Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi, I'm Brian, and
welcome to this course on creating looping
animations in After Effects. I'm emotion graphic
designer and animator. And I've been teaching animation
for the last six years. This course is perfect for
anyone new to After Effects. We will create this bouncing hamburgers scene where you'll discover new
techniques that will kick-start your
animation career. Let's learn something new and
get going in after effects.
2. Understanding Projectfiles: Before we start the project, it's important to understand the way all the files are. In the project that you've downloaded, you will get these three items. In the assets folder, you will find the hamburger dot PSD and the mustard dot AI. These are the two files that we will be animating. In the project files. You will find the aftereffects files. If you get lost at any point in the beginning of every video, I will tell you which file I will be using. And lastly, we have the hamburger one.gov. This is just the end result of the project that we will be creating in this lesson. If at any point, when you open up a project file and it says that some files are missing, that's an easy fix, just push. Okay. This is the era. You can see that the hamburger files got lost or unlinked to replace this or fix it. Go over to the hamburger layers to a let down. You can see all the broken links inside. I'm going to right-click on any one of these, say, Replace Footage File. Then I'm going to open up the assets folder. Choose the hamburger and push open. It'll say that it's found those links push, okay, it should correct the problem and you should be good to go.
3. Photoshop AE Import: So first I'm going to show you how this file is laid out in Photoshop. So in Photoshop, if you open up the hamburger dot PSD file that I've given you and you have a look, you can see that it's kind of broken down into layers. So there's the mouth, the eyes, the top button needs a separate layer, and every little bit of the hamburger is all separate. And this is very important for animating. We can't animate something that's old blob together. You want them to have separate pieces. Also name them so that it makes all sense to you. And then when you're done, save the file as a Photoshop file, just irregular dot PSD. Okay, so in After Effects, we're going to start out project. You may have a pop-up window in the middle of the screen right now. You can close that window down. We're going to import our footage. And that is what's going to dictate the size of our video. So if you go up to File, Import File, go navigate to the folder that you've downloaded. Click once on hamburger. And this is super-important. Down the bottom here where it says footage. We're going to change it to Composition, Retain Layer Sizes. I'll explain why in a minute and open that up. You can push okay, in this pop-up window. Now in the top-left window, this is our project button. And you can see you have two things. The have the hamburger layers, which is all the same as Photoshop. That's not the one we're going to use. We're going to use this top one, and it's just cold hamburger. And this is a composition. And the composition is basically a mini-project inside our big project. So let's go inside then have a look at what we have. We're going to double-click on that. Once you've done that, you'll see that we're now inside of this composition and inside the composition which is called Hamburger. We have all the layers of our hamburger, same as Photoshop. We need to change the size again, this may look slightly different on your screen. You may have a white background, but let's make it the same as mine. We're going to go up to Composition. Composition Settings. Keep the name as hamburger. We're going to change the width and height. 1080. By 1080, the frame rate to 24 frames. And the duration, we can make it 1 second. The background color, which could be anything, doesn't really matter right now because we're going to change it to something else later on and push Okay. That to earlier thing that I said where we imported it and I said keep it as Retain Layer Sizes. If you didn't do that and you import it as footage, you wouldn't have these layers that be collapsed into one layer that you couldn't access, the individual ones. So it's really important if you want to have all the different layers accessible to you, that you import all your assets as composition retain layer sizes. So the last thing we gotta do before we start animating is put a big colored block in the background. So to do that, we're going to create a solid layer. So if you've got to layer new solid, you'll get this popup window. You can ignore the rest is going to be 1080. By 1080, that's the size of a composition. But we want to click on this color here. Yours might be a different color and just click on it. That's going to open up this color picker. And we're going to put in a number here. So let's go for C5, b, for c, f, very pale green push. Okay, and okay, so it's gonna make a big solid color which is at the top of our layer stack over here. We just need to drag it down, put it at the bottom. And we're going to lock this by clicking on that icon and put in a padlock on so we don't accidentally move it while you're animating.
4. Animating the Eyes and Mouth: We're ready to animate all the layers of the hamburger now. So let's start with the eyes. So I'm gonna select the eyes layer. And if I just roll my mouse wheel to get a little closer, I can see that the eyes are selected. They're all in one layer. Now if I just move them around, you can see they are connected. I'm just going to undo that and put them back in their place. So when we scale these eyes, though, scale left and right, up and down in all directions from the center point, which is this little anchor point. So let's try that tongue and hit S for scale. And you can see it opens up the scale properties. If I grab any one of these a 100 numbers, because there's a link that all move together. So I can scale them by clicking and holding and dragging on those numbers. I don't want the ISD scale like that. That looks a little weird. So I'm just going to undo that. So what we wanna do is unlink the scale so that when I grab this, the last 100, it's only going to scale up and down on the y-axis. And then undo that. So it's back to 100. Okay, So let's animate this. We're gonna go to about frame 6. And I'm going to turn on the stopwatch, which is going to allow me to animate these. After Frame 6, we want these eyes to go from normal and we want them to get bigger around about frame 14. I'm going to change this number to 150. All right. So they are is a little bit bigger. And then I want them to get small after that. So I'm going to go to frame 18 a little further in time. And I'm going to change this number to about 18. I'm just going to click and hold and drag so that they very small. After that, I'm going to drag my playhead as far as I can to the right. And I'm going to change the number back to 100. Okay? So now if we hit Spacebar, we can see our animation. Sees eyes get big and then they blink shot. And that keeps looping. And you can see that the playhead will just keep going and going and looping. So that's great. Now stop that and go back to 0 on our timeline. So that's working perfectly. We're done with the eyes, we can 12 that up. Now let's do the mouth. The mouth is exactly the same. I'm going to hit S for scale and go to, go to frame six. And I'm going to turn on the stopwatch. You can see that again, these are linked. So I'm going to unlink that. And we're looking at the last set of numbers, the 100. So I'm going to leave it at 100. I'm going to go to frame 14. I'm going to change this to 150. So you can see if I play it from there at the normal mouth. And it starts to get bigger and bigger and bigger. And I want the mouth to stay like that for a little while. So I'm gonna go forward in time. And I'm going to put another keyframe right there, but at the same 150. And if you want to do that, you go all the way to the left-hand side of the screen and you'll see little Great diamond and you click on that. And that's going to put another keyframe at a 150. So nothing's going to happen between these two keyframes for the mouth, they are the same. And then go to the end of your timeline and change that 150 to 100. Now you can see if you play it, mouth and eyes will element.
5. Keyframing the Bouncing Hamburger: So now it's the fun part. We get to animate all the insides of this hamburger bouncing up and down like an accordion. So the first thing we need to do is take the mouth and the eyes, and we're going to parent them to the BUN. And that means whenever we move the been around the eyes will follow it along. So we want to take us to select them both and grab any one of these little twirly pick whips and bring it and drop it onto top bun. So now if I select the top down and I move it around, the eyes will follow it along, right. So those are parented and that's excellent. Then the rest I'm going to say top been all the way down to let us an apparent Vose to the bottom button. Okay, So now for select bottom button and move it around, everything is going to follow along. What we're going to be doing first is animating the position of the pieces of the hamburger. And then after that we will change the rotation slightly. So the pieces we're going to animate our top been all the way down to bottom. Then select them all. Make sure you at the front of your timeline. And then hit P for position and turn on the stopwatch for one of them. And they'll all turned on. If they're all selected. Then we're going to go forward a little bit to about eight frames. And I'm going to slowly start moving all the pieces of been up and kind of separating them as if they are doing their balance. So I'm going to de-select everything by just clicking away and then grab the button at the top. I'm going to move him the first. Then I'm going to grab the cheese and move that up. Then I'm going to select the tomatoes, the paddy, and give a little bit of lift to that piece of lead us. And then the bottom bun, I'm going to move that up a little, which will move everything because it's all parents. It. Okay, So now if you play that, you can see that it'll just all move up like that. And then we want them all to come back down to the resting position. And that's going to be at the end of the timeline. So I'm going to move my playhead right to the end. And two, for this to work, we want to have a perfect loop. So again, this keyframe That's in the beginning needs to be copied and pasted at the end. So when it gets to the end, it goes back to the beginning and those numbers are the same. So the easiest way to do this is select the first one, command C, or control C on a PC, Command C and Command V, and then paste one at the end. So the one in the beginning and one at the end are exactly the same. So if I play that, it's going to go up and then that button will come back down again. So let's do that to the rest of the layers. I am going to select the cheese, copy that, and paste it. Copy command C and paste it command V, copy, command V, copy. And then again, the last one for bottom button, copy and paste. Right? Let's play that. Hit spacebar. All right, so it's working. But you can see that everything goes up and down at the same time. And we want to have that kind of staggered look as if the top band gets left in the air and then dropped slightly. I'm just going to stop that. So that's where we change these keyframes in the middle. If we offset them and kind of stagger them slightly, things will fall down at different spaces. So I'm going to stop at the bottom. This is the bottom bun. It's fine. Let's leave that one there. Then I'm going to choose the letters keyframe, and I'm going to move it over two keyframes to frame, sorry. And then this one, I'm going to drag that and move that one over, grab this one, move this one over, and grab this one and move that. And then this one, I'm actually going to put it at the end right on top of the last one right there. And let's play that. Excellent. So now things are falling down, how we want them. So right now everything goes up and down, very kind of linear. And we want to have like a little bit of a hover at the top and then it drops and have this nice kinda rolling animation. So this is where we add an ease. So all these keyframes are very linear right now. So if I just click and drag a big mark key over the, all our keyframes so that they are all blue. And it doesn't matter which one, but if you hover over any of them and right-click, you'll get this dialogue box. I'm gonna go to keyframe assistant. Easy ease. And you'll see your keyframes changed to an Easy Ease keyframe. And now if we play it, it's a little bit smoother. It's more flowing rather than just up and down like a mechanical item. Okay, so now that we have all the pieces going up and down, Let's add a little bit of rotation to everything. So we still have all these layers selected. And if you don't, remember, just select the top one, hold Shift and select the bottom button and that'll select all those layers. This time we want to affect the rotation. So I'm going to hit R for rotation and that's going to bring up rotation in the layers. I want to have rotation not from the beginning. I want these pieces to kind of go up and then anew around about there. Do I want them to start animating and turning? So at about eight frames, I'm going to turn on the stopwatch. That'll turn all of them on. And you can see that you have a keyframe there. As they're going up. Let's say about 14 frames. This is where I want them to kinda get all messed up and rotate it. I'm going to leave the bottom bun at 0. Then I'm going to go to let us. And I'm going to add a little bit of rotation on the lettuce. Then on the Patti, I'm going to rotate it the opposite direction. The tomato, the opposite direction, cheesy, opposite direction, and the BUN, just a little twist. Then I'm going to go to the end of my timeline as far as I can go. And I want to put all those numbers back to 0. So they end up, instead of being all muddled up like this, back to the original position. So 0 there, 0 there, they're 0, 0, and the bottom band is already at 0 and that's fine. And you can see the button has been all fixed up. And let's play that. That's looking great. So again, let's add an easy ease these keyframes and click and hold and drag a big mark key over all of them. Right-click on any one of them. Keyframe assistant, easy, ease. There you go. So the buttons animated. Let's move on to the next part.
6. Adding the Shadow: Now that we've done animating the Bund, we can kinda do some housekeeping and tidy everything up. I'm just going to twirl down all these layers, close them up, make everything neat. All right, so one thing we are missing with this little hamburger is a shadow. So we're going to draw one in. For this to work. You do not want to have any layers selected. So make sure that you just click away down in a gray area or up here to make sure it's de-selected. And we're going to use the Shape layers. So right at the top of your screen, we're going to click and hold on the rectangle and get an ellipse. You may have a different color to mine, but in this fill I'm going to click on this blue or whatever color yours is, and I'm going to choose a gray and kind of bluish gray. It's kinda compliment and maybe put a green compliment that wanted to be kinda light. So I'm going to go for A1, B9, B5, and push. Okay? Right now we just need to draw the shadows. So I'm going to click and drag and want to get a little bit of an oval like this. And map that big, right? Once we're done with that, I'm gonna get my selection tool. And then I can just move this around and place it where I need to. Obviously, this is on top of the hamburger, we want it to be underneath. So I'm going to grab that shape layer and drag it down and put it underneath the bottom bun. Let's also rename this shape layer. If you're on a Mac, you hit Return. If you're on a PC, hits Enter. And I'm going to name this shadow and pull that up. All right, so there's our shadow and it's looking great. If I clicked away and have a look. Now, we have a shadow for our hamburger. If it's too big, you can scale it down by hitting S. And we can just make it maybe a little bit smaller. So one thing we need to fix up is if you click away from our shadow, de-selected, and then select it again. And you'll see that our target or the center of the shadow is way up here for some reason and we want it to be in the center of our shadow. So holding Command or Control on PC, I'm going to go up to the top here and on this icon and a double-click. By doing that, the target is now in the center of our shadow. What I wanna do is now animate the shadow. So when the button bounces off the ground, the shadow will grow smaller. So I'm gonna turn on the stopwatch at the beginning of my timeline for scale. Maybe you're going to change my scale to something around like 90. So that's an even number. Then I'm going to go forward in time to where the bunnies at its highest, which is around about eight. And I'm going to reduce the size of the shadow. The shadow would get smaller the further the banana which is away from it. And then move all the way to the end. And I want to go back to its original size, which is this first keyframe. So again, selecting the first one, copy it, command C, and paste it at the end. Let's play that and watch. Awesome, That looks great. Okay. Just going to scrub out here, right. So now that we have all our hamburger pieces animated with its shadow, Let's neaten this up again by taking all of these layers from mouth all the way down to Shadow. Select them. All. Right-click. And we're going to choose precompose. You're gonna get a dialogue box. And let's name this, let's call this hamburger animated. And this is just so you remember what is inside this folder and push. Okay, Once you do that, you'll see that now you only have one layer called Hamburger animated. The animation still happens inside, but you only have one layer. And that's great because it's neat. But don't worry if you needed to go in and change anything, you can double-click on that composition. Go back inside this all out hamburger pieces. You can see it doesn't have the background anymore because that's wasn't precomposed. We have all this. We can make some changes, do whatever you need, and once you're done, you can go outside of the comp again, back to that one composition called hamburger right over there. This is awesome. Which means we can move the hamburger around. Oh, sorry. Grab it. So now we can move the hamburger around. So if we hit V, We can now grab a hamburger and move it around. We can scale the hamburger up and down and make it whatever size you want. I'm going to play such off to the side of air.
7. Animating the Mustard: Now we're ready for the next piece, which is the mustard. So I'm going to import. So let's do it. The shortcut Command I or Control I on a PC. That's going to open up our important dialogue. And I'm going to get the mustard. I'm not going to worry about the footage this time. I'm just going to say open. Okay. And there it is. Bring that mustard layer and drop it on the top. So the masters looking good. Okay, just placed out of there. So the mustard is also missing a shadow. So let's do the same thing again for the mustard. And then to get my ellipse, it's going to be the same shadow color as last time. And the click and draw a little shadow. Get my selection now. And again, the target or the center is going to be messed up again. You can see that it's actually going to be up there. So I'm going to click away selected again, and there it is. So I want to hold my Command or Control key, go up to the pan behind tool and double-click on it. That'll place the anchor points in the center. Let's rename this. So select the layer, hit Return or Enter. And it's going to be shadow. And we'll call it shadow method. And so it's not confusing. And call it closed. And I can move that underneath the mustard layer. Nine kinda position and a little bit better. Oops, mustard. You need to get your selection arrow. That'll fix it. Okay. All right, We're not going to animate the shadow until we've animated the mustard. So what we're gonna do is we're going to add an effect to this mustard. And you can find YOU effects over on the right-hand side it says effects and presets. If you don't see that, go up to Window and make sure that effects and presets is ticked on. Once it's ticked on, you can see this and we're going to type in the little search bar, bend, BE envy. You'll get all these options and we want to get to the CC, Bend it. If you grab and click and hold and drag it over and we're going to place it on top of the mustard. Once you've done that, you will get these parameters up in the top left here. You get ben start. And it's very important that we have. I'm just going to zoom in so you can see them. These small little targets here that one's can grab it and move it. You will see if you go down, the mustard starts to disappear. So you want to move it so that it's just above the spouts. And this one, again, it kind of gets affected. So I want to put it at the bottom. So this is the start and the end. And if you grab this bend number, click and hold and drag right or left, you can see that you can animate and bend the mustard. So this is awesome. I'm just going to undo that. So let's animate that. Scroll out. And to get that started, you have to turn on the stopwatch up next to Ben. So making sure you're at 0 and your timeline click stopwatch on Ben. I'm going to start with a bent a little bit to the left, maybe minus 12 that in. We can see that you can see the keyframe down at the bottom. But if you hit U on your keyboard, it'll open up anything on a layer that has a keyframe. And there it is, bend deserts keyframe. And I'm going to go roughly to the middle of our timeline. So if we're at 24 frames, 12 would be the center. I'm going to change that number to the opposite side and then go all the way up to 12. And then we want to come to rock backwards and forwards. So again, the last keyframe, copy that. And I'm sorry, the first keyframe, copy it, go to the end and paste that in. Now if we play that, little mustard will bounce backwards and forwards. So let's make sure we add another easy ease to this, selecting all of these keyframes of the marquee. So they all blue. Right-click on one of them. Keyframe Assistant. Easy, Ease. Now when we play it, it will sway backwards and forwards rather than just being like mechanical backwards and forwards. So we have this little shadow under the mustard and it doesn't move, but we have the mustard swaying then technically the shadow would move with the Swain. So let's do that. We're going to animate the position of the shadow. So I'm going hit P for position on the shadow mustard. Make sure you're in the beginning of your timeline. Turn on the stopwatch. And I'm going to grab this shadow layer. And I'm going to move it over too. So it's a little bit more heavy on the side that it's bends over. Right? Then I'm gonna go to the center where it bends the opposite way, which is at 12. Grab the shadow and move it the opposite direction, and then go to the end. And again, to make it look correctly, I'm going to select that first keyframe, copy it, and paste it at the end. If we play that now, the shadow will sway backwards and forwards with the bending.
8. Colours: So these two fellows are looking pretty great. Now that I've done my animation, I'm not really happy with the color of the background that I've chosen, which is this bottom one, it was locked. So if you just unlock it and select that layer, if you want to change colors, you can do this at any time. So I'm gonna go up to Layer solid settings. And this time, I don't want this green color. I want to be more in the yellow. So I'm just going to drag this slider down into the yellows. And let's say that is good. And okay, I can lock that layer again. Now I can bring in another graphic element which is going to be a circle. So with my ellipse tool, I can drag it out holding Shift and nice circle. I want it to be aligned in the center of this. So you can use your Align panel by doing the vertical and horizontal if you don't have this panel up to Windows and make sure a line is ticked. Now I can move that circle entities the hamburger. And that looks great. What if you didn't want to have mustard? We must have this great. But let's say we wanted to change the mustard into ketchup. All you need to do is go to the effects down to Color Correction. And we're going to apply an effect called hue and saturation. By clicking that, it'll put the effect onto that layer mustard. And this is the human saturation slide. We're going to grab this little dial and drag it over until you find the shape that you're happy with. Simple as that now we have catch up. So now we're done, uh, colors looking fantastic. The last thing we need to do now is export our video.
9. Exporting: So we need to export it as a video from aftereffects and then bring it into Photoshop. We will change it into a gift. So from After Effects and do a File export Add to Render Queue, you will see a timeline changes. Now, we just need to place, find a place where we want to put this. So I'm going to click on the little blue words down there. It'll ask me what I want to save it, choose a place and safe. Once you've done that, you hit the Render button. It'll render and we're good to go. So over in Photoshop now we can open up this video we've created file open. Finally, hamburger that you exported. And here it is. You'll see if you hit the Spacebar, it'll play just like it does in After Effects, but we're in Photoshop. And to export this, all you need to do is go to File export. Save for Web Legacy. It'll give you this dialogue box. It should by default say gif right there. Make sure that it does. We want as many causes as we can. So 256, this is the size it's going to export as. So if you wanted something smaller, like little thumbnail, you could reduce this today, 3, 4, 500 by 500. And Looping options needs to say forever. If you want to give it to play over and over, it's going to loop forever and Save. It's going to ask you where you want to save this. I'm going to save that as Hamburg a gift. Save. And we're done. Now that little animation that you have is a gift and you can go pop it onto your website. Thanks very much for watching. I hope you enjoyed that.
10. Assignment: Now that you've completed this course, go and open up your project files and open the after class assignment. Inside that you will see a breakfast dot PSD. So my assignment to use to take these breakfast items, there's a mode, some pancakes, sausage and eggs and a plate. And apply some of those techniques that I've just taught you to take these still objects and give them life and bounce and make a fun looping. Gif. Feel free to be creative with this if you want to add a face to the mug or the pancake or even the sausage. I'd love to see that. So get creative. Let's see what you can do. Upload your projects, and thanks for taking my course.
Bryan Webb
