Animating a Food Ad for Instagram — After Effects Fundamentals

1. Intro Video: Are you a graphic designer or an illustrator? Do you want to animate your own design? In this class, I will teach you the basic of After Effects and the common practical tools to create an Instagram ad just like this. Hi guys, my name is my Martin. I'm a motion designer based in the sunny island of Singapore. I've been doing motion design for over 14 years, animating TV ads, commercials, social media ads, and many other type of videos. I can't wait to share my knowledge with you. This class is aimed at the students that know a little bit of Photoshop and Illustrator. We will learn how to prepare your Illustrator or Photoshop file for animating in After Effects. You don't need any prior experienced in After Effects. Although the project is about Instagram ads, but the techniques that you learn here will be applicable to many other types of motion design projects. By the end of this class, you'll be able to animate simple characters, line arts, and your own Instagram ads. Let's get started. 2. The Project: Today's class is about Animating Dog Food Ads for Instagram. As a graphic designer or illustrator, oftentimes, you are required to create social media ads, animating them will make your design more lively, and you will wow your clients. I will provide the Photoshop and Illustrator file for the class practice. But for your homework, I encourage you to replace the whole design with your own design, so you have your own original Instagram ads. I will start the course by demonstrating each technique one by one. Then I will show you the whole process of animating everything, so you understand the whole process. 3. File Preparation for Animation: This is the final design, and essentially, what you want to animate, you have to separate all the layers. For example, if you want to animate this hand differently than this hand and the head, or maybe this apple, you have to separate all the layers. What is important is also to release all the stuff from the clipping mask; for example, this one, this carrot. We are planning to animate this, maybe rotating like this, so we cannot have them crop this, so we have to release the clipping mask like this, "Release". Later on, we can animate them separately. Nothing can be cropped. For example, the hand like this that is actually behind the body. But you have to make sure the hand is not cropped. With something like this, maybe it's a good idea to just round them. It's the same with this. We're not planning to animate the dog coming out from behind the packaging, so it's fine to have the one behind like this, but you shouldn't have them crop exactly to this. Because, oftentimes, we want to animate, for example, maybe the whole dog like this. Maybe he wants to move out a little bit or move in a little bit. If anything is cropped, your animation will be limited, so avoid off cropping anything in your design for animation. You can also see this. See? I never crop anything. Anything that you want to animate separately like this, like we are planning to do it like this later on, it can not be cropped. If you see this AI file, this is the file that I will provide in the download folder. I save this as. When you want to save for animation, usually, I will just save it as. This is the original file, I will just underscore and then put AE behind so we know that this file is going to be used for animation. If you guys see, everything here is separated. This is the packaging overlay. This is the dokkies logo. I will turn off one by one. This is the doggo cookies, this is delicious. I'm planning to animate every single element separately, so we have to separate them. This is paw number 8, paw number 7, paw number 6. You can see all the paws. This is the carrot; carrot 4, 3, 2, 1. All the chicken and all the apples. The text plate, the digital, the 500 gram. There's the packaging itself. Basically, all of these. The legs are separated, the cookie crumbles. Everything is different layers. All these things. This is also quite important, the eyes. If you guys see, the original design looks like this. We're planning to make the eye blink, so we need to separate the white eye and the black eyes. If you see, I also release the clipping mask. Initially, the eye was inside the white eye. I just make it like this. We can put back the clipping mask in After Effects. But from Illustrator, we have to separate them and release the clipping mask. This is the head, this is the body. You see there's nothing cropped. This is on the Illustrator side. You guys see, our design actually consists of vector file and also a Bitmap file from Photoshop. I recommend you guys to also prepare the Photoshop file. Anything that Bitmap, we will use Photoshop file, and anything that's vector we will use the Illustrator file. We can actually use this Bitmap file in After Effects as well, but usually, After Effects react better for Bitmap using the file from Photoshop. The next thing where we need to separate is the Photoshop file. This is the Photoshop file. I think that's good enough. One thing to note if you are using a Photoshop file is the image size. In After Effects, make sure you are using resolution 72. The dimension on this design, we are using Instagram ratio. It's 1080 by 1080, it's already correct. But oftentimes, let's say you are animating something that comes from the advertising agency. Maybe the file size is big like this. Let's say the agency is giving you this file that is very high res. Let's open in Photoshop to check. Whenever you download something from Internet, a hi-res image, you check first before putting in into After Effects. If the Effects doesn't really like 300 DPI files, it will make it crass, oftentimes. You see this file that I downloaded from Pixabay. This resolution is 150, so After Effects will not like this resolution. What you need to do is remember this 1920 is the dimension. We want to maintain this dimension, but change this into 72. So 72, then you can put back 1920, and you can convert like this. Then you can save this file as anything you want. We will use this file, the 72 DPI file, for the After Effects. Another thing that you need to check is the bit image. For example, you go to Image, Mode. Sometimes you get file that is 16 bits per channel or 32 bits per channel. The higher this number is, the heavier it gets in After Effects. If you don't see any difference, you should just change it to 8 Bits. If you see a noticeable difference in quality, then you can maintain this. But make sure you have a good computer to work on. Because, if not, the After Effects will be quite slow. On this file. We just need eight bits per channel, so I will maintain that. That's it for final preparation. See you in After Effects. 4. Import and Safe: We are here in After Effects, and this is what you will see when you just open After Effects. We are using the Workspace Standard. Window, Workspace, Standard. If you don't see the same thing, with me, you can just go to Window, Workspace, and then change it to standard. If it still doesn't look the same, you can just reset Standard to Saved Layout and you will see something like this. To start, let's import our file. This is the Project Library where we will import all of our assets. There are many ways to import your file. You can go to File, Import, File, or you can also just double-click here and you can navigate to this folder Doggo and then AI, and then not this one this is our original file. This is the one that we have prepped for animation that has all the separated layers. So before you click "Open," make sure you import as Composition Retain Layer Sizes. This option will only give you one layer, and this option will give every layer. We click "open " and it will give you this composition where everything is there and you will also be given this folder that has everything. I will double-click this and it will open our design here. Another way to import file is you can go from Finder, go to Doggo folder; maybe we'll bring in our Photoshop, and this one, you can also click and drag this thing here and it will open this dialogue box. We also need to make sure we choose the Composition Retain Layer Size. And if you import Photoshop file, they will ask you whether you want to Maintain The Layer Styles or Merge Layer Styles Into Footage. It is up to you, if you have any layer styles that you want to animate differently you should just keep these Editable Layer Styles and then you click "Okay, " and it will give you the same thing. This is the composition and this is the layers. That's how you import file. The next thing is to know how to navigate in After Effects. This is your Preview window, where you will see your animation. And this is your Timeline window where you will set all the keyframes for the animation later. If you want to zoom in or zoom out, you can use this tool and zoom in. Holding Alt will turn it into minus and then you can zoom out. You can also use this Magnification, It's the same thing. Choose whichever or you can just fit it to your window. And you can also use Spacebar for the hand, this hand tool, and you can navigate like this. The next thing is to check the duration. Go to Composition, Composition Settings or Command K is the shortcut. Make sure we are using the frame rate 30 for this assignment and the duration just set it to 10 and then you click "Okay" and then for the next one as well, just Command K, make sure it's 30 frames per second, and then duration is 10 seconds. This is frame number, this is seconds, and this is minute. We will only use about 10 seconds of animation, just set "Okay" that's it for the importing. Don't forget to save your file. So you go to File, Save As, Save As, and we'll go to Tutorials, Doggo, Ae folder that we have prepared, and then you can name this as anything you want, but I will just name this Doggo_01 and then click "Save" that's it. 5. Transform Properties: We're going to learn about the basic elements of animation, which is position, scale, rotation, and opacity. If you guys see here in our Doggo_AE_01, every layer that comes from Illustrator or Photoshop, if you open this arrow, there's this thing called Transform, and if you open this arrow again, it will have these five parameters that you can animate: Anchor Point, Position, Scale, Rotation, and Opacity. It's the same with the rest. Everything also same. It has the same thing. If we go to the other column, this is from Photoshop. If you open this, you will see it has the same parameter. Let's try to animate something. Maybe we should just add new, so we don't interrupt this main file. We will go to Composition, create New Composition. It will open this dialog box. Maybe you just name it, "Test Animation", and let's just use 1080 by 1080. The same like the Instagram square ratio, the frame per second. Maybe for this one, we just keep it to five seconds. I will change this into 05 and then click "Okay", and it will give you a new composition. I'm going to copy and go to this, our main file. Let's take one of the apple for the animation. Just go to find the layers of apple, maybe this one, I just press Command C for copy, go to Test Animation, and then Command V, and we will have this apple. I'm just going to scale up just above, maybe like this. If you guys see this, you will notice that when we scale up, it became pixelated. That is because the file is smaller than what we scaled it up. The good thing about using Illustrator file is their vector. You can click this sun, and it will become sharp. It will maintain the vector capabilities of it, but you cannot do this on Photoshop file. You can only do it on Illustrator file. We can't see the stem, so I will create a background. Click on the empty space here, right-click, New, Solid, and you can change the background to any color that you like. Maybe I will just use maybe yellow, then click "OK", put it underneath the layer, and then we have this. Let's lock this layer so we don't accidentally move it and click on your apple. You can position it anywhere. Open this, and you see if I change the position, this number moves, if I click and drag here also, you will notice that these two numbers are moving. The way to animate is to create a keyframe. Let's say you want to start here. Maybe you want to do animation like this from here, go to here. We go to duration 0, and then click on the stopwatch. It will create a keyframe for you, and maybe you move 10 frames. If you see this is one second, this is 10 frames, this is 20 frames. Maybe I'll move 10 frames and then I move. Hold Shift to maintain the horizontal locking. If you didn't hold Shift, it will give you free like this. Maybe I'll move it here. When I release my mouse, you will realize that it creates automatic keyframe for you. If you go back here and you press space bar to play, you see the apple is moving like this. Maybe you want to move from left to right, and then you will stay for 10 frames here, then we will click again, create a keyframe, and then go to one second, maybe move your apple up and then move 10 frames again, then you set another keyframe, so it will wait there. If you see, wait, go and wait, and then from here you want to move too 20 and move it here. Move to two seconds, set a keyframe, and then move to another, and then you copy the first one, select this, Command C, and then on this time indicator, you Command V, or go back to the original. It will give you this. That is position. You can also set a rotation. This is our anchor point. If you see this anchor point, if you move the anchor point, you can move the apple to the middle. If the anchor point is in the middle, if you rotate this apple, it will rotate from the middle, but if you move the anchor point at the corner down like this, for example, it will rotate from this point. Something like this. It's the same thing with scale. For example, if the anchor point is here and you change the scale, it will scale from that point. That is anchor point. You can also animate the opacity. Opacity is for the transparency. Probably I will delete this keyframe for now. Also you can use this for anchor point. There are many ways for you to adjust anchor point. One is from here. If you notice, if you adjust here, your apple is the one that's moving, but if you use this tool, it's called Pan Behind; the shortcut is Y. So if you click this, you can also click and drag this to anywhere you want. If you hold Command, it will lock to certain point like this. If you want to make sure it's the exact center of this file, you can press Command and then it will bring the anchor point there. This is position, scale, rotation, and opacity. I will let you play around with this and get used to all these parameters and see you in the next lesson. 6. Types of Keyframes: This lesson is about different types of Keyframes. Will use a new composition and actually, I want to change the background color of this. If you guys remember, this is how to create this. It's right-click, "New", "Solid". I'm using the same file, I already have a solid, and I'm just going to add effects. There is an effect here. I will find the effect called Fill and I will just click and drag this to this layer or I can also drag to this layer. It will give me read by default. You see this if a control is here, appearing, and this is the parameter for this effect. If it doesn't appear you can always go to "Window" and then "Effect Controls". Just activate this and you can change this background color to anything you want. I will actually just use black. Then I will create a cube using this rectangle tool. The shortcut is Q. I'll make a box like this and if you notice the anchor point is that in the middle. Just use this tool, select this layer, click and holding "Command" and make it center. Press "V". Make sure is at the center. If not, our animation is going to be a bit weird later. For the first box, maybe, I'll just color it red. I'm going to create 5 boxes. "Command", "D" to duplicate this and then drag it down holding "Shift" so it aligns and then this, maybe, I change it to yellow. Then "Command", "D" again, drag it down. This one, maybe, we change it to green. "Command", "D" again. Drag it down. Maybe this is blue. "Command", "D" again, drag it down. Maybe this is white. We have 5 boxes. Select them all. Let's try to align. Go to "Window", "Align", align them like this. If you click this, it will distribute vertically, evenly. Actually, we can also just do this, select all the layers and then distribute evenly. While selecting all, press "P" for position, go to the 0. You can actually press Minus to zoom out this or Plus to zoom in. Set a Keyframe for all. Then maybe we go to 2 seconds and then move them all here and then let's try to play this animation. Actually, maybe it's a bit too slow. If you think the animation is too slow, you can actually take the whole thing and then move it forward and then try to play it. It will get faster. This Keyframe is all Linear Keyframe. Linear means there's no speeding up or speeding down things. Everything is just equal speed. If I click this, you see there's a dot here that the distance are all the same so when we play this it will be the same. But let's change the first one. Let's name this Linear and then you can also change the layer color to pink fuchsia maybe. Let's just put it on top so we don't get confused. Then this yellow one, let's adjust the layer to yellow and put it on second. Then this one green. Let's move it to the third row. Change the color to green. This white, let's leave it there. Actually, there's no white color. I'll just leave it as it is. This is blue. Maybe the last one we just change it to no pitch and we can change the color to pitch as well so we don't get confused. All of them, at the moment, is linear. Let's take the last keyframe, like this, and you right-click on the "Keyframe". Go to "Keyframe Assistant". Change it to "Easy Ease In". You will notice the left side of the keyframe turned into an hour and the right side is maintained as a diamond. This is Easy Ease In. It means that the animation, if you see now, it changed and it slowed down at the end. If you want to make it more visible, let's select this, go to the Curve Editor, select this Keyframe, and then drag this like this. Go back to this and then now if we play it, you will notice that it will slow down at the end. You see it slowed down. This means that near the end it will slow down, coming in slow. That's why it's called Easy Ease In. Let's go to the green one, change this, right-click "Keyframe Assistant", "Easy Ease Out". Easy Ease Out means it's slowed down and then it will be picking up speed. It starts slow and it will become fast. Again, let's make it extreme so we can see. Select this, go to the "Curve Editor", select this one, make it a curve like this and let's play. You can see that it's very slow at the beginning very slow and then picking up speed. That is Easy Ease Out. Let's go to the blue color and then select both of them. Right-click and then go to "Keyframe Assistant" and then go to "Easy Ease." Easy Ease means it will slow down, picking up speed, and then it will slow down again coming in. Both way coming in slow, coming out slow. This is what it means by easy ease. Again, let's make it extreme. Select both, go to "Keyframe Editor" like this and then the other one is like this and then let's play it. Pay attention to the blue one. Slow, fast, slow, slow, fast, slow. That is easy ease. The last one is called Toggle Hold Keyframe. Let's select this one and I'm going to select the first Keyframe, right-click, click "Toggle Hold Keyframe". What Toggle Hold Keyframe means is it will maintain this Keyframe until you change the value on the next one. By the time it's here it will immediately jump like that. What do you use this for? Many things. The thing that we will use in our cookie assignment is rotation. If I press "R" for rotation, let's say I select First Keyframe is like this, maybe like this. Select first Keyframe, go to 10 seconds. Let me remove my position first. The first is maybe here and then the second one is like this and then maybe I want to copy and paste here, paste here. If I solo this so you can just focus on this one. At the moment, it's interpolating between right. From this, it's rotating here and then rotating back. But if I select all of them and I right-click and then turn it to "Toggle Hold", you see it creates an animation. It looks like a stop motion. That is what we are going to use for our cookies later on. But in this case, let me delete all of this, and then go back to position. 7. Layer Parenting: Let's animate the dog. Before you animate in the dog, you need to know what you want to do with the dog. You need to try to imagine how the animation will be, so we don't get lost when we animate. What I'm trying to do with the dog is like, maybe I want him to, let's animate this one. I want him to pick out, maybe wave his hands and then blink two times maybe, and then, it will come back behind the packaging. First of all, let's color coat him. Just to make it easier, I don't know which one is him. I scroll down, I think it's this one. Yes. Doggo ear, eyes, head, body, legs, select all of them. Click on this and maybe change the color to maybe fuchsia so we know that these are the dogs. Color coding is always good to manage your layers. This is the head. I will press R for rotation. Of course, you can access them here as well. But on this case, shortcut is always good. I press R. You see if I move the head like this, there are few things that are gone wrong, obviously. First of all, the anchor point is wrong. It's supposed to be on the neck. Second of all, all the eyes doesn't follow the head, so we need to fix first of all, the anchor point. Let's use this tool. Cut Y and then, move this to somewhere here. Then let's check the rotation. I think the rotation is correct now, but now we need to parent all of this to the head. This ear, if you see, there's a distinct called pick whip. If you click and drag this to the head, you see this parent and link, it parented to the head now. If I move the head, now the ear is correct. We want to parent the eyes to the head as well. Select both of them, then drag the pick whip. Now if we move the head, it will all move correctly. We need to parent the head to the body. Because if not, let's say you want to move the body coming out, the whole thing doesn't follow. The next thing is to parent the head to the body. If we move the body, the head will also follow. Then these two, hence, the dog leg. There are many things that wrong again, few things. Rotation is wrong, anchor point. We need to move the anchor point here, press Y for the behind tool. Move it here. If we rotate, it is correct now, then parent it to the body, then the right leg. Put it here. Also parent it to the body. If we rotate this, and then if we move the body now, now everything follows. Then the last thing is we need to fix, I'm soloing this layer by clicking on this and then press Y again, and then I change my anchor point here and solo. When I rotate, then the whole thing is correct. What I want to do now is maybe at the duration one one second. First of all, I want to animate this doggo body position, P for position and holding Shift, press R. I can open the P and position and rotation. I will set a keyframe here. This is N position. Select both of these, move it somewhere to 115, maybe. Go back to duration one. I want this dog to rotate a little bit like this. Maybe I can zoom out a little bit, then the position maybe is here. Let's see how it goes. I think it's a bit too slow. Move these two keyframes here. Peek for a while. Maybe peek imaging wave and bling, bling, bling, and then maybe add here. I set another keyframe, and then go to four seconds. I will copy this Command C Command V, and then copy this rotation, Command C, Command V. Go back out. Something like this. Let's see the animation. The animation at the moment, the keyframe is linear. You remember, we need to smooth out the animation. I want it to be like coming out and then slow down here. I will select both of these keyframe. Right-click Keyframe Assistant, Easy Ease In. You remember Easy Ease In is to slow down. Let's see how it looks like. It's not as linear as before. Then here, I want to easy ease out. Select both of these keyframe, right-click Easy Ease Out. Let's see how it goes. Hello, hello, bling, bling, go out. Actually let's ring our render region. Let me zoom out this fit. This is a render region. At the moment, if you press Space-bar, it will just play for 10 seconds. Sometimes, we need to isolate the render region. We just want to see the first five seconds, for example. I can just ring down this into five. Now if I play, press Space-bar, come in, come out, come in again, and it will look back to the first. This is the base animation. Now, let's do the waving. Maybe after coming out like this, I'm going to both of the leg. Press R. Click "Keyframe". Here is down. Then here is up, then here we copy, paste, copy, paste, to be able to wave twice. I need to select both copy, paste. This one copy, paste. Let's see how it goes. Maybe one more time. Command C, Command V. Let's see how it goes. Then maybe I select all of them, turn them into right-click, then Easy Ease. Let's see how it looks like. I think it looks pretty good. Let's animate the ear rotation. Come here, click. We need to fix the anchor point, otherwise the rotation of the air is going to be wrong. Press Y again and then, move the anchor point there. When we rotate, it will be like this. I think when it comes, the ears should be like that. Set a keyframe. I think should be like this. Coming in, by the time it hits here, the ear will go back here, then somewhere here, maybe it will bounce back. Somewhere here, maybe bounce a little bit there. Here maybe it's 20. Let's see. I think it's a bit slow, but I'll let you guys play around with this, but let me just quickly do this. Select all, right-click, Easy Ease, something like that. Then maybe when he moves, go here, then the ear goes like that. That's it. That's the physics of things. That's the ear, save. Don't forget to save, Command S. 8. Alpha Matte: What happened with the eyes? Let me zoom in here. First of all, let's clipping mask this inside of the white eyes. The way to do it in After Effects with strings is called matte. First of all, let's just change the color of the layer of these two eyes so you can see what I'm doing. This is the eyes, the black eyes, and this is the white eyes. What we want is to put the black eyes inside of the white eyes. How to do it is by duplicating this wide eyes Command+D. You see now we have two of the layers of the white eyes. Put it on top of the white eyes. It's covered. Select the black eyes. You need to click on this "Toggle Switches" and see track matte. See if I toggle track matte. Change this track matte of the black eyes into alpha matte eyes white 2. When we do that, you will notice that it automatically hide the white eyes layer on top of the black eyes. These two icons appear, and now the black eye is inside the white eye. Two of these layers are now combined. It's not really combined, but It's using the white eyes layer to mask the black eyes layer. What we want to do is to blink the white eye. I press S for scale and click this two string unproportionally like this. But you see the black eye doesn't get close. That is because it's using the white layer that is not animated. If you want, we need to parent these white eyes to the same white eye. If I parent this, it will inherit all the animation that we do on the white eyes layer, the reference layer. You see if I blink now, this layer will follow whatever we do on this layer. What we want now is to animate the blinking. So the dog come out, maybe somewhere here it will blink. Click on the scale. Blink like this, copy this, paste, and then somewhere here, copy this, copy, paste. Select the whole thing. Right-click, "Easy Ease", then lets play again. Blink, blink. The blinking is quite slow, so we can select the whole thing holding alt and it can swing them down. I think still quite slow. Holding alt again, make it like this. Yeah, something like that. You can adjust the animation based on your preferences. But this is basically our animation, and come back out. I think with this concept, you can actually start to animate other things already. See you on the next lesson. 9. Trim Paths for Line Art Animation: In this concept, I will introduce a concept of trim paths, which is making the line animating, following this script. First of all, let's color code those files, those layers. This is dokkies, doggo cookies, and delicious. We'll just animate these three things. Let's solo them. Maybe we also need to solo the background. I can see them on the background. Let's color code them to, I don't know, maybe blue or purple. Next thing is to use the Pen tool to trace this text. One thing you need to by using this Pen tool is like if you select layer, like this, now we're selecting this layer of dokkie. If you use this Pen tool, and then let's say I draw something like this. Then I close the loop. This actually create a mask. If I change this mask, yeah, it's creating a mask. How do you turn this into a shape instead? First of all, I will delete this mask. How you do it is you cannot select anything, so you need to deselect by clicking somewhere out here or you cannot select here because it was the layer. You can select maybe somewhere here. Now you are not selecting anything, and then you click on this Pen tool, and then now if you draw this mask, it will actually create the shape and it will create a new shape. This is what we want, but we don't want a color, we want a stroke. Now you can go to this Fill, make it no color, and then change the stroke color to anything you want. Maybe for now we just use something like this. But it's so thick. You can reduce the thickness, maybe something like actually I will make it thin first. We can make it thicker later, but I need to see the original thing that we traced so it cannot be too thick for now. Yes, I'll go back to this. Click on that. Let me adjust a little bit. Then it can continue tracing this. Then I will stop here and then maybe continue another layer. I click here. Let's hide our doggo, then change this to black. Then open the shape layer, open the content, open the shape, open the stroke, and then now we can make the stock thicker here. Then we can also make the tip brown and then the join all around. I don't know why it's not by default round most of the case we need these two to be round. You see the corner and the tip is round. This is what we want. Then let's try to zoom out a little bit. Let me just finish this. Change back to this press "G" again for Pen tool then only you can reactivate back this. I will deselect again, deselect anything. I don't select anything, and then I will draw another continuation of this. Press "G", you see when I click here, it will generate a new shape layer, and that is what we want. We'll draw this, I'll continue drawing this letter, holding Alt, and then I can move this up, again I will stop here. Then see this is for stroke, so I will select this and then turn it into four as well. Again, I have to open this, go to stroke, change this to round, change this to round, and close it. Deselect again, I want to continue. Press "G" for the Pen tool. Then I will draw this again. We have this, and then now let's deactivate the original dokkies and then select all of them, press "G" again to activate this, change the color to black. That is our design. Now what we want to do is to animate them stroke by stroke. First, this is the first one, open this. While selecting the shape, go to this arrow at Trim Paths. Open this Trim Paths and then now if you see I'm deselecting. We can see this. If I animate this end, you see it will animate out and By the way, while you're animating, sometimes you don't really want to see these lines. You can click this and you will deactivate that line. Remember, if you want to see it again, you just click on this [inaudible] button here. Now what we want is to animate this from 0, set a keyframe here. Go somewhere maybe to 1, and I animate it to 100. Then we go to Shape Layer number 2, open this, click on the Shape 1, add Trim Paths. Open a Trim Path. Again, we animate this from 0, maybe somewhere here. I don't know where, we can lightly adjust later, then to 100. Then this one again, click on the Shape 1, add Trim Paths as well. Open the Trim Path animate the end from 0 to 100. The last one is the dot. I think we can just move it here later. Now we want to close this, you see there's a lot of parameters that we don't need to see. If you select this layer and I press "U', it will just oscillate on the things that we have set, the keyframes that we have said. I'll press "U", press "U", and then let's try to see our animation. How does it look like? It actually looks pretty good. I think you guys can play around with this but that is the main concept of trim paths. 10. Text Follows Path: The next thing is to animate the delicious and the dokkies word, so let's zoom in. First of all, we need to recreate this layer because when we bring in text layer from Illustrator, it will become a normal layer. We have to recreate it in After Effects. First of all, I'm going to select my text tool, come here and then type delicious. You can use any font, but I actually used a font called Proximal Nova if you have them, and then you can adjust the font size here. This is the tracking, this is the leading, and yeah. I think for now we just set it something like this. I think let's change it to bold. T looks more similar. While selecting this text layer, let's draw the path, I think it's something like this. You have to select the layer and then click on this Pen Tool and then try to draw the path. Something like this. Touch V again, and then go to this text layer, open this parameter. Inside the Path Options on this text layer, we can change it to mask 1, and then now it will follow that path. We need to turn off the guide layer to delicious, so something like this. Then what we want to animate is actually, it's just like a typewriter, [inaudible] come out. There's a very easy way to do that, where you select this text layer, you go to this window, open this text Effects and Presets. Then you can just find here called typewriter. It's Animation Preset, that's called typewriter. You can just double-click while this layer is selected, or you can click and drag to that layer. It will be gone, but if you click on this layer, and then you press "U", you will see two keyframes. You can set this keyframe here and maybe trim the beginning. This is actually the beginning, which is at nothing, and then it will slowly, one-by-one come out. Let's see the animation. That is what we want with delicious, something like that. Then now, I think with the same concept, we can animate the doggo cookies. You can try that. 11. LoopOut Expression: Let's animate all of these things using Expression. I want to animate for example, the carrots. Let's just focus on the carrots first, go to the carrot. First of all, we need to fix the anchor point to the middle of the carrot. I press "Y", and then maybe somewhere here, and then I press "R" for rotation. Go to the first frame, click "Keyframe", create a keyframe, and then maybe go to five frames. You can zoom in or zoom out this to zoom in the timeline. Then I will probably rotate to this, and then go to 10 frames, copy this first one command C, Command V. I want to see how it looks like, so I will string this render region to here. We can just see on that small chunk of looping render region. This is not what I want. I want to use the toggle hold keyframe so it looks like slow motion. I right-click my "Keyframes", click on the "Toggle Hold Keyframe". I think it's a bit too fast, let's change it to maybe 10 frames. Probably you can readjust this. But what I want to do now is to loop these keyframes. Of course, if you want, you can just copy, paste this, like for example, copy, and then come here, paste, and then paste, paste, and so on. But this requires a lot of effort, a lot of adjustment, and it's not very precise where you put the keyframes. If your clients had already changed the parameter, you need to change on all of these. The more wiser method is to use Expression. You have list-based setup of your keyframes. What you want to do is to set a very simple expression. How to do it is by going to this stopwatch, holding "Alt", and click this "Stopwatch". It will actually open this Expression window. What you need to type is loop, L-O-O-P, and by the time you type that, After Effect will suggest a few different expression that is commonly used. We want to use this LoopOut expression. You go down to LoopOut, press "Enter", and then you click out of this window, maybe somewhere here. Now if you see, and if you play your animation, your animation will go forever. This will loop forever. LoopOut means looping out of this to the right side, and it will keep forever. If you change this to LoopIn, it means that everything before these keyframes will be looped. But on this case we want to LoopOut, it will give you this. If you see the benefit of this, if your client change something, for example, let's say it says, it's too fast, you can just adjust this holding "Alt", make it slower, like this, and then play it back again, and this will be looped. It's very easy for you to change your original setup of the animation by using this expression. You can imagine, you can apply to all of the others. That is animating with a simple LoopOut expression. 12. PreComp: Sometimes you need to group things in After Effects to move them together or to copy or for many other purposes. We can use this feature in After Effects called pre-composition. Let's say I want to group all of the cookies, so I can mask them inside this packaging, I will try to find all my cookies. This paw, carrot and the chicken, and the apple. I think that is a whole thing. I select them all by holding Shift and then I hold Command Shift C. When I click that, it will ask me this Pre-compose or if you can't remember the shortcut, it's actually here, Layer, Pre-compose, Command Shit C. It will ask you what is the name of this pre-composition; I will maybe call them Cookies elements. Then adjust composition duration to the time span of the selected layers. Yes, I want to tick that and then I just click "Okay". You'll see all of the objects there become one layer. Now I can actually move them together like this. If you want to edit any of this, everything become group. Now, you can just double-click this and you will enter this group. It's similar like in Illustrator when you group them, then if you double-click things, it will enter the isolation mode. This is similar thing, but pre-composition actually can do many more things. For now, let's say, I just want to mask this out. I need to find the layer that we used for this thing using the [inaudible] , if you remember our previous lesson [inaudible]. Actually, I have prepared this layer map from Illustrator, or we can also use the Packaging layer from here. This is the Photoshop file. Click on this Packaging layer, then we can Command C, copy it. Come back here, go to that Cookie elements, and then Command V. It's exactly paste there. If you remember, this is our cookie element, we can click on this segment and Alpha Matte packaging. Now, it's cropped to the packaging. If you see these two, it hide the layer and then it gives me these two icons, if you remember the Alpha Matte lesson. Now we can just select these two and then change the color to yellow, so we know that there are two are linked together. This is one function of using pre-composition. There's another function of it. Let's say you want to group this dog that we have [inaudible]. Let's go down there. This doggo here is the whole thing, if you remember. Let's say you want to move them together, but you already have something animated here. If I press "U", see you have this position animated. If I move it now, like this, it will actually screw up the whole animation. See, I create a new key here. It becomes very crazy like this. I will undo that, we don't want to do that. We can actually group them first, then only move that group. To do that, let's just again select this whole thing, then press Command Shift C, Pre-compose, then maybe you call this Dog Right, which is dog on the right, or you can call it anyway whatever you want. Click "Okay". This becomes one layer, and it still has all the animation there. If you go to isolation mode, you can edit this again as you like. Then we come back to the main composition. What you can do now with this is, first of all you can duplicate. For example, let's say you need to have a copy of him doing the same thing. You can Command D, duplicate this dog, and then maybe you can bring it up. Maybe you can press "S" to scale, make it smaller. Maybe you can flip it, so on this scale, and take this uniform and then change it to minus 60, so it's flipped. Then maybe you want to put him here. Now you have the same dog that is using the same exact animation. The benefit of this is when you change the original, everything will be updated together. If you imagine you have maybe 1,000 bees on your animation and you want them to just animate once and then duplicate to many things. Then if your client change the original bee, everything will be updated. Pre-composition is very good for that. You can also automate the timing. See, for example, this one will come slightly later, or something like this. This one will come out first and that one come up later. So pre-composition is really good in staggering the timing so they all can animate a different timing. Maybe I'll duplicate this dog one more time, make it smaller like this. Then maybe this one is even earlier, so we have three dogs animated a different timing. You only need to animate it once and then you can alternate, and you can change things. You can also change the color of this, for example, you go here and then you go to Effects and Presets. Then you type hue. This is just an example, so if you drag this hue and then maybe you change the master hue to maybe green. I don't know why you want this, but say for example. Now with the exact same setup, you can have three different varieties of it. This is another power of pre-comping. 13. CC Bend It: This tool is called Bend. Say you want to animate the hair of this dog. Maybe you wanted to wave left, right, left, right. Let's try to use a tool called CC Bend. Let's try to find the hair. This is the hair. We'll change the anchor point, press Y to the top, and then go to this Effects & Presets. If you can't see it, go to Window and then Effects & Presets. Then type Bend. It's called CC Bend It. So you can double-click it and it will be applied to this layer. Something crazy will happen. Let me solo this layer. You see it's cropped my layer, this is because the starting point and the ending point is wrong. We need to adjust this. If I bend this thing now, it will go to bend in a very weird way. Actually, I think we might want to flip this. Put this one up, the starting is up and the ending is at the bottom here. Now if we bend, it will bend like this. Now you see something happened, which is my layer is cropped now. We need to add another effect called Grow Bounds. Type here Grow Bounds and then add it here. Let me try to bend this again. Grow Bounds have to be before. You see, if I grow this thing here, grow to pixels, it will actually declare the cropping. Now we can animate this like this. Actually, first of all, let me reset this to zero again. Let's do the proper parenting of this dog so we don't get crazy. This hair have to be parented to the head. Wait. Yeah, this hairy head. This the hair back also parent to the head. This head, I think we need to press Y and then change the anchor point to somewhere here, so when we rotate the head it will be correct. Then the head to be parented to the body. What I want to do is for this dog come out and the hair will follow the physics of when he'll come out. Then this the hair back also, we need to fix the anchor point. Press "Y" put it up here. The body, first of all press "P", and then set a keyframe at the beginning, maybe the dog is here, then maybe the dog come out within 15 frames. By the way, there's a shortcut to move frame-by-frame, which is Command Right Arrow and Command Left Arrow. If I hold Command and then I press "Right Arrow", it will move by increment of one frame. If you want to move by increment of 10 frames, you can hold Command and Shift, so it will move by 10 frames. But on this case, I want to just go to this 15 and then move the dog out, maybe here. Let's see how it goes. Maybe he'll stay there for a while, and then set a keyframe and then he will go back in. Command C, Command V. Come out, come back in. Then you can turn everything into Easy Ease. Right-click "Keyframe Assistant", Easy Ease. Here, let's animate the hair, the Bend. Click on "Start Keyframe" on this, press "U" to open the keyframe. Then, first of all, his heir should be like this. That is when he came like that. I think I want to move this hair up a little bit, yeah. Then by the time it hits this position, it will animate to the opposite direction, something like that. This is just a physics tool, somewhere there, and then we'll go back up to these keyframes, copy-paste, but the power will be reduced a little bit, so reduce a little bit like that. The physics of bouncy things like this usually is like go far, go back again with the same power, and then go back there with the half power, and then go back here with another half, and then you just cut half all the way through. Here, we'll animate it back maybe like this, and then here, copy-paste, but this time reduce to minus 4 maybe or maybe even minus 2, and then here Command C, Command V, reduce these to maybe three, maybe to zero. Let's just readjust this a little bit. Then change everything to Easy Ease. See the moment. Yeah, something like that. But I think the timing is wrong. I think by the time he hits here, this should be moved somewhere here maybe, yeah, something like that. Then when he goes away, we need to set another keyframe. When he goes away we animate like that and then we adjust this. Let's see. Yeah, I think that's pretty good. Yeah, you can take your time to try to adjust this until you get the animation that you like. But yes, that is CC Bend It. 14. The Rest of The Process: This step is just to show you how I animate everything till the end. The first thing I want to do is to bring in Photoshop layers, these three layers into my main Kong. I actually can use this file that I prepared in Illustrator, but somehow it's not always, but sometimes the file bitmap that you bring in from Illustrator sometimes give you a problem, so I will just bring it in for safety. I paste this, and then this shadow and background color obviously is at the bottom. I can delete this layer, and then I will replace this packaging with a new one. Delete this one and then I will duplicate this packaging and then put it on top of everything as a texture. Let me change this to blending mode. This is the blending mode. You can play around with this by scrolling, select this layer, holding Shift, and press "Plus". You can actually scroll through the different blending mode that they have. You can check here the name keep on changing. You can find the thing that you think is the best. But for my case, I will just use multiply, and I will reduce the opacity to about 80 percent. That is my texture that I'm going to use. You see now the difference with and without. You can see the foldings will be apparent. Then I will lock this layer so I don't accidentally move it. I actually want to create a looping animation. In my looping animation, I don't need this text to be animating out. Now you know the techniques, but on this case actually, I don't really need that anymore. I will select all of these, press "U", and then actually I will delete all the keyframes. Delete, move this back. This text doesn't animate. It will just be there. Then this delicious, I also don't want it to animate, so I click on this layer, press "U", and I will delete these two keyframes so they don't really animate anymore. Then I can delete this further, I don't need anymore and this I don't need anymore. This whole thing, these titles plus this, actually I think I want to just pre-comp them, so I will group them together, command shift C, pre-comp, and I will just call these Titles. They become one. It's just tidier that way. Then now I want to animate each of these cookies. Go inside here, and I need to fix them one by one, the anchor point. I think it should here, then this poll. I'm just going to try to speed up this and we see again after I've done all of this. If you accidentally double-click something, you will open the attribute of this layer, you can just click this back here, and this is your main composition. I adjusted. This is one transparency toggle between transparent and black background. You can actually change this color if you cannot see what's behind by pressing "Command K", "Composition Settings", and then you would just change this color to something. It doesn't really matter. This is actually transparent, but this is just for you to see the design behind. Let's select all of these. Press "R" for rotation, let's give some space and fit this, except for these two. Create a keyframe, go somewhere, go here, and then create a keyframe, and then go to the middle. I think it's better that we just do it one by one because if not, you might not know which one is which. This, maybe you want to do the opposite like that, and then this one we want do the opposite like this. I think we've got them all. Let's select everything, right-click, change them to Toggle Hold. Then we want to copy the looping script. How to do that is you select. This one has already a script inside. Click on this "Rotation", right-click "Copy Expression Only", click, select all of this, the remaining layers. Then just paste. It will paste all the looping expression. I think they are quite fast, so let's select everything hold alt, and then expand. Let's see. I think this is a more reasonable speed. When you animate make sure you are animating in the increment of multiplication of one seconds because we want to try to make a loop of a five-second loop. Let's actually check them on the main composition. Let's close the render region press N, the shortcut to five seconds. I think this dog, I want to keep him longer in the frame and I want to animate the other hair so let's go down there. This hair, I think we will apply the same effect. Bend it CC bend it. Double-click while we select this layer. Let's solo this layer. I think it's getting cropped as well. Click on this "Effects", press "V". I think we have to flip, and then put. This is the starting on the top and this is the bottom. If we bend this and then remember we need another effect called Grow Bounds, type Grow Bound, and then just click and drag it here. Grow Bound has to come before so when we bend, that's extended. Cool. Let's un-solo that. Let's actually color-code this dark orange, and then solo them, so you can see just the dog. This hair, let's set a keyframe for the band, then press "U", so we can see the keyframe. At the beginning, I want it to be like this, same like the other hair. Then we'll come here. The hair will go that way. Come back here. Then we copy this one, copy paste. Remember we want to reduce the power by half. Come there, copy this one, click "Command V", and then again cut by half the power something like that. Come here and then move it back to this, and go there, and then move it to come here and then back to normal zero. Actually, the zero should be here. Then there's another zero and then when you go back out, it will be like this. Then select all of them, right-click, and then Easy Ease. Then let's check it out. It looks good, but I think we need a little bit of a staggering time. This is to make it more organic, so we probably delay it by one frame. This will give you a bit of variety. Let's see. You see the hair, it's a very minor difference, but it is giving you a detailed animation. Let's un-solo them, and then pursue. I want to keep this dog longer. Maybe it will come out here. Then I will take all these keyframes and maybe somewhere here, so it can stay longer and the scene. Come out, come back in. Then when the dog is not there anymore, we want to trim this layer. Hold Alt and then close bracket. You can trim this to this. This is a good habit to trim the layer that is not there anymore, so you know where the layer ends. Now it looks really good. The last thing that we need to animate is this pug, pug tail, pug body. Let's change this color to green. Maybe we differentiate the pug and crumble. Let's change the pug to read. Let's animate the pug tail. Click on it and then change the anchor point, press "Y". Change it here. Press "R" for rotation and then I just want to move it like this. Go to the front, set a keyframe, maybe rotate like this. Go to 15 frames, go to the opposite direction, go to one. Again, remember always in the one-second increment and multiplication. Copy this, copy and then paste Command C, command V. Select both of them, right-click "Keyframe Assistant", Easy Ease to smooth out the keyframes, and then press "Alt". Holding Alt, click on the "Stopwatch", and then we will add loop expression. Press "Enter", and this will loop forever. That is a good looping. Let's move that leg. Press "Y" to adjust the anchor point here, so when we rotate the leg, it looks good. The other leg as well. Move the anchor point here, select both of them. Press "R" for rotation, go to the first frame, set a Keyframe. Actually, I think it should be why there, maybe like this. Then go to one second. Go to the opposite direction. 15. Render: Now you have all the animation done, the last step is to render them out. First of all, let's set the render region to five seconds, because we animate everything in five seconds. You can go to this exactly five second timestamp, and then just string this render region there. You can press N, that is the shortcut to set the render region, N is for the ending, and B is for the beginning. Five seconds, and then you go to composition, add to Adobe Media Encoder Queue. When you do that, it will open the software called Adobe Media Encoder, and you need to wait for a while sometimes, until it appear. It depends on the computer speed. But once it appear here, sometimes it opened and this thing is not appearing yet, so you also need to wait for that. After it appear, then make sure this thing is set to H.264. I think by default is H.264, but if not, you can just click this, and change this to H.264. H.264 is the best codec for uploading video into the Internet, or the social media. The rest, you don't need to worry about, just click "Okay". This one, you can leave it as it is. Click this to define where you want to save the file. I want to save it on my output folder, and I'll call it Doggo_01, click "Save", and when you're done, just click this to render. This is the rendering bar. Just wait until it finish, and once it finish, you can check in your finder and in your output folder, and this will be our animation. Congratulations, you've just finished your first Instagram ad. 16. Conclusion: Awesome, guys. You made it to the end of the class. I hope you enjoyed the class and had some fun. If you make any cool stuff, please share with us in the submission. If you bump into any problem, you can always message me on my social media, or email, or you can also post here in the discussion feed. Keep practicing and see you next time. Bye.