Animation for Graphic Design: Make a Short Educational Video

1. Introduction: [MUSIC] Are you a graphic designer who wants to experiment with animation, want to level up your design skills to add a touch of magic to your work? Adding motion to your designs brings new excitement and meaning to your work while keeping up with the latest marketing and social media trends. I'm Carolyn, a graphic designer who is always looking to learn new skills, techniques and softwares to help enhance the design skills that I've been practicing for years. At the beginning of the pandemic I decided to teach myself animation finally. Although it really brought me out of my comfort zone it was intimidating and scary to learn a new mindset altogether. It was really rewarding and brought a lot of value to my design skills and gave me a new skill that I can use in my projects every day. That's why I'm breaking down and sharing the tips that I learned and found most helpful on my animation journey with you in this class. You'll learn how to write a simple script and storyboard your ideas. Use a streamline design process. Anime custom visuals apply these new skills and other creative projects. To get your hands dirty in animation today we are going to do a super short easy class project that's only going to be a 15 second educational video to help you ease in and feel confident in your new animation skills. This class is for creatives with a design background who want to add an almost essential skill, animation to their design toolkit. No prior animation knowledge is required but you will need access to Adobe After Effects and Illustrator to get started with our project. Animation can seem really tricky and intimidating but that's why I'm here to provide you with the necessary tools to help you feel confident with your new skill. I'll provide an intro to After Effects lesson to welcome you to the application, a guided worksheet to introduce you to the animation mindset and tips and processes you'll need to build your motion graphics knowledge. When you're done with the class you'll have learned so many new essential storytelling and animation skills that will only level up your traditional graphic design skills that you already have. Let's have fun and get moving. [MUSIC] 2. Project: Your class project today will be to create a super simple and short 15-second animated educational video to teach your fellow classmates something you're an expert in or something you're passionate about and want to bring awareness to. We'll go through the following digestible steps. First, look at some example videos to get a sense of what direction you want to take your own video in. Then you'll make some sketches and notes in your guided worksheet that I'll provide to introduce you to the animation mindset. Then you'll animate through a streamlined step-by-step process to ease you into your new skills. Then we're going to have fun, of course, playing with your new skills and create your 15-second video that you can share with your network. When you're done, you're going to upload your video project and all of your notes that led you there to the project gallery section. All you need to get started on this project is the guided worksheet I provided or a blank piece of paper and pencil and then access to Adobe After Effects and Adobe Illustrator. As I mentioned, I provided a guided worksheet here in the project and resources section. Use this to write your short script storyboard your ideas and make notes as you start your video project. I can't wait to see how you explore animation and learn from you in your educational video. Let's get started. 3. Trends & Examples: [MUSIC] Before we even jump into your project, I want to share with you a few example videos of what I mean, how you incorporate animation into videos, how you animate your design work, and different ways that you can tell a story through your animation. In this first example, animation showcases how a product works by showing how this dog toy works for the dog, and then animating in some bullet points that explained the benefits of the product. This example on Pentagram's website showcases how a user can scroll down on a website and how the design should appear as they're scrolling. This is how the designers intended the website to be viewed. This next example shows how animation can bring awareness to a cause. This short video on Instagram shows just text and video, super simple, but the words animate in, and it's a little more dynamic than just reading boring subtitles. It brings more action and meaning into the video content that's being shown. Next is animation to visualize data and statistics. Data can be very complicated, and this is just a sneak peek into how the designers designed the data. It moves pretty fast, but the idea is to show the data in a very dynamic moving way. Then this last example is animation to educate your viewers by explaining a concept or a topic. This is actually a TED-Ed video that explains what bipolar disorder is. It does a really great job visualizing the concepts that are being spoken in this narrative voice over format. Can you think of any example videos that really caught your eye? Why do they stand out to you? Maybe how can you mimic the animation, and the motion, and the effects that they created in your own videos? [MUSIC] 4. Animation Concepts: [MUSIC] When you're animating, you have to think about design, motion, and time, and how they all come together to tell a story. Let's look at an example of an after-effects file and see how these different elements, time, motion, and design are going to come together in that file just so we can get used to after-effects before we really get into it later. In this preview panel where we see we are the drug discovery engine for ALS, that is where you are going to really focus on your design and see all of your pieces in your composition come together. Then you'll focus on your layers panel to figure out the motion. Last, you'll work in your timeline panel to figure out the timing of the design and the motion. Here are the very simplest basic movements that you can create and work with in after-effects. Position, you can create a bouncing effect, you can move your objects around the composition. You also have scale. You can make something larger, you can make something smaller, you can create this zoom in, zoom out effect. Then you have rotation, which is where you can spin things around and make things appear like they're rolling. Last, you have opacity, which isn't really a movement, but it's basically creating this fade-in, fade-out effect for you. You can combine opacity, scale, rotation, and position to make even more dynamic effects with your animation. Think about how you can use animation to tell a story that's close to you. Start thinking about the topic you want to address in your short video project. [MUSIC] 5. Script: [MUSIC] Now we'll start on the first step of making your animated video, and that's going to be to write a script. What makes a good educational video? Storytelling. We need to get our story together before we can even think about design. Here's an example format that I make my scripts according to. A hook, then an explainer, and last, a call to action. Your hook is a statement that gets attention. Your explainer is the supporting information for your hook, and your call to action should tell people exactly what to do next. For my topic today, I'm going to focus on ALS. It's a fatal disease that not many people are aware of, so I really want to explain what it is, and get people to learn more about it. For my hook, I'm going to pick a really interesting and jarring statistic. Did you know that one in four people will develop ALS? Maybe somebody doesn't know what ALS is. I am going to follow that up with my explainer, or my supporting information. That's great, it very concisely explains what ALS is. Now I'm going to prompt people to take an action here. I'm going to tell them exactly how to learn more, and where to go to find out more about ALS. I'm simply going to say, learn more at www.als.net , and that's it. This will be the perfect script for my 15-second video. It's super short, straight to the point, and really has a good hook, I think, has a good supporting information, and then tells people exactly where to go next to find out more information. You want to keep your story and your script really short and sweet. This is only a 15-second video, so you don't want to write a whole novel here. This is almost a teaser intro video into the topic that you'll be choosing. Now it's your turn. Get out your worksheet, and try and brainstorm your topic and what you want to say about that topic in a script format. Think about what you're an expert in, what you're passionate about. Here are a couple of examples of how you could write a script and some topics. For example, if you really love make-up. Find your perfect shade of blush, match the color to your lips, and slide onto the apples of your cheeks. Then see more tutorials on my YouTube channel, Makeup Master. If you maybe have an Etsy store where you sell custom dog-shaped cake toppers, want to include your dog in a special way on your wedding day, order a custom figure of your dog to use as a cake topper, and then visit my Etsy store today. Pick your topic and start writing your short script in the formula of hook, explainer, and call to action, before we get started on your storyboard in the next lesson. [MUSIC] 6. Storyboard: [MUSIC] Now that you have your script, we're going to get down to what you're probably most excited about. That is the visuals and the supporting imagery that's going to really lift up your script and help tell your story in just 15 seconds. Here's an example of a storyboard frame that I've used to make an animated video with before. I'm going to show you the progression of how the drawing and the idea started all the way through to how I animated it. This storyboard frame just shows some text that's almost acting as a subtitle on the bottom. I didn't write out the whole line of text here, but I noted what line from the script I wanted to say here. Then I supported that line of the script with imagery above it. I used colors here to note how I wanted the elements to move into the frame, move out of the frame, and then move within the frame. Then I wrote a little note below the frame. You can see the enroll button moved from the left, right into the middle, like I drew it in the storyboard. Once the mouse moved into position over the enroll button, I wanted it to create a clicking effect. Then when all that was done, the enroll button and the mouse moved to the right out of the frame. Drawing and sketching your ideas first can really help you translate your thoughts and ideas when you get into the animating stages. I want you to start with your worksheet or your blank piece of paper and draw your compositions and how you want your different frames in your videos to look. We're going to start by just using three of these rectangles. You can label them 1, 2, 3 if that's helpful for you. Then your first frame is going to be your hook sentence, your second frame is going to be your explainer sentence, and then your third is going to be your call to action sentence. Basically, what I want you to do is simply take whatever you wrote in your script and use that here. I'm going to keep my script very close by and refer to that as I'm starting to sketch how I want my video to look. I want you to write out your script really big in your composition. Be sure that your text is dominating your composition and is really high on your design hierarchy here. Then you can go in and add supporting visuals. I have my statistic here, my one in 400 people and I think I want to visualize that. So that way people can read it and then can see the visual and reinforce the one in 400 number that they're reading. I'm going to draw a person who's in the center of my composition here. Then I think I'm going to just copy this guy, once I go onto the computer, it'll be very easy. Basically, just add 400 copies of him. Then I'm going to move on to my second frame and do the same thing. My text is going to go right in the center. It's going to be big. Take up a lot of the composition again, just as I did in the first frame. But then I'm going to change around the visuals to again, depict this line of the script. It's a little hard to illustrate progressive neurodegenerative muscle, all that stuff. I'm going to try and keep it very concise like my script. I'm going to have a little stick figure guy again and then I'm going to do a similar guy but in a wheelchair. That will hopefully get the paralysis, muscle weakness across in this visual. Then I think I want to try and depict the progressive line here by maybe adding in gradient and maybe it starts off dark in the background and then it gets lighter and lighter over time. Maybe I animate that to make it move. It's really clear that something is moving in that direction. I have my call to action here. I think I'm going to keep it super simple and maybe not even add any visuals here to assist with that. I did include other frames here. You can do, for example, a quick logo or something at the end that comes after your call to action that may be fades out just really quick. It doesn't really count as part of your script. It's just a super short visual. Just like in any other design project you want to think about composition. In your storyboarding make sure each little rectangle that you are drawing in is its own composition. You want those compositions to come together in the end to tell a story. That's what I think is a little special and more challenging about video and animation, is you have to make several images to build up to tell a cohesive story. That's what I want you to focus on while you're storyboarding. Now that we have our storyboard compositions laid out and we're happy with them, we're actually going to make notes about how we think we want these things to animate within the frames. I like to do that by grabbing three colored pencils or markers or something to note different movements. I'm going to make a little key for myself over here. I'm going to have the blue be coming into frame. Because we have to transition all of these from one frame to the next to the next. You have to think about how things are going to move in and out of your frames. I'm going to say out of frame. Again, just make your quick notes in the margins here. Then the yellow I'd like to use for inside of the frame. Because it doesn't really disrupt your imagery within the frame because yellow is such a light color. Basically, I think I want the position to start not completely off of the page, but just slightly to the left. Then I want my text to fade in. I want to combine the two motions of the position and the opacity can fade and move a little bit in. I'm going to write a little note below in my margins here. I'm going to say move and fade. Now I'm going to think about how I want things to move inside of my frame. Basically, I want to emphasize this one, one in 400 guy. I just want him to basically grow or scale up from all of these little guys around him. I'm going to say scale up. Then how they move out of the frame. I think I just want all of this to drop down. This whole frame is going to look like it's just falling down. Then now that I've established my consistent movements that I want with my fade in and move in, I'm going to use that motion and repeat that motion consistently in all of my frames. That's going to be nice to tie this story together and just make the focus on your text and your message, and not on some crazy dynamic animation, funky movement. It's really all about your message and your story, not some crazy weird effect that you're trying to make. I have my script, I have my storyboard, and all of my notes on how I want the elements in my storyboard to move throughout my animation once I get to my computer. If you're working on an animation project with a team, it's really helpful and important to storyboard because that's how you share and communicate your ideas before you even get started on the computer. Finish up your storyboard, write any notes that you need to remember before you get into the computer. We'll move on to the next lesson and start designing your video. [MUSIC] 7. Design Your Assets in Illustrator: [MUSIC] Now that you have your storyboard, let's start designing. Before we even get into After Effects, the next step that I found really helpful in this process is to build all of your assets in Adobe Illustrator. That's going to be important because in After Effects it's really hard to draw things to really build complicated illustrations. You need to prepare all of that and all of those files ahead of time. If you don't want to draw vector graphics or illustrations in Illustrator, feel free to skip this lesson and collect other photos or video footage that you can use as visuals in your video instead. We're going to create our new Illustrator file in the film and video format. That is 1,920 pixels wide by 1,080 pixels tall. We're going to create it a new name for our file, and then all the rest of the presets should be good to go. Open that up and create your new file. If you're really preparing to make a huge video animation, it might be helpful to make a checklist of all of the little icons, all of the visual assets that you will need to prepare before you start animating. I would need to create my little guy and the first frame and then smaller versions of that. I would need to create the full stick figure and then the wheelchair figure as well. Then because I wanted that gradient to move in the background, I think I'm going to create that in Illustrator. We'll add our text layers in the next lesson and After Effects. That way it'll just be easier to edit if we need to make any changes. You have your list either written down or in your head of all the components that you'll need to make. You simply go into Illustrator and start designing all of those elements. One thing that you will have to think about is how you want pieces to move separately from each other. For example, if I have a jar illustration and in my video I want my jar to become separate from the lid or I want to look like I'm removing the lead. I need to make the jar and the lid two separate pieces so that way they can separate when I'm animating them. Now I have all of my elements that I already wrote out in my storyboard. Now I'm going to organize them. They're all in separate layers so I can get to them easily as individual components in After Effects. This process is all about the layers. I'm just going to copy and paste them into their own layers. [MUSIC] Then all of these should be their own top-level layer. There's nothing hidden under them. I'm feeling confident in taking this to After Effects in the next lesson. If you want to create something that's a little more hand-drawn or natural feeling, you can always draw on your iPad and Adobe Fresco, and then take your illustrations from your iPad into Illustrator and organize them the same way we're talking about organizing them in each layer. Once you're done designing your assets in Illustrator, you're going to make sure everything is organized and triple-check before you bring it into After Effects. To do that, you want to make sure every individual piece of your illustrations are on different layers. Then you want to make sure there aren't any layers hidden within those layers. All of them need to be a top-level layer and all of the layers need to be named appropriately. Expand your shapes and lines so they won't get altered down the line. Then use the pathfinder tool to create one shape per layer to consolidate all of your graphics. Once we're done creating those layers, organizing those layers, and naming them appropriately. We're going to make sure that all of the layers are on and visible. Layers have to be visible in order for After Effects to recognize them once we import that file in a minute. Make sure you have all of your design elements in your Illustrator file and ready to go in the next lesson where we'll get into After Effects. 8. Create Your File: [MUSIC] Most of the time anyway, I completely built everything up for my animated videos from the ground up. I'm building every last background, a little piece of icon that animates, and I'm typing over a piece of text. It's a lot and it can be an overwhelming process. Let's break it down into easy steps so you can be confident going into your project. The very first step in our animation process is going to be setting up your After Effects file. First, we're going to open After Effects and start a new file or composition. We're going to click on "New Composition" here and a window called Composition settings should pop up for you. You're going to name your composition. [NOISE] We're going to set the width to 1920 pixels, the height to 1080 pixels, and that way we're getting the traditional 16:9 aspect ratio. The frame rate is 30 frames per second. Resolution is full. Then we're going to check to see how much time we have here. We're going to start our time at zero, just to make sure everything says zero, and then we're only going to make a 15-second video here. Just set it to 0:00:15:00. Then just set the background color to white, and we can make shapes and backgrounds to change that later if you want to. Looks great, we're going to hit "Okay," and now we have our After Effects composition. You notice that I made the composition with Ed Video as the title, but up here in the project, it says Untitled Project. Before we even really get started, I'm going to do Command Shift S or Command S and do a quick Save As. Now, let's get started. [MUSIC] 9. Add Text Layers: [MUSIC] Let's start our project and after effects by simply adding our text layers. We're simply going to type out your script. To add our text layers, we're going to go here in this Layers panel and we're going to do a right-click. Then at the top here we have new text. That's going to give us this new text layer here. Beautiful. I can just start typing here. I'm going to refer to my script. I'm just going to drag this in here. Gotham Narrow looks good. I'm going to make it bigger to match how it looks in my storyboard that I laid out. My storyboard, I really prioritized the text in my visuals because that's the type of educational video that we're making. We're relying on that text to tell our story. I picked out the font that I wanted. I picked out the size and placed it in my composition based on the storyboard that I created. I think that this text might be too large. I need to make room for my little people icons, and I don't know if they will fit around this big text. I'm going to try and re-work that text a little bit to make some more space for the imagery. I think this looks good. It adds a little more space for some imagery around it while still focusing on the text. Now that I have my first hook piece of my script designed in the composition, I am going to simply duplicate this to create my other two lines in my scripts, my explainer and my call to action. I'm just going to Command C and Command V to copy and then paste. I'm going to make sure I'm on my second layer here and then I'm going to type in the second part of my script. I have this typed out, but obviously, it looks really wonky and overlapped. That is because these two layers here in your timeline are overlapping with each other. Basically, what we're going to have to do throughout this whole process is shrink down the layers, which means that I'll bring it to this two second mark. That means that this layer will be two seconds long and then it'll disappear. I think it's probably going to take people longer than two seconds to read this. I think I'll give it four seconds and just see how that goes. These don't overlap, I'm going to drag this out to the four second mark. Now we have our first layer of text or a hook and a script. Then it switches over to the explainer part in our script. Then I can re-work this line in the composition now that I can actually see it properly. I'm running into an issue here with the second line in my script, is significantly longer than my first line in my script, which does not leave me much room at all to place my imagery around it. As you can see, I'm jumping back from layer to layer to make sure that my text is consistent. I want to have similar spacing or the same size type in all of my texts layers to keep that consistency for anybody who's reading the video. Now I'm going to add my call to action layer. Again, one of my other texts layers, I'm going to do Command C, Command V to copy and paste. I know that I'm going to run into this issue with overlap, so I'm going to click on the second layer or the second line of our script. I'm just going to bring that over and bring this third layer to 10 seconds, let's say. That way they're not overlapping and I can clearly work on this third layer without any distractions. I have my three texts layers on my scripts integrated into my after-effects file. I'm going to do a quick Command S to save. Make sure you do that often so you don't lose any of your work. Once you've added your text, make sure to play your video back. See if each line of text gives enough time for comfortable reading. This play head or the blue line here in your timeline off to the far left, so we're at zero in your video. Then we're going to hit the Space bar to press Play, read aloud your texts. I'm going to say, did you know that one in 400 people will develop ALS? ALS is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that leads to muscle weakness and paralysis. Learn more at als.net. My second line fell a little rush. One thing I noticed when I was watching the video through is that, my second layer and my first layer are overlapping. I'm going to zoom in here with these two little mountain icons at the bottom here and I'm going to zoom in and just make sure that these are not overlapping. Right now I'm not holding the Shift key and it's hard for me to land right on the end of that layer. I am going to hold down my Shift key and it snaps right to the other layer. That's something to keep in mind when you're moving your layers around in your timeline. Great. You have the start of your basic video, basic animation here with your text layers. Now, if I wanted a colored background, instead of just a white background and dark text, I could click right here in my Layers panel and add a solid layer here. You can also add in a shape layer or other layer options here, more texts layers. But I'm just going to add in a solid layer here. But you see it's sitting on top of all my text layers now. I'm simply going to drag it down in my layers panel to the bottom. I would have to adjust my text color obviously, but that's how you create a background layer. Arrange your texts layers on your timeline to allow for that comfortable reading. We'll move on to add our other visual elements in our next lesson. [MUSIC] 10. Import Your Assets: [MUSIC] Great, you've already set up your file. You know the basics of how after effects is set up and you've already added your text layers. Now we're going to take it a step further and import the Illustrator file to include our other supporting visuals. Now we're going to go back and grab those layers that we designed in Illustrator. We're going to do that by going up to File, Import, File. We're going to find our Illustrator file, click on that. We're going to go down to import as and we want composition and retain layer sizes. That way everything will come in as layers into our after-effects file. Looks great, so we're going to click ''Create'' and you'll notice here in your project panel now you have your Illustrator file here as a composition which shows up as these little shapes. Then we have a separate folder with all of our layers inside. We're going to click down to show our layers and now you can see all of your layers that you designed in Illustrator. That looks great. What we're going to do is we're going to click on your layer and grab it, drag it down to the layers panel in after effects. Now you see your first Illustrator layer. Looks great but it does look a little pixelated. What we're going to do is we're going to right-click on the layer, we're going to hit ''Create'', create shapes from vector layer. This is a vector layer or it should be in your Illustrator file. We want to retain those properties to allow you to easily change the color and easily scale things up and down without the icon or the illustration falling apart. Now it's created a separate layer and hidden your original Illustrator layer. I'm going to simply delete the Illustrator layer because we don't need that anymore, so I'm going to click and delete. Then we have our first layer here. Look back at your storyboard and place your first layer into the composition, how you originally planned in your sketches. I'm going to make sure that he's aligned in the center by going over to the align panel and align layers to composition. Now he looks great and centered so I am just going to continue dragging in these illustrator layers to create new layers in my layers panel. [MUSIC] I have all of my Illustrator layers imported into my layers panel. I have them organized so that the visuals that go with the first line of my script are grouped together here. The visuals that go with my second line of my scripts are grouped here and then I didn't have any visuals to go with my last line of my script. Just like we did in our text layers, we're going to move our layers so they don't overlap. Remember if you hold down the shift key while you're moving your layers in your timeline it'll snap to match your other layers. If I had photos and videos that I wanted to import into after effects to use as my visual assets, I could do that the same way by going up to File, Import file. I can find my photo files or my video files and open them up. They'll appear right with our other visual assets in our project panel. Then we simply drag them down and bring them together with the rest of our layers. I'll drag this to match the timing of the part of my script that I want it to pair with. Then I'll place it into the composition how I want it to look. I think that adds a nice bit of information and visual interest to this text right here. I think I might actually remove the photo for now and play with that a bit later. [MUSIC] Now you can see I have just the straightforward bones of my video here. It's almost like a slide presentation or a PowerPoint presentation. Now we need to go in and smooth things out and add in our animation. [MUSIC] 11. How to Add Animation: [MUSIC] Before we start animating our videos, let's take a quick look at how we're going to add animation in After Effects. We'll do this by changing our property controls in our Layers panel and using keyframes in our Timeline panel. You're going to tell your layers how you want them to animate with properties. This is something that we talked about back in the animation concepts lesson with our rotation, opacity, position, and scale controls. Right now you can only see just these three layers really simply. What we're going to do is reveal the properties. We're going to click on this little arrow here, so it drops down more information. We're going to click on Transform and that's where we're going to transform our layers and add our animations. Here we have those properties that I mentioned earlier and let's say I wanted this to move slightly to the right. I'm going to click the stopwatch icon to start the animation and that adds a keyframe into my Timeline panel. I'm going to click a few frames out because I think the animation should only be a quick few frames. I can always change this later, but I'm going to add a little keyframe. My animation is going to take place from the first keyframe till the second keyframe, but I haven't changed any of the values here with the numbers or up in the Preview panel. It's not moving, it's not doing anything just yet. I need to tell it to move. I want my text to end up in this position, so I'm going to leave this keyframe here at this value, then I'm going to go back and with this first keyframe, I'll change this value so that it's a little more to the left. I can do that up here in the Preview panel, you see it changed the value down here. It created this little line here that you can just barely see, but because I moved it, it drew out a line from the anchor point of the layer to where I wanted it to move. Now I'm going to play this, switch back to fit this here, so it moved just slightly like I wanted it to. It started a little to the left and then moved in right to where I want it and where I had it in the composition before. Now that we have these keyframes, this movement, and the position, and our stopwatch on, if we click the stopwatch again, it'll delete all of your keyframes. Try not to click the stopwatch unless you want to delete all of your animations within that property. If I wanted this animation to take longer and really slowly move from left to right, I can simply click on this keyframe and then move it a few frames down and now it's moving much slower. It all just depends on what effect you're going for. If you want something to be jarring and sudden or if you want something to be soft and relaxed. In the next lesson, we'll get back to animating with those properties like you just saw and really get into making your animation. [MUSIC] 12. Animate: Part 1: [MUSIC] Now that we have all of our visuals ready to go, let's get moving. Now I'm going to go back to my first text layer. I am going to actually add in this position animation here, because I made a note in my storyboard that I want all of my text to move and fade in from left to right. I'm going to add my keyframe, turn my stopwatch on. I'm going to add another keyframe to show where I want this to end up. Go back to my original keyframe. I am going to simply scoot my text a little to the left. You can either work in the preview panel to move and create your motion or you can work down here in the layers panel and just simply move these numbers. I find that the numbers are a little more direct sometimes, especially when we're creating like opacity and scale. For example, I want this to move and fade-in. I need to click on my position stopwatch, add that property to my motion, and then add the opacity property to my motion. I clicked the stopwatch here, and then I want them to work at the same time, so I'm going to hold down the Shift key and move my play hard so it's on that other position keyframe that I made a second ago. Then I'm going to add another opacity keyframe. It's on the same exact frame. These two properties will change at the exact same time. Here I want the opacity to obviously be 100 percent so people can read it, but I want it to fade in. I'm going to change this 100 percent opacity to zero percent opacity. Now you can see I have the play hard at zero, zero. I change the property for the opacity and the position here. You can't see it because the opacity is zero. But if you just slowly drag this play hard, you'll see the opacity changes over time. Now it's at 75 percent here to reach the 100 percent that I wanted it to be at this keyframe. Then I'll play that back here by clicking my space bar on my keyboard. There we go. It created this nice fade and movement here. Perfect. That's the subtle movement that I was looking for, but it doesn't feel super smooth. I'm going to highlight all of these keyframes here and I'm going to go down to keyframe assistant and easy ease these in. Now you see these change to a diamond half hour glass. There we go. That created a smoother movement here. Now what I can do because I want all of these text layers to have the same exact animation with this position change and the opacity change is, I'm going to highlight all of these keyframes that are relevant to those properties. I'm going to do Command C to copy them. I'm going to go up to my next text layer. I'm going to just twirl all of these down so I can see all of my stopwatches, all of my property controls here to make sure that it's working. I'm going to scroll over my timeline to this layer. It starts right here, so I'm going to place the play hard there. I'm going to do Command V and copy those keyframes on to this layer here. Perfect, so it created the exact same animation. This is a really nice way to just make sure you're keeping everything consistent. Consistency, especially in a long video, will help your audience to easily get through your story and understand it without any distractions. I did the same for my last text sentence layer. I'm going to do a quick command S and make sure everything is saved here. In the next lesson, I'll add motion to my other illustration layers. Start slowly animating your layers to build your animated video. [MUSIC] 13. Animate: Part 2: You've already learned so many basic animation concepts. Let's continue animating. Throughout this whole process of animating, be sure to refer to your storyboard and your notes so you don't get lost. You already made notes on what direction you want things to move in, how you want things to transition, and how you pictured your secondary elements moving around your composition. Simply refer to those notes and you should be good to go. I'll zoom in here to focus on the imagery of just these few frames and focus on my iconography. I'm going to open up these properties down here. I have my 399 layer selected with all of these guys in the background here, and then my one layer is on top of it with this one darker purple guy. The motion I'm envisioning happening here, is that we start off with all of these guys in the background and then one of them scales up and pops out of the 400. What I'm going to do is, I'm not going to do anything actually to this 399 layer. I'm going to click on my one layer, and I'm going to bring my playhead to the beginning, and I'm going to start the scale stopwatch, and I'm going to bring out my playhead here. Now that I'm seeing the text animating in front of it, maybe I will align these key frames and align the motion with the motion that I already established with my text layer above it. I'm basically going to open up my properties in my text layer and make sure that these key frames are aligning. I'm going to add a scale key frame here to my one layer, and then I'm going to close my text layer above it so I don't get confused. I'm not editing this at all at this point. I'm just making sure that aligns with my new layer that I'm animating. Then I'm going to go back to this zero-point. I'm going to click on this key frame for scale and then change the numbers from 100 to zero. Now he's disappeared. When I cross my space bar, you can see that he animates up and goes from really small to really large. But I want to differentiate him hiding and look like he's coming out from one of these little guys. He's different from these 400 or so because he's a darker purple. I clicked on one of these icons in the 399 layer. I'm going to zoom in so you can see that better here. I'm going to use this hand tool to pan around to find where that guy is, and it's hard to see at this point. I'm going to scale out a little bit. I think I'm going to do just this centered one right here. I'm going to go back to my select tool. You can see that because I created a shape vector layer from the vector in Illustrator, I'm now able to change the color super easily on this shape. Now that one little person icon has changed. I'm going to do a quick command just to make sure everything is saved, and I'm going to play this animation here. It's actually super fast. What I might do, I'm going to close out this layer just because I don't want to do anything else to it. What I might actually do instead of aligning this key frame with the key frames and the text layer above it, I might actually extend this animation so that way the viewer can see this little icon out of all of these other icons hopefully. Notice that there's one that's different. Then as they're reading, just really see and notice that this one is growing bigger than the other. I think that might be a little more dynamic and give people time to see what's going on in the imagery and really help them connect the texts, the one and 400 concept in a visual way. Let's try that. I like that, but I might actually want to make it quicker. I think the slower transition was a little strange, so I might tighten up the timing between these two key frames and then tighten up the timing of the animation. Now I'm going to make this a little smoother by selecting the key frames and then easy easing them in. It's pretty subtle, but I do like it, and I think it does emphasize though one and 400 concepts that I was going for. Now I'm going to animate my second part of my script, which is my gradient, and then my two icons here. I want this gradient background to move very subtly throughout the whole time that this slide is up. What I'm going to do is create a key frame at the beginning of this layer. Then I'm going to create one at the end of this layer. Now I'll add in the change in position, which I'm going to do in this preview panel. Basically, I want this effect that starts off lighter purple and then becomes darker purple. Then I want this motion to become softer, so I'm going to go ahead and right click on my key frames again and then easy ease them. Let's see how this transition looks. Now it's pretty subtle, but you can see the background slowly getting darker and darker. Then we don't have anything to animate in our last part of our script or CTA. So I'm going to play your video from the beginning and see how it looks. My video is looking good, and I finished adding all the motion I noted in my storyboard. I would consider this a finished video, but I think I can go in and experiment with adding a few more animations to add a little more interest. Have fun and experiment in the short 15 second video. There's a lot that can be done in these 15 seconds, and there's a little that can be done on these 15 seconds. Just go at a comfortable pace for you, and have fun, and experiment. That's all I want you to do. I realize that I forgot to add the following down transition from frame to frame that I noted in my storyboard. I went ahead and I added that effect to my first and second group of layers. I'm going to try to subtly animate the 399 layer with all of my people icons. Just to layer in a little more dynamic movement. I'm also going to add some subtle animation in the standing person and the person in the wheelchair icons because that background animation is so subtle. When in doubt, refer to those example videos that we talked about at the beginning of class to draw some inspiration. Mimicking different animations, different styles can help you learn really fast. It's not copying. It's simply learning and taking from what other people have done to make your own spin on a new animation. Keep exploring how you can add animation to your video and get to a place where you're happy with your video. In our next lesson, we'll review your video, tie up any loose ends, and save it. 14. Review & Save: [MUSIC]. Congratulations. You have the book of your video done. Now we just need to review it a couple of times and save it to share with your network. Let's play it back a few times and go over our review checklist before we save. The first time, I'm going to play it back and watch out to see that nothing is overlapping and that everything is looking smooth and natural in my animation. That looks smooth, the transition is smooth, and that was pretty smooth too. I decided I wanted to add that picture back into this last part of my script. Now, I'll watch the video back and I'll read it aloud just like we did before to double-check that we have enough time to allow our viewers to read our text. Did you know that one in 400 people will develop ALS? ALS is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that leads to muscle weakness and paralysis. Learn more at als.net. That sounded great to me. We're finally going to save our video once we're happy with where it's at. To do that, we're going to make sure that this composition that we've been working on is selected. We're going to go up to File Export, and add it to our Render Queue. We have our video in our Render Queue. It's going to be highlighted blue, so click on it and make sure that you're outputting it to the proper location that you expect it to be. Now that you know where it's going to save and you're already, you're going to hit the render button. This is going to create our movie. You'll see this blue progress bar and that'll give you a sense of how long your rendering is going to take. Now we have your file, but the.mov file is less universal than the MP4 file. We're going to convert that.mov file to an MP4 file by clicking on this link to Adobe's converter that I've provided in the project information. What you're going to do is, you're simply going to drag and drop your.mov file and it'll upload that and convert it to an MP4 file. Now I have my MP4 file downloaded and I am all set. I'm just going to quickly play the video to make sure it looks okay. It's still looks really clean and crisp, nothing weird or crazy is happening. Great. I'm really happy with my video. I'm going to upload it to the project gallery and wrap up my project. Be sure to upload your MP4 file along with your script and storyboard to the project gallery to share your work with me and your fellow classmates. We saved your video. Congratulations. Now it's time to learn a couple of bonus things and see where you can take your skills into other creative projects. 15. Bonus: Add Sound: [MUSIC] You don't have to add music or a voice-over to this project, but it can be really helpful and add to that excitement. I like using this website called Free Music Archive to pick out some free background music to use in my videos. If you like the option of adding sound, you can do that easily in Adobe Premiere Pro. I have Premiere Pro opened and I'm creating a new project and just titling it. I'll just title it the same title as my animation file and just add width sound to the end of it. I'm going to click "Okay", and then I'm going to simply drag in my animation MP4 file. Here it is. For some reason there seems to already be some audio things sitting in the audio row right here in A1. I don't know what that is so we're going to unlink. Then we're going to delete whatever was taking up that audio space. I picked out an MP3 file with just some subtle background music. I'll drag that into the Premiere profile, I'll cut it down to the right size, and then make sure that the beginning and the end are easing out. That way it nicely fades out and fades in at the beginning and the end and nothing sounds jarring. Let's see how that looks. Very subtle. Exactly what I needed to just add a little something to my video. Creating different ways for your audience to take in your content can be really helpful. Some people are visual learners and love to read things as they scroll through their phones. Some people really like to listen to things and that's how they remember information. If you're adding in a voice-over file, what you can do is just record your voice, save that audio file, and then drag it into Premiere Pro, just like what we did with this audio file. We're going to do a quick export. That's how you add audio to go with your animated video. In the next lesson, let's explore some ideas of how you can apply your new animation skills and other projects. [MUSIC] 16. Other Applications: [MUSIC] You've learned so many animation skills in just doing your 15 second animated video project, and you can carry these skills into so many other aspects of your creative projects. Here are some examples. You can make a short video to promote sales. You can showcase your products in a short video and promote it on social media. Here's an example of a video on an Etsy store that shows video of the product being used, but also includes a short animation of the brand. You can add some interest to your portfolio website by animating some of your designs. Instead of just showcasing a static logo on Penn diagrams website for this project, they decided to create an animated version of the logo that adds a little more interest to the project. If you're into video editing, you can incorporate animated transitions, like in my class lesson intro and outro slides. I created these animations all within Adobe Premiere Pro and you can do that by working in the Effects workspace. It's almost like a shortened, abbreviated version of After Effects, right in Premier Pro. You can pitch a video storyboard to your creative or marketing team to innovate with the latest trends in your company. Here's an example of some storyboards that I've created and talked to my creative team about. In the end I did a great job of breaking down the research that our company was doing and presented the information in an approachable way. Keep adding to your skills, take other Skillshare classes, and learn more about After Effects. I'm just giving you a really short intro to After Effects that's really focused on graphic design and animation that will enhance your design skills. [MUSIC] 17. Conclusion: [MUSIC] Congratulations, you've learned so much in this beginner's crash course and animating for graphic design. You've learned how to write a simple script and storyboard your ideas, use a streamlined design process, animate custom visuals, and apply these new skills and other creative projects. If you only take away one thing from this class, I hope it is that animation isn't so scary after all. Hopefully you've built up some confidence, learning all about After Effects and just the basic skills you need to get in and level up your graphic design. Hopefully it gives your audience, new excitement, and adds value to your content that you're building. Don't forget to upload your storyboard notes and your final video to the project gallery. Practice makes perfect. Keep practicing and making these short videos so you can build up your confidence and hopefully surprise yourself with what you're capable of doing. If you want to learn more about animation and After Effects from the experts, I recommend taking these animation classes on Skillshare. Thank you so much for learning the basics of animation for graphic design with me today. Please leave me any questions or comments in the discussion section, and don't forget to leave a review. That way I can learn from you guys and help improve future classes. See you next time. [MUSIC]