Bring a Logo to Life: Principles of Animation for Motion Designers

1. Welcome: I have to admit, even though I create educational animations for a living, I've never liked animated movies or TV shows. I see what I do as a completely different thing than cartoons. So when I stumbled upon Disney's 12 Principles of Animation, I thought that they didn't apply to my work, but I was wrong. Hi, I'm Meghan Frias and welcome to an essential and foundational class. Bring a logo to life Principles of animation for motion designers. The whole point of the principles of animation is to create the illusion of life. No matter what style of animation, 2d3d stop motion or motion graphics, the goal is to take something static and add motion to make it come alive. The principles of animation are key to doing so. A logo animation is the perfect project to practice these principles. Since a logo has less layers and is shorter than what you might encounter in other animation projects, you can focus on perfecting each principle and polishing every frame. Throughout this class, I'll break down numerous logo examples and guide you through exercises to practice applying each animation principle. You'll learn how to use the principle of staging to create rhythm. How to apply anticipation to capture the audience's attention. And how to add follow through and overlapping action to make animations more realistic and much more. Before taking this class, you should have some animation and after effects experience. Find more details on the class description page including how to follow my class curriculum. I'd highly recommend my class smooth moves as a prerequisite so you're comfortable adjusting motion curves in the graph editor. The demos and downloadable practice exercises will take place in after effects, but the concepts we'll cover are applicable to all types of animation and can be translated to any software. Not only will you come away from the class with a custom animated logo, but you'll have a deeper understanding of how to utilize animation principles to communicate ideas and emotions through movement in any motion design project. If you're ready to bring a logo to life, then let's get started. 2. Class Project: This class is a fusion of logo animation and animation principles. The class project is to animate a logo, but along the way you'll learn animation principles that can be applied to any motion design project. The goal of this class is to help you design a custom professional looking logo animation. But equally, if not more importantly, you should come away from the class with a solid understanding of the principles of animation and how you can apply them to your future motion design work. I can't tell you how to animate every possible logo, and if a tutorial is claiming to do that, there's probably some kind of catch. They're probably only teaching you one simple generic technique. A high quality logo animation is unique to that specific logo. So there's an infinite number of techniques that you may need to learn or come up with. With that in mind, expect for this class to provide guidelines on how to animate a logo. Well, using a modern modified list of the principles of animation, you may need to find other resources to figure out the technical side of a look that you're trying to achieve. I'll point you towards resources that I think will come in handy. But also feel free to ask questions in the discussions tab for your logo. You could animate an existing brands logo or a logo that you create yourself. It could even be for an imaginary brand. If you're stuck on what to animate, you could create a logo for yourself, for your personal brand. This could be an icon that represents you, your name, written in a custom way. Or you could do something cool with your initials and animate that. We'll start by going over some of the basics of logo animation and the principles of animation. Then we'll dive into each principle. Throughout these videos, I'll show you different logo animations so you can see how the principles can be applied and get inspiration for your own logo animation. As you watch, sketch out ideas for your logo animation in whatever form you like best. At the end of most videos, there's a prompt to help you in the logo animation planning process as we go through the principles of animation. I'll show you how to actually apply them to these simple animations and after effects. You can practice alongside me by downloading this project file. Each principle of animation has its own comp that's all set up and ready for you to practice applying that principle. All of these comps are compiled into this comp so that at the end of the class, you'll have this handy guide to help you remember all the principles of animation. I've also provided you with a completed version in case that helps you to learn, but it's definitely not as meaningful as completing the guide yourself. If you feel a burst of inspiration to start animating your logo midway through the class, then go for it. Otherwise, by the time you finish watching each principle of animation video, you should have a solid plan to start animating your logo. And you can get to work and at the end of class, there's a bonus video on common logo animation techniques. So that may be helpful for the technical side of bringing your logo to life. 3. Logo Animation 101: Because our eyes are naturally drawn to moving things. Animating a logo even in a simple way can make it more attention grabbing. But a custom logo animation can make the brand stand out even more and make it more memorable. If the goal of a logo is to communicate a brand's essence, then animating the logo should assist in that goal and even communicate additional information about the brand. The way that the logo is animated should give insight about the brand. This dual lingo logo is bouncy and playful, which aligns with how dual lingo gave Pi. Learning a language with their fun animated characters. Uber logo animation, on the other hand, has a much more serious feel. It's simple yet effective. And the parallel lines that look like lines on a road hint at what Uber does when planning your logo animation. Consider how it will be used. You can see here how the logo animation also works as a launch animation for the Uber app. A logo animation can help explain what a brand does and it could even tell a mini story about the brand. Here are some examples. At first, these look like abstract circles, but then they form the shape of grapes and then swirl into a liquid, all of which is hinting at what the vineyard does in this logo. When this line twirls around, it suggests the shape of a cocoon. This Google logo animation was designed to transition between different core brands within Google. It's a unique use case, but maybe it can provide inspiration for your logo animation. It's important to have a deep understanding of the brand so your logo animation will align with their other visuals, messaging, and values. Depending on whether you're actually contracted to animate the logo or just doing it for practice. Here are some ideas for how you can research the brand before you start planning your logo animation. Hopefully this process will help you come up with animation ideas too. There are a few different types of logo animations. The first is a logo reveal. The logo appears from nothing, pauses, and then disappears. We'll mostly focus on logo reveals in this class, but know that that's not your only option. In some cases, you may want to animate between two versions of a logo, like for example, the logo mark and the logo type. You could also consider making your logo animation loop. It could just be a subtle looping animation if that makes sense for what you plan to use the logo for. Maybe like for a digital sign where the logo stays visible for a while but isn't the main focal point any of these types of logo animations is perfectly fine for the class project. Do whatever makes the most sense for your logo. If you're working on a logo animation for a client, be sure to communicate what part of the logo you'll be animating. Whether that's the logo mark, the logo type or both. And if the tag line or slogan should be included. And consider how the logo animation is planned to be used. In order to animate different elements of the logo, you'll need an Illustrator file. You'll want to separate the different elements of the logo out into their own layers so you can animate them. You may need to recreate parts of the logo depending on how you want to animate it. Just be really careful that your recreation is as pixel perfect as possible. I'm going to assume you're comfortable with Adobe Illustrator so you can prepare your logo animation and you know how to import the Illustrator file into after effix. If you need help with any of that, check out this tutorial or this class. 4. Intro to the Principles of Animation: Disney's 12 Principles of Animation were coined by Ollie Johnson and Frank Thomas in their 1981 book, The Illusion of Life. As the title of the book suggests, the goal of the principles of animation is to take static illustrations and make them believable to give them the illusion of life. Even though technology has changed since the book came out in the principles were originally intended for hand drawn two D cartoon animation. Most of these principles are still very much relevant to modern motion design. But with that in mind, we'll be working off a modified list of principles of animation as you work on your logo animation. Keep in mind that not all principles of animation will be fitting for every logo. For any type of animation, it's important to use the principles of animation intentionally. Now let's get into each principle of animation and start planning out your logo animation. 5. Slow In & Out: Hopefully you're familiar with the terms timing and spacing in animation. I'll briefly review, but if these are new to you, I'd highly recommend watching my class Smooth moves to learn all the concepts you need to know and how to apply them to your animations. Then meet me back in this class. Timing refers to the time between key frames when looking at the timeline. Timing is the distance between keyframes. So as you're probably well aware, key frames that are closer together will produce faster animation or quicker timing than key frames that are further apart. When you're working on a super short animation, like a logo, you can expect to spend some time on the timing of your animation by just nudging keyframes a few frames. When an animation is not very long, it's extra important for the timing to be just right. Spacing is what happens in the space between keyframes. Remember that a video is just a series of still images switched before our eyes so quickly that we see a moving picture. When Disney animators first came up with the principles of animation, every frame had to be drawn by hand. If an animator wanted a character to look like it was moving more slowly, frames would be drawn closer together. Whereas if a character was supposed to look like they were moving quickly, frames would be drawn further apart. That's where the term spacing comes from. When using after effects, the computer interpolates all the frames between your key frames. It figures it out for you. But as the animator, you can control how after effects interpolates between the key frames in two ways. First in time or temporal interpolation, which is done by adjusting the easing on the key frames. This is similar to how an animator would draw frames closer together or further apart for slower or faster motion. As you hopefully know to add easing to key frames and after effects select them right click, choose keyframe assistant, then easy ease or use the keyboard shortcut nine linear key frames are diamond shaped and key frames with any easing are hourglass shaped. Once you've applied easy ease, you can further customize this motion in the graph editor. And that's going to be key to emphasizing fast and slow movements within your logo animation to make it more realistic or expressive. If you're not familiar with the graph editor, my class smooth moves covers everything you need to know. Adjusting the temporal interpolation of an animation can dramatically change what the motion conveys. It can indicate an object's weight and what it's made of, whether it's light and bouncy, or heavy and stiff. When you adjust the timing of an animation, it can make it feel like it's coming alive. But as you'll see in the rest of class, incorporating principles of animation can make it feel even more alive. The second way to control spacing is in space, as in left, right, up and down in the frame. This is called spatial interpolation. And it's often accomplished by adjusting the motion path of a layer. We'll talk more about this in a later video. The first principle of animation is directly related to temporal interpolation. And it's called slow in and out. Motion designers usually call this easing motion. That starts slow, speeds up, and then slows down before coming to a stop can be more pleasing to the eye than linear animation because it's more realistic to how a lot of things move in real life. In the after effects project file that comes with this class, find the exercises folder and the first comp called slow, In and out. For the first exercise, just apply easy ease to the key frames on the bottom square. I know this might feel insultingly easy, but this comp goes into the master comp where you'll have all the principles of animation. Every exercise has to be done to complete this. Not every logo animation uses multiple principles of animation. Sometimes the only one you need is slow in and out. These examples look super smooth and professional, but the only principle of animation they use is slow in and out. Notice how there are multiple parts to the animation and each part uses slow in and out. This is something we'll talk more about later. If all your logo animation needs is some really smooth easing, don't just stop watching. Now remember that the principles of animation are essential to leveling up any motion design project. When you're animating a logo, you'll want to adjust the easing of all of the different elements within the logo. This example, I haven't used any of the principles of animation and all the key frames are linear. Now compare that to this version where I've added easy ease to all the key frames, but I haven't used any of the other principles of animation. The second version already looks a lot better. It's less mechanical and more smooth. Now look at the difference. When I customize the easing of each element. It's a lot more interesting because I've exaggerated another principle of animation, the slow and fast movements, to make it more dramatic and feel more lively. This is the final version that incorporates other principles of animation to. We'll come back to this later. Another thing to think about when animating a logo is the overall flow of the animation. It's not enough just to make sure that each element's motion is fine tuned. You'll also want to consider the order and speed in which elements appear and the rhythm that they create. In this example, each letter starts and finishes animating at the same time. Even though the animation on each letter start slow, speeds up, then slows down as it finishes. All the letters do this at the same time. It's predictable, not very interesting. You also wouldn't want to animate each letter one at a time because that's also predictable and going to draw out the animation too long. Instead, it's best to stagger and overlap when the letters come in. This is better, but the letters are staggered the same amount for each letter. The overall animation is linear to make this even better. Now I've staggered the letters. The animation as a whole starts off slower with fewer moving pieces. Speeds up in the middle with many things moving at once, then slows down with fewer things moving. This has a nice overall flow to it. This goes for logos that aren't just text to. Here are a few more examples of animations that apply slow in and out to the overall flow of the animation. The takeaway is that the principle of animation, known as slow in and out or easing, can be applied on a key frame level or across the entire animation. 6. Staging: Staging means directing the audience's attention to the most important element or elements in a scene to effectively communicate a message. Staging and animation is similar to composition and artwork. There are multiple ways to lead a viewer's eye to the most important aspect of your animation. Doing a good job of staging can help make complicated scenes easy to follow. There's a lot to effective staging. Let's focus on logo animation. As you think about how you want to animate your logo, try to come up with two to five phases or scenes in this logo. Everything animates in at basically the same time. It's a bit chaotic and doesn't flow very well to make this better. The idea here is similar to what we talked about in the last video about staggering when elements come in and using the principle of slow in and out on the animation as a whole. When you apply the principle of staging, you can break the animation into chunks, which I'll call scenes for this logo. Since we have different kinds of elements that have different kinds of animation, I broke up the different main actions into scenes that take turns. Notice how the scenes create a rhythm with each scene. Using slow in and slow out between each scene. Elements pause just for a moment, then once the logo is in its final state, it pauses for longer so the viewer can get a good look at it. Then it animates out. This version has a much better flow to it. The viewer knows where to look. So it's a more satisfying animation to watch. It often works out well to have the animation of the logo disappearing, be simpler, and have less scenes than the animation of the logo appearing. The animation on the logo disappearing could be just one scene. You'll want to consider the context for where your logo will be used. But usually once the logo animates in, the viewer is ready to see what's next. So you don't want to drag out the animation too long. In this animation, there are three clear scenes to animate in and it pauses. Then two scenes to animate out scene 123, then 12 to animate out. This example has five shorter scenes to animate in 12345. Effective staging can also involve using different tools to direct the viewer's eye. We tend to look at the biggest, brightest, or fastest moving element in a scene. You can use color, size, or speed to direct the viewer's eye where you want them to look. In this animation, the spoon leads the viewer's eye around into the center of the frame where the letters animate out from. Then a little square drops from the end, which catches the viewer's eye. Since everything else has stopped moving this square loops around, directing our eye to the tag line here. The needle and thread direct our eye all throughout the frame and the animation of the elements in the final logo design always follow the needle and thread. This is especially helpful for this logo since there are two lines of text and our eyes need to be directed from the right back to the left when the second word animates in. There's no practice exercise for this principle of animation, but now it's your turn to plan out two to five scenes that will make up your logo animation. You can sketch out your ideas in any way that works for you. Be sure to consider the flow or rhythm of your animation, keeping the principle of slow in and out in mind. 7. Arcs: The principle of animation, known as Arc, has to do with spatial interpolation. In real life, things often move in the shape of an arc because of physics or anatomy. For example, a ball being thrown or bouncing moves in the shape of an arc. Usually, the faster something moves, the more straight its trajectory is. Think of a friendly game of catch versus a major league baseball player, throwing the ball as hard as they can. In this example, I made the humming birds movement look more realistic by animating it in an arc. Hummingbirds are known to be fast, though. If I was animating it lining across the screen and wanted to show how fast it was moving, I would animate it in a straight line. In some cases, things move in the shape of an arc because of their structure. When layers are parented together, animating an arc happens practically automatically. Another example of this is when a person walks their arm swing in an arc shape because of the way they're connected to the body. The feet move in an arc shape for the part whether off the ground. And the hips move in a series of arcs. A lot of times animating something in the shape of an arc is as simple as adjusting the motion path if you have your layer selected and it has key frames, but you don't see a motion path like this. First, make sure that this button is toggled blue. Also that under view Show layer controls is checked. If you don't have handles to adjust on your motion path, go up to the pen tool, click and hold, and then select the convert vertex tool. When you hover over a point or a keyframe on the motion path, you should have this upside down V shape, and you can click to add these little handles. Then make sure that you go back to your regular selection tool by going up here and selecting it, or using the keyboard shortcut of V. Now you can drag these handles to create an arc shape. Let's look at how to animate something that's tossed in the air and moves in an arc. First, I'm going to set key frames to just move this across the screen. Then I'm going to go in between those two key frames and just move it up. And that will automatically create this arc shape. It'll automatically adjust your motion path. You can go in and adjust this further. I don't really want it to curve right here. I'll just bring these handles up next. I'm going to add easy's to my keyframes by doing nine. That way I can adjust them in the graph editor. If we play this back right now, it doesn't look very realistic. Let's select these keyframes and go into the graph editor. I'm going to look at the speed graph. The first thing that I can tell from the speed graph is that this slows down as it comes to a stop, as it lands on the ground. We don't want that to happen because gravity would accelerate things towards the ground as they fall. I'm just going to select this key frame, Hold down, shift and drag it up so that the speed does not slow down as it reaches the ground. Now it looks a little bit better, but it's odd how this it comes to a complete stop at the very top of the arc, because that wouldn't happen in real life. We need the speed to not be zero at this center point. We need to do, if we just try to bring these key frames up, they're going to be separate like this. Instead we need to select them. Right click, go to keyframe velocity. Then check this box that says continuous lock outgoing to incoming. Now if I drag these key frames up, they move together. I'm going to do something like that. Because I want the top of the arc right here to be the slowest point of movement. Now let's see what this looks like. That looks already a lot more realistic. If you wanted to convey what this shape was made out of, you could further adjust the graph editor to make it look heavier, or lighter, or anything like that. For the exercise for this principle, you'll need to take these linear key frames on the bottom circle and adjust them to make this animation look more realistic. The first thing that I'm going to do is have this last keyframe on the X position ease in. That way, it's going to look like it's rolling and then slowing down as it comes to a stop. I'm going to right click on this. Go to keyframe assistant, and then it should be a half hour glass shape on the left. Next I'm going to select all of the y position key frames and just apply easy, they're ready to adjust in the graph editor. Then I can open up the graph editor. Let's go into the value graph. Now what I want to do is adjust this graph to make it look more realistic. Remember that the slope of the value graph at any point is the speed right here. Because the slope of the graph is leveling off, the speed is slowing down. This is when the circle comes to the first time it hits the ground. That means that it's slowing down as it reaches the ground. Which of course we don't want because gravity pulls things towards the ground. It accelerates them towards the ground. I'm going to take this handle and drag it down so that this graph looks more like this, it doesn't level off. Then I'm going to do the same thing for all of these other points, right when it hits the ground. Also, when the circle is lifting off the ground, it wouldn't curve and go slow here. I'm also going to take these handles and drag them down at points like this. When it's bouncing on the ground and coming back up. I'm going to make the first handle a little bit longer than the second one because as it bounces, it's going to lose momentum. This way the graph is reflecting that. All right, so something like that looks pretty good. But let's play this back and make sure we could maybe adjust this to be a little bit more slow at the top. Maybe have this jump up, like it has some kind of springs to it or some kind of power that's coming from the ball. Another thing to keep in mind if you are animating this from complete scratch, is that these points where the ball bounces should decay over time. If you were to draw a line from here to here, these bounces should not touch the line, they should be just under it. They're decaying a little bit more every time as the circle loses momentum as it bounces. The final result should look something like this. Here are some examples of logos that incorporate arcs when animating anything, including a logo. Keep this principle of animation in mind and consider if what you're animating should move in the shape of an arc. 8. Anticipation: Anticipation is a movement just before the main action that's in the opposite direction of the main action. You can think of it as the wind up or the pre action. Anticipation serves as a visual cue to what's about to happen. It directs the viewer's attention towards that object so they look at it and don't miss the main action. Examples of anticipation in real life include bending your knees before jumping or pulling your arm back before throwing a ball. Anticipation can be used to make animations look more realistic. In this cooking veggies animation, the hand moves down in anticipation of flipping the veggies. Or anticipation can make an animation look more cartoony. This evocado character bends his knees in anticipation of doing something as simple as a wave that doesn't actually require bending knees. Anticipation can add interest and direct the viewer's eye when animating more abstract things like logos. But before we look at logo examples, let's practice applying anticipation in the exercise file for the middle square. I'm going to animate the position moving a little bit towards the left before the main action, where it moves towards the right. I'm going to bring my playhead to about ten frames and then set another position, key frame with the same value. Then I'll go over to the second key frame and move this position back towards the left. Let's just go at 200. Let's add easy to these key frames if you want, you can adjust these key frames in the graph editor to give this more of a custom look for the bottom square. Instead of animating the position property to create anticipation, let's animate the rotation property. If we toggle open this layer underneath transform. If we were to rotate this rotation property, it's going to rotate from the center of the square, it's going to go through the ground. We could just move this anchor point into the bottom corner right here so that it would rotate from the bottom corner. But there's already keyframes set up and that would mess up those keyframes. Plus, when we get into more complicated animations, having the anchor point not be in the center and at the bottom corner can be a pan. I'm going to show you a trick that can help alleviate those pins underneath contents, there's going to be rectangle one and then transform rectangle one. Under here we have a whole another set of transform properties that we can animate. And these transform properties will only affect this rectangle. If there were multiple different shapes in this shape layer, then these transform properties just affect this shape. Each shape in the layer would have their own set of transform properties. Then these transform properties would affect everything on the entire layer. This is a way that you can have essentially two different anchor points for the main shape layer. We'll just keep this anchor point as is to not affect these key frames that are already set up. But for this anchor point, you can see when you select the shape, it's going to be this right here. We want to move this anchor point, that's the anchor point for just this shape, to the bottom corner here, This rectangle is just 200 by 200. This point is going to be negative 100, 100. I'm going to type that in to the anchor point. You can see that that moved my shape. But a quick fix for this is just to take the position property and use this pick whip to parent the position property to the anchor point. Now it moved the shape back in place. This just means that the position property for this rectangle will always be the same as the anchor point. I could move this anchor point, You can see it moving along the bottom. Now up, the position doesn't move. I'm just going to undo that. The anchor point is now here. If we rotate this, it's going to rotate from this corner at the very beginning of the time line. I'm just going to set rotation property. For this rotation to be zero, then let's go forward in time. Probably just a little bit before this first position key frame. Let's rotate this back, maybe something like that. Then I'll go five frames equal distance after the first key frame and set this rotation back down to zero. Let's add easy to these key frames. This is looking slow. It doesn't really look realistic. I'm going to adjust these key frames in the graph editor. I'm looking at the value graph here. Since I just applied easy ease to these key frames, it's slowing down as it reaches the ground, which isn't realistic. Gravity would be pulling it towards the ground. This keyframe should not be slowing down. As it comes into the key frame, I'm going to drag this handle down. It accelerates into this keyframe that looks better. But we could maybe even make this more extreme. Make it hold a second at the top here. Let's see what that looks like. Yeah, that looks better. But obviously, spend as much time customizing this to get it looking exactly how you want it. Here are some examples of logos that use anticipation. Here the O has a pretty obvious wind up. That's anticipation. Keep in mind that anticipation doesn't just have to be at the very beginning of an animation. In this example, the circles move up before dipping down and then the main logo reveal happens. In this example, dots go up in anticipation before becoming the microphone and also before making the letters for Google. The dots are moving slightly in between different scenes, which you could argue is a subtle form of anticipation. In this example, the moves down slightly in anticipation of moving up as the other shapes appear. It also moves down in anticipation before smashing the other shapes. Keep in mind that anticipation can be used to make an animation look more playful or cartoony. Especially if that anticipation is exaggerated. We'll talk more about exaggeration later. 9. Follow Through: Follow through is like the opposite of anticipation. It's an action after the main action that overshoots or goes past the end state or pose. Follow through is a post action or a recovery from the main action. In real life, it can be hard to stop. Suddenly, when you land a jump, your knees bend a little. Or when you throw a ball, your hand continues to move even after the ball has left your hand Follow through is natural. So adding it to your animations can make them look more realistic, or it can make objects look more floppy, and therefore cartooning for the follow through exercise. Let's start with the middle square and animate the position property. I'm just going to drag this last keyframe over about ten frames to 25 frames. And then where it was at 15 frames, I'm going to copy this keyframe at 25 frames and paste it. And then just drag this a little bit more towards the right. Let's do 800 pixels. Then I'll select these keyframes and easy ease them. I'm going to go into the graph editor and make this look a little bit better. I'm going to look at the speed graph. Let's make it so that it takes longer to slow down. As it comes to a stop, like there's friction with the ground that's slowing it down. But let's justify the overshoot by making it a little bit faster towards the end of the animation of the main action. I mean, it's like slimming to a stop, and then that's why it overshoots. Let's see what this looks like. That looks pretty good. Feel free to adjust this to however you think looks best for the animation on the bottom square. Let's animate the rotation property, similar to what we did with the anticipation exercise. I'm going to toggle down go under contents rectangle one and then transform rectangle one. I'm going to move the anchor point for transform rectangle one to the bottom right corner. This time again, this is similar to the anticipation lesson. If you miss the explanation for why I'm doing this, make sure to go back and watch that lesson. This anchor point needs to be 100, 100. Then I need to parent the position property to the Anchor point property so that it doesn't move. This is all set up and now I can rotate it from this bottom right corner just before the final position property. I'm going to have the square start rotating. Let's set a rotation property for here. At about 01:10 I'm just going to hit you on the keyboard so I can easily see both sets of key frames. Then let's go forward to maybe about here. Let's rotate this, let's do 15 degrees, then go forward a few more frames and set this back to zero. Then let's add easy ease to all of these key frames. I'm going to go right into the graph editor and adjust this. The red is the position property and the yellow is the rotation, and I'm looking at the speed graph. I'm going to adjust the position similar to how I did on the middle square. Let's have it be a little bit faster towards the end of the main action. Then for the rotation, I want it to rotate up really quickly, like it's being shot up into that rotation. Let's adjust the graph so that happens right away, it shoots up. Then I want it to rotate as if gravity is pulling it towards the ground. But it like hovers in midair. It's like teetering when it's rotated something like this. It's going to land had, but stay rotated back like it's teetering for this part where the graph is really slow. Let's see what this looks like. All right, so that's our follow through exercise. You could also combine rotation and position to have both of those act as follow through. Whatever you're animating, you want to be able to justify why it moves in the way that it does. Here are some examples of logos that use follow through. In this example, the curved line underneath the R, I'm going to call it a smiley face, rotates back and forth as a follow through when it animates in the three dots as they come up overshot and bounce a little bit, which can be counted as follow through. When the white dot shoots through the other two green lines, it extends past its final position when it becomes glasses, and then it bounces back into its final resting position. That's another example of follow through in this example that we've already seen as a good example of anticipation. There's also a lot of follow through in how the letters rotate once they come in. Also, when the letters fall in, there's some overshoot and that they fall lower and then come back up to their final position. Similar to anticipation, follow through can make your animations look more realistic, or if you exaggerate it, it can make your animation look more playful. 10. Overlapping Action: Overlapping action is the movement of things that flop, flow, flap or fall behind the central mass of an object. It's usually something that the character or object that you're animating is doing involuntarily. But that doesn't mean that it happens automatically. You still have to animate it. Overlapping action is due to the way things are structured. The momentum from the primary action and the laws of physics. Think of it as a chain reaction and consider this for how things are parented in after effects. Examples include an arm swinging while walking, waving how the hand lags behind the arm, or things blowing in the wind. In this animation of seaweed moving underwater, notice how the stem of the vine bends, which is the main action. And the leaves rotate, which is the overlapping action. The rotation of the leaves lags slightly behind the bend of the stem. This animation of a girl biking has a bunch of overlapping actions. There's the motion of her head, hair, earrings, and shirt blowing in the wind. And the bouncing basket and dogs, ears waving in the wind. Keep in mind that things will move at different speeds depending on their weight, size, and how they're structured. Overlapping action can happen during any or all phases of an animation anticipation, main action, and follow through to animate overlapping action. In our practice exercise, we're going to add a bend to the square. To do that, you want to go up to effects and presets and just search for CC, bend it and then drag that onto the layer that's probably going to cut off part of your square. And that's because of where these controllers are for the start and end of the bend. We need to position these closer to the square so that it's not cutting anything off. But as the square moves across the screen, those controllers are staying in place. They're not moving with the square. Here's what we can do to fix that. I'm going to toggle down into E, X, and then into the bend. I also need to just open this layer so I can see both the X and Y position. You'll see Y in a second. The start of the bend is going to be at the bottom of the square. I'm going to option click on this stopwatch to start writing expressions. If you've never written an expression before, don't worry. I'll walk you through everything we need. To enter two different values, x and a y value because that's what the start entails. I'm just going to type in a bracket because that's the way that you write two numbers like that. Then I'm going to use this pick whip to grab the location of the x position. Now the position of the start of the bend controller is always going to be the same as the position of the square, which is exactly what I'm going to want. Then I'm going to write a comma, and now we need to define the y position. I'm going to do the same thing. Take the pick whip and drag it to the Y position. Then I'm going to do plus 100 because I want this to not be in the center of the square but 100 pixels down, which will land right at the bottom of the square, because I know that this square is 200 by 200 pixels. Then remember to type an end bracket and then click out of this. Then if you click back on CC, bend it, you should be able to see that controller is attached to the bottom here. Now we need to do the same thing with the end controller. If you're worried about how this is getting cropped on the sides, we need to just make sure that the end controller is further up and that'll fix that. I'm going to again, option click on the stopwatch for the end of the bend. First type of bracket. Then the same thing for the X position. We'll take the pick Whip down to the X position and then a comma then pick whip the Y position. We want this controller to be higher than the square. I'm going to do like negative 300 and then the end bracket. Let's click out of that. That looks good. Let's see if we bend this, that looks good. It's not getting cut off. If yours is getting cut off for some reason, just make this a bigger number. Now let's animate the bend property. I'm going to go to the first key frame and just set the bend amount to be zero. Then also, we'll set the bend amount to be zero on the last key frame. Then in the middle of those two key frames, let's have it bend backwards. Let's just add easy ease to all these key frames and see what this looks like. You could go into the graph editor to further adjust your key frames, but already this is giving the square a little bit more personality. In this case, making the box bendy gives it more of a cartoony look. But overlapping action can also be used to make things look more realistic. Like you saw in the biking example, the principles of animation can be combined for an enhanced effect. Here's a simple animation to help explain the difference between follow through and overlapping action and how they can be combined. Follow through means there's an overshoe after the main action. Overlapping action means the pieces of an object are staggered and how they move, they slightly lag behind whatever is driving the action. Finally, follow through and overlapping action can be combined. For the most dynamic look in the exercise animation, you can add follow through on the bend animation, which will act as an overlapping action. The way that this bends back and forth as it comes to rest is called damping. Oscillations is another way to make an animation look more realistic. For this one, I've already added the bend effect for you. Just speed things up a little bit. I'm going to go to the first key frame on the position, set the bend to zero. Then in the middle of these key frames, let's set this back to negative 30. Then a little bit after this first key frame, let's set this to positive. And a little less than 30, let's do positive 20. It's going to bend back in the other direction, then go forward a little bit. Let's bend this back. Let's do negative five. I'm just guessing on these numbers and we can always adjust them and then go forward again and set this back to zero. Let's just hit, you, just see those key frames. And then easy ease them. Let's just see what it looks like. All right, it's looking a little bit slow, right in here. Maybe if I bring this key frame back, then maybe I can bring this keyframe this way. Bring these to this way. I'm just going to adjust the timing so that it bends. And then it, as it has less to bend, it's going to go a little bit faster. So let's see what this looks like. That's a pretty subtle little follow through animation. But if you wanted to communicate that the square was made of something more Jellowy, you could add more oscillations back and forth, make it bend more, or do whatever adjustments in the graph editor to convey what the square is made of in your imagination. Let's move into the next exercise, comp number six, putting it all together for this animation. The idea is to combine multiple principles of animation that we've talked about so far. I'll leave this up to you to animate since I've covered everything you need to know. But here's what you should include for the main action. You slow in and out. There are technically a few ways you could incorporate anticipation. But I was planning on having the square rotate back before the main action. To incorporate overlapping action, the square bends backwards. As it rotates in anticipation of the main action. Then there should be follow through and overlapping action as it rotates and bends to the right after the main action. Finally, there's follow through on the follow through as it bends back and forth before coming to a complete stop. There's one little trick that you'll have to do with the anchor point in order to make the rotation work properly. If you look at my completed version, you'll notice that I've key framed the anchor point and there's two hold keyframes. For the first part of this animation, I need the square to be able to rotate backwards like this. The anchor point needs to be at the bottom left corner. I've set a hold keyframe on the anchor point for the anchor point to be at negative 100, 100 for the beginning of the animation. And then once it gets to this point, which is just before it starts rotating the other way, at the end of the animation, I've set another hold keyframe so that the anchor point just moves all at once to the bottom right corner, which is 100, 100. The reason that this doesn't actually do anything to the shape itself, it doesn't move the position is because what I set up in that first lesson with anticipation, that's this part where I parented the position to the anchor point. Here are some examples of logos that use overlapping action. Well, if you look closely, some of the letters have pieces that lag behind. On the first D, the circle part lags behind the stem of the letter during the follow through bounce animation. Another example is how the second D rotates and bounces. You could also argue that there's overlapping action across the whole logo during the part where the letters move up in anticipation of animating out. Since the letters are staggered, this creates an overlapping action effect. Notice how the green square bounces the letters, and they act as a unit. The way that the letters all bounce but are slightly staggered is an example of overlapping action. 11. Secondary Action: Secondary animations are animated details that support the main action. Think of it like layering animations. These smaller secondary animations embellish or enhance the main action to make the animation look more realistic or give it more personality. In this animation, the primary action is lifting weights and the secondary animation is the character's facial expressions. Here the main action is the turtle flapping its fins to swim. The way the fins bend would be considered overlapping action. Secondary animations here are blinking and breathing, which can be seen as the bubbles. Secondary animations should add additional meaning that doesn't distract from the primary action. For example, it can convey what mood character is in their emotions, intentions, reactions, et cetera. While you may hear the terms overlapping action and secondary animation used interchangeably, they are two different things. They're both ways to add detail and enhance animation. Overlapping action is usually involuntary. Think of things that swing flap, flop, or lag behind, often because of the anatomy of the character or object. Overlapping action needs some other action to overlap with it's a result or reaction to another action. And it may not be possible without that other action. Secondary action is more likely to be voluntary. Think of characters that are doing multiple things at once. For example, if the main action is walking, the character could turn her head and look around and that would be a secondary action. It's not necessary because it's not a physical reaction or result of another motion. It's an additional motion that could occur without the main action. Secondary animation is not always voluntary. For example, things like blinking would be a secondary animation rather than an overlapping action. Because it's overlapping with another animation, it's not a reaction or result of another animation. You already saw how the motion of the girl's head, hair, earrings, and shirt blowing in the wind and the bouncing basket and dog's ears are all examples of overlapping action. They all happen because of the fact that she's biking. The animation of the dog's tongue, like he's panting, isn't a reaction to the other motions, that would be considered a secondary animation. The dog doesn't have to be panting in this situation. If the dog wasn't riding in a bike basket, he could still be panting. But since it would be realistic for a dog to pant in this situation, adding secondary animations like this can help make the scene come alive. An animation could be a secondary animation and have overlapping action. For example, in this animation, the primary action is eating the tail is a secondary animation. The cat could be eating without wagging its tail. The way that the tip of it lags behind is an overlapping action. The takeaway here is not that you need to pick apart an animation to figure out what constitutes what principle. What's important here is that you're able to layer principles of animation to create the illusion of life. For the practice exercise, I'm just going to add a rotation animation at the same time as the main action of the square moving across the screen. This rotation animation is layered over the main action, but doesn't actually have anything to do with the main action. I'll just set a key frame, maybe like starting a little bit after the first position key frame, for the rotation to be zero. Then at the last keyframe, let's just animate this, 180 degrees. Let's add eases to both of these. The term secondary action was originally intended for character animation for logos. We can use the term a little more loosely to just mean additional animations that enhance the main animation. In this example, the burst that comes from the speech bubble could be called a secondary animation. Or in this example, the accent dots are an additional animated detail that enhances the overall animation. In this animation, there are multiple accents and bursts that could be counted as secondary animations. 12. Squash & Stretch: Squash and stretch is when an object is animated to expand and compress to give it the illusion of weight or flexibility. You can use squash and stretch to indicate what an object is made out of, whether it's hard as a rock or squashy like rubber. When animating squash and stretch, consider the material that the object is made out of and how that would behave in real life. You can exaggerate this to give it more of a cartoony look. Squash and stretch can be used for anticipation and or follow through. And when combined with other animated properties, it can make up overlapping action. In this example, instead of having the cake bound up off the ground when it falls, squash and stretch is used as a form of follow through. Since the cake also bends side to side as it squashes and stretches, this could be considered overlapping action. There are also other times that the cake and cherry squash and stretch, like here, in anticipation of the cherry being tossed up. And also when the cherry falls. The use of squash and stretch makes the piece more expressive, interesting and gives it more personality. When animating squash and stretch, you want to make sure to maintain the object's volume to make it look believable. In other words, if you stretch an object's height, you should equally squash its width. A lot of times you can get away with scaling an object, so the numbers seem equal and opposite. For example, if you scale the x value to 120% then you scale the y value to 80% Technically, this isn't totally accurate, though All it takes to be accurate is some simple math. The area of a rectangle is its width times its height after effects uses x and y. Let's go with that. With this equation, you can figure out the area if you're using the scale property to animate squash and stretch, you can just use the scale percentages. 100 times 100 equals 10,000 Now that you know the area, you can rearrange this equation. If you know you want to squash the object so that x is 120% You can figure out what the y value needs to be to maintain a consistent area. 10000/120 equals 83.3 Not much difference in the first example, but the math is easy. Why not be accurate? You can make this even easier by setting up an expression to automate the math for you if you're working with circles. Technically the area is pi times the radius squared. But when you're just trying to animate squash and stretch, you can get away with using the same equation, x times y equals area. This is good enough because it's not super important that you calculate the area of the shape accurately. It's just important that you squash and stretch the shape proportionately. The area of the shape doesn't change. If you want to be super accurate when working with different types of shapes, then by all means go ahead and do the math. But otherwise you can just use this simple equation. And the expression that I'll show you later on will work too. In the practice exercise, I've set up two different circles. For one, you'll animate the size property to animate squash and stretch. For the other, you'll animate the scale property. Let's start with the scale property. Make sure that this one is visible and the other one is not. I've already set the anchor point to be at the bottom of this circle for you. Because when you squash and stretch it, you want it to squash and stretch from the ground. It makes sense for the anchor point to be here. You'll see that I've set up y position key frames. But if you play through this, nothing is actually happening yet. If yours is like this, that's how it's supposed to be. And we're going to go in and make this actually bounce using these existing key frames. The first thing we need to do is add as to these key frames and then go into the graph editor. Now we have handles, since we added as that, we can adjust this curve and this will actually give it a bounce. But if you're adjusting this curve and you don't see anything happening, like if you look really carefully, it's slightly moving. But also look at the scale here, this is barely moving one pixel, like not even a pixel. We could just keep dragging these handles and make this really big until the scale gets bigger. But what I found it is easier is just to go in the middle of these key frames and just move this and then look at how the scale of the graph has already changed. Now I can adjust these handles much more easily. Then I can even delete this key frame, and the scale of the graph stays relatively the same. This just makes it easier to go in and adjust all of the different handles so you can make those bounces. I'm just adjusting these handles that the first one on the left side is a little bit longer than the one on the right side, but they're making an upside down. The reason for this is because as the circle bounces, it's going to be losing momentum due to gravity. This curve should be decreasing, but decreasing, not just linearly. These bumps should get smaller each time. I'm just going to adjust my graph to make sure that it reflects this. You can adjust these handles to however you want it to look, depending on how high you want it to bounce, You can set that with these handles. Once your animation looks good, then you can go in and add squash and stretch. I'm going to go out of the graph editor and then let's toggle open the scale property. On the scale property, I'm going to set up that expression to automate the squashing and stretching so that I don't have to do the math for every single key frame, set an expression you want to option or Alt. Click the stopwatch and then you can start typing. We need to define two different variables. Variables are just like names or placeholders for things that we're going to use later on in the expression. I'm going to set the first variable by typing VAR and then you can guess what this one's going to be. For the x value of the scale, I'm going to take this pick whip and just grab this x value basically. I'm just saying x value is going to be whatever I set here. That's all this is saying. Then for the end of every line, like how you end a sentence with a period, you need to end this with a semicolon. Then for the next line, I'm going to set the y variable. Then this one I want to be the area over x. If you remember back to that equation, that's what the Y value is going to be. I'm going to set the x by just adjusting this value and key framing this value. And then it's automatically going to figure out what y needs to be to maintain the same area. I know that 100 times 100 is the area of this circle. I'm going to just type that in as 10,000 and then divided by x. You can see I'm now using that variable that I set in the first line and then semicolon to end the line, and then brackets because we're defining two different numbers. Because the scale wants two different numbers, it's just going to be x and then y because I've already told it what those are going to be here. There's definitely multiple ways that you could set up an expression to automate squash and stretch, but I think this is the simplest way. That's why I'm showing it to you here. Now, if I were to adjust the X scale, I can use the slider to adjust it. Let's just do like 150. You can see that the Y value was automatically calculated for me to be 66.7% If I go the other way, 71% in the x value is going to be 140.8 in the y value. I don't have to worry about the y value, I just have to set the x value. You can go in and type in a number, and that works too. Or you can use the slider. Also note that like it looks like you can adjust the y value, but when you let go, it's actually just having you adjust the x value. That can be a little confusing. But just remember that you get to set the x value and it will automatically calculate the y value. When you set this back to 100, it should look normal, not scaled in any weird way. I'm just going to close this up and now we can keyframe this value. I'm going to go over to where the circle is about to land. And this is going to be about 20 frames where it's going to be moving at its fastest as it falls to the ground. And I'm going to set the first scale keyframe here. Then right before it hits the ground, it's going to be its most stretch. It's going to be elongated, that it's like maybe 80% in the x value. Then right when it reaches the ground, when it hits the ground, it's going to squash in the opposite direction. Let's just do 120 for the squash. And then as it lifts off the ground, you could have it stretched like it's sticking to the ground. Or you could just have it go back to its normal shape. Let's look at what that first squash and stretch looks like. All right, now let's do the same thing on the next bound. Maybe just a couple of key frames before it lands. I'll set the first key frame, then right before it lands, let's make this a little bit less because it's going to be not bouncing as high so it wouldn't squash and stretch quite as much. Let's do like 85. Then once it hits the ground, let's do 115. Then the next frame, I'll set this back to 100. Then for the next bounce, set the first key frame for 100% Then it's going to stretch. Let's do 92 even less then when it hits the ground, it'll squash. Let's do one oh eight and back to 100 for the very last bounce. I'm not even going to make it stretch at all, I'm just going to do a small little squash. All right? There's not really a huge point in easing any of these key frames, because key frames that are just one frame apart don't have any interpolation to them. So I'm just going to leave this as is. And let's see what it looks like. Now let's look at how we can animate squash and stretch on the size property instead of the scale property. Why would you want to animate the size property? I'm going to show you the completed example when you animate the size property like this. When it lands on the ground and squashes, it's going to be flat against the ground, which looks more realistic. The trick to this is that this is not actually a circle, It's actually a rectangle with rounded corners. There's something that I've already set up for you, but it's really important to making sure that the squash and stretch works correctly. Underneath transform rectangle one, I've set up an expression so that the anchor point is always going to be at the bottom of the circle. It's going to be centered x equals zero and then y divided by two. Half of this will put the anchor point right here at the bottom. That way when we set up the squash and stretch, it will squash and stretch from the bottom of the circle. In order to animate the size property and automate the math with an expression, it's going to work a little bit different than the scale property. Let's look at how to do that now. First, I'm going to toggle down underneath rectangle and rectangle path so we can see the size property. Before I set an expression on the size property, I'm going to need an expression controller. If you've never used one of these, they're actually pretty straightforward. All you need to do is right click on the layer, go to effect expression controls, and then slider control, that's going to add effects here. And then here's the slider. I'm just going to select where it says slider control, hit enter and rename it. This value is actually what we're going to keyframe for our squash and stretch value. That way we can control the squash and stretch with something that's not the actual size property. If you wanted to go in and change the size, you can. And this will still work. It'll still have that automation already set up. I'm going to set the expression on the size property option, or I'll click the stopwatch. Then we first need to define a few variables. X is going to be x value here. I just use the pickwip to copy that address basically. And then a semicolon then variable for Y, same thing. Grab this y value with the pickwip semicolon. Then the next variable is going to be for the area are area, that's just going to be x times y and semicolon. Then the last variable is going to be for the slider. You can call this whatever you want, but I'm just going to call it slider And take the pickwip and grab the slider. There's one more thing that I want to do on the slider variable. I want this slider value to be 100. When the squash and stretch is not squash or stretch at all, it's acting like a percent I'm going to add divided by 100 so that this slider value acts like a percent. Then semicon. Then I'm just going to go down and let's redefine x. So we're using the variable x, but setting it a new value. X equals x, whatever is set here then times the slider using the slider variable, and then semicolon. That means that we're affecting whatever the slider value is. Say the slider value is 200, then it's going to do 200/100 times X. Then in that way, we're affecting the X value, just like we were with the scale property when we animated the scale property in the last example. Then I'm going to redefine y to be the area over X. Again, we're just rearranging that equation to figure out what y needs to be. If we know what x is, then we'll define x and y. When I click out of this, I get an error because the slider value is set to zero and it doesn't like dividing zero by a number. I'm going to set the slider value to 100 because I want 100 to be normal, not squashed or stretched. Now we can keyframe this slider just like we did for the scale value. And it will work just like the scale, except for it'll have that flat bottom when it squashes. I'm just going to hit you to just bring up these Y position key frames. Now I need to adjust these Y position key frames like I did on the scales Y position keyframes. Actually, instead of doing that all over again, I can just copy these ones that already have that nice easing that I did in the graph editor. I'm just going to paste them onto here now because my anchor point for the scale property was at the bottom and for the size, it's in the middle. This is going to offset the circle a little bit with all the keyframes selected and my playhead over one of the key frames. I'm just going to drag this up to line it up with that line. Again, technically they should all be at 900. If you want to be really accurate, you can go in and type in 900. All right, now we're good to add squash and stretch. I'm just going to toggle down. Let's find that slider. This is what we're going to keyframe again. Right about here. We'll set the slider to be 100, right before it hits the ground. We'll have this be stretched. I'll set this to like 80. Then as it hits the ground, we'll have it be squashed maybe 120 and then set it back to 100. Then here, 1805115. And I'm just making up these numbers, do whatever you think looks good. All right, so now that we have all those key frames set, you can play it back and see what it looks like. Here are some examples of logos that use squash and stretch here, the litter squash and stretch as they bounce into place. In this example, the O and the dot on the squash and stretch. Notice how in this example, the first white circle squashes and stretches. But the ball inside the B, that's a pool ball, doesn't squash and stretch. This was a good design choice that effectively communicates that this is a pool ball, because pool balls wouldn't squash and stretch in real life. One more thing to note is that when the white circle dips around, it has a smear effect. Which is similar to a squash and stretch, but a different principle and the topic of the next video. 13. Smears: Smears were not actually on the list of Disney's original 12 principles of animation, but they were invented by animators at the time who drew every frame. These animators needed a way to indicate that something was moving quickly between frames. They didn't have after effects with a motion blur switch that could just simply be turned on. Instead, they came up with this idea to draw an elongated frame, a smear to indicate a really fast movement. Although the techniques to create smears have changed, this is a look that stuck around in modern motion design. An easy way to animate smears on a circle is to create a line that has a stroke but no fill. Then make sure that the stroke has round caps. I've already set that up for you in the practice exercise. To animate this, we're going to use trim paths. Go to the Ad button and choose trim Paths. I'm going to go to about 15 frames and set a key frame on the start and values. Now you can see the full line here. What I'm going to do is bring down the value to 0.1 That way it'll just look like a circle. Then I'm going to go forward to about 01:15 Let's bring the start value all the way to 100, and the end all the way to 100. But actually we need the start to be 99.9 That 0.1 value makes it a circle. Now if we play this, it's just going to be a circle moving across the screen in order to add smears. First, let's add easy to these key frames and then go into the graph editor. I'm looking at the speed graph. What I want to do is make this animation go really fast. In the middle, it's going to start really slow, go really fast, and then go really slow again. It's the fastest. That's when I want it to have the smear. I'm going to adjust these graphs so that the end value graph is going to be steep like this. Then the start graph is going to be really steep, just like this. But a little bit lagging behind, that's what's going to create the smear effect. Since these graphs are on top of each other, it can be hard to select the right handle. But if you select the curve first, then it will bring up those handles so you can grab the correct handle. I'm just going to make this really tall, it's really fast. And then let's also adjust the end one a little bit faster. However far apart your graphs are, the points of them, that is where the smear is going to be. If your graphs are closer together, then smear is going to be smaller. Whereas if your graphs are further apart, your smear is going to be bigger. Once you get this looking how you want it, like it's much smear as you want it, see what it looks like when it's played. This technique can be a bit limited, especially if you have a unique shape or illustrator layer that you want to apply a smear to the echo effect and adjust and keyframe the parameters to animate a smear look. But to make this even easier, I'd recommend checking out Battle X's free smear tool. This logo animation uses smears. Let me show you how I achieved this effect. When each letter moves at its fastest point of movement, it's smearing in the direction that it's moving. If you look at this L, you can see that I've key framed the path property as it moves down the top of the L. These keyframes here are moving this way. I've just dragged them like this to make this taller. Then when it moves the other way, I've just drag these key frames this way to make that smear. I've done that for every letter. The O is going to be a little bit different because there's two different paths that make up the O. But it's basically the same idea. At the fastest part of the movement, I'm dragging the key frames to create a smear offset. Some of these keyframes for the inside and outside of the O, just to make it look a little bit more interesting. So you can see how it makes that smear look like that. Here are some examples of logos that use smears. This example uses smears as well as bouncy anticipations and follow throughs to give the logo a playful look. The Google logo isn't as bouncy and playful, but it uses smears effectively to add interest. In this example, as the O, or the olive drops down, there's a big smear in this example. As the white ball loops under and up and then becomes the center ball in the B, there's a smear. 14. Exaggeration: All of the principles we've covered so far can be applied to make your animation more lively and realistic. By pushing the boundaries of what's realistic, you can add personality and expressiveness to your animation and give it more of our cartoony feel. Think of it like a spectrum on one end. An animation doesn't use any of the principles of animation and only uses linear key frames. It looks dull and practically lifeless. As more care is put into perfecting the timing and spacing of keyframes, principles of animation are used. The animation becomes more realistic and lifelike. If you push the boundaries of physics and exaggerate the motion or principles of animation, the animation becomes more playful and cartoony. Don't fall into the thinking that this is a spectrum from bad to good. Both realistic and cartooning animations can be considered great work when deciding where on the spectrum you want your animation to fall. Consider your audience. For example, through my job creating educational animations at a healthcare company, we found that our audience of patients finds cartooning animations to be condescending. They feel like they're being talked down to like they're a little kid because they associate cartoons with kids. For this reason, I hardly ever exaggerate principles of animation and I steer away from ones like squash and stretch or smears. Before we can do the exaggeration exercise, we need to do the Putting it all Together exercise that combines a bunch of different principles of animation in the putting it all together exercise. First, let me walk you through what's already set up for you. If you want the extra practice, feel free to delete this and start from scratch with a fresh square first underneath the rectangle path and then size. I've used that same expression that I showed you in the squash and stretch lesson to set up squash and stretch. You'll also notice that underneath Effects there's a squash and stretch slider. You'll key frame this to animate squash and stretch. I've also already set up the bend effect. I've parented the start and end values so that they remain in the right places. Also notice that the anchor point for this layer is at the bottom of the square right here. If you toggle down rectangle one and then toggle down transform rectangle one, there's also an expression on this anchor point. Let's start animating. I'm going to go roughly in the order of this list. First, let's animate the x and y position. I'm just going to hit P on the keyboard to bring those up. Let's start at 15 frames. That way we give ourselves a bit of time for the anticipation. I'll set X position and Y position key frame, and then we'll go to 1 second. Let's move this over to 770. Then for the Y position, I want that to be on the ground at 600. I'll just set a key frame. Then in the middle of these, let's just go and set this Y position up to maybe like 440. Let's add *** to these Y position key frames, that'll make it more arced. But I'm going to go into the graph editor, because I don't want it to curve like this. That's not very natural. I'll go in and let's look at the value graph, then let's take these handles and drag them like this. I feel like I've said it 100 times, but remember that this needs to be straight, so that it's acting as if gravity is pulling it towards the ground. It's not going to slow down when it's going towards the ground, it's going to hit the ground hard. That's looking pretty good for now. Let's move on to anticipation first. I'm going to set the anticipation using squash and stretch. Let's just toggle down and grab the effects. And then go into squash and stretch. Starting at the beginning of the timeline, we'll just set the squash and stretch slider to be at 100. And then let's go forward in time. Maybe about eight frames, halfway between these key frames we already have. Let's squash this down to 17 then lined up with the first X and position key frame. Let's have it stretch up like it's launching off the ground. It's like jumping off, we'll do 93. Then right after that, once it's in the air, I'm going to un squash and stretch it. I'll just set it back to 100. Let's just add easy to these keyframes so far. It's going to squash, stretch a little, to jump up and then. It'll jump in its arc. Now let's animate the bend for another form of anticipation. I'm going to go into the bend effect at the beginning of the timeline. We'll just set the bend to zero. Then lined up with this squash and stretch keyframe, I'll just set this to 25. It's bending in anticipation of the main action where it jumps up and across. Then let's move over to here and set this bend back to zero. Let's easy ease these key frames. I'm just going to select the layer and hit you on the keyboard just to condense. I only see properties with key frames. All right, let's looking good so far. Now let's go to follow through a couple of frames before it lands. I'm going to set the squash and stretch to just be squash or stretch the right before it lands. Let's stretch it out a little bit. How about like 92 then as it lands, let's squash it down like it's getting impacted. Let's give it a little bit of time to recuperate. I'm going to move over to like 110 and then set this back to 100. We can easy ease these last two key frames. Now let's add the bend property as it's landing. Let's have it be bent back. Let's do negative 25. Then let's add some damping oscillation. Let's have it move back and forth. Jello like as it comes to rest. Let's go about here and have it move forward. Maybe even positive 25, just so it moves back in the other direction, giving it a little bit of time. Let's move it back in the other direction. Then maybe forward, and then finally to zero. I'm going to leave these keyframes for now, but if yours aren't looking quite right then definitely feel free to adjust the timing of them or go into the graph editor last for follow through. Let's add a slide. It's going to land and then slide a little bit past its landing position. Let's just bring this x position over. Let's go like 820. Then I'm going to right click, go to keyframe assistant and easy ease in that way. This will slow down. As it comes to a stop, it's as if there's friction between the ground and the square, that's what eventually causes it to stop sliding. Here's what we have so far. One thing that I'm not liking is at the beginning when it's doing the anticipation. The square is sliding because of the way that it's squashing and stretching. But I feel like it should be moving back in anticipation and not sliding slightly forward. Like you can see right here. It's sliding slightly forward. I'm going to fix this by just setting a couple of position key frames. If you don't see your rulers, you can hit command R command or control R to see them. Then I'm going to move over to the first X position key frame. And just drag out a guide from the ruler and position it right at the start of the square. You can zoom in to get it really precise. Now if I move backwards to this squash and stretch and bend keyframe here at eight frames, you can see that it's moving forward from the start line. What I'm going to do is just bring this x position back. That way it's not going to pass this guideline. Then I'll do the same thing at the start of the timeline. I just eased all of these key frames. Let's easy ease these so they line up. But when I do that, notice how it actually changes the arc of the line. Because it's adjusting the values of the x position. I'm going to actually set this one back to a regular linear key frame. Here's what it's looking like. Now I think this looks a lot cleaner. Because it doesn't slide at the beginning. It only slides when it lands, which makes sense. Next in our list is overlapping action by animating the bend effect. But we've already accomplished this by animating the bend during anticipation and follow through. But when it's in the air, it's pretty static. It doesn't bend much. I think we can make that a little bit better. Maybe this key frame where it goes back to zero, let's just delete that. Maybe somewhere around here, let's actually bend it back to negative 25. Maybe like the air is providing some resistance. And that's why it's bending back. Next. And actually last is secondary animation. Let's add a rotation to the square. So it's going to jump up, rotate, and then land. If we were to just animate the regular old rotation property underneath transform like this, then I'm going to have to do a full revolution. If you scrub through this, you'll notice a problem right away. This is happening, this cutting off because of the bend effect. If you remember back when we first use the bend effect, we had to set up these expressions where we parent the start and end values of the bend to stick with the square as it moves across the screen. Now that we're rotating the square, it's messed up again because the start and end bend values are still staying in place. They're not rotating with the square. Instead of trying to update that expression, which could get really complicated. Instead of animating this rotation, I have a different trick that's going to make this a lot easier. I'm just going to take those key frames off. Then I'm going to go up to effects and presets and search for transform. Underneath the store there's this effect called transform. And I'm going to apply it to this layer that's going to give me this whole new set of transform properties that's going to be applied to the entire layer. So this is like another way to get anchor points and position properties and all this stuff that you can use to layer different transform properties on top of each other to get crazy different effects or to do things like what we're trying to do now, just simply rotate this square without breaking everything underneath transform. I'm going to first need to set up the anchor point in position so that there's expressions to lock them down. Because right now notice this controller right here, that is the anchor point for this square from this transform effect that I've applied. Then the other one is going to be for the position there's actually two, they were on top of each other. I need to get these positioned on top of the square. And also to move with the square as the square moves. This should sound a little familiar, similar to the bend effect. I'm just going to undo that on the transform effects position property. I'm going to option click the stopwatch to start writing an expression. Then I'm just going to be defining two numbers. I need brackets. Then I'm going to take the pick whip and drag it down to the position. The position for this transform property is always going to be the same as the position for the layer. That's all we need to do here then. And then let's define the y position. I'm going to do the same thing. Take the pick whip and drag it down to the Y position. Now remember how the anchor point for this square was down here at the bottom of the square. That's what I'm telling it so far. But when the square rotates, I want it to rotate from the center, instead of it being at the bottom. I need to move it up. This square is 200 by 200 pixels. To move it up halfway, that's going to be -100 And then I'll set a bracket to close those off. Now when I click out of this, the square has disappeared, but don't worry because the next step will fix that On the anchor point, we just need to parent the anchor point to the position and it's back. Once you've got all of that set up, we can animate this rotation property underneath the transform effect. I'll set the rotation to be zero here at 15 frames. Then at the end, when it lands, I'm just going to set this to be one. Let's easy ease these key frames. Now if we play this back, it should be working fine. If yours is having a problem underneath effects, make sure that you have CC bend it above transform in the layer stack. This way the transform will be applied to the whole layer and you won't get stuff getting cut off. If bend is applied after transform, the layer order is really important here. Make sure it's just like this. The last thing to do here is to fine tune the motion of all of these different key frames in the graph editor. I'm going to hit you just to bring up all the key frames and then we can go in and make sure that everything is looking really polished. I don't always save this step for like, I've already adjusted the key frames on the Y position, but for a lot of these other key frames, I haven't actually touched them in the graph editor. First, let's start out with the bend effect right here. It's just doing a simple ease, but I think we can make that movement more dramatic. Let's go into the graph editor and just drag these handles that. It starts out slower, goes even faster in the middle, and then ends up a little bit slower. It's really going to pop. Then here for these oscillations, I'm just going to actually go in and re, add the because you can see how the shape was messed up before. I think this will automatically make it look better. But right here, when it lands, I think the landing impact should make it go a little bit faster. Right around here. Let's just adjust this graph. It bends back the other direction faster. Let's see what this looks like. All right, that looks pretty good. Now let's check the squash and stretch slider here at the beginning. It should probably match the bend graph for these two key frames. Let's do that just a little bit faster in the middle and slower on both ends. Keep in mind that anything where there's like two key frames back to back the graph doesn't really mean much because there's no interpolation going on. Even though it looks weird in a couple of places, you can just ignore that. Then here at the end, between these last two key frames, maybe it should start unsquashing quickly and then just slow down. I think that would make sense for whatever material this is. I'll just drag these handles like this. And then one more thing on the rotation. Let's just make this even more dramatic. So it's going to be slower at the beginning and end and faster in the middle. All right, so this is the final result of the Putting it all together exercise. For the exaggeration exercise, I've already set up two squares for you that have the putting it all together exercise key frames on them. The top one is meant to just be a reference. This is the putting it all together as is. And then the exaggeration is going to be the putting it all together. Then you should go in and adjust these keyframes to make the animations exaggerated. There's a bunch of different things that you can do. I won't go through every single step because you can see how I chose to do it by going in and looking at the completed exercise. But some of the ways that you can exaggerate this would be to make the squash and stretch amounts more instead of just one oh seven, Maybe this squash is to like 125. Then here, instead of just 93, maybe it goes to like 70, Then so on for the rest of these key frames. Then for the bend, instead of going to 25, maybe it goes all the way to 40, you get the point. You can also go in to the graph editor and adjust the motion curve. Maybe save the rotation. Maybe you make this even steeper. It's even more, extremely fast in the middle. Just go through and make changes to exaggerate any of the animations on these existing key frames. This is where your knowledge of the brand comes in handy. Think about the style of animation that fits the essence of the brand. Where on the spectrum should your logo animation fall? Then think about how you can exaggerate the principles of animation you plan to use or tone them down to fit this style of animation. 15. What's Next: Hopefully you now have a solid understanding of the principles of animation and some plan for how you're going to animate your logo. Now it's time to put your knowledge to work and animate your logo. Like I mentioned at the beginning of class, I can't show you every possible technique that you may need to animate your custom logo. But I have put together a bonus lesson of common logo animation techniques and the right direction for where to learn more. I'd love to see what you come up with, so please post your logo animation as a class project. There are instructions in the projects and resources section. If you need help rendering your logo as a video or gift file and uploading it as a class project. If there's anything in particular you want feedback on, please include a note to let me know. You can also tag me at Animation. Explained, if you post your project on Instagram, if you found this class helpful, I'd really appreciate if you wrote it a few. This helps me create more valuable content for you. Thank you. To keep learning, click on my name next to this video to check out the other classes that I'm teaching. You might be interested in some of my classes on animating text. Make sure you're following me on Skillshare. And sign up to my newsletter to hear when I have a new class for you. Thanks so much for watching and until next time, happy. Animating. 16. BONUS: Logo Animation Techniques: In this video, I'll show you some common logo animation techniques. And I'll point you in the right direction for where to learn more about any of these techniques. And stick around until the end because I have a bonus tip to help you figure out how to animate your logo animation idea. A quick disclaimer, I'm going to be showing you examples that I didn't actually create. So while I can make an educated guess for how they were animated, I don't know for 100% sure. One of the fun things about after effects is that there's usually multiple ways to achieve similar results. The first technique is trimpaths. Trimpaths allow you to animate lines. And while it's a super simple concept, the possibilities are endless. Trim paths can be used to animate texts like it's being drawn in the works. Great for both sand seraph and script lettering. Trim paths are also great for animating accent lines. There are so many examples of logos that are animated with trim paths. Once you know what to look for, you'll be able to spot them. Anytime there's a line drawing in, there's a good chance it was animated using Trimpas. You can also animate dots or lines moving along a custom path using trim paths, like in this example. To animate with trim paths, you'll need an after effect shape layer that has a stroke but no fill. You may need to recreate parts of your logo to achieve this. You can do this in after effects, but I find it's often easier to do. An illustrator, this is super important to getting the drawing in look and although it can be tedious, it can't be skipped. Make sure each path or shape has a stroke and no fill. The lines also need to have the same width throughout. And you can't use brushes. If that's an issue, I have a tip for you in the next technique. Also, it's best to have each path or shape that you want to animate in its own labeled layer. If you used Illustrator, you'll need to import your logo into after effects under Import As. Make sure to choose composition, retain layer sizes. Then write. Click the vector layers and create shapes from vector layer or use overload to streamline this process. Then toggle open one of the layers, That's a path with only a stroke. Click the Ad button and choose Trim Paths. Now you can animate the trim path properties to make the line draw in. If you want to reverse the direction of the path, click this button. You can animate dots moving across the screen and even give them a smear effect by using trim pass. To do this, you'll want the path for the dots to travel to be a shape layer with only a stroke. The stroke weight should be the size of the dot. Set the caps to round caps, add trimpass, and set the trim pass value to be a very small number, like 0.1 to make a dot. Now you can animate the offset value to move the dot along the line. You can also animate the star and values and then offset their motion in the graph editor to create a smear effect. I know that was fast, but I cover it in more detail in this class. In this example, these dots are actually created using trim paths on a circle. That way, it was really easy to animate them spinning around in a perfect circle. These dots are actually a circle layer that has a stroke but no fill. There's actually two circles that are right on top of each other and one is just flipped 180 degrees. That's why there's two dots. First, to animate them, coming out from the center, I animated the size of the circle. Then to have these dots spin around, I animated the offset. Then here to give them a smear effect, I animated the start and the end values. Then if you're curious here, when they become o's with a circle cut out from the middle, I actually use separate layers and use mats to cut out that circle. These cut out this inner circle. Obviously a lot of logos have text trim paths can be a great way to animate texts. But there are other options too. Check out this video and guide to learn more about animating texts. The next technique is to use mats. Mats allow you to control which parts of a layer are visible. They allow you to crop, intersect, and exclude animated and overlapping shapes. Here's the basics on mats. First, choose which layer you want to crop. I want to crop this full screen design, so it's only visible within the text layer that says mats. On the design layer, I'll choose the text layer as the mat. There are a couple different kinds of mats, so check out this tutorial to learn more. Here are some examples of logos that likely use some kind of mat or mask. In this example, there's likely a circle that acts as a matt to crop out the ends of these lines. Here it looks like yellow circles followed by green circles fill in each letter. The letters act as a mat. For the colored circles. There's probably a hidden mat making the letters EVO not stick out to the left of the V as they move into place. You can also combine trim, pets and mats. This way you can reveal shapes that aren't just a simple stroke with a consistent thickness throughout. This can be helpful if you want to animate text drawing in, but the width of the text isn't quite the same all the way around. You can also use this technique to reveal lines that have a brush effect or texture. This example is from my class animated lettering. Another technique that can come in handy is to animate the path property of a shape layer. This way, you have complete freedom to transform the shape. In order to animate the path property, you'll need an after effect shape layer. If you're working with vector artwork from Illustrator, you can write, click the layer and choose create shapes from vector layer. Or if you want to animate the path of text, you could right click a text layer and choose create shapes from text. If you have a parametric after effect shape, like a circle rectangle polygon or star, and you see something like rectangle path but not simply path, you can convert the shape to a bezier shape. To get the path property to do this, right click where it says rectangle or whatever shape path. Then choose convert to bezier path. Now you have a path property that you can key frame. Here are some examples of logos that likely have the path property animated. I converted these letters into shapes and animated the path property to create the smear effect in this logo animation. The way the cub head elongates could be done by animating the path of the shape. The way that this shape expands could be created by animating the path property of the shape. When doing something like this, it can be easier to animate backwards. So you start with the final state of the shape and move to the left on the timeline to set earlier key frames. The way that the letters expand could also be done by converting the text to shapes and animating the path properties. Check out this guide to learn more about working with shapes and after effects. Again, you can combine different techniques. For example, you could animate the path of lines that draw in with trimpass to give them a more dynamic look. Morphing shapes or icons can be a unique way to animate a logo. Here are some examples of logos that use morphing. In this example, the Barry builds in by morphing shapes. This example hints at what the brand does by animating morphing icons before revealing the logo. This example follows a similar idea to explain what the brand is all about. To learn more about creating morphing animations, check out my class animating morphing icons and after effects. Keep in mind that a lot of logos are animated by simply animating the standard transform properties. You might not need to do anything super fancy in order to effectively communicate what the brand stands for through their logo animation. Just make sure to use any principles of animation that makes sense for the logo animation and get into the graph editor to fine tune those motion curves. Now for the bonus tip, if you find a cool logo animation, but you have no idea how it was created, here's a simple but effective tip. Either download the video so you can scrub through it in slow motion, or take a video of the video on your screen and put your phone in slow motion mode. Well, you should never copy anyone else's work. You can watch it in slow motion to try to get a better idea of what's going on. This can help you figure out how they may have achieved a certain effect, so you can create your own unique version of it. Again, do not copy other people's work. Use this tip just to learn for more logo animation inspiration. Check out my Pintrest board and be sure to follow me as I'll keep pinning more as I create or find new logo animations. Hopefully these techniques have helped you to figure out how to go about animating your logo links to all the resources I mentioned will be in the class resources section. 17. BONUS: Common Logo Animation Mistakes: Here are six common mistakes when animating logos and what to do instead. Let's start with the worst mistake, butchering the logo. What I mean is that once the logo animates in, it should be pixel perfect compared to the original logo, down to every color curve, corner, et cetera. When animating a logo, you may need to recreate parts of it in order to animate it. Or you may use masks to animate the logo revealing. If you're not careful, a corner could be clipped or a layer could be bumped to check to make sure everything is looking correct. Make sure to save a fresh, undisturbed version of the logo. Then import that and overlay it on the finished state of your animated logo to use as a reference. To make sure everything is lined up, you can set the blending mode on the original logo to difference to highlight any inconsistencies. The next mistake is making the logo animation too slow and or too long. A logo animation should last about three to 10 seconds. If it just animates in, it should be shorter, closer to 3 seconds. Versus if it animates in and out, it should be longer, closer to 10 seconds, to allow time to pause in the middle so viewers can see the full logo. The goal of a logo animation is to catch the viewer's attention and convey what the logo stands for in the shortest amount of time possible. The logo animation should be snappy. The last thing you want to do is annoy or frustrate your customers by making them watch a slow or predictable animation before they can get on with what they're trying to do. Mistake number three is using the whole frame. It might be tempting to animate a logo reveal by having elements of the logo fly in from offscreen. But before you do this, consider all of the use cases for the logo animation. If the screen size changes or the aspect ratio, you'll have to figure out a way to account for this. Making a bunch of different versions could be a real pain. It definitely looks unprofessional to have raw edges shown where artwork is cut off in an awkward way, even if it's just for a split second. You'll also run into similar problems if you have the whole screen changed colors like this example. I'm not saying it's bad to animate a logo like this, I'm just saying that before you do, you should consider all of the different use cases for your logo animation. If you need to make different versions for different screen sizes or aspect ratios, that could be a real headache. Instead, I'd recommend having your entire logo animation contained within a relatively small area, like this. Mistake number four is using mismatching elements in your logo animation. When animating a logo, you may want to incorporate new elements that are not in the actual logo design. These could be simple things like shapes, lines, or smears, or they could be completely new icons or illustrations. Either way, anything in your logo animation should be on brand. Be sure all colors are within the brand's color palette. The level of detail is consistent, including things like line thickness and that the overall style is consistent. If you didn't design the logo, but choose to make your own icons to incorporate into the animation, be extra careful that they match the style of the logo. If you can consult with the logo designer, either to have them design the icons or to make sure that the ones that you designed fit. Mistake number five is not obeying the laws of physics. When things fall, gravity accelerates them towards the ground. So don't just easy ease those key frames. The object will slow down before landing, which will look wrong because it is. Instead, you'll need to go into the graph editor to adjust the motion curve. When an object is tossed in the air, it usually moves in the shape of an arc. The motion should start off fast because of whatever force launched into the air. Even if that thing is imaginary, then at the highest point, the object should slow down but not stop. So the speed should never reach zero. As the object falls, gravity accelerates it towards the ground. Again, you'll need to go into the graph editor to create this motion curve. Bouncing will also require obeying the laws of physics. If the graph editor scares you, check out my class smooth moves to learn everything you need to know about creating realistic motion and after effects. The last mistake is lacking rhythm or flow. A logo animation can be a simple reveal that starts slow, speeds up, and ends slow. Or it could have a few segments or scenes that create a rhythm. Look at the difference between these two animations. The one on the left uses all linear key frames and everything animates in. At the same time for the one on the right, the key frames are not linear. They've been adjusted in the graph editor to give each element a custom motion curve, and the timing of when each element comes in is staggered. This logo is a lot more interesting and satisfying to watch. As you've learned throughout the class, incorporating a few principles of animation can level up this animation even more. Now look at the difference between the boring linear first version, the second improved flow version, and the final version that uses principles of animation two. 18. BONUS: How I Animated This Logo: This bonus video, I'll walk you through step by step how I created this logo animation. Let's take a look at the project files for the finished version, and then I'll recreate it step by step. This is the main composition where I have three different versions of the same logo animation. So if I go into this, this is where all of the animation happens. And then if I go back into the main comp, these two additional comps are for the accent layers. I'll show you how to do that at the end. Let's start by recreating this animation. I'm going to create a new composition. I'm making this 1,500 by 1,500 pixels, 30 frames per second and 5 seconds long. The next step is to just use text layers to recreate the logo. So I'm going to do each letter on its own layer of text. You can see all my settings for my font here, but feel free to use your own. And then I'm just going to be lazy and duplicate this and then change the letter. And then I'll repeat that for the other letters. It might be helpful to zoom in and turn on the grid to make sure that you have everything lined up nicely. Because I'm going to animate the letters changing shape, like kind of creating these smears, what I need to do is convert these into shape layers. To do that, right click on one of the text layers, go to create and then create shapes from text. For some reason, it doesn't let you do them all at once. If you select multiple, the option is great out. I'm going to delete the original text layers. The way I'm going to tackle this animation is to animate the position and scale properties of each letter, and then at the end, I'll go back and animate the path property. So let's start with the L. And the first thing that I want to do is move the anchor point so that when it scales, it scales from the top. And it's also going to be animated in from the top, so I think having it scale from the top will look better than having it scale from where the anchor point currently is. To move the anchor point, you can use the pan behind tool. And then if you hold command, it'll snap into place. Next, I'm going to open up the position property and go to 25 frames and set a keyframe. Then let's go back to ten frames and have this move over to the left. Then at the start of the timeline, let's have it move up. We're just animating in reverse. So something like that. I'm also going to add a little bit of follow through. So instead of just having it come to a stop right here, it's going to overshoot its final position and then come back to it. So to do that, I'm going to move to 1 second, copy and paste this keyframe, so this is the final position, and then I'll move back to this keyframe at 25 frames and just move the L over a little bit to the right. So now it looks like this. These are all linear keyframes, which makes the animation look really boring and mechanical. So what I'm going to do is select them and do F nine to Ess. You can also right click Go to Keyframe Assistant and then EZ Es. And then I'm going to open up the graph editor with those keyframes still selected to adjust this graph to make it look even better. So right now, it looks a little bit better, but I can make this look even more snappy. First, I'm going to click on one of the keyframes to bring up the handles, and then let's just drag this holding shift to make sure that I don't go like that and adjust the keyframe. I'm going to drag this so that it's going faster at the beginning. I'm looking up the speed graph. This is showing a graph of speed over time. It's going to start off pretty fast. The peak of the speed is right here, and then it's going to slow down as it reaches this first keyframe. Then let's exaggerate this motion, it's going to be slower and then faster and then slower. And then also for this little anticipation peak, I'll do the same. So let's see what that looks like. Much better. You can finest this as much as you want, but let's just keep going. Next, I'm going to animate the scale property. So with this L layer selected, I'm going to hit Shift S to bring up the scale property. I'm going to go to ten frames and set the scale value to be 100%, and at the start of the timeline, I'll set the scale to be zero. So now it's going to scale up as it's moving down, and then it'll move over. Let's add follow through to this animation two. So I'm going to move this keyframe over to 15 frames for it to be 100%, and then I'll set the scale value to be a little bit bigger than 100%. Let's do 15 here, so it's going to scale up a little bit too big and then shrink back down. Let's add EZ Es to these keyframes. And then go into the graph editor and just make these a little bit more dramatic. So I'll kind of try to match the position graph so that the peak speed is right here. And let's see what that looks like. Now we just need to do similar position and scale animations on all of the other letters. If we go into the final version, you can see that the top O is going just straight down and the G is going straight up, and then the last O is going up and then left. Also, notice that I've positioned each of the anchor points so that it's on either the top if the letters on the top or the bottom if the letters on the bottom. I'm going to speed this part up since it's pretty repetitive. You can adjust the easing on sets of keyframes across layers by selecting them all at once, adding eases, and then going into the graph editor, and then just clicking and dragging to select the keyframe, and then you can grab both of those handles at once. I have the position animations for the O, G, and O, and I already adjusted the graph editor for the O and the G, but for this last O, it has the same kind of motion as the L. So I want to copy this exact easing onto these keyframes. There's a handy tool that's free or pay what you want called Es Copy, where you can easily do that. So if you select the keyframes, then you hit Copy, then you select the keyframes that you want to paste those easing values onto. I don't want to actually paste the keyframes because then the O would be over here where the L is. I just want to paste those easing values. So I'm just going to hit Es over an Es copy, and now it'll have the same easing. For the scale property, you can actually copy and paste the exact keyframes onto each of the other letters. Here's what it looks like so far. Now let's animate the path property each letter to give it that smear effect. This is another principle of animation. I'm going to start with the L and toggle open to find the path property. I'm going to move to 25 frames and set a path keyframe, and then I'm going to move to where the starts moving to the right. Right now, the entire path and all of the points are selected, so I can't pick up and move individual points. So what I'm going to do is click off and then click back on right where it says L. Now you can see that the path is visible, but none of the points on the path are selected. So I'm going to zoom in and then just click and drag over all of these points on the left to select them, and I'm going to drag them out to the left. Then I'm going to move back to ten frames, and then I'm going to copy and paste this keyframe so the L is back to its normal shape. Then at the start of the timeline, the L is scaled all the way to zero, so I can't see anything. I'm going to open up the scale property and just take these keyframes and move them over and then set the scale to 100. Now I can actually see what I'm working with, and I'm going to select where it says L again, select these top points on the path and then drag them up to make the L tall. Let's add es Es to these keyframes and then go into the graph editor and make this graph just a little bit more interesting. It's maybe something like that. And then I need to delete this scale keyframe and move these ones back into place. Here's what this looks like. In order for smears to look good, it's important that the thing that's creating this mir doesn't look like it's backtracking because of the smear. So let me explain more what I mean. So if we kind of scrub through this and just focus on the L, right here, the L isn't moving forward fast enough for it to look like it's a smear coming out from behind the L. That thick part of the L is kind of scaling from both sides, left and right. So to fix this, we need to find the fastest part of the position animation. So if I go into the graph editor and I'm looking at the speed graph, that's going to be this peak right here. And that's where I want the smear to be at its widest part. So the widest part is going to be this keyframe. So if I just drag this keyframe over, that's going to help. And then if I also go into the graph editor and adjust this graph so that it's fastest right as it's getting smeared. So like this. Now let's play that back. That looks a lot better. So right here, it's only moving forward, and the smear is coming out from behind the L. It doesn't look like it's scaling. It looks more like a smear. Now let's move on to the O. So for the O, if you go into the path property, there's actually two different path properties because there's an inner path and an outer path. So I'm going to move my playhead to 25 frames and set a path keyframe for both of these. Then I'm going to go back to 15 frames and let's zoom in on the O. Right now, if I were just to animate this point right here, the O is not going to stretch in a way that I think looks good. So I'm going to undo that and go up to the Pen tool and then click and hold and find the Add Vertex tool. I'm going to go really close to these existing points and add another point. So it probably helps to zoom in even more. So I'm adding a point right next to the existing point on both sides. And I'm also going to need to do this on the center circle. And then I can carefully select just the top points and then drag them up to create this smear. Then at the start of the timeline, I'm going to copy and paste these keyframes so that the O will start as a normal shape. So here's what that looks like. Let's make this miror look more like this and also make sure that it's not back tracking so that the smear is happening during the fastest part of the O's motion. I'm going to open up the position property. Let's just look at where the fastest part of the motion is. It's happening right here, which might make the smear hard because it's also scaling in then. Let's actually just adjust this position property. So maybe if the fastest part of the motion is right around here, I'm going to move these two keyframes over so that when the o is the most smeared, it lines up with the fastest part of the position of the o. And then I want the inner circle to be a little bit smaller so it makes the top thicker to give it more of a smeared look. I'm going to go into the inner circle and let's zoom in and then just grab all of these points and bring them down. And let's add Ess to these keyframes. You could go into the graph editor and adjust these keyframes even more, but let's keep going. Hopefully it's relatively easy to figure out how to animate the G and the O based on how I animated the path property of the L and the first O. So for the sake of time, I'm going to skip ahead, but here's what I have so far. One thing that I want to adjust is that you can see the letters when they're teeny, tiny like this, and I want to avoid that. So I'm going to go to three frames and just trim the start of the letters so they start right at three frames. That way, the letters will pop in and you won't have to see when they're really small. The next thing I want to do is stagger the layers so that the letters don't all come in at the same time. So let's have the L come in first. And I'm not staggering these evenly because I want the animation to follow the principle of ease in and ease out, which you can apply to keyframes, but you can also apply to a logo animation as a whole. So how this works is that the L is going to start the animation, and there's relatively few things happening. And then there's going to be more things happening in the middle of the animation. And then this last O is going to finish off the animation more staggered than the rest so that it finishes with less things happening. So it's kind of tapering the amount of animation. So it starts off with a little bit less animation, less speed in the middle, there's more animation, more things going on. Things are moving faster. And then at the end, there's less animation and things are slowing down. So here's what I have so far. To animate this logo out, I'm going to have each letter scaling. But right now, each of the anchor points are in different positions and I want all the letters to scale from the center. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to where I want them to start scaling out, and let's just go into the L. If you go under contents and then the L, there's another set of transform properties, which is just for this shape. These transform properties here are for the entire layer, so you can have multiple shapes within this shape layer. But in these transform properties, if I toggle this open, there's another anchor point. Right now, it's right here. Usually these anchor points are already in the center, but because this was originally a text layer, the anchor point is here. So what I need to do is move this anchor point to the center. So I'm going to use the pan behind tool because unfortunately, this tool doesn't work for this kind of anchor point, and also snapping doesn't work either. So I'm just going to carefully move that to the center. And let's just do that for all the layers. Now it's animate the letter scaling. I just want to find that scale property that's underneath contents and then the letter name and then transform and the letter. And I'm going to animate this scale property. So I'll set a keyframe at 3 seconds for the scale to be 100. And then let's go to 310 and set this to 110, and then go to 4 seconds and set this to zero. So by animating the scale increasing a little bit before it scales down and completely disappears, I'm adding a principle of animation called anticipation. Let's add easing to these keyframes and then go onto the graph editor and just make this look a little bit more exciting. Now let's copy and paste this scale animation onto all the other scale properties. So I'm going to search for scale to quickly bring up those properties and then make sure that I'm pasting it under transform and then the letter name. So now they're all going to scale out, but I also want to stagger the scale key frames. So let's find that scale property again. And let's start with the L going first and then scale these ones a couple of frames after. So here's what I have. Let's also cut the ends of the layers so that they kind of pop out and so you don't see these little tiny layers. So I'm just gonna hit you to bring up all the key frames. And let's cut the layer when the size of the letter is about like this. Now that this animation is finished, the last thing to do is to bring it into another comp to add those accents. I'm going to go into the project panel, take this comp that I've been working in and drag it onto the new comp button to create a new composition with this inside. Let's create a shape for the background, so I'm just going to double click on the Rectangle tool and move this to the bottom. Next, I'm going to duplicate this logo animation by hitting Command D. Then on the bottom copy of this comp, I'm going to add some effects. I'm going to go to effects and presets and search for the fill effect. Drag that on, and then also find the echo effect. And then I'll add this echo effect to the comp. The echo effect creates additional copies to create a trail or a smear. Let's increase the number of copies. You can see what the echo effect is doing, but I don't like the look of the gaps in between the letters. I want this to be a solid smear. So I'm going to set the echo time to something really low. And then let's also change the fill color. Even though I change the fill color to this teal greenish, the echo is still showing in white, so I need to change the echo operator to maximum. I don't want the top copy of the logo to be black, so I'm going to copy this fill effect and paste it onto the top comp and then just change this color to white. If I put this back right now, you can see that the smear for the green part is actually coming in before the smear on the white, which doesn't look quite right. I want it to be the other way around. So if I go to the second comp, right now, the echo time is set to a positive number, which means that it's echoing before the thing that it's echoing. So I need to set this to a negative number, so I'll just add a negative sign in front of this. And now that green smear is going to be after the white. Let's duplicate the second comp to create another set of accents. On this third bottom version of the comp, I'm going to delete the echo effect, and then I'm going to change the fill color to the same color as the background. And then let's just offset this by a couple of frames. You're not going to be able to see this because it's the same color as the background. But what I'm going to do is add a stroke to this. So to do that, I'm going to right click, go to Layer Styles and then stroke. Toggle open the stroke, and let's set this to the green color. And let's make it on the inside. That way, it won't be sticking out behind the letter. And here's the final animation. One last quick thing. If anyone's paying really close attention to detail, in this tutorial, I move the anchor point for each individual letter to the center of the letter so that when they animate out, they animate towards the center of the letter. But in my original logo animation, I did it slightly differently, so the letters go more towards the center of the composition. So if you want to do it that way, all you need to do is just go into each individual letter and move this anchor point towards the center of the comp instead of the center of the letter.