Motion Design Kick Starter: Pops and Bursts in Adobe After Effects

1. Introduction: [MUSIC] Hello. I'm Russ Etheridge. Today, we're going to make some simple pops and bursts in After Effects. I'm a freelance animator and director based in Brighton in the UK. I've worked in the animation industry for about 10 years, working on things like visual effects, motion design, and 2D and 3D character animation. This class is intended to be a first toe dip into After Effects animation, so I'll be taking you through everything you need to know to make a simple graphic style pop, like an After Effects motion graphics kick-starter. I'll be covering just the essential parts of After Effects to get you going, and we'll be specifically looking at making a simple animation using Shape Layers. Shape Layers are basically After Effects' vector drawing tools like what you'd find in something like Adobe Illustrator. I'll be putting a bit of extra emphasis on the animation side so that the motion looks and feels really nice, and you'll be following me through step-by-step. This class is suitable for people who are completely new to After Effects. Then at the end, I'll be setting a hands-on class project so that you can try out your new knowledge to make something unique. We'll be covering a quick intro to the After Effects interface, just the main parts for your popping purposes, and then an intro to Shape Layers, the ins and outs of what they do and how they work. We'll be making one main pop animation that looks like this. [NOISE] Then once the pop animation is ready, we'll be adding that to a pre-made balloon template animation that I've made and is available in the class materials. Finally, I'll take you through some variations on the pop animation that I've made just to give you some ideas for when it comes for you to make an original pop of your own. I hope that once you've completed this class, you have got the grips of the basics of After Effects, as well as a good knowledge of Shape Layers and the timeline so that you can make some satisfying animations with them. Let's pop. [MUSIC] 2. Class Overview: [NOISE] To sum up the main objective of this class is we're going to be using After Effects to create a very simple graphic-style animation of a pop. We're going to do this by just focusing on the main things in After Effects that we're going to need to be able to do this without getting too bogged down in all the things that After Effects can do because After Effects can do a lot of things. Then by the end, you're going to have this very satisfying burst animation that's useful in lots of different situations. Years ago, I saved myself a little pop animation preset and I keep going back to it and using it and those are different projects because it's just such a useful thing. Not just for when things pop like balloons, but also when things just appear or disappear on the screen, you can just use a little burst for that, like graphics, text, icons, even characters, you can do that, or even just highlighting something that's happening on the screen. If there's a light blinking, it's useful to have a little pop animation next to it. So it's useful in tons of different ways and it's something that is great to just keep in your back pocket. So let's have a quick rundown of everything that we're going to be covering in this class. First, we'll be looking at the After Effects interface, basically what you see when you first open the program. After that, we'll make what's called a composition, which is basically where you do all your work in After Effects. In that composition or comp for sure, we'll be making a shape layer. I'll take you through what shape layers are and what they do because that's how we're going to be making our pop. After that, I'll be taking you through the various animation tools that we'll need to make it actually move. We'll have a very quick look at the graph editor, which is a little bit more of an advanced tool which you don't often get in beginners After Effects classes. But in this situation, I think it's going to be useful to make our pop look really nice. So I think it's worth it. Once the pop is animated, I'll take you through how to add it to the balloon template animation that I've provided so that our balloons can pop with our beautiful burst motion. Finally, we'll need to export our animation so that we can actually watch it. I'll take you through the process of just outputting an MP4 from After Effects. Make sure you watch through to the last video because I'm going to be setting you a class project so that you can apply the knowledge that you've learned in the class , say something practical. Then you can post your animation in the class project section, and I'll be there grading them really harshly. Make sure you do a good job, no pressure. Hopefully, the plan is all nice and clear. In the next video, I'm just going to quickly take you through the balloon template project that I've supplied in the class materials so that you know what we're going to make. I'll see you there. 3. A Closer Look at the Class Materials: In this lesson, I'm going to quickly show you the balloon template project that's available in the class materials, although we're not going to be covering exactly how I made the balloons in this class. The template is there if you want to explore it yourself. But I just thought it'd be way more fun to have something to put your pops on, rather than just ending the class with a pop by itself. I thought it would be useful for you to see what we're going to be making and also what's included in the project so that it's in your brains before we get down to the nitty-gritty. It's not essential to follow along in this lesson, but if you want to, make sure you go to the class materials and download BalloonsTEMPLATE.aep. We're going to be using it later anyway, so make sure you have it. Let's get to it. This is my After Effects pop template. These are all the pops that I've made. I'm going to supply the balloons template and I'm going to supply all the pops that I've made in the class materials, so make sure to check that out. I'm just going to show you everything that I've made and then what we're going to make and then I'll start a completely fresh After Effects project and will make the pop from scratch. This is the balloons template, Balloons__00. This is the balloons, so we just hit "Play" on this. These are the balloons popping with no animation at all. Then this is the pop that I'm going to go into a lot of detail on how to make. [NOISE] Then this is all of it combined together, so this is the balloons and the pop [NOISE]. It makes a very nice clean motion graphics pop, which might be useful in a scene like this. Then I'll just quickly show you the other ones I've made, so this is the second one, variation on that. [NOISE] This is like sparkles. Then we've got this, I guess, slightly more anime type pop and then we have balloon 4, its's a bit more like another fireworks type one, where we got the lines coming out and then we've got some line sparkles as well. Finally, the fifth one I made, this nice moon-shaped pops, which are a bit more like mini animate explosions as well, with a little bit of line detail there and I've also colored these ones to match the balloon color. This one almost looks like the actual material of the balloon is popping away. With that, I'm going to go into a little bit more detail later with the balloons 2,3,4 and 5. But for now we're going to focus on the first pop as an introduction to shape layers. As you can see in here, in pop 1, it's just one shape layer, everything is just happening on one shape layer and if I press "U" it will show me the key frames, so this is quite nice simple keyframes. If I just show the balloon's comps slightly, expand this, there's quite a lot going on in here and there's pretty comps and things, so feel free to explore that in your own time. I'm not going to be covering how I animated all this stuff. But it's all pretty straightforward, so once you've got to grips with After Effects, go ahead and have a look at how I've made this, it's all fairly straightforward. The most tricky thing was getting the wiggling string underneath the balloons. Everything else is just a shape layer animated at different speeds and things like that. Great. That's the balloon template and ultimately what we'll be integrating our pops into. In the next lesson, we'll be looking at the After Effects interface, basically what you see when you open it up for the first time, so I'll see you there. 4. After Effects Interface: [BACKGROUND] Hello, so in this lesson, we're going to be looking at the After Effects interface and we're going to be focusing on the parts that we're going to be using to actually make our pop. Like I said earlier, we're not going to be looking at everything After Effects has to offer because we'd be here all day long. We'll be just looking at the essentials just to get you up and running. This is After Effects, so let's start a new project. I'm going to File, Close Project. When you close a project in After Effects, it just gives you a blank project. You can see up here it says untitled project. I'm on Windows so if you're on a Mac, things might look slightly different, but the main interface of After Effects should be the same. I can't actually remember when you first open After Effects, what layout you are presented with. Things in the middle should be roughly the same, but over on the right-hand side, these panels might look slightly different, so don't worry if this slightly different. This is the area in which we're not really going to be looking at anyway, so don't worry about that for now. If you want to get it to look like this, hopefully if you press "Default "up here, these are the different panel layouts that you can load out. You can even save your own one, I've got a rough space there. But if you press "Default", hopefully it'll look pretty much like what I've got here. There's a lot of After Effects. After Effects is a program that takes a long time to learn every aspect of it, but you can get going quite quickly, particularly if you've got any Photoshop experience, it's very similar in terms of the layer system, but the layout is completely different. Obviously this is geared around making video rather than stills. If you don't have Photoshop, After Effects actually does a lot of the things that Photoshop does. In some ways, it doesn't mean slightly different ways in After Effects, things happen live so you can change things more easily. In Photoshop, a lot of the effects and ways you might make masks and things like that are irreversible, they're destructive so once you've done something to a layer, you can't go back unless you undo. Whereas in After Effects, things tend to be a bit more live and editable, which makes them animatable as well. That's the main difference between After Effects and Photoshop just as a point of reference for those of you that know of Photoshop. Let's get into the interface. Up right at the top here is all your tools. The main tools you'll be using is this selection tool, which you use to drag things around, click on things and move things around inside the panel, so we'll get to that in a minute. The other ones we don't have to worry too much about. This one is like the pen tool, there is zoom tool the next few things are to do with 3D. This Anchor Point tool is very useful and then there's your shape tools, pen tool and text tool, and then these are brush tools and things which we're definitely not going to get into today, and these ones [inaudible] These ones are a bit more advanced and they're a bit more for compositing and advanced animation, so we're not going to get on that today. But the main ones we will be focusing on are the shape tools because we're going to be making a shape layer. But we're not really going to be making complicated shapes we're just making lines, so we're probably use the pen tool. If you were making shape like we did with the other pop animations, I think I made some circles and stuff, so those would be made using here. We can't do it right now because we haven't got a composition open. But if you drop this down, you can select some different shapes. Moving away from the tools we've got the Project Window. This is another main window that you'd be using everything that you make in After Effects appears here. If you import images or videos, they appear here. If you make a composition which we'll be doing in a second that appears here, audio files, etc. Everything goes into this window here. Then moving down to the timeline once you make a composition, this timeline becomes active and this is where all your layers will appear down here and over here is where your timeline is. You can go from zero time and then you can play forwards in time across here. There's various tools to zoom in and out and use this a bit better. Then in the middle here, the big window is where you can see all your things that you're making, so this is your main viewer. It's a little bit confusing with a blank project, so let's make a composition and everything should become a bit clearer. That's a super quick rundown of what you see when you open After Effects. But like I said, the best way to understand it is probably just to get started. When the next lesson we'll be setting up our After Effects project and we'll be making a composition with all the settings we need to get started on our pop animation. I'll see you there. 5. Setting up a New Project: Making a Comp: We had a quick look at After Effects, but things don't really come to life until you make a composition to start working in. Compositions or comps for sure are where you do all your work in After Effects. If you're used to something like Photoshop, where you make a new document and you do all your work in there, it's the same thing. But in After Effects the difference is you can have multiple compositions in one project. What that lets you do is actually nest compositions inside each other so you can have one composition and then you can bring all that work into another composition as one layer. That's actually the basis of a lot of powerful stuff that you can do in After Effects. We'll be touching on this a little bit later on when we add our pop animation inside the balloon animation. But for now let's just focus on getting the settings right for a new composition so that we can start making our pop. To make a new composition, you can either go up to composition up here and click "New Composition", or there's a handy button down at the bottom of the project window which you can just click. You should be presented with this window, which is your composition settings. You need to decide on the size, frame rate, and the length as the main things. Hopefully, your default will be standard HD size, which is 1920 by 1080. If it's not that, make it that. The frame rate, we're going to work at 24 frames a second. Set your frame rate to 24 and set your duration to, this is called a time-code, the way this works, and it's basically just hours, minutes, seconds, and frames. We want this to be fairly short, otherwise you can have a massive long composition and we're not going to be really using it. Set this to zero and let's work at 10 seconds because it's good length, and set this to zero, so it'd be 10 seconds and 0 frames. Make sure everything is looking the same as mine. Click "Okay", and we've got our composition. You can see up here, comp one has appeared in the project window, and then down here this is our composition open. It's got nothing in it at the moment, so it's just blank. We've got a black screen, which is just nothing in it. This is our comp. This is the HD comp that we just made. Just to quickly look at the comp window we've got, this is your zoom. If you want to zoom into your comp, you can go to 100 percent. We're at 50 percent at the moment because I'm on fairly small screen, and you can set your resolution here, which speeds things up. If your computer is running a bit slowly, it will speed up your preview time. There's other things here which are quite more advanced settings. You don't really need to look at these too much, but I hope you explore in your own time. This shows you things that are transparent. This turns your guides on and off your mass and shape path visibility, which you just went on actually at the moment. Don't worry too much about that. Then let's turn this one on. I'm going to turn on Title/Action Safe. What that does is it just gives you a few guides on top that allow you to make things a bit more accurately. Because we're going to be making our pop right in the middle, I want it to be quite accurately in the middle. It's not 100 percent necessary right now, but I think it's good practice. Make sure, when you're making things, that you're aware of where they're going, because it's quite important when you're animating to be nice and clean and tidy with the things that you're making. Switch on "Title and Action Safe" by clicking on this target little button and then turning on Title Action Safe. Great, so let's just quickly recap what we learned in this lesson. We clicked on our make new composition button. Next, we looked at the comp settings window that popped up, and we made sure that we were working at 1920 by 1080, and that we're working at 24 frames a second. Then we set our comp length to 10 seconds. After that, we saw that a new comp had been added to the project window and that the timeline for that comp was added to the timeline window. Then we had a quick look at some of the settings that you get around the comp viewer, including the zoom in and out. Finally, we turned on our action safe guides so that we can see where the middle is, which is really useful for when we're going to be making our pop. In the next video, we're going to actually start making our pop. We're going to start looking at shape layers and what they do. I'll see you there. 6. Making our First Shape Layer: [NOISE] Welcome back. In this lesson, we're finally going to get into our pop animation and for this we're going to be using shape layers. Shape players are essentially After Effects' answer to Illustrator, if anybody's familiar with that program. They are basically a vector drawing layer, so you can draw your vectors into this layer type. Lots of tools that are similar to Illustrator in lots of ways, although it's very much stripped back. But the main difference with After Effects is that you can animate all the properties. Without any further explaining, it's better to just have a look so let's get to it. The next thing we're going to do is we're going to make a shape layer and the shape layer is going to be a line so that we can make our pop. If you think about how the pop is constructed, it's a ring of lines that are expanding out from the middle. A lot of the things in After Effects is figuring out the simplest ways of doing things. You can obviously make every single line and animate it. But what we're actually going to do is a clever way to use shape layers so that you can make one thing and have it repeat multiple times in a circle. To make a shape layer, we're going to click on ''Pen Tool'' at the top here. We're going to just click on the screen and make a line. I'm not going to put it right in the middle, I'm going to offset it slightly because I don't really want the lines emanating right from the middle because it will make an ugly star. I want a gap in the middle. You can make it however you want to, but I don't really want my lines to touch in the middle so I'm going to make it slightly to the right and we're going to make a line going off to the right and we want it to be dead straight. I'm going to click where I want the line to start, something like that, and I'm going to hold Shift [NOISE] and I'm going to click where I want the line to end. I think I'm going to make burst about that big. Something like that. There we go. Now we've got a path here. As you can see, it's now made a shape layer in the composition. It has put this blue block here, which is indicating how long that shape is on for, and it just makes it for the entire length of your composition. You can see it goes 0-10 seconds here like we made in the composition settings and it's made Shape Layer 1. When you click off it, because we haven't added any look to the shape, you can't see it at the moment. Yours might be different. You might be able to see it. Actually, it has for me. It has made a black stroke. You can see the shape layer settings at the top of the window here. You can see Fill and Stroke, which are two things you can apply it to shape layers. It's got no fill, which is indicated by that red line, and it's got a black stroke, indicated by this black box. The stroke is two pixels wide. Because it's black on black, we can't see anything. But just to give you a bit more of an intro to shape layers because it's difficult to see with one single line, if you create a shape, you can close it. You can create any line. These are beziers so if you drag and click, it will create a curved line. If you just click, it will make a straight line. If you click back on the first point that you made, it will close the path. If I click on the Settings up here to change it so you can actually see it. If I click on the ''Fill'' , it will give you a color box. Let's just make it red for the moment. If you click on the ''Stroke,'' I'm going to make that blue. Actually, let's make it a bit more visible. I'm going to make it green. Then I'm going to increase the size of the stroke. This is a shape layer. This is a shape and I've given it a red fill and it's got green stroke. The stroke runs along the actual path and the red fills the inside of the path. If I click on the shape that I just made and press this little arrow on the left of the layer, there's a few options here. It might look a bit complicated at first, but we don't really need to worry about any of these for the moment. Let's just roll down this arrow and then we'll roll down Contents. You get Contents and Transform. Transform is something that comes with every single layer in After Effects, whereas Contents is particular to shape layers. We're going to open up the shape layer contents. Then you get Shape 1 because you can have multiple shapes within a layer. We'll roll down Shape 1. You can see that it's got Path 1 because you can have multiple paths in a shape. If we open that, you can see the path in there. Then if I roll down Stroke, we can see some stroke settings as well as a green color. You can also see your stroke width here, 31, which is the same as up here. You can also see that we've added a red fill with some other fill settings as well. We don't need to worry about the settings for the moment. It's worth noting that these settings inside the shape layer are the main settings for that shape layer. You can change the shape layer settings using these ones up here, but these ones are more for creating new shape layers. These are the settings that if I made another shape layer now, it would take these settings. But if you want to change your shape layer that you've made, it's probably better to use the settings inside just in case. Because once you start having multiple shapes with different settings inside one layer, this one doesn't really change it anymore. I think it might change all of the shapes and it's maybe not what you want to do. I'm going to delete that second one for the moment and we're going to focus back on this line that I made. Let's roll out this shape layer, roll out Contents and shape. We're going to go into the stroke settings, rolling down Stroke, and I'm going to change this to white. Under Color, we're going to change the black to white so we can actually see what we're doing and just make it bigger so that we can show that we're doing it. I'm going to change this to maybe four so that's like a nice thin line. I'm going to change the Line Cap from Butt Cap to Round Cap. Make it clear and then increase the stroke width so you can see what it's doing. That's actually rounded now. Whereas before, butt cap is flat and then we can round cap. [inaudible] that back down to four. Before we go any further, I'm going to save my projects. I'm going to File, Save As, Save. I've just imported something just for myself for reference. This is just for me making it. In this window, you can have folders. [NOISE] If you click on this button down here, you can make folders. This is just for organization. Let's say I wanted my comp in there, you can put it into the folder. This is just an organizational thing. This is just my other balloons just for reference so that I can see what I'm doing. Maybe a good idea as well is to rename our comp to pop. If you click on your pomp and if you press ''Enter'', [NOISE] you can rename that. I'm going to call this Pop_01. If you right-click, you can also rename it here. I'm also going to rename the shape layer. If you press ''Enter'' on the shape layer, that will let you rename it, and I'm just going to call that Pop. Cool. I'm just going to make the stroke width a little bit bigger. It's going to be stroke 11. Gets thicker, so it's a bit more visible. Just to quickly note as well that when you make a new shape layer, it puts it right in the middle. This dot here is called an anchor point, which is maybe familiar from what I said earlier because there's an anchor point moving tool here. But it puts it right in the middle of the composition. I want my pop to radiate around from the middle. Keeping everything locked to the middle like this is really useful for when you're positioning it later. Because later on we can just drag this whole composition to the middle of the balloon and it will pop exactly where you place it. Even if you can't see the actual pop itself, you'll know where the middle of the composition is. It's just much easier to keep everything nice and tidy and in the middle. What we want is we just want a stroke on the path, so we don't want the fill. If you'll fill is on, you probably can't see it if you've drawn a perfectly straight line. But if it's on, it's best to turn it off. You can use [NOISE] these eyes here to turn all of these things on and off, including the layer. If I turn the layer on and off, you can see that it just completely disappears. You can turn the stroke on enough, but we want the fill-off, In fact, I'm just going to delete the fill because we don't need it at all. Either hide it or click on the fill and press "Backspace" and then it will just go. We didn't need that. Great. Let's quickly recap what we covered in this lesson. First, we found our Pen tool, which is located at the top of the window in After Effects where the tools are. We clicked in the Comp Viewer so that you can start drawing in your shape layer. A very good thing to remember is if you hold down shift while you're drawing your points, it will either snap to the horizontal or the vertical depending on how close you are. I think it might do diagonal. I'm not sure. You have to test that out. But it's a very handy shortcut to keep in mind. After that, I showed you a little bit more about drawing shape layers using the pen tool and how you can close them if you go back to the first point. Also about how styling work. There's some tools at the top where you can set your style for the shape layer, strokes, and fills color. Then also you can open the shape layer to change those which are the main settings. We probably should have done that before actually drawing our pop, but hopefully it all clicks into place. After that, we went back to the first line that we'd drawn and rolled out the shape player settings so that we could give it a thin round cap stroke, which is the style that we want for the pop. I also went and deleted the fill style inside the shape layer. It's not totally necessary to remove that because you can't see it anyway, but it's nice to keep things clean because it's just adding a lot of settings that we're not using. For the pop, just for now, we're just going to be using the stroke. I also touched on the anchor point of the layer, which is something that's not really necessary to worry about now. As long as you've followed me and made your pop in the middle of the comp, everything will be totally fine. But if you did want to know a bit more, it's basically the point around which everything moves when you animate a layer. If you move position, but especially if you rotate something, so if you rotate a layer, it will rotate around its anchor point. It's just something to keep in mind, but like I said, we don't need to worry about it right now. Amazing. In the next lesson we're going to look at animating our shape layer. We're going to make the motion look super sleek and satisfying. I'll see you there. 7. Animation: Setting our First Keyframes: Time for my personal favorite bit, making things move. In this lesson, we'll be adding an effect called trim paths to our shape layer. This is basically so you can animate the stroke along the path. We'll then be looking at setting some keyframes for animation. We're going to touch very lightly on the graph editor. Let's go. Great. We've got our path and we've got our stroke on our path. Now we need to animate it. The best way to animate the stroke during the motion that we want starting from nothing expanding and shrinking again is something called trim paths. You can actually trim the stroke along the path to a desired length. To do that, we're going to add here. Up here are some special properties that you can add to shape layers, all kinds of fun things. You don't really need to worry about any of these right now, apart from trim paths, we're going to add another one later, but we'll get to that in a minute. And trim paths goes down here below the shape. It automatically adds it in here, but you can add it anywhere else. You can drag it around if you put it anywhere in here, we'll do the same thing, maybe above it, so as long as it's below path thing that's a good place for it. I'm going to expand up trim paths and then you get some options in here. It's a fairly simple one. You get start percentage, end percentage, and then you get an offset. You can ignore the other two options, offset and trim multiple shapes. We're just going to be animating the start and end to animate a property in After Effects. You may have seen these stopwatches all around everywhere. These are all the properties that you can animate. By default, all the animation for all the properties are off. If you want to animate a property, you need to click on the stopwatch. If we turn on animation for start and end, you can see that they've turned blue and we've got a few more things that have appeared. These two things here that have appeared are called keyframes. They basically hold the value of these properties. This one is currently at 100 percent and this one is currently at zero percent. If you set more keyframes with different values further along in time, then these properties will animate accordingly. This play head will show you what's happening in this composition at any given time. It's exactly like YouTube or any other video playing so far that you might have used this shows you where you are in the timeline. If I move forward a bit and I change these values, so let's trim the end. If we trim the end, you can see that our line is getting shorter. We go down to zero, and then if I go back to the start and press play, if I just press space bar, they will animate to that keyframe down to nothing. It goes from 100. If you look over here, It's showing you what the number is across time, so we drag it and it goes all the way down to zero. That's basically how the animation works in After Effects. What we want is, let's just fiddle with the buttons until we've understood. What we want to do is I'm going to drag the end down. We go down to the bottom. Then we want it to start down here. I want it to expand out like that. Then we want it to collapse again like this using the start. We want the end to go 0-100 and then we want to start to go 0-100. That way we'll get a nice line moving from left to right out of the center. I'm going to delete these keyframes here. Sorry. It was worth noting that once you've turned these properties on for animation, any changes that you make, it will make a new keyframe. If I move along, changes the property, you'll keep making keyframes. It automatically put a keyframe when you change the property. You can also both select these by dragging and selecting multiple ones and move them around. You can also copy and paste them. If I do Control C or Command C on a Mac moving forward, paste it, it will then paste whatever value that keyframe holds, it will paste it here. Have a play around, get your head around manipulating these keyframes. We want to start with start on zero and we want to start with the end on zero as well. We want zero-zero. You can see that the stroke is essentially at the left-hand side of this. Then we're going to move forward a little bit. Then I want the end to be at 100 percent so that we have the line moving this way. Then I want to start to be at 100 percent. We have the end, the left-hand side of the line moving to the right as well. Then when we see this animation, nothing happens. That's because they're both moving at the same rate. You can't see these values are the same. If these are the same, then it means nothing. Maybe I'm confusing a little bit, but you'll see what I mean when we make the next chain. We want the end to move across first and then we want to start to move across afterwards. Now we get this line moving across like this. If we move the start behind the end. If you press play on that, you get this nice beam running across. Our next goal is to make this look really nice. We want it to start off really fast and then slow down like an explosion. We want it to go fast and then slow. To do that we're going to do some easing. Great, so let's just quickly recap what we learned in this lesson. First, we added a trim path effect to our shape player, which can be found in the Add menu. It's a special property of a shape layer so that we can animate our path. We then went through using the stopwatch, which can be found on the left-hand side of most of the properties in After Effects. Once this stopwatch is on it, we'll set a keyframe at the time where the play head is in the timeline. If you move the play head forwards or backwards from that time and then change the property. It will set another keyframe with the value that you changed it to. This is how all animation works in After Effects. We then adjusted the timing that we've made on the animation, on the trim paths. Great. The animation we have currently won't cut it as a pop. The motion is a bit too linear and boring. In the next lesson, we're going to add some easing. I'll see you there. 8. Animation: Making the Easing Really Nice: Welcome back. We've got the line moving, but the emotion is quite linear at the moment. In this lesson we're going to concentrate on making the line feel like it's going to be something exploding. To do this, we're going to add a little bit of easing and we could just add the default easing, but I think it's going to need a little bit of extra love. To just add that extra oomph that the explosion is going to need, we're going to use the graph editor. Just a quick heads up that I mentioned earlier is that the graph editor is a little bit more of an advanced tool that you wouldn't normally get in a beginners class like this. But quite frankly, if you don't use the graph editor in this situation, I think the animation is going to look a little bit chunky. I'm going to insist, and it's going to be a little bit of special sauce that will make our animation look really slick. But don't worry, if you follow my steps closely, hopefully you won't get lost. Easing is the way you control how something moves over time. Setting key-frames like this is telling the computer how far to move something over a certain time and easing is how something moves. What you basically have control over is the speed over that time is the best way to describe it. For example. if you want it to go slow and then quickly, or do you want it to go quickly and then slow, or you can go slow, fast, slow. You can do any combination in between and you can adjust that, you can fine tune that to whatever you want. That's how you control the way something moves between two points. Let's quickly break out here for the moment because easing is quite a tricky thing to explain. If you fully understand it, I think it's going to be really good because it's basically the fundamental way to make animation look nice. I'm going to make a little graphic to hopefully explain it a bit better. On the left here we've got three graphs and what you have on the vertical axis of the graphs is the speed and what we have running along the bottom is the time. Over here we can see the different types of easing that I've applied to these three balloons. The top we have a constant speed. In the middle we have the default easing. This is what After Effects calls and easy ease. At the bottom we have an exaggerated ease, which is what I want to do using the graph editor with you guys. You can see the effect that it has on the motion. If you just look at the blue balloon, you can see how it moves across and it just very robotically in a completely constant speed, goes back and forwards. The middle balloon slows down towards the ends of its motion. It does go down to zero, but looks fairly constant in the middle. It speeds up and slows down in a very smooth motion. Then the bottom one is really exaggerated. You can see by the graph it goes really slow and then there's a bit in the middle where it goes really quick and then it goes down to really slow again. You can see it moves slowly and then whips across. That's basically different types of easing and you can completely adjust this curve to do whatever you want. You can have it be constant and then go really slow or you can have it go really fast at the start and then go down really slow and a whole combination of all things in-between. When you combine that with the movement going into places, or whatever that's how you build up all different types of complicated animation. Applying that to the pop, you can see that the easing I've got on it is very fast at the start and then it slows down towards the end. Ignoring the length of the line at the minute because that's just different part of the animation. If you just look at the front of the lines, you can see that it is moving really quickly at the start and then slows down. The reason we want that is because that's how things explode. If you're imagining explosion, you get something moving very quickly at the start and then because of air resistance, that thing slows down. You can control the easing of something to match reality in a way. Even though this is a really graphic pop, we still want it to feel natural and to make things natural, you have to apply a certain amount of physics to it. You don't need to know it, obviously because this is just animation and its graphics and stuff, so it doesn't have to be physically accurate, but using your experience of the world, you can just apply that to anything that's moving. Obviously, when something pops, it will be moving really fast at the start and then because the air around it slows it down. The bigger the explosion, the more exaggerated that is, so the more exaggerated the easing would be. A really powerful explosion would be super-fast at the start and then it will just get really slow towards the end. There will be this very slow drift. Hopefully that explains a little bit more about easing and why we're animating the pop in this way. I'm going to zoom in a little bit. I'm going to grab this top bar here, shows you the amount of the timeline that you're zoomed into. The moment it goes all the way along, which means we're fully zoomed out. This is the entire timeline that we're looking at. If you grab the right-hand blue little knob there, you can bring it in and that zooms in so that we can really see what we're doing. We want to focus on this area and because the pops is going to be quite quick, that's all we need to see. What I'm going to do is if you go to Frame 7, on the top left here you can see the current time of the play heads. If you move forwards, it will count up. I want to go to Frame 7 because I think that's how long the pop should be because going to be really quick. I'm going to grab these top two keyframes, the start key frames and I'm going to move them over. They're just one frame after the end keyframes. Then I'm going to drag the N2 by box selecting again and I'm going to drag the bottom one to Frame 7 and the other one will be on Frame 8. Make sure these N2 are selected and I'm going to right-click. I'm going to go to keyframe assistant and I'm going to click easy, ease. You can see that the shortcut there is F9. Now you can see that these two have changed shape. They've changed so this hourglass shape and that means that's an easy ease. An easy ease is basically slow. What we've got at the moment are these diamond ones and these ones are linear. They will go at a constant rate and the eased ones will go slow. Now what we've got is a free press play. Let's get rid of our action safe. If we click on this target button again and toggle that off, press play. Now we've got fast and then it slows at the end. The easy ease is a default ease. You can make it even slower than that and the way to make it even slower is by using the graph editor. The graph editor, admittedly is probably the most advanced thing we're going to look at today. It's an advanced way of controlling the ease. In my opinion, we're not going to make it look very good if we just use regular easy ease because to me it looks quite robotic and what I want is really satisfying fast pops, it's really fast at the start and then very slow at the end. The way we're going to do that is to increase the amount that we're easing. We're going to click this button at the top of your timeline is called the graph editor when you hover over it and we get this graph view. If you just click it and you don't have anything selected, there will be nothing in there, so you've got to select something. If we select our start and then you hold shift and pressed end, then we can see both lines here. Now they're here in the graph. We can zoom in a little bit more here. There's two different views in the graph editor. Your one should be the speed graph. If it's not on the speed graph, switch it to it now. The other mode is the value graph. We're only going to look at the speed graph today. I don't want to confuse you too much by talking about the difference between these because it's quite complicated and it's quite difficult to explain. But just know that the speed graph is the one that you need. Make sure you click on this button down here, which is this little square with a menu thing, edit speed graph. Then you should see this. These are two lines. One represents a start and alone represents the end. These squares are our keyframes. Make sure you're on the, let's go to our selection tool. If you're on a different tool, make sure on the selection tool, so that we're selecting these. When you box select them, it will give you these handles which show its influence. The speed graph shows us how fast something is moving on a particular frame. You can see these ones at the left, they're moving fast. These numbers are meaningless. I never really looked at the numbers 342 percent per second. It's meaningless. The other one is zero percent per second, so that's a bit more easy to understand. This is coming to a stop at the end. Basically, from this point onwards, the line is not moving at all. It's moving zero percent per second, whereas at the beginning it's moving very fast. It's moving 300 percent per second. This line shows you that change over time. It's slowing down towards the end. But don't worry too much about that, that's technically how it works. What we want to do is we just want it to go really fast at the start and then we want to go really slow at the end. We're going to box select these two end keyframes and then I'm going to hold shift. Make sure your magnet is on down here. This makes mixed things snap together. Snap two things. Just make sure that's on before you do anything. Again, make sure these two are selected. We're going to drag to the left these two little points and it should make change the shape of your graph. I'm doing this while holding shift by the way, I'm just going to undo that, undo again, hold shift, and drag these dots to the left. Now we've got really fast at the start and then it goes really slowly towards the end. It goes up to 1,400 percent a second. That's quick. now if we press spacebar, now it looks like a real laser light. Just to be able to loop this a bit easier if you pick gray bar below the zoom bar, this is your preview range. If you grab the left-hand side, which we can see here, you can move it left and right. If you zoom all the way out, you can see the other bar here is the full length of the timeline. We're just going to pull this in to zoom in again, so that we're just previewing this little section so that we can see it over and over again. If you if you press space bar and you're outside of your preview range, it will just carry on if you're inside your preview ranges it should loop. Make sure when you're previewing things, if you just drag the play head to zero, then press Spacebar, it'll be fine. Now we can see it over and over again. That's looking really nice. It's really nice and simple. That looks very satisfying, amazing. Hopefully that will make sense. you now have a very snappy line that zips across the screen. Let's quickly recap what we covered in this lesson. Hopefully, I've successfully explained what easing is. It might be obvious to some people, but I think if you're completely new to animation, it might be a bit of a tricky concept. I think it was worth spending a bit of extra time on and we can now apply that principle to our pop animation. After that, we selected the end keyframes and added what's called an After Effects and easy ease. This is just the default amount of ease that slows the movement down towards the selected keyframes. We then looked at the graph editor to adjust our ease. The aim was to pull out the default ease so that you get a really fast movement going down to a very slow movement. This will give it a really nice snapy pop. Don't worry too much if you didn't manage to do this and it was a bit confusing, you can just add the default ease and that would be totally fine. But I think if you put this extra effort in and you did manage to follow me, hopefully it will pay off. Great. The next thing we need to do is make an entire ring of lines. There's a really handy tool inside shape players to help us do this. In the next lesson, I'm going to be taking you through how to set that up. I'll see you there. 9. Adding the Repeater: Finishing the Pop: The last thing we need to do to finish our pop animation is repeat the motion in a circle. There's a really handy tool inside shape layers that lets you do this exact thing and it's appropriately called a repeater. Let's add that now. But we've only got one line and we want an entire circle of lines. To do that, we're going to need to add another shape layer property. We're going to go to Add here where we found our trim paths and click on this [NOISE] and then we're going to add a repeater. Click on "Repeater" and that will appear down below your shape layer. I like to keep everything inside the shapes, so out of just practice I'm going to put it below the trim paths. Open that up, and then we've got some more options here. This allows you to copy whatever is above it and you can move the copies. Let's move forward a little bit so we can actually see our line and you can see maybe it's doing something here. We've got three copies at the moment, 1,2,3. If you roll down the transform in the repeater here. Let me just make sure that's not confusing. If I close everything, Shape, open the repeater and then open the transform inside the repeater. Transform repeater, you don't want the transform shape or the transform at the bottom. You want to transform repeater, open that up. You can see here it's moving 100 in the x dimension. For all positions, unless you're working in 3D, it's x and y, and x is horizontal and y is vertical. We want those to be actually both be zero. This is like the default repeater offset so just make that 100, 0 in position. Now they're just three on top of each other that's why you can only see one again. But what we want is rotation. We want to rotate our copies all around. We want it to just make a complete circle. We might need to do a little bit of maths. You basically need to choose how many you want and then divide that number by 360. I hope everybody remembers their middle school mathematics. I think I'm going to make eight, so I'm going to type in eight. I'm not going to get the calculator out because there is a very handy thing in After Effects, you can actually do maths inside these little boxes. I'm going to click on the 22 here, which I've randomly scrolled to and I'm going to type in 360 divided by 845 degrees. Maybe some of you who are better at math than me knew that off by heart. [LAUGHTER] But I find this really handy. You can type any number in there so let's say we wanted 50 copies. I go to 360 divided by 50 and there you go. You got a perfect circle then. [NOISE] Maybe you want something like that, but I'm going to go for a nice eight, so it's 360 divided by 8. There we go. Now I'm going to hit Play on that. There we go. That's the pop done. Amazing, well done for getting this far. That's definitely the hard bit over with and hopefully you've got some nice pop animation that's similar to mine. Let's have a quick recap of what we went through in this lesson. After the animation was done, I then took you through adding another special property to the shape layer called a repeater, which makes it so that you can repeat the same shape over and over again. If you did it around the rotation axis in the middle, then you should have a ring of pops now. I then showed you how you can do basic mathematics inside number properties, inside After Effects. This works on any property where there is a number. You can just click on the number in After Effects and you can do a bit of math in there to give you the correct result. We then applied that to repeater circle. I wanted eight repeaters, so I just typed in 360 divided by 8 and that gave us the degree of separation for each repeated animation. Great, so we're nearly there. The next thing to do is to use our pop for something and for that we're going to be going back to our balloons template and adding it into the animation, I'll see you there. 10. Adding the Pop to the Balloons aka Compositing: Hello. In this lesson, we're going to be taking our pop animation that we've done, and we're going to be adding it to the balloon template that I showed you earlier. If you haven't downloaded it yet, then go now to the class materials section where you can download BalloonsTEMPLATE.aep. What we're actually doing in this lesson is called compositing, so that's when you take multiple assets, whether it's animation, text, or footage, or whatever it is, then you can combine them into one thing. In our case, it's going to be the pop animation and the balloon animation and we're going to composite them into one thing. Let's get to it. Your project should look something like this. You should have a pop composition up there and your pop animation shape layer will be inside that composition. Now what we're going to do is just import my balloons template project. You can import an entire After Effects project into your current project. Let's just do that now. So in your class materials you should have a project named Balloons Template. If you right-click here in your project window, go to "import file". Go to class materials and download it if you haven't done it already. Go to the folder where you saved it and you should have BalloonsTEMPLATE.aep, which is an entire After Effects project. You double-clicked on that in "Explorer" or "Finder", it would just open up After Effects. This After Effects project where we're going to import the entire thing. Click "Import", and then it should come in as a folder, BalloonsTEMPLATE.aep, and inside is the entire project. Then the next thing we're going to do is open that folder if you haven't already and double-click on Balloons Template. This should open up this project. I'm just going to click on this. At the moment, I'm at 50 percent Zoom, yours might be different. I'm going to do fit up to 100 percent so that I can resize this window here by dragging on this line that divides the different sections of After Effects up. I'm just going to pull this up so that we can see a little bit more of the composition down here and this just shrinks if you've got it fit up to 100 percent. Just to have a quick overview of what we're looking at, this is all the animation that's happening in the balloon comp. I'm not going to go into it too much, but explore it at your own pace. If you drag the play head along, you can see the balloons come up and they just pop like that. Hopefully you're not overwhelmed by this. This is just a few things that are different happening, the balloons come up and you can see as they disappear, I'm just turning the layer off here by dragging the layer out points so that they just turn off at different times for the three balloons. Then you can see my mountain layers there and the cloud layers and then there's background color there, we're not actually using the clouds. You can turn those on if you want to, but I'm going to leave them off. This is super simple all we're going to do is we're going to drag the pop composition that we made previously and we're going to drag it in and the first one is going to go below layer number four. I want them to go underneath the balloons, so I'm going to drag that into here. Now you can see Pop 01 has appeared here and the way we've animated it, so you've now got multiple competitions at the top of your composition window. You can go back to your pop animation. If you want to go back to your pop, you can just click on these tabs here and we've animated the pop right at the beginning of the composition. The balloons pop later on completion. Obviously there's a pop right in the middle here, and as you scroll along the balloons pop a bit later on. What we need to do is we need to drag our pop along. You may have your masks turned off, so we need to turn those back on. This button here, toggle mask and shape path visibility is, should be on that way you can see what you're clicking on. When you click on something, you can see what it clicking on in the actual competition. When I click on this one, balloonMAIN01 it's the middle one. Actually let's do that one first so we can drag our Pop and just put it underneath here. It doesn't really matter where we put this, as long as it's below the balloons, I just want to be right below the one that's actually popping, so you know what you're looking at. I'm going to drag along to where the red balloon pops this frame here. I'm just going to drag this pop composition to the point at which it pops. Now the red balloon goes off, and then the pop animation happens. If we step through the frames very slowly the balloon disappears, then there's a blank frame and then the first frame of the animation happens. If you followed me exactly, you should have this. Doesn't really matter if you don't, because basically all we need to do is just do it by eye. Basically I want when the first frame that there's no balloon, I want to be the first frame of pop so I need to just drag it back one frame. We go to this frame here, drag it back one frame and now we should have balloon, then pop on the next frame, and then it just pops. Also, you might notice that it's not where the balloon is. That's the other thing we need to do is we need to move this composition so that it's right underneath the balloon. Because we know that the pop was in the middle of our composition, so this anchor point here tells us the middle of the composition, this is the middle. If we go back and turn our title action safe on again, you can see that that anchor point is right in the middle. Let's turn that off for now, so we just need to drag this anchor point lychee with the make sure you've got the selection tool selected, and make sure you've got your Pop 01 composition selected and just move it to the middle of the balloon. Doesn't matter, it doesn't have to be exact, but just do it by eye and now when you step through, balloon will pop and then we've got a nice satisfying graphic pop, let me play it. Perfect. Now we just need to do the same for the other two. You can either drag the Pop here again, or you can just duplicate this one. To duplicate you do control D or Command D on a Mac. Click on your Pop and do, I'm using a PC, so I'm just going to be Control D. I'm going to make two. Now we've got three pops now and I'm going to drag this one down underneath the balloon 03, and I'm going to drag this one down underneath balloon 02. Then we know that it's one frame off so I'm going to drag this. This is lining up and there's one frame back and the same. This is lining up with this but one frame back and then we just need to get the positions right. Balloon 03 is the blue one so I'm going to click on the pop that's underneath the balloon 03 and I'm going to move that to here middle of the blue one I'm going to just check that works, that's fine. Then I'm going to scroll ahead to when the yellow one pops and I'm going to move the one that makes sure that that's underneath balloon 02, we selected this pop and just move that to the yellow one. We play that got 1, 2, 3. Perfect. The only other thing that we might want to do, so this is basically done now. But all these pops are the same size and then balloons have slight variation in size. These two are smaller than the red one. I'm going to leave the red one as it is, and I'm just going to scale down the pops for the yellow and blue ones. I'm going to click on the blue one, go to the pop, click on a layer and press "S" you'll get scale. The other way to get that is just to roll it down, roll down the layer, roll down transform and then you've got anchor point position scale rotation similar to what we've got in the shape layers, but this is much simpler because it's just for a layer, there's no other options other than transform options and the scale here is what we're looking at, what we're interested in. If I just scroll along to where we can see the pop, you can see if you click and drag on these numbers, you can scale it down, up and down. I'm going to go with something about 60 percent. See how that looks. Maybe a bit bigger than 60 percent, maybe 80 percent. Yeah 80 percent looks good, so I'm going to close that. I'm going to open the one for the yellow one and I think that can be about 80 percent as well. Let's have a look at that. Yeah, there we go. That's nice. Very nice. We can try our preview range, so if you want to just test the bit that you're working on, you can move this two handles here, which is your preview range. Then you can press "Spacebar" within this range and it will loop around and around. If you double-click it, it will pop back to the full length of the timeline and then make sure you save this control S. Congratulations, you have now successfully completed a beautiful popping balloon animation. Let's quickly recap the steps we went through to composite our animation. First, we imported the BalloonsTEMPLATE.aep project into a pop animation project. I then gave you a very general overview of how the balloon animation was put together inside the balloon comp. After that, we dragged our pop comp into the balloon comp. We then shifted the pop animation along in the timeline so that the pop starts exactly when the balloon pops. We then position the pop in the middle of the balloon so that it looks like it's actually coming from the balloon when it bursts. Then we repeated the same step for the other two balloons. Finally we scaled the left and right pops down a little bit to match the reduced scale of those balloons. Amazing. We've now completed our popping balloon animation, but it's still inside After Effects. In the next lesson, we're going to be going through how to export an MP4 of your animation. I'll see you there. 11. Exporting an MP4: So we're finished, but there's one last important step to do. If you actually want anyone to see your animation, we're going to have to get it out of After Effects. For this, we're going to be rendering our animation as an MP4 using Adobe Media Encoder. That's actually a separate program which is installed alongside After Effects, so you should have it. It's not complicated and we can launch it all from inside After Effects, so let's get to it. So we're done with our animation, the last thing we need to do is export it so you can show everybody. Otherwise, what's the point? You don't want to have to open up After Effects every time you want to show someone something you've worked on. Let's export this animation. Make sure you've got your balloons projects selected, balloons template, if that's the one you want to export. Then you just go up to Composition up here and we're going to add it to the Adobe Media Encoder Queue. Just click on ''Composition'' go to add to Adobe Media Encoder Queue. Just to give you a little bit of background history of what's going on After Effects. Basically we want to put an MP4 out. Hopefully you've heard of an MP4, which is the most common video format currently. We want that After Effects use to export MP4s and then it went through a big long period where it didn't export MP4s and now it does export MP4s again. If you're using an After Effects version, which is in that middle bit where you can't export MP4, which is probably pretty likely. Because they've only recently added it and they've taken away. Cut a long story short. Let's use Media Encoder because that should be fine for everybody. So what would happen? What should have happened is you should have clicked on composition at Adobe Media Encoder Queue and Adobe Media Encoder should have opened if you didn't have it open already. Switch to Adobe Media Encoder if you're not on it. So it should be down here on your applications bar, or if you're on a Mac, it'll be also down there. Your balloons template or whatever your composition is called, should've appeared in the render queue here. My default is H264, which is what we want. That's what an MP4 codec is. If it's not that you can use this drop-down here and make sure you're on H264. Then the default should be Match Source-High bitrate but if it's not, click on this drop-down and do Match Source-High bitrate. Then you just need to choose an export location where you want to save it. Save, and then you just need to press this little green play button up here and that will render your video. Hopefully this won't take very long. When it's done, it should say, Status Done here and give you a little green tick, and your beautiful pop animation is ready to view. Finally, we can show your friends, your dad, your grand, and one billion strangers online your beautiful animation and bask in their praise. It wasn't a long one this, but let's quickly recap our steps so you can solidify it in your mind. First, make sure that the composition you want to render is selected either in the timeline window or in the project window. Then go up to composition at the very top of the After Effects window and go down to add to Adobe Media Encoder Queue. Media Encoder should open, and then with a little bit of waiting, probably your composition should appear in the render queue. Then make sure you're outputting an H264, which is the Render codec for an MP4, and set your output settings to Match Source-High bitrate, and then select the folder where you want the MP4 to go. After that, you can just press the green play button at the top right of Media Encoder window and everything should start rendering. Amazing, so you've now finished your animation and you've now outputted file ready to share. In the next video, I'm going to be taking you through the other example pop animations that I made that I showed you at the beginning of this class. Then in the video after that, I'm going to be sending you some homework so that you can apply your knowledge to something practical. Make sure you watch till the end. I just want it to stick in your minds rather than just watching it, doing following me, and then you've finished. I'll see you there. 12. Pop Variations Walkthrough: Hey guys. Before I set you the project to go off and do by yourself, I thought it'd be useful to take you through the other example pop animations that I made that are available in the class materials as a bit of inspiration. Let's open up all the POPS.AEP project file, which is available to download below. I'll take you through it now. When you open this up, it should have a folder in here called Comps. Then I've got 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 balloons and 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 pops. The pops are the actual pop animations. This is where I'm going to be taking you through. Balloons 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 is just the same thing with the pops. Competent. I'm going to keep this brief because it's more of just an inspiration thing and you can explore it on your own. But I'm just going to go through each one and just briefly explain how I approached the animation. So the number one is the one that we made. The number two is the one with sparkles. So this one is actually quite a bit different from the one that we made. I made this big sparkle shape, which I just made out of a polystar, which is one of the different shape types you can make. It didn't take you through that before. I was just showing you the pen tool to make shape layers. But you can also use this shape tool to make shape layers. Then the rectangle, rounded rectangle, circles, and polygon tool, and a star tool. The polystar is what I used, instead of coming up with a path in the shape layer, it comes up with a shape. This would be rectangle or ellipse or whatever you've chosen. I chose the star. The star has all these different options. So you can determine the number of points. So you can change the number of points here. You can do the roundness, which is how I made this inverted diamond shape now to roundness. You can have a fiddle with that. It's quite fun. The first frame is this single pop. I'll just hide these things so we can see it better. Then I just made a different shape layer for every single star that animates. The big one just shrinks down. Then you get this ring of flushing stars afterwards. If I press U, select all my layers, and press U, you can see the animation. I mean, I guess all of these are there going to be the same, but I've just arranged them in a circle. Let's just select one. I've offset them randomly as well so that you get this random sparkle variation to the animation. But I'm essentially animating the scale up and down and also the position. So the position, if I bring my guides back, you can see they just go from the middle outwards. They slow down. I've used an easing to slow that down. Then they just drift down. The way I've done the drift down as I've parented all of these to an unknown. That's another thing that you can do in After Effects, which is really powerful. I took all of these and I made a null, which I won't get into too much, but it's just basically a nothing layer. It just got positioning information and I use the parent tool here just to connect them all. Sorry if I'm going over this quickly, otherwise, I don't want to get this to be too bloated. It's going to be really complicated for me to explain every little bit. But essentially that's how I did the drift down. You could have just done it by animating the vertical position of all of these, but it was much quicker for me to just do one vertical position. You can see this red box moving down and they all drift down with that red box. You can do that using this parenting thing. So you can just select which one you want it to follow. The layer will just follow the animation on that one. That's basically how it works. Pop theory is the circle that starts off as a circle and then you have another circle inside that animates inwards. There's a few different ways of doing that is just figure out how I did this. Actually, I'll start with these four lines. The four lines that come out is the same as pop one only I've to use four of them to create this target shape. That's the same as pop one. Then the new thing is this big circle in the middle. I animated that using the stroke width. That's good, we're doing it. It's just an ellipse path and another shape that you can select up here using the ellipse tool. I drew a circle, and the circle size, which you can control here just gets bigger over time. That does our ease out. Then the stroke width goes from really thick to really thin. It looks, the stroke width is just so thick, it looks like a circle, and then it gets thinner as the circle expands. Number four is the sparkles one. This has got a few more elements going on here. I've got this circle in the middle that just shrinks, which I think is this layer. That just goes down over two frames and disappears. This is also pop one again. This is the same as we've done on pop one. I think I've just made it a bit smaller. You can solo layers if you click this button and then you can just see this one layer that I've got selected by clicking that button. Then if you click it again, it goes back. It's just for again of our pop number one. I've actually got two of them. There's another one around here somewhere. I've named these layers, apologies for that. This one, Yeah, if you open up the transform, you can go to rotation and you can see that I've rotated it by 45 degrees. That's allowed me to have to offset in time. Drag this along a little bit so that they don't go off at the same time. They go off slightly one after the other. You get this full pattern and then another full pattern on the diagonal, so they're slightly offset. So it's the same as before. It's eight the same as pop one, but I've offset them. I did that by duplicating the making one with four, duplicating it, and rotating it so that I can have eight. But they just got off at different times. Then I've actually got smaller ones. So these smaller ones are also pop one again, but I've made them again smaller. I've just lined them up with the ends of the lines. It looks like they come out from the middle and then each one splits again into another little pop. And then I've just offset them again. This is the same technique just over and over again, but just different sizes, and I've timed them differently. Then you get this nice fireworks thing. Then pop five is a different technique. I actually have, we've got the little bit of the end of pop one. I'm using pop one. Again, this is a really good technique because I'm using it lots of times in these different pops. It's just a really short one. So you get this nice burst impression. Then this circle, I'm using a completely different technique to the other circle because I wanted it to be offset. So there's no way you can do that with a stroke. The easier way is to have one circle that's getting bigger. Then you have another circle that's cutting out the first circle. You can do that using these Track Matte settings. This might look different depending on which version of aspects you've got because they've recently changed this. But essentially what you can do is you have one circle. So this is a shape layer one that I've gotten in the middle with this circle, and then I've got another circle. You can see that I've moved it slightly to the top-right and then offset the animation slightly so that you see the first one first and then the second one expands afterwards. Then I've used the track matte so that it cuts out the circle. Then the interesting thing that I've done with this one is when I copped it, I then colored the pops to match the balloon color so that you can see the blue one, the yellow one, and the red one all have the pop slightly colored. The way I did that is within effect, we didn't cover any effect so far in this tutorial, which is ironic considering the name of the program is After Effects, but we actually just looked at shape layers. But if you click on a layer and go to this probably closed if you're using the default After Effects. But if you go to Window at the top here and go down to Effects Controls. Underneath Composition. They'll be effects controls for that layer. It should open this panel here next to the your project tab will open it Effects Controls tab. When you open it, it will look blank like this. The effect that I've used, there's loads of effects in here. If you've used Photoshop, these are basically like filters and you go down and there's a whole bunch of things here that you can probably take another tutorial to do about the effect that I used is essentially just called phenol. So you go to Generate, you right-click on your effects controls to go to Generate and you click on Fill. And then that will give you, it will just fill that layer with a color. The default is red. I'm just going to undo that so that it goes back to my blue. But essentially you can either pick the color. I used a slightly faded blue and then that's how I made all these a different color. I also actually rotated the pop so they're all slightly different to each other. Otherwise, they would all just look identical. But the key to this was doing the change in this composition rather than the actual pop composition. Because if you colored it in here, then you'd go to your balloons and they would all be the same color. But you could actually use the fill on top of that. But there's no point. There's no point coloring it in the comp if you're just going to use a different color in the balloons color. There you go. That's a quick overview of how I made these different Pops. I hope that's given you a bit of inspiration for when you make your own pop. Great. Hopefully, that's given you a little insight into what's possible with the pop animations and also how it changes the feel of the overall finished animation. When the balloons pop and disappear, it gives them a completely different look and vibe when they actually pop. In the next video, I'm going to be sending you a little bit of homework so that you can apply the knowledge that you've learned in this class to something practical. We'll also be doing a little bit of a wrap-up. I hope you'll join me there. 13. Class Project and Wrap Up: Congratulations, well done for completing this class on creating a graphic pop in After Effects. A massive thank you to everybody who made it through to this last video. I hope you found it useful. If this is your first step into After Effects, I wish you the best of luck going forward. Hopefully you've successfully made your own pop. Now, you're going to get your homework. Basically what I want you to do is make your own pop. I have two separate levels for the class project if you want to see it like that. Either you can just make your own pop and apply it to my balloon animation. But better yet would be to make your own scene with something that either pops or even appears or whatever you want it to do as long as it's something appropriate for these pop line animation or any other popping, bursting animation that you can think of. You can either use my example, pop animations, as inspiration or come up with an entirely new method of your own. Either way, whatever you make, please post it in the class projects section. You can post a class project by clicking the green button that says Create Project below this video. As we're making animations, you'll need to post the video, so the best way to do that is to upload it to something like YouTube first and then when you go to the create a project form, you can just paste your link to the video in there. I'll be grading your pop animations really harshly, so make sure they're good. If you have any questions or if the class is unclear in some way, then you can chat in the discussions amongst yourselves. I'm sure you can help each other out but I'm usually around in there too. I hope that's all clear. I can't wait to see what you come up with. Amazing, so I hope you've all found that useful and I hope it's given you a bit of a leg up into After Effects if you're just starting out. I hope you've also seen a little bit of the power of creating animated graphics with shape layers. If you're looking for what to do next, I would recommend my class called, a beginner's guide to creating a hand-drawn look in Adobe After Effects. I'd say that's the perfect next step. I've had a little bit of feedback on that class saying it's more intermediate then for beginners. But I would say it's a bit more for serious beginners, if you want to call it that. It's quite tricky getting those categories, beginner, intermediate, advanced, because it's quite subjective. But I think this next class that I'm recommending is going to give you a good idea. It's how to create a hand-drawn look in After Effects, but I think it's a really good way to see the power of animating with shape layers because I go into a lot more depth, it's a bit longer and we look at some of the more advanced options as well. But I do go through it step-by-step right from beginning, so anybody should be able to follow it. I think it's a good follow-up to this class. Once again, I'm Russ Etheridge you can follow me on social media @russ_ether and don't forget to check out my free content over my YouTube channel. If you like this class and you found that useful, or if you've got some feedback, then please leave a review. It's all much appreciated. Thanks again, and I hope to see you next time [MUSIC].