Smooth Moves: Better Motion with Animation Curves in the Graph Editor

1. Welcome: When you first get started with motion design, it's exciting just to make something move. But as you progress, you start to notice the work of other motion designers. Their animations are buttery smooth, their motion is still believable, and so much life, and personality is infused. In comparison, your work just looks dull or like something is off, even if you can't put your finger on exactly what. Maybe you wanted to get into a creative field like motion design because you're not a big fan of math and physics. When you saw a math tool, aka, the graph editor in your design software, you probably decided to write it off and avoid it. But there's a reason the graph editor exists. It's key to creating realistic, interesting, and professional-looking animations. It's key to taking your animations to the next level. Welcome to Smooth Moves, better motion with animation curves in the graph editor. I'm Megan Friesth and I'm an explanimator, which is just to say that I write, illustrate, and animate educational animations mostly on health and environment-related topics. I had the exact experience I described a second ago. I studied physiology in college, then went on to get a master's in creative technology and design. I didn't specifically go to school for motion design, so most of my animation skills are self-taught. I spent a while avoiding the graph editor because I didn't think that I understood it. But as it turns out, the math and physics classes that I was required to take for my degree were preparing me to create realistic motion in my animations. I just didn't know it at the time. Even if you've never taken a physics class, you intuitively know a lot about physics, likely all that you need for animation just by living in this world. You just need to learn how to apply that to your animations, which is what this class is for. Achieving realistic motion is the focus of this class. But once you understand how to control the motion of your animations, you can push the boundaries for dramatic or cartoony effect that's playful and full of personality. This class is for you if you're comfortable with the basics of setting key to create animations in Adobe After Effects. While many of the concepts discussed in this class apply to animation in general, I'll be using After Effects to demonstrate them and to complete the class project. If you're brand new to animation in After Effects, check out a few of my beginner classes first. Whether you chronically avoid the graph editor or use it occasionally, you'll come away from the class with a clear understanding of this powerful tool. You'll gain new ways of analyzing motion that you can apply to every animation you create from here on out. We'll talk through definitions to give you the vocab to communicate with other motion designers and we'll put these concepts into practice with a fun exercise and the class project. If you're ready to move your animations to the next level, then let's get started. 2. What to Expect + Class Project: In this class, you'll learn about concepts behind motion and apply what you learn to a hands-on project. I'll go over animation terms and break down how basic math and physics can be applied to make your animations look more realistic. Don't worry about memorizing definitions for the terms we'll cover. What's important here is understanding how you can apply these concepts to your work. That said, knowing these terms can be helpful when communicating with other motion designers. I've provided you with a downloadable PDF guide with important info from the lessons. It's basically like I took notes for you during class. There's even a little bit of extra info in there that isn't really covered in the video lessons. Make sure that you download that guide and have it handy. Feel free to add your own notes to it. Animating a bouncing ball is a classic first animation assignment. But by creating this little scene of falling elements, you'll have a more interesting portfolio or social media piece. You can even use this technique as a way to animate items in and an explainer video. If animating bouncing objects doesn't sound super exciting, just know that this is great practice for concepts that come up over and over again for many different animations, like even characters and walk cycles. Throughout the hands-on part of this class, you can follow along with me to replicate my animation. It's totally fine to copy my animation exactly for learning purposes. Just please don't post this or present as your own original work outside of Skillshare. If you're ever applying for a motion design job, it's always super important to be very honest about what exactly you've created. You can always just mention in the class alongside the posts of your class project, or if you want to have your own original animation, you can illustrate your own collection of items and use the same techniques that I'll go over in class. You can pick a theme like your favorite breakfast or things to pack when camping if you need some constraints to design around. It's helpful to have objects with different weights and materials, so you can practice considering how that will affect their motion. For extra practice, you could go through the class the first time, following along with me and replicating my animation. Then you could go back and try to apply these concepts to your own illustration. No matter how you decide to go about it, hands-on practice is imperative to getting the most out of the class. If you have any questions along the way, feel free to post them in the discussions tab below this video and I'll do my best to get back to you ASAP. Let's go over the files that are included with the class. First, there's the PDF of notes. Next is an After Effects project file with three different components. In the demo folder, there are some really simple animations that are used during the lessons to explain the concepts that these columns are labeled with. I've provided you with these in cases it's helpful to play around with them to get a feel for how things work. There's also this Graph Editor Exercise, which we'll use in a later video. I've created these different comps as exercises for you to practice the graph editor and that's all explained in that upcoming video. For the class project, I've provided you with my final animation in case it helps you to pick things apart. This still-life comp is the final animation. Within the elements folder, there are different pre-comps used within the final animation. There's also a fresh version that doesn't have any animation yet that you can use as a starting point. I created this illustration in Adobe Illustrator and moved it into After Effects with one of my all-time favorite plugins, Overlord. This way, there's nothing linked into this project file because these are all shape layers. If you want to learn more about Overlord, I cover in my class, Top 5 plugins for efficiency. When I play the final animation in different videos throughout the class, you'll notice that I've added textures. There are a few ways to add textures, but for this project, I mostly use Jake Bartlett's method which he covers in his class, Texturing in Adobe After Effects. I removed the textures for you and me while recording the class so that it renders faster. Make sure that you download those files and let's get started. 3. Timing: [MUSIC] Timing refers to the time between keyframes. Visually, this looks like the distance between keyframes on the timeline. As you're probably well aware, keyframes that are closer together, will produce faster animation or quicker timing than keyframes that are further apart. One thing you might not have noticed is that keyframes have a slightly lighter shade of gray when there's another keyframe on the other side of it. Your first keyframe will be darker gray on the left half, and your last keyframe will be darker gray on the right half. The dark gray bookends the keyframes for that property. This can be helpful if you're getting an animation you didn't expect. It can help you notice if there's been a keyframe, that's got pushed off the timeline and is no longer visible, but it still exists, so it's causing something to move. 4. Spacing: If timing is the distance between keyframes, spacing is what happens in the space between those keyframes. Any video is just a series of images that are switched before eyes so quickly that we see a moving picture. In animation, every frame has to be created, either by the animator drawing them or by the animator setting up different frames and the computer fills in the rest. In a program like After Effects, you set keyframes which tells the computer what values you want something to have at certain times. Then the computer calculates all the values for every frame in-between the keyframes you've set. This is called interpolation, the process of filling in unknown frames between known keyframes. Another name for interpolation is tweening. What's the difference between spacing and interpolation? Spacing applies to all different kinds of animation, whether that's hand-drawn, cell animation, or if it's animation using software like After Effects that does interpolation for you. Interpolation requires software to fill in the values for frames between set values or keyframes. Let's look at how this can be useful. There's usually multiple ways to get from point A to point B. In other words, there's multiple ways to interpolate between keyframes. We'll look at the two ways to control how After Effects interpolates between keyframes in the next few videos. 5. Spatial Interpolation: The first way that you can control the interpolation between keyframes is in space, so spatial interpolation. This mostly just applies to the position property. In your composition, if you have a layer with the position property animated, you should see a motion path that looks like this. If you don't see that, then just make sure that this button right here is toggled on so that it's blue, or you can use the keyboard shortcut, which is Command or Control, Shift, and H, and that'll hide or show the motion path. Once you have the motion path, you can click on the endpoints which are the keyframes, and you might get handles, or if you don't, if you go up to the Pen tool, click ad hold, and then go to the convert vertex tool. Then you can click to Add handles to your motion path. I'm going to go back to the regular selection tool, and now I can just adjust these handles to change the motion path of my animation. This is changing the spatial interpolation, so now if I play this back, it's going to move in this wave. A couple of quick tips for you when working with spatial interpolation and motion paths. What if I want this square to align with the path as it's moving instead of just staying in that same position? I want it to rotate a little bit as it moves along this path. There's an easy way to do that instead of animating the rotation. You can right-click on the layer, go to Transform, and then all the way down to Auto-orient, and then you just want to make sure that Orient Along Path is selected and hit "OK" and now the square is going to automatically rotate as it moves along the path. You can still go into the rotation. Let's say I wanted maybe the point of it to go first or something like that, you can always adjust the rotation still, you still have full control over this, but it automatically will align to your motion path. If you want to move your entire motion path, an easy way to do that is just to select the property so that it selects all of the keyframes and then you can just move it in the composition to wherever you want it to be. Now, if you wanted to do this with the values here by sliding these, you'd have to be over one of the keyframes, and then you can do the same thing. Just make sure that all of your keyframes are selected. You had a motion path that looks something like this, and you want it to curve into this position and then be straight from here. Right now we have these two handles that are locked together, so if I move one, it moves the other one to make a continuous flowing line. But what if I want to break these handles? What I can do is just hold down option and then take the handle that you want to move and then it will break those two handles, so now you can get a more pointy corner here. Now that we've broken these handles, you don't actually have to hold down option when you want to go back and edit this. If you wanted to connect these again, you can hold down option again and it will snap them back together so that they're always going to be a straight line, they're connected again. If you ever want to get rid of the handles entirely, go up to the Pen tool and use the convert vertex tool to just get rid of those handles or get them back again. If you have a really specific shape that you want to be a motion path for another layer, then what you can do is toggle down the shape and go into the Path, and then you want to select Path next to the stopwatch and just copy that, so command C. Then I'm just going to go and delete, so unclick the stopwatch on the fishing keyframes that I had, and let's just start at the beginning of the timeline. Then I'm just going to hit "Paste" with position selected, and it's going to paste that same shape as my zigzag. Sometimes it doesn't paste it in exactly the same place, so you can just with all of your keyframes selected move the entire motion path into place. Now my square is going to move in the shape of that zigzag. But what if I wanted it to go in the other direction? Instead of going right to left, I want to go left to right. I can select all of these keyframes by just selecting Position over here, right-click, go to Keyframe Assistant, and then time-reverse keyframes. The reason that it chose to go from right to left is probably because of how I made that shape, but it's easy to switch by just doing the time-reverse keyframes and now it'll go left to right. 6. Temporal Interpolation: Temporal interpolation is the interpolation of values in time. When you set keyframes in After Effects by default they're linear. Linear keyframes are diamond-shaped. Animation software often has a way to visualize the spacing of your animation. In After Effects, these little dots on the motion path of the layer show you the temporal interpolation. Remember if you don't see the motion path for your layer, makes sure that this button is toggled on or blue. Each dot shows you where this shape will be at each frame between these two keyframes. You can remember the term spacing by thinking of these dots showing you the space your layer moves between each frame. Dots that are closer together indicates slower motion and dots that are further apart indicate faster motion. You can see that for these linear keyframes, the shape moves the same amount between each frame. This usually looks abrupt and mechanical looking. Linear Keyframes are the default, but most of the time you don't want to leave your keyframes like this. Another common temporal interpolation is called Easy Ease. To change keyframes to Easy Ease, you first need to select them, then right-click, go to Keyframe Assistant, and then Easy Ease. Or the keyboard shortcut is F9, and on a Mac, remember you have to press the Fn key as well. Now, notice how these keyframes have turned into an hourglass shape. For the Easy Ease shape, you can see that there's less space or less change in value at the beginning and end of this animation, and in the middle, the little dots are more spaced out. What that's telling us is that the circle is going to be moving slowly at first, it's going to speed up, and then it's going to slow down before coming to a stop. Let's play those back to compare. If I select both layers, we can compare what this visual of the little dots looks like on the motion path for the Linear Keyframes versus the Easy Ease. If you ever need to convert keyframes back to linear keyframes, you can just hold "Command" and then click on them. Easy Ease is generally more pleasing to the eye than linear movement, because it's more realistic to how things move in real life. If you've been applying Easy Ease to all of your keyframes, that's a good first step. But later in class, you'll learn how you can adjust the temporal interpolation in the graph editor to make your animations even better. Oftentimes, animators will talk about easing keyframes instead of saying adjusting the temporal interpolation, because that's a mouthful, but this is what they mean. The motion path is great for seeing the spacing of the position property, but there isn't an automatic visual way to see the spacing of a lot of other properties like scale or rotation in the composition viewer. Here's the simple animation that I have on this layer. I don't find the need for this a lot, but there is a trick you can use if you want to see the temporal interpolation for all the properties of your animation mapped out. In animation software designed for creating frame-by-frame animations, there's usually a way to see the frames on either side of your current frame. This is called an onion skin. For this little trick we're essentially creating our own onion skin. To do this, we're going to go to Layer, New, Adjustment Layer, and then make sure that your adjustment layer is on top of any of the layers that you want to see this onion skin for. Then you want to go over to your effects and presets panel and look for CC Wide Time, and then just apply that to your adjustment layer. Now if I scrub through the timeline, you can see that these semi-transparent versions of this shape are the frames before and after the current frame. If I go over to the effect controls panel, I can increase the number of steps, so the number of frames that we're seeing forward and the number of frames that we're seeing backward. This starts to get a little bit hard to see what's going on. You can adjust this to make it most helpful for you. A time when I found this DIY onion skin really helpful is when something is jolting or moving in a way that doesn't look very smooth, I can apply this onion skin and see where there's a big gap in the motion, like where there's a big jump, and then I know that's the area that I need to work on. When you're done seeing this onion skin you can either delete or just turn off this adjustment layer. Seeing an onion skin is super helpful when doing frame-by-frame animation, and After Effects is not the best program for that. Like I said, onion skins aren't super necessary when working in After Effects, but if you ever find a time that you'd like to see one, now you know how to get it. 7. Graph Editor Basics: Let's look at how you can precisely customize the spacing of your animations in the graph editor. This is how you can really take your animations to the next level. When you're working in the graph editor, you're usually adjusting the temporal interpolation of your animation. To get to the graph editor, first select at least one key-frame of whatever property you want to see. Or you can just select the property over here. Then click this graph icon. There are two different graphs you can see in the graph editor. If you have auto-select graph type checked here, After Effects will guess which graph you'll find most helpful for that property. But you can always change the graph type here. First, let's look at the value graph. The line shows the value of the property, so in this case, rotation over time. We've got time in seconds or frames on the x-axis and rotation in degrees on the y-axis. These squares are the key-frames. These are linear key-frames, so the graph is a straight diagonal line, which shows that the rotation is changing the same amount each frame. It's moving at a steady speed, never slowing down or speeding up. If I switch over to the speed graph, it tells us exactly that the speed is constant the whole time. The speed graph maps out speed on the y-axis over time on the x-axis. If you don't know whether you're looking at the speed or value graph, like maybe you're watching a tutorial and you can't look in the menu, look at the units on the y-axis. If it's a value like pixels degrees or percent, something over seconds, then it's the speed graph. Or if it's just a value, then it's the value graph. Let's go back to the value graph. If you ever need to adjust the view of your graph, you can use this same mountain slider as you would to zoom in and out of the timeline or the same keyboard, shortcuts work. So plus to zoom in and minus to zoom out. This magnifying glass icon will automatically fit your graphs to the height of your graph editor area. Keep in mind that different levels of zoom can make your graph look quite a bit different. This button will fit your graphs to the whole area so widthwise too. I'm on the value graph and there are currently no handles to adjust this graph. But if I click and drag to select this graph, including the key-frames, I can apply Easy Ease. There's actually three ways that you can do that from the graph editor. Just like in the timeline, you can right click, go to key-frame assistant and then Easy Ease, or you can use the keyboard shortcut F9, or you can use this button to apply Easy Ease. Now the graph has a curve to it and there are handles which are called Bezier handles or influence handles. You can use them to adjust the curve of the graph to change the spacing of an animation. But before you can really adjust the graph to get a custom animation, you'll need to understand how to read these graphs to understand what they're telling you about the spacing of an animation. Remember this is the value graph. It's telling us that the rotation starts out at this many degrees and later in time it ends at this many degrees. The slope or steepness of the graph tells us about the speed. The flatter the line, the slower and the steeper the line, the faster the motion. I know we're getting into some math concepts here, but if you pause to think about this, it makes total sense. This graph starts out not very steep, so our shape is starting off slow. Then the slope increases in the middle here, so the shape is moving quickly. Then the slope starts to level off towards the end, which means that this shape is slowing down. Now let's look at the same thing but in the speed graph. Here we can get the same info about the spacing of our animation, but it's just presented in a different way. Remember the y axis is speed, so when the speed is slow, the speed graph is going to be closer to zero on the y-axis. Then in the middle of these key-frames, the speed is fastest, so the speed is furthest from zero on the y-axis. Then the shape slows down before coming to a stop, so the speed graph dips back down, eventually reaching zero. If you've ever had to take a calculus class, you may have recognized that the speed graph is a derivative of the value graph, and if you've never taken calculus or that made absolutely no sense to you, then let me explain. This just means that if you graph the slope of the value graph, like you go frame-by-frame and look at how steep the slope is at each point, and then you plot that on a new graph, the result is the speed graph. If that made absolutely no sense to you, don't worry about it. We'll keep practicing reading graphs so you don't need to understand what I just said about derivatives in order to understand and use the graph editor. I just know that when I realized that some of the stuff that I was learning in calculus that seemed totally irrelevant to my life at the time is actually useful in animation I was pretty excited. If that's you too, there you go. I know that I've mentioned that linear motion is not very realistic, at least in many cases, and the reason for that is because there's no acceleration or deceleration. If you think of a car, acceleration is when you're speeding up, like after being stopped. Or deceleration is just the opposite. Slowing down like before coming to a stop. Sometimes people mistakenly think that acceleration means really stepping on the gas or going really fast. But actually acceleration is the rate of change in velocity, and deceleration is just being specific that that rate of change in velocity is decreasing. Acceleration occurs anytime you're changing speeds. In other words, anytime the speed graph is not a straight flat line. If you want to know how fast the layer is accelerating or decelerating, look at the slope of the speed graph. I can increase the acceleration by pulling this handle to make the slope of the speed graph really steep here. Now you can see that the circle is really accelerating from its starting point. If you think back to calculus again, the derivative of the speed graph is acceleration. Meaning that if you went frame-by-frame and plotted the slope of the speed graph at every point, you would get a graph of the acceleration of a layer. But if that made no sense to you, again, don't worry about it. After Effects doesn't have an acceleration graph. What you need to know is that if you want to know where something is really speeding up or slowing down, look for when the slope of the Speed Graph is really steep, either going up or going down. If you use the math terms that I've been using here when talking with other animators, you will be accurate and you may sound smart. But more commonly you'll hear animators talk about easing into or out of a key-frame or making an animation more punchy. If you ever want to see both the value and speed graph at the same time, click the second icon and select reference graph. Whichever graph you were on will still be editable, whether that's the sweet graph or the value graph, and the other graph will be shown as reference. This one won't be editable, but it will react to any changes you make to the other graph. One graph might seem easier to you than the other, but it's important to understand and be able to use both. Because there are certain cases when one might be better than the other for adjusting the spacing of a certain property. So I'd encourage you to just play around in the graph editor a little bit with a really simple animation like this, and just start to get a feel for how things work. To summarize, when looking at the value graph, look at the slope of the graph to see how fast or slow something is moving. Flat equals slow and steep equals fast. When looking at the Speed Graph, the further the line is from zero, the faster. Sometimes the speed graph is negative, like if your layer is traveling from right to left or bottom to top, or if it's rotating in a negative direction or scaling down, whether the line is above or below zero, the closer the line is to zero, the slower the speed and the further, the faster. If you want to know about the acceleration of a layer, look at how steep the Speed Graph is. The steeper, the greater the acceleration or deceleration. 8. Working with the Position Property: [MUSIC] The position property is a bit unique in how it works within the graph editor because it's made up of two values; an x and a y-value. The x-value is represented by this red line and the y-value is this green line. If you forget, just hover over a line and a label will appear. The shape is moving linearly from left to right as we can see what this x graph. The y position isn't changing, so that graph is flat. Now let's look at the speed graph. This just shows the overall speed, it doesn't separate out x and y. Since these are linear keyframes, the graph is flat at this speed. Let's go back to the value graph again, and adjust the spacing of this animation. First, how easy is, but notice there are still no handles here. In order to adjust the spacing of the position property, we need to separate the x and y values. There are two ways to separate dimensions. Right-click on the position and choose separate dimensions. You don't have to be in the graph editor to do this, or use the button in the graph editor. I can actually delete the y position keyframe since they're not changing. Now there are handles, and sometimes doing this step messes up the spacing you had on your animation. Let's try adjusting the x position. Maybe something like this. One thing to be careful about here is that you can actually adjust the motion path or the spatial interpolation of the layer by adjusting the value graph for the position property. If I drag this second handle up so the line extends past the value of my keyframe, the shape will go past the final position and then back. Sometimes this can be useful if you want to create an overshoot animation, which is one of the 12 principles of animation that I'll talk about in another class. If you don't want this to happen now, you can hold down shift to snap the handle to perfectly horizontal. That way it will extend past your final value. In order to adjust the value graph of the position property, you have to separate dimensions. If only one of the dimensions is animated, then this is usually just fine. But if you have a custom-specific motion path that you want your layer to follow, this can get tricky, and we'll talk more about this in a later video. 9. Working with the Scale Property: The scale property also has an X and Y value, but it works a bit differently than the position property. You can't separate the dimensions of the scale property. In the graph editor, there's only one line for scale in both the value and speed graphs. But if you unlock constrained proportions and move one of the handles, there's actually two lines, they are just overlapping. There are separate lines for the X and Y scale values that you can adjust separately. The same goes for the speed graph. If you lock the proportions again, you can adjust the handles and the lines will adjust proportionally. 10. Graph Editor Exercise: Knowing how to read and adjust graphs to get the motion you want is extremely important for leveling up your animations, and this takes a lot of practice. Hopefully you can get to a point where you can just glance at an animation curve and understand what it's telling you about the motion of your animation. With even more practice, hopefully you can watch an animation or look at an animation curve and understand what adjustments need to be made to make it even better. Let me go through a couple of examples of the words that I say in my head when reading animation curves. First, you need to know if you're looking at the value or speed graph. This is the value graph, so the slope of the line will tell us how fast the shape is moving. Reading this in my head I'd say slow, fast, slow, or eases out of the first keyframe, goes faster, then eases into the last keyframe, or now it would be really slow or eases out of the first key really slowly, then moves really quick, then eases into the last keyframe. Now let's look at a speed graph example. The further the curve is from zero, the faster, and a steep slope means that the layer is accelerating or decelerating quickly here. Here, this would mean that it's accelerating really quickly, then reaches its peak speed about a third of the way through the animation, and then just continues to decelerate or slow down from there. Within the project file you can download for this class, there's a folder labeled graph editor exercise. In here, there are eight practice exercises for you. For half, you'll use the value graph to manipulate the animation curve and for the other half to use the speed graph. I'll demonstrate how this exercise works with this extra example that I made. Inside these comps, there's a circle with a linear animation. You don't need to add any keyframes. The circle is only animated in the x position and I already separated out dimensions. Your first step is to convert these keyframes to easy ease so that you have handles to adjust in the graph editor, then adjust the animation curve based on this description using the graph that it says here. This language isn't the most precise, so there's a little wiggle room in the answer. There are different ways to describe motion, so I try to add some variety here. Once you think you've got your circle moving like the description, turn on the visibility of this red layer so you see the correct answer and compare your circle's motion and graph. Obviously there are ways to cheat on this exercise, but that's not going to help you learn. Hopefully you find these exercises helpful in practicing the graph editor. 11. How to Figure Out How to Animate Almost Anything: [MUSIC] Now that you know the concepts behind motion and how to use the graph editor, it's time to apply this to your work. Every time you go to animate something, get in the habit of asking yourself why it moves? Is it moving because of gravity? Is it self-propelled? Is it reacting to something? Or is it a combination of factors? What motivates this movement? When you know why something moves, you can figure out how it should be animated. If something is falling because of gravity, it accelerates towards the ground until it crashes into the ground. Now you can adjust your animation curve to reflect this. Even if you've never taken a physics class, you probably intuitively know everything you need to apply this to your animations. If you're unsure how something would realistically move, do a test or even better take a reference video. You can play the reference video back in slow motion to see the nuances in how something moves. Or you can import the video into After Effects to animate alongside it. If you can't take a reference video yourself, you can usually find a video for what you need online. Only once you know how something moves accurately can you push the boundaries to add more personality, make it move in a more interesting way, or make it more dramatic. It's knowing the rules to break the rules situation. In this class, we're mostly just focusing on animating things realistically, and we'll leave the rest for later. Let's get started on the class project. 12. Animate Falling Planter: Let's start applying the concepts you've learned to the class project. Here's what the final class project looks like. Within the project file that you can download for this class, you'll have a folder called Class Projects. Within that there's another folder for the finished version. You can poke around in this finished file if that's helpful to you. You also have a folder called Start Here. You want to open up the still-life start here composition, and this is going to be your starting point. I'm going to use the same exact composition but I'm actually going to preserve my start here folder so that I have this blank starting point, and I'm going to use this one called tutorial, but it's the same thing. I've already color-coded some things for you and created some pre-comps. But let's start out with innervating the pot falling down. You don't necessarily have to do this, but I'm just going to toggle the visibility off on all the layers that we're not working with and shy them from my timeline. This will just make it easier to focus on what we need to see. Obviously we're going to be animating the position property here, so I'm just going to select the pot and hit "P" on the keyboard to bring up the position. The first thing I want to do is right-click on position and separate out the dimensions. The reason I'm doing this is because we're only going to be animating the Y position, and if I separate out dimensions, then I can adjust the value graph in the graph editor which I find a little bit easier for something that really involves physics like this pot falling. First I'm just going to go, let's go like 15 frames into the future and just set the Y position for right here when it lands on the ground. Then I'll go back to the start of the timeline, and let's just bring the Y position all the way up so that this is off-screen. These are going to be linear keyframes. This animation is just going to look a doll and just falls at a constant rate, and that's not really realistic. First I'm just going to click and drag to select both of these keyframes and apply Easy Ease. Remember there's multiple ways to do this, but I like to use the keyboard shortcut which is F9. Now this is going to move on Easy Ease motion. If we look at the graph, this is the value graph, and I can tell that this animation is going to be going slow because the slope is not that steep here, and then it's going to speed up in the middle because the slope is steepest, and then it's going to slow down because the slope level is off right before reaching the last keyframe. Because I separated the dimensions, I can now adjust these handles to manipulate this value graph. That's a really important step. This flower pot is moving because of gravity. Gravity accelerates things towards the ground until they crash into the ground. There's actually a number for this in physics which is 9.8 meters per second. If you didn't think that you knew this, you could probably think through it and come to the right conclusion. Think about if you dropped an egg from a really tall building. It's going to speed up so much as it's falling that whole distance that when it hits the ground it's definitely got to splatter. But if you drop the same egg from closer towards the ground, like when you're standing on the ground, there is a chance that it might not even break. This is because it had less distance, less time to speed up as it was falling, so it hits the ground not quite as hard as if you dropped it from that tall building. This physics fact and thought experiment just tells us that things don't slow down right before they reach the ground. There's nothing there that would cause it to slow down. Things accelerate towards the ground because of gravity, so Easy Ease is wrong, so let's fix it. I'm going to take this handle and drag it down so that the graph is not leveling off. Now the graph just keeps being steep all the way through this last keyframe. This means that it's going to accelerate until it hits the ground. You can already tell that that looks a lot better and it makes the pot look heavier. I can actually adjust how heavy this pot looks by adjusting this curve. If I make it more like that, the slope of this graph is still pretty steep. It's not leveling off, it's not slowing down. But you can see that the pot looks a lot lighter in this case, than if I were to drag this handle all the way down like this. Now it really comes to a third on the ground. I'm just going to make that somewhere in the middle. I think this looks pretty good. I think it looks pretty accurate to a heavy pot with dirt in it. I'm just going to jump over to the speed graph really quick, because remember how I said that the slope of the speed graph is acceleration. If you look at the slope of this speed graph, you can see that it's always positive. The slope is always positive at any point along this graph, and that means that the pot is always accelerating. If you remember back when we had this at Easy Ease, the slope is going to be positive here and then negative here. This would mean that it's actually decelerating here. I just wanted to show you the speed graph just to explain acceleration again and show you that the speed graph doesn't always have to go up and back down. If there's an acceleration when it hits the ground or when the animation stops, then it will just have this line here AND the graph won't actually come back down, curving back down to zero. This is exactly what we want. The next step is to add a little bit of a bounce to this. It's not going to bounce a lot because this is heavy, but I want to add a little bit more interests. What I'm going to do is just go maybe five frames forward in time and just set another Y position keyframe, That's the exact same for this ending point on the ground. As you would expect, this doesn't have any animation in-between these last two keyframes because these are the same exact value. Now, if you did get an animation that you weren't expecting, sometimes that happens, but in the next step, we'll fix it. I'm just going to go back into the graph editor, and we can just adjust the graph with these handles to add a bounce. Remember that this is a graph of the y values. You can think of this as mirroring what's happening in the composition, but the graph is just upside down. The bottom of the graph here is when the pot is at the top of the composition, and then when the graph is up here, the pot is actually at the bottom of the composition. You just have to flip this graph in your mind. If we increase the size of this curve right here which is the bounce, the pot is going to bounce higher up. The reason that this graph is upside down, it's just because of the way the after-effects defines the coordinates, so it defines it as 0,0 being in the top left, and then the x values increase as you go from left to right, and the y values increase as you go from top to bottom. Just flip this graph in your mind and it can help you think about how this is actually moving in space. As you can see, when I increase this shape of the bounce, the pot bounces is higher, but I actually want it to be a really small bounce because again, this is a heavy pot, so it wouldn't bounce that much. If it helps you, you can zoom into the graph by hitting the plus key. We just want to make sure that this looks like a bounce would. The graph should be steepest as it's like hitting the ground and going back up. Then as it switches direction in the middle of the curve, it's going to be leveling off and then it should accelerate back towards the ground. Our graph is pretty reflective of that, so let's just play this back. Yeah, I think that looks pretty good. Obviously you can spend a lot of time adjusting the graph editor, but hopefully as you practice you'll get better at getting something that you like with less time. I think that looks pretty good. 13. Animate Falling Oranges: [MUSIC] Next, I'm going to animate the oranges falling into the bowl because this animation is really similar to the pot but obviously the oranges are made of a different material, and they are different weights. We'll factor that into how our animation looks. First I'm just going to select all three of the oranges, hit the "Position" property, right-click it and separate the dimensions. I'm going to have to do that on each one [NOISE] but now, that is set. Let's just do one orange at a time. Let's say this takes about 15 frames to fall, and I'll set a Y position keyframe on the first orange for right here at 15 frames. Then let's go back in time and just bring this all the way up, so it's off of the composition. Of course, we don't want linear keyframes, so I'm going to apply Easy Ease and then go into the graph editor. Again, we don't want this to be this Easy Ease curve because we don't want it to slow down as it reaches the ground. I'm just going to drag this curve out. Let's even hide this pot just so it's not distracting. I think that looks pretty good. We can make a couple more adjustments. Maybe it doesn't Ease-out of the first keyframe as much. It starts moving a little bit faster sooner. Once you've tweaked this graph to your liking, now let's add that bounce. I'm just going to go forward, maybe five frames and set another Y position keyframe. Let's actually have this orange bounce a couple of times. I'm just going to go and set more Y position keyframe, the same exact value. Let's make this balance four times, so we need five total Y position keyframes here. Now let's go into the graph editor to actually create these bounces. Now I can just click on in these keyframes to get the handles and then drag the handle down to create a balance. I'm just going to do that on each one of these bounces really quick and then we'll go back and adjust. I want the first bounce to be the highest one because that would be realistic. It's going to bounce up highest and then lose momentum or lose height of the balance as it goes. I'll just adjust my graphs to reflect that. What I'm creating right now as I'm creating this bounce, this kind of graph is called a decay curve. When you look at the graph, if you draw a straight line from the starting point to the ending point, your bounces shouldn't actually touch that line. They should decay a little bit exponentially over time. In other words, the first bounce is the highest and then they shrink a little bit more each time. Let's play this back to see where we're at so far. That bounce is obviously happening way too fast. I'm going to adjust the timing of this before I adjust the curve anymore. You can adjust the timing in the timeline or you can actually adjust it in the graph editor. I'm going to click and drag to select all of these keyframes, and then holding down Shift to make sure that I don't change the value of the keyframe. I'm just going to slide this out. Maybe it lands the first time like 18 frames. It took 15 frames for the pot to fall, so it makes sense that the orange would take just a little bit longer to fall because it's lighter. Then I'll select the last four keyframes and drag those ones out. Then we'll select these and drag those ones out. Each time it bounces, it's not going to take as long because it's not bouncing as high. I'm adjusting the timing accordingly. Something like that looks a little bit better but now, this is bouncing really high. When I adjusted the timing it actually adjusted the graph too a little bit, so let's just bring this way back down. This one too. Another thing to think about when you're working with a decay curve is that you want the handle that goes into the keyframe, the one on the left to be just a little bit longer than the one going out of the keyframe. The one on the right. In this case that one looks pretty good. Then this one on the next keyframe should be even shorter than the second one on the last keyframe. Just like the balances are decaying, I want these handles to decay to. That's because when this is going into this keyframe, it's going really fast and then it's losing momentum as it bounces back up. Then when it bounces back up a second time, it's lost even more momentum, so the handles should reflect that too. I'm just going to go back in and adjust the handles, make sure that's happening. That one's way too long. Something like that. If we see all the handles, you can see that they are also matching that decay curve. For each keyframe, the handles are pretty symmetrical if you look at the angle. Let's play that back and see where we're at. That's looking way, way better than it was before. I'm going to tweak this graph just a little bit more. I think that this part can be a little bit faster as the smaller bounces happen. I'm just going to adjust the timing here a little bit. I think that looks pretty good. Maybe the last bounce is a little too high. This is just going to be fine tuning, playing it back and making small adjustments until you're happy with your animation. Then once you're happy with your animation on the first orange, we can just copy the Y position. I'm selecting it over here to select all the keyframes and then hit "Command C" to copy. Then since we separated out the dimensions of these other two oranges, we can give them the same Y position as the first orange. I'm just going to hit "Command V" to paste those keyframes. Right now they look like they're all stuck together, but I can just offset them in time to make it look much more interesting. Let's just move orange three back, or let's do it four frames. Then we'll move orange two back an additional three frames. Now this looks a lot more interesting. Now obviously, these oranges would probably be hitting each other and colliding and creating some different motion but I'm not going to worry about that for this. One other thing that we can fix is that originally I had my oranges at different levels inside the bowl. To fix this, it looks like orange number two needs to be a bit higher. I can just take all of these Y position keyframes and just make sure that they're all selected. Holding down Shift, I'm just going to drag these up. Something like that, and I'm going to bring this orange three down just a little bit. Selecting all of the keyframes, I'll just hold Shift and drag these down so that they're at different levels. That didn't affect the bounce. It all still works. 14. Animate Falling Watering Can: [MUSIC] Now let's animate the watering can falling into place. For this one, I'm going to add a little bit of rotation as it falls, so it's going to land on its corner and rotate and fall into place. First, what I need to do is make sure that the watering can handle is parented to the watering can. That way, I can just animate the watering can, and the handle will be attached. Then next, I need to use the Pan Behind tool, so this tool, or Y on the keyboard, and I'm going to move my anchor point where we want to rotate the watering can around. If I zoom in, let's try to put that right here on this corner. You can hold down "Command" to snap into place, so that just snapped it to the bottom-edge of this layer. Now I can go back and go into the position property, and make sure you select your selection tool back with B on the keyboard. Then with the position property selected, I'm going to "Right-click" and go to Separate Dimensions. Now let's animate the Y-position. At 15 frames, it'll be down on the ground and then at zero frames, we'll move it all the way off screen. Now this falls into place. Let's add easy ease, and then work on the Graph Editor. F9 for easy ease and then with the keyframes selected, let's go into the Graph Editor. Remember, we don't want this to slow down as it reaches the ground because that makes no sense, so I'm going to take this handle and really drag it down because I want this to look heavy. Remember, the steeper the slope here, the heavier this is going to look because the faster it's going to go. I think that looks pretty good. That's a good thud. Maybe I can even adjust this, so it starts falling faster sooner. I'm happy with that. Now let's go back and add that rotation. I'm just going to hit "Shift" and "R" to bring up the rotation property, and keep that position property up too. I'm going to have the rotation be, let's say maybe like eight, right here. Let's set that keyframe. We can have it rotating in the air. Maybe it starts at zero and maybe the weight of this, the center of gravity is a little bit off, so that's why it's rotating. Then it's going to need to rotate back into place, so say about here. Let's rotate it back to zero. Let's easy ease these keyframes, and then we'll adjust them in the Graph Editor. So far, it looks like that. I feel like right here, it's going a little slow, so that's something we can work on in the Graph Editor. This is the value graph of this rotation. I want it to rotate instead of slowing down right here, because there's really nothing that would cause it to slow down as it's reaching its final sitting-on-the-ground position. I'm going to bring this handle up to make that faster, so it accelerates into that rotation till it hits the ground. It makes sense that it would accelerate into this orientation, where it's sitting on the ground, because gravity is what's pulling that, or changing that rotation so that it sits down on the ground, so it should accelerate into place. Also, at this point, there's nothing that would really cause the rotation to start slowing down, so I'm also going to adjust the graph for this so that it accelerates into that rotated state. Maybe I want this to be rotated a little bit more as we start seeing it in the frame. I can just also drag this one back, so it rotates a little sooner. We can just go back and try tweaking things until it looks really good. I think that looks good for now. Let's also add a bounce to this. I'm going to go to this last rotation keyframe and set another position keyframe. Now we need to go into the Graph Editor, and create that bounce just like we did in the last video. I'm going to drag down these handles. Remember, however big we make this little curve of the graph, it's going to be how high the watering can rotates. That is going to be too high, I think, because this is really heavy. Let's try something like that. I think that looks pretty good. It looks like it's heavy, but it's made some some kind of material that makes it a little bit bouncy. I think we're good on this animation. 15. Animate Orange Slice: [MUSIC] Let's animate the orange slice, falling, bouncing, and rotating. Pay attention to what the orange slice looks like in the final animation. At the end there, it rocks back-and-forth, so we'll do that too. I've already pre-comped all the different pieces of the orange slice. This orange is a composition with all these different things inside of it, but you really only need to worry about the composition itself. First, let's just go into the position property and separate dimensions. I also want to change where it's going to be rotating from so I want to move the anchor point down to the bottom. I'm just going to use the pan behind tool, which is Y on the keyboard, and also hold down command to snap it to this bottom edge. Now let's set the position keyframes. For a lot of the objects that were heavier, I was using about 15 frames and then I think I used 18 frames for the orange to fall in. But this orange slice is going to be even lighter than that. Things that are lighter, obviously, if you think of a feather, it's going to take a lot longer to fall to the ground. Maybe let's go to like let's say 23 frames and we'll set Y position keyframe. Then as always, we'll go back to the start of the timeline and bring this all the way out of frame. Let's add Easy Ease and adjust this in the Graph Editor. As it falls, it should not slow down and that looks fine. We'll adjust this, even more, when it bounces. Let's animate this bouncing. I'm just going to go here on the timeline and set another Y position keyframe. I actually want this to bounce quite a few times because it's light and it's a bouncy material. We'll just set like let's say 1, 2, 3, let's do six bounces, or five bounces, six keyframes worth. I have six of the same keyframe here. Remember that as things bounce, it's going to take a little bit less time for them to bounce, so try to just adjust these keyframes accordingly. Now let's go into the Graph Editor and adjust the animation curve to make it bouncing. We'll just drag down these handles for each one of these bounces. I just do this really roughly the first time around and then adjust. I think that could go even higher. Remember this is going to be the lightest object so it can bounce the highest, probably. This one could be a little bit higher. I'm creating another decay curve here, making sure that the handles are symmetrical. If you look vertically, draw a line right here. Also that the second one is just a little bit smaller and that the bounces are decaying over time. This obviously needs to be a lot smaller. If it helps, you can zoom into the graph just to see it at a bigger scale. I think some of these in the middle here are a little bit too similar, so let's adjust this. [NOISE] Maybe the last one can be even smaller. Just adjust again. Maybe all these need a little bit of adjustment. Here's what we have so far. I think this motion is a little bit too sharp. I'm going to go into the graphs and pull these handles to make the graphs a little bit less steep. That's going to be making the handles a wider upside-down V. [NOISE] Now let's see if that looks better. I think it looks a little bit better. I think there's one bounce in here that pops up a little bit too high. I think it's this one, so let's bring that down. [NOISE] That looks better. One little trick for you, if you have a hard time seeing it play back in real-time and catching what's wrong, you can go into your preview panel and then make sure that timeline is selected. If you change the frame rate to something that's less than your actual frame rate, it'll play back in slow motion. If I just set that to 15 frames, because I'm working in 30 frames, now it's going to play it back in slow motion so I can more easily see what's going on. When you're done watching in slow motion make sure that you always change the frame rate back either to auto or to your actual frame rate so that you see things in real-time. Now let's go and add in that rotation value. I'm just going to do Shift R to bring up the rotation property. At this point when it first lands on the ground, I'm going to rotate it, let's say back like, what's doing pretty far, something like that, and I'll set this rotation keyframe. But if you look really closely, you'll notice that this is actually going through the ground right now. To compensate for that, I'm just going to adjust the Y position. With my layer selected, I'll just use the arrow keys to nudge this layer up so that the bottom of the orange is just touching the ground. Then on the next keyframe, I want this to rotate back the other way. Started off at negative 36, I want to do something in the positive direction but a little bit less than 36. Maybe let's just do 22. Again, this is going through the floor, so I'm just going to nudge it up. Let's go to the next keyframe and go back the other direction. Something less than our last keyframe. We can always adjust this later. That looks good and I'll nudge this back up. It's important that we did the position key-frames first and then the rotation. That way we can just adjust the rotation afterwards, it makes it a little bit easier. Back again the other way, and nudge that up a tiny bit and back again. Again, this is decaying every time it rotates and doesn't need to be adjusted too much on the Y position. Let's even rotate this a little bit after it's finished bouncing. I probably needed to rotate the previous keyframe is a little bit more, but we can adjust that later in the Graph Editor. Now let's just add Easy Ease to these keyframes and go into the Graph Editor to adjust. This is the value graph of the rotation. We want the values to decay over time. This is narrowing down. But these keyframes, this one needs to be higher. Let's just drag that one up so that we have this nice decaying shape. Maybe this one needs to go down, something like that. Maybe this timing needs to be adjusted here. Let's see what that looks like. That looks pretty good, but if we think about what the rotation should be doing, it shouldn't be doing an Easy Ease. We need to adjust this graph. As it comes and hits the ground, again, like I've been saying many times, it doesn't make sense for this to slow down as it's reaching the ground because gravity is pulling it down, also pulling that rotation value, so it should accelerate into this keyframe. I'll just drag the handle down to reflect that, and then as it rotates back the other way, the same thing here. Drag this keyframe up. It's not slowing down as it gets into that keyframe. Then same thing here and here and then we got one more on this last bounce. Then as it rocks back and forth, I think it's okay that it does this Easy Ease because it's less about gravity and more about the friction of the floor and the orange. Let's play this back. Once you see the rotation and the position keyframes together, you might want to go back and adjust some things, but overall, I think this is looking pretty good. [NOISE] 16. Animate Falling and Rotating Bowl: [MUSIC] Now let's animate the bowl falling into place, but let's also give it a rotation. For this one, I'm going to actually give it two rotations. It's going to bounce from side to side, and then land in place. [NOISE] First, I want to make sure that the bowl base is the thing that's going to be driving the animation. I'm just going to parent the bowl to the bowl base. I need to adjust that anchor point again. Let's zoom in. Let's move that anchor point to this bottom corner. Using the pan behind tool, which is Y on the keyboard, it's going to hold down command to snap that into this bottom corner. Now let's go into the position and separate dimensions, then let's go to 15 frames and set a Y position keyframe, go back up and move this all the way back up off of the composition. Now this is going to fall into place. But I have the oranges shown here because the oranges obviously need to fall after the ball hits the ground. I'm just going to move these oranges back. Let's move him back all the way till one second to get them out of the way. Now we can add Easy Ease to these keyframes, and go into the graph editor, and adjust the motion. As always, we don't want things to slow down right before they reach the ground when they're falling. Let's adjust that curve. That looks pretty good. Maybe I'll make it speed up a little bit faster here. This ball is pretty light; probably the lightest thing that I've animated so far, maybe besides oranges. We'll just adjust that curve. I think that's good. Now let's add the rotation. Do Shift R to bring up the rotation property. Then let's rotate this bowl when it lands to negative 12, and set that as keyframe. At the start of the timeline, maybe it's not rotated all the way to negative 12, maybe it's only at like negative 4, just starts falling a little bit off-center. [NOISE] I'm going to add Easy Ease to these keyframes, go into the graph editor. There's no reason why this should slow down as it's reaching the ground. There's nothing there that would cause it to start slowing down its rotation. Bring this handle up so it keeps speeding up as it gets into this rotation. Now it falls and lands just like that. Now we need to balance it and rotate it back the other direction. It probably needs to rotate back right about here. But the tricky thing is, if I rotate this back the other way, the bowl is going to dip below the floor because it's rotating around this anchor point. I'm actually going to rotate this back to zero, and we're going to set up a controller to allow us to rotate around this point. What I want to do is go up to layer new null object. Now we can take this null, and put it where we want the rotation to be, the second rotation. I'm going to zoom in so I get this exactly right, maybe even saw the bowl base and the null to make sure that I can see what I'm doing without the ground being in the way. Now, this null is exactly where we want the second rotation to be. What I'm going do is parent the bowl base to this null. We can rename this null because it's always a good idea to label your layers. I'm going to name this bowl rotation controller. Now, if I rotate this, you can see that that bowl can now rotate around this other axis. It's like we've given it an extra anchor point. I'm actually going to undo, go back to zero because we need to set a keyframe where this bowl rotation is zero and that's going to be right here when it's rotated up on the other side. Now when it's in place, when these two things are aligned, now we can rotate the null to rotate the bowl. It's important that you set this keyframe to be at zero rotation, and then when these two things are aligned, the null and this corner of the bowl, then we can use the null. If you were to use this null to try to rotate the bowl when it's over here, it's not going to give you the effect you want. It's going to rotate around this point. But since this point is not line up with the bowl, you're getting an effect that you probably don't want. It's important that we set the keyframes in this way so that you can rotate the null when it's aligned with that corner of the bowl where you want the rotation to be. Let's rotate this just a tad bit more. Now we want to bring the rotation back down to zero. We'll set the nulls rotation back to zero. Let's Easy Ease these rotation keyframes on the null and go into the graph editor to adjust them. This is going to be very similar to that rotation on the base of the bowl. When it's rotating into this place, it doesn't need to slow down, there's nothing that would cause it to start slowing down. We need to make sure that this graph doesn't level off. I'll just drag this keyframe down. It might start slow here as it's gaining momentum because of gravity, pulling it down into place and then here, there's no reason why it would slow down; gravity is accelerating things towards the ground. This handle should be more up like this. It makes it feel like it snaps into place. But that looks a little bit awkward without the bounce. So let's add that in. [NOISE] Right here, I'm going to set a Y position keyframe. This will be the first bounce and is actually going to have two bounces also another Y position keyframe aligned with this last rotation. Then we can go into the graph of these keyframes on the Y position and add that bounce by pulling these handles down. [NOISE] I think that's pretty good about the height that I want, maybe a little bit less. [NOISE] Actually, that's a little bit too high, I guess, let's bring it down. Remember, we want the second handle to be a little bit shorter than the first handle because there's going to be a loss of momentum as it bounces. It's pretty good. Let's play back what we have. [NOISE] We can keep tweaking this to make it even better, but we'll call that good for now. 17. Animate Orange Bouncing: [MUSIC] Let's animate the orange that bounces off the bowl and then rolls. Pay attention to that orange in the final animation. We're going to start by just animating the orange in the Y position, and then we'll add the X position, and later in a different video, we'll add the leaf. I'm actually just going to hide the leaf and shy it for now. I'm going to go into the position property of the orange and separate the dimensions. Since I've already animated those other oranges bouncing into the bowl, the animation on this orange should be pretty similar to that, so I can use that as a starting point. I'm just going to go into my shared layers and go to one of the oranges I've already animated. Let's just copy this Y position. By selecting the Y position here, it'll select all the keyframes, and I can do a "Command C" to copy. Then I can just shy all the layers again. Go back into this orange, hit "P" on the keyboard. Since these are already separated, I can just hit "Command V" to paste those Y position keyframes, and it's going to maintain that same X position but I actually want to move the X position over, so that it lands on top of the bowl. We'll need to move this whole layer forward in time so that it happens after the bowl has already landed. Right here is where I want to make sure that the bottom of this orange is lining up with the top of the bowl, like it's hitting the rim of the bowl, so I'm just going to move that X position over like that, and then I can also adjust the Y position. I'm just going to select this one keyframe and just nudge the Y position up. I just like to use the arrow keys on my keyboard for this. That's looks like pretty good but let's zoom in and make sure it's perfect, and then we can also nudge the Y position over, so I want to click the center of the orange to line up with the edge of the bowl. I think that looks pretty good. Now, it will fall into the bowl that it's going to bounce and I want it to now hit the ground. Notice right here, this keyframe is not exactly aligned with the playhead. It's actually in-between a frame, so I need to just drag it a little bit over and this Y value I actually want the orange to be on the ground, so I'll just nudge it towards the ground. I think the value for the ground should be like 766, so I can just type that in. Then all of these other keyframes afterwards should also be landing on the ground, so I'll just type in that 766 value because I know that's where they should be. Right now the orange is going to be bouncing up and down in place. It bounces once on the ball and then just bounces on the ground but I want this to be moving to the left. Right here where it bounces onto the rim of the bowl, that's what I wanted to start moving to the left. I'm going to set an X position keyframe right here. Then, let's just go forward in time to the last keyframe. We'll just drag out the X position. This is cool because you can now see the motion path. You can see all those bounces. I'm not exactly sure where I want this to be. Let's just unhide some of my other layers for perspective. I know that it was like that, and maybe let's see what the flowerpot looks like. I think that's about the right position for the orange. I'm just going to hide those two layers again and try them. Now the orange is bouncing off of the bowl and moving to the left. It just abruptly stops at the end and I want to have it roll a little bit before it gets to the end here. What I'm going to do is just move this keyframe out and then set another keyframe here, that aligns with the last Y position. This way I can know that this is going to be a linear animation, and I can add an easy ease to this one, so that it eases into that final resting position. Now if we go into the graph editor, we want to make sure that this line is pretty straight. This line is constant. It's a pretty straight diagonal line. Then it's going to ease into this value. We can maybe pull out this handle a little bit more and adjust the timing, so that this line is straight, and then ease into this final value. This last piece of the graph is curved, showing that it's slowing down as it reaches its final position. Let's see what we have. You might need to go back and adjust this, but I think we're pretty good here. 18. Animate Reactive Motion: Plant: [MUSIC] We've already animated the pot falling into place, but now let's add the plant. The plant is going to be reacting to the motion of the pot falling. I've already created this plant stem pre-comp for you that has the stem and all the leaves for this one strand of the plant. Then in our final animation, we can just duplicate that plant stem multiple times to have a full plant. The first thing we need to do is make sure that the plant stem is parented to the pot, so that way when the pot falls in the plant will come with it. Next, we can add a bend effect to this plant stem to make the whole thing bend. Go over to Effects and Presets and search for CC Bend It. Then you just want to apply CC Bend It to the plant stem. If you look closely, it's cut off my top leaf so what I need to do is just adjust the start and end values so that the whole thing is visible. This is the end. I'll drag it up so my whole leaf is showing. Then on the bottom, I'll just drag this all the way down to the bottom of the stem. In the effect controls panel, you should see CC Bend It on your layer and you can adjust the bend value to bend this stem. Now we can animate this bend value to animate the plant reacting to the motion of the pot falling. While this pot is falling, I think I want this plant stem to be pretty straight up and down like this, like it's blowing in the wind that's created from the pot falling. But then the final look of the plant stem won't be curved because I think that just looks better. I'm going to set a keyframe a little bit in the middle of these first two keyframes while the plant is falling. This will just be, well, it's straight up and down. The bend value will be zero. I'm just setting the keyframe up here in Effect Controls. Then if I go click on my layer and hit U on the keyboard, that'll show any keyframes on this layer. Now I can also animate this down here. Then once the plant hits the ground, so lining up with this keyframe, I want the bend to be pretty dramatic. Maybe something like that. Then as the pot bounces back up, we can have this go back up, maybe like that. Then as it comes down, maybe we'll have the plant stem bounce a little bit. It'll go back this way and then back like that and maybe that's its final position. Now I'm just going to select all of these keyframes and hit F9 to easy ease them. Then let's go into the graph editor to adjust. This shape is looking good overall, we want the amount of bend to decay over time. But let's just play back our animation and see how it looks. It looks like this bounce is way too fast. I'm just going to go and drag these out a little bit. Let's see what that looks like. This comes to a sudden stop right here. Maybe we want it to end as it's moving down instead of up. I'll just bring this down a little bit more. Then let's make sure that our animation curve still has that nice decay. Maybe this point needs to be a little bit more. I just want to make sure that this is like a cone shape. Let's also make sure that it's really easing into this final value. We'll drag out this handle. Then it's starting to bend pretty soon at the beginning here, so I'm going to drag out this handle so that it's more sudden when it hits the ground that it bends. I might even need to move this entire keyframe over. Take it a little bit more time so it can just like very suddenly bend. I'm making this slope really steep right here. I think I need to adjust the timing a bit more so this is happening too quickly. Let's try this. It's looking better. I think the timing is still too fast here at the end. Let's try that. Looks pretty good. I think it still ends roughly. Maybe we need to adjust these and let's do that in the graph editor. Maybe we can just bring this amount of bend down a little bit so it's not having to do such a big change at the last keyframe. I think that's going to be better. Let's play it back in real time. I think that looks pretty good. It looks like the plant is reacting to the pot falling into place. Now let's animate the leaves within the plant stem to make this animation even better. This will make it look a little bit more fluid and the leaves aren't so stiff when they're attached to this plant. I'm going to click into this plant stem layer. But first I want to put my play head over this first keyframe on the bend value so that way I know where it is when I'm in this composition. I want to animate these leaves so that they are most upright when the plant is most straight. That's when it's falling down. I'm going to go into the rotation for this leaf and let's just bring this. It's even more straight up and down. Maybe like six. Then the opposite leaf on the other side of the stem should be the same rotation but negative, so negative 6. Let's set rotation keyframes for these and then go up the plant stem doing the same thing. This leaf, this leaf, and this leaf should be six as well. Then this leaf, this leaf, and this leaf should be negative 6. The top leaf probably can just stay rotated straight up and down just at zero. Now I just want to make sure that I set keyframes for all of these values. Now, as the plant stem is coming back into a bent position right here, I want the leaves to bend accordingly. The leaves on this half of the plant should bend down more and leaves on this half of the plant should probably been even more straight up and down so that they're tilting more towards the left. Making sure my play head is over this second keyframe, I'm going to click into here. Now I know where to set these keyframes. Let's just bring this down so maybe like still negative 10. Then on this upper leaf, maybe we could also rotate this to like, let's do negative 10 here too. They're both tilted in the way that it's bending, which makes sense for how the leaves will really react. We can do the same thing for the other leaves on this stem. These three will be negative 10. These three will also be negative 10. Everything's at negative 10 right now, except for this top leaf which we can just rotate till it looks good. Maybe negative 10 is good too. Back in our main comp, you can see that this looks a little bit more, the leaves are participating in this motion too. If we move on to the next key frame, let's make these leaves stand more upright. Maybe not as upright as they were at this very starting position, but a little bit less bent towards the left as they are in this second key frame. I'm going to click into my plant stem again and let's set these key frames. Let's rotate this leaf to how about four? [NOISE] These other three leaves on this side can probably do the same and then on this side we'll bring these ones back down, so maybe they should be like negative 4. Our top leaf could be maybe just negative 2. Let's go back into the main comp, and then going to our next key frame we'll click back into the main plant stem and now let's add more rotation key frames. This first set when they were rotated to the left these were are at negative 10 but this was more bent to the left, so let's make this a little bit less than negative 10. Let's try negative 8 and we can actually do that on all of these, so negative eight. These were the same, so negative 8, and this top leaf. See what looks good, probably actually negative 8 again and then let's go back and go to our next key frame. This new set of key frames should be this set of key frames but a little bit less, so this was at negative 4 and 4 on this side so let's do. For these guys we'll do how about two? These ones on the right side we'll do negative 2, and our top leaf let's just do negative 1. Going back into our main comp one last time. This is the final resting position so let's make this like these key frames but a little bit less. These ones we're at negative 8, so let's do negative 5. These ones were at negative 8 also, so we'll do negative 5 and then this top leaf maybe just negative 4. I'm just going to select all of these key frames and do F9 to ease them. Let's go back into our main comp, and let's see what this looks like. Hopefully you can tell that, that looks a little bit more fluid. The leaves are bending as well, so it just makes it look a little bit more natural. But one thing we can do is make the leaves react to the motion of the stem moving because if you think about how these things are all connected, so the pot is driving this whole animation. All of the motion is happening because the pot is falling. The stem is rooted to the pot and then the leaves are attached to the stem, so the reactive motion should have a ripple effect. Starting with the pot moving into the stem and then into the leaves. We should start animating these bottom leaves first probably after the stem. The stem is the bend and then the leaves starting at the bottom should animate first after that and then a little bit offset would be the next set leaves, the next set of leaves, the next set of leaves until this final leaf. I'm just going to go back into my plant stem and let's offset these key frames. Let's just move every single key frame one frame back so that all the key frames are offset from our bend key frames on the plant stem comp. [NOISE] We're going to take the next set of leaves; so this one and this one, and move those key frames one more frame over. The next set of leaves going up I'll take these key frames and move them one frame over from the previous step, and then on these last ones we'll just take the top leaf to move these ones over one more and the very top leaf can move over one more. If we just play back this comp, you can see that it has a more rippling effect. It's a little bit more slowly and natural than all moving at once. If you think of the motion as being driven from the base of the plant or the stem moving up, then this animation makes sense. If we play this back the play of stem looks a little bit more flowy, fluid, and more natural, and realistic. What we need to do from here is just duplicate this plant stem so we have multiple plant stems within the pot. I can just select this one and hit "Command D" to duplicate it, and then I can just drag it over but I want this plant stem to be bending in the other direction. Rather than adjusting all of these bend values I'm actually just going to take this plant stem, hit "S" on the keyboard and then adjust the scale to flip this horizontally. I'm going to unlock the constrained proportions and then do negative 95 in the x-direction, and that's going to flip it this way. I can also just move it to where I want it. We have two plant stems but they're moving in the exact same way, just mirror image which looks a little bit weird. It's like antlers or something. Let's take this duplicated plant stem and go in to the bend key frames, so I'm selecting all of those. To go into the Graph Editor, we can actually adjust all the values at once within the Graph Editor. To do this, you need to make sure that you have Show Transform Box checked so it's blue, and then you can click-and-drag over your entire graph to select the whole thing and now we can treat this as a shape that we can manipulate. We can drag the whole thing up and if you hold down Shift it will make sure it doesn't slide it left and right. This whole thing is a little bit less bendy. You could also make the plant stem more stiff by shrinking the difference between the bends. that's looking just slightly different. But one thing is that when I did that it's going to change this first value so this plant stem is not going to be as straight up and down at the beginning and I still want it to be. I'm just going to set this bend value back to zero for the first key frame. Another thing we could do to make this slightly different is to adjust the scale. Maybe this is negative 100 and 100. Just to be a little bit bigger, adjust the position of it. Let's do this Whole thing again to make a third stem, so I'm just going to duplicate the main one , drag it over. Let's make the scale 105 just to make it have more variety, and let's go into the bend key frames. We can actually just click-and-drag over part of the graph, that way it doesn't mess up this first bend over zero which I want to maintain. We can just drag these up so that this stem is overall less bendy, and then maybe I'll drag this bottom up just to make the whole stem not bend as much. Let's see what this looks like. I think that looks pretty good. All the stems are bending at once which looks a little bit unnatural, so maybe I can just offset the key frames on each of these stems to make it a little bit more offset. They're not all happening at the same time. I'm just going to select all the key frames on this middle stem, drag them one frame over, and then maybe all the key frames on this one can go two frames over and I'll just keep a little bit more variety. Here's the final animation on the plant stems. 19. Animate Reactive Motion: Orange Leaf: [MUSIC] This little leaf on the orange should be reacting to the motion of this orange falling. Let's animate that now. First, I need to make sure that the leaf is parented to the orange so it stays connected, and then I need to make sure that the anchor point of this leaf is going to be rotating from the right point. I'm going to use the pan behind tool and hold down command to snap this into place. Now, obviously we already animated the orange so we can adjust the leaf's rotation according to this animation on the orange. But first I actually want to make sure that the orange is rotating because it's going to be bouncing off of this bowl right here, the bowl that you can actually see right now. There's this bowl that it's bouncing off of, and then as it bounces from here, it should be rotating just to make it look a little bit more interesting and realistic. I'm going to set those rotation keyframes first. It hits the bowl here, so I'm just going to hit R on the keyboard to bring up the rotation and set a rotation keyframe. Then let's just hit U to see all the keyframes. Let's go forward in time, and it should continue to rotate until it stops. Let's just make it do one full rotation, but I'm actually going to make it negative one, that way it'll rotate this direction, counterclockwise. Now we need to animate that leaf doing something that looks more natural than this. I'm just going to drag the leaf layer so that it aligns up with the orange layer. This isn't super necessary, but I just like to keep my layers neat and organized like this. As the oranges falling down, I want the leaf to be straight up and down, like the plant sounds, like the wind of falling is blowing that leaf up straight. Let's just change the rotation to negative 180. Our leaf isn't really attached to the orange at this point, so let's just move it over and just place it where it looks good. Let's set this rotation here for negative 180. As the orange falls, the leaf is sticking straight up in the air, but then once the orange bounces off the bowl and starts moving back up, the leaf should immediately come back down because the momentum of the orange going up is going to be pushing the leaf back down. Let's just set a key-frame. Let's go right here and just rotate this back down. Then as it lands on the ground, that actually is going to be a good rotation for it to have, so let's just move this keyframe over and then we'll adjust the spacing of this animation in the Graph Editor. First, I'll add Easy Ease, and then let's go into the Graph Editor. I want to make this happen so that right as the oranges bouncing back up, this is already flapping back down. I need to adjust these handles so that it really quickly animates back down, so there's a steep change right here. Something like that looks pretty good so far. Then from here, the orange is rolling but also bouncing. Let's see what it would do next. The orange is bouncing back up and turning, so I think the leaf would actually fall to the left and then it lands like this. Maybe the leaf at this point would be falling onto the ground like that. In-between here, let's see if this looks right. I think it would probably start falling a little bit sooner rather than being straight up because the orange is moving up, they would be pushing the leaf down, so let's adjust that in the Graph Editor. We want to make it fall down sooner, so if we adjust the curve like this, it'll do that. Let's move on to the next phase. Here the orange is spinning and it doesn't make sense that the leaf would go through the ground. Maybe at this point it flips over to the other side so that here it's like this. I think that looks pretty good. Then as we get to the end here, I noticed that on the orange layer, this last rotation keyframe is just a linear keyframe, so it's not going to slow down as it finishes rotating into its final position, and that's going to look a little bit abrupt. We need to add an Easy Ease to this, just like we did on the x position of the orange. I don't want to affect any of the other rotation on the rest of this layer, I want that to be linear because otherwise it's going to mess up how the leaf looks. On this last keyframe for the y position, this is where the orange just starts rolling and that's the part that I want to ease out. I'm going to set another linear keyframe on the rotation and then we'll just ease this very last keyframe. Now we can continue on with the rotation of this leaf. We had here, and then as the orange bounces back up, the leaf should probably be coming down so it rests on the ground like this here. We can probably make this happen a little bit sooner as motion of the orange goes up, the air pushes the leaf down. This should probably happen a little bit sooner, so we'll ease into the second keyframe and get steeper there, and then it's going to bounce one last time and then roll and we want this leaf to move into its final position, which is something like that. I think that looks pretty good. We might need to ease into this keyframe a little bit more, so I'll just drag this handle out. That looks pretty good I think. Let's play the whole thing back. The whole ending I feel like it's a little bit abrupt, so maybe we just take all of these keyframes and give it a little bit more time to roll and everything to rotate into place. I think that looks better. Now we have the orange with the leaf bouncing off of the bowl. 20. Putting it All Together: Now that we have all of our objects falling into place, let's just adjust the timing a little bit so that they don't all fall into place at the same exact time. Here's what we have so far. It would look great to have the watering can go first. Let's just leave the watering can as is, and then let's move the flower pot back a little bit. Maybe that'll start at five frames. I'll just move those and maybe the bowl. That will affect all the oranges. Maybe those should start at ten frames. That looks good. The orange slice should be a little bit later. Maybe it can come in, let's say, 20 frames, see how that looks. Maybe the oranges could actually come in a little bit sooner. Let's do the orange with the leaf first. The bowl looks like it's in place about here. Let's just see the keyframes on this orange. The soonest that it can come in would be here. Let's see how that looks. That looks pretty good. You can further adjust this to however you think it looks good. But I'll leave mine right here. 21. When to Use the Value vs Speed Graph: [MUSIC] When it comes in the value in speed graphs, it can be tempting to just want to get good at one, use that one all the time and ignore the other one, but one is not always better than the other, and taking a shortcut here isn't a good idea. Sometimes the value graph is better than the speed graph for adjusting the animation on a certain property, and sometimes it's the other way around. Sometimes there are trade-offs. Let's look at some different scenarios for when to use the value graph versus the speed graph. A lot of times animation that heavily relies on physics, like falling or bouncing objects is easier to use the value graph for, but sometimes the position property can be tricky in the graph editor. In order to use the value graph with position, you need to separate dimensions. Otherwise, there are no handles, at least in the value graph. This works out well if only in the x or y position is animated, or only one at a time is animated. It can also work well if you're animating something like a bounce where most of the action is taking place in one direction. Where things get messy is if you have a specific motion path that you want your layer to follow. In this case, separating dimensions can mess up the temporal interpolation. Here's an example. Let's say that I want this butterfly to move in this motion path, and I also want to adjust a temporal interpolation of this animation. First I'm just going to add easy ease to my keyframes because I want it to go slow, speed up, go slow here, speed up, slow here, and then speed up and slow down. I want it to do this easy ease motion. Maybe there's a flower or something at these points where it slows down, where I want it to actually go slow. Say this is the temporal interpolation that I want but say I want this to be a little bit more dramatic. I want the butterfly to take a longer pause at these keyframes. Pretend there's a flower here or something at these two keyframes. If I go into the graph editor, this is the value graph. Because I haven't separated out the dimensions, I don't have any handles so I can adjust this graph. But if I were to separate the dimensions, you can see that first of all, it changed the shape of the graph. Second of all, if I play this back, you can really tell that it took away the temporal interpolation of easy ease. I wanted the butterfly to go slow here, but if you look at the dots on the motion path, it's actually spaced out the dots really far apart at these keyframes, which means that the butterfly is going to be going really fast at these keyframes. I could try to smooth this out by adjusting the value graph but if I do that, you can see that it starts to actually affect the values because this is the value graph and that affects the actual motion path in the composition. This is not what I want. I'm just going to undo all of that and go back to when the dimensions weren't separated. Instead of adjusting the value graph when I want this specific motion path, is going to be a lot easier to adjust the speed graph. Again, I'm going to easy ease these, and let's go back into the graph editor, but switch over to the speed graph. Now I can adjust the speed graph without affecting the motion path. Now this will make the butterfly go especially fast in-between the keyframes and slower at the keyframes. Now this has given me the more dramatic effect that I was going for. Here's a little pro tip for you. It might not look super awkward because this is a butterfly, but if you had another object that was moving through your scene like this, and it looked awkward because it was taking a complete stop at the keyframe, here's a way that you can make it look a little bit more smooth. If you go into the graph editor, you can actually take this point where the speed reaches all the way to zero and bring it up so that it just keeps drifting. This can give you a really nice-looking animation. If we click and drag to select this keyframe, when you bring it up, you'll see only one of the handles is going to move. What you need to do first is actually right-click, go to Keyframe Velocity, and then check the box that says continuous lock outgoing to incoming, and then hit "Okay." Now you can bring this point up and it will bring both sides up so that the speed never gets to zero and it'll just drift. You can see what that looks like compared to this second keyframe. If you have an animation that's similar to this, this is a good way to smooth it out. A scenario that I like to use the speed graph for is when I want the spacing of different animations, possibly even on different properties to be the same. Whereas depending on the properties or if a value is negative, the value graphs may look quite different. The speed graph will look more similar. This is helpful to make things synchronize. The line art flowers that draw in the class project are a good example of an animation that I find the speed graph to be a little easier to work with. So far, we've animated things that have been driven by physics, but this animation is a bit more abstract. Since explaining how I created this entire flower animation is not super on topic for this class, I've created a separate tutorial on the exact step-by-step process to create something like this. You can check that out over on my YouTube channel. Right now, I have all the keyframe set on these flowers, but they're all linear, and I've also spaced out the layers so that things come in in the right order. I've used trim paths to animate the stem and branches animating in. For the leaves, flowers, and these little buds, I animated the scale and rotation. Let's look at a couple of examples of how I'd use the speed graph to polish this animation. On this leaf, I have scale and rotation keyframes. I'm going to add easy ease and then go into the graph editor. This is the speed graph, and you can see that the red graph is the scale and it's obviously above zero, and then the blue is the rotation, and since it's rotating in the negative direction, it's below zero. If I looked at the same thing in the value graph, you can see that it's not quite as symmetrical. While I could adjust in here, it's a little bit harder to visualize than the speed graph. For the animation on this leaf, I want it to go pretty quickly at the beginning and then really ease into its last keyframe. I'm just going to click and drag this influence handle so that the graph reflects that. It's just going to quickly scale and rotate and then slow down as it gets into its final resting position. It's important that the spacing on the scale and rotation is the same or synchronized for this leaf because I want it to look like one fluid motion, scaling and rotating at the same time. I find it easy to use the speed graph in a case like this. To summarize. With the position property, if you have a unique motion path, that your layer needs to follow, the speed graph is probably the better choice. If physics is involved and you don't have a complicated motion path, the value graph is usually easier to work with, and you'll need to separate dimensions. If you want to synchronize animations on different sets of keyframes, even if they're for different properties, it can be easier to do so using the speed graph. Aside from the position property, most other properties aren't as complicated so use whatever graph makes the most sense to you. There's not really a right or wrong way to do something, it's the result that matters. You'll figure out what works best in different scenarios as you continue to practice with the graph editor. 22. Rove Across Time: Going back to this butterfly animation, let me show you a different way that you can affect the temporal interpolation. Remember, this butterfly has this fancy Motion Path. Let's say that instead of making it slow down and speed up throughout the motion path, I just want it to move slow at the beginning, fast in the middle, and slow at the end. I want an overall Easy Ease over this whole motion path. That means that I need to get rid of these keyframes. But if I get rid of these keyframes, then it won't have the same motion path. What I can actually do instead is first, let's just apply regular old Easy Ease. Then on these two keyframes, I don't want their easing values to be calculated into the temporal interpolation for this entire layer, I just want to use their position properties so that it moves in this motion path, but I don't care about their temporal interpolation. In fact, I want to get rid of their temporal interpolation. What I can do is right-click on one of the keyframes and go to Rove Across Time. You'll see that move the keyframe slightly and made them these smaller circles. If you adjust these, it's going to revert it back to regular Easy Ease keyframes. You just leave these as is. What this has done if you look closely at the dots on the motion path is that it's made this entire animation an Easy Ease animation curve. Making these two keyframes, which you can see as these little dots on this animation curve. Making these rove across time keyframes has erased their temporal interpolation, but kept their spatial interpolation. 23. When to Use Plugins: [MUSIC] I mentioned earlier in class that you should rarely leave your keyframes as the default linear keyframes but not every project is as physics-based as the class project and sometimes there are more efficient ways to adjust the spacing of an animation than going into the graph editor. This definitely doesn't mean that you can skip learning the graph editor, if you want to create professional animations there's no way around it. There are a few different plugins that have graphed presets you can apply to your keyframes with just a click. A plugin is a piece of third-party software that you can download and install into After Effects. My favorite plugin for animation curves shortcuts is motion. It may be a little pricier than some of the other options, but it has tons of other related and unrelated features that I think make it well worth it. Let's look at some of the features within motion related to the graph editor, so here I just have a really simple animation with linear keyframes. If I select these keyframes, instead of applying easy ease and then going into the graph editor, I could just use one of the presets for motion. I'm just going to click on one of these little graph icons and it will apply that motion to my animation and if you go into the graph editor, you can see that this is applied, that easing. This is the speed graph and you can also see that within motion you have a little preview of the speed graph here so all of these presets are speed graphs. Now you can also adjust the graph right here in this little preview. With your keyframes selected if you click and drag in this graph, you can adjust it right within motion. Also, if you click and drag on this center darker line, it will adjust the graph symmetrically from the center. Also notice that these sliders are moving when I adjust the graph and that's because the sliders can also adjust your graph, so it's pulling the influence handles within the graph editor. You can also type in the numbers for the influence. If you go into the graph editor, if you didn't already notice this, when you drag a handle, you can see this influence number which is a percent, that's the number represented here. If I wanted it to be 56 percent, I could just type that in here. You can either type in numbers or you sliders, which is the equivalent of adjusting the influence handles. If you drag the center button, it will adjust symmetrically so you just click and drag and it will adjust your graph symmetrically. As always, you get a preview here. You can also reset your keyframes to linear or to hold keyframes with these handy buttons here. If I want the spacing on my animation to be something really specific, I still use the graph editor rather than trying to do it in motion. If you create an animation curve that you want to use over and over, you can save it as a preset with this button here. When is it okay to use a graph preset rather than going into the graph editor? Well, the flowers drawing in from the class project would be a good use case. Animations that are more abstract or aren't rooted in physics are good candidates for graph presets. In motion graphic style animations, if you have multiple elements that you want to all animate in the same way, animation presets are great. Here's an example. In this design of a speed graph, I animated the handles and the graph adjusting. I want to make sure that all of these keyframes have the same easing values so what I can do is just select all of these first ones, this is first move and apply a graph preset so maybe I want it to go slow and then fast and then it's going to just maintain that same position. Then it's going to animate back the way it came. Maybe I want to do fast and then slow on this one so this way I can just apply the same easing on all of these. Now sometimes you may get a little bit of unwanted drift, which you can see right here. I don't want anything to move between these two keyframes. These keyframes are the same values so nothing should move, but you can see that there is movement so what I can do is just select these keyframes, right click and do toggle hold keyframe. And that way I won't have that unintentional animation that After Effects added that I don't want. I'm probably going to get the same problem here. If you look really closely at the motion path, you can see that After Effects has added a little bit of overshoot animation that I don't want so by selecting the keyframes, right clicking and doing toggle hold keyframe it gets rid of that. If I look into my graph editor, you can see that by using these presets, it just nicely applied the same easing values to all these different keyframes so in this case, using a preset was really efficient. Another plugin that's helpful for making sure that multiple sets of keyframes have the same spacing is EaseCopy. Let's say that I had adjusted the spacing on this set of keyframes and now I wanted to apply that same spacing to these other sets of keyframes. Maybe I did something really custom in the graph editor or maybe I used presets. Either way, you can use EaseCopy to copy the easing on the set of keyframes that you've already adjusted and then just select the other keyframes and hit, Ease. What EaseCopy allows you to do is to copy the spacing on a set of keyframes, which they call the easing and paste it onto another set of keyframes without affecting the value of those keyframes. If you're interested in learning more and seeing an example of when this is helpful, check out my class, Top 5 Plugins for Efficiency and After Effects. Or if you're interested in learning about some of the other features in motion that's also covered in that class. 24. What's Next: [MUSIC] Congrats on completing this class. I hope you feel like you have a better understanding of how to control the spacing of your animations in the graph editor. The skills that you learned in this class will take practice to fully master, but now you have a foundation to build on. If you're out for sharing, I'd love to see your class project. You can post your project as a GIF using the Image button or by uploading it to a site like YouTube or Vimeo and posting the link here. If there's anything in particular that you want feedback on, be sure to include a note to let me know. If you post on Instagram, tag me so I can see it there. To keep learning, click on my name above this video to check out the other classes that I'm teaching on Skillshare, and make sure that you're following me on Skillshare, YouTube, and Instagram for more classes, tips, and tutorials. Thanks so much for being here. Until next time. Happy animating. [MUSIC]