Easy Animated Icons in Adobe After Effects

1. Welcome: Animation has the power to bring your ideas to life, but Adobe After effects can be intimidating. Whether you're an illustrator looking to add motion to your work, a graphic designer looking to expand your skill set or a YouTuber wanting to incorporate motion graphics into your videos, this class is a great place to start. Welcome to Easy animated icons and Adobe After Effects. I'm Megan Frias, and I'm an explanimator. I write, illustrate and animate educational animations, mostly focused on health and environmental topics. In this beginner friendly class, you'll learn how to prepare graphics, created in Illustrator for animation, Import graphics into After effects, set keyframes to create animations and export a video file to show off your work. You can jump right into animation by downloading my icons, or you can use the skills that you learn to animate your own set of icons. If you haven't already, you can watch my class Illustrate with shapes to learn how to illustrate your own set of icons. So if you're ready to learn or practice after effects by creating a fun set of animated icons, then let's get started. 2. Class Project: The project for this class is to animate a set of icons. You're welcome to download the Illustrator files that I provided and animate these icons. Or you can use the skills you learn to animate your own set of icons, whether you illustrated them yourself or have permission to use a set of icons you didn't create. You could even do both for extra practice. Before you start animating, it can be helpful to plan out the animation by creating something like this. Try to animate your icons in a way that enhances the meaning of the icon rather than just having movement for the sake of it. 3. Prepare Icons for Animation: Before you can start animating, you'll need to prepare your icons for animation. This is where I left off in the previous class, Illustrate With Shapes, where I showed you how to illustrate these icons. It's totally fine if you want to jump right into animation by watching this class and not Illustrate with shapes. If you've already created your own icons or got a set of icons somehow, you'll likely need to follow the steps in this video to get the icons ready for animation. Although your starting place might be slightly different than mine. If you're using my icons that I've provided you as part of this class, I've given them to you already ready for animation. So you could skip this video, but what I'm going to cover here is really important if you ever need to prepare artwork from Illustrator for animation. So here's how to prepare artwork for animation. When you import an Illustrator file into After effects, After effects only recognizes the first artboard. So the first step in preparing these icons for Illustration is to separate them into their own files with only one icon and one artboard in each file. Luckily, there's an easy way to separate all of these different artboards into their own Illustrator files. So to do that, you want to go up to File Save As. I'm saving this in an Illustrator folder, which is in another folder that contains all the things for this project. I'll show you more about file organization later. But for now, I need to save this and I don't want to overwrite my original copy just because I want to have that as backup. I'm going to change the name of this, let's just call it icon and then hit Save. Then to separate each artboard into a separate file, you want to check this option here, and I want to do all six artboards, so I'll just leave it on all and then hit Okay. Then in finer, you can see that it's made six new files and each just has one icon. This is actually a duplicate of the color swatches, let's just delete this one. Let's change the file names of each of these files. Now I need to open up each of these files and make sure that the icons are ready for animation. I'll just open up all six of these. I'm going to start with the color swatches. You'll need to separate each piece that you want to be animated into its own layer. You're going to need the layers panel. If you don't already see it, then make sure you open it up underneath window. Right now in the Layers panel, I just have layer two and a background layer. If I toggle open layer two, you can see that there's actually more artwork behind this. Each of these pages of the color swatch booklet, I want to be animated. I need to create new layers for them. I'm just going to go down to the bottom of the Layers panel and click the new layer button, and then I'm just going to take this group and drag it into the new layer. Then I'm going to repeat that So now I have each of these three pages of the color swatch booklet in their own layers, and then I have the cover in its own layer too. But now the cover is on bottom, so I'm going to bring that up to the top. In after effects I'm going to rotate each of these layers so that they animate coming out from behind this color swatch booklet. That's why I'm leaving them unotated and just all stacked behind this front cover layer. Another thing that's very helpful when you're animating is to have all of your layers labeled. In after effects, you don't get a little preview like this, so it's very hard to know what layer is what if they're just named layer one, two, three, four. To rename a layer, just double click on the text. I'm just going to go through and rename all of these layers. There's actually one more thing that I need to separate out, and that's this little binding. Even though this binding is kind of part of the cover and I don't need to animate the binding itself, if I separate this binding into its own layer, then I can use its position to easily snap the anchor point of all the other layers to this binding so they rotate out from the binding. If that didn't quite make sense, it will when I get into after effects. So I'm going to bring this circle that represents the binding of the book into its own layer. So I'm just going to hit the new layer button. I can see that the binding circle is selected within the cover layer. So a little shortcut instead of having to open up this cover layer is just that you can use the selection indicator box right here and drag that up into the new layer to just move whatever was selected into the new layer. Now let's rename that. Now that I have everything that I need separated into its own layer, I'm just going to hit Save to save this and let's move on to the next icon. If I toggle open layer two, you can see all the different pieces of the camera and the photos which are grouped. All of these things are sub layers of layer two. You can see that they're indented underneath layer two, so they're nested within layer two or in other words, sub layers of layer two. After effects doesn't recognize these sub layers, so that's why we've been separating things out into their own layers. So say you wanted to make all of these sub layers, their own layers. There's a quick and easy way to do that. What you can do is select the layer and then go into the three line menu in the layers panel and choose release layers to sequence. Notice that it's renamed all the sub layers into layers, and now you can toggle open to see the actual shape inside of them. But this hasn't actually made them their own layers because they're still nested underneath layer two. So the next really important step is that you need to select all of these sub layers and drag them up and out of this layer two so that now they are all their own layer. From here, we can label the layers. I'm going to turn off the eyeball on the photos for a second, so we can just see the camera a little bit better. I need to label all of these layers. But first, there's a few things that I think could actually be combined because I'm not going to animate them separately. So this little detail, this little detail, this line, this detail and the main camera, I think those can all just go together. You can see that these are all on different layers, but since these aren't going to be animated separately, they can all be on the same layer. I could click and drag to bring them into different layers. Another way to do this would just be to hit Command G to group them all, and that will put these shapes in the same layer. Then I'll just name this camera. Now I have a few blank layers, so I'm just going to select these and hit the trash can to delete them. This camera layer needs to be on the bottom, so let's move that and make sure that you didn't accidentally nest it. And now we can label the rest of these layers. This is going to be the lens. Now that everything is labeled, let's turn back on the visibility of the photos. It doesn't matter that the photos are stacked on top of the camera because they're separate layers, all of the layers will be imported into after effects, and it will be easy to animate the position of the photos in After effxs. Keep in mind that only artwork that is on the artboard will be visible when imported into After fix. So for example, if I had this photo off of the artboard like this, this photo would not be visible when imported into after effects. Even though the layer is visible in the timeline, the artwork is not visible. Also, if it was partly cut off, like if I had the photos down here and I imported it into after effects like this, then only the part of the photo that was on the artboard is going to be visible. There's no way to make it recognize anything that was off of the artboard. So what you need to do is just make sure that your artwork is always fully on the artboard. Even if that means that your Illustrator file doesn't look perfect right now, we're going to animate all this, so it doesn't matter. Make sure that you save this file. The paint fresh icon has a problem because these drips are off the arboard so they won't be visible when I input this file into After fix. What I'm going to do to fix this is go over to the artboard tool and then just drag out the artboard so that it's bigger and those drips are going to be on the artboard. If you want to, you could also unlock the background layer and just drag the background down too. I'm going to animate these drips falling off of the paint brush. So when I animate these off, the shape that's left doesn't look very good. So let's make another shape that's going to fix that problem. So first, what I'm going to do is just separate out some layers. So I'm going to select the entire paint brush and hit the plus button to create a new layer and then just drag up the selection into the new layer. Let's name this paint brush. And I'm going to bring it below the other layer. And then let's separate each of these drips into their own layers. All right, so now if I hide all of these drip layers, this shape on layer two, let's name this paint. This is the shape that I need to make look a little bit better so that when the drips drip away, it's not left with this weird flat edge. To add to this shape, I'm going to duplicate these drips, so I'm going to turn the visibility back on for these. And then I'm just going to select them by clicking over here, and then hit Command C to copy, and let's just turn them off again. Select the paint layer and then hit Command Shift V to paste them in place, but on this paint layer. Now let's adjust the length of these lines. So I'm going to switch to the direct selection tool so that I can adjust the actual points on these lines, and I'm going to hold down Shift and just drag them to make sure that I'm maintaining the horizontal position of the line. So once you get the drips looking how you like it, this paint group is just going to be static. We're not going to animate it. And then these drip lines are going to be the thing that's animated. But when they drip away in after effects, the shape that's left looks good. So once you have all of that done, make sure to turn back on the drip layers that you're going to animate and then save the file. The last three icons are pretty straightforward, but let me show you how I broke up the layers. So for the pencil, the entire pencil is going to move as one thing, so that can all be in its own layer. And then the line is going to be separate. I'm going to have this drawing in, so that definitely needs to be in its own layer. For the scissors, I've separated out the two halves of the scissors. And then I've also separated out this hinge because that'll make it easier to position the anchor point for each half of the scissors to be in this exact position so that the scissors will rotate from the hinge. For the eyedropper, I have the eyedropper main shape, the droplet, and the fluid. When in doubt, it's better to separate out more layers, even if you might not animate each layer. Once you import your Illustrator file into after effects, you can update some minor things in your artwork like colors, save the file, and these changes will be recognized in after effects. Unfortunately, you can't add new layers in Illustrator once you've imported into after effects. After effects won't recognize the new layers, so you'd have to reimport the file. 4. Import Illustrator Files into After Effects: Before you import your Illustrator files into after effects, it's really important that your files are organized. Trust me, this will save you a lot of headaches down the road. So I'd recommend setting up your folder structure similar to mine. I have a parent folder called animated icons, which everything for this project is going to go into. Then I have a folder where I'm going to save the After effects project file, and it'll also put auto saved versions of the project file in here. And then I have this Illustrator folder with all of the different icons in this folder. When you import a file into after effects, it links to wherever that file lives on your computer. So it's important that you don't move the file once it's imported into after effects, otherwise, you'll get a missing file alert. There is a way to relink files, but if you just stay organized from the start, then you don't have to move things around and confuse after effects and deal with missing files. Now let's open up after effects and start a new project. From the home screen, click the New Project button. You can also start a new project under File New New Project. The next step is to import the icons. So I'm going to go to File, Import File, or you can use the keyboard shortcut Command or Control I. Then you want to navigate to where you saved your icons. You can import all of your icons at once, or if you're not finished with something for your icons, you can always import them later. I'm going to select all of my icons. Before you hit Open, you need to make sure that you change the setting Import as to composition retain layer sizes. If you don't see this option, hit the Options button. If you accidentally import your icons as footage, the layers won't be separated out. And if you import them as compositions, then every layer will have an invisible box around it that's the size of your composition, which is going to be really annoying to work with. Make sure that you have composition retain layer sizes. Then you can hit open. In the project panel, you should see all of your icons imported as both a composition and a folder with all the layers inside of it. If you double click on a composition, it'll open up in the timeline and you should see all of those layers that you separated out in Illustrator here and after effects. So what is a composition? A composition is similar to a sequence in premiere. It's like a folder that contains all the layers within your animation. That could be imported artwork from Illustrator or Photoshop, shape layers that you make in after effects, text, video clips, audio files, and even still image files. You can also nest composition so that you have compositions inside of compositions. I'll show you more about that at the end of class when we put all of our icons together. When you're done animating and you want to export or in after effects terms, render your animation as a video file, what you're going to export is a composition. Let's make sure that the composition settings are the way that we want them. So go up to composition and then composition settings, or the keyboard shortcut is Command or Control K. And it's adopted the name and the width and height from the Illustrator artboard, and so that's what we want. I also always use square pixels. Then for the frame rate, I like to use a whole number for animation. If you're working with video, then you probably want to go with whatever the video frame rate is usually something like 29.97. But since we're just doing animation here, I prefer 30. If you want to drop down to 15 frames, that'll give you a little bit more of a choppy cartoon look, or if you want to go hyperreal, you can do 60, but it could also slow down your computer. So I think the sweet spot is 30, so I'm going to go with that. And then the resolution here doesn't really matter. That's just the preview of what you're seeing in your composition viewer, which is right behind this screen, this. You can always change the resolution here as you're working. It makes sense to start the timeline at zero. For the duration, I only need 4 seconds. This is going to be hours, minutes, seconds, and then frames. If you go in and select this whole thing, you can just do four dot, and that will get you 4 seconds. If you want to change the duration of the composition later, that's really easy to do just by going back to these composition settings. Then the background color doesn't really matter because I already have a background illustrator layer. Then I'll hit Okay. It's probably a good idea to go into all of your other icon compositions and just double check the composition settings to make sure that the framer is 30, and then let's just give them all duration of 4 seconds. Before we get any further, let's save this project file. I'm going to go to File Save or the keyboard shortcut is Command or Control S, and then navigate to that project folder and then after effects folder within that. Let's just give this name and hit save. 5. Tour of After Effects: This is your first time using after effects, then here's a tour to orient you. If you've used after effects before, feel free to skip this video. First off, if your workspace doesn't look like mine, you can go up to Window Workspace and change it to the default workspace, which is what I'm using. Next up in the top toolbar, we have the selection tool, which is similar to selection tools and other programs like Illustrator. It's what you'll probably use the majority of the time. Next up is the hand tool, and this lets you move your composition around in this composition viewer. Next up is the Zoom tool. If you click with this tool, it'll zoom in and if you hold down Option or all and click, it'll zoom out. You can also use the keyboard chart cuts, which are the greater thansign or the period and then the less ensign or the comma. The shortcut to switch back to the selection tool is V. You can also adjust the size of your composition in the viewer down here in this drop down, so you could change it to fit. In this dropdown, you can change the resolution. So if your computer is having a hard time playing back your animation and it's going really slow, it can be helpful to change this to a lower resolution like quarter. This will make it look more pixelated, but it's only in this viewer. When you go to Export your animation, it won't look pixelated, it'll still be full quality. The next three tools are for three D, and then next is the rotation tool where you can rotate objects. This one is the Pan Behind tool which allows you to move the anchor point on an object. This little icon that I'm dragging around is called the anchor point and it's where any transformations happen from. If I go back to the rotation tool, you can see that now this photo is rotating around this point. Just going to undo that by doing Command Z. Next is the shape tool if you click and hold, there's other shape tools just like an Illustrator. There's also a pen tool similar to Illustrator, and then a text tool where you can create your text write in after effects and a couple of others, but I hardly use these. This here is the project panel, and this is where anything that you import into your after effects project file is going to be stored. It's also where all of your compositions are. We already created some compositions just by importing artwork from Illustrator, but you can also create a new composition using this button, and this will bring up the composition settings, and then here's the new composition. If you want to delete a composition, you can just hit the trashcan. Down at the bottom of the screen is the timeline where you can open up your compositions and set keyframes to create animations. Over here, I have the preview panel, which gives you player controls. You can also just hit the spacebar to play back your animation. Next is the Properties panel, and this can be really useful because depending on what's selected, you'll have different properties shown in the Properties panel. Next is the Align panel, which is pretty straightforward and very similar to Illustrator. The Effects and Presets panel is like a library of different effects and presets, like the name says that you can apply to layers to create different styles and looks. We won't be using any in this class, but there are tons of resources out there for you to learn about these and I show more about effects and presets in other classes. 6. Set Keyframes: Animations and after effects are based on keyframes. If you toggle open a layer and then toggle open transform, here are a bunch of different properties you can animate for this layer. To start animating a property, just click the stopwatch icon next to that property. You can see that'll make a keyframe wherever your playhead is on the timeline. This keyframe is saying that at a time of 0 seconds zero frames, the pencil is going to have a position of 250 pixels in the X direction and 250 pixels in the Y direction. Then if I move my playhead by clicking along the top of the timeline, you can set another keyframe. There's a few ways to do this once you've set your initial keyframe. The first way is to manipulate the layer in the composition viewer. I could just pick this up and move it over. You can see that that's created another key frame, and it's also created this motion path in the composition viewer that shows the starting position and the ending position. If I move my playhead back to the start of the timeline, I can hit the space bar key or go over to the preview panel and hit Play to see this animation. You can hit the space far again to pause. Basically, what keyframes do is tell after effects you want this value for this property at this time, and then this value for this property at this time. And then after effects figures out how to get from one keyframe to the other. So it figures out how to get from here to here. I'm going to move my playhead again and show you that another way to set keyframes is to click and drag over these numbers. So you can drag over the X or Y numbers to move your layer. That's automatically setting another keyframe wherever your playhead is. I'm going to move my playhead again and show you that another way to set keyframes is by clicking on these numbers and then typing in exact values. If you want to switch from one value to the next, you can hit tab. You can either hit Enter or click out to save the value. I'm going to move my playhead one more time to the end of the timeline and show you that there's one more way to create a keyframe and that's to copy and paste another keyframe. I want to copy and paste this keyframe to select it, you can actually click right on it, or since this is a small target to click on, you can also just click and drag over it to select the keyframe. That's also a good way to select multiple keyframes at once. I just want to select this keyframe and hit Command or Control C to copy it and then Command or Control V to paste it where my playhead is. You can see that copy the keyframe with the exact values of this keyframe. If you want to see the values of a keyframe, just hover over it. So now I have this little loop. If you want to change the value of a keyframe, you can just put your playhead over that keyframe and then you can use any of those methods that I just showed you to set a keyframe to change the value of this keyframe. You could move it in the composition viewer, or you could go in and type in a different value, or you could copy and paste a different keyframe, or you could click and drag over the value. When your layer is selected, you should see this motion path. If you don't see it, make sure that this button is turned on and also go up to view Show layer controls and make sure this is checked. You can also select keyframes and drag them along the timeline to rearrange their timing. So if I put these two keyframes really close together, you can see that the animation between these two keyframes is really fast. Whereas now between the first two keyframes, the animation is much slower. So the positioning of keyframes on the timeline influences the timing of your animation. I'm just going to undo that with Command Z. If you want to delete keyframes, just select them and then hit the delete key. If you want to delete all of the keyframes on the layer, just hit the stopwatch icon again. You can also adjust the properties without having any animation happening. In other words, without setting keyframes. If you have keyframes on a layer, and then you want to create another keyframe with that same value at another point on the layer, you can hit the new keyframe button here. This could be a way to have an animation pause. Another thing to note is that wherever this bar for the layer is visible on the timeline, that's where that layer is going to be visible in your animation. If you hover your mouse over the start or end of a layer, you'll see these double arrows, and then you can use this to trim the layer. So now the pencil is not going to be visible until this point. If you select somewhere in the middle of the layer, you can drag the layer across the timeline. 7. Anchor Point & Rotation: Color Swatches: This color swatches booklet has three pages hidden behind the cover page and I want to have each page rotate out from behind the cover. I'm going to select all three of these pages and then hit R on the keyboard to bring up the rotation property. If I rotate one of these layers by clicking and dragging over the rotation value, you can see that it's rotating from this point here, which is called the anchor point. But I don't want it to rotate from here. I want it to rotate from the binding. What I need to do is first move the anchor point for this layer. I'm going to undo the rotation. To move the anchor point, go up to the top toolbar and grab the pan behind tool. The keyboard horca is Y. Then with this tool, you can click and drag to move this anchor point. If you hold down command or control, it'll snap to other layers. So I'm going to snap it to this binding layer, which I made a separate layer in Illustrator so that it would make it easy to snap to this layer. Then I'm going to click on page two and do the same thing. And same with page three. To switch back to the selection tool, you can either go up to it in the top toolbar or use the keyboard chart cut, which is V. Then I want to rotate each of these pages. I want all of them to have a keyframe of zero at the start of the timeline, so I'm just going to hit all three of these stopwatches, and that'll set three new keyframes. Then I'm going to move my playhead over. Let's try 15 frames. Then let's rotate the first page to, let's do negative 30 degrees. The second page, let's do negative 60 and the third page, negative 90. So now if I play this back, here's the animation. Now, let's animate the pages going back behind the cover so that this animation will loop. Let's go forward on the timeline to 315, and then I want to set a keyframe here for the values to be these values here. You can do that by clicking this new keyframe button. So now in between this set of keyframes and this set of keyframes, no animation is happening because these keyframes have the same values. Then I'm going to move to the end of the timeline, and I'm going to set these keyframes back to zero. You'd either type in zero or you could select these keyframes, hit Command C to copy, and Command B to paste. If for some reason you're on an older version of After effex and copying multiple keyframes across different layers duplicated your layers, then you're just going to need to do a different method like copying and pasting one at a time. This has been updated in a recent version of Afterefix. Now if I play this back, you can see that the animation will loop. To make this a little bit more interesting, we can stagger the keyframes. I'm going to click and drag to select the keyframes for pages 2 and 3, and then drag them forward in time. Let's go to five frames. And then I'll select the keyframes for page three, drag those over to ten frames. And that'll make this animation a little bit more interesting. Let's do the same thing for the keyframes for the animation out. And this time, I'm going to start with page three starting the animation first. Here's what I have for now. I'm going to come back to this icon to improve the animation later by using parenting and easing. 8. Anchor Point & Rotation: Scissors: Steps to create the scissors animation are going to be very similar to the color swatches. First, I'm going to move the anchor point using the pan behind tool to the hinge for both halves of the scissors. Then I'm going to switch back to the selection tool and hit R on the keyboard to bring up the rotation property. Then I'm just going to rotate these to five and negative five so that the starting position of the scissors looks a little bit more like it would be possible. They're not quite as overlapping. Then I'll click the stopwatch to create keyframes at the start of the timeline. Then I'm going to move my playhead along the timeline to 15 frames and then set the rotation to, let's do 25 and negative 25 for the scissors to be open. Then I'll keep the scissors open for just five frames. I slid a keyframe for the same rotation values and then move the playhead to 1 second and copy and paste the first keyframes to create a loop. Here's what I have so far. Now I want to repeat these keyframes to make the scissors look like they're continuing to cut. I'm going to go to 1 second, five frames on the timeline, and then just copy and paste all of these keyframes by hitting Command or Control C, and then Command or Control V. Again, if this copies and paste your entire layers, so you have a duplicate of the layers, you'll just need to go layer by layer and copy the keyframes and then paste them. Then I'm going to move to 210 and paste again. If I play this back, it's predictable and robotic because they're cutting at the same speed the whole time. What I'm going to do is adjust these key frames so that sometimes they cut a little faster and sometimes a little slower. Maybe here, I'll speed up these keyframes by dragging them to the left, so they open a little faster. Then instead of pausing when they're open, I'm just going to have them start closing immediately by deleting the second set of keyframes. Then let's move these key frames that close the scissors to the left. So it's just going to be open and then close. And then let's have them open immediately instead of pausing in the closed position. So I'll delete these keyframes. Then let's move all of these keyframes up. So now they'll close, open, stay open, and then close. Then we have a little bit more space on the timeline, so let's just copy and paste the first open close sequence. And let's see what we have so far. Adjusting the timing of the keyframes added a little bit more variety, but I'll come back to this animation later to make it even better. 9. Adjust Motion: Now the rotation animation on these pages is boring and mechanical, and that's because they're linear, which means that they maintain the same speed the whole time. In this very simple demo, the top square is moving linearly, so it maintains the same speed from point A to point B, whereas the bottom square has what's called Easy Ease applied to it. This square is going to start off a little slower, speed up in the middle, and then slow down before it comes to a stop. The bottom square is a little bit more interesting of an animation because it changes speed. Also, when you're animating real life things like these icons, it makes more sense for the animation not to be linear because in real life, things actually do usually start off a little bit slower in their motion, then start speeding up and then slow down before they come to a stop. This can make your animations look more natural or realistic. To add easing to your keyframes, the first step is to select them. You could click and drag over keyframes to select multiple at once, or you could also select the property name to select all the keyframes for that property on the layer and then hold command and do the same thing to select multiple layers. Once you have the keyframes that you want to add EZ Es to selected, you want to right click on any one of them, and then go to keyframe assistant and then EZ Es. Notice how this changes your keyframes from diamond shapes to hourglass shapes. Then if I play this back, you can see that this looks a lot more smooth and realistic. I'm also going to add easing to the keyframes for the scissors animation. So to do that, I'm just going to select all of these keyframes and then right click on one of them, go to Keyframe Assistant, and then Easy Ease. You can also use the keyboard shortcut, which is F nine. Now all of these are eased keyframes, so let's play back the animation. While adding EZs can improve your animation, you can take this a lot further. That's beyond the scope of this class, but if you really want to take your animations to the next level, you'll definitely want to learn how to customize the motion of your keyframes using the graph editor. My class Smooth moves covers everything you need to know. 10. Parent Layers: Color Swatches: Another thing that I could do to improve this animation would be to have the entire booklet move a little bit as it's opening. I want all of these layers to move, but instead of animating all the layers position properties, there's an easier way to do that. I'm going to use the binding layer as what's called the parent. This is going to be the layer that moves, and then I want all of these other layers besides the background to follow the parent. So they're going to be the children. I'm going to select the cover and all three pages. And then I'm going to go over to the parent and link options and take one of the pick whips next to any of the selected layers and just drag it to the binding layer. Now in the drop down menu, it says that the parent of these layers is the binding. That means when I move the binding around, you can see that all of the other layers go with it. So parenting is a way that you can have child layers which are all of these follow a parent layer, which is this one. So like you just saw, in order to parent layers, you can use this pick whip to drag to the layer that you want to parent, or you can also select the layer in this dropdown menu. Now let's set some keyframes on the binding. So I'm going to move to the start of the timeline and set a position keyframe for the binding and therefore the entire booklet to be here at the start. Then let's go forward to 1 second and move this up. I'm just going to move the Y position. Something like that. Then let's have it start moving back down as the booklets closing. But actually, this booklet takes a long time to animate. I'm just going to bring these keyframes over. Let's make the whole animation just last 2 seconds instead of four. I'm going to copy the first keyframe on the position of the binding and paste it here at 2 seconds. Let's see what this looks like. Honestly, not that great. That's because these keyframes are linear and it would look better if they had easy Ease. I'm going to do F nine, the shortcut to add Easy Ease to these keyframes. Let's try that again. It looks a little bit better, but I think we could adjust the keyframes a bit more to make it look even better. But first, I want to rotate the entire booklet too. I want to go to the start of the timeline and let's just give this rotation like maybe plus six, and then I'll set a keyframe for that. And then when it's moved up, let's rotate it so this rotates even more back to the left. So maybe minus six. And then at 2 seconds, I'll rotate this back to plus six and then easy ease these keyframes. Let's see what this looks like. This is getting better, but I think if I adjust these keyframes, it can look even better. What I'm going to do is actually take these keyframes and move them so they're all lined up. This means that, all of the pages are going to finish at the same time. Maybe let's make this animation a little bit faster and also staggered so that the entire booklet starts moving first and then the pages start to open. I'm going to move these three keyframes over a little bit, maybe 25 frames. Let's see what that looks like. Yeah, I like that better, and then maybe they'll start closing all at the same time. So I'll line these up. And then we'll have them staggered coming back together. Maybe let's move all of these keyframes over just a little. Let's see what this looks like. This animation looks a lot better than what we had before, but we don't need all of this extra time. If you go to composition and then composition settings, we can adjust the duration to just make it 2 seconds. 11. Parent Layers: Scissors: The two halves of the scissors rotate, it kind of makes the scissors look like they're moving to the left. But if a hand were holding on to the handles of the scissors, the hand would probably stay in place, so the scissors should actually move right to counteract how it looks like they move to the left. To fix this, we can use parenting, and while we're at it, we can make the animation look a little bit more realistic and interesting as well. So I'm going to select the top and bottom of the scissors and then choose the parent to be the hinge. So now if I adjust the hinge layer, you can see that the rest of the scissors will go with it. Keep in mind that parenting goes for any property. If I scale the hinge, then it will also scale the scissors. Or if I rotate the hinge, it also rotates the scissors. I want to animate the position, so I'm going to hit P on the keyboard and set a position keyframe here. Then as the scissors open, I want to move them over to the right, but it's hard to tell where they were. So what I'm going to do is hit Command R on the keyboard to bring up the rulers. Then at the start of the timeline, I'm going to go over to this vertical ruler and drag out a guideline. I'm going to place it right on the right side of the handles of the scissors. Now I can see the starting position of the scissors. Now I'm going to move forward on the timeline and then make the edge of the handles line up with the guideline again. I'm going to adjust the position. And I could also adjust the Y position just to make this animation look more interesting and realistic because if a hand was holding the scissors, it probably wouldn't be perfectly still vertically. I'd probably move a little too. So I'll just adjust this to move the scissors up a little bit as they open. Then it's going to pause in this position, so I'll copy and paste that keyframe. And then when the scissors close, I can copy and paste the starting keyframe. Then I can just go through and do the same thing for all the rest of these keyframes. You could just copy and paste these keyframes where it makes sense too, but I want this to look a little bit imperfect, again, to make it look more realistic. I'm going to go in and adjust the position so that it's slightly different every time. If it's hard to select this hinge because it's small, you can zoom in with this drop down, or if you have a magic mouse like I do, you can just slide your mouse to zoom in. For the last keyframe, I'm going to make sure that it's the exact same as the first keyframe so this will loop perfectly. I'm going to ease these keyframes by selecting the position property to select all the keyframes and then I'm going to use the keyboard shortcut, which is F nine to easy ease those keyframes. Let's see what we have. H 12. Animate Lines: Paintbrush: For the pain Brush icon, I'm going to animate these drips with trimpaths. But right now they're just shape layers, so it's not a line that I could animate with trimpass. The first step is going to be to select all the drips, right click, go to create and then create shapes from vector layer. I'm going to delete the original Illustrator layers. Then each one of these, you can see is a line that I can now animate with trimpats. Let's go into the first line and go to add and then Trim Paths. Then I'll toggle that open. I'm going to animate the end and start properties of this paint drip. But first, remember that there's a paint layer here. So if I just solo this layer by clicking this little button right here, you can see that there's this paint shape here and these drips are partially overlapping with this paint. I'm going to unslo that. I'm going to adjust the end value, so it's just overlapping with that paint shape but not extending past it. I think 27% looks pretty good. I'll set a keyframe here at the start of the timeline, and then let's move forward to 20 frames and bring this all the way up to 100. But as this is dripping down, I want it to actually detach from the rest of the paint on the paintbrush. To do that, I can animate the start property. I'll go to halfway between these two keyframes and have it start detaching. I'll set a keyframe for the start to be at zero, and then let's go to 20 frames and have this animate all the way to 100%. It'll animate the drip all the way off. Let's see what that looks like. Let's add Easy Es to that to make it just look a little bit better. Cool. We have the first drip and we can copy and paste this entire trimpath animation onto the other drips. I'm going to select where it says Trimpas and make sure my playhead is at the start of the timeline and just paste this on drips two, three, and four. Then if you hit U on the keyboard, it'll bring up all keyframes to the selected layer. Now I can see those keyframes and let's hit you again to see just the keyframes on that layer to condense it a little bit. Then I can adjust the keyframes to stagger these animations. Maybe we'll have drip three go first since it's the furthest down, and then maybe drip two will happen next. I'll just drag these keyframes to stagger them. After that, maybe let's have drip four. I'll select these keyframes and stagger them. And then let's do drip one last. And let's play that back. That looks pretty good, but the whole animation lasts only 2 seconds, and we have an extra 2 seconds on the timeline. So two ways you can change that. You can either put your playhead on 2 seconds and then hit the end key, and that will trim this gray bar at the top of the timeline, which is called the work area to your playhead. Then from here, you can right click on that gray bar, the work area, and choose Trim Comp to work area. The other way to do this would be to go to composition composition settings or do Command K, and then adjust the duration here. So here's the end result. One thing to note is that I set key frames for the end value to start at 27%, which was based on where drip one overlapped with this paint layer. Depending on how your paint layer looks and how long the drips are, you might need to adjust the end value for the different paint drips. But for mine, it worked out because drip one was the shortest one. You could also adjust the timing of the keyframes if you want a little bit more variety in how the drips drip. 13. Animate Lines: Pencil: The pencil animation, I want to rotate the pencil so that it's at an angle. Then I want to have the line drawing in and the pencil looking like it's drawing that line. In order to make this line draw in, we're going to need to convert it to a shape layer. To do that, right click on this line layer, then go to create shapes from vector layer. This is going to create a new layer and you can tell it's a shape layer because it has this little star icon next to it, whereas our vector layers have the little Illustrator icon next to them. This layer is an editable shape layer. If I toggle it open, you can see that it has all of the transform properties that you're probably familiar with now and it also has contents, which contains a group and then a path. I even has stroke properties, so you could go in and change the stroke width or the color of this stroke or other things like dashes or tapers or the caps on the ends. Then underneath path, you can actually move this path around. If you select the top layer path, you can select the individual points on this path and edit it. You could even hit the topwatch and key frame this property. I'm going to undo all of that. I don't want to animate the path of this line. I want to animate it drawing in. The way to do that is to go to this ad button here and choose trim paths. This is going to add a new trim paths property, and if you toggle that open, we can animate the start and end values to animate the line on and off. I'm going to go forward on my timeline to 1 second and set a keyframe for the end value to be at 100%. This means that the line will be 100% drawn in. Then I'm going to go back to the start of the timeline and bring this end value down to zero. Now if I play back the animation, the line is going to be animating in. If your line happens to be animating in backwards, so the opposite way of what you want, just hit this button here and it will reverse the direction of the line. The direction of the line is determined by how you drew it in Illustrator. Next, I'm going to select the line layer and just move it down so that we have space for the pencil to draw the line in. I'm going to close up the line and bring it below the pencil, and then I'm going to actually delete this Illustrator version of the line. If you happen to need that back for some reason, you can always find it in this folder of Illustrator layers for the pencil. Now let's make the pencil draw the line in. I'm going to hit P on the keyboard to bring up the position property. You could try to keyframe this, so you have keyframes all along this path to make it look like it's moving in the shape of this path. But there's a much easier way. But before I do that, I want to move the anchor point to the tip of the pencil. Before you do any position animation, it's always a good idea to check where you want your anchor point to be. Let me show you why this is important. So if I were to animate the position of this pencil, I'll just do something very simple like this. So it's moving across the screen like this. But then I realize that I want to change the anchor point. If I grab the pan behind tool and move the anchor point, you can see that it's actually changed the motion path. So now the animation is going to be much different. So I'm going to undo all of that. And all that's to say, remember to move your anchor point before you animate the position property. If you want to learn more about anchor points and how to fix this issue in some cases, check out these tutorials. All right, so I'm going to move the anchor point to the tip of the pencil. And then switch back over to the selection tool. Then I'm going to go into this line layer and find the path, and I want the one next to the stopwatch. I'm going to select where it says path right here and hit Command or Control C to copy that path. Then I'm going to move my playhead to the start of the timeline when I want this animation to start, and I'm going to pace this path onto the position property. Now, this isn't exactly in the right place because when you see that the line animates in, this path is not lined up with that line. But with all of these keyframes selected and the playhead over one of the key frames, you can easily pick up and move this entire motion path. So it's basically moving all of the position key frames. And I'm just going to line it up with the line. So now if I play this back, the pencil almost looks like it's drawing in the line, but the position keyframes are not lined up with the trimpath animation keyframes. What I'm going to do is select this last keyframe for the position animation and just drag it over so that it lines up at 1 second with the trimpath animation. You can see that this keyframe, which is represented by just a little circle, automatically adjusted for me. That's the keyframe right here. This type of keyframe is called rove across time, and the way that it works is that it's always sandwiched between a set of keyframes. If you adjust the end keyframe, or the start keyframe, A ovcrossT keyframes in the middle will automatically adjust their timing so that the animation plays smoothly between the first and last keyframes. When I copied this path and pasted it on the position of the pencil, it automatically set these keyframes to have ovcross time. But if you needed to set this on a set of keyframes, then you just need to select the keyframes, right click and choose RovcrossT. Next, I'm going to select all of these keyframes and hit F nine to easy ease them. Let's play back what we have. Since the pencil is outside of the composition, I'm going to make the composition bigger. So I'm going to go to composition settings by hitting Command K, and let's just increase this to 1,000 by 1,000. And we can also go and increase the background just by scaling it up. So I hit S to bring up the scale property and then just drag the scale to be bigger. You can also lock the background layer. That way you can't accidentally select it. Now let's animate the pencil flipping over and erasing the line. I'm going to open up the transform properties for the pencil and set a keyframe at 2 seconds for the position and rotation. Then I'm going to move forward 15 frames, and I want the pencil to move in the shape of this line. I I copy these keyframes, it'll move the pencil back to the start, but I also need to rotate it so that the eraser is touching the line. I'm going to rotate this backwards. Then take all of these position keyframes by selecting all three of these and move the entire thing up so that the eraser is touching the line. That'll move this entire segment of the motion path. If I scrub through the timeline, you can see right here, this animation looks a little bit weird because this part of the motion path is so straight when the pencil flips over. If you don't see the motion path, make sure that this is toggled on, and also that underneath view, you have show layer controls checked. I want to make this segment of the line curved. In order to do that, I need to have handles, like you can see here for this curve segment of the line. Since I don't already have handles on this portion of the line, you can go up to the Pen tool, click and hold, and then grab the convert vertex tool. Then you can click on a keyframe, which are represented by the squares to create handles. I just clicked once and it deleted the handle. I'm going to click again to add back handles on both sides. Then I'm going to drag this handle out to create a curve and then drag this handle in to hopefully maintain this curve line as much as possible. So let's see what this looks like. I think that looks better. Now let's add some easy ease to these rotation key frames. Now let's animate the line animating out. So underneath the line under trim pass, I'm going to animate the start value. So I'm going to set a keyframe here at 2:15, and then I'm going to go to 315 and bring the start value all the way up to 100. And let's easy ease these keyframes. Let's see what we have so far. Now to make this loop, I need to have the pencil flip back around. Here, when this animation finishes, I need a rotation keyframe. Then I'm going to move to the end of the timeline and copy and paste the first position keyframe so that it starts back at the start of the line and also the first rotation keyframe to flip the pencil over again. When the pencil flips back over, this line right here for the motion path is really straight, and it would look more natural if it had a bit of a curve. So to do that, I'm going to go back up to the convert vertex tool and then click on this keyframe here, and that'll add handles, and then I can drag this handle out, and let's bring this one back. You can hold down option or Alt to just adjust one of the handles and not the other. So I'll bring that one back. Make sure this line still looks like the shape of the line that draws in and out. And let's see what we have so far. Let's make the pencil pause for equal amounts of time at the start and the end of the line. In order to do this and to see all of my keyframes on the timeline at once, I'm going to have no layer selected and hit the key. Then I'm going to take all of these keyframes and move them backwards 15 frames. One other thing I want to do is have the pencil rotate a little bit as it's drawing in the line. So I'll set a rotation key frame at the start of the timeline, and then when this animation finishes, these are both 35 degrees. And then in the middle, let's have the pencil rotate a little bit more this way. So maybe like 40. Here's what this looks like. You might have noticed that when the pencil flips over, there's a little bit of time when you can see the line through the pencil because this shape that I created in Illustrator is an open shape with no fill. Sometimes you can fix things like this by going back into the Illustrator file. And in this case, since it's just a simple color switch, it's easy to fix an Illustrator. So what I'm going to do is go over into my Illustrator file. This whole pencil is group, so I'm going to double click on the shape that I want to add a fill color to and then add that fill color. And then while we're at it, might as well fill these just to be safe. And that looks pretty good. So I'm going to exit the group by clicking on this bar and then save the file, and then I'm going to go back into after effects. And let's just scrub through the timeline and see if that's fixed it. Yep, so now you can see that this is a filled in shape because my Illustrator file has updated within after effects. 14. Animate Scale: Eyedropper: Going to make this rectangle, the fluid that's inside of the eyedropper. But first, let's animate this little droplet of fluid that's coming out of the eyedropper. I'm just going to hide this rectangle fluid layer for now. Then let's move the droplet into place. Since this is getting cut off, let's also make the composition bigger. I'm going to do command or control K to get to composition settings. Let's just make this 700 by 700 pixels. Then I'll scale up the background. I'll select the background, hit S on the keyboard to get to the scale property, and just scale this up. For the droplet, I also want to animate the scale so that it looks like it's coming out of the eyedropper. But first, I want to move the anchor point to the top. I'm going to go to the pan behind tool up in the top toolbar and then let's just zoom in. You can hold down spacebar to get this little hand tool to move your composition. Then I'm going to drag the anchor point up to the top, if you hold down command or control, it'll snap to a corner or an edge, and then I'm going to switch back to the selection tool with V on the keyboard. Then let's top open the droplet and let's animate the position and the scale. The position should start about here, maybe a little bit higher. Then let's go to 15 frames and animate the position moving down. And then at 15 perms, I'll also set the scale to be 100%, and then at the start of the timeline, let's have this be at a scale of zero. So now the droplet will scale up and move down. But I think this goes a little bit too fast. So let's just move these keyframes over to 1 second and 15 frames. I also want to make this animation loop, so I need some way to get rid of this droplet. So let's animate the opacity. So starting at 1 second, let's animate the opacity from 100 and then lined up with these other two keyframes, let's animate it out to zero. Then let's easy ease all of these keyframes. So here's what I have so far. 15. Animate Size: Camera: This camera icon, I want to have the lens scaling like it's adjusting its focus. Let's hide these two photos for now. I want the inner lens to scale, but if I use the scale property, you can see that the stroke weight of that circle actually scales too. I don't like how this looks. I like all the stroke weights to be consistent, even if this is scaling. Let me show you a way that you can affect the size of the circle without affecting the stroke weight. What I'm going to do is deselect this lens inner layer by just clicking off of it, and then I'm going to recreate it with the shape tools and after effects. If you go up to the rectangle tool and click and hold, there's other options for tools here, so I'm going to grab the ellipse tool. Then I'm just going to drag out an ellipse and I'm going to hold down Shift to make sure that I get a perfect circle. If you're not exact, that's okay because you can adjust. I'm going to switch back to the selection tool and then move this into place. Let's just solo this layer, this shape layer, and the lens layer just so it's easier to see what I'm doing. I'm going to zoom in. And then to recolor his stroke, I'm going to click this box here and use this eyedropper to sample the stroke color on the original Illustrator layer. And then I also know that the stroke weight should be 14 because that's what I was using in Illustrator. And then this needs to be a little bit bigger. So I'm going to toggle open where it says ellipse and then ellipse path, and then adjust the size. So I think that looks good. Let's hide this lens layer. That's close enough. The circle shape layer that I created doesn't have a fill color because the fill eyeball is turned off, so I'm going to turn that on. And then let's just move it off so I can click this fill box right here and then use the eyedropper to sample the fill color from the original. And then let's move this back into place. And then let's just drag this shape layer right on top of the lens, and then unsolo both of these layers. And then I can actually just delete the lens original layer. And let's rename this shape layer. So to do that, select it and then hit Return or Enter, and then you can start typing. All right, so now we have this brand new layer that has this size property, and if you animate the size property, you can see that the stroke weight stays the same, even when I make this bigger or smaller. You might be wondering why I didn't just right click on the layer and say, create shapes from vector layer. The reason I didn't do that is because it just creates a path and not an ellipse path. And a path doesn't have the size property. So to animate the lens, let's set a keyframe at the start of the timeline for the size to be this. Then going forward ten frames, I'm going to make this a little smaller. And then let's go to 25 frames and just copy and paste the first keyframe. Easy Ease these keyframes. So it looks like this. Let's animate this lens layer scaling too, but again, I'm going to need to use the size property to maintain that stroke weight. So what I'm going to do is duplicate this inner lens layer by hitting Command or Control D, and let's rename this. And then let's toggle open the glare and find the size property. I'm going to put the playhead over the first keyframe. Since I have all three of these keyframes selected, if I drag over the numbers for the size property, it'll adjust the size for all three of the keyframes while keeping their relative values. I'm going to line this up with the original lens glare from Illustrator. So now, you can see that that inner glare is scaling. Let's just delete the original layer. Of course, this is a full circle, so we need to make it just a quarter of a circle. To do that, I'm going to hit this ad button and choose trim paths, and I'm just going to set the end value to 25% to leave just a quarter of the circle there. Then to move it over here, I'm going to change the offset value. So let's make that negative 90. Then I also want the caps to be rounded caps. I'm going to go into the stroke, or you could also do this in the properties panel, which is a little easier to find. Just hit the round caps. You could also find this underneath stroke. I'm just going to hit you to see all the keyframes and this is what I have so far. 16. Create a Matte: Camera: Let's animate these photos coming out of the camera. I'm just going to hide the flower and work with one at a time. First, I'm going to animate the position and then I'll create a mat so that the photo is only visible in this bottom area and then I'll make it look like it's coming out of the camera. So I'm going to hit P on the keyboard to bring up the position property and set a keyframe at the start of the timeline, and I'm going to drag the Y value up so that it's above this line where the photo comes out of the camera. And then I'll go to 1 second and animate this so that it's all the way off the camera. Now let's create the mat. So to do this, I'm going to use a shape layer and just draw out a rectangle starting at the top of this slot and extending to the bottom of the composition. Let's rename this layer MT, so hit Enter or Return and then Enter or Return again. Then on this Photo layer, I need to set the mat to be this shape layer. To see the MT options, hit this toggle switches Modes button and you should see Track Mat here. If you don't see the track Mat options, then toggle through these buttons until you see it or right click on this top bar here, go to columns and make sure that modes is checked. Then in this drop down menu, you can choose the mat layer to be the MT. You can also use this pick whip to drag to the layer. So now the photo is only going to be visible inside of this mat, and I need to switch back over to my selection tool with V. Now if I play this back, you can see the photo kind of looks like it's coming out of the camera. But it would look better if the mat were moved down a little bit. So I'm just going to select this mat layer and bring it down like this. And maybe let's have this photo go all the way off screen. So I just updated that keyframe. I can also easy ease these keyframes. I want the animation of the lens adjusting to happen first, and then maybe it would look good to have the whole camera move a little bit like someone's pressing down on the shutter and then the photo should come out. I'm just going to close up all the layers. In order to animate the entire camera, I want to have all of the layers parented to this camera layer. So I'm going to select all the layers and parent them to the camera. Now let's see where the keyframes are for the lens. Let's start at about 15 frames and have the camera, the whole thing move down. I'm going to hit Pee on the keyboard to bring up the position property for the camera and set a keyframe here, and then let's move to the end of the lens adjustment animation and move the camera down a little bit. And then move forward another ten frames and make the animation loop by copying and pasting the first keyframe. And I'll easy ease these keyframes. Then it should probably take a little bit of time for the photo to process, and then I'll have the photo come out. So let's drag this layer back and have it come out at 2 seconds. So here's what I have so far. I could also add a little bit of rotation when the camera moves down. So at this keyframe, I'm going to set rotation keyframes. So to see the position keyframes and also bring off the rotation property, I'm going to hit Shift R, and then I'll set a rotation key frame, and then here I'll set a rotation keyframe for, let's just do something really subtle, like maybe just negative one, and then here back to zero. And Easy Ease does keyframes. Then you could repeat all of these keyframes and then also animate the photo flower coming out of the camera and make sure to set the mat to this mat layer. 17. Create a Matte: Eyedropper: In order to get this rectangle that's the fluid, to be just inside of this eyedropper shape, we need to set up a Mt. To see the mat options, go down to the bottom of the timeline and click this button that says Toggle Switches slash modes. So I want this eyedropper shape to be the mat for this fluid. So on the fluid layer, you want to select the mat here. You can either use the drop down and select the layer, or you can use this little spiral, the pick whip and drag to the layer that you want to be the mat. By default, that's going to turn the eyeball off on the layer that you've chosen as the mat, which is the eyedropper. But if you look here, this is not working how we want it to. This eyedropper is a shape that has just a stroke and no fill. So the mat is just showing up on that outline. Let's fix this by giving the eyedropper a fill color. And I'm going to do that in Illustrator. If you don't already have this file open in Illustrator, an easy way to find it quickly is to right click on the layer, go to reveal and then Reveal and Finder. And then you can open it up in Illustrator. So this eyedropper shape needs to have a fill color, so I'm going to select it and color the same color as the background. Then I'm going to hit Save. Then if I go back into after effects, you can see that this mat has already updated because I've given this eyedropper a fill color. Some things like just adding a fill color to a shape, you can do in Illustrator, save the file, and it will update in after effects. Other things like adding layers to your Illustrator file won't update back in after effects. If you want to learn more about what you can and can't do in Illustrator and have updated in your already imported Illustrator file in after effects, I have a tutorial that explains more about this. But for now, I'm just going to unslo this and turn off the eyeball and you can see that that fill fluid is now inside of the eyedropper shape, but I need the eyedropper shape back. I I turn on the eyeball, you can see that this still isn't working because now once the eyedropper layer is turned back on, the fill color is hiding the fluid. To fix this, I'm going to bring the fluid above the eyedropper, but this still isn't perfect because now I'm not seeing the outline around the entire eyedropper because I'm seeing the fluid on top. To fix this problem, I'm going to take the eyedropper shape, and I'm going to right click and go to create shapes from vector layer. And then I'm going to bring this layer on top and this layer still has that fill, but I'm going to go into the layer Underneath contents, there's a few different groups. Let's just kind of click through to find the one that we're looking for. So it's going to be group three, and then I'll toggle that open, and this is going to be the fill that I want to hide. So I'll just either delete it or turn off the eyeball. So now we finally have the look that we want. So I can close this up. I know there was quite a few steps to fix a problem that I could have anticipated. If in Illustrator, I had just created another copy of this layer and had that one have the fill and then just called it like Matt or something, and then on the original eyedropper, have this one not have a fill color and then just imported it like this. That would have solved all of those steps that I had to do between after effects and Illustrator. But I actually didn't do that on purpose. I figured that if you were creating your own icons, you might accidentally get yourself into a situation where you didn't anticipate a mat layer that you would need, so I wanted to show you how you could problem solve. Also keep in mind that adding a layer in Illustrator, once you've already imported the project into after effects is not going to work. It won't recognize this new layer. Now let's animate the fluid in the eyedropper moving down. So I'll hit P on the keyboard to bring up the position property and set a keyframe at the start of the timeline. Then let's move over to 1 second and animate this fluid all the way out of the eyedropper. Since I want this animation to loop, I also want to animate the fluid back in. I'm just going to have it move back up in 15 frames and I'll just copy and paste that first keyframe. Let's easy ease these keyframes and see what we have. This animation only lasts 2 seconds, so I'm going to trim the work area, then right click and choose Trim Comp to work area. There's one more thing we could do to make this animation a little bit more interesting, and that's to make the entire eyedropper move a little bit, so it's kind of like somebody is squeezing it and actually using the pipette. So to animate the position of the whole eyedropper, I need to parent some layers together so I can just animate one layer's position. So I'm going to take the fluid, eyedropper and droplet and parent them to the eyedropper outline layer. Then for this layer, I'm going to hit P on the keyboard to bring up the position property and set a keyframe at the start of the timeline. Then let's go forward in time to 1 second, and this will be when it moves down. And then I want that drip to completely go away before it moves back up so that the drip isn't moving up because that wouldn't make sense. So let's wait til it fades out, and then I'll have this move back up. So let's copy and paste this last keyframe. And then at the end of the timeline, I'll copy and paste the first keyframe, and this will make a perfect loop. And then let's easy ease these keyframes. I think it would look better if the fluid rolls back up as the eyedropper is actually moving back up. So what I'm going to do is move this keyframe over so that it's at the end of the timeline, and then here I'll copy and paste this last keyframe so that the fluid is not visible. So in this space, the droplet will just fade out and then everything will move back into place. This is the final animation. 18. BONUS: Animate Path Property: Might have noticed that in my camera animation, I have the photo kind of morphing a little bit to make it look like it's three D. If you want to learn how to do that, I'll show you how in this video, but it's a little bit more advanced than what we've done so far in class. The first thing that I'm going to do is make my composition bigger by going to composition settings. So let's make this 700 pixels for the height. And then I'm also going to go to advance to make it so that the height is added at the bottom. I'll click this top button here and then hit Okay, and then let's make the background bigger. The next step is to select the photo and convert it to a shape layer. So right click, go to create shapes from vector layer. Then under the shape layer version of the photo, I'm going to toggle it open, and I'm going to select these layers to figure out what they are and then rename them to make this whole process easier. This is going to be the sun, We also need to set the mat for this photo shape layer has this mat layer that we created. Then as the photo is coming out of the camera, let's make it pause maybe right here. I'm going to hit you on the keyboard to bring up those position keyframes and just set a position keyframe here. Let's make it pause for just five frames. I'll copy and paste that keyframe. So it'll come out, pause a little, and then let's have it come out more and then start morphing. But right now you can see there's already a problem. This mat layer is cutting off the bottom of the photo. I'm going to go into the mat under contents, Rectangle one, Rectangle one path, and then the size property, I'm going to unconstrain the proportions and just make the Y value bigger. Then let's move this down so the top of this rectangle still lines up with the slot. But now we have plenty of room down here so the photo doesn't get cut off. Let's go into this photo layer. In the main layer, I'm going to animate this path property. So I'm going to click the stopwatch for the path property right here. Then let's move forward in time, and it looks like the photo is going all the way off the composition still. So let's actually move it up a bit. So I'm going to bring the Y value up so it ends about here. And let's actually make this animation take a little bit longer, so I'll drag this keyframe over to 310. Then at 3 seconds, I'm going to start animating the path property on the main photolayer to make it start morphing. I'm going to select where it says path one, and this way, I can actually select the individual points on the path. This can be confusing because if you select where it says path next to the stopwatch, then all the points on that path are selected. So if you try to move one, you end up moving the whole thing. Instead, if you select off of the layer and then select just where it says path one, but don't select where it says path next to the stopwatch, then you can grab the individual points and move them around. So for these bottom points, I'm going to drag them out and I'm holding shift to maintain the vertical position. This is going to make it look like the photo is coming towards the viewer. I also need the photo to bend a little bit so it looks more realistic. I'm going to go up to the Pen tool, click and hold and grab the convert vertex tool and then just click both of these points to add curves. Then I'm going to switch back to the selection tool and grab these handles and just bring in the ones on the inside so that this bottom line is straight and then I'll grab the handles for the vertical part of the line and bring them so that I'm creating a curved line. Something like that. Now on this Inter Photoayer I need to do something very similar. I'm going to go back to the start of this path animation and click the stopwatch for the inner Photos Path property and then move over to line up with this keyframe and animate this path. Again, go to convert Vertex tool and it might be helpful to zoom in at this point and get these handles. Then I need to animate the path on the mountains layer. So I'm going to do the same thing, go to line up with these keyframes, start the keyframes for the path property, then move over, and then select just path one so I can select these points. Alright, so what we have now is the photo is going to come out and it's going to start to, like, bend towards the viewer. I also need to bring these points down, so it's like the photo is kind of starting to lay flat. I'm going to click and drag over all of these points to bring them all down at once. And then let's also bring the mountains down. Then let's bring the sun layer down. For this, I'm going to toggle open the sun, go to transform sun, and there's a whole other set of transform properties that are different than the transform properties on this entire layer. These transform properties are just for this little sun circle right here. I'm going to go to the start of this path animation and set position keyframes for the sun to be here and to have a scale of 100 100 here. And then at 3 seconds, let's move the sun layer down. And then unlock the constrained proportions on the scale property and shrink down the Y value for the scale. So here's what this looks like so far. I need to bring the mat down a little bit. That looks better. Alright, so the photo moves down, and then I want it to fully lay flat. So I'm going to go forward another ten frames and then again, animate the path properties. So starting with the main photo, I'm going to have these two top points collapse all the way down to meet with the bottom of the photo and then I'll adjust these handles to make just a flat line. And then the same thing on the inner photo. And if I just click and drag, it'll also select those bottom points on the mountain layer, and then I'll just drag that down. And then I'll select these top points, including the mountains, but making sure that I'm not selecting the sun, and I'll start dragging these down to make a flat line. So let's see what this looks like so far. Okay, the last piece is just to move the sun down. So let's animate the position moving down, and then the scale going to zero and the y axis. So here's what we have so far. You could go back into the keyframes to adjust the path slightly or just the timing to make this look a little bit better, but this is the basic idea of how you would animate with the path property. 19. Nest Compositions: This video, I'll show you how to put your icons all together into one composition so you can create a video file with all of your icons side by side. The first step is going to be to go over to this new composition button, and let's name this icons. Make sure to set your width and height, and then I want this to be 4 seconds because that's the length of the longest icon animation, and I've set the background color to the same background color as the icons. Next, you can drag in all the icon compositions. If the background color differs from the background color of the main comp, go up to view and then uncheck use display color management. That should fix that issue. I'm just going to bring in all the other icon comps. Et's scale these so that they're not all overlapping. I'm going to hit the S key to bring up the scale property, and then I'll just select all of these by hitting Command A and let's set the scale to 50%. The next step is going to be just to rearrange the icon so that this composition looks good. You can use the align tools, or if it's helpful, you can see the center of the composition by choosing title action safe here or the keyboard charcu is the quotes key. Some of the icons only last for 2 seconds, and then they disappear. The easiest way to fix this is just to select those compositions that only last 2 seconds and hit Command D to duplicate them and drag the copy over into the empty space. Now if I play this back, I should have everything looping. 20. Render a Video File: Here's how to export this composition as a video file. This is called rendering and after effects terms. Make sure either this composition is selected in the timeline and the timeline is selected with this blue outline or make sure that the icon composition is selected in the project panel. Then go up to composition, add to render Q. This will bring up the Render Queue and the timeline. Then next to output module, you can choose the settings for this video file. I'm just going to use the default, which is an MP four file. But if you want to change the settings, you can either use a template that you can find here or click on the blue text to bring up all of the setting options. Next to output two, if you click on this blue text, you can choose where to save this file. The last step is to hit the render button. Here's the video file that I just exported. 21. What's Next: Congrats on completing this class. I hope you feel more comfortable in after effects. I'd love to see what you animated, so please post your work as a class project. And if you posted on Instagram, tag me at Animation Explained. If you've got something out of this class, it would really help me out if you left a review. To keep learning, check out my other classes, and make sure you're following me on Skillshare or sign up for my free email newsletter to hear when I have a new class for you. Thanks so much for watching until next time Happy Animating.