Create an Animated CV / Resume

1. Create your own Animated CV: In our class today, we're going to learn how to take our CV from this boring white pieces of paper with blocks of text to this. Hi there. My name is Kai and I'm a filmmaker, videographer, animator, YouTuber, and all-round visual creative, living and working in London. I'm a firm believer in lifelong learning. I strive continually to improve my knowledge and skills across the whole creative spectrum. Thank you so much for watching. I look forward to hearing from you and working with you in the future. Hi there, my name is Kai Song and I'm a videographer, filmmaker and animator. I currently work as the head of video production for an international company in the higher education sector, I also run my own freelance business called Kai Creative and I have a YouTube channel of the same name dedicated to film making as well as camera and tech reviews, which you might want to go and check out. Now back in 2015, I was really struggling with my freelance work. I had a couple of big projects fall through and what I needed was something that I like to refer to as an artificial springtime. Something that would get me noticed by the right people. But I also realized that I needed to stand out from the crowd. There was, and still is a lot of competition out there and a lot of very talented individuals. What I decided to do was to create an animated CV. Something that would highlight my background, my skills and interests in an engaging way, using storytelling, which I could then use to pitch to prospective clients and even positions within the companies, which is exactly what I did. Late one evening after I just lost a big freelance client, I used my animated CV and a simplified single PDF sheet version of my CV to apply to two jobs that were posted online. The next day, I got back two responses. I had seven interviews and I go two job offers. I took one of those offers and today I am still with that same company part-time. You can actually go and have a look at my original animated CV, as well as my newly updated animated CV right now on the Kai Creatives YouTube channel. Now at the time of recording this video, my original CV has nearly 90,000 views and over a 100,000 minutes of watch time. Granted, it is over five years old, but how often can you say that people all around the world have spent over 100,000 minutes or roughly 70 days worth of time checking out your personal CV. Now, this is actually my CV from about 10 years ago, like so many other CVs out there, it's just pages of plain text on white paper. When hiring for my own video team, I had to read through hundreds of similar CVs just like this. I know that I just scan read through most of them. Something really had to stand out to me for me to put that CV on the cobalt pile. Just reading CVs can be very time consuming, but the animated CV makes it easy for an employer to learn about you in a captivating, engaging, and personal way. They don't have to actively do anything apart from scanning a QR code or clicking a link. It then takes them directly to the video and they can sit back, relax, watch it and enjoy the story that is being played out to them. This type of CV is not just for creatives. I get e-mails and direct messages weekly from all over the world from all types of different professionals asking me to help them make an animated CV. That's one of the reasons I put this class together. Your story and your experiences are unique and telling them in a unique and engaging way will not only help you stand out from your competition, but also will enable your employers to get a taste of what you would like as a person. What will we cover in this class? Well, first of all, we will cover the planning and brainstorming stages, the process of taking your current written paper CV to a more visual CV, and then planning out the animation. We'll also discuss what information you should include to make it engaging and we'll look at how you can choose the right style, colors and assets for your animated CV as well. Now everybody's background, experience and chosen field will be different. My animated CV and your animated CV will be very different. But I will be adding deep dive sections for individual parts from my newest animated CV projects that will help to cover a lot of the basic principles that I used that you can then take forward into your project. Also, this will be an evolving class. If you want more information on a specific part of my animated CV, just leave a comment in the comment section of the class, and I will create a deep dive video on that particular section of my animated CV and I will then add that into the class. Of course, there is going to be a class project and that will be to use what you learn to make your own animated CV and stand out from your competition. You will need access to Adobe After Effects, Illustrator and Premiere Pro. If you want to put in a little extra effort, you can also film yourself too. You will need some basic After Effects and Illustrator knowledge, but don't worry, I was still very much learning After Effects myself when I put my original animated CV together. This class will really arm you with the ideas and knowledge that you need to create your very own personalized animated CV. As a bonus, I will also drop in how I used my animated CV as well as the PDF version to apply for jobs, get interviews, and ultimately get the job I have now as well as freelance clients. I very much look forward to jumping into this class with you and seeing all the amazing animated CVs and resumes that you create. 2. Who should create an Animated CV?: You might be thinking that an animated CV is only for creative people, filmmakers, animators, photographers, designers, actors, artists, etc. But is that really true? But as I mentioned before, I get e-mails and DMs weekly from all over the world from all types of different professionals asking me to help them make an animated CV from lawyers to health care professionals to business people. Obviously, depending on what you do, the tone and style of the animated CV will be different. If you think about it, what is a CV actually for? It's there to demonstrate your capabilities, your skill sets, your experience to really highlight your unique story. But the difference is someone has to actively read your CV, they have to put the work and to learn about you, so in most cases, they just scan through your resume and then maybe throw it on a yes or no pile and then go to the next one. But an animated CV is different, an employer can passively learn about you, it's easy they click a link or they scan a QR code, and then they are educated and entertained for a minute or two on who you are. If it's engaging enough, they will watch the whole thing, unlike a written CV where they might just quickly scan through it and that already puts you ahead of your competition. Because it's visual, it's more memorable than a white piece of paper with chunks of text, so there's a higher chance that they will remember you. An animated CV could be for anybody in any profession. Your story and your experiences are unique, and telling them in a unique and engaging way will not only help you stand out from the crowd but will also enable your employer to get an idea of what you are like as a person. Because you've gone the extra mile to produce this piece of content about yourself, I think that it speaks volumes about the type of person you are. 3. Planning out your new CV: The first thing that you're going to want to do is take your current CV and shorten it down. Try to get it all on one page, so there's no more than 4-500 written words. That will ensure that your animated CV is about 2-3 minutes long when you read it out. The idea is not to bore your prospective employer or client with too much information, stick to the main point and cut out the waffle. However, I would recommend having a quick introduction about yourself and what you currently do, your educational background, key achievements, skills, previous employment and successes, and you should also include some pivotal moments in there too. Things that make you interesting and unique as a person, and you want to tie all of that together through engaging storytelling. How are you going to do all of that? Well, first of all take your current CV and use it as a guide to brainstorm. Create bullet points for the main things that you want to highlight. Basically you want to write out a reduced version of your CV as a script that reads like a story. You want to take your viewer on a journey with you. Now, if you watch my animated CVs online, you will notice that I make them play out like a journey. So we're heading in a certain direction. There's a constant flow of movements in my animated CVs. This really helps to captivate the target audience which is my prospective employer or a client. Also, you want to plan out the route when creating your new shortened CV script. What I mean by that is to think carefully about the visuals and how each theme will transition to the next one. Note down how things will flow from one point to the other. Let's take my paper CV as an example here. I imagine a lot of people's CVs look very similar to this at the moment; lots of writing on multiple pieces of paper. What you want to do is look at the bullet points and the main points that you want to highlight, and you want to think about what would work well in the industry you work in and for the majority of employers or clients in your professional fields that you're targeting and want to attract. Remember, I'm not an expert on you, or your profession, or your background. You are the expert when it comes to making a decision on what you feel is important and want to include in your animated CV. As mentioned earlier, what I would recommend is having a little introduction of who you are, your covered role and experiences wrapped up in a few sentences and show that your contact details are up to date and easily found, your previous work experience, technical skills, key achievements as well as interests, hobbies and transferable skills, and anything else that you think is relevant. One thing to keep in mind is that as things start to come together, they will also start to evolve and change along the way, and that is completely fine. In fact, I managed to reduce my old CV down to exactly a page of writing, probably about 500 words or so which works out to just over three minutes. It's still a little bit long. Because I'm creating a course on making an animated CV I did actually spend a little bit time on my animated CV, but I would recommend that yours be no more than 2-3 minutes long. 4. Choosing the Style, Colour and Assets: Now that you have this cut down version of your resume, the next step is to choose a style that you want to use for the animation, a color palette, as well as making notes of any assets that you require. Remember that this is a visual CV, and so we want things to look as visual as possible. Go through your shortened CV and make a list of images that you think you'll need. Look at the logos of previous companies that you've worked for, educational institutes that you've attended, and qualifications you've gained and try to find high-quality versions of those assets and download them. Also, consider getting logos for social media links like Facebook, LinkedIn, or Instagram if they are relevant and appropriate for your CV. Now, for me as a content creator, having my YouTube channel up there is quite important as prospective clients or prospective employers can have a look at my past work and can see my track record of what I've produced. But if your YouTube channel is full of family or holiday videos, it might not necessarily be relevant for your profession and prospective employers. Again, it's up to you what you decide to include. Now, what I did was print out a reduced copy of my script and add some spaces in between them, and that is where I did some very rough drawings of ideas I had on how I wanted the animation to play out. Actually, if you have a look at some of these initial drawings and concepts, you can see that a lot of them actually made it through to the finished piece. Now, if you are an artist, you can create your own illustrated images and assets, and you can use these for your animated CV. If you have that as a skill set, I strongly recommend you use it as much more of a customize fill to your animation projects. Now, I'm not an artist or an illustrator, so instead of creating the images myself, I use a website called iStock for my image requirements. Now, this is a subscription-based service, but you can get free assets from websites like freepik.com as long as you give accreditation. When searching for images and assets, it's really important to look for things that have a consistent style and fill. Otherwise, if you choose lots of different random images of different styles, your animation is going to look like a pick and mix PowerPoint presentation, and that can make things feel really awkward and a little bit uncomfortable to watch. If you do come across a style that you really like on a stock image website, then it's a good idea to check out the profile of the artist who created that image because there's a strong likelihood that they have other images of that style that you might also be able to use, and that's exactly what I did. While investigating and searching for images, I came across this artist called Akindo on iStock and I loved the style of their images and decided to use a bunch of their assets for my animated CV. Not only did I like the style, but also liked the color palettes that were used in those designs. If you don't know what color palette is, essentially its range of colors that you intend to use in your project. I decided to create my whole animation using those particular colors. The purples, the blues, and the white colors. That artist, Akindo, really helped me to kill two birds with one stone to set the style and choose the color palette for my animated CV. There were a few assets that I had to go and find from other artists on iStock or that I had to modify myself in Illustrator, but for the most parts, Akindo's images were very relevant to my story and this made things much easier for me to keep my style more consistent. Also, it saved me a bunch of time from searching for all of my assets individually. Another thing you might want to consider is creating a storyboard to make things more concrete. Now, this type of in-depth planning, brainstorming, and visualization will really help save you a lot of time during the actual creation process so that you can break things down into more manageable tasks and not be stuck halfway through your animation unsure with which direction you want to take it in. I actually sat down and spent a good few hours just thinking about how I want each of the scenes to look and also the transitions to use, and even then, I did end up deviating slightly from what I originally planned, but I was never stuck as to what direction I wanted the animation to heading. It's not a prerequisite of creating your animated CV, but it definitely helps to create a storyboard, and I would recommend that you sit down and create one. At this point, you should have a basic cut down script of your CV that reads like a story, it shouldn't be more than two to three minutes to read out loud. You should have a rough idea of how you want your story to look possibly even a storyboard. You should have decided on a style that you like or be looking to design some assets yourself. Also, you should be thinking about a color palette that you want to use. The next step is to record your script so that we can start animating, and that is what we'll be talking about next. 5. Recording your script: Now that you've finalized your scripts, you can create a voice over for it. This can be as simple as recording it on your PC or Mac via a free piece of software like Audacity, or you could film yourself reading out like I did in front of a green screen. Now, it must be mentioned that it's not necessary for you to film yourself, you could just record your voice and use that to guide your animation. Some people might want to avoid a voice-over altogether and just use text and that is completely fine too. It really depends on how you feel about it and also whether it works for your profession. In my line of work, I feel like it is appropriate and I feel like it helps people to get an idea of what I'm like as a person. If you do want to film yourself, what can you do? Well, first of all, think about how you should represent yourself, this is very important as you want to set a good first opinion. What should you wear? Well, I'd say wear what you normally wear in your line of business. If you're a business person and will generally be wearing a suit at work, then wear a suit, if you're a personal trainer then wear gym clothes. You then want to memorize your scripts, practice it again and again. If it's only a minute or so long, you should get the word perfect. Then you can cut your footage anytime into your animation. If you're having issues doing that, then you can also use a teleprompter. But if your script is only about 500 words long, I would recommend you practice it, memorize it and present it to camera like you're giving a speech on a stage. If you're just going to record your voice, then you can simply read it and record the audio, but do try to sound as enthusiastic as possible to try and keep those energy levels up. Remember, that the most important thing here is the storytelling element. If you do want to use a green screen like I did, then here is a quick breakdown of my approach. First of all, make sure you light your screen as much as possible and as evenly as possible. Also make sure that you light yourself, but try and avoid casting shadows on your green screen. When you're happy with your footage, import it into After Effects, use the selective color effects and select the greens. Push up the cyan, drop the magenta and push up the yellow and the blacks to really punch that green color. Now, use the Keylight 1.2 effect and select the green background to remove it. Then you can tidy this up by going to view screen mats, then go into the screen map drop-down menu and then push up the clip black option and pull down the clip white option. You can then use the screen shrink grow option with a negative value like minus one to pull the edges in a bit and just make things a little more tidy. If you have any artifacts in the corners of your image, you can then use a mask directly on the footage to remove those. But hopefully, if you've lit your screen correctly, you won't have this problem. Now, sound is vitally important for this piece of content, so you want to ensure that you don't record in an echoey room. If need be put a cover or a sheet over your heads and your recorder and record your sound. That will ensure that you don't get any reflected sound or echoing. Also, set the levels on your recording device to avoid peaking, that's when you talk too loudly and your sound clips. If you use a device like the H1 Zoom recorder, you can set your levels between minus six and minus 12 db. So when you're talking, make sure that your voice falls in between those values and you should be good to go. So with a recording of your footage or a voice-over, you can now use that as a foundation to build your animated CV. This means we can now jump into the actual animating. 6. Time to Animate: Now we can get to animating this project and really bring your CV to life. Now, at first, things can seem a little daunting, especially if you've never used after effects before. Having a basic working knowledge of after effects is useful. But saying that I will be doing deep dive sessions into the main principles of my CV and breaking things down into simpler tasks. You'll be able to use these lessons and principles in creating your own animated CV. The things that we will be covering in this section, will be one, modifying the files from I stopped to create our assets. Two, using keyframes and null objects to control our movement. Three, using shapes and alpha maps to reveal things, and four using trim paths to build out our lines. These will be the basic building blocks that you need to create an animated CV similar to mine. Now, I won't be covering every single part of my animated CV, but saying that if you want a deep dive into additional parts of my CV then leave me a request in the comment section of the class, and I will work to include these in the course later on. 7. Basics - Modifying illustrator files from istock: So we are finally jumping into After Effects and we can start animating our CV. We're going to look at the first few seconds of my animated CV just now, and really what we're going to focus on is this little man waving. So a lot of my time was actually spent sorting out the Illustrator files that I had downloaded from iStock to really get them into a workable state for my animation. So removing sections and adding in layers and making adjustments in Illustrator. So if you're going down the same path as me and you're going to find images or assets on stock websites like iStock or Shutterstock, then there are a few things that you will need to bear in mind. So let's go to iStock first. As mentioned before, an artist that I really liked that I found on here was called Akindo. I really like their style and I really like their assets. Just scrolling down here, you will notice a lot of these assets and characters, and of course the color palette which I used in my animated CV. So if we're going to download an image, let's go to this one as an example. So when it comes to downloading the image, we don't want to download any of these JPEG images. Rather we want the EPS version. This is basically a vector file, which means that you can scale it to any size, especially within After Effects, and it won't lose any quality. It will retain its quality, and that is exactly what we want. So let's download this image. Now, we can open that in Illustrator, and what you will notice about this image in particular over here in the layer section is that they're all individual bits and pieces that are grouped together that we can now take apart and edit. So ideally what we want to do is emulate a waving man. So we can choose one of these characters and probably the one that is standing up, and we want to get him into a workable Illustrator file ready to import into After Effects. How we can do that is by clicking on this white cursor here or pressing A. This is the Direct Selection Tool, and we can click on a part of our man. You will notice a little red indicator pop-up over here. We can scroll down now to this indicator. Click on this little button, and that will select our whole man. What we can then do is go to Edit, Copy, and then go to File, New and create a new Illustrator file. Create. Then we can go to Edit, Paste. We have our man now out of the original scene into a new Illustrator file ready to be edited. What we can do now is just save this as Animated Class Man, and Okay that. Now, it's not easy to see what's going on because of this whiteboard covering things up. So what we want to do very quickly is go back to our original iStock image. I'm going to just copy the backgrounds and then select it here, Edit, Copy. Go back to our animated man. Create a new layer, put it underneath the man, and go to Edit, Paste. So now we can just see things a little bit more clearly. So what we want to start doing now is editing this man to get him into a state where he is ready to be animated, but also where he's waving. So the first thing we want to do is remove this chart. We can do that by going to the layers, toggling down our main layer, and finding that chart. So we've got the two graph bits here. We can do that also by clicking on our Direct Selection Tool or hitting A, selecting that and then you can see it pop up here, it's highlighted with this little blue indicator, then we can either turn the layers off using the I icon or we can hit the Delete button, select the layer, hit the Delete button, and get rid of them completely. That's what I'm going to do just to remove the chart completely. So now you will notice that he's got an arm here, which is layered up, which is fantastic, but he's also got a hand here without an arm. So we're going to remove this little hand first so we can click on it here, which selects the hand and then hit Delete. Now we want to build up this hand, but before we built a second arm and hands, we need really to get these into separate layers so we can animate them in After Effects. So what we're going to do is create three new layers. One for the arm, the forearm, and the hands. Then we're going to select these individual pieces and put them into those new layers. So we're going to select the arm here. I'm going to pop it into Layer 3. We're then going to select the forearm and pop that into the layer above, and then we're going to select the hands, which is here, I'm going to pop that into that layer there. Actually, we want the hand, if you look, we want this hand underneath the sleeves. So we're going to pop Layer 5 underneath Layer 4 so that it's covered by the sleeve. So now we have this right arm in a state where we can animate it in After Effects. But he's obviously missing an arm. So we want a second arm here just hanging down. We can do that by copying our other arm over. So create three new layers, and let's just put them above these layers here. We're going to select on our arm and just go Edit, Copy and Edit, Paste. Again, we can move this arm up to his shoulder. In order to rotate this, we can come up to our Selection tool. So we can click here or just hit V on the keyboard and if we come very close to one of the corners, the arrow will change, and this means we can now rotate the arms. We're going to just rotate it over to this side, and then we're going to pull it over to his shoulder, and we're going to leave it there. So we're going to get our forearm here and we can Control C and Control V that into our new layer. Again, we can move it over, go to one of the corners, rotate it around, and pop it onto the arm there. We just want a hand now, so we're going to do the same thing with the hands. Select it, Control C, Control V. Bring it over here, rotate it around. Now, it's not facing the right way as you can tell. So we'll right-click on it, we'll go to transform, and we will go to Reflect. Then we can reflect it vertically by going to Okay, and now it's facing the right way. We'll just put that there on to the left forearm. We really want this underneath the forearm, so we'll move it under Layer 6. So now we've got our man and he's in the position now where we can animate his arms in After Effects. The only other thing that I think I want to animate from this man in After Effects is going to be his head. So what we're going to do is again, go to our Direct Selection Tool. Select his head, pull down the arrow to find his head in this layer here. We want to create a new layer, and we want to pop his head in that layer. So now that is in an editable state. You will notice however that it is above his shirt and tie and his body. So we're going to put this layer underneath his body. So now this man is in a state that we can start to animate him in After Effects. Before that though, I'm going to turn off this background layer, and I'm going to save. Now we're going to jump into our After Effects project. So we're back in After Effects now and we want to create this animation of our man just waving very briefly on the screen. So how are we going to do that? Well, we're going to go to our animation file that we just saved and it was called Animated Class Man. We're going to import that directly into After Effects. Just drag and drop it into our project, and you will notice that it asks me how I want to import it. So as a composition or a footage. We want to import it as a composition because we want to be able to edit those layers. So what we're going to do is go Okay, and it creates its own composition animated class man. What we can do is click on that and we have our new man here, I'm just going to turn the resolution up a little bit for this part, and we have our individual layers. Now, a good practice here would be to name our layers individually. So first of all, we've got our heads. So we're just going to type head. Then if we come up here, we've got our body. That is our right arm, that is our right hand. To rename our layers, you can click on the name, hit "Enter", and write them in. We've named all of our different body parts here. What we want to do now is start animating. Now, we can animate these parts in a couple of different ways, but I'm going to take the simplest approach, which I think probably one of the best approaches for what we are trying to do. To move around After Effects, hit H on the keyboard, and it will bring up a little hand and you can just move things around now. To bring back your cursor, just hit V. So H for hand, and that allows you to click and move around, and V is now to select different parts of your project. Now we're going to start making things move. Let's make this right arm wave. We've got these three elements. What we can do is we can solo these layers by clicking on a little circle to the left-hand side here, and this one, and this one. Basically, we want the arm to come up and wave. We want it to rotate. If you hit R on your keyboard, you can bring up the rotation value and we can actually now rotate our arm. But this looks very odd, doesn't it? We're not really rotating in the right way. It's not pivoting around the elbow, is it? The reason that's happening is because of this, and this is our anchor point. We need to put our anchor point where our arm is going to be rotating, which will probably be around here. Now, in order to do that, hit Y on your keyboard and move your anchor point over to the middle of your asset. Now, if we hit R again and we move that rotation around, you can see that we're actually rotating around where the shoulder should be. We need to do that for each of our different parts of our arm. If we go to the right arm, we want it to rotate around the shoulder. We're going to hit Y and move the anchor point to the middle of the shoulder, which is about there. It's the same for the hand. We want it to rotate around the natural spot, which would be the wrist. Go to our hand, hit Y again and move the rotation point to around there. Now, we want to be able to rotate this arm so that it goes up and it waves. We obviously wave by raising our arm up from our shoulder. If we go to our right arm and we hit R, and we go to rotate it, that's brilliant that it rotates up, but our forearm and our hand are not moving with it, which is not good. What we want to do is pick whip or parent our forearm to our arm and our hand to our forearm. How do we do that? Well, you will notice that there's this little spiral here and underneath that is this parent and link. Ideally, we want to parent our right arm or our forearm rather to our right arm and a hand to our forearm. If you get this little whip, you hold down and you pull it over to the forearm, now the hand is connected to the forearm. If we rotate the forearm as an example, you will notice that the hand stays with the forearm. The same thing is true of our right arm. If we get our forearm, we get the pick whip tool and we put it to our arm. If we rotate the arm now, it all stays together. Now, you will notice that this movement doesn't look very natural and that's because of where we're connecting the arm to the forearm because of the illustration. What we need to do is correct that next. Get our forearm, we're still on rotation, and just rotate that round slightly. What we can do now is just move this into a position that looks a little bit more natural, so maybe around there. Now, if we move our arm, the hand can be something around here. If we rotate our forearm back to that original type of position, it's not perfect. I suppose we can fix that by, again, hitting Y and moving this point just probably a little bit that way. Ideally, to make this look better, these should be curved. We could actually mask these corners out. What we'll do is we'll unselect these just to have our forearm visible and then we'll hit this pen tool up here. We can create a mask around our forearm by selecting and creating a mask here, creating a second point here, and then holding down to create a curve going around the forearm, creating another point there and then this point here, and then, again, creating another curve here. Now we can actually create a curve to our arm to stop those long sharp bits from pointing out. If we click away, you can see now it's curved. We can bring out other elements back in now. Hit V on the keyboard, bring that anchor point in a little bit and we can pop that there. Now, when we rotate, we do have a sharp edge on the actual right arm, so let's just solo that a second. We can do the same thing here, we can make this curved. Go to your mask tool and select a point. Hold and drag to create that curve, and over here the same thing. Then, move around the arm. Bring that up a little bit and down, and now we have a curve on both our arms. We can bring those arms and hands in. It's starting to look a little bit better, isn't it? Now we can rotate these into that position of waving. How are we going to do that? Well, we need to use keyframes to do that. We're going to set the keyframes for our arm here. We're going to hit R. There's a little stopwatch over here. We want to turn that on. That introduces a little diamond here, and that is called a keyframe. That's a marker point for the position or the rotation details of the arm there. We want to leave that like that. Now, we also want to create a rotation keyframe for our forearm. Click on R on the forearm and turn on the rotation keyframe stopwatch. Again, I'm going to move this anchor point slightly more central. Now we've got the two keyframes for the rotation set on our arm. How are we going to rotate this now? Well, we're going to move a few frames forward. A good way to move 10 frames forward in After Effects is to hold down the Shift key and the page down key. As you can see, that's moving 10 frames forward. That just is an idea. A lot of my animation is done with about ten or 20 frames worth of movement. Now we're over here and we want this arm to be up here. What we're going to do is click on our right arm, and then we're going to slide over the rotation of the arm so that it's about there. While we do that, we're also going to do that with the forearm as well. That's going to rotate up like so. There we go. Now our arm movement is going to look something like this. What we can do is select those two keyframes and hit the F9 button to create something called an easy ease movement, just to make move in a bit more of a smoother motion like so. In fact, I might actually make it 40 frames for the movement. You can vary the movement, so you can have the forearm moving after the arm has moved or slowly moved into that position. Now, if we unsolo these layers, we can see what that looks like on our man. It does look very odd. But what we can do is move that right arm and you can see he's literally just moving his hand up. We want him to now wave that hand. In fact, let's get that position looking a little bit better by going to the arm and properly about there. Again, we can move the rotation point around. That's where it will rotate from, just to get it looking a little bit smoother and correct. He's going out like that and we want to move that in the same motion and timing. Move those keyframes around just to get it looking fluid. Once his hand is up, we just want him to wave with his hand. All we need to do there is just go to the right hand, click on rotation. Again, we'll set a keyframe for about here where he starts to wave. We'll move 10 frames forward, so shift, page down, and we'll rotate it a couple of degrees to the right. We'll move 10 frames forward, and we will move it a couple of degrees back. Then we'll select those two keyframes, we'll move two frames forward and control C, control V. It's almost like he's going. Again, we can copy those three keyframes. Copy, move 10 frames forward, and have that animation. It's a little bit of a stunt there. Let's get rid of that keyframe. Now we've got a waving man. He goes, hi. It's not exactly like our original animation. I haven't even curved out his arms in this one. It's literally on the scene for a second and then it spins off, so it doesn't really matter that much. There we have essentially how a lot of the basic animation was done in my animated CV. Finding the EPS files on Shutterstock, editing them in two layers, importing them as compositions into After Effects using dynamic linking, and then animating them using anchor points. Then, just playing around with the movement and the rotation points to get it looking as good as we possibly can in After Effects. Now, you can go a lot more complicated with your movement in After Effects, may be using things like Duik and character animated to add more natural movement like walk cycles and mouth flaps for talking, but I didn't do any of that this time round. I do, however, encourage you to investigate those options a little more for your individual projects. Again, if you want any specific details on any of the characters or elements that I animated in my animated CV, just let me know down in the description box below and I'll see if I can get a little part of that into this class. 8. Basics - Key frames and using null objects to control movement: I'm assuming that you're After Effects knowledge is quite basic in this section. If you know how to move things using keyframes and how to use null objects to control movement already, then feel free to skip this part. Everything in After Effects is controlled by keyframes, and we've already seen how we can move keyframes around by shifting the anchor point and then playing around with the rotation as we can see here with our waiving character. There are other basic keyframes, such as position and scale that we can use unchanged in After Effects. We can highlight this by going to Composition, New Composition. We're just going to call this position and scale movement. Then maybe we'll use our YouTube logo as an example and it's a little bit big, so what we want to do is scale it down to about 25 percent. You will notice straight away that the anchor point is in the middle of this YouTube button. That means that if we hit "A" on our keyboard and we rotate it, it's going to rotate around that anchor points. I just put that back to normal, hit "0". But not only can we move the rotation, but we can also keyframe the position data. If you hit "P" and you select the stopwatch, that will create an initial keyframe. Now, again, to move timeframes forward, we can hit shift and page down, page down. We can now move this by selecting it and then dragging it forward to another position. Now, we have our objects moving on the screen and that it just seems a little bit odd, doesn't it? That movement, so in order to ease that out, we can select both of these keyframes and hit "F9", and now we've got that kind of movement. In fact, we might just drag this keyframe outside a bit over time. We have this nice shifting movement. Now, we can also keyframe the scale of that. We can have it come from a scale of zero. Again, hit the "S" on your keyboards, and select the stopwatch. Now we've got a scale of 25, but we want it to be zero, so we want it to almost be invisible. But when it hits the end of that position movement, we want it to be 25 percent. How do we do that? Well, if you hit "U" on your keyboard, you can bring up the position and the scale keyframes, and if you go towards your end keyframe, or if you click on this button here, it will take you to the end keyframe for position. Then you can hit the scale button here, and then you can change this value to 25 percent. What we'll see now is this actually moving and scaling at the same time. As we can see that move my easy ease those frames as well as selecting both of those keyframes and hitting "F9". This is what our animation currently looks like. Now, we can also add a rotation effect into there at the same time. If you hear "R" on your keyboard, select the keyframe, hit "U" to bring up all the keyframes. Move your cursor to where it ends, and then again, hit the rotation keyframe. Now, if you move this along, and we can actually go all the way around, to 360 degrees, that's 357, sometimes 360, and you'll notice that there's a one here, and that one means that it's rotated fully or it's rotated fully one time. If I wanted it to spin once, which is what it's doing, that is what it will do. Now we have this little icon rotating and spinning in at the same time. We might want that rotation to complete a little bit earlier than the scale so that it's a bit more fluid, and the reason maybe because it's not F9, so that's F9 that or easy ease that. Put that back and just see how that looks. Yeah, I'm not going in the middle more before. In order to play this, I'm just hitting the space bar by the way, so I'm putting the current time indicates a which is this blue line at the beginning and hitting the space bar. That's just an example of basic position scale and rotation keyframes in After Effects. These are the fundamentals of After Effects and how to control and create movement. The next thing we want to talk about is how we can control whole sections of our animated CV, and in order to explain that, we need to talk about null objects. Now, when it comes to my animated CV, the good news is, all the animation is 2D it's two-dimensional and actually it's quite simple to create, so there are no 3D cameras, everything is controlled by null objects. What exactly is a null object? Well, a null object is an invisible layer that you can use to create a super parent. As you can remember from our waiving man animation, we created everything with parent links, so we linked the hands to the forearm and then the forearm to the right arm, so it all works together where it would connect naturally, and you can see that here in the parent and link drop-down boxes, where each of those connections is specified. A null objects work in a very similar way, so if we look at our animation, we can see that everything here, while there's individual position and rotation and scale movement for all of these little bits of the animation while the camera is moving, these continue to move in their relative positions. The reason why that's happening is because they're all connected to a null objects. A lot of these assets, specifically for this machine, are connected to null 1. If we go all the way up here, we can actually see that null objects. It's quite far away at the top here, and I've already got the position and scale data down. Essentially what's happening is any position and scale data that is added to the null is affecting anything that is parented to it. These individual parts of the animation are basically all child links or children that are then linked to the parent, which is the null object. The best way to explain this is to actually do it in a simplified way. We can go back to our YouTube logo and we can see that the individual position, scale, and rotation keyframes, they're doing their own thing. Maybe what we'll do is we'll bring the scale up so we can see it all the time. That way, it's just rotating across the screen and maybe we'll make it a little bit smaller. We will take the scale of the whole thing down to maybe five or see how small that is. We see our YouTube logo is doing its own thing based on its own individual parameters here. But now, say, for example, I want to bring in my animated class man. Let's quickly find him. Animated class man, and we can drop that composition into this position and scale movement composition. We have our man now and he's waving. Essentially what we want is for our waving man and our moving YouTube logo to move off the screen at the same time, but we want them to continue moving in that pattern without breaking it. Now, if you were to go into the YouTube logo's position data and try and modify this, it will stop it from doing what its individual parameters are set to already. We want it to move in that direction, but at the same time we want to move it off screen. What we can do is create a null object and pair these to the null objects. We can go to a Layer, New, Null Object, and you can see our null objects appears on screen, and this won't render out. When you render the actual video, you won't see this. We can see it here now, but when we play, it won't render out when you make the complete final video. But when we're not playing, we can see it on screen. As you can see now we have our null 8 and we want to see the parent unlink menu option. You can't see here at the moment. If you right-click here, go to Columns and select "Parent and Link". Now, that brings that up, and we can actually pick whip it or use the drop down menu to select it. I could pick whip this to the null 8. That makes this a child of this parent objects. I can even just use the drop down, so I can go here and go, okay, so null 8 would be the parent for our animated man. Now, we still have our animation here. But what we can do is modify the position data of our null objects. We want to set a keyframe there. Like I said, we want them both to come off the screen to the left. We're going to move our x-axis over here to the left-hand side, and we're just going to drag it until they're both off of the screen. We're going to easy ease that by selecting those and hitting "F9". Now, they're continuing their motion, but they're moving off screen. Now say for example, we want this animation to scale back. We don't want it to move off screen, we just want it to get smaller. We can actually control that by hitting the "S" button on the null, hitting our scale, and then going to the end of the timeline here, and scaling it down to about 50 percent. Now that animation will continue in the same fashion, but get smaller. It's the same for the rotation, we can delete these keyframes. We can bring up the rotation. We can set a keyframe on our null objects for the rotation, and we can rotate this whole thing around it. Now, we play out, it will continue its own individual movement. But the same time, it's rotating because it's parented to that null objects and we are modifying the null. Then again, like individual parameters, we can do the same things that we could get it to rotate. We can get it to scale down at the same time. We could get it to rotate, scale down and use the position data to actually move it off the screen as it does so, so that we end up with something like this. If you want to create something like that, that looks, doesn't look great, but it's just to highlight how we can use null objects to move whole sections of our animation and not have to use the individual parameters for every single part. That's how we were able to make whole sections like the factory here, the creative factory work together, so all of these elements, if we scroll down to the creative factory, we've got creative workspace here. What we can do is just highlight some of these creative workspaces. If we go over here and we look at the creative workspace here, which is just a, the little hand that comes down. Click on it. What we can see is there's a lot of individual, let's put out a full second. We can see a lot of individual movement going on and these are basically just keyframe with position data, these little buttons and things that are moving and these little dials that so individual position data inside this composition, which is then if we go to the main composition, as we can see, it's connected to the null 1, parents or the parent null. Because that parent null is moving from right to left, everything moves in unison with that so that we can have all these individual parameters moving and we can actually see it come to an end. If we scroll back up to the null objects, we can see it stops there on this key frame, and then obviously it picks up the light bulb and moves it around. But that data there, that position movement, the movement of the machines is actually coming from this null. That way we can control the position of all of these individual assets on the machines like these levers and these buttons. But they stay in their relative places because of the fact that they are all parented or the ordinate composition and that composition is parented to this null object. That is a very brief overview of using position, rotation, and scale movement in our project and also how I use null objects as a parent objects to move whole sections of the animation across. Again, if you want a more detailed breakdown of any part of the animation or maybe even this creative machine part, let me know in the comment section and I'll build one out for you and put it together into this class. 9. Basics - Using shapes and alpha matte to reveal things: You will have noticed that I reveal a lot of the elements on the screen, and they seem to just appear or animating out of nowhere. A lot of these elements are basically just hidden on the screen. We've shaped layers and we can hide anything we need until it needs to be revealed using something called a Track Matte, and in particular, Alpha Mattes. A good example of Alpha Mattes in my animation is the timeline, which builds in here as you can see. A lot of these element is just hidden onscreen and revealed are using shape layers. How exactly do we use those Track Mattes in our animation? Well, again, we can go and create a new composition. We'll just call this one Track Mattes for class. Essentially, all we need is an icon or something. Maybe we can get our animated man, he's waving at us. Is that him there? There he is doing his weird wave. Maybe we want him to come into the screen. What we could do is we could bring up some position data of our man. Let's just zoom in a little bit. Probably give him about half a second. Set a key-frame, and then drag him off over here somewhere. Then he comes on like that. We could have him coming in out of the sides, but I imagine we want him to appear in a circle. We could use a circle as an Alpha Matte to reveal him. What does that mean exactly? Well, let's scale him down, here S, and bring him down to about 60 percent. What we can do now is create a shape layer by clicking up here on Rectangle Tool. If you hold it down, it gives you other options and we can select the "Ellipse Tool". Then if we hold down Shift and drag across, we can create a uniform circle, a completely round circular. Now if we don't hold down Shift, what happens if we try and create a circle is we get this weird opal shape, and we want a perfect circle. If you want a perfect circle, hold down the Shift button. That's our shape layer right there, and that's what we're going to use as our Alpha Matte to reveal our character. In order to do that, what we need to do first of all, actually, let's just change the opacity. Let's toggle the Transparency. Here, we have a black background, and here, we have just the Transparent Grid. I can see things a little bit better. What would be better is to just get backgrounds like this. I'm going to copy the original backgrounds into our Track Mattes composition, and I'm going to copy it. There, we have our background. In order to reveal our waving man using a Track Matte, we need to put our Track Matte over the top of a waving man. What I'd like to do is use a Radial Wipe to reveal him using a Track Matte. To do this, we need to make sure that our Y position or our anchor is in the middle. Hit "Y" on your keyboard, and we can bring down some rulers here. If you don't have rulers available, then come over to this choose grid and guide options, and make sure that rulers is ticked or checked. You can just pull it down from the top. Just hit this grid, pull it down. We'll put it in the middle there, and the same thing here. What we'll do is we'll just zoom in, just scrolling on your mouse or keyboard or toggle down here to change how much of a zoom you have hit while on your keyboard, and bring that into the middle. Now, the Radial Wipe will happen from the middle. Well, let's kill the position data on that moving man first, so he's not moving around. He's still hidden underneath, and we can toggle the eye on and off to see him hidden under our circle. What we can do is go over to where it says Track Matte here. If you don't have that option, hit "F4" to toggle between the options, and you want to go to Alpha Matte "Shape Layer 1". The Track Matte has to be the layer above what you want to reveal. That is the revealing shape, which it has to be above this in order for that to be selectable. Now, it's disappeared, and you might be thinking, "Well, that's very odd." Obviously, the eye has disappeared here. But now, if we move this circle around, you will notice, we can only see our character when he is inside that circle. There's lots of different things we can now do with that. In order to make this slightly more interesting, I'm going to duplicate to that layer, Control D. I'm going to bring it underneath the animated man. There's not going to be any Track Matte selected for it. I'm going to turn it on, and I'm going to go up to here to the Fill Color. I'm just going to change it to a complimentary color, a light yellow. I'm just going to change the background of that. What we're going to do is we're going to turn this eye icon back on for a moment. That's our Alpha Matte. We're going to come over to Effects, and we're going to write Radial Wipe. You can see that down here, Radial Wipe. I'm going to pop that onto our Alpha Layer. Our Alpha Layer is there. The first thing we want to do is select the "Wipe Sensor." Put that in the sensor there. We're getting to keyframe the transition of this Radial Wipe. If you don't have a Radial Wipe, I'll quickly demonstrate this. It's basically just wiping the circle. But what we want it to do is we want it to be complete because it's an Alpha Matte, we want it to be complete at zero at the finishing line. Hit "U" on your keyboard to bring up the keyframes, and you can see it there about one second in. We can go back to the beginning now, and we want to make this transition 100 percent. What you'll see now is it transitions the circle in. That's how we're going to use an Alpha Matte to reveal our man with a Radial Wipe. I want it counterclockwise so that it goes the other way. I'm going to easy ease these by selecting these keyframes and hitting "F9" on the keyboards, and that is our Alpha Matte coming in. Now, if we hide this layer with the eye, what we should see now is a man Radial Wipe in because we're using the Alpha Matte to reveal him. Now, we can also use this same Alpha Matte or the same transition on top of our background, our white layer. We can take the current time indicated to the beginning of the composition, select the top layer transition "Radial Wipe" and just Control C, Copy that or Command C copy if you're on a Mac. Select down here or to the background or this light yellow layer and Control V. What we should see is the whole thing reveal itself together. What we want to do is we want to pick with this to the actual shape layer so that it's parented to that. If we move that around and that as well to the shape layer. If we move that around, wherever we move it to, it's going to be revealed. What you've seen there is an issue that generally happens with the wipe sensor points. We don't want to move our assets around freely like that. The best way to move them around is to connect them to a null object. You have these null objects on the screen, and you want to pick-whip them or pick-whip these to those null objects. But if this is the Track Matte for the class is in its own composition, and then we drag that out into the main composition, then we can reveal it like so, and it can stay in place. For example, we look at our main composition here, it could throw our little man, our little Track Matte into this composition. Go to the Main Comp, and type in Track Mattes for class. We're going to pop our little man over here somewhere, probably here as an example. There he is. He's being revealed, and we will track that to Null 1, wherever it is. I'm going to track this on Null 1. What we should notice now, as our Null 1 moves over to the side, yes, it tracks without moving all the way. This is just an example of it being tracked in the main composition. Let's just turn that background off, go back into our main composition. We can freely move that. We can just move him up here maybe, and you'll see that now that, central wipe stays there even though we've moved it around, because we put the pre-comp, which is this file here, which is represented in our project here, into the main project file, and we've also parented it to our main Null 1 object. Now that it's in there, it will also move in line with the rest of our compositions. As we see the Null 1 now move off into the next part of the animation, it moves with it. That's how you can use an Alpha Matte to reveal objects and also parent it to the null objects of your main composition to then move it. As you can see, this is how we can start building this animation out completely. As we can see here, we have the actual timeline in a pre-comp. It's here, timeline for first parts of animation, and here it is. Once we've built it in its own composition, it will be up here, but then drag it into the comp. We parent it to Null 1, and it's revealing these different dates, again, using Alpha Matte. For example, we have 2005, which is where it starts off. It's basically over here, use the H to get the hand, zoom in. It's just a shape layer, which is a box with the text 2005 in a pre-comp. This pre-comp is in here, and there's an Alpha Matte here. You can see, the Alpha Matte is just a rectangle. It's just a box that this box can move into. The position data of that moves into that it's revealed by the Alpha Matte. If we hit "F4" or toggle switch modes, we can see here that that is the Alpha Matte or that is being used as the Alpha Matte for 2005. Then, this again, all of this stuff is revealed using Alpha Matte. It appears as if from nowhere. This stuff is all being revealed by Alpha Matte. Then this whole composition, as we mentioned before, is dropped here into the main project file, and it is parented. That way, everything moves and reveals itself, but stays in line with the movement of the null objects. That's just a quick breakdown on using shape layers as Alpha Matte to reveal things. Of course, any effects you then put on the Alpha Matte like, for example, the Radial Wipe can then be again used to reveal things in different ways using different effects to reveal things using Alpha Matte. This effect is really very useful, and you see it time and time again in my animated CV. When I use the Mac screen to reveal what I've been doing on YouTube, again, all of that is using Alpha Mattes. At the end of my animated CV for my hobbies and interests, I use Alpha Mattes to reveal the footage. It's not just pictures and it's not just photos, but also video as well. It's a very simple, but effective technique that I've used in multiple places in my animated CV. Definitely, something that you can use to take your animated CV forward. If you want to have more information on how I've used Alpha Mattes in my animated CV, or if you want me to break down a particular part of my CV that uses Alpha Mattes like this timeline as an example, then let me know in the comment section of the course, and I will do a class section specifically on that and add it to the class later on. 10. Basics - Using Trim paths to animate lines: Now another technique that I used extensively in my animated CV is the line animation effect called Trim Paths. Now, this is a simple but very useful technique to animate single or multiple lines and can be really useful to build out your scene. A good example of it can be seen in this part of the animation here that we're watching right now, where that purple line builds out into a roller coaster truck and you have the little lines, the little railings that build up into the track as well. All of those were created using Trim Paths. How exactly do we use Trim Paths and how can you use it in your animated CV? Well, let's go and create a new composition first of all, and we're going to call this Trim Paths class, of course, not couse, class. We're going to start off by creating a line by clicking on the "Pen tool" here and making sure that our stroke is set to about 20 so we get a nice thick line. I'm going to click on here, that creates the actual shape layer, and then we're going to create a second point over here. That essentially is our line. Now, to create our Trim Paths on this line, to make this line actually grow and build out, what we need to do is toggle down on the actual shape there. So there's a little arrow here, I can click on that. Then if you look at contents that says add over here with another drop down, we can click on this arrow here and you will see that the option for Trim Paths is available. We're going to click on "Trim Paths" now, and what we can do is we can keyframe the start and end of the Trim Path to build it out. Let us click on both the start and the end. Instead of the ends being a 100 percent, let's make it 0 percent. After, let's say five seconds, we want that whole line to grow out. What we can do is go five seconds forward, go back to our key frame and make this a 100 percent. That is now growing out over a five second period. We don't actually need the start one on, we can turn that off. Again, we can F9 this, and that will grow out similar to our roller coaster truck. Now, if we wanted this line to be curved, what we can do is go back to our pen tool and just adding another point here. Now, we can go to the point over here, the last point, and we can actually lift it up like so. Now, of course this isn't a curve and we have this fill layer. Now, what we want to get rid of this layer, and we can click on "Fill", the fill option up here, and there's an option here to say none and that will just get rid of it, so e just have a line now. That's how we just have a line. How do we add a curve to this line, if we wanted to create a curved track? Well, click back on our layer here and click back on our pen tool. If you click to where the pen tool is, if you press on it, you've got something called convert vertex tool and you want to select that. Now, if you hold down the middle point and pull it apart, these two toggles, you'll see that we can actually now make a curve and we can use these to toggle lines to pull it apart. Now, when our shape grows outs, it will grow out like a curve. Again, we've got the easy ease. Of course, if we bring this key frame in, the last key frame, it will grow out a lot quicker, like so. If we go back to our original animation, the actual roller coaster line, and all of these supporting lines, which have soloed down here are all just Trim Paths and they just build out in front of the roller coaster cart as it comes up onto that track. Again, all of this was just built using Trim Paths. That's just a very basic breakdown of how you can use this very simple but effective technique, Trim Paths to build out your lines in After Effects and also curve your lines to create different shapes for things that you might want to create like a roller coaster line. If you do want a more thorough breakdown into how I created this roller coaster scene or any other scene in my animated CV, then do leave me a little comment in the comment section of the class and I'll be sure to create that and put it on for you later on. The four main things that we've covered in our After Effect sections so far have been modifying Illustrator files from iStock to create our assets, along with dynamic linking between After Effects and Illustrator, using keyframes for movement and using null objects to control pre-comps, using shape layers as alphamats to reveal things and using Trim Paths to build out our lines. Now, these points are really all you need to start building a 2D animated CV yourself in After Effects and probably makes up about 90 percent of what I used to create my animated CV. However, as I mentioned before, if there are any additional parts of my CV that you want a deep dive in or more explanation on, then let me know in the class comments and I'll either reply or put an extra section in the class. 11. Basics - Additional points to improve your workflow in After Effects: This full sections that we've covered so far are the foundation building blocks that you will need to create a 2D animated CV, similar to mine in After Effects. We've discussed a lot of different techniques already for After Effects in those class chapters. But I think it would be a really good idea to elaborate on a few more of those techniques, and mention a few more additional points that will really help you to improve your workflow for your animated CV. The first point I want to talk about is moving multiple keyframes. What we have on our screens already is a simple shape layer. There are two position keyframes that are moving it from left to right on our screens. What happens when I want to move this moving shape up to the top part of the screen because I want to put something else underneath? If I were to grab it and just move it up. What's happening now is because there is actually two position keyframes already, I've introduced a third position keyframe up here. If we go to our layer and hit P, we can see that just moving that around, maybe if I go over here, if I just move this around, I introduce new keyframes, and that certainly is no longer moving in a straight line. Let's undo both of those keyframes. Now if we want to move multiple keyframes, what we need to do is first of all select all the keyframes, and also make sure that this blue line, the current time indicator, is actually on one of those keyframes. Now what I can do is move that freely up and all the keyframes will move in unison. I can do it from that keyframe, or I could use this next keyframe tool. Go to the end keyframe. Again, I can move that freely. Make sure that all your keyframes are selected, that your current time indicator is on one of those keyframes, and then you can move your whole animation without messing up the position data. The next thing we want to talk about is using Easy Ease keyframes. We've already discussed that the easiest way to create Easy Ease keyframes is to select our keyframes and hit F9. In fact, we can duplicate this layer. We can bring this example down. Now we'll have two objects moving across the screen. If we take our bottom layer, select both the keyframes, and hit F9, now what we'll see is that smooth movement. The bottom one is with the Easy Ease keyframes on. Now we can actually go further and manipulate these Easy Ease keyframes by going into the speed or the graph editor. Let's make a third shape, and bring that down here. Select both of these keyframes, and we can really demonstrate how changing these keyframes in our speed editor really does affect the look and feel of your animation. Just take a hold of this little keyframe. I'm going to drag it out, so there's a little toggle there, and we're going to pull that in, just to affect the speeds of our keyframe. Now if we play that in unison with the other two objects, it leaves later and arrives earlier than all the others. Just having that swiping or slide-out motion from changing the speed. Then maybe we could try the other way round, so we could make this more rounded like so. Then see how it affects the speeds in comparison to the other objects? You can even go further to manipulate the speed, perhaps we want to drag it down like this, so that it goes in faster, but comes out a lot slower. We can compare that again. It speeds off, and then it slows right down. I think you can start to get an idea of how playing around with speed graph or the graph editor with our speed can really affect the feel of your animation. Another useful effect that I used throughout my animated CV was the tint effect, which I used to change colors of assets that weren't from my primary artist. This was really to ensure that I held closely to my color palette choice. An example of this is the rocket man animation. In order to highlight how to use this, we can simply drop our rocket man illustrator file as a composition. We can open that up. What we will do is toggle the transparency grid so we can actually see that black silhouette. To change this rocket man to the on-brand purple color of our animated CV, we can actually get the purple color by clicking on our little square here. That's the purple we want to use. Going to the fill here, just clicking on that. You'll see the hex number here, and you can just Control C, copy that. Then let's come over to our rocket pack composition, and in the effects and presets box type "tint", and you'll see color correction tint. You want to drop that onto your rocket man layer. You'll notice that I've actually dropped it onto our flame layer, and I don't actually want it on there, so I'm going to turn it off. I might hide that for now. I want to put the tint on the other two parts of the rocket man. Click on the Map Black To, and select that black color. In this box here, just Control V the purple. You'll see it's a lighter version. We can change the whites. We can map the whites to the same purple, and that is the purple color that we want. Then what we can do is just copy and paste this tint effect to our other body part, and there we have it. There we have our rocket man. A variation of our rocket man on brand with the purple color of our color palette. That's using the tint effects to make sure that all our colors are the correct color palette colors. Now another thing that I did during my animation was to step the resolution down to make things run a bit quicker in After Effects. In order to do this, when you are, for example, rendering something like this animation out, this is quite a simple animation, so it's not very taxing on my computer. But if there are lots of elements on screen and assets and images, that can really start to slow your computer down. We can run our animation by hitting the space bar. If we've just done some animation, we want to view it, we want to see how it looks in After Effects. We hit the space bar to run it, and if it starts to slow down, what we can do is come over here to the resolution, and we can change this from full, which is full resolution to a half, a third, and even a quarter resolution. That will really help to speed things up when you want to pre-render, when you want to see what the changes in your animation currently look like. I think for my project, I had a lot of the heavier animations, for example, the creative machine, the roller coaster section with all the footage in bubbles, and the world section with China and London spinning around all of those, I ran a quarter. I actually was able to pre-render the whole three minutes, and I did this at quarter resolution. That really helps to speed things up and it's good practice for you to change that depending on your PC specs. A good way to reduce the amounts of clutter on your screen is to solo your layers. If you come over here, you will notice a little circle icon, and that is to solo your layer, so that only that layer is displayed. If we just click on the solo layers of these squares, we will only see the squares. For this composition, it's not too difficult to understand what is going on, but if you have 50 different elements running on the screen at the same time, soloing your layers will really help you to focus on what you need to work on without being distracted with too many other elements on screen at the same time. Another thing you can do to tidy up your workspace is too shy your layers. If you go to the toggle switch modes button, you'll see a little man with his nose popping up over a wall. If you click on that, he'll duck down and he'll hide out the way. This means that these layers will now be Shy Layers. If we go up here to the global Shy switch, if we click that, it will then hide the layers that you have shied. Your layers haven't been deleted, they've just been hidden from the composition. Again, this is a really great technique for just making things tidier. If you've worked on a section of the animation already and you don't want to be scrolling up and down all your layers, especially if you start getting into hundreds and hundreds of layers, shying the layers that you've already worked on and you won't really need to use or see again, is a great way of keeping them hidden, but it's also a great way of ensuring that you don't change those layers or move those layers accidentally. Shying those layers is a really useful tip. Another way to avoid mistakenly making changes to your layer is to lock it. You will see a little padlock here, and if you click on that padlock icon for the individual layers, you can't actually make any adjustments to them. Again, this is great to stop you from accidentally moving things along or changing keyframes accidentally in your composition. Now, another thing that I like to do is enable motion blur for all of my layers globally. If you go across here, you will see that there's a motion blur button that you can turn on. If you can't see this, then toggle the switches until you see that motion blur. You can actually turn this on for all the layers. The motion blur actually creates a better sense of motion for your moving layers. It creates this natural looking motion blur that you would see naturally if something was moving in real life. One thing I should mention here is that motion blur can seriously slow down your machine and slow down pre-renders. In order to see movement while you're doing your animation, you can turn this little button off globally, which will then turn the motion blur off, and just before you render out your project file, turn this on. This will add that nice motion blur to your moving objects. Now, something that I would recommend you do is regularly save as well as backup your project files to an external hard disk drive. Now, I had issues with a Windows update during the project and I was unable to open my main file. Fortunately, I had an external backup and was able to use that so that I only lost a day or so of work. Now, this is good practice and common sense generally, but because it happens to me while working on this particular project, I feel the extra need to repeat it here to you, so you have been warned. If you've finished your project and want to export it, the way I export it is to go to File, Export, add to render queue. I will select the output module, and for this project, I selected QuickTime. For the format options, I actually selected animation with the highest quantity settings and Okay, and Okay that, and I exported it as a.MOVfile and then edited the sound in Premier probe. Now, the actual export time for my projects in After Effects was about 2.5 hours, and I've got a semi decent PC as well. It was 25 gigabytes of output data. These can be pretty heavy files and they can take quite a long time and that was for three minutes of animation. That's definitely something you might need to consider when you try to build out your animation, what type of hardware you're using to try and do that. My animated CV Project took me about two to three evenings a week for about a month or so to complete, from the time I started brainstorming, planning, storyboarding, connecting assets, as well as animating to actually finishing my latest animated CV, that is up now on YouTube. That's with my full-time job, my freelance business, family life, and other various responsibilities going on in the foreground. This was really something that I was doing as a passion project in the background, and to be honest with you, there are still lots of things that aren't 100 percent correct that I would like to change or display in a different way visually. But you can't keep working on a project forever. There does come a time when you need to let it go out into the wild. That's something to keep in mind for your animated CV. It doesn't necessarily have to be perfect, otherwise you might never release it, but get it to a workable state so that it catches your employer or client's attention, puts you on their roadmap and also it gets you that all important interview or freelance job. 12. Sounds effects and music: If you've made it to this point with your animated CV, well done. A lot of planning and hard work has got you to this point. Now to really polish your animated CV, the next step is to add in some sound effects and some music. I did this by dropping my rendered After Effects project file into Premier Pro, and then adding the music and sound effects in there. In my opinion, it's just easier to do in Premier Pro than directly in After Effects. You can actually get free sound effects from freesound.org, soundbible.com, and the free sound effects packs that you get on YouTube. Again, there are various other sites that you could try out. I personally have an account with Epidemic Sound, and this really helps speed up the process for me, when it comes to looking for sound effects as well as music that I can freely use on my content. For free music, you might want to check out YouTube's own personal library. There's a good website called incompetent.com, audiolibrary.com.co. Also, there are channels on YouTube such as NoCopyrightSounds that let you freely use their music, but a lot of them do require that you attribute credits to the creator and put a link in any content that you create with their music, so just bear that in mind. Sorting out your sound effects and music in Premier Pro, also gives you a good opportunity to ensure that your sound levels are all correct on your narration. When you add the sound effects and music in, you want them to complement your animation and voice-over, not dominate the whole piece. So ensure that the levels are lowered for those particular audio pieces and not drowning out the voice-over. 13. Making a simplified pdf version of your CV in illustrator: So you've gone through all the trouble of planning, brainstorming, storyboarding, collecting or creating assets, and animating your CV. But how are you going to use it to apply for jobs? How are you going to get prospective employees or clients to actually see it? But what I did back in 2015 alone with my animated CV, was to create a simplified PDF version based on the animation. You can see that here. Again, for my latest animated CV, I also created a simplified PDF version. Both of these were created in Illustrator, an output as PDF files. Really the purpose of this CV is to help you grab the attention of your prospective employer. If you can imagine someone scanning for you some printed CVs that they've been given, lots of them are going to be the standard white paper, black tech CVs. This one will definitely stand out from the crowd or even if they're scanning through digital copies, this will definitely catch their eye. You will notice that this version includes things like a brief overview about me. It has my up-to-date contact details. It has my skill sets as well as interests and transferable skills. It's all sets out in a very visual way, is designed to be scanned through, which is what an employer would be doing anyway. The main thing here is to get the employer interested and excited to learn more about you and what you do. In the corner here you can also see that there is a QR code at the top of the page, and this will take them directly to the animated version on YouTube. Also, you can turn this into a link that can be clicked on if they're using a digital copy. So the main goal of this version is to get your prospects onto the animated CV online, which will then hopefully be memorable and engaging enough to keep you in the mind of the employer and get you the interview or freelance job. I was planning to put the details of how I made this into this part of the course, but it's not really animation related. I've made a separate class specifically on making the paper version of the CV in Adobe Illustrator. Do you go and check that out if you want a PDF version. 14. My experiences and strategy: What was the result of my animated CV campaign back in 2015? Well, after struggling with freelance projects, I had a major project for through from one of my trusted clients. I had booked out the entire month of November to work on their project, I did it in good faith, I didn't take a deposit which was a bit of an amateur mistake, I know, and I was left up the creek without a paddle when they canceled on me last minute and I didn't have any other work lined up for the rest of that year. My wife Lauren, who was pregnant at that time, expressed her concerns of the lack of work and income with the impending family, and so I decided to apply to some full time jobs. That evening I applied to two jobs with my PDF cover letters and a link to the animated CV. The next day I got an interview with one of these companies and the week after that an interview with the other company and I've now been with that company for the last five years. Starting off as a sole videographer and now the head of a small international video production team. I managed early on to negotiate a three-day week with that company so that I could concentrate on my own business as well, which is awesome. The actual strategy that I used back in 2015, was first of all to find positions online that were within commuting distance for me and that interested me. I sent the spoke cover letters to each position introducing myself, as well as with the PDF version of my CV, which of course contained a link to the animated version of my CV. In the cover letter, I also included a link to my animated CV directly. As I said earlier, I applied for two jobs one evening, I intended to apply two more jobs the next day, but I got a reply from one of the companies the day after and went to an interview that very same day. Then I got an interview for the other job the week after that and that's the same job that I'm in now. I actually had an opportunity to talk to my boss about it a few years later, and he said they had quite a few applications, but mine caught their attention and got me that all important interview. All because of the animated CV that I had made. 15. Conclusion : How did your animated CV turn up? Be sure to share it in the comment section, and get a discussion going with others out there who are planning and designing their own animated CVs. Don't forget to share your experiences and your tips. If you want to see how I created the illustrated PDF version of my CV, so this version, then go and check out my other class on that. If you are a student of this course, I want a deep dive section on a particular part of my animated CV that you're not really sure about, or if you need additional information just to get you going, then please do leave a comment for me and I'll get back to you. Thank you so much for joining me in this class, and I really look forward to seeing you again in the next one.