Motion Code Made Simple: After Effects Expressions for Beginners

1. 1 Class Introduction: Ready to make after effects feel smarter, faster, and a lot more powerful. Welcome to Motion Code Met simple After effect expressions for beginners. Another exciting class in my Skillshare after effect series. Hi, I'm Eli. And in this class, I will introduce you to one of the most useful features in after effects, expressions. Don't worry. Expressions may sound technical at first, but you're going to break them down in a simple, practical beginner friendly way. You don't need to be a programmer. You just need to understand how expressions can help you automt animation, link properties together, create smarter controls, and build motion graphics that are easier to edit. In this class, you learn how to get smarter with expressions, how to use expression tools, how to explore the expresion language reference, and how expression controls can help you create flexible learning missions. We will also look at five most new after effects expressions that every beginner should understand. These expressions will help you create movement, control values, loop missions, and make your project feel more dynamic. And to bring everything together, we'll create a practical class project, a progress bar linked to percentage text using expressions. This is a clean, useful motion graphic setup you can use in infographics, UI animations, presentations, explaner videos, and real client projects. This class is part of a bigger after effects learning journey. So every skill you learn here connects to the larger goal, hoping you become more confident, creative, and efficient inside after effects. So get after effect open, get comfortable, and let's start making motion code simple. 2. 2 Class Project: In this class, we have one main class project. For this project, you create a progress bar and percentage text admission with expressions. This project is covered in video ED and it brings together many of the ideas we'll explore throughout the class. You will build a progress bar that fills up over time while a percentage number updates automatically under it. Instead of admitting the bar and the text separately, you will connect the boot of them to one simple control using expressions. This is a very useful project because it teaches you how expressions can make your works matter. You'll practice using a slider control, linking properties, controlling skill and creating percentage text that updates automatically. By the end of the project, you'll have a clean practical motion graphics mission that can be used for data visuals, loading screens, UI designs, planer videos, and presentation graphics. Once you complete your project, I encourage you to upload it to the project section. You can keep it simple, or you can customize it with your own colors, phones, layouts, and design style. The goal is not just to copy what I do, but to understand how expressions can help you build missions that are more flexible, more professional, and easier to control. So when you're ready, jump into the project lesson. Follow along step by step and create your own admitedPgress bar. 3. 3 Getting started with expressions: Hey, there in this video, we're going to talk about expressions, and we're going to have our introduction to expressions. So what are expressions? What are expressions? Expressions are basically little pieces of code, which we can add to our project in after effects in order to simplify rather complex tasks. So there are tasks which require a lot of complexities and a lot of keyframes, okay? So it's easier to perform these asks, some of these complex tasks with expressions rather than having to keyframe every single little detail. Okay? Key framing can be frustrating at times and expressions can come to our rescue. Expressions open a whole new world of possibilities. So if you master expressions, working in after effects will become extremely less frustrating. So instead of talking, let's go ahead and see how we can add expressions. So here am I with my new composition. Go ahead and create a new composition. I'll just create an ellipse here, very small ellipse. Yep, and I have my ellipse aligned to the middle of my composition. Yeah. So how do we add expressions? And what can we add expressions to? Expressions can be added basically to any property in after effects that is key flamable. So any property that has a stopwatch icon beside it, just like the ankle property, the position, the scale, the rotation, okay, all of these can be added expressions. Yeah. And it also applies to effect. So let's say we add an effect here. Any effect, we can see that we also have key frameable properties, so it means we can add expressions to these. So how do we go ahead and add expressions? The first thing we need to do is, of course, expose the specific property which we want to add expressions too, so we can use the rotation in this case, for example, and then all you need to do next is hold down Alt or option at the mark and then click on the stopwatch icon, and we immediately, you see that the value turn red, and we have some tools here, and we have this text field. Okay, we have this text field, which you can now write expressions and now we have a default expression, which is transformed dot rotation, and this expression basically references itself, so it won't really do anything. So this is just a default expression, and we have our expression field. This expression field will work just like any text field. Okay, we can write. Our expression, remember their code, so we can write our code. We can delete, we can copy, we can paste, we can do all sorts of things, just like a normal text field. And we can come here, just click here and make this text field even bigger or in case we want to write a longer line of code, you get. So we can increase the size of our space. We can make this smaller. So that's the text field for you. And these are the expression tools, which we won't be looking at in much detail for now. But yeah, that's the expression for you. And then how do we remove an expression? So we can remove an expression by doing the same thing. Okay, that's coming back to the property who need an alt or option in the mark and then clicking back and you can see that we've removed our expression and our values are packed to blue. And that's not the only way to add an expression. We can also add expressions by selecting the value and then come to animations and then add expression. You can see that it has a little short call here, which is all shift equals. So you can use that as well to add your expression. I just added the expression using the animation option. So you can see that the same thing, we have our text, our default text, we have our expression tools, and here we have our expression. So I'm just going to remove the expression so that we now look at some actual example. So for this example, I'm going to first of all, turn my layer into a three D layer by clicking here. And then that's because I want to create or I want to add my expression on my Z rotation, and I want to next move the ankle point for my layer or for my ellipse rather, just here. Here just a bit to the left hand or to the right hand side. So I did that by, of course, using my pan behind tool and just moving it like this. Yeah, next, I want to take my selection tool and align my ellipse or the ankle point back to the middle yeah. So next I want to create an expression or I want to add an expression to my zero rotation so that we have this sort of rotation, okay, so that our ellipse will move or rotate around our anchor point, which is this point. So all I need to do now, of course, is select my zero rotation, either go to Admission and then add expression or do option or alt and click. So the next thing is now add our expression. Now, I just want to type time times 180 and click out. Now, my expression has been added, and if I play now, we're going to see something happen. I didn't see that our ellipse is rotating, in the Z axis along the Z axis. And how is this rotation structured? So when I get back and start to move my time gradually or slowly, we're going to see that from here to 1 second. Is 180 degrees. So my expression is telling after effect to rotate my ellipse by 180 degrees in every second or after every second. So that's basically what my expression is telling me. Now, instead of just creating key films, we can see that all we needed to do was write in a very simple expression, and we have our animision done. And this gets even more interesting because we can easily increase or decrease our speed. So let's say we want to increase our speed and just click here. And instead of 180, we can type 360. And click out. And when we play, we see that our expression or our rotation is down faster, down faster. We can make this even crazier. We can make it as fast as possible. Things we normally can do with keyframe. So we can see that I'm making it rotate by 360,000 degrees in 1 second. Now this is something that's almost impossible with keyframe. So you can see how expressions can really save us. So if I play this, we can see that it's extremely fast, right? So in every second, it does 360,000 degrees. Of rotation. Yeah, so that's expressions for you. That's how incredible expressions can be. And it's even possible to copy expressions. So let's say we have multiple layers. So let's do control the Control D, Control D, to have a lot of them and we have seven layers, and I'm just going to select this guy to this guy hit R, and I'll just go ahead and remove the expressions on each of these ones, each of the duplicates, so that we have no expressions on them. So of course, I'm doing or option and click and that to remove the expression, I'll just close this, and now we have expressions only on this guy. Let's say we want to now copy our expression. All we need to do is select the guy, right click and then copy expression only. And now we can select as many layers as we want and just hit Control V to paste our expressions. So when I open now or when I hit R, can now see that our expression has been pasted right on our Z rotation property of each of these layers. So each of them now is rotating because we copied our expressions from this guy. And we can even go further to paste our expressions on specific properties. It mustn't be the Z rotation. So let me just delete some of them so that you see what I'm seeing. Now we can select, for example, our X rotation and do Control V, and you're going to add the expression to our X rotation. So now we see that we are not only getting the rotation on the Z, we're also getting it on the X axis. So you see what we get because of our rotation on the X axis. Same also with our Y axis, Control V, and now we'll get more interesting or more complex animation, right? And all of them are moving by 360,000 degrees. So that's how crazy expressions can go. And of course, these are just really simple examples. These are just scratching the surface on expressions that are very complex stuff that we can achieve with expression, things that we can't even look at in this course because expressions open a whole new world of possibilities in after effects. So that's it for this video on Introduction to Expressions. Hope you learned something new and interesting. Yeah, and that's it for this one. See you in the next video. Bye bye. 4. 4 Expression tools: Hey, there. Welcome back. In this video, we're going to learn how to use the expression tools in after effect. These are simply the tools we get access to whenever we add an expression. In order to start, I'm going to create my ellipse, a very simple ellipse and align my ellipse to the middle of my composition. In order to see our expression tools, of course, we need to add some expressions. Of course, you can come to our skill, for example, and hold on Alt or Command on the M or option on the MAC rather and click on scale and now we've added scale expression, a default expression, which references itself. And now we have our expression tools here. We have the first guy, the second guy, the third guy, and the fourth guy. So there are four expresion tools. Now the first one is the enable expression button, and this enables our expressions. So unfortunately, we are not seeing anything. We can't see how it works now because we don't have any animion. So what I'll do is just take out our expression and create a little animation. So I'll come to my scale and create a keyframe and come to 1 second and make this 200. Okay? So we have our scale animating 0-200 within a second. Now, select everything here, right click and easy ease, my keyframes. Okay. Now I'll just go ahead and add my expression now to my scale. So create my hold on Alt rather and click to add my expression and now click away. And we have our animission, right? And in order to actually see this thing at work, we actually need to have an expression which modifies our current animation, right? So we can click here and write a simple expressions, which is a value times two. And when I click away, we immediately see that our ellipse gets multiplied, or the skill of our ellipse gets multiplied by two. And with that, I'm very sure you already understand what our expression does. So our exclusion basically takes the value of our skill and multiplies it by times two. So it means each value of our skill. From this keyframe to this keyframe is multiplied by two. Okay? So now this is our expressions, and we can enable our expression by making sure we have this bottom turned on. And if we have it turned on, it's going to be looking blue just like this. So we have our expression, and we can click and turn it off to disable our expression without removing our expression. So our expression is still there only that it's been disabled. Yeah, so that's the enable expressions button for you. The next guy is the pushed expression graph, and this is just like a graph editor. So you actually need the graph editor to see how this guy works. So I'm just going to select our keyframes here and enable our graph editor. So here is our graph editor. Of course, you're familiar with the graph editor. Now, when I enable my pushed expression graph, you're going to see that something has been added to our graph. Okay? So it's the graph editor just like you know it only that we have this new line. So what's this saying it's basically saying that this is our original line. Okay? The new line is actually our original line. That's our original keyframe without the expression. Okay? It's our original keyframe without the expression. And this FICA line, the one that goes above, it's the modified line. Okay? It's the modified graph. So it basically shows us our modified graph or our expressed value over time, just like our graph editor does. Okay? So that's basically the post expression graph for you. That's what it does. It shows us our express value versus our original value side by side. Yeah, that's the expression or the push expression graph. The next guy we have is the expression PiwpT is just like a perentinPi weep just like you know it. And just like we use our perentinPi weep to basically parent one layer to another or one object to another. We can use this pick whip to kind of reference certain attributes, okay, in our expressions. So for example, we can click it to reference see the anchor point, and we can now see that the anchlepoint has been referenced here. And in order to use the Phip tool, you actually have to have that attribute which you want to reference exposed. So even if it's on another layer, say, it's on another layer, let's see, we have some two layers, and we want to reference the attribute on this layer. We actually have to open artribute. So you can solo the attribute, for example, by selecting the attribute and then just hit S two times to solo the attribute, so that you can see that attribute in cases where you have plenty layers. Okay? So now with this, we can go ahead and select our P whip our expressions P Whip, select it, and then reference that attribute. On a different layer. And this can also work when we have effect. So let's say we want to reference an effect. This can also with effect. So I'm just going to do that and delete this duplicate. And this tool actually has a limitation. The limitation of this tool is that you can only reference things you can see, right? So it means the things you are able to reference will have to be in the same composition. So you can reference stuff in a different composition. Okay, so let's say we have a new composition and we have this guy here, Control C, Control V, and we want to reference an attribute here. So we can actually parent from here to here. But there's actually a way we can do that, and that's by just copying it. So you have to select your attribute, which has the expression on it to select it, and then come to edit and then copy with relative properties links. So click and now you can go to your next composition, and let's just delete or remove the expressions from this scale here. So I'm just going to hold on and click to remove the expressions. So you can see that we have new expressions, right? So what I'll do now is select my layer and go to edit. And piste. And now we can see that we have basically pasted our expression. And this is not just a piste. We're not just pasting. We're actually linking this to this. So this is the parent and this is the child, okay? And I'm going to prove that to you right now. Now, I'll just played this so you see? So you see, it's the same thing that's happening here, right? It's the same thing that's happening here. So all I'm going to do right now is basically make this bigger. 400 now, I'm just going to make this bigger, right? I'll just go back here, and now we can see that this guy is bigger now. It follows the parient. So that's a proof that we've been able to parent this attribute to this attribute right here. So basically, that's how to parent expressions across multiple compositions. Yeah, and the next two we have here is the Expressions Language menu. Now, the Expressions Language menu basically contains categories of common expressions with their syntax. Okay? So we have different categories of common expressions. We have lots and lots of them. Okay, we have the global, we have the vector mat, we have the random numbers. And we're going to look at some of them in this video and in subsequent videos. And for example, let's just take a look at one of them or some of them. So let's just delete this expression we have here or create a new one. Now I'm just going to click here and go to interpolation. And let's just add one of these and click away. And we can see that we have an arrow. This is an arrow. And that's because this is actually a placeholder, which we can use to write expressions. So we have values like the T value, the T minimum, the T MAX, the value one, value two, and all of these are actual values we need to impute. So we don't have them imputed. That's why we're having this error. But let's go ahead and look at another type so just click on the Expression Language menu and go to Properties. And for properties now, I'm just going to click on LoopOut. Okay? Now, we are not going to have any error here. Now, let's play this and see what we've got. So as you can see, what it does is it modifies our current admission. It loops our current admission out. Okay? So we are just going to have our current admission repeating as our video keeps playing. So that's also one of the very simple expressions you can add using the Expressions Language menu. So that's the Expressions language menu for you in a nutshell. It contains lots of expressions and expression templates, which can help us build more complex expressions. Okay? Yeah, and that's basically it for the Expression tools, and that's it for this video. See you in the next video. Bye bye. 5. 5 The Expression language reference: Here, welcome back. So the Expression Language reference is a piece of documentation here on Adobe's website. So you can just go ahead and search the expression language reference in after effects, just on your search bar that's on your browser and going to bring you to this place. And of course, it's on the Adobe's website. So this piece of documentation teaches you how to use the Expressions language menu this Expressions language menu here in After effect. So of course, we have all of these categories Okay, of expressions, we have the global the vector mats, the random numbers, interpolation, and so on and so forth. Now, when you come to the expressions language reference, it's going to teach you how to use all of this. Okay? So there's lots and lots of things here to learn, lots and lots of things here to learn. Okay? But you have to, of course, go through them and read through them, okay? Teaches you what the expressions are and the values you need to impute and even gives you examples. There are lots and lots of things here, so we won't go through them all. But we also have the expressions examples. If you click here, you're going to see expressions examples. So we have the wiggle random, and then we have the control wiggle with slider control, so even slider controls, which we're going to look at next, we have examples of that here as well. We also have videos. You can play this to see for yourself. And there are lots and lots of examples. You can really learn a lot with this piece of document. So definitely check it out. Definitely check it out. Yeah. And there is even more. So if you come up here, you're going to see that this is an entire section on expressions. Okay, this is an entire section on expression. So we have expressions basics. So it means you can even start learning about expressions right from here. So you can learn all about expressions right from here. Okay? Understanding the expression language, you have syntax differences where syntax differences between the JavaScript and legacy extended script, okay? And, yeah, basically lots and lots of things here. Definitely check it out. But that's the Expressions language reference for you. And that's definitely it for this very short video on Expressions Language reference, and see you in the next one. Bye bye. 6. 6 Expression controls: Hey, Day. Welcome back. So in this video, we're going to talk about expression controls, and expression controls are a very easy way to link multiple properties or multiple values to one source, okay? And this makes it very easy to use, very easy to mit. And without further, let's just go ahead and see how they work. Okay, so I'm just going to go ahead and create null object, and you can actually add them to any type of layer, not necessarily null object. So you just come to effect and come to expression controls, and you can see them. We have a number of them here. In fact, let me just search them here, controls. So that we can add them all at once. Okay, I'm not seeing. Okay, let me just close this and manually come to the category. So these are the expression controls. So you see them. I just selected all of them, and now I'm just going to add them to my layer. So these are the expression controls. And now the first one is the slider control, and the slider control is a simple slider. Okay, it's a simple slider, and it can be used to control properties for very nice transition, just like 0-100. Let's see opacity or 0-100 or let's say scale 0-100. So you can link all those properties to a slider like this using expressions. We have the point control, and this one just acts like a point. Let me just hide my null object so that we didn't see my null object. The point control is just a point, which can be used to control positions. As you can see, we have the vertical and horizontal position. Okay? We also have this guy, which is the three D point control. It can be used to control both vertical and horizontal and as well as the three D space. So it's just different from the point control in the sense that it has a third slider or third value, which is the three D value. So this is two D, and this is three D. They all do the same thing. They control points like positions. And then we have the layer control, and the layer control basically can be used to select the layer which one wants to reference using expressions. So if we had multiple layers here, we are going to see all of them up here here. So let's say we have this or layer. And select back our non object. And when we come to the layers control, we're going to see that our new layer has appeared here, right? So that's the layer control for you, and it's not very commonly used, but it's one of the expression controls and it's important. We also have the drop down menu, which gives us a drop down menu, which we can then link using expressions. We have the color control, which controls the color. And we're going to see how these things work actually. I'm just going through them so that you see each of them for what they are. Now, these are really simple simple stuff. They just have one or two. Most of them just have one or two options. So we see that the color control has just this color picker, which is used to control the color of the linked properties, right? And we have the checker control, which acts like an on and off button. So you can check this two on the layer. You can check this two of the layer. It basically returns either a positive or a negative value, either true or false. Okay? So the checker control is very effective for creating on and off animation effect. And then we have the last one, which is the angle control. This just serves as an angle. So it's good for linking properties, which can be related with using the angular slider. You get properties like the rotation, properties like that, which can be related with using this 360 degrees angle slider. Yeah, so that's basically what they are. Now, let's look at some of them in detail. I'm just going to delete all of these. And now you can add your layer control to a null object. You can add it to basically any layer. So I'm just going to delete this new solid. I'm also going to delete the null object to that. We just add it to our layer. Now, I'm just going to create a new ellipse. So let's create our ellipse. We're always using our ellipse. Let's create our ellipse, and let's just centralize our ellipse or align it to the middle of our composition. Yeah. So align our ellipse, and now let's look at the first guy, which is the slider control in this case. So select your ellipse. You either go to effect and then effect control, and then slider control. So add the slider control, and this is just the slider control, like we said, it's used to generate values 0-100, just like this. So what we need to do now is go to the property which we want to relate the slider control to or connect the slider control to. So in this case, I'm going to use my scale, for example. So just come to your scale and then Hulan Alt or option at the MAC and create your expression. So you can see that we have our new expression, and all we need to do now is select the pick whip tool and drag it to our slider control and release it. Now automatically, it creates our expression for us, and when we click out, you can see that our expression has been added without any arrow. So it means it's been collected now, and now you can immediately see that the scale for our ellipse turns to zero. So when we make this big, we can see that now we're taking the scale or we are basically controlling the scale using our slider control here. So you can just create a keyframe on your slider control. Let's make this zero. Yeah, it's zero now. So create a keyframe here, come to some frems, S eight frames, and then make this 100. Hit you, select everything easy. Now, we've basically created this animation using our slider control, so we can see how easy it is to connect to our slider controls. So I'm just going to hold them Alt and click, not this. Hold the Alt on the scale and click to remove our effect. So we can see that now they are no longer connected. I'm just going to delete this and look at the next guy, which is our point control. So our point control, we can go to effect and add our point control. Point control. And for point control, all we need to do is go into our properties and then go to say our position. So create a keyframe for your position or hold down Alt and click to create an expression and basically link your position to your slider or to your point control. Okay? So with this now, it's been linked, and we have no arrows, and with this now, we can go ahead and start changing the direction. Or the position rather of our shape using our slider control, and we can even use this to specify specific positions. Yeah. So that's basically it for the slider control, and the slider control will work in the same fashion. Only that we're going to have a third option here, which enables us to control the three D dimension of our layer of our ship. So I'm just going to delete this expression from our position to hold on Alton click to remove the expression and delete our point control. Perfect. Now the next one we're going to look at is the color control. Let's look at the color control. Let's see, the color control. So we have to first of all, go into the properties, that's ellipse and then go into parts. Okay? Or instead of going to the properties, let's just search for color because that's the property we are targeting, right? So search for color enter and now we have the color. We have the field color here. We also have the effect color. Of course, this is the color relating to the color control. So you don't want to be linking this. You want to be linking the field color of the layer. Okay? So hold on Alt or command on the mark and click here to create your expression and use your Phip to drag it here and click away. And right away, we see that it now copies the color of our layer. So we can change the color and this is going to work with multiple layers. This can work with multiple layers later duplicate this and open the color property and delete or remove the Q frame and basically create a new q frame or rather create a new expression and then connect it to our control, our color control. And let's just move this so that we see that we are not changing the color of multiple layers. So let's Okay, sorry, we can see that as we duplicated this, we actually are duplicating our color control, right? So it means we have different color controls for each of these layers. So we actually want to have only one layer selected. So let's choose one layer. Let's choose Layer one, or we can just create a new null object and then add the color control effect on the null object and relate all of these to the color effect control on the null object. Okay? So we can do that as well. Or we can just use one of these layers. So let's use layer one. And since we always want to have Our layer visible here. The effects on our layer visible here. One thing we have to do now is come here and click on this Toggle viewer log. So this will lock our effect control so that we only have the effect on layer one showing we get. So we can open this and go into our field column. Now, let's do this all over again. So we can just click here to remove it and then click that len click to add it and take this and connect. Click away. So it's now been driven by our color control. Yeah. So this is the first guy now we can do this to others as well. So we can select this guy, pink up the color property. Remove the effect here or the expression here by holding down Alt and clicking. Now we have our normal color now we can do Alt and click and take the pick whip and then relate it to our color control on layer one. Click away. And now we can tear out our layer two color is now driven by the color control on layer one. So it means we can take this and basically control the boot layers or key the color on the boot layers. And with this, we can do the same thing to multiple layers. So we can use one color control. To drive the colors of multiple layers. We can do this for the third one, Hulam and click to remove, then Hulu Alt and click to add the new expression and do the same thing, click away, and now we can drive the colors for all three layers. Just using one expression. Incredible. Now they just did it two and look at the next expression control. I'm just going to unlock the effect control panel, and let's look at and let's delete the color control and look at the next guy. Now the next guy is the checker box control, like I said before, it gives us two values, positive or negative. So it's also very good for on and off scenarios. So let's try to create an on and off scenario using this expression control. So what do we do? We go to our transform property. And then go to the opacity, right? So we want to create an on and off effect, so on and off using the opacity. So all we need to do, of course, is hold on t or option on the mark, click her to create our expression. Okay, and we want to type in something now. We actually want to type in something because this is a bit more complex than the ones we just looked at. So we want to type I and then open parenthesis. And now we are inside our parenthesis. So what we want to do inside our parenthesis is just go ahead and pick our Pick Whip tool and drag it and drop on the checkbox effect. And now we have it referenced in our checkbox. Now the next thing we have to do is go ahead and type greater than zero, and then come out of our parentheses and create a curly bracket. Open curly bracket, close Core bracket, and then inside our car bracket, we're going to write 100 and outside and then go outside and then write else. And after else, we're going to create another curly bracket and close Core bracket, and then inside our curly bracket, this time, we're going to write zero, and then click out. So we can now see that immediately, it turns our layer of it turns our opacity of now, let me just click this to enable our opacity. And let's see what we route here. Now, this is what we call IL statement. Okay? This is an IL expression. Now, what am I saying is, if our checker box is greater than zero. If the value our checker box returns is greater than zero, it should give us 100% on opacity, else, give us 0% on opacity. Okay? So that's basically what we are seeing here. So if our checker box returns a value of zero, and, of course, you know, zero is off, right, and one is on because it gives us either of two values, zeros and ones. Okay? So zero means off and one means on or zero means false, and then one means true, right? So if our checkbox returns a value greater than zero, it should make our opacity 100 else, it should make our opacity zero. So that's basically the expression here. And with this, we can drive the on and off effect or transition on our layer using the checkbox control. So that's basically this very simple but useful expression. I'm just going to delete this so that we look at the next guy. Now the next guy is the angular control. Okay, so select your guy and then add an angle control, go to effects, go to expression controls, and then angle control. Now, like I said before, this gives us the ability to create angular manipulations, right? So go to your transform property. And I'm just going to remove my expression here by holding down Alt and clicking. So we have removed our expression. And for this, we want to be using our rotation to experiment. And I'm just going to turn this into a treed layer. Okay. And now we have a TD layer, and let's go ahead and drive our Y rotation. Y axis rotation. So you need to come to the YX rotation hold on Alt or option on the MAC and then click here and take your Pick Whip too and drop it on the angular control and just click away, and now you can drive your rotation using your angle control. Yeah, so that's basically it for your angle control, and that's basically it, guys for expression controls and after effect. Hope you learn something new. And that's it for this video. See you in the next one. Bye bye. 7. 7 5 must know after effect expressions: Hey, welcome back. In this video, we're going to learn how to use five fairly simple yet incredible expressions in after effect. So I have my new composition. Go ahead and create a new composition. I will create my first shape, which is a rectangle and align my shape with the middle of my composition. Perfect. And I'll just pick or open my position property and create a keyframe for position. I want to bring my position to the left hand side of my composition, create a keyframe here, come to 1 second, and then bring it to the right hand side of my composition. Okay? So just this very simple animion is what we want to create. Yeah, I select everything and EZ Es my key frames. So I have this movement from left to right. And what I want to do is just come to 2 seconds and copy my first key frame and piece. Yeah. So we have this very simple animation for the position property. Now the first expression I want you to learn is the loop in and loopOut expression. So the loop out and loop in expression. All you need to do now is come here and learn all and click to add your expression, and we just type Loop so we loop and then out with a big O, loop out and we can see the expression right here. So you just want to do open and closed parenthesis and you really don't need to type anything else. Just click away and play your animation. So after our Q frames, we have it animating down till the end. And we also have the looping animation. Now, the looping animation creates keyframes or creates the loop animation before our Q frames. For this, we can just move our Q frames to the middle just like this. And then instead of loop out now, I'm just going to type Loop in with I. Loop in, and click away. And when I play it, we're going to see that it creates this loop in admission before our keyframes. Now, after our Q frames, we are not going to have any other animations. So we can see that our animation stops after our q frames. So basically, that's a loop in and loop out on admission for you. Very simple but very effective and very useful. It's one of the most commonly used expressions. Now, you can also add this expression by just coming to the expression language menu and then go to properties. And now you see on the properties, you're going to see them, loop out loop in. So you want to be using one of them so you can go with the loop out this particular loop out, the loop out, this one. So you can go with this and basically, it's going to do the same thing we've done so far. And here, that's the loop out animation for you. Now let's look at the next guy. I'm going to remove my expression by hooding down all to a command and clicking here to remove my expression. And I will just remove my keyframes and basically reset my property is incredible. Now, I want to bring my uncle point to the middle, so I'm just going to hold down Control Alt and home or command option home on the MAC and then furthermore, align my shape to my composition. Close this. Now the next guy is the wiggle expression. So the wiggle expression is also very popular and very useful expression in after effects, and it can do great things. It can do magic. So for this example, I'm going to use the position, so hold down Alt and click to add the expression and then just type wiggle and then open and close parenthesis and then for this example, I'm going to type seven comma 45 and click away. And right away, we've added the wiggle property. Now we can play it and see what's happening, right? So the wiggle expression basically wiggles our ship or our layer along or about a specified amount of pixels using a specified amount of frequency. Now, these numbers we have here, seven command 45 are the frequency. So seven is the frequency and 45 is the amplitude. Now, this means that seven times in 1 second, the ship emits 45 pixels above and below the start value. Okay, so the frequency is seven. It means seven times per second, the shape mites above and below 45 pixels from the start value. Okay? So let's say we make this instead of 40 5405. We go see that the distance which it covers increases, because we've increased the amplitude, we've increased the boundary around which it wiggles. Okay, we can make this 70 to also increase the speed or the frequency of our wiggling. So we see that it's wiggle very frequent, very frequent. So that's basically the wiggle expression for you. You can add it to multiple properties, not just the position. So I'm just going to remove it here and look at the next guy. Now the next guy is a time expression. So we looked at the time expression before. I'm just going to make this longer. So this is a rectangle now, and I'll just open my transform and go to my rotation and hold down all and click and add the time expression. So for the time expression, all I need to do is type in time and asterisks and say 360. So time times 360. So if you play this, we're going to see that object is rotating, right? So what it does is it rotates 360 degrees in 1 second. So we can start here and we're going to see that in 1 second, it covers the same or it completes a 360 degrees rotation. So this is what we've got. And one secret with this is or maybe not the secret, we can go counterclockwise by just putting a minus in front of 360. Okay? So we're going counter clockwise. So it means we can just do something like this, can duplicate this guy hit Eu times. So E, E E to bring up the expression for that layer, and let's turn this two plus. Or let's remove the minus from this. So when we do this, we're going to see that we're going to be having this sort of animation. This one admitting clockwise, while this one animitting counter clockwise, all with expressions. And we can increase the speed basically by just making this a bigger value, right? Let's make this 3,600 and see. Incredible. Yeah, so these are some of the things we can achieve using expressions, using the time expression. Now we can go even further by adding the time expression to say an effect. So let's go ahead and add the turbulent displace effect. To our layer. So turbulent displays, this our effect. We can add the time expression to say the evolution. So down all the click and just do time times 360 or whatever value is 720, click away. Right away, we can see that, let me just remove. Let me just disable this guy, disable this one so that we see the effect we get only from our turbulent displays. So we can see we are driving the admission on our evolution just using the time expression. Incredible. Now, let me just delete this guy and look at the next guy. The next guy, let's hit E times and remove the expression, look at the next guy. Now the next guy is the random expression. For the random expression, I'm going to hit T to open the opacity, and I'm going to add the random expression to my opacity. So I'm just going to click Hold down O and click to add the expression, and I'm going to type random. And then after random, I'll do open and closed parenthesis and ten comma 100. Now, what I'm telling after effect to do is randomize the value for our opacity 10-100. So it's creating a random animion of our opacity from value ten to value 100. So you can keep playing and it loops everything out from start to end. We can as well change the values here. We can even remove the ten completely if we want it to actually start from zero. So you see that starting from zero and just randomizing our animation, our opacity. That's the random expression for you. You can try it on other properties as well, not just the opacity. Now the next and final expression we're going to be looking at in this video is what we call the matt round expression or the match round expression. I'm just going to take my text tool here and create a text. Let's make this zero. Okay, make the zero and align the anchor points to the middle to control Alt Hum ki or command lt, Hum key or command option Hom key on the mark, rather, and then just make this centralized. Okay. Incredible. Now, next thing I want to do is select and then go to effect and add a slider control. So come to expression controls and then slider control. And what I want to do is come here, open this up, go to my text and go to my source text. Hold down all to command and click to create an expression and just take my Pick Whip tool and drag this to the slider control and release and click away. Now, what happens is, if I open my slider control and move this from zero to whatever value I want, we can see this animating or basically moving 0-100. Right? Yeah, so this is what we get. We are able to modify the values of our source text. Yeah, so that's what we get with this. And we can now see that we have this in fractions. We have this in decimal places, and this can be a little bit problematic. So we can use the march round expression to actually solve this. So let's come here, for example, so that we see the whole numbers or the fractions properly and just come to our expression. And then under our expression, we're going to type in the march round expression. So in front of your expression, that's your current expression, just type march round. So the has to be a big letter, captul letter, and then mart dot round. So you do dot round and then open parenthesis and then you don't need to close the parenthesis. Just delete this close parenthesis, but come here and close it. Come here and close the parenthesis. Basically, that's it. We have two parentheses here. Now you can click away and now we see immediately that our number gets adjusted or gets rounded up using our expression. Now we can of course, bring this aligns to the middle and see that everything now works perfectly. Everything has been rounded off now works perfectly. And we can use our paragraph tool here to centralize our text and furthermore, align it or the ankle point to the middle and then centralize or align the entire text to the composition. So we have everything going perfectly. Now, we can create a keyframe of course, come here, click and then come to 4 seconds, and make this say 55. So we have it a meeting 0-55. Incredible. So let's say we want to add, say, a symbol, something like maybe $1 sign so that we have everything going from $0 to $55. You can do that with expressions as well. So all we need to do for this is come here under expression, and let's go ahead and type the quotation mark to open and close quotation. And then inside our quotation mark, we have to put in our dollar sign and then go out, and then between our quotation mark and our MT round, we have to use the plus symbol. So we are doing the dollar sign, plus our MT round, and then our slider control, which gives us our value. So we now see that the dollar sign appears in front of our text. Incredible. Yeah, so we can as well select our text. And let's say we don't want our dollar sign to be moving, we can just maybe just align to the left hand side or justify it to the left and side and align everything the middle of our composition. And now we see that the dollar sign remains static while the other texts animates. That's basically it for these five little but important expressions. Now, expressions can be a really overwhelming topic, and there are lots and lots of things to look at in expressions, okay? So if you are trying to create something in after effects and you want to use expressions and you don't know what to do, the easiest way to find a way around that kind of situation is just go ahead and Google it. Okay? It's very easy to find help with expressions online. It's very easy. I've used that method to navigate through some problems as well because expressions can sometimes be overwhelming. And with this, we'll come to the end of our video on these five fairly simple yet important expressions. See you in the next video. Bye. 8. 8 Class Project Loading bar animation: Heyday, we comeback. So in this exercise, we are going to create a simple very powerful motion graphic setup in after effects, progress bar that is linked to percentage text using expressions. This exact admission you can see on your screen right now. This is what we're going to be creating in this exercise. And this is the kind of animion you can use in infographics, explana videos, UI style animations, presentations, loading animations, and deta diving motion graphics, basically. And the best part is that instead of animating the bar and the text separately, we are going to be connecting both of them to one control so that they update together automatically. That makes the admission faster. It makes it cleaner and much more easier to edit. Let's go on to see how to do this. First things first, I'll create a new composition by clicking here. Now nim do exercise. Make sure I am using the 1920 by ten TP and 30 frames per second. Just hit okay. Next, I'll create a new solid, right click New and solid. Heat okay. The next thing I want to do is actually give my solid a gradient ramp effect. And for this black color, I will just change it to a very light blue, very light and subtle, move it here. Maybe for this point, I'll have it here. Just something that looks like this. Good. Next thing I'll do is actually lock my background layer and then go on to select my ship, my rectangular ship layer, and create my rectangle. This rectangle will be the Louden bar. I'll select my rectangle and do Control Alt home to move the anchor point of my rectangle to the middle of my rectangle. I'll do control home to move my rectangle to the middle of my composition, or just go to the align panel and align my rectangle to the middle of my composition. Next thing I'll do is open up my rectangle shape, and then go on to rectangle path one, open it up and just increase my roundness to about 30 and give this a field colour with a very neutral field colour that just turns out from the background slightly. Perfect. I'll close this and we need to rename this the progress bar. So progress bar one. I'll just duplicate my progress bar to have the progress bar two, which would be the main progress bar. And this one will also have an effect. I'll give you the gradient ram effect. And I'll make this darker blue and make this a brighter blue. I just adjust their points like this. And just slightly further adjust my gradient. Yeah, maybe for this, I'll use this color. So this looks good. The next thing we're going to do is actually create a null object. Create a null object, and we're going to rename this null object, progress control. So progress control. And after our null object, we're going to create our text layer, which will hold our percentage text. I'm just going to write 0% here. Now do Control Alt home or command thom to actually move my ankle point to the middle and just come and align my text to the middle of my composition. Now, bring my text down a bit. Select my text and every other thing and just make sure we're having something that looks balanced composition that looks balanced. Okay, this looks good. Perfect. And for my text, I can also add a gradient ramp to give you that bit of beauty. You can make this whatever color you want. It could be gray, it could be bluish, like what we had. Here looking perfect. And now we need the control layer that will drive the whole animation. Now we have our null object, and we're going to be adding an effect to our null object. We're going to go to effect and expressions control, and then slider control. I'm just going to renew my slider control effect to progress. Perfect. Next, I want the fill bar to grow based on the slider value. Easiest way to do that is to actually connect the bar's scale to the slider, so we can open this up. But before I do that, I will actually have to move the anchor point for our fill bar right here so that it scales from here and fills the bar. Okay? So let's make sure our anchor point is right here. This looks perfect. Good. Now we need to go on to open the skill value of our bar and connect it to our slider control, which is this. But again, our skill value has the width and height values. They are currently linked, and I only want the width value to change and not the height value, right? I want the width value to change like this and not the height value because that will mean it's changing like this, which is not what we want. So in order to achieve that, I'm actually going to use an expression. This is what you have to do, select the progress control so that you see the slider control effect and then come to the progress barrier and use the PC whip, which is attached to the scale property and drag it and drop on the slider control effect, just like this. So this what we have now. We just need to hold down and click here, alter option on the mark and click here and then type in our expression that instructs after effects to link only the width property and not the height property. Now go on and type this expression P space, equal space, and then put in this comp or ident to select it, and then that layer Hidnt. Inside my bracket, I'm going to use the double quotation mark, and inside my double quotation mark, I'm going to write progress control. Okay, so we are referencing our progress control layer. And then we want to come out to the bracket and do that effect, hiddena and double quotation mark. This time, I'm going to write progress. So we're referencing this effect, which we named progress, this effect, which is attached to our node object, okay? Let's go back and continue writing in our code. We can see that because we deselected and stopped writing our code, we got a bit of error. Now you also need to do open closed bracket. And inside your bracket, you're going to do the double quotation mark and type slider and go out and do the semiclum Hid enter to go to the next line, and we're going to do the square bracket and P, comma space and then value And then open and close Quare bracket one, and just click out to complete your expression. Now, let's go on to explain what our expression actually says. Now in this line you see go to this layer. Which is the progress control layer, which is this layer, and then look for this effect, which is the slider effect named progress, and then get the value from the slider. When you get the value from the slider, store the value under the variable named P. So this is what we are literally telling after effects to do. So if the slider is currently at 40%, then the value of P will be 40%. Let's go to explain the next line. The next line is saying the skill value for the progress bar should be the value of P on the X axis and one on the Y axis. And one is usually the default of value on the Y axis. So it means the X axis changes while the Y axis remains constant. And of course, in this case, the X axis represents the width, while the Y axis represents the height, since we are not trying to change the height but only the width. Perfect. Now, all we need to do is come and open our slider and just adjust our slider. Now we're going to see that our loading bar animate alongside our slider. Isn't that incredible? That is incredible. Now let's go on to link our percentage text to our slider control. So in order to do this, we need to, of course, close all of this, select our text layer, open it up, go to text, and go to source text. Hold down all the ocean and click on your stop watch icon. And now we need to go on to write this expression P space equals space and this comp. And then dot layer, closed bracket, and then we want to reference with double quotation mark, the progress control. So here we have it. You can click here. We're not done yet, and go out of your brackets, hit dots and then effect KdnalPgress And then go out of your bracket, then open enclosed bracket, open otition mark and slider, go out and semicolon. Hint to go to the next line, and I'm just going to do the mat round expression. And we're going to do P, go out one piece, plus, one piece and the double quotation mark, and we want to put in percentage here and click out. Incredible. Now what did we just do? This expression is basically similar with what we did previously. So this line, what it basically does is it gets the value from the slider and stores it as P. So if the slider is 2%, P will be 2%. If the slider is 72%, P will be 72%. And this line, what it does is it turns the slider value into readable percentage text. Sometimes the slider may produce decimal numbers like 5.5 or 50.001 or something like that. So, of course, what the Mt dot round expression does is, it rounds that number to a whole number and then adds the percentage symbol after it. It's basically as simple as that. So now when we come and select our progress control and push it to the right hand side, we see that both our progress bar and our text are being animated. Of course, we can further centralize this so that it looks more centralized. This looks perfect. So now the next thing we need to do is actually select our progress control, open this up, and click here to create a qframe hit you to view our qframe we're just going to animit this 0-100%. So this should be 100%, and this should be 0%. You go 0-100%. Incredible. Of course, you can select these and eases them. Incredible. And that's it for this exercise. See you in the next one. Bye bye. 9. 9 Conclusion: Congratulations on completing the class. You've taken an important step into one of the most powerful as of after effect. In this class, you learn what expressions are, how to start working with them, how to use expression tools, how to explore the expression language reference, and how expression controls can help you build smarter animations. You also created a practical class project, a progress bar linked to percentage text using expressions. That project may look simple, but the idea behind it is powerful. You learned how one control can drive multiple parts of an admission, which is the foundation of more advanced motion graphic systems. Before you move on, make sure you complete and upload your class project. I'd love to see your progress bar animation, especially if you customize it with your own design style. And because this class is part of a wider after effect series, I encourage you to continue with the next class so you can keep building your skills step by step. If you miss any of the previous classes, you can also go back and take them so that the foundation becomes even stronger. Thank you so much for joining me in this class. Keep practicing, keep experimenting and remember, expressions are not here to make after effects complicated. They're here to help you work smarter and it faster and create with more control.