then comes up like this. So So as it does that, it can then ease in. Okay, so that's quite a nice little animation. Whoop. So I'm going to save. Okay, now, plant four. What have we got here? Okay, so I'm going to then duplicate plant four. Let's go to plant five, and then I'm going to select all of these leaf Animation ones, and then replace it with leaf Animation two. So with all of these layers selected, I'm going to press Option or Alt and then drag leaf one anim two onto them. Poop. Okay. Now there's a weird stem over there. That's because we still got this stem inside this comp, so I could delete it or just hide it. There we go. Okay. Shui. Okay, so that's, like, really interesting. Shui kind of feels like a butterfly. And this is good. It's like, Okay, does this work? Does it not? Maybe it makes us think of something else. Maybe the leaves could flap. And then, you know, the plant could take off. Maybe it's a butterfly plant. Again, we're just iterating, we're exploring, we're playing. It's like, oh, I have an idea. And that is exactly what I'm going to get onto in the next lesson, how to think about iterating, exploring, playing, and how to, you know, kind of decide what to spend your time on. So I'll see you in the next lesson. 9. Deciding What’s Next: Okay, once you begin playing around in After Effects, you begin to notice like, Oh, this is interesting. And you begin to ask questions like, What if I and you fill in the gaps. Like, What if I tried more leaves this way? What if I try to make it look like a butterfly? What if so what I want you to start doing is start to give into those curiosities, try things out, explore, experiment, play, see what works, see what you like. And as you go down one way, more what ifs will arise. You may begin to be like, Okay, I got so many options. I don't know which one to try. Try the one that has the biggest difference, the biggest influence, the biggest variety first to be like, Oh, like, which direction should I go? Should I go in this big direction or this direction? Or which one is going to add the most interest? Which one is going to be or bring about more variety, more flexibility. So let's have a look right now at what I've got, and I'll tell you what I'm thinking. So I've got plant number one, and this is a really nice animation with three leaves. It's great. It's simple. I've got plant two. Which is cool. It's very, like, synchronized swimming kind of vibes. Plant number three. Which is really nice. And I think plant four is probably, like, the culmination of all of that, and it works really, really nicely and, like, pushes the flower out. So what I'm thinking about right now is what if each of these elements was frame by frame animated. So each one had five frames. And so just like kind of had this, like, wiggly handmade kind of feel the whole time. Another what if is what if the flower, the stem and the leaves instead of being, you know, scaled in or the scale being animated in, what if I actually drew that frame by frame from nothing to flower and leaf and stem coming up. We don't have to do this all at the same time, but maybe just the flower to begin with. That would be pretty cool. Another what if is what if it's windy? Like, could this thing bend and sway in the wind? And what about the leaves? Like, would they not like, jiggle a little bit. So, I would like to try all of these things or some of the big ones like the bend in the wind. This is one over here, a bend in the wind. That would be cool. I would like to go back into Procreate and at least do five frames for each of the elements, the leaf, the stem, and the flower, and then animate the flower from nothing in so I don't have to use scale to actually do the animation from nothing. To flower. And so maybe here with an animated flower in, I could frame by frame animated flower in, I could move the stem with position up. The leaves could do the scale in or perhaps I could animate the leaves as well. And then the flower would sit on top and just go, and then sit there with a five frame loop. So what I'm going to try first is I'm going to try the five frame loop for all of the three elements and then a 02 fully formed flour in Procreate, and then export all of those things as PSDs or Photoshop files and then bring them into After Effects. So that's what I'm going to do in the next lesson. I will see you there and I'm going to be working in Procreate again. 10. Frame by Frame Assets in Procreate: This lesson, I'm going to animate each one of our elements and give it a five frame loop. In addition to that, my flower, I'm going to animate from nothing into something and then give it a five frame loop. So this is our original document. You'll see that I've got my leaf layers, I got my stem, and my flower layers. We've done some naming in some other documents, either in Photoshop or in After Effects. And what I'd like to do here instead of trying to animate everything inside of one document is to focus on one element per document. I'm going to go to my gallery, swipe this and just duplicate this. I'm going to rename this flower. Then I'll duplicate it again. I'll rename this one leaf and then duplicate it once more, rename this one stem. Okay. So let's go for the stem first. What I'll do is I'll just whack everything that doesn't need to be there. So delete that change to black. I think I still have the same pencil, the same brush, which is great. Then I'm going to go to my settings or wrench icon over here. I'm going to go to Canvas, turn on Animation assist, go to settings. That's great frames per second. I'll change that to ten because we're working on ten frames per second in After Effects. Onion skins, I'm just going to go for one, and that should be good. Right. I'll add a frame. And I'm trying to be, you know, exact here. But the thing is, I don't want to be exact exact because I want it to feel like a hand drawn animation, like frame by frame by frame. So it needs to be a little bit unexact inaccurate, textured, handmade, but at the same time, I don't want it to be like, What the heck is going on here? Needs to look like I've tried. So we're just going to go for a five frame loop. If you're lazy, you can go for a three frame loop, but five frames I found is really nice. It's like half a second for a ten frame per second animation. And what's nice about this inside of Procreate is that we can actually preview this. So one, two, three. Okay, we got five. Perfect. Let's play this. Okay, so there's a little bit of a jump, which is okay. We could also change it to ping pong. See how that looks. Yeah, I mean, I think that's great. Ping pong might be the way forward. Okay, so we've got our stem animation here. This is now an animated asset. We can then put this into aftereffects, replace our stem, our static stem and After Effects, and voila, it will be then an animated stem. But we'll do that later. Right now, I want to go to my leaf. And later on, maybe I want to do the same for the leaf as I will for the flower. But for now, we're just going to make it into a fire frame loop. Okay. So stem flour planning. Let's delete these guys. Okay. So this will be like frame one. And here, we've got the Pepsico. Do it call that Pepsico. A petiole. I think it's called a petiole, not a flour person. And we've got the fill behind it over here. So we need to remember to do that. So what I'm going to do here is 12, three, three layers per frame, and then I'll group it. Okay, I'm going to fast forward here. Then let's go to animation assist. Let's turn that on settings, onion skins down to one, frames per second, ten. Okay, great. Then I'm going to focus on just doing the outlines first, then the petiole and then the white fill. So here might be like, Oh, what's going on here? Well, that's because our fill is there, so I'll just turn that off for now. Okay, so if you've got a group selected, you'll tap here and then choose which layer you want to draw on. So I'll always go for the top layer for this leaf. I don't know if you guys draw with sound effects, but it's a lot funner than not drawing with sound effects. If you wanted to put the veins on a separate layer, you could also do that. Alright, let's play that. Okay, so beyond the petiole, I think it looks pretty cool. Okay, I'll do the petiole. We'll do that on the middle layer. Okay, I'm gonna fuss forward here again. Okay, here, we can have a good look at what it looks like. See how it's jumping around quite a bit, but I think that's great. It's perfect. Okay, I'm going to take off the background layer so I can focus on doing the fills. So here, I can perhaps just move this one up. Okay. Let's go for white. And I'll change the onion skins to none just so I can see exactly what's going on. Remember, I don't want to, like, fill this completely. I want it to feel still textured and, like, I've actually drawn the background in. Okay. And if we need to, we can also use ping pong, so we can just change it to ping pong. And that works quite nicely. It also kind of looks like it's swaying in the wind a little bit, so that might just, you know, play out really well for us. Okay, so we've got two of our assets here. We've got our stem and our leaf. Perhaps for this one, I can also just turn off the background. And then our flour is next. Okay, let's delete all of these, delete the planning. Okay, we'll go to the animation assist, change the settings to ten frames, onion skins to one. Okay, I'm going to do the outlines first. So I'm going to do five sets of outlines to do the five frame loop, and then I'll actually animate this in, but I'll do it backwards so that I can keep on adding frames. And then After Effects, we'll just flip that around. Okay. So we'll go and add a frame here, just turn off the fill. Okay, not trying to be exact exact, exact, but being pretty close. If that happens to you, it's just because you double tap and you just got to double tap to get back to your brush. It switches between the eraser or the last used tool and your brush. Really handy when you know what's going on, when you don't know what's going on, man, it's like, What is it? This is crazy. Okay, some lovely texture in there. Okay, let's play that. It's a little bit of a shift. But again, if we go for ping pong, yeah, I think that's great. So ping pong might be like, our saving grace here to, you know, instead of it being that, like, that big like up, that jump. Okay, so we've got our five frames. From here, what I want to do is start animating it down. And what we don't need to worry about Procreate is moving this flower at all, because it's going to stay in the same position, and in After Effects, we're going to move it around, put it in the right place, or parent it to the stem, something like that. Okay, so it's going to end up down here. Perhaps what we can do here is just not raise. We'll just maybe do, like, the last frame here. Something like that, or maybe it's like that. And then tap on this and set it as the foreground. And then we'll just drop the opacity. And this makes it easy to know where we're going. Okay, so let's add a frame. And we're not raising again. If we need to, we can always add a frame in between two frames, if it looks weird or something, or if it animates too fast. Okay, let's play that. So maybe here we're gonna add another frame. In between those two frames. Okay, then maybe in between these two frames, too. Or here to there. Let's see how that looks. Yeah, that's lovely. Okay, this final one. We can just say, you're not the foreground anymore. Sorry, and we'll pull up the opacity again. Alright, maybe we can do a ping pong just to have a look at what it looks like if it's growing. Yeah, it looks great. Okay. So now you might be like, Yeah, let's go for it, but what we still got to do is we got to make sure that each one of these has a background, which can be a little bit frustrating. So there's no real quick way to do this. Besides, we're doing things frame by frame, handmade. So we need to put in a little bit of effort, you know. Again, sound effects make everything better. Boo Boo Boo Boo Boo pop. We're coming until the end. Okay. Fantastic. Now, let's go for white. And hope, deep. I think this one's done right. Yeah, it is. Okay, so we're going for this one, I'm going to change the onion skins to zero. And I just got to remember not to press too hard. Otherwise, the texture doesn't really come through. And it's one of the reasons I'm using Procreate is to get this textured illustration style inside of my animations. Okay, one thing that is good here is that the amount of white area that I need to fill gets smaller and smaller as I'm going. Nice benefit of working backwards. ADHD brains like. Okay, this is taking forever. Can we do something else? Okay. So we've got all of the frames here. Now, honestly, to, like, rename all of these on my iPad, mission. So I might rename all of these layers inside of Photoshop or just deal with the ramifications of importing it into After Effects with a whole bunch of unnamed layers and compositions and groups. So at this stage, I've got my flower, which has a five second loop and a complete zero to hero kind of animation. I've got my five second loop, not five second loop, my five frame loop for my leaf and my stem, and a five frame loop plus a zero to hero animation for my flower. Okay, so at this point, I think I can export from here. So share PSD. That's great. Ta ta ta, Rich's MacBook Pro, cool. And can I do both at the same time? Yes, I can. Okay. Alright, now I'm on my computer in my finder, and I've got flower, leaf, and stem. They're extra assets, and it's different because they're not all inside of a plant or PSD. They're separate files because they have these frames, because we're going to take them into their own separate elements as f frame looping animation. It's gonna be epic, but we need to prepare them before we take them into After Effects. We need to trim them. So let's use PSD trimmer. I'm going to say hey rich.net slash PSD TrimR and I'm going to do my flower first. Download PSD. I'll then do my leaf second. Let's go process another. Whoop. Download PSD, process another and stem. Okay. Download PSD. Okay, fantastic. Let's go into Finder. I'm going to delete Stem, leaf and flour and then rename this to flour, rename this one to leaf rename this one to STEM. And maybe I can just say five F for five frames. Okay. The thing that I like to do is name all of my layers as much as possible before I come into After Effects. So you can do that inside of Procreate. I just find it so tiring, so time consuming, trying to type on my iPad. So if you have a keyboard attached to your iPad, fantastic. Still, I find it way easier to do this inside of Photoshop or After Effects. But if you do it inside of After Effects you're not actually changing the layer names. You're just changing the instance names. So I love to do this inside of Photoshop. So that's what I'm going to do. Now I'm going to set up all my groups and layer names. If you're like, Okay, I don't want to do this, you don't have to, but you then have to deal with the problem of unnamed layers and files if you encounter a problem later on. Not saying you will, but, man, if you do and things are unnamed and you've got frame ones and threes and sevens, it's like, super nasty. So that's what I'm going to do now. So let's go for flower five F first. Okay. And I'm going to go all the way down to the bottom. I'm going to do outline first. Okay, I'm going to fast forward here again, too. Okay, we've done the outlines. Now let's do the fools and again. Okay. That's fantastic. I'm gonna collapse all of these. I know how to do this, like, really quickly in After Effects, but this is not After Effects. This is Photoshop. Okay, delete the background. We now got flower one or flower dash one. That's great. Flower dash two, flow dash three, four and five. So these are the five looping frames. And then this is the flower in and maybe we can do this from the top flower in. Copy that one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, ten. 11, 12 and 13. And so the way that we're setting this up here, number 14, makes it a lot easier in After Effects because then we're just like, Okay, at this point, we can start looping it. And from here to frame 14, this is where the flower is going from zero to hero. Okay, that is fantastic. The fact that there's a whole bunch of space around here, that's fine. The fact that it's the same size as our other compositions is great, but if you do want to crop it, you can. It's really easy to go to image, um trim, and then based on transparent pixels and you go, Boop, and it crops it. But I'm going to leave it as the size of the composition settings. There's no real reason for this. Just in case you do, I'll show you how it works in After Effects. Okay. Save this, close. Flour is done. Let's go for leaf. Okay, let's fast forward again. Okay, let's save that and we can close. Then we not gonna do plant that is our original asset. Then stem. This could be even easier. So just Stem one, two, three, four and five. Delete the background, save. Okay, in the next lesson, we're going to take these assets that we've just trimmed and named inside a photoshop into our After Effects and start creating compositions and animations that are full of movement and wiggles and stuff like that. I'll see there. 11. Frame by Frame in After Effects: Alright, now we're going to take our five frame assets that we've trimmed and named inside a photoshop into After Effects, set them up in After Effects so we can begin replacing our static assets with these five frame wiggly wobbly handmade assets. It's going to be epic. It's going to be quite a lot of setup time, but the benefits far outweigh how long it takes and how complicated it might seem. But let's go step by step through the process. Okay, Inside of After Effects. I'm going to just close down our comps folder for now and our elements animated. Let's close down that for now imports. Let's start importing these. Okay, so we've got our stem, so I'm going to pop it into imports. The import kind, composition retain layer sizes. Okay. And then let's go for leaf five F. Same thing, and then flower F. Imports. Okay, fantastic. I'm gonna start with Stem five F. But before we do that, let's move all of these into elements. And I'm saying elements because they're not quite animated in except for the flower, which we'll deal with in just a moment. So let's start with Stem five F, composition, composition settings, ten frames per second, great, background color white. Okay. How long was our composition? 5 seconds. That's fine. For now. We really needed to be quite short. So what I want to do is I want to make each of these layers just one frame. And at the moment, they're just sitting on top of each other, doesn't look like they're moving. So what I want you to do is select all your layers, so Command A and then either drag them and zoom in and drag them and zoom in all the way down to just one frame or if they're not quite one frame, just yet, go to frame number zero, hold down option and press your right brace or bracket. And then I'll make it just one frame. Then we're going to put each of these on their own frame like that. I'm going to press space just so you can see, gives a bit of a wiggle, but then it's like, Okay, there is nothing now. Then I want to make my work area, stop over here so I can either zoom out, ij chit, and drag my work area all the way there, and then zoom in again, which is great. I can press space now, and it gives me a nice preview of what this looks like. Or if this is all the way down there, I can go to frame four, press N, and then it will bring my work area into this five frame work area. Okay, I'm going to press space looks nice, but I think that a ping pong effect could be better. So the way that I'm going to do that is just increase my work area a little bit more. I'm going to select my three middle layers, press Command D, and then command and right brace, and then put these onto their own frames again. So basically just duplicating the middle frames here. So as it goes back here, the next frame would be frame one, and then two, three, four, five, four, three, two, and then back to one. Okay, so I'm going to go to frame number seven, press N, press space. Et's have a look at this ping pong animation. It looks fantastic. Okay, so once you're happy with that, composition, trim comp to work area. So now the composition length is eight frames. Which was great. Fantastic. Looks great. Then we can't add a five or eight frame loop to an animation just yet. So if we have to look at this, let's go to our comps. I think that plant four was our best one. Okay, so let's duplicate this. Command D, supplant six. Let's open this up. Let's go down to stem. And this might get a little bit messy, but let's check it out. So we've got our STEM five frame. It's now actually eight frames. So let's hold down Alt or option and just pop it onto Stem one. Okay. And you'll see that. Hm. Now, the length of it doesn't quite work because it's not even 5 seconds. It's like eight frames. Okay, so I'm going to undo this just so that we still got Stem one. And then what I'll do here is put Stem five F into a new composition and call this one, Stem 30 frame, loop, and then STEM, call this an eight frame. Loop Okay, so Stem 30 frame loop, what we've got here, composition, composition settings. Let's turn this into 30 seconds. That looks good, and then we zoom out a little bit, yeah. And yeah, we need to fill up this space. Okay? So how do we do this? There are some more complicated ways, but the easiest way to do this, the most, you know, stock standard, reliable way to do this is to duplicate this layer. And then move it to the right so that when this layer ends, the one above it begins, and you do this again and again and again. There is an easier way to do this and an even easier, but it gets more and more complicated. So I'm not going to get onto complicated stuff, but I can show you a little bit of an easier way to do this. So I'm going to select all the layers, hold down or just press on my left brace, which means hate or come to the point where my playhead is, so I can move my playhead, select my left brace, and I'll move them there. So once I've got some layers, I'm going to hold down or just select the top layer, and then hold down my command key and then D, press D, D, D. I still got my command layer selected or my command key. And then just keep on duplicating until I have like 50 layers or so, going to scroll down. Comeand Dee, deed. I got 43. Yeah, there we go. About 50. So, there is a lot of them. All right. Then I'm going to hold down either the top one or the bottom one and then select with shift being held down the bottom layer, then go to Animation, keyframe assist, and sequence layers. Make sure that overlap is not checked, then press Okay. And what it does is it sequences our layers for us. So I'm going to press space here, and here we have a looping animation. And it loops for 30 seconds. I don't think I'm going to need 30 seconds of looping animation, but it's here if we need it. Okay, which is great. So we've got our STEM 30 frame loop. Now let's go back to our plan six composition. We've now got Stem one, which is still a static asset, right? It grows in fantastic. Now we're going to replace it with a stem, 30 frame loop or maybe we call that a 32nd loop. There we go. Hold down option and then pop it onto Stem one. Okay, that looks great, except for the fact that it's not align. So quickly, I'm going to select the rest of these layers, parents none, and then I'll move them again, zoom in here. Move these around, zoom out a little bit. Okay. Once I'm happy with that, I'll then re parent it to stem 32nd loop. Okay? And then I 32nd loop, we can then also change the anchor point. Okay, and then move it down here again. Okay, let's play this Okay, so it looks pretty cool. Some of these things are a little bit misaligned, but we can fix that. So I'm going to select all of these, zoom in again, and maybe we move it just a few frames. Okay, so that works out pretty well. Maybe the flour can come down a little bit, but we're still going to update our flower animation in just a bit. Okay, so let's do our leaves next or our leaf animation. So we've got our leaf five frames. It's probably going to be eight frames again, but let's open it up. Composition, composition settings. Background color should be white, and duration 5 seconds and nine frames is fine. Select all of our layers. Hold down option, press right brace, and then Zoomin. They're going to be one frame each, and then just space these out quite nicely. Select our middle frames, Command D, then move them to the top and then put them on their own frames again. On frame number seven, press N, which then creates our work area, composition, trim come to work area. Okay. That looks quite nice. I matches what we had in Procreate. Fantastic. G to rename Leaf five F to eight F and then drag this onto a new composition. We'll then rename this one leaf 32nd loop and leaf eight. Whoop. Eight loop, eight frame loop. Okay, so inside of leaf 32nd loop, I'm going to say composition, composition settings, change this to 30 seconds. Okay. Then duplicate this a lot of time. So a quick way to do this would be to get to five, and then select them all. Command D. Now you've got ten, select all Command D, Command D, Command D, got 40 and then you've got 50 here. Okay. Then I'm going to select all of these. Maybe I'll select from the top, top to the bottom, Effects, keyframe assistant, sequence layers, no overlap, o. Then scroll to the top and zoom out, and they are all nicely sequenced all the way past 30 seconds. The fact that I've got a couple extra here doesn't really matter. Okay, so press play here. Really nice loop. Okay. Then inside of, I'll plant six Animation. All of my leaves now, I can then replace with my leaf 32nd loop. Or actually that won't work because these are all animated in. So if we try this, let's have a look Yep. It looks very weird. So what we need to do is we need to go down to our elements animated folder. We've got our leaf one Anim one. I'm going to duplicate this Command D. I'm going to say leaf one, Loop. Num one. Okay, let's open that up. We've got leaf one in here. We're then going to replace leaf one with leaf 32nd loop. We could call this leaf one, 32nd loop. All right. There we go. I'll close this, close Leaf 32nd loop, loop, close the eight frame loop, close the stem loop. Okay, back to plant six. Got all of my leaf animation composition selected. I'm then going to replace them all with leaf one loop anim one like that just by dropping it on that. And now it doesn't look like we need to do any changes. We have this beautiful leaf animation for all of our leaves, and now they're all wiggly, the stem's wiggly. It looks really, really good. Hmm. So you can just see how quick that is. It took quite a while to set everything up. But once everything is set up, it's just like, bam, like, replace all of those leaves that we've already done earlier with the static leaves. Perfect. Now, it's time for our flower animation. So we've got a lot more than five frames here. So I'm going to go into the five frame flower composition, change the background color to white. Okay. And now what I'm going to do is just make sure that all of these are one frame. I'm then going to duplicate this. So command D. One is going to be called the five frame, one is going to be called the the anim in, okay? So let's go for the five frame first. And then you'll see I've got flower one, two, three, four, five. So I'm going to select the rest of the layers and delete them. And then with these, I'm going to do the same thing that I've done with the previous five frame loops, select the middle layers, duplicate them, put them on top, and then Move them about. Press in here, have a look if that looks good. Looks perfect. It's a really nice ping pong effect. If you didn't want the ping pong effect, remember, you don't have to then duplicate the middle layers. Okay, composition, trim comp to work area. So this will be very nice if I just wanted to replace our current flour with this five frame flour. We can now call it eight frame. Loop. There we go. And then I've got my flour anim in. So let's double tap on this. I'll delete my flour one, two, five. Okay. And then what I'll do is I'll go from flower one, select that first, and then hold down Shift and select 14 last Animation, Keyframe assist sequence layers, make sure that overlap is not checked. And we've got this flour that animates in, which is fantastic. Shop. Okay, so I want to press N here. It's the last frame and then composition, trim com to work area. So this works really nicely. And then it will flow onto that eight frame loop that we created over here. Okay. This is looking really, really good. So inside of plant six, I'm going to go down to my flower. Gonna press to see what effects and things that we've changed. This hue saturation, it goes from black into, you know, kind of white. So I'm going to take that off. Boop. And the scale, I also don't want it to scale, and I want it to animate it. So I'm going to remove that. Okay, so it does do some scaling because it's parented to the stem. So maybe over here, I'm going to put my flower anim in. So I'm gonna replace flower one with flower anim in. Boop. And then just move this along here. Okay, flower I'm in. Where are you? It's up here. And because it's got this transform or collapse transformations, there we go. It's up here. Okay, so let's zoom in a little bit. Okay, that's great. It looks really, really nice. But up until that point, there's nothing there. This little like two frame bud, I want that to be there until this point here, or until this point here, something like that. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to duplicate it, so Command D, and then I'll just select these two frames like this, I'll then go to layer time and enable time remapping like this, I'll then zoom in a little bit. And instead of the two frames, I'll just go for the one frame. And on this frame over here, this is the only frame that I want. So I'll remove this frame over here, this keyframe. So if we had to have a look at what this looks like, chi. It's just static, which is perfect. So I'll put this all the way at the start. Make it go until it begins our animation. So doop. And then our animation begins. And this is all still parented to the stem. Okay, that looks great. And then I will then duplicate this animation or this composition again, zoom in a bit, or move it over here and then replace it with our flower eight frame loop, although we haven't made that into a 32nd loop, so I'm going to quickly pop that into New composition, composition settings. Change that to 30 frames or 30 seconds. Okay, and then just duplicate this a couple of times. So we get to 50 and then select them all Animation, Keyframe assistant, sequence the layers. Okay, that is great. So I'm gonna save that and call it flour 32nd loop. Okay, so let's go back to plant six. This flour anim in, I'm gonna replace with the flour 32nd loop. Like so. Let's have a look. Okay, that all looks really, really good. I think it could begin the flower animation in a little bit sooner. So I'm going to select Oops. Close that, close that, close that. So select these three flour layers and just drag them back a bit. Maybe even a little bit more. Okay, maybe a little bit forward. It's probably about the same as what we had it. Okay, so that looks really, really nice. So we've got this layer over here that's using time remapping to be like just have a keyframe on the first frame, and we're not going to move the time at all. It's just going to stay static on the first frame of the flower animation in composition. And then we're going to go to the flower Animation in. So frame by frame, it builds in Shou do. And then from here, we've got the flower looping animation, which is an eight frame loop inside of a 32nd composition. It's all parented to our stem. Okay, so you can see that there was quite a bit of maybe a little bit complicated setup, quite a lot of steps to actually get a looping animation working. But once we have a looping animation working, we can then just simply replace our static assets with these wiggly handmade assets, and it looks beautiful. The only thing I guess I want to change here is make this longer. I want to see this on screen for more longer. More, okay? So we increase our work area. And this by itself is already beautiful. The fact that it's animating in is it's lovely. It's amazing. So from here, we can duplicate this, try some other things. We can duplicate some of our earlier compositions and replace the static elements with the animated looping elements. Yeah, I think we've done a lot of good work here. In the next video, what I want to do is explore the what if it's windy question. Like, how does this plant or yeah, this plant interact in the wind? What happens if it's a windy day? How do we make it look like, you know, it's bending in the wind? So yeah, let's explore that in the next video. 12. Flower in the Wind: In this lesson, the curiosity that I want to explore is, what if it's windy? How do we get this plant to sway? What do the leaves do? I think this could be really fun to explore. Inside of After Effects, I've got plant six. That's what we ended up with last time. It's beautiful. There's a lot of wiggly elements. Just this alone looks great. So I'm going to duplicate this. Command D. This is plant seven. I will work with this a little bit later, but for now, I want to just test out getting this whole thing to bend. So what I need to do is pop plant seven into its own compositions that we can work with the entire thing. So like this, it's now all inside of this plant seven composition. And the reason why I'm doing plant seven instead of plant six is because, well, I still want to retain everything that is plant six. So I'll work inside of plant seven just now. So maybe instead of plant eight composition, I'll say plant seven windy, something like that. What I want to do is use this CC bend effect. So you could have some effects and presets up here. You could search for it, so CC bend it. There we go. Or you could go to effect. And here it's like, Well, where is this? Where could it be?'s go under Distort. There we go. CC bend it. Tap on that, and it applies it to the layer that is selected. Might be like, What is going on here? It doesn't look great. No, it doesn't right now. So here you can adjust the start point and the endpoint. So this is the endpoint. So I'm going to make this quite high. And you can see as I'm adjusting it up, it shows or reveals more of the composition. And then the start point, I'll make that quite low down here. You might be like, What are you doing? Well, I have some experience with this. Now I'm going to play with the bend. Okay, so that's quite nice. Maybe I can bring the star point or the endpoint down a little bit. I was a little bit better earlier. So that's really nice. I wonder if I can bring the Starpoint up. Just want to make sure that it doesn't get chopped off at any stage. Okay. And of course, we can animate this. So maybe it starts out. Let's start animating a chair. But but B starts out over here, and it sways over quite a bit, and then it sways over quite a bit again. Whoo. Okay, so this is what, 6 seconds, 5 seconds. How does that look? So I just want to copy that, paste that, remove this keyframe. So quite like that. This one doesn't need to be as much. I don't think it is. This one goes to 27. This goes to 14, then maybe this one can go to something like ten. And this one can go to minus five. This one can go to two, and then like zero. Let's have a quick look at what that looks like. Okay. And what we can do here is select all of these keyframes, right, click keyframe assistant, Easy Ease. Looks a lot better. Okay, that looks lovely. And that happens over 10 seconds. So maybe we can make all of these come a little bit closer. So maybe this isn't necessarily wind, per se. Maybe it's just a plant growing and it's a bit heavy or something. Maybe it can end. A little bit to the right. Okay, so it's a really nice animation. It's super fluid. It's beautiful. I like it. So you can have a lot of fun with this bend animation, CC bended Animation or effect. Okay, but now I have the question of, like, what about the leaves? Like, what fun can we have with those? And so that's why I created a new composition or duplicated plant six into plant seven cause inside of plant seven, I actually want to change the rotation of each of the leaves. So let's do it. Let's go for leaf one, which is over here. What I'll do here, you can see that, hey, this is actually looking a bit weird. So perhaps we can jump into here, jump into here. I'm going to select all of these and just tap on this continually collapse transformations. Let's see if that has any different server here. There we go. So it's not taking up the entire composition, which is just a lot easier to then select the leaves. Okay, so these come in, and then I want them to rotate a little bit. So right now, I don't think these have any animations or keyframes or anything. So it's gonna come in. Whoop. And yeah, at the moment, I've got a third quality, but I maybe even be able to drop that to a quarter. It's feeling a little bit slow. And then I'll just start animating the rotation a little bit. So let's go here. And so for each leaf, yeah, I can do this individually. How I kind of feel what it feels like. And I want to do each leaf individually because yeah, they're individual leaves. Like we could create this animation and then create a composition of it and then replace each of the leaves with it, but then it'll be all the same. So I want each leaf to be unique. Okay, that looks pretty cool. And so I will then use easy ease Okay, that looks great. I'll select this one. I'll just press R for rotation and do the same thing. And I'll use EZ Es from the beginning. So, yeah, it should go up and down. Maybe it would stay in one place a little bit longer or one kind of rotation takes a little bit longer or shorter. Okay, let's have a look at that. Okay, that's looking really cool. And I'm thinking, Oh, no, why did I choose one with eight leaves, you know? Like, why couldn't I have chosen one with three leaves? Well, let's do it all. I don't think it'll take too long. Okay, let's go for this one. To Go for keyframe assistant, go for Easy Ease. And if I select Easy Ease right now, it, you know, applies that easy ease to the rest of the keyframes. Let's speed things up here a little bit. And you can see that there's like I kind of want to always have movement. Like, the more natural it feels, the better. Yeah, it kind of feels like each leaf now has its, a life of its own, which is lovely. Alright, so right now, this looks pretty cool. We have all of these, like, leaves like swinging in the wind. Yeah, that looks great. What about our rose or our flower? I think, at this point, yeah, we can start animating it here. And maybe we need to go inside of this 32nd loop two and select all of these and make sure that collapse transformations is on. Yeah, that's great. Okay. So the point, the anchor point is actually down here. So I'm gonna move it back up here. Okay? And then I'll press R for rotation. And then let's start rotating this just slightly, make sure it's on easy Es. Okay. And you can see how nice this looks with a frame by frame loop hand drawn. And then we're just animating the rotation in After Effects very easily, very powerfully. Okay, let's have a quick look at what that looks like. Okay, that looks really cool. So then let's go to plan seven or windy. And I'll just been doing that all inside of plan seven, and this is where the CC bandit effect applied. And it just looks like full of life, right? Like, yeah. So yeah, I think that if we cap this at around about 10 seconds and press N to make our work array go there, otherwise, it's like, how do we stop this? But let's just say it's a ten second animation. So maybe it comes here goes five Let's make you go to five this side. And then let's go for, like, negative ten this side, and then let's go for seven this side. So it's windy. Maybe a bit more windy in the beginning, but it's still, you know, swaying a bit. It's lovely. It's so full of life. The wiggles, Oh, everything. It just looks really, really cool. So now at this point, you can apply this kind of effect to any of the other compositions that you've made, make duplicates, do some bending. You could even replace or duplicate this one and then replace plant seven with plant two or plant one or something like that. What I want to do in the next two lessons are two curiosity explorations. The first is, how do I make this look a little bit more abstract? Can I just use the flower multiple times to kind of create like an animated pattern? And then the second one is, can I bring in more texture into the background onto the flour, maybe even change the color, but just make it even more handmade, feel like it's really texted, really, you know, hand drawn without taking it back into Procreate and hand drawing the whole thing. So in the next lesson, what I'll do is try to create something a little bit more abstract, and then the lesson after that, I'll create some kind of textured background Procreate, and then bring it into After Effects. All right. See you in the next lesson. 13. Abstract Flowers: In this lesson, what I'm going to explore is a more abstract kind of composition animation. I'm going to try take this flower and create some kind of pattern or animated pattern from it. So let's go inside of After Effects. Let's go to the project, and yeah, let's have a look at what we gotcha. P p p elements. Got flower one, and we've got this flower 32nd loop and flower Animation in. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to duplicate the flower animation in, which is like that and then get it to do a bit of a ping pong. So let's come on D, flower Animation in out ping pong. Alright. Let's zoom out a little bit. Or let's do composition settings. Let's go for 5 seconds. Okay. Okay, that's cool. And then the flour eight frame loop, one, two, three, four, five. I'm going to copy that. Command C. And then this gets to the end and Command V. I'm going to press left brace, and then go Command shift left brace to make them all go to the bottom, and then just space these out. Not like that. Okay, so it animates in, and then sticks around for five frames. Okay, that's great. Now I need to basically animate these all out again. So command C or sorry, Command D, and then command shift right brace, Max it go all the way to the top. And then I will then press left brace to align them all up and then select this bottom one, flower four, select flour in one, and then animation, keyframe assistant, sequence layers, no overlap. Okay. Okay, so we've got flower four here, and down here, we've got flower five, and we've got flower one. And flour in one. So I don't need that one. I'm gonna press in here to decrease our work area. Okay, let's have a look at this. Alright, I wonder what it would look like without four, three, two, one. So I'm gonna delete that and then all of these flour ends. Let's have a look at that. G make it a little bit quicker. Yeah, I think that's better. Okay, so what we got now is we've got a looping ping pong flour coming in, flour going out. It's just gonna keep on looping. So we're gonna have some fun with this. So this is called flower Anim in out ping pong, which is great. So let's add this to a new composition by bump, and we'll drag this all the way to top into comps. So let's go for flour Abstract one. Open this up, and I'll tap on this transform or claps transformations, and I will move this position over here. Okay, I'm going to go until I get the full flower. Let's go to composition settings, 5 seconds. Yeah, it should be good. Okay, so now I've got this, you know, this flower, and I'm going to make sure that it's in the middle for now. If you don't see this align window or panel, just go to window and align, and I align layers to the composition. Okay, so yeah, it's pretty cool. Now, what I think could be pretty cool is having a bunch of these. So maybe one, two, three, four, five, six, maybe eight of them. So I'm going to go and press R for rotation, go to 90. Okay. Press Command D, press R for rotation, negative 90. Okay, then select both of them and just use my keyboard to put them in the middle. So something like this could be pretty cool. Maybe it's a little bit too close, so a little bit to the right, a little bit to the left, maybe one more. Okay. Okay, that looks great. Except it is not really looping, is it? Okay. So let's go into here. Let's go composition, trim comp to work area. Okay. And then we've I'll flour anim out ping pong, and this is 3 seconds ish. So maybe like 31 frames. Okay, so I'm going to add this to a new composition, and I'm going to say ping pong 30 seconds. Okay, then composition, let's go composition settings, change this to 30 seconds. Zoom out a little bit. This shouldn't take too long because this is a little bit longer. Okay, let's see what we have here. Okay, that's great. Should be fantastic in and out and in and out. Great. Okay, now we're on flower abstract number one again. So instead of the ping pong, I'm gonna go for ping pong 30 seconds and replace those. Okay, let's go into this one and just check that collapse transformations is on. Okay, then it's easy to select my layers again. Okay, then it's just going to keep on going over and over and over. Okay, but what's really important here is that we actually get a length or composition duration that fits the loop so that it loops like perfectly. That would be great. So inside the ping pong there's three frames or 3 seconds and one frame. Okay, so let's try that. Let's go to three and one. Let's see if that loops nicely. I think so. Okay, that means that we can now duplicate these, Command D. Press Command and write brace. Okay, so we might not get four here, but let's go for three. Command D, and command and right brace. Let's bring it down a little bit. Okay. That looks quite nice. Okay, so maybe it's a little bit too symmetrical, but it looks pretty cool. So flower test, flower abstract one, Command D, flower abstract two. Let's open that up. And I'm going to start just dragging each of these layers a little bit. Maybe I'll drag them all to the left to begin with. So it means it starts somewhere around here. And they're still going to be looping, but they're going to be starting and ending at slightly different times. So I'm dragging some to the right and some to the left. Okay. And that looks like, really nice. It kind of feels random, it's lovely. Yeah, I like that a lot. So you can use your elements that you've created to create different kinds of animations, sometimes a little bit more conceptual or abstract, sometimes a little bit more real, sometimes super rigid, sometimes windy, you know. Whatever you want, like, give in to that curiosity. It's just another composition, another duplicate, another replacement of elements and layers. So have some fun with different kinds of animations, different kinds of concepts. In the next lesson, I'm going to create a little bit of textured background inside of Procreate, bring it into After Effects, and then start putting that on top of some of our compositions to create some kind of more texture. So it really feels like this is a legitimate handmade, hand penciled kind of illustration slash Animation. 14. Adding More Texture (and Getting Stuck): Okay, this is future Rich, the Rich that is editing and putting this course together. Now, I made a choice to keep this lesson, this version of this lesson in because actually I get stuck. I'm like, there's one critical thing that I don't quite understand or I forgot, and it kind of, like, trips me up. And I even acknowledge it during the lesson. But still, there's a lot of parts where I'm just like, looking down, really confused, like, a very big scowl on my face. But I want to keep it in because I want to show you that when you're exploring, sometimes you get stuck. I want to show you how I go about fixing it, how I go about solving it. I want to show you that I am not super human. So if you need to, just fast forward through parts of it, and then yeah, just watch how I solve it at the end. In this lesson, I'm going to create an animated background. It's going to be five frames, it's going to be looping, it's going to be textured. And the reason I'm doing this is to add even more texture to the background to the elements. So I'm creating this background in Procreate, and then exporting it as a PSD and then bringing it into After Effects. I'm going to create a new ultra HD document, rotate a little bit. My brush is swans. I'm gonna turn on Animation assist. Make sure it's at ten frames per second. Just onion skins, nothing for now. And I'm just going to make this, pretty big, as big as possible. I really like to take up a lot of space here, the whole document. So I want to try, like, fill most of the document, but then leave, like, nice textured gaps, almost like a photocopier wood or some kind of really cool texture. Maybe you can see this as like a little bit of grain, dust, that really nice, like, old film feel. Okay, and then I'm going to do this five times. So add frame. Let's get to it again. Okay, let's have a look at what that looks like. Pretty cool. So maybe I just do three frames. And with a ping pong, it'll kind of be like four frames. Okay, let's play that. So we get a ping pong. Okay, that's epic. Let's move the background ller and then I will share this as a PSD photoshop document, send it to my computer. Fantastic. Alright, here we are. And it's called Untitled Artwork. I'm going to rename it big dot PSD. And the good news here is that we don't need to trim the layers because the layer contents are the same size as the document size. So I'm just going to drag it into imports, inside of After Effects, composition retain layer sizes. Okay, that's great. And then I'll drag BG into elements. And let's open up BG, composition, composition settings. Let's change it to white. Okay? 30 frames, that's okay for now. Let's select all of our layers except for our background, which we can delete. And then option right brace to make it just one frame long. Then we'll zoom in. And then duplicate frame three in the middle. Duplicate that and then just bring it out there. So there's a nice ping pong effect. Press N to reduce our work area, and then composition, we can trim comp to work area. Okay, there we go. So BG, I'm going to rename this BG Loop and then drag it into a new composition, call this one BG Loop, 30 seconds. And then composition, composition settings. Let's change this to 30 seconds and then duplicate this five times, select it all, duplicate it. Select all and press Command D, one, two, three, four, five. There's 60 versions of this. That's okay. Select the first one, shift, select the last one, Animation, keyframe assistant, sequence layers, no overlap. Okay. Okay. Do we have 30 seconds yet? We do not. Okay. So let's do this all again. Command D, command shift, left brace. Okay. And then we'll just drag all of these, like so. Okay. So now we should have more than enough, which we do. Okay, so we've got this epically texted background that we can now use. Okay, so Command S, save that. Let's close elements, close imports. Let's go to comps. And yeah, we've got plant seven windy that I reckon we can apply this too. So what I'm going to do is select this Command D, plan seven windy with BG. Okay, so let's open this up. And I want to apply the texture to both the plant and the background. So let's close this elements BGop Okay. That's pretty intense. It doesn't quite look looks really stormy. It's lovely. Maybe that can be something else that we can explore. Like, I'm like, Oh, storm rain. Like worms, raining, growth, like that epic. Leaves blowing off, you know? Just lovely. Okay, so under Effects and Presets, I want to search for inverts, or channel inverts. Let's invert that. Okay, so it would be like white on black. So let's change composition, composition settings, background color to black. Okay, that looks quite nice. I wonder if we need to reduce the opacity, so I'm going to just drill down to transform or press T for opacity. I don't think so. What we could then do is look for something like levels. Pop that on. Um, I'm wondering if this is actually changing anything. It doesn't look like it. Let's go for curves. Just trying to make it, you know, maybe not so dark or so black. It doesn't really look like it's doing anything. Did do do. Of. No, it's not. All right. Well, then we'll just have to live with it for now. Okay, so, yeah, I still think it's, it's pretty intense. So what I'm going to try to do is go layer new and solid, and I'm just going to make this a white layer. Press T for opacity and then reduce the opacity a little bit. Okay, maybe we go for 80. So we're putting something on top of the background layer to not make it so intense. Yeah, I think that works really well. Okay, what I'd like to do now, too, is if we zoom in here, I'm going to take off this white layer. Is that underneath here, like the white leaves are on top, so I wonder what that would look like if perhaps plant seven had a blend mode of multiply. And if it doesn't really work, it might be because a multiply or a blend mode doesn't work on a background color and needs an actual solid or something to work on. So I'm going to duplicate this and just move it to the bottom. So turn off this one. Going to see if it has any kind of effect. Yeah, not so sure, actually. Okay, so now what I want to try to do is add this texture to this plant layer. So I'm going to just put that back on normal. Yeah, it doesn't really look like it's had much effect. Okay, back on normal, and then I'm going to go to my project, bring in BG Loop 30 seconds and put this on top again. And here, what I want to do is say, Hey, just be visible where this plant seven is visible. So if you can't see this, tap on toggle switches and mode to see your track mate. And then you could either use this, which is kind of like a clipping mask, or you could use the track mate, which does something like this. Which, yeah, it's really interesting, right? It's totally changed how this feels because it's like, it's all black now, but it's a lot more textured. And the reason why we can't see in between them is because the leaves and the flower, it has that fill, remember? And so if we really wanted to, we could go into leaf one and leaf four here and turn off the fill over here. And we have to do that for each frame in the animation for a leaf and for the flower. And then it would finally update all the way over here. Plant seven windy with background. But for right now, I think this looks really, really cool. It feels a lot more dark, a lot more heavy. And if you're like, Oh, but what if we invert to this? Okay, cool. Let's try that. Let's go for layer new adjustment layer. And this is at the top. You can press command right brace. And then we can search again for invert. Let's pop that on this layer. How does that look? Yeah, that looks it's beautiful, right? Okay. Then, perhaps I want something in the background again, you know? So these two are linked because of the track mat. But then this particular one, yeah, it doesn't have I can't really see him, you know. So I'm gonna try and get him back. Opacity is at 100. It's definitely there. It's got, uh, kind of weird. So he's definitely there. I don't think this one has anything to do with it being there or not. Alright, at this point, I'm a little bit stuck, honestly, like trying to figure out why this doesn't work. And so if this happens to you, like, that's okay. Like, you're allowed to just move on, leave that composition as is, or be like, Cool, I like it, how it is. Not exactly how I want it, but this is part of exploration. You could go down a path and kind of just hit a dead end. There's one more thing that I think I can try right now, and maybe you have this idea while you're walking or in the shower or something, you're like, Oh, yes, or maybe you wake up at 2:00 in the morning, like, I think I got it. Yeah, try it in the morning or if you can't sleep, then just get up and go check it out. So what I want to try to do here is inside this BG loop. What I want to do or inside this BG loop is layer new and I'll choose a solid. I'll go for white, and I'll just add this at the bottom. And maybe this will make a difference. Not sure. So, come on, S, let's close that Bj Loop 30 seconds. Yeah, there we go. So I think I was like, trying to invert it, but it was just inverting, like, the visible bits and not the background layer underneath. And so if a composition has a background layer of white and you invert the composition, it just, like, inverts the contents and not the composition's background. So yeah, this for me looks much better. Okay, there we go. Lovely. And here I might be like, Okay, maybe three second loop for the background is too short or maybe the brush is wrong, but now I can go into Procreate, create a little bit longer Animation, background animation or use a different brush and then bring in it again. Yeah. It looks really cool. Yeah, it's beautiful. I love it. Okay, let's try that out on comps, flower abstract two. So I'll just duplicate that flower abstract three. Let's close some of these compositions. I will copy this background loop 32nd, and I will paste it in over here. And maybe here, all I need to do is I need to change the mode to multiply. Or what I might need to do is delete all of these flowers, bring in flower abstract two, and then I can use a track mat on flower abstract two, something like that. Maybe it looks a little bit weird. Maybe I need to invert this one. And then BG Loop 30 seconds, just duplicate that, bring it down below. No mat. And let's take off invert. Yeah, maybe not as effective as the other one, but maybe we could try this out. So I really want these to be white. So let's take off multiply normal invert. There we go. Maybe too many inverts going on there. I guess this also doesn't need a multiply effect. Yeah, so it feels kind of nice. I think that I could work on the background a little bit more. But, yeah, I think it's yeah, a nice exploration. And it was really nice for me to show you what happens when I get stuck. Like, I don't know everything, and sometimes I do know stuff, and I just missteps or something changes after effect. So if that happens, like Google it, go on to YouTube, try figure it out, ask AI, like, this is happening, or sometimes you just need to, you know, step back, take a break, and then come back a little bit later. And the next lesson, what I'm going to explore is adding some color into my black and white compositions. I'll see. 15. Exploring Colour: Lesson, what I'm going to explore is adding color to my black and white compositions. There are a couple of ways that I can do this. Sometimes it works best with one way, sometimes best with another way. So let's see what we can get. Okay, I After Effects, where I am right now is on plant seven windy with background. So it's beautiful, it's textured, fantastic. I then got plant seven windy, which has these veins in the leaves, but I quite like plant seven windy with BG, so I'm going to duplicate that, so command D. And then I'll say with BG poll color. Let's go into here. And a very simple way to add color here is to go to layer new solid. And we could go for a deep orange, we could go for a blue. This blue's quite lovely. Okay? And if you do add a solid, you'll see it at the bottom. In the solids, it goes into a solids folder. Okay? So you might be like, Yeah, but it's just blue now. So where it says mode, which is like your blend mode, if you don't see that, tap on toggle switches and modes. Tap on multiply, which looks quite nice, kind of starry or maybe like nighttime ish. You could also set this to screen, which, yeah, that looks really nice. If you pop that adjustment layer on, Oof. So something like this, yeah, it's beautiful. I feel like, Okay, that's great. Let's create a new one. So layer new solid. Maybe let's go for a pink, like a light pink or something. And then we'll change this. You can change it to almost anything. So what does overlay look like? Has a different kind of effect. Dancing dissolve. Nope. What about a color bun? What about a linear burn? So they all have these different kind of effects. Depends on what you want. You can explore all of these different blend modes. But let's go down to screen for this one. So it totally depends what you want. If you want texture, if you want it to be smoother. Yeah. So I quite like that. I think I like the blue a little bit more. Perhaps you even want to, you know, merge blue and pink. So I'm gonna press T to get to opacity. And then you could even make something a little bit more purple. You could animate the opacity. Yeah, there's so much you can do. Okay, so that's one way to bring in color into our animations. I'm going to adjust the opacity backup. Maybe just turn that off because I really like the blue. The other way, especially if there are multiple elements, there's only really one element. You've got your plan seven, and that's the only thing that I can change. Sure, there are background animations that we're using too. But let's go up here. I close my elements folder, plan seven windy. See, this only really has one element inside the composition. Plan seven, on the other hand, has a bunch. So I'm going to say command A or Command O, just collapse them all. And you'll see that there's a lot of elements in here. So let's select plant seven, Command D, and I'll rename it as plant seven. With color. Okay. So here I can select my flower. I can select my leaves, and I can change their color. So let's make this flower pink or something. And there's a bunch of different ways you can do this on After Effects. So if you go to effect and you go down to color correction, hue saturation is pretty easy. You can also use something like change to color or change color, but let's go for change to color. And from we'll go from black to let's go for a pink. Something like that. And if nothing changes, don't be alarmed, you may just have to change some of these settings, so change hue lightness and saturation. Okay? So that's interesting. It changes the white fill as well, which is, yeah, it's a different kind of effect. So if we select this change to color, effect, copy that, select our other two flour layers and paste that. Let's have a look at what this looks like. So that alone, looks really interesting, right? Like, it's just this really pink flower on top of this black plant. So, yeah, I quite like that. I wasn't going for that, but that looks really nice. So we can maybe say, like, plant seven with color one. Okay, we can duplicate that plant seven with color two. Let's open this one. Or maybe we're actually still in plant seven. Okay, so let's duplicate or delete that one, rename things a little bit. Okay, I'm going to copy that plan seven over here. And then this plant seven this plant seven? This plant seven. Okay, paste over here. Confusing. I know, but now plant seven is the original plant seven and then plant seven with color one is now this one. Then we can duplicate this plant seven with color two. And perhaps for the leaves, we can use hue saturation. So effect if you don't want to use the effect menu, you can go to the Effects and Presets. Search bar here and just type in Hue saturation and color correction is the menu item that it's under. So if you go to effect or if I type here, effect color correction and then hue saturation, there we go. So here I would go colorize, let's zoom in a little bit. Still on a quarter. Let's change it to a half maybe. The lightness, let's bring that up. Let's bring up the saturation a little bit, and then colorize this to be green. Saturation, drop that. So something like that could be pretty cool. Not too saturated. Okay, cool. Then I select hue saturation here. I copy that. I select the rest of the leaves and the stem two, and then I just press Control or Command V, and it then populates the entire composition. And so, yeah, that's it changes it, right? Now it kind of feels more like a kid's drawing very innocent. Okay, so, yeah, I really like that. That's great. And so now what we can do is say, plant seven windy. Let's duplicate that. Plant seven windy two with color. Okay. So open up this. Okay, so this one has the wrong plant seven. There we go. So let's go to plant seven, windy two. Let's update this one. Okay. Plant seven windy with color two. Okay, then plant seven with color two. So this is windy now and with color. And you can see now how this changes things a lot. Color adds something else into animation. So there are tons of possibilities here. Again, explore, given to your curiosities. In the next lesson, I will cover exporting your animations from After Effects. There's quite a lot to cover there. So I'll see there. 16. Exporting From After Effects: Alright. In this video, I'm going to show you how to export your animations from After Effects. But, whoa, there are tons of different ways to export something from After Effects. You can use After Effects itself. You can use Adobe Media Encoder. You can export as an MP four, an MOV, a Photoshop file, an animated Jif. You can export with an Alpha channel. It totally depends on what you want to do with your exported animation. So I'm going to go through a couple of different options or use cases, and we're going to start with a very simple stock standard export or what it's called in After Effects, it's called a render. So right now we've got plant seven windy with color two that we finished up in the last lesson. It's not a looping animation. When it starts again, the flower is nothing, and it grows into something. So we don't need it to loop, right? So with your timeline selected, you've got this, like, blue box around it. Tap on composition, and then you're going to tap on add to rendic. This is the easiest way to render this composition. So you tap on there, it goes to your rendic tab. It's got the best settings, and you've got it at 15 megabytes/second, which is honestly, it's great. Like, if you're needing something of high quality, you can change it. And so you can tap on this drop down. You can go for 40 megabytes/second. So sometimes I o for that. Sometimes you can go for high quality or high quality with Alpha, and I'll talk about that in a moment. Lstless is like the best of the best of the best quality. I don't think I've ever actually needed this. Again, Photoshop sequence. And if you want to do something custom, go into here, check out the formats. Like if you've got some sound and you've done some sound compositing or whatever, yeah, you might want to export an MP three or a PNG sequence if you want to take your images into Procreate or somewhere else. All right? So cancel. You can also just tap on that to get that output module settings again. But most of the time, I just go for h264 match render settings, 15 megabytes/second, and then here you can tap on this. Honestly, I've never, ever used any of these things. The only thing I've used over here is the quality best or no, actually, I've always gone for best. The resolution, I've changed this to half or a third. And when you do this, it just speeds up the render time. So if you're not sure if it's actually going to render how it looks like in After Effects, as opposed to in your finder or somewhere else, just render it. Maybe you need to render it at half or third quality, just to preview that everything looks like it looks like everything is working really nicely. And if it is, then you can go back and change the resolution to fill and then export it again. Okay. Who. It's a lot of like, Oh, yeah. If you need this, if you need that. But most of the time, you won't need to do anything. Output two, we will then go to Downloads folder. I'm going to create a new folder called renders. Sometimes I create a folder called De if I've got stuff that's not just renders. Okay? So let's go and create that. You can change the file name if you want to and save. And then you tap on render. And you've got this little render bar here. This is really nice and quick. And when it's finished, it makes that lovely sound. And seriously, this is like music to my ears. I remember waiting 24 hours or longer for one of my college animations to finish rendering. And when something is rendering in After Effects, you can't do anything else. It's rendering. You can't change compositions. You can't do anything, right? You can cube animations to be rendered, so you can have like ten or 100 and just go like render. And we'll just, like, process them all. But right now, let's check out our finder. And inside of our renders folder here, we've got plant seven, windy with color two. And that looks great. Super cool. Okay, so that is Export one done or render one done. Now, if you're like, I want to render this with a transparent background because I want to take it somewhere else outside of After Effects, maybe into Premiere Pro or somewhere else that you do editing, you want to add it on top of video or other animations or you want to send it to Procreate dreams, Who, how do we do that? So let's go inside of plant seven windy with color two, and we'll tap on this button here, which is a toggle transparency grid, and nothing happens because we've got this white solid. So if we take that off, you'll then see this transparency grid. Now, this won't work for every animation because some animations, there is no nothingness behind it. There is no transparency. There's a video behind it, and you can't make that transparent, right? So this is a special case, a special scenario. So what we do here, again, we go composition and then add to rendic and we then select high quality with Alpha. Okay. And here I'll be two, underscore one. Cool, let's render. Fantastic. Here you'll see that it has a black background. So Finder won't really support this. Also, it's really interesting to know here that the whites in the leaves show up, which is cool. Okay, so Finer doesn't support Alpha channels in a video, which is fine. Some apps don't support Alpha channels at all, but After Effects does Premier does, maybe some of the apps that you use also support it. So I'm going to go inside my After Effects, like Project Window here and I'm going to type in renders. And then I will add there's 21 to it, and then drag it into a new composition. And there we go. It is supported. Alright. So if you wanted to, you could go layer a new solid. Let's go for a light a light sky blue, and we'll drag that underneath. Okay. There we go. And so that's how you export something with an Alpha channel. Now the next thing that I want to cover is exporting a looping animation. So what we'll do is we'll go to our comps. Let's go to flower abstract number two. And what we've got Che is something that's like just over 3 seconds. And back in the day when Instagram just looped your videos, that was great. You could, like, upload a three second animation and it looped and looped and looped and looped. Fantastic. But now it does one play, and it's like, Hey, you want to watch this again? Which is not what we want. We want this to loop and loop and loop. So what we're going to do here is drag flower abstract two onto a new composition. And the process here is much the same as before. It might be like, sorry, what's going on? Why is there a blue background? Because our composition settings have changed. So let's go and change that to white. Let's change this to roughly 30 seconds. And zoom out. Okay, and then we duplicate this a couple of times. Ba ba pa, select the first, and then the last Animation, keyframe assistant, sequence layers, Okay, go. And what we need to do is we need to come to the end of one of these layers, Zoom in just before the switchover the frame before press N. Then we can zoom back out. Let's see if this transition from the end of the animation to the start actually works. Okay, so something's going on here, right? It's like, What? Like, it's a bit weird. So I'm going to double tap into here. And the reason why this is happening is because, cool, we've got a work area here, but our composition is still 5 seconds long. So we need to go composition and then trim comp to work area, which is fine for this composition, doesn't affect it at all. But if we go to flower abstract four or maybe we call it flower abstract two, long loop because I'm not sure how long it's actually going to be. And we named it loop. Okay, so inside here, let's go and select all of our layers again. I'm then going to press my left brace and then Animation keyframe assistant sequence layers. Okay, now let's try this again. I'm going to zoom in here. Maybe around over here, just 28-29, press N. Zoom out again. Let's see if this loops nicely. Yep, I think it does. Okay, fantastic. Here we can trim the C to the work area. So composition, trim Com to work area, and then we can say composition, add to render Q, or we can then say add to Adobe Media Encoder Q. Now, I've already opened my media encoder. I'm just going to tap on this. Normally, when I open this, it takes a long time to actually open. It jumps up and down, and it's like, Is this thing actually going to open? So when you open it for the first time, just be aware that it does take a while. The benefit of using Media Encoder is that you can carry on working in After Effects while Media Encoder is rendering stuff, which is great. If your computer can handle that, fantastic. Sometimes when your computer is rendering stuff, everything else is like, slow. It's a great time to go for a walk, go for a shower, make yourself coffee, tea, make dinner, something, right? If you've got a beast of a computer, just carry on working. So this is H 0.264, great match source high bit rate. Who, there are a lot of different things here, but you could be adaptive high bit rate. It's slightly different After Effects. If you don't change anything, it will go into a special After Effects media encoder folder. So we're going to change the output file to renders. There we go. And press play. It will connect to the dynamic server and then start rendering. Now what's interesting here is that I noticed it had a black background which I don't think was the point, right? So, I'm curious to know whether this is an Alpha channel or not. I don't think it is, but let's just check it out. Dip, dip dip. Let's pop it in here. No, it's just a black background. So if we go back to our comps, go back to the long loop, we want the white background. So I'm curious now to see what happens if we render it in After Effects. So add to render Q and call it loop one, render. It looks like it's white. Okay, so be aware that there might be some things weird between the two different ways of rendering. If you wanted to make sure that it had a white background, you would just need to add a white solid at the bottom as a layer. Then it would render white. Let me show you. Okay, so let's go in here. I think we've actually got some solids that we can use. White solid. We've got a bunch here. I'll just put it at the bottom, and then composition, add to media encode a Q. There we go. And then let's press Play. And it looks like it's white. Okay, so went to the AME folder. So let me show you where that is. It's not in your renders folder, so go to After Effects, then you have to go to Plant Animation, AEP AME folder. It's got a bunch of temporary After effect files, and then you've got your render here. Fantastic. So you can actually select all of these logs and auto save things and just delete them. This one here is just an extra file like creator while creating this course. You don't need to worry about that. You should just have plant Animation dot AEP in your folder. The next thing I want to discuss is animated Gifts. Alright? Because sometimes you're like, Yeah, I just want a cool little Jiff, especially if you're using a ten frame per second project or a composition. So let's go back to After Effects. And let's go to flower abstract. To Okay, so this does not have a lot of frames in it. If you want utmost control, either export a Photoshop file. So let's try that or export images and then take those into Photoshop, or you can export an animated Jif. And I like using media encoded here because honestly, to find it in After Effects either takes me a long time or it's impossible. So I'm going to say composition to media encode Q. And here under h264, we'll scroll up and go for an animated GIF and then we'll say renders, save. Now, this is actually really big. It's like ultra HD. What we may need to do is tap on animated Jif here to change some settings, and we'll check this little box here, change the width to one oh eight oh, and then that will go to 192 oh. Okay. The background was also black there. So we could actually just delete that delete it all. Let's go back to After Effects here. Let's add a white solid at the bottom, and then do this again. Okay, it'll be an animated Jif now because the last format was an animated Jif. We just tap on this, and then let's change the width and height again 108 oh, which reduces the size, the file size, and the width and height. If it's too big, I don't think some apps can actually handle it, but I think this is fine. So let's render that And then we should have a Jif somewhere. Here it is. I'm going to add it to our renders folder. I might feel a little bit sluggish or slow because it's actually doing quite a lot. But there we go. We've got an animated Jif. Let's try a Photoshop file next. So composition, add to render. But but Photoshop. Okay, it looks like each frame will actually be a PSD. So I'm just going to create a new folder called PSD. Okay, render. Let's have a quick look. Yeah, so each one is an actual PSD. Basically treats it like an image. So I'm going to delete that. It's not really what I want. And then, again, we'll go back to flower abstract two composition, to render Q, and then Photoshop, let's do something custom. So format. Let's go for a JPEG sequence or PNG sequence. Okay. Yeah, let's go to the Downloads folder, renders New folder, PNGs. Okay, let's save that. I guess you could uncheck Save in a subfolder. Let's hit Render. Okay. Now you've got these as PNG files, which is really great. If you wanted to take these into Photoshop and export a animated Jif from Photoshop, it's a lot more powerful when exporting jifsOr if you wanted to send these to Procreate on your iPad or bring them into a Photoshop document and then send that to Procreate to then animate on top of or Procreate dreams, you could do that, too. Alright, so hopefully this has given you a really good overview of exporting from After Effects. Most of the time, I just use the stock standard export feature. Once I've completed a composition, I add it to the render queue in After Effects, press render. It renders really quickly. I have it in my Downloads folder. Fantastic. Other times, I need something a little bit more custom, and so then I start exploring, tweaking, testing the different settings to find something that works best for what I need it for right then. Whether it's taking it into Procreate dreams, taking it into premiere, taking it into Procreate, posting it on YouTube or Instagram or TikTok or whatever. If you have any questions around this, just hit me up. I'm happy to answer them and help out. Now, in the next video, I'm going to talk about what's next for you going forward after this course, and then after that, we'll end the course. Alright, see you in the next video. 17. What’s Next?: We've got a bunch of different animations that we've created, but what's next for you? Well, I guess the thing is keep on doing what you've learned during the class. What do you want to explore next? What are you curious about? Is it adding sound to your animations? Because sound can just make animations pop. Is it creating something now in your own style, your own illustrative style? Do you have some things that you want to explore by yourself? Do you want to take all of those leaves and hand animate every single leaf to be a slightly different leaf? Do you think that your wind plant could be a little bit better than mine? Try it out. Seriously, there are so many things that you can explore. On top of that, start having a look at animations that you really like. Try slow them down, see how they animate. Ask yourself, why do I like this? And then try replicate that in your own style. And as you start replicating that, you'll then be like, Oh, but what if? And then you've got a path to follow? You know, you're following your curiosity again. If you're like, but I still need to learn a couple more things, go look on YouTube. Go look on Skillshare. I have got a bunch of courses on Procreates, Procreate dreams, Procreate Animation, After Effects, stop frame Animation, how to create mesmojft they keep on looping. The world is like it's endless. Like, there are so many cool things that you can do with animation. If you're ever stuck, and you're like, but how do I do this? Just seriously, go to YouTube, go to Google, ask your chat bot, just be like, How do I do this in After Effects? And oftentimes, it'll give you a video, I will explain it to you and you just be like, Cool, thank you so much. It's never been easier to animate in After Effects. And you start plugging in these beautiful handmade, texted frame by frame animations that you do in Procreate or procreate dreams or even on paper. There's just so much cool stuff that you can do. Just keep on exploring your curiosity. What are you curious about? What are those what ifs? Keep on giving into them. Keep on exploring. Seriously, you just may end up so far away from what you've ever thought possible. It's just this amazing explorative kind of journey. In the next lesson, the final lesson, I'm going to conclude this course and then say Adios. Alright. I'll see you there. 18. Conclusion: Okay, this is the end of the course. Thank you so much for taking it. I hope you've had fun. I hope you've been like, Whoa, this is just ridiculous. Like, combining Procreate and After Effects and then being led by our curiosity or my curiosity. That is just it's epic. It's an epic way to animate. It's an epic way to explore, to just create a bunch of different animations. I hope you're just exploding. And I hope this way of creating animations brings attention on social media. I hope it brings more client work in. I hope that you can maybe even just approach clients or client briefs with more firepower. More confidence, more like, Hey, this won't actually take my whole life to do this animation. I've got this process of iteration, of exploration that I can fall back on, that I can use. It's been a real pleasure for me to do this course because I don't really normally do an explorative kind of process with students. I normally teach you guys this is how it's done. So if you could do me a favor and let me know how you found this process, it would mean the world to me and also to students who are like, should I take this course or should I not? It will then help them know whether they should or shouldn't if you want more courses, resources, newsletter, that kind of stuff from me, if you want to check out my artwork, visit Rich armstrong.net, and I will see you in the next course. Alright. Bye for now.