Introduction to Adobe After Effects: Getting Started with Motion Graphics

1. Trailer: I'm Evans Abrams from Ottawa Canada. I'm a motion graphic designer, I've been doing this for about 10 years making animation and motion graphics for people using Adobe After Effects. So, that's made me something of an expert on the subject. So, I'd like to share some of my skills with you and give you an intro to how to use this program. After Effects is a compositor, so we'll be taking footage and assets and combining them together with things we can make in the program to create things like titles or explosions or visual effects all things. But in this tutorial we're going to be making lower thirds which are the things at the bottom of the frame that are telling you who's talking and what they're talking about. Throughout the course of the tutorial we are going to spend a lot of time talking about what the tools of the program are and what they do, we are going to talk about the windows and the interface, we're going to talk about layers which are the assets as they appear on the timeline. The properties of those layers and how to animate those properties, interpolating the key frames of animation over time. We're going to talk about what the word interpolation means, we're going to use expressions to automate motion, we'll have to use key frames and when all is said and done you'll have some delightful graphics that you want to export and we will talk about how to export them. Basically this will be a start to finish run of how to use the program and hopefully we will move on to more advanced tutorials or just making cool stuff like this. So, if these seem like skills you'd like to have shared to you then go ahead and sign up for the course and I'll see you on the other side. Thanks and have a nice day. 2. Lesson 1 - Part 1: This is Evan Abrams for Skillshare and if you're watching this, then you have selected the Intro to After Effects course and are about to embark on a wonderful journey of getting into one of the greatest compositing programs ever created. Although it's like one of the only compositing programs ever created. It's like one of three. Of all your options, this is probably the best one. So, just a few things before we start. The first thing to know is I will be working in After Effects CC. What this means is that at the time of recording, this is the most advanced version of After Effects available. If you're working on CS 6, CS 5.5, CS 4 or earlier versions, you may not have all of the features and yours may not look exactly like mine. But thankfully, since this is only an intro course, a lot of the things we talked about are going to be exactly the same. So, if you are concerned, Oh my version isn't as new as yours, well, don't worry. I'm going to get you through that. This is a core fundamental course and a lot of the fundamentals have never changed. So, without further ado, start-up your program. I've started up mine and here we are inside of After Effects. The first thing we need to learn is how to get around the interface, what do any of these windows mean, what am I looking at. So, for that purpose, we're going to start off by just talking about what you're looking at. If yours doesn't look like mine, it could be because you need to go Window, Workspace and then Standard or any of these layouts. Essentially, Window is going to govern what all the windows you can see are. As you can see, there's an Align panel, there's a Brushes panel, Info panel, et cetera et cetera, but if we go Workspace, All panels, that'll pull up every single possible panel, and in fact, way more than you need to know. If this is your default, then it's needlessly confusing. So, go Window, Workspace and let's just set it to Standard for now. So, what do we have in front of us? Up here, we have the Tools panel, which are tools like the selector, the hand, magnifier, things like that. So, these are tools that you can use. This is the Project window and the Project window basically shows all of the assets that you're working with. If you're familiar with something like Premier or Final Cut which are editing programs, this is similar to the bins. This is where any files you bring in or anything you create ends up here in the Project window. Now, attached to that we also have the Effects Controls which has nothing in it because there's no layer with effects on it. So, don't worry about that too much. So, Project window is right here. This is what's known as the Timeline. Right now I have a Comp and we're calling it Comp 1, and as you can see, I'm looking at a timeline called Comp1. Obviously, this is spread out. So, if I create a new Comp, for example, by clicking that new Comp button, it creates Comp 2 and then I can look at Comp 1's timeline or Comp 2's timeline. So, this is a timeline and on it you can put layers and then layers up here vertically stacked. Here and time is displayed along here. So, to better understand what this means, this is where you find stuff. This is where you get into that stuff. Now, what does that stuff look like? Well, it looks like right here. So, this is where things end up. You can make things that end up out here and this is what you would know as your art board. But for us, we are calling it Composition Comp 2 and this is timeline of Comp 2. So, this is what's known as a Composition window because it is where you compose things, composing your frame and this is the timeline. So, whenever I mention a palette specifically, this is Project, Composition, Timeline. These are the main things that we'll be worrying about. Over here we have things like the Audio, we have the Info, we have the Character tool, but really only because we're using text at the moment. We have every Effects & Preset, and we have the Paragraph, we have the Align and like I said, we have a lot of other ones to look at. So, if I mention later on on this tutorial using a window that you don't see, the window can be accessed by popping it up here. Like if I say open up the smoother, then you'd click on Smoother and there it is. So, just because it's not on mine, doesn't mean there's anything wrong with yours and specifically, it means you just need to open it up and then you'll be fine. So, let's start off by doing something like importing an asset. So, that can be pretty good. Since we're going to be creating lower thirds, we need to put the lower thirds over some footage. At the very least, even if you don't have any footage available, you're going to want to put some footage in just as a placeholder. If you're going to be putting your lower third in over an anchor speaking or an interviewee, then you're going to want at least to show the framing of that interviewee or whatever it is. So, let me just go ahead and find some footage. If you want to import things, what you're going to do is you can right-click here on your project and you can go to Import and then you're going to have a whole lot of things. So, you can import a Solid, a Placeholder, a Vanishing Point,.vpe file, probably not. Who even knows what that is? You could Pro Import After Effects, you could bring in a Premiere Pro Project, you could bring in multiple files or just one file. At its simplest, let's just import one file. Now, I'm going to import some footage of myself speaking over the intro of this course. If you've seen the intro video, you already know the footage of which I speak. So, I can open that up. So, I've selected it. Now, these are basic things like all acceptable files, you know what that is. If you've used a computer, you know what that is. What you're importing it as, however, is a little bit more dicey. You can import things as footage, you can import it as a project, depending on what you're working with. For example, if we want to import this, we don't get those options. Those options aren't available. You can import some things as compositions. You can import, for example, Photoshop files as a composition with the layers spread out and editable here in After Effects, but for our purposes, we're bringing in some footage imported as footage and click Open. It's going to take awhile to interpret and understand that footage for you. So, now that we have this footage, we can take it and drag it onto the new Comp button which will create a composition that is the size, dimension and duration of that footage. What that means is, if you look up here, 1920 by 1080 and pixel aspect ratio of 1.00, meaning square pixels. So, this is the frame size. This is the duration, which is three minutes 47 seconds and 13 frames at 23.976 frames per second. Millions of colors H.264 codec and this is a little bit about the audio. All of that information is also displayed lovingly along here. You can add a whole bunch of columns about it if you would like to display all of the metadata information that goes along with that clip. But for us, what we're going to do is create a new composition and then bring this footage into it. So, creating a new composition clicking this button here and then we are going to call this Lower Third, because that is what we are creating. We're just going to name it very simply and we're going to go with the HDTV 1080,24 frames per second preset. Now, why am I using 24 frames a second? Because it's incredibly close to the frames per second of the footage. Now, we just need to refine that a little bit to take it down to 23.976 which is the exact frame rate. Meaning, the time codes will line up precisely. When we see these time units here, there will be exact between the footage and the stuff we're creating. Frame rate is incredibly important to prevent lost frames, dropped frames, and to make sure that animation looks as you would anticipate it over time. So, if we are creating lower thirds to go over a 29.97 footage, you will select this one. If it's 24 here, 25 here and so on. You can also just type it in if you'd like. So, if it's not found in this menu, this is the menu of the most common frame rates that you'll encounter, but you want to select the one that is the same as what you're going to be working with. This is the idea of projects standards and it's something that you probably know already if you work in Premiere et cetera. So, if video is something new to you, then this is probably a new subject. If this is something old, then I apologize for going over it but it's very important in this early stage to get it right. The starting time code, I'm leaving it all zeros. Meaning, the base is going to be 00 and it goes up from there. The duration is 30 seconds even though we might not use all of it and the background color is just what color is the background when there's nothing there. I'm just going to go ahead and hit OK and create this new composition. Now, to keep everything nice and tidy in our Project panel, I'm going to create a new folder called. 3. Lesson 1 - Part 2: Let's go ahead and hit okay, and create this new composition. Now, to keep everything nice and tidy in our project panel, we would create a new folder called Footage. That's a good name for a folder, I think, so I put Footage in that bin. I'm going to create another one and this is called Comps, and anything that is a comp I'm putting in there to keep everything nice and organized. I don't want anything to be crazy disorganized especially for me but most especially for you. Here in the lower third, I'm going to drag my Footage down into it. As you can see it fills it up quite nicely, and since I am using this selection tool, I can move it around as much as I would like, and grab these handles and I can scale it like so. That's about it. So, not much to it, but right now we have footage on our frame. I'm just going to drag along to where we have me staring smugly at the camera. This is the approximate framing, and keep in mind, we don't necessarily need the footage to be anywhere in specific for what we're doing. If you do need it to be in a specific spot, you can grab it on the timeline, and move it back and forth by clicking, and dragging. You see, when I click, makes these nice little lines down there by my cursor, and then I drag it around. At this point, let's talk about what we're seeing on the timeline. This red line is called the playhead. This is the place in time, that this is displaying. We're displaying frame two seconds and three frames, or I hold down command or control for you Windows users, and I click over here, and it changes it to just frames or seconds and frames. So, if you display the information differently just click this and it'll do that. We're at 203, that's just so you can know what that information is. And you can scroll through this way, you can scroll through this way, both of which are very valid ways of doing it but wherever you click up here we'll set your playhead there. So, that is an important thing about moving around in the timeline. Another thing that's important about moving around in the timeline is keyboard shortcuts. Your first one of those is hitting page up to move backwards, page down to move forwards. You can hold down shift and it page up and page down to move ten frames forward and backward. But imagine that you're scrolling up and down a film strip, so when you go up, you're going in reverse, when you go down, you're going forward in time. So, I may at times call out page up, page down, shift page up, shift page down, and that's just a quick way of moving in 10 and one frame increments all through your timeline. So, at this point and there isn't much else to cover about your tools because we don't have to do much. You can use the hand tool here to grab and move yourself around, you can use the zoom tool to zoom in. If you hold down alt you can zoom out, if you have a mouse wheel scroll in and scroll out, and then it's very helpful to be able to pan around using this hand tool. Wonderful. If you hit V you will get your pan tool back and you can move things around on the timeline. You can use the rotation tool when you select it to rotate things. Now, as we're discussing rotation I have to talk about this anchor point. If a lot of this seems redundant and very basics because this is the basic tutorial, so please bear with me. We'll get into making things in just a moment once you understand all of these concepts. So, we are rotating around this anchor point and why it's important for me to talk about the anchor point, is that this pan behind tool, when you click, you can move that anchor point. So, If I move the anchor point up here and then I use the rotation tool, I'm rotating around that anchor point. When we get into moving things and rotating things it's very important that you understand everything will rotate around an anchor point and to move that anchor point you can use the pan behind tool. This is the camera tool. We won't be working in 3D and there won't be any cameras so you can sort of forget that but it is your camera control. This is a rectangle tool, you use it to create rectangles, and in fact, since we need to create more assets than just what you're looking at we're going to now use it to draw a rectangle, which is quite an excellent thing to do. Select nothing, make sure you don't have anything selected and then you can double-click on this to create a rectangle the size of your frame. If we have a layer selected and we double-click on the rectangle it will instead create a mask around that, and we're not interested in making mask at this time. This is not about masking. This is about making elements to go onto the timeline, so we'll be doing that by double-clicking here and it will create a rectangle. This is called a Shape Layer. When we look in here we can see, it says "Shape Layer One." Excellent. So, it is correctly named, but we can rename it if we like. So, what I'm going to do is press return and that will allow you to rename layers. Now rename this one, Main Rectangle, just like that, hit return again and we'll rename it. The renaming of layers is essential to keeping everything straight forward. If you want to know what the source name is you can just click here and it'll change it from layer name to source name. Now, the footage, I'm just going to call this footage in the timeline. So, now the source name is NVI whatever, whatever, but its layer name is Footage. The Main Rectangle is not at all where we would like it, neither is it the size we would like it. It has none of the properties that we're interested in seeing, so what I would like to do is modify its properties to be something we're interested in seeing. To modify the properties we need to open up the layer by hitting this twirl down. Whenever I say twirl down, that is clicking one of these sideways arrows to point down. Within here, you can see we have transform and contents. All layers have the transform properties, so the footage layer has the transform properties. And what you're looking at here are things like the anchor point. We spoke about that anchor point before. You can move the anchor point around which is shifting the relative position of the layer while maintaining the anchor point where it is, because the position value says, where is the anchor point and the anchor point value says, "Where is everything relative to that point?" I'm just going to reset what we did. We're going transform reset. The anchor point is fine where it is, position is fine where it is, the scale is fine where it is, and being linked together is fine, that's what that symbol means right there. The rotation is fine and the opacity is fine. These transform tools applied to the global layer, the footage has only those things applying to it, but I would like to edit inside the contents. Inside the contents, inside the rectangle, some things in here. For example, this layer is made up of a path and that path I would like to alter its size to be more applicable to the size of a lower third. So, I'm going to unlink its properties here, meaning the height and width are no longer linked and then I'm going to scale them down to be a bit more appropriate. But to know how big things should be you're probably going to need a few guides, you're probably going to need a few sort of rulers around. If you need a ruler, you can hit command R or control R and bring up the rulers. Here's a wonderful looking ruler then you can drag them out from the side. If you want to know the proportions you can pull up the proportion grid. We're creating what are called lower thirds and a lower third obviously takes place in the lower third of the frame which is down here. Now, when I toggle on my proportion grid it's divided into thirds. I do that by clicking this button here, selecting proportion grid. If your proportion grid doesn't look like my proportion grid I would say, "Now is a good time to go aftereffects preferences and then go into grids and guides." Now here you are able to redefine your proportion grid. You can have way more horizontal things if you would like, so that's alright if you have way more vertical things. But if you would like it to look like mine that's preferences grids and guides and three horizontal by three vertical blocks. You can change the color of that if you'd like, you could change it to be a pink, a hot pink color if you'd like. The standard is green, but you can really do whatever you like. This is very weird but anyway that's totally up to you, that's something you can alter in your preferences. Now, something else to be aware of is the title and action safe. So, the title and action safe basically indicate on tube TVs and the like. Where is it safe to have title information or action information? Where are things going to get cut off? And basically, things are unsafe outside of this margin here. So, If we're putting in text and important things, the lower third we want to be below this lower third line. I'm dragging the ruler down, right there, but we would like for text to take place above this line here. things that we put in we basically now have set up this space where we want things to happen. So, looking back at that title and action safe we also know that we want things to be in generally at least this far. These guides are for four by three televisions and I don't know if those exist anymore and for putting this on the web, who cares? We don't need any of those things, but we do now have these wonderful rulers that define where we would like stuff to be, generally, it is this space in here. At this point, I'm going to clear off that initial rectangle and let's get started making something from the very beginning. So, what we're going to do is draw on our primary. 4. Lesson 1 - Part 3: Let's get started making something from the very beginning. So, what we're going to do is draw on our primary shapes and just lay out our frame for later animation. At this point, we're going to use the shape tools like the rectangle tool to define a nice area where we can have some text displayed. Displaying text over footage can often be confusing because we have areas of light, and dark, and shadows, and highlights that can interfere if you have truly dark or purely light text or gradiented text or whatever the text is. Trying to read important information can be confused, so you have to incorporate into your design the idea of making it easier. So, I'm just going to click and drag a rectangle out that extends off the end of the screen, like this, good. Now, if we go into that rectangle, we look at the rectangle path, we look at the path's contents, you can see that even though it appears like I'm changing the size of that rectangle, there's an important lesson to be learned here in what I've drawn. So, here is the lesson. When you look at the transform attributes of this layer, you can see that the transform attributes say the position, scale, rotation, et cetera, are all identical to the position and transform now all of that information of the footage layer. So, when we look here, we're seeing that the position here is the same and so on. However, this object is clearly in a totally different area. When you look at the contents, it's important to know what you're looking at. So, not only does this transform say what's going on, but the contents also say what's happening. So, contents come first and then transform comes second. So, when we look into the transform of that rectangle, you can see that because I was playing around with these handles that look like this, they have that white dot with a blue little circle around it. When I play with those, I'm messing with the scale within that transform rectangle as a property in there. What can get confusing is when you go to animate these things. If you intended to animate one but instead you animate the other or you don't know why one doesn't come up when you start scaling, or why is it that when I scale this, it's relative to this anchor point but if I scale this whole thing, it's going to be relative to this other anchor point. That is the confusion that comes often when creating these assets. So, hopefully this intro is going to give you the where with all to not let that happen. So, the best way to prevent you from becoming maligned with these things is to ensure that your contents are being made in good order. So, having the position and scale be erroneously strange, we want to prevent that. So, usually, I like to set the position to be at zero and then I start at the top by defining the size by using the length and width to create what will be the size and height of what I'm working with. So, I would like a rectangle for my purposes that is, 200 tall by, I'm going to say 1500 wide, so not very wide. Then, I'm going to move it, so I'm moving it using the regular old position and I'm going to move it to be down here. If I want to adjust the position, I can also select a layer and nudge it using the arrow keys. So, this is nudging. The scale is getting nudged around. Now, a new feature in Adobe CC and a little bit in CS6 is the ability to snap things to other things. So, I'm clicking and dragging, and I'm holding down Command or Control, and you can see it's selecting, this will be the thing that's relative to, I can snap it to these things, I can snap it to the edge of the footage below it and I'll just leave it right here. This is a good spot for me to have this in play. Good. So, we've created our rectangle. All that work just for a rectangle. So, at least you're now able to edit it and you will successfully be able to create more and move them around. So, we have this rectangle, what if I want to make another one, I want to start to duplicate that rectangle, I'm going to call one white rectangle, that's a good name because it is a white rectangle. The one below it, I'm going to set it as something more saturated and maybe something a little bit darker. So, I'm going to call this, 2nd Rectangle, just because it's the second one below. I'm going to nudge it out a little bit, so that it sits this far out. Then we duplicate that again, 2nd Rectangle 2 doesn't make any sense, so I'm going to call it 3rd Rectangle. Now, I'm naming it this way just in case I start duplicating them again and I want to cut them up. I'm going to nudge it out a little bit and I'm going to make it slightly more saturated and slightly darker as well. Cool. Duplicate it at another time, nudge it out quite a bit more, alter its color so it's more saturated. Anyway. So, that's what we're creating like that and this is 4th Rectangle. Good. I'm happy with all of this forth, that means 4th Rectangle. So, now I'm just going to nudge these a little bit. So, the first one was nudged once, second one I'm nudging twice and the last one I'm nudging one, two, three, four times. Okay. Cool. So, this will form where text goes over. Now, we need to also put in some text at this point. So, it's good to know where you would like your texts to be. You can create new text by clicking the Text tool, drawing it in somewhere or you can go New, Text, by selecting in here. What I'm going to type in now is title, space and then name. Name just because sometimes it's like Doctor, Mr., whatever but this should be enough for me to act as a place holder. I'm going to change its color to be something quite dark. So, since it is a light background, I would like something dark on top of it. This is around 20, would be good. Cool. I'm just going to set the font to the Source Sans Pro, Black. That's a bit large. You want to make sure that your text is going to be accommodating for what you have going on. So, if you know you're going to have really long Russian names, perhaps you will require this to be smaller to take a lot more information in. Right now, we're not going play around too much with the text except to duplicate this by doing Control D or Command D and then setting the bottom one to be around half as big as the top one, and making its font less severe. So, maybe I can make this one a little bit bigger and they go like this. Now, I can select things, I can use the align panel to align them to each other for example. But right now, this looks pretty good for having someone's name and then other things below them. So, this would be what, where, why and so on. So, that's about it for this lesson. You should now have the ability to know what windows are which, what tools do what, how to bring in new assets, how to create assets for yourself and how to lay things out in your Composition window and on your Timeline window. We're going to get into animating them and working a lot more with the Timeline window and getting way deeper into this. So, now that you know how to access properties, you know what a property is, you are ready to animate them. So, this has been, Evan Abrams, for skillshare. Hopefully you've enjoyed part one and I will see you in part two. If this has been difficult, I would encouraged you to re-watch this and pay very close attention to which tools are what and what clicking and dragging and such was happening. Hopefully, it's been clear for you but if not, this tutorial will always be here for you. So, thank you for watching and I'll see you in part two. 5. Lesson 2 - Part 1: Hello and welcome to Part 2 of the Intro to After Effects course here on SkillShare. I'm, Evan Abrams, and if you're joining us here at Part 2 hopefully you've completed Part 1 and you already have essentially what I'm looking at in front of me here, which is a series of layers on the timeline and some things in the composition window and some things in the project panel. Since you've done Part 1, you know what these windows are and what I'm talking about. If you don't, I would recommend you go back and look at Part 1. But for those of us who are following along, then we're going to continue on with what is known as primary motion. This is when we start to move things around. We've created things, we've looked at their properties and now we need to make the move. Now the primary way we make things move is through keyframes. Keyframing is a concept that relies on two things. The first is knowing what is happening when, and the second is how we get from one point to another. To illustrate what I mean, I'm going to just poke out the eyes of all of these layers so we don't look at them. We're only going to look at this top rectangle here. The simplest way to conceptualize keyframes is in the motion property. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to hit "Home" and take us back here to the very first frame. Now we're going to hit "P" which will call up the position of this rectangle. The position controls lateral left and right, and up and down, and in the case of 3D layers, forward and backward on the Z-axis. So what we're going to do is I'm just going to zoom in on the timeline here, such that we are looking at frames much closer together, and I'm going to move ahead in time here to what is known as two seconds. So you can see we're at two seconds on a timeline, and I'm going to hit the stopwatch. That has set a little diamond here on the timeline. When I double-click on it, it tells us the information about it, which is X750 Y848 measured in units pixels. Now you can measure it in inches, millimeters or whatever but pixels is the easiest way. Say okay, that's acceptable. This keyframe is information that says, at this point, these values should be this. What I'm going to do is move the playhead to the beginning here and I'm going to hit this triangle button here which means "create a new key frame." Now I've said at this point, the value should be this, now I'm going to edit those values by making the 750 much lower. So you could edit the values, that's one way of doing it, or I can just click, drag, move this thing around which I will do. So I just click it, I move it and there it is. So I'm saying at this point, this is the position here at this key frame and then at this keyframe, I would like its position to be there. What will happen, is after-effects will make up the information between those. It's called a tween. So, it knows that to go from negative 750 all the way up to 750, it must travel at such and such a speed and it will be at these positions throughout this process. So, when it moves, it looks like this. It's moving at a constant rate from here to here. So when you keyframe, you're setting a marker and that marker is saying, at this point in time, be at these values. I'm saying values instead of position because we can set keyframes for the opacity for example. So, at this point in time, the opacity is 100 and I can go to another point in time and I can set that opacity to zero. So, the opacity is going up to 100 over time. It is a change over time between two points. Then you're able to take these and you can slide them around. So if I wanted to operate like this, that is perfectly acceptable as well. You can just take and drag and move these keyframe however, wherever you would like. In fact, when it comes to moving keyframes, you can select a bunch of keyframes and move them around. You can copy them, paste them, and whenever you paste them, they appear at the play head, so this red line. You can hold down Alt and then click and drag which will stretch and warp them over time, so you can see how they're scaling like so. That's one way of modifying these keyframes. Another thing you can do is if you don't like the property, you can always double-click and input something new. As well, these are what we call linear keyframes, the interpolation. So, what happens between the key frames is defined in such a way that if we click on here and we go down to keyframe interpolation, we can see that temporarily, so over time, affects how a property changes over time in the timeline. It can be linear, bezier, continuous bezier, auto bezier, hold, all such things. Then the spatial interpolation can also be many things. So it's important to realize that the keyframes are not the be-all and end-all of motion. Saying where it ends up is not quite as important as how it gets there. Both I would say are equally important. For more detailed analysis of how something gets where it's going, you should click on this graph editor. So, I'm going to take away the opacity. I'm just going to leave it always at 100 by clicking my stopwatch and that gets rid of that keyframe information. I'm going to click on the position, selecting both of those key frames, and then I'm going to go into the graph editor. This graph editor basically shows how we get from one thing to another. Right now we're looking at the view settings, we're looking at a speed graph, we can look at a value graph, if we'd like as well, so you can see the value constantly changes over time. There's this linear representation between this point and this point. So, back at the speed graph, and this is the speed it is at a constant speed right here 836.38 pixels per second. That shouldn't mean too much to you and don't get too bogged down but here's something that you should know, when you select these and go animation, keyframe assistant, easy ease, which is applying a natural curve to your motion, starting from a position of rest at speed zero to become faster and then slow down. The keyframes have not changed, but the way the motion goes has changed and that is incredibly important to remember that the keyframes are only half of the story. So, now, we can even take these keyframes, select them, and alter them by dragging their influence handles. Then I can take this first handle and I can drag it like this. So, it's creating a much more exponential curve that it's coming in fast and then slowing down, and in this way, it's speeding up and then slowing down. So, you can see when you watch the play head go through the graph, where is it fastest? Well it's fastest at this peak, and then it slows down. This is a very important concept to understand about keyframes is that when you edit keyframes, you're not only editing what data it says about its point in time and that value, but you're also going to be editing how that data effects the rest of the motion throughout the movement. If we look at the value graph, it looks completely different but you can see this part here is still linear and then it has that taper. So, something like this and that's quite wonderful and good. Great. So, we're going to imbue our created objects with motion. In the example in the intro, there were a lot of objects moving in a lot of ways all over the place, there were a lot of tiny thin rectangles but since you're just starting out to learn the fundamentals, we're only going to be animating a few of them and it's not going to get that crazy. So, we're going to go ahead and put all of these back on and we're going to try to animate them. So, won't that be a gas? So, we've annotated the first one and we'd like all of the other ones to animate in a similar way. So, I'm going to clear the position data from that list, remove all of that. We want to set a position for each of these. So, I've called up all of their position data and I'm setting keyframes for each of them here at our desired end state. So, with keyframes, we often work backwards. We've designed something we like and now we would like to animate it to that desired state, so we work backwards. So, we've sent keyframes here where things should end up. Now, we select all of our layers because we are going to be working with their position and we're going to hold down shift and drag them all away. So, they all get dragged away to here like this. So, if they all come on at the same time, then it looks something like that. All right, that's okay. They all have the exact same motion though, and that is a little bit boring. Let's go back to the beginning here and you can see that they're all offset. What I'm going to do is I'm going to drag them all to be next to each other, by doing that holding down a command or control and snapping them to each other. So that they're all expanding away from being at the same position. So, they're all just going to push out, so that they're all moving in an uneven pace, I think that is working quite well. Now, the next thing I wanna do is select all of these keyframes and then I want to easy ease them. Now, like we said, you can go animation, keyframe assistant, easy ease, or if you prefer, you can hit F9. So, F9 will easy ease them. You can see the shape of that keyframe changes, it's not a diamond anymore, it is a pinched hourglass. So, now we can select all of these. Okay, we are going to have a look at them. So, when we look at their handles and the like, go into their speed graph, you can see they all look slightly different. So, now I'm going to pull all their handles to go like that, so that with big curve here, that's where they're going the fastest, like that, perfect. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to offset all of these things in time. So, when we look at their position graph, we can see that they are fastest at one, two, three, four, five, eight seconds in. So, at eight seconds that's when things are really going to pick up. So, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to offset them all by eight seconds. So, we're at seven or something close to it. So, I'm going to grab these layers and I'm just going to click and drag them. So, you see it makes these steps like this, and the result is that these things come on in a staggered fashion. Now, what we might like to do is instead of having an even space between each of them, we could have say one, two, three four, five frames and then this one starts and then one, two, three, four frames, and then this one starts and then one, two, three frames, and then this one starts. So, they have an exponential increase in them as well. So, like that. So, that is a slightly more interesting way for these things to all come on. So, perfectly good. So far so good, everybody's happy, everybody's with it. So, that seems pretty great. In our original design, we have these as kind of like a tab at the end. So, I think we'll keep that, that looks perfectly fine and we're just smoothly animating them on this is what we call primary motion. That we're defining at this stage what is the primary thing that these things are doing. So, they're all moving in, this is what they're all doing. Now, even though they're all moving in in this way, I would like them to be a little bit more together in their movement. 6. Lesson 2 - Part 2: Moving in, this is what they're all doing. Now, even though they're all moving in this way, I would like them to be a little bit more together in their movement. So, I'm going to create a new null objects. Null objects don't do anything. You can see there's nothing around them. It's not like it takes up a lot of space or even very interesting, but what it does do is, it allows you to parent things to it, and have null object affect them. So, that's kind of what we're going to do with what we have here. We're going to take all of these layers and we're going to parent them to that null object, okay? Then we're going to take that null object and call up its position, all right. So, if I start moving the null object around, I'm moving around everything that is stuck to that null object. So far so good, pretty simple. Okay. Again, we have the desired end state which is around here like this. It's desired start state, however, I would like it to be drag a little bit behind, and this is just so that everything is always constantly moving with each other as they come in. Moving independently is good, but I want them all to be just having that little bit of a tie in into each other's movement. Again, it's important to harmonize, I'm going to say this a lot, it's important to harmonize your motion. So, going over to easy-ease these things, such that they have an arc that they go fast and then slow, kind of like that. So, they are slowing down into this ending. So, the difference in the emotion is that they're all going to be pushing ahead just that slight little bit more. Now, we can take this key frame and maybe move it out a little bit, so that it's still moving even after everything has come to arrest and it kind of slides in there. Now you can imbue this motion into these layers if you want with more keyframes. But, it's far easier to set up parent child relationships when you know that you're only going to be moving them in the same way, if many things are going to be linked to one thing, or going to be pushing the same time, you might as well use a null object. So, that's a new kind of layer. Maybe you've never heard of it, but even if you have, that's cool. We're also going to be parenting our text to that null object. All right. Now, our text at this point we haven't done much with. But, I guarantee you in the next lesson, which is called editing and animating text, we are absolutely going to talk about editing and animating that texts. For right now, we just need to talk about using keyframes and smoothing motion. So, you now understand little about smoothing and sequencing motion. I'm sure you can extrapolate from this how you create what we did in the intro. I'll show you a little bit right now. We would take one of these layers, all right. Now, what we're going to do is isolate it by hitting this solo button here, so we're looking at only that layer. Good, perfect. Now, we would like it to be broken up into many smaller rectangles. So if you remember, we talked about how there is a rectangle path that basically defines by its position and size, how much space is taken up within this thing. Now, we can also keyframe its size and its position and all sorts of things about this inside the rectangle path. So, what we could do is, that we are going to create more rectangles to define this space. Right now it is 200 wide. So, what I'm going to do is, I'm going to duplicate this path, making path; one, two, three, and four. I'm just going to expand all of those right now. I'm going to drag this window up, and I'm going to hold down spacebar and use a hand tool to manipulate our window here, so we can see what we're doing a bit better. We have one rectangle path, that's at 200. But instead, I'm at four that are all at 50. So, I'm just going to make each of them 50, 50, 50, 50. So, it's all become quite a bit thinner. Now, I would also like to offset them a bit. So, one of them will have to of course move up something like minus 75 for example, and then one of them will have to move up minus 25, and then the other one will have to move down 25, then the other one will have to move down 75. So, we're still taking up the exact same amount of area. But we are building it out of many parts. Okay, good. So far so good. So, I going to put the play head here at the place where the position keyframe comes to rest, and we going to set a keyframe for the position of each of these. So, these all now have position keyframes associated with them. Okay, good. Now, we move back here to the beginning. We're going to have to set some position keyframes for these so that they start further back. Because really, as this comes on, it's coming on right there. If we want these to be staggered, that's not what we're into. So, we're just going to edit the position of all of them to be saying minus 500 each, right? So, we take that minus 500, and we're going to apply it to all of them. So, that means right now, since they're all with the same timing, they're all coming on at roughly the same time. What I want to do is to offset their end state so that each of these keyframes is offset from each other. I'm going to select the layer, I'm going to hit U. U will bring up all of the keyframe data only the that we have keyframed. Now, I'm going to offset each of the these by one, so they look like that, as they come in. So, that looks pretty good. If you want the bottom to be starting first. If you want to go the other way, then you're more than welcome to do this. So, they come in staggered like this top first and then bottom like so. Now, what I would also like to do is stagger their start, so the first one I'm going to stagger by one, the second one by two, and the last one by one, two, three. So you see, that looks quite a bit different. Now, I'm going to select all those keyframes, I'm going to easy-easy them like this, and I'm going to go into the graph editor, grab the graph, and pull their handles like so to create this kind of a look to them. So, let's have a look at how that looks different. Quite a bit different I would say, how it looks good. Now, I unsolo this. We can have a look, at that sliding across like so. Very excellent, very excellent indeed, good. Now, let's say we've created something we're interested in. We've created motion, and we would like that motion to be in all of the other layers. So, we know each one is a copy of the others. So, I'm going to select the contents here. In here, I'm really only interested in this rectangle paths. So, I'm going to select those rectangle paths. I'm going to copy them. I'm going to go in here to this thing, it's contents. The group called rectangle one, so we play head here at the beginning, and I'm going to paste them in there, okay? Seemed pretty harmless. So, I've now pasted a bunch of these rectangle paths in rectangle one. I'm going to drag them up to make sure they're all in the right spot, and delete that original rectangle. So, what that does is, you can see we have now placed all of these keyframes exactly as they were within that group, and they retain all of the information of that original piece. Then, we can repeat that process here in the contents, in rectangle one, paste, move them to where they ought to be, and delete that original. Good. Now you can see I pasted them while the play head was here. So, when I hit U, what that means, is that, that is where the first keyframe starts. So, that is a little bit about mistakes you can run into when pasting keyframes. So, that means you just have to select them and drag them back to where they ought to be. Good. Now, let's repeat that on here without that horrible mistake. We are going to put the play head at the beginning. We are going to paste, we are going to move them up, and we're going to remove that original, good. So, now watching back what you've created, you can see that they're all staggered, and they're all duplicating the same kind of motion. Very good. Very good. So hopefully, this has taught you a little bit about better understanding keyframes, what keyframes are, and how they interact with things. The position keyframe is probably the easiest to conceptualize, because you can see it. But it's important to remember, keyframes apply to everything. You can keyframe abstract values, you can keyframe opacity values, which is how see-through a layer is, you can keyframes scale, anything that has a property, you can keyframe it. In fact, in our next lesson, editing and innovating text, we'll be applying these keyframes to far more abstract ideas. It's really only important that you know how keyframes operate, and what we're talking about when we say things like interpolation, set a keyframe, and tweening. So, thank you so much for watching. If you've understood everything in this lesson, it's time to move on to the third lesson, which is editing and animating the text. If you missed some of these concepts or some of the concepts that were covered in video one, I would encourage you to rewatch them before you move on to the third step. Because it will be making use of everything we've talked about up until this point. But, if this is all good, I've been Evan Abram for SkillShare teaching you an intro to After Effects and I will see you in lesson number three. Thanks again, and have a nice day. 7. Lesson 3 - Part 1: This is Evan Abrams for Skillshare teaching you an Intro to After Effects. This is part three of five, where we've already learned all of the windows and tools and interfaces. We've learned about creating and importing assets like the ones you see here, and we've added what we call primary animation to a piece. Now, it's time for us to animate the text. Text animation gets its own segment because it's such a deep and rich and important part of after effects. One of the principal functions of after effects, is adding things like titles and labels, and in this case, lower thirds. You can't have lower thirds without the important naming information. Here we have two layers. The first, we're going to call this something like a title. This is the title or main title of the person or place or whatever you're looking at. The second, we're going to name sub-title. In the previous tutorial, we've linked this to a null object and that null object is moving, so there is some slight movement in them already. But animating text is a special and unique thing. In that, just like we've looked into these layers and we saw it has contents and transform, when you look into a text layer, it has text and transform. Getting deeper into the text part, you can see that there are many options already. There is the source text, which is essentially the words that are currently displayed. Editing the source text is as simple as using the character palette and the paragraph palette. Now, just to touch on these before we delve any further, editing text uses character and paragraph in order to alter things about this text. So, simply typing things in is pretty good, so you can type in whatever you would like. Going into the character palette, these are things you've seen in any character palette. You have the font, we're using Source Sans Pro, a delightful font. It is the weight black, so everything from extra light to black italic and we've chosen black. So, font and weight. You can choose its fill color, so any color under the sun that you so desire. You can set it to black or set it to white, you can use an eyedropper to pull color from the scene, you can simply double-click here and pick a color. You can even apply a stroke color to it if you would like. So, in this way, this is much closer to the character palette you will find in Illustrator for example, and then you have all of your text options which should be familiar to you if you've used this kind of program before, if you haven't I'll explain them. This is your font size, so just the raw what size is it, you have the kerning which is metric, optical, or all of the other fun-time kerning options. You have the tracking, so you can adjust the tracking between things if you would like, you can adjust the line spacing. If we had some lines you can see what that means, but we just have the one line. Then, we also have things like the stroke width, if you have a stroke applied, you can enjoy that, if you have no stroke applied then, it's not really going to do much for you. Then you have the stroke options, you have the vertical 100 percent, horizontal 100 percent, you have the superscript baseline shift, and then you have this delightful Tsume for characters if you would like to do that too. Then you have things like bold, italic, all caps, small caps, superscript, subscript, anything you would like. This is the character palette, it's everything that affects things with the character. Now, here in the paragraph, we have things like align the text. So, when it's left-align, notice where the anchor point is. Right now, it's hard to see, but it's right down in this corner and it is left-align text. When I move it to center align text, the text moves around that anchor point, and then right align text means it aligns itself there. You can create a block text, you can create text inside things, so that's when a lot of these come into play, you can of course edit the paragraph settings all in here. These are shifting things away from and towards that anchor point. For our purposes, we're good with how this is. I won't edit too much of it because I've already created the things I wanted. But for you, when you use the text tool, keep in mind that this character palette here and this paragraph palette are defining all of these points about that text. So, I'm going to take the time right now to type in Evan Abrams, that's my name and that's who we're looking at on screen, so that makes sense. What I would like to do, is to start at animating on at point where it's going to make sense. Right here, we currently have some nice light background, so I think it's a good time for this to animate on. I'm going to hit the square bracket to set the start of the layer at the play head. That's what the left square bracket does. So, that sets it there. Now, what I'm going to do, is I'm going to say animate. I would like to animate about this thing, I'd like to animate its scale. Now, we've talked about animating already. In primary animation, we use key frames to move these things along. If we animated their scale, we could animate their scale from 0 to 100 using key frames. This is working with a similar thing, except the key frames are not applied to the individual things. The key frames are going to be applied to this thing called a range selector. What the range selector basically does, is that it says, I like to define a range in which something is either happening or not happening. The range selector is essentially saying from the start, zero that's right here, to the end apply this, and where it is applying is a scale of 100 percent to it. If I set this to zero, everything between that range from 0 to 100 has now been set to zero percent scale. If I start altering that, you can see that as the range shrinks, everything grows to be visible. So, that's what I'm going to do. I'm going to set a key frame here, and then I'm going to set another key frame when everything has come to a rest which I know to be this key frame out here, extend my work area a little. At this point, I would like everything to be nicely animated on, just like this. So as it expands, it is adding more and more texts till it finishes, perfectly good. Everything is scaling up as it's going. In fact, I might even want that to be happening a lot sooner, because there is ample time for it to be done. I will put it like so, right here. So, it is done when that bar is also done. These bars' animation is complete, these texts' animation is complete, I think that's a perfectly reasonable thing to have happened. It starts as nothing and then it starts to also come on, and that's the scale. We can then add to this something like a property, we can add the property of rotation. If we add a property of rotation, and we set it to be 90 degrees, then everything is scaling up and it is also rotating up, so that's perfectly good. It's rotating around this dot here which is the anchor point for each of the letters. When we look into something like more options, we can see the alignment of those things. Now, if I move it, to say, be here at, I don't know, say, minus 100 percent comma zero, well, that just means that I'm moving it to the furthest bounds on one side 100 percent removed from the center, and that's perfectly good. So, we can see how that is animating up like so. Now, we can even get more advanced on how it animates up, just like when we set key frames, we determined the start key frame and end key frame, and then we also determined how it gets there. Well, we can do that here in a more advanced way, we can use that easing by easing low a 100 percent, meaning we're going to be easing the way that it slides into these things, so they kind of pop on like this. So, instead of applying this motion to these key frames which would be the range selector, so the start and end of its animation, we're applying that easing to each individual letter as it comes on. The difference, is that it's coming on at a constant rate but each letter is still in keeping with that type of motion that we created earlier. So, this has taken care of the first thing as well as I would like it to be. Now, I would like to animate on the subtitle. Now, we used what was called a range selector for that first thing, but for the second one, I don't think I'm feeling the range selector. We're going to use a second aspect of text range selecting that is called random. We're going to go animate, I'm going to say, opacity on this one, which is just, whether you can see letters or not. This is just to give you a sense of the variety of things you can do, and I'm going to set it down to zero, all right, good. Now, we're going to use that range selector again, starting at a range of zero and ending at 100, exactly the same as we did before. You would think that this is perfectly fine. Now, we're going to go into the advanced here, and here it says, randomized order just click that on. So, now you can see it says randomly populating all that stuff along. Now, it's not really in keeping with the motion of the rest of the piece and it's certainly a little bit different and kooky and weird, but really, it's nice to put in some variety sometimes. Just keep that in mind as you're making things, that sometimes variety is worthwhile. Now, you would want to type something in here perhaps. 8. Lesson 3 - Part 2: Things that sometimes variety is worthwhile. Now, you would want to type something in here perhaps and we've already animated this. So, if you already animated it, can you go back and edit it again? Well, absolutely you can. So, if I go in here and I edit this, I can edit it to say something like After Effects Experts. That has more characters and takes up more space than the first thing. Which brings me to the second point that I want to talk about or I suppose the final thing that we need to speak about when talking about animating text and that is that, especially on a lower third, you're going to come back and you might have to change things. For the next interview we might not be talking to Evan Abrams, we might be talking to a guy incognito. A guy who knows nothing about After Effects and whatever. So, we would need to be able to change and edit these things. All of those changes take place in what's called the source text, but because we are using a start and end that is based on the percentage of these things, we can change these to be anything we want after effect. We can come in and have this be a Xavier Vesuvious. As long as it's not breaking the bounds of our design, then it's going to animate on in exactly the same way. Nothing has changed except what is being animated. Now, I mention this for a couple of reasons. The first reason that I bring it up is because there is an option for you to animate this based off of the character. So, here in the animator range selector it can be based on the character, characters excluding spaces, words or lines. The units can be percentage or index. If you're using the index value, and this is very common for people to use when they're using words because they want one word and then the other, not 50 percent and then 100 percent. If you're doing it that way, by the index, then instead of a percentage you see it's changed the numbers. Then if I start typing in different numbers of characters the different numbers or letters, then it's going to affect it such that if I only have like BC Ontario as my words, it's still going to go from 0 to 20. But it's going to reach the total number of characters way before I had intended. So, if you want things to be easily editable for the future, leave it alone as percent and make everything based on something that is going to stretch. So, percentage always stretches. That always works. Always think about, how far can I push this design? How flexible will it be to accommodate more or less stuff, and then, how easy is it to edit? The next thing I want to do with this title is to show you a little bit about adding some flair and a little bit about making it even more editable using expressions. So, if you've already grasped the first half of this tutorial, well, now we're going to move into phase two. So, this title I'm going to duplicate it. Boom. It's already created Title 2. Well, I'm now going to make Title 3 and Title 4. We have four bands here. I'm going to make four of these. I want Title 4, Title 3 and Title 2 to be under Title 1 just for naming conventions. So, Title 1, Title 2, Title 3, Title 4, just like that. Now, let me just solo these like this, and I'm going to put it on the transparency grid so I can see what I'm doing. Let's look at them one at a time. The one on the bottom I want to be a different color. The color I'd like it to be is going to be the color of this thing. So, I'm going to take my eyedropper here on the text and just make that happen. Cool, that happened. The next one I would like to be the color of this. So again, I select that text layer. I grab the eyedropper and I click in here. That is now done. Then, we repeat the process with this one and this next layer and select, and we are good. So we have all of our titles which now have different colors, and they all animate on in much the same way. What I would like to do is to offset them. So that the bottom one is coming in and finishing first and then the top one is finishing last. So, I can do that by just dragging these key frames out, like so. What that creates is one letter and then the rest come in to fill in that space. All right. So, it looks something like that. It looks like that. It's a little bit unique, it's a little bit different. It has created something that is now much more difficult to edit. If I wanted to change my name, I would have to then go in here. I'll have to edit each of them, have to write in Evan Abrams in this one, then don't click at this one then write Evan Abrams on that one. So, that is all really annoying. I don't like that. That would make me upset. So, what I'm going to do is I'm first going to change the color of this from red to yellow, and that will help me identify later that this is a primary layer and I want to know things about this layer. The other thing I'm going to do is I'm going to go into all of these title layers, hold down Alt, click on the Source Text, which will add an expression for it. Then I would also like to look at the source text of this and I would like to have this source text reference this source text. So let me just pull this up so you can see everything that we're looking at. Essentially, I'm just going to take this pick whip, just what this is called, I'm going to draw a line from here to here and that will create a simple expression that essentially says, your source text is now referencing this comp, so the composition lower third which we are in and the layer named Title. So, as long as this layer is always named Title, that's what it's going to be. You're looking at its text and you're looking at its text.sourceText. So, looking inside Text and then inside its Source Text. So, what does this mean? Well, it means, if I edit this one and I type in something like boogers, then the other layer will change to also say boogers. Now I can take that expression I can copy it. I can go down to these other layers here and then I can add it into the source text of those just like pasting it in. Just like that. To the last one, Source Text and paste. Good. So, now everything says Boogers. Pretty good, right? Booger. Now, if I want to change this to be something else, change it back to my name Evan not Booger. Just like that. So, it goes pretty easily. Now, everything has been updated to say Evan not Booger because that's not my name, my name is not Booger. This is how you can make lower thirds and keep your text nice and editable. This is a bit of an advanced move but it can help people out when they're just starting out to understand that text can reference other text in this way and it can save you a lot of time later. So, you don't have to go back through and manually change so many thing. Hopefully, it encourages you to use many instances of the same text. But, that pretty much concludes everything I have to say about animating text. I'd like you to explore this idea and really get into all of the different properties that you can key frame and change. You can animate this skew, the scale, the opacity, the rotation, the anchor point, you can change the fill color, the stroke color, the stroke width. You can change tracking line spacing, line anchors, all sorts of things in here. So, I want you to know that the sky is the limit, and when you create your project to really get creative with animating the text on. So, not only in animating solids in unique ways but think about animating the text in unique ways. This is one of those things where I can show you the door but you have to walk through it. So, hopefully you can sort of extrapolate from this how and in what ways you would like to make your text animate on in special ways. I've shown you two. The rest is kind of up to you. So, this has been Evan Abrams for Skillshare talking you through how to animate text in lower thirds and giving you a good grasp of how that text tool really works. If you understood everything in this segment, then it's time to move on to segment number four, which is going to be adding embellishments and to making all of these elements really come together a lot stronger. We'll be playing around with some effects. We'll be doing a few more expressions. So, if you understand the basics of what we talked about in this tutorial, let's move on and I'll see you on the other side. If you didn't understand anything in this tutorial, I'd encourage you to watch it again before moving on. If there were some concepts you found challenging, I'd recommend that you go back and watch the second tutorial mostly about primary motion and key frames, and even further back to understanding just about the tools and the windows and the layer and everything. But like I said, if you're all good, then this has been Evan Abrams for Skillshare. This has been part three of your intro to after effects and let's move on to part number four and add embellishments. So, thank you very much for watching and I'll see you in the next lesson. 9. Lesson 4 - Part 1: Hello everyone, and welcome to part four of the intro After Effects on Skillshare. I'm Evan Abrams and if you've been following us so far, we've learned that the interface, we've created some elements, we've animated those elements with keyframes, and now we've animated some text and linked text together with expressions. Sounds like a lot of stuff but we've only been doing it for a couple hours. So, that's a pretty good use of your day I think. So, now, we're going to move on to what's known as secondary or embellished motion. The general order of operations is layout, primary motion and secondary motion. This idea of primary and secondary motion helps you not only save time, but it helps you define in broad strokes what you want the animation to be, and then you're able to refine that animation with other things. So, presently, I'll just run us through what we have now, by extending the work area a little bit to five seconds, and hit the zero button to render it for us then we can observe how that looks. So, it comes on, it says, "Evan not Booger, After Effects expert." I guess that's me, and that is the lower third. So, essentially, what I would like you to do now is to consider what you would like to add to your piece. Do you feel there's anything that's missing? Is there something more it could have? Is there a better way to blend the elements together, or make elements pop out or sink in or just do any of those things I mention. A lot of the ways we do this is with Effects, we're going to do is going to type in drop shadow, which is going to pull up this, it is the Drop Shadow effect. You can apply effects by dragging them onto the comp, you can drag it onto the timeline, or usually you can just select something double click on it, and then it applies the effect to it. So, you can see what this has done, is it has applied a small shadow here to the outside of this shape which is pretty great, except for this, there's our problem over here. But the Drop Shadow just applies a shadow looking at the alpha bounds of what you've got, and then applies a shadow coming down off of it like there's an imaginary light source. This is a two-dimensional shadow, in that it has almost no basis in reality. So, that's something to remember. I misread the opacity down to 25 minutes at this distance to zero and then I'm going to set up the softness to something like 25. Now, what that means is that it's really just creating a soft border that goes around this thing. So, it's really just hoping to set it from the shape below it. Why I'm doing that is because I want to copy it and then we're going to sort these other layers and paste it, which will be making sure each of them is casting a bit of a shadow on the others. So, why is this good. Well essentially it means that we're going to now have a bunch of shadows that are creating just a bit more depth out of this thing, just making it that much more deep and interesting. So, that seems to be working out for me, I'm good with it and also increases the layering here. It's all very thick so there's a lot more shadow here than there is over here and there are a lot more logical elements stacked here than there's here. So, it's creating that depth and offsetting. When we talk about using embellishments to blend this is what we mean that instead of having a stark contrast, here is a pixel, here's another pixel, we're using gradients and drop shadows to blend from one thing into the other. So, that is a very excellent way to do that. Now, with these we would also like to apply drop shadows to those, just for consistency sake but those drop shadows I'd like to animate them. Now, you can animate all sorts of properties with drop shadows. Like we first call up their keyframes so I can see, yes, this is where it's animating up. Okay perfect. So, when I start to set things like the opacity, the distance, and the softness, then I hit U once to call upon those. I can then go back and I can set animation for all of them. So, we've got to like the opacity set to zero, the distance is set to zero, and the softness is set at zero. Then I would like it to end at 25 opacity, a distance of five is good, and a softness of 25 would be good. In fact, the opacity can be lowered down like a 10 to get him, we only care for it that much. However you do is just fine with you. So, here we go, So, this "Evan not Booger is standing out a bit more. Cool. That seems to be working out. In fact, if I would like to apply this effect to all of the other text layer involved. What I would to do then is take this. I'm going to first drop it's ending opacity down to something, yeah, definitely 10. Because if we're going to be copying it and then layering it on the rest of these, making sure the play head is set at the beginning then pasting, what's going to happen is we're going to get a lot of shadow put over each other. So, that's not necessarily a good thing because it creates a lot of shadows. But in this case, because you're setting down each individual shadow, it's going to make it that much better. So, we've got that coming on. Let's apply the same thing to the subtitle as well. So, as it comes on, it is being offset from the background too. However, it's ending shadow opacity, we're going to need to jack that up to 25 percent. So, there we go. So, that's just a little thing that makes this all stand very nicely I believe. But that is just one thing that we're going to do. In fact, the main thing we're going to be doing is to be creating small elements that we can use to push over this thing. Let's duplicate this white rectangle, bring it up to the top and solo it. We want to turn this element that we already created into something far more interesting. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to open it up here. I'm going to take a look at what we have changed about it already. We have the size of it, that seems more or less consistent. Let's shrink the size of it. Let's shrink it down to be 250, let's do that. Just like that. So, it is a very tiny thing. Just like that. Now, let us not parent it to that null, let's parent it to nothing. So, we take that away. Okay, cool. Now let's find its position, there is that. Position is starting all the way there, so let's just drag it in, so this position starts closer to the edge here and it could start right on the edge for all I care, it could live on the edge. Then we would like it to end off the frame here. So, it's life is to shoot across like this, separating and then coming together. So, it starts together, it moves, separates and then comes back together. Now, well it's there in the middle though, we'd like it to do something. So, I'm going to take the solo off, have a look at it. Now observing this,it doesn't really like much special. But we're ready to change it's type of layer from being a regular old layer to being an adjustment layer. So, I click this button here. It makes it an adjustment layer, which means anything that's applied to it, it is going to apply to things below it. So, I'll show you what I mean. I want to apply a tint to this. So, I apply that tint effect to that adjustment layer. Anything under that adjustment layer is now being tinted. See what I mean? Very interesting. Now, what I'm going to do is because I want this to be slightly larger than anything else, I'm going to scale it. So, I'm going to grab the scale here and I'm just going to make it bigger so that it takes up more space than usual. So, i'll set it to 110 like this. Okay, good. So, as everything's coming in, it washes over everything. Cool. That's pretty nice. I'm comfortable with that. Now, what else what I need to do? So, it is tinting, let's also apply a Curves. All right. So, we apply those curves and now we're going to push the curves up like this to make things brighter, we make everything brighter. I want to do a little bit like this make it more contrasting. So, it's making everything brighter, more contrasting. Now, I'm going to apply a transform distortion to it. What this effect does is essentially it makes things transformed but we use it in this way so that we can do something like increasing the scale of what's behind, which will create a nice looking glitch effect as it washes over everything, like it might be made of glass and it's altering what's happening. Now, what I also like to do is to make it go much faster. Seems to me it really take its time moving across. I think it would be better served to be on its way out if there as possible would be great. So, i'm going to do that and then I'm just going to set the second keyframe there to really be free and clear about what we're working on here. So, it really jets across. Okay. Now, since we've made an embellishment like this, we can then even duplicate this. Then just offset it a little bit in time and then maybe change it's scale up to make it a little bit bigger, perhaps something like that. So now, the one is kind of chasing the other and then offset it in time a bit like this. We can change this keyframes to be faster, slower. However, we would like this creating these weird wavy things happening. Now let's duplicate another one and have its way sooner, so it is a precursor to everything. Embellishments are meant to be just that. They are meant to foreshadow movement that is about to happen or to end movement, add a cap on to them, that kind of thing. So, by having these come through, we are able to do things like distract from the blandness of the text animation for example. Maybe it'll smooth that over a little bit and people won't notice as much that it's just not terribly exciting. It could be something worth doing. However, it goes that's up to you. But remember, any element you've created, you can make into an adjustment layer just by clicking this button here. Adjustment layers can be made on their own. You can just go, new adjustement. 10. Lesson 4 - Part 2: That's up to you. But remember, any element you've created, you can make into an adjustment layer, just by clicking this button here. Adjustment layers can be made on their own. You can just go, new adjustment layer, and create one of those. For example, I'm going to create a new adjustment layer, and then I'm going to put it above the footage, and then I'm going to apply a curves, and then a tint, and then I want to duplicate that tint like so and put the curves in between it, and the way to use this to color-correct my footage. So, I'm going to set this first tint to 10 percent, and the last tint to 10 percent, and then I'm going to increase the contrast of my footage like this, and then I'm going to go into the red values, and I'm going to skew them like this. Let me go to blue values, and I would just skew them like this, to create slightly altered footage. Now, when I turn that I'm both on and off, you can see how much that's changed my footage. If I put the adjustment layer above everything, you can see that adjustment layer is affecting everything below it. If the adjustment layer is below things, it's not affecting them. So, that is the rule of adjustment layers. That's about it for adjustment layers. Just remember, the adjustment layer is for altering everything below that adjustment layer. So, when we do things like color-correcting here, and After Effects, this is the way to do it. Now, when you want to add small secondary motion, it's best to derive it from already established types of motion that are happening. So, we're using a lot of position movement. It's all going from one side to the other side. If we wanted to add more types of movement, we might have it go back, and forth but I'm not sure why you would ever do something up and down, because we're already moving things in one direction. So, that is how that goes. Now, the only thing remaining, is to finish this off as a lower third to make it go away, is essentially what we're doing. Now, I've already done something to set it up to save you a lot of time on that. We're advanced to 10 seconds, we're going to go that no object we're talking about, trying to hit you during this position and I say keyframe, now I moved ahead a few frames, and perhaps six of them, and then I'm going to take that whole object, and about move it over here like this. So, what we've done, is we're just simply sliding that off of the frame and it is simply going away. So, we look at this graph, it's a little bit messed up, but we're going to change its key frames like this, push it a little bit like that. At the same time, what we're going to do is get into the graph editor. We're going to look at all those wonderful things, check out their position of those rectangles we set keyframes for all of those, and just as they arrive together, we would like to copy and paste their starting keyframes so that they all end up next and together in the end. As you can see, they are so far away, so let's just move them in to be ending around there. Okay. Then we observe how that looks as they slide together on their way out. Okay, that's good. We check the graph editor to see what exactly that looks like and select all those, sure they're all easies when we drive them all have similar types of motion. There, we have it. So, everything is coming on together, everything is leaving together. That is essentially the end of animating this lower third. What I'm going to do now, is I'm going to set the work area here at the end, and now I'm going to hit the zero button in order to RAM preview this, so that we can observe our work. Observe as the green bar goes across showing you these are all parts that it has rendered, so green areas are rendered, and areas with nothing are not rendered, blue areas are cached, and partially readily to be rendered, they'll just be rendered a lot faster. Once it's completed, it's going it play it back for you, as close to regular time as it can. This is how you essentially check your work, and it is the best way to do so. It also relies heavily on your RAM resources, so if you haven't already checked the specs of your computer, make sure you have a lot of RAM in order to take care of these types of things. But that is essentially how you do things. I also talk about at this point, other types of embellishments you might like to add. This is a time where you can have things like, slight wiggles, perhaps to things. You could add jitteriness to them. So, we have all of these copies of the text layer to play with. For example, let's use expressions to make this just a little bit more interesting. Let's go to some of those, and let's add first a slider control to them. You're probably wondering why I'm doing this, but that will become apparent later. Now slider control is unlike the other effects we've currently looked at in that it has no visual impact on anything. The drop shadow, obviously applies a drop shadow, but the slider control simply creates a linear value, and it's a linear value that you can keyframe. So, now we're going to do, is we're going to call it the position of this thing, you can hold out Alt, click on a position, and you type in an expression. That expression is going to be wiggle, and then a set rounded brackets. So, W-I-G-G-L-E bracket, and then two, comma and then take a pic width, and move it up to the slider, and everything with a bracket. Okay? Then I hit return to have a look at that. So, what I've written is wiggle(2, effect slider control). What I'm saying is, two times a second, I would like for you to move about as much as the slider control. What that means is, if I set the slider control to 10, then that two times a second is going to be moving around that much. It seems very simple to me. So, pretty normal thing for something to be doing that means it's going to be shaking around quite a bit. So, what I'm going to do, is we are going to set a keyframe for that slider to be at zero here at the beginning. Now, we're going to move ahead to when everything is sort of settled down and then we are going to put this up to something like five. So, that it starts to move around, it goes from stable to starting to become unstable. In fact, you could say by the end of this thing, we have that slider all the way up to like 10, such that it's becoming incredibly unstable. I'm going to take that slider, and copy it, and I'm going to paste it at the start of all these other text layers. So, it's going to paste it in there. Okay. Now, I'm going to call up their positions and look at the position of this first one here, with the expression on it. Copy that expression and I'm going into these and I'm going to apply the same expression to them. So, remember we use keyframes to create emotion, and now we are using a slider to create motion. What does that motion look like exactly? Well, you can see that it's creating all of these layers poking out and moving around behind that layer. Okay. That's very interesting, I suppose. But it doesn't look that great. So, I'm going to take those layers, and I'm going to toggle the switches and modes. I'm going to change their mode to something like it add, take it to something like an overlay, or maybe I'll move it to something more like a softlight, alinear light. Something that is going to make all of these layers interplay with each other. So, multiply seems to look good, which is operating on dark values, which is good, because these are dark values over light. So, now when we observe what we're looking at, we can see that not only does animating on look quite a bit little bit different, that as it continues to stay on there, things are becoming progressively more interesting. Has to break apart, and just have sort of like a stereoscopic look. So, that seems to be working quite well for me, as just a little thing that we can look at and keeps you a little interested. It doesn't take too long to read people's names, so don't be afraid to play around with things like that. So, my name of course is in bold, so you have a lot more to work with than you do with the subtitle. But, I want you to use things like the wiggle to view a lot of motion without having to do a lot of work. Expressions are here to save you time in that way, and the blending modes are meant to add visual interest and to apply different layers to each other and unique and colourful ways, more so than just the normal pixel and pixel that you would get. So, this has been Evan Abram's, taking you through adding embellishments and blending things and looking more into the effects side of things. This pretty much completes how to make things in After Effects but our next lesson is going to be about exporting things from After Effects. Now, if you've made something good, you need to share it, or I should hope you want to share it, and are proud of it. If you want to turn in anything for the course project, then you'll just need to learn the next lesson, so that you're able to do that. So, if everything seems good for you so far, step ahead into part five, exporting from After Effects. If anything in this lesson has been confusing for you, I encourage you re-watch it, take it slow, I'm deliberately talking very slow, but hopefully it's working out for you. And if at any point you feel like you've derailed, I want you to just go back and watch those earlier tutorials that are going to talk about the tools, and the windows, and the layout of everything, so you know what we're talking about, and especially the key framing part, because that is probably where most people kind of get confused, and we've been using keyframes this whole time, so I really don't want to lose anyone in the shuffle there. Anyway, if you've been with us so far, then I thank you very much for watching and I will see you in part four. If not, enjoy other tutorials and you'll get there eventually. But this has been Evan Abram's for Skillshare and thank you so much for watching and I will see you in the next lesson. 11. Lesson 5 - Part 1: Hello and welcome to Part 5 of the Intro to After Effects course as taught by me, Evan Abrams, on SkillShare. If you've seen the first four parts of this already, then you have a mostly completed project in front of you, and the only step left to do is to export it. Exporting things from After Effects requires a process known as rendering. It's going to take everything you've made and basically bake it down into one video file. You can think of it like you're putting much of ingredients into the oven, and it's going to come out as a cake. Once you've made that cake, you can't get the ingredients back from it. I mean, you can always put the ingredients back together which would be the same as re-rendering it, but once you have a baked cake, you can't take flour back out of it. So, that's the process that we're doing with our ingredients here. Now, in order to do that, you would usually go "Composition" and then "Add to Render Queue." Now, what you're adding to the render queue is either a copy you've selected over here in the project or whatever timeline you happened to have activated, as this yellow line, that means you've activated that, or whatever Comp you have activated here. So, if you have nothing activated, you can't add anything to the Render Queue. So, if you'd like to add this to the render queue, we are perfectly able to do so. You just go here or use the appropriate keyboard shortcut, but you can also add it to the Adobe Media Encoder. I'm going to cover the Render Queue first, and then we'll look at the other options for exporting from this program. Certainly, the Render Queue's the most popular, but it is not the be-all and end-all for everyone's workflow. So, when we add something to the Render Queue, you can see that it opens up the Render Queue for us which you can open by just opening it in the window, and then you're presented with four little options here that make absolutely no sense to anyone who's never seen them before. Now this here, the "Output To", is what it's going to call what you're putting out. So, that's, you know, where's the file going, what's the file called. The Log here is just what it's going to produce as a log. So, if it produces any errors during encoding, it'll let you know in the ".txt" file. But, the things we're really interested in are the settings, Render Settings, and the output module. You can think of this program as running through them this way that it goes. This Best Settings, and then Lossless, and then the Log, and the Output. So, this should really be stacked vertically. But, the reason why they're not is because you can take the output module, and you can duplicate it a bunch of times, so you can perform one render option and produce many different types of outputs. So, let's go through what the settings are and what any of this means to you. Here, in Best Settings, if you click on this name, here you'll be able to change things about it. You get this wonderful window that's going to give you a lot of options. The quality is essentially how nice it looks, what is the optimum starting depths that we're working with. Usually when I have that on Best, unless this is just a draft, in which case, it'll look horrendous, and if it's just a wireframe, you'll not be able to tell anything that you're looking at. So, Best is usually best. Full resolution basically means that it's going to use the entire Comp size. In this case, 1920 by 1080, and the column size was determined at the beginning when we started this whole mess, and we said "Create New Comp". Do you remember that from Part 1? Well, that's where this size comes into play again. You can export full, half, third, quarter or some custom value. If this is for final export is the last thing you doing with it in After Effects, then do it on full. But, half, third, and quarter here, in case you're sending this to a producer or a client or someone who needs to look at your work and then give you some feedback and you don't want to be sending giant files around, so send one half as big, a third as big, and so on. Disk Cache is not really important to basic users. We haven't covered anything using proxies, and proxies are using simple low fidelity version of a file. There were places with a high definition version of that file and export. So, that's what proxy uses. Effects, we've applied a bunch of them, and you can have them all on, all off, or as they are presently on your timeline. You usually want them as they are in your timeline, so Current Settings. Solo switches, Current Settings is good, as these solo switches here on the timeline that you can turn on or off. Sometimes when you're working, you'd like to have some things solo-ed, some things not. But then, when you export, you can just click all off, and it'll make them all visible. You can have your guide layers show if you really want. I don't know why you would. I wouldn't, but if you're sending this to someone and they need to prove your work or something, sometimes guide layers are good. And the Color Depth here is one that is interesting to pay attention to. If you've used effects that only work in 32 bits per channel or that look best in 32 bits per channel and you want to put this up to 32 bits per channel. Right now, we've been working in 8 bits per channel so what that means is there are only 8 bits per channel of information. When it's up at 32, it takes a lot longer to render. Things are a lot more complicated, but the image looks a lot nicer. However, it only helps you if you are using effects that work in 32 bits per channel or if you're using footage that has 32 bits per channel. You could be adding more layers of fidelity than you need. So, if you've been working in 8 bits and it looks fine, leave it alone. If it looks cruddy at 8 bits, put it up to 32. This is things like banding ingredients, so instead of a smooth change from black to white, you would see bars of black and gray and so on. That's called banding. You can get rid of that by increasing the bits per channel. It just creates a lot more radiation and a lot more variance because there's more color information for you. Time Sampling, the biggest thing here is going to be your frame rate. If you use the Comp's frame rate, and you set up your Comps frame rate to be in keeping with the entire project, you're good. However, if you have not and you know a specific frame rate that you need to change it to, then change it at this time. The next thing here is Time Span. Time Span deals with how much of the Comp you're exporting. Maybe your work area, maybe the full length of the Comp, maybe something else. The work area is this gray bar that we set on the timeline. You can set its beginning by hitting "B", and it'll set it at the playhead. Hitting "N", it'll set it at the playhead. You can click and drag these handles wherever you want. But, if you're working with only the work area, it'll only export where this gray bar is. I get a lot of users who come to me and say, "Why it didn't export everything?" And I asked them, "Did you tell it to?" And the answer is usually no. So, if you want the entire Comp, tell it so. If you want only the work area, tell it that. But be aware of where your work area is, keep in mind we're looking right now at the default Render Settings. So, this might confuse you. Motion Blur, we haven't put Motion Blur on for any layers, but Motion Blur simulates the blurriness that happens when objects move too fast for our camera to capture them exactly, and this can be simulated with Motion Blur, and putting it on for layers. A Field Render deals with interlaced footage. We don't have any because I don't think I've used an interlaced footage system like mini DV, probably since 2000. So it's been awhile. But some people still have those cameras and if you're using interlaced footage, please be aware of which field is which and what you need to do for that. So, that's something you'll know if you need it. And Frame Blending, I guess, would be the last thing here in the Time Sampling, is what After Effects has had to make up new frames using its frame blending. We didn't, so don't worry about it. Okay. And that's about it for the Render Settings. For our purposes, using Best Settings is best. And this arrow here, and give you a shortcut to a bunch. So Best Settings is best for us. The output module now is where even more options come 12. Lesson 5 - Part 2: Shortcut to a bunch, so best settings is best for us. The output module now is where even more options come from. The Render settings are basically all the quality you're bringing into the output module, and you can, like I said, have many output modules. So, you can export a QuickTime, a Photoshop sequence, a PNG sequence, an MP3, an AIFF, a wave, all sorts of things. Now, depending on what machine; Windows or Mac, you'll have different options, so just keep that in mind. Format is basically what kind of container am I putting things into. Then, we get into things like; we can say, yes video output, no video output, we can have, yes audio output, no audio output, and then within the audio we have what kilohertz, how many bits, stereo or mono, and then when you click format options, it'll tell you what type of codec it's going to use. So, audio codec like uncompressed, AAC, lossless, and so on, and we have the same for the video options that we can set a codec. In this case, video codec animation is used for lossless. What that means is there's going to be a very large file that has all of the information. So, it is lossless, it has not lost any information. However, you might want to use something like an H.264, which is a lossy codec, so information will be lost. The file size will be smaller, and make it better for uploading to YouTube for example. YouTube uses H.264, as does Vimeo, as do many places that stream video, and it is a codec. So, a codec is basically a set of instructions, a language that takes less file size, to tell the same story. The best way to think about it, it's simply adding encode and having code that stands in for different things, so, that when one computer sees this much shorter story, it's still able to understand everything. So, the video will still play back, and pretty close to the same fidelity, but it'll have lost some information at there. Setting the codec in here, and then hitting okay, can change a lot of your options out here. Those options are things like how many channels. In this case, red, green, blue, and alpha are available, but red, green, blue, plus alpha is not, and that means basically this is color information, a regular video. Alpha information is whether things are see-through or not see-through. Having something that's RGB plus alpha, is both. So, not only is it however many colors that pixel should be, it's also a range from 0% to 100% see-through for each pixel. So, that's a lot more information to put in and H.264 codec simply cannot have that information, and then you have things like color depth. As you can see a lot of the options are grayed out because of the format we've chosen. If we go back and we choose animation, you can see these options are back, and we have more options in here, and we have more options in here. So, this will change these, so always set this first. Now, you can at this point resize things. So, just like we did, setting it from half to full, to a quarter resolution in the settings. You can do a similar thing here if you would so desire. So, it has a bunch of sizes for you to choose from or you just pick one. Great. It's basically stretching and scaling the picture that you're putting out. You can also crop it if you'd like. You can crop it using what's known as the region of interests which is something you can set in a comp. We didn't do any of that, so don't worry about resizing and cropping. Just worry about putting it out in a size that you can work with. So, H.264, okay, okay, sweet, and we're ready to put this thing out there. You can also select some of the output modules that already come built in or you can build some templates of your own. Once you are ready with all that, hit Render, and it'll start. It'll start rendering, a bar will go across here, and I'll make a wonderful noise when it's done, so that is using the render queue. Now, depending on your workflow that might not be the best option for you. Let's say you have a whole bunch of these that you want to render out, and then you want to do something else with your computer. Well, instead of adding it to the render queue, we will go composition, add to Adobe Media Encoder. Now, we're going to see as the computer clicks and words and grinds that it needs to open up Adobe Media Encoder a separate application. A perfectly nice application, and its only function is to encode media. Adobe Media Encoder comes with Adobe After Effects CC or comes with Adobe Premier CC, and if you have the entire Creative Cloud suite then you'll definitely have it at your disposal. Here is what this looks like, so you can see it loads up for you, your comp in here, and you can of course import other things, but you are now able to leverage a whole bunch of system presets on here. So, the easiest way to use this is to say, all right I'm sending this to YouTube, I want it to be an HD clip and I want it to be HD 1080p 23.967. I drag that down here, and boom everything is good, but a lot of the same options remain. For example, you can edit the preset here by clicking on the name of it in the preset, and then it will connect to the dynamic link server, and then it'll attempt to open up a window here, and it'll give you pretty much all of the options that we had before, but just laid out in a totally different way. So, you'll have your video, your audio, and all of the options are exactly the same they're just laid out in a totally different way. The Media Encoder should be used when you have more of a grasp of encoding media, and then you're quickly able to say, okay I want this preset, and this preset. So, all of these format options are available here, and you can customize them in here, and this is the output file. If you're using the Media Encoder, you can press play, and then close down After Effects, and then do something else or you can go on and make something else in After Effects. You can set up a whole bunch of these things to go throughout the day, it uses a lot more background processes, so it doesn't bog down your computer. So, that is a second way to take things out of After Effects. The third way is just to import the After Effects file. If you're going to be editing things in Premier and you're going to be working with things in Premier later, you can just import a.aep file into Premier onto the timeline. Adobe products are all well integrated like that, so if your workflow is entirely in adobe then you'll be totally fine. One caveat I will say at this point though, is if you intend to use this file, and you want to export everything except the footage. When you make the footage go away, you'll see this transparency grid. Now, if I export this, one of the things you need to be aware of is that the adjustment layers will no longer function the same way they did before. So, you can see the adjustment layers are showing a magnified wacky version of what's behind it, but once there's nothing behind it, there's nothing for them to display. So, it's only going to be enacting its properties upon anything that is visible. So, if your workflow is such that you want to export this with an alpha channel, that's that RGB plus alpha thing we talked about, and then composited later on to something else. You are totally welcome to do that, but do be aware that these effects will not transfer because you will be baking your cake without that footage in it, because this footage is important to causing this to happen, then you might want to render just out of After Effects. Similarly, if you import this file into Premier, and you're going to overlay this over other video layers, it won't be transferring this kind of magnification effect along to those. It doesn't happen that way. It has to be here inside of After Effects in order for that to work. So, I think that's the only thing that you might get hung up on. I would encourage you now to go ahead, and give it a try, and of course this lesson is available for as long as you live or as long as the Internet lives. So, if there's anything you missed in the lesson, anything you're unsure about, go back to the beginning, and watch it all the way through. That way you know all of the tools, all of the windows, and all of the functions that you need to basically get started making cool stuff in After Effects. You have all the tools at your disposal to create what I created for the intro or this sort of pared down simple version, if that's good enough. But I would encourage you for your student projects in this, to really expand on these ideas, and try to bring all of your design ability to the table. Thank you for watching this Skillshare lesson. Hopefully, you've enjoyed it, and I would encourage you to check out other intermediate and advanced things now that you have all of the basic tool set for how to use After Effects under your belt. This has been Evan Abrams, for Skillshare. Thanks again for watching, and I'll see you around the Internet. 13. Explore Design on Skillshare: way.