Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Hung Chu, and I'm a motion designer in Canada. I've been animating in Adobe After Effects professionally for more than five years. I've worked in two different advertising agencies for clients like Adidas, PayPal, Walmart, and many more. Today I'm going to be teaching you how to animate explainer videos in After Effects from storyboard to final animation. Explainer videos are in high demand now, it is an essential part of motion graphics. Once you know how to animate explainer videos, it will make you a more marketable animator towards your competitors and be able to take on fun projects on your own. In this course, I'll show you everything you need to know to get started with this short and simple explainer video. I'll show you the complete full professional workflow from first coming up with this storyboard, how to set up your illustrations for animation, identify the main animated scenes and transitions, adding accent and secondary animation, step-by-step working through the storyboard. Applying animation principles like overshoot and anticipation, using graph editor to bring life to your keyframes and tons of keyboard shortcuts tips and tricks that I use all the time for more efficient workflow. For the class project, you will be applying the skills and techniques learned here to create your own 15-second explainer video. Make something that you feel really proud of, and the things we learn in this course will be easily translate it into any type of motion graphic projects and gets you up and running with After Effects animation. Beyond just creating your final explainer video, you will also develop greater insight into visual narration and expand your animation vocabularies. It will train your eyes to become animators eyes and provide you with a brand new way of looking at animation and storyboards in the future. I hope you have a lot of fun learning an animating. I'll see you in class.
2. Projects: Welcome to the class. Before we begin, I want to talk about the class projects. For the project, you will be animating your own 15-second explainer video based on the script and storyboard provided. I will take you through the whole process, from how to customize or come up with your own storyboard all the way to final animation. First of all, I want you to read through the project description that I've listed in the details section, and there you will find the steps you need to take to complete the project. Get familiar with what we're doing, and I'll take you on the journey of creating an explainer video. As you're taking the course and working on the project, I encourage you to share with me the work in progress in the project panel so that I can provide you some feedback and guide you through the process. A 15-second explainer video is not an easy project, especially if it's your first time doing it. There will be struggles, and there will be pain. Trust me. Your brain might even hurt a little bit. No kidding. But same as learning anything, it is a part of the process, and I'm here to help you get the most out of this course and answer any questions you may have and clear the roadblocks along the way. Once you follow me and complete this project, you will get an idea of what the full process is to create an explainer video. This process and workflow is applicable to any motion graphic works. It will help you get ahead of the game and give you the confidence to be able to take on any future client work. Not only that, in the end, you will have a full explainer video to put on your demo reel that you can share among friends. That's it was class projects. I'll see you in the first class.
3. The Storyboard: Welcome to the first lesson. In this lesson, I want to talk about the storyboard. There will be two scenarios when it comes to storyboard. One is if you're provided with the storyboard by your client or an art director, all you need to do is to animate it. Two is if you're only provided with a script and you need to design your own storyboard. I'll be covering both scenarios in this course and provide a rough process of how I come up with a storyboard. There will be some helpful resources where you can find some free illustrations or color palettes. Now without further ado, come take a look. For our SmartCity.io, here is a storyboard that I received from an art director, which is me myself. I gave myself this storyboard. As you can see here, I've got here the logo of the company and then 15 second explainer video storyboard, what it is. Here I've got seven storyboards, at the end, there's a logo lockup of the company. Here underneath each storyboard, there is a few notes here. First one is the V0 highlighted here, which is the script of the video initially. So the whole 15 second video is going to read like this. No matter where you are in the world, what city you live in, information can be accessed anywhere. That's why we built SmartCity.io, stay connected wherever you are. That's our hot spot. Then, in between each storyboard, I also have a transition artwork. It tells me roughly how the first thing transition into the next and then the next transition into the next. Normally, if you're not good at illustration or storyboard, you're not a storyboard artist. If you're only a motion designer who are good at animation, you will typically receive a storyboard deck like this from art director or a Illustrator, and they will have all the illustrations storyboard done for you. Together with this PDF deck, I will also receive a Illustrator working file. Let's open this one. Essentially, this is the storyboard-working file that the illustrator did all the illustrations in. It's got all the separated elements of the storyboard, and then I can later on use this one to prepare my files and then use it for animation. The illustrator also included is color palette in here as well. These two documents here are typically what I receive from, say, art director or a illustrator. But what happens if you don't receive them from someone else? Like what happens if you're freelancing and then your client wants a 15 second explainer video, and you are going to be the one who is doing the storyboard. How can you do that? Well, let me show you the process of coming up with a storyboard. Although to be honest, I don't consider myself a storyboard artist or Illustrator, but sometimes when I have freelance client, I still have to do them myself. I can show you roughly my process, how I deal with those. If, for example, the client come to you, you would only receive a script with probably a logo of their company. Let me open this storyboard template here. This is a template that I use. For example, we have a 15 second video that we need to come up with a storyboard and then client already sent me the script. The script reads the same as what we've seen before. No matter where you are in the world, what city you live in, information can be accessed anywhere. That's why we built SmartCity.io. Stay connected wherever you are. That's the script we received. I've already put it in here into my storyboard template. Then as you can see, I have a guideline of my storyboard for 15 seconds. First of all, I need one artwork here, which is the main artwork, the opening, and then I need a transition as a second one, and then I need a second scene, basically, a third storyboard. Then need another transition. I need another scene, and then at the end it would be logo revealed transition, and the logo lockup. This is a guideline for me to come up with a storyboard that I need to present their information to basically story tell their scripts. Next step, what I would do is, I would go to two ways. If you are doing it for free as your personal project, I would recommend you to go to freepik.com. This is a free graphic resources, and then if you only use it for educational purposes, all you need is just to note the artwork or the graphic, whatever you use it's coming from this website and you don't need to pay for it. But that's only for educational purposes, you cannot use a free for any client work. That's one. Then another one I would recommend if you are working on client work, I would recommend Shutterstock. You can pay like around $30 a month for 10 images. Look, I even have this here. Ten images for free. I've account myself so I can just download images for client work and then pay like $30 per month and you can download any vector illustration and then maybe customize it for your own needs so that you don't have to do anything from scratch. Unless you are very good at illustration, you are a pretty good illustrator, by all means, in that case, you can do anything you want. For now, we're just going to stick with Freepik because I think most of us are using it for educational purposes. First, I need a graphic for, no matter where you are in the world. The key word here is, World. Let me search for World. World. I got a world map. These graphics with a crown icon here, those requires premium lessons in order to download. If you are using a free account, you can't download those images, but everything else, you can just download it for free. Pretty much. I would just find something that I like that I can use as my first storyboard. Even this globe here. You can just get rid of this guy and then use that globe. For example, if I want to use that one as my first storyboard, I can just come here and click "Download", and then you can free downloads, but then you must attribute to the author. Copy this link. If you want to put it into your portfolio, you can do it, but then you have to attribute the author. Now that I download that little globe icon, I can look for my third storyboard, the main scene. Although before I start looking for image reference or inspirations, it'd be great if you can draw something down so that you have a specific image in your head that you want to create. Some kind of scene that you want to create before you get into Illustrator. But with this template, you're able to have a pretty clear guideline of what kind of graphic you need, either as a transition or at main scene to help you with the storyboard. Go back to what we have now. You can see it's similar to my template. We have one main scene transition, another scene, another scene, and this is transition and another scene. Then logo transition, logo review, and then logo lockup. That's the general flow of the video. But this course, I want to show you how to do explainer video. I'm not here to teach you how to do storyboards, so I just want to show you the general idea how to come up with a storyboard yourself. I would just go through the keyword of these scripts and then think about the scene that you want to have and then place them in here. Once I have it, something like this. I have all of the artwork placed in my template, I will then go to another website Coolors. This website, you can actually select a color palette. Try, hit "Explore." It's loading. Those are the trending color pallets. You can select any trending color pallets you like and then customize your graphics to whatever color you want to convey the message or convey the mood and feeling that you like. Say if I like this one here, so that I would just screen capture it, and then I would come back to my Illustrator file. Put this screen capture here, and then maybe create a few blocks. Something like that. If I like this color, I would go into each our boards and change the color of these elements around this color palette. But right now, I've got this color palette to work with, so I don't want to change a right now. What you can do is you can follow the same process. You can use this template, fill it in with the type of graphics you want and then search for a color palette that suits your storyboard. Change all the colors or you can customize the graphics as well to come up with a storyboard similar to what I have here. Now let's recap. In this video, we first talked about the storyboard, and then we talked about how to come up with your personal storyboard and the storyboard template where it can guide you through the process. We also have some resources like Freepik, Shutterstock, or Coolors, where they're going to be also helpful with the process. That's basically everything that we covered. To begin your project, you will need to have a storyboard. Now here's my challenge for you. I've got two options. First, you can take my storyboard and customize it with the different color palette or some different design elements, do whatever you like. Second option, you can use the way that we teach here in this video and come up with a brand new storyboard. Makes sure to post your storyboard or any progress you have in the project panel and share with me to inspire fellow students. I can't wait to see what you come up with. Next video, I'm going to show you how to prepare your Illustrator files and get it ready for after effects animation.
4. Prepare Illustrator File: In this video, let me show you how to prepare your Illustrator file with multiple storyboards and make it ready for animation before you bring it in into Adobe After Effects. Let's open this explainer storyboard. Here we go. Now we have all seven storyboards. They're all on separate artboards. Normally if we have only one storyboard, it would be easier, but now, since we have seven of them, the first thing we need to do is to separate each one into its own file. Make each storyboard into its own Illustrator file. To do that, we need to go to File, and then click on Save As, maybe create a folder here, Storyboards separated, and then click on Save. Here's the option panel. Now we need to check on the Safe each artboard to a separate file. Then we just need all of the artboards into separate files. Click on Okay. Let's go back to the finder. Here we go. You see, I've got explainer 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, and then there this original master Illustrator file. Now we can close this master one, and then check each one. Here, 01, this is our first opening scene. However, 02, it doesn't seem like, let me open this storyboard here. 02 doesn't seem like the second storyboard. It seems like this one, as the fifth storyboard. All we need to do is to rename those storyboards. This one, let me find the second. This is the second. I'm going to rename 002, 001, and then this is the third one, and this is the fourth one, fifth, sixth, and then seven. Now we have each Illustrator file in order from the storyboard. This is my first one, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, and seventh, the end logo lockup. That's the first thing we need to do. The second thing is, we need to figure out which storyboard we need to bring it into after Effects. To be honest, we don't need to bring all of these seven things into After Effects, because some of them, like this second line is only a transition. I can animate from the first scene to the second scene, to the third scene. I just need to find out the storyboard, the main artwork, which is the first one, and this one, the fourth one, and maybe this one with the icons, and then the last one. These are the only four artboards I need to bring them into After Effects. Having said all that, let me open the first Illustrator file. Now we have this Illustrator file. This line here is just the indication of secondary sparks, whatever. I don't need it right now. I can just animate it later on in After Effects, so I can delete this one. The first thing I need to do, I need to go to Layers. If you don't have Layers panel here, just go to Window, and then it's under here, Layers. As you can see right now, there's only one layer, but what I need to do is to release all the layers underneath this one master layer, so that later on when I bring this file into After Effects, all of the elements are going to be separated. Right now if I bring this file into After Effects, it's only going to show me one flat image, which I cannot do anything, I can not animate it. To separate the elements, I need to click on this Layer, and then go to this button here. Click on this Release to Layers Sequence. Now I've got all of the layers below it, select all of them, click on the first one, shift-click the last one, and then drag them out of the master layer. Drag them out, and then delete the last one because it's empty now. Now as you can see, all these little stars are separated on its own layer. Another thing I need to do for this storyboard is I need to right click and then release clipping mask. I need to release the clipping mask of this world map and the globe because I need to redo it in order to animate it in After Effects. This is just a specific case when you're doing the globe. If we don't have this globe here, that is all we need, but since we have this globe, we have to have this full map in After Effects so that we can animate the globe. That's all we need to do. I just now need to save this file command S. We're done with the first storyboard. The second one is transition we don't need it. The third one, it's almost the transition, so we don't really need this one as well. We need this full scene here. Double-click fourth one. Here's our fourth storyboard. We need to repeat the same process. Go to Layers, and then click on this Layer 1, go to this top right corner button, click on Release to Layers Sequence, and then just drag all these layers outside of the layer 1. Now just go down and then delete the last layer which is empty. Another thing I need to do, is to clean up some of the elements in here. I need all of these buildings in one layer. Some of them are right now separated in multiple layers. It's going to increase the number of layers when I bring them into After Effects, which is something that I don't need and I don't want, I just need each building to be on its own layer to be clean. Now I will just go from the bottom of the layers panel here and organize the layers a little bit. I can click these little circle here to select the layer artwork, and then the three should be one group, so, I'll just group them, command G. Since it's grouped, the two layers beneath it are empty now, so, I can delete these two layers. This one is over here, behind that building. I can just delete this one because it's a little hard to see. Then there is something, some window behind as well, I can delete that one too, but maybe later when we get to it. This one is done. This one. So D3 are the same building. Command G group, delete the two that's empty versus a blue one here. Blue one, blue window, group these too, delete the one that's empty. These three are the same building command G, group, delete the two that's empty. So this is over here. Delete that. I'll speed up this part. All I need to do, is to group some of the building window elements together. Here we go. Now I've got all of these buildings on its own layer. Every single elements are on it's separate layers now. Let's save the project. You can see in the layers panel here I have reduced the number of layers from a 100 something just now to maybe around 20, which is much easier to manage later on in After Effects. That's all we want to do for this artboards. Let's go back to the Finder. Now let's open O5. The trick for this one is, since we already have O4, the building, so, we don't need to import all these building again in After Effects, I can just delete it. Then these are the only thing that we need from this artboard. Go to Layers Panel. Click on "Layer 1", go to this button here, release to layer sequence. Then we can just select all of these layer underneath it, drag them out, delete the last one, and now I want to see if they're all good to go on its own layer. So I've got that. I guess the only thing is, I want to group this circle and this card together. Command G and then delete this one. So these are the layers I need for this artboard. Command S, go back to Finder. Now it comes down to the last logo lockup, open it, go to Layers, hit on this "Layer 1". Go to Release Layer Sequence, and bring these outside of layer 1. Delete layer 1. I've got the logo here, and the cloud, and the background. Yeah, that's all we need. Command S, save the project. There you go. That's how we prepare our storyboard in Illustrator before we bring them into After Effects for animation. I basically repeat the same process for four times. You can do the same for your own storyboard or you can use my storyboard to prepare the files. Once you work on it hands on, it's going to help you to memorize the whole process, which is pretty simple. After you finish these projects yourself, you will be able to quickly and easily prepare the Illustrator files. Now it's time to recap. In this video, I first showed you how to save each artboard to a separate Illustrator file, and then we identify which are the main scenes that needs animation. Then we went into each Illustrator file to try to separate the element, and the key function is release to layers sequence. I also showed you in the building scene where I've grouped some of the layers together to reduce the number of layers illustrator so that we can be more efficient in After Effects. In the next video, I'm going to show you how to set up your files in After Effects.
5. Setup Files in AE: In this video, I'm going to show you how to setup files in after effects for explainer video. Now let's open Adobe After Effects. What I'm using is Adobe After Effects 2020. If you have a previous version that's fine as well. Here we go. First we need to create a new project. To do that, if you don't see what I'm seeing here new composition, you can go to file and then create new project. Click on this one. If you are seeing what I'm seeing right now, just click on new composition. We're going to rename it to main comp. This is going to be the main composition that we're animating the explainer video. The dimensions are going to be 1920 by 1080, which is HD quality. Square pixels frame rate at 30 frames per second, full resolution. Duration let's create a 20 second video timeline so that we have more timeline to work with. Our video is going to be a 15 second explainer. The background color you can use any color you like, I'll just stick with white color for now. Click okay and then okay. The first thing I want to do is to make sure we all have the same layout. We need to go to window and then workspace, choose this standard layout. After you choose standard layout, you should have the same panel as you can see here. But if you don't have what you're seeing here, just go to window or space and reset standard to save layout. This button is going to change the layout to the default standard layout, and then you should be able to see a same layout as mine here. Next, what I want to do is create some folders to organize the project panel here. The first folder I want to create is CSF folder. The second one is going to be the final comp. Then third one, just click on this button to create new ones, it's going to be the precomps. Now, the final comp folder it's going to be this main comp that we're going to be animating in. First of all lets load the illustrator file and see what happens. To load the illustrator file, the storyboard, the easiest way is to double-click on this empty space here in project panel. Then this navigate to desktop assets. Go to this storyboard separated. Click on this 001 which is the first storyboard, and then over here change the footage to composition. If you import it as a footage, it's going to import as a flat image without the ability to separate all the elements on the storyboard. Now, I've got a composition selected. Let's open it. You can see here it created two different things here. One of them is a composition. If I double-click to open it, it consists all the separated layers in this composition. Then the other one is a folder, and the folder also consists all of the Illustrator files. Now what I need to do is to drop this folder into the assets and then this comp into the precomps. If I open all the folder here, you can see this is going to be similar when we import all the other illustrator files. The folder is going to go into assets and then the newly created composition is going to go into the precomps, and then the final comp is going to be this one single final composition that we're working in. That's how we organize the project files. If you don't do it this way or if you have your own way, that's fine but you have to organize your files in project panel because once you have a lot of different layers, different comps, it's very easy to get confused later on especially when you're working on a longer explainer video, say one minutes, and you're going to have a ton of different folders files in this panel. If we want to add music later on, we can also create a folder called music, something like that, and you can customize it as you wish. But normally, the main three folder that we need here are these three. Now, let's go back to the main composition, close this one. I've got a transparence backgrounds. If you remember, we did create a white background color when we first created the composition, but why is it in transparent mode? The reason is because I have this button here click, toggled transparency grid. If I uncheck this one, you can see the white background that we created before. But then although you see it's a white background, it doesn't render as a white background. It's actually just showing you this way, and in reality it's actually a transparent background. That's how you set up after effects file for explainer video. Now let's recap. In this video, I showed you how to create a project in After Effects. Then we change our workspace into the standard layout so that we all have the same window and layout to work with. Then I showed you how to create folders in the project panel and organized your layers. The last thing we talked about is how to import illustrator files into after effects. Now let's go to the next video and start animating.
6. Animate Opening Scene: In this video, I want to talk about a general workflow of a explainer video and then we can start animating. Just to recap what we did before. We first use one master illustrator file and separated this one illustrator file into it's individual outboards, as you can see here. We went into these ford separate Illustrator file and then separated the elements, organized the files, and also released the layers and that's why we're able to bring them in later on in After Effects, that's the second step. The third step, we created a After Effects file and then we organized our project panel into folders so that it's easier to track later on. Then the fourth step, we're going to import the storyboard Illustrator file into After Effects for animation. That's what we're going to do here. Let's start animating the first opening storyboard. From the last video, we've already imported the first opening scene of the storyboard, which you can find here under princomp. Then double-click on this smart city explainer. Those are all the different layers we have and then select one of them, command A, select all, commands C, copy them, and then go back to main comp, paste them all into the main comp. Now we can close this composition. The first thing I see is the naming is long because right now showing use a source name. I can just click on the source name here, and then it's going to change back to layer name, which is shorter, easier to recognize. In this storyboard, the animation is going to essentially be this globe growing from nothing, come up to the center of the frame and then the star is just twinkling in the background. That's essentially our first scene animation and that's what we're going to do here. Now I know the last layer here is a background, so I'm going to quickly rename it EKG. Now I want to try to find the globe here. Just select a few frames, turn on the I icon and see if it disappears. If it disappears, the globe is going to be within those layers that I selected. Here we go. There's this one mistake that I made here. The problem is right now you can see these two layers are not separated. I've got this map and the globe all in one layer. These two are not separated. If that's the case, there's no way that I can animate it. I have to go back to the Illustrator file, open this explainer storyboard 01 and fix it over there. Go to layers. Find the globe here. This is the one, you can see from the thumbnail and the reason is, although all the other layers are released and on it's own layer, but this layer, I need to release it again. Click on the layer here, layer 10, and then go to top right corner. Release the layer sequence. Now I've got all of these two separated, bring them outside of this layer 10, and then delete layer 10. Now if I toggle between the I icon here, you can see those two layers, I separated. Save this Illustrator file. Go back to here. Now you can see you cannot find layer 10 anymore because I've already deleted it. The easiest way is to just delete these two in the project panel and re-import everything again. Click on this first storyboard, choose composition, open, and then put this composition to princomp, and then put this folder into assets. Do the same thing, copy all the layers, go back to main comp and paste in everything. This process just shows you if you've done something wrong from the beginning, there's always ways to go back and then change it and then redo it again. Now let's just find the globe here. Here's the globe. Here's my map. In order to create a globe, here is a step you need to follow. First, I need to duplicate this globe layer command D and this one is going to be as a reference. I just need the size as a reference and then select the two layer here, globe and map, precompose it, command shift C, precompose these two layers into one composition, rename it to globe. Click on okay, double-click this globe here, going inside and then I need to go to layer new solid. I need to create a same color as this blue globe here. Just use the eye dropper, click on it, click on okay, put it underneath the map and then you can delete the globe Illustrator file. I don't need it anymore. That's our flat globe. Go back to the main comp. This one, the globe right now is on top of this, so I want to hide it for now. Click on globe, go to the right-hand side. Find effects and presets. If you don't have it on your right-hand side, you should, because we all have the same layout. But if you don't go to window and then click on effects and presets and choose search for a CC sphere. Drag CC sphere on top of this globe composition. Now you can see our globe. However, it looks more like a 3D globe, doesn't look as flat as our illustration. What we need to do is we need to turn off the light intensity, change it back to zero. Then height zero, direction zero, everything zero. Then the shading, the ambiance, we're going to increase the ambiance. Now you can see it looks similar to our design here. I want to put it at 115. That's good. Then if I want to change the size of A, I will just increase the radius. Remember the globe that we saved here, just as a size reference, somewhere around there and then I can delete that globe. What I want to do first is to animate the size from zero to maybe the spake 414. The way to do it is, I want to teach you a shortcut command shift right arrow, go forward 10 frames and then command right arrow, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. So that's essentially 15 frames further. I want to add a key frame on the radius and then go back to zero seconds. Maybe change it to zero. Click on use space bar to preview. Yes, that's our globe animation from start to finish. However, that's too boring because there's no energy and then the animation is linear, the speed is constant. That's not fun. In order to show the key frame, I need to hold down shortcut U and then it's going to show me those two key frames. The first thing I want to do is before this globe settles in place, I want it to become bigger, maybe at 10th frame. So the end, it's supposed to be 414, but then at 10 frame, I want it to be 425. I want this globe to become bigger and then settles back in place. This is typically what we call a overshoot. As the globe grows from zero to bigger and bigger, it overshoots a little bit and then settles back in place. This is what we call an overshoot in animation, it's one of the animation principle. Let's preview this. It's a little subtle, so I want to change it to 440. That's good. Now, what I need to do is select all three keyframes. Right-click Keyframe Assistant, Easy Ease. What it does is, it's going to give more energy to the animation, as you can see here, and then the speed change is not linear anymore. If I open this graph here, click on this Graph Editor, and then click on this button to fit the graph to view, this is basically the speed graph. Over here at zero second, you can see the speed is zero. Then over here at this high point, the speed is 2,000 units per second. The speed goes down again. It's basically showing you the speed of this animation. However, what I want to do is to make it more dramatic. I want the animation to be more energetic, so I want to change the speed graph over here to this shape here, so that I have a higher speed here at the highest point. Once I adjusts that, let's go back and preview this animation and see what happens. You see that? The animation is not only smooth but more energetic. Now my issue is, I feel like I need to extend the animation to give it more time, because right now is only taking around 15 frames, which is a very short period of time. I'm going to give it more time. Just select all three keyframes. Hold on Option on Mac, Alt on PC, and then drag the last one. Drag it out a little bit. Over there to 20 frame. Now let's preview the animation. Yeah, I like that. That's good. Other than that, I also want the globe to rotate as well. Here you can see a rotation on top of the radius. Let's animate the Y horizontal rotation. Just put down a keyframe over here and then go back to a different row and maybe put down 180. Let's see what happens. Now that's too much. It's rotating too fast. I want to change it back to probably 90. Let's preview that. I want this globe to slowly rotate. Before I zoom into the globe, I want it to constantly moving. At this point here, I want to adjust the rotation, so that the graphic looks like that. Let's preview that. Yeah, that looks good. Make sure to save the project Command+S. This is also my first time saving it so I want to save it to SmartCity Explainer. Animation, creates SmartCity Explainer, Save. Next, what I want to do is to animate all the stars, which is very simple. First we need to find all the stars. I think all the other layers are the stars except for the BKG background. Now I'm just going to select all of the other layers, change them to one color, maybe like a blue and then you use the eye icon, turn it off to see if they're all stars. Yes, they are. Now I want to group them together with Pre-Comp. So Command+Shift +C, name is Star, and then click "OK". Now you've seen, we've cleaned up the timeline here. We've only got the globe, the star, and the background. The way to animate the star, I just want the star to like twinkling at the back. In that case, it's only a transparency change. Double-click the star here, switch off this transparency button, and then right now the background is white, but I can't see them so I need to change the background. I need to go back to the composition setting, which is Command+K, and then change the background color to black. Now I can see the star. Select one of them, this one over here. Zoom in. Hit "T" for transparency opacity as well. Hold down Option, click on the stopwatch here. It's going to allow you to add a expression. The expression I want to add here, it's very simple, it's called wiggle. Just type in wiggle bracket. I want to add two value here. The first value is going to be the frequency of the changes. If they put three here, it's going to be three changes per second. Then, next one is amplitude. I'm going to put 60 here, which means the transparency, also opacity is going to change between 0-60 values from what it is right now, which is 100 percent. That means the real value is going to change from 40 percent to 100 percent. That's what we need. Let's preview this. You can just see the star that's twinkling. Then here's the easy parts. All I need to do is click on this opacity value here, go up to Edit, and then I'll click on this "Copy Expression Only." It's going to copy this expression. Then select all the rest of the layers. Click on paste on keyboard Command+V. It's going to paste in the expression to all of these layers. After that, let's preview this comp here. Now you can see our stars are animating. How easy is that? Takes no second. Now let's go back to the main composition. Start from zero, let's preview this. Our star is animating, the globe is animating, it's rotating. Looks settle and nice. Now let's recap. In this video, I showed you how to use CC Sphere effect to animate the globe. Then we talked about overshoot. One of the animation principles. I also showed you how to modify the speed graph in the curves editor so that we can bring out energy to our animation. The last thing is how to add a wiggle expression to the stars to animate the stars. In the next video, I'm going to show you how to add some accent, which is secondary animation around the globe.
7. Add Accent to Globe: Next I'm going to show you how to add a line burst accent to this first opening scene. First of all what we need to do is go to the Paint tool on top here, and then over here, you can see there is a choose grid and guideline. Click on that. Turn on the Title/Action Safe, and it's going to show you the center point of the frame. Zoom in. What I need to do is to draw a line here. Use Pen tool to click on the center here, and then go up, hold down Shift to constrain it. Just draw a straight line, and then you can change the stroke. Click on the Stroke, change it to white, and then you can turn off the fill. Holding down option, click, click, click, three clicks. Now we have a white line with 4 pixels. Next, what we can do is go up here, change it back to the Selection tool, now we have a white line. First, we need to animate this white line. Click on this down arrow here, hover over here, let's use a effect called trim paths. If I change the end percentage here you can see, the line is animating. So the way I want to do this is, at zero second, I want it to be both at zero. Click on the stopwatch for 2 key frames, and then go back to maybe 15 second, and change them all to 100 percent, and now what I need to do is, select these 2 ending key frames and track them out. It's going to create an effect like this. If I just solo this layer, this is the Solo button, sometimes when you need to preview just one layer, it's going to solo 1 layer without showing you any other layers. Once I click this, you can preview this 1 single layer individually. Let's preview this, with the keyframe that I have now, from 0-10, it's going to create these effects here. Then what I need to do is to change these 4 keyframes to easing keyframes: Select and right-click Keyframe Assistant, Easy Ease. Now you can see, there's a bit more energy, but still that's not enough. What we need to do a select all 4, go to Graph Editor, click on this to fit it to the preview, and then drag those graphs to a similar shape that we had before when we animate the globe, like a mountain here. Make sure you are in the speed graph. If you click on this, you can see edit speed graphs. Sometimes if you're in the value graph, it's going to show you a different type of curve, but this is not what you want, you want to be in this speed graph here. Just drag it out. Give it more speed, like this. Now let's preview this. Something like that. Next thing we need to do is click on this Arrow key, and then click on Add. Let's use a repeater, click on this arrow, open the repeater, open the transform property under the repeater and make sure you don't click on this general transform, just use this one transform within the repeater, and then change the position to zero. If you want to repeat by an angle, maybe 30 degrees, and now, I can change the copies to be off copies, and this is what we get here. Let's preview this. That's something that I like, and now I can just turn off the Solo button. Zoom out. Let's preview this. Go to the end of the globe animation, and then I want this line to be like this when the globe settles, and now I need to change the size of the spark. Maybe something like this. Let's preview it. Right now it's in front of the globe, so I need to put it beneath it, something like that, but I feel, the line is still not line enough, I need the line to be longer. I can modify slightly the key frames, in the trim path under the line, maybe move these two slightly on the right, something like that, that's what I like. Another thing is, maybe I want to add more lines, so I'm going to go down here, go to the Repeater, maybe I want to change this rotation value to say, if I change it to 24, I can change the copy number to 16. It needs to add up to 360 degrees. That looks better to me. I'm going to stick with that, let's preview that. Looks nice, and the last thing I need is a circle that goes around the globe. Just go on top here, click on this Rectangle tool, hold it, until you see Ellipse tool, click on that, and then go to the center of the frame, hold down your Mouse button, hold down Command, Option and Shift on the keyboard, 3 keys on the keyboard. It's going to constrain the circle to be a perfect circle, and then draw from the center. This is about the size of the circle that I want, release the mouse, now I've got a perfect circle around my globe, and now what I need to do is just to copy the animation of the trim path from this line here and see if it's going to work on our circle. Copy these 4 keyframes, go to the fronts, piece it in, that works. I feel like it works. That's what I like, but then I feel like the circle is a little bit big. I need it to be smaller, so I need to change the size of the circle, maybe to 90 percent, or 93, too small, 96. What if I move back the spark here? Save the project. I'm going to stop here. I don't want to make it too complicated, but I'm pretty happy with how it turned out. Here's our opening scene. That's it with our opening scene. Let's go to the next video for the second main artwork animation. In this video, I mainly just showed you how to add a line accent, which you will be able to see in many different explainer videos. Once you learn how to do this, you can apply this technique to many different scenarios. First, we draw a single line and animate the single line with the trim path effects, and then we used a repeater to duplicate the lines in the circle. Then, after we add the line accent, we also added a circle and we animate the circle with the same trim path keyframes from the line. Don't worry if you can't remember everything all at once, you can always come back and watch this video again, to refresh your memories. After practicing it few times, you should be able to do it yourself, and that's it with the first scene animation. Next video, I'm going to show you how to transition from the globe scene to the cityscape.
8. Globe to City Transition: Now that we've animated the first scene, let's continue on for the second scene. Come to the top here, go to projects, and then let's import the second scene from the Illustrator file. Double-click in this empty area. It's going to bring up a window. Let's just locate the second scene we have, which is this one. Then over here, select "Composition". Click on "Open". Now we can see here we have a precomp, but we also have a folder named Smart City Explainer 4. Let's drag this folder into the assets and drag this precomp into the precomp's folder. Double-click on this, "04." You can see I've got all these layers separated here. Now what I want to do is go back to "Main comp." Remember, this is a Main Comp that we're animating. We already have the first half of the animation here. I want the transition to happen around here, two second, and then that's where I'm going to import this 04 storyboard. Let's drag this precomp into the timeline. Now you can see I've got this precomp on top of the graphic I already have. All I need is to drag this precomp, just use mouse button all the way to two second. This is where it comes in like that. But right now, it's a straight cut. We're going to do the transition later. One thing that I realized right now is that we don't have any background color within this composition, the 04 composition. That's why you can see through the globe. We need to go into this precomp and create a background. Go up here, "Layers, new," click on "Solid". This is how you create a background. Let's try to make this background white for now. Let's see what happens. Click "OK." Put it all the way to the bottom as a white sky background and then go back to the main comp. Now you can see our composition is solid, it doesn't have a transparent background. What I need to do here is to figure out the transition. Remember our storyboard. Let me pull up the storyboard. Now let me show you how to do this transition from this scene to this scene here, from the third storyboard to the fourth storyboard, the transition. Let's say if we want the full landscape to settle at around four second, first we need to go to the scale property. Hit on "S", on the keyboard and put a keyframe. Then maybe around here, go back 20 frames. I only want this to show a portion of the city. But if I zoom in right now, you can see it's scaling based on the anchor point in the center of the frame. However, I also want to show the street cars and the cars on the road. I cannot scale based on the center point of the R board. I need to change the anchor point down so that when I'm zooming in, let's change it back to 100 percent for now. Go on top here, click on this "Pen behind tool." And then click on, "This anchor point." Drag it down all the way to the bottom of the layer, and now let's change the scale property. Just drag it to the right to make it bigger, and now you can see it's scaling based on this anchor point on the ground. That's how we can see the cars and the streetcars at the beginning, maybe something like that and then the transition. I only put two keyframes for the transition. Let's preview this. That's good. First of all, I want this globe to zoom out, and at the same time, when it becomes too big, I want the transparency to become zero. When we're zooming to the globe, it also disappears. The way to do that is go to the globe layer here. Then let's go back to the effect control panel. Here's a radius. Let's set a keyframe for the radius and then go forward maybe 20 frames. Now I've gone too far because the city layer is covering my globe so I want to turn off the eye icon just to hide it so that I can see everything beneath it. I want this globe to be bigger at this point. Something like that. Let's try a 1000. Then let's also click on the "Globe." Hold down, "Shift T" at a keyframe on transparency, and drag this 100 percent back in time and change the value here as zero. At this point it becomes zero. As the globe grows bigger and bigger, it also disappears. Let's preview this. Looks good except there's no energy. We still need to adjust the graphic curves. But then remember what we did before when the globe settled in place, we added one more key frames for overshoot. We also want to do the same thing over here when it zooms out. But this time it's actually something that's called anticipation. When the globe grows bigger, it first becomes smaller, anticipates. It's a preparation for the action. You can see at the beginning it's 414, and I can add another keyframe over here, make the globe smaller, maybe 395. Before it becomes bigger, it actually shrinks first like that. Then let's select all three keyframes. Go to Graph Editor. Make sure you're in the speed graph. Just drag the speed graph over here and make sure you have this graph like a mountain just to give it more energy. That's nice. Then just as the globe disappears, I want this city scene to come up. What I want to do is over here, at this point, I want to add a keyframe here and then go back in time, maybe at the beginning, make it smaller. Right now, it's 276. Let's try 240. Also, I want to pull up the transparency on the layer, Shift T and then click on the "Transparency", put on a keyframe. I drag this one forward in time and then at the beginning I want it to be zero. Zero to 100 transparency. Let's preview this. Something like that. But I think the layer came in too early. I want to drag it back a little bit. Then I want to make sure the globe transparency changes faster, right now it's too slow. I just want to make sure these two key frames are closer to each other so that the transition happens faster. Just make sure to drag these keyframes closer too so that this transition happens faster. It's more natural. Let's preview this. Now works. The reason I put here a scale change is because as we're zooming into the globe, we're assuming we have a camera coming into the globe. Then when we transition into the next scene, I want the scene to still be moving. I don't want the scene to be cut straight in. That's going to disturb the motion. Now, since I've put a zooming in motion, it actually leads into the second scene. That's why we can have a smooth transition. As you can see here, we're zooming in and this thing comes out as if we're also zooming into the city, and we're working on this. If your computer is becoming slow and it reacts very slow, you can also change the preview resolution here. Right now, I've got a full resolution. But if I change to half resolution or third resolution, it's going to make my scene here a little bit blurry, but then the software is going to respond faster and you can work faster. This transition here, I want to right-click "Keyframe assistant, Easy ease it, and then go to the Graph Editor. Make sure we have that mountain-like graph here to give it more energy. But right now it's bothering me because every time I hit a preview, it always preview from the start, zero second but want to preview around here, two second. All I need to do is to hit on keyboard shortcut B to cut the preview range, and you can see this range header here, it's cut to two second. Now when I click on "Space part for preview." It'll start preview from there. Now I feel like the scale change is a little bit abrupt. I want to put the keyframes further apart and add some Easy ease to them. Now let's recap. In this video, we talked about how to create solid layers and also how to change anchor point and animate based on where the anchor point is. We also covered how to modify the speed graph and also how to change the preview resolution to speed up the software. Now let's go to the next video.
9. Cityscape Animation: Now it's time to animate the trains, the cars, and the buildings inside this comp here. Let's make sure you have this timeline indicator here, so this is where I want this train to come into the view. So this is exact time frame and when I go into the composition, the timeline indicator is going to show me exact location that correspond to that time in the main comp. If I don't change my timeline indicator this position here, where our timeline indicator is correspond to the position over here in the main comp. If I don't change my indicator, these two positions are exactly the same because if you look at the time frame here, this is only the eighth frame but within this comp it's actually two second 23. So the only way is to use your timeline indicator put it somewhere here and then go inside the pre-comp, it's going to show you where that point is. Now all I need to do is to animate this train here. Let's find the train. This is our train layer, hit p on keyboard, put a key frame there. Maybe drag it back a little bit and then go forward, maybe two seconds and then change the position. Move it to the left, lets put 400 for now or maybe 200. Now I've got the train traveling like that. Here's my pink car and then yellow car. I want these cars to travel too, so put a key frame there and then the yellow car should come from the left, whereas the pink car should come from the right. Let's see what it looks like in the main comp, lets preview this. Let's put the indicator at the front of this layer here and go into the composition. We can see at the beginning first frames they are not moving. I want the train to be moving even before zero second. Let's just drag them over even before zero second so that the train is moving already, lets preview this. Yes, but the problem is, I still don't want the train to be already this far to the left when it first appears. I'll want to adjust the position of the train, maybe change the starting position to 1,300. Let's go back to the main comp and take a look. Yeah, something like that. The train comes into the scene and then the cars and then the camera zooms out. I want the car maybe just keep moving, the train keep moving until it goes out of the scene. It seems like two second are not long enough, so I want to drag these key frames to four seconds and move the train out of the frame and then also change these to key frames, drag them to the four second, and then make those two cars to go outside the scene. Let's go back to the main comp, take a look. Yes, that's nice. The next thing is right now this scene here based on the storyboard, you can see there should be some trees in the frame. I just want to drag the trees into the scene. Make sure you know where the trees should be. It should be between the blue and orange building and this green and blue building, somewhere around there. Let's go back here, find the trees. So that's one, just need to drag this tree to the left. I'm holding down shift constrain the horizontal position, put it over there and this is another two trees, drag them over there. Something like that. Now let's go back to the main comp. You can see there are two four trees. Now it looks pretty good to me. Now let's go into the pre-comp again to animate the building. I actually want the building to start from somewhere around here, a three second, let's try that. Just need to find all the buildings. This is one and then go all the way to the bottom. I think these are all my buildings, yes, I'm just toggling between the eye icons and you can see these are all my buildings. Click on this color, let's make it yellow so that my yellow layers are the buildings. To animate the building, it's fairly easy. We're going to need three key frames for all the buildings, and there we can copy the three key frames onto every single one of them. We can animate this first orange building first. All we need to do is to first change the anchor point to the bottom of this building here, but right now I can't see where the bottom is so what I'm going to do is to solo this layer, click on this button here, little dots, it's going to solo this layer. I just need to see this one single layer, go top use this pen behind too, drag this point to the bottom of the building and then what I need to do is, let's turn off the solo button. Hit "S" turn on the scale property and link the x and y property here. Put a key frame and then drag it forward. Change the y-scale to zero. If I scrape through the timeline, the building is going to grow from 0-100 percent, only in the Y position. However, as we talked about before we need to add an overshoot to make it more interesting. So before I reach 100 percent, it needs to go over maybe 110 percent. I want to drag this keyframe further apart to give more time for the animation. Select all three, Right-click. Another way to achieve the same graph as that we can actually do a keyframe velocity here, and then just change everything to 66.66. Click on Okay. Let's go into the graph. You can see this graph it's almost the same as what we did. There are two ways to modify it one is to go in here to manually drag the handles, and then the other way is just to right-click change the keyframe velocity here. Let's preview this, and you can see the building comes up. Looks good to me. So the next thing I need to do is to change the anchor point of all of these layers to the bottom of the building, and then copy the three keyframes onto each single one on all the layers. Find this building here, drag the anchor point to the bottom, put it down there. Next one also put it down there to the bottom. I'm just going to speed up this part so that you don't have to watch me doing this over and over again. Now you can see we've got all the anchor points down there at the bottom of the building. The next thing I need to do, before I copy the keyframe I need to go into each one to a link the scale property X and Y scale. So select all of them hit S, is going to show you all the scale property and then just uncheck the link to a length dx and Y scale. That's good. Then come up here, copy the three keyframes, Command C, and then select all of the rest of the building. Make sure your timeline indicator is at the start of this keyframe Command V paste in, and then you can see I've got all these keyframes. Let's preview this. Oops, there's an issue with one building, this one here and that one too so two buildings, these two jumped out. So I need to delete the keyframe I think the anchor point is at the wrong position. Let me delete the keyframe. Then I want to find where is that anchor point for that building. Zoom out. As I zoom out, I have no idea why this anchor point is all the way over there. So I need to drag that back into the frame, put it at the bottom of the building, and then recopy the keyframe, pasted it in again. We got one last building has problem now which is a screen one here. Let's just look for the anchor point for this green building. It's far, far away from the artboard. Drag back the anchor point to the bottom of the green building. Put it down there, and then do the same thing. Copy the three keyframes and then paste it onto the green building layer. Now I think all of our buildings are animated. Next, I want to stagger the animation of the building because I don't want those building to come in all at the same time. I just want to give it a random motion. So I'm just trying to drag these layers to give it a randomness so that they're not starting all at once. Let's take a look. Let's come into this O4 composition again. I want to change the background color into a sky color. Just Command Shift to Y, and then let's use this eyedropper tool to eyedrop this blue color on the train. Maybe make it a little bit lighter. That's good. Let's hit on Okay. Now, we have a light blue sky here in the second scene. Now all I need to do is to fine tune the timing so that when this transition happens around here at four second, I want to see the building buildup. Right now these buildings still builts pretty early. I can only see the end part of the animation. I still want to be able to see the building to build up from the ground within this transition, so I need to move these layers a little bit further back to delay the animation a little bit. Let's preview. Yeah, something like that. Now we have the first two things animated and ready to go. In this video, we talked about how to change layer labeled colors to group them. Also I showed you how to modify the speed graph by changing the value of the keyframe velocity. 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11. Transition After Cityscape: Let's see what we have so far. In this video, we're going to continue on from where we left off. We're going to keep animating into the next scene. Let's pull up the storyboard. We've already done the first fore scene and then the next thing is going to be a transition where the camera pans up so these communication icons appear in the sky. To do that, we need to first import this artboard. Now let's go to the project panel here. Instead of double-click, we can also right-click and then choose Import File. Let's navigate to our Artboard, Assets, Storyboard Separated and this is what we need here. Those icons. Click on this file down here, change it to composition, click Open. Now, we've got this precomp, import it into the project panel. Remember what we did before, we need to drag this, all five precomp into the precomp's folder and then drag this folder into the assets. If I close all the folders, we still have a pretty clean, organized project panel. Now first what I want to do is to do a transition from this scene as if the camera's panning up, so the city goes down. To do that, I want to drag this preview range, maybe to eight second here, and then go to almost the end when the buildings stop and then the cars are still moving. I want to hold on the scene maybe for one second, right here. Then at this point, I want the camera to pan up. Instead of using camera, which is pretty complicated, what I can easily achieve is to just shift the position of the whole comp. If I click on the first composition and then you use a shortcut shift P to pull up the position property here, what I can do now is to add a keyframe first. This is the starting position of this whole comp and then maybe go forward 25 frames. I want this transition to be very slow. The camera's panning up slowly. After 25 frames, I want the white position to change down here. Maybe I want the city to be like this on here and then go forward another 25 frames. I want the whole city to disappear. But the problem is right now, we're seeing the initial opening scene, which is what we don't want. I need to extend the sky here to cover the back of this composition so that we're not seeing the initial sky scene. The way to do that is go to layer, create a new solid and the height and width is going to be the same as this composition. Change the color to the sky color, click on Okay, and then drag this solid color beneath this city skyline comp. Then when we move down the city, we can still see the solid layer here. However, I don't want this layer to start at zero seconds because if I drag the timeline to the start, it's going to cover all my other animation. All I need is starting from this point here, when the city scene starts to move down, I need this background to appear on the frame. Hit the keyboard shortcut left square bracket and then this solid layer is going to start from this point where my timeline indicator is. Let's save the project for now and let's preview this. I want to preview starting from the four seconds so I'm going to change this preview range, use shortcut B, to cut it from there so I can start preview from the fourth second. Something like that. However, the motion here is pretty linear. It's very boring. It's because we didn't apply any easing keyframe to this animation here. Now what I need to do is select the three keyframes, just as what we did before. Right-click keyframe assistant easy ease. Let's see what happens now. Something like this, but then I want this scene here to slow down in the middle keyframe here. In order to slow it down in the middle keyframe, I want to select the three and then go to the graph. Here is the speed graph for this. What I want to do is to give more time for the center keyframe and let the animation to slow down in the center keyframe. If I do a shape like this, let's preview the animation here. It's going to give us slightly faster speed at the beginning here and then there's going to be a easing into the middle keyframe. Then there's the ease out of the middle keyframe slowly, then goes faster in the end. The only thing is, I want to hang around the middle keyframe. I don't want the animation to go too fast in the middle keyframe. This is a type of curve that I need in order to achieve that. Let's preview this again. I can even give it more time to maybe make the three keyframes further apart in order to achieve a slower, maybe more subtle animation. I'm going to select all three keyframes. Hold on Option on Mac, Alt on PC, drag the last keyframe so that I can evenly space the three keyframes out. Give it more time. Something like that. The next thing I want to do is to import this icon into this main comp. Just drag it down into the main comp and then drag the starting points to the right until where we are supposed to see the icon here, which is around here. Let's drag this starting point until maybe over here, at sixth second. This is where we're going to see all the icons. However, we still need to animate those. Before we move on to the icons animation, I want to recap. In this video, we talked about how to import files into After Effects, how to add a solid layer, and how to modify speed graph. It's something that we've covered previously. Now we can go to the next video for icons animation.
12. Icons Animation: Next, I'm going to go into this icon composition to animate those icons. Double-click on the "Smart City Explainer 005". Within this composition, you can see all these little icons here. The good news is they are going to have similar animation, so we don't have to do each one individually, we can just do one of them and then copy and paste all the key frames. Let's start with maybe this layer 4, this icon here. We can zoom in, hit "Z" on keyboard, drag the mouse, zoom in. What we want to do is, first we need to change the anchor point to this position here because I want to rotate this icon starting from this bottom right corner here. Click on the "Pan Behind Tool". I need to find where the anchor point is, drag this anchor point over here. Then we're going to need the position property, hit on "P", then we're going to need rotation, hit on "Shift R" still the Shift key. If you only hit one key on the keyboard, say if you hit "P" and then if you hit "R" it's only going to show you one property. If you want to see multiple property over here, you have to hold down "Shift Key" on the keyboard and then click on "P". That's how you can see multiple values in the layer. I also need the size. Hit on "Shift S". First of all, create a key frame for all three. This is going to be the final ending position. Go back to the selection tool, the shortcut, "SV", then select the three key frames, maybe put it forward around here, 18th frame, and then go back to zero second. I want this icon to start from maybe lower and then animate up. I also want the scale to change from 0-100 percent. I also want the rotation to start as a negative degree, maybe negative 90. Let's see what it looks like now. Something like this. That's essentially the animation that I need. However, I need a bit more energy. Remember how we did the other animations? We need to add in a overshoot. First of all, let's add in some overshoot. As the rotation value becomes zero, I want it to overshoot to a positive 10 degrees before it comes to zero, so It go pass zero and then comes back. The scale. I also want to go pass 100 percent, which is maybe 110 percent, and the position, I also want it to go over the ending value. The ending value is 526 on the y position, so I want it to be 500. It goes higher and then comes back down. Let's preview this animation. I think the position is too much. It should be 526, and then over here maybe 516. Let's try that. Yeah, that works for me. You see? Without even changing the linear key frames into easing key frames, we already have a bit of energy going on here, however, it's just not enough. Next what we want to do is, select all the key frames, right-click, "Key Frame Assistant", easy ease. Let's take a look. Look at that. Look at the energy and the smoothness. You see that? That looks good to me. If we want to go even further, I can select all the key frame here and then go to the graph editor. Click on this icon here, fit the graph to view and remember the mountain-like graph that we had before. We can just drag those handles outs, to have this higher mountain here. That is going to give more energy to the whole animation. Let's preview this. It's more deliberate. You see that? I'm good with this animation now. Next what I want to do is just to copy all those key frames into the other icons so that they all have the same animation. I need to be careful because some of the icons, they have this little arrow on the left-hand side of the icon instead of the right. In this case, I need the icon to rotate from an opposite direction. Having said that, I need to be more careful when I copy and paste my icons. First, what I need to do is to change the anchor point of each of these icons to a position where I want the icons to be animated. Let me just go through each one individually. Click on the first one. Go up here, pan behind tool, that's the little circle here card. I need to change it to here. Maybe I want to animate from the bottom here. This one is going to be similar to the first icon starting from bottom right, and this one starting from bottom right. Now what I can do is, I want to change this one, this one, this one, these three to different colors so that I can do this one first. This one is red. Now I've got three color groups. The first three icons are the three here. They all need to rotate from right, which is the same as what we have for the first icon. In this case, I can just copy, select all the keyframes Command C, and then select all the three layers, Command V paste as preview. You see now we've got a problem, because I've pasted the position property, and now the three icons, they all have the exact same position property as the first one. That's why the four of them are now at the exact same position here. That's what we don't want. It's going to be very easy to fix this, hit on U to show the animated property on this layer. Now all I need is to just select all three keyframes and then change the x position and y position to where I want this icon to be in the end. Say this icon here, I want it to be in the end at this position here. Then hit on U to select all three keyframes. Change this one, change the x position and the y position. If you change it this way, once everything is selected and your timeline indicator is at one of the keyframes, it has to be on one of the keyframes. It cannot be one frames apart. It has to stay on one key frames, and then when you change the position property, It's not going to mess up your animation. The whole animation is going to be shifted based on where you want this to be. Then I want to click on the layer five here. Hit on U, show all the keyframes, select all three keyframes here on the position property, and then change the x position here. Now let's preview this. Look, I've got exact same animation on four different icons. That looks good for me. The next thing I want to do is I want to copy the keyframes on these circle icon, circle elements. This is going to be a bit different because the circle doesn't need the rotation value here. I don't want the circle to rotate to the right or to the left. I just want the circle to pop up straight directly. What I need to do is only copy the position and the scale property, and leaving out the rotation. Copy these keyframes command C, and go to zero seconds, select all these layers, and then Command V. Now I've got the same problem, everything just one to the same position. But we can do the same thing to fix it. Let's go through each one, hit on U, put the timeline indicator on top of the last keyframe here, select all three keyframes, and just change the x position and y position to move it to where you want it to be at the end. This circle thing, with a card, should be around here in the top left corner. Yes, that's good. Then the two last icons we need, let's copy the keyframes from here. Position scale property, Command C, and then go to first starting zero second keyframe, select the two layers here, Command V paste, and then let's just do the same thing. However, I still need to change the rotation. If I preview this, these two are rotating to the wrong direction. All I need to do is to change this negative 90 to 90 and then change this overshoot to negative 10 instead of positive 10. Let's preview this. Yeah, something like that. I'm happy with the animation here. Now the last thing I want to do here is to stagger these layers, give them some randomness. I don't want them to start all at the same point as zero second, I want to drag those layers and then just stagger those to make sure it's got some randomness. After I've done that, let's see what happens here. Now let's go back to the main composition and take a look. Right now, it looks good to me. However, since the icons are all in the sky, I don't want them to stay static in the sky. I want them to just wiggle in the sky, maybe give us some more motion, so I just need to add effects. Let's go into the composition again. Now I want to go to the effects and presets panel here, on the right hand side, if you don't have it here, just go to Windows and then effects and presets. Let's find wiggle effects. I just need to use this wiggle dash position. Last time we tried to drag this effects onto the layer. This time, we can just double-click the effect. As long as you have a layer selected, you can just double-click on the effect, it's going to apply to this layer directly. This is the one that we have here. After we apply, let's preview this. You see, it's already moving. However, this is not what I want. I want a more subtle animation so I want to change the wiggle amount to maybe 20, and then the speed as one wiggle per second, maybe I wanted three wiggles per second. Let's preview from here. Still too much. Change it to 10, the wiggle amount. Yeah, that's what I like, subtle, but effective. Now all I need to do is just to copy the effects, Command C, and then select all of the other layers, Command V, pasting all the effects. Let's preview this. Zoom out. Let's preview the animation. You see they are all floating in the air? That's what I want. Good. Let's go back to the main comp and take a look. Yeah, and one last thing I want to do, as the building goes down, I want those icons to go down with the building slightly so that I can just fake that camera motion panning up. Otherwise, if only the building goes down, and the icons are still just staying on the same position, it doesn't seem like the camera's panning up. All I need to do is from here, hit on P, give it a position property, and then as a building goes down, I want these icons kind of slightly moved down to maybe in the center of the frame here. Then right-click keyframe assistant, easy ease. Preview this. Something like that. However, I also want to just maybe delay the keyframe a bit, because I know the building start to move down from this second here. But I want to delay the starting point of the icons moving down because I just want to create that kind of lagging effect, as if the building is dragging the icons down. All right, that's all I want to show you in this lesson. Let's take a look at what we have so far. We've come a long way. We got the first scene, we got the transition, the second scene, and then the fourth scene looks super nice. Next video, we're going to finish it up with the closing logo lockup and also the transition. Now let's recap. In this video, we talked about overshoots, one of the animation principles. We also talked about how to modify speed graph to give more energy to your animation. I showed you how to copy keyframes to different layers and adjust animation accordingly, wow to add wiggle effect to our icons, and also how to stagger layers randomly to give it more of a natural look. That's it with this video, let's move on.
13. Transition After Icons: Let's just pick up from where we left off. Over here, we have this icon animation here. Now let's take a look at the original storyboard. Remember this scene here with the eye constants as cities. Next it's going to transition into the logo lockup, and the way I imagine it is that all of these little icons, they can come together to the center of the screen, and then trigger some transition, and we have the circle thing pop up from the center of the screen to fill the entire screen. Then transition to reveal the logo animation. That's what we're going to do here. I want the transition to happen, maybe around 9 second here. Around here, just put the timeline indicator around 9 second, in the main comp, and then let's go into this icons pre-comp explainer O5, double-click. Here is the time-frame that correspond to the 9 second 04 frame in main comp. This is a point where I want those icons to come together in the center. The way to do that is, first of all I want to select all of the icons. Hit on p to show the position. Put down a key frame, use this icon here. Now I've got a key frame to lock the position of those icons. Maybe go forward 25 frames 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. After 25 frames, I want those icons to come in the center here. The easiest way is to drag each one of them to the center, since I've already have a key frame created before this point, once I drag the position of the icon here, it's going to automatically create a new key frame, which is what I want. It saves my time. To create a key frame, I can just drag those icons to where they should be in the end. Then it's going to have the animation ready for me. Now let's preview this. Starting from this point here, would be to set the preview range. You see that they all come together. However, it feels pretty linear to me. Although I know those key frames are easing key frames, but then it doesn't have enough energy, remember we talk about the overshoot. When the objects settles in position, it goes over a few frames. In this case, I want to use the same principle at the start of this animation here, and now we don't call it overshoot anymore. It's going to be called anticipation. Basically what it means is that when a object moves to the left, it always move slightly to the right to gain some energy. Then it's going to move to the direction that it wants to go. Say if you want to go forward, you need to lean back to gain some energy or like say if you want to jump up, you always squat down to gain some energy, and then jump up. So that's the anticipation. It's also one of the animation principles, and that's what we want to apply here. When the object moves to one direction, I want it to move first to the opposite direction to gain some energy, and then go where it want to be. In this case, for each one of them, I want to move forward maybe 5 to 6 frames over here, and then I just want this icon to move back from where it was to gain some energy. Let's preview this. You see that it went out for a second, and then come back in. Now let's take a look at what we have in the main comp. Here's a problem again. Remember we changed the position of this composition 05 to move down with the city scape, and now the center of this composition inside is different from the center of the main comp here now. Remember when we animated this icon here to move everything in the center, but one is outside here in the main con, this position is not an exact position anymore as a relative position, the center of this comp is actually lower than the center of the frame here, and that's something that we need to fix. It's very easy to fix again, let's go back to the composition here. Then we can just select all the last key frame, which is the position. All we need to do is to move the y position of this key frame. Move everything up, maybe somewhere around there. Just go back to the main comp check to see if it's in the center. Yes, It Is. That looks about right to me. Let's preview this. Now all the icons are coming in to the center. The last thing I want to do it just to stagger the key frames here so that they don't all move at the same time. Just to give some randomness. Remember the first time when we stagger the animation in the front at the beginning of this comp here we drag the layers instead of a key frames. But now if I drag the layers again, it's going to affect the key frames in front of it. That's why we're only using key frames to modify the staggering of the animation over here. Just [inaudible] they drag all these key frames to stagger them. Let's preview this animation. Yes, something like that, and now going forward I need a circle come out from the center. Let's go to this rectangle too here, and then click on Ellipse tool. Now we can draw a circle just from the center point here. Use my mouse button to drag a circle, and then hold on shift to constraint to a perfect circle. Hold on command to draw from the center of the circle, and this is what we need. Release the left mouse button. Now we have a shape which is circle with only a stroke that's four pixels. Now I want to turn off the stroke. Hold on Option key on the keyboard. Click the stroke here, 1, 2, 3 click three times. Turn off the icon the circle, go up here, click on fill, click on the eyedropper tool I want to add drop this pink color here, click on Okay and then turn on the eye icon. Here is a circle that we have. The circle started from zero seconds. I need to drag it back, maybe start over here. I want the circle, hit on S on the keyboard, put a key frame over there, and then go forward 25 frames again. Now I want the circle to grow outside of the frame here, nice. Select the two key frames, right-click key frame assistant, easy ease, and then go to the graph editor. In this case, I actually want the circle to slow down at the end more, and then I wanted to grow faster at the beginning. If I drag the mountain like this is going to grow faster at the beginning and then slowly settles in place at the end. Let's see what it looks like now. Something like that. I'm good with that. But then I need to duplicate this circle command D, and the second circle is going to become the color of the final lockup. Go to my project panel. Here is when we need to load in the final storyboard, which is the final logo lockup. Double-click on here. Click on this 07 Illustrator file composition open. Remember to put this one into the pre-comp, put this folder into the assets, and drag this one down, over here. This is a sky color that I want at the end. The second circle needs to have the same color as the sky as a transition. Now what I want to do is just to turn off the 07 composition. Now you see the circle is on top of the pink circle that we had. It's covering it completely. Just drag this one back, nudge it back two frames. Or three frames to have something like this. Let's preview this. In this video we talked about anticipation. Similar to overshoots, it's also one of the animation principles. I also showed you how to stagger key frames randomly, how to draw a circle, and how to modify speed graph. Now let's move on to the next video.
14. Logo Lockup: In this video, I'm going to show you how to do the logo review. Now all I want to do is to go inside this composition to animate the Logo Lockup. First, I want to animate the Cloud. Here's a Cloud 1,2,3. These are three Clouds. Change it to a different color, maybe a blue color. Select all three. Put P for position. Put a keyframe there, move it to the 5th second and then we can just drag the position of each one slightly so that the Cloud is moving. Another thing is, since we have a transition here, I don't want the Cloud to just pop into the frame. What I want to do is to give it a transparency change, shift "T" for opacity, put down a keyframe. Maybe move it slightly forward a few frames, and then change it to zero as beginning. Now, we have the Cloud fading into the scene. But I feel like the fade is too slow. Give it only 10 frames here. At 10 frames, the opacity is 100. Next, let's animate this logo in the center. First, I need to draw this yellow bar in after effects. Let's go up here, hold on this rectangle tool until you see this rounded rectangle. Click on that. Then we can zoom in, draw a rounded rectangle. Here's a mistake that I made. Since I've got this layer selected, when I draw with the rectangle tool, it's actually creating a mask instead of a shape layer. That's what I don't want. Just delete the mask, and then click off the layer. Make sure nothing is selected. Then we can draw a shape layer, something like that. Then we can go to the rectangle path and then we can change the roundness. We can also adjust the size. I just want to make sure that it's similar to the original storyboard. Now I think the height is good, but then the width is shorter than this yellow bar. Now I'm going to just uncheck this link button to unlink the X and Y dimension and then I can just adjust the X and Y position individually like this. Now that my shape is almost the same as what we had before, we can delete this Illustrator file, we don't need this anymore and then drag this behind the SmartCity.io. This is the shape that we have. Now I want to animate this shape to grow up. First, what I want to do is put down a keyframe on the size of the rectangle path, and then maybe go forward 10-15 frames, drag this keyframe onto the 15th frame mark, go back to zero seconds. Then I want to only change the X position here until it become a perfect circle, like this. Now, if I preview this, you can see the yellow bar is expanding, something like that. But then I want to add some curve adjustments so that it's not linear. Go to keyframe assistant "Easy Ease." I remember the other way that we can do is right-click add in "Keyframe velocity." Right now is only 33.33. I want to change it to 66.66 just to give it more energy like that. That's good. Then what I also want to change is the size of the whole shape. I want this yellow circle to start from zero and then grow up to 100 percent. As I'm looking at right now, there is a anchor point that's not in the center of the circle. We need to adjust the position of the anchor point first, go up here to the pen behind tool, drag this anchor point to the center of the circle so that when we animate the scale property, it can grow in the center, something like that. Then let's add a keyframe onto the scale, drag the scale forward, and then at zero seconds change the scale to zero. Now you can see it disappears. But if we preview this, you can see the whole thing animate on. However, I want to delay the first size animation. I want the circle to pop up first and then expand horizontally to become this rounded rectangle. If I change and delay the size keyframe and then also I want to right click keyframe assistant, Easy Ease, maybe I'll also give it some influence. Keyframe velocity change to 66. Let's preview this. Something like that. I'm happy with it. Next thing I want to show you as to animate this SmartCity.io here. We can make it pretty simple. Let's just animate the position property, hit on "P" and their right click separate dimensions. Now, I want to separate the dimension of X and Y position so that I can only deal with one, which is Y position. Click on the Y position. Stopwatch at a keyframe. This is going to be the final position. I want to drag it forward maybe to the 15th frame. Then I can drag this down. Initially is going to start from here and then move up to the position and follow the same process. We can add a overshoot. Right now we can see the Y position is 540. It's starting at 661, so the overshoot, we can change it to 530 as if it's moving too high up and then come back down. Select all three, right click "Keyframe velocity," change to 66. If we stick with the same number for the velocity, your animation is going to be very consistent and it's like a branding thing. Whereas sometimes when you're designing something, you want the design to be consistent, the color palette to be consistent, but now we're dealing with animation. If we have most of the influence or keyframe velocity with the same value, the animation is going to be consistent. It's just something that's to think of. Let's preview this. Something like this. I like it. But what we don't want is, I only want to show the SmartCity.io within the yellow bar, I don't want to show it when it's outside the yellow bar. In that case, what we need is a Track Matt. Let me show you what is a Track Matt. All I need is a rectangle here. Let's draw a rectangle to cover the yellow bar. Then this layer here is going to be our Track Matt. If I click on this SmartCity.io layer and then go down here, right now it's not in my function here. I need to go down and then check this button here. It's going to show me more options and there's a Track Matt option. I want to check this Alpha Matt. Then you can see this Track Matt layer disappears. When I click on it, you can see the border of the Track Matt. Basically, what happens is we can use this layer on top to determine the boundary of the layer beneath it. Which means wherever this Track Matt layer is visible, it has visible pixel on the screen, the layer beneath it is going to be visible on the screen. If I change the position of the Track Matt, you can see here, once I move it up, the rectangle is moved up, but everything outside of the rectangle is invisible. It's like a mask covering it. That's called a Track Matt. In this case, if I scrap the timeline all the way to zero, and you can see what happens here. Once it enters in, it becomes visible. When it's outside this rectangle is not visible. However, I don't want this random rectangle to be my Track Matt. I want this yellow bar to be my Track Matt. All I need to do is to commend D, duplicate it, put it on top of the SmartCity.io layer, and then go to this layer 2, set Alpha Matt shape layer 2, so the layer on top it's Alpha Matt. Oops, you know why it's now showing? Because this layer when it's a Track Matt, it needs to be turned off, the I icon. Normally, when you are setting it up here, when you choose Alpha Matt here is going to turn off the visibility for you automatically. Now, if I preview this, it's going to be something like this. Yeah, that's all I wanted to do, but then I need to stagger, maybe delay the logo line animation here, drag it back a little bit so that I want the yellow bar to grow first and then the logo comes up. Something like that. It's smooth and natural. Time to recap. In this video, we talked about how to use label color to group layers and also how to change keyframe velocity to manipulate the energy level of the animation. I also showed you the concept of Track Matt, which can be applied in many different scenarios. Let's move on to the next video.
15. Tagline and Finish Touches: Now, we can animate the tagline. Let's find the tagline here. This is my tagline. Let me just rename it tagline. For the tagline, I also want to only do a position change which is P, and then separate dimensions, go to zero second. I always want to animate things as zero second and then later on I can drag the layers to wherever I want. Now, I can click on the stopwatch here on Y position and drag it forward. This one, move it down. Since this line is very small, it's not very visible so I don't have to add a overshoot. If you want to add a overshoot, you can, but then it's not going to be very noticeable. So I just want to add a probably velocity here to make everything consistent. The motion is going to be consistent. I want to add a opacity change, Shift T, bring up the opacity, maybe from 0-100 like this. I want to move it back a little bit, something like that. That's good. Looks good to me. However, I still want to do more. I want to give in more attention to details. Let's duplicate three times the tagline. Select the tagline Command D, Command D duplicate two times. Now, we have three copies. Then, I want to add a mask on this tagline. So the first line is going to be the "stay connected". Just go to the rectangle tool and then with the tagline selected, I can draw a mask. If I solo this layer, this is what it looks like now. I'm drawing a mask that's covering the first two words and that's the only thing that's going to be shown after the mask. Then for the second one, tagline 2, I can draw a mask on wherever. Then for the tagline 3, I can draw a mask on "you are". Basically, I have separated the tagline into three different parts and since they are already animated, all I need to do is to stagger the three layers, to stagger the animation. Maybe drag this back a little bit, a few frames, and then drag this one a few frames back. Then, once the top logo animation is about to settle down, I want this tagline to appear like this. Just move it back and then stagger the three animation. Let's preview this. Yeah, something like that. I feel like the tagline is animated too fast, so let's select all three layers, hit on U to show all the keyframes. I want it to be slower, so I want to select tagline with Shift key hold on the keyboard, I can select all the Y position. Then, remember something that I showed you before with Option key hold on the keyboard, we can drag the last keyframe to space them out evenly to give a more time. Now, let's take a look. Yeah. Something like that. I'm happy with it. Now, what I want to do is go back to main composition and now I can preview the animation. Let's preview. That's what it looks like now. Here's the issue, when this 07 composition kicks in, here's a straight cut, but since we have a blue background within the composition, it just covers all my transition. So all I need to do is go inside the pre-composition and then maybe right now let's try turn off the visibility icon for the blue background so that this composition is essentially transparent. Let's go back to the main cam and take a look. It also bothers me that this blue color is different than this blue color, I want to change it back to make them the same. Let's just find this circle here which is shape layer 4. Then, let's go on top fill, hit on this eyedropper, change it back to this blue color. Let's see what it looks like because right now if I change it to that blue is different from the storyboard that we got. Yeah, I think it looks fine. It looks better. Now, we've done all the animation of the explainer video, let's go back to the start and take a look what we have. All right, that's our animation and you probably noticed that our animation ends at 12 seconds. There is right now a three second gap because remember our video supposed to 15 seconds but then normally some explainers, they usually have like a one second to two second hold at the end for their logo, just so people remember what the company is, what the product they're trying to promote but then for us right now we have almost three-second gap, which is too much. It's something that you have to adjust on the go. Sometimes like as you're working, it's better to have a scratch VO, say someone can read the voice-over first and then if you have the voice-over imported you can animate based on the pacing of the voice-over so that you can get a pretty accurate pace for the animation, but then since we didn't work with a voice-over, we just worked on our own pace. In that case, when we get the final voice-over we would have to time the animation, the transition again to that voice-over. It's just another workaround if you don't have the VO firsthand. As you can see here, we worked with pre-composition and all these transitions are pretty simple, so it's very easy to read time some of the transitions to make a slower or some of the animation, we can still adjust. It's just going to maybe cost you a bit more time to finesse it, to make it polished, but you get the idea. This is the final video for all the animation. In this video I showed you how to apply mask to layers and also I share some thoughts on pacing and voice-over. In the next video, I'm going to show you how to export your animation.
16. Export: Now we finish all the animation, let's take a look. That's our 15 seconds Explainer animation. Let me show you how to export this file into a MP4 format video. First, we need to go to here ''Composition'' and then ''Add to Adobe Media Encoder Queue''. Click on that. Now, it's going to open Adobe Media Encoder. By the way, before you export, you need to make sure that the preview range is set to the range that you want to export. For example, right now our range is from 0 second all the way to 15 seconds. You can see the range header here, it stop at 15 seconds. If you have somewhere else you can just use your mouse to drag this header to wherever you want. If you drag to 14 seconds for example, it's going to only render 14 seconds. If I drag to 15 seconds it's going to render 15 seconds. Here we go. We have this animation added to the Encoder Queue. Right now, my animation exports format is already set to H.264, which is a common format for MP4 video. This is going to be high res MP4, and this is the most common one. Another option is that you can also export it as a Quick Time which is a ProgRes file. The file size is going to be much bigger, but most of the time we only need this H.264. For the second preset column, just keep it the same as is, don't change anything. For the file location, I can just change it to the folder that I want. Go to desktop, and then put it in SmartCity Explainer creative folder called output, hit on ''Create" and now we can rename this one to SmartCity Explainer, hit "Save''. Now, we can just hit on those green play button to start rendering. It's done. Let's go back to the desktop and check out our 15 seconds Explainer video. Open it, there you go. That's how you export the animation into a MP4 format video.
17. Congrats!: Congratulations, you made it. Now, is time to finish up your project and share it with me and your fellow students. Make sure to post your video to the project panel to get feedback and inspire other students. This is not an easy course, but now you've made it. If there's anything that you're not clear of, feel free to ask me any question you have. I'm here to help you. If you can't remember some of the techniques we talked in here, you can always go back to watch it again and refresh your memories. I also have a few other classes about motion graphics that you can check out if you want to learn more different techniques to improve your skills. Thank you so much for taking my course, and I hope to see you in my other videos. Cheers.
Hongshu Guo, Motion Designer
