Animating With Ease in Adobe After Effects

1. Course Trailer: Hey! I'm Jake Bartlett. In this class, we're going to be animating with ease in after effects. In this updated and expanded version of one of my most popular classes, I'll teach you how to use the graph editor so you can take control the motion inside of your animations. Whether you've been using After Effects professionally for years or you just opened the software for the first time yesterday, if you're not using the graph editor, you don't have full control of your motion. In this class, you're going to learn everything you need to know about both the speed and value graph as well as all the other graph editor tools so, that you can use them to your advantage and they even set up a demo project file for you to learn from, while you're watching me teach from the same project file in the lessons. Even if you've already taken the first version of this class, you're going to want to watch this one because I've learned much better techniques since the first version and go much more in-depth into the graph editor in this class. There's twice as much content as version one. For the class project, you'll be designing and animating a house from the ground up. You can create your own or use one of mine. Along the way, I'll be sharing my own workflow tips and tricks as well as keyboard shortcuts that I use all the time for a more efficient workflow. By the end of this course, you'll be animating with ease. I'll see you in class. 2. Artwork Prep: All right, first I just want to say thank you so much for taking this class. It really does mean a lot to me and I am so excited to be teaching you about the graph editor. It's my favorite feature of After Effects and I truly believe that it's the most powerful way to take control of your motion. Once you start understanding how it works and implementing it into your own animations, you're going to see in night and day difference with the way that your animations will look and feel. If at any point in this class you have any questions or you get confused about something, do not hesitate to ask me a question on the community page. I do my best to answer those questions as quickly as possible. All right, let's do this. The first thing you'll need to do for this class is create your house artwork. Now I've gone ahead and created mine in Illustrator. I'm not going to show you how I made it because it's very basic and I want to focus on animation not design in this class, but you can see this is my reference image. This is the house that I grew up in and I just used it as a reference to recreate it in a very basic, simplified, geometric way, like you see that I took some of the detail out of the windows. I didn't want to overwhelm myself with all of the details, but something that represents the house and is identifiable. Like I said, it's very geometric. There's just a whole bunch of rectangles making up everything within this design. Then on some of the finer details, I had to do a little bit of work to get it to to make the shapes that I wanted it to. But it's purely vector and it's all very basic. Now, you do not have to create your artwork inside of Illustrator, if you're more comfortable in Photoshop, you can do that. The reason that I'm using Illustrator is because I know that my vector artwork will translate to vector layers inside of After Effects very easily. But if you'd like, you can do a completely different design style. It doesn't have to be this 2D flat vector look. You could add textures and patterns, or even use a real photo references within your artwork. Just keep in mind that you'll need everything to be on its own layers so that you can animate it inside of After Effects. Now, we could bring this straight into After Effects as it is but if we look at the layers palette, you see that everything is on one single layer. If I open this up, I have a whole bunch of paths inside of here, none of them are named, nothing is organized, and so if I bring this in After Effects, that's exactly how they're going to come in. Just unorganized paths that's going to be very hard to dig through. So, I need to organize all of it before I go into After Effects. First of all, I don't need this photo reference inside of After Effects. So, I'm just going to save a copy of my artwork on the desktop and call it House_AE, for After Effects. That way, I have a copy and I can do whatever I want to this without worrying about losing my original. I'm going to delete that picture and now I'll start breaking up these paths into their own layers. Now in this design, I don't actually need to do it for every single element and that's because a lot of these elements are identical. So, all of these upper windows, they're all exactly the same and these four bottom windows, these four bushes, they're all exactly the same. So, I can just make one of these bushes on its own layer and then in After Effects, I'll duplicate them across the image using the artwork as reference. But that way, I don't have to do quite as much work in here. But I am going to start by breaking everything into its own layers because that's actually much easier than making a selection of the individual elements I want and separating them out. So, I'm just going to make a selection of everything, and then I'll come over to my layer's palette into this, a little drop down right here, and say, Release to Layers (Sequence). I click on that, now all of those elements are placed on their own layers. They're still contained within this Layer 1, but I can now grab any of these layers and drag them out to be their own individual layers in my document. That will translate into After Effects as layers as well, and that's exactly what I want. So, I'm going to start by just grabbing the roof. We'll start at the top and work our way down. So, top this is the roof. So, I'm going to double-click on that layer name and rename it Roof, and then I'll just click and drag that layer out above Layer 1. So, now I have roof separated from the rest of the art. Next, I'll do these windows. So, I just want to start with this one right here. So, I'll grab this layer and I'll rename it Upper Window Upper Glass. Then while I'm at it rename this one Upper Window Lower Glass, and I'll grab this layer and rename it Upper Window Frame. Then I'll grab all three of these layers by clicking on this one. Shift clicking on the top one and then click and drag that all the way up to the very top of my layer stack. So, they're out just below the roof. Now those three layers are separate from everything else. I don't need to worry about any of these other window layers. So, I'm just going to ignore them and I move down to this window. I'll grab the top and rename it Lower Window Top. I'll grab the glass, Lower Window Upper Glass and Lower Window Lower Glass. Finally, the Lower Window Frame. I'll select those layers, move them to the top just below the Upper Window Layers, and then I'll grab this bush and just rename it Bush and then move that up. That can actually go above the lower window because I want it to appear above those layers, and then I'll come over here to this lamp, and I'll grab this top part and I'll call it Lamp Top. Zoom in and grab this layer. Name it Lamp Glass, Lamp Lower and Lamp Base. I'll make sure I grab those layers. Don't want this one, so I'm holding down Command or Ctrl on a PC and clicking on the layers that I want to make that selection. Then I'll bring those up, all the way up, and I'll put them just below the bush. I'm just going to continue this process for all of my elements. Now, on this particular element, I have a couple of different shapes making up this artwork. I want to merge these two together because they really don't need to be separate. So, I'm going to select both of them by clicking and Shift-clicking on them with the selection tool, and then with my Pathfinder open, you can find that under Window, Pathfinder. I'm going to click on this first button which is Unite. Then I'll just bring them together, and that made everything else disappear because it joined it at the top of those layers. I'm just going to drag it down to here. So, now it's below everything. For these individual glass panes, I have these stroke paths just overlaid on top of this semi circles. So, I'm going to select those three paths and outline them by going up to Object, Path, Outline Stroke, and they're just rectangles. It looks like this one is a little off center actually, so I'm going to select this layer, Shift click on this layer and then click one more time on the glass, and that makes it the key object, and I'll then a line that rectangle to the center of the semi circle. There we go. Now that's nice and centered. I'll select all three of these, as well as the glass, go back to my Pathfinder and click on the Merge button. Now those are all merged together, I'll double-click to go into the group and just delete this white part. Now I'm left with these blue glass, pizza-shaped pads, and then double-click to get out of that and ungroup them by pressing Command-Shift-G or Control+Shift+G on a PC. Now those are all individual paths but they're all living on the same layer. But we have some empty layers here from all that Pathfinder work that I just did. So I'm going to just cut one layer at a time, Command-X and paste in front by pressing Command-F or Control+F on a PC on the new layer. So, I'll name this Door Glass One, and then I'll just continue this process for all the other pieces. Okay, that's all sorted out and I'm actually going to just go ahead and rename everything else before moving it up, because that way I can then just see which layers were renamed before dragging them all up at once. So, Threshold, we've got the Siding, the Trim and the Background. Then I can make a selection of all the layers that have been renamed and know that those are the only ones that I really need. Everything else can be taken care of inside of After Effects. So, I've got all of those. I'll drag them up to the top. That's going to hide a bunch of my layers, and actually, it looks like I have one renamed incorrectly. So, yep, that's not what it's supposed to be. I'm just going to drag that back down. Push this back into the layer one, because it's not actually important. Remember, as long as that's contained within a layer, After Effects isn't going to see any of the contents. It's all just going to keep it contained into that one single layer. Now, the reason why everything else is being hidden is because that Layer 1 is below everything else. If I moved it up to the top, then we're going to see all those elements come back. But these are the only elements that I'm actually going to need inside of Illustrator to be separated out on their own layers in order to animate them inside of After Effects. Again, because I can just duplicate these layers for the other windows, for the other lamp, the other bushes, and everything else is unique. Now that that's done, I can save and bring it into After Effects. You can do the same. So, at this point go ahead and decide on what house or building you'd like to create and then create the artwork for it. Again, you do not have to do this in Illustrator, if you want to use Photoshop or another program, that's totally fine as long as you can bring it into After Effects as layers. The key thing to remember is that you need all of your elements to be on their own layers if you want to be able to animate them independently of other objects inside of After Effects. If you're making something that's a little bit more complex and using things like textures inside of Photoshop, I would recommend that you merge all of those textures onto the individual elements so that you're left with a structure very similar to this one, where you have all the elements that make up the glass of a window on its own layer. All of the elements that make up a roof on its own layer. That will make it easier to animate inside of After Effects. Another thing that I need to point out is the size of your document. Work at whatever size you plan to animate at. My document is 1440 by 1080. So, that's a four by three aspect ratio at an HD resolution. This way, I can always expand this out to the side if I want to put it into an HD comp, but it also will scale down nicely for someplace like Dribbble. Along with that, if you're working inside of Illustrator, make sure that all of your artwork is contained within your art board. If you have a shape, go outside the art box like this. You're going to run into issues later on once we're in After Effects. Another extremely important thing to keep in mind is that if you want to work with shape layers in After Effects, like I will be, you have to use only solid fills or solid strokes. What I mean by that is no gradients, no patterns, no transparency, no blending modes. If you're using a stroke, you cannot use any kind of a styled brush like this, even if it looks uniform, this is actually using a five point round brush and After Effects is going to ignore that brush and just convert it down to the basic brush. So, all of your strokes need to be basic and uniform. If you keep all of that in mind, you're going to save yourself a whole lot of headache once we get into After Effects and start breaking this apart. Now that doesn't mean you can't use gradients and effects. Those are things that we can recreate inside of After Effects but you also have another option which is not using shape layers inside of After Effects. I know I'm probably getting a little bit ahead of myself, I don't want to overwhelm you, but if you really want to use patterns, gradients, transparency's, things like that inside of Illustrator to create your artwork, then I would suggest that you just plan on not using shape layers inside of After Effects. That's totally fine. You'll still be able to follow along and do everything I am. You'll just be working with Illustrator artwork inside of After Effects instead of shape layers inside of After Effects. But the animation process is identical, and as always, if that's confusing, feel free to ask questions, I'm happy to help. Now there are two things that you can do for your class project before moving on. The first one is simply just design your house. It could be the house you grew up in, the house you live in now or even a fantasy building, like a castle, any building that you like. You can design it in whatever software you're most comfortable in. Just remember to follow the guidelines that I gave you in this lesson. Once your artwork is designed to save a copy of the file so that you don't lose the original artwork and then organize all of the layers for After Effects. Remember to keep any object that you want to animate on its own layer, and if you're adding any textures or anything like that inside of Photoshop, make sure that you merge all of those layers with the object so that you have one single textured layer for every object. Once all of that is done, you can export an image of your artwork and upload it to the class project page, so we can see what you'll be working with. As always, don't hesitate to ask questions on the community page. 3. Getting Organized in AE: Now, that your artwork is ready, we can jump in at After Effects. All right, now it's time to get to work. Let's open up After Effects, and bring in our artwork. Now, I'm using a very low resolution while I'm recording this video, so that it's easier for you to see. So, my After Effects probably looks a little bit more cramped than yours, but all of the basic panels are here, and you should be able to follow along. I need to bring in my artwork that I just prepped inside of Illustrator. So, I'll right click in my project panel, and go down to Import, File, and then I put mine on the desktop. Remember, I made a copy, House_AE, I'll double click on that, and then I'm going to get some options. Under Import Kind, it's very important that you import this as a composition, and not footage. I'm going to show you what happens if I choose footage. I'll just click OK. I have a single layer. If I drag that down to a new composition. This is flat artwork. There's nothing I can do with this. All of those layers that I work so hard to organize inside of Illustrator are gone. Nothing I can do at all. So, instead, I'm going to delete that and try again. Import, File, House_AE, and then I'm going to change the kind to composition. We have one other option that's important, footage dimensions. So, our options are layer size or document size. Layer size is going to keep the bounding box of each layer the size of that layer and document size is going to put the bounding box to be the size of the document for every layer regardless of its contents. Ninety-nine times out of 100, layer size is the option you're going to want to go with. So, we're going to choose layer size, click OK, and that automatically generates a composition and gives me a folder. If I open that up, there are all of my layers named exactly the same way as how I had them named in Illustrator. If I open up the composition, there are all my layers. Here's my document that looks exactly like it did in Illustrator, and if I solo this bottom layer one, all of those other elements are still intact. Now, that I have my artwork in here, I need to just verify some composition settings. I'm going to come up to Composition, Composition Settings, and verify that I have my width and heights set to 1440 by 1080, the size of my Illustrator file. My frame rate is 30 frames per second. That's what I want to work at but feel free to change this if you'd rather work at something like 24 frames per second. Then, my duration is very long. Now, this is showing up as frame numbers not actual time code, so I'm actually going to cancel out of this. Come over to my timecode and Command Click on it, so it switches to hours, minutes, seconds instead of frames. So, I come at the Composition, Composition settings one more time. Now, I can see that my composition is actually 43 minutes long, 49 seconds and three frames, that's absurdly long. I do not need anything near that length, so I'm going to back this up and just zero that out and change it to something like 15 seconds long. That should be more than enough for this animation. Everything else looks great. I'll click "OK", and then just rename this composition. So, I click on it in the project panel, press Enter and rename it House_Build. All right. Now, like I said you could use these layers exactly as they are and make an animation the same way that I'm going to. But I prefer to work with shape layers because, then right inside of After Effects I can change things like the color, I have access to some more fun controls, and I just generally enjoy working with shape layers. But if you'd rather just work with these layers as they are, that's totally fine. I would just note that if you select any Illustrator layer and enable the Continuously Rasterize switch, this little star right here, then you can scale this layer infinitely and it will always remain crisp. It's preserving the vector artwork within that layer. If I uncheck that switch, you see you it get some blurry. It loses the vector quality and instead preserves the original resolution. Something to keep in mind. If you don't see this column right here, just make sure that you have this button right here pressed. So, you see all of your layers switches. All right, I'm going to undo back to where I was. Now, I'm going to convert all of these layers into shape layers. All except for layer one. So, I'm going to select the top layer, Shift Click on the background layer, so now I have everything selected but that layer one, and I right click and go to Create Shapes from Vector Layer. I should point out that this is a feature that requires at least After Effects CS6 or later. So, if you have an older version than that, you're not going to be able to do this step. All right. I'm going to click that, and After E Effects now generates all of these shape layers with the same layer name as the source, plus the word outlines. So, it outlined all of those layers into shape layers. While they're still selected, I'm just going to click and drag on any one of the selected shape layers, and push it right there and that way it, separates all the shape layers from the Illustrator artwork. Okay. So, now it can zoom in here and I can take a look at these panels. I have the upper window upper glass, and because it's a shape layer, I can do things like change the color to whatever I want right here inside of After Effects. It's great. At this point would be a great idea to save. You definitely want to get in the habit of saving regularly, so that you don't lose any of your work. So, I'm going to save Command S or Ctrl S on a PC, and I'm going to put this on the desktop and I'll just rename this House_Build. Great. Now, I chose to create artwork that's pretty simple, geometric and kind of repetitive. So, I want my animation to fit that style in the way that it moves. So, for these windows, I'm going to want all of them to animate on in the same way. I could animate one window, duplicate it three more times and have layers for every single one of those windows that are just duplicates of each other, or I could group these three layers together in a pre-composition, animate within that pre-comp, and then duplicate the pre-comp four times to create the same animation. The benefit of the pre-comp is that I can edit one animation and have it reflected in all of the instances of that comp. So, let me show you what I mean. I'm going to start by selecting these glass panels and this window, just the selection tool clicking and Shift clicking on the other layers, and then I want to pre-composed these. So, I'll come up to Layer, all the way down at the bottom, Pre-Compose. I want to point out that there is a keyboard shortcut right here. Keyboard shortcuts are so helpful for making your workflow faster in After Effects, so I'd really encourage you to start learning and memorizing these keyboard shortcuts. I use them all the time, but I'm just showing you them in the menu, so that you can see where they are now. But right here, we have Shift Command C. So, if I have them selected and press Shift Command C, that will bring up the pre-compose dialog box, and I can give this new comp a name. So, I'm going to call this upper window, and "Move all attributes into the new composition" is great, Adjust composition duration to the time span of the selected layers is also great. I'll click "OK" and now this pre-comps bounding box is the size of my document. So, if I double click on this pre-comp, I can see all three of my layers now. But I have all this empty black space that isn't doing anything. I'd really like to keep my artwork cleaner inside of this comp, in my main comp, instead of having this huge bounding box with all this empty space. So, what I'm going to do is first take a snapshot of my scene. That's this little button right here. I'll just click it, and now let's say I change something. I can hold down this button, it shows snapshot, and as long as I'm holding down, it will show me what my comp looked like when I took that snapshot. So, off and on. There we go. So, I undo Command C, and with that snapshot saved, I'll go into my comp and I want to make my comps dimensions the size of this window. There is actually a pretty easy way to do this. It's using the Region of Interest tool and that's right here. Normally, this is used for rendering just a specific portion of a comp but you can actually use it exactly like the crop tool. I just make the bounding box the size of the window. I'll zoom in nice and close, that's pressing the Period key on the keyboard to zoom in, Comma key to zoom out. I'll just line this up nice and close, making sure not to trim off any of the window. It doesn't have to be perfect, but something very close is great. Then I'll come up to Composition, "Crop Comp to Region of Interest." Click that and now my window is nicely positioned right in the center of that pre-comp. But if I go back to my main comp, the window is now in the center of this building. That's not what I wanted, which is exactly why I took a snapshot. So, if I hold down the Show Snapshot button, I can see where that window needs to be now, and I'll just click hold Shift and drag it over. Zoom in nice and close and then show that snapshot again. So, it needs to move down into the left. So, I move it down to the left, and then nudge it down with my arrow keys, and there we go. It's lined up perfect. Okay, that's great. Let's move on to this window. I'll select all the layers that make up this window- Here we go. Then, Command + Shift or Control + Shift + C and rename this lower window. All the other settings are great. Click Okay and we have the same issue. So, I'll go into that layer, set my region of interest. By the way, I'm switching to the zoom tool very quickly by pressing Z on the keyboard. Click once to zoom in and hold down the option or Alt on a PC, and click to zoom out. Then, I'm holding on the spacebar to temporarily switch to the hand tool which allows me to just pan around my document. So, that's how moving in and out and around my documents so quickly. That's just some more ways to speed up your workflow. You'll get used to that as you use After Effects more often. All right. So, let's set the region of interest here. We're going to make a box around the window, nice and close. Again, I don't want to crop anything off, so it's okay to have a little bit of a margin. I'm trying to be symmetrical as possible around these edges. Then, I'll go up to Composition, Crop Comp to Region of Interest. Go back to our main comp, and the window is now up here where it shouldn't be. Now, I could use the snapshot feature again, but I want to take this as an opportunity to show you another technique. Since we have all of our original artwork here, I can actually just find that layer which would be these layers are what make up this art. So, I'll enable those. I can't see them because these two layers right here are hiding them, so I'll turn those off and the background as well. Here we go. Now, we have those original layers back where they need to be. So, I'll just grab this window and line it up until it fits exactly the way that the original artwork did. It looks like that, it's pretty perfect. If I turn this layer off and back on, you can see that that's almost dead on. So, I'm going to call that good, turn those layers back off, and turn my background layers back on. Great. Now, I don't need to make multiple copies of this door, but I do want to keep this main comp as clean and organized as possible. So, I'm actually going to select all of the layers for the door. So, starting here and going down to the door frame, and I'll precomposed these as well. So, Command + Shift + C, Control + Shift + C on a PC and I'll name this door. Go into that precomp by double-clicking and then set my region of interest. I'm just going to continue this process for all of the elements that I want to exist on a single layer within my main comp. Again, that's just for organization. It makes things much easier to look at and deal with in the main comp. So, there's my door, I'll bring that down nicely with the threshold. I have that to line it up with as a guide, and then I just want to make sure that it's centered. So, I'll show my snapshot, and look at that, it's perfect. Dead on right in the center. I'll did the same thing for the lamp because that is going to be duplicated. So, I'll select those layers. Precompose lamp. Set my region of interest. Again, this does not have to be perfect as long as it's pretty symmetrical. I'm trying to put the same amount of space on the sides in top and bottom. Then, I'll crop to the region of interest and reposition my lamp in the main comp. Make sure that's nice and where it needs to be. I'll use the arrow keys to just shift it around until it lines up with that snapshot. Perfect. Okay, I am going to precomp this bush because it has four duplicate. So, Command + Shift + C, bush. Perfect. Okay, I think that's good for now. I've got my door, my windows, the bush, the lamp and then all of these other elements are basically just rectangles so I'm going to leave them as they are for now. Next, I want to take a look at my project panel because you can see that all of my precomps are now showing up in here. This is another part of After Effects that I want to keep organized so it's easy to navigate the project. So, I going to make a new folder by clicking on this button right here and I'll rename it Precomps. I'll just grab all the precomps and move them into that folder. Now, that's nice and organized. I've got my main comp here and my Illustrator artwork. Now, that that's organized, I want to duplicate the elements that can be duplicated. So, I'll start with the upper windows. For this, I'll use the original artwork as reference. So, I'm going to turn off some of these layers. The siding and the trim, I'm just going to hide those. I'll hide the background. Now, I have this layer 1 visible, which is what I'm going to use as reference. So, zoom in nice and close here. This is my precomp and this is layer 1 from Illustrator. So, I'll select this precomp and duplicate it by pressing Command + D or Control + D on the PC. So, now I have two instances of that same precomp. Then, with the selection tool selected, I'll click hold shift and drag this window over until it lines up with that layer. So, right about there, it looks good. I'll hold spacebar to pan across the comp a little bit and duplicate again. Command or Control + D, click, hold Shift and drag until that's lined up. I'll just do this for all of the windows. Now we go one more, and there we go. Now, all of my windows are recreated using just these precomps. So, if I solo these, and see that I have all of my windows existing from these precomps now. I'll do the same thing for this window down here. So, I'll duplicate it. Command or Control + D, click shift and drag. Pan over, duplicate, click shift and drag, duplicate click shift and drag. Looks great. Okay, I'll do the same thing for this lamp. Duplicate, all right. Then, finally, this bush. So, duplicate, move it over. Duplicate and one more duplicate. All right. There we go. Now, I've got all those repeated elements recreated. I can turn off layer 1 and my artwork is still there. I'll turn on those background elements, and my house is completely recreated inside of After Effects using precomps and shape layers. Now, that I have all that set up, I can actually get rid of all of my Illustrator artwork. I don't need it anymore. So, I select the first layer, scroll down, hold Shift and click on the last layer, and then just press delete. Now, the contents of my comp are only the layers that I'm actually concerned with. I'll press Command + S to save or Control S on a PC. Remember, save all the time. Now, we can start animating my house. At this point, you need to bring your artwork in the After Effects and break it down just like I did. If you're following along with me and making a building very similar to mine, then you're probably want to use precomps for repeated things like the windows on my building. If not, that's fine. Just make sure that you keep all of your layers in your comp nice and organized, labeled properly so that it's easy to navigate and easy to see what you're doing. Once you're done with all of that, take a screenshot of your After Effects layer stack and post that to your class project page so I can see your project. That we can move on to animation. 4. The Speed Graph: This is the single most important section of the entire class. I'm going to teach you how to use the graph editor and all of the tools that go along with it. So, if you haven't already, now is the time to start paying attention. Now, I'm going to take a little these who are from my own class project, and I've got a demo set up to explain exactly how the graph editor is working, and I've made this demo as after effects project file available to you to download, so that you can interactively play around with it while you're watching me. So, I'll go ahead and put that in the notes of this video. You can also find it under your project tab in the attachments, but that way, you can be interactively messing around with the graph editor while you're learning about it. So, I've built a demo here that's going to show you an outline like a trail of this circle moving across the screen. I'm going to make this project file available to you for downloads so that you can play around with this as you're watching me, and after you're done with the video. Because I think it's a really great exercise in being able to understand how your objects move based on the way that you're manipulating your keyframes. So, you can find that project file in the notes of this video right now, as well as on the your project tab in the attachments. Don't worry about how I made this demo right now, I will have a bonus lesson at the end of class, if you're really interested on how I made this, I'll show you there. But for now, just think of it as a guide. It's showing every frame between frame zero and frame 30, as this highlighted circle outline. That way, we can see exactly how this ball is moving. If I preview, you can see that it's just traveling across the screen. This animation was generated with just two position keyframes. First keyframe set at 200 pixels on the x-axis, and 1080 on the second keyframe. The y-axis doesn't change. That's why it's only moving left to right. My keyframes are linear. That's what these little diamonds mean. I'm going to give myself a little bit more room. But that's what these icons represent, linear keyframes. If you spent any time animating inside of after effects, then you're probably familiar with the term 'Easy Ease'. If I select these two keyframes, and right click, go down to keyframe assistant, there will find easy ease the keyboard shortcut is F9. If I click that, my diamond switch to these hourglass shapes, and my animation is changed as well as the trail. We see now that there are more overlapping circles on this end and this end, and the motion is slightly smoothed on the front end of the animation. If I undo to get back to linear, you can see it's very straight, linear, static. If I redo Command Shift Z, or Control Shift Z, we have that little bit of easing at the front and tail ends. Now this is where most people getting into motion design and after effects stop. They just say all these keyframes, it'll smooth it out and it'll be great. But, you're taking this class because you don't want to be just like any other motion designer. You want to understand how to control your motion, and the key to learning that is through the graph editor. So, we can open up the graph editor by coming to this little icon right here. See, graph editor, I'll click on it, and here we have a bent line, it's bell shape, and a graph, and some numbers, and it might seem a little bit confusing. But don't worry, I'm going to break it all down and explain everything you need to know to take advantage of this tool. First thing I need to point out, is that there are actually two types of graphs within the graph editor. So, if you're playing around with a graph editor while you're watching this, your graph might look different than mine. In fact, it probably will look different than mine, but yours might not be this nice bell shaped curve. If I come down to this little drop down right here, I can choose the graph type. Now, by default, it's set to auto select graph type, because certain graphs tend to work better with certain types of properties, so after effects is suggesting which type of graph it thinks you want to use. This just so happens to be the speed graph. So, if I choose speed graph it stays the same. But, we have another option, the value graph. If I click on that, it looks different. We have colors, we have this S shape, and then the straight line. Again, all of this might be a little confusing, but I'll break it down. Let's start with the speed graph. Since we're on the position property, and after effects defaulted to that, let's talk about what this is representing. Well, these two points right here are representing our keyframes. I can select either one of them, and turn the graph editor off, and back on, and you can see that within the timeline, they're at the same point as those keyframe. So, that's easy to remember. These squares are exactly the same as these hourglass icons. They're keyframes. This bell shaped curve is telling us how fast this ball is moving at a specific point in time. It's measuring the pixels per second that it's moving over time. That's why this is called the speed graph. On the position property, it's measuring the speed of pixels over time, on the rotation property you would be measuring degrees over time, and on the scale property it'd be measuring percentage over time. But with all of those properties, the value that it's actually measuring is the speed. So, let's see if we can read this graph. It's a bell shape. Down here we see a zero. If I highlight that keyframe, we get a pop up that says at frame zero, it's traveling at zero pixels per second. So, the keyframe anchor point is down at that baseline of zero. Okay. That makes sense, because at the beginning of our animation, the ball's not moving. So, it's travelling at zero pixels per second, and as the animation goes on, the speed moves up. So, the by frame six, it's moving about 846 pixels per second, and then at the top at frame 15, we're moving it like 1300 pixels per second. At that point, it's traveling the fastest. So, it's sped up to that velocity, and then the bell shape starts going back down. So, we can predict that this ball is going to be slowing down as it nears that last keyframe which ends at zero pixels per second. It's as simple as that. The speed graph is just telling you how fast the object moves between keyframes. This is called interpolation. It's what makes animation so easy inside of a computer program, because you can just tell after effects, start with the ball here at frame zero, and here at frame 30, and in between, you make up the rest. It fills in all of those gaps. But the graph editor allows you to choose how it's interpolating between those two values. So, if you take a look at the keyframe again, I have this one selected. I also have this handle. This is called an influence handle. If I click and drag it to the right, my bell shape changes, and you can see that my trail is also updating. So, let me play this back. You see that now it takes a lot longer to get across the screen. Again, we can read that graph. It starts off at zero, takes it longer to speed up, and now it's around 20 frames that it's at its max speed, and it's much faster than 1300, it's now at 1780 pixels per second, and then it slows down pretty abruptly. If I grabbed this influence handle and drag it out to the right, now that's going to be even more of an abrupt stop. If I do this while we can see the trail, you can really see how that's affecting every single frame. So, this is how you fine tune the motion using the speed graph. But these keyframes don't have to start at zero pixels per second. If I click and drag upwards on this handle, you can see that I could tell it to start at a velocity of 1,000 pixels per second. Now it's going to be fastest at the beginning, and then taper off down near the end. You can pull this handle out a little bit, and now we have a whole bunch of frames bunched up near the end and it comes to a nice smooth stop. If I grab this handle and move it all the way to the left so that it has basically no influence on the curve, then it's going to be fastest on the first frame, and slow down all the way to the resting velocity of zero. I can exaggerate this even further, and now between this frame and this frame, you can see there isn't even any overlap. Let's play that back and see what it looks like. Now it starts traveling very fast, and gradually gets to that resting point. I could reverse this very easily, I'll take all the influence out of that one, put it all back into this one, and now that speed is reversed. It starts off very slow, and takes off at the end of the animation. Now, I want to get back to my linear keyframes. I could do that by going out of the graph editor and Command or Control clicking on the keyframes, or, without leaving the graph editor, I could just hold down option or Alt and click on those keyframes. Now my graph isn't curved at all. It's a straight line. If you think about it, that makes sense, because linear keyframes have a constant velocity. There is an equal amount of distance traveled between every single one of these frames, which brings me right into my next point which is timing versus spacing, and these are two fundamental animation concepts that tie in directly to the graph editor and how things are moving inside of After Effects. Timing is the distance between keyframes. Literally, where we've timed these two keyframes. That's why this is a stopwatch icon, it allows you to assign a specific value to any property at a given time. So, at frames zero, I have it set to this value, at frame 30, I have it set to this value. That's my timing. The spacing is what the interpolation that we talked about is. It's all of the frames in between those two points in time. Because my key frames are linear, the spacing is perfectly even throughout every single one of these frames. The ball's traveling equal distance between each one of the frames. If I ease this. Now the spacing is different, there's less spacing between frames on the front and tail ends of the animation, and more spacing in between. If I open up my graph editor, and is this quite a bit, then I'm a really affecting the spacing. So, there's a bunch of gaps in between these frames here in the middle and barely any gaps in between the frames at the front and tail end. So, I'll play that back, we get a much smoother animation. The thing that you've got to think about, is that the timing hasn't changed at all. At frame zero, is the first frame, and at frame 30, the second keyframe. All that's changed is the spacing between those two keyframes. Let me show you what I mean. I have another comp here set up with that same easy comp that I just made the adjustments to, as well as another duplicate where we only have linear movement. So I'll make this bigger, so it's nice and easy to see, and I'll play this back. The point of this is to show you that the timing of both of these animations is identical. They both start at zero and end at 30, but the spacing is completely different, and you could see how dramatically that affects the actual motion. That's exactly why knowing how to use the graph editor is so important. Because you can take two keyframes and produce something that looks totally different than the default and linear keyframes. Now, if I went back into my demo comp, and I adjusted this so that maybe it doesn't end as smoothly, it starts off much more smooth and ends more abruptly, we can go back and still see that the timing has not changed, only the spacing. Both of these layers start and end in the exact same position. That goes for any property, it doesn't just have to be positioned. Timing and spacing applies to anything with keyframes, and that's why it's so important to know how to use the graph editor. I like using the speed graph a lot. There's some controversy out there which type of graph is better, and I would strongly encourage you to not favor one over the other. Both of them have pros and cons, and can do things that the other can't. So, it's very important that you understand how to use each one, so that you can know when to use each one. 5. The Value Graph: Now let's switch over to the value graph. So, come down to this menu and say edit value graph. Now, remember we're back to our linear keyframes and we're seeing something different in our graph. The biggest difference is that we now have two different lines and there are two different colors. This is something that's a little bit confusing about the value graph, when you're working with a property that has multiple values like the position or the scale, the value graph is going to show both of those values. So we're seeing this green line and that's representing the position Y, as I highlight over it you can see position Y in that pop up box, and the red line is a representing position X. That's great. Let me select these keyframes by clicking and dragging and then I'll convert them to easy ease, F9 on the keyboard, and now I have this S shape curve for the red and my green line is still straight. Again, because there is no Y position movement this line is staying completely flat. But my red line, the X position, is this S shape. So, why is this an S shape and the speed curve a bell shape? Well, it's because the speed graph was measuring velocity or speed over time and the value graph measures the value over time. So, if you remember, I said that the ball starts at a value of 200 pixels on the X axis. So, there we go we have this first keyframe 200 pixels and then on the last keyframe it's at 1080, and here we see this keyframe at 1080. We can look at our units and see that we have 500 pixels 1,000 pixels. So, down here at 200 is where the first keyframe on the X position is that, makes sense and as time goes on, it ends up at 1,080 pixels. Hopefully, that makes sense to you it's not that complicated once you understand it. Speed graph measures speed over time, value graph measures value over time. Once you understand that, you really can start to predict what's happening with your animations just by looking at the curve. So, I'd easy ease my keyframes and I can see that it starts at a value of 200 and eases out of that value, it's travelling fastest, changing value fastest between these two points and then it starts easing in slowing down to that 1080 position. Now, I have this first keyframe selected and you'll notice that I don't have any handles to manipulate this curve, and why is that? Well, this is another part of the value graph that's a little bit confusing at first and sometimes pretty frustrating, and the reason for that is because it behaves differently with different properties. For whatever reason, I'm not able to edit this curve with the position property that has both values together. However, if I right click on it and say separate dimensions, now I have an X position property and a Y position property, and they're highlighted with the color that the graph editor assigned to them. So, my X position is red that's easier to identify and the Y position is green. Great, I don't need to concern myself with the Y position in fact I don't even need keyframes on the Y position so I'm going to select it and press the stopwatch to take those keyframes off. Then I'll select the X position, so that it shows up in my graph and take a look at this curve. Now with those keyframes selected, I have access to those handles. Now, they got messed up when I split the dimensions, so I need to easy ease them again. I'll press F9 on the keyboard and now that S shaped curve is back. Play S back so we can see the animation and just like with the speed graph, I can grab one of these handles and drag it out. But as I do this, you'll notice that it is not staying horizontal like the speed graph was. I'm able to move it up and down as well. If I hold shift, it will stay horizontal, so that can be handy but not holding downshift gives me some more flexibility. If I want this to end up at a resting position, that's very nice and smooth, I will hold downshift and keep that horizontal. As I drag this out, you can see all of these circles bunching up to the right side. I'm going to really exaggerate this on both of these handles and play it back. Now, I have this extreme S curve and you can see how that's really affected my motion. If I were to grab this top handle and drag it down so that it's more of a shape like this, you could see that almost all of the circles are over on the left side now. If I play that, we've got that same motion of easing out of that resting position into a very fast speed. If I click on it and drag it upwards past that top ceilling point and see that these circles now shooting off to the right side. So, let's play this back and see what it does. Now, it's actually going beyond that that value of 1,080, up here you see it's around 1,150 before coming down. It did the same thing with this handle if I just grab it and drag it downwards, that's really pushing a bunch of these circles off to the left. They've got this completely different motion just from editing my curve. I'm going to click and drag while holding shift to snap these back to being perfectly horizontal. Now, let's switch back to the speed graph and compare the curves. So, here I have this bell curve that's nice and pointy, and then on the value graph I have this S curve. Again, we can read them both to interpret the speed. Starts off at zero arresting value, speeds up very quickly in the middle, and then immediately slows down to a resting position again. On the value graph, we're looking at a value. So, it starts at a low value of 200, the value begins to change slowly then very quickly then slows down again resting at 1080. Now, here's something interesting. If I select these keyframes, right click on them, go to keyframe assistant and say time reverse keyframes, now my S curve is mirrored. So, it's starting at a higher value and dropping down to a lower one. So, that makes sense with the graph. It would start at a higher value and then move downwards instead of upwards. I'll play that back and now it's moving from the right to the left instead of left to right and if I switch back to my speed graph, my bell curve is upside down and the reason for that is because the speed is moving at a negative velocity. Now, you don't typically think about speed in negative values, but the reason for this is because after effects is basing all of these graphs on the comps pixels. So, over here, we're at a value of 1080 and over here read a value of 200. So, it's measuring the velocity of the change in value, and because it's going from a higher number to a lower number, it's interpreting that as a negative velocity. The curve is the exact same shape, it's just inverted. I'll undo to get back to where I was. 6. Motion Paths & Rove Keyframes: Now I could go back to my timeline and just add another key frame by going to a frame and clicking right here or within the graph editor, I could actually just switch to the pen tool which is G on the keyboard and click anywhere on this graph to add an extra key frame. Now that it's there, I can switch back to my selection tool V on the keyboard and then adjust the influence handles to however I'd like. So, if I want to maybe space this out a little bit longer and have it take longer to build up to that speed, that's how I can do it or if I want to go crazy and just have this go all over the place, I could drag it down to a negative velocity and if I switch over to my value graph, we can see what that looks like. That's added another key frame right here in the middle. I can grab these handles and move them around to adjust very precisely how this interpolation is happening between these key frames. Now with the value graph, I can actually break these handles. If I switch back to my pen tool, G on the keyboard, and hold option or Alt on a PC, that switches to my Vertex tool, I can click and drag on these handles. Now that they're broken, I can just select the other one click and drag it and now I've got some very crazy looking motion. Now, this may not be at all what you would want but it is something to be aware of. It gives you a lot of flexibility with how to interpolate the values between your key frames. If you want those handles to be snapped back together, just hold down option click and drag and they'll be locked together again. You can also option click once on a key frame and now those handles won't have any influence on the value change. I'm going to undo back to where we had this crazy key frame and just compare that to the speed graph. So, here we can see that looks completely crazy but the way this is working here is that we have influence handles on either side of this key frame that's in between two others that we can operate independently. Again, you can split a key frame's influence handles by holding down option or Alt and clicking on that key frame. Click once to join them, click again to separate them. So, I can keep them separated like this or link the influence so that it's nice and smooth between those handles. It still adjusts them properly but the incoming and outgoing influence will be very similar if they're locked together like that. As you're starting to wrap your head around these two graphs, it can also be useful to use the reference graph. Like click on that. It's going to show you both graphs at once. Whichever one you're not using will be the reference. So, I'm adjusting the speed graph so it's showing me the value graph in the background. I can't actually edit it but if I make changes to the speed graph, we can see how that's affecting the value graph. If I switch over to my value graph, I can do the same thing. Adjust these handles and see how they're affecting the speed graph. This is a really great way to understand and interpret how both graphs are being displayed. I'm going to turn off my reference graph, delete this key frame, and then pull this handle up again. Now, as I do this, you can see that my graph is automatically scrolling upwards so it's giving me a little bit more room. But sometimes that might be difficult to work with. If I undo and change this value from 1080 down to say 300, you can see that my curve hasn't changed but the graph units have. Now it's only displayed between 200 and 300 pixels. So if I click and drag this handle and move it up, it's barely moving past that resting point. To get around this, I can uncheck this auto zoom graph height button. What this allows me to do is simply zoom out using the zoom tools. So if I press Z on the keyboard, hold down option or Alt, I can click and you can see that zooms out vertically on my graph editor and now I can switch back to my selection tool, V on the keyboard, and click and drag that much more dramatically. So that gives me the ability to just zoom out or in if I'd rather zoom in more freely and just like inside of my curve, hold down Spacebar to pan around that graph. I am going to turn that back on so it just keeps that nice and centered and then put my values back to where they were. Next, I want to talk about the motion path a little bit and how that plays into all of this. If you're not familiar, this up here, this little blue line is the motion path. The reason it's blue is because my layer is blue. If I switched the label color to green, it will be green. The motion path is a representation of the position of this layer over time. Each one of these dots is a frame. The open squares at the ends represent the key frames. If I click on them, you can see that they're being selected down here in my timeline. As I step through this animation, you see that the anchor point of my layer is lining up with each one of those dots. So that's what those dots represent. If I adjust my speed or value graphs, you can see that those dots are also bunching up exactly the same way that my trails were. So that's a way that you can read the motion of your path. That's great. As it is now, that's really just for reference. It's not doing much for me or giving me any more control. But if I right click on my position and uncheck separate dimensions, I've gone back to my linear key frames and I can no longer adjust my value graph. But if I switch over to my speed graph and I adjust these handles, you can see that that's updating both my trail and my motion path. The nice thing about this is that I can now control the path that my circle takes between these two key frames as if I was drawing a path with the pen tool. So, if I switch over to my pen tool and highlight over the first key frame, you see that it switches to my Vertex tool. By click and drag, that's going to give me a handle just like any vector path, just like my value graph, it behaves exactly the same. I'm now able to control the path that this object takes between the two key frames and as I'm doing this you can see that not much is changing in my speed graph at all. Maybe a little bit on this Max velocity but nothing too much. If I play this back, my key frames are exactly the same. The values are still set at 210 80 on the x axis. They are eased based on the speed graph but it's going in this S shape instead of a linear left and right position. So that's a benefit to keeping your position locked. You can animate objects using the motion path. If that's important to you, then you're going to need to get used to using the speed graph because like I said, you can't adjust the motion path with the position dimensions separated. If I separate the dimensions, I lose those handles. I can no longer adjust them. However, this motion is still preserved. The reason for that is because it's generated key frames for both the x and y position. So, now if we take a look at the graph editor for just the y position and I'll switch over to the value graph, you can see that it's changing from a value of 360 down to 315 up to 420 and then down to 360 whereas before this was just linear. So, if you need to use the value graph but still want to be able to control the path that your object takes, this is how you're going to do it. You're probably going to want to select both the x and y positions, you can see them both at once and then I'll just start by easing everything. So again, this is just traveling in a linear path but I want to move in that curvy path again. So select my y position, grab one of the handles and drag it down and then grab the other handle and drag it up. Now this is, in my opinion, a little bit more difficult to manipulate and get it to behave exactly the way that you want because you have to play with four different values. The incoming and outgoing key frames for both the x and y positions. I've got something that works pretty good but it doesn't ease very well at the end so I would have to play around with this a little bit more and this is why I say that it's just important to know both graphs, how they behave with different properties, what their limitations are and what their benefits are because then you can know when to use which graph. If I was trying to make this kind of animation, I would never separate the dimensions. I'd keep them locked, I'd easy ease my key frames and then I just adjust my motion path. Exactly how I did before. So, I'll just select this handle on this key frame, do the same thing down here and very easily, I'm able to manipulate where that circle is travelling along that path. So that's a very important thing to keep in mind. The next thing I want to talk about is called a Rove key frame. So, I'm going to start by just making all my key frames linear again, getting rid of that motion path handles so that it's just travelling in that straight line again. Let's say that I want to adjust this motion path but this time using a key frame instead of the handles. Let's say that these handles weren't giving me exactly what I wanted. I want the ball to go down here between these two key frames. So, I just click and drag it. It generates a key frame and now I can play it back and it shoots from one key frame to the next. If I select the outer two key frames and easy ease them, the first key frame is going to ease out of this value and go to this key frame and then that easing is going to be disregarded as it gets to the other side of the key frame and go from a linear key frame into an East key frame. Play that back. It's not a very continuous smooth motion. If I try to easy easing this one then it's going to ease to that position and then ease out of it. But I just want it to have this nice flowing motion between these two points. Well, first thing I need to do is make my motion path nice and smooth. So, I'm going to switch to the pen tool, G on the keyboard, click once on that key frame to automatically smooth out this curve and then maybe just adjust it a little bit. Okay. So the path that it's taking is great but the timing is off. I don't like the way that it's slowing down to this position before taking off to here. I want it to be one continuous movement almost as if this key frame wasn't here. I just want to use this as a value on my motion path. Well, one way that I could do this is by holding command or Control on a PC and clicking on the key frame wants to make it linear and one more time to make it a circle. This is called an auto Bezier key frame and what it does is attempts to smooth out the velocity between those key frames so it's doing a pretty good job. This is much smoother than this linear key frame and a whole lot smoother than this East key frame. So that's great. But let's jump into the graph editor and switch over to the speed graph to see how that looks. It's not very smooth. Like I said, it is smoother and again if I made this linear by option clicking on it, you can see how that really doesn't look smooth. It breaks the handles and those don't work. If I ease easy it, it comes down to a resting position. I don't want that. So, I'm back to my auto Bezier and I'll use that as a starting point. That's like a way to get a rough idea of where the easing should be for that key frame and then I'll just pull on this influence handle out and maybe pull this one in just a little bit and now I've got this nice smooth fluid motion. It almost looks as if there is no point here where there's a key frame. That's great. But, what if I told you there's an even easier way to do this kind of emotion? If I go back into my timeline, right click on the key frame and go down to rove across time, my key frame gets smaller. It's a circle so it looks a lot like auto Bezier and it shifts over. It's not even under where I set it. If I go back to my graph editor, I've got this perfect bell shape curve again and that Rove key frame is right here. It's that circle. Watch what happens if I adjust my curve. That's automatically being shifted to wherever it needs to be, in order to maintain the velocity between these two key frames. So what Rove across time is effectively doing, is what I had already explained. It's taking the position value that I set for this key frame rate here and incorporating it into the interpolation between the two key frames on either side of it. So, it's not paying attention to any of the velocity information in fact, I can't adjust any of the velocity information. It's only holding onto the data that I put into the motion path. So, if I click and drag it around, you can see how that's affecting my curve. Actually, it's not affecting the curve at all, it's just shifting along it. So, I can make this curve as wacky as I want it to be and it's always going to have the same incoming and outgoing velocity, based on these two key frames. The great thing about this is that you can actually add multiple rove across time key frame. So, if I add another key frame right here, right click and say rove across time, now I have two of those and I can adjust the motion path however I want, maybe make this a little bit nicer and be very precise about how the motion is playing out in my comp while still controlling the velocity with just this start and end key frames. This is all very important concepts to understand and can make your life a lot easier when animating things. 7. Using The Graph Editor With Other Properties: All right, now that we've done all of this position animation, let's take a look at one of the other properties. I'm going to bring up the scale and set a couple of keyframes. We'll start by turning it down to say 50, set a keyframe and then go to this frame 30 and turn it back up to 100. So, now that ball is scaling up while moving left and right. Great. And if I easy ease those keyframes we can see that ease reflecting, it's no longer perfectly linear. If I go into my graph editor, I see a speed graph and it's behaving exactly the same way as the position graph. Instead of pixels over time, it's measuring percentage over time, so I can increase this or decrease it, however I want. And now, the shift in scale will be more dramatic right around here. You see that it speeds up a lot and if I switch over to the value graph I've got the same S- curve. Now what's interesting about this is that I only have one curve for two values and this is one of those instances where the value graph is pretty confusing sometimes because on the position value, I can't edit this at all. I have two lines always, I have to separate the dimensions if I want to use the value graph. However, on the scale property I can just continue to edit this as if it were one single value and it will always work. But if I uncheck the constrain proportions button, so that I can independently change the x and y scale. Now if I select this keyframe and click and drag, I suddenly have two lines and the x scale is always going to be on top. So, if I select everything and just easy ease it they're all overlaid on top of each other. If I want to adjust just the y scale, I have to first move the x scale out of the way and then I can do whatever I want to the y scale. It's kind of annoying and something that you just have to deal with. Unfortunately, you can't separate dimensions on a scale like you can with position. But something to take note of is that now that I have this kind of weird scale happening, you see, it's going into an oval here and maybe I'll even exaggerate this even further, we've got this weird animation happening. I can now link these properties together, these proportions, and if I adjust one of the handles it affects both. So, you can at any time link and unlink these values, and even if they are linked and you easy ease the keyframes, it will line them all back up nicely. And if we go back to the speed graph and unlink these, we have the exact same thing happening. I can now adjust both the x and y values independently of each other. And once they're different if I linked them back up they'll then affect both the x and y axes. All right, I'm going to get rid of that scale animation and let's bring up rotation. To do this, I'm pressing shift and then the corresponding keyboard shortcut for the property. So, R is rotation, S is scale, P is position, and then if you hold down shift and press R, that will bring up the rotation while keeping the position, we'll then shift and press S you get the scale as well. Okay, so, if I rotate this you don't actually see anything happening because it's a circle, so I'm going to go into this and change it from a circle down to a square. So, it looks something more like this now. Press R to bring up my rotation again and shift P for the position and set my keyframe. So, zero at frame 30 and then I'll just rotate it back maybe 270, there, and will play this back, and now my square is rotating. Another thing I want to point out is that you can ease multiple properties at the same time, so, I'm going to select all four of these keyframes for the rotation and the position. Press F9 to easy ease them. The reason why I usually like to easy ease is because it brings the speed graph, influence handles down to the base line of zero or the value graphs handles out to this horizontal position. It's just a good starting point. So, on the speed graph with both of these properties selected I can actually grab any of these keyframes by making a selection and ease everything at once. So, now the speed graph matches on both the rotation and position values. Now, unfortunately, I can't do that on the value graph because my position is not separated, so, I can't adjust the value graph for the position. But the rotation value, if I hold down command or control and click on the position, that way I'm left with just the rotation, that rotation value is a single property. It's measured in degrees, so that's why we're seeing degrees over time but we don't have any issues. I can edit this in the value graph or the speed graph and handle it however I'd like and it will work in either one. Out of a lot of the properties that you can use the graph editor on, the rotation property is really one of the most easy to manipulate. And just to show you again how easy it is to ease multiple keyframes for multiple properties so easily, I'm just going to set some scale of keyframes as well and maybe we'll have it start out at 25, go up to 100 and then I'll just select everything. Again, easy ease it and let's separate the dimensions on the position, easy ease again, go into all four of these at once and then I could just ease this out nicely and see how that's affecting in our trail. We've got bunched up frames over here, bunched up frames over here, play it back and just like that, I've eased four different properties all at once. And because I separated the dimensions on the position property, I can edit these exactly the same inside of the value graph. So, if I grab all of these and raise them up and then grab all these, push them down, I've got something that's just absolutely bonkers. But the point is it's very easy to manipulate. I can't stress the importance of this section of the class enough. Understanding how to use the graph editor really is the key to controlling your motion inside of After Effects. And that was a whole lot of information to take in all at once, so you really need to take a step back from your class project and get into After Effects. Use this demo project file that I've set up for you to play around with the graph editor and see how it's affecting the motion of that circle. Make sure that you understand how the speed graph works versus the value graph. How they're similar, how they're different, so that you can know when to choose one over the other. And also be sure that you apply this to other properties other than position. See how it affects the scale property and the rotation property and how one of the graphs might be a better choice depending on the property that you're using. If you come up with any unique looking experiments feel free to share that on your class project page so we can see what you're up to. And if you have any issues, any questions at all, just hit me up on the community page and I'll do my best to help you out. 8. Anchor Points Matter!: Now that you've gotten your feet what with the graph editor and you understand the basics of how it works, I'm going to start animating my own class project and use the graph editor to ease all of the motion. If any of this is going over your head just take a break from this class for a second and go watch, The Beginner's Guide to Animating Custom Gifs. That's the class I made that's just 30 minutes long for people who have never used After Effects before, and will get you up and running, and you can come back and follow along. Another thing I'm going to be doing through the rest of this class is using a lot of keyboard shortcuts, and I'll do my best to call them out as I'm using them. But that's something that you should start memorizing. Keyboard shortcuts are an incredible efficiency booster for your workflow in After Effects and make you a much quicker, more efficient motion designer. Through the graph editor demo I mostly used the position property to show you how it works. But the reality is I'm probably not going to be animating a lot of the position property if any with this house design. I think mostly I'm going to be using the scale property, maybe a little bit of rotation. But as you'll see all of it still applies regardless of what property we're animating. Let's start with the top row of windows. I'm going to double click into any one of the pre-comps, and start thinking about how I want this to animate on. It probably makes sense to have the frame animate on first followed by the glass, and that way the glass doesn't animate on top of nothing it has the frame behind it. So, I'm going to turn off the glass layers by hiding their eyeball icons down here in the layers panel, and that way I can focus on just the frame. Like I said, I think I'm going to use the scale property to animate. So let's bring that up by twirling down this arrow, going into the transform controls and finding scale. Now this is where I want it to end up at. At a scale value of 100 percent on both X and Y axis. So I'll set a keyframe and then click and drag this out a little bit. Now, I'm pretty far zoomed out here, so I'm on the plus button on the keyboard to zoom in, so I can see these units more clearly. I'm also going to switch my timecode to view as frames instead of hours, minutes, seconds. So that way I can just count frames. Zoom in one more time and there we can see 30 frames equals one second so I can know relatively how quickly I'm animating this. So maybe it'll take about a half a second. I'll go to frame 15 and drag this keyframe to that point in time, then back up to frame zero and adjust the property to zero, After Effects will automatically generate another keyframe, and then I'll set my work area, which has this little bar up here. That's with these blue handles are. I can only see the in-point right now but as you can see when I click and drag, it shifts where that work area is and it changes the highlight in my timeline. But there are two keyboard shortcuts that are really handy B to set the endpoint. So I can go to any point in time and press B and that will snap to my timeline scrubber. Then N which is right next to the B key to set the outpoint. So, B and N for in and out. With that work area set I can now preview by pressing zero or the spacebar on the keyboard, and it's only going to preview within that work area. If I click and drag this over and preview again, we're only going to see what happens there, which has no animations so nothing is happening in my comp. Okay, so here's my animation going from zero to 100 percent. It's not all that exciting, but before we go any further, I just want to talk about the way that things animate inside of After Effects. So right now I have this anchor point in the center of my bounding box for this layer. That anchor point is where this layer is scaling up from. But I can change where that anchor point is to adjust the way that my animation looks. If I come up here to the pan behind or anchor point tool, keyboard shortcut is Y, then I can click and drag this anchor point anywhere I want. So, if I say, put it down in this lower left corner and preview again, now the animation is happening from that lower left corner. So it looks a lot different than what it did before. Let's try and get it to scale from the top in the middle. Well, I could click and drag, and try and line it up nicely but you can actually temporarily enable snapping if you will down command or control while you're dragging this anchor point. You can see that that's giving me a bunch of guides and snapping to various points of this layer. So if I go right up to the top, right there, that big square is telling me it's snapping to that transform handle. So I know that my anchor point is right in the middle at the very top edge of this layer. Now if I play it back, it's scaling from the top perfectly. So it's important to consider your anchor point when you're animating things like scale. This is also the point that the layer will rotate around. So if I switch to my rotate tool, and click and drag, you see that it's rotating around that anchor point. If it was in the center of the layer, which you can easily do by right clicking, going to transform center anchor point in layer content, which there is a keyboard shortcut for, Option Command Home or Alt Ctrl Home on a PC, that will just bounce that anchor point right back to the middle, and now if I try rotating or switch to the rotate tool by pressing W on the keyboard, that's going to rotate around the center and scale around the center again. Okay. So with that in mind, I'm going to move my anchor point to the left edge. Hold down Command or Ctrl to snap it to that left edge, and let's say that I don't want it to scale on both the X and Y axis, I want it to only scale from left to right on that X-axis. Well, to do that I'm going to need to uncheck this constraint proportions icon, unlink the X and Y so that I can leave the Y at 100 percent on this first frame. Now we still don't see anything because the X value is zero. So even though we have a 100 percent height, we have zero width so we still don't see anything. But if I play this back, now it's scaling only from the left to the right. All right, so I think that's the direction that I want this animation to happen in but it's very linear. We just have linear keyframes so let's make this a little bit nicer to look at. I'll start by easy easing, F9, on the keyboard. Then I'll jump into my graph editor. Now I accidentally had the position value selected as well, so I'm just going to hold down command and click to get rid of that, and now I'm only seeing my scale. Now I can start easing this. So I'm going to select the second keyframe, bring it in a little bit, maybe even a little bit further and then do the same for the first keyframe. So now that ease is just a lot more extreme. All right, so I like that motion but now that I'm seeing this animation, I'm second guessing it. I think I actually want to have it scale from the center. So, with these keyframes already in place, I can still adjust the anchor point, I just need to make sure that I'm beyond this last keyframe because if I were to change the anchor point in here it's going to mess with my animation. So, if I move it over here and then show my keyframes by pressing U on the keyboard see that, that totally destroyed the animation, now it's going way off the screen. So I'll undo, go to where it's at 100 percent scale and then move it over while holding command to snap to the center. Now I'll play that back and we've got this nice smooth motion from the center outwards. Okay, that's great. Now let's do the two panes of glass. I think I want these to animate from the top down and the bottom up. So I'll start by setting the anchor points up. I'll grab this layer, move the anchor point to the top while holding command to snap, and then do the same thing for this second pane, I'll put that one at the bottom. I want the timing to be the same, so I'm going to set scale keyframes on these two layers by selecting them both, holding down option or Alt on a PC and pressing the S key and that sets a scale keyframe for both of those layers. Then I'll back up to the front of the animation- Unlink the scale properties and change the Y scale down to zero. You'll notice that even though this layer's instance had the scale properties linked, because I was adjusting the one that was unlinked it followed suit. Okay. So, I'll play this back and we see the animation happening the way that I wanted it to. So that's great. Now we just need to work on the easing. I'm going to shift these layers forward in time so that I'm not distracted by the frame animations. So I'll will shift my work area forward so I can just focus on the panes of glass. I'll select both of these key frames and this is another good point to bring up that you can ease any number of key frames. Any number of properties across any number of layers at the same time. So, I selected all my key frame and I'll easy ease them, then go into the graph editor and I'm seeing all of those properties at once. So, I'm going to select all of them and then just adjust my curve. So that it's nice and smooth. This is an issue. Now, what's exactly happening here. Because I have one of my scale instances, constrained and the other one not, all of the handles didn't move together. If you remember the Y axis actually sits behind the X axis so the X axis is right up here. It's this red line at the top and because it's on top, when I grabbed that handle it was actually adjusting the X axis. In the case of this window, I can adjust the X and Y independently of each other, but on this instance where they're constrained it's going to move both at the same time even though they are different values. So, I'm going to re-constrained the proportions of both layers then command or control click on the other scale property so I can see all of my key frames at once, select them all, and easy ease them one more time. Now, I can click and drag and know that I'm going to be affecting all of the key frames at the same time with the same amount of influence. All right. So, let's play that back. That's a nice fast fluid move. I like that. Okay. So, I'm going to go out of my graph editor, and zoom out a little bit by pressing minus on the keyboard, and now we want to overlap the animation a little bit so they're not happening at the exact same time. So, maybe I'll go forward from the start point, five frame. So, I press page down on the keyboard, one, two, three, four, five times, and then move the second layer to that point. Then, I'll back up in time and grab both of those glass panes and shift them back in time so that they start animating right about here, right when the frame is the width of those glass panes. Now, I can play all of that back, and I've got an animation going. Now, I think am going to bring this second pane back a little bit so it's not overlapped quite as much, but that looks really great. Now, let's jump back into our main comp and because I'm using that same pre-comps for all of these windows up here, when I play this back, all of them animate at the same time, in the same way. This is the power of pre-comps, and it's exactly why I set up my comp using them. What's even more powerful is that I don't have to have them animate on at the exact same time. I can offset each one of these pre-comps instances. So, let say I want to go from the left to the right. So, I'll unselect the first layer by command or control clicking on it, then hold down option or Alt on a PC and press the page down key twice to shift those layers forward in time to frames. Then I'll do this for all the other layers. Commander control click on the next layer, option or Alt page down twice. This way I'm putting two frames in between each instance, and now if I play it back they animate in kind of this cascading motion, and it looks really nice. And let's say I wanted to animate from the center outwards instead of left to right. Well, all I have to do is re-offset these layers a little bit, so I'll grab these three windows, shift them back to the front so that this window starts, and then I'll offset this one forward, and now they'll animate from the center outwards. I can exaggerate this a little bit by adding some more frames between each layer and now that's a really nice looking movement. Let's say I don't like the way that that's animating. I could go in and change the anchor point. So, maybe instead of from the center outwards on the frame, I'll put it from the left to the right. We'll go back to that animation, and then I'll reverse the anchor points on these two, I'll grab this one, push it up, grab this one, push it down, and then maybe have it animate quicker. So, I'll bring these ones in, play it back, and now I've got a different looking animation. I'll jump back out to my main comp and play it back, and every instance updates. So, as you're working on your own animation really think through all the different possibilities, you can make something that's completely unique and different from what I'm doing. I chose to use scale but you could also incorporate something like rotation any keyframable property to reveal any of these elements. So, I'm going to take these anchor points and move them both to the top left corner, and then I'm going to add in some rotation keyframe. So, let's start with this layer right here and press option or Alt R to add a rotation keyframe, and I'll shift that forward to the same time as the scale keyframe, then I'll rotate this back a little bit maybe forty five degrees, and I want to ease these exactly the same as the scale. But that might be really hard to do by I. So, probably be a better fit for the speed graph but even then it's going to be difficult for me to grab this rotation and kind of match the curve of the scale. Fortunately, I can actually find out the specific influence and velocity values of any keyframe by right clicking on it and going to keyframe velocity. That's going to open up this window and it's going to tell me that the incoming velocity is 33.33 influence on both the X and Y at a zero percent per second velocity, and then I have the same parameters on the outgoing velocity. Now, this is actually the value of an easy ease keyframe. The reason why we're seeing these values is because this is the incoming velocity. So, down here it's on the left side. It's part of the influence that isn't actually changing in animation. What I'm concerned with is the outgoing velocity. That's this column over here. Obviously, I'm not going to able to remember these exact numbers so I'm just going to copy them. I'll remember that the velocity is zero and the influence is this number. So, I'll select it, command or control C to copy, click OK, and then go into the keyframe velocity for the rotation keyframe, look at the outgoing velocity and set that down to zero, and then change the influence to that number that I had copied. So, I just pasted it by pressing command or control V, click OK, and now that one is set. I'll do the same thing for this keyframe. I'll go to this scale, keyframe velocity. I'm concerned with the incoming velocity this time. The velocity is still zero per second and the influences is numbers copy it, go into the rotation keyframe velocity, set the velocity down to zero and paste this influence, click OK. Now, if I select both of these key frames and go into the graph editor, we could see that the speed curve is identical, even though they're different speeds, the influence handles make the same shaped curve. So, I can play this back and now we see the rotation and scale happening exactly the same way. I think I want to change the starting scale property. Instead of being 100 in zero, I'm going to just send them both down to zero. That way it starts as this little dot and just scales up while it rotates. So there we go. I've got that little animation happening, and now that I have these keyframes, I can actually just copy them, because I want them to also apply to this layer, so, I'll go to the front of that layer and paste, press you wants to collapse layer and you one more time to show all the key frames, and there we go we have both the scale and rotation keyframes, and I'll play it back again. Okay. So, now I've got a different looking animation. I'll come back to my main comp and I can see how that's updated. Now, that you watch me play around with my animation, you should do the same thing for your artwork. So, start animating different objects and moving the anchor point around to see how it affects the overall animation. Practice overshoots. That's one way that you can really add a lot of personality to your motion and use those different graph editor controls to find two near overshoots and apply them to many different objects at the same time. Once you've made some progress, feel free to share it or just move on to the next lesson so you can see how I approach the rest of my animation. 9. Overshoots: All right. Now, that I played around with a bunch of different options, I think I have a good idea of exactly how I want this animation to happen for the upper window. So, I'm going to go jump back into there, get rid of these rotation keyframes, and think this through. I'm picturing this house building from the ground up. So, the layers in the background like this trim and the siding are going to come up first and then all of the elements on top of it. Otherwise, all these windows would be appearing with nothing behind them. So, because it's going to be moving in an upward motion like the house is actually being built. I think it makes sense to have these windows scale up from the bottom. So, that's how I want to animate the back frame layer. So, grab my anchor point tool, Y on the keyboard, and hold down command to snap that to the very bottom center. But that's still animating from the center outwards. I needed to animate from the bottom down. So, on the first keyframe instead of zero to 100, I'll change it to 100 and zero. Now it scales up but I've lost my easing because I didn't ease the original keyframes with the constrained proportions. That's okay though. I'm just going to redo this quickly, set everything to easy E's constrained my proportions again and then adjust the speed curve to something like that, maybe a little bit more influence on the second key frame that looks pretty good. I'm just going to turn off these two glass layers one more time because I want to talk about another technique in animation called an overshoot. An overshoot is a technique to give a lot of a bounce or elasticity to your movement. I'll show you exactly how to do it. First of all, I need some more room in my comp. I've pretty much cropped this to exactly the size of the final resting point of this window, but I want to be able to scale this up beyond that point a little bit. So, I'm going to go into my composition settings. Then, move this window out of the way a little bit so I can see the cop. I'm going to come over to my width and height and make sure that lock aspect ratio is checked, and then I can just click and drag on this number to expand my comp out a little bit. Because I had that checked, it's going to scale proportionately. So, that gives me a nice margin around the window, I click okay, and now I have a little bit more room to work. The way an overshoot works is by taking an animation like this where it's growing from the bottom to the top, and going beyond that resting value of 100 percent or overshooting it. So, I'm going to start by just taking the ease off of these key frames converting them to linear by selecting them and commander control clicking on them. An overshoot is actually really easy to do, really intuitive using the value graph. So, I'm going to switch over to the value graph, and unconstrain my proportions so I can edit just the scale Y value. I don't need a little bit more room to see this graph nicely. So, I'm going to scale this up and zoom out by pressing the command key on the keyboard for my comp viewer. Then also zoom in on my timeline by pressing the plus key a couple of times, and now we can start making my overshoot. So, like I said I want it to go beyond this value of 100 percent. So, I'm going to switch to my pen tool, G on the keyboard, and then clicked somewhere around here, switch to my selection tool by pressing V, and then click and drag that key frame up. Now, I have snapping enabled. So that's going to snap that keyframe to other key frames, but I want to be a little bit more precise. I'm going to uncheck that icon. Now, I can bring this up further and I'm looking at the little pop up that tells me how far beyond 100 percent I'm going. So, I think I want to go around 110 percent, and if I scroll to that point, I can see exactly how far up that's going. Now, this is something interesting that I should point out. If you ever run into a keyframe happening between frames, it's because you have this option down here. If you go to this menu and have allow key frames between frames checked, then you can very precisely move these keyframes anywhere you want regardless of the frame number. Now in this case, I don't want keyframes in between frames. So, I'm going to go back into there and uncheck allow key frames between frames, and snap that back to this frame. There we go. Okay. So now I can very easily see how far beyond I'm going 100 percent. So, I want to push it maybe 112,115, somewhere in there. That looks pretty good and I'll set my work area and play it back. So, now we can see that it's shooting very quickly beyond 100 percent, and then coming back down. I can already tell that my timing is a little too quick. So I'm going to zoom out a little bit and then drag this keyframe out, the resting keyframe while holding shift. That way I'm not accidentally dragging the X scale down, I'll just hold shift and go straight over to 15 frames, and then I'll bring this one out as well. Preview that, and I think that timing is a little better. Now, it will ease everything. Select all the key frames, F9, and now that looks a lot more bouncy. So, this is an overshoot in its most basic form. But we can make it even a little bit more bouncy. If I back this keyframe up maybe one or two frames, I can add another key frame right here, G to switch to my pen tool. Click V to get to my selection tool and then drag this down a little bit, and then I'll press F9 to easy ease that. Now, it's going to go up beyond 100 percent, deep down below 100 percent before getting to that final value. I'll play that back, and now it's even a little bit more elastic. Now, that I've got these keyframe set up, I can start adjusting the handles. At the beginning, I wanted to ease out a little bit more. So I'm going to click, hold shift and drag that out. I also want to bring this handle up here from the second keyframe out a little bit, so that it eases out, goes very quick and then slows down very quickly as well. Then, I'll just continue to adjust the handles for all of these values and I'm pretty much ignoring the X scale at this point, because there is no scale animation. We're always going to see those keyframes, but I'm just concerned with the green line. Now, that becomes a problem with the last keyframe since the X scale graph is on top of the Y scale graph, but I'll just move it out of the way, making sure to hold shift. So, it doesn't go up or down, and then grab the green handle. So, I can adjust that exactly how I want to. Now, we've got this very nice smooth curve, and let's see how it plays back. Very nice. So that is an overshoot. Let's say that I like the way that this is working, but I want to make the overshoot even more dramatic. Well, there's a really really great tool inside of the graph editor that allows us to do that very easily. It's this little button down here. The show transform box. If I click on that and select multiple keyframes, I'm gooing to get a transformer box just like any transformer box on a layer. It gives me all these different points that I can click and drag to resize my key frame values in the exact same way that I can resize my layer. But instead of the actual proportions of the layer, it's affecting the values of the keyframes. So, I could retime it by clicking and dragging to make it quicker or slower, and I'll play that back so you can see that now my overshoot is slower or I can make it much quicker. I'll undo. If I grab the top handle and bring it down, now it's not going to get nearly as big, and because it's a scale property this is affecting both the x and y scale that's why I got so much smaller. I'll undo again, and I could grab the bottom handle and scale it up, and now it's going to start around 64 percent instead of zero. But none of that's really doing what I wanted to. I want to just make this overshoot more dramatic while preserving the start and end keyframes. Well, the easiest way to preserve those keyframes is to first just only select the two key frames in the middle, so that not just the start or ending key frames, but this is still going to be a little bit difficult to scale proportionally and make it look exactly the way that I want it to. You can see that that little movement adjusted the X scales, so now it's squeezing in a little bit. I'll undo, and there's a modifier key you can press command or control on a PC before grabbing one of these transform handles. Now when I click and drag, you can see that it's scaling around this anchor point, just like any other layer. Now, again, this isn't solving the issue of moving the X scale. So undo and what I need to do is reposition that anchor point. I'm just going to scroll forward in time a little bit so I can get nice and close in this graph. Just like with the anchor point of a layer, I can grab the pen behind tool, click and drag this anchor point to whatever I want and that's where it's going to scale from as I adjust my transform handles. Now, I want this to snap to the baseline of the last keyframe. I turned off my snapping though so that's going to be very hard to be precise. So, I'm going to turn snapping back on, click and drag, and now that's going to snap to any of these keyframes. So, I'll just go to that one, make sure that I'm on the right keyframe, scroll back to the beginning so I have a little bit more room to work with. Hold down command and then click and drag. As I'm doing this, you can see that it's scaling proportionally based on this anchor point. I could even invert it if I wanted to, but this way I can shoot it up much further, 150 percent down to 83 percent and play it back. Now, that overshoot is much more dramatic, and in the same way I could go in the opposite direction scale it down so it doesn't go nearly as far and it's much more subtle. I think I wanted a little more dramatic. so I'm going to hold down command and scale that up just a little bit more, and there we go. Now that's nice and bouncy. So, that's how you can create an overshoot animation and adjust it with all these nice tools that we have available in the graph editor, and overshoots can really be applied to anything. You can do and overshoot with position with scale rotation. Basically any property that has a key frame in this particular overshoot just happens to have four key frames. A starting and an ending. One that goes up beyond the final value and one that deeps down below the final value. But you can make your overshoots last longer just by adding in more keyframes. So, if I spread this out a little bit, I could add another frame rate here, and just have this go up a little bit beyond 100 percent. Not very much. Look at my graph editor and zoom in, click and hold shift to make these nice and smooth curves, and then preview again. Now, I've got that one extra movement there at the end of the animation that makes that bounce last a little bit longer. Once you have your value said you could work on the timing a little bit, maybe give some more time at the end of the overshoot so you have a whole lot of customization options. 10. Continuing My Animation: Now that I'm happy with the way the might overshoot looks and I've got it built, I can actually apply it to my other layers. So, I'm just going to copy the scale keyframes because they're going from zero on the Y scale, to 100 on the Y scale. So, I should be applied to other things even though they're different sizes. So, I'll open those up, press U to bring up the keyframes, and then just get rid of the scale keyframes by clicking on the stopwatch that gets rid of both of them, and then I'll paste on the first layer, then go to the start of the second layer, and paste it there as well. Now I should be able to play this back, and all of my layers are overshooting. Now the anchor points are at the top of the layers, so they're overshooting downwards. I think I want them to also overshoot upwards, since that's the direction the frame's going. So, I'm going to reposition my end points one more time. It doesn't matter where it is left and right, since it's only scaling on the y-axis, but just for good measure, I'll put it down at the bottom of the layer. There we go. Play it one more time, and now the top pain is coming on before the bottom pain. I think it would make more sense if I reversed that. So I'm going to back this one up a couple of frames, push this one forward a couple of frames, and then it can start sooner too, probably right about here, and then I don't need to overlap this layer as much either. Now this is all happening much more quickly now. Maybe a little bit more overlap would look nice, just one or two frames. Now I can't push it that far, because then it's going beyond the frame, but maybe instead of worrying about the overlap, just zoom in nice and close here so we can see. I could just scale down the overshoot a little bit for these two pieces of glass. So, I'll select the three key frames in the middle, that are for the overshoot, go into my graph editor, zoom in here a little bit, make sure that my snapping is on, and my transformer boxes on, and then move my anchor point where it needs to be, and then just scale it down a little bit. Actually, I'll undo, and go to the top part of the overshoot, where it's shooting up the most, and that way I can preview what this is doing. Make sure that anchor point is where it needs to be, Command click, and scale that down a little. That way, it's not going to go beyond the top of the frame. All right. Now, I'll just copy those keyframes, and paste them on the other piece of glass so that they match, and play it back again. All right. Now that I'm watching it back, I think that it's happening just a little bit too quickly for the glass. I like the way that the frame is animating, but it's going a little too quickly on the other two layers. So, I'm just going to select all of the key frames past the first key frame on both of those layers, and shift the keyframes forward by holding down option or Alt, and pressing the right arrow key. I'm just going to do this one frame at a time and see how it affects the animation. I think that looks better, and I think I'm even going to do that with the frame layer as well. Now that I'm seeing a little bit slower, I think that just looks a little bit more fluid, not so drastic, and I just overall like the way that's looking. I think I'm going to call that good for the upper window for now, and then I wanted to cascade, and then I'll play it back here. Yeah. I think I'm happy with that. Next, why don't we move on to the lower windows. Since those are similar, I'll go into that, and I think I want to change things up a little bit on this window, just so that my animation isn't too repetitive. But I'll still be using the scale property, and probably overshoots. So, I can actually just open up my upper window and copy the scale keyframes of any one of these layers as a starting point for my overshoot in this comp. So maybe for this one, I'll have these layers scale from the center outwards. So, I don't need to reposition any of anchor points. I'll start with the frame again, to shift these other leaders forward, so I can focus on the frame, go to the first frame, and then paste. Now press U to bring up my key frames and zoom in. Now I'm going to need to modify these key frames a little bit, because right now it's scaling on the y-axis, and I want to scale it on the x-axis. So, I'll set my work area, and then just go one keyframe at a time, swapping these values. So I'm going to unlink them, and change this to 0100, and that way we have a little height with no width, go to the second key frame, and swap these two values. So, I'll just copy here, and change it to 100, then paste that number here. There we go. Then I'll go to the next one, and do the same process. Copy 100, paste, copy 100 and paste. Now may overshoot goes out to the sides. Now that looks perfectly decent, but I might want to push it out a little bit further. So, just like with the first window, I'll open up my composition settings by pressing Command K, or Ctrl+ K, and then just expand the width out a little bit, making sure Lock Aspect ratio is checked. And then I'll click "OK". Now I just have a little bit more room to work with. I think I want to exaggerate that overshoot a little bit more. So, I'll select the three key frames in the middle, going here, zoom in so I can see clearly, grab my transform box and move that anchor point, hold down command or control, and then just exaggerate the overshoot a little bit more. I can play this back, and there we go. That's a lot more bouncy and elastic. I think that looks great. Okay. Let's do the same thing for the two panes of a glass. I'll copy these keyframes, move these layers back to where they could start animating, probably right around here, and paste. Actually, I have the wrong two layers. The lower window top, that should just go to the top of the stack, I'll move that forward and grab this other piece of glass. All right. Now select those two layers and paste, and they should animate very similarly. Great. Now just offset them by a couple of frames, and I'm running into that same issue where this top layer is overshooting a little too far. So, I'm going to select all of the overshoot keyframes for both of these layers at the same time, go into my graph editor, zoom in nice and close, and move the anchor point, and then just scale it down a little bit, and there we go. Now it doesn't go beyond the frame. Great. Okay. Then we'll bring the top part of the window back, and this one I don't think I want to scale from the center outwards. I think this time I'll have it scale from the bottom up. So I'll move that anchor point down to the center, and these keyframes I modified to go from the center outwards, so I'll just jump back to my upper window, copy these key frames since they go on the y scale instead of the x scale, press I to jump to the endpoint of that layer, and paste. I'll play that back, and that looks good. I just want to retime it. So, it happens pretty quickly after the frame. Something like that looks good. And then I just have this little bit of a gap, and I think that's just some semi transparent pixels. So, I'm going to click and drag while holding shift until that seam goes away. All right. Let's play that back as a whole. Great. I'm just going to push the top window forward a couple of frames, Option or Alt and Page Down. Yeah, I think that looks great. Let's jump back to the main comp and see how this looks. All right. So everything is pretty much animating on at the exact same time. So, I want to offset those layers, just like the top row windows, I want it to animate from the center outwards. I only have four layers to deal with at this point, but the door will come into play once that's animated. So, let's take these two layers show down here, and shift them forward to line up with these two windows right here. Then I'll take the outer to windows and push them forward in time to line up with these layers. Now they go from the center outwards. Again, since I'm animating from the bottom up, I probably will have the bottom windows come on first. So, I'm actually going to select all of these layers for the top row, and shift them forward four or five, six frames, and see how that looks. All right. I think all of that is great for now. Obviously, once everything is animated, I can retime all of this until I'm perfectly happy with it. So, I'm not going to be too worried about how it looks yet, but I've definitely got a good start. 11. The Door and Lamps: All right. Now, I'm going to jump into the door, and get this animated. There's a whole lot of parts to this, but they're all very basic. Most of them are rectangles, so it's really not going to be that complicated. Let's once again start with the back layer, this frame. I'll select everything else and shift it forward in time, zoom in, and I want this one to shoot up from the bottom just like the upper windows. So I'm going to copy those key frames again, go to the start of that layer and paste, and then re-position the anchor point to the bottom. Great. Then, we have the green door. So, I'm going to put that probably right around here, and also animate that in the same way. I'll re- position the anchor point, paste. Then I just need to modify those scale key frames. Give myself a little bit more room to see here. Then make sure that I'm not overshooting that frame. I don't want to lose that overshoot, it is going beyond the frame rate here, and I don't really want to minimize it any further, so what I could do is just change the timing of the overshoot on the frame. So, let me bring up those key frames, and maybe just stretch them all out a little bit. Now, I already showed you how to do that with the transform box, I could select all my key frames and do it like that. But, there's another way that you can do it right in the timeline. You have all of your key frame selected, and then you hold down option or Alt, and click on the start or ending key frames, then you can click and drag and scale these proportionally. So, I'm just going to scale them out a little bit, and see what that does to my animation. There we go. I think that timing works better, but I am noticing a weird issue on the green door. It looks like it's scaling inwards, and if we take a look at the numbers, the X scale is supposed to stay at 100 percent the entire time, but it isn't right here in the middle. So I must have had my anchor point in the wrong place when I scaled these. So, I'm just going to quickly adjust all of these by hand, unconstrained the proportions, and type in 100 on each one of these key frames, and that way the width will always stay the same. There we go. Play that back. I think that looks good. I'm not going to worry about everything that goes on the door yet, I'm going to grab the door top, and drag that down, bring it to this point, by pressing the left bracket, and I think I want to have that pop up right about here. I'll do it the same way as the lower windows, from the bottom up. So, I actually just copy these key frames right here, go to the endpoint, I on the keyboard, and paste, and I'm going to want it to pop up probably right at this frame. So, press the left bracket again to snap that layer in point to that point in time. That way, it comes up just as the frame is finishing it's overshoot. Think I wanted it to happen a little bit sooner, I'm going to back it up. So, I like this timing, but I don't like that gap that it's producing, obviously. So, what I want to do is actually go to the resting point, after all the animation has happened, and then just parent this door top to the door frame, and that way it's going to move with the scale of the other door, and that seam will never show up. Great. So, now it's moving with the door, for whatever reason, we are getting that tiny little seam right here, so I'm going to just tap that down maybe one pixel, and that gets rid of the seam. Great. Now, it's just going beyond the top of the frame a little bit, so I'm going to press command K, to open up my composition settings, and expand this out a little bit. That should give me plenty of room to contain that top. Okay. I like that. Let's grab the door knob, that gold plate next. I think going to have that happen probably on the way back down from that overshoot, so right around here, I'll press the left bracket to bring it down, and I like to have my layers going in ascending order, so I'm just going to rearrange them based on when they start animating. I'm going to zoom in nice and close here, and move this anchor point to the top center of the layer, because I wanted to animate from the top down, to kind of go along with the motion that's already happening, of the door and the frame, shrinking back down. All right, then I'll copy these key frames, paste, and see how it looks. Great. Even on this tiny little detail, you can see that overshoot and it looks nice. Let's bring these door panels out next. Probably have them happening around the same time as the door knob. Drag it down below the top of the door, and then maybe I'll just push the anchor points to the outer edges of each one of these panels. So, I'll need to go to the lower window, and copy one of those overshoot scale key frame sets, and paste it there since that's going on the X axis. That's look pretty good. Now, I'll just offset them a little bit, maybe two frames each. Then back them all up in time a little bit. Zoom out so I can see the whole thing in context, and I think it looks pretty good. Next up is the glass at the top, which is all of these remaining layers, there's all these different elements. So, that'll probably happen right about here, I would imagine. So, back this up to that point in time. The way that I'm thinking about animating this is having first the white semi circle, that's in the background come on first, and then reveal all of these glass panes, using this as kind of like a mat. So, let's start with the first background semi circle. I'll move this anchor point down to the bottom center. So I'll pace the key frames that I have for the overshoot, but then just modify them. So, instead of 0100, I'm going to put zero on both the X and Y. Then, I'm just going to copy the X value, and paste it on the Y for each of these key frames. That way it's scaling, proportionately on both values. Constrain those proportions again, and just play that back. Okay, that looks good. I don't think that I want to have quite as many bounces. I think I'm going to get rid of this key frames right here. Delete that, so it goes up, down, and then back to 100 percent. Great. So, now what I want to do is parent all of the glass panes, and the other semi circle, to the main semi circle after the animation is finished happening. So, I'll parent all of those to this layer, and now they'll follow that animation. So, at this point, right here at the top of the overshoot, that's where I want these layers to start. But I don't want to be able to see these glass panes yet. So, I'm going to take this other semi circle, and move the anchor point down to the bottom middle of that layer. I'll set a scale key frame, and then move it forward in time, and then scale this up while holding shift, to scale it proportionally. Now, that's effectively using it as a mask, hiding those glass panes. Now, again, not exactly covering everything up, so I'm going to just tap it down, once or twice with the arrow key, so that we can hide the entirety of that glass. Now, as that scales down, you see that it's revealing all of those other layers. It looks really nice. Now, I just want to ease it a little bit. So, I'll grab both key frames easy ease, go into my graph editor, and then modify this, and play it back. Let's look at the entire door, and play back the entire animation. There you have it, I have all these elements, nice and bouncy, animating on very nicely. Let's take a look at the main camp. It looks great. Let's move straight onto these lamps. I'll jump into here. I'm going to start with this large center piece right here, I'll put the anchor point down at the bottom middle, grab the key frames from my upper window, and paste. There is that first element, it comes on nice. Comes on like that, and think I'm going to exaggerate the overshoot a little bit more. Since this is such a small element, I really can't scale it up quite a bit more. So, I'll just make sure that anchor point is in the right spot, hold on command, and then scale. Now, that's going to get a lot more of an overshoot, and I can move on to the next layer. So, the base of the lamp will come from the top down, but I can probably use the same scale key frames, copy and paste. I just want to make sure that I have enough room in my comp to fit that. So, I'm just expanded out a little bit more. There we go. Those can happen pretty quickly, one after the other. Then, we'll move on to the next part of the lamp, probably have the exact same type of animation, paste. Zoom in nice and close, move that anchor point to the bottom of the transformer box, and paste. Great. Now, we'll do this same thing for this top piece as well. Move down the bottom, have it starting, probably right on this frame, paste, and then play it back. Everything's great except for this first piece, because it's overlapping this glass pane, we're seeing it shoot up a lot further than I'd like. So, instead of using the transform box and the graph editor to scale all this down, I'm actually just going to grab all of the key frames here, all at once, unconstrain the proportions, and then just click and drag, here, until it lines up somewhat with the bottom of that glass. Because I had all of them selected it modified all of them proportionately. So, now it bounces up and comes back down. Now, I don't want it to go quite so far down, so I'll just go to that key frame, and scale it back up a little bit. Now, that's going to stay behind the other elements. Great. Let's take a look at that in the main camp. Looks good. Now we'll just offset the two lamps, so I've got have got lamp one and two, I'll shift this forward a couple of frames, and now they don't animate on the exact same time. I also don't want them to animate on at the same time as the door, so I'm going to push them forward in time a little bit. Staggering and overlapping the timing of your elements like this really adds a lot of personality to your animation, and this makes it look a lot nicer. So, definitely play around with the timing, to get something that looks nice. Also notice that I'm just giving a couple of frames in between each one of these elements. I don't want this animation to happen over ten seconds, I want it to happen pretty quickly, so don't be afraid to keep all of your overlaps pretty tight. Just for organizations sake, I'm going to grab all of the bush layers, and move them up in the layer stack. I think that's going to animate on last, so I'm just going to put them right at the top. Then I'm going to move the roof down to just above the siding, and the threshold just above the door. Since I have all of the elements that are on the siding taken care of now, I'm going to go ahead and animate that next. 12. Commanding Keyframes: Now, I want to animate this a little bit differently, just so my entire animation doesn't look exactly the same. Right now, it's just one big rectangle, but I want to break it up into multiple layers so that I can have a more unique looking animation. The first thing I'll do is precompose this layer. So, with that selected, I'll press Command + Shift + C, or Control + Shift + C, and rename it Siding. Click Okay. Now, I can go into that comp and crop it with my region of interest. So, I'll get it nice and close, Composition, Crop to Region of Interest. Then, I just want to make sure this is perfectly centered in the comp. So, I go up to Window, Align. Then, make sure Align Layers to Composition is selected and click on the horizontal and vertical alignment buttons. That way, this is perfectly centered in the comp. I'll close that. For this animation, I want individual slots of this siding, the individual boards to actually animate on to form at this final piece. So, I'm going to want to break this up into a bunch of different rectangles that end up looking like one solid piece. So, I'm going to start by duplicating this and call it Siding 01. Then, open up the scale by pressing S on the keyboard and unconstrained my proportions. In that way, I can scale this on the y-axis. Now, I want to break this up evenly, so that it fits nicely on the rectangle that's already there. So, let's say I want to make up this animation from 14 boards. Well, I don't know exactly what that scale value would be, but I can actually type in an equation into this value and After Effects can figure it out for me. So, I want 14 of these boards, so I need this to be 100 percent divided by 14. I'll press enter, and that automatically calculates exactly the percentage I need to make up one-fourteenth of the larger rectangle. Now, I'm going to turn the opacity down on the background layer by pressing T to bring up the opacity and just turning it down. In that way, I can see exactly what I'm doing. I also don't want to move that layer, so I'm going to lock it. I want this to go to the very bottom edge of this larger rectangle. So, I'm going to zoom in here, move that anchor point to the bottom center, snapping it there, and then clicking and dragging on that anchor point while holding Command to snap to the bottom edge, and right there, that's locked on to the center edge. So now, I know that's perfectly lined up to the bottom of my larger rectangle. Now, that it's aligned up properly, I want to put that anchor point on the left edge because I want to animate it from the left to the right. I don't think I want to do any overshoot with this one. Since it is such a long board, the overshoot would be pretty extreme, so just go to frame one and set the x scale down to zero. I'll set a keyframe and go forward maybe 10, 15 frames. So, that's a half a second, and set this up to 100. Then, I'll Easy Ease the keyframes at nine, go into my graph editor and then smooth this out even further. Now, I'll play that back to see what it looks like. Okay. I think that's good. Maybe I'll have it last a little bit longer, maybe 25 frames and play it one more time. I'll make that Ease even a little bit more extreme. Great. Now, that I have that animated, I'm going to zoom in here and duplicate the layer. Then, with my selection tool, I'll click and drag near that bottom left handle and hold Command to snap it to the edge of the next layer, and I'll do that again until I have 14 copies all perfectly aligned to each other. So, I'm just duplicating, clicking and dragging while holding Command to snap. Perfect. Now, all of that is aligned up nicely. I can turn off my background layer and play this back. Now, it looks like I just have one giant rectangle all animating out at the exact same time. Obviously, that's not what I want. So, what I'm going to do is select all of my layers from the bottom up, and that is important that I'm selecting in this order from the very bottom layer, hold shift and then click on the top layer, because After Effects knows what order you select layers in. I'll go to the very beginning of the composition, hold down option or Alt and press the right bracket to trim all the layers down to just one frame, and then, I'll right click on any one of the layers, go to Keyframe Assistant, Sequence Layers. Then, I'll leave Overlap unchecked and click Okay. You can see that After Effects cascaded each one of those layers offset by one frame. Then, I'll just go to the end of the comp, hold down option and press the right bracket to bring the duration of all those layers back. Now, I'll play it back to show you what that did. So now, I have a very cool looking animation for all the siding boards. By pressing U to bring up all my keyframes, I can see what that looks like. So, that looks really cool and I could probably call it good there, but I might even make this a little bit more interesting if I select all of these keyframes, the second keyframe for each layer, make sure I have all of them selected, and then I do that scaling trick, where I hold down option and then click on the first or last keyframe, and then, click and drag this back. You can see that this is scaling it proportionally. So, instead of having the exact same timing on every layer as you go further up in the stack, it takes less amount of time to finish animating. Let's see how that affected the animation. See, now, all of the layers end up at the final position pretty much at the same time. I'll undo so you can compare it. This is where every layer animates on in the exact same timing, and then, redo, now, all of their animations end right around the same time. All right. I really like the way that looks, but I'm thinking that it'd be cool to be able to still distinguish between each one of these boards once the animation is finished, so I'm going to do this simply by adding some shading. When I select the top layer and search for drop shadow, here we go, and apply that to that top layer, zoom in nice and close, and I want to make sure that this is only going straight down and not off to the side at all. So, I'll change the direction to 180 degrees. In that way, it's going straight down and that just gives a little bit of an edge. I don't know that I need it to be that dark, so I'm going to turn the opacity down just a little bit, maybe around 25. Then, copy the drop shadow and paste it on all of the layers except for the bottom layer, because I don't need to cast a shadow on anything below the final piece of siding. I'll paste, Command V. Now, we have all of these lines showing up, indicating where the siding is. Play this back. I think that looks really nice. Let's jump back to our main comp and see how that looks. Now, that did mess up the positioning when I cropped the region of interest, so I'll just bring that back down, zoom in nice and close and see that that aligns up very nicely. Give myself some more room to see this, and then play it back. All right. So it looks really great. Obviously, we need to work on the timing. So, I'm going to select everything in my layers stack besides the background of the house, so the door, and all of the windows, the lamps, everything like that and push it forward in time. I don't want that to start animating on until probably about right here. So I'll just push those layers forward and play it back again. That looks really nice. Okay, let's animate this threshold on, I think that could happen right about here, so I'll just grab that layer push it forward to that time, and I think I just want to have it scale from the center outwards and overshoot a little bit. So, I think the lower window is the one that I want to copy this overshoot from, copy and then paste that on the first frame of that threshold, and then zoom out and see how that looks, great. Going to move these bushes forward in time so that I'm not distracted by them, and go to the front of the animation, so I have the roof and the background, the trim of the house, to animate on. The trim is probably going to animate on first so let's start with that, I'll reposition the anchor point at the bottom center, and I think because this is such a large object, I'm going to want to make a unique looking overshoot. So, let's just start by adding a scale keyframe option or alt plus the S key and then move it forward in time, maybe 20 frames. Then I'll scale the Y scale down to zero, go into my graph editor, easy ease those keyframes and then switch to my value graph. So I wanted to shoot up but I want it to take its time doing that, so probably right around here and instead of adding a keyframe, I'm actually just going to grab the transform handle and move it up. I don't want this to shoot too far forward but probably something like that, then I'll just ease that keyframe and because the sighting is coming up right behind it, I don't think I'm going to want it to dip back down, so I'll just need these three keyframes for this particular overshoot and I'll just ease them out nicely. So it will probably shoot up pretty drastically, and then dip back down nicely, nice and smooth, this one doesn't have to be crazy bouncy and play that back. Going to get the roof layer out of the way so I'm not distracted by it. I think that happens even faster than it should be, so I'm going to grab these two ASCII-frames and shift them forward quite a bit and play it back. I think that looks a little bit better, maybe a little bit faster. Then, maybe instead of ending up flush with the siding, I'll leave a little bit of a margin. So I'll just grab my layer and scale this up, so that it kind of matches the margin on the bottom as well. All right. Looking good. Now I can animate on the roof which I think I want to do in a similar way to the siding, so I'll pre-compose it, rename it roof, go into that layer and crop it down, so I'll set my region of interest, crop it, and then again, make sure that's perfectly centered, so, window align, composition horizontal and vertical. Great. In the same way that I broke up the siding into lots of different layers, I think I'm going to do that with the roof but I'll have it animate in a little bit differently. So obviously, the positioning of this is off now, think I need to line that up right with the edge of the siding, that looks good. I think I'll break it up into the same number of rectangles as the siding, so just 14 copies. So I'll duplicate this layer, name it roof 01, turn down the opacity of the background one to say 50 and lock it, then open up the scale by pressing S unconstrained proportions say 100 divided by 14, and move this down to the bottom, so that it lines up perfectly. For this one, I want to animate it from the top down, kind of like the roof is being built from the top of the roof down to where the gutters would be. Again, I don't need to add an overshoot to this one, this layer, since they are so many layers, they are going to be overlapping, so I'm just going to scale it from zero to 100 percent on the Y. Press option or alt S to add a keyframe, push that forward in time, zoom in and then set the Y scale to zero, easy ease and modify that curve, make sure opacity isn't selected, and the reason these are so far apart is because the scale only gets up to 7.1 but, I don't really need to cede that much detail in here. I can just tell how far I'm pulling these handles, that looks pretty good. I think it just needs to happen much quicker. Yes, something as simple as that will be fine. Now I just need to duplicate it a whole bunch of time. So duplicate, and then I'm going move to the left edge, click and drag near that bottom left transform handle, and just repeat this process again. Exactly the same way as the siding. All right, there we go. Now I have this issue where I'm getting some semi-transparent pixels showing up between some of these slats, so, what I'm going to do is just press S without any of the layers selected to bring up all of the S scale properties, and then select the second key frame for each layer, go to that point in time, and then click and drag just to hide that scene. Now, clicking and dragging really makes that very dramatic and it's kind of hard to be precise. But if I hold down Command while dragging, then I can do it at a 10 times more precise value. So I'm just going to do this a little bit, just so it covers up all of those seams, and now those all animate on nicely. Now I can turn off the background layer and I want to offset them in time again, but this time instead of from the bottom up, I want to go from the top down. So I need to make sure I select my layers in that order, click at the top, scroll down, shift click on the bottom, go to the first frame, hold down option and press the right bracket, right click keyframe assistant, sequence layers, click okay. Now they're cascading from the top down, I'll go to the end of the comp, option or alt plus the right bracket to extend the outpoints of all the layers to that time and play it back. I need a little bit more time on my work area, but there we go. Now we've got this kind of building animation from the top down. Now I'll go to my main comp and just to time this nicely, so I probably want it to happen right around here. So it meets up with the top of the house just as the siding is finishing up its animation. I think that looks great. So let me zoom out a little bit. Give myself some more room in the comp and play this back. All right. Everything looks great. I just have the bushes to animate. So I'll jump into one of the bushes, and I want to give myself plenty of room to work with, so I'll press Command K and expand out my comp a little bit, and just to be consistent with my other animations, I'm going to have this overshoot upward, so I'm going to go to my upper window and copy those keyframes one last time, paste them onto this layer, and then just move the anchor point down to the bottom center. Now that will pop up very nicely, maybe I'll make that a little bit more extreme. There we go, nice and bouncy and then jump back out to my main comp. Great. Now I just need to offset them in time, and again being consistent, I'm going to have them go from the middle outward. So probably right around here, I'll bring the two inner layers up first, followed by the outer two. All right, now all of my properties are animated, I'm going to maximize this frame by pressing the tilde key, the little squiggly key under the escape key on your keyboard, and maximize the window and play it back, and there you have it. I've animated my entire house build. 13. Adding Details: Now, I just want to add some more details to my artwork to give my scene a little bit more depth. So, I'm going to start with the upper windows, I want to add a drop shadow to each one of them. So, I'll just have one selected and add that drops shadow again. I think the default angle will be fine, but I want to match the same color that I use for the drop shadow on the siding, and I don't want to see any darker pixels here. So, I'm actually going to make the opacity 100%, and then use the eyedropper tool to select that color, and that way those two shadows just flow rate into each other. Maybe make the distance a little bit further, maybe something around there. Then I'll just select this effect, copy it, and then pasted on all the other windows. I'll actually do that for all of these elements that are on top of the siding as well. So, all of the lower windows, the lamp, the door and I'll just select them and paste. Now, that little bit of shading has really added some depth to the scene. I could also probably add a shadow underneath the roof. But if I were to paste that effect here, and move this down to be 180 degrees instead of to the side, it's going to put that shadow places that I don't want it. As it's animating on, we're also going to see those red lines in between, and I definitely don't want that. So, I'm going to get rid of that effect, and instead, I'm just going to come into the siding, because that is where the roof lines up with, and I'll move my timeline to right about here, so I know what point in time the shadow should be appearing, and then go into my sighting precomp. Then I'll just select the top layer, duplicate it, and rename it siding top shadow, get rid of the drop shadow, and move the anchor point to the top left corner. Press U to bring up my keyframes and go to the first one, and then set this to 100 on the X scale so it's full width, and then zero on the Y scale, so it's scaled up at the top. And now that scaling downwards. Now, I already lost where I was supposed to animate this on, so I'm going to find that in the maincomp again, right about here, then I'll just jump back to my siding comp, and shift this layer forward so that's where it starts to animate. Now, I just need to change the color to match the shadow of the rest of the siding. So I'll select that color, use the eyedropper, and there we go, and finally, I'll just change this scale value by clicking and dragging on this transform handle, so that it's about the same width as the rest of the shadows. Okay. I'll play that back, and that's animating on fine. I think I'm just going to speed it up, so it's nice and quick, and then go back to my house build and see how that looks. Perfect. I think I can even push it back in time just a couple of frames, and that looks great. Now I want to add some shading to these bushes just to give them a little bit more depth. I'm actually going to do that with a layer style. So, I'll jump into this layer, right click on the layer and go to layer styles, and then inner shadow. Then I twirl down my inner shadow in the layers palette, and change the angle. Right now the shadows from the top left, I want to rotating it around until it's going to the bottom right. There we go, somewhere around there. Then I'm going to increase the distance a little bit and turn the size all the way down. I'm going to rotate this around a little bit more until I get it right where I want it, and then I'll just turn the opacity down. That way it just gives this nice little shadow, and I'll go back to my main comp, and we can see that now those have a lot more depth. I'll play it back. All right. One other detail I want to do is add a little bit of a highlight to the glass, almost like there's a glare of each of these windowpanes. So, I'm going to double click on the the upper window, and add in that reflection. I think I'm just going to do this by hand with the pen tool. So, I'll select the pen tool and turn off the fill, clicking that little icon right there, and then change the stroke to be, white. And I'll increase the stroke size just a little bit, and then just draw a path with no layers selected. So, something that looks a little bit like this. So, it's an angled line, and then I can control the width of that line just by increasing the stroke with here. So, something that looks like that, and then I'll go into the contents of this layer, and duplicate this shape, switch to my selection tool, click and drag to move it over, and then I'll go into that shape too, and adjust the stroke width down a little bit, so it's a little bit smaller. Zoom in nice and close so we can see what's happening, and then move it back over to the left a little bit. Now we just have these two simple lines that are making a stylized layer. How I want to animate this on is basically having the slide in, but I need to keep them contained within the glass. To do that, I'm just going to duplicate the glass layer, move it up, and rename it, glass matte, and I'll rename this layer highlight one, and then I'll set this layer to be a matte for the highlight by going to the track matte, which if you don't see the track matte column, just click on this button right here, and I'll change this to alpha matte, and you see glass matte is the layer name for the layer above it, that's how an alpha matte works. Now that's going to contain these lines within that layer. Now I can grab this highlight layer and move it around, and it won't show up anywhere else. Now I'll back this up and have these come on probably right about here. So, I'll start with this layer off to the side, and I'll press the left bracket to push the in point of that layer to this point in time, set a position key frame by holding out option and the p key, and then go forward in time a few frames, and put it back where I want it to end up. So right around, there. Now because it starts offscreen, I don't really need it to ease out of that keyframe, really just want to focus on easing into the second keyframe. So, I'll select that, in easy ease it, go into my graph, and switch over to my speed graph, and then just increase the velocity all the way on the second key frame and bring this handle all the way in on the first keyframe. That way, it just shoots in nice and quickly. I think I'm going to push it forward in time just a little bit, so there's a little bit more of a overlap in animation, and I'm going to take this even a couple steps further by going into the contents, and find the transform properties for this shape two groups. So, I twirl that down, go into the transform for shape two, and set a position keyframe. Then I'll press U to bring up only the keyframed properties, and this is going to allow me to shift this around independently from the first highlight. So, I'll just shift that forward in time a little bit and then maybe push it over 10, 15 frames, something like that. Then make the same type of easing as these two keyframes. So, easy ease, go in, crank this one up, get rid of the influence on the first keyframe, and then line them up with the first two key frames. Now, we've got this slight bit of air basically between the two. Now it's very subtle at this point, but if I grab both these key frames and push them out, now it's going to be much more noticeable, and that might even be a little bit too much. So, it looks like that might be the sweet spot, but it looks like one comes in after the other now, that's exactly what I wanted. Something else that I could do to make this even a little more interesting, is bring up the stroke width for each of these lines. So, with that layer selected, I'm going to come to this little search bar and type in, stroke width, and there we go, we see the stroke width properties, I'll set keyframes, again press U to bring up all the keyframed properties, back up in time a little bit, and then turn them both down. So, this one was 10, I'll turn it down to probably three, and I'll grab this one that was five and turn it down to one. Then I think I'm going to make this overshoot a little bit, so that it has a little bit of a bouncy motion. So, I'm going to extend this out a little bit, copy and paste, and then scale them both up. So, maybe 10 goes to 14, five goes to eight, and then I'll select both keyframes and go into my value graph. I'll easy ease all of these keyframes, space out the last two a little bit while holding shift to preserve the values, and then scale each one down a bit. So, five will go down to four, 10 will go down to eight, bring those both back up, and easy ease those properties as well. Then I'll just increase the influence on all of these so it's a little bit smoother. I'm doing all of this without even looking at my animation, because at this point I know how an overshoot works, so I should be able to get this looking right just by looking at the graph. So, let's play that back. That looks pretty good. I think the timing of this last two keyframes just needs to be adjusted and maybe the values shouldn't go quite down so far. Turn off my snapping so I can be a little more precise, and then I think I'm going to take the easing out of this first keyframe, so that it just shoots up to that top value, and then scales back down. That looks pretty good. Now, let's align those keyframes up with the actual animation. I'll put this one to the front, grab the second one and line it up with the second layer and see how it looks. There we go, just a very simple detail but it adds a little bit to that animation. Now, I also want to turn the opacity of this layer down so that it's not exactly the same color as the frame. So, there we go, I press T to bring up opacity, and then turn it down, so that it's more transparent. I think I want to push it over to the left a little more so I'll just press P to bring up the position, and shift it over. So, it's more like that. Great. And now that I have this animated once, I can duplicate it, and then I'll need a matte at the lower window, so I'll duplicate that, move it to the top, and call it, glass matte two, and make sure to turn it off. Because even if a layer is being used as a matte, it's going to show up unless you turn it off. Then I'll select the duplicate highlight layer and press P to bring up the position, and I need to move it down, but I don't want to do it one frame at a time. So, I'm going to select the both keyframes, make sure my play is on one of them, and then click and drag while holding shift. And you can see that's moving both keyframes at the same time. All right, I'll play that back. That looks good. I'm just going to offset them in time a little bit. I think I can make them happen a little bit sooner. That looks great. Now, just to make it a little bit different on the lower glass, I think I going to back it up so it doesn't travel quite so far. So, maybe it's over here a little more, then I'll press U to bring up the keyframes and maybe I'll make the second line not quite as thin. So, I'll select the keyframes for that, grab the last three and then just scale it up a little bit while holding command, so I can do that nice and precisely, that way the reflections look a little bit different from each other. All right. Great. Now that I have that I'm going to copy it, go into my lower window, past it at the top of the layer stack, and then reposition it to line up with this top glass. So I'll press P, collapse these other layers by selecting them and press U, and then select both these key frames, move them up, and it looks like my lines are just barely too short to fit. So, what I'm going to do is simply just grab the scale, and scale it up. Press P on the keyboard to bring up position and align that up right where I want it to be, and great about there looks good. Now I just need my matte, so I'll grab this layer, duplicate, command D on the keyboard, rename it, glass matte one, and turn it off. Then I'll go back to my upper window, copy the top highlight, and paste it in. Press P to bring up the position again, go to one of the two key frames, and drag it down, while holding shift, scale it up a little bit, and again reposition it until it's right where I want it. I think right about there. And once again duplicate this layer, move it above that highlight and rename it, glass matte two, turn it off, and now it's going to be contained within that window. All right, let's look at it in context of the entire house, and there you have it. I added a whole lot of depth to this artwork just by adding some simple shading. Now you've seen my entire animation process from start to finish, so you can finish your own animation. If you want to add in little details like I did, for shading, to add some more depth, or just stylization, feel free to do that. Once you're happy with what you've got, then we can move on to looping it for export. 14. Looping The Animation: Now that I've animated my house on, I want to reverse the animation so that I can loop this as a GIF. There are two different ways that you can do this. The first way is really simple. I'm going to start by selecting all of my layers, pressing Command or Control A and then pre-composing them. So, go up to Layer, Precompose and I'll name this House build loop. Click OK and now all those layers are contained within this pre-comp. Now, I'll play the sequence back and stop it when I think that I want the animation to reverse. So, here we go. I think right about there is probably where it could reverse and animate back off. This is something that I can adjust later but now I know that right around frame 75 is where I'd like it to just reverse the animation and go back to the beginning. So, what I'm going to do is trim this layer to this point in time by holding down Option or Alt and pressing the right bracket. Then, I'll duplicate the layer by pressing Command or Control D and then click and drag this layer while holding Shift, so that it snaps to the outpoint of the layer below it. So, now I just have two layers of the exact same animation. But, I want to reverse this one, so it animates on and then animates off. So, I'm going to right click, go to Time and then say Time-Reverse Layer. Just like that, my animation is going to play in reverse. So, I'll set my work area outpoint to right here at the end of this layer and then play it all back. Animate is on, reverse, animate is off. So, that's okay but, there's a lot of time between finishing the animation and reversing the animation. Then from this frame to this frame, there's no gap at all, it just goes straight back into the animation. So, I'd like to close up the gap between this point right here and then give some more time before it animates back on, even if, it's just 5 frames. So, I'm just going to trim off some of the end here, back it up, looks like right about there is where it starts animating. So, I might even trim off a little bit more, back it up again, and then see how that plays back. Even that is pretty long. I think I'm just going to eliminate all of the dead space on this reversed clip and then maybe back it up a few frames into this layer. I'll play it from here. Yeah, I like that timing better. That way we don't have quite as much of a pause before it animates back off. The only other issue is that there's nothing to fill in this gap right here, when the house isn't visible anymore. So, I am just going to make a new solid layer, go up to Layer, New, Solid and I want to make it the same color as the background. So, I'll click on that with the eyedropper and click OK, and then just move that down to the background. That way, when the house animates off and his layer isn't visible anymore, we still see that background color. I'll play this back one more time. There's my looped animation. Now, there's absolutely nothing wrong with animating your house off just simply by reversing it. For this particular animation, I think it looks just fine. If you'd rather not just reverse the animation, then by all means just animate it off. You could always go back into your pre-comp and then say right around frame 70, that's probably where I wanted to start animating off. Go into one of your windows and then just animate everything off, in the same way that you animated things on. Maybe, it doesn't need to overshoot, it could be as simple as just scaling the elements down, so I'll do that really quick. Grab all three of these layers, set a scale keyframe, go forward a few frames and turn the Y scale down to zero. I'm going to push the frame layer forward a couple of frames, offset the upper and lower glass panes a little bit, maybe in the opposite direction. Then, I'll just copy these keyframes to the corresponding matte layers. I'll grab all those keyframes, go into the graph editor and then just give some more extreme easing. Maybe, take the easing off of this side, there we go. Now, that window animate is off, then we can see how that looks. So, just like that, I could animate each one of these individual elements, animating off in the exact same way that I animated them on and that way it wouldn't just be purely a reversed animation. But, that's totally up to you. Feel free to make your animation whatever you'd like. 15. House #2 Walkthrough: For the updated version of this class, I decided to animate another house project and make it a little bit different. So, let me play this back for you. So, there you go, it's another very simple house animation, but the design is a little bit different and some of the elements aren't just simple rectangles like my first house. So, I just want to walk you through some of the techniques I use to animate this house. So, I'm going to go into my loop comp, and here are all of my layers. So, first of all, let's talk about these brick lines. I'm going to find that layer and just solo it. So, that's what it looks like. It's just a bunch of stroke paths in the way that I animated those. So, if you're going to the contents, into each one of these groups, there's a trim paths for each one of the lines. So, that's how I animated each line coming on is through the trim paths. And if I press you to bring up all of my keyframes, and see that I offset all these keyframes evenly on the first and then compressed all of the second keyframes, just like I did on the siding of my other house, that produced a nice looking animation. So, for a lot of the thin lines that you see, that's how he animated them on. Same thing for the clouds in the background. That's just a trim pads on a stroke line. On this tree I did something a little bit interesting. I wanted it to bend, kind of like it's just flowing up in the background, so let me find that layer and so it and take a look at how I animated it. Well, first of all if I press R and bring up the rotation, you'll notice I don't have any keyframes on that property. Instead, I animated this with an effect. The effect is called CC Bend It. And the way that it works is by setting a start an endpoint. So, I'm going to duplicate this, turn the first one off and then reset the second copy, getting rid of the keyframes, and you'll notice that my tree disappeared. And that's because of the way that you have to set it up. First, you need to align your start and endpoints to your artwork. So, I need to move the end point to the top of the tree, the start point to the base of the tree. And there you go, now you can see my artwork is back. Now that those are set, I can bend this tree in either direction, and it's as simple as that. You have some more options for how you do this distortion, but that's all I needed for my animation. Now I'll get rid of that and turn the original one back on and take a look at the actual keyframes. So, like I said earlier, you can do an overshoot with basically any keyframable property. So, this particular property is bending the layer back and forth, but I still didn't overshoot with it. You see that it starts bent over, it overshoots the final position, comes back and then just nicely rocks back and forth to its final value. And this is what my value graph looks like, very similar to our other overshoots. I just spread it out over time to make it feel like it has a lot more weight since it is such a large tree behind the house. But you'll notice that in this case, I didn't do many overshoots with any of the other parts of the house. There are some like on that tree and the bushes in the front, but all of these other elements are kind of just sliding in or being drawn on. And I did that intentionally to give this animation a slightly different feel. So, take all of those things into consideration when you're working on your own house. You don't have to only animate the scale property, you can use effects, you can use textures, you can use position, rotation. There are no limits because you can apply the graph editor and build things like overshoots or really nicely eased motion to any one of those properties. So, get creative, play around and just have fun seeing what you can come up with. 16. Exporting a GIF: Now, that my house is animated, I want to export it. Now, I have two classes specifically teaching you how to export animations as both GIFs and video files, compressing GIFs like a boss, and compressing videos for the web. If you'd like to know how to export your animations in either of those formats, definitely go check those out. They're quick classes and they give you a great overview of how to do just that. For this particular animation, I'm going to export it as a GIF, and to do that, I'm going to start by setting my work area. Now, this is already set to the length that I want the animation to be, so I don't need to change anything, but be aware that whatever your work area is is what will be exported from after effects. So, set your work area exactly how long you want it and then go up to Composition, Add to Render Queue. The default settings should be fine. You should have best settings, Lossless, and then you can change the Output To by clicking on these in blue letters. That's how you can tell After Effects where to put your animation. I'm going to put mine right on the desktop, just call it House_Build, that's fine, and then click Render. It shouldn't take very long. You'll hear a little chime once it's done, and I'm going to open that animation inside of Photoshop. So, open that up. It might take a little bit of time to open up depending on the length and the resolution of your video. I exported mine at the HD resolution of 1440 by 1080, which is pretty large and much larger than I need to export. There we go. The timeline should be open. If you don't see yours, just come up to Window, Timeline, and you can click Play and make sure that that's showing up just fine. You might not be able to play back in real time, but this does at least show you that your video exported properly. First thing I want to do is resize this. So I'm going to go up to Image, Image size, and change it down to 800 by 600. I'd recommend that you keep your GIFs at least 800 pixels or less on the width or height, whichever is longer, just for the sake of compression and loading time. I'll click OK. We're going to get a little notification that this needs to make it a smart object to resize it, that's totally fine, and now that's the right size. Now I'm going to come to File, Export, Save for Web, Legacy. This is how I can export it as a GIF. I want to come up here to the Presets, click on that drop down and go up to the very top, GIF 128 Dithered. This will take a little bit of time to process because it has to process every frame. But there we go. Now we see a preview of the GIF compression, and you can step through this one frame at a time or even hit play. It looks like we're getting quite a bit of compression, so I'm going to take a look at my file size down here. It's only 626K which is very very small as long. As long as your GIF is 2 megabytes or less, you can upload it straight to Skillshare. So, I'm going to go ahead and increase my colors from 128 to 256. There you go. Now our image is much more clear. I'm happy with the way this looks, so I'm ready to export. If your animation is still pretty big or if it doesn't look very good, there's pretty much only two things you can do here that will really affect the image quality. The first is to change the resolution. I would suggest you drop down to something like 400 by 300 if it's not looking that great and then changing the number of colors. 256 is the max, but if your GIF looks fine at a lower number of colors, then by all means, drop that down because that will reduce your file size. Now that everything's set up, I'm going to make sure that looping options is set to forever. Then I'll click Save and just put this right back on the desktop. House_build is fine. Click Save, Photoshop will export this GIF. Then I can go to my desktop, take a look at that GIF. There we go. It's playing back, reversing and looping perfectly. Now that's ready for uploading. 17. You Made It!: Congratulations, you've completed animating with ease in after effects. By now I'm sure that you can tell that I'm very passionate about the graph editor. So, if you have a good grasp and understanding of how it works then, I have succeeded. Thank you so much for taking this class and be sure to post your class project once it's finished. We all want to see it and if you share it on social media tag me @Jakeinmotion so that I can see it there. If you have any questions at all, as always, ask them on the community page and if you like this class, I would love it if you let me review. Be sure that you're following me here on Skillshare so that you can see any updates as I post them. Just one more time, thank you so much for taking the class. It truly does mean a lot to me and I'll see you in the next one. 18. Bonus: Graph Editor Demo Walkthrough: The first version of this class by far, the question I got asked the most was how did I set up this graph editor demo? Well, I'm going to finally answer all those questions right now. What you can't see here is all of the duplicate layers making up these outlines because I have my shy switch enabled if I unshy my layers, we see that there are actually lots of layers within this comp and I locked and shied them all so that I could hide them and not mess with them. So, what's going on here, is I have a duplicate of this master circle with the fill turned off so we just see the outline and there's a duplicate for every frame between zero and 30. That's how we kept it from extra frames showing up but this only works for those 30 frames. That's the catch to this whole thing, is that it's not a very practical solution. So, what I did if I unlock one of these duplicates and go into the transform controls and then the position. I have an expression on here that's not easy to look at, at all but I'll break it down for you. What it's saying is look at this comp layer master circle. So, the master circle layer and into the transform controls the position value. So, the position of the master circle layer and then look at that value at a specific time, that's what value at time does. Then, I specified which time I want it to be looking at, in those parentheses we have thiscomp.frameduration. That expression is calculating how long one frame in this comp is in the units of seconds because that's how time is calculated in expressions, with the units of seconds. So, I found out what the length of one frame is then, I multiplied it by 30 which effectively means look, at the position of this circle at frame 30. Now I could have written this a different way, I'm fully aware that I could have just said one second but this is just how I ended up writing it out. So, look at the position value of this circle at time 30 frames then, subtract one frame times the index and the index is this number right here. It's the index of the layer this expression is written on. So, the layer number or the index value for this layer is 30. So, I'm taking frame 30 and subtracting the index from it, which is 30. So, we're getting a value of zero. So, let's read it one more time. Let's look at the position of the master circle at the time frame 30 minus 30 giving me frame zero and use that position value at that frame for this duplicate layer. Because I based this expression off of the index, every time that I duplicated a layer the index value changed. So, layer one was 30 frames minus 30 so frames zero. The next one would be 30 frames minus 29 which would be one frame and so on. All I had to do was duplicate the layers 30 times because it was basing it on the index value. So, every one of these is going to be offset by one frame in time. So, it's literally just taking whatever the position value is of this master circle and equating its index value to the frame number that it's taken a position value from. Now that I've explained that, you can probably understand why I never showed that in the lessons. It's very confusing especially, if you're new to expressions. On top of that, it isn't very practical because it only works for the number of duplicate frames that you have. But I came up with another method that uses some effects rather than duplicate layers, just in case you want to use this. So, let me show you how that works. Instead of duplicate layers, it uses the echo effect and this does behave slightly differently and it renders a little bit more slowly. So, this is why I didn't use it in the graph editor demo but as you can see, the trail will animate off. Way that I've set this up is through a stack of effects. So, let's just go through them one at a time. First, I have just a black circle with a white outline and it's important that you use those colors, black for your fill, white for your stroke. Then I applied an effect called CC composite. What this effect does is takes the original layer and then composites it back on top of the layer after any effects using any one of these blending modes. Now, I happen to use stencil luma which is the same as the stencil luma track mat. Because I used black and white, it's getting rid of everything that's black and leaving the white. So, that's the first step, CC composite with the stencil luma composite mode. So, I have my outline circle traveling across the screen. Then, I applied an echo effect and this is what's going to give us the trail. But I added an expression to the echo time because it's measured in seconds and I wanted to be able to just type in negative one frames to know that the echo is offset one frame at a time. So, we go into the effects, look at echo, open that up. I have a very simple expression, I have the value, so the value whatever I type in here times this comp.frame duration, which we just talked about that's just calculating how long one frame is in seconds. So, I can now type in negative five and now the trails going to be offset by five frames each. Now, I wanted this to work as just one frame so that it basically looks like those trails are staying still, and then I just turn the number of echoes up to 30 for those 30 frames. Now if you want more echoes, you can have this last longer, just turn that up to whatever frame number you want. You can also do some interesting things with the echo effect like, turn the decay down so that it fades off, it's not 100 percent the entire time. WI'm going to leave that back at one and then I added another CC composite. If you remember, what that does is composites the original layer before any effects were applied in a way that you choose. So by default, this would be in front and it would be RGB only. I wanted to put it behind all of the echoes and I didn't want just RGB, I wanted it to also take the alpha. That way I can get the entire layer back exactly the way that it was. So, this is without RGB and this is with. So, that took care of bringing back the original and now it's just a matter of tinting it so that it's the actual colors that I want. So, I added a tint effect set my black to this pinkish red and the white to the yellow color, and now I have the exact same echo effect. If I want to make the stroke thicker, all I have to do is grab the layer and increase the stroke size and this is going to behave exactly the same way as the other graph editor demo. So, if I were to combine my X and Y dimensions again, I could make this path whatever I want, ease these key frames with the speed graph and it's going to behave exactly the same as the expressions demo. So, there you have it, that's how I built the graph editor demo.