Animation for Social Media in Adobe After Effects | Valeri Visuals | Skillshare
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Animation for Social Media in Adobe After Effects

teacher avatar Valeri Visuals, Adobe After Effects Instructor

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Intro

      2:21

    • 2.

      14 Steps to deliver the perfect project

      1:32

    • 3.

      Useful tricks before starting the project

      14:31

    • 4.

      Script analysis and Moodboard Creation

      7:30

    • 5.

      Storyboard creation

      3:34

    • 6.

      Design in Illustrator

      20:44

    • 7.

      Voice over and markers

      15:59

    • 8.

      Animating the first two scenes

      13:44

    • 9.

      Smooth transitions

      19:18

    • 10.

      Mistakes you can take during the workflow

      12:37

    • 11.

      What is Keyframe velocity?

      23:33

    • 12.

      Captions creation

      15:14

    • 13.

      Final touches

      25:13

    • 14.

      Home Task

      0:23

    • 15.

      Outro

      0:24

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About This Class

Jumpstart your journey to making money with your creativity in motion graphics. Hi, I'm Valeri, and I'm excited to share my top course on making cool animations for social media!

But, I want to be clear: this course isn't just about following the latest trends. It's about learning how to work on big animation projects from start to finish. Trends may come and go, but the skills you learn here will stick with you forever.

You'll learn how to tackle any project, even complicated ones like explainer videos. By the end of this course, you'll know how to come up with creative ideas and feel confident working on big projects to tell amazing stories.

We'll start with how to understand a script from a client, or how to make one yourself with AI if there isn't one. Then, I'll show you how to think of cool visuals, find inspiration, and look up stuff that can help your project. You'll also learn how to plan your work with a storyboard. Next, we'll make the scenes in Illustrator.

I'll teach you how to create a great voiceover with AI, making it easier to start animating your project. After that, we'll jump into After Effects to start bringing your project to life. I'll share tips on matching animation to voiceovers and moving smoothly from one scene to the next.

You'll also get to know how to add captions, using AI or doing it yourself in After Effects. Lastly, we'll polish your animation with some basic effects and sound before it's all done. So, get ready to boost your motion design skills and move closer to earning from your creativity.

Don't worry if you're a newbie or just starting with After Effects. I'll explain all the important functions and concepts of After Effects in a simple way ever. And if you want to go in-depth and learn more, I have a free beginner's guide where you can find detailed explanations about the most important topics in After Effects.

Free Class to Learn the software (After Effects) even better

On top of all, to give you the best learning experience, you'll get a clear notification on when to work with me and when to listen without touching the computer.

 

You'll also get mid-lesson questions to help you memorize the lessons better,

and I'll even tell you when to take a 10-minute break.

And the cherry on top is that this course is voiced by a professional voice-over in super simple English, so even if English is not your native language, like mine, you'll easily understand the lessons! So, get ready for a fun, engaging, and rich learning experience with logo animation!

 

Meet Your Teacher

Teacher Profile Image

Valeri Visuals

Adobe After Effects Instructor

Top Teacher

Hi, I'm Valeri! I am a freelance Motion Graphics Designer who also teaches After Effects, the best software for Motion Graphics. My job here is to teach you the best skills in Adobe After Effects so that you can start a successful career in Motion Design.

Ever since I was a kid, I've always been into drawing. I started off doodling animals, cartoon characters, and people. As I grew older, I decided to take my passion more seriously and got a bachelor's degree in visual communication, which covered graphic design, illustration, and animation. And would you believe it? I even worked at an animation studio for a whole year during my third year of college! I worked at an animation studio for a year but eventually decided to go freelance full-time. I loved what I did so much that I st... See full profile

Level: Intermediate

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Transcripts

1. Intro: Unlock the full potential of your creativity and learn how to tell a better story with motion graphics. Hi, I'm Valerie and I'm super excited to tell you about my most advanced course yet on how to create viral animations for social media. To be honest, the main goal of this course is not to teach you how to create a trendy animations for social media. My main goal is to show you the steps on how to deal with complex animation projects based on the script. Because trends are come and go, but the steps you will learn in this course will stay forever. By practicing these steps, you will be able to apply them to your own future projects. Even the tough ones like explainer videos. So by the end of the course, you will learn how to come up with creative ideas. And you'll gain the confidence to deal with complex animation projects to tell a better story. We will start by learning how to analyze the script you get from the client. And if your client doesn't have a script, I'm going to teach you how to create one from scratch using AI. After dealing with the script, I will show you my method on how to come up with interesting visuals, how to get inspiration, and how to search for relevant references. You are also going to learn how to make a storyboard that will guide you throughout the process and then we'll design the necessary scenes and illustrated. In addition, I'll show you how to generate a high quality voiceover using AI so you can start animating your project in the most efficient way possible. Once we have that, we'll dive into after effects and start animating. I'll show you all my tricks for timing the animation to a voice over and making smooth transition between the scenes. Moreover, you will learn how to create captions, whether by using AI platforms or creating them from scratch in after effects. Finally, we'll improve the overall look with basic effects and even add some sound effects before rendering the final piece. So get ready to have all your questions answered and take a step further in your motion design journey. 2. 14 Steps to deliver the perfect project: Welcome, and thank you for joining my course. Let's start by understanding the importance of following the steps when working on animation projects with a script. In this course, our focus will be on creating trendy, minimalistic motivational motion graphics video for social media. However, it is important to understand that these steps are relevant to every project that involves a script, including an explainer video. Essentially, by practicing these steps on this particular animation style, you will be able to apply them to all your future projects. The most important thing that you need to remember while working on a project with a script is that it's very important to follow the steps in the right order to make things run smoothly. Don't jump ahead to the final stages before finishing the initial steps. For example, don't work on the animation before marking the scenes duration on your timeline while hearing the voice over. If you start animating without knowing where each scene ends, you'll end up adjusting key frames and timing later on, which takes a lot of time and effort. Another example is that you should avoid adding too many effects at the start of the animation phase, as it will slow down your project and make it difficult to work on. There are a lot of other examples, and we will cover all of them in the course. Pay attention to the steps and try to stick to them as much as possible. In the following lessons, we will cover each step in depth. I hope you are ready for this amazing learning experience. So let's get started. 3. Useful tricks before starting the project: Welcome back. In this part, I'll show you my process for working on a script and deciding what visuals to show according to the script. First, when you get the script, read it a few times to deeply understand it. Next, I like to split it into scenes. Usually you'll know when a scene ends by looking for a comma or a period in the sentences. But before we get into that, I like to add a horizontal line to separate the script from my thoughts. Let's do it together. Great, now let's start to split the script. First, let's select the first sentence, copy it, and paste it below the line. Continue copying the rest of the text up to the sign. Keep doing this until we reach the end of the script. This helps us get a clear vision of how many scenes this animation will consist of. I found this method very useful in cases where I don't know what to do and when I don't have ideas to create the animation for the script. Awesome, we are done with the first part. Now we need to highlight the important or interesting keywords in each scene. This will help us come up with relevant visuals later. In the first line, we have the word key, which I find interesting and important for this text line. Plus I know I can come up with an interesting visual for this word in the animation phase. Next, we have personal growth, which are crucial words in this line because they're the main topic of the sentence. Moving on, we have goals, which is the main topic in this text line, that is the scene. Next, we can mark organized, then we mark the word strong. And things get tough because these are the key words in this text line. Moving on, here, we can mark a better person. Now in this text line, we see the word goals again, but this time it's about reaching your goals, which can be shown differently than the first mention. Let's highlight this word here too. All right, finally, in the last scene, the main topic here is that being disciplined will make you life happier. Which means that the word happier is very important in this scene. It's the keyword in this text line. Great. Now, after we've highlighted the keywords for each scene, we can start thinking about visuals according to these key topics. At this stage, I love to find references across the Internet. Let me show you what I mean. For example, we can head over to the free Pick website. Now we can take our important words that we highlighted and find some good visual references. Let's start with finding some visuals for the word Key. Note that you might see different options than mine, because these websites are always updated and new designs are uploaded every day. But don't worry, you can find the link for my final docs document in the PDF file called Links found in the main folder for the course you downloaded earlier. Anyway, as you may understand, there are many ways to show a key. So you need to see different options and choose what you love the most. Usually, I go over the first five pages and decide to pick one. There it is. Since I want my design to be very minimalistic, I will take a screenshot of this design for inspiration in the design stage later on. Now I'll copy the screenshot and paste it below the first text line. Awesome. Now let's move on to the next marked word. Sometimes to get different results, you can use the filter option and ask free pick to show you only vector designs which are designs created an illustrator. Let's see if we can find something interesting here. If I can't find something I like here, let's see what's under the icons category. Our goal is to find some visuals that can give us an idea of how to represent personal growth in an interesting way. Sometimes you won't find what you need on one stock website, like therefore, I love to go to Shutterstock as well and search for the same thing there to see if I find some more interesting visuals. All right, here I can see some more interesting options that fit my minimalist visual look. For example, I love this interpretation of personal growth. Let's take a snapshot of this design and paste it in our document. By the way, we see this yellow color because of this text that we highlighted earlier. Anyway, I'll scale this up and let's move on. Let's copy the next marked word and search for nice visual references. I will continue to use shutterstock for this word as well as for the previous one. I can see here some nice options, but I love the most, this one. It's simple and looks similar to our previous references. So I'll take a quick snip of it and paste it into our document. Awesome, let's move on to the next keyword that we marked. I'll continue to search for it on Shutterstock. I love this design. It seems like it can fit our general design look that we're aiming for. I will take a snip of the two options because they both seem like a nice choice. All right, let's paste it under this text line and move on to the next word. Let's see what visuals we can get for the word. By watching others design for your keywords can give you a new way of thinking about these words. Or even inspire you to recreate some design in your own way. So feel free to go over this process when you feel stuck. Anyway, all the options here are boring and not visually interesting. Let's try to find something on Prepic. Let's see what we can get under the vectors category first. Remember, our goal is to find some visually and conceptually interesting designs rather than straightforward visuals like we see here, such as flexing hands or bodybuilders characters. Not all of your video should be like that. Sometimes, like in our first scene, we can use a straightforward visual, like we use the key design. But to get the audience impressed, it's better to use both straightforward and visually interesting designs. For example, this design may not fit visually to our project. But we can get a nice idea interpretation of the strong personality, like in this design, when a strong person is helping and lifting the weakest one. Sometimes some designs can bring you a general idea and a new way of thinking to show your audience what the word strong means. Anyway, let's continue searching for more references. If we do not find something better, we will use this one. Let's try to see what we got in the icons category. All right, now I see these icons which remind me of the lifting gesture that I saw in the previous design. Actually, I love this idea of an uplifting motion. Let's take a snip of this one and paste it into our document. Now as you can see, a new page was created automatically. Since we got to the end of the first page to fix it, you can go to the File menu. Click on Page Set Up, and make your document pageless. Great. And now we can scale this down a bit and continue finding references for the rest of the marked words. Let's try to find something interesting for things get tough, I will start to search for some ideas in free pick. First we can reset the filter to see more results. I don't see something interesting here. Let's try Shutterstock here. And either in these situations, we can go back to basics and search for some inspiration on Google. Let's paste the keywords here and go to images. I already can see some nice visuals here before deciding, let's see some more results. All right, I can't find something interesting, so let's go back to the reference at the top. I will snip this visual and paste it with the rest of my references. Awesome, let's move on and see what we can find for a better person. Let's use free pick for this one. Let's see what we will get in icons. I love this option, not because of the visual design, it's because of the uplifting idea like someone starts small and goes up and gets bigger. I think it explains very well the concept of being a better person, like a bigger version of yourself. But before deciding, let me check for more options on Google. All right, can't find something interesting here. So let's go back to free pick and take a snip of the icon we found. Let me just scale this down a bit and let's move on to the next one. In this one we get the word goals again, but this time it's about reaching goals, not just striving for them. Let's copy these two words and find some relevant visuals. Can't find something interesting. Let's try Shutterstock. This one looks interesting. Let's see if we can find a better option. I love this interpretation of flying towards your goals. We can enter this design and scroll down to see similar options. I love this visual concept, so I'll take a snapshot of it. Later on, I will think of how to create a better visual for this scene. One that fits my minimalistic visual design that I want from my animation. Awesome, so we've reached the final keyword this time. Instead of copying it, we won't copy this word. We can just write happy in the search bar to get more results. I think we can show this using a simple smiley face or just a smile line. I'll snapshot this minimalistic smiley face and add it to my document. Great, everything looks awesome. Let's just name this document before moving on, we can call it discipline mood board or just discipline script. Before moving to the design stage, I love to check my mood board once again and see where I can add more references and scenes that need more visual ideas. For example, in personal growth, I feel like I missed some visuals for the word personal. Because in this scene, it's very important to show personal growth, not some company or institution's growth. Therefore, I will take some time to find another visual reference. We need to find a visual to represent the word personal. Let's search it on shutter stock as well and come back to free pick if needed. I think I can find some better results here. For example, I see a very similar design to the word growth that we picked earlier. But this time it comes with a person. Like it's growth in his mind which can fit our scene. I will add this visual to my document as well. All right. I'll just paste it beside the references for the first text line and scale it up a bit. If I go back to free pick and see some icon designs for this text, I can see that a lot of times there's an entire person silhouette shown beside the growing graph. Maybe we can use this information later on as well. Therefore, I'll add this visual to the document two. All right, let's recheck all the references one more time. If we're good with the results, we can move on to the next stage, which is creating the storyboard. See you in the next one. It's going to be super fun. But before moving on to the next part, I highly recommend taking a ten minute break to refresh your brain. You can also do some light stretches or make yourself a good cup of water. These all are going to help you concentrate more for the next part. 4. Script analysis and Moodboard Creation: Welcome back. First up, I'd like you to download the main folder for our course. We'll use it soon to grab some assets for our project, but for now, let's set it aside. I want us to learn how to start a project like this from scratch. The very first step for a new animation project is to create a new folder on your computer. Let's name this folder discipline because that's the main theme of the animation we're going to create. Now let's enter this folder. And now you should create four more folders inside it. The first one we will call where we'll keep all our after effects files. The next folder we need is for our designs that will create for this project. Then let's make another folder named Assets to store all the graphic assets we'll use, including files we download from the Internet, sound effects, and so on. Finally, let's create the last folder named finals, or we'll save all our final renders, meaning the finished animations. Now let's go into the Assets folder and place it here. Now, open the Assets folder from the main course folder you downloaded from me. Here you can find all the assets I used to create the final animation for now, let's just copy these files right here and paste them into our newly created assets folder. Awesome, we can close this folder for now. Now let's see what we got here. Here you can see the script and other files we'll use throughout the course. For example, in the link file, you can find all the websites we'll use in this course and links to lessons from the ultimate beginner's Guide to after effects that I specially created for beginners who want to learn in depth about the topics and functions I'll discuss. Now let's open the script and start working on our project. When I start working on projects like this, I like to copy the scripts from the PDF file provided by the client, then go to Google Docs and paste the script into a new document. This makes it easier to make important notes and share the document with the client for any changes or notes they might need to add. Using Google Docs allows both me and the client to work on the document simultaneously online. But what if the client doesn't have a script and asks if you can provide one? Don't worry, I've got you covered. Before we continue with our project, I want to show you a great way to generate short scripts for these kinds of projects using the free version of ChachiPT. Let's do it together now, just for practice. First go to Chat GPT and create a free account. Then you need to tell Cha GPT what you need, which is to write the right prompt for it to generate the best result. Let's enter the Assets folder and open the GPT file I prepared for this lesson. Copy this text and paste it into the cha GPT input field. Now let's talk about how to interact with chat GPT. First, you want to specify the profession. In our case, a script triter specializing in viral social media videos be as specific and detailed as you can. Then ask it to generate a 100 word text about discipline or any other topic you need. After inserting all the information, hit the Generate icon. Now let's wait a couple of seconds. At this stage, I like to copy the text and paste it into a new Google Docs document. Then I go back to ChachiPT and ask it to rewrite it in a more specific way. Maybe in an optimistic tone this time. But you can choose any tone you want. Like serious, dramatic, funny, casual, motivational, and so on. Now I usually ask it to shorten the text by 50% so I can get a shorter script that fits into a 22nd time frame. Now copy this text and paste it into the doc we just created. Now to get perfect results, I usually read the two scripts and try to combine them. Taking the most interesting parts from each. I'm looking for the most interesting words because that way I can create a more engaging animation later on. These are the exact steps I took to create the script for our project. Great, and now I want to show you another way to come up with good text for your animation. Or at least get inspired and find a good reference for an interesting motivational topic. Let's close this file and cha GPT and head over to a site called Brain. You can find the link in the PDF file named Links in the Assets folder. The cool thing about this website is that you can search for any famous person alive or dead, and it will show you all their quotes. For example, I can search for Salvador Dali's quotes. Now I've got all these beautiful quotes which I can use to create an animation or get an idea for a motivational topic to create a whole new script based on this quote. All right, let's close this website and get back to our script to start working on it. The first thing I do when I receive a script from a client, I check if their request for a 12 to 22nd animation is feasible. This step is crucial because if the text requires more time than the client expects, they need to be informed as it means more work. Therefore, I copy the text and go to a website that converts words to time to see how long it will take for a voice over actor to read it. If you don't know what 0.3 minutes is, you can copy this information and paste it on Google. Then write in seconds. This helps ensure we don't plan for an animation longer than 20 seconds, making us ready to start on the project. After confirming the animation's duration, we begin visual research. This involves immersing ourselves in animation similar to what the client wants. That is, to watch a bunch of similar animation references. You can find online. It's important to fill your mind with these animations for inspiration and to understand how your final product should look. Seeing various references helps us know which videos perform better and why. The goal is to find visually interesting ways to represent concepts without being too literal or too abstract. Finding the right balance for creativity. This approach helps set the visual direction and enhances the animation's appeal. Because this way you'll get a good sense of which visual direction to take your imagination. Plus, when you look at lots of examples, you can figure out which videos are more successful than others. From my research, I found certain accounts that really stand out. And then I tried to understand why. It turns out that animations grabbing more engagement are those with conceptually interesting visuals rather than direct illustrations of what's being said. For instance, instead of showing a flexing arm or a muscular figure when talking about strength, think of using images that spark the imagination without directly depicting the narrative. It's way more captivating to explore abstract visuals for simple concepts, But it's crucial not to get too abstract. Finding the right balance between straightforward and unique visuals is key. And that's exactly what we'll dive into next part. See you there. It's going to be awesome. 5. Storyboard creation: Welcome back. In this part, we need to sketch out all of the scenes we've outlined in the script. You can use a blank sheet of paper and a pencil, but I'll do it on my ipad using an app called Procreate. This lets me share what I'm doing while I draw the scenes. The key here is not to get bogged down in details or aim for perfect accuracy while sketching. Focus on the overall look and feel of the animation and keep referring back to the script and our earlier design references. Let's start with the first line of the script. First off, draw some vertical rectangles to represent the resolution of Instagram reels, Youtube shorts, or Tiktok videos. Now we can begin sketching the first scene according to the script. I imagine starting the animation with a large key at the center of the scene. Then I want the camera to pull back and we'll see a man's silhouette with the key in the center of his chest. From the key lines start to fill the man's silhouette from the inside. I want to show that discipline is like a key that activates the inner workings of a person's activities. Next we move on to showing the goals. We can do this by zooming into the head to see the goals inside it. This demonstrates that discipline, which is the key, activates a person's goal oriented activities within their mind to transition to the next scene, the person fades away, leaving only the goals, which then split into three spheres to represent the order in a person's mind when they decide to be disciplined. Now we need to illustrate that this discipline makes the person strong. We can use the uplifting motion idea from our reference making the three spheres rise one after the other. Now to visually represent that the person becomes strong when faced with challenges, we can draw a large heavy rock falling on the person, symbolizing the toughness mentioned in the script. To show the person becoming stronger, we can use the uplifting motion and scaling animation from our reference. This symbolizes the person's improvement when they decide to be disciplined during this motion. The large rock shrinks and eventually disappears. Now to depict our main character, the small sphere, achieving its goals, we can use the flying idea from our reference. Let's create a scene where the spheres fly through space to reach the goals illustration. Finally, to wrap things up, we shrink our main character, which triggers the smile illustration. Let's make it more interesting by only drawing the smile line. Awesome, it looks great. I could only come up with all these ideas after watching tons of similar animations online. That's why I emphasized in the previous part how crucial this stage is. Always fill your mind with animations in the style you're aiming for before starting a project. This way, you train your imagination to think in the right way for your project. Great, now that we have the storyboard, we can present it to the client and walk them through the entire story. It's essential to do this before the animation stage. You avoid dealing with conceptual revisions after you've started animating. That's why I recommend not moving on to the animation part until your client approves the storyboard. All right, let's say the client approves the animation and we're ready to move on to the next stage, which is the design phase for this. We'll use Adobe Illustrator and we'll cover this in the next part. See you there. It's going to be super fun. 6. Design in Illustrator: Welcome back. In the design phase, we're going to create the elements for our animation in a vector based software like Adobe Illustrator. Using vector software means the elements we create will be sharp and high quality. We can scale them up without losing any quality during the animation phase. Before opening Illustrator, I'd like to review the storyboard again to see if there's an element I can download from the Internet to save some time. And which elements I can create inside after effects during the animation phase. For instance, in our case, it might be the man's silhouette. Because the rest of the elements are simple shape layers. That means that in our case, we'll focus on designing only the first scene of this storyboard. Because the rest of the scenes we can create directly and after effects from scratch. All right, let's head back to free pick and search for a man's body to see if there's anything that fits our project To start, we can search for man body. I'll deselect the icons option and choose vectors. Also selecting free in case you don't have a paid account on free, pick. Now let's search for some minimalist silhouettes. Don't rush to download something you see on the first page, even if you think it can fit the project. Go over a few pages to ensure there is nothing better in there. I find this one nice, but there is a lot of unnecessary objects around. Let's keep searching. Look at this illustration, guys. It's not minimalistic and I won't use it for the silhouette. But this illustration gave me an idea for doing something interesting in the animation phase. Later on, I'll explain what I mean. In our storyboard, we drew some lines inside the man's silhouette. Now after seeing this illustration, I got an idea to design these lines as blood veins inside a man's organism. We can create an animation that references flowing blood inside a man's body, which fits perfectly with our script conceptually. Let me take a snip of that pick to use as a reminder for this idea later on. Sometimes ideas can come from other designs. Always pay attention to interesting visuals you see while searching on these websites. Awesome. Now let's go back to free pick and continue searching for the perfect silhouette. This one looks nice, but there's too much going on around it. All right, let's try to search for a man's silhouette and see if there are better results. There it is. This one looks pretty simple and realistic at the same time. Let's use this one. Click on the arrow here and choose to download it as an EPS file. Now head over to the Assets folder and create a new folder called freepic. That way, our project folder stays organized and we can always know from which website we downloaded this graphic asset. All right, let's save it and navigate to the Assets folder. We can close the snipping tool, there it is. Let's enter the freepic folder we just created and right click on this file to open it. In Illustrator, if you get this pop up, just click yes. Now let's make sure we all see the same panel arrangement for this. Head over to Window, go to Workspace and choose Automation. Great, now let's create a new document so we can copy this asset and start designing our scene. When working on animation projects, I highly recommend using a film and video type document. So I'll explain why. For now, let's choose the full HD format and change it to be vertical. It will transform this document to the resolution of the Reals format, which is 1080 in width and 1920 in height. Now let's name this document, main scene. Make sure we are using one. Our board, the color mode is set to RGB and not CMYK. Because we're creating a document for a digital screen and not for print. You can leave the PPI at 72 and hit Create. Now I want to explain why it's better to work on a film and video type of document while working on an animation project. If we go to our boards, we will see that there are two R boards in this document. With the help of this automatically created art board, we can design our scene in the main art board without being afraid of going out of its borders. If you save an illustrator file where you designed your scene on a regular document and you got some elements getting out of the borders, and then you bring this file into after effects. You will see that everything placed outside the borders will be cropped. Unlike working on a film and video document, which will not crop the elements placed beyond the border of the main art board. All this, because this type of document has an unseen buffer art board inside it. All right. This was something important to know. I'm sure you got my point. Now let's start designing our main scene First let's go back to the Freepic asset and copy this layer into our new document. Now let's scale this layer by dragging it from one of the corners. And holding the shift and the Alt keys on the keyboard for Mac users hold down the Shift and the option keys. This will scale the layer symmetrically from all its sides. Finally, we can change the name of the layer to man body. Great. Now since we need all our elements in the project to be designed as lines, let's click here so we can see only the stroke. Next, change the color to white and set the stroke width to two. After that, let's click here and create a new layer for the background. To create the background, we can select the rectangle tool. Click here once and set the dimensions of the rectangle to fit the document size. Great. Now let's click here to fill it with a color and change the color to black. Finally, use the aligned tool to align it to the center of the canvas and change the name to BG. Now we can lock this layer and create a new one for the design of the key. We can go back to our mood board and see the reference we found for inspiration. All right, I want to create a very minimalistic key design. First, let's zoom in a bit to the center of the body. Now, create the first shape of the key. For this, let's click and hold on the Rectangle tool and choose the ellipse tool. Now let's set it to be only with a stroke. Change the color to white and the stroke width to two. Now create an ellipse while holding down the shift key. Awesome. Now I want to teach you something very important when creating projects based on line design. The important thing in these kinds of projects is to maintain the same line width for all the elements in the scene. This will look much more professional because the general visual look will remain the same. But now let's say we want to scale this layer a bit. As you can see, it's stroke width gets scaled with it. Now it looks very weird compared to the man's body stroke. We can change the stroke here back to two. But what if you decided to scale this layer down later on? As you can see, you will need to adjust the stroke back to 21 more time to prevent the stroke from changing its width. During the scaling process, we can go to window, scroll down a bit, and open the transform panel. Now while the object is selected, make sure to uncheck these two boxes. Now the stroke width will remain the same no matter what I'm doing with this layer. Awesome, Now we can close this panel. Next, let's make sure to check the constrained function and set the size of this shape to 100, or maybe to 150. Click here to align it vertically to the scene. Select the selection tool and lift this layer somewhere around here. Great. Now let's continue to create the rest of the parts of the key for this, select the regular pen tool. Now click here. Once, hold down the shift key and click here once. This will create a straight line. Now let's go back to the selection tool. Zoom in a bit, and start to create the final parts of the key. Select the pen tool once again and create a small rectangular shape while holding shift the whole time to make straight lines. Now let's go back to the selection tool and move this shape to the left using the arrows on the keyboard. Now let's make this shape corners rounded. For this, we can select the direct selection tool, which will open up the corners function for this shape. And set a tight. Awesome. Now let's go back to the selection tool and create a copy of this shape. For this hover over the shape, hold down the Alt or the option key and move this shape up a bit. Let's scale this one down and adjust the position for both of the shapes. Now select all of them, right click, and group them together. Now we can move this shape closer to the ellipse and group all of these shapes together. Now we can change the name of this layer to key and lock it. Let's set the screen to fit and move on to creating the lines that should be inside the character. Let's make it look like a combination between the line icons and the inside organism of the man. First, let's create a new layer and lock the man body layer. Now select the pen tool and turn on your imagination. Let's zoom in a bit and try to create the first line somewhere around here. Create the first point here and continue creating the rest of the points while holding down the shift key. I don't really know what I'm doing. I'm just trying to draw a line according to the shape of the hand. All right, now let's go back to the selection tool and see how that looks. I think we can move all the points on this side a bit to the left. For this, we need to select the direct selection tool And select all these points. Now use the arrow keys to adjust the position. Awesome, that looks great. Now we can select the pen tool again and create a new line, something like this. I think that looks super cool. Now let's create another one between those two. Now let's make a small one here to connect between the key and the first line. Awesome. I think it's enough lines for the upper part of the body. Now let's move on to the stomach part and the legs to move the preview down. Hold down the Spacebar key and drag the preview. And then continue to create the line. I don't want the line to touch the body. I'll select the direct selection tool and move some points. Actually I need to move the points from the upper area. I'll zoom out a bit and now select all the points from the left side. Hold shift and select the rest of the points. Now let's use the left arrow key to move it to the left. Awesome. Now let's move on and create another line somewhere around here. That's starting to look very nice. Now let's create the goal spheres that should be inside the character's head. But first let's change the name of this layer, two lines, and lock it. Now let's create another layer. Zoom in a bit and adjust the preview screen so we can see the head in the center of our document. Now let's select the ellipse tool and make sure that the ellipse has a white stroke and the stroke weight is set to two. Now, create an ellipse while holding down the shift key. Next, align it to the center. Then let's make sure that the constraint proportions are checked and set the size of this ellipse to 150, or maybe 130. That's better. Now let's move this layer down a bit on second thought. Let's set the size to 140 awesome. But now as you can see, it looks like the sphere is not centered. But the truth is that the sphere is centered. It just looks like this. Because the head of the silhouette of the man is actually not proportional from both sides. Let's fix this real quick. First, let's select the selection tool, lock the sphere layer, and unlock the man body layer. Now to see only this layer, hold down the Alt key and click on at once, we can turn on the background layer to see what we are doing better. Now let's select the line. And using the direct selection tool, select all the points here and delete them using the delete or the backspace keys. Great. And now to delete the points in the area of the head properly, let's select the pen tool and create a new point in the center of the head. Now using the direct selection tool, we can delete the last unnecessary point. Awesome. Now to duplicate and flip this shape, all we have to do is select the silhouette using the selection tool, right click on the layer, Go to Transform, click on Reflect, and choose to flip Vertical. Then instead of clicking on Okay, we need to click on Copy to get a new duplicate of the line. Finally, let's adjust the position of this line and make sure it fits proportionally with the left side. To make it precisely, we can turn on the sphere layer and move the right side of the man's body according to the sphere. Looks nice. Now let's head over to the bottom part to see if everything is okay there. We can use the direct selection tool and adjust the points. Now let's select both points and join them together so we can fill up this shape later on if we need to. Just don't forget to connect the points in the area of the head as well. Great. Finally, let's adjust the curves of the head by selecting the points and moving down the curve handles for the two points. Great job. Now let's go back to the selection tool and continue working on the goals illustration. First, let's select this shape and copy it using control C. And now let's paste it in place using control shift V. Now let's scale down this layer while holding shift and control. Or we can just set the size here to 100. Great, let's do it one more time, but this time set the scale to 60. Finally, let's change the name of this layer to goals, set the preview to fit, and turn back on the rest of the layers. Now let's create some lines in the area of the head. But first, make sure to lock the goal layer and unlock only the lines layer. Now using the pen tool, create the first line here. Let's align it to the center. Using the align tool. Now create another line in this area. Once we're done creating all the lines, we need to zoom in and make sure all the lines are not getting crossed with the rest of the design. To fix this, select the direct selection tool. Then select the point you want to adjust and move it to the right place. Go across all the lines and check their connection points. Once we're done adjusting the points, we can select the selection tool and select all the lines to round their corners to get a much more interesting look. Actually, I can see that I didn't adjust all the points. For example, I see that in the area of the leg, there are some points that need to be adjusted. I'll go back to the direct selection tool and adjust this point right here. Let me check the hand as well. I see that I got a few points I can adjust. Let's double check the upper part, two. All right, everything looks fine. Now let's go back to the selection tool and select all the lines elements now to round the corners. Let's go back to the direct selection tool and adjust the roundness value. Let's zoom in a bit to see what we're doing better. Let's set it to 16. Awesome. Once we're done with that, we can unlock all the layers and save the project. Note that we don't need to duplicate the lines elements to the right side, because we will do it in after effects after creating the animation for the left side. All right, now go to File and click on Save, as you can choose to save it on your computer, and then navigate to our main folder of the project. Then enter the design folder and save this file here. Check the name before clicking Save Awesome. And with that, we have finished designing the main scene of this project. At this point, you can also save this design as a Jpeg file and send it to the client as a style frame. That is to show the client how the overall look of the project is going to look like. In our case, we are not dealing with a client. We will skip this part and move on to create the rest of the scene and after effects from scratch since the rest of the scenes don't have complex elements that are made of. But before that, we need to prepare our project for animation. We will do that in the next part, so see you there. It's going to be amazing and super interesting. 7. Voice over and markers: Welcome back. After designing everything we need for the project, it's time to dive into after effects. First thing first, we can close this window now, so we all can see the same panel arrangement. Let's click on Default here. Now we're ready to create our first composition. Let's name this comp, Master Comp. Since we're creating a reels format video, we need to change the resolution to 1080 in width and 1920 in height. Next, set the frame rate to 30 and the duration of this comp to 30 seconds. Then choose black color for the preview background and make sure the resolution is set to full. Awesome. Now let's make sure we all see the same thing. First, set the preview screen to fit. Now if you don't see the black color, click here to turn off the transparency background. Next, if you see the numbers in the time line here differently than what is shown in my timeline, then hover over the time display. And while holding control, click on the numbers once. This will change the time line numbers, whether to frames or seconds. In our case, let's set it to show the seconds. Also, to see the preview properly, make sure the Cap Slock key is turned off so you can get rid of this red message in case you see it now. Finally, make sure your keyboard language is set to English. The shortcuts we will use during the workflow will work properly. All right, now it's a great time to save this project and give it a name to make sure after effects will start to save it automatically every few minutes. As you can see right now, the project we are working on doesn't have a name. The name we gave earlier was for the first composition. Let's go to File and click on Save. Now, find the main folder we created for the project. Enter the AE folder and save the project Here, make sure to name this file and hit Save. Great. And now our project has a name. And we activated the autosave function. Speaking of the autosave function, let's use this opportunity to go to Preferences and check that all your program settings are set like mine. You can have the best workflow experience while working in after effects Mac users. You can enter the preferences in this way. All right, let's enter General and start to adjust the settings. Pause the video if you need more time to check it. In the meantime, I will move on to the rest of the settings in the disc cache. You can change a different number than mine. Try to set it to the highest number your computer will give you. We will talk about what that is in the next lessons. All right, moving on. Here is the autosave function. Ensure you set it to save your project every 5 minutes. As I did this way, even if the program crashes and you forget to save it, you will be able to find the latest version of your project to continue work on. Under the memory settings, you may see a different number than mine. It's because you may have less or even more Ram installed on your computer. The most important thing for you to understand here is that you need to give more Ram to after effects rather than for other applications. That way, after effects will work faster. All you have to do is just lower this number right here, which will give less Ram to other applications and more Ram to after effects. Under the audio settings, you may see different names. It's because you have a different audio device connected to your computer. All right, moving on. Awesome. So we're done with the technical stuff. By the way, you don't need to adjust the preferences every project. This is something that you do once and the program will remember your last adjustments. All right, now let's start working on our project. The first thing we want to do is to import our design to after effects. Therefore, let's find the illustrator file we created earlier and drag it into our project. Now let's choose to import it as a composition, since we need all the layers separated and not flattened into one footage layer. Next, we will choose layer size, since we want the layer controls to fit the size of the layer and not the size of the illustrator document. Great. And now we see a new folder with all the layers separated and a new composition with the entire scene exactly the way we designed it in Illustrator. Awesome. That is a great time to hit control less to save the project before moving on. Get used to this short cut. Even if we got the autosave feature activated, it's better to save the project every while. Because After Effects is a program that can crash suddenly, no matter if you have an expensive computer or a cheap one, to avoid unnecessary problems, save the project after finishing an important step. Now when everything's ready for animation, the first thing we need to do before starting to animate the project is to import the voiceover for the script. It's very important to bring the voice over now because that way we can approximately know how long every scene should last. That way we'll know when to transition to the next scene. And it will be much easier to adjust the timing of the animation rather than adjust the timing after creating the entire animation without listening to the voiceover. If you're providing a voiceover service or you're working with a good voiceover actor, that's great. If you don't have one of these, I want to show you how you can generate a really high quality AI voiceover like you here right now. This voiceover is generated by the same software I'm about to show you right now. Get ready, it's going to be super interesting. The first thing we need is to find a good AI platform. From my experience, Vdo and Descript are the best out there. But if you're seeing this course later from the date I created it, there may be much more advanced platforms than what I showed you. Anyway, in our case, we will use V O and you will be surprised by the results at the end. First thing first, you need to sign in for the free trial and then go and create a new project. Since we don't have any file to upload, we can close this window. Now, give this project a name and head over to the text to speech option. Next, copy the script and paste it in the text area. Right here, we can delete the unnecessary lines and spaces. Now make sure the language is set to English. And now choose a voice over actor that fits the best for your project. You can test the voice by clicking on the play icon. Being disciplined is the key to your personal. There are a lot of different actors and you can check them all later on. In our case, I already picked a voice that can fit our project vibes. Scroll down until you find Eric. Now all we need to do is click on Generate and let the AI magic do its work. Awesome. Let's see what we got. Being disciplined is the key to your personal growth. It means sticking to your goals, keeping things organized, and being strong when things get tough. Discipline will help you become a better person. Reach your goals and make your life happier. I love it. Now let's click on Done and hit that Export button. After the file finishes rendering, click on the download icon and choose to download it as an MP three file. Now locate our assets folder and create a new folder name, voice over. Enter this folder and save the MP three file inside. Now let's go back to our project and go to the master comp. Finally, bring the MP three file to the project and drag it into the master comp. Now let's hear it one more time to see if we need to adjust something. Being disciplined is the key to your personal growth. It means sticking to your goals, keeping things organized, and being strong when things get tough. Discipline will help you become a better person, Reach your goals and make your life happier. As you notice, there is some part where there are large pauses during the speech. I think we should get rid of them. For this, we need to find where those pauses are to see where they are. We can select this layer and hit the L key twice to see the audio wave of this MP three file. There it is almost an entire second without speaking. To fix this, we can zoom in a bit. And now we need to split this layer from this point. For this, let's use the shortcut control shift. Now let's select this layer and hit the L key twice, once again to see the audio wave. Now we can crop this layer from the left side by dragging the edge of it to the point where the sounds begin. Awesome. Let's do the same thing here. Great. Now we can close the layers and adjust their position. Select this layer and drag it to the left, while holding down the shift key. That way this layer will be snapped to the end of the first one. Let's do the same with this one as well. Great, now it's a good time to save the project. Let's hit Control. All right, After adjusting the voice over, we can mark the points in time where one scene ends and the other one begins. Soon. Now explain why it is so important to do this before jumping into the animation phase. Let's see how we can mark the times for the scenes. For this, we can create a new adjustment layer which is a blank layer. Now we can change the name to markers and use this layer to mark the points in time where there is a transition between the scenes. For this, let's hear it once again to see where the first scene ends. Disciplined is the key to your personal growth, it means, all right, so the first sentence ends here. Therefore, we will right click on the adjustment layer and create a new marker. You can use the short cut as well. Now let's double click on the marker. And right here the number two. So we can know that from this point the second scene starts. If you want, you can create another marker at the beginning of the timeline to mention that the first scene should start here. All right, let's continue with this process and hear the voice over once again to find the point in time where the rest of the scenes start and end. It means sticking to your goals. Let's hear that one more time. To your goals. Great. According to our storyboard, we know that after sticking to the goals, we need to start the next scene. Which means we can mark this point in time as the beginning of the third scene. Moving on, keeping things organized and all right, keeping this organized. This is the end of the third scene. We should mark this point as the beginning of the fourth scene. By the way, you can also note to yourself the main topic of the scene, in addition to writing its number inside the marker. Anyway, I prefer to stick only with the numbers. All right, let's move on. And being strong when things get tough, let's mark the point in time when he finishes to say things get tough. Since after this we need to start the next scene. Discipline will help you become a better person. Let's mark this point as the beginning of the sixth scene. And continue hearing the voice over, reach your goals and make your life happier. Goals. All right, so when he says goals, this is our sign to mark this point. Because the next thing he will say is to make your life happier. And this is the scene that makes your life after reaching the goals, person reach your goals and make your life happen. All right, I think we are good to go. Now let's cut this layer from this comp using control X and paste it in the main scene comp we got from Illustrator. That way we can know now what the duration of the scenes should last, which makes it much easier to work and know where to transition between the scenes. Finally, we can tag this layer with a neutral color and lock it so it won't interfere with us during animation. Now I want to teach you something very important. As you may understand, this video needs to be posted on social media platforms. Since every social media has its own unique UI design, we need to make sure that we're creating an animation that fits this UI design. So we can be sure that we're not putting any of the important stuff into fields where it will be hidden behind the UI design of the platform. In our case, let's imagine that this animation needs to be posted on Instagram reels. Therefore, you need to make sure you know the safe zone of the UI design of this platform. That means you need to use safe zone guides every time you work on these kinds of projects. Luckily for you, I created the ultimate safe zone guide that you can use in your projects. Let's navigate to our Assets folder and drag the IG Real Safe zone PNG file into our project. Now let's drag it into our composition. Great, now let's hit the key to open up the opacity of this layer and set it to 30. Finally, we can tag this layer in a neutral color and lock it as well as the markers layer. Once we're done with that, let's hit control as to save the project before moving on. Now we're ready to start animating this project. Since we're working on the portrait format, that is a vertical type screen, let's adjust the panels according to that. It will be much easier for us to work and see what we're doing. First, hover over the gray area of the composition panel. When you see the mouse cursor changes to the icons of the two white panels, This is how you can know that you can drag this panel and place it somewhere else. Let's select this panel and drag it to the blue area right here. Now we can shrink the project panel since we won't use it in the near future. Then we can enlarge the layers panel like that. We can shrink this area to see more of the time line area. Finally, let's zoom in on the timeline and start to animate the first scene. I hope you're ready, because now we're moving to the most exciting phase, which is to animate the whole thing. And we will do it in the next part. See you there. It's going to be awesome. But before moving on to the next part, I highly recommend taking a ten minute break to refresh your brain. You can also do some light stretches or make yourself a good cup of water. These all are going to help you concentrate more for the next part. 8. Animating the first two scenes: Welcome back. First up, we're going to animate the key in the lines, since according to the script, they're the main elements we need to showcase right off the bat. According to my markers, this animation scene should last just over 3 seconds. But before we dive into animating, I highly recommend checking the script again to make sure the key and animated lines are indeed what we need to show. In this opening scene, we might decide to include the man silhouette two. But we'll see how things shape up as we animate. For now, let's start with the key first, let's focus solely on the key layer. I want to create a cool reveal animation for it. Here's how we do that. First, let's zoom in on the key using your mouse wheel or the zoom keys move the screen, so the key is front and center by holding the spacebar and dragging the screen towards the key. Great, Now to animate strokes and lines in after effects, we need to turn this layer into a shape layer. For this, right click on the layer, go to Create and select Convert Shapes from Vector layers. We've now got an exact copy of our illustrator shape as a new shape layer. Let's rename it by pressing Enter and deleting the word outlines. Then press Enter again, we can delete the original illustrator layer. Now opening up this layer, you'll see it has four groups inside representing the shapes we drew separately in Illustrator to reveal all these shapes at once rather than one by one select contents. And then add the trim paths effect. Using this effect, we can create a cool reveal animation for the strokes of the key layer. Now let's adjust this panel to see more of the timeline. Make sure we're at the start of the timeline, set the end property to zero, and create the first key frame. If you're new to after effects, I suggest checking out the keyframe lesson in my free beginner's guide. All right, moving on now, zoom into the timeline, go to the 1 second mark and set the end property to 100. Great, we've got ourselves a reveal animation to spice it up. Let's also animate the offset property. This will make the line move during the reveal start at the beginning of the animation. Create a key frame for the offset at zero and then at the 1 second mark, adjust the offset to make a full rotation. Let's watch what we've got by hitting the spacebar. It looks great. The stroke moves beautifully during its reveal. Now let's animate the line's layer using the same method. First, to isolate the key layer and focus on the line's layer. Next, let's adjust the preview so we can see the lines better. Now to animate it, just like with the key, we'll convert this layer into a shaped layer, Delete the original and rename the new one. Then open the layer, select contents, and add trim paths. But before we get into animating, pay attention to the lines layer. When I adjust the properties, we barley can see what we are doing. And it's because of the blue layer controls that getting in our way and hiding the lines. Let's turn off the layer controls for clarity by hitting controls shift H. Awesome. Now we can see the lines. Now I notice one of the lines is moving in the opposite direction from the others. I'm talking about this one up here. This is because of how we drew it in Illustrator. The direction you draw an illustrator affects the animation in after effects. Since we draw it from the up, down, the trim paths effect moves it from up to down. No worries. It's an easy fix to fix this. All we need to do is first find the problematic shape and to find it, bring back the layer controls with controls shift and keep selecting groups until you find the one to fix. There it is. Now to reverse it, open the group and click on the reverse path direction icon. Now let's hide the layers controls once again. As you can see, this line is revealed correctly. All right, let's close this group and create an animation for the end property. Let's go to the beginning of the timeline and create the first key frame with the value of zero. For now, let's decide that is animation will be 1 second long. Let's see how that looks nice. Now I want to create something very interesting. Let's go back to our mood board and try to create an animation that looks like it's a blood streaming inside veins within an organism. Let me show you how we can do that. Obviously we need to duplicate our lines layer. But first let's press and set the opacity of this one to 30% Let's hit control D to duplicate it and change the opacity for this one to 100% Now let's reopen this layer to find the trim paths effect. First, we want the end property not to reach 100% at the end. That means we need to change the value for the second key frame. For this we must place the time indicator on the key frame we want to adjust. And only then change the value. Let's set it to 50% Now this layer won't reveal the entire stroke. Now when we change the offset, we will get a cool moving lines effect. To make this value move constantly, we can use a very simple expression. What is expression? Expression is a piece of code that you can use to automate and control various properties of your animation. It is a powerful tool that enables you to create complex animations without having to keyframe every single element manually. Let's hold down the Alt or the option key and click on the offset stopwatch. Now, wright time asterisk 100. This will make the offset rotate 100 degrees every second. Let's see how that looks. If you want to speed this up, you can write a higher number. Let's say 300. That looks great. With this, we have finished animating the lines animation. All that's left is to do the same for the other side of the body. For this, we can group these two layers, but in after effects we don't call it grouping layers, we call it precomposing the layers. For this we need to select the layers we want to precompose, then right click and choose Precompose, or use the shortcut control shift C. Great. Now let's name this pre comp line. Make sure that both are selected and hit. Okay, now let's select this pre comp and hit control D. Then right click on the new Duplicate, go to Transform, and flip it horizontally. Now for more organized time line, let's precompose these two pre comps. We get one layer for the lines in this time line. We can call this comp, lines main comp. Great. Everything looks awesome. Now let's time between the key animation and the lines comp. I want the lines to start only after the key finishes its animation. Therefore, I'll drag the lines comp to start from the second one. We are ready to move on, but before that, let's slow down the animation of the lines a bit because it's happening too quickly. Let's enter the lines composition, make sure no layer is selected, and press you to see the key frames. We can also zoom in on the timeline to see the key frames up close, all we need to do is move the last key frames to the two second mark. Awesome. Now let's go back to the main scene comp and continue animating the project. Now we are ready to move on to the next scene. In this scene, we need to create the goal animation inside the head of the silhouette. To start, we can turn off the safe zone guide for now. Then adjust the preview screen. Now I have a question for you guys. What do we need to do to the goal layer in order to be able to animate the lines of this illustration? Let's right click on the layer. Go to Create and convert this vector layer to a shaped layer. Now we can delete the original layer and adjust the name of the new one. Now let's open up the layer and select the contents to add the trim paths effect to all the shapes inside it. But before that, let's isolate this layer and zoom in a bit to see better what we are doing. All right, now we can add the trim paths effect. We can go to the beginning of the layer to start the animation. From here, we will time this layer with the rest of the animation later. For now, I want to teach you something cool. Let's say I want the lines animation to start from the bottom part and not from the right side. I want the lines to go from the bottom and reveal from both the left and the right sides. To create this animation, first we need to set the end property to 90% so we can see the lines separated. Now we need to adjust the position of the line, and we can do it using the offset. In our case, we need to set the offset to 90 degrees. Finally, we need to set the end to 50% and the start to 50% as well. Now we can create the first key frames with these values. Then let's go to the second one and set the start to 0% and the end to 100% Now we've got a cool animation that starts from the bottom part and finishes from both sides. Awesome. Now I want to start each shape one after the other. For this, we can duplicate this layer two times. Let's change the name here to go one. Now all we have to do is just leave one shape in each layer. In this one, we can delete the second and the third group, which are the medium and the large spheres. In the second one, we will leave only the second group. In the third one, we will delete the first two groups. This way we can easily control the layers and create a small delay between them before starting to animate. Let's zoom in a bit on the timeline to see the key frames we will create. Soon, we want the first shape to enter the scene to be the big one. We will leave this layer as it is now. Let's say we want to start the second shape after five frames. Let's move it here. Then move five more frames and bring the last sphere here. Great. Now you might think it's necessary to precompose these three layers since they are part of the same animation. However, we don't need to do that. Our storyboard shows that one of the spheres here needs to continue into later scenes. We will leave all these layers without precomposing them. All right, now let's find a nice point in time to start the goal animation. Since the voice over for the second scene mentioned striking towards your goals, it's easy for us to determine where to place these layers on our timeline. Awesome, Now let's just change the order of these three layers to fit our sequence in the timeline with the rest of the layers. This is how your layers should be arranged when working in after effects. All right, now let's move back and forth with the time indicator to check the timing of the animation. My goal is to focus on watching the goals inside the head while moving the time indicator. And while doing that, checking how it looks together with the lines animation. Pay attention to the upper part of the scene. In my opinion, the goal animation is too quick and is starting too late. I think we need to adjust this part a bit. Let's start this animation from second number one. Select these layers and drag them like that. Noting that we are not moving the layers, we are extending them. Now we can hit the Ukey to see their key frames. Now let's drag the first key frames to the beginning of each layer. This way we will still see the goals entering the scene at the right time according to the script and the markers. Also, this animation will be a bit slower. Now we can play around with the delay of the layers to create a more interesting animation. But pay attention that the last layer should finish its animation up until the third marker. And not beyond that, because we know that from this point in time, the third scene should start. All right, I think it looks nice. Now we are ready to move on and start animating the next scene. And we will do it in the next part, which is going to be super interesting. See you in the next one. But before moving on to the next part, I highly recommend taking a ten minute break to refresh your brain. You can also do some light stretches or make yourself a good cup of water. These all are going to help you concentrate more for the next part. 9. Smooth transitions: Welcome back. Before we dive into animating the third scene, let's give the man silhouette a bit of action. Since it's just been hanging out during the first two scenes. We're going to have it show up right when the key finishes its animation around the 1 second mark. I'm thinking a cool dissolve animation with a little flicker effect should do the trick. To get started, select the man body layer and press key to bring up the opacity. Drop the opacity down to zero. Now let's position this layer here and create the first key frame. Now zoom in a bit on the timeline, move two frames forward, and bump the opacity up to 100. Keep doing this a few times, after a bit, we can copy all these key frames and paste them two frames after the last one. Let's repeat this once more now. We've got a neat flickering effect for the entrance of the man's silhouette. To keep our timeline tidy, let's place this layer underneath the lines comp. All right, before we get into the third scene, we should wrap up the previous scenes with an ultra animation starting with the lines. This needs to happen just before the third scene kicks off. Let's head into the pre comp where the lines are. We can zoom in on a time line. Now let's reopen the layers to see the trim paths effect and create an outro animation from the point in time where we place the time indicator for the outro. We're going to play around with the start property. Up to now, the start position has been fine. Let's mark it with a key frame. Move 1 second forward in the time line, and for the first line's layer, adjust the start property to 50 since the end value is already at 50. For the second layer, set start to 100 because its value is at 100. Let's check out the result to make it a bit more dynamic. Let's move 1 second forward again and adjust so the second layer finishes its animation after the first one. Let's see how that looks. It's looking good, we can move on. Let's go back to the main scene and create an outro animation for the key starting from the same point in time. Select the key, press you to reveal its key frames. And just reverse the animation by copying the key frames and pasting them at the indicators position. Right click to reverse them using the keyframe assistant menu. Let's see how that looks. While moving the time indicator and watching out what's happening in the scene, I think we can delay this animation a bit. It disappears right before the lines to check the timing. Move the time indicator while watching the key animation on the preview screen. Perfect timing. Next up, let's reverse the man body layers animation to serve as its outro. Let's copy the opacity animation we have here and paste it just before the third scene should start and reverse it Looks awesome. A good moment to save our project and lock in all the hard work. All right, now let's start animating the third scene, where we need to create an animation to visualize the organized behavior that you will achieve. When you're disciplined according to our storyboard, we want the three goals, Shapes, to scale down and change their positions. Before creating this animation, I want to teach you something very important when working with shaped layers. You already know we need to change the scale of these layers soon. But pay attention to what happens to the stroke. When I change the scale using the scale property, it affects the stroke width. And that's not something we want because we aim to maintain the same line thickness throughout the project as much as we can in shape, layers, and after effects. There is another scale property that we can adjust and you can find it under the transform properties of the group, but here as well, it will affect the stroke. Remember not to use the scale from the transform property of the layer, and not to use the scale property from the transform properties of the group. Instead, in these situations, we need to animate the path that creates this shape. To select the path, we need to double click on it and then scale it, just like we are scaling a regular layer. As you can see, the stroke width remains the same. Awesome. I'll press control Z to undo my action. And now let's do it together. First to find all the paths of these three layers. We can select them all and use the layers panel search bar for paths. This will bring up this property for the selected layers. Now since we want the path to be as it is up until this point in time, we will create the first key frame for it for all the layers. Now let's move to the point in time where the next needs to start. We can move the time indicator while holding shift. This way it will snap to the nearest marker. All right, now let's select the first path, zoom in a bit. Double click on it in the preview panel and scale it down while holding shift and control to scale it proportionally from all sides, press Enter to finish the action. Great, now let's do the same for the rest of the layers. Awesome, now let's add a position animation. In addition to the path animation we just created. Place the time indicator here, select the three layers and hit the P key to bring up the position property. Let's create the first key frame with the current value for all of them. Now let's move to the fourth marker and adjust their position for the first layer. Click here to create a key frame with the same value, ensuring it stays where it is now. Then let's move the second layer to the left and the last one to the right. To work more precisely, we can enlarge this panel and turn on the proportional grid found in the preview functions. Now we can adjust the positions of the layers. Awesome, Everything looks good, and we are ready to move on to the next scene. I want the middle sphere to be our main character for the rest of the animation. Therefore, I want to color it white. To make it more notable for this, let's go to the beginning of this scene and create an animation for the fill of this layer. But as you can see, even when I turn on the fill from here and color it white, I don't see the color on the shape. Let's reopen the layer and try to understand why that is it's happening. Because we didn't have a fill for this layer in the original file. Which means this layer didn't have a fill color when we created it in Illustrator. Therefore, after we converted the original Illustrator layer to a shaped layer, we don't see a fill property for it right now. But that's not a problem at all. To add a fill to a shape layer, all we have to do is select the contents and add a fill effect. Now we've got a fill property that we can change to white. Now let's animate it, make sure you're at the beginning of the third scene. Now create a key frame for the opacity of the filled property with the value of zero. Move to the end of this scene and set the opacity to 100. Awesome. We're done with this part. Let's move on to the next one. At this point, we need to create an uplifting motion for the spheres. First, let's turn off the guide and enlarge this panel a bit more. Now let's select all the spheres and hit the key to see only the position property. After the spheres are organized, we need to create an animation for them to represent them being strong. While things get tough, let's begin to create the uplifting motion first before the big rock falls onto the middle sphere. Up until this point in time, we are good with the position of the spheres. Now we can move 1 second forward in time to create the uplifting motion. For this, we can click on the numbers here and change the second 6-7 This will move the time indicator exactly 1 second forward in time. Now while all the spheres are selected, we can move them up using the y axis. Now let's move to the end of this scene and create the following down animation for the middle sphere. Let's select only it, adjust the preview screen. We can also turn back on the safe one guide to ensure we're not moving it down too much. Now while watching the sphere, let's move it down using the y axis. Once again, place it somewhere here since we know that here the big rock is going to be right now. Now to create the rock, ensure no layer is selected, then long press the rectangle tool to choose the ellipse tool. Now color a dark gray with a white stroke with a weight of two. Now let's start to create a big sphere. Holding down the shift key, we can make this sphere big since we want to represent that times can be very tough sometimes. This big sphere represents the amount of problems our main character needs to deal with. Now I have a question for you guys. From which property do we need to scale this sphere so that the stroke remains the same and is not affected by the scaling process. For this, we need to scale this shape layer using the size options path. Let's set it to 1,600 Now select the layer, Choose the selection tool, and move it up here. Now let's align it to the center using the horizontal alignment in the aligned tool. Great. Now let's zoom in and bring this layer down. Using the down arrow key, it stays right above the small sphere. Awesome, we can zoom out. Now check the size of the big sphere and move on to the next scene. But before that, let's bring this layer above the small spheres and change its name to big sphere. Now we need to create an intro animation for the big sphere and time it with the rest of the animation we have here. Let's find a point in time where we want this sphere to enter the scene. I think we can time it from this point in time where the three spheres make an uplifting animation. Let's select the big sphere, press P and move it up until we don't see it in the frame. Set the preview screen to fit to make sure it's out of the frame. Now, create the first key frame for the position, since we want this sphere to be where it is now at this point in time. Now to time it, together with the down animation of the main character, we can move to the point in time where all the small spheres finish the uplifting animation. And make the big sphere enter the scene. Place it right above our main character. Now go to the exact point in time where the small sphere reaches its down position and bring the big sphere to be right above it. You can adjust the value using the up and down arrow keys. Let's see how that looks great. It looks awesome. Now, since the big sphere enters the scene only from the fourth scene, we can crop this layer from its beginning. To save the organized timeline to crop this layer from its beginning, press out and the left bracket. Nice, Now we are ready to move on to the next scene where we need to create an uplifting motion for our main character to create a visual representation of becoming a better person. First, let's split the small sphere layer from this point in time using control shift and place it above the big sphere, because we want to create an entirely new animation for it. And it will be much easier to deal with timing adjustments later on in case we need to adjust the timing of the scenes. All right, according to our storyboard, the small sphere needs to go up while the big sphere scales down, representing the situations when a person is getting better and dealing with all its struggles until they disappear. First, let's change the name of the new duplicate to goal one, as it was Now, press the Ukey to show all its key frames. Let's delete them all from the beginning, while leaving the last keyframe for the position, since we want this layer to be placed here at this point in time. All right, now to create a scale animation for this layer, we will use its path to maintain the stroke width at this point in time, create the first keyframes for the path. For convenience, select this layer, press the Ukey once, and then once again to see only the key frames we got on it. Now let's move to the end of this scene and bring this layer up. Now select the path. Then double click on it in the preview. And scale it up while holding shift and control. Then press Enter to finish the action. Let's see what we've got. All right, that looks okay. Now let's create a scale down animation for the big sphere. Let's start at the beginning of the scene, then use the search bar to find the path of it. Let's open the path and create the first key frame for its size. Now move to the end of this scene and scale it down to zero. Now, during the uplifting motion of our main character, the big sphere disappears. But as you can see, it does not align perfectly with the white sphere, which is totally fine. But if you want it to align with it, you can use guides to create much more precise animation. Let me show you what I mean. First, let's open the rulers and create a new guide line from above to mark the position of the big sphere. Now we can change the last position of the white sphere to move to the position of the big sphere we just marked. Now this will create a much more interesting motion. All right, so we're done with this part. Before moving on, let's check the storyboard once again to see if we miss something. As you can see according to the storyboard, in order to represent the situation where the person has become better than he was. That is, he left his older version behind and grew up to his new version of himself. We need to show a disappearing animation for the small sphere we had earlier. For this, we can expand this layer up until the end of this scene and create some disappearing animation. To save some time, we can actually copy the outro animation we created for the man's silhouette and paste it onto the small sphere. I'll copy these key frames from the man's body layer. Then I'll select the small sphere and press to see its opacity. Now I'll select the property, make sure that I'm at the right point in time and hit control V to paste the key frames. Now we've got an outro animation for the small sphere, but in my opinion, it's happening very fast to slow this animation down in the most efficient way we can, select these key frames, hold down the alt key, and drag the last key frames to the end of the scene. This will move all the key frames while preserving the same spacing between them. Great, so we are done with this part and are ready to move on to the next one. But before that, let's organize our project for more convenient work. First, at this point, we can return the panels to their original arrangement. We can close the rulers, set the previous screen to fit, and hide the guide we created using a shortcut control and the semicolon key. Awesome. Now let's organize our timeline. First, I'll change the name of this layer again. For some reason it returned to its original name. All right, now let's make sure no layer is selected. And press the U key to see all the keyframes on all the layers. Now we can crop the layers where the animation on them is over, like the key layer, its animation ends at this point in time. Meaning we can crop this layer from its ends. For this, press Alt and the right bracket. The same goes for the man body layer. We can zoom in a bit on the timeline and crop this layer from the end as well as the key layer. Now let's see where the lines finish the animation. Let's enter the precomps until we see the lines layers. The animation ends here. Place here the time indicator. Now go back to the main scene and crop this precomp from the end using the shortcut. Let's crop these two layers as well. The animation ends here. Let's bring here the time indicator and crop the layers. This one is already cropped, okay? It's a good time to see all the animation before we move on to check how it looks. Everything looks totally fine. But at this point in time where the three spheres are going up, I want to create a small delay in the animation. I want the white sphere to start going up first, and then the other two will follow it. For this, let's select the three spheres and press to see their position animation. Now let's zoom in a bit in the preview to see what we are doing. Now all we need to do is just to start the animation of the two spheres on the sides a few frames after the white sphere. Let's zoom in on this timeline and move these key frames forward in time. To create a good delay animation, we actually need to copy the position of these spheres and paste it here. All the spheres at this point in time will be placed at the same position. Now we can easily select the uplifting animation of the two spheres and move it wherever we need. Just don't forget to extend these layers to the end of the animation. Great, now the uplifting animation of these spheres will start a few frames after the white sphere. Now we can click here to unselect the layers and press the Ukey twice to close them all at once. Finally, before moving to the next part, let's crop the big sphere layer as well as the rest of the layers that already finished their animation. Awesome, now we are ready to move on to the next part when we will create the rest of the animation. See you in the next one. It's going to be awesome. 10. Mistakes you can take during the workflow: Welcome back. At this point, we need to create the next scene where the main character is flying towards their goals and achieving them. Therefore, let's continue animating the white sphere. First let's press the U key to view its key frames. Now let's create the illusion of this sphere flying in space. For this, we need to move 1 second forward on the timeline. Now we can move it down here. Then we can select the path, double click on it, and scale it down a bit. Now let's move to the end of the scene and bring this layer to the center of the composition. I'll zoom in a bit to see where is the center of the frame. Now let's scale it down even more at this point. From this point in time, we can create an outro animation for this sphere. For this, let's move 1 second forward. We can use the numbers here which represent the timeline, and simply change the seconds here to 13. This way we will move the time indicator exactly 1 second forward. Great. Now let's select the path and scale it down as much as we can. Finally, we can cut this layer using out and the right bracket. Awesome. And that's how we created the flying and space illusion. Now let's stand at the beginning of this scene and enter the goals that our sphere needs to reach by the end of this scene. For this, we can drag the goals layer into our timeline. Since I want to animate the intro of these spheres one by one, I will convert this layer into a shaped layer. Let's delete the original layer and adjust the name of the new shape layer. We have now to animate this layer without affecting the stroke width, we need to animate it from its path. Let's select this layer and use the search bar to find it. Great. Now at this point in time, let's create the first key frames for all the shapes in this layer. Now let's move to the end of the scene, select the path, and double click on it to scale it up. Let's turn on the safe guides to ensure that we didn't scale it too much. I think it looks awesome. Now let's create an intro animation for this layer. We don't need to do something fancy, we can just create a nice opacity animation. Let's stand at the beginning of this scene and press the key to bring up the opacity. Create the first key frames with a value of zero. Now let's use the numbers here to move 15 frames forward in time and change the opacity to 100. Looks awesome. We can crop this layer from its beginning, since it enters the frame only from scene six. All right, now from this point in time where the white sphere is making a scale down animation, let's create an outro animation for the goals. First, press you to see all the key frames. Now let's scale each shape separately. Let's move 1 second further in time. Now select the first path, double click on it, and scale it up until we don't see it in the frame. Let's do the same for the rest of the shapes in this layer. All right, now let's make these shapes exit the scene one by one and not all at once for this. First, let's zoom in on the timeline. Now let's move a few frames backward from the middle key frames and copy and paste them here. That way we got a few frames in this animation, which will be handy in a few seconds. But for now, let's move these key frames here to maintain the same duration of the intro animation of the goals. Now let's create a small delay between the shapes in this layer. We want the biggest shape to exit first, Therefore we won't touch its outro key frames. Now we can select the first two paths and move their outro animation five frames forward in time. Next, select the first shape and move its animation five frames forward in time as well. Awesome, I think it looks nice. And now we can crop this layer, close it, and move on to create the starburst animation that needs to be in this scene. A quick tip for you guys. Every time you finish an animation, always go back to the storyboard to see if you miss something. And to check what you need to do in the next scene. All right, now I will show you how to create a Starboarst animation in a few minutes. First, we need to create a new solid layer. We can call it speed lines, Make sure it's in a comp size and set the color to black. Let's isolate this layer to see what we are doing better. Now we need to add a CC particle world effect to it. Let's search for it in the effects and presets panel and drag it into the solid layer. Let's zoom in and adjust some parameters. First things first, let's get rid of the grids of the effect. Now let's change the birth rate to 0.1 so we get much fewer particles for the longevity. We set it to 5 seconds. Next, let's open the producer properties and expand the particle across the x axis to one, the same for the y axis, and 20 for the zaxis to get more depth for the particle space. Moving on to physics, start by changing the animation to direction axis, set the velocity to 20, the gravity to zero. And finally, reset the extra angle and set it to 90 degrees. Now open the particle properties, set the opacity to 100 and change the color to white. And both birth and death color properties. Now let's an isolate this layer to see the rest of the layers and bring the speed lines to start. At the beginning of the sixth scene, we can place this layer above the goals layer and drag it to start from this point in time. Great. Now let's make the speed lines disappear at the end of the scene. We can do that by animating the birth rate property. Let's create the first key frame at this point in time with the current value. Now press you to see the key frames. Now we can move one frame forward and set the birth rate to zero. Now the particles will start to disappear and it will take them 5 seconds to do that. Since we set the longevity to 5 seconds, in our case, we need them to disappear much earlier. Since the flying movement illusion we created stops at scene seven, let's drag these key frames backward in time to start the outro animation of the particles much earlier. At this point in time, we should not see any particle in the scene. Let's drag it even more back in time. Let's see what we got. Great. Now let's crop this layer to the end of this scene and move on to create the final scene which is the smile animation. First, we need to create the smile in the scene. For this, ensure no layer is selected. And choose the ellipse tool, turn off the fill color, and select a white stroke with a width of two. Now let's create a proportional sphere while holding the shift key. We can isolate this layer, change the name to smile, and place it above the speed line's layer. Let's crop this layer from its beginning to start from scene number seven. Then let's align it horizontally and press P to adjust its position. Place it so the bottom part is placed exactly in the center of the frame. Now let's reopen the layer to find its path size and set it to 450, so we all be on the same page. Now let's select the selection tool and ensure the bottom part is in the center. All right, and now let's animate this. And we will do it using the trim paths effects. First, let's open the layer to select the contents and then add the trim paths effect before animating it. Let's press Control shift H to hide the layers controls. So we can see the line. Now in order to animate this line from the bottom center, we need to set the end and the start properties to 50% and create key frames for both. We can press you now to see only the key frames on this layer. Now let's move 1 second forward in time and set the end to 75% and the start to 25% Great. And now let's move 1 second forward one more time. Either by changing the numbers here or from here. This is the same thing. Now just copy the initial key frames and paste them at the time indicator position to create an outro animation. We can now crop this layer from the end. Awesome. And now we have an outro animation for the smile. Now an isolated and move on to time. Everything we created in this scene, first thing first, I see that the white sphere needs to disappear a bit earlier. Therefore, let's select this layer and press you to see its key frames. Now let's move the last keyframe for the path responsible for the scaling down animation of the layer a bit earlier in time. Let's see how that looks. Looks nice. Before moving on, let's set the preview back to fit and see the final scene again to check how that looks with the rest of the objects in this scene. All right, I think we can scale down the smile a bit because it's too big right now, in my opinion. For this, let's find the size of the path and set it to 300. Once done, don't forget to bring this layer down. All right, so we have finished animating the entire script and everything looks fine. It's a great time to press control as to save the project before moving on. All right, now I want to teach you something important in case you want to create a unique background and not just a black solid in the scene. Let's turn on the transparency background and turn off our background layer in the scene. As you can see, the main body layer doesn't have a fill color, which can be a bit problematic. If we want to add some elements behind it or just create a grid background, that means we need to add a fill color to our character. For this first, we need to convert this layer into a shaped layer. We can delete the original layer and adjust the name of the new one. Now as you can see, even if I'll turn on the fill for this layer and color it in black, we won't see anything. It's because we didn't create this layer. An illustrator with a fill to fix this, all we have to do is to select the contents of this layer and add a new fill effect to it, and finally color it in black. Awesome, now we have a pill for the character and we are ready to create a cool background. But now since this layer has a fill, we can't see the key layer. Since it's placed under the character layer, this is not a problem. All we need to do is place the character layer under the key layer. Great. Now let's press control to create a new solid, which will be our new grid background layer for this animation. Call it background, make it the size of the comp and color it in black. Let's place it below the character. Now, search for the grid effect and add it onto the new solid layer. Let's adjust some parameters to get a nice grid. To get a nice grid background set to control its size using a slider first. Now adjust the slider to get something that you like. Finally, adjust the border to set degree width. As you can see, since our character has a fill color, the scene looks much better. All right. I actually prefer not to use a grid this time. I just turn it off. We can delete the original background layer we got from Illustrator. Awesome. And now we can move on to the next part to time our animation with the voice over and create additional camera movements for the animation to make it look much more interesting. It's going to be super fun. So see you there. 11. What is Keyframe velocity?: Welcome back. After creating the rough animation with the correct timing, let's add some rough camera movements to the animation to help the viewer concentrate on what we want them to focus on. For this, we can copy our guide layers from here. Turn them on in this comp and paste them into the master comp. Now let's bring the main scene to this comp and create an illusion of camera movements. And we will do it using the scale property. Our goal is to create an illusion of a camera zooming in and out. In these kinds of projects, it's a better choice rather than using a O camera because we don't have three D layers in the scene. We have one pre comp that we can scale up and down. By the way, if you're asking why we copied the guide layers from the main comp and turned them off, it's because if they were turned on in the main comp, they would scale up and down with the comp. And that's not what we need. We need the guide to stay in place so we can make sure we're in the safe zone. All right, so I'll bring everything back to normal and let's get started first, according to our markers layer, we know that at this point in time we need to see the entire silhouette, because according to the script, we need to show the personal growth scene. We will use the end to beginning method of animation. This means we're setting key frames from the end of the scene to the beginning. This is because we know how the scene should end. Therefore, we will place the time indicator at the end of the first scene and create the first key frame for the scale property with the current value. Since we want the scene to look exactly as it is now, since we know that there will be a point in time where we will need to move our layer as well as scale it. We need to create an animation for the position property as well. To see the position of this layer, we can hold shift and press P. This will show this property together with the scale. Now let's create the first key frame with the current value, since we want the scene to look as it is now at this point in time. Now we see that we need to create a zoom out animation to make it interesting. We can go back 1 second, set the comp size to 150, and place it here in the center. Now let's place the time indicator somewhere where we can still see the key. We can see where we are moving the comp. Now let's scale this comp to 300 and move it so the key will be placed in the center. Once done, we can move these key frames to the beginning of the animation. With this, we have finished animating the camera movements for the first scene. Now let's move on to the next one. According to the script and storyboard, we know that at this point in time, we need to show the goal scene. Therefore, let's adjust the scale and the position of the composition. At this point, we can set the scale back to 300 and place the composition so we can see the goals inside the head of the silhouette, somewhere around here. Now I want to teach you something important about scaling up precompositions with shape layers or illustrator layers inside them. As you can see, after scaling this composition, the shapes inside appear a bit pixelated. To fix this, we need to activate the collapse function found here. If you don't see it, you can click here. What this function essentially does is it maintains the properties of the original layer. In cases where we use an Illustrator file and then activate the collapse function in after effects, this will make the layer very crisp since the original layer was created. In vector based software like Illustrator, a vector means that no matter the size of the layer, the object will remain in high quality. By activating the collapse, after effects will preserve this information. In our case, we have a layer that is a composition. This layer has a lot of shape layers inside it and shape layers in after effects are vector layers as our illustrator layers. This means no matter the scale, the shape will remain very sharp. By activating the collapse on this composition after effects will preserve the information inside this layer. That is, it will preserve the information of the shape layers inside it. Since the shape layers can stay in high quality no matter the size, we will see the shape layers inside this composition in high quality as well. Since the lines here are illustrator layers, we need to enter this composition. Then we need to activate the collapse on the lines precomposition here, as well as for the two precompositions inside it. By doing this, we preserve the information inside this precomposition. We preserve the information of these shaped layers that can be in high quality no matter the scaling. This information is preserved here, here, and here by activating the collapse along the way. Awesome. That looks good, and we are ready to move on. All right, so let's move on to the end of the third scene and adjust the composition to see all three spheres in the center of the frame. First we can set the scale to back to 100, and then adjust the y axis for the position property. That looks nice, but as you can see, we can see the big sphere in the scene. And that's not what we want. We need the big sphere to enter the scene only in the next scene. Let's fix that first. Let's understand why we are seeing the sphere. We see it because we activated the collapse for this composition, which makes all the layers inside this composition visible. If I turn off the collapse, you will see the original bounds of this composition. When we activate the collapse, we see all the information inside this composition. In our case, we see the big sphere that's placed in the upper part of the composition. To fix this, all we need to do is adjust the intro animation of the big sphere inside the main composition. In our case, we need to adjust the position property. That is, we need to change the initial position of this layer first. Let's stand here on the first key frame with the time indicator To change it, to see where to relocate it, we need to see how it looks in the master composition. Therefore, I want to teach you a little trick to witness the changes we implement within the main scene in the master composition. We can click here to lock this composition and then enter the main scene. Now we can drag the panel of the main scene here to view both of the precompositions. Since the master composition is locked, all the layers we see in the layer and the timeline panel are the layers of the main scene composition. All right, now we are ready to adjust this keyframe. Let's move the big sphere up until it is no longer visible in the scam. While we are checking the master composition, keep moving up the sphere while watching how that looks in the master comp. Great, Now we can unlock this panel and close it. Let's return to the master composition and see what we've got. Looks great. All right, now let's adjust the position of this composition according to what's happening in the main scene. In the main scene, there is a moment when the big sphere enters the scene. Let's position ourselves here with the time indicator. Go back to the master composition and adjust the position of this composition. I want the scene to look like that. I do not want to change the scale of it at this point. Let's click here to create a new key frame with the same scale value. Let's see how it looks. Keeping things organized and being, being strong when things get tough. Discipline will help you become better person. Reach your goals and make your life happy. Let's view it one more time. Keeping things organized and being strong when things get tough. Discipline will help you become a better person. Reach your goals and make your life happier. All right? I think that looks awesome. And now let's continue adjusting the position and the scale of the composition. For the next scene. We can slightly elevate this layer and leave the scale as it is. Let's check how that looks and being strong when things get tough, discipline will help you become a better person. Reach your goals and make your life happier. All right, that looks great. And I don't think we need to add another scale or position animation until the rest of the animation. This means we have finished creating the camera movements animation. Now I have a question for you. What should we do after finishing an important part of the project? It's a great time to hit control as to save everything we've done so far. All right, so at this point in our project, after setting the key frames and creating a rough animation, and after ensuring that all the animation we created fits to voice over, we can move on to adjusting the key frames. And improving the motion by converting the key frames to easy ease and adjusting the velocity of the animation. Let's see how to do that. First, let's enter our main scene and arrange the panels for a better workflow with working and viewing all the key frames. For this, we can drag the layers panel here and shrink the project panel. Now let's get rid of the guide. For that, we can use the shortcut control and the semicolon. Awesome, now let's set the preview to fit. And enlarge the layers panel to see more of the timeline. Great, now let's click here to ensure no layer is selected, and press the U key to view all the keyframes on all the layers. All right, now I want to teach you something cool about how you can quickly improve your animation if you are not a beginner. I still want you to listen closely because very soon I will show you something that you didn't know. Of course, there are a lot of scripts and plug ins out there that you can use, but in this course I want to teach you how to achieve it inside after effects without using any external help. All right, so first let's talk about a basic key frame. Quickly. As you know, when we want to create an animation for an object, we need to create keyframes across the timeline. These key frames indicate to after effects that a change in a certain value needs to occur at the points in time we chose. In this case, there is a changing value in the position property across the duration of 2 seconds. While creating basic key frames, the object will perform the animation at the same speed during the 2 seconds, meaning the object moves at a linear speed. To make it more interesting, we can adjust the speed of the object throughout its animation by using the graph editor. And adjusting the animation with the speed graph. Currently, the speed of our object's animation remains constant during these 2 seconds. To modify this, we can transform these key frames into as key frames which will alter the speed of the object at the start and end of the animation. I know that the speed of the animation has changed because I see that at the beginning of the animation, the speed is zero pixels per second. However, in the middle of this animation, the speed has increased to more than 700 pixels per second. This indicates that the curve is displaying the speed of the object during its 2 seconds of animation. For instance, at frame number 20, the speed is slightly more than 600 pixels per second. At frame ten, it is slightly more than 400 pixels per second. And at frame number zero, the speed is zero pixels per second. This means that the speed of this object accelerates from the beginning of the animation and starts to decelerate after the first second. Now after understanding what we see in the graph, I can make the animation remain at a slow speed for a longer period. The animation will maintain a very slow speed during all this time and will start to accelerate. From this point. It will be at a high speed for a short period before slowing down very quickly. Since the animation we created lasts for 2 seconds, the last key frame is placed at the two second mark. This all means that we aren't changing the duration of the animation. When we play around with the speed of the animation, we are just deciding at which point during the 2 seconds the object will move slowly or fast. This means we can decide that we want the object to start slowing down earlier during these 2 seconds. But this also means it will be very fast at another point in time. Right now, the animation will be very slow at the beginning and end, but around the first second it will be super fast. For a very short period, it will be very fast for one frame only. That's how you can control your animation and create interesting movements for your layers. Now I want you to pay attention to the percentage numbers that change when I decide whether to make the animation fast or slow. I don't want you to be a programmer and try to understand what it means in depth, but try to remember that there is a way to control this velocity influence percentage more easily in case you want to create the same movement for many layers. Let's say that I love the movement of the object when its velocity percentage is set to 85% for both key frames, both the first and the last. But setting this exact velocity for all layers by going to the graph editor every time can be very challenging. Therefore, I want to teach you a quick way to do it. All we need to do is select the key frames we have either right click on one of them and go to the key frame velocity panel. Or we can enter this panel using a shortcut for this. Hold down the alt key while all the key frames are selected and double click on one of them. Here we can see that we are dealing with the position property key frames. And we can see how many key frames we have selected. Now if we set the influence percentage here to 85, it's like we're dragging the handle of the first key frame to the right to make this animation slow. When we change the outgoing influence, it's like we're dragging the handle of the second key frame to the left. By doing so, we are making this object slow at the end of its animation. That means this object will be at a slightly faster speed, exactly in the middle of its animation. A very important thing to remember when using this method is that we can change the velocity for only one property type at a time. For example, if we have key frames for scale and position. Even if we select all the key frames and try to change the velocity for both properties, the velocity will change only for the key frames we have double clicked on. In this case, I double click on the position property. Therefore, I can see that now I will only change the velocity for the position key frames. All right, enough with the talking. Let's practice it on our animation. As you can see, we have a lot of different types of properties for which we created key frames. Let's start by changing the velocity for the end property of the trim paths effect. Select the property from here, This will select all the key frames for this property on the layer. Now hold down shift and select the same property on the other layers. Now hold down the Alt key and double click on one of the key frames. Here we can see that we are now dealing with the end property and we are going to adjust 13 key frames at once. Let's set both incoming and outgoing velocities for all the animations we have on these layers. Great. Now let's do the same for the offset property of the trim paths effect. I see that we have an animation for the offset only for this layer. Let's change it only here. We don't have to change the velocity on the opacity property since we are good with the flickering animation that we created. All right, let's move on to the next property. Select all the start key frames on all the layers and change the velocity to 85% for both incoming and outgoing velocity for all these key frames. Great, let's move on to the next one. We don't have to do it on the birth property of the particle world effects, since we are good with this animation. All right, now let's select all the path key frames on this layer and change their velocity to 85% as well. We can do the same here. We can select all the path key frames on all these layers and change their velocity at once. Now let's do the same for the position key frames for the disappearing animation of the man's body. We can just convert the key frames to *** using the F nine shortcut. Now I notice that I forgot to change the velocity for the size animation of the big sphere. So let's do it real quick. We can convert the opacity animation on this layer to easy key frames. Now let's not forget the lines animation we got in the scene. Since the key frames of this animation are inside this pre comp, let's enter them and adjust them as well. Now make sure no layer is selected. And press the Ukey to see all the key frames on these two layers. First, let's change the velocity for the start animation. And now do the same for the end. Awesome, now let's go back to the master comp and do the same for the position and scale animation we created here. Let's start with the scale key frames now move on to the position. Great, now let's see how everything looks together and try to find some issues or adjustments we need to make before rendering the animation. In this part, all we got to do is watch the animation a few times and see what we can improve. Being disciplined is the key to your personal growth. It means sticking to your goals, keeping things organized, and being strong When things get tough, discipline will help you become a better person. Reach your goals and make your life happier. All right? I notice that the flying in space animation is happening very fast. Let's see it one more time. Reach your goals and yeah, that's happening too fast. Let's enter this comp and try to fix this First, let's zoom in a bit on the timeline to see the key frames up close. And we can also enlarge this panel for a better workflow. Now let's find the problematic part. This is happening in the scene where we see the goals flying toward us and the white sphere flying toward the goals. Therefore, let's isolate these two layers and see what we can do to fix this. I see that at this part, the sphere is making a small pause, which I don't really like it's happening because we played around with the velocity of these key frames, But that's not a problem. To fix this, we can select the problematic key frames, hold down the control key, and click on them once, and then once again to convert them to continuous key frames. That will fix the pause. Let's see it one more time. I think it looks much better. Now, we can de, isolate these layers and move on. This part looks good now, but I notice that the smile enters too early. Let's move this layer a bit forward in time and see how that looks. I think it looks much better now. All right, let's go back to the master comp and see the entire animation one more time. Being disciplined is the key to your personal growth. It means sticking to your goals, keeping things organized, and being strong When things get tough. Discipline will help you become a better person. Reach your goals and make your life happier. All right. After watching it once again and hearing it with the voice over, I notice that the silhouette of the man enters the scene too early. I think it should enter approximately At this point in time. Let's enter the pre comp and adjust the intro animation of this layer. I think it should enter the scene a few frames after the lines start their animation, somewhere around here. Let's select these key frames and move them here. Let's go back to the master comp and check how that looks. Being disciplined is the key to your personal growth. It means sticking to your goals, keeping things organized and being strong when things get tough. Discipline, Great. Now I want the silhouette to disappear a bit earlier. I want it to disappear during the zoom in animation. Let's enter the scene and move the outro animation to start somewhere between the second and the third scenes, somewhere around here. Let's see how that looks. Being disciplined is the key to your personal growth. It means sticking to your goals, keeping things organized, and being strong when things get tough. Discipline will help you become a better person. Reach your goals and make your life happier. All right? I think it looks great. We can press control S now to save everything we've done so far before. Moving on to the next part, let's bring the panels back to normal. We can also enter the scene and shorten the timeline. Since our animation ends at second number 15, we don't need the rest of the timeline. For this. We can drag the workflow area manually to the end of the animation or press in to bring it automatically to the position of the time indicator. Now right click on the workflow area and choose Trim Comp to work area. Awesome. Now let's click here to make sure no layer is selected. And press the Ukey to close all the layers at once. Great. We can now close all the open precomps and save the project one more time before moving to the next part where we will learn a few ways to add captions and so much more. It's going to be awesome, see you there. But before moving on to the next part, I highly recommend taking a ten minute break to refresh your brain. You can also do some light stretches or make yourself a good cup of water. These all are going to help you concentrate more for the next part. 12. Captions creation: Welcome back. We will begin this part by learning how to use AI platforms to create automatic captions for our video. I know there are many scripts for after effects that you can purchase, or you can use Adobe Premiere to generate automatic captions. Since there are plenty of tutorials out there on how to do this using these options, I decided not to show you these methods. Instead, I will show you how you can use a free AI platform. To achieve this, the first thing we need to do is to render an MP three file of the final voice over for the video. Let's do it now. First, let's place the time indicator at the end of the animation. You can drag the time indicator while holding shift. This way it will snap to the end of the voiceover layer. Now let's press the key to bring the end of the time line to this point. We do this because we don't need to render the scene after the end of the voice over. All right, now let's press control M to render this time line. Now let's click on the output module. And in format, we will choose to render it as an MP three file. After this, let's click on output two and choose where to save this file. Let's save it in the voiceover folder. Now we can click on this file to sample the name. Let's just adjust it to edit it. Finally, click Save and Render. Now let's go back to Vo and click on the logo to go to the dashboard. Now let's create a new project and import our new MP three file. Awesome. Now leave the background in black and here you can choose another format to work on. In our case, we will not change the format because I want to export the highest quality of the text possible. Soon you will understand what I mean. All right. Now let's change the name of this project to Discipline Subtitles. Great. Now let's go to subtitles. Click on auto subtitles, make sure the language is set to English, and click on Create Subtitles. It can take a few minutes to finish, so be patient. All right, and now we have subtitles for all the voice over. Don't worry if your subtitles look different than mine. Soon we will learn how to change them. For now, let's at play and see that everything is okay, strong when things get tough, discipline will help you become a better person, reach your goals. And now let's learn how to adjust the subtitles. First, we can make every subtitle be short and not a very long sentence. For example, I want being disciplined to be separated from the rest of the first sentence. For this, I can click here and press Enter to drop the line. Let's do the same in the third sentence. We can drop the line after the. Now we need to bring the word organized to be together with keeping things. Let's click here and press de Let to bring this text up. Now we can drop the line after the comma. All right, it looks good. Let's move on to the next sentence here. We can drop the line after the word here. After the word goals. All right, now let's hear it with the voice over to see how that looks. Being disciplined is the key to your personal growth. It means sticking to your goals, keeping things organized, and being strong when things get tough. Discipline will help you become a better person. Reach your goals and make your life happier. I think it's awesome. Now we are ready to design these captions for this. Let's click on Style now. Just choose the style you want and move with the time indicator to see how that looks. There are a lot of super cool options here, so make sure to check them out. You can also choose to show each word separately if you want, before deciding. You should ask your client if he has something that he preferred the most. In our case, let's pick this one. This is the simple one, and in my opinion, it fits our project. Now let's adjust it even more. First, you should know that there are a lot of cool, different font styles to choose from here. In our case, let's pick the anybody font. You should see it at the bottom part of this list. I see it up here because I already worked with this font earlier. Anyway, choose this font and now click on the italic font option to cancel it. We want the text to be straight. You can also click here to make the text bolder. You can also click here to make all the text and caps letters. Or to make every first word to be caps or no caps at all. In our case. Let's click here and set it to default. There are a lot of other cool functions here that you can play with later on, but in our case, we are good with the design. Now let's move the text to the center of the scene and scale it up. Once done, bring it to the center. Awesome. Now move across the timeline to see that everything is fine. Once you are good, let's click on Done. Now we can adjust the quality. First, set the resolution to ten ADP and the quality to high. Make sure burn titles is checked and go back to Export. And click on Export Video. Now wait a few seconds and then click on Download. And choose to download it as an MP four file. Let's choose to save it in the Assets folder, make sure the name is good, and click on Save. Great, now let's go back to our project. We can close the render panel and bring this file into our master comp. Great, now I want to show you a few ways on how you can get rid of the black background. The easiest method to get rid of a black color in after effects is to click here and change the blending mode of this layer to add. The problem with this method is when you want to add a drop shadow effect, you won't see it on the text. We can't see it on the text because this layer is in a full HD size format. That means that you will see the drop shadow effect on the edges of this layer. Fix this, make sure the blending mode is set to normal, and now search for the effect called lumache. Now drag the effect on the layer and make sure it's on top of the drop shadow. Now set the key type to key out darker and adjust the threshold. Let's isolate this layer and turn on the transparency background to see what we are doing better. Make sure you crank up the threshold until you don't see any of the black color on the text. In our case, we can set it to 220. Awesome. Now let's turn off the sound on this layer since we already got a voice over in the project. Now to make the drop shadow stronger, we can duplicate the effect and adjust some parameters. Great, now all we need to do is just scale down this layer and place it in a good place in our scene. I can place it somewhere around here and maybe scale it up a bit. Let's see that the text stays in the safe zone during the rest of the animation. Now I see that we got a little problem with the background in the scene. This is happening because we moved the scene. To fix this, all we need to do is enter the scene and cut the background layer from here using control X. Now go back to the master comp and paste it here under all the layers. Awesome. Now let's go back to dealing with the captions. As you can see, they are interfering with the safe zone. In that case, we can just scale this layer down a bit until we get the right size. 50. Looks great. All right, now let's turn off this layer, and I want to show you how you can manually generate the caption in after effects from scratch. Maybe it's a bit more time consuming, but in small projects like these, I actually prefer to do it manually and after effects because I can gain full control over the text and create much more interesting scenes. With that, let me show you what I mean. First, let's open up the script and copy the text of the first scene. Now let's go back to our project, Select the text tool and paste the copy text. Now let's adjust it a bit to fit our scene. First, I'll change it to any font with a thin weight. You can find this free font on Google Fonts. Find the link in the links PDF file. Let's set the size to 50. And I'll uncheck the all caps function. Now let's go to paragraph and make sure the text is aligned to the center. Now go to character and color the text white. And finally, go to a line and align it to the center of the comp. Now I see that this font is too thin. I'll go to character and try to find something better. All right, so I'll stick with the default version of the font with a bold weight. Now let's drop down the text. From this point, I see that my leading is messed up, so I select all the text and set it to auto. Awesome. Now we need to hear the voice over and bring the relevant text according to what we hear. It's going to be very easy since we split the text. That is, each text line we are using is actually a scene in our timeline. Being disciplined is the key to your personal growth. It means stick. All right, from this point in time we can split this layer using control shift and then go to the script and copy the text for the second scene. Now let's double click on this layer and paste the text. Great, let's move on to the next scene. Sticking to your goals, keeping things organized, everything looks fine. We can split the layer at this point in time to bring the text of the third scene. Awesome, let's move on and continue to hear the voice over. Things organized and being stoke let's split this layer at this point in time and bring the relevant text for the fourth scene. Since this is a long text, we can drop the line from this point. All right, moving on, let's keep doing this process until the end of the animation. Being strong when things get tough, discipline will help you become great. Now let's crop this layer from the end using alt and the right bracket. The best benefit of using this method is that now we can select the selection tool and adjust the position of the captions we created according to the design of the scene. For example, in the first scene we can bring the caption down here so we can see the key according to what we see in the second scene, we can bring the text up here. Moving on, At this point in time, we can bring the text here. Looks great. Let's keep adjusting the text according to the scene to the end of the animation. Basically, all you have to do is to move the time indicator slowly to see the scenes and try to think of a good position to place the text at each scene. Now let's improve the look of our new captions by selecting important words for each scene and coloring them in a different color. Let's choose the yellow color before clicking Okay. Let's copy the info of this color to use it in the next captions. In this part, let's color this text. Press control V to paste the info of the yellow color we copied from the previous caption. Awesome, let's continue doing that until the rest of the animation. To know which words to mark, you can ask the client or choose one for yourself. The goal is to make the important words pop. You can also know which words to marker according to the marked words from the script. Great, now let's see what we've got a few times. Being disciplined is the key to your personal growth. It means sticking to your goals, keeping things organized, and being strong. When things get tough, discipline will help you become a better person, Reach your goals and make your life happier. Being disciplined is the key to your personal growth. It means sticking to your goals, keeping things organized, and being strong When things get tough, discipline will help you become a better person. Reach your goals and make your life happier. Being disciplined, alright? Everything looks very nice and we can save the project before moving on. Now I've got a question for you guys in a case like ours right now, where we've got a bunch of layers that belong to the same type of role in the scene, like the text layers we've got here. What should we do in order to keep our timeline organized and make all the text layers function as only one layer? In this case, we can precompose all the text layers. Let's do it. Let's select them all in press control shift, let's name it, subtitles or captions, and hit, okay, great. Now let's collapse this pre comp and add a glow effect. To improve the look for this, go to the effects panel and search for glow. Then drag the effects onto our new precomp. We can set the glow radius to 50 to get nice glow. But actually in this case, I don't really want to use it, but you can leave it in case you love how that looks. Instead of the glow effect, I'll go back to the first subtitles layer and copy the two drop shadow effects on it and paste them on our new subtitles. Precomp. Great to see the shadow a bit more. We can play around with the softness property. I'll leave it at 50. Awesome, so we are done with the captions. Let's just bring this pre comp above the voice over layers and we are ready to move on to the next part where we add some cool sound effects and improve the overall look of the animation and so much more. It's going to be a fun one, so see you there. 13. Final touches: Welcome back. After finishing the animation and adding the captions, we are now ready for the final touches. We will begin with improving the overall look. For this, we can enter the main scene and add glow effects to some of the main objects in the scene, like the key layer. Now I want to teach you something important about how you can further enhance the appearance of your project while working with the glow effect. As you can see, even if I adjust the parameters of the glow and increase its intensity, the effect doesn't look so good. To improve it, we can go to the project panel and click here to enter the project settings. Once there, we can open up the bit depth menu and choose the 32 bits per channel without going into too much unnecessary programming detail. All you need to know is that the more bits per channel you have, the richer your project will look in terms of colors, gradients, and glowing effects. Now, as you can see, we immediately see a drastic improvement in the glow effect. Now we actually need to lower the intensity and adjust the radius. Try to find the perfect balance between those two that looks awesome to achieve a much stronger glow. You can also adjust the threshold if needed. I'll leave it as it was. Just so you know, there are many different paved versions of the glow effect that you can find online. But I'm trying to teach you ways where you will spend as little as possible on this project anyway, let's move on now. Let's copy the glow from this layer to the lines comp and paste it into the moving lines layer we have here. When pasting the effect onto the new layer, make sure to check how it looks and adjust the parameters if needed. Great, now let's go back to the main scene and find another layer to add the glow effect to. I think we should paste the effect onto the small sphere we have here. Since this layer will become the main character of the project in the next scenes, let's not forget to adjust the effect and see how that looks. It looks nice. And now let's copy the effect from this layer and paste it onto the main character layer we have in this scene. Because it is the continuous layer from the previous one. All right, it looks great. And now we can paste the glow effects onto the speed lines we have in this scene. Let's close the particles effect to see the glow and adjust the parameters a bit to get better results for the glow in the speed lines. Looks awesome. Finally, let's paste the glow effects onto the smile layer and adjust the parameters to fit. This layer looks great. All right, now we can go back to the master comp and continue with improving the look. But before that we can turn off the safe zone and the grid in the preview. Now let's learn how to add a cool motion blur effect for the entire animation. For this first we need to create an adjustment layer to use it as a filter that will affect all the layers below it. Let's change the name to Motion Blur and place it below the subtitles comp. Actually, we can place it below the voice over because we want it to affect only the main scene. All right, now let's search for the motion blur effect and add it to the adjustment layer. Note that adding a motion blur to your project will significantly slow down your rendering time since the motion blur creates a bunch of duplicates of the scene. Therefore, it is very hard for after effects to present all these duplicates at once. The effect actually does is add some nice motion blur at points in time where the movement is very fast. We can control it by changing the shutter angle. In our case, we can set it to 120. Just note that the more you add, the slower the rendering time will be. As you can see, the motion blur can sometimes ruin the look of certain effects like our speed lines that we created using a particles effect. To fix this, you can try to lower the threshold and maybe turn on the native motion blur. Soon we'll go back to it and find a proper solution for this problem. In the meantime, turn off the motion blur and continue working on the project. I see that the glow effect I created for the key is not looking good because this pre comp has a scale animation. It causes the object to be large but remain the same settings for the glow. In that case, let's just enter the main scene and adjust the glow effect on the key. It will look good when it's small and when it's big. Let's try setting the threshold to 50 and see how that looks. I love it. All right, now let's use this opportunity to check the glow effect for the entire animation. Being disciplined is the key to your personal growth. It means sticking to your goals, keeping things organized, and being strong when things get tough. Discipline will help you become a better person. Reach your goals and make your life happier. Being disciplined, al right, everything looks awesome. And now, once we're good with the animation, the subtitles, and the effects, we are ready to add some sound effects. To download sound effects for free, you can go to Pixabay, a cool website for free stuff for creators. In our case, we'll go to sound effects before moving on, here's a quick tip for you guys when you are downloading music or sound effects from the Internet before using it in your projects, make sure to check the license stuff on the website. In our case, if we go to license summary, we can see that we can use the content from this website for free. And here you can see what you can't do with the content you are downloading from this website. Make sure to check for this on every free content website you are using to avoid unnecessary problems in the future. All right, let's go back to the main page. And here you can search for some cool sound effects that you need for your project. In our case, to not waste time, let's use the sound effects I already found and downloaded. Let's find the main folder for the course that you have downloaded from me and copy the sound effects folder from there to the assets folder you created on your computer. Note that there are many other ways to add the sound effects you downloaded to your project. The most efficient one is to send them over to the sound designer artist and pay him to do the job. This is what I'm doing when I'm dealing with big projects. But since we have a small one, we can do it ourselves. And we can do it either using Adobe Audition, which is software from Adobe for editing sound, or we can do it in Adobe software from Adobe that focuses more on video editing than visual effects like after effects. Anyway, to make it simple, we are going to add the sound effects directly to our project and after effects. Great, so now let's go back to our project and bring all the sound effects files into it. To arrange these files and see them side by side, we can tag these files with a different color and then click here to arrange the files according to the tagging color. Awesome, Now, before bringing the files into the timeline, let's hide the layers. We don't need to see in the layers panel, so we can have more room here to hide a layer in after effects, we need to use the function found here. If you don't see it, you can click here. All right, now let's select this layer as a shy layer. And click on the shy icon here to activate the function. Awesome. We can also hide the markers layer and the subtitles layer that we are not using. We can also hide the motion blur effect. Looks great. And if you want to see the layers again, just uncheck the function by clicking on the shy icon found here. All right, and now we can start with adding some nice sound effects to our scene. First, let's start with checking this file. For this, we need to double click on it. And now after effects, we'll open it in a new preview panel where we can press the space bar and listen to it. Okay, I think this sound can fit well with the beginning of the animation where we see the revealing of the key. Being disciplined is the key to your personal growth. When working with sound effects, we don't really need to see the animation in the best quality. Let's lower the preview quality so we can check the sound effect without waiting for the preview to render. Being disciplined is the key to your personal growth. I think that's awesome. But we can crank up the volume a bit to hear it better. For this, select the layer and press the L key. Now we can set the audio levels to five and move on to the next one. Let's double click on this file to check it. Okay, let's hear this one. I think we can use this sound at the end of the animation where we see the smile. Let's place this layer here and see how it looks and make your life happen. We can start it a bit earlier poles and make your life happen. Being disciplined, all right. I think it's great, but the volume is too high. Let's lower it a bit. I have a question for you. What is the shortcut to reach the audio levels of the sound file? To reach it, we need to press the L key. Let's do it. And set the audio levels to -15 And hear it once again. Reach your goals and make your life happier. Being disciplined is the key to your personal growth. It means sticking to your goals, keeping things organized, and being strong when things get tough. Discipline will help you become a better person. Reach your goals and make your life happier. I think it's great. And now let's move on to the next file. Let's hear this one as well. All right. I think this sound can fit the downward motion of the big sphere to enhance the feeling of tough times. Let's place it here and see how that looks when things get tough. This is okay. As you can see, this is a very long layer, which means we need to crop it to the end of this scene to know until when to crop the layer without cutting the sound. We can select the layer and press the L key twice. This way we will see the audio waves of this layer and that's how we can know at which point exactly to crop it without cutting the sound. Let's drag it here and use this sound from this point, press Alt and the left bracket to cut it from its beginning. Now let's drag it here and hear it once again. And being strong when things get tough, discipline will help you become a better person. I think we should start this sound earlier. And being strong things, getting tough, it's too early. Discipline will help you become a better person. Keeping things organized and being strong, Alright, I think we can place it here. And finally, let's crop it from its end using out and the right bracket, okay? And now let's press the LK once and set the audio level to minus ten to lower the volume. Let's hear how that sounds. Keeping things organized and being strong when things get tough. Discipline will help you become a better person, reach your goals and make your life happier, being disciplined. And now let's hear the rest of the sound effects and try to find good points in time. To add them to the scene, we can use this Woohoo out animation we have in the first scene. Blind is the key to your personal growth, To your personal growth. Watch the scene a few times and move the time indicator across the timeline. And use the left bracket key to start the sound layer to the position of the time indicator. Personal growth, it means sticking. And now let's press L and lower the volume in this layer to minus five. Let's hear it one more time. Personal growth, it means sticking to your goals, keeping things organized, and being strong when things get tough. Discipline will help you become a better person. Reach your goals and make your life happier. Alright? Now we can duplicate this sound and add it at this point in time as well. Help you become a better person. Reach your goals, reach your goals, reach your goals, and make your life happier. Disciplined is the key to your personal growth. It means sticking to your goal. Great, and now let's add the last sound effect and use it in the quick motion part, we have in the animation, organized and being strong when things things organized and being strong, keeping things organized and being strong when things get tough. Discipline will help you become a better person. Reach your goals and make your life happier. Being disciplined is the key to your personal. We can duplicate this sound and use it at the beginning of the animation for the zoom out motion. And is the key to discipline is the key. Being disciplined is the key to your personal growth. It means sticking to your goals, keeping things. It means sticking to your goal. Let's duplicate this. Wooh Sound and use it for the zoom. And animation in the goals seen means sticking to your goals, keeping things organized, key to your personal growth. It means sticking to your goal. Here's a tip for you. You can reverse the layer to get the reverse Wo Sound if you need. It means sticking to your goals, keeping things. Or it means sticking to your goals. Growth, It means sticking to your goals, keeping things organized and being strong. Sticking to your goals, keeping things organized and being strong when things get tough, Discipline will help you become a better person. Reach your goals and make your life happier, happier. We can also duplicate this sound and use the stretch time function to create a unique sound. If you don't see this function, right click here, go to columns and check the stretch function. Now we can click here and set the stretch factor to 50, which will make the layer end faster. And because of that, we will hear a whole new sound. Now let's place it in the moment where we see the goals for the first time. Keeping things organized and clicking to your goals. Keeping things organized to your goals, Keeping things organized and being strong when things. Let's speed this up even more. Goals, keeping things organ to your goals, keeping things awesome. And now let's press out to set the audio level to -20 It means sticking to your goals, keeping things organized, and being strong when things get tough to your goals, keeping things goals, keeping things organized, and being strong when things get tough, discipline will help you become a better person. Reach your goals and make your life happy. And now let's duplicate this layer and this time make it slower. We can use this whoosh for the uplifting motion. We'll help you become a better person. Reach your goals and make your life happy. Discipline will help you become a better person. Reach your goals and make your life happier. All right, so once we're done with the sound effects, we can close the open panels and organize our project in the project panel to keep our project organized, which is one of the most important things you should care about when working on creative projects in after effects, we can organize the project by creating new folders in the project panel. For this, let's click here to make sure no file is selected. And click here to create a new folder, which we will call precomps. Now drag all the pre comps we created during the project beside the master comp into this folder. We can tag the master comp in a different color to differentiate it from others. Next, let's create another folder, which we will call assets. Now bring all the asset files into this folder. For the sound effects files, let's create another folder, drag them into it, and then put this folder into the Assets folder. Great. Now, before rendering the project, let's clear our projects so we won't have any errors during the rendering in the animation. We will do it using the purge function in after effects. Purging is like cleaning up your computer's memory and storage. It's about getting rid of temporary files that build up while you're working on projects. This helps keep things running smoothly, prevents your computer from getting bogged down and can even fix some pesky glitches or crashes. It's basically like giving your after effects a little refresh to keep it working its best. Especially when you're dealing with big complicated stuff like rendering or previewing complex scenes during the work. To do it, let's go to Edit Purge, and choose to clear all memory and disk cache. You might see here a different number than mine. That's because this is what you allowed after effects when adjusting the preferences at the beginning of this course. In any case, let's just hit, okay. And wait a few seconds. Awesome. Now, one last thing, Since the animation ends at second 15, let's get rid of all the unnecessary timeline here by adjusting the duration of this comp to get to the setting of this P, let's press control K. Now let's shorten the duration to 20 seconds. Great. And now let's hit Control to get to render this composition. Here in the render panel, we can go to output mode and choose to render it in 50 megabits per second, which means in a high quality MP four format. If you don't see it here, you can click on the formats here and make sure in formats it's set to her 0.264 which is an MP four file. Then in format options, you can crank up the target bit rate to get a bit more high quality video. Once done, let's click here and choose where to save the file. We will save it in the finals folder we created for this project. Now let's change the name, Click Save, and hit the Render button and wait for a few moments. All right, and now to see the render, we can open up the output mode and click on the link here. It will take us directly to the folder where we rendered the project. Great, so now let's see how that looks. Being disciplined is the key to your personal growth. It means sticking to your goals. Being disciplined is the key to your personal growth. It means sticking to your goals, keeping things organized, and being strong. When things get tough. Discipline will help you become a better person, Reach your goals and make your life happier. Being disciplined is a key to your personal growth. It means sticking to your goals, keeping things organized, and being strong. When things get tough. Discipline will help you become a better person, Reach your goals and make your life happier. Being disciplined is a key to your personal growth. It means sticking to your awesome. It looks great. Now let's render it with the motion blur effect and adjust the scene a bit in the necessary part when the motion blur changes the look of the scene. Let me show you what I mean. First, let's turn on the motion blur and set it to 120. Now, if you remember when we activated the motion blur earlier, we couldn't see the speed lines since they are very thick. I'll turn off the glow effects so you can see what I mean. As you can see, we barely see them in the master comp where the motion blur affects them. To see them better, we can right click on the Speed lines layer, go to Layer Styles and add a stroke to this layer. Now let's change the stroke color to white and see how that looks in the master comp. As you can see, we can now see them much better. All right, let's render this version with the motion blur, but without the subtitles. Let's turn off this layer and press control M to render the animation. Once again, I'll choose to render it as a high quality MP four file. To keep our project organized, let's click on the previous render to sample the name and add a suffix V02, which means version two. Great. And now let's render the project and be very patient because since we have activated the motion blur effect, it will take much longer to render. I'll speed this process up and once it's done, let's check the new render. Being disciplined is the key to your personal growth. It means sticking to your goals, keeping things organized, and being strong when things get tough. Discipline will help you become a better person. Reach your goals and make your life happier. Being disciplined, awesome. And now you will have two options to send to the client and let him decide which he likes the most. All right, let's go back to our project and close all the open panels and pre comps. In my case, I will turn off the motion blur and the stroke on the speed lines. I'll enter the main scene, pre comp and press the Ukey twice to see all the activated properties on this layer. Now I will turn off the layer style from here. With this, we have finished animating the entire project. Now we can finally close the project and save it. While doing that, let's close the folder and exit Illustrator as well. With this, we have finished the course and you are ready to move on to the assignment I prepared for you. Have fun. Thanks a lot for watching. 14. Home Task: Hey, so you've got a homework assignment to do, you've got three scripts to choose from. And you need to create a cool motion graphic animation for one of them. Your comp size should be 1080 pixels in width and 1920 pixels in height, and your animation should be no longer than 20 seconds. Just use three colors at most for the task. Good luck. 15. Outro: Congratulations on completing the course. You have taken a big step forward in your motion design journey. And if you have some questions about the course or want to discuss the home task with me, feel free to reach out to me on any of my social media channels. And until then, thank you very much for being part of it. And I can't wait to see you in the next one.