Intro to Motion Graphics: Logo and Icon Animation in After Effects

1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Hongshu, I'm a motion designer in Canada. I have been animating in Adobe After Effects professionally for more than six years now. I work in two different advertising agencies for clients like Adidas, PayPal, 711 Walmart, and many more. Today I'm going to be teaching you how to animate logos and icons in Adobe After Effects. Any meaning logos is an essential and one of the first skills you need to learn to get into motion graphics. Every single motion designer, when they first started, has been asked to animate the logo before. It's a solid starting point to learn the fundamentals of motion graphics to get ahead of the game and prepare you for future success. In this course, I'll show you everything you need to know to get started with logo animation. I'll show you the complete professional workflow from storyboard to final render. How to work with a variety of tools in After Effects. How to use Track Matte in After Effects, which is essential for animation. How to work with animation principles, how to use Graph Editor to bring life to your logos, thinking behind the movements, and how to problem-solve. Feel free to take my project file to follow along. For the class project, you'll be animating your own logo, the concepts and techniques you'll learn in this course will be easily translated into any type of project and get you up and running with After Effects animation. Beyond just creating a logo animation, you will also develop greater insight into visual narration and expand your animation vocabularies. It will train your eyes to become animator's eyes and provide you with a brand new way of looking at logos and animation in the future. This course is for anyone who wants to get into motion graphics or for someone who wants to animate their personal or business logos. At the end of the course, you should be able to apply things learned in this class to any logo or icon animations. I hope you have a lot of fun learning and animating. See you in the class. 2. Prepare Files in AI: Here is our Storyboard. We got this beautiful icon of Toronto. Before we bring it in into Adobe After Effects, we need to do something in Adobe Illustrator to prepare the files, to have all of the layers separated. I can show you right now what's going to happen if we don't do that. Let's just create a composition in Adobe After Effects first, and then just click "Okay". Double-click on this Project Panel that's loading the Storyboard file here, choose "Composition", click "Open" and then now we've loaded the Illustrator file into the Adobe After Effects. Then let's click on this Composition icon. Here you can see we got this Illustrator file of this Toronto icon, but we only have one layer. We don't have access to the separated layers in Adobe Illustrator, so that's a problem. Before we can bring it in, into After Effects, we need to open the Illustrator file, let's open it. Here we go. Then what we need to do is we need to go to Layers panel on the right-hand side here. If you don't have it on your right-hand side, you go to Window, click on Layers, and then click on this single layer here, go to this dropdown menu, and click on this Release to Layers (Sequence). Click on that. Then we need to click on Shift, select all the layers under this master layer, and then bring them out of the first master layer. Just drag it until you see that blue line there. Now we can delete the last layer, which is empty now. What you can see here, basically, we have separated all of the layers in Adobe Illustrator. When we bring this file into After Effects, we're going to have all of these elements on it's individual layers so that we can animate them separately. That's all we need to do before we bring this Storyboard into Adobe After Effects. After we've done that, let's save the file. Here we can go to File and then click on "Save." I've already Saved As, so that's why it's grayed-out. 3. Setup Files in AE : Now let's open After Effects. Here is our After Effects. First, we need to create a new composition. Just click on this new composition icon here. Let's rename this to main comp. Over here, we can change the width and height of the video. Let's do 1080 by 1080. We don't need to change anything here. The frame rate is 2997. We can change the duration to 10 seconds. Our animation is going to be around six seconds, so we put in ten seconds to have more timeline to work with. Background color can be in black and then click okay. Now let's import the illustrator or storyboard into After Effects. We have two ways, we can first right-click on this project panel and then go to import, file. Now let's navigate to our storyboard, which is under desktop, Toronto icon, storyboard. Here's a file that we need. Then we can choose composition. The file that we have is in 1080 by 1080, so it's going to be same as the video comp that we created in After Effects. Click on open.Now it's loading. Here we go, it's here. That's one way to import the Illustrator file. Another way is to double-click on this empty panel here. Once you double-click, it's going to load this window so that you can choose the file that you want to import. I'll click Cancel, because we already have the file in here. Before I go any further, I want to organize the project panel first, so that everything is clean and organized. It's the best practice so that I don't get confused, going forward. Let's create a photo here, name it assets, and then another folder. Then let's create another folder, name it final comp. Let's drag the main comp to our final comp, and then let's drag this Toronto icon layers folder into our assets folder. One more folder that we need, which is the pre comps folder. So we can drag this Toronto icon into our pre comps folder. These three folders are the ones we need to make the project panel organized. 4. Rename Layers: Before we move onto anything else, we want to make sure we save the project, so go to File and then click "Save as" because this is the first time we're saving it. I want to choose a folder to save it to, so I'll go to Desktop, Working files, and then name it Toronto Icon. Click on "Save", so now we have the project saved. Next, I will also want to make sure that we have the same layout so everyone is on the same page. First, we need to go to After Effects Window and then click on "Workspace". Click on this "Animation layout". Now we should all have a similar layout. Right now, I'm using Adobe After Effects CC 2020. Before we do anything else, let's copy all the layers, Command A, and then Command C Copy, back to the Main Comp. The Main Comp is going to be the composition that we're going to be working in. Now what I need to do is to organize the layers, just to group some of the elements and also rename some of them. Here we have three layers, which is this yellow balloon. What we need to do is to precomp these three layers so that they are within one composition. The way we do that is to select all three layers and then click on "Command, Shift and "C". Name it Balloon Yellow, and then click on "Okay". Now we have a precomp within this Main Comp that's containing our yellow balloon. These strings of the balloon, I want to delete them and then I will draw them afterwards. These three layers are the same; these three layers are the blue balloons. We also want to precomp this, Command, Shift, C, Pre-comp and then rename it to Blue Balloon. Here we can see, this is the reflection layer. I want to turn that off for now. This is another reflection. Here is our Toronto copy. Then, what is this? Here we have the four lines here. What we need to do is similar to the balloon that we had before. We just need to precompose these four layers. Select all four, and then Command, Shift, C, rename it. Click on "Okay". Now these layers here in the bottom section, we can see when I toggle the Eye icon here, those are the colors behind those lines. What I want to do is to change a label color to all the layers so that it's easily recognized, and I know right away they are the colors behind the lines. I just want to click on this "Label" here and then choose a different color, maybe a Pink color, or maybe a Yellow color. These are the color fills behind the lines. Let's scroll down to the bottom here. What are those? One of them is the background. I don't need the background here, so the last one is a background. I can rename it to BKG, and then I can lock it because I don't need to animate the background. Those are all the colors that we have. Remember the balloons that we precomped previously? So here's the Balloon Yellow, and then we have Balloon Blue. Both the blue and yellow balloon. These two, when I delete them in the Main Comp, they are not actually deleted. You can still access them in this Project panel here. You can see these are the two precomps that we created before. I want to make the Main Comp clean and organized, so I just want to delete the balloon right now. I don't want to worry about it right now, I just want to animate it later. Now we can go to the Project panel here, select the three precomp that we had, and then drag them to the pre comp folder. In the Final Comp, all we have is this Main Comp which is the one that we are animating in and then in this precomps folder, we have those different elements that we created. Here we have, from Layer list, this name here, Layer 26 to Layer 32. If we toggle between the icon here, we can see these layers are the lines within this middle section window. I want to do the same thing to precomp these lines. Select all, click on "Command, Shift, C", and then rename it. Click on "Okay". These two layers are the reflections on the tower. It's something that we don't need right now. What we can do is to click "Shift click" to select both, and then click on this "Shy" icon here. This is called the Shy icon. Once you click the "Shy" icon and then go up here, you can click this "Hide all layers" which has a Shy icon switched on, so once I click this, you can look at here, these two layers are going to disappear, but they are not deleted. We just hide them from this entire panel. Once we are ready to animate them, we can just turn off the switch and we can see them, they're back on. Basically, we just need to rename all the layers so that we know which one's which. Now we can move on to the next video. 5. Pre Compose Layers: Continue on from the last video. In this video what we need to do is to group some of the fill color with lines so that each element has its own composition. Let me show you how to do that, first, let's click on the three sun layers, and then hold command+shift+C to precompose it and then the Sun and then click Enter, so here is one element that we have that we need to animate later, so we've done that one. Now let's find the cloud. We have this three cloud lines here, but we need to find the fill color, so we just need to go down to the bottom here, look for the light blue cloud color. Here we are, it's layer 51 to 53 and then I just need to bring all them to the top. The shortcut for that is command+shift+right bracket, and then this is the first cloud. This is a fill color put it underneath the clouds and then precompose these two layers. Do the same thing for the second and third cloud. Now we have all three clouds precomposed. Next layer is the top needle, which we don't have to precompose it. This part we need to find the entire middle window section here, so this is a window line, and then we need the go down center window here, and also we need this red color background. Red color fill color, layer 61, and then bring it all the way to the top. Put it underneath the central window layer and precompose these three layers. Now we have the entire section within one layer. Here we have the bottom pole, so we need to find these two blue colors behind the pole, and then bring these two all the way to the top precompose these four layers. Here, the circle, triangle. Here we have a short rectangle, i need to find that fill color too. Basically do the same thing for all the rest of the elements. I'm going to speed up this parts so that you don't have to watch me doing this over and over again. Okay, let's take a look at what we've done, so right now you can see in the main comp, we have all of these different elements on the separate layers, and then some of them are grouped, so we've cut down all the way to 23 layers instead of around maybe a hundred at the beginning. Now we need to put all these precomps into the precomp folder that we created. Right now, they're all saved under "Final comp", so go to the project panel here and then just drag everything except for the main comp into this precomps folder, and then click this arrow to close the folder, now we have a clean organized project panel, so we've done all of the organizing, renaming and everything, now it's ready to be animated, let's go to the next video. 6. Animate Tower Bottom: Now let the fun begin. Let's start, animating. First, I need to introduce a concept in After Effects called Track Matte. It's the ability to use one layer to determine the margin or the boundary of the layer below it. Let me demonstrate how that works. We can just click on this icon here in the Project panel to create a new composition. I'm going to name it "Test" for demonstration purposes. Then, let's type in something, and then, let's add a rectangle on top. Go to the layer below, click on this "Track Matte" icon here and put "Alpha Matte." This way, I can use the boundary of the first layer to determine where the layer below is going to be visible. If I move the first layer, you can see when the layer below goes outside of the box it becomes, invisible. This way, if we were to animate the second layer, then it can go from the bottom to the top. Once they go past that invisible box, its going to appear on the screen. Let's go back to the main composition to start animating this Toronto icon. We're going to need that Track Matte concept. We're going to use that to animate most of the elements in this icon. I want to animate this bottom pole to slide in from the bottom. Click on the shortcut P. If you only have one position, just right-click. Click "Separate dimensions", and then you can access both X and Y Positions separately. I want to set a key-frame at zero seconds for the Y Position and then go forward 15 frames. Use a shortcut "Command-Shift-Right Arrow" to go forward ten frames and then "Command-Right Arrow" to go one frame each time. I'm going to click five times. One, two, three, four, five, five frames. I want to move this final Position to the 15th frame, and then go back to zero seconds. Drag the Y Position down. You can see the pole starts to go down. I want it to start from there, and then show up once it go past circle. In that case, we're going to need Track Matte. I want to click on this "Rectangle Tool". Draw a rectangle mask and then click on this "Bottom Pole". Go to "Track Matte". If you don't have Track Matte in your toolbar, you just go to the bottom left corner, click on this "Expand" or "Collapse". Then the Track Matte is going to show up. Click on "Bottom Pole", use "Alpha Matte" and let's see what happens. Let's preview it. There's a problem now. The pole is showing up where the layer of this rectangle is, but I want to inverse it. I need to choose "Alpha Inverted Matte". It's going to invert the mask. You can see it disappear within that rectangle, and then when I scrape through the timeline, it's going to show up where there's no rectangle. This is what I need. I want it to animate in. Let's zoom in. Slightly adjust the position. That there's no gap between the pole and the circle. That's the animation I want. It's pretty boring because there's no energy to this animation. I want to add in an overshoot to this Y Position. Before it settles in place, I want it to go over a few pixels and then comes back out. From the 15th frame, go back maybe, five frames. At the 10th frame, I'm going to add some overshoots. This is a overshoot. Let's try 530. You can see the value here at zero seconds from 680. It's going to go up until 530 and then come back down to 540. That's the animation we need. After that, we right-click, go to "Key-frame Assistants", "Easy Ease". Instead of linear key-frames, we want the key-frames to change the speed, and if we drag these key-frames and go to this "Curve Editor", we can see this is a curve of these three icons. Click on this to show full-screen, in this section. Now we're in the speed graph. To make it more energetic, I want to drag the speed of the speed graph. Now you can see at this zero-second mark, the speed of these elements is zero pixels per second. This speed goes up and then comes back down. The steeper the curve, the higher the speed is. I want to drag this curve to get a higher speed; to get more energy. Just drag it to have a curve like this. Let's preview this. Click on "N" to change the preview range so that you only preview in this section. Do you see? That's the first pole animation. It looks good to me. I want to do this base animation, this section here, bottom base. Use shortcut to bring it to the top. "Command-Shift", "Right-Square-Bracket". It can bring the element all the way to the top. We want to animate the same way as this "Bottom Pole". Click "P" to open the Position Property. Right-click "Separate dimensions" and then we want to copy the key-frames of this pole. "Command-C", "copy". Go back to the zero frames. Click on this layer, "Paste". This element has the same animation as the first pole animation. Now what I need to do is add in a layer as a Track Matte to cover where I don't want to see this bottom base. Click off the layer. If you don't click off the layer, you're going to make a mask on the layer. That's not what you want to do. What you want to do is to create a new layer with a new shape. I want to go over here and I want to draw a rectangle in this area. Just big enough to cover this bottom base. Then click on this, choose "Alpha Inverted Mattes". Let's see the animation. 7. Animate Tower Center: Next what we want to do is, we want to animate this single line here. Let's go find this line layer, we've got the Top Line and then Bottom Line. Use shortcut to bring it to the top, Command Shift right square bracket. Zoom in, this is going to be easy. First what I need to do is to change these anchor point to the center of the line. Click on the Layer, go up here, use this pan behind tool. This is the anchor point tool also. I just need to click on this anchor point, drag it to the center of this line. Now we can go to this bottom line, click on this right arrow, and then Transform. Here's the scale property. What I want to do is I only want the line to grow in the horizontal direction. I need to unlink the height and width property, so click "Unlink" and then set a keyframe as zero second. At zero second, I want the line x value to be at zero, so type zero. At 15th frame, I want this value to be 100, type in 100. Now you can see the line can just animate in as if it's growing on. Let's preview this, so that's what I need. But right now you can see the line animation is too slow, so we need to do the same thing. Select both, right-click, Keyframe Assistant, Easy Ease, go to the Graph Editor. Here's the speed graph that we had before. Drag this curve here to give it more speed. But don't drag too much otherwise, the animation is going to be too quick. Preview this. That's a similar speed to the previous two animation. But now I feel like these three animation are happening too fast, so I want to slow it down a little bit. It's very easy to do that. First, we need to select the three layers. One is this Bottom Line, and then there's Bottom Base, Bottom Pole. Click on the shortcut key U on the keyboard to show all the animated keyframes. Select All Frames, Hold down Option on Mac or PC. Drag the last frame to space them out so that you can drag the frame to be faster or slower. In this case, I want it to be slower, so I drag to the right, hold on option key. Let's see the animation. That's above the speed I want, that's good. Save the project. Now let's finish the animation of this bottom line. We can also do this top line too. Let's just go down here to find the top line. Here is it, command shift right square bracket to bring it to the top. We can just drag and copy these two keyframes. But before we do that, we need to change the anchor point command R and to turn on the ruler, and then drag a ruler out so that we know where is the center point. Click on this layer Top Line, choose this Pan Behind tool and then drag the anchor point on this guideline, also in the center of this line here. Copy these two keyframes, go to the zero second mark and then paste it onto this Top Line layer. Let's preview this. Now you can see these two have the exact same animation. After we've done that, I want to animate this center section here. First, let's find this center window section, Center window, bring it to the top. This one, I want to animate the same way as I animated the two lines, I want it to grow from the center to both directions. I want to use this Pan Behind tool put it in the center here. Click on this arrow, go to the Scale property unlink this x and y value. We can just copy this keyframe, go here, paste. Now we can see the center sections animating the same way as the two lines. But for the center window, I also want to give it more characters, I want to add in some overshoots before it settles in place. I want it to go over 100 percent in x value so I can change it to maybe like 110 at the 11th frame, or even drag it back one frame. So at the 10th frame, preview that. Select the three going into the graph editor. Make sure it's a speed graph, and then just drag this to give it more speed. Go back, preview this. I feel like 110 percent is too much, so I want to change it to 105. Let's preview that, that's better. Save the project, let's move on. Let's animate the bottom and the top part in the center section. Let's drag these two, Center bottom, Center Top. Moved all the way to the top. Once the central window grows into position, I want the top to slide in from the bottom and then this bottom section slide in from the top. First, let's do the bottom here. Click on this arrow, Transform and then go to Position property right-click Separate Dimensions, go forward, 15 frames. At the 15th frame, I want the position y to be in place, 540 and then go to this zero second mark. Drag the y position like this, and then slide down like that. But right now it's too slow, I also wanted to overshoot. So it's 540 at the end, and then 469. In that case, our 10th frame, I want it to be 545. Drag all three keyframes, right-click Keyframe Assistant, Easy Ease. Go to the graph editor, click on this to fit it to screen, and then drag the speed graph to make it faster like this. That's good, then I want to do this top section here. Click on P, bring up the Position Separate Dimensions. Five position at 15 second. With this, drag it to the 15 second and then zero second. I want it to start from the bottom here and then at 10 seconds, maybe 535 overshoot. Select all three Keyframes, Keyframe Assistant, Easy Ease, and then go to graph editor, do the same thing. Drag it out to give it a bit more speed. Like that, then let's preview this. Look at that, the animation itself looks good. Now we just need to add the Track Matte, as we did before. Make sure you click off any of the layers and then go up top here, Rectangle Tool. Drag a rectangle like this, and then click off, drag another rectangle like this. For the bottom layer, I want it to show up where this bottom rectangle is. Click on this center bottom, Go to Track Matte, click on Alpha Matte, and then bring the other two layer together. Set this one to Alpha Matte as well. Let's see. You can see there are still two layers of the reflection because remember we hide them with this with a Shy button, but we forgot to turn off the eye icon before them, so they're still showing up in the preview. I want to click this icon here, unshade it. Where is the reflection? These two. Yeah. Just click off the eye icon to hide it in the preview. Here's what it looks like right now. Save the project. Now we've finished the bottom pole, the base, and then the center section. 8. Animate Tower Top: Before we move on to the next section, I want to stagger these layers. This is called overlapping action. Basically, I don't want them to come in at the same time. I want one of them to come in first, and then trigger the next one and then the next one trigger the next one, like a staggering effect. Now let's find the bottom pole first. This pole should come in first. Here's the bottom pole. As a bottom pole comes in, like that, this bottom base should come in a little later. Then the bottom line. After that, I want the center window come in first. Then I want this top to come in and then the bottom to come in. Let's see what happens now. You see that, is more clean and organized now. Right now it looks to me that the center window section is still too exaggerated. I want to go in there and see what happens. This is center window. Click on ''U'' to show the keyframe. Goes from zero all the way to 105. Then you see from 105, it should come down to 100. But then as I scrub through the timeline, it goes over 105. It goes even bigger. That's what I don't want. I want to click the three keyframes and then go to the graph editor, to see what happens. I want to redo this animation part. Sometimes it's just easier to redo it. Delete. At first, it should be zero. A tense frame it should be 105 and then after five frames, it should go back to 100. Right-click ''Keyframe Assistant, easy ease," go to the graph editor. Drag this E graph to make it faster like that, and then go back, preview this. That's better. Now, looks much more smooth than before. See, yes, I like that. Now we can move on. Moving on. We want to animate the top section of this icon here. First let's grab this rectangle. Bring it all the way to the top and now we can just drag them somewhere around here. Drag them back. I want to add them in the same way as we did for the bottom pole. I just wanted to slide in from the bottom up, and then add a track mats to cover where I don't want it. This is a rectangle. Click on "p position," separate dimensions. Click on "y position" and then go forward, drag it down. Go to the 10th frame. Overshoot a little bit, 535, that's the animation I want. Then right-click "Keyframe assistance, easy ease." Go to the graph editor, adjust the speed, make it faster. That's done. Then this short rectangle on top of it, click on "p" do the same thing. This is the final position, final size. Then here, go forward. Drag it down. That's suppose to 535. Right-click "Keyframe assistant, easy ease" go the graph editor. Drag the speed. You can hold on space-bar to navigate in this graph editor as well. Go back. Let's preview that. It's good except for we don't have the track Matte yet. I want to add into track Matte, first let's do this horizontal one. Click the "Rectangle icon." Remember to click off any of the layers, so that you don't add a mask. If I don't click off to layers, when I add a rectangle over it, I'm going to drag a mask. That won't work because the mask is going to travel with layer. It doesn't stay in position. You layer is this rectangle here, is always visible. That's why we need a track Matte, to make the place where we don't want to be invisible. Click "Cursor layer" go to the rectangle tool, hiding a rectangle, and then put it on top of this horizontal rectangle, choose Alpha Matte. Drag a box here and then set it to Alpha Matte. Now let's preview this. They are coming up at the same time. I also want to stagger these two as all. I want nothing to come in at the same time, so that it looks more natural and organic. That comes in, then the short, this rectangle comes in. Then what we need to do is animate this long rectangle. This one. Bring it to the top. Do the same thing. I'm just going to do it quickly. It's going to be the same. Yes, that's done. Let's preview this. Nice. These are all using the same animation, just light in from the bottom. Let's do that quickly too. Finally, we can do the top needle here. Right now, I did just paste in the y position of the other layers. But I want this needle to pop up and then come down. I want this overshoot to be much larger, maybe like that. Now one more time. I need to drag this y position further. Let's preview that. Yeah, something like that. I want to hide the ruler, I don't need the ruler anymore, just the shortcut to hide ruler is command semicolon. Zoom out show the full picture. You can also change from here, maybe 100 percent, use spacebar to navigate and then let's preview from the start. Looks good. Only one problem. I forgot to add a track Matte for the top needle so I'll do that. Drag a rectangle here, make it bigger because it travels further from this point. Then just set Alpha Matte. Let's preview this. Now looks nice. I like it. There you go. That's your turtle icon animation. Next video, we're going to build the circle and the sun coming out. 9. Become Motion Insiders: Before we continue, I want to share with you an exciting news. Motion design courses just became more affordable at motion circles. With our motion insider membership for as low as $7 a month, you will get unlimited access to our top tier motion design courses, trusted by over 50,000 students worldwide. Time to elevate your motion design skills to become the best animators you can be. As an insider, you will also receive complimentary project files from all of our Motion Circles YouTube tutorials. And enjoy an exclusive 25% discount on all the other incredible animation projects from other artists in our project file shop. Don't miss out on this opportunity to level up your animation skills while becoming part of our vibrant community. Join us today at motion circles.com and unleash your creative potential. 10. Animate Circle and Sun: Last video, we finished the toron CN Tower animation. In this video, I'm going to show you how to animate this circle around it and also the sun coming out. First let's find this circle layer and the sun layer. Let's go to the bottom here. Here's the sun layer and the circle layer, let's move them to the top. First of all, let's do the circle. To animate the circle, we have to use this thing called trim pass, but in order to trim the pass, the circle has to be a shape layer, or like a line. Right now it's illustrator files, so we need to convert it to a shape. To do that, just right-click the illustrator layer, and then go to create, and then create shapes from vector layer. Click on that, you can see right now there's one more layer generated, it's called circle outline, and then this circle illustrator layer is hidden. The eye icons turn off, we don't need it anymore, so we can just delete it. Click on the circle outline, click on this little arrow here, and then click on this add button here. We need this thing called trim path. Basically it's going to trim a path literally. How it works is sad, go to the trim path property, and then right now you can see if I scroll through this percentage, you can see the line is actually animating on and off. What we need to do is, at the beginning, I want it to be zero percent. Then maybe over here, a one-second 16 frame, I want it to be 100 percent. Let's preview that. That's about right. The only thing is, I don't want the line to animate from this point here, I want it to animate from the bottom. To change that, we need to change this offset percentage. Just drag the offset and you can see the line is actually moving, the starting line, just drag it until it reach the bottom there, so that's about 96 percent. Now, it can start from the bottom. I want it to start with the pole coming into the frame. I'm going to drag it back two frames. Let's preview that. That's good. Right now these two keyframes are linear keyframe, so I want to right-click and then keyframe assistant, ease ease, to change it to easing keyframes. Something like that. That works for me. Save the project. In order to animate the sun layer, first of all, I need to change this anchor point to the center of the circle around there, and then I need to draw a path along the circle here so that the sun can travel along. To do that, I need to use this pen tool, just basically draw a circle, like that, like this. Don't close it, otherwise it won't be a path, and then the sun cannot travel along it. You have to leave it open. Then I can go to the top here, hold down option, toggle between the color to turn it off. Now I have this circle path, all I need to do is go down here, this icon, and then go down to this path, click on this keyframe, add one keyframe here, anywhere, and then copy this one keyframe, Command C, go to the sun layer, go to transform position, and then Command D, paste. You can see the sun has changed its position. It now change to the starting point of this line here. If I scrub through the timeline, you can see it actually travels along the path now. This is what we want. Now I can just turn off the icon for this path, I don't need it anymore, I just need the sun layer here. It's going to start from the bottom there. Let's move all the keyframes forward, I want the sun start traveling maybe around 10th frame, from here. I also want it to cover the edge of the circle so I can move it on top of that circle line. Before we go forward, we're going to just select all of these keyframes here, right-click and click on this rove across time. As I've circled travels, I want it to stop right there. I'm going to add a keyframe and then delete the keyframe behind it, so that it stops there. It doesn't travel further anymore. Another thing is, I want to add opacity change. I want the the sun to fade in instead of just cut in. Let's go to the opacity, click on the keyframe, change to zero here. At this point, the sun should start as zero opacity, and then as it go forward, it's slowly phase in, maybe fit in faster, and move these two keyframes closer. Right now you can see when the sun comes in, it's not very smooth. The animation is a little choppy. What we need to do is to change these two keyframes back to the rove keyframe, so that the speed is not affected over here in these two position, and then it's going to make the animation much smoother. The way to do that is to go into this keyframe here, hold down command to click this keyframe, and then click two times basically, and then it becomes a circle, which means it's a roving keyframe. The speed doesn't change at this point. It's just going to rove through this keyframe here. Command click two times. Now change to first keyframe to easing keyframe too, right-click keyframe assistant, easy ease. Now let's Preview. I want to see the curve, what happens here. That looks good. Save the project. Let's preview the animation. I still feel like the sun is coming out too fast, so I make it slower. Yeah, like that. One other thing we can add is, right now, the sun has a circle outline too. We can also add a trim path to that, so the circle can build on. Let's go into the sun composition. Do the same thing as the circle in the main comp, so here is the outline and then right-click "Creates shape from vector layer", and then go in here, add a trim path. At zero second, change the ending value to zero, and then around one second is going to be 100. Let's go back to the main comp and take a look. The outline is animating, but the circle is not rotating, so that makes it look weird. Now, I need to add a rotation value to the circle itself. Just click on the stopwatch on rotation and then go back in time. Over here, maybe change it to negative 90, or negative 180. Let's preview that. I want the circle to come in at this point here. From here, and then it's already starting to rotate. I guess a rotation value is not big enough, so I want to change it to negative 360. Then I'm going to move the keyframe of the trend pass back too so that it comes in at the same time when the circle becomes visible. This is a point here that the circle stops in position. Let's preview that. That looks good to me. Now I feel the outer circle is traveling too early. I need to move it back. Maybe a touch. Now let's preview this. That looks good to me. Now we've done the tower and also the sun, the circle, next video, we can see how we can animate the clouds. 11. Animate Cloud: In this video, we're going to animate the clouds and also the copy here, this as Toronto. First, let's get the cloud layer. Do down here. Here's a cloud one, two, and three, select them, bring them to the top. So what I want to do is, I just want them to slide in. It's going to be very simple. First, let's change the anchor point from this position to the center of each cloud. Now I'm going to grab this pen behind tool. Zoom in, use space bar to navigate and drag this anchor point to the center of this cloud. So here's my second cloud. I'm going to drag this anchor point to the center here and then the third one, the same, done. Now what I want to do is, let's do the first cloud first. Click on "P" on the keyboard, turn on position, and then right-click separate dimensions. I'm going to only animate the exposition. So as the tower is building on, I want the cloud to come in probably over here. So I want to click on this "Stopwatch" here and then add a keyframe, drag it forward. So here at this keyframe here, this is going to be the final position of my cloud one layer. Right now I'm at 20 frames. So I want to change this, drag it to the left. Maybe move this one further away so that it moves slowly. It's not moving so fast. When it comes in and also want the cloud to fade in instead of just cut in. So I want to add a opacity change to this layer. One way to do that is to, while you have the layer selected, hold on "Shift" and then hit "T" on the keyboard. So it's going to show the opacity value here. Click on the "Stopwatch" at a keyframe. Now it's at 100 percent and I'm going to drag this 100 percent keyframe forward, maybe a little bit, a few frames and then change it to zero. So that right now at 20 frame, the opacity is from zero to 100 on the 23rd frame. I'll weigh the cloud is going to fit in, while it's also sliding in from the left. Like that. Let's preview this. So the cloud is still moving too fast to me. I'm going to drag this keyframe further away so that it's moving slowly and also I want the cloud to come in after the sun go pass it because I don't want them to overlap. In that case, I'm going to grab these three key frames and then move it back a little bit, so that the cloud is not starting to fitting in until the sun go pass it. Drag it here, and then change the. So I also don't want the cloud to intersect with the circle. So I'm going to drag this opacity even further, right now the cloud is intersecting with the circle, I don't want that, so I'm going to change the exposition. Drag it to the right so that is not intersecting. Let's preview this. Yes, something like that, that works for me. Now I'm going to do the same thing for the other two clouds. Just animate the position property and also the opacity. This is the final position of the cloud. Also I want at this point here, I want the opacity value to be 100 and then at the start, I want it to be zero. Slightly changed the x position from the right. Or maybe I want the final position to be even further away from the edge. Maybe right there. That's fine. Then I'm going to do the same thing for the cloud three, separate dimensions. Turn on the opacity. So I want the opacity to be at 100 right here. Drag this point to align with the other two layers and then over here, the opacity should be zero. Slightly drag the exposition, that's good. Let's preview this. I like it, except that right now they are coming up at the same time, which is something that I don't want. So first of all, I'm going to cut these three layers so that the first frame is at this point. One second, two frames. The way to do that is to hold down option and left square bracket. You see the layers are cut and then these three layers all started at the same point. What I wanted to do is just stagger those a little bit, so that they're not coming up at the same time. Like that, let's preview this. I feel like when they come up, they are too close to the edge. Especially the first one. I want the first one to come in closer to the tower when it first appear on the screen. So the way to do that is to change the exposition, maybe over here, and then drag the end point closer to the tower. Maybe over here. Like that, that looks good to me. Now I feel like there are still moving too fast. So I'm going to drag these two key frames even further to make the animation slowly, that works for me. Now, we have the clouds nailed. Let's do the Toronto copy. 12. Fun Text Reveal: Next, let's animate this Toronto text here. I want to teach you one of the easiest way to animate a text. This is also one of my go-to. Sometimes, when I don't know how to animate text or I don't want it to be simple, boring. I want it to be stylized, but also very easy to do. This is one of my go-to animation for any title and you know that you can apply to anything that you want. Let me show you how to do it. First of all, the Toronto layer right now is in Illustrator. It's a vector layer, but what we need is to retype it in After Effects because I cannot convert this Illustrator layer into a text layer. All we need to do is grab this type tool, just type in the word Toronto. The font that I'm using is Gotham X Narrow bold, all I need to do is to change it to all-caps. You can choose whatever font you want, and then I'm going to overlay on top of that vector layer. That's all right, I can turn off this other layer that I have here. Now, I can even delete this Illustrator layer. I don't need it anymore. First I want to reposition the anchor point to the center of this Toronto, and then all I want to animate is the position property. Hit on "P position", right-click "Separate Dimensions." What I know right now is y position 850 is a final position I want the text to be in. I'm going to click on the "Stopwatch", hit, put a keyframe there, and then I'm going to drag it forward to the 15th frame. After 15 frames, I want the text to settle in place. Go back to the beginning, I wanted to animate from the bottom here, slide up, and then at the 10th frame, I want to add an overshoot. Exactly, what we did before for the other elements on the tower. At the 10th frame, overshoot attach here, so that's 850. Then the overshoot, I want it to be 845. Select all keyframes, so right-click "Keyframe Assistant" easy ease. Let's preview the animation. I want the overshoot to be even more dramatic. Maybe, I can add in 840. Let's see that. That's good. Then go in the graph editor, modify the speed graph to give them more energy and speed, like that. Let's preview. Yeah, I like that animation. Cool. Now here's the fun part. Just follow me closely. First, I want to duplicate this layer 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. Six times, so that I got seven layers and each layer can contain one letter. The way to do that is very simple. Just hit on "Command-D" to duplicate six times. One, and then I'm going to draw a mask. On the first layer here, I'm going to draw a mask on T. In the second layer, draw a mask on O. Third layer, draw on R. Do the same thing for the rest. What happens is each layer is going to contain only one letter. If I toggle between this icon on and off, you can see each one of my layers is just one letter. Now what I need to do is select all seven layers here, and then use a shortcut option, right square bracket, to cut it. All the seven layers are cut to one frames. Now here's a trick, de-select all of them, select them from the bottom first and then to the top. I'm going to click the first layer at the bottom, the order is very important here. Whichever you are clicking first, it's going to be the first thing that's animated. First, I'm going to click on this "T" layer and then hold on shift, click this last layer O, and then right-click on my mouse, "Keyframe Assistant" sequence layers. Here comes another window, we don't need to change anything, just click on "Okay". Now you see the position of the layer has been changed and then they all come in one after another. Now what I need to do is, before I click off anything, you see there's a left and right arrow on my mouse. I just want to track the ending of all the layers. Just drag them out, so that they're all the way to the sixth second mark. Now let's preview the animation. You see that, that's the effect that we get from this workflow. It's a spring effect for the text and this is animation that I always do, whenever I can't think of a creative way to animate the copy. Now we're going to group all the seven layers into one composition, "Command-shift-C", "Pre-comp" and call this Toronto hit "Okay". Next what I want to do is to add a track matte to cover where I don't want to see the copy at first. Make sure you don't have any layer selected. Draw a rectangle like that, and then set it to alpha matte. Let's preview this. Perfect. That's the animation I want for this text to come in. Now let's preview the whole animation before we move to the next video. I want Toronto to come in later. Select the two layers, drag it behind, forward in time. Just as the tower is building on, I want the Toronto text to come in. Oh, I forgot to drag this yellow bar. I want the bar to come in at the same time as the Toronto text. There you go. That's your animation. 13. Animate Reflection: In this video, let's work on the reflection on the tower. First, let's go down here to grab the reflection that we turned off at the beginning. These two layers are the reflection, bringing them to the top. Now what I need to do is to recreate this reflection within after-effects. The way to do that is first let's create a new solid layer, go to layer, new. Click on "Solid". Here's a window that I dropped this color here, this light blue color on the reflection. The solid that we're creating, it's going to be 1080 by 1080, we can rename it to reflection, click on "Okay". You see now we created a layer that's the same color as the reflection. Now what I need to do first, I want to draw along the lines of this reflection but then this layer is covering on top of it so I can't see that. The way to do that is first click on this icon, this is Adjustment Layer icon. Once I click on this, this layer is going to become an adjustment layer, which is going to be invisible. But at the same time I can still draw on this layer. With this icon checked, I can go on top here, grab a pencil, and then zoom in. Just draw along the contour of this reflection, like this. This way is going to create a mask on top of this solid layer, and once I finish it, I'm going to Click "Off" so that shape is done. Then click on this reflection layer again, I want to draw another mask beside it, zoom in again even further. I want to draw this shape here. Close the shape, then we can turn off the adjustment layer like this. You can see this the effect we get, so I did draw to mask on top of this solid layer. Now the solid layer, if I turn off the mask. This is the layer before the mask. Once I draw the mask, it's going to show me only the part that's inside the mask that I drew. We have the reflection now I can delete the two reflection before. Just delete those two. Now what I need to do is get this center section here, try to find the layers, Center window. This is the center window, center top, so I got center window, center top and center bottom. I want to pre compile these layers. Command Shift C, recompose, tower center section. Click on "Okay" and then I want to bring this reflection down on top of this tower center section. First, what I need to do is to animate this reflection going from the right hand side to the left. Click on P position, right-click separate dimensions. I want the reflection to animate around here. Click on the stopwatch at the key frame in the exposition. Drag it to the right, that's the reflection and then go maybe over here, drag the position to the left, like this. That's the animation of the reflection. Let's preview this. It might be too slow, I'm going to drag it closer here. Still feel like it's too slow, maybe even more. That looks better for now and then what we need to do, Remember the track mark that we were using before, we can do the same thing with this reflection. All I need to do is to duplicate this layer, the tower Center layer, Command D duplicate, and then put this new duplicated layer on top of the reflection. Use this layer as the boundary of the reflection so that the reflection is only going to be visible inside this tower center section. Just set this reflection to alpha matte. Now you can see if a scratch through the timeline. The reflection is only visible. One is inside the tower. That's how we achieved the reflection. Let's preview the animation. I still feel like there is no energy to this reflection as I grab the two key frames even closer. That looks better, now I want to select the two key frames. Right-click key frame assistant. As previewed that looks good to me, that's how you do the reflection. 14. Balloon Animation: Now let's animate the balloons. First, let's go grab the balloon from the project panel under "Pre comps" folder. Click on this arrow. I got this balloon blue and then balloon yellow. Let's grab this balloon blue, put it into the main comp. First, I want to go in there to add a string attached to the balloon. Double-click, now, let's just go to the pen tool. With no layer selected, I want to draw a string, maybe this long, and then I don't want any fill color, but I want a stroke color. Go to the "Content", "Shape" and then turn off the fill color, turn on the stroke color, change it to black. That's about right. Next, what I want to do is to add effects to the string. Let's go to "Window", click on this "Effects & Presets". This is where are we going to apply effects. Search for wave warp, and then double-click to put it on this layer and then let's adjust some of the settings. First, I want to change this anchor point to the string here. This is the anchor point. I'm going to put on top there. Let's change the wave width to around 90, and then we can try to change the direction of the wave. You can see as I was changing the direction, you can see the line is already warped as if it's waving. I just want a slight wave, very subtle, like that, and then I want to change the wave speed to zero. Now all I want to do is animate the face. From here, I want to add the zero seconds. Let's add a keyframe on the face, so click on "Stopwatch" here. Now we can click on the shortcut key, "U", on the keyboard to show the keyframe in the timeline here. Then I just want to maybe go up to one second, and then change the face to negative one here. I want to drag this face all the way out so that it lasts longer, which means the animation is going to be slower. It's very subtle right now, but let's see if it works after we animate the balloon, go back to the main comp. Go up here, click on the pen behind tool, put this anchor points on the balloon itself, like that, and then drag the y position down. From this point, the balloon is going to be there, and then drag forward until maybe four seconds. Click on the keyboard shortcut "V" to go to "Selection Tool", and then I'm going to drag this balloon out, all the way up. You see there's a handle on the path. I want to slightly modify the handle on the path to have a curve path to it. Instead of straight path, a slight curve. Doesn't have to be to exaggerated, I just want to slightly moving to the left or to the right. That works. Let's preview the animation. The floating animation looks good to me it's just a string. Maybe I need to make the string move faster. Right now, it's barely moving. Go to this string here. I also want the string to be behind the balloon, so I want to put the layer on the bottom. Drag the two keyframes closer so that the animation is more obvious. Let's go back to the main comp to preview this. You know what? That looks good to me. Now let's do the same thing for the other balloon. Let's go back to the project panel, grab this yellow balloon, put it in the main comp, and then go inside there. I can just copy the other string to this composition. Up here, you can see there's this balloon blue layer, pre comp, and then let's just copy this, "Command C". Go back to the yellow balloon, paste, and then all I need to do is to change the position, put it behind this balloon here. We can put the layer at the bottom so that it's behind the balloon. Go back to the main comp, drag this layer, maybe around here. I don't want them to come up at the same time, as I said before, so I want to stagger the animation. First, let's change the anchor point to the center of the balloon. Then what I can do is to copy this two keyframes, "Command C", and then go to the beginning of this yellow balloon layer, paste in the two keyframes. Now let's preview. I want to see what happens here. You see right now, the yellow balloon is following the same path as the blue one. What I want to do is to modify the path of it. First, we need to select two keyframes and then go to the first keyframe, then I can change the path of the yellow balloon. Now you see I can drag the two position at the same time to the right-hand side, and now it's a different path. But still, I want to change it even more. I want to go to the last keyframe here and then maybe drag it to the last a little bit, and then drag it further away from that. I want this yellow one to move slower than the blue one. Let's preview the animation. I feel like these two are still too close to each other. I want the yellow one to go to the right instead of the left. Go to the last keyframe here, drag this path, somewhere around here, and modify the curve a little bit. Let's preview this. Now it's not high enough, so you can still see the string. I need to go to the last key frame and then drag the yellow balloon even higher so that you don't see the string hanging in the air. That should be good to me. Let's save the project. Next, all we need to do is just to follow the same process for the first two balloons, and then we can create another two balloon, but at the different position. Here's the final animation. All I did is to copy these two balloons and then paste it to another composition, and then fix the position of these two and change the color so that I have four different balloons coming up. It's going to be the same process as the first two. Here's the final animation. Next video, I'm going to show you how to export this file as a GIF or in MP4 so that you can share it with your friends or post it on the Internet. 15. Export: Here we go. This is our final animation. So now I want to export this file into a GIF file. All I need to do is click on this composition here, and then click on this add to Adobe Media Encoder queue. Once I click that, it's going to open Adobe Media Encoder. Another thing to pay attention to is that right now my preview range is set to from zero second to six seconds. So that's going to be the range that this animation is going to be rendered at. Basically, if I put the render region as six seconds is going to only render out six-second video for me. I can also set it longer if I want. I can set it to nine seconds. All I need to do is to click on the nine-second mark, put my timer indicator there and then hit the N key on the keyboard to set the out point. Then if you want to set the end point is going to B, B on the keyboard. Here we go. Now we have the Adobe Media Encoder queue open. This file right now is sent to the queue. Here is the setting that we can choose from. Click on this down arrow here. We can export this file as a MP4 formats. So if you want to export as MP4, you can just hit on this H.264. That's a high-quality MP4 video formats. Then if you want a GIF formats, you can just click on this Animated GIF. Now I only want it to be Animated GIF so I'll choose this. You can change some settings in the preset, but for now, all we need is this Animated GIF option. Then we can choose here where we want to save the file. I want to save it to desktop, final output, and then name it Toronto Logo. Hit enter, and then just click on this green start button. It's going to start render. All right, it's done. Let's take a look. Here's our final animation. 16. Congrats!: Congratulations, you've finished the course. Now you should be able to apply the techniques learned in this course to any kind of animation. My challenge to you was to take any of your own logos or icons, something that you're excited about, and apply what you learned in this course to your own design. Be sure to post your animation the project page, I can't wait to see what you come up with. If you have any question going through this course, shoot me a note in the discussion panel and I'm here to help you. Thank you so much for taking the course. Happy animating. [MUSIC]