Non-Scary Intermediate Course in Adobe After Effects 2025

1. Introduction to this Adobe After Effects Course: My name's Tim Wilson, I've been training Adobe products for over 25 years. I've trained companies from Nison, Disney, BBC, NHS, and so many others. You'll learn after effects so easily because I take you through everything in bite sized pieces. And at the end of most sections, we do a project so you can consolidate all the knowledge that you've gained during that section. Have a look at the projects you will be gracing. These are so called. Start right now. I can't wait to help you to learn adobe after effects. Okay. 2. Pre-compose - Learn with a Project Intro: Another project. Well, what we're going to be doing with this project is we're going to be using green screens. The curtains are on a green screen, and then we're going to put things behind the green screen. So we're going to have all the videos, which will just blend from one into the next and have a color over the top as well. Finally, we're going to take the whole thing, and we're going to put it onto a billboard. You'll see how it works as we go along, but I hope you have fun with this one. 3. Add Clips & Keylight: Let's make a new composition and get some footage. I'm going to go to composition, new composition. Once again, I'm just going to go down here to my HD size, 1920 by 1080, 30 frames per second. And the duration is set to 30 seconds in there. Doesn't have to be that long. You can change it as you go. I'm just going to leave mine on that default. Let's click. Now, I'm going to go and find some videos in here, and I've got a whole lot. Once again, I've put these into your assets folder, but they did come from Adobe stock. So let's have a quick look. I want to start off with this one over here, and this is just a curtain opening with a green screen. The curtain with a green screen is going to open, and then we're going to be showing this one here where it counts down. This is going to be an old tiny cinema type of feel to it. From there, we'll then go in to this one. Over here, but we're going to make it a CPA color so it looks really old, and we're also going to mask it using this mask in there. Once again, it's got a green screen on it. I'm just going to select all of those. I'm going to select with the command or the control key depending with your MCO PC. Click on pen and bring them in. Now, let's set this up. I'm going to take first of all, the curtain opening, and I'm going to drag and drop that into my composition. It's just going to be that little bit over there. Then we're going to take count down the numbers that are counting down, this one here, and I'm going to drag and drop that in underneath it. Now, you'll see that if I then go to the top one, this is the green screen curtain layer that I'm on. You've done this plenty of times before, effect keying and key light. Use the eye dropper. Click on the green, and that will show through that countdown in there. Now that's quite a long countdown. I actually wanted to be at about or, I don't know, number four when the curtains are still opening. I'm going to move that back. I'm just going to push it back like that. Let's try that again, so that happens three, two, one, and then we're going to the next video after that. I'll stop there. Have a bit go with that, get those files, and then we can build some more on this. 4. Colorize: What I'm going to do now is to add the second piece of video. So this little clip I'm going to bring in over here, and that's going to be this person filming. I do however want her to be not in color, but to look old oldie video. I'm going to go up to effects down to color correction, and I'm going to use black and white. Now I don't want her to just be in black and white in there as interesting as that looks, but I'm going to go over to where it says tint. I'm going to click on tint and that means I can tinted with a color. Now the tint color is over here, and I can just click on that and choose any color that I like. I'm going to go with something which is it's not too yellow. But it's ever so slightly, not black and white. It gives it that lovely, old, almost CPA type of feel to it. Now, I'm going to close this effect so I can get back in here because I've got another one, and that is this video here that I'm going to bring in and just put on top of that. You can see this is what we've got now. I'm going to move that down. It's going to be above the one at the very bottom. This is now my green screen, and this is going to mask that video there. Let's give these a name. This one here is women with camera, I'm going to press enter. Women filming. This one here is my mini or soft green screen. The one above it, which is this one here is count down, and the top one over here is the curtain. You can see the order that I've got them in. I'm going to go to soft green screen, and once again, I'm going to add you guessed it the Kete 0.2, if I can get to it, Kete 1.2, and just sample the green. As always, you can go to your screen game and just experiment with it to see how much of that you want in there. I'm going to keep those weird colors that are coming in the side. I think they're quite interesting red and the blue on either side like that. So this is the final piece now. I'll just play it from the beginning. It's only about 12 seconds long. That opens up. We then go into the filming. Now, I've got a small problem there because this should have been back in there. Let's try that again. Over there. And then finally, we're going to have a piece of text coming down to say tri traditional cinema. So using the type tool. There it is. I don't know where tr went. Anyway, I'm going to just move it in the right position. There it is over there. And that's just going to appear towards the end. If you want to bring it in gently with a bit of a blend or even an effect, or just bring it in with a bit of capacity. It's up to you. And this is where it's going to end on my ten second mark up there. So I'm going to take my work space and just drag it up to that point. Let's check this out to make sure that it's all working. So curtains open, we count down. We get the person filming. Tritraditional cinema. That was it. I think the tri traditional cinema needs to be back a little bit over here so you can actually read it before it cuts off. Have a bit of a go with that and get those bits in there. You can use different videos if you prefer. But as I said, I have given these to you if you want. And then in the next lesson, what we're going to do is we're going to take all of these, and for want of a better word, we're going to squish them all down together. But you'll see how that works. 5. Pre-compose Your Layers: Now, I'm going to go along and get another image, and this is the one that I want to use. And I want to put all those into this great big billboard. Now, this comes from Adobe stock, so I just searched for billboards in there. And if you want to find your own, that's absolutely fine. I'm going to bring that in and you're going to see the problem. Now, because I need to get all of these layers to fit this. Now, firstly, this is far too big, so I'm going to press S and just scale it down until it fits my screen size, and I want it to be something like that. And then I've got to then go and get all of these different layers and try and force them into that shape over there. Now, when we did this before, what we did was we rendered that out, all of those layers out, and then we brought in the rendered version and forced it to fit into a screen like that. We remember when we did the laptop project. Now, that's okay. You can do that. But the problem with that is if you then realize you've made a mistake or you want to change something in this original animation, you've already rendered it. So you've got to go and find all the originals, open that up, make your changes and re render it. So instead, we're going to do something slightly different. We're going to do a pre comp. Now, I'll just get rid of this one over here. So I've got all the bits that I want for my pre comp. I'm going to select them all, and I'm going to go up to not composition, you would think it was in composition, but it's actually in layers because it's all about layers, and it's going to make us a new layer. Now, before I choose precompose in there, just check my project area here. I've got all those different clips, and then I've got something called comp one, which is the composition that we're in at the moment. If I go and make a pre comp or precompose, first, it allows me to name it, so I'm going to call this screen content. You can call anything you like. It really doesn't matter, and I'm going to move all the attributes into the new composition. So I click. Now, it looks like it's squashed all of those down into one single layer over here. But what it's actually done is it's made me a new composition in there. I'm in composition one, so I'm actually in that composition, and this screen composition is now inside composition one. We've got a composition within a composition. Sounds a bit strange. I know. But the great thing is that I can just go to my screen comp. You can see, I can play that in there. I can go and get this piece of actually, it's not video, it's an image. I'm going to scale it down to a sensible size. That. And then if I go along to my screen comp over there, the screen content. I could then scale that down if I want to, so I could press S, and I can scale it down, and they'll all scale down at once. Or I can go up to my effects. I'm going to go along to distort. We did this before, and I'm going to use corner pin, and I can just pin this to the corners there, and it's doing all of them at once, but I haven't actually destroyed anything at all. So let's just move those into the right position. That one's going to go somewhere down there, and this one will be up the top. So. Sometimes you might need to zoom in to get this exact in the right position. So. So that should then just play. Like that. So why couldn't I have done it by just rendering it out? Well, I could have, but if I play this now, when it gets to the end, so that opens up, the movies playing behind it. It's a bit clunky and slow at the moment because it's still rendering into my ram. What I then realized that I wanted to do once I saw this was I want the curtains to now close again, which I didn't do in the first one. You can see when I get to there, it just stops and everything goes horribly wrong. So we'll have a look at how we can actually do that and close those curtains and reverse that layer in a second. But do have a bit of a go with this. So before you actually bring in your background, the billboard, select all the layers, go to composition composition, go to layer. Precompose, give it a name, and then you'll see, you'll actually see that composition there as a layer. Then you can bring in your background image, which is the billboard. Over there, move your css that you can just see the billboard all at once. Change the size, so it fits into your screen, and then you can move back and go to the composition or the pre comp that you've got, which minus called screen content, and you could use if you go to up to effect, I used distort, and I used corner pin in there and just drag the corners into the position. If like mine, you can see, Oh, my goodness, I've missed something over there. You can always just click on the effects again. Go into Corner pin, click corner pin and grab one of those corners again to just get it absolutely correct. As well. Have a go with that, and then we'll make some more changes to our content video. 6. Time Reverse: Now, let's go back and see what we can do about getting these curtains to close. I'm just going to close down those effects in there. Let's close down this effect. Panel as well. So what I want to do is I want to actually go into the screen content over here. You can see it's called screen content there. It's called screen content there. If I double click this, look at that. I've gone back into where I was before, and I'm actually in the screen content now. I could also be in the comp one. That's my main composition. So I've gone from there into that, and there it is, it's showing it to me. So now that I'm in the composition, I can do any changes that I like. And what I want to do, as I said, is I want to get those curtains to close over here. So the curtain will open. The video will play, and they'll close again and then it'll keep repeating itself over and over. I'm going to just pull my timeline out. Sorry, I'm going to pull my work area out a little bit along the timeline. I'm going to go to the curtain. This is the curtain that closes. I'm going to copy it so we can just go up to edit and copy and then go straight to edit and paste. That's copied that entire lay. You can see it's called curtain two. I'm going to press return and call this curtain close. Now I'm going to move it along a little bit over here. So let's have a look over here and see what it's doing. Because you can see at the moment, it's still just opening like that, and it doesn't close at all. It just remains open. So what we can do is we can reverse videos. We can reverse most things in here and there's a whole section devoted later on in the course to working with time. But for the moment, we're just going to go up to the Layer menu down to time, and I'm going to say reverse layer. Now, if I were to play that, you'll see it's open, and then they close. Now, really, all I want is this little section here going from them being open to them being closed. So I'm going to go to the edge of this clip. Pull it in. So this is the bit that I want just closing closing closing until they get to that stage over there. I'm going to move that O here a little bit in my video so let's have ale look and see what happens. Now, if you find because you've got a number of green screens in here, that things are starting to slow down a bit. Maybe you're struggling a little bit on the computer. Instead of looking at it at full quality, go to a third quality or a quarter quality in there. Once again, you can see the quality doesn't look quite so great, but it'll render fine. Don't worry about that. So over here, just going to go along, and then those will start to close. On the video. In fact, I'm going to have to move it back just a little bit. So if I play that now, and let's take the render area back to there. Let's play this from the beginning. And the curtains are closing. On that. This is still pre rendering it into RAM on my machine. So this is now in real time. And close. Now, I'm not working on the most height high spec machine at all. This is my training machine that I used to record. And I'd rather not work on high high spec machine because I know many of you won't be. So if mine starts to struggle, it means that yours is started to struggle potentially as well. So, um Always just change this down to a third or a quarter quality. When we render it, it'll be fine on the final render. It's just while you're previewing it. Have a bit of a go. Get to that stage. Don't forget you copy and paste, it's in there, and then just move it out and we're using up to the layers. We're using and we're using time reverse layer. Try it out. 7. Render: Now, I've made sure that I've got my working area to the area that I want to actually see, and I'm going to go now and just close this down, so just close down screen content. And this should now work. Absolutely fine. If I pull this over, you'll see that it'll update and the curtains close in there. I might need to adjust. Let's just zoom in a little bit over here. I might need to adjust this area, the work area to get in exactly what I want. I think that's now 12 seconds over there. So, even though this is set to a quarter quality, so it looks pretty bad in there. When I go to file and export and I add to media encoder, And I'm using the Facebook option. If you want to use Twitter or anything else, it's absolutely fine and it's up to you. The settings that I've got in here will be full quality settings, and you can go in here if you need to change the various settings. We'll look at a bit more of this later on. But I'm going to choose to save it somewhere. Let's call this cinema. And I'm going to put mine on my desk. I'm going to put mine on my desktop, getting tongue tied there and click on the record button. Then we'll have a look when we finished and see if it's the quality wise is absolutely fine. It took a little bit longer to render this one, but I'm going to go over to the final rendered result. You can see the quality is absolutely fine, and I can play that all the way through. It plays fine. Curtains open. We have our video, and the curtains close again. That's it. We're done. Try it out. 8. Issues: Now, I don't know whether you noticed on mine, you might have different problems on yours, but in mine, as the curtains were closing, there was a little white flash up there where it went full screen the uh The green screen that was masking behind it stopped. So what I'm going to do is, I'm going to actually go back into after effects, and I can adjust it. Let's find it over there, so you can see that's where it goes, flashes up. Now, as I said, you might have different problems, but the answer is the same. We can go back in here. And I can then actually go to that screen contact, double click to go into that, and I can just adjust it in here, so I'm going to pull this over a little bit further. Like that and just make sure that it closes properly and maybe change this to shorten the render. Same again, check it in here. Make sure that render is exactly where I wanted to stop. I'll move it over a little bit like that, and then just do another render. Have a go if you have any issues. 9. Masking & Paths Intro: This section is about track mats. Track mats are where you can get one layer to look at the transparency or the lightness and darkness of another layer and hide or show things based on that lightness or darkness or transparency. Once again, it sounds complicated when you explain it like that, but when you see it done, it will all make perfect sense. Let's go. 10. Animate Mask : Let's go and get a video. Now, honestly, at this stage, it doesn't really matter what video you choose or whether it's a still image. Absolutely fine. I'm just going to pick one of these see videos that I've got and drag it in down there. Now, what I want to do is I want to have a look at the masking, and we have had a bit of a look at this. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to pull this up so you can see this a little bit better. I'm going to go up to the masks, and if I click and hold or right click on that it's kind of like a little arrow in the corner there. I can actually see the other mask shapes in here. Now, as I said, we've had a bit of a look at them, but let's look at how we can actually animate them. I'll start with its rectangle tool, and I'm just going to draw in my little mask. Now, remember, it's on the layer itself. If you don't have that layer selected, it will draw a separate shape. It comes up and it's called mask one and it's set to add. If you set it to subtract, it does the opposite area. Let's just set that to add. I'm going to click on the drop down next to the word mask, and we've then got the option for the mask path itself. So it says shape. What I'm going to do is I'm going to keyframe that. And then I'm going to move along a little bit over here, and using my arrow tool, I'm going to select one of those points and change that point. I've just keyframed that now so you can see what it will do is will adjust the mask shape in there. L et me go back to that one again, so I'm going to use this little tool here to click to go back to that key frame, or remember you can use J and K to jump between key frames. I'm going to select this one, and let's pull that one in as well. And once again, that will just animate that shape, like so. Of course, while you're animating that shape, you could also change things like the feathering, so I could soften the edge of that off quite a lot while I'm changing the shape, I can change the capacity, and I can change the expansion, which I can also key frame as well. So do have a little bit of a play with that with the mask. Once you've tried out a rectangular one. By the way, to get rid of it, just click on it and press back space or delete. Have a go with some of the other shapes in here. I'm going to go to the elliptical tool or the elliptical shape. Click and drag a little shape in there. I'm going to go down to my path. I'm going to key frame the path, and then I'm going to select. Maybe that one there and pull that down. And this one here and pull that up. And then I'm going to move along a little bit. I'm going to adjust them. That will come there. Let's get that to go down there and that want to go that way. So when we look at this, we can get this really interesting morph between the shapes. Have a bit of a go. Try out. 11. Mask GreenScreen: We can mix masks and green screens quite happily. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go along here and to bring in something from a green screen. Just one of the things that we've used before. You can find a different file if you're bored with those. I'm going to pop it in there. Here's my little beam which is spinning around. I'm going to use the usual effect keying key light and just get rid of the green screen from that. Now, what I want to do is I want to go up to the top to the shapes, and I'm going to use an elliptical tool, and I'm going to draw a little ellipse down, down the bottom. And then I'm going to keyframe that. So moving my playback head right to the beginning, I'm going to open that up so I can get to the mask path options. Click on the little key frame, and then I'm going to say over here, by the time we get to 5 seconds, I want this to go right to the top. I'll use the little arrow tool. Now, be very careful when you try to select those because if you just click and drag over there to select it, you might end up doing this and actually moving the background instead. If you do that and think, Oh, my goodness, how do I get back to those little points? Go back to the lay that you should be on and click the Mask Path option, so you can find those points. Very often, I'll actually do it from the edge here going in to select just that point like that. Once you've selected one, the others are easy to select very quickly. I'm going to move that up like so. So let's go back to this one over here, so there it is. There is my animation going up from there, and I could even take that one now and just drag it down a bit. But of course, we want it to be a little bit more interesting than that. So I'm going to go to the feathering. I'm going to put some feathering on that. Let's have a look at how that plays. Do try that out with a mask and some animation on a object which is maybe on a green screen. Understand 12. Make a Track Matte: Now I want to look at a different way of masking. What I'm going to do is, I'm just going to go and find a clip that we haven't used before, and you can take any clip you like. I've just downloaded a C scene from Adobe Stock. Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to make a composition, but I'm going to do it in a different way that I haven't shown you yet. To make a composition, I'm going to take this clip and drop it straight into this area over here. This is the timeline. And you see what it's done is it's made a new composition for me with the same size and length as the clip that I've got. So a nice quick way of making a clip, if you need one, rather than going to composition, new composition, et cetera. Let me go and find the thing that I want to use as a mask. I'm going to go in here. I've created some of these and they're available in your assets folder. So I'm going to go to my desktop and find mine, and I'm just going to use this black and white mat. Over there, pop in this little mat over here. This is just a J peg, half black, half white. I'm going to go into my timeline, and I'm going to right click right at the top over here where you've got layer name, you've got the switches in there. I'm going to right click in there, go to my columns, and I'm going to show the modes column. Now, we had a very quick look at a mode earlier in the course. But what I'm interested in, are these track mats over here. So I'm going to go to the underneath one. I'm not going to the mat itself to this black and white. I'm going to the one underneath where it says, No mat, I'm going to click on that and go to the drop down, and this says, choose the mat that you want, and I'm going to choose the black white mat. Now, nothing's happened so far. So what I have to do is I have to choose from the type of mat, because we've got two types of mats. We've got an Alpha mat and a luma mat. And if I click this settle button here, I can change from the alpha mat to the luma mat. The luma mat means the lightness. It's looking at the lightness and darkness of this layer over here. So where this is black, it's actually hiding this layer, where it's white, it's showing this layer. If you're on the Alpha mat, there's no Alpha on there, so it's not actually doing anything at all. So just make sure that you switch that on. The little square to the right of that, by the way, if you click on that, it invokes it, so it does it the opposite way round. I'm going to get rid of that and show you a different one. So I'm going to go in, choose another mat. I've got this one called weird black white Mat. And I'm going to bring that one in above that. Same again, if you can't find it, remember, right click columns and it's the mode that you want, go to the one underneath. The black and white one is above, in my case, the C scene, which is underneath, go to the underneath one. Click the drop down, choose the mat that you want. And then you might find that you need to actually change the settle button from Alpha to Luma. And there you can see how those bits are just showing up based on the blackness and the whiteness of that little mat. And of course, we can invert it the other way around as well if we like. Now, what about putting an image underneath? Well, if I go in and get another piece of video. So once again, I've just downloaded something from Adobe stock over here, and I'm going to put that right underneath everything. You can see both videos at the same time now, so they'll both play together. This top one is being matted or masked by the black and white one right at the very top. Let's do one last one over here. So I'm going to go and find another mat here. And once again, I've provided this for you. And in my case, it is on my desktop, and it's just a gradient. By the way, I did these in photoshop, if you want to try your own, you're happy with photoshop or another package which like photoshop. I just made a Basically, something that went from black through to white in there, I used a gradient. I've got the mat in there. Let me go and bring in one of the pictures in there. I go to the bottom. Sorry, pictures, pieces of video. Go to black and white, and when I switch that on, you'll see how it'll fade out. Of course, if I put another clip underneath that one, one of those vids will fade into the other one like so. Have go with those ones provided, if you want to make your own, try it out, and then we'll come back and we'll do something like this, but with movement and video as well. Heavy go. 13. Video as Track Matte: I. Let's do the same track mats, but we're going to use a video as the mat. I'm going to go in and open up some videos. I've got a interesting piece over here with little LEDs, which flash up and down. I've also got a crowd of people dancing. And lastly, I've got this black and white or silhouette type of image of somebody putting earphones on. Now, this is going to be my mat. Then I'm going to take one of those. Let's start off with This one here, which is, if I move this over, is the crowd scene. Then I'm also going to bring in the last one, which is the little LEDs going up and down. So we'll pop those in. I'm going to just hide the bottom one for the moment, so we'll ignore that. And we're really looking at these two in here. This one is the person with the earphones. That's going to be the mat, I'm going to go to the one below it, and I'm going to choose it in there and click on the little button to make it a mat. Then I can switch in the one at the bottom and you'll see that those little things will appear. In the shape of the person who's listening to the music. But if I don't like that, I can click this to make it go the other way around. And once again, I can have the person with the music and the LEDs in the background. Of course, if you don't like those videos, just try something else. I've got something a little bit more gentle in here that I could bring in underneath that, and We could then have the person listening to music and the waves in the background or reverse it cats the other way round. It's up to you. Have a go. Have some fun with that one. It really is cool. 14. F Intro Project: This project is going to be fun. And what we're going to be doing is we're going to be taking some still images, photographs and illustrations. We're going to be putting them all together into, as you can see this final piece. Once you've done this one, why not try making your own items to go into it and have it go again. You could use a different photograph, you can use different graphics as well. But as always, let's get started. 15. Create Comp & Scale Buildings: For this project, we're going to do some really cool stuff. We're going to be using pre comps. We're also going to be using some paths to mask. But I'm going to show you a new technique that we haven't looked at yet, and that's how to get text onto a path and then to follow a path along. We're also going to be looking at moving an object across the screen, but actually getting the object to follow the direction that it's going in. If that doesn't make sense, just hang on with me and it'll all work out, as you'll see. Now, first of all, I'm going to go to composition, new composition. I'm going to name this composition, and this is going to be my city scape. I'm going to suggest that you name your compositions very well as we're going along because that way, you'll know exactly what we're actually doing and which comp or pre comp we're actually working on. This is going to be the usual size over here, 1920 by 1080 at 30 frames per second. I'm going to put in a duration in here of 30 seconds, a bit more than we need, but that's fine. It just gives us some room to breathe. White background is okay. And we'll click. And now we're going to bring in the first files to go in here. This is going to be our city scape, which we're going to animate. So I'm going to double click. I'm going to find my city scape, and these are buildings Layer three, two, and one. I'm going to select one, hold down the Shift key and click, and then open that to bring them all in. I want to bring them in to my timeline. So let's start over here with 32, and one. Now, I want to scale them all at the same time, so I'm going to select them all, click and drag over them, press S, so they're all selected, and the scale has come up on all of them, and I can then scale them all down at once like so. Anyway, have a go with that. Bring in those buildings, make sure they're the correct order, three, two, one, and then we'll move on and get them animated. 16. Animate Buildings: D I've got all the three scales open, but I want to show you a little quick technique here that I use quite a lot. I could select all of those and just press S again to close them down. But sometimes you might have other things selected. In here, maybe I've put in P for position. Maybe this one is actually totally open because I've been working in something like that. So a quick way to close them all is if you've selected them all, press one of your shortcuts, so I'll just press P, and you can see it just shows me position P a second time and it closes them all down like that. Now, we're going to animate these. I'm not going to be animating the back one. This is the one at the bottom over there, so that one's not going to move. Let's go and move the top one. What I'm going to do is click on the top one over here, which is buildings a layer three. If you want to rename them front middle and back, that's absolutely fine. I've gone to building Layer three, and I'm going to start it over here by moving it across to one side. Now, I'm actually going to be moving in a little bit just over to say there, for example, in a fraction. I'm going to keyframe that, so I'm going to press P for position. I'm going to keyframe that there, and then I'm going to say, by the time I get to 10 seconds, I want this building to have moved across. So I can either do it manually, or I can do it with my settings in here. If I'm doing it manually, I'm holding down the shift key so I can make sure that it actually moves horizontally. Now let's move it back, so it's moving from there across to there over 10 seconds, and back to 20 seconds, I want to go back to the start again. So I'm going to select this key frame here. Copy it, so I'll go to edit and copy, move to my 22nd mark and use edit and paste. Let's have a quick look at that. So you can see the timing. It is very slow as it's moving along like that, but it's enough to give us the feeling that we're actually moving around the city, so moving backwards and forwards. Now, let's do the next one. I'm going to click on Building layer two, press P again. Go back to the beginning. This one is going to be moved over not quite so much, but maybe like that. You can see I've just got a little bit of a small gap in there. I'm going to key frame that. Move to the middle, move that one a little bit less once again. Maybe just to there a bit. I'm holding on the shift key, so when I'm dragging it, it is going absolutely horizontal. Then I'll copy this key frame. I'm using a keyboard shortcut, either control C or command C, depending with your PC or Mc, and then go and paste it in over there. What we get now is a movement of these, but the front one is moving more than the back one. So. Now, when we get to this of the middle bit, we do want to slow it down. So you know the score now. Oops, I'm going to select those two key frames. I'm going to go to the animation keyframe assistant and put some easy es on them. By the way, they're not quite in the right position, so I need to just move that one up to there. So we should actually end up slowing down, and then moving back to the beginning again. Of course, if you wish, you can go and put some easing onto your start and your end key frames as well. Sometimes you can just do the whole lot. It's quicker that way. Of course, these end bits here where it comes out, those will be cut off in the final result. Do have a bit of a go, get your animation going, and before you go any further, go to file and do a save. So just in case the worst happens and your machine crashes. So I'm going to call this city scape. Heave to go. 17. Pre-compose & Add Paper Plane: What I'm going to do now is I'm going to take these three layers, and I'm going to use the precompose. I'm going to go to layer down to precompose, I'm going to name this my animated buildings. And I'm moving all the attributes into a new composition. We'll click okay. So we've now got this really nice clean timeline with just the animated buildings in there. Of course, if I move that backwards and forwards, you can see that's what I've got. But the great thing about this rather than actually rendering them out and bring them in again is, as you know, you can always double click to go into that to make changes. Now, what we're going to do is we're going to then animate a little paper plane flying down over the city. So I'm going to go and find the paper plane, and this has been given to you in your assets folder. So it's just a little paper plane here on a transparent background. If you want to use something else which is already cut out with a transparent background, feel free to do that. I'm going to take it and bring it in over here. You can see it's pretty large and I want to scale it down. I'm going to press S to scale it and scale it down a little bit like so. The second thing is that I want this paper plan to be a bit more obvious, so I want to make it red. I'm going to go to the effects. I'm going to go down to my color correction. And I'm going to choose black and white. Black and white, we've seen this before allows me to tint things a color. I can click on tint. Then I can click the color below it and go and choose a color for the plane. Now, that's not very red. It's more light pink, so I'm going to drag my color across until I get something. Like so. I think I'm reasonably happy with that. If you wish, you could always go into the effects, color correction, and then maybe darken it down using any of the options that you are a fe with. For me, I'm just going to take the levels. Now, there's auto levels in there, I'm going to go down to levels here, and the middle slider will allow me to lighten and darken the planes. I'm just going to drag that little middle slider there over to the right. If you use photoshop or any other image manipulation software, you'll be aware of what the levels actually do. Otherwise, just move the middle slider to lighten and darken it. Have a bit of a go with that, get your plane in and make sure everything else is a pre comp, it's very simple down here. 18. Animate Plane & Transform Path: Now, let's get this plane animated. The problem is that it's facing the wrong direction. It's going over to the left, and I wanted to fly from the left and go over to the right. So I'm going to make sure that I've selected the layer, and I'm going to go along to the transform options. Now, that's in the layer menu at the top. I'm going to go down to transform, and I can just flip things around so I can either flip it horizontal or vertical. If I flip it horizontal, you can see it's now facing the other direction. Now, let me go and animate it, so I'm going to move it across over here, and I think I'm going to just scale it down a little bit more as well. I think it's a bit too big. So I've got to scale, just take it down just a fraction over there, and I'm then going to move it off the screen in there. So right at the beginning, it's going to be over there. I'm going to keyframe that, so I'll press P for position key frame it. I'm going to move to my ten second mark, and I'm going to move the plane down to the other side over there. So it'll just fly from one side to the other like that. Quite slow, but that's all that we need. Remember, it is a paper plane. But we also want now to actually get it to fly around a bit, so it's not just a straight line. I'd like to move around a little bit, maybe go up and down a bit like a paper plane would. So over here on the timeline, I'm going to click on the plane and just pull it down at that point there. Then over here, I'm going to go and get it to go up. And then once again down here, we're going to get it to go down over there, and then another little sort of bounce over here. Now, you can see that this is not going to look good at all because paper planes don't fly down like that and then suddenly change direction. Like that. So what I will need to do though is to actually go along and make these inter Nice curves. I can do that by going to the animation menu, and we've got some options in here. I'm going to go to the key frame interpolation. And what we're looking for is the spatial interpolation. Instead of linear, we're going to use Bezier. When I click k, you'll see I've now got some nice Bezier handles on there, and I can actually pull these handles out if I want more of a curve like so. Okay, our plane is still not right. Once again, when I fly it, it's not following the direction of the path, it's just going up and down, but always pointing in the right in the right direction there. So one more thing that we can do. If we go along to the layers and down to transform, where we're going to go and do the flipping, we can say auto orient. And now, if I switch that on and say, oriented along the path, Now the plane will actually follow the direction of the path. Now, it's kind of looking like it's going down a bit too much, so I'm actually going to press for rotation and just rotate it a little bit, so it's actually facing the path over there. Let's play that now. It's a little bit on the slow side, but that's absolutely fine for the moment. We'll speed it up shortly. Maybe as it comes up here, it's getting closer to us. Maybe I want to scale it up a little bit as well. So I'm going to press S for scale. Right at the beginning, I'm going to key frame my scale size. When it gets to here, I might want to be a little bit, so I might increase the scale in there. Move along a bit. When it gets to there, maybe it's further away, so I'll decrease the scaling size. And once again, over here, we're going to get it back to normal size once again. My rotation is a little bit off over there, so I'm going to press R again and just try and angle that correctly. You could actually keyframe your rotation as well if it wasn't doing exactly what you wanted it to do. Now, with these points that we've got in here, if you need, you can actually drag them along. If you've done like mine, a little bit too extreme on them, just drag them around, a little bit like that. You can drag the handles out as well. Be careful of breaking the handles because otherwise you'll get something which looks a bit weird. Although, to be honest, maybe paper planes do that, and they go up and then suddenly jump down. I don't know. Not a paper plane expert. So let's just do that there. Once again, be careful if you pull these out too much, your key frames will be too far apart compared to that, and it will change the speed that the paper plane is running at. Let's have one last look at that. So it's getting bigger going down a little bit. There's a funny little thing over there. I might have to go and look at that. Now, I want to speed the whole thing up. So I'm going to open up all of these transform options, so I can see them all. Select all of them, which is position and scale, and I'm going to hold down the option key or the old key on your keyboard and just pull them closer together like that. So this is now running over 5 seconds, be much more of a paper plane type of look. Mine's a little bit extreme, but have a go with yours. 19. Change the Anchor Point: H. If you have a look at mine, you'll see that my plane suddenly jumps at one point. So let's have a look at it. What I want to do is, I want to get that path back again. So I'm going to go and click on transform in here, and I can then see all those points. This is the point where it suddenly jumps. And if I click over there, you can see these handles are not lined up. So if I just make sure that those two handles are absolutely in line like that, as I said before, if you've got a funny bit like that, you can get a jump, but sometimes it's just subtly enough that when it moves, you just might need to tweak it a little bit. I think that's better. Now the next thing I want to do is I want to rotate the plane on the center rather than on the very end, which is why it goes right off the edge like that. I want to rotate around the center. I'm going to do that by using the anchor point. What I can do, and I'm going to just zoom in a little bit so that you can see this a bit easier. Is over there, I'm going to move the plane in relation to its anchor point. You can see I can move it around in relation to its anchor point there. So I I move it back a bit like that and into the middle, now the rotation point is in the middle of the plane, and I should get a much better movement up and down like so. I'm going to go back again to fit or up to 100% in there. That's just your little Zoom to zoom in and out of this. Let's check that out again. That's over about 5 seconds flies in. Have a go with those last two, the Anchor Point option and check your path to see if there's any aberrations in there which are causing it to gottle bit funny. 20. Mask to Billboards: Let's bring in the background picture. I'm going to go and find it. Once again, this has been provided for you, and it's going to be this subway picture over here. You can see it's just a little subway with three what are those called like advertising boards. I'm going to drag that in and put it underneath everything else. Now, let me just hide this one over here, so we'll just hide that. You can see the subway picture is really huge. I've just hidden the animated buildings for now. The subway picture is really big, so I'm going to press S to scale. I'm going to scale it down to the sort of size that I want. So I want something about that. So it fills the whole frame. Now, I'm going to go back to my paper plane, and you'll see the paper plane just flies through the scene. Over there. I'm going to hide the paper plane for now. Let's close those down and go to my animated building. Now, you can see with the transparency on the animated building, you can see the whole thing in there. I'm going to scale it, so I'm going to press S over there. Remember this is going to do all three of those layers because it's a pre comp. I'm going to scale it down a little bit like that. Over there. And I might even squash it down just a little bit over there disproportionately, so I can unlink those, and you can see I can then scale it left and right or up and down. Over there, I'm just going to scale those buildings just a little bit like that because it's a drawing you won't notice any difference. And now I want those to be inside those billboards. So I'm going to go over and I'm going to add a mask. So I'm going to click on the square, the rectangle tool. Make sure I'm on that pre comp, and I'm going to add in my mask. Now, I like to actually zoom in a little bit to do this. So let's go up to say, 200 whoops. Let's try that again. Let's go up to 100% in there. And I'm using the track pad on my laptop or if you've got a scrolly mouse, you can do the same as well. I'm going to start at that corner over there and just click and drag a mask for that. Now I'm still on that same animated buildings, and I'm going to do a second one over here. That one comes in there and a third one over there. Those three masks are all working on that same pre comp layer. Let's show this now, so we'll just fit that into there. Switch on the little paper aeroplane, and we'll play that from the beginning. We've got the animation going on in the background. 21. Mask Paper Plane with Track Matte: L et's mask the paper plane, so it looks like it's going into one of these sort of scenes and then out the other side over here. So if we try doing that with a mask, exactly as we've done with the last one. I'm going to click on that and open it up so you'll see that I'll add a mask. And I go along to the mask, and I make a little mask over here. That's the area that I don't want the plane to be, or I do want the plane to be depending on the masks option. You can see, first of all, it gives me this weird shape in there. And as I move, you can see my mask is moving as well. So the mask is actually moving along with the path itself. If I did that over there on that mask, you'll see that as I'm moving the plane, the mask is moving as well. L et's undo that. Once again, commands Ed or controls Ed to undo it. So what about a different way of doing it? Well, how about we use a track mat? But instead of using a video or a pixel layer like we did before, let's use a shape as a track mat. I'm going to click down here so that no layers are selected, and then I'm going to go and draw in my shape. I've gone to fill, I've chosen black as my fill color, and I'm going to draw in a little shape over there. No, and a second one over here at the same time. So both those paths are on the same layer in there, I haven't done them as separate ones. Now, I can go to my aeroplane. Let's just move this until the aeroplane is slightly over that. And if I go down here to the track mat on the aeroplane, and I choose the shape layer. You can see how it's just showing the plane only when it's going in that mat. Now, remember, there's another little button there where we can invert the mat. So I click on that and now it's inverted, so now the plane will be hidden where that mat is over there. So we've got the plane kind of down. Let's play that again, so it'll come in and it'll go through the picture, and then out the other side over there. Of course, you might not want to come in at the beginning. So if I'm on that shape layer, I could then just draw in another shape over here. Let's try drawing in a big shape in there. And then once again, the plane will only come in in the picture. But then it'll actually go out of the picture over there. It's up to you what you want to do with that. I kind of like it coming in on that side as well and flying into the picture that way. Do have a bit of a go with that. Remember, you can't use the mask on here, so you can't on the paper plane, so you make a shape layer. And to make the shape layer, make sure that you've clicked off of these layers, so nothing is selected. Then make your shape layer, make sure the fill is black in there. Just put in the shape where you want to hide the plane. Then on the paper plane layer, you go to the track mat. Over there. Remember if you can't see it, just right click and then say, show the modes, and choose it, but you might have to reverse it in there. If you're not seeing it or you're seeing the wrong thing, I just put my plane over there so you can see both of them and you can reverse it one way or the other. Have a little bit of a play with that. This one's a little bit more tricky, so take your time you might want to watch this video once or twice more to just get that absolute spot on. Have it go. 22. Text Along the Path: Let's bring in some text and put some text along a path as well. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to use my text tool over there. Now, just click over here and put in the text. So I'm going to say property sales because this is all about city properties. I think that text is about the right size, actually. Although I am going to select it, I like the red color. I think that's brilliant. I'm going to go down here in my options, and I'm just going to change the horizontal look of that text, but I'm also going to move the character slightly further apart as well. And maybe make it a little bit smaller. Now that I've done that, I want to hide some of these layers so I can't see them all the time. So I'm just going to click on the little shy button and then click the button, the global button up here to make them shy, so I can just see the text layer by itself. Now, that's really easy stuff. You've done it before, and you know how to put in the text. I want my text to come in from here, and I want to well, follow a path along there across inside the billboards. So once the plane has come through, that's when I really want the text to come in, so I'm just going to move the text over to there. So I need to make a path for that. And to do that, I'm going to use the pen tool. So there's the whoops. So there's a little pen over here. Now, if you've never used the penal before, don't worry. It can be a little bit difficult to get to grips with when you're doing more fine work, but for this, we're just going to do something really, very simple. I'm going to click over here with one click. Then I'm going to move up to here, and I'm going to click drag. I'm going to click down. I haven't let that go the mouse, and I'm just going to drag out. That'll make one of these little handles. These are called Bezier curves. Then I'm going to move down to here, and I'm going to click and drag once again. Up to here, click and drag. So it's all one movement. Click, drag, so click down. Keep holding down, don't let go and drag out like that. Because I was actually on the property sales layer, when I did that, it's actually put that in as a mask on the property sales layer. If I had if I didn't have that selected, and I did that, you'll see we'd get sort of some solid colors coming through, I would make a whole new layer. So I'm just going to get rid of that layer there. Now, if you need to see your mask again, you can just click it like so. You can use the white arrow tool. If you wish to select the individual points and you can move them around if they're not in the right place. Over there, you can grab the handles, and you can drag the handles around as well. You can see these handles are actually linked, so We can drag one and the other one moves at the same time. So how do I get my text to go onto that path? Well, if we go to the text down here in the properties, You can see we've got some options in here. On says path options. And the path at the moment says none. And this is where we need to choose the mask. So when you choose the mask, your text will just jump straight onto that path over there. Now, like mine, it's upside down, if you want to change it, there's now some path options. You can just switch on reverse path to get it to go to the other side. My text is in the middle because my properties here, the paragraph properties are centr lined. If it was left aligned, it would be over there. If it was right aligned, it would be on that side over there. So we can also change where the text is on the path itself. I'm going to come to some of these settings in a little while. But for the moment, I'm going to suggest that you just try this out. Put in some text. Make sure you're on the text layer. Go to your pen tool and just click and then click drag to make the path like that. If you make a mess of it, don't worry about it. You can always use the little arrow later on to select those individual points and move them around and move the handles as well. You'll see I've actually now got two masks. On there, I'm just going to delete whoops. Delete that second one in there. Try to out get that far and then we'll animate this along the path itself. 23. Animate Text Along the Path: I'm going to go to my text options again, and I'm on the path over here. I've still got that path selected, and I'm going to left align my text, O, sorry, right align my text. I wanted to start over there. You'll see now I can actually go to the first margin or the last margin. If I go to the last margin, I can actually move that last margin along. That's the right hand margin. In fact, I can keep going, so it keeps going off the path. And I'm going to do that. I'm going to move my last margin along so my text disappears. I'm going to key frame it, and then I'm going to move over 20 seconds over here, and I'm going to go the other way. So I'll just keep moving this until my text goes right the way through to the other side. Yes. And out the screen O there. Let's have a little look at that, and you can see it just animates through like so. But I want that text to only be inside the video or inside the moving billboards. So if I'm on this text over here, I can then go and I can add a mask. I'll use one of these masks, and I can just add a mask in over there, one. Two and three of them. And now let's have a look. And you can see the text will only appear inside those masks. I'm going to undo that again. So make sure you're on the properties layer. G one of these solid masks or closed masks, shall I say? And I'm going to zoom in a bit so I can see exactly what I'm doing. Let's go up to 100% in there, and I'm just going to click in there. First mask in there, second mask in here. L et's get the third one over there. And that's it. Let's just fit that and play it from the beginning. So we've got the plane that goes into the picture and comes out again, and then the text comes in the other way. If you find that it's not coming in fast enough or coming in too quickly, you can always go in here and change those key frames. So if I just move these in a little bit like that, and move to there. I think that's a bit better where it's coming in and going out that side. Have a little bit of a go with that, and then we'll do one last bit of text which we're going to mask in here as well. 24. Animate Text Along the Path: I'm going to go to my text options again, and I'm on the path over here. I've still got that path selected, and I'm going to left align my text, O, sorry, right align my text. I wanted to start over there. You'll see now I can actually go to the first margin or the last margin. If I go to the last margin, I can actually move that last margin along. That's the right hand margin. In fact, I can keep going, so it keeps going off the path. And I'm going to do that. I'm going to move my last margin along so my text disappears. I'm going to key frame it, and then I'm going to move over 20 seconds over here, and I'm going to go the other way. So I'll just keep moving this until my text goes right the way through to the other side. Yes. And out the screen O there. Let's have a little look at that, and you can see it just animates through like so. But I want that text to only be inside the video or inside the moving billboards. So if I'm on this text over here, I can then go and I can add a mask. I'll use one of these masks, and I can just add a mask in over there, one. Two and three of them. And now let's have a look. And you can see the text will only appear inside those masks. I'm going to undo that again. So make sure you're on the properties layer. G one of these solid masks or closed masks, shall I say? And I'm going to zoom in a bit so I can see exactly what I'm doing. Let's go up to 100% in there, and I'm just going to click in there. First mask in there, second mask in here. L et's get the third one over there. And that's it. Let's just fit that and play it from the beginning. So we've got the plane that goes into the picture and comes out again, and then the text comes in the other way. If you find that it's not coming in fast enough or coming in too quickly, you can always go in here and change those key frames. So if I just move these in a little bit like that, and move to there. I think that's a bit better where it's coming in and going out that side. Have a little bit of a go with that, and then we'll do one last bit of text which we're going to mask in here as well. 25. Mask & Animate More Text: Let's get one last bit of text in here. So I'm going to click, and I'm going to put in some text. So this is going to say in the city, That's kind of big, but that's really what I wanted. I'm just going to select all that text and just go and choose something else, which is going to be much bolder because this is not really going to be seen, it's just going to be on the back wall, and you'll hardly see it. So I'm looking for something maybe like impact, which is a really thick slab type of typeface. I can then adjust the height and the width of that over here if I need something a little bit more chunky. And I'm going to move the characters closer together as well. I've made my text white, which I think will work quite well. And now what I want to do is I want to animate this. So by the time the plane has gone through, it's getting to this stage here, I want in the city to start coming in from the left hand side from the right hand side, going across to the left hand side. So I'm going to move it to where I want to start. I think let's have it over there. Actually, while I'm here, I'm going to make it just a little bit taller as well. So we're going to pull that up a little bit. Like that. You'll see it all the way through. Let's move that back to there. So it's going to start there. So I'll just take my text and pull it out to that particular position. And I'm going to key frame the position, so I go to p, put in a key frame, and this will be over 20 seconds. By the time we get to 20 seconds, I'm going to move it across to the other side, so I'm just holding down my shift key, so as I'm moving it, it is moving absolutely horizontal. That's it. By the way, when you're doing this, if you release the mouse and you'll still hold down the shift key and you try and move it. I won't move. You have to just let go of the shift key, then start to move it and hold down the shift key again. Over there. So that'll give us the movement from one side. To the other. But of course, I don't want that covering up everything. I want to look like it's actually on the wall. I'm going to have to make some mask for this. The mask I'll use is not going to be a standard mask like we did for the last bit of text because this text is actually moving. It's not just changing the property, like we did on the property sales, where we're actually changing the left margin. We are actually physically moving the text path itself along. I can't use a standard mask. I'm going to have to do what we've done before, and that is click off everything and use the little shapes to mask it out. Now, I will hide that for the moment so I can see what I'm doing. Using the shape tool, I'm going to go and create a shape over there. That one another one here, and these are all on the same layer, the same shape layer. One last one. In there. So three rectangles on the one shape layer. Now, I'm going to go back to in the city and over here where it says, Matt, I'm going to choose the shape layer two. And then I'm going to invert that, so it's everywhere except that. Lastly, on my in the city text, I'm going to press T for pacity and take the capacity down so we can see some of the wall coming in behind it. It's going to be kind of subtle. I'm also going to press P, by the way, and just whoops. Just move that down a little bit like so. Let's have a look at that now. So when the plane gets to the other side, that other bit of text should be coming in, over there, a little bit like an underground train wood as it moves its way through there. Of course, you can always go in if you wish and put in some easy ease on that. Have a go with that last one. It's an easier one with the animation, but you have to do it from a shape player and use one of these track mats as well. 26. Render the Project: I'm going to go in here and I'm going to take my work area and just move it to the end of that piece that I want to record, so that's going to happen like so. Now, I want to record this and sorry, I want to rent this. I'm going to go up to file and export. I want to show you a little problem that sometimes you'll come across. You go up to file and down to export, and it's grayed out. The add to median Code Q is great out there. Why is that happened? Well, I was a bit sneaky here. You see, I clicked on the project window in here. If you're in the project panel and you go to file and export, it won't allow you to export that. If you click on your timeline, Then go to file and export, you'll find that you can then get to add to Adobe media Q. While we're there, if we're going to file, let's just go back into after effects for a second. If we're going to file and export, you also if you're using Premier Pro, you can export this as a premier pro project as well. That's a bit of a tongue tied one there. Let's go into after effects, sorry media encode, should I say, It's the usual, choose a preset from here. Decide where to save it. Press the render button, and your away. Now, I'm going to just show the final piece. There it is. I always like to have a look at this quite large and just see if I can see any mistakes at all. I think this text needs to come down a little bit like that, and some of my masks are not quite as perfect as they could be. But once I've checked it out, I can then go back into after effects and tweak those and re render it correctly. Anyway, do you have to go and render your project? 27. Parenting Intro: This section is really useful. It's called parenting. What we can do is we can get a child object to follow what its parents do, and we can get the parents to follow what the grandparents do, and the grandparents to follow what the great grandparents do. I'll stop there, but you can see it's one object doing what another object does as well. And it's used so often in after effects. So let's jump in. 28. Bounce Circle Ready to Parent: Let's make a new composition, and as always, I'm going to keep it to HD size. You can try different sizes if you wish. The duration is 30 seconds. That's far too long for what we're going to be looking at, so I'm just going to take that down to 6 seconds in there and click. Now, what I want to do is I want to get a little circle line, I just want to bounce it around inside this square area so that you can see how this whole thing works. So let me make a little shape in here. I'm going to use one of these shapes. I'm going to go to the rectangle tool, and I'm going to go and add a stroke color. And I'm going to click on the fill, and I'm going to get rid of the fill color in there. So how do I get rid of the fill because there's no nn in here? Well, if you click the word fill, then you can choose none from the fill options over there. I'm going to make the little shape inside there. Now, I won't be able to see it, but because I haven't actually given it any size, I'm going to increase the size on stroke. That'll do, and I'm going to lock that down over there, and in fact, I'll hide that using the shy option like so. Now, let me go make the little ball to go in there, so I'm going to I'm going to take a rectangle. I am going to go along and choose a different fill color. Let's use a green this time. And the stroke. Well, let's have a blue stroke around the outside. And I'm going to click and draw a little shape. Now I'm holding down the shift key, so I get, look at that. I've used the wrong one. I'm on the rectangle again, so I'm going to use the command Z or Control Z to undo that. Make sure I'm on the circle this time. So let's just go back and get the ellipse. Click and drag, hold down the shift key to get a perfect circle. Now, I've drawn the circle in, but it's actually its registration point is over there. So I'm going to go to my shape layer, and I'm going to go down to transform and the anchor point, I'm going to move this in relation to its anchor point, so it's right in the middle. Now it's registration point is right in the middle of that shape over there, like if you brought in a graphic from a illustrator. Now that I've got that, I'm going to start to animate it. So let's have a look at the animation. First of all, I'm going to press P for position, and I'm going to move it to where I want. Now, make sure that you're not on that tool anymore, go back to your arrow and move it to its starting position, which in this case is going to be just on the edge over there. I'm going to key frame that. And then when it goes all the way around, I want to get back to that point, so I'm going to go to the end over there, and I'm going to keyframe that again. Now, don't click the keyframe button. You know that already. Go to this little diamond here. Click on that and that'll create another key frame for you. So it's going to hit one, two, three, and back again. So one, two, so this will be the middle one over there. So in the middle, I'm going to move it across to that side there. And over here, I'm going to move it up, so it hits that, and over here, I'm going to move it down, so it hits that. It doesn't have to be perfect. All we're looking to do is to get something which will bounce around like that. Try that out, get something bouncing around your screen, and then we'll add something else to it, so I can show you how parenting works. 29. Parent Text to Circle: What I'm going to do is I'm going to go and get some text. So I'm going to take my text tool and just click in here and I'll put in the word bounce. I'm going to make that a lot smaller, so I'm going over to my text options here and just taking the size down a little bit. Impacts probably a b over the top for this. Let's just choose something a lot smaller. That's perfect. Little word bounce, and give it a color, anything you like really. I'm going to go with the blue on that. Now, what I do want to do is I want to make sure that the registration point is where I want it on the text. I'm not saying that it's in the correct position because the correct position is wherever you want it. And I want it to be in the middle. So I'm going to go to bounce. I'm going down to the transform option, and the anchor point, I'm going to move over there, so it's actually in the middle of the word. Now, let me move my word over to the ball. I'm just going to go to the position, move it over to there. And put it next to that word. What I'd like to do is as this ball bounces around here, I want the word bounce to actually come with the ball. This is where parenting comes in because we can get something to track or follow something else. I'm going to close this down, and what I'm looking to do is to find the parenting options over here. I can see mode, track mat, but I can't see any parents, so I'm going to right click next to the word track mat and just say, hide this because we don't need to see those. I'm going to right click in the same area again, go to columns and find parent and link. I'm going to go to the word bounce because this is the child object, that's the parent, and this is the child. And the child is going to choose the parent. So if I go along here to where it says Parent and Link, you can see this looks like water going down a plug hole, if you ask me or a little funny paper clip. It's called a pick whip. If I click on that, I can then drag this from the bounce layer and say, I want that to be the parent. Now, look what happens when I play this, Bounce will just follow that little ball around. If I don't want to be there anymore. Well, you can see it's chosen that layer there. I could just say none. And once again, we're back to the start. So going over to the word bounce, I will move it across. Oops. Try that again. Move that Sometimes it's just easier to do it down here in your position and move that across, like, so, it's too easy to hit those little nodes on the side by mistake and, and then pull it out as I did. No. So once again, this time, I'm going to move that down over there, place it on top. And I'm going to go to the little pick whip and choose the shape layer over there, and it will just follow me around like so, and you can then choose none if you don't want it to follow. I will move it up a little bit. I'm going to go to position again, and I'm just going to move it just above that ball. Try that out with a very simple one object parented to another and get them to move around together. Remember, it's the little pick whip. It's not the one on position over there. It's that one there next to the word, none. You've got the bounce, and I can take that and drop it in there. Have to go. 30. Adjust Parent & Child Separately: I've renamed my layers, so I've got the text which I've called bounce text Child and the ball, which I've called ball parent. Now, whatever the parent does, the child has to do as well. So let's go back to the ball. The ball has got the movement on it over there. But let's say that I changed the scaling. So if I click down here and I go to scale, well, I'm just going to keyframe the scaling there, and I'm going to keyframe the scaling over here. Put another one at 100%. Then between those two, I'm going to scale it up and you'll see the word bounce has to scale at the same time. Once again, between those two, I'm going to scale it down this time. I'll keyframe it there. Put another key frame over here. I'll just click on these little diamonds over there because I want to keep the same as they are. And then here I'm going to make it smaller. Let's have a look at that. The word bounce is going to do exactly what the ball. Is doing. So anything that the parent does, it tells the child what to do, the child has to do. But the child, like kids in the real world, have actually got a mind of their own. And even if they are following you and you're telling them what to do, sometimes they might do their own thing. And if they're doing their own thing, it doesn't affect you. So if you think of the real world, if you're walking along with a small child, you're holding the child's hand as you walk along, that child has to come with you. But if you jump up and down, the child has to jump up and down as well because you're holding them quite tight. But if the child jumps up and down by themselves, it doesn't make you, the parent jump up and down. If that doesn't make sense, have a look over here. When whatever the child does is totally independent from the parent. I'm going to go to bounce over here, and I think I'm going to move the word bounce slightly away from the ball. We're clicking here, I'm going to go to position, and I'm just going to move it a little bit away from the ball. Obviously, that's going to change everywhere. It's going to be further away from the ball. What about if I rotated it? So I'm going to go to rotation. I'm going to key frame rotation, and then I'm going to go to the end 6 seconds. I'm going to say off those 6 seconds, when it gets to the end, I wanted to have rotated around ten times. So I'm putting ten in the rotation in there rather than in the that's degrees and that's rotations. So ten times 360 times ten. So I'll go back to the beginning again over here. So now when I play this, the word bounce will rotate, but the ball won't. Let's play that. And it's just going to keep going. What about if I rotated the ball? Well, once again, if I go back to the ball, remember, whatever the ball does, whatever the parent does, the child has to do too. If I go to the ball and I key frame rotation on that, and then I go to the end over here, and I'm going to put in let's say five times. Now, look what happens. The ball is rotating and it's forcing the text to spin around the outside. Anything the parent does, the child has to do. But anything the child does is purely down to the child, it doesn't affect the parent. Remember, you can always unparent things by just going in here and choosing none if you don't want it. Try that out. Have a go. Use some of these options in here. By the way, if you go to pacity on the parent, it's not going to affect that bit of text over there. But the other ones will all work at the moment. Try it out. Th. 31. G Intro Project: Another one of my favorite projects, I really enjoyed doing this one. This is all about taking one object and getting another object to do what the first object does. So as you'll see, we've got a planet, and we can get a rocket to go around the planet, and then we have a spaceman going around the rocket. And of course, I haven't done this, but you could even have the Spaceman's lung going around his head if you wanted to, and then an ant on the You know how it works. One object does what the other object is doing. We're going to put this together into a tech tok style video, and we'll just add a bit of a text effect at the end. I hope you enjoy this as much as I enjoyed making it for you. 32. Add & Rotate the Earth: Let's start this very fun project. I'm going to go to composition. I'm going to make a new composition. But this time we are doing it for social media, but something like TikTok or one of those social medias which are portrait. I'm going to go down and I'm going to find social media portrait HD. Now, although I'm going to be doing the background black in the final result, the background color here won't actually be the final result. So I'm going to actually change this just to a dark gray or something that will remind me to make sure I put a black background in. You don't have to do this. It's just I'm doing it for myself. Now, I'm going to go and make sure that I can actually see everything, so I'm just going to say fit up to 200%, and that way it'll just fit in that little window as I'm moving this up and down. I'm going to go and get all the pieces for this. Now, these actually come from Pixabay, and I'm going to suggest that you use mine unless you're confident enough to go in, find them in Pixabay and cut them out individually because they all came from one document, and I cut them out for you and I made the Earth into a vector AI file as well. So we'll bring all of those in. Now, as far as time goes, I'm going to keep this to 10 seconds. It's not going to be that long. And I'm going to start off with my Earth at the bottom. So we're going to have the Earth at the bottom. We're going to have the Saturn planet, which is going to move up. It's going to have a rocket going around it and a spaceman that's going around that. Going to have a little alien in a spaceship, which is going to float across the screen and he's going to pop out of the spaceship every so often. We're also going to have a star with an astronaut or two spinning around or moving around that, and that's going to move across. So lots and lots of parenting. Let's start off with the easy one, which is the Earth. I wanted to be at the bottom over here, and I wanted to just spin very slowly over my 10 seconds, just spinning around once. Let's go and find the Earth. Now, the Earth is a vector file, so it's fully scalable. I'm going to drag it in and I'm going to scale it up, so I'm going to press S and scale it right up so much bigger than I think it should be. I'm going to pop it down the bottom like so. Then I wanted to spin slowly round. I'm going to press for rotation. At the beginning, I'm going to key frame it. I'm going to go to the end and this is where it's going to have rotated once, or you can put in 360 degrees in there. Either way, doesn't matter. Once like so. When I play this now, the earth will just spin around. Like that. If you think that that is too fast, just get it to do half a spin. So to do that, once again, I need to go to the end, so I'll press this little arrow over here so that my playback head jumps to the end. Instead of one, let's take that down to zero again, and in here, we'll put in 180 degrees. So that'll be much slower now. Like so. Okay, we can't see all the continents, but I got no idea what continents are what anywhere on there. It's just the idea. So now that I've got that, I'm going to lock it over there. And using my shy, I'm going to make that shy so I don't have that in the way, but I can still see what's going on in there. Have go. Make your composition. It's going to be 1920 by 1080 by portrait. And give it a different color background just that we can remember that we actually need to put in a black shape right at the back. Do your Earth, bring in your Earth in there. It's an AI file, and you can scale it up, and then you can hide it. Now, that leads me onto something else that we do need to look at with this. If you're scaling something up, It's a good idea if it's a vector to switch on this little switch over here. So this is called continuously size or continuous rusterization. And when you switch that on, let's just unlock that. When you switch that on, it just make sure that it continue rusterizes, this and you can see it at its highest quality. We'll just lock that and hide it again. Have a go with that, get to this stage, and then we'll move on. 33. Animate Rocket Around Saturn: Let's bring in satin. So I'm going to bring in satin over there. And you see it's got this little ring around the outside. I'm just going to place it down over here. We're going to move it around later on and animate it, so it's going to move across into the distance. So I'd like to now bring in the rocket. The rocket is actually going to go around the outside of Saturn. I just going to keep on orbiting Saturn. So I'm going to go and find my rocket. Bring that in over there. You can see it's a bit too large. So let's zoom or sorry, Zoom. Let's scale that down, so I'm going to press S and scale the rocket down to something a little bit more sensible for Saturn. Okay. It's still half the size of Saturn, but there we go. I'm going to zoom in over here. I'm at 40%. I'm just going to go up to 100% in there so we can see this a little bit easier. I'm now going to put this directly above Saturn over there. I'm going to go to the start. And what I want to do is I want to animate this around the outside of satin. Now, we're not spinning satin around because that would just be weird because Saturn's got a ring here, so the ring needs to stay exactly as it is. So I'm actually going to spin the rocket around the outside of satn and I'm going to do that by animating the rocket. So Saturn stays where it is, we animate the rocket for this one. I'm going to go along to positions. I've clicked P on the keyboard. I've gone to position in there. And right at the beginning, I'm going to key frame the rocket. Then I'm going to move as far as I wanted to go. So I think by the time we get to 3 seconds or so, I wanted to have done one orbit of satin. So I'm going to click the little button over here, the little diamond, which will then put another key frame in there. So that's from the start to the end. In the middle, the rocket is going to be down at the bottom here, so I'll just drag it down. It doesn't matter that it's facing the wrong direction. We'll fix that later. So I was in the middle, dragged it down. About a quarter of the way along here, the rocket will be a quarter of the way round, so I'll move it out to there. Yes, I know it's kind of going in a square. But we'll deal with that shortly. And over here, Once again, I'm going to drag that out to there. We've got this box shape, and if I were to play that now, you can see the rockets just going around in a little box like that. Let's select these and change them a little bit. First of all, what I want to do is I'm going to select those key frames, I'm going to go to animation. I'm going to go to key frame interpolation, and I'm going to change the spatial interpolation from linear to continuous bezier. And let's click on that. So that then gives us these really nice handles. And you'll notice that if I drag these handles, they are linked together, they are locked together. So if I twist one, the other one will twist at the same time. This is a bit different to when we did it last time, where we actually had those handles, that were independent. You had to make sure they were correct. So I'm pulling these around to give myself a rather nice circle. Now, the beginning and the end do not look very good, and those handles are independent. I'll have to pull them around until I get a circle like that. So there's my circle. Rocket goes all the way around. Of course, we want the rocket to follow the direction. First of all, I'm going to go to rotation, press r for rotation and angle the rocket around until it's going in the right direction like that. Once again, you'll see that it's still pointing to the right. Then when we've done this before, we go to layer, transform, and we use the auto orient over here, I can say orient along path, click, and now the rocket will follow the path in the right direction, like so. Let's zoom out and see the whole thing. I'll just say fits up to 200% and we'll play that. There the rocket goes around the outside. Now, I do want to continue playing over here. So we're going to do that by copying the key frames. Let's show all the key frames, and you can see we've got these key frames here. I'm going to select all those key frames. Copy them, move along and paste them in. Now, there is still a bit of a problem here because this last keyframe here on second number three and the first key frame are actually in the same position. So if I were to play this, the rocket would come to a bit of a lt at the top before moving on again. So I'm going to remove one of those key frames, either the last or the first take all of those and pull them back a bit. That should give us two orbits of the planet. We'll do one more. I'm going to take those four there, copy them, move along, and paste them in like so. Now, they don't quite go to 10 seconds. So finally, I'm going to select all of these key frames. Don't forget, hold down the alt to the option key, and you can drag them out like so. Let's get that going around three orbits around Saturn. Now, once again, this is one of these slightly more complicated ones. So if you want to watch this video again, do so, or try it out, and if you get stuck, then rewatch the video because there's lots of little things to do over here. But it's all things that we've done in the past. There's nothing really new on this, except the fact that in the key frame interpretation, we're using continuous bezier, not just the standard bezier. Have a go. 34. Animate Astronaut: Let's close these ones down, and we can also just click on the little Shy button to hide them for the moment. I want to get an astronaut around the rocket. What I'm going to do is find my astronaut. I'm going to use this little one over here. Drag him in, press S for scale. Scale him do a bit, quite a lot actually, for position and just move him across to my rocket. I think he's going to be over there. Like that. And I would just like him to kind of just float over the rocket like that and maybe around again over there. So he's just moving around the rocket itself while the rocket is flying. So same again, I'm going to animate the astronaut. I'll start with my position over there. I want him to end up there after don't worry that the rocket is way over here. That doesn't really matter at the moment. But I want him to maybe over 2 seconds, I want him to be on the other side. So I'm going to just move him across a little bit, and I'm going to use the numbers down here to just move him down and across to there. So he's just going to float over like that, and then I think he's just going to float back again backwards. So I'm going to copy this key frame, move over here and paste it. In there. So as you can see, he's just kind of floating over and backwards like that. I think when he gets to the middle, I'd also like him to scale up a little bit as well. So once again, I'm going to press S. I'm going to keyframe the scale there. When he gets to about halfway, I'm going to increase the size. It's at 14 at the moment. I'm going to increase the size, and after another few seconds, I'm going to take it back to my 14 that I had in there. So you'll just get bigger and smaller again. I think I should take those and just do a little bit of easy easing on them. So it's not too harsh the sudden change. Now, I've got the rocket moving around that. I've got my astronaut, which is not moving at all, and I've got Saturn, which is not moving. Let's put this all together. I'm going to click the Shy button to get all those layers back again. And I'm then going to just go in, and I'm going to be using the astronaut, the rocket, and satin with parenting. But just before you start that, can I suggest that you maybe bring an astronaut or something that you want to move around the rocket? Don't worry about the fact that it's somewhere there and your rocket is elsewhere. That will all work shortly. Anyway, try that out, and then we'll parent it. 35. Parent Rocket Earth & Astronaut: I want to parent the astronaut to the rocket. The astronaut is a child of the rocket. I'm going to go and take my little pick whip on the astronaut and drag it onto the rocket. Now, the rocket is a child of Saturn. I'm going to take the little pickwip and drag that from the rocket onto Saturn in there. Now it'll just all work. You can see the astronaut is moving across the rocket like so. What about satin? Well, if I go to satin, and I decide to move satin and animate satin, which I'm going to do now, so I'm just going to zoom out a little bit so I can see everything. I want satin to start over here and just come in and float up towards the top getting smaller as it goes. Let's start it over here. I'm going to and I'm going to go to position. Key frame the position there, at the very end of my animation, I want satin to be up there. And about a third of the way into my animation, I want Saturn over here. Now, I don't want to do a straight line, remember, we go to animation. We go to key frame interpolation, and we change the linear setting to continuous Bezier, and then we can drag those handles out to get a really nice curve like that. What's going to happen is the rockets going round and round and Saturn's moving all the way up, and the astronaut is attached to the rocket. Of course, I wanted to get smaller, so I'm going to start off with it being quite large. So once again, I'm going to Saturn. I'm going to press S for scaling. I'm going to scale it up. I'm then going to go and key frame it. Then at the other end, that's not right at the beginning. Let's put that at the beginning. Then right at the other end, I'm going to go to my scaling and I'm going to scale it down. That's quite small. Let's have a look at that and you can see how it's just going to get smaller and smaller. As it goes. Of course, the Earth should actually be from our viewpoint in front of Saturn. So I'm going to take the earth layer over here, which is locked at the moment. Let's unlock it and drag it above all of those layers. Try that out. We've got the rocket and Saturn moving off into the distance. 36. Animate Star & Astronaut: Let's do another animation. I'm going to hide these ones by clicking on the little Shy button and hiding them away. Let's go and find the star. In here, I've got a little star, which I'm going to bring in, and I'm going to animate two astronauts spinning around the star. This one will be a lot easier than the last one. So let's go and find another astronaut over here. I'm going to bring him in and a different one. And bring him in as well. Now, these two astronauts are quite big, so I'm going to select them both, so by clicking on one, shift selecting the other, and then pressing S, I can scale them both down at the same time. I'm going to move them around as well, so I will go back to my little arrow at the top and move them so they're either side of the star. Now, I'm going to get these astronauts to be parented to the star. When I spin the star, the astronauts will spin at the same time. But to make my life easier, I'm actually going to just pair parent both astronauts to the star directly. Astronaut one, I'm going to take the pick whip, and I'm going to take it and drag that onto the star. Astronaut two, I'm going to take the pick whip and drag it onto the star. I've now got two children on the one parent. Let's go back to the star now. If I do rotate, let's press r over there. You can see as I rotated, the astronauts and the stars will rotate around. Now, I think what I'd like to do before I start to rotate it, is to just animate the position and scale it. So I'm going to reset that to zero. And I'm going to have a look at where I'm going to animate it to. I think I'd like it coming down from there and going across the page like that. Let's just take it to where I wanted to start. Over there. I'm going to keyframe that with position, press P, key frame it move to the very end. Once again, I'm going to key frame it and then move it to the right position down here. If you want to put a bit of a bend in, just go to the middle and you can move it around. But don't forget or let's move it that way, I think. Don't forget to do the whole animation, key frame interpellation, and bezier, or better still continuous bezier in there to get the curve on that. Once you've done that, you can then go to your star and rotate it. I'm going to press R for rotation back to the beginning, keyframe that, and at the end, I'm going to put how many rotations I want. I just want one. When you play it, they're going to come spinning in together. Like so. Have to go. 37. Animate UFO & Alien: Now, I have actually scaled my astronauts up a little bit. You can see, they've got a little bit bigger there, and I reduced the rotation as well, so they didn't rotate quite so much. But you know how to do that, so I won't go through that with you in detail. Now, let's bring in the UFO. I'm going to bring in my UFO. This is starting to look a bit of a mess. I'm going to select all of those, press S, and that'll hide all those scales, and then I'm going to go here and just click on the shy button to get rid of them. Of course, if you click on the shy button here, you'll see just how many layers you're actually working with. But it makes it so much easier when you don't have them all up at the same time. Let's bring in the UFO. I'll pop in my UFO over here, and I've got a little alien. Which I'm going to bring in as well. So the alien is actually going to be behind the UFO, and I really just want him to pop up, but he's going to scale up and go whips like that and then go down again with some movement as well. So I'm going to go to the alien and animate that first. So I'm going to press S for scale over here. I'm going to key frame the scaling as it stands and just make him a little bit smaller in there. I'm going to go to P for position. And I'm going to keyframe his position, but I'm going to move him down a little bit like that. When I move along over here, I'm going to keyframe his position a second time, but then go in the middle and pop him up. So he'll just be like that, and then he'll pop up a bit to have a look at what's going on. And then the same thing will be all way long until he pops up again. I'll just copy these key frames. I've just used command C or control C and pasted them in over there. And then again over here. And once again, over there. You can see what's happening is he's just popping up every so often. And then if I wanted to, I could then go to scale as well. So when he pops up like that, I could actually unlink these two and just scale him either horizontally or vertically at that point, it goes, ops like that, and then once again down to normal, and I'll just copy that key frame and paste it over there. So he's just going to scale up the rest of them will just be normal. So the first one he looks, he has this weird scaling going on. Now I've done all of those things there. I'm going to get him to be parented to the UFO because I'm going to be moving the FO, so the alien will be the child of the UFO. I'll take the little pick whip and drag it onto the UFO. It doesn't matter whether the parent is above or below, that's absolutely beside the point. When I move the UFO around, the alien will move with it. And let's go and animate the sN. So we'll start over there. I'm on the UFO layer. I'm going to press P for position. I'm going to move along. T over there, and he's going to have popped up to here along a bit more down. He's going to be in the background. He's going to be behind all of these things in a moment when I'm finished. And finally, he's going to zip off into space towards satin over there. So if we play this now, he pops up every so often. Like that. You can just keep playing with all of these items by just parenting one to the other and then animating them around. When he zips off into space like that, I think he should get a lot smaller. I'm going to go to the end and in scale, I'm going to press S for scale. We'll keyframe that. Let's go back to the beginning. Key frame this. He's going to be a bit bigger at the beginning, and at the end, he's going to be a lot smaller. So once again, he's just getting smaller as he goes into space. Have a bit of go with your alien, play with it, see what you can do. Once you've finished, if you want to move it behind the rest, I would suggest just getting rid of everything that's dropped down in there so you know that that's UFPone alien. Un shy everything. Oops. Now, I've done something really silly there. I grabbed the wrong item and pulled it. That's messed up my interface. Now, this is something that you'll probably remember from the beginning of the course, you can always go to window, work space. And just reset the default. That resets it again. There we go, Let me try and grab that between those two. I want to take the alien and the UFO and move them below all the other layers. When he's moving along, he should be behind everything else over there. Try it out, have fun with it. 38. Render with Text: Now we need our background in here, so I'm just going to zoom out a little bit further. Let's say 25%. I'm going to take one of these shapes in here and just draw in the shape. And then I'm going to take this shape and drag it below all the other layers. Make sure it's right at the bottom over there. Now, mine's bright green. I probably want a black space. You never know. It's quite interesting, I suppose, but I'm going to click the fill color in there, and I'm just going to take that to black. Like so. Doesn't matter about the stroke around the outside, you can't actually see that. I would suggest locking this as well as you can't move it by mistake. Now, let's have a look at what else we can do here. Well, I'm going to bring in some text, I think. So I'm going to go to the type tool. I'm going to click over here and put in some text. So I put in the word space kids in there that I'm going to move across to that. In fact, that works perfectly exactly as it is. I've used a typeface called inky. If you can't find what you're looking for in here, you can always click Add Adobe Fonts. And because you've got an Adobe Creative Cloud, you can just go along and download fonts directly from Adobe. When you click on that, it'll take you to the website. And it looks something like that, and you can just search for a particular font in there and install it onto your version of design or, in fact, sorry, I said in design when I meant after effects, but in fact, what I really mean is you install it into creative cloud, and then it's available in after effects, photoshop, illustrator, in design, all the different packages. Getting my packages confused there. And I want another piece of text over here as well to just say, out of this world. So once again, a bit more text. In here, nothing special about this at all. It's just just the usual. So Type tool. Click in here. Now, why won't allow me to click in there? Just keeps on going to the little arrow. Well, that's because this space kids is still selected, and it thinks I want to click and move it around over there. So what I'm going to suggest is that you just click somewhere to deselect, then you can go back to the Type tool and click to put your next lot of text in. So I've got some more text in here, and you can see it's a little bit interesting and all over the show, it's a really lovely font or typeface that I've got in there. I can then move it closer together further apart, and I can change the line spacing as well, and I can also move it left, right, or aligned. I think something like that, but making this a little bit smaller in there and maybe not quite so scaled out. Right. If I'm feeling happy with that, I would make a run through. And if I do, I'd realize that my text is all over the place. I want out of this world to come in there. So I'm going to grab this the beginning and pull it over. So that's where out of this world will come in, and space kids is going to be there all the time. So let's have a look at this, goes through there. Everything seems to be working okay. Finally, the text comes in. If you want, you could actually fade the text in, or you could use one of those really cool effects that we've looked at in the past. Finally, export it. Don't forget you should have saved it as we've been going along. I'm going to just take it over to Media queue. I'm exporting it out here. Now, don't forget if you click in there, you need to make sure that you actually match the source for the size. Otherwise, you might end up with something which is not quite right or has got black bars down the side. So in the video, Over here, you'll need to click on Mach Source. Let me just do that again for you. You click over here where it says Facebook or YouTube, or whatever it is. Make sure you go across to video and Match Source down there. And then just decide where you're going to be saving this. I'm going to be putting this onto my desktop, and I'll call it space. Kids. Click the render button. Doesn't take long to render that little one out, and then we're going to have a look at that now. Call it in reasonable quality. If I feel happy with it, great, if not, you can go back into after effects, do some tweaks, and then re render it again. Anyway, I hope you had fun with that one. Try it with some different graphics. It's just all about the parenting. Try it out. 39. Motion Tracking Intro: Another important part of after effects is something called motion tracking. And that enables you to follow something on a video. So during this lesson, we're going to be looking at taking a piece of text and get it to follow the guitar as you can see over here. You'll see this effect all over the show. Once you know how to do it, it's like, Oh, that's easier than it looks. 40. Null Objects: Now, one of the really big things about after effects is something called motion tracking. This enables you to track an item on a piece of video and then get maybe a piece of text or a logo to follow that item around. And it's actually easier than you think. And we're going to be using a new object called a null object, and then we're going to be parenting our objects that we bring in, whether it's text or logos to that null object. Let's go and get some footage. Now, I've got a piece of footage here, which once again, I'll be providing for you, it's from Adobe Stock, and it's this person playing guitar. Now, there isn't any sound on here. I've actually gone and found some acoustic sounds or acoustic music from Pixabay, and once again, that's there for you to use. I'm going to just drag it into the bottom and about 20 seconds, that's the length of the video, so that's all that we need. I'll just play this now so that you can see what it's doing. She's going to walk along. And what I want to do is I want a piece of text over here, which is following the head of the guitar. So as she moves, I want the bit of text to move along with it as well. Now, to do that, what I need to do is, I need to create something called a null object, and I'm going to go to layer new, and it's a new layer. It's called a null object. I'm going to click on that and it pops it in there. It's called null one. Now, if I move it above the video, you can see it's invisible. So think of this as an invisible helper object. Anyway, if you'd like to go and bring in the video, get some sound if you want. And if you're going to be using your own piece of video, one of the things to remember with tracking is that you need to have something which is really obvious to track. And the head of this guitar is perfect because Adobe can track that quite easily. If you have something which is more difficult, say, for example, a pot of a hair there that you wanted to track, after effect, we'll struggle with that. Anyway, get up to this stage, and then we'll actually look at tracking. S. 41. Track Video: Now, what I'm going to do is I'm going to go and find the tracker, and if I go along to the window menu over here, you'll see down the bottom we've got something called tracker under Tools. And this opens up this little tracking window over here. Now, I need to make sure that I'm actually on the video layer, not the null object. That's really important. You need to be on that video layer. And down here, I'm going to go to the tracker. It says track camera warp stabilizer. Once again, that's for stabilizing bits. I'm also going to go to track motion. This is the one that I'm actually interested in. So if I click it, I've then got these settings, and what's happened here is you can see, there's my composition, and I've actually gone into the layer. If you've got other things going on in your composition, you won't see them. We've actually gone directly into that layer now. That's why it looks different. Make sure that my playback head is right at the beginning. Let's just go back to the beginning over there. And in here, it says, the motion source is the Adobe stock, so it's that video there. It's going to make something called tracker one, and we're going to be using the position. You can also track things like scaling and rotation. We're just going to do a simple position in this. And then the target is going to be null one, which is this null object over here. It's going to apply all of these to null one. Now, you need to click edit target over here if that doesn't say null one, and just choose the layer that you want, which will be usually your null layer. Now, we need to move the tracking point to the thing that we want to track. And if I just pull this around, you'll see that it's got an outer box and an inner box. It's kind of a little bit weird in this way. And there's a little x in the middle as well. So I'm going to move the whole thing around to the head of the guitar over there. And, as I said, we've got two boxes in the outer box and an inner box, and I'm just going to pull this in so that I can get to both of them to show them to you. I've managed to separate them now. The one was on top of the other side I couldn't get to it. This inner box is the area that it's looking at to track, so it's going to keep an eye on the head of the guitar, this shape in here. This outer area is the area when an object moves by a frame, you need to make sure that the tracking object is within this outer box. You can make it as big or as small as you like. The bigger, obviously, the more it's got to actually check. If you make it too small, then if the guitar moved suddenly, the tracker would lose it completely. So a reasonable size around the outside. This is the area that it's going to go to next. This is what's tracking at the moment. All I need to do now is to go down here and I'm going to click the play button. So click on play and it's starting to track. You can see how that tracking point is moving along as the guitar is being tracked. It's a little bit on the slow side. So I'm going to cut this video here and pick it up once it's done. And we're finished. Now, that worked really well. There are times when I've been tracking things and sometimes the tracker just loses it completely and goes off on its own little world. And then I've got to click the stop button over there and then try maybe a different object, which is a bit more obvious for it to track. Now, this is not quite done yet. What we have to do is we have to click the Apply button. If you just go back to the arn editing, you'll lose the tracking. So click apply, and we're applying it to the x and y position, the horizontal vertical. That's done. 42. Parent to Null: As you can see, it's put in a tracker in there. I'm going to close that down and go to my null object. At the moment, we don't need to worry too much about this tracker, but I'm going to put in a little bit of text and then parent the text to the null object. I'll go to my type tool. I'm going to just type in I can change the text a little bit later, and then I'm going to move my text. So I just want to move it roughly to where I wanted to be in relation to the guitar. So I'm just going to pop it over there. Now, remember our parenting and our little twirly thing over there, the pick whip. Well, I take the pick whip from the acoustic text layer and drag it onto the null. Let's play this now. It's as easy as that. The main thing is getting the text to sit, sorry, getting the tracker to track correctly in the first place. You'll notice that my text occasionally jumps around a little bit like there. In the next video, we'll look at how to smooth that out so we won't get those funny little jumps. Have a go with that. 43. Smooth Out Keyframes: Let's have a look at how we can smooth this out. I'm going to go to the null object over here and open it up and you can see we've got this position. It's actually transformed the position of the null object, just moved it around. We've got all of these little key frames. Those are actually key frames there. If I zoom into them, you can see that all individual key frames like that. What I'm going to do is I'm going to select all of those and I'm going to use a smoother. Now if you can't see the smoother up there, go to the window menu and you'll find the smoother down to above the tracker. Now, at the moment, the smoother is grade out, what we need to do is to select all of these keyframes in there, so I'm going to start over there and drag all the way across. Be careful that you don't drag over a few different areas. So it's only on position, not on scale and rotation. You can see if I do that, I picked up position and scale and the smoothes grade out. So when you do it, start at the end and make sure it's only position that you've selected, and then the smoother will ungrade itself, if there's such a word. I'm going to say apply to the spatial path. Now, the high the tolerance, the smoother it will be, but you might lose some of that this is attached directly to that type of feel. I'm going to take the tolerance up a little bit and I'm going to take it up to about eight or ten. You can experiment with different amounts. I'm going to click Apply, and you'll see what it's done here is it's actually smoothed out all of these key frames. So now when I play this, the whole thing will be a bit smoother. It's not quite as perfect as it was. But it's moving around really nicely. There are still a few areas where the text jumps suddenly. Let's have a lo and see. I think there, there's a sudden jump in there. What I'm going to do is I'm going to zoom into that area and manually fix it. We'll just zoom rice in over here, so let's see where that jump, so it goes from. From here, I'm just going to play it and stop it. I think it was there there. The problem is you've zoomed in so much, that's the problem area. And it's probably this key frame over here, so I'm going to delete that key frame and see if that makes any difference. There we go. That's a lot smoother now. So I'll keep working my way through. And when I come up with these come up against these sudden jumps in here, like that one, I'll just go to the key frame and delete it. Now, because we've done this on a null object, you can apply as many things as you like to that null. So I could go in, get another bit of text in here and let's just click down here. Put in the word guitar. I'm going to go back to the beginning. Let's just take that out to there. Move to the beginning again and take my word guitar. Move it to where I want it to always be. And let's say over there. And same as before, we just take our little pick whip and drag and drop it onto the null object, and the word guitar will now move around as well. In fact, you can put anything in there that you like. I know this is a bit ridiculous, but I'm going to put an astronaut. In there, as well, let's just take the size down a little bit like so, and we'll move an astronaut over to there. Just use the pick whip, drop it onto the null object, and the astronaut will then follow the guitar as well. Have a go with that. Once you've tried it with this video, try it on some other ones, but try and find a position or an object which is really obvious in there to track. Have a go and have fun with it. 44. H Intro Project: For this project, we're going to take motion tracking on to the next level and get a number of objects to track one object. We're going to have a car, and we're going to get the circle and the lines and the text to track the car. But while it's tracking the car, we want the circle to pulse as well. We're going to be adding a few more bits and pieces in to this particular project. 45. Track Car & Add Circle: For this project, we're going to start in the middle and we're going to be doing the tracking first. We're going to go and first of all, make a composition. I'm going to call this composition car and I'm going to go over to my preset sizes and just choose the usual social media landscape HD. Let's just give it a different color because gray is so dull. I'll make it white and click. Now I'm going to go and find the video that I want to use. Let's go and have a look at this clip, and it's going to be the car this one. I'm going to bring the car in over here, and I'm going to do the usual that we did before. But instead of going to layer New and then over to null. Down the bottom here, I'm going to right click, and I'm going to go to New and null. It's exactly the same both ways, so sometimes it's just easier to right click inside the timeline. There's my null, and I'm going to go and find my tracker. So if you can't see your tracker over here, go up to the window menu and the tracker is near the bottom. Let me click on the video. I'm going to go to track motion once again. And it takes me into this area. Remember, you're actually in the clip now, not in the composition. And I'm going to zoom in a little bit so I can actually see that tracker a little bit better. So I'm going to go up to 100%, and then I can just grab a corner and pull it out like that. Just to make it a little bit bigger, it's easier for me to see what's going on. Now, I'm going to hold down my space bar, which gives me the hand, and I can then move that up a little bit like that. L et go the space bar and your back to your arrow. You can, of course, just use the hand over there. And I'm going to pull this down onto my car and I want to track something in the car. So something which is going to be pretty obvious maybe like that windscreen over there. So let's see what we can do with the windscreen. I'll just make sure it's covered completely. And then the outer one, remember, that's what happens with the frame. So if the window moves outside this box here, it might not track it properly. If you make this box too big, you'll find that it actually slows down your tracking when you're actually doing the tracking, and it can take quite a long time. So let's have a bit of a go with that one. I'm going to go overhead and check that my motion target is set to null one, or you can click the edit target. I'm going to play that And I'm going to cut this bit so you don't have to watch the whole thing going along. And there we go. That's been tracking absolutely beautifully. And now, what I'm going to do is, if I'm happy with that, I'm going to click on Apply. Do remember to click Apply. The number of times I've done this done a great tracking, and then forgot to apply. I cannot tell you. Let's apply that. Click, and it's done and it's been applied to my null. Let's go into the null here, and you can see under transform, we've got the position in there. Now, as before, I want to smooth it out, so I'm going to go along to my Smoother. Once again, if you can't see it, go and have a look in the window menu. Let's click on the tracker so it brings the smoother up over there, and I'm going to select all of these key frames and then just make sure, as I've said before that you're only selecting the positional key frames. I'm going to just take my torance up a little bit. Maybe something up four or five. And then click Apply. Now, that is awful because if we have a look here, this is just this hardly any key frames in there. Let me undo that again. I'm going to take the tolerance down this time. So we'll just put in two in there. Once again, click a ply, and we've got more key frames had an we had last time, but far less than when we started. So you might want to just adjust this on a video by video basis. Let's put that to one click a ply. That's probably looking a whole lot better now. Now, I'm going to put in some text. Sorry, I'm going to put in a shape. Shall I say not some text? So I need to get back to the video, so I'm going to move my playback head to the beginning. You can see how it's tracking the car up there the little red null. I'm going to go and get a shape, and I'm going to be using an ellipse, and I'm going to be drawing the ellipse over there, I'm holding down the shift key so I get a perfect ellipse in there. But I don't get any color that's coming up over here, why not? Well, I'm going to undo that. That's because I actually had the null selected. Remember, click off of all of your layers, and then you can go in here, and when you draw you will get the fill and stroke. Now, I've clicked on the word fill, and I've chosen none, so I don't get a fill in there. And the stroke, I've gone with a white stroke over here, and I can then just increase the thickness of that line. I want this to be pretty delicate so I'm going to go with two pixels on that. Now, I'm going to move the circle that I've drawn so that its registration point is right in the middle. So once again, on my shape layer, I'm going to press A. A is for your anchor point, and then when you move it, you move your circle relative to the anchor point. So we'll move that until the circle and the anchor point are lined up. So one last thing, let's just test it out, even though it's in the wrong position. We'll just take our little pick whip and drop it onto the null over there. When I play that now, you'll see that the circle moves with the car. I know it's not a huge movement, but it's going relative to the car. Try that out. 46. Pulse Circle: L et's hide the null layer for now and the other layer. When I say hide, what I should say is, let's click on the little shy layer. And then I'll make it shy over here. At the moment, all I've got is a shape layer, and I want to animate it. Now I'm not worried about where it is at the moment, whether it's in relation to the car or not, we'll fix that shortly. But what I'm going to do is I'm going to get this little circle to very gently pulse. It's going to get bigger and smaller very gently, and I'm going to do that by going in and using scaling. I'm going to press S for my scale, Right at the beginning, I'm going to get the circle to be the size that I want to be normally, so I think something like that is perfect, and I'm going to press scale in there. And then I'm going to move over 1 second over here. Key frame that. So the little diamond over there in the corner, go to the middle and make it a bit bigger. So we'll just take it out like that. So what's going to happen is that's going to just get bigger like that with a little pulse. Then I'm going to continue on with this. I'm going to take those two key frames. Copy them. I've used my commands or controls, go over here and paste them. So bigger, smaller, bigger, smaller. And then once again, I'm just going to move over a bit paste again, paste again. In there. So we should have some nice pulsing going on on that. Now, I don't want to go all the way along to the end because it'll take too long doing this process. So if I select all of those, and then I'm going to copy them, move along here and paste them in again. Move along there and paste them. Doesn't matter that they're going out of my animation. Let's have a look at the timing on this, really nice pulsing on that. 47. Create Lines & Parent Them: On the shape layer, I'm going to press P for position, and I'm going to move it, so it's over the car. I'm using these values over here to get it roughly over the car. I think we want something like that. That pulse is going to just follow the car as it goes along. I'd like to then get some lines that come over here and a bit of text. And this is going to say things like hydrogen or electric or hybrid. So the different types of things that could power a green car. What I'm going to do then is I'm going to put draw in the little lines, and I'm going to do that using the pentol. Now, this is the problem. You see, if I'm on this shape, and I draw the little line like so. Well, then as I'm doing this, the line is pulsing, as well. I don't want the line to pulse because I want the text to sit over there nice and smoothly. I don't want the text pulsing away either. So I'm going to undo that. So what I need to do is to make sure that I'm not on my shape layer, so I click off of the shape layer. Then I draw in the little line, so it's going to go from there out to there as a new shape in there. And you can see that line doesn't move at all. But I do want that line to move with the circle and the car. So what I'm going to do, I'm just going to move the line to the position where I wanted to be over there, so roughly over there. So It just almost touches the circle on the outside. So like that. And then I'm going to I can't see the null object. I'm going to go to the parent. Now, should I parent it to the null or should I parent it to the shape? Well, if I parented it to the shape, same problem we've had before is it's going to pulse. Was if I parent it to the null, then it will move with that object, but it won't pulse. You can see it's going right up there. And moving around tracking the car. So I'm going to do two more of those. So using my pen, I'm going to draw another little line over here from there. I think that will go up and across a little bit. That's the next shape. Click off of that, and one more over here. I think we'll go from about there. Out to there. Remember, you can always move these around later on because they are independent shapes using your arrow. You can just go and click on them and move them manually if you need as well. Let's just move that one out a little bit like so. Those at the moment are still, but I'm going to choose the null and the null for them. So now they'll all move, but only the circle in the middle will pulse. As you can see, I think I'll need to move maybe this one closer in a bit like that. Have a bit of a go with that and put in those extra little lines. Don't forget, do them as extra shapes, make sure they're not part of your first shape. Otherwise, they will pulse as well, and we don't want that. Then in the parent and link, choose your null one from that. So everything is parented to the null. 48. Edit the Lines: This little line over here, I want to adjust it, so it runs actually horizontal and about to the same length as that one over there. If we go down here, first of all, I've shown my other two, so I've gone to my shy layer and switched them so that I can see them because I want to be able to select that little point there. I'm going to make sure that I lock my video in the background. Whoops, wrong one. Lock the video in the background, so I can't move it by mistake. It's easy to click and drag and move something else. I'm going to find which one of these it is, and I think it is shape four. G to open up Shape four, and in here, we've got Shape one in Shape four. I know it's a bit strange, but that's the layer. This is the path inside it. I'm going to click on Shape one and click on Path one, and you can now see that the path has got these two little editable nodes on them. I can now click and drag to select just that node and move that one around as well. Once again, as when we were drawing, you can use the arrows on your keyboard to move about if you need at the same time. Once I've done that, I'm happy with that, and I'm going to zoom right out again so that I can see the whole thing. 49. Add Text: Let's get some text in here. So I'm going to go to my text still. I'm going to click. This one is going to be electric. And I will select that and do all the formatting that I want to that. So reasonable size, I'm going to change the type face because that one is a little bit too fun for a serious subject like this. I'm going to go in and find something reasonably um, Well, not too over the top, but fairly sober, shall we say. So I've got times new Roman trying that out. I'm going to make sure that my scaling is set to 100%. It's just remembered these from last time over there. And I think that's probably about it, really. I just need to move into the right position now. There. Now, I need two more of them because I need electric. I need what else was the hybrid and hydrogen. So I'm going to take this layer, copy it. Control C to copy, Control V to paste or command C and command V. Now that gives me a second version of that, which I can then move over to there. I'm going to double click it and change that to hybrid. And I'm going to do the same again. So click on that, copy paste, and we've got one more in here, which I'm going to move down, which would be hydrogen. Have a go, get your text in. 50. Parent Text to Lines: I've now realized that my text is too big, so how can I adjust them all without having to go through each individually? If I select them all at the same time with a shift key, I can then go to my text options here and I can adjust them all at once. I might need to change their position a little bit, but that's a small price for quick and easy adjustments like that. I'm just going to move that one in a little bit there, that one to a similar place, and that's perfect. What I'd like to do is I'd like to then parent these with something else, so they move at the same time because the moment they don't move, they're just sitting there. If I were to parent them to the car, it would work absolutely fine. If I parent it to the circle, well, they'd start to pulse as well, which might look a bit odd. Let me show you how that would look. I'm going to go to the electric one and just parent that to the null. And you can see with that, it just moves around perfectly. If I parented it to shape one, it'll pulse as well, maybe that's something that you do want. It's up to you. But I'm actually going to parent these three to their equivalent little lines over there. That means that if I happen to decide, k, that line needs to be moved around, the text will go with it at the same time. I'm going to parent electric to shape two. Electric, and it's easiest to just drag it with a settle pick whip onto Shape two. Shape three is for hybrids. I'll go to hybrid and parent that to shape three, and then hydrogen gets parented to Shape four. Let's play this now. There we go. It's subtle, but it works. Have a go and just adjust your text and then parent it to something appropriate. 51. Pre-compose & Intro: Now I'm going to take all of these, I'm going to just unlock them, select all of them, and I'm going to go to layer precompose and make them into pre comp. I'm going to call this car. Now, that was a very silly idea for me to do because you can see my original was also called car. So how on earth do I know which one is which? If you do something like that, don't forget command E or control E to undo. Let me do that again. I'd love to say I did that on purpose to show you, but that was a genuine error on my part. So I'm going to say car with text. I've now got a composition called car, which is my main composition, and in that is the car with text composition. I'm going to bring in my intro clip. Once again, I've provided these clips for you, but you can make your own. And I'm going to pop it in over here. It's just a weird lighting shape. I'll move the car W text over. If you have a look at this little clip, it's this green that just appears and then it almost looks like the northern lights. So I'm going to cut off the beginning bit and I'm just going to do that by pulling in like that. So we really are just starting over there. The green is going to come in like so. So I will move that back there. You don't honestly have to pull that in. I just wanted an excuse to show you that you could. So I'm going to start over there. And I'm going to have some text which appears, and it just says, what does your future car look like? So We'll just have that over about four or 5 seconds, and then we'll blend in that the car travel over there. I need some text, so I'm going to go up to the text tool. Click in here and put in my text. So very simple little bit of text like so. I'm going to move it into the middle. We're not going to do much with that, it's just a big old statement saying, what do you think? So hopefully people will sort of read that and then go, I don't know. And then after a few seconds, so that will come in there. After a few seconds, we're going to bring in our car with text pre cup over here, and I just want to fade it in subtly. So I'm going to press T. I'm on the car with text layer. And we're going to put 100% capacity there and then just go back here and take that to zero. When we look at that, you get a little bit of text in there and then it fades in to the options. Then we're going to fade it out at the end with another bit of text, but we'll put an effect onto that. Have to go, make some intro area, and then come back and we'll do the outtro. 52. Outro Text: Now, I want to do an outro, but I've run out of space over here. I've only got 10 seconds worth of timeline. So I'm going to go up to my composition, composition settings, not new composition, but composition settings, and I'm going to increase that. So I'm going to put in 16 seconds in there, probably a bit more than I need. Click. Now, I still can't see it. But if I go to the top, I can just pull that little slider, and that will show me the rest of my timeline. Now, I'm going to go and get another piece of footage. So I'm going to use this one over here, and let's just put that right on the top there. It's very simple. It's just Some nice green, what are they fir trees or something, I think. Same again, I'm just going to fade into that, so the car will be going along, and then we'll fade that in. So I'm going to press t. You've done all this before. Go over to where I want to be 100%, put in my key frame, go back to the beginning, take that down to zero, and we can just a really nice soft fade. Into that. You can then just adjust your fade by adjusting your key frames over there. Then we need some text over here which says go green. So I'm going to go to my type tool. Click on the Type tool. Put in my go green. In fact, I want it to be all caps. Not go green. That's a bit of a fo part there. Go green. Really, I'll get this text right in a moment. I'm going to select it all and just take the size up quite a lot. It's going to be white text, which is absolutely fine and move it into the middle. Then I want this text to appear. Well, just on once the green fir trees have come in. I'm going to put an effect on this. So I click off of my layers. I go and find my effects and presets. I'm going to go to animation presets, down to text. I'm going down to animate in, and I'm going to use a text preset in here called reining characters in, and I'm going to drag that and drop it onto my text. So it should appear where my playback head is, and as you can see, it'll just bring in those characters like that. Let's play that last bit and the characters come in at the end with G green. If you feel that that's a little bit too extreme, you could just bring it in very, very gently, or you can go and use any other effect in here that you like. Have a go with that, get your text in. Once you've done it, don't forget. As you're going along, you really should be saving. And if you want to save this to work on at a later stage, go to dependencies once you've saved and collect files to make sure that all of your files are copied into a folder and you can carry on with it. And lastly, when you're done, go to Export and add todobe Media encoder Q and export it out. Have a go with that, and try some variations on it as well. 53. Working with Time / Easing Intro: Have you ever wanted to time travel? Well, we can't really time travel in this, but we can make time go backwards. We can make time go forwards, really fast, really slow. We can do all sorts of things with time. So we can speed things up and then slow it down and then make it go backwards all within the same clip. It's cool. Let's go. 54. Slowmo or Speed Up: Let's go and find a clip, and I've got a clip of some sky ders over here. Once again, I will have given this to you in the assets folder comes from Adobe stock. I'm going to open that up, and we're just going to take that and drop it straight onto the new composition button. What it'll do is it'll make a composition the same size and length as this clip. If I just play it to you, you can see it's just the sky ds jumping out of the plane and going down. They form a little shape over there together. That's it. But now, what I want to do is I want to slow this down. When they jump out of the plane, we have a real nice slow motion of the whole thing. I'm going to do that by going up to the layer menu and down. Remember we've been looking at transform quite a lot the audio orient and things. I'm going to go to time, and I'm just going to say stretch. Now, in the settle window, we have the time stretch factor, 100 is normal. So if I want to slow this down and I want to go to half the speed, if I put in 200 in there. Now, the hold in place is quite important, not so much now, but when we're actually reversing things, you'll see why. I'm going to click on there, but leave it on the layer in point. So from this point here, it's slowed this down. So if we have a look now and I press the space bar, you can see it is running a lot slower. It's a bit clunky. Let's make it worse. L ayer, time stretch, and it's still on 200. So let's go with 400 over here, so it'll be much slower. Now, once again, go back to the beginning, and I'm going to press the space bar, and you can see it's really slow. But it looks very, very bad. So one of the things we can do is we've got a little switch over here, and this little switch is called frame blending. And what it allows you to do is to blend the frames so when you slow things down, you get a much smoother change between them. Now, there are two qualities in here. I've got the first one there that I'm going to click, and it's actually the second one that I want. I'll show you that first one in a moment. But this is the one that I want, and look at the deference. Now, I'm just going to pull this up so we don't have to watch the whole thing. When I press the space bar, We've got a much better, slow motion. It's so much smoother in there. Let's see that jump again. Much, much smoother. Now, there are a few problems with this that you have to be aware of, and I don't know whether you've noticed them yet. Have a look when they jump out of the plane at how the ground is being slightly distorted as it's being blended. And that happens sometimes with this quality in here. So just be aware that it could be a problem, and people might pick up on that. Now, the other one over here. Once again, we won't have the same problem in the background. But you can see it's putting in extra frames between it, which look a little bit strange as well. Really, it's up to you to decide which of these you want to use. If you switch it off completely, let's take that off completely. It will be very jumpy. No pun intended. So I'm going to go that second one in there, which gives us a nice smooth jump from the plane But once you see that weird artifact in the background, you can't unsee it unfortunately. I have gone a bit extreme with this, going 100-400, It is very, very extreme. Let's have a look close up at what's happening with these frames. So I'm just going to go in here down to the individual frames in there. If I switch this off completely, when we play this, you'll see this frame one, two, three, four. They're all exactly the same before this moves again. That's why it's so jumpy. So it's just adding an extra frames between them. Whereas if we go to the second sorry, this button here. What it's going to do is going to kind of make these semi frames. You can see there sort of a slight shadow almost over there. And then another one. Once again, we get a slight shadow. So it's trying to make it look smoother by just putting those sort of semi frames between them. Then the last one is actually filling in all these frames with something that you think should go there. So same again, you can see a bit more movement, same, again, bit more movement. Watch this hand, you can see how it's actually moving, and those frames are being made up by after effects, until we get to the next frame, and once again, it makes up some more of them. But as I said, with things like that, it sometimes does some odd bits and pieces. But it still looks a lot better than this where it's one, two, three, four before it moves. Up to you, have a little bit of a go with that. If you are going extreme like this 400%, you're going to find issues. If you get to 200%, 150% to slow it down slightly, not a problem. However, what about speeding things up? Well, I'm sure you've guessed it. If you go into time stretch, anything less than 100 is going to speed things up. So if I went to 50, the whole thing would run at double speed. So let's just pull this out a bit so we can see the hold of that frame. And we'll just play that now. And off they jump and the whole thing is doubled up. Once again, the smaller the number, the faster, it will run. Try it out, experiment with it on a few videos, and then we'll start looking at making things go backwards. 55. Reverse Time: I've gotten rid of that clip in there, as you can see, my composition is 20 seconds long. I'm going to go up to composition and composition settings and just give it a little bit more room to breathe like 40 seconds in there. So we've got plenty of room to play with. I'm going to bring in my clip again so the clip is coming in nice and fresh. There it is 20 seconds. Now, I'm going to make this go backwards, and I can do it in two ways. I can actually go along to layer down to time. I can just say time reverse layer. Now, it's reverse that layer. You can see there's a little bit of a line, Chevron type of line under there. You can barely make it out. But now if I play this, the whole thing is going to be backwards, and they'll fly long. Now, you can see my machine is starting to struggle over here. If you find that is a problem, once again, watch your quality in there. There's one more thing that you can do, and that is that you can actually skip frames while you are watching it. If you got your preview option up here, and I've just double clicked it, so it's full screen so you can see the whole thing. Over here, we can actually get it to skip frames. I'm going to get it to skip one frame in there. So double click on that again. So now when I'm playing this, it's going to be skipping every second frame. Might look a little bit rough, but it will enable me to actually render this out without any problem. If you find that, as I said, it is too struggling too much. Go to things like the setting in here. Maybe take that down if I went to 50% in their quarter quality, and maybe move or remove some of those frames. It's just a temporary measure for preview. It's not going to affect your final result. So just allow you to see things in real time. Anyway, any moment, now, they're going to just fly back into the plane. Like so. So that's one way to reverse a layer. And I can go to layer, time reverse layer, which then takes it back to normal. And once again, they're going down the usual way. The other way we can do this is to actually go to layer down to, and using our time stretch, anything negative in there will be reversed. 100 negative or negative 100, is going to be reversed. Now, this is why I said, you need to be aware of this hold in place. Because if I were to click k at the moment, it's going to take the layer in point, which is over there and flip this whole thing backwards from there. If I click K, you can see what it's done. In fact, the clip is actually down there. So it's going backwards. I won't actually be able to see it at all. Let me just undo that. The easiest way is commands or controls to undo that. So if I were to move it here, once again, you can see if I go to my time stretch, and if I now put in -100, it will flip it from that point backwards. I could say from the current frame or from the layer out point. If you want to speed something up or slow something down backwards, you'd put in a negative figure so negative 50 I'm just going to do that from the lay end point. Click OK. You can see this will now actually play backwards, but fast. 56. Freeze Frame: I brought in this clip again, so this is a fresh clip running at normal speed. And this time, what I want to do is to have a look at how we can freeze frames. So if I wanted just a frame which was frozen like that, for example, where his hand is up, all I've got to do is to go to layer. Make sure I've selected the correct layer, layer, time, and say freeze frame in there. And that's it. It will freeze the whole thing all the way long. Now, I'm going to undo that. If when I was watching this, I thought, when I got to the end, I would like to freeze it on that last frame in there. What I can do is, or you probably guessed it, freeze on last frame, and it just freezes it at that point over there. Now, you'll notice that this puts in something called time remapping or time remap. So we're going to have looked at in the next video. But do try out those two quite useful sometimes. 57. Time Remapping: Now, for this one, I've brought in another clip. Oh, sorry, another version of this clip. So I've got a fresh clip in there, and I'm making sure that I've got a longer composition than my clip. So there's lots of room over here. And I want you to notice that my clip goes 0-20 seconds in there. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to go to ayer, once I've selected first layer T, and I'm going to go to enable time remapping. Now, what this does is it keeps the same length on my clip. It puts in an option here called T remap. If I close this down and open it again, you'll see that we've got time remap over there above transform. And it's still 20 seconds, and there is a key frame at the beginning and a key frame at the very end. Now, unlike a normal clip, I can actually go to this clip and I can just pull it out and stretch it out over there. What happens if I stretch it out? Well, it still plays normally all the way through until we get to the end, and then it just sits on that last frame. So this is very much like where we had the extending or freezing the last frame on there. So what about, if I went to this little clip, sorry, thistle key frame on the clip, and I pulled it up to 5 seconds. Well, what it'll do is we'll speed the whole thing up. You'll see if I were to play that now. It's super fast up to there, and then that's the end, so it stops over there. If I took that right the way down, say to 30 seconds. Once again, I played this, I will go into slow mo, and it's going to play that all the way through to 30 seconds, it's just extended it 20-30 seconds. I can get rid of that at any time by clicking on time remap and pressing delete or backspace on the keyboard and I'm back to normal. As you can see, you can't pull out a clip further than its length unless you're in time remapping mode. Let's try that again. What I'm going to do is I'm going to go to layer T enable time remapping. I'm going to pull this out over here. This key frame is at the start, and this one is at the end. I know I'm being a bit specific about this, but it's really important. And then if I go here to once they've jumped, over there and put another key frame in, so they are jumping from there to there, and then from there to there is normal. What about if I took these two key frames? That one and that one, and I pulled them out towards the end. This bit here from there was where they jumped is going to run at normal speed, but the beginning bit is actually going to run in slow mo. So what this enables you to do is to actually change the speed of a clip halfway through, so you can slow it down and speed it up in the same clip. So once again, I'm going to get my frame blending and just click twice, so the slow mobit will have frame blending on and should look a lot better, and then we go into fast mode in there. Have a bit of a play with that. Add in a few more key frames, move them around so that you can change the timing on your video clip. Once you've tried that, and you feel comfortable with it, add in more key frames. I just put in a different key frame in here. And move one of the key frames over the other. And then what you'll find is it will play forwards, and then it'll reverse itself and go backwards and then play forwards again. You can get that backwards, forwards thing happening. Anyway, have fun with it. Not something you're going to be using all the time, but it's quite cool when you need it. 58. Graph Editor Introduction: I've made a very simple animation. It's just a little square, and when I play it, you'll see it will go from one side to the other. That's it. We've got no easing, nothing. It's just very robotic one side. And it'll just play over and over like that. Now, let's have a look at thistle option over here. Now, some of you might have clicked on this by mistake and wondered what's happened. It's called the graph editor. If I click it, it takes me into this area over here. Now, if you've done that before and you go, Oh, my goodness, what have I done? A you've got to do is click the graph editor again to hide it and get back again. But if I've clicked it and I've clicked on my layer, This then shows me or allows me to change the speed that the animation is running at over time. I can start it off slowly and I can speed it up and I can slow it down again. Now, what we're going to do is we're going to go to the bottom. There's a little I, then there's a menu. We're going to click on the menu, and we're going to be editing the speed of the graph. So edit speed graph in there. I'm going to click on my position because that's what I was doing as well, and now I can actually see the graph of the speed. In fact, it tells me how fast this is, believe it or not, you can measure the speed. This says that this is over there is actually 500 pixels per second that this is running at, in fact, it's slightly higher than that, it's 597.33 pixels per second, that it's moving across the screen. Let's just zoom in a little bit like that to make it a bit better. Now, if I do that, I think, Oh my goodness, where's that graph gone? Well you just go in and click on the value that we're working on and we're working on the positional value? I can see how fast that's running. It starts off at 597 pixels per second, said per inch, pixels per second, it'll run all the way through to the end. What happens if I actually went back in here and I selected those key frames, and I went to window, Sorry. Let's try that again. I went long to animation, keyframe assistant, and I put on some easy ease. Now, as you can see, some of those key frames look close together and some of further apart, so it's actually changing the speed, so it starts off slower and then gets faster. Let's have a look at that in terms of the graph editor, and you can see clearly here how the graph editor goes from zero pixels per second. By the time we get here, the speed is running probably at about 300 pixels per second. By the time it gets there, the speed has gone up to maybe 45 or 600 pixels per second at its peak. If I move over it, you can see it's running at 894 pixels per second. It's speeding up and then it's slowing down on the other side. That's all that easing does. It's speeding up and slowing down. When I play this, starts off slowly, speeds up, slows down, and that gives it more of an organic feel. Take a few minutes on your own machine to have a look at this. Make a simple animation, just going from one side to the other, go to the graph editor, make sure that you've clicked on your position and down here that you are actually editing the speed graph over there. Then go back again, as we've done before, select those key frames, put on some easy ease up there and go back to the graph editor and see how that's changed. Try it out and then we'll take this a little bit further. 59. Change Speed: Now, this little graph we've put in by using the Easy Es. But we can edit it in here. You'll see if I click on it. There are some little handles sticking out, and I can grab those handles and pull them around. If I pull these in quite a lot, This will start off really slowly and then speed up a lot in the middle. Look how far away those key frames are in the middle. Let me just play that for you now. So starts off slowly, then speeds up and then slows down at the end. So you have full control in here as to what you want to do with the speed of the movement. You could do them like this. I could take one and move it right the way in. Over there and pull this along. What's going to happen now is this is going to start off slowly and just speed up all the way. Once again, let's play that, so you can see it slowly, and then it just gets faster. Or obviously, we could do that vice versa by pulling this one across and that one right in. I'll start off really fast, but then slow right down at the end. Have a little bit of a play with those two handles. To see them, by the way, just click on the graph and the handles shod just appear. 60. Use other Values: If for any reason, you can't see this graph. What could be the problem is in here under the little ei, if you click on the eye there, if you have show selected properties switched off, you won't see the graph in there, so just make sure that that is switched on. Now, what would happen if I put in another key frame? I'm just going to pop one in over there. Once again, we have those little handles, and I can pull them out and I can change them independently. So what's going to happen now is, well, this is going to speed up, slow down, then suddenly go from fast down to slow, a bit of a strange combination over there, but it's there nonetheless. Once again, do you just have a little bit of a play with this? This is just the tip of the iceberg that we're covering in this course over here, and you could try it with other things as well. So don't just do it on position. Have a bit of a go with something like rotation. I press R in there. Now when I click on rotation, you can see it's a flat line. If I were to key frame my rotation, and then once again, spin that around? I get a straight line like that. If I've selected those two key frames, we'll just go back and do it this way. You can select from within the graph editor, but we'll do it this way because that's how you've been doing it so far. Keyframe assistant, Easy Ease, once again, if we go back into the graph editor, we get exactly the same thing and we can adjust the speed of the rotation so we can get it to speed up and then slow down. My it there, if you just go back to that last key frame, only put in 62 degrees, so I'm going to just zero that and put in one rotation in there so you can see it a little bit better. Starts to rotate slowly and then flips quickly based on that and then slows down again. Have a bit of a play with that. 61. Expression with Simple Maths - Cogs & Balls Intro: This is the last section, and we're going to be looking at something called expressions. Now, expressions are after effects language that it uses to help you control objects. Now, if that made you go, don't want to code, don't want to code. Don't worry about it. We're just going to be using dragon drop. All you need to be able to do is simple maths. So if you can time something by ten or divide it by five, you're absolutely fine. Now, if you are a code, you can really get into this, you'll see that it's based on Java script. But if you're not, it doesn't matter at all. Let's get started. 62. Animate with an Expression: I've made a little composition over here. It's really simple. It's just the usual ten ATP size HD size, and I've given it about 4 seconds over here in the timeline. I've brought in some balls. I've put these balls in the assets folder for you. So I've got the first one here. I've had to scale it down slightly because it was a little bit too big, but what I want to do is I want to spin the ball. I'm going to go along and I'm going to press S No, not S for spin, for rotation. That's it. I'm going to key frame it and over here on the other side, I'm going to go in and I'm going to get it to rotate around four times. Doesn't matter how many times I've just chosen that as a nice simple little number. I'm also going to just click on there so it's easy to see press enter and call this tennis. Tennis B, just so it's easy to see in my layers. Now, I'm going to bring in another ball over here. This is a beach ball, so it's going to be a bit bigger over there. I'm going to once again just rename et's close that. Make sure I click on there. Rename it. Bach B. I want to rotate that around as well. Now, one of the things that I could do is I could actually just manually rotate it. That'd be fine. Or I could copy these key frames, so I'm going to select one and hold down the shift key, select the other. Press Bach ball, go into rotation, click on rotation, and paste them in over here as well. Let's just make sure I've copied them first. I forgot to do the copy bit, and then over here, paste them in. You can see we can copy key frames across like that, and they'll now both spin exactly the same. I'm going to get rid of these over there, so we'll just go back again to the standard beach ball sitting there. Now, that's absolutely fine, and you could do that. But what about if I then, when I did this, decided that I actually wanted to spin the tennis ball ten times the amount. I'd then have to do the same with the beach balls. I'd have to copy those key frames that I've changed and go back to the beach ball. You can see it's a long hold process. So an expression is a way of getting values from one layer and putting them onto another layer, and it automatically updates. So, what I'm going to do is I'm going to just close these two down, so I'll just close down the rs. Over there. I'm going to open them both up over here, go to transform and click in there and click on transform. So that you can see everything that's going on. Now I want to use an expression, which is going to be on this beach ball layer, and I want to use the expression on rotation because you can put it onto different transform properties. I'm going to go to rotation. I'm going to go up to my animation, and I'm going to say add an expression. And what it does is it puts the expression onto rotation with a little bit of code in there. Now, the language that After Effects uses is actually based on Java script. So if you do use Java script, you'll be right at home. It's not the web based Java script language, it's based on it, so it's got its own properties. If that just wind wish over your head, don't worry about it. We're not going to actually get into the language. We're just going to use a dragon drop system. So, I've got my rotation in there, and you'll see there's a little pick whip, a little, you know, water going down the drain symbol. And I'm going to take that, and I'm going to drag it onto rotation over there. Now, what's happening is that this rotation here is going to do whatever that rotation does in there. Well, I suppose it's almost like parenting in some ways. You can see the language over here. It says in this comp that we're in this comp, and we're looking at the layer tennis ball. We're in Beach ball, but it's looking at tennis ball object there, and it's going to tras transform, and it's going to take whatever is in rotation in there. This little dot syntax, that's all that it's saying in there. So, what happens is as I move this along, the beach ball moves and rotates exactly the same. You can see as I'm moving the playback head, the number of rotations here and the degrees are changing in there. You can see down here in red, this is then picking up exactly the same degrees. Now, let's say that I didn't want this. Well, what I can do is I can click in there and I can delete all of that code and basically just click off of it, and that expression is now gone. And we're back to square one over there. Let me do that again, but we'll take it a little bit further this time. So I'm going to go to rotation. I'm going to go to animation and add an expression. I'm going to drag the little pick whip up to the rotation and it's taken that rotation. On there. So what would happen if I changed the rotation in here? Well, it will just change it down there as well. You'll see if I went into my last keyframe over there instead of being four, I'm going to just change that to one. I'll be one rotation. And once again, the beach ball will just update and do exactly the same thing. Whatever that does, the beach ball does. I'm going to stop over there so you can try it out. Just keep this as simple as possible in here. Just use rotation for now. I'm going to show you some of the other properties shortly. But use rotation and just change that once you've done it and see how this works. And if you want to have a look at the language, that's absolutely fine. 63. Make it Faster: I've got my tennis ball rotating round once. What about if I wanted my beach ball to rotate around twice while the tennis ball rotates around once? Well, this is where we can actually go into the expression and just change the expression in here. Now, once again, you don't have to know any code for this just very, very basic maths. I'm going to click in that expression, go to the very end, and at the end, I'm just going to do a simple bit of maths, which is just going to be times by two. So if I put in star two in there or times two. Now what it's going to do is it's going to take that number there, and then times it by two. So as I go over here, you'll see when that gets to 14.5, that's now 29. And the beach ball should now rotate twice as fast as the tennis ball. L et's change that little number in there and I'm going to say times ten. Now the beach ball will go ten times the speed of the tennis ball. You can make it go slower as well by dividing it. I'm just going to say divide by two. Now when the tennis ball moves, the beach ball will only move half the speed. In there. Try it out with just a simple little times or divide in there. You can even add something to it, so I could say plus 60 over there. So it's actually starting slightly further round over there. See if I take off that plus 60, The Beach boat will then jump back to its original starting position. Have a little bit of a play with that. Simple little bit of maths on the end and see how you get on. 64. Reverse & Animation: I've got some cogs over here, and you'll see if I just drag them in. They all just look like that. There's a few colors. And I want these cogs to actually work together and mesh together. So I'm going to start off with the purple cog over here, and then I'm going to go to the orange cog, and I want the orange cog to mesh with the purple cog in there. So let's just get that a little bit, those two together, something like that. Then I'm going to go to the green cog, and I'm going to get that to mesh with the orange cog. Over there. Finally, the blue cog is going to mesh with the green cog, like so. Now, I want to get this to work, and I'm going to be using an expression for that because all I've got to do is go to the purple cog. I'm going to press for rotation, and I'm going to rotate that around once. So I'll start at the beginning, click the key frame. Stop watch actually to make a key frame, go to the end and just type in one rotation over there. So all it will do is rotate around once. Now, let's go to the orange one because we want the orange one to mesh with the purple one. So if I go to the orange one, once again, press R, go to its rotation, and I'm going to go to the animation, add an expression, and I'm going to drop the little Pickwick onto the purple one. Now, this is not going to work out as you expect because they're both going in the same direction. They're both rotating clockwise. And when cgs work like that, if one is rotating clockwise, the other one should be rotating counterclockwise in there. But this is the whole joy of using an expression because we can very simply change it by adding in a few numbers. And to make something go backwards, you times it by minus one. So I'm going to put in at the end of my expression. You can see it's picked up the purple cog over there. I'm going to say star minus one. And that little expression there will just get that to run backwards. Watch this now. The difference. They just mesh in there perfectly. Okay. If that one's running counterclockwise, this one should run clockwise. So let's go to the green one, and once again, I'm going to go and add an expression to that. Let's make sure that I'm actually on rotation. I'm going to add an expression to that, and I'm going to drag this up to the purple rotation. So it's expression is coming from the purple one. And I don't need to do anything because it's going to be the same as the purple one. You can see how they're working together like that. Now, the blue one has got to obviously go the same as the orange one, so it's got to go counterclockwise, so I'm going to go to the blue cog. I'm going to animation. I always forget to put in my rotation. Click on rotation, go to animation, add the expression, and I'm going to drag the little pick whip not to the purple one, but to the orange one and to rotation in there. So we can actually take an expression from an expression. Here we go. You can see it all works together, absolutely perfectly. So, all we've had to do is put in on one of them the times minus one to get it to go backwards, and then the other ones can be copied from either of those two. Have a bit of a go with that. By the way, I know some of you are going to be thinking, Oh, you know what? I should do? I should scale this up like that. You're going to find it looks a bit weird when you scaled. I mean, it'll still work. But the size goes a little bit strange. These are illustrator files. If you do happen to scale things bigger than what they were brought in, don't forget you need to go along, which one did I scale? This one, the blue one here. And It's this little star over here, which is the continuous Rsterization button. If you click on that, it'll make sure it's absolutely spot on sharpness. Have a go. 65. Use Different Properties: I've brought in this purple cog. I've just scaled it up a little bit, and don't forget to switch on that little continuous rasterization button if you do scale it up. I want to rotate it. I'm going to start off over there by having zero, and then over here one rotation. In there. In fact, if I go back to there, that's not on zero, so let's make sure that's zero. So it will rotate around once. Now, incidentally, if you see when you're rotating them that they're a little bit on the walk like that, you can just move the registration point, so just press A on the keyboard to get an anchor point and move it around based on its registration point, and that with a little bit of fiddling, get that right. Now, what I'm going to do is I want to then fade this out over here. So I'm going to press the little arrow. I've gone into transform, and I've done my rotation. So I've put my key frame on my rotation. Now, if I go to pacity, I can go to animation, add expression, and in here, I can drag the little pick whip onto rotation. What's happening now is it's taking the degree and putting it into the opacity. Now obviously, you'll see the problem when I start to do this because if I do that, 20 degrees in there equals 20%, so it's changing degrees into percentages, it means that it will fade in. But of course, when we get to 100 degrees, well, that's going to just stay there at 100% because we can't go higher than 100% obviously. To get around this problem, what we're going to do is we're going to add a little bit of maths to the end. So I'm going to click in there because remember, what we're getting is that number and we need to convert it into a percentage. So if I were to say, take that number and divide it, find my divide by 3.6. That would give us the correct percentage. You see if I go about halfway to 2 seconds there, we're coming up and it's 50%, and when that gets to 180, that becomes 50% in there. Just a simple little bit of maths to change from one to the other. Now, you can go from different values across, and as I've shown you, sometimes you have to actually use something like a little bit of maths to convert them over. Of course, all of the stuff that we're doing could be done manually. The expressions are just there to help speed up your working. Do be careful, by the way, when you start dragging these in and you get things with x and y positions, x and y anchor points, or scaling horizontal and vertical scaling because there's two numbers in there to deal with. But do try this out. Go from rotation to pacity and just divide it by 3.6. He we go. 66. Project: Social Portrait Music Video Cassette Intro: This is our final project, and it's going to be a big one. We're going to be using some scripting. I shouldn't say the word scripting because I know it's scary. We're going to be using an expression to control something to make the speaker move in time to the music. As you can see from this little clip next to me, that speaker is being distorted and it's distorting in time to the music. We're also going to be adding all of things that we've looked at earlier, from distorting the cassette as it comes out of the player through to adding a preset to get the text to look really cool. This is a brilliant, brilliant project, and I really hope you enjoy it. Let's go. 67. Make a Comp and Add Photo: This is one of my favorite projects. We're going to do something for Instagram, Tech Tok, any social media platform or even advert that has a vertical format. This is going to have sound, it's going to have text. It's going to be cool. Let's go to the composition, new composition. By the way, you can always sorry, you can always go to a new project if you've been working on one al. I'm going to save that last one that I was working on. So composition, new composition, this is going to be social media portrait. 1080 by 1920 at 30 frames per second. We're going to go down over here and I'm going to give it a little bit of time in here, and I think that I've got plenty to play with, I'm going to choose 30 seconds. There's lots and lots in there. The background color will make white although it won't matter because we're going to put in a black shape later on. The white will just help us to remember that we need to actually put in that black shape. Let click. Now I'm going to go and find the starting point of this, and that's going to be the background graphic. Now, I've got a little graphic. The original actually comes from Pi spay. What I've done is I've actually extended it in photoshop. If we have a little look at this, this was the original graphic over there, and in photoshop, I just got the AI to add some more ceiling and some more floor as well. Didn't take long to be honest, you just select and then tell it to add it in. I'm going to bring that in. And pop that into my scene. Now, this is actually double the size of a file. In case you're working on a faster machine and you want to do a higher quality, maybe four k or something like that. I thought I'd give you a high quality image. Anyway, I'm going to press S, and I'm going to take this down to 50% because it is double the size and with 50%, it should just fit in absolutely perfectly. Have a go, get that far. 68. Animate with Corner Pin: Now, the next thing to do is we're going to bring in a drawing of a cassette. So I'm just going to go to my downloads, like everything else. I've given this to you. I'm going to just bring in the cassette and pop it in there. You can see it's sort of an old old style player there. The first thing is, we're going to be animating this, so it looks like it's actually bouncing out of the cassette player at the bottom. So I do need to take the scaling down. I'm going to press S on the cassette and take it down a little bit like that. I've been around for a while. And to be honest, when I was young, we actually used cassettes, and I know that that cassette is actually the wrong way around because when they go in, the buttons tend to be on this side over here, unless, of course, they've changed it since. What I'm going to do is, I'm always going to press R and just rotate it 180 degrees like that because that's how they go into the player. It still looks a little bit strange in there because we're sort of seeing a bit on the side, but hopefully by the time it ends up at the top, it'll look okay. What we're going to do now, just regle it a little bit like that, get it right, is we're going to get it to actually look like it's coming out of the player. So I'm going to go and add, and I'm going to go to the effects in here to do this, a distortion that we've used before called Corner pin. The first thing I need to do is to make sure that this is angled at the correct angle because it's straight on, but you can see our perspective is going in at an angle that way. So if I go to my effects down here in the in the comp. God corner pin. I've got upper left, upper right, lower left, lower right. What I'm going to do is I'm going to move this around. I'm going to move these corner pins around until this is in the right place. So I want to start with those out there and that out there. And these I'm going to bring in as well. So you can see I'm angling it to the same way that the roof is angled in there. Let's just pull that across a little bit. Maybe this one can come a little bit like so. So that's my first one, and I'm going to actually now go in, and I'm going to key frame it. So those points have been keyframed. And I will do this over 5 seconds, but to be honest, we're going to speed it up shortly. And then I'm going to say, at 5 seconds, I want this to be down here, and that to be in there. And if I can get to the top one. I'm just holding down my space bars. I can move this around. That's going to be there, and that one is going to be over there. So what'll happen now is it'll just animate out from there using those key frames. In fact, that first key frame there, I think that should come up a little bit like so. So I'll press the space bars. You can see the animation. And of course, it's going the wrong way. But that happens so often. It doesn't matter. I can select those, pull them across. I'll select all of them and take them back again to there. Now when I play it, it's going the right direction. 69. Boing & Masking: What I want to happen though is as I'm dragging this out, I want this cassette to actually stretch. So this part of it here, the top of the cassette stays in there, and the bottom stretches out, and then all of a sudden, the top just releases and goes boeing up to the top. If you want to put in boeing side effects, you're more than welcome to do that. How am I going to do that? Well, what I'm going to do is I'm going to move two of the key frames up a little bit. Now, this is going to be a bit weird because you see if I move these ones here up to this, I want them to start there. It just looks really weird because it's actually almost going flat. Why is that happening? Well, remember at the very beginning, what I did was, I actually spun around 180 degrees. As far as the values here are concerned, these lower left and lower right are actually not these two here. They are actually these two here at the top, and the upper left and upper right are the two over there at the bottom. If I took these two at the bottom and move them up a little bit, quite a long way. You'll see as I pull this up, it'll actually stretch the tape out like that and then suddenly release it over there. In fact, I'm going to move those closer. I'm going to zoom in a bit so I can see exactly what I'm doing. I'm going to move these ones in a lot closer like that. It comes out, and then all of a sudden, it just springs out like that. I do want to slow down at the end, so I'm going to select those key frames. I'm going to go along as always keyframe assistant eases. If you're really feeling into this, you could actually go and do it using the graph editor. I think that works. We've got a slow coming out there and then all of a sudden boiling, it just zips up to the ceiling. I think I'm pretty much done with that bit. But what I'd also like is that when this is in there, I don't want the cassette to be seen on that area. I want to mask that out. We're going to do that by using a shape. We're not going to put a mask onto that layer because if we do the movement and things will affect the mask. I'm actually going to go over here. I'm going to use the pen. I'm going to zoom into the cassette player. I'm going to hold down the space bar and move up a little bit over there. And using the pen, I'm just going to draw in a shape over here. So I think up to there, and I wanted to kind of go something like that. So looking at this, it's hidden, and then it will show over there. Now, you can see how it's showing on the side. I don't want that, so I'm going to use my arrow tool, click on a point and just pull that out a little bit like that. Let's make sure that none of that actually shows. I can pull this one out as well just in case we've got any problems. I've got that. How do I make this work then? Well, remember, if we went into our track mats, if you can't find your track mats, just right click, go to columns and find your modes in there. And I go to the cassette itself, and on the cassette, I say, use shape one, like so. Now, of course, what it's done is it's matted the wrong area. So there's a little button over there if you click on that, that inverts your mat for you. I'll zoom out a bit and just pull this down so that you can see it's now coming out of the cassette player like that. Do you have a bit of a go with that? Get that animation going and mat out the cassette so it actually looks like it's coming out at the top. You could even go round the buttons if you wished. And if you want to, you could add another mat over there, so it actually went behind the handle. It's up to you. 70. Bring in Logo & Change Opacity: I'm going to bring in something else to animate a little graphic. So I'm going to close these effects down, and I'm going to go and find the graffiti image over here. Let me open that. Once again, this comes from Pia Bay. I have removed the background from it, so it's on a transparent background. I'm going to make these layers over here. I'll click on them and then click the Shy button, so we've got a nice clean area there, and then bring in my graphic over here. Now, this is going to be reasonably simple because what I'm going to do is I'm going to scale it, so I'm going to press S to scale. Take it down to the size that I wanted to be, which is going to be something like that. It's going to sit in the middle over there, and I'm going to I'm going to be bringing it in Just as the cassette arrives over there, I want it to come in as well. Now, I'm going to just very simply use pacity in here. So click on T key frame it. Move back a little bit and take that down to zero. Nothing exciting about that one at all. It's just got to come in really fast up to there. Once again, bring it in. Once you've done that, if you want to try changing the mode on it, so it looks looks almost like it's painted on the wall. You can go to your modes, and there are a number of different blend modes. If I go to multiply, you can see we've got that. We can see some of the wall behind it. Darken, very similar. Or you can try some of these like add or lighten to get totally different effects. Have a go. 71. Create Text & Change Color: We're going to get some really cool text in here now. Before I do that, I'm going to just make that layer shy. Then I'm going to go to my text tool and I'm going to click up here and put in the text that I want. I want this at the top to say summer, and the bottom is going to say vibe. So somewhere at the top. I'm going to select that. And I'm going to go along to my text options and find a really interesting typeface. I've got one here called Droug. You might have all sorts of other weird and wonderful type faces. It really doesn't matter which one you choose. Just think of something that might be appropriate for the rest of this video. Now, I'd like to actually just make it a bit bigger so I can see it a little bit easier. And as I'm scaling this up and down, you can see that what happens is it scales from the bottom left hand corner. Remember that. I also want to change the color of this text. I'm going to go with the S. I'm going to go down here to the text color. Use the little eye dropper, and then just sample a color from my document somewhere. I'm going to go with that light pink in there. The U, once again, click on the eye dropper, that's going to be blue. Is going to be yellow or orange. Green, obviously, red. Then finally, black. Sorry, purple. Now, the other thing I want to do with this, so it matches in with the graffiti style is to put a stroke around it. So if I go down here, there's a stroke option. If I click on the tick and making it black, you can have any color stroke you like, and then I can adjust the stroke width in here as well. I could also choose to have the stroke over the fill or the fill over the strokes. I could actually have a really big stroke in here, a little bit like graffiti, but with the individual characters actually still showing up in color. And don't forget in our settings here, we're going to make these closer together, once again, getting more of a graffiti feel to the whole thing. Try it out and get some interesting looking text in there. 72. Add a Text Preset: Don't forget if you are going to manually change the zoom on the summer. What you can do is you can press A and just make sure that the anchor point is actually in the middle, so it scales from the middle out rather than the bottom left hand corner. What we're actually going to do, and I'm going to do this once I've scaled this up to the size that I want. Scale the text up a little bit. In fact, I want mine to be vertical as well. So I'd like to end up something like that and to just move it with P for position. Move it across and down a little bit. I'm going to go along and I'm going to use one of those effects that we looked at. Now, I've gone to bridge over here, and I thought this horsefly one looks interesting or the humming bird looks interesting as well, where they all come in like that. But you can pick anything that you like. Let's try one of those. So in my animation, the Cassette comes up, the music comes up, and straight after that's happening. I want this all to happen fairly quickly. I want the summer to come in with some sort of effect. So I'm going to click off of my layer. I'm going to go and find my effects and presets. And in the text preset, remember you're in animation presets, we're looking at text. I've gone down to organic. And this is where I've got the horse fly. I'm going to drag and drop it in there, nothing happens there. Let's just play it, and then the text will just come in using that horse fly effect. If I don't want it, I can undo that again, and let's try that one more time with the humming bird. Drag and drop that in, try that out. Prefer the humming bird to be honest. So I'll undo that. Look at your timing over here, what's happening. So first of all, that is coming in, whizzing in, then the music comes in, and maybe as the music has just come up like that, about that transparency, I'm going to bring the humming bird in in there. If you want to get it going before that, it's entirely up to you. Let's do that once more. Just at that point, bring the humming bird in like so. Have a go with that. 73. Copy & Change Text: Last bit of text, this is ready easy. I'm going to take this layer, copy it, so control or command C, Control V or command V to paste it in, and this is going to be exactly the same at the moment. But now using my move tool, I can move it down to the bottom and just go in and change my text to something else. So I'm going to put in summer vibes in there. Once again, I would have to go in, and I won't force you to watch me to do that. I'll do it while you're trying out yours. But you can see the effect is there. As well. So I need to move it across, so I'll just press P for position and move it across with position to there. I also wanted to start slightly after summer has come in. So I'm going to move the whole clip along a little bit. So now, that one will start coming in, and then the vibes will start coming in as well. Have a go with that, change a text and then get some different colors going on down there as well for a really wild effect. You can change the size if you want it smaller or bigger. It's entirely up to you. 74. Change Scale on Logo: Let's look at the timing of this. If I play this, we have this slow start where that comes in, and then the music just pops in, and these things then bounce in. I want a little bit more bounce from this. What I'd like to do is to go back to the graffiti over here, and I want to kind of come in with a sudden sort of bounce in not a physical bounce, but I wanted to sort of bounce in a scaling way. So I'm going to go and find it. Now, it's hidden because of the shy layers. I'm going to unshy them, and I'm going to go down here. There it is. It's the graffiti there, and I'll make the other layers shy and unshy the graffiti layer, like so. Once again, it's easier to work on that way. So when it comes in, what I'd like to do is I'd like it to end up at this size over here. And I think, before the text comes in, that's where I want it to be that size. In scale, I'm going to keyframe the scale. Then I'm going to go back a little bit, just a small amount, and I'm going to really push the scaling right up, and then back a little bit more and scale it right down. So if we go even further, I can scale it, so it virtually disappears. Let's have a little bit of a look at that, so it actually comes in and jumps towards the camera with that bounce. Now, I want to speed this up a little bit, so I'm going to select all of those. Don't forget you can hold down the alter the option key, and you can drag them closer together. If you don't have the alt the option key, it really is just a matter of moving them all at the same time. So once again, comes in, bounces towards the camera and stops. I think I'm going to make that a little bit more interesting by zooming in. It doesn't just get bigger and then smaller and stop. I want to then ever so slight to get bigger again. And then once again, down to its final size. Now, I can't remember what the final size is. It doesn't matter. If I can click on the key frame that's got the final size, I can copy that and just paste it straight in over there. Oh, I've done the wrong one. Haven't I copy the wrong one? Let's control Z that. It was actually this one here, which is the final one. Copy that, paste it in, like so. So you'll start off really tiny come zooming in, get really big, come back again and do that bouncing. Let's check that out. Go. I think that looks a whole lot better in there. If you want to start changing your timing on this, absolutely fine, you can just adjust it as you like. This beginning bit is a little bit on the slow side. I might have to speed that up a bit later, but it's going to bring people's attention in to go, Oh, what on earth is that? Oh, and then it all comes in like so. Anyway, have a bit of a go if you want to change that graphic in there and adjust the animation on the scaling. 75. Adjust Music Volume: Now I'm going to bring in some sound, so I'm going to go and find this piece of music. Now, you can use anything you like. I've used this piece because it's got some very definitive beats in it, and we're going to use those beats to move something. So I'm going to pop it in the bottom over here, and let's have a look at the sound wave. I'm going to click the down button in there. Down to the audio, and I'm going to go into the wave form over here. I'll just pull this out a little bit so you can see there's very definitive peaks and troughs in that wave form. I'll just play it for you so you can get an idea. It's a very sort tropical light reggae aspects. I don't know what style it is, but. There was something going on like that. And then this second piece over here is really what I'm actually interested in. Now, what I'd like to do is I'd like this more interesting piece to come in probably at about this point here once the text has come in over there. So I'm going to move the sound all way across. And let's just play that last bit. I'm going to take the volume down from here from this point. Let's zoom into that area, and I'm just going to put my playback head over there, so that's where I want the volume to be. And I'm going to key frame the audio levels. Then if we zoom out a bit over here, I can then move across down here and then reduce the volume. You can see how it slowly going down. We'll have something a lot softer And then the beat comes in over there. And this is then where I want to start animating something. But bring in the music. If you don't like my choice of music, feel free to find your own. I found this on Pixabay, this free music in there as well. And just find something with lots of peaks and troughs in the music because that's what's going to affect what we're going to be doing next, which is making the little speaker move. 76. Audio Amplitude & Bulge: Now, we're going to be using an expression, and we're going to get the expression to control a effect, which will make that little speaker get bigger and smaller in time to the music. So what we want to do is we want to use the values from the wave form. Now, we can't use the values from the audio levels because they're just set, but it's actually this wave form here that we need. You can't just pick them up, but there's a way round it, of course. If I go to animation and down to my keyframe assistant, there's something which converts the audio into key frames. So as long as I'm on that audio, if I click on that, what it's done now is it's done a new layer called the audio amplitude. I'm going to click the drop down over there and go into the effects, and the left, right channel, or both channels. Let's use the both channel over here. And you can see we've got all of these little key frames over here. Those little key frames are just values which come from the wave form. When I do the effect, what I'm going to be doing is I'm going to be using this both channels from the audio amplitude, which actually comes from there, the value goes from there into there and that's where we can pick it up to use. I'm going to go back to my graphic. Let's try that sentence again. Not the graffiti. I'm getting tongue tied. Over here. I'm going to go and show my background graphic. So if I click the little Shy button. It's this one over here that I want to make unshy, and the graffiti logo, I'm going to make shy again, click the button. Really, I've got this one, which is the graphic selected, I can see the audio amplitude and I can see the sound waves in there as well. In this graphic, I'm going to put in an effect. I'm going to go to effect down to distort, and I'm going to use an effect called the bulge distort. Now, when you first put it in, you don't actually sometimes see much of a change. If I zoom in a little bit, there make it bit bigger, you can't see anything. So I'm going to go to the settings on that either up here or actually on the layer itself. I'm going to change the horizontal radius, and there we go, you can see the shape now and the vertical radius until I get a circle like that. Make it a bit bigger. And I'm going to then go along to the bulge center, and this will allow me to move it over my speaker. And you can see the effect that we're getting there. It's almost like a magnifier. The amount that it actually magnifies or changes is based on this bulge height. You can see we can adjust it in there. The bulge height is what we're going to be using with our expression. Now, I'm going to just make it a little bit bigger over there and change the horizontal as well. Of course, you can adjust this later on. Now, once again, I'm going to stop there so you can put on that effect and move it over the speaker. If you've got a different graphic, put it over something else, which you want to bulge. Works great on people's eyes, by the way, to make the eyes bulge in time to music. I want to stop there. 77. Use Bulge With Expression: Let's go to the graffiti graphic, and I'm just going to close down the sound for now and open that up so that you can see it. I'm going to effects. I'm going to go down to bulge, and as I said, it's the bulge height that I want to adjust. So I'm going to click on Bulge height, and then I'm going to go up to my animation do to my add expression. So I need to drag my pickwip, make sure that your audio amplitude effects are open so that you can see all those channels and even actually open up the channel itself so that you can see the slider in there. And then drag the little pickwip and drop it on that slider. You can see it won't allow you to drop it onto those channels. You have to actually drop it on the slider itself. And then all this is saying is in this comp, go to the audio amplitude layer, go to the effects, use both channels and the slider. That's all that that little piece of code actually says. Now when I play this, what will happen? You can see how it's adjusting it and that's going a bit extreme. Let's make this a bit bigger. So as I'm moving that around, that's adjusting, but it's going, really big like that. So what we can do is we can now go to the expression, click at the end of the expression over there and just use a little bit of maths to maybe have less of an extreme effect. And I'm going to say, divide it by 20, quite a lot. So let's have a look and see how that looks. So if we do that now, You can see we're getting a few little beats out of that. I'm going to play it so we can see what it looks like with the music as well. You can hardly see it there, which is perfect. Now, that's great, but I think that my shape is a bit too big. So I can go back to my effect over there, and maybe my vertical radius, I can adjust that a little bit. So we're not affecting the top of the music player quite so much. Maybe the horizontal a bit more as well. Let's see what that's. H Did you hear the music suddenly slowed down? It was just my machine was struggling to keep up with that because I'm looking at this at full quality. Anyway, have a bit of a go with that and drag it onto your audio amplitude layer. You can't delete that audio amplitude layer once you've used. I mean, you can, but then your graffiti will stop working. Close it down once you're done. And if you open up your waves, you'll actually see how it's affecting it. Every time you get a peek here, you get more of a speaker expansion. If you want to put it over the whole of that graphic, that's absolute fine, you could even try it out on this graphic here to get this to scale in time to the music. There's so many things that you can do with it. Have a bit of a go with that. 78. Use Scale with Audio Amplitude: I did take the amount down by going into the effects and to my expression and just dividing that by 20. But if we want to smooth it out, what we can do is we can go to the audio amplitude layer. And if I were to select all of these key frames, all the way along. I can go along to my smoothing option. Do you remember the smoothing that we looked at before where we smoothed out the keyframes? And I can actually smooth those key frames out a bit as well. I'm just going to use one in the tolerance there. Click apply, so we've got less keyframes, so it'll be less of an extreme or sudden change and then it might look a little bit different. That I can show it to you again, I'm going to do the same thing on this music in the middle. I'm going to go and find it. I'm going over to the where is it graphic? Let's sit there. I'll show it, and I'm just going to hide some of the other layers. Click on Shy again so I can see the graphic. On the graphic, I'm going to add an expression, and I'm adding the expression to scaling. So Animation add expression. Now, why won't it let me do it? Or because I haven't actually clicked on the word scale. So animation add expression, and I'm going to use the pick whip and drag it onto the slider. Now, as you can see, there are two lines of text in here, but let's have a look at what happens. You can see it's really small in there. So I'm going to go and click in the code over there find the very end of the code and then just say times by ten. L et's have a look at how that works. It's a bit extreme. Maybe by ten was a bit too much. Let's have a go with five. And we'll stop over there. To be honest, I'm not that happy with that. I'm going to take it off. I'll just delete the code, and it's gone, and I'm back to where I was before. But if you want to try it out, have a bit of a go with any other objects and using scaling with the audio amplitude. Er. 79. Create Video Out: Yes. Okay. I'm going to make all my layers unshy and just close them all down over there so we can see all of them. Once I'm finally happy with this, what I'd like to do is to then just get rid of the text and the background picture. So I just have the word music in there and then some details about when the event is going to be. That's going to be pretty straightforward to be honest. I'm going to work through these ones in here. I'm going to start off with vibes, and it's going to be a little bit shorter. In there. Now, some of them are going to be really long and trying to get to the end is a bit of a pain, so I will just go to my comp composition settings. There are other ways by the way to cut this, but for now, we'll just do this. I'm going to increase that composition setting to 50. And that way, I can very easily get to the ends like so. Now, I'm going to say, at this stage here, I've listened to the music, and that's where I want to bring in the other details. I'm going to take vibes, drag it there, hold on the shift kestal snap to that. Summer is going to stop there as well. The background picture. I'm going to leave the graffiti there, but the cassette will go. Let's try that again. The cassette We'll go. The graffiti image will go. I'm just left with something like that. Now I want that background to be black because I think it'll look a lot cooler. I'm going to go to layer, new solid layer. I'm going to put in the solid layer here and I'm going to make that solid layer black. And it's above all the other layers. I'll just drag it down below those like that. I'm happy with that. The way that it's looking. All I need to do is to bring in some text now, and that's going to be very simple over there. So I've just put in some text in here. Now, my text actually looks quite groovy because it's overlapped almost like graffiti is. The reason for that is I didn't intend to do it, but over here where we've got our tracking, sorry, leading, you can see we can actually get the text to overlap like that. Let's see what happens if we do something like that. Do a return and it just needs to all be scaled down now. So the fastest way will be to press S on that layer and scale it down a little like so. Now, obviously, this is going to come in over here. I hold down the shift keyset locks to that. And once that's been in, I like to then fade it all out. Now, another quick way of fading is to use a solid. If I go and go to layer new and solid. And then in here, I'll choose a black solid because I want to fade to black. Make sure that's right at the top. And I'm going to say at this point here, my 15 second mark, I'm going to have the capacity set to 100. I'll key frame that, and I'll just go back a little bit. And then I'm going to take that opacity down to zero. So it'll just fade out. I also want my music to fade around then, so I'm going to go into the music. I'm going to the audio levels. And I wanted to be 100% at this stage here, just as that's fading out, so I'll put in a key frame. Now, I've done something very, very silly. I've made the stupid mistake before. In fact, you'd think I'd learned. I've made it so many times. I'm going to undo that. I pressed the keyframe button, forgetting that I've got keyframes on there already. So I need to click on this keyframe button there and then move over here and just fade the music out. And I'm going to then get my work area and drag my work area to where the music has fade out. Once again, holding the shift key, so it'll just snap to that point. Now, before you start to render it, it might be a good idea to just check the whole thing to make sure that your timing is right, and everything is correct. So I'll just press the space bar. This section is probably far too long. But that's easy to change because I can then just change the length of those layers and maybe move the sound back again, and also the black layer, which is on top, which is fading things out. I've done quite a few things in this last little section over here. The none of them are too difficult. But if you want to rewatch this to get an idea of exactly what I've done, or make up your own. You know how to do it now. And have a go with that, and then we will do the final save and render. 80. Save & Render: I've shortened mine a little bit, so the timing is a bit better. We're going to go to file. You should have been saving all the way long. I really should practice what I preach, and I'm going to call this one Cassette. I'm putting this onto my desktop only so that I can find it again. I'm going to go to file, and I'm going to go down to dependencies and collect the files over here. Once again, I will then save that folder full of files. Lastly, I'm going to go to file export going to media encoder. There it is there. I've got the Facebook HD Full HD size there, which is pretty much the same as the YouTube one to be honest. But I'm going to click on that because remember, if you did it like this, it would give you that format with just that little piece of video in the middle. We need to make sure that we're on video in here, and we want to match the source. So now this is our video this way. I'm going to click on there. I'm going to tell it where I want to save it, which in my case is on the desktop. Calling it Cassette, and I'm going to click on Save and Render. Let's have a look at it. Here it is. And play. 81. Well Done & Thank You: Congratulations. You've got to the end of this intermediate course. I'm sure you're creating amazing work and feeling very, very comfortable with working with after effects. Please don't forget to leave us a review. It really does help us to build better content for you. Finally, share your work. We love seeing the things that people do, and we'd really enjoy seeing what you've come up with. Do look out for our other Adobe and affinity courses. We've got quite a few out there, and I hope to see you again soon.