Precomps, Masks and Track Mattes - Adobe After Effects for Funsies

1. Introduction: Pre-comps, track mattes and masks. What the heck is that? If you have heard these terms before, but you don't really know what it's about. This class is for you. I'm Alyssa, I'm an animator, illustrator, designer, creative dabbler of sorts. And I'm here to hold your hand through learning some After Effects. So keeping it fun, nothing too intimidating. This isn't about being the most incredible graphic designer, motion graphics artist in the world. This is about having a bit of fun and having a bit of play. So I'm just going to show you some tools in a light and non-intimidating way because After Effects is animation and animation supposed to be fun. It's just unfortunate that After Effects is scary. So I'm here to make it a whole lot less intimidating. So this class is all about some really early on tools in After Effects that have huge potential. So pre-comping is effectively grouping stuff. So if you've started in After Effects and you've got a huge amount of layers and you just want to be able to put some stuff together. That's the magic sauce. Track mattes and masks, use them kinda similarly but for different purposes. So track mattes and how you can hide just a little bit of something, reveal it kinda like you're looking through a window. Masks are attached to a layer so you can use it for things like making an eye blink. What we're gonna do in this class is go through all of those. I'm going to give you a really specific project that shows you how these tools can work in this very specific context, but then reuse them in a few different ways. So hopefully you can start to see their broarder potential and how you could use them in your own ongoing projects, while no experience in After Effects is needed to start in this class, I would recommend if you're feeling like it's a little bit too complicated and deep divey at the beginning. Go back to one of my earlier classes and have a look through those because this is all kind of flowing along together. So it's building on those skills we've already used. Having said that, if you're already feeling a little bit comfortable with the basic tools, jump straight on in friends, if you know how to use transforms, if you know how to render, you're gonna be fine. This is specifically pre-comps, track mattes and masks, and some slightly more advanced tools, but still nothing too fancy. If you're keen to keep building on those After Effects skills, jump on in friends and let's get going. 2. The project: This is what we're going to be creating in our class. A little 1920 by 1080 looping animation or not quiet looping. So it's going to be working with assets that I created in Photoshop using a little layering system. And then that is going to be imported into After Effects. And we'll start animating from there. So we're going to use those layers to go through pre-comping, track mattes and masks. If you'd like to work with you own assets, you are absolutely welcome. But I highly recommend that you watch the videos first so you know what kind of set up and what kind of layers are needed so that you can make sure that we've got some continuity. The main purpose of this project is not to make something incredible and totally versatile, it's to get comfortable with the tools. So the project is really specific to make sure that I can cover those tools as thoroughly as possible. Having said that, it's more important that you learn how you want to learn so chop and change how you like and make the assets that you feel most comfortable working with. The final video is going to be a 1920 by 1080 landscape video. It's going to be an MP4. If you would like to make it a little gif that you can share online oh my gosh, plays do. If you'd like to make it square. Absolutely more than welcome. If you want to make it vertical, you've got options because it's two Polaroids. You can do whatever you like with it. But the main thing that we're going to talk through is just your classic HD normal ratios. We're not gonna do anything more complicated than that. But if you are interested in going further and making the project work for you, please do. Don't be afraid. Don't be afraid my friends. 3. Inspecting those files: So go ahead and download that Photoshop file. It's just this one here, Polaroids. And then we'll open it up and have a little look, see. So it's important here to note how After Effects and Photoshop can work together. And Illustrator for that matter. After Effects can read layers. So it doesn't need, you don't need to export every everything that you want to animate as its own individual file. You can just import one big Photoshop file. And After Effects will be like, Oh, I recognize them layers, I'll use it. So... What that means is you need to split up everything that you might want to animate into its own layer, e.g. if I want this little fish fellow to swim, I need the fin to be its own individual layer. So they're two separate things. Same with the eyeball. If I wanted to do some blinks, I need to keep it all separate. Another thing worth noting potentially at this point is that After Effects can read folders. So in Photoshop you can have a folder created with this little tab. If I pop all of this polaroid into here, group one. What that's going to do when I bring it into After Effects, is it's going to read this group, this folder as its own, pre-comp, its own composition. So you'll already have one big main comp and then the comp for this Polaroid. So that is a way of setting up your files. It's not what we're gonna do this time. We're going to leave it just raw as it is all individual layers, just so we can get the hang of pre-comping things and grouping things directly in After Effects. But it's handy to know that you can do that. Cool. I think that's all we need to know about this file. So let's jump on over to After Effects and bring it in. 4. Importing our layers: So in After Effects, I'm going to make a new project. I'm going to go file and import. So I can go import file with Control I or I can double-click in the project tab. And then I'm going to navigate to my Polaroids. And before I hit Import, I'm going to change the import as from Footage to Composition, Retain Layer Sizes. It's important we do that. Because. If I jump back here for a tick, Here we go, the fin is a great example. So if I want to animate this fin, I want to be able to click on just that little space where the fin is and know that I have it selected. If I don't tivk Retain Layer Sizes, what it'll do is make a bounding box the size of the whole composition, which is far too big. That means if I select anything, I'm going to hit whatever is on top, basically because the bounding box is the whole thing for all of the layers. So we always want to take retain layer sizes because animating without that that is a pain in the bottom. Then we'll hit Import. And now because of the Photoshop file, I don't know why After Effects, thinks this is important, but you get to do it twice. Basically. Composition, Retain Layer Sizes. That's what we want. Editable layer styles. Great, because that means if we've got any blending modes in there, we can adjust them directly in After Effects. Just a note, if you're using Illustrator files, you don't get this option twice. It's only for Photoshop. How fun. Let's have a look at what has come in. So we have a composition. Now I know it's a composition because this icon is the composition icon. And we've got a folder. Now if we twirl down our folder, we can see all of our layers. Amazing. So many layers. Now these are automatically in alphabetical order. So just as a note, I don't know if that's very interesting, but it's a handy to know they're not in the order that you have them stacked here. They adjust straight out alphabetical order. So if we are still thinking of this project window as our pantry, then this is a little Tupperware container full of your very organized ingredients. This is the little herb wreck, herbs and spices. But we don't need to go in there because we've already got out perfect mixed spice collection right here. It's already done. So if I double-click on this one, that'll open up a composition. Because when we import, we selected composition retain layer sizes. So created a composition for us. And all of our layers are nice, clean, tiny bounding boxes, Beautiful. 5. Preparing comp settings: Usually when you're creating a new project in After Effects, you'll need to make a new comp. But because we've imported one, we can just work straight from that. But before we go too far, we want to make sure it's the right settings. So to update our settings, we go to Composition and Composition Settings. Or as you can see, Control K. If that menu isn't allowing you to select, it, just makes sure that you've got a little blue box around either your timeline or your comp window that tells you where you are. If you're just in your project window, it doesn't know what comp you're talking about. So you need to be in your, one of the two. They represent what comp comp you're in. So comp settings. Now, what I wanna do, mine is actually set correctly, which is fantastic, but that doesn't always happen. So whenever you import a scene, it will use the size of the file. But the frame rate and the resolution and timecode, all that kind of stuff. All that is just assumed from whatever the last project you did was the last time I was in here, it was a six second comp, so that's handy. And 25 frames per second. Perfect. We want 1920 x 1080px, 25 frames per second square pixels every time. 6 second duration should be plenty. That is looking hunky-dory to me. Just make sure that yours matches. Something else I'm gonna do while I'm here is a bit of tidy up because this is a bit much information for me. I don't care about all this news yet, so I don't need my in-out duration stretch, no thank you. I'm going to down here, click this little guy. Tiny little, I don't know. I always think it's a knee it looks like a knee to me. It's not. But that's what I think of. I'm going to turn the knees off. I'm also going to turn off this little guy up here. I'm not sure why that's on. It's just a bit excited to be here. So I'm going to turn that off. That's our motion blur, which I can show you later. But for now, we don't need it slowing down our machine. So make sure that's all grey. And what I'm gonna do right now before we move on is I'm going to save my file. So I'm going to go File, Save As. And we always do this at the very beginning because After Effects always thinks it's being really helpful in saving it somewhere extremely dumb. Call it Polaroids, animated, maybe. And hit save. So now that we have everything saved, organized, we're all ready to crack in. What we're gonna do now is we're going to start pre-comping. So that means basically grouping everything. 6. Grouping via precomps: Alright, let's get pre-comping. So... What I wanna do is there's a couple of simple groups that I know we're going to have because we've got a Polaroid and another Polaroid. So I'm going to grab those elements and I can grab them from here. You can see that's a little bit faffy though. I know that I organized it beautifully here. So I can, I know the layers are stacked the same way so I can use that knowledge. So basically Polaroid one, all the way up to bubble. I click on the bottom one and then hold shift and select the top. Then I can right-click and go to pre-compose. Keyboard shortcut is Control Shift C. And now I'm going to name it Polaroid One. These little tick boxes should automatically be ticked for you, move all attributes into new composition. That means nothing in this particular instance but hopefully I can explain that later. But we do want everything to go into the camp. Absolutely. And we always want this ticked. This means very little right now, but adjust composition duration to the timespan of the selected layers. Once again, After Effect is being complicated, I'm gonna, I'm gonna show you so hot tangent while I do this. So I'm going to cancel that for a second. If I just cut this for a second and I pre-comp and I don't take this, see how my layer goes all the way to the end. But my images disappear. If rather than unticking that, if I grab everything, precomp and tick, adjust composition duration to the timespan of the selected layers and go, okay. My new pre-comp is at the correct length. So I can see when it disappears. That's all that little tick box means. Adjust composition duration to the timespan of the selected layers. How long are the layers? Crop the comp to that length. It's not a permanent chop. It's just a handy-dandy chop. I'd always always have that ticked because you've got visual cues of where things are happening. That's what that little button means. Back to where we were, Polaroid One. And then hit OK, you may automatically have opened new comp. That's fine. That doesn't matter. That just means it's going to open for you. If you don't have it ticked, like moi, but you want to open it, double-click. That's how we get there. You see now that you've got little tabs. So I've got my Polaroids and Polaroid One, Polaroids, Pollaroid One. A good way to tab between the tabs is, would you believe hit Tab? And then we'll show you a little flowchart, Basically of where you are. So now we can see we've got a lot less layers in our main comp because we've grouped a bunch of things together. So I'm going to work just with this Polaroid One comp for now. And we can mess around with everything else lighter. So I'm going to double-click. I also want the image that's on the Polaroid to be its own little comp. I'm going to grab everything above Polaroid one. So the water to the bubble. And control shift C, or right-click and pre-compose. And I'm going to call it fishy pic and then hit OK or Enter. And that will pre-comp that. I've got my Polaroid back and then I've got the picture. If I double-click a little fish, friend. And we're gonna do one more. We're gonna do fish to eyeball. I'm going to go Control Shift C, pre-comp. Fishy. Amazing. So now we've got four comps. So if I hit Tab now, I'll see, I can go back to fish pic, back to Polaroid one. Back to Polaroids. I can also click through here in my tabs. And you'll also notice that you've got more pre-comps in your pantry about layers. I've got the original and the individual little nests. Now this is just a way to keep things a bit more organized so you don't have thousands of layers in one comp. There's also some other advantages to it that I'll show you as we go along. But the other thing we want to do at the moment, at the very beginning of this, we imported some files and we set retain layer sizes. But now we've got this huge bounding box. So what was the point of all of that effort? If I go to grab the background Polaroid's in the way. So what I wanna do is basically crop it. To crop a comp. You can obviously do it through your comp settings, composition and settings. However, if you change these sizes, It's just no matter what it's going to scale it from the center. So it's going to be everything has to be in the middle, which ours is not. The easiest thing to do is this little guy down here. It's got a rectangle with a rectangle in it. Whoa, scientific. Click on this. This is called a region of interest. If I draw a little box around what I want, it doesn't have to be perfect on the first go, you can adjust it. But this creates a region of interest. It's a focus. The main tool of region of interest is if you've got something really chuggy on your machine, you can just tell After Effects to focus on just this area. So that's all that will preview. In this case, what we're going to use it for is... if we set the size about the main, main polaroid size and we go to composition, Crop Comp to Region of Interest. So if that's our region of interest tool and we're going to crop out comp. We're going to crop it to that size. Shablammo. And then I'm gonna do the same with my fish pic. So I'm gonna jump inside, grab my region of interest tool. Now, once you've cropped it, and if you're not happy with that crop, easiest thing is to undo. Because otherwise if you scale it out, you're going to be scaling from the middle again. So do be precious when you're doing it the first time. I would never go right to the edge because as you can see, it's not going to show that bit. You're going to actually cut a bit off. So give yourself a bit of margin. But we don't need all this stuff. Comp, crop comp to region of interest. As always, one more time with the fish. Now if I go back through my little tabs, I can see here that they've been cropped, great. I can also see everything is moved. That's fine. We can just pop them back in place. So that is the one annoying thing about the region of interest. It doesn't remember, where you put stuff. So you do have to move it back in place. 7. Animating our fisho: Now that we have our same kind of setup, we're ready to start animating. So I'm just still going to focus on one Polaroid at a time. And we're gonna get that working well. And then we'll basically rehash everything with Polaroid number two. So don't worry about getting everything set up put just a little bitty at a time. So I'm gonna jump into my Fishy. And what I wanna do is I'm going to animate this guy. Now that resolution is atrocious. So I'm going to change my preview from quarter to full because I reckon this computer can handle it. If ever your computer is being really laggy. I highly recommend animating on quarter. I'm a big fan. But do make sure that you flip back to full to check it every now and then, particularly before you render because you want to make sure everything looks exactly as we think it does. If I go back to quarter, quite a bit of variation. Like it's obviously pixelated, but you can see if you're trying to line stuff up, you wanna make sure you're on full. Let's animate this guy swimming. Simple swim. I'm gonna get the fin to flap about because that's how swimming works. First thing. Basically I'm just going to rotate it. That's how I'm gonna make it swim. But I need it to rotate from the joint, basically, the moment the anchor point is in the middle of the fin. So I use my rotate tool. That looks weird. That's not how fins move. So I need to move my anchor point. Use my anchor point tool keyboard shortcut is y. If I move it over to the edge, there's a vague big point. Over here-ish and then w for wotate tool. That looks better. Then I'm going to animate the rotation of this fin. So I'm going to open the Rotate property. So R on the keyboard, will open up the rotate property. R. Now go to the very beginning of your little comp. And I'm going to activate the property. I don't need it to be at this neutral position. I'm just gonna go from one extreme. Move along in time to the next extreme. So bloop, bloop, bloop. Yeah. There's no need to tell it where the middle point is. That's how I drew it, but it's going to rotate from one extreme to the next. Great. So the next pose after this one will be the first one. So I'm just going to grab it. Control C. Move along in time then Control V, That's right. Copy Paste works. Great. I don't think that's quite the same distance. I'm going to nudge it on over. If I play that, look at it. Amazing. It's really not that amazing, but look, it works. What I wanna do is I want it to loop. So what I could do is I could copy all three and paste all the way along. Now I'm overlapping because my first and last are the same, so I can do that. I play that. She goes. But that's tedious for one also, if we want to make a change, I have to do on all of them. I'm not gonna do that. We're gonna do the loop expression. So I'm going to Alt click on this little stopwatch. I'm going to hold Alt on my keyboard and click. And then I'm going to type in my favourite expression. loopOut() Really important. You've got a capital O for Out, but a lowercase l for loop, and then bracket, bracket. Now if I click off or hit Enter on the numpad, close. Now if I play, that will go infinitely. That's important when we're using a loop out expression that the first and last keyframes are the same because otherwise you'll get a glitch. So if you find, you get a little glitch on the loop, that is usually why. The reason I'm getting glitch there is because it doesn't fit perfectly into 6 seconds. If I just nudge this over one, she will fit into six second loops. Lovely. I don't know that I like it. So what I'm gonna do, I think it needs to go faster. I think these a little frantic piranha fish. So I'm going to move these all closer together. Nah that's cute. And then of course, a little bitty of easing. You can select everything by dragging and selecting or my favourite. Click the word of the property that you want. Rotation, that select all the keyframes in there, and then hit F9. For your basic Easy Ease. That's cute! Awww. It's not quite a perfect loop. Why is it not a perfect loop? Because I can't do math. So let's see if we can get it onto ten frames. And I can't be bothered waiting so I'm gonna go back here. There it is. Perfect. Lovely loop. So anybody that missed that ramble, to get it looping smoothly, you need the length of your loop to fit evenly and divide evenly into however long your whole comp is. So in this case my whole comp is 6 seconds. So if my loop goes for ten frames, ten frames fits neatly into 6 seconds times 25 frames per second whatever that is, 150, they go. So it's got to fit evenly into 150. So if I have ten frames per loop, that'll fit nicely. Cool. So that little fishy is doin' it's thang. Great. 8. Just keep swimming: Now if I go back to my little fish peak comp and I play out here, theories, do any little thing and the best thing about a comp. One of the many great things about comps is I can have multiple instances of my fish. I'm just holding Shift. So when I scale them a fish so it stays proportionate and then getting weird distortionary hold Shift. And then if I do Control D, D for duplicate, that makes another instance of math fish. I got as many fish as I like, all different sizes. Now that we've got the fishy is doing they're thin, flat. We should animate the position cell. This one could be simple, could be convoluted. Doesn't matter which one you start with. But I'm going to pick this one because again, I'm going to start with him off the same as I'm going to hit P for position, open up that property and then hit the stopwatch mirror. Belong in time. I'm gonna go to the very end because what I'm swimming in the hotel all the way across. Stunning, amazing. That's just a beautiful little escalated moment, not a particularly convincing fish move. So what I wanna do is I want to make it more fluid. Now because this is a path I can animate. It, hits the pen tool up here, a little fountain nib. And we're gonna get a pen tool. And then just on this path I can drag and that will add handles. So like the pen tool in many other Adobe programs. If you hover over, you see the little cursor changes. So if I click it again, that's just going to remove those handles. But if I click and drag, that'll create new handles. And then I can grab these and do whatever I want with them. Much more. I don't want to say realistic because it's a funny look on page, but it's not as stagnant, which is not. So then if I do the same kind of thing with all the Alba fishy, if one next I guess because that's what was selected. In the mirror of cross, I generally find it easier to animate the position just as a straight line first and then add the curve ease. It's just you've got something to work with them. You know where you're going, you know how long you've got. And you've also got this little motion paths, dots. So you can see kind of what's happening on each frame. I just find it slightly easier. Myself. Do whatever works best for you on how can this guy actually much too fast now he's up Tiger. So it's really important that you keep playing it back. Like proper playing it back. Not just scrubbing through. Because scrubbing through is how fast your hand moves. How fast the actual animation is. Always important to check because I'm completely ignoring the bubbles, by the way, don't worry about then. We could add more points on that motion paths. It adds a little bit of complexity. So I'm not going to bother, we just wanted something that's not completely innovatory. So just two curves is going to be absolutely planning to get that kinda look. Bbb. Now we've got all of our fisheries. It's really nice that they move at slightly different paces. The fins all being perfectly in sync is a bit weird, but we're going to play with that in a minute anyway. So we're going to leave that as it is. 9. Blinky bois: Now that we've got them on a map, we can see what they do and don't know about you guys. The non blinking vibe is flipping terrifying. So I'm going to animate them blinking because it's a bit on the crepe side. Actually also something that I absolutely should have done is taken on over the full let's have a look how it actually looks. Shelly might take a hot second occasion, but it's okay. Sorry. I'm so used to just working with quarters that I didn't even think about it. But that was ugly. But still that deaths there. Okay, So let's jump in to our fish friend. We're going to animate a blink. So what we're gonna do, there's so many ways to do this, but this is just one that I like. So on the eyeball, we're going to basically mask it off. In theory, you could potentially do a little scale. But the pupil getting squashed completely gives away the game. So I'm not gonna do that. I'm going to use the pen and I'm going to animate a mask. So how does one with the eyeball selected? If I go up to my pen tool and start clicking around, basically I'm going to create the top eyelid and the bottom eyelid as one big shape. So I'm going to start with my open I oppose. So I'm gonna click and hold. So again, nice little curve at the top. And then click and hold. Oops, wrong way. Now I don't need this curve because I'm just gonna go straight down from there. So I'm going to, I'm holding Alt and then dragging that handle back into the dot. Then I'm going to click. And then again I'm going to hold Alt so that I create a new split. Annoyingly that did nothing the other end. So that's fine. I'm just dragging by him. And then I'll continue it on. Drag this one back. And I have not learned that up very well, so that's fine. I'll just nudge it on either. Holding Alt again and drag their unpacking. It really doesn't matter if you do have curves and left sides. I'm just saying precious makes it easy for me to keep track of where everything is gearing. So you could do this just by clicking and clicking UI around. I like the curves personally, do have a go with the pen tool, start to get used to it because it is stupid, helpful. Just a note, if you found while you're being clicking away, you started to create a stripe. That's okay. Everything's or hot. Don't panic. All you've done is you've created a shape. That's exactly what you've done. So delete that. You don't need it. What you need to do is make sure that you have the layer selected before you start creating a shape. Because if you have a layer selected and then you start drawing a shape after Effects is going to be like, Oh, you want to mask? I got you. And it will create a mask for you. If I twirl this down, I can see now I have a mask properly. If you don't have a layer selected, It's like, Well, you must want to share it because what am I going to put a mask on? Make sure that you have a layer selected before you create anything. With the eyeball selected. I'll just do that one more time. I'm going to click and drag. Click and drag. Done this so many times and still no good. But that's not important. So you can see when I cut through the eye what's happening, something that I completely forgot to tell you. What are we doing? So if you move the shape, it's just revealing his main section. So we are creating the open eye-blink part right there. If I twirl down this math, I've got all these little properties that have a stopwatch. A stopwatch means I can animate it. So if I want to animate this guy and blinking, what I can do, hit the stopwatch on mask path. Then if I move along in time a little bit, I can move these points. So I'm gonna go back to my normal selection. I'm going to Shift click on one of these points that just diesel X1. And then I'm going to re-select it. Yes. It is silly. Yeah. Selecting the points is a pain in the bum. Look, angry thief. Get, I'm going to move this one down as well. And this one right up. I'm just basically faking a closed eye. It's not gonna be completely closed. That's fine. I'm going to move along and time again, and I'm going to copy paste my first one where it's nice and open. So if I scrubbed through a little blink and I can put a Z on it if I wanted to. Amazing. Then because I've already animated at once The best thing, copy, paste it. Wherever you want. Heist two together should blame or you could have double blink, loop, loop, retirement. So once you've animated one blink this way, you don't need to do it again. And if you don't like it, delayed it, copy, paste. Amazing. It's a little bit robotic. I don't want it to be all exactly the same pricing. That feels a bit weird. We got a little blinky fish. Very huge. So I would also point out that you can do anything else with it doesn't have to be a blink. Feel free to play around. It could be making efficient angry fish. That's fine. If this is my neutral pose or I can do is plug that in here over the top of all of my neutrals. So copy, paste, paste and paste. I'm going to make now I have blinking angry fish. Actually got lava, sinister. But I'm gonna, I'm gonna stick with the happy fish because happy fish is friendly fish. Just like that. So have a play around with it. You can get quite a bit of expression out of just angry eyelid. But if I go back to my main fishy peak and play this back now, it's even more insane because they were all blinking perfectly in sync. So I'll show you how to fix that next. 10. Offsetting fish friends: So what we're gonna do to fix this creepy fish pod is we basically need to offset the animation. We want it to start at different times. So if I just hit U on the keyboard, That's going to hide my keyframes for me. And I'm going to basically, well, I need to do is shoved them other, right? So if I grab this one, shove it to the left. No particular science to this just randomized, just different. Cool. So I've got one shot there. Let's play with play that. Now they're all slightly out of sync. All gets a little bit blinky needy in there. So I'm just gonna natural WIOA. Don't worry about the broken bit. We'll address that in a minute. That's better. They don't feel like they're losing their marbles quite so much. However, there are disappearing. That's a problem. The reason is out fishy comp is 6 s and our fishy peak is 6 s. But if we nudge everything over without clicking and dragging over, we don't have enough comp to work with, fair? If we go in here and go to our comp settings. So Control K, easiest way or competition income settings. We just need to change our duration. So safe bet would be double it. So my thought 12 s instead. Go back to my main comp. Now I can see I have all this extra to play with so I can drag it out. Won't die off the end anymore. But it's still disappears. Because back inside my fish comp, I haven't extended the layers here. The light is still in that six times. So I just need to grab everything here, extend that out as well. So I'm just dragging it all the way to the end, not moving it. Because that would just change the problem. I'm at. If I hover over, I get this little arrow cursor. I'm going to drag that all the way over. Or I can go to the very end with my little timeline marker. And I can do Alt and closed square bracket, and that will extend the end to that point. Now if I go back to my fishy pick and play, nobody vanishes. He stops. He doesn't vanish. Why does he stop? Because I'm silly. I think so. Yeah, it's because I'm silly. Yeah. Okay. So that's the thing. So now the keyframes are out of sync as well, which I forgot about. So sorry team. But what we wanna do is we want to shove those back to where they were. So quickest way, select the word position. That'll grab all the keyframes, even the ones that can't see. And then I'll just drag them over to back in time without comp grab and shovel that, apply that back. There we go. Nobody's overlapping getting anybody else's business. So we moved the whole layer, but when we move the lines, we took the keyframes with us. We didn't want to do that. We've got a nice little staggered animation. We're pretty close to done with the same really. I haven't played with the bubbles yet. I'm going to turn them off for now. 11. Offsetting, but better: Wanting to jump back to this scene and show a slightly neater way to offset the animation so that at the moment, the creepy little fish friends are all blinking perfectly in zinc. Heck, and weird. So what I did before, it was messy, but it totally works. But what could be Nita is now that we know what's going on, if I jump straight into my fishy camp and change the length of it. So I'll do my 12 s because that looked like it worked nicely. And I will extend all my layers. So Control a to grab everything, and then Alt close bracket to extend it all out. Then go back to my fishy pick. And you can see it's kind of extending off the timeline already. So I drag it and I can save this heaps more already there, right? So what that means I can do is rather than grab and move the whole layer, which is where we messed up our keyframes, right? So if I grab the layer and move it either takes the keyframes with it. What I can do is if I use my anchor point tool, which don't ask me why it's not, but it is the anchor point tool. It's also called the pen behind tool. Maybe that's what it refers to and can see the cursor changes. If I grab this and move it around, I can see I'm not sure if it's going to come up very well in the video, but there's a texture that's moving. So what that means is I'm actually dragging the inside contents along. This little fish is now blinking out of sync with the other ones. So I can do that with a little days as well. So it's very sporadic because I can't really see what I'm doing. And I'm just randomly dragging basically. I can say that works as well as obviously a much neater way to do it because I'm not messing up all of my keyframes. That is using the anchor point. So y or pan behind. Neither of them makes sense for what you're doing. So grab the, grabbed the layer with that tool and then you can drag, loan the contents in either direction. If I jump into the timeline. So easiest things Jersey from the very beginning and I jump in, I'll say I'm actually at the five-second mark, will go back and go to the beginning on this one. At the very beginning. When you jump in and out of layers, it will try and put your timeline marker exactly where you are in relation to that previous comp. So that's kinda how you can see what's going on. 12. Final touches: So what we're gonna do now is just basically continue tidying up and finishing off. So this is my fishy peak. That's pretty spiffy, I'm happy with that. But if I go to my Polaroid, that makes no sense. Fish hanging outside of my picture. So I need to mask them back in. But first, I'm going to reset my preview to be full. So I can actually say how beautiful they are. Now to do the mask, same as the eyeball with my fish pick that I have that selected. And I'm going to grab my pen tool, and I'm just going to click any cookie, click 234, and back to the beginning. Now you know that you've landed up in the little circle icon appears. So do try to get that blend. Move these if I want. I don't want it to be perfect because my Polaroid isn't perfect. So my Polaroid picture shouldn't be there. Now if I go back to my Polaroids, full play, that little bunch of fish is still in there. A little fishy thing. And the great thing is I have full control over this little Polaroid itself. So I'm also going to animate that. So I'm going to move my anchor point, so y and move the anchor point down a bit. Then they have to get back to my selection. The reason I'm moving it there is because I'm kind of imagining somebody throwing it a little bit. So it's pivoting a little bit more from the bottom that it is just the middle. It's coming in with a bit of force. So I'm going to start with it out of frame down here somewhere. So do position and rotation and activate that. And then I'm going to also rotate down a little bit and activate it. And then sometimes when I'm not sure how long something should take, I'll just like play and then stop it when I think that action should be done. It's not very scientific, but it's done me well. So back to my selection and pop it up. Gives you something to work with the very least. And then I'm going to overshoot this point. I'm just trying to get like a flow. Yeah, that feels all right. But it does feel very straight. So similar to the fish animation. I'm going to use my Pen Tool to curve up. Whoa, that's hefty. Be aggressive. So I'm going to slow it down because it's slowing down with friction. So it's not gonna just stood up. And I think it's going to finish rotating after it finishes moving. Not quite that much, just a little bit. That's better. It's kind of a ball. Then we've got one Polaroid. Now that totally works. I am going to go in and animate the bubbles that because I might bubbles. Let's add an item. So all I'm gonna do is just randomly and it might their position. So position. Now is that too fast? Yes. The answer to the question is yesterday's too fast. Then what I can do now, I wouldn't bother looping. And actually, because we haven't got the length of a compound to have a full loop anyway, you'd only get a section of it. So it'd be easier in this case if we wanted duplicates to just literally duplicate it and offset them. So I'm not going to make a loop with this. A second bubble. Let's do that. I can hear a bit slower, actually. Big Boy, Little Big Boy. That's right. I know what I'm talking about. This is fun. That's quite nice not to be too excited about some bubbles, but then this one, it's probably actually going to start here. So what I'm gonna do, rather than just animate the position from here, I'm going to use the open square bracket to move the layover so it doesn't exist before them. Then plunk it down here and animate the position. Good. Maybe fast. Rather than moving the keyframes out of my timeline where I can't see what I'm doing. I'll just have it ended earlier. That does the same thing effectively. That feels like a better price. And I want these to do that twice because that's quite cool. I'm just going to make them happen at a different time. So that's kinda offset. And then about here, these ones, I want them to not be in the same spot because that's obvious. So I'm going to select position and I'm going to nudge it over. So if I select the word position, that means I'm getting all of those keyframes on that property. And then I can adjust them together. As long as my timeline marker is on one of those keyframes, I can move them together. Because otherwise, if you don't select it, you're only doing one at a time. Which means you'll get like a weird angle. And I don't want that. I want to, I want it floating up in the up in the gravity's right except you, if you're going to start lighter, need to be white in here. I'm probably want one at the very end as well. So it doesn't just like, Oh, we're doing the bubbles go. You begin, you belong over here. Actually, I'm going to do two because two, when it's pebbles, two is better than one. All right? So I'm just control Dang and playing it by ear. As you may have guessed, varies. No plan. I'm just having a Red Hawk macaroni saying what takes a muffle labor. That's cool. So then it ends with some bubbles in space. Fabulous. But what I am gonna do is I'm going to shove all the bubbles behind my fish because it is bugging me that they float over the top. Might have like the little ones float over our friend. Just not the big ones. I think that will be less disruptive. And then also it helps fake some depth. If you've got some going over the top and some not. I'm finding it quite hard to see what's my fishing, what's my bubble? So I'm also going to take this moment to grab my fish, change the layer color to raspberry. And then I can see what's a bubble? Lots of fish that having to dig through my lions codons. This bubble. It doesn't go so it's all right. I was gonna get it to weave betweens and fish, but it doesn't quite hit that one. So we're okay. Now, if we're happy with our little bubbles, back to my Polaroid one, how does that look? They're amazing. That's how it looks like. Some might even come back to our Polaroids. All. So nice. Little animation. 13. A spot of admin: Before we jump into the next Polaroid, we're gonna give it the old side because we should be doing that all of the time. So at the top you can see I've got a little asterix. That's how I know I haven't saved it. I've done something and I haven't said, so Control S, sublime, a little asterix is gone. So keep an eye on that because that's how, you know, you goofed up. You've done a bunch of stuff for many hours and forgot to say. Also before I jump into the next one, I'm going to do a little bit hold and management because my pantry is getting out of hand and I'm not here for it. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to make a new folder. And I'm going to do one called assets. I'm gonna do one cold. So assets will be my layers. This shows these Polaroid layers that can go in there, donate to deal with that again, attempt this DOM. In my comps. I'm also going to add a, another folder called pre-comps. Because remember, we've been making a bunch of pre-comps, which are comps, I don't know why. I don't know why After Effects does anything, to be honest with you, but they called breakups. So this is our main composition. That's where we are now. Pop that in comps. These other ones are gonna go in my parade comps. Now the reason I differentiate for me comps is what I'm going to render. My final video. Pre-comps is all the pieces are needful that potentially pre-comps could be in my assets. That's also fine. Whatever floats your boat. I've just gotten so used to this being in mockups. That's how I work. This is all my raw stuff. So Lyons, audio textures or that kind of stuff, I'll usually put into assets. That's just me. Everybody has to find their own flavor. So do as you see fit. But to do something tiles is fine for now. But let me tell you when you come back in six months and six other file. You want it to be NUS future, you will love it. So pre-comps at what I could do in here, I could add another folder and have one called Polaroid. One Polaroid to I'm not gonna put a code. There is a point where too many folders, as too many folders. I'm done. I don't need that much, girls. But yes, the folders is just for your own organization. You don't it's not going to break any links or anything like that. That's just so you can find where everything is. I would really recommend your main comp is somehow Stan DOT compared to everything else. 14. Let’s do it all again!: Now that we've done that, we're gonna go back to the very beginning process of break pumping our staff. But for Polaroid number D. So this time I'm gonna go left five and shift all the way down to Polaroid to so Control Shift C Polaroid and then hit Enter. And apparently white for ages, I hope your machines aren't as a foodie as mine. Now you'll notice whenever you break up, it's automatically going to pop it in your mind calms bit. That's fine. But do get in the habit of tidying up as you go. You don't have to look straight away, but make sure before you pack up for the day that everything is where it should be, if you can. I'm going to double-click on my Polaroid D, and I'm going to set my region of interest. So last time we did all of our pre-comps first and then went back into the past and rage it of interest. It doesn't matter which order you do them. As long as you do them. Like do you have a bit more buffer on that side, I reckon, because we've got fiddle leaf action potential. And then Composition Crop to region of interest. Then I'm going to pre-comp all the stuff that's gonna go inside the picture, forest, all the way up to leaf. Control, Shift C, hot peak. And then jumping region of interest probably isn't so important this time. But I'm going to follow the process. So I'm going to grab a region of interest tool and just cut off that bottom. There we go. I'm also going to do the half's because they are all going to work together. So I'm going to do house, same, same window apply whole. Let me obviously. I am also very aware that I know what these layers are. Huge. You haven't, you didn't make it. So do feel free to poke around and play with it. This is how I'm gonna pretty complex. It's not a rule. You can play with stuff. As I always say, feel free to break it and then fix it rather than worry too much about being precious. But I do know for a fact because I've done it before, hole through to house. He's what I want to pre-comp. So control shipped fee. And hot. It is a house on hot. What's the difference? Demographic. And we're going to do a regional interests. Again. Dvdt the beauty. Now, we need to move all the bits because everything has moved. Where should not pop that back? There ish following your van. And then Polaroids. Yeah. What am I actually do at this stage is my masking first. So in this case I'm going to mask my hot right now because, why not? So I've already pretty competent so I can do that. So selecting my hot peak, grab my pen tool. I'm going to look great. I'm going to fix it says no, quite ugly. I drew this. I'm allowed to say it's ugly. You can't because that'll be rude. Alrighty. Then. It's already nice and crisp. So that's lovely. But now we're actually going to animate it because it's kind of boring. If the fish are cool, the hot needs to be something interesting. So just like we did with the fish, the first thing we animated, the literal little fin flapping away. We're going to similarly animate these leaves. So rather than a frantic flap, we're gonna do a slow ambient sway, like it's kind of in a breeze. 15. Ambient loops: Let's jump into Polaroid. And then hot peak. And we're going to animate liens, these little leaves. We're gonna do the same process we did with the fish. So first thing and then set the anchor point. So why to get to the anchor point tool and shove it down near the rotation point. Then W for rotate can check that that looks about right. That looks absolutely stunning. So natural. This isn't about being authentic. Sweep that being representative. I'm gonna do the anchor points and all of these leaves conduct little bit of a stem to vaguely base it off the point. And then I'll do one at a time. I'll start with number one because it's called number one. That's nice. So I will go off or rotate to open up the property or I can just twirl down. Mr. Armando toiling is still always an option. So then rotate the property. I'm going to set it back a little bit. Hit the stopwatch. This time it's probably going to animate a lot slower than a little. Fishes thin might go to 1 s for the next move, this might be too slow, but we'll say, let's go to the next extreme. Keeping an eye on these rotations here, because what looks like not much might accidentally be a whole bunch. So just keep an eyeball on that. First one is negative five. Second one is almost positive. That's almost magical. That feels or Raj about approximately a pace. That's fine. Then I'm gonna go to 2 s. Copy paste. My first one. This time I'm going to easy A's first so I can get a better vibe of how it's moving. Oh, that's too much. That feels like it's drawing attention. I don't want these leaves to draw attention. I want them to just kinda be there. So I'm going to either I can make it move less or I can make it move slower. I can do that. I'm going to go with move less first. Better. But I still think it's too fast. So I'm going to make it all happen at the 3 s instead. That's better. Now, once again, I need to do the loop because it's on the loop twice because it's going so slow. This would be an instance where you might just copy paste. But for longevity and for simplicity, if I ever wanted to extend my comp or I want to offset all of these and I need to move the layers around. Looping makes it easier to do that without having to go back. So I am going to loop the animation. So that means holding Alt and clicking on the stopwatch and doing loop out. And then Enter on the numpad to close. Now that should go all the way to the end and then hopefully loopback perfectly. That's alright. So we'll do that on all the leaves. Will set the rotation. But they are gonna be different. I don't want it to be exactly the same. So I could animate them exactly the same and then offset the keyframes kind of like we did when we duplicated the fish. Or I can animate them to be slightly different in the first place. So I don't have to offset quite so much. I don't know if that made any sense, but let's see, happens. This time I'm going to rotate in reverse. I go in together and say that's a little bit different. Well, that's not going to work because it's not going to loop because it needs to be divided evenly into 6 s. So I need to make this go. Three frames. Three secretary, that I'm just a bit of a mini pants and I forgot that. Ef nine out. Good. It is a little bit too in sync. So even though they're going in different direction, it's happening over the exact same manner, friends. That's silly. I could make them happen at different rights, but then our risk stuffing up my loop and we can probably already gather how much I don't want to mess with math right now. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to select my keyframes, ones that Amanda, just now. I'm gonna grab them and shove them to the left. That's outside of my timeline As are entirely unmanned. Because what that means is I'm effectively offsetting the keyframes. If I hit U here, you can see. So this is one set of keyframes, starts and ends, and then the other starts somewhere in here, and then the V. So they're not happening at exactly the same time. Feels a lot more organic. Without having to do any moments. That's just grabbing your keyframes and moving them over. So I'm going to do that exact process all over again on these ones. So we don't go read it. Cool. That looks kinda cool. I've got a little liberty do please by Control a and hit U. That'll tab all of my keyframes away. I can see much better what is going on. Quite happy with that, it's going to look weird because we've got we can see the ends basically. But if I go to hit tab, tab back to Polaroid and white for an autosave. Lovely. It looks pretty great. Like not to be smug about it or anything. I'm actually just a bit surprised, even though I've done it like 20 times, I'm still a bit placed. So if you have it cropped off the edges, it actually looks quite convincing if we see the bots, if I look down. But if you trust the process and make sure you double-check as you go. It looks kinda came. Next thing we're gonna do is we're going to jump in to the heart. There's a little pie in the window that we're going to animate. Popping up. 16. Pie time: Now that we've got some ambiance happening, we'll do the actual animation part. So jump into the hut. And then in here, if we zoom in a bit closer, you can see these layers. So I'm going to turn off my house for a second. So you can see, turn off the window. That was a little cheeky pi, j pi and a little bit of steam. Lovely. So what we're gonna do is we're going to animate the window, opening up. The pie, popping out into the window. Sill has windier. The pie is going to pop up. Okay. So for now, if I just turned my window off, sorry, I didn't mention these little eyeballs. We can turn lights off so we can see what's going on. I'm going to turn my window off for a hot minute while I'm animating the pie. So first thing is P for position to animate is the pi going from nowhere up to the shelf. Right? Now, if I would like to, I could animate a little bit of scale like it's being pushed out as well. I would like to I would say, let's do that. We want to open up the scale property while the position property is open. So if I hold shift while I hit S, that will open the scale while keeping possession of him. I'm at the scale. Getting bigger whale, little bit kit. And then again, been amazing. And overlap slightly. It feels to match that there's a little bit too cartoony. So I'm going to type the values in. Instead. There it is, that's better, a better position. And then a bit of scale. I'm going to animate to the steam. It's going to look real dumb for a hot minute, but trust the process. So I'm going to animate the position for the first time and I adjust the opacity. So P for position. Once it's on the shelf, that's what I wanted to start. I'm going to do this. And I made it up. So in this case, because I know where I wanted to end rather than animate and then guess, I'm working backwards. So I set my keyframes, That's where I want it to end. And then I worked backwards to animate it down. In these guys because I'm not doing any rotation on them. I'm not worried about where the anchor point is. Usually I'll do that first, but in this case, it absolutely doesn't matter. So I'm not going to bother I'm going to easy way and then offset so they don't happen at the same time because it looks super weird when that happens. Well, that's too fast. That's nuts. Cool. Now, it shouldn't be in front of the pie. That silly. So let's pop them behind, shall we? Yeah, that's better. And a little bit of opacity too, because I look a little bit too of the house capacity and again, working backwards. So I know I want it to end at 46. So I will set that first and then go back to zero. Again, easing. Have it happened the hall I actually and now I'm happy with that. So rather than do it twice, copy the opacity property and paste it, paste it on the opacity property for the other steam. That's lovely. So we've got our little pie. But if I turn my window back on, can't see it. That's silly. So I need the window to animate as well. So I need the window. I'm going to lock this house, so don't keep nudging it. The window to get up. That's what I do next. Now, this is cleverly built so that the house is on the houses on top of everything. So the house is hiding the window frame. So I don't need to mask or do anything tricky with that. I just need to animate the position. So position and up. I'm going to leave a little bit because, you know, it's an old window to be the easing on both ends on this one. Happy with that, but that means now the pie is happening too soon. So I'm gonna grab all these layers and shove them over. Now ideally, we would have done the window first, but I think it's important to show that it really doesn't matter. Really doesn't. You can do things in any order you like, and you can come back and change him and shove them and move them around to your heart's content, my friends to your heart's content. Needs to be like old ladies law. To slow down. I think I think it's a bit too peppy. It's a bit too much. Walk the fish, the fish or to exalted. Not the fishery appropriately excited, but this is a different thought. I wanted to animate at a different pace. That's better. Now I'm gonna go back to my main scene and I'm just going to take a hot second to compare. That feels fun. Like they're slightly different pace. That's nice. I'm happy with that. Great. Always good to double-check the context of your whole thing. Don't get too bogged down in the olive stain. Looks amazing now because it doesn't make sense with the rest of your scene. So always go back. But speaking of steam, it does look a bit gentle word used. So what are we going to do is make it a bit of jazzy by adding some effects to eat. So the steam, we're gonna get it to do a little bit of weirdly wobbling, a little Weebly wobbly stuff. 17. Wibbly wobbly steam time: So I'm gonna go, I'm gonna select my same layer. I'm gonna go over to my Effects and Presets window. Now, if you don't have that, that's fine. Go to Window and then find it in your list. So being in the top, is there an alphabetical order, effects, effects and presets? If you've got to take, it means it's open somewhere there. Just close it and open again, That's fine. Then I'm going to search for an effect called Wave Warp. This guy with my layer selected, if I double-click, it's going to plunk it on. And already, you might have noticed she will wobble to apply it back. Look at a Tolkein, but doing some stuff. So what we can do is mess around with these settings. I'm finding it difficult to see him and we will wobble with the bounding box on. So if I go Control Shift H or Control Shift H, that will turn off my bounding boxes. So I can just see what I'm doing. Now on the Wave Warp, what we've got, we've got height and we've got width and direction, and speed for a bunch of settings actually. But the main tool we want to play with right now, height and width. If I reduce the, if I reduce the width, I shouldn't be able to. There we go, you can start to see it kinda distorting itself. And if I play, you guys can see what's happening. Now because these are really small layer. Because remember, it's just these tiny pixels inside a huge comp. And we don't need a big number to make it do something cool. So we just need a little bit. So the wave height and the wave width, that depends on which direction it's going as to what's, what. If you do it? If you imagine a wavy line, you've got the height of the waves and then you've got the width between age wave. That's basically what it's referring to. If I want to make some variation to it, I can adjust the direction. So if I change it to zero, you can see it's like perfectly through the middle of it. And you get a more obvious ripple. I want to go a little bit distorted though, because it's fun. Beautiful. That's all it needed. So then I'm going to grab that effect and I'm going to copy it. I'm going to paste it a mother one. You get some settings that work. Why reinvent the wheel? But I want it to be slightly different. So I'm going to set the angle to be kinda the opposite, but opposing. That looks weird. Maybe what I'll do is I'll change the size. They're not completely in sync. Yeah, that feels better. I think that fading is happening a bit. It feels weird. The more effect you add them all up, you probably want to change everything. That's fine. We go, That's looking cool. If I go back to my hut. See it in the full context. Grandma's back down little pine. 18. Reflections: The last little bit we're gonna do is we're going to really ground the same because at the moment that's a, that's a little pond there, but there's no reflections. There's no The wasn't doing anything. It feels kinda weird. So what we're gonna do is we're going to basically use what we've already done, the Wave Warp to create a reflection of the hat. To create a reflection of the hot, we need a duplicate hot. Just like we did with the fish. I'm going to Control D to duplicate as I've got to now. And then a bit of a giveaway, but I've got this water mat here. If I turn that off, you say nothing changes. Because what I've done is I created a layer that is the same as this water. And that is so I can, it's kind of like a mosque, but it's a bit different. So on the mat, what we're going to use it for. So on this heart that we just created, I'm going to flip the scale. I could do this with the proper scale properties, but I'm not going to worry about it because it's gonna be able to store it anyway. I just wanted to be squishy and turn a watermark off so I can see what I'm doing probably. I'm just going to line it up with this one. We want it to be squishy. We wanted to be squeezed so that it looks like it's a reflection. It's not just like the exact copy because that's not how perspective works. We want to squish it a bit, right? You can see it's got the whole animation happening in it. Now, if I have a little look, see in here, you've got blending modes you can play around with. I'm actually not going to write now. I'm going to leave it exactly as it is because it feels the most right to me. I think normal is gonna do me just fine. I'm just going to drop the opacity. So T for opacity and toil it down, That feels better to me. I think there's a few in here that could work. And this is exactly when they are fun to use. And when you're making reflections and different effects and things. Well, having it at the moment. So I'm just going to keep it on normal and drop the opacity. Then what I wanna do before we get too lost isn't buying what the heck a track matte Tibet. Now this is specifically for 2023 and beyond. If you've got an earlier version of After Effects, I'll put a little bonus video in on what you need to do. But what we're going to ask After Effects to do is this lay here is effectively going to be treated as my mask. So just like we drew mask on other things earlier that are attached to the layer, we can use a separate layer to be a mask. Why would we want that? Because in this case, we've distorted it and we played with the scale and we're gonna do some other things to it that we don't want to react to the mask. We want it to be a completely independent thing. So what we're gonna do is we're going to say on this hot, you're gonna go over to the Track Matte menu. And we're going to say that the water matte layer is the mat. Now it fits perfectly inside the mat. So wherever this is, it's going to only show where the water is. Similarly, if I grab the mat and move it, you can see it breaks the reflection. So on the layer that you want to be mattered or masked, go to the track matte option and select the layer that is the, that, that is how you do that. Then we want it to be liquidity. So we're going to do what we did with the stain. We're going to add Wave Warp. This time. We're going to play with the direction a lot at the beginning, because that's the correct way to do it. In any pants. Have a little play. But we want this to be ambient action at the moment. It's a little bit chaotic, so I'm going to just reduce the speed. The speed here by default is one which doesn't sound very fast, um, but I'm going to make it a decimal. So I'll go like 0.4. I feel better. Now, we can play around with the height and width a lot more if we wanted to, but I'm actually quite happy with how that landed. I think that's all right. But the last thing I want is I'm going to fight it off because reflections aren't normally perfectly clear. Otherwise we'd see everything all the time. So what I'm gonna do is even though we're going to track matte, I can add a mask as well. I'm going to use my pen tool. And with my hut selected, stops paying. I'm going to click just loosey-goosey around and cut through the top. Right. That looks stupid. But bear with me. Because what I can do is under my masks, I've got feather. If I pump that value up, by, then you get a more authentic kind of reflection. I don't even make that a bit smaller. The opacity a leader does not. Go back to my main Polaroid. All That's lovely. Does runoff. Cute. Then all that's left is animating ease, animating the Polaroid coming in and doing a couple of little funnel final touches. 19. Old Mattes: Little bonus note here for anybody working in After Effects 2020 or earlier, before they changed their Track Matte system. This is how you will do the track mattes. What's really important in the older versions of after effects is that your mat is directly above the layer that you want to reveal. So in this case, you've got my heart. Not just isolate that here. At my water layer, that is going to be my Mash goes above it. So it's really important, that's 6.7. If it's underneath, it won't work. It has to be exactly above it. Sera, what you do on the hot, you go over to your track matte column. You say, I want the one above, to me, my Alpha Matte Alpha inverted or being it reveals everything except where the water is sort of just revealing outside. Alpha Matte reveals where the water is, should blend. Then it's working exactly the same as the 2023 version. So it's just the, the stack order that's different really. And that you can only alpha matte to one thing at a time. So if I needed to reveal a few things, I'd need multiple instances of this mat. 20. Final touches: I'm going to grab Polaroid to, I'm going to animate the position and rotation of the Polaroid. I'm going to first though, adjust the anchor point. So same as last time. Position. Tasting. Just going to start down here. Now, I couldn't be doing this in reverse, but I'm just really not that precious. So I don't mind having to rely on it because it's one big rectangle in a frame. And again, get a bit of a curve happening. So it's a bit more organic. And never at the same time because if we had to definitely be the one on top, like happens last, which has never been what I've done. Because we've got Polaroid won and Polaroid to, and I've gotten really stuck up on me which one goes first? So, use your best judgment. What you want to have this cute. One thing I am noticing is this action happens before the Polaroid is in frame. So I'm actually going to take a hot second, jump on in and my goal of that action happen a moment later. So that means all these are going to move on with all the windows not going to open straightaway. So now if I go back to my Polaroids, Yeah, that's better. So it gives the Polaroids a second to come all the way in. So it's really important that you like I keep saying, check as you go. Because as soon as you make a change to one company will adjust everything that a dean. That looks mighty spoofing, I reckon. I am noticing that I've fallen over to the right. So I'm going to pop them back in a bit because that's annoying. And assign with me you show. Now I want to add a little bit more definition between these two. So this is when I'm going to add a little bit extra flavor to our lions now. So now I'm going to add some layer styles so I can add a drop shadow on my layer. If I right-click in the timeline, all the window, it doesn't matter which one. Lifestyles. Drop shadow. Then if I twirl down, you can already say it, but it's hideous. So I'm going to make it not ugly. The default one is just nasty. So I'm going to pump up the signs so I can see it all the way around. Something that I really recommend you do never use a black shadow. It gets of muddy sometime, sometimes it works great. But I find that hit and miss. So I like to get a color from the scene already, usually the background. Then it's already set to multiply. That already feels a bit better. I might drop drop it down a bit. I don't mind it being quite half. That's right. I can play with the distance to it, nudges out to one side more if I want to make good. And then again, as always, when I've got one thing looking fabulous, don't do it to us. Copy, paste except on this Polaroid. Going to twirl down the properties. And I'm going to change the angle so that it's the shadows coming out the other side. So as if the light source is kind of in the middle. Lovely. We could also do that with the images themselves. Because Polaroids traditionally have a little bit of a ridge if we wanted to. But I actually quite like that crisp edge. So I'm going to leave it just as 0s. That's it. That's our whole scene. So we're gonna say that done. We got to render. 21. Rendering: So we're gonna do one big render in Media Encoder. So my personal preference as well wines. I'm going to go to Composition, add to Media Encoder, Queue or Control Alt M. I love my keyboard shortcut. Then that's going to open up a new program so that I can render it out while still working on other stuff. It also has other codecs that I could use. It's just got a few different options. You could render it strikethrough After Effects. But by default it doesn't usually come with the codecs I need. Sarah, I prefer Media Encoder, but everyone has their peripheral personal preference. So what I wanna do now is set my format. Easiest thing to do is click the little blue text and white flipping ages for this thing to open. And we can change the settings, are very least check them. By default, you may have already nailed it because it's what you've been rendering it anyway. Scrub through, we can see H.264 is the format that we want because it's a nice small MP4. So we've got all these options, but H.264 is flip and perfect for what we want. Match Source, pretty much always that is set to what our composition settings are, which means our 1920 by 108025 frames per second. And ask where pixels we want it to match what we said at the beginning. The other thing we'll do is we'll set out Polaroid location and the name. So we're gonna go workshop and there is fine. Actually know what am I doing? Polaroid? I'm just go animated. I'll hit Save. Then that's all we needed. That is absolutely, absolutely it. I do like to do a quick double-check of our Match Source settings that we have in Dade go 1920 by 1080, because sometimes you've scrolled where you didn't mean to and you've changed it without meaning to it. So really good to just double-check the original settings are correct and you can do that just by scrolling down here. So that's it. I'm happy. Okay. Then he'd play. Watch it. No, it's fine. And we go all down and click on the little link. It'll take you to it. And here we did it. And apply that on loop because it's beautiful. So this was a very specific example, but hopefully it gives you a bit of an overview of how mats and masks can work in a couple of other little things along the way. And there's lots of other little tools that we can keep exploring, but I'd love to see what you guys are working on. 22. Wrapping up: That's it. We've made it to the end gang. So now you've got your little animated sequence. You can pop it on your socials. You can share it with your mom to do is you plates. But through these very specific process of making these two Polaroids with little fish in a hut. Hopefully you can see how these tools can be used on a broader scope. So pre-comps, track maps, masks, endless possibilities. I'd love to see what you guys make in the future using these tools. I'd love to say the projects that you've made following these steps, feel free to share it in the little projects thinking down the bottom or the discussions. Tag me on Instagram, whatever, just show me what you're making. Um, just to be curious what everybody is up to. Thank you so much for taking the time to get up all the way up to this video. You're awesome. And I'll see you next time.