Learn Apple Motion through Animated Graph Projects

1. Welcome to the Class: Regardless of what type of content you create, you may just run across some case where you need to display information. And what better way than animated graphs. In this class, I'll be teaching you everything you need to know to create different types of animated graphs using a promotion. And what's more is we'll do this by going through various animated graph projects. So you cannot just learn the techniques, but see exactly how I prepare graphs. We'll start with an introduction to a promotion. There you'll familiarize yourself with the software's interface tools and the workspace just to help you to navigate effectively while you're animating. After that, we'll explore animation techniques to add movement to your static graphs to make them more fun and engaging. We'll talk about key frames behaviors and using masks to fine tune your animations. And lastly, we'll go into exporting your projects. How to best export them, whether you want to bring them into a video editing project or if you simply want to share what you would have done on social media. By the end of this class, you'll have the skills and confidence to craft visually appealing graphs like you see here. My name is Arm Little and I'll be your instructor for this class. Let's dive into the world and bring our static graphs to life. And I'll see you on the inside. 2. The Class Project: Class project. Choose one of the animated graphs covered to recreate using the techniques you've learned with new data values. Feel free to share it in the project and resources panel or I'll review and provide feedback. Good luck and have fun animating. 3. About the Apple Motion interface: Let's start by getting to know the interface. This toolbar at the top has controls to import media, add effects, and add various objects to your project. You'll also find the option to toggle on or off your heads up display. And here's where you'll go to export your projects. On the left side here you'll find the library and the inspector. The library is a collection of resources you can pull from to make creating animations easier. It also includes behaviors generators, filters, particle emitters, and replicators, which are some core features of Apple motion. We'll cover a few behaviors and filters in this class. The inspector shows all adjustable parameters for both layers and groups. Depending on what you have selected. Inside the inspector is where you'll be able to add your key frames for position, scale rotation, and pretty much every other adjustable property or parameter. In the middle at the top here is your project panel. And this is a collection of all the elements you add to your project. Whether you create them in motion or you import them, everything can be found here. On the right. And side here is the canvas and this is where you'll preview your animation. Below the canvas is the canvas tool bar and the timing pane. The canvas tool bar has tools for creating and transforming your objects in two D or three D space. Here you'll also find options for adding text, creating and editing shapes, and adding masks. You can also find options to zoom and pan around your canvas here. The timing pane lets you view and modify the timelines. By default, only the video timeline is visible. Or you can show and hide the audio timeline by selecting the audio icon here. You can also hide the video timeline by selecting the video icon Beside it. Beside the audio icon is the icon for the key frame editor. This is where you can edit and adjust keyframes to your liking. 4. Understanding Anchor Points: When it comes to scaling an object in any direction, it's all about the anchor point. Objects scale and rotate from its anchor point. To illustrate this, let's click the down arrow beside or select Tool and select Anchor Point. Then let's select a rectangle. Now you'll notice this icon comes up that shows us three arrows, one for the x axis, one for the y axis, and it's blue one, that's actually pointing at U, which is for the Z axis. Let's recenter our anchor point by placing it back to its original section here. Let's go to properties. And let's play with our scale to see what happens as we scale or object. You'll notice it scales from the center. Let's place it on the left hand side. You'll notice it's scaling to 100% of its size from the left. What if we were to tuggle simply just the x axis of the scale? You'll notice that it literally keeps the y in place, which is let's say the height of the rectangle here while it's pushing the X to 100% oval, depending on the values that we slide in or we tuggle in. 5. Design a Basic Bar Graph: The first step in creating our bargraph is creating our outline. Let's select our rectangle tool and drag out a rectangle on our canvas. This will be the outline that our bargraph will be placed in. Ensure that it's still selected. Go to Shape, let's deselect the fill and select an outline. I think two pixels for the width is fine. Let's go to geometry and add some roundness. About 30 is good. Let's click the arrow beside a rectangle tool here. Let's select our line tool, hold on Shift, and you draw a line at the bottom. And this will be the base for a graph. Now this white line is a little bit too thick. Let's go ahead and press Escape. Then let's go to the width in our inspector and change our width to two. Let's select our line with the line selected. Hold on Shift command. And tap your up arrokey to move it forward. Tap the Don Okey to move it down. Place it anywhere you want within the shape. And then we'll begin to create our rectangles, which will be the bars in our bar graph. Let's go ahead and create a few of them. By simply selecting the rectangle tool and dragging out a rectangle. You can simply select this rectangle, duplicate it, select it, and hold shift and drag it across. And do it one or two more times, depending on the width of your rectangle. From here you'll notice that we have 4 bars. All we need to do is stagger them based on the increments that we want to show. So maybe we can have one very short, we can have this middle one really tall, and maybe have this one shorter. Now I'd like to create a little bit more space between my base here and the bars. So let's hold on shift command again and just use our Don Ararchy to add a little bit more space in between them. And this is fine. Let's also increase the width of our shape here by holding option and using your cursor to click and drag on one of the sides, and this constrains the shape. With that done, all we need to do is go ahead and add some shades of color. I'll be playing with some shades of blue. Let's go to the inspector. Select color here. And I'll work with the shades that we have available here. Let's start with this light blue. Select the other rectangle. Let's go a bit darker. Select our other rectangle. We'll go with that color blue there. And finally, that darker blue is fine. Now that we have our colors, let's adjust our anchor points so we can start animating. Select your fair shape command plus the zoom in. Select the transform tool. Here, select anchor point. And simply drag down your anchor point until it gets to the bottom of our shape. Once that's done, let's move on to the next shape and do the same double click here. And it brings us back to our transform tool. So now that we have all our anchor points in place, it's time to start animating. 6. How to Animate Using Scale Properties: With the first shape selected, open up your scale property and you're going to animate our wire positions. Let's go forward to 20 frames here. And let's add a key frame telling a promotion that hey, at 20 frames, this is exactly what we want it to look like. Let's go back to zero. At zero frames we want it to not appear. Let's do this for the rest of them. However, let's stagger them in like ten frame increments. Let's go forward ten frames, select second shape. Again, add a keyframe for wire position will shift on your right arch, press it twice, and that moves us in ten frame increments. So that's 20 frames. Add another key frame. This icon here takes us back to our previous key frames. Let's select it, and let's select zero here. Now we have two. Let's go forward ten frames, again, holding down shift. Now that we have ten frames into the animation of the second one, let's select our third shape, again on the Y axis of the scale. Go forward 20 frames, add another key frame back to your previous frame, set it to zero. Finally, going forward ten frames. Select your final shape, again, on your Y axis, 20 frames forward, previous key frame, and set that one to zero as well. Let's also add an animation for our base line here. Let's do this by selecting the line going to shape select last point offset. Ensure that you're at the zero or the starting point. Go forward to the end of the animation, add a key frame. Let's go back by hitting our previous keyframe and setting our last point offset to zero. So far, we have an animation that looks like this. It's time to add some easing and make it look a little bit smoother. 7. Adding Easing to Your Animations: Let's select our first doctangle. Let's open up our keyframe editor. Click and drag over both our key frames. We want to right click and select ease. Both You can add some more emphasis to the animation by selecting both key frames. Right click, interpolation and go to bezier. Once you have those bezier handles, simply click and drag them to define the easing curve that you like. Now we're going to do this for our other three shapes as well. Let's select our second shape. Let's click on drag to select both key frames. Right click, ease both from there. Again, right click again, interpolation, bezier, and just adjust those bezier handles that. We have that done, let's select our line. Let's select both parameters for the key frames. Again, ease both. Now let's see what our animation looks like n that we've added easing to each one of our key frames. 8. Stylise Your Graph with Filters: It's time to style our animation now by adding some filters. Let's select group, select our last layer, this whole shift to select the line as well, and that selects everything. Let's command G to place them in a group by themselves. And we'll add a filter to this group called Ripple over in our inspector. You'll notice that filters actually appears here. Let's change our amplitude to something like two. Let's go back to filters again, head to glow and let's add a neon glow to our chart. Let's also copy this filter command C and paste it on our rectangle. So now that we've had our filters, let's see what our animation looks like. 9. Introduction to the Gradient Generator: Finally, let's started this up by adding a background and scaling down our animation a little bit so we can go ahead and export. Let's create another group. Let's go to library, head to generators, and you want to select gradient. Once you have your gradient selected, go ahead and click Apply. Let's place our gradient group below our animation. Let's open up our gradient group. Select our gradient head to the transform tool and select your down arrow. And we're looking for a just item with that we can go ahead and move these handles to smoothen out our gradient a little bit. And we'll also change the color. Let's head over to the inspector. Let's change our color from blue to something that will blend with these colors a little bit more. Let's go ahead and select our animation group. Let's scale it down to about 80% now. Let's see what our animation looks like now that we've added to our final touches. 10. Create a Basic Grid Using Generators: In this section of the class, we'll be using everything that we've learned so far, the same principles, to create a line graph animation. Let's start by first creating a grid with this group selected. Let's go to library generators and select or grid, click Apply, and your grid pops up on the canvas head to the inspector generator. And let's adjust our grid. Let's set our background width to about 01:40 And let's set our height to about 01:20 Let's also change our line width to about two. Let's also scale this grid down a bit. So let's go to properties scale and punch in about 80% 11. Design a Basic Line Graph: Time to add our values. Simply use command plus to zoom in and use your mouse pad to move around the canvas. We want to start at the bottom here, select your text tool and click anywhere on the keyboard. And type in your text at Escape. And let's change our size to about 36. Once you've positioned this, go ahead and hit command D to Duplicate. Click and drag. And then hold shift to move it in a straight line. Let's do this a few more times to create all the values on our wire axis. Once you have your values correctly positioned, go ahead into the text inspector and adjust each value as needed. Let's also do the same thing for our x axis, and this one will be months. So let's duplicate our ten in and place the ten on our first line here. Let's center line text and simply change this to the first month. Remember to hold shift after you start moving the text to get it flowing in a straight line. Now that we have all our values here again, let's go through them and place the carrect months in order. We notice you have an extra value here. You can go ahead and delete that. Head over to your transform tool. Select Crop, select your grid and simply remove that value by cropping it in. Double click on the crop tool. That brings us back to our transform tool, and now we've added all our values for a graph. 12. Adding the Values to Your Line Graph: Time to create our line and see that we have 12 values here for each month. We're going to need a point on each one of these vertical lines. Let's start at January. Let's select our Pin tool. You can zoom in to ensure that you have precise accuracy and earlier points. If you want to adjust a point after you've placed it, simply select the transform tool here to edit points. Click on the point you want to edit and drag it to a new position on the canvas. Let's deselect or Feel. Let's change our stroke or outline to a different color. Let's use orange. Let's change it with a four line from ten to about five pixels. Let's also duplicate our line and name this copy light trail. 13. Animating and Adding Filters to Lines: It's time to start animating our line. Let's click pier one. Let's go to last point offset. Ensure that you're at the beginning of the project and at a key frame. Let's go forward to about 3 seconds at another key frame. Let's go back to our previous key frame using the previous key frame icon here. And simply set our last point offset to zero. Let's hide our light trallao, We can see our animation looks like. Now it's time to animate the light trail. Let's turn on the layer. Let's go back to the beginning of the project. And we want to offset this by about 20 or so key frames. Hold on shift select your right error twice, moving ten frame increments, that's 20 frames. Let's add a key frame for a last point offset. Let's go to 3 seconds and add 20 more frames to that, add another key frame. Let's go back to our previous keyframe and let's set this value to zero. Because there's no difference in color. You can't tell the light trail different from our animated bezier line. So let's change the color of our light trail, and let's change it to white. So let's see what our animation looks like now let's keep editing our light trail. Let's go forward another 20 frames from our first key frame. Let's add a keyframe for our first point offset. Let's go another 20 frames at the end of our project. Let's add another key frame for the first point offset as well. Now at the end of the project, let's change our first point offset to 100% This should give us a nice trail of our white line behind the orange one. Finally, let's ensure that we have our light trail selected. Let's go to filters, glue neon, and add that neon glue to our light trail. 14. How to Create a Gradient Background: In our last example, we talked about adding a background to our animations. This time let's take it a step further and not just add a background, let's position or animation in three D space. Let's go to add object group. Let's place this group below or animated layer. Let's head to library generators and we're looking for a gradient. Let's apply this gradient and you'll notice that our grade is actually black. Let's go back to greater, let's head to the inspector. Let's change our background color. Let's just drag the opacity 1-0 group. Let's go back to gradient group. Let's adjust item. We have a nice smooth gradient. Seeing that we have a lot of light colors here, let's choose some dark colors for this gradient. Let's rename this group or background, Leo, and let's name or animation group. Animated line. 15. Adjust Your Animation in 3D Space: Go back to add object, Add the camera. We're going to switch to three D. Now that we've added our camera, let's select our animated line group. We're going to scale it down a little bit further. Let's go about 80% Let's also go back to the camera. Let's go to position. Let's open up position and add a key frame on the Z position. Let's go forward about 3 seconds. Or better yet, let's go to the end of our project, another key frame for our z position. Let's change our value for the z position at the end to about -300 And this gives us a nice zoom in. But more than that, let's also change the position of our layers so that we can definitely get that three D effect. What we'll do is go to the background layer. Let's scale this to about 300% let's push it back in Z space. And if you're not sure what you're seeing here, all you can do is go to perspective. So let's switch from active camera to perspective and push it back in three D space. That's far enough, we could even leave it at -500 For now, we can change our scale to maybe 200% Let's go back to our active camera. Let's select our animated line group. Let's position it in z space. I think about 200 is fine. Then what we'll do is selecting the camera. Again, add a key frame for rotation. Let's go to the end of our project. Let's add another key frame for rotation. And this time you'll notice that we've added all key frames for rotation and also for the beginning of the project. What this allows us to do is to change each rotation value simultaneously. Let's end the animation by having our camera pointing at the very end of our line graph. Let's start by going to the right. We can also punch in our z position. Let's go to the beginning of our project. And we want our rotation to be at the beginning of our line graph. Let's start here. Let's also punch in, so we finally finished adjusting our line graph animation in three D space, and it looks like this. 16. Export Your Animation Projects: Let's talk about exporting our project to export. Go to Share Export movie. You notice you have Info Settings and Render. In this case, we can leave Render as is info. We can add tags if we desire, and change the name of the creator if we want. But settings is where all the magic happens in settings. You can preview your animation, you can change the format from video on video and audio, or audio only. In this case, we have no audio. Video only is fine. You'll notice we also have a publishing section that says Apple devices, computer and social platforms. Let's leave video only for in video code. Let's talk about three specific options. Apopsour 444 gives you transparent video footage. So if you don't have any transparent layers in your project, you need not select this one. This 1422 is a high quality version of a animation that can go back into an editor, like Final Cut or Da Vinci, or even Premiere. And H 20064 is pretty much standard for sharing to Youtube and other social media platforms. In our case, we're going to use 422. Select Next. Change the name of your project to whatever you want. Let's call this or Line Graph animation, and click Save. 17. Design a Circular Graph Animation: This lesson, we'll be recreating this circular graph animation. Let's start by creating a new project. Let's go to file New. Let's ensure that we have the right resolution. 5 seconds is okay. Let's go ahead and click Open. Now that we have our new project, let's hit come and minus to zoom mode. Let's drag out a rectangle for our base. Let's go to our inspector. Let's change our field color to a gradient. Let's hit into the gradient tub and's exchange our gradient colors. Let's use a blue and a purple. Let's go to adjust item here and just smoothen out our gradient a bit. Let's go back to the colors and play with the colors until you get something that you like. So now that we have our gradient, let's go ahead and name this group background. Let's close our background layer and lock it. Let's create a new group. Inside of this group, we'll add our circular graph. Let's start by grabbing the circle tool while creating your circle. Hold on, shift to constrain the circle to make it a perfect circle and not an oval. The first circle created, let's set back into our inspector. And here we have shape fill. Let's deselect our fill. And let's add a stroke. Let's set the stroke value to three. Let's also in the canvass, go to Properties and simply click Reset parameter. Let's duplicate our circle set back into our shape panel. Let's change our width to about 80. Let's also change the color, and let's use a blue. Let's go to last point offset and set our last point offset to one. Let's also change our start caps from rounded to square. Let's rotate our blue circle so that our first degree starts at the top. Here again, you can hold on shift to constrain it. It's at a key frame for last point offset, go forward about 1 second. And let's add another key frame and set our last point offset value to 100% Let's keyboard circle selected. Let's open our key frame editor. Let's expand it so that we can see our key frames clearly select both keyframes, go to interpolation, and select bezier with both handles. Let's ease them a bit so that we have a smooth animation. Let's enlarge our base circle outline. Let's go back to the inspector. Ensure that we have it selected. And choose something about 15. Let's decrease the size of For a circle. Group a bit. Let's go about 70% Then let's zoom into the canvas. 18. Introduction to the Numbers Generator: Now it's time to add our values. Let's select our text tool and click anywhere on the canvas to add your text. Let's say to escape, we want to center, align this. But first let's center or text and then head to properties position and reset parameter. This brings it directly into the center. Let's use our y axis to bring it up so that it's at the top. Let's also scale or value so that it's more visible. Zoom out, let's add our numbers generator. So to do that, head over to library select generators, go to text generators and select numbers. Go ahead and click Apply. Now we've added our numbers generator. Let's zoom in so we can see it. Let's send it over to the inspector. And you'll see this text generator panel up here on this side. Here in the text generator panel, you'll see animate start format, et cetera, et cetera. Let's talk about the first four. Animate means that numbers generator will continue animating for the duration of the generator start indicates what value it actually starts from. If you go to the beginning of the generator, which is at the beginning of or project, you'll notice that it starts at one. If you go to the end of the project, which is also at the end of generator, it ends at 100. Let's say we were to shorten this generator at 3 seconds by hitting O. You'll notice that 100% is at the three second mark, and that's because that's the end of the generator. Let's go back to our end here and let's select O. Let's go back to the beginning of the project. We don't want is, we don't want it to animate automatically. Let's go to the animate option and de select animate. This allows us to key frame the specific target values that we want. Let's say we wanted it to stop and hold at 45% That's exactly how we're going to do that. Let's take our value, let's start at one and then a key frame. Let's move up to about 1 second. Let's change our value to about 45. Let's also center or text here. Let's go to format center, align our text, then let's increase the size. Let's zoom out a bit. Let's go back to our circle. Let's go to Shape. Instead of setting our last point offset to 100, let's set it to 45 as well. No, our animation looks like this. As you see, it stops at 45 and holds that figure for the duration of the project. 19. Editing Your Circular Graph Animation: Now that we've created our first circular graph, let's go ahead and name this group. Let's call this middle. Let's duplicate it, Heating command D. Let's call this left. Let's use our properties or exposition and var it over to the left hand side. Let's also go to our scale and drop this down to about 50% We can also go inside or left group and change our colors. Let's change the value from a blue to a red. Let's use this one to indicate a downward movement. See that we'll be doing a downward movement. Let's start our last point offset at 100% and bring it down over the course of our animation. Let's bring it down to about 25% Let's also change our value in our numbers generator. So let's select the numbers generator. Let's go to generator and change our value, 45-25 Let's change the start value, 1-100 And now we have our animation playing like this. Let's do one more for the right side. Let's select our left. Hit command D to duplicate. Let's change this to right, go to properties and push this one over to the right side. Let's go ahead and change this from up to down to just to add some difference. You can also scale down the text if you realize a bit too big, where it's not fitting in your canvas or your circular frame. Let's go to our right hand side. Let's change our color here from red to green to indicate an upward movement. Let's use this green. Let's start our green at 1% Let's move it to about 85. Let's also go to our numbers generator. And let's do the same thing. We wanted to stop at 85% we also wanted to start at 1% Our animation looks a little bit like this. Our next step is to offset these in time a little bit, so that they don't all seem to come on at the same time because it's a bit too much to look at in order to do this. Let's go ahead to our time in pain here. Let's start with the left, because we want this one to appear first. Let's leave it there. Let's go to our middle. Let's go forward ten frames. Can you shift your forward arrow, your right arrow to move ten frames? Select your middle group. Ensure that you have the group itself selected. And just push it forward to begin at ten frames. Next, let's go forward another ten frames. Let's select our right group and push that forward. We have our animation looking a bit like this. We can take it a step further by offsetting them in 20 frame increments. And I would simply be doing the same thing going forward another 20 frames and offsetting them further. Next, let's add an overshoot so that they don't randomly just start appearing and animating. We'll be adding our overshoot to scale. Let's simply just group all of these just to make them easier, and we'll add an overshoot to each one of these groups. Let's go the properties scale. You'll notice the scale is at 100% Let's select the down arrow beside our key frame. Add parameter behavior overshoot. You notice our overshoot stretches for the duration of the project. We want our overshoot to be about ten frames. Let's move forward ten frames into this behavior. And select that cuts our overshoot at ten frames. Let's also jump to our start value and set it to -100 Let's change our ramp duration to about 25% on our cycles to one. Now that we have this done, let's go ahead and ensure we have the behavior selected. Hit command C. To copy this behavior, to paste it to the other groups, simply hit command V while you have the group selected. And select group two, which is here command V n animation is complete. And it looks a bit like this, but we can take this a step further and blend the colors properly. Let's unlock our background, and let's change our gradient to something that matches these colors and allow them to pop a bit more. Let's go to Shape and select our purple color. And let's change it to maybe an orange. Let's also select the color on the other side. And let's change it to, I'm thinking to also duplicate this group. Instead of choosing ingredient at a color, make this a black. And we'll change our opacity to about 30% Let's tuggle this layer on and off, see what it looks like. Let's also group all our circular animations that we would have created. And we'll do one final touch by hidden the properties drop shadow. And it's at a drop shadow just to have it stand out from the background a little bit more. Now we have the complete animation. Feel free to offset them further to ensure that the focus of the animation is exactly where you want it to be. So let's offset each one by another ten frames. Let's go to the right group two. Let's move it down by ten frames. Let's go to this one. Let's move this one down by ten frames as well. 20. Closing thoughts: So you've come to the end of the class. Thank you so much for journeying with me through the world of animated graphs. Feel free to post your projects in the project panel. I'll definitely provide my feedback. And if you have any questions, feel free to leave them in the discussion panel and let's get the conversation going again. Thank you so much for journeying with me. Feel free to check out the Youtube channel at everything, Apple Motion, and follow me here on Skillshare, we'll be posting more tutorials and classes about using Apple Motion.