Part 1 - Animation and Compositing Basics

[♪♪] [ADOBE TV Presents] [♪♪] [CLASSROOM - Basic Compositing & Animation in After Effects CS5] [♪♪] Hello. My name is Adam Shaening-Pokrasso. I'm a multimedia educator, producer, and artist working in San Francisco. Today I'm going to be teaching you about animation and compositing using After Effects. After Effects is a very powerful tool used in the creation of title sequences in movies, commercials, and even some web banner ads. In doing this, we first want to start with some basic terminology. So I want to walk you through some terms that we're going to use throughout the course. First of all, the term compositing is a term that refers to the merging of multiple images that come from different sources. So this can be still images, video images, even hand-drawn imagery that can be combined together to create the illusion of everything existing in one unified environment. Another term that you should know is layers. Layers is the process of stacking multiple images together to create a sort of composite sandwich. We refer to layers in both After Effects as well as in physical animation environments. Traditionally, it was like cel animation when we were working with multiple layers of transparency, stacking them together. In After Effects, we also work with layers. The rule is always the same. The layer that's on top is always the layer that's in front. Another term you should know is the term animation. Animation refers to the rapid display of images to create the illusion of motion. This is also based on the phenomenon of persistence of vision, where multiple images are shown quickly to create the illusion of motion. Another way we use the term animation is to add movement to static images. Finally, the term keyframe is an important one to know as well. A keyframe traditionally referred to an animation technique where an illustrator would draw a key moment in an animation, maybe at the beginning or end of an action, and then a junior animator would go in and animate all the frames in between. So this term keyframe also carries over to the digital world, where we have key moments in an animation, either at the start, change, or end of a movement where certain attributes are adjusted. This could be things like position or scale, seeing something grow or fade in opacity. These are all done with keyframes. Keyframes are really the central tool in After Effects that make everything possible. So now that you understand some of the basic terms, I think it's about time to get started looking at some media and getting started doing some animation. If you're watching this from the Adobe TV website, go ahead and click the Download Sample Files button, and that will give you all the source media that we'll be working with. If you're watching this from another site, go to the URL that you see on the screen and then download the sample files there. So here we have the folder that you just downloaded, AE Title Sequence. Go ahead and open that now. I'm working on a Mac, as you can see, so my finder might look a little different than yours if you're working on a Windows machine, but all the files are the same. Go ahead and navigate to the Exports folder. Notice how I have my Project folder organized. Organization is a very important aspect of any job, whether it's video production, animation, or any creative medium. Just keeping files organized is a very important thing. You'll find in this Exports folder a finished movie called Power Foundation. This is a title sequence that we're going to be building as part of this workshop. [♪♪] [EARTH PICTURES presents] [a film about ENERGY] [directed by TIGER KIRCHMAN] [starring KATE MARQUEZ] [power FOUNDATION] [♪♪] So as you can see, this file is combining a bunch of different sources, using video, still images, text, and even modifying things with nice edges, like the stroke effect that you'll see later. We're going to build this, and you're going to start by going to the first lesson. You'll find this in the AE Lessons folder. Go ahead and navigate to the AE Lessons folder and open up Lesson 1. This will open up After Effects CS5. So now that you've opened After Effects, it'll first show you the welcome screen. Since we've got a project file ready to load, I'm just going to hit Close here on the welcome screen and then we can get started. We're starting with an empty project. So before I build some stuff and import some of my assets, I want to give you a little tour of our workspace. First of all, you have the Project panel on the left-hand side. The Project panel is your central organization tool. This is where you collect all of your media and store your image, video, sound, and even compositions in your project. Above the Project panel you'll find the Toolbar. The Toolbar has a variety of different tools available to you which are used to do different things in After Effects, generally things like moving your stage around, moving layers, rotating layers, so on and so forth. Below that in the center of the frame you'll see the Composition panel. The Composition panel is the central area where you see everything happen. This is the visual area where you can manipulate some layers, but for the most part, this is where you see all of your animation happen. Below that is your Timeline. Your Timeline is the area where you structure layers, you organize the order of those layers, and you place keyframes in time in order to create animation. You'll find in the Timeline area that there will be a time bar across the top of the Timeline area which will tell you the current time of where you're parked. On the right-hand side, we have the Info panel, Preview panel, and other things like Effects & Presets, and a variety of other panels that might come up in After Effects. The Preview panel is very important since in After Effects we don't just hit spacebar to play. We actually use a tool called RAM Preview. We'll look a little bit more at that later. So we're ready to get started. What I'd like you to do is navigate to the File menu, then select Import, then select File. What you'll notice is that there is a Command I key command there which is a shortcut enabling you to get to this menu quicker. If you're working on a PC, Control I is your key command. Go ahead and click that now. Once you're in this dialog, then you'll want to navigate to your Project folder. Mine happens to be found on the desktop. So go ahead and navigate to that now. Select the AE Title Sequence folder, then select the Video folder. In this Video folder you're going to find four video files that we're going to use as part of this title animation. We want to import all four of them. We can do so by just selecting the Video folder, then selecting Open. Go ahead and do that now. As you can see, the Video folder has now been imported. I'd like you to click on that little triangle there to open this folder up and find the assets therein. As you can see, there are four video files there, the same four files that are found on your desktop. After Effects works like a lot of software, where it links to the files on the desktop or on your hard drive. So when you move these files around, it may lose the link in After Effects. Something to be mindful of. Keep your project organized. The next thing we want to do is to build a new composition from one of these video files. Select the Faucet Drops video, then drag this video file onto the New Composition button that you'll find at the bottom of the Project panel. Let go of your mouse, and you'll see that it creates a new composition. You'll find that the settings for this composition match your video file. It's a good way to keep things consistent. It's got a slightly different icon here, and this represents a composition or a timeline. This is an assembly of a variety of images, videos, or other sources to create a composite. I prefer not to have this file located in the same video folder since it's not a video. So I'd like you to create another folder called Compositions or Comps. Go ahead and do that now by clicking on the New Folder button at the bottom of your Project panel. This will create a new folder, and you'll want to title that Comps. Once it's titled, deselect by clicking below in the empty gray area. Then move the Faucet Drops composition into the Comps folder. Now you'll find that inside of the Comps folder you also have the new comp that you just created. Go ahead and double click on this comp to open it if it's not already open. Before we begin our animation with this composition, I'd like to import one more asset, and that's going to be the music. Music can be an important driving force behind motivation for animation. It can give us inspiration around timing, inspiration around colors, feeling. All of that is driven by a lot of the sound. To import the music, we're going to do this a little differently this time. You can double click in the empty gray area in your Project panel to open up the Import File dialog box. This time instead of importing from the Video folder, we'll need to navigate back to the desktop. Go ahead and do that. Then locate the AE Title Sequence folder and find the Music folder. Once again, we want to keep things organized in folders, so instead of just importing the single asset, I'm going to go ahead and import the whole folder. Go ahead and do that. As you can see, the Music folder has now been imported. And inside of it is the PowerFoundation.wav file. This is the music that you'll be using as part of this animation. Now that you have your music file, let's give it a listen. Go ahead and double click on the Power Foundation file, and it will open in the Footage panel in the central area of After Effects. To listen to this file, most video people reach for the spacebar. But the spacebar isn't the main tool that we use to preview things. In After Effects, we use two keys. To preview most things, we use the RAM Preview button, which you'll find in the Preview panel on the very right-hand side. The key command for this is a button found on your alphanumeric keypad on the right-hand side. It's important to distinguish that this separate keypad works as different buttons than the keypad on your main keyboard area. If you are working on a laptop, you'll want to use an alphanumeric keypad as an external device or even just plug in an external keyboard so that you have full control over these key commands. So you can hit the zero key to play back both video and audio or if you just want to play back audio, you can use the period key to the right-hand side of the zero key. If you don't have an alphanumeric keypad, you'll want to navigate your mouse to the RAM Preview button found in the Preview panel. Go ahead and click that now. [♪music playing♪] This will initiate playback of the audio. Go ahead and give it a listen and get a feel for the movement at the beginning. This first shot is going to be the very first thing that we see. To stop playback, you can hit the spacebar to stop the playback. [music stops] Now that you've heard some of the audio and get a feel for the beginning of the music, let's navigate to the Composition panel so that we can begin animation on the faucet. To do this, click on the top left tab in the Composition panel. This will bring you to the Composition area. The first thing I'd like you to do is build a new text layer. To do this, click on the Text tool that you'll find on the top Toolbar. It's the little T located right here. Once you've clicked on the Text tool, you'll notice that two new panels appear, the Character panel and the Paragraph panel. These panels give you complete control over the text formatting of your layer. To create a new layer, I'd like you to click in your Composition area with your Text tool. You'll notice that a new text layer is created on your composition. But there's no text in there yet, so you'll have to add some text. Now that you've created a new text layer, go ahead and type in the words Earth Pictures Presents. Then let's modify the formatting for this type. I want you to highlight the words Earth Pictures. To do this, place your cursor left of the letter E and then drag from left to right so that you highlight the words Earth Pictures. This works very much the same way as it would in any other word processing program, and it allows you to modify specific characters or words within a single text layer to have different formatting. And we're going to do this so that the words Earth Pictures are nice and bold and big while the word Presents is a little bit more scripty. I'm going to choose a font called Impact. To do this, move your cursor to the Font area on your Character panel, then select the font Impact. If you don't have the font Impact, then you can use an alternative font such as Arial. Then to make this font all caps, you can select the All Caps button at the bottom of the Character panel right here. You'll notice that it's now all caps. We also want to modify the word Presents to use the Brush Script font. First, highlight the word Presents by placing your cursor on the left side of the letter P and select the word Presents by dragging from left to right. Now move your cursor to the Font menu and select the font Brush Script Std. Now that you've modified the font for the word Presents, let's talk a little bit about the importance of choosing a font. Font choice can be pretty extensive and an overwhelming field. So if you're just getting started with this, choose simple fonts. There are some really important factors to think about. First of all, make sure it's legible. If your viewers can't read it, then what's the point of putting text on the screen, right? Second of all, make sure that it's big enough, that it can be read on most screens. Consider that it might be on a mobile device or in other scenarios. Things like this will weigh in to the font choice that you make. But again, start simple and build from there. Now that the word Presents has been modified, go ahead and move it to the next line by clicking Return to the left of the letter P. I'm going to place my cursor to the left of the letter P, click, and hit the Return key on your keyboard. This will move it to the next line. So far, what we've done is modified individual words in this text layer. But now we want to modify the whole text layer as one to make everything a little larger and to control the leading or space between the lines. To do this, you'll need to deselect then reselect. To deselect, move your cursor into the empty gray area on your Timeline. Click once. This deselects that text layer. To reselect it, just click the Earth Presents text layer in your composition. This will reselect that same layer. Therefore, all the content within the text layer will be modified. Move your cursor to the Character panel and modify the Font Size setting. To do this, you'll notice that once you hover over the Font Size setting, your cursor changes from an arrow to a little hand with a double arrow left and right. This signifies that you can change the value by clicking and dragging either left or right to scale this value up or down. We want the font to be larger. Therefore, we're going to click and drag to the right. Go ahead and do that now. I'd like the font to be about 48 to 50 pixels. And there we have it. The other thing that we want to modify is the space between lines. This is also referred to as leading. You'll find it to the right of the Point Size setting. This setting is currently set to Auto, which means that it will scale the space between lines depending on the font size. We want to override that so that there's a little less space between these two lines. To do that, click and drag to the left and then to the right so that it scales up or down. Again, I'm trusting what looks good, but in this case I'm using about a value of 30. Now that we've modified the space between lines and the font size, let's go ahead and change the color for the word Presents. I want to highlight the word Presents. This time we're going to do this by double clicking on the word Presents with our Text tool. Move your cursor to the word Presents and double click to highlight the entire content of the word Presents. Then let's change the font color by going to the Character panel and clicking on the color swatch, which is currently set to white. This brings you to the Text Color dialog box, which allows you to change the color of your text. I'm going to select the color orange. First, modify the hue selector so that you're in the range of orange by just clicking and dragging up so that you get to the orange range. That looks about right. Then move your color selector in the big square area to the top right corner so that you get a pure orange color. To complete this color change, click the OK button, and it will modify the word Presents so that it's now orange. I chose the color orange here because it complements the color blue. It's a nice color harmony. If color theory is new to you, I suggest you familiarize yourself with the color wheel. The color wheel displays colors in a circle or in a wheel and displays opposite colors and complementary colors. It's a great tool to help you identify color harmonies. Then you're going to want to change from your Text tool to your Selection tool. To do this, move your cursor to the top Toolbar and select the Selection tool on the very top left. You'll notice that a Tool Tip pops up. This says that the Selection tool can also be enabled through the key command of the letter V. You can click the letter V on your keyboard to quickly switch to the Selection tool. I think of the letter V as corresponding to the Selection tool because it kind of looks like an arrow with the triangular shape. It's just a quick way to remember it. So now what I'd like you to do is to open up the text layer by selecting the text layer on your Timeline. Move your cursor to the Timeline panel and select the Earth Presents layer. Then click on the little arrow that you see to the left of this layer to allow this layer to open up. This will reveal two attributes: Text and Transform. We want to dig in to the Transform attributes to view some of the movement attributes that we'll be using as part of this animation. So click on the Transform arrow to the left of the word Transform. This will open up this area. What you'll notice is that After Effects takes up quite a bit of space in this Timeline area. So what you may want to do is modify the arrangement of your workspace so you have a little bit more workspace dedicated to your Timeline. To do this, move your cursor into the seam between the two panels, the Composition and the Timeline panel. You'll notice your cursor changes to a little double arrow cursor. And then click and drag up to expand the Timeline area. Now that we have a little bit more space to work in, let's talk a little bit about these five attributes. These attributes--Anchor Point, Position, Scale, Rotation, and Opacity-- are the five attributes that are consistent with all layers in After Effects that have some visual content. So this could mean a video, an image, a still image, a solid layer, a bunch of different layers. They're all going to have these same five attributes. Therefore, we can use these same basic attributes to animate virtually anything. In this case we'd like to have this text move from the right side to the left side. This is using the Position attribute. Each one of these attributes can be recalled using a keyboard shortcut. It's usually the first letter of the attribute. So in the case of Position, it's the P key. You click the P key on your keyboard, and it will reveal just the Position attribute. If you want to revert back to viewing all the attributes, you'll need to move your cursor back to the little arrow area, close the layer, then reopen it. This will reveal all five attributes again. So again, A for Anchor Point, P for Position, S for Scale, R for Rotation. And Opacity is a little bit different. We actually use the T key for Opacity, not the O key. I think of transparency as a way to remember that. So we want to view just the Position attribute. To do that, you'll want to click the P key on your keyboard, and now you're viewing just the Position attribute. If you move your cursor to the text layer on your Composition panel like so, then click on the text layer and move it around, notice that these values change as I move things around. These two values consist of an X and a Y, so the X axis moving horizontally and the Y axis moving vertically. We can move these things onscreen by clicking on the text layer on the Composition panel to move things around. Or you can modify this attribute by coming down here to the Position attribute. In the same way we modified the Font Point size, you can just click and drag left or right on either the X or Y attribute and it will slide left and right or up and down if you click on the Y attribute. I'm thinking I want this text to move from the right-hand side to the left. It's going to move in pretty quickly and then land and then kind of drift a little bit. I've noticed that having a little bit of drift to movement helps to make things a little bit more interesting. So we're going to place three keyframes. You haven't seen how to make a keyframe yet, but it's really quite simple. To create your first keyframe, you'll want to click on the Stopwatch button to the left of the Position attribute. Go ahead and do that now. This will enable keyframing. It places the first keyframe wherever your current time indicator is parked. Notice that it also creates a little diamond icon which signifies there is a keyframe at that current moment. So I'm thinking I want this to move from left to right in about 10 frames. On the top left of your Timeline you'll see a little yellow area which currently has a bunch of zeroes to it. That's the current time. So when I move my current time indicator, this little yellow bar right here, and slide it left or right, notice that those numbers change, signifying a change in time. As I move through this, you'll notice that the water from the faucet is dripping, signifying playback of the video. And if we had multiple keyframes, you might see some of the animation on the text. Animation doesn't occur with just one keyframe. You need two or more keyframes. And as I mentioned in the beginning, all the information in between is filled out by the application. We want this text to begin on the right-hand side. So go ahead and park at the very beginning of your composition on top of the very first keyframe that you've already placed. You can also use the key command of the Home key on your keyboard. This will always put you at the very beginning of your comp. Then grab your text layer on the Composition panel and slide it over to the right-hand side so it's just below the faucet and just on the outside of your stage. Since you've already got a keyframe at that moment, you don't have to change anything else. You just need to advance forward and then modify the value. We want to advance forward about 10 frames. So grab your current time indicator and slide it to the right until you see the number 10 appear in your Current Time area. At this point you'll need to place a new keyframe. To do this, click on the Diamond button to the left of the Position attribute like so. Then modify the X value so that it's moving just from right to left and not moving up or down. The easiest way to do this is to actually click on the X value and just drag it to the left. You may have to click and drag multiple times since it's traveling a good amount of distance. I want it to land so that it's just about aligned with the faucet on the left-hand side. That's the first landing point. So this movement occurs in 10 frames, moving from the right-hand side to about center in frame. For the rest of the animation, we want to see this layer drift from right to left so that it's got slow, subtle movement to make it a little more elegant. To do that, we can jump to the end of our Timeline by using the End key on your keyboard just below the Home key. So Home will put you at the very beginning, and End will put you at the very end. Click the End key on your keyboard. This places you at the very end of your Timeline. Then let's add a little bit more movement on the X axis by clicking on the X attribute and sliding from right to left. This will give it a little bit extra drift. Previously, you noticed that we clicked the New Keyframe button to add a new keyframe. You can do this, but as you noticed, once I modified the X attribute, it automatically placed a new keyframe on this layer because this layer attribute is already being animated. Once you've placed your first keyframe on any attribute and you've moved your current time indicator and you changed the value, it automatically adds a new keyframe, making it quick and simple to modify these values. So now we want to play back our animation. As I mentioned before, you could use the spacebar, but it's not ideal because it might not play in real time. So instead, you'll want to move your cursor to the RAM Preview button found in the Preview panel. You can click this button or use the keyboard shortcut, which is the zero key on your alphanumeric keypad. It then begins playback of your animation, and you'll see that the movement from right to left happens pretty quickly and then it has a little bit of drift to it. Let's watch it again. I'm going to hit the spacebar to stop playback of the animation. So that concludes basic animation. It's as simple as placing two keyframes to add animation to virtually any attribute. In the next part, we're going to be looking at animation techniques, keyframe interpolation, some of the Rotation tool, and basic effects. I'll see you in the next part. [Adam Shaening Pokrasso - Presenter/Course Design] [Bob Donlon - Executive Producer/Instruction Supervisor] [♪♪] [Kush Amerasinghe - Director/Graphics/Assets/Course Design] [Karl Miller - Producer] [Erik Espera - Editor/DP] [ADOBE TV PRODUCTIONS - tv.adobe.com] [♪♪]