Anyone Can Animate in Adobe After Effects: IsomeTRICK Moves

1. IsomeTRICK Moves: I've been teaching on Skillshare for about four years producing many classes in Illustration and graphic design. Some of the most enjoyable things in the class creation process are the short title sequences I get to create. Through these sequences, I'm able to add a little bit of animation. Though they are only a few seconds, they have a big impact. Hey, guys, my name is Kyler and Parson, and I am not a motion graphics expert. Wait. Should I tell you that? Hey, guys, my name is KylernParson. I am a graphic designer, illustrator, and top teacher here on Skillshare, and I am not a motion graphics expert. Hey, but I use After Effects all the time, and that means you can, too, even though you're not an expert. I come from an illustration background. After Effects is a powerhouse tool with so many tools and features, and at time, it can feel overwhelming. And, trust me, I've been there. I was scared to open the program, but when I learned some of the basics, it was really fun. In this class, I will try to remove the curtain and share with you how anyone can animate. I will start out small and show you the interface, focusing on key areas you should know to get started, gradually building up your understanding to animate simple transformation properties. We will learn simple ways to mask objects using track mats, parenting different layers, and learn some basic expressions. This will be an introductory course into after effects. That will take you from I'm a bit scared to open the program too. Hey, I am a master motion graphic designer that can animate anything. Maybe not that, but at least by the end of this class, you'll animate a thing. Through our journey into After Effects, I will help explain some of the key tools to add motion to illustrations from the file set up in Adobe Illustrator to importing and animating key properties. There will be side lessons to help you understand what's going on and why we're using the tools that we're using. You don't have to be an expert to make fun stuff. You don't need a ten hour course. All you need is a little bit of time and after effects, I guess. Yeah, you probably need after effects to learn it. So make sure you have that. So if you're ready to get moving, I'll see you in class. 2. Welcome To Class!: He Hey, guys, welcome to class. For this class, we'll create a simple animated gift, as well as a quick and punchy six second real All using the same animation. For this class, you will need Adobe Illustrator and after effects, as well as Adobe Media Encoder for the final export. We will have a customizable Illustrator file so you can add some personal touches to your class project. So a basic understanding of Adobe Illustrator is definitely helpful. I will give you a brief introduction to after effects, showing you the interface and some of the key windows we will use. Throughout our journey in learning after effects, there will be many lessons to help you understand the tools we will use to create our class project and gain some basic understanding of how things are working. All the files as well as the class project files, and my final Adobe After Effects file will be available to download in the class resources. So you can reference and learn from. I would highly recommend downloading and printing out the isometric moves keyboard shortcut, cheat sheet. So you can reference it as we go through the class. Getting familiar with the keyboard shortcuts will help you navigate and speed up your workflow in after effects. Having the reference sheet available will help you to start build up the habit, and it will save you loads of time as you progress in after effects. This class will touch a lot of parts of after effects in a relatively short period of time. Although it may feel overwhelming at times, feel free to pause or rewatch a lesson to fully take it in before moving on. Or you can watch through the whole class and get a big picture of what we will do in the class and then go back and reference the sections that you still need help with. After watching the class, if there are still parts that are difficult for you, feel free to post in the discussion panel so we can all learn together. So if you're ready to get moving in after effects, go download the project resources, and I will see you in class. 3. Setting Up After Effects: Hey, guys, in this class, we'll just jump into after effects. We'll poke around at some of the windows and see what we need for this class. Okay? There's so many windows in after effects, and it can be overwhelming. So in this class, I'm just going to get rid of all the windows and just talk about the necessities. There's three windows that we're going to use the project panel, the composition window, and the timeline. For this class, these are the only three windows that you will need. If you want to explore and see what's in the other windows, go right ahead. But for this class, we're going to just bring it right down to the bare essentials so that we're not getting too overwhelmed with everything that After Effects offers because there is a lot, but we're going to just look at what we need to get started in Adobe After Effects and start animating something. Alright, that's champ in. So if you have Adobe Creative Cloud, you can open up the window and just double click on after effects. I'll open up. After Adobe After Effects opens up, you can select, create a new project, and it might look something like this. This is the default window here. After opening After Effects, you can see that it gives you an untitled project. It doesn't save automatically, so a good practice is to save your file. So let's just go Control Shift S, save your file. After opening up after effects, you'll be presented with all these windows here. You got your project window, your composition. You got effects controls. You got all these different panels here. You've got the timeline down here, and you can actually change it up here. These are some default window settings. So default gives you all these options. Learn, you'll actually be able to access some tutorials. Produced by Adobe to help learn after effects. So if you want to jump into those, you can learn there as well. You can go to Standard and just see what panels are open. But for us today, we're just going to get rid of everything and go through the bare essentials. So the three essential panels that we need is the timeline down here, the project window, and our composition window. So everything else, you can just go up and you can close those panels. So just go into the Top Burger menu and close every panel. Now, doesn't after effects look a little more manageable? Absolutely. All right. So we have three windows here. Now, if you wanted to create a new composition where you would create a video, you can go down here, create a new composition. Click there. I'll open up the composition settings. You can name your comp Practice. And then you can set up custom presets. There's also pre made presets. So let's say you wanted an HD video at 24 frames per second, that's here, and it'll give you those perspectives. If you wanted to change any of these, you can just click on Custom and you can change it to anything you want like 13 50 or sorry, 1080 by 13 50, and that'll give you the dimensions for an Instagram video. All right. We'll hit Okay. Before we do that, you can change the duration of how long it is. So it goes here milliseconds, seconds, minutes, hours. So you will rarely touch hours, maybe minutes and definitely seconds. So we're going to just change this to 6 seconds and zero, zero, based on 24 frames per second, full resolution. It's good 24 frames. Square pixels, that's fine. And background can be white. There we go. We got a composition. As you can see in our project panel, it created a new composition. This is where all our media will be stored in. And then down here, you can see the practice composition has been brought up in the timeline, and this is where we're going to do all our animation. We're going to add in our layers. We're going to move some properties around, and we're going to have some fun in after effects. In the next class, I'll just go over how to set up an Adobe Illustrator file for animation in after effects. Let's jump in. 4. Set Up Illustrator File for Animation: Hey, guys, in this class, we're going to go over how to set up an Adobe Illustrator file to prepare it for animation in after effects. So let's jump right into it. So I have open up here an Illustrator file that contains an illustration that I created in one of my other classes. Now, what I want to do is I want to actually animate this illustration. But in after effects, you're going to have to separate everything that you want animated on separate layers. When something's in one layer, all the properties will, you know, be connected to everything in that layer. So we want to separate what will be animated. So how can we do that? So in Adobe Illustrator, we can find the things that can be grouped together that will remain together in Adobe After Effects, and then we'll separate the things that need to be separated. If you see here in my layers panel, I have a group that is the mug. I have the actual artwork that's on the mug and a shadow and highlight layer here. All those can stick together, so I'm going to just select them all and I'm going to group them up. So you can see my layers panel got a little smaller, which is great. I want to keep the shadow separate so that I can animate it separately or move it or remove it as needed. All right? Now I have this heart layer. And as you can see, this heart layer, actually, it has a pattern swash attached to it that allows me to move it up and down, and the swatch, the reflection swatch actually doesn't move at all. So it it gives this effect that it's, like, moving, which is really cool. And that's what I want in after effects. But to set it up for animation in After effect, we got to set it up a little differently using something called a track mat. So we're going to have to set up a few more layers to make it work in after effects. So the first thing that I'm going to do is I'm going to jump into my heart layer, and you can see that I have my main heart, and then I also have a layer with a pattern swatch attached to it. I'm going to cut the pattern swatch, and I'm going to paste it in place outside that group. So now I have two different groups, the heart and the heart mask. So I'm going to give this a color just so I can differentiate it. I want to have the reflection basically stay stationary throughout the entire illustration and animation, but I want this mask to move. So I'm going to have to actually make another layer just containing the reflection. So I'm going to hit M on my keyboard. I'm going to make a box over my whole composition or my whole artboard, and I'm going to give it my pattern swatch, which was right there. Now I have different groups in my one layer, but I don't want just one layer. I need to separated into multiple layers. So how can I do that? I could click on Layer one. I can go up to the burger menu and say release layers to sequence. And now you can see that all those groups, they were actually converted into layers, layer two, three, four, five, six, and now I'm going to drag them out of layer one, plop. And I'm going to delete layer one because we don't need that anymore. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to actually name my layers here so that it'll be easily transferable into after effects. So the reflection, I'm just going to double click and name reflection. And I'm going to do the rest of the layers as well. Alright, so now after you name your layers, we are all ready for after effects. Now, just one thing to note is the reason why I separated the reflection mat from the heart is because I only want the reflection to be contained within this section of the heart and not the entirety of the heart. If I wanted to use the entirety of the heart, I can keep it as one layer, but I only want the front of the heart to be the side that actually has that animated reflection. So that's why I separated that specific section of the heart. So now that you know how to set up your Adobe Illustrator file for After Effects, I'm going to give you a little bonus Illustrator file that will allow you to customize your class project however you want. I'll see you there. 5. Customizing Your Illustration: Alright, so now that you learn how we can set up an Adobe Illustrator file for animation and After Effects, I want to give you a little bonus Illustrator file that you can customize and make your animation a little more personal to you. Alright, let's see how we can do that. So I have the file open here, Mug Illustration, and now you can see that there are different sections in this illustration. I have a reflection mask, reflection, object, mug, and shadow layer. What I set up in this file is that in the actual mug illustration here, I'm just going to turn off the reflection for now so you can see it. You can see that I have actually provided different icons that you can apply to your mug. So if I turn off the isometric logo here, you can actually turn on a different one. Oh, hot cup of coffee. Hop, hot cup of awesome. Yeah, that's even better. I love coffee. Number one, motion designer. That's you. Love you. Very cute. World's greatest boss. It's not me. World's oest motion designer. Hey. That's my cup of tea. World's okaest motion designer right here. All right. So yeah, if you want that, you can change that. Also, if you hit Y on your keyboard, you can select the mug. You can give it a different color, whatever you want. You can select your icon there, change that. Now we have it little different. That's not all. Let's jump into the other thing. So you can customize the graphic I'm just going to lock the muggler and I'm going to open up the object and the reflection mask. These are two connected. So if I unlock both of them, you can see what's happening. I have my heart in my object selected, but I can turn that off and I can turn off my heart mask as well. Now I could turn on some other object, lightning bolt maybe and lightning mask. Now you're going to have a lightning bolt over your coffee. That's awesome. Very cool. What about, I want to have a conversation. Bubble mask, bubble. All right. Oh, you're excited about coffee? Me too. Exclamation mark over top of your coffee. And what we're gonna do is we're gonna animate this top section. So maybe there's a location. World's Okiest Motion designer? Right here. That's this guy. So what we're going to do is we're going to animate this up and down. We're going to make some movement into here. And so customize your Illustrator file however you want, and make sure whatever you want visible in your animation is visible in your Illustrator file. Whatever's not visible in your Illustrator file will not be transferred over to Adobe After efects. Make sure you turn back on your reflection layer because we want that to be seen in our animation, and then we're going to you know, close it. You can lock the layers as if you don't want to touch anything else. In the next class, we'll jump into Adobe After Effects where we will learn how to set up our project for animation and start animating. Let's get into it. 6. Getting Started in After Effects: In this class, we'll import your illustration into after effects so that we can start animating it. Let's jump right in. So I have opened my after effects file, class example, and now over in the project panel here, I'm going to Right click and I'm going to go to Import. I'm going to import file. I'm going to find my mug illustration that I want to use for my animation. And I'm going to make sure the import option is set as footage and create composition. I'm going to hit Okay. And now, import kind, composition and your footage dimensions, you want to retain layer sizes, and I'm going to hit Okay. So now you can see here we got two compositions set up. One is the composition with all your Adobe Illustrator layers within it, and the second one is a composition. Yeah, it's just a composition with that composition inside it. And after effects you're going to have compositions within compositions within composition sometimes. And we'll see how we can use that to our benefit when we create our final class project. First of all, we have mug Illustration one, this has our layers inside and Mug illustration two. We're going to go into Mug illustration one, and this is where we can start animated. As you can see, all the layers that we created in Adobe illustrator are now set as layers in Adobe aftereffex. The next thing that we want to do is we want to parent objects that are going to move together together. Now, what we want to do is we want to parent our reflection to our heart layer. Our reflection right now, it'll move separately from the heart layer. Just going to undo that. Now, what we want to do is when our object, our heart moves, we want the reflection layer, the reflexion mat to go with it. So how can we do that? Over here in our timeline, you can see that there's parent and link. So what that allows us to do is parent our object from one to another. So we want the object to be the parent layer because that's what we're going to animate and we want the reflection mask to follow it wherever it goes. So I'm going to just click on the dropdown menu and I'm going to select object as my parent. Now, if I were to click on the object and move it around, I can move it around, and the reflection mask will go with it. Now, what I want to do is I want to make sure that the reflection that I see everywhere around here is only seen through the reflection mask. And we're going to use something called a track mat for that. So what is a track mat, you ask? Let's learn about it quickly. 7. Track Matte, What is That?: Alright, I have a file open called AE Examples, and you have access to these. You can open them if you want to play around with them. Feel free to check this out. But just to show you what's some of the things that we're going to be using in the animation, I'll show you here. Alright, I got the Track Mat example open here. And as you can see, we have this cool little park scene, isometric park scene that looks really cool. And basically what a track mat is, it's like a window to view your illustration or to view your image. You can use different objects or shapes to do that. So in Illustrator, we made a track mat with the shape of our object. So as you can see here, they're not in view, but you can see that if I turn them on, there's waves, there's some stripes. There's a star, and there's a window. So there's your image and then your track mat. You always want to track mat the image to whatever layer you want it to be contained in. So in this case, I'm going to find the track mat options. If you can't see it, you might have to do the toggle switch mode down here, and then find Track Mat. Go to your layer Park, and it says no Mat right now, and then I'm going to find window. Now, what that does is it turns off the window layer, so it's no longer visible, but it uses the shape of that layer as a window for the park. Now, if I click on the window, I can move it independently from the park and you can see how you can only view the park through this shape here. And that's going to be very cool. And we're going to be able to use this for track matting our reflection in our animation. So you can go through and you can use different ones. So change the track mat to stripes. And now you can click on the stripes layer, and they're like blinds going down. So there's a lot of cool uses for track mats, and you can use any shapes. We can change it to the star and see the star. Now that we've learned about a track mat, let's just apply it to our animation. If I click on my track mat reflection mask, you can see that that's here. I want to use the reflection mask as a window to see the reflection. I don't want to see the reflection everywhere just through the heart reflection mask. So how I'm going to do that is I'm just going to find the track mat window here. I'm going to go to my reflection. I'm going to sit here and I'm going to do reflection mask. Now, as you can see here, the reflection layer is only visible through the reflection mask layer. Now, if I move the object, you can see that the reflection doesn't move anywhere, and we can only view it through that. So if I animate it up and down, boom, you can see that it will animate just like that. 8. Getting Moving with Key Frames: Alright, in this class, we'll learn how to animate. All right. So let's jump in here. We have our file open. We have our layers parented. We have our reflexion mask set, and now we want to animate our heart to move up and down like this. To do that, we have to open up the position property. And to do that, we hit P on our keyboard. And this is where we're going to do our animation. Now, we're going to set something called keyframes. So let me explain quickly what keyframes are and how you can apply them to create animations. Key frames are essentially bookmarks that store information of a specific property in your timeline or on your layer. So if we go into our layer, let's go to the position one here. That's this little ball over here. Let's just zoom in. Let's go fit. Now we can see it. Okay? That's this ball here, and we're going to just drop down this menu. We'll go to transform options, and you can see there's a few different options here. There's the anchor point, position, scale, rotation, opacity. Those are the five properties that you can adjust to animate your objects or animate your graphics in Adobe After effects. So we're going to look at each one quickly and just see what you can do and you can play around with them. So here we have the position. So the position right now is currently at 328.2. Anyways, it's in this vicinity on the screen, and this is the property values. If we hit the stopwatch, it'll create a keyframe in our timeline. Now, what that keyframe is, it is a bookmark that stores this property information right here. Now, if we drag our cursor or our playhead further down in the timeline and we move it somewhere else, now it has different information, and that information is stored in this keyframe. Now, what Adobe After Effects will do we interpolate one keyframe, one bookmark, to another bookmark. Just as if you have a book, you know, you have one bookmark and a second bookmark. There's 100 there's pages in between those two bookmarks. And in order to go from one bookmark to another, you have to pass through all those pages. It's the same in after effects. You're going to have one set of properties and one keyframe, another set in another keyframe, and then Adobe After effects, it'll interpolate the stuff in between for you automatically. So we can see that happening here. So if I go back to the start and I hit the space bar, it'll play the animation. There we go. So that looks pretty cool. So if we extend it out a bit, we can just see the path that it takes from one keyframe to another, one bookmark to another. What you can do is you can actually use keyboard shortcuts to activate or find your properties. So let's go down to the scale property here. This is the bottom one. You hit S on your keyboard. I'll bring up the scale function here, and now you can actually click on a keyframe and then bring it over more and you can scale it up. As you can see, it's getting bigger. And now you can say that's the bookmark of 177 and the bookmark of 47, and it's going to interpolate between those two keyframes. Then we can go to rotation, hit R on our keyboard up here as the star. We can go to the beginning. We're going to set a keyframe, hit the stopwatch, go further in the timeline, and then we're going to rotate it around. 360 degrees, and then that's one rotation plus 13 degrees. Then if we go, Wow. Ooh. There you go. You got a spinning star there. Then finally, we have opacity. Opacity is T on our keyboard, and that'll change the opacity. It'll disappear. So let's hit it at 100. Opacity can only go from 0%, no opacity, completely clear or 100%. So those are the range of values you can work with. So I'm just going to bring it down to zero. And now you can see what's happening. Yeah. Now you're seeing how we can create some animation in Adobe After effects by setting our key frames. Now, one last thing that affects your animation is your anchor point. This one is more apparent when you use scale or rotation, and we'll see how that works. So let's just go on rotation. So rotation right now, you can see that it's the spinning star. But if I hit Y on my keyboard, it brings the pan behind tool, and that's the anchor point tool. So now I can click this little button in the middle of my star. That's the anchor point, and that's where my transformation will originate from. So right now it's spinning around this anchor point around this dot. But if I move this anchor point maybe down to this point at the bottom here, now let's see how it changes the animation. There you go. I made it quite a bit different than it was before. It spins around that anchor point. Let's go back in. Let's hit Y on our keyboard. Let's change it down here and hit. Now you can see it's rotating around that point over there. Pretty cool. With scale, it's going to do a similar feature. Let's click on Scale, hit Y on our keyboard, and then just change the endpoint to maybe this corner and it scales up. Let's hit space bar to start the animation. And you can see how the scale sort of changes and it pushes out from that area. Alright, so that's simply how we can use keyframes and anchor points to start our animations, and we're going to use them in our animation to make things move. Let's see how we can do that. 9. Animate Your Illustration: Now that we know about keyframes, let's start animating our heart. Okay, so what we're going to do is we're going to click on our object layer. We can see that it's here and we're going to position it where we want to start our animation. We want to start it maybe down here so it's at the bottom near the mug. In our object layer, you can see that the position property is open. Now, if you click the stopwatch off to the side here, it'll set a keyframe in your timeline. Now, the keyframe, like you saw is sort of like a bookmark. It's going to hold the information of these property. So this position values, they are contained within this keyframe. Now, if I move in my timeline to 1 second and I adjust the position, actually, this one will contain a different bookmark, a different set of properties. Now, what Adobe After Effects will do, it'll look at this bookmark and look at this bookmark, and it'll find all the pages in between and animate it like that. So now, if I hit play or hit space on my keyboard once, you can see that it moves from one bookmark to the other, one keyframe to another. Very cool. And because we set up our parents, the reflection mask moves with it, and the mat only contains the reflection inside. So that's really cool. I'm going to drag my timeline indicator over to the two second mark. And what I'm going to do is I could try and move it back down and try to position it where the exact position was, or I can click on my keyframe. And I can copy it and paste it. And now, what you can see is it goes up and down. That's how we can start animating our illustrations, is we can use the position properties, set keyframes, set one keyframe, one bookmark at one position, move through the timeline, a second later, move it to a different area. Adobe After effects will fill in the blank pages and animate from one to the other. Okay? So we want to give a little more life to this animation. So what we're going to do is we're going to use something called ease. So in the next class, we'll learn how to add some life, some character to our animation with ease. 10. Make Smooth Animations with Ease: Alright, guys, in this section, I'm just going to quickly go over how to apply ease to your animations to make them feel a little more natural. Okay, let's jump into it. So this is our Ease example composition here, and in this, you can see that there are four lines with four dots. Let's just see what they are. So there's four dots, and they have nothing applied to it. They just have a static motion going from one side to another. So if we animate this, it just it's pretty boring. Nothing too exciting happening. But ease allows the animation to feel a little more natural, a little more fluid. It starts off at zero and then it slowly builds up to full speed, and then before it gets to the end, it starts to slow down, and that makes it feel a little more natural. So how can we apply this? So in our second ball here, E's in and out, we're going to select our keyframes and to automatically input E's, we're going to hit F nine on our keyboard, function nine. Now, what that does is it makes the animation start out slow. As you can see, all the other ones, the already ahead of the first ball because it's easing into the animation. It's slowly entering the animation. But as it goes to the middle, it speeds up, and then eventually it starts to slow down. And the animation ends at the same spot at the same time. It's just what happens in between that changes. It starts off slow and then speeds up and then slows down. As you can see, it feels a little more natural. What that's doing, I'm going to show you the animation in something called the speed graph. Now the speed graph or the graph editor is here. It's a little wave or a little S curve here. You just click on that. You'll see the speed graph. We're just going to click this button here and it shows you. The first animation, this is the speed of it. It's completely constant at 668.48 pixels per second. It's completely constant, no change. Now, let's go back and select the keyframes of our Easy Ease. We're going to go to the graph editor, fill the view, and this is what's happening. It starts off at zero and then it builds up and peaks in the middle and then it comes back down. To zero. That's exactly what's happening. It's easing in really fast and then slowing back down. Let's go out of our graph editor, and we're going to try to apply the EZ Es in or out of our keyframe. We're going to just right click going to go keyframe assistant and we're going to find EZ Es out or control or command Shift F nine. That'll started off really slow. And then push to the end fast, there will be no ease into the end, so it'll just stop abruptly. But that ease out is much more apparent there. Now we'll try the opposite case, we'll hit the last key frame of our last one and easy ease in and let's see what happens. It starts really fast, but then it really slows down as it goes into that last keyframe. So this is how we can apply ease to our animations, give it a little makes it a little smoother and gives it a little more life. And yeah, so we'll try to apply that to our animation. Okay, so now that we understand what ease is in Adobe After Effects, let's apply it to our animation. So what we're going to do is we're going to select our keyframes. We're going to just click and drag over all our keyframes. We're going to hit F nine. That's just going to apply an easy ease on every keyframe. It's going to apply as an ease in and out of every keyframe. Now if I hit play on my illustration, that looks a lot better. Very cool, very fun, very easy. Now, what I could do is I can just go to the three second mark. I can copy and paste. My second keyframe and then to the four second mark, and I'll take my last two keyframes and I'll copy and paste. And now we have sort of a looping animation. That's really cool, really fun. Really easy. Now, what I want to show you is how to actually automate this looping process with something called an expression. Expressions are a line of code given to the animated property that allows them to automate certain processes. We're going to learn one expression in this class today that allow you to loop animations so that you don't have to keyframe every single insistence. Let's learn about that in the next class. 11. Understanding the Loop Out Expression: In this class, we're going to touch a little bit into expressions in Adobe After effects to automate some of the animation properties so that we don't have to work as hard because who wants to work hard, you know? Let's jump right into it. Alright, so jumping into it, I have my loop out expression file open here, and you can see that there are some bouncing balls. So they bounce over and bounce back. This is just a position property animated with two keyframes. But when we put a expression on it, you can see something happens. Now, to activate an expression, we're just going to delete this expression here. Control click on the stopwatch that will remove the expression. To add an expression, we have our keyframe set already, so they go from one keyframe to the another. Now to add an expression, just go to the stopwatch, alter option, click on it, and this will open up our property here, our expression property. Now, if you wanted to, you can search for expressions in the panel here, this little arrow with the.in here, and here is where you can enter it. We're just going to do one expression today and it's the loop out expression and it automates your animation after the first two keyframes to repeat over and over again. Now, there's four different loop out expressions that you can try out to see what you like, and we'll just cover what they do in this class very quickly so that we can understand it. Yeah, let's jump into it. So the first one we're going to try is loop out. So it's LOOP and then O. And you can see that autofill is for you really easy. So you can make sure you click on one of these autofills LoopOut. Now I'll put it in quotation marks, and this will give me four different properties or four different types of loop out expressions that I can choose from Continue cycle, offset, and ping pong. They all work a little differently, and we'll look at them right now. So the first one is cycle. By default, if you put in no quotation marks, it'll just automatically go to cycle. So you don't have to do it with anything. If you want cycle, just loop out and the brackets and that'll give you the cycle loop out effect. But if you want a different one, you'll have to change the property with the quotation marks. We'll just hit cycle for now and we'll hit Okay. I'm just going to turn off the other ones for now and just see what loop out. These are our keyframes. We only have two keyframes, but what happens after these two keyframes run? It starts over. Cycle, it takes the two keyframes. It basically starts it again from the first keyframe and again. And again, just like that. So it's pretty simple. Cycle. It cycle through the two keyframes. It's cycle through the motions. If you have three Kframes as a start from the beginning and cycle through all three and then repeat at the beginning again. Frames as a start from the beginning and cycle through all three and then repeat at the beginning again. Now, the next one is ping pong. Ping pong works a little bit differently and I really like ping pong because it can save you a lot of time to if you're going back to the same position, it'll bounce back automatically for you. So it'll go through the first motion. But instead of going to the first keyframe, it goes through the motions in reverse to get back to the first key. Serve serve It goes through the motions in reverse to get back to the first keyframe. I'll go from the last keyframe, back to the first keyframe, and then it'll start again there. So it bounces back and forth. This one makes a really cool, smooth continuation of your effect. Let's just play that through and see how that works. Boom boom boom boom. Really cool. Offset is a really cool one because it takes your animation, ends at the last keyframe and starts all the animation again, starting from that as the first keyframe, ends at the last keyframe and starts all the animation again, starting from that as the first keyframe, ends at the last keyframe and starts all the animation again, starting from that as the first keyframe. So let's see how that works. So it'll loop. And then it starts from here and does the animation again, but starting from that point. And then it sort of does like a jump off the screen, leapfrog. Boom, boom, boom, boom. Very cool. Now, continue. I never use continue. So yeah. But here's what it does. It takes the last speed and direction of your last keyframe and it continues on with that motion infinitely after. Okay? Now, let's see how it works here. If I turn it on, if I hit okay. It stops. The reason why it stops is because I have an Es attached to this keyframe and the final speed of my keyframe here is actually zero, so it won't move anywhere because the last keyframe has a speed of zero and zero repeated is zero. Let's remove this keyframe. Let's change this back to a regular keyframe. Okay, if we change it to a regular keyframe, it'll actually speed up into it and stop abruptly. And actually, that last keyframe would have had some speed coming into it. So boom. And as you see, it sort of went off screen. But I'll just pull both of those back. Oh, sorry. V. And here, I'll pull it over here and you'll see what happens. She so just continues that speed and direction after the animation ends. Yeah. There you go. So you can play around with this example worksheet if you'd like. You can go into the After FX file, play around with it, try out all the different types of loop out expressions, and then we can see how we can apply it to our animation. So let's jump back into it. 12. Automate Your Animation with Expressions: In this class, we'll go through adding expressions to our animation to sort of automate the process a little bit. Stem in. So you can see here that I have my animation, and I have keyframed it back and forth, so I created a looping animation like that. So if I wanted to automate the process even a little bit more, I could use something called expressions. So how do we add an expression? For an example, I'm just going to duplicate my object, Control D, and now I'm going to I have two layers. One, I'm going to keep as a regular keyframe property, and then the other one I'm going to add an expression to. So I'm going to delete all the extra keyframes and just have my single loop. So as you can see here, now I have three keyframes and at the start, it looks like the same. But then after this keyframe ends, it doesn't continue. But I want it to continue repeating just like it is, but I don't want to have to animate every single keyframe. So what I can do is I can go over here is I can hit all on my keyboard. Click on the stopwatch, Alter option on your keyboard. I'll bring up the expressions window, and then you can enter in an expression. If you want to look at expressions, what After Effects offers, you can click on this button here and it has all the different expressions that you can use. All right? The one we're going to use today is called LoopOut. Loop then out. And as you can see, when I start typing it in, it already gives me options to pick from. I loop in loop in duration, loop out, loop out duration, we're going to use loopOut After I hit loop out, I'm going to hit the quotation signs, and that'll give me a few different options of the type of loop out I want to apply to my keetframes. So for this case, I want to use cycle because the beginning frame and the last frame, they actually are the same, and I can cycle through it really easily just like this. So I hit cycle, and let's see what happens. Now when I play back the animation, both the keyframe property and the expression property move at the exact same rate at the exact same time. It's the exact same thing. You're just having an expression do the work for you instead of keyframing every single time. Now, why is this beneficial? Well, let us just go up to our composition window. Composition settings and then go to the duration. I'm going to increase the duration to 15 seconds. Now, if I hit the 15 seconds and extend, you can see sort of what's happening. I'm just going to drag to the end, select all my frames, and I'm going to hit Alter option right square bracket. That'll extend all my layers to where I place the playhead. So now you can see what's happening here. Now, the key frame property it goes up into the last keyframe. But what about the expression property? It continues even after that. And we can see this happening in something called the post expression graph. So if we were to open up the post expression graph, you can see it right here, right beside this equal sign that says Enable expression. We can highlight all our keyframes, go into the graph window. Now you can see what's happening here. These are the keyframe properties that are in a solid line. But after that, that is the properties that are continuing within expression. The keyframe properties stop at this point, but the expression properties continue. Well, infinitely. So if you just want to animate something in a psycho loop, you can use the loop out expression, and it'll continue infinitely. So if you extend your composition longer duration, you don't have to re keyframe everything. So that's one way it can help you out in your illustration workflow or your motion graphic workflow. Exit the graph editor because we're not going to really go into it in this class. It's just a basic class, but this just visually shows you what's sort of happening. I'm going to delete the expression layer, go back to my properties. I'm going to get rid of all these keyframes and I'm going to apply a different keyframe. Now I just have the two keyframes going from the bottom to the top. But now I want to use an expression to loop that back and forth. I want to go from bottom to top and top to bottom. Well, there's an expression we can use. Let's alter option, click on the Stopwatch Loop. Out, quotation marks, we can use ping pong. Ping pong goes back and forth between the two keyframes, looping the cycle, and now we've got a cool, animated heart floating over top of a mug. Awesome. Very cool. Very easy. Now, you don't have to know all the expressions. Just know that they're available. And if you want to key framate yourself, just key frame it yourself. You don't have to use expressions if you don't want to. If you think it's easier to use the keyframes, just animate with key frames. If you want to try out the expressions, this is a couple that you can try out and play around with and see what you can do. Alright. In the next class, we'll take our cool little motion graphic and we'll composite it into a new composition, and we will create a cool six second reel, really punchy, really fast, and I'll show you how to use markers and how to set up different layers. And, yeah, have some fun with it. I 13. Syncing Animation with Music Using Markers: Three. Hey, guys, in this class, we're going to create a quick motion graphics reel using the animation we created, and we're going to duplicate this animation multiple times in various ways on our timeline, so it'll create some cool effects. Let's see how we can do that. So the first thing we want to do is we want to create a new composition. So we can right click and hit New composition, and we're going to create it, you know, MoGraph. Reel, something like that, whatever you want to call it. We're going to set it to the width of 1080 by 13 50 for Instagram, I will set it to 24 frames per second, and we're going to hit Okay. I'm just going to set it to 6 seconds. So it's not too long, easy to work with. Have some fun with it. And you can see that motion graphic reel. It appeared here. Now, I'm going to add in some music. So I'm going to right click Import File, and I'm going to find my music. I have stomping Intro short version here, and you don't need to create a composition from it. I'm just going to import it. And that'll be fine. All right. So we already made the composition. We're going to drag our music into the composition, and now you can see we have some music. Now what we want to do is we want to set up some markers to signify where we want to make good cuts. So how we can do that in after effects, we can go to the drop down menu here and we can go to audio. Now we can go down to this one and we can click waveforms. Now we can actually see the waveforms here. If we want to zoom in, we can zoom in closer and get a better picture of what we're dealing with. Now we want to decide where we want to make our cuts or make our animations and sort of composite everything according to the sound bites. Now we can add our markers. So how we add our markers, we just find the point where we want to add our marker, maybe at the where it kicks, boom, boom. Move on to add some markers because those are good points where you could transition to something else. You can go up to layer markers and add marker like that, and you can see it adds a little marker right there. It signifies where the cut can be made, and it allows you to line up your layers a little better. The shortcut for that is on your number pad, the asterisk sign. When you play back, You can find spots where you might want to add a marker and just hit and add marker. And I think at the peaks, add marker. Quick cut. Yeah. Yeah. Let's make one at the end and then one at the peak again. We're going to have it really fast pace, really fun. A lot of cuts. And then maybe then here, we'll just make a couple cuts at the peaks. And I really want to hit that. This one. So I'll leave it till there, and that'll be a bigger transition. Boom. And then I think at these peaks, something's gonna happen here. We'll figure that out, and then not until there. Boom, boom, boom, boom. But I'm just listening, playing it back, and I'm just marking it, and it doesn't have to be exact right now, but it's just a good guide that we can use. Let's just listen to that. Uh, Yep, let's just move that one over. And then one here and one final one here, and this will be like our ending. Boom. And then we'll just keep it constant there. And that's setting up our markers in our composition. This is going to allow us to easily set up our animation, our reel really quickly. And in our next class, we're going to bring in our animation, and we're going to composite it into a fast paced, fun little reel. Alright. I'll see you in the next class. 14. Creating Your Motion Graphics Reel: Hey, guys, in this class, we're going to take our simple animation, and we're going to make a mocha graphics reel out of it in after effects. We're going to composite it. We're going to make multiple layers. We're going to cut it, slice it, and make it a little more dynamic and interesting. So let's see how we can do that. And now, what you can see is we set up our markers with that, according to the beats. So what we're going to do on top of this, we're going to add in our animation. So we have our original comp here and we have the mug illustration two. In the Mugulillustration two, it actually has the composition and I'm going to make a background for this. How I can do that is I'm going to go to Nu right click Nu and I'm going to make a solid. When I make a new solid, it'll automatically make it to the scale of my composition. 1080 by 13 50, and then I can pick a color. I'm going to color drop this one and then I'm going to make it a little lighter than that just because that's the shadow. I'm going to hit Okay. And there we go. Now I'm going to bring it underneath my mug illustration. Now I have a composition with a colored background, but I also have my original composition here that has no background at all, a transparent background. So I'm going to use those two in my motion graphic reel. So going back to my MgraphRel here, now we can bring in our animations and we can cut them and make it more interesting. So let's bring in our first animation. So all I'm going to do is I'm going to bring in my first animation. I'm going to drag my mug illustration too, and I'll bring it into my timeline. So now I have my mug illustration too, and what do I want to do? I want to figure out how do I want to go with the beat? So there's multiple ways you can do this. There's no one right way or wrong way. Just have fun with it, play around, see what you can do. What I want to do is I want to cut it, make a cut here, or make a transition, some sort of make it dynamic at these points. So what I'm thinking is maybe I can do something with the scale is if I mark the scale at zero or at 100% here, and I go to the next marker, maybe I can bring it up a bit like that. And then at the third marker, maybe I can bring it up even larger. Okay. And then finally, at this point, I'm going to cut it to a new scene. So how I can cut it or trim a layer is I can hit Alt and right square bracket. That will trim the layer to where my marker is or where my playhead head is in the timeline. So you can see that now if I scroll past it, it disappeared. It doesn't mean the animation's gone. It just means it's trimmed. You can also drag the animation like this from both ends. So you can see when you hover over the double arrows appears, you can trim it like this. So then it'll only appear where the trim section is. The animation flows as it normally would, but you're just trimming the layer. We can see this animation coming in. Now, I don't want it to smoothly transition like this. I sort of want to do it sort of jump from this scale to this scale to this scale at the markers. So how I do that is I have to change my keyframe to something called the keyframe hold. So I'll right click. I'll go to Toggle Keyframe hold. And what that does, it holds this information until the next keyframe. So it won't fill in the pages, as we said before. So if I scroll, you can see no transition until boom that keyframe hits. Now I can do the same thing here, keyframe hold. And no animation until boom. So now if I play it back, you can see that it jumps at those markers, and now I want to cut it here. So Alt or option right square bracket. And it's gone. All right, so now I want to add a new composition. What I'm going to bring in is I'm going to bring in my mug Illustration one. I'm going to pull it down, and I want to start it at this marker here. So to start it, all I have to do instead of, you know, I can click and drag and pull it over here. That's good. Or if I want to make it more easy for myself, I can just put my play head where I want it, make sure the layer selected, and hit left square bracket just by itself, and this is where the animation will start. My layer will start at that point. Okay, or I can drag it wherever I want to go, but I want it there. One thing you can see is that this one is transparent, so there's no background to it. But in this composition, I'm going to build up layers and layers and make my video. I'm going to right click into this empty area, select new solid, and I'm going to bring a new color in. I'm going to make a turquoise green sort of feel, and I'm going to hit Okay. Now, I want to bring this underneath that layer so I can just drag it down by clicking in this area. Or if I don't want to do that, I can hit Control and left square bracket to bring it down in my layers panel or Control or command right square bracket to bring it up. Now it's right underneath and I want it to start there. Left square bracket brings a front to my playhead, and there we go. Now it looks like this. Okay. Now, what's great about this one is I can actually duplicate this one on top of itself. So to duplicate a layer, you hit Controller Command D, and now it made two instances of this animation. And now I can drag this animation somewhere else. So maybe I want to make a couple of them. So maybe I want to make them pop in one by one, one here, one here, one here and one here at each of these markers. So I'm going to try that. So I'm going to make my duplication. I'm going to bring my playhead to the next marker. I'm going to hit left square bracket. Now, actually, no, I'm not going to left square bracket. I want the animation to stay the same. I'm going to hit Alt left square bracket and that'll trim my layer. The animation will still be the same. They'll be in sync the whole time. It'll just appear at that time. Now I'll go to my next playhead. I'm going to duplicate it again, Control D, and now I have a second layer. I'm going to move it into the position. I want it right here. And then I'm going to hit Alt, left square bracket, cut it. And now you can see what's happening. Okay. I got another one here. Next marker, Control D to duplicate that layer. Now I'm going to move it into place. Maybe I want this one to appear back here, just like that. Now you can see that it's over top of everything, but now I can drop down so I can hit Control left square bracket, bring it down in my layers panel behind everything else. And I also want to cut it to right there. So all to left square bracket. That'll trim it to that time. So let's put that. Cool. And one more at this playhead here. I'm going to duplicate it. I'm going to bring it over. If you don't have your control handles, hit V on your keyboard, that'll bring up the selection tool, then you can drag it. Make sure the layer you want is selected, I'm going to alt left square bracket to trim the layer to this point, and there we go. So let's play back. Cool. All right. Now I want some sort of transition here. Maybe I want these two in the front to disappear and then at the next marker, the two in the back disappear. So I'm going to click on the two in the front. I can find them in my layers panel. And if I control or hit Alt, right square bracket, it's going to trim them to this point in time, and now you can see after they disappear. Then the next one, I'm going to click on the bottom layers, Alt left square bracket, and it trims them at that point. Now they disappear. So let's watch it back. Yeah. Cool. All right. Now we want to do something at this point in time. Maybe I want to change the color again. I'm going to get my color layer or I'm going to just trim it to this point. And now nothing's there, and then I'm going to make a new color layer. Let's new solid. Let's pick a color. Let's do a purple like that, it okay. All right, got a purple. Now I want to trim it or start it at this point, boom, boom. Okay. Then maybe I just want to change the color twice here. At this point and this point, I'll do something different. Let's cut this layer, and let's make a new solid. I'm going to pick the yellow. We're just going to make it the same as the mug. Just like that, and I'm going to start it there, just square bracket to bring it to the front like that. Then at the next marker, I'm going to trim it like that. There we go. That looks pretty cool. Maybe I'll hold this yellow until the next marker. I'll just drag it out and pull it to the next marker right there. Now this is where I'm going to do something new. We have to fill in this. Maybe I want to duplicate that green again, Control D, duplicate it, bring it up to where I want it. The left square bracket brings the point to the playhead, and now we got this color back. Now what I want to do is I want to maybe do some motion. Just like I did with my scale, I want to cut, cut, cut. Maybe I want it to start at the top and then boom, boom, boom, boom down. Let's see how we can do that. I'm going to just duplicate it. I start with a new one and I'm going to cut that one there. All right. Then I'm going to cut this one here. Now I'm going to bring this one up to the top. Maybe I have to pull that one back one frame. Like this, I'm going to start here, and then I'm going to hit my P on my keyboard to get the position. I'm going to go to my next marker. I'm going to pull it down. Next marker, pull it down. Next marker, pull it down, and next marker, pull it down. Then my final one, I'll cut it there and I'll bring back my main composition. Now you can see what's happening here. It doesn't look the best because it's smooth. I'm going to highlight them all and go toggle hold keyframe. Now let's watch it through. Okay, let's do that big smack at the end with my main mug illustration two. And I'll start it. Move the endpoint to there. Boom. There we go. So, there we go. We made a cool motion graphics reel. It looks really awesome, really fun. In the next class, we're going to learn how to export our animation as a animated gift, as well as an MP four file, video file that we can share on social media. I'll see you there. 15. Exporting Your Animation: 33 Alright, guy. So in this class, we're going to learn how to export our illustration as an animated gift, as well as a video file that we can share on social media. Let's jump into it. Okay, so we have our file open here. Now, we have our timeline here, and the first thing that we're going to do is we're going to go back to our Mug Illustration one, our main illustration, where we have our animated comp here. We're just going to cut the animation to let's just find where it loops. We're going to find the starting point of the loop. So it loops at 1 second, so at it goes back at 2 seconds. We're just going to maybe 4 seconds would be fine. We're going to put our play head at 4 seconds. We're going to pull down the work space to there. This is our work area. When we play back, it'll just play back through this section. We can see here. Let's see if it loops properly. Yeah, it looks pretty good. All right. Now what we're going to do is we're going to go to File. We're going to export, add to Media Encoder Q. This will open up Adobe Media Encoder, make sure you have that installed in your computer, and then we'll be able to export this as an animated gift. Once Media Encoder is open and your file has been there, you can click on the output file and you can click where you want it to be saved. And then you can double click on this h264. This will bring up the menu, and this will allow us to change a lot of the options of our animation. So here, we want to change the format from h264 and we want to find animated gift. This will allow us to create an animated gift from our illustration. As you can see here, it actually says source range, work area. We set it to only a few seconds, and that's where it'll export four. So it's only going to export 4 seconds of animation, which is perfect for an animated gift. It's good. Now, we're going to go down here and we're going to just change some of the settings a little bit to reduce the file size of our gift. The first thing that you might want to change is you can keep it at 25 frames per second, but we're going to change that. We're just going to reduce it to maybe 12.5. I'll give it a little more jumpy feel and it'll also reduce the size of your file. So when you're loading gifts on the Internet, they'll load faster. The second thing you want to do is you might want to change the resolution of your animated gift. We're going to just unclick this checkmark, and now we're going to go into this and we're just going to divide by two. We're going to divide by two that just cuts the resolution in half and it just reduces the file size quite a bit. If you want to keep it as the full resolution, that's perfectly fine. It'll just increase your file size, but, you know, your call. Anyways, I'm going to reduce it, and there we go. So all we have to do is hit Okay, and now it is ready, so you can click on it. We can hit Play and it'll run through it and you'll have your cool animation. We can find the spot where it exported, and there we go. We got a cool animated gift right there, and it has a transparent background and everything. It's awesome. The next thing we want to do is export our video. So let's jump back into the video. Let's go to our MgraphRel and this one we want the workspace to be the full range. M. Very cool. And we're going to go to File, Export, add to media encoder Q. All right. In this one, we don't want it to be an animated gift. Let's just click into that again. We're going to reset that to h264 or whatever file type you want and it'll export as an MP four here if you want to dot MOV, you're an Apple user, you can do that, anything like that. You can keep the resolution at full because we're going to post this maybe on social media and we want it to look really nice and make sure the work area is set fully, and all you got to do is hit Okay. And we'll hit Play and it'll export your video as an MP four. If we find it in our files. Open it up. Alright, there we go. We exported our illustration or animation as a gift, as well as an Npour file that you can post on social media. Make sure if you post on Instagram, just take me at l dot an dot art. I would love to see what you guys create. 16. Thank You! You Rock!: Hey, guys, I just want to thank you so much for taking the class. It's been a journey to learn after effects, and it's been really fun. I hope it wasn't too overwhelming for you or too simple. I hope that you were able to take something from this class and apply it to your own workflow and your own illustration process. And after effects is such an amazing tool, and it's really fun to play around with. Once you know a little bit about it, you can start doing more things. You can play with the position, rotation, scale, opacity and animate all those things using keyframes or try that loop out expression to, you know, just make a continuous flowy animation. It's really fun. I really want to see what you guys create. So make sure you export your animation as an animated gift and post it in the project panel, as well as anything else. If you posted on social media, take me at kyle dot an dot q. If you have any questions about what we covered in the class, feel free to post in the discussion panel, and I'll get back to you as soon as I can. If you enjoyed the class and you learned something, please consider leaving a positive review on Skillshare so that more students like you can come learn together. If you want to continue learning with me, follow me here on Skillshare so you'll be notified when new class is launched. As well as you can check on my profile for a library of other classes. I have classes on Illustration and graphic design, and now I have more on motion graphics, so we can continue this journey together. Thank you so much for taking the class, and I wish you all the best on your creative journey. I'll see you next time. Hey, I am a master motion graphic designer that can animate anything. Wha 17. Bonus Lesson: Bet You Thought We Were Done: Hey, guys. Welcome back. I bet you thought the class was over. Well, this is a bonus lesson. If you want to change your animation in any way, I want to show you how you can easily edit the Adobe Illustrator file, and it'll automatically update in After efects. Let's jump right in. So we finished our animation, and it looks pretty good. But what if we wanted to change the logo or the colors of the mug or the heart? We want to change that to something else. Well, what we can do if we go back into our main mug illustration, you can see that these are all AI files. You can see that the icon is an Adobe Illustrator file. It's because they're linked to the Adobe Illustrator file. So if we update the Adobe Illustrator file, guess what? Your animation will also update in after effects. So let's jump over to the Adobe Illustrator file that's connected. And you can see here we have our different layers. I'm going to turn off the reflection for now, and now I'm going to make some adjustments. So instead of the heart, I'm going to hide the heart. Let's just unlock our layers and then hide the heart. And maybe I want a lightning bolt. I think I want the lightning bolt. That'd be cool. So I turn on the lightning layer and the lightning mask later, and I can relock those and like that. And now I don't want to say isometrics anymore, so I'm going to I'm going to unlock my mug layer, and then I'm going to turn off the isometrics logo, and I'm going to turn into something else. Maybe I want to put, you know, hot cup of awesome. That looks pretty cool. And now if I want to change the color, I'll hit Y on my keyboard, select the mug, and then I could double click and I can change the color to Let's see. What kind of color goes good with this? Obviously, the yellow is probably pretty good, but let's change the color pretty dramatically just so we get a better picture. Maybe a blue. And we'll change the color of the writing as well. Maybe we'll do a darker blue, and then we'll have the writing. We'll hit Y on our keyboard, select the writing, and then we're going to change that as well. Let's change that to a bright yellow. Or red? No, yellow looks pretty good. Hot cup of awesome. That's awesome. Alright. So we changed our illustration in Adobe Illustrator. Now we're going to go back into after effects. So make sure we close our layers, lock them, hit Save, control S, and you can see that it's saving in the corner. Now let's go back to after effects. And as you can see, it automatically adjusted for us. So if we go back to our comp, our MoGraph reel, you can see that since we only had the one composition, it automatically td. Now, there's one thing that's a little funny about this is that the lining doesn't match up entirely with the reflection, so we have to go back into our main comp and we have to just adjust that. So we double click into our main comp, and this is what we have here. Now, if we zoom in, I just use my scroll wheel to zoom in. Or you can go to 100% here and find that. Now, we want to get the reflection mask layer. That's the one that contains our reflection, and that's the one we want to move. So we're going to click on that layer and this one is parented to the object. But we can also move it independently from the object as well. So I'm going to move it independently from the object and I'm going to find the place where it needs to be. All right. Now you can see here. But one thing you can see is that where it starts is not really the place that I want it to start. So in order to move the entire thing, if I hover over my keyframes and I just move this, it'll only adjust that specific keyframe. So now it'll sort of go sideways like that. But what if I wanted to move the entire animation? I can hover over one of the key frames, select all of them. And now when I move it, both keyframes will move with it. So now I can put it into the place where I want to start it and it animates perfectly. So all you have to do is you've got to, change your Adobe Illustrator file, then you have to save it. I'll update in after effects. You have to move your reflection mask layer. To where you want it to sit on your object. And then you just have to move the position properties of your animation to where they are. Just make sure when you move the position properties, your playhead is over one of the keyframes and all keyframes are selected, and then they will all move together. If your playhead is somewhere different than the keyframes, it'll actually add a new keyframe right there. And you don't want that, it'll sort of look a little strange. Okay? So that's how you do that. And now let's see our animation, our MgraphRel. Let's just go to hunt to 100% and start again. That's really cool. Okay, one last thing I want to show you how to do in after effects is if we go back to our Mug illustration. And what if we wanted to change the color of the shadow without going into the actual Adobe Illustrator file? What we can do is we find a shadow here. And one thing that we can do is we can adjust it. We can move it. And now, since it's adjusted in this layer, it affects every case that this composition is used. And that means it's in this one here. I changed and also in your Mgrapho. So it changed everywhere. Now, let's say we want to change the color. So we can't directly change it from here, this layer. But what you can do is you can right click on it. You can go to create and create shapes from vector layer. So right now it's a vector layer, and it's connected to the Adobe illustrator file. But once you create vector shapes or shapes from the vector layer, it becomes independent from the Adobe illustrator file. So you can change the color however you want in after effects and won't change the actual illustration. So we change that. Now you can see it created two layers. It turned off the original shadow layer and it created a shape layer over top with that property. And if we go up to the top here, you can see that it has a fill, and you can actually change the fill to whatever color you want. Maybe the shadow wants to be a orange like that. So now I changed my shadow layer to an orange, go back to my MgraphRel and it changed automatically. Okay? Now, if I wanted to change the background of my main composition, I go back to my mug illustration too, and you know that we have a background. We could just select new solid and change it to something different. So I'm just going to select the color, make it a lighter yellow, and hit Okay, and move it above my previous one. And yeah, let's see. Alright, so we just updated our animation very quickly, very easily, updated the Illustrator file, saved it. I updated automatically in after effects, and we created an entirely different reel in just a matter of minutes. So that's pretty cool. If you created a reel and you posted on Instagram, please, I would love to see it. So just take me at kyle dot n dot q. I can't wait to see what you guys create. O