Part 2 - Animation Technique and Keyframe Interpolation

[♪♪] [ADOBE TV Presents] [♪♪] [CLASSROOM - Basic Compositing & Animation in After Effects CS5] In the previous episode we looked at basic movement with After Effects. In this episode we'll be looking at animation technique as well as keyframe interpolation. So if you're just joining us, you can start by opening up the second lesson. If you're continuing from the previous lesson, you can either choose to continue on your current project or open the new lesson. To open the new lesson, move your cursor to the AE Title Sequence folder that you've downloaded. Then find the AE Lessons folder and double click on the lesson02 project file. This will open up the second lesson. As you can see, our previous lesson is complete, and we're looking at the first scene, which is the animated faucet and text moving from right to left. The next thing we want to do is to create a new composition from a different video file. So move your cursor to the video folder in your Project panel and open it by clicking the little triangle to the left of the video folder. Then create a new composition from the light bulb movie by clicking on the light bulb movie and dragging it onto the New Composition button. This will create a new composition from that movie. The attributes will match, so it's still 720 x 1280, the same frame rate, and all the attributes therein. We also want to keep our project folder organized, so I'll want you to move your light bulb composition into the composition folder. To do that, click the light bulb composition and drag it up to the top, where you're finding the comps folder. Then let go to move it into that folder. This keeps comps separate from video files, so on and so forth. This organization will really just help things go smoothly when you're working in the application as well as being smooth when you're communicating with other After Effects artists. So you've got your light bulb composition created, and you see your timeline has changed. So now we want to preview our video and get a sense of what we're looking at. To do that, move your cursor to the current time indicator, click, then drag right-- this is also called scrubbing--so that you can view the timeline. You'll see the light turn on, then later turn off. I'm going to move my current time indicator back to the beginning of my composition. Now I want to create another text layer in this one. This time it's going to be a little different. In the previous part, what we did was we moved the text from the right-hand side to the left-hand side. In this part what I'd like you to do is have the text move from below the screen up onto screen. But it's not just going to be that simple. We want it to move up onto screen but then land and slide back down. This sort of refers to a theory called squash and stretch. Squash and stretch stems from traditional animation where things in motion didn't experience just movement in position but their scale would change, different attributes would change depending on the friction of the environment. In this case what we're going to have happen is instead of just a layer rising up and stopping, it's going to rise up past its destination and slowly land back to it. This gives the feeling that it's kind of elastic. It makes it feel more realistic. Let's begin. To create your new text layer, the quickest way I've found is instead of creating everything from scratch and reformatting your text, we can just go back to our previous composition and copy the text layer. Move your cursor to the faucet drops tab on your timeline. Click on it, then click on the Earth Production Presents layer. Once you've selected the text layer, you'll want to copy it. To do this, you use your keyboard shortcut of Command C or Control C if you're on a PC. Go ahead and click that now, Command C. This copies this layer into my clipboard. Now I'm going to go the light bulb tab on my timeline area, click on it, and hit Command V on your keyboard. This will paste whatever has been copied into your clipboard into the current composition. If you're working on a PC, the key command is Control V. So now we've got the same animation, the same layer--everything is the same from this composition to the previous one. So now what I'd like you to do is remove all the animation from the current layer. To remove these keyframes, you first need to reveal them. Move your cursor to the Animation menu. Click on the Animation menu, and at the bottom you'll notice Reveal Animating Properties and Reveal Modified Properties. You'll also see a U symbolizing a keyboard shortcut for this particular command. So if you hit the U key, it will reveal all the properties that have keyframes. This is a great key command, one definitely worth remembering, because this is a quick way to just get to all your keyframes on a given layer. So go ahead and click that now. You'll notice that position is the only attribute which is animating. To remove keyframes, it's the same process as starting to keyframe. You just click the stopwatch, and this will remove all keyframes on that particular attribute. Go ahead and do that now. Now we have no more keyframes on that particular attribute. So now that we've removed all the position keyframes for the text layer, we'll want to reposition it to be in a complementary place for the light bulb in the background. To do this, move your cursor onto the Composition panel and then grab the text layer and move it onscreen so that it's on the left-hand side. Then advance your current time indicator forward in time by scrubbing the current time indicator to the right. This will reveal the light as it's turned on. After you've moved a second or so down the timeline, we'll want to reposition the light so that it's rotated vertically, facing down, kind of like a light bulb would naturally. Before we animate the text layer, I'd like you to open up the light bulb layer with the rotation attribute. That's right. That's the R key. All you need to do is select the R key with the light bulb layer selected and it will reveal the rotation attribute. Please do that now. Now that you have the rotation attribute revealed, we're going to turn this layer so that it's vertical. The rotation attribute has 2 values. The first value is the revolutions value. This defines how many times the layer has spun around. The second value is the degree value, and that defines how many degrees of turn the layer has turned. We're not going to animate this value, so there's no need to add keyframes. But we do want to rotate the layer so that it's facing down. To do this, you'll want to move the degree value to the left and make it negative 90 degrees. So place your cursor on this degree value and click and drag to the left till you see -90. It might be kind of hard to get that -90 dialed in, so another way to do this quickly is just simply to click in the value once and type the numbers -90 and hit Return or Enter. This will confirm the value, and it will now be rotated so that the light bulb is facing down. Now that you've rotated the layer, you'll need to reposition it to the right-hand side. So move your cursor on the Composition panel to grab the layer and move it to the right-hand side. Then move it down so that the base of the bulb is positioned at the top of the composition. Be sure not to move it too much, like this, because then when the light turns up, you'll notice the edge of the layer, and that's not good. We want to make sure that it feels like it's all one cohesive composite. So be sure the top of the light bulb or the base of the light bulb is positioned above the top of the composition. Then we're going to have this Earth Pictures layer move from the bottom up. We also want to modify the type to read something else. We could either animate it or change the text first. This is a really cool feature of After Effects. Nothing is set in stone. You can always modify these things later. I'm going to start by modifying the content of the text. First you'll need to change to your Text tool. So move your cursor to the toolbar and select the T for the Text tool. Or you can use Command T or Control T on the PC if you want to get the Text tool. So then select the words "Earth Pictures," then type the word "Energy." Now it says "Energy presents." What we want it to say is "a film about energy," and we want the yellow text, the brush text, to be on top. So what we'll need to do is highlight the "presents" word by highlighting it, then hitting Command X or Control X if you're on a PC. This will cut this text and then allow you to move it to the beginning of the text layer. Hit the Delete key to move up to the previous line, and then cursor to the left of the word "Energy" and hit Command V or Paste to paste the word "presents." Now we want the word "Energy" to be on the second line, so go ahead and hit the Return key to move it to the next line. Once again, the leading needs a little bit of modification. I want a little bit more space between those lines. In order to do this, I'm going to deselect the layer, then reselect it, then adjust the leading. Place your cursor in the bottom area of your timeline in the empty gray area, click once to deselect, then click the words "presents Energy" and go over to the Character panel and adjust the leading, which is currently set to 40. We want more space, which means a higher value. You can do this by clicking and dragging to the right. I'd say a value of 50 is about right. So it looks good from this view, but I think I might need to get in a little bit closer to really see what it looks like. To zoom in to your Composition panel, there's a couple of ways to do it. First of all, at the bottom of your Composition panel you'll see a value which represents the magnification ratio. By clicking on this, you'll notice you have a bunch of different scale ratios. It allows you to see things at larger or smaller ratios. I'm going to zoom in, so I want something larger than 33%. How about 50%? Once you click 50%, you'll notice that your Composition panel is now larger, viewing your composition at a larger scale. Nothing's changed about the animation. This is just for preview. Another way to zoom in and out of your Composition panel is by using Command + or Command -. If you're on a PC, it's Control + or Control -. This will allow you to zoom in with Command + or out with Command -. If you do have a mouse with a scroll wheel, you can zoom in by scrolling up or zoom out by scrolling down. Notice scrolling up and scrolling down, zooming in and out. If you want to ensure that the composition fits perfectly within the Composition panel, you can do this by going over to the magnification ratio and selecting Fit or Fit up to 100%. Go ahead and do that now. The key command for this is Shift and /. Now what we want to do is modify the text once again so that instead of saying the words "presents" we say "a film about." You've still got your Text tool enabled, so hover over the word "presents" and double click. Then change the word "presents" to read "a film about." The other thing I'd like to modify for this text layer is to make it aligned right instead of aligned left. This is going to be done in the Paragraph panel. With your text layer selected, move your cursor to the Paragraph panel and select the Right Align Text button. This will change the text so that the alignment is to the right-hand side. It looks as though it moved in position, though, so we may have to reposition this a little bit. The position value, however, did not change. It's just changing the alignment of the text. To move the position value, you'll need to change back to your Selection tool. The key command for that is the V key. Go ahead and change to the Selection tool. Then select the text layer and move it to the right so that it's positioned in a way that's complementing the light bulb. I think the most appropriate position for this text layer is somewhere between about halfway between the light bulb and the left-hand side of the composition. This just deals with visual balance. There's lots of concepts corresponding to design and graphic design and layout, and for this case you want to trust your eyes and go off what you feel is correct. But I think the most important thing is to make sure it's legible and feels balanced. So this looks about right. Now what I want to do is animate the position value. Move your cursor down to the text layer and begin at the very beginning of the composition by hitting the Home key. This moves your current time indicator to the beginning of the comp. You'll place your first keyframe by clicking the stopwatch on the position value. Then advance, say, 10 to 20 frames forward. Before, we did this by scrolling with the current time indicator. There is a shortcut, though. You can hit Shift and Page Down on your keyboard. Go ahead and click Shift, Page Down. This will move you 10 frames forward in time. You can also use your Page Down key alone, which will just move you 1 frame forward in time. Notice I click Page Down, and it's 11 frames. You can repeat this to move it, say, 15 frames or so. Timing will always be something that you can adjust later. I think getting the general animation dialed in is the most important part. Later we can decide if it needs to be quicker or slower. Now that you're parked at 15 frames, go ahead and add another keyframe at this point in time by clicking the diamond button on the position value. The position for this moment is about right, but I want to go to the previous keyframe and adjust that so that it rises up from beneath the composition. To jump to the previous keyframe, you can do so by using the J key. The J and K keys are used to jump between the previous and next keyframes or go to previous and next keyframes. I think of "jump keyframe" as a way to remember J and K-- J to move backwards, K to move forwards. So we're going to use the J key to go to the previous keyframe. Now that you're parked on the first keyframe, you'll want to reposition the text layer so that it's beneath the composition. Go ahead and do this by grabbing the text layer onscreen and dragging it down. But you'll notice that it's sliding left and right while I slide it down. This is because it's moving both on the X and Y axis. To have it move just on 1 axis at a time, you can hold the Shift key. This will constrain it so that it only moves on the Y axis in this case. So while holding the Shift key, move your text layer to beneath the composition, and that way it moves in a straight line. Let's go ahead and scrub through our timeline and just see how that looks. I'm going to grab the current time indicator and scrub to the right, see what happens. Looks good. Slides from the bottom up. As I mentioned before, we don't want it to just move up and land. We want it to go past its destination and then fall back into it. So what we want is maybe to modify the second keyframe to be a little bit higher. All you have to do is park on that keyframe either by using the J and K key to jump to it or by just simply moving your current time indicator and parking on top of that keyframe. It's important to know the modification that you make only happens to the current time. It doesn't happen to the keyframe that's selected. So if you think that I'm going to modify this first keyframe by selecting it, then you're wrong. Really, you have to be parked on the keyframe to modify it. With my current time indicator parked on the second keyframe, go ahead and move the position of the text layer up. We do this by grabbing it onscreen, holding Shift, and then sliding it up. I'm going to go to just about the middle of the frame, positioning it so that it's really nice and centered. It's going to rise up to this point but then slowly drop down to the point a little bit lower than that. I'm thinking maybe another 20 frames or so before it lands at its final destination. So we can use Shift and Page Down to advance another 20 frames forward. I'll click it twice. Shift, Page Down. That's 10 frames forward. Then Shift, Page Down again. That's 20. That means that it rises up in about 15 and falls in about 20, a little bit faster because the elasticity of things moves quickly in the beginning and loses a little bit of velocity over time. This just deals with basic animation theory. So then what we'll want to do is move the position of the layer down. Once again, grab the layer, slide it down, but be sure to hold that Shift key. I'm going to move this down so that it's about at the lower third of the layer. Think of the layer as dividing it into thirds. There's a couple of sweet spots in the layer. If you divide any composition or image in thirds, you'll find that the connection points between those different divisions make great sweet spots for text and for different layouts. Your eye is generally not attracted to the center of frame. We use off-center compositions and balance things like this. So now we want to just get a feel for how it's moving, so let's preview it. This time when I preview it, I don't just want to preview it in the position that it's at. I want to look at the Composition panel a little bit larger. So with the Selection tool, be sure to select the Composition panel. Then hit the Tilde key, which is above the Tab key on your keyboard. This will maximize this panel to be full size onscreen. This is a great way to view your composition if you want to see it full screen. There are other ways to do this as well. So now let's preview it. You remember your key command? It's the zero key on the alphanumeric keypad. Once again, if you don't have an alphanumeric keypad-- for instance, if you're working on a laptop--you may consider picking one up. They're very useful and speed up your workflow. If you don't have an alphanumeric keypad, you can also just move your mouse to the Preview panel and click the RAM Preview button. Go ahead and do this now. Preview your composition and see what it feels like. Is the movement too fast? too slow? Is it moving in the right direction? These are the questions I ask myself in this stage of the animation. I think it looks pretty good. It moves slowly up from the bottom of the screen. I think I want it to be a little bit snappier. So to minimize this panel and go back to the full workspace, you can hit the Tilde key one more time. This will minimize your panel so that it's back to your normal layout. We'll want to speed it up. Speed is not an attribute in and of itself. In this case it's the amount of time between the 2 keyframes. So if I shorten the amount of time between the 2 keyframes, it's faster. If I lengthen it, it lasts longer. So in that case, let's go ahead and grab the second keyframe by just clicking it and dragging it to the left. This will allow you to move it as many frames as you'd like. I think I'd like it to be about 10 frames into the animation, consistent with our previous scene. To confirm that, you can use your J and K keys to move between the keyframes and make sure that your second keyframe is parked at 10 frames. Now let's watch it one more time. Go ahead and move your mouse to the RAM Preview button and click it. It moves a lot faster now. It feels a lot better, in my opinion. So I'm going to hit the spacebar to stop playback, then modify some of the keyframe interpolation. It's a big word, I know, but it's really quite a simple concept. Keyframe interpolation comes in 2 forms. It's simply time and space. We also refer to it as temporal or spatial interpolation. Temporal is the way in which keyframes translate through time. For instance, if you have an object that's moving through space and it's moving quickly through space and comes to an immediate stop, we refer to this as linear or linear temporal interpolation. When you have an item that moves quickly through space but comes slowly to a stop, this is referred to as easiness or ease in, in this case. So we'd like this to ease in to the movement so that as it rises it comes slowly to a stop and then drops slowly. Using easy keyframes will make your composition feel a little bit more fluid or organic and less mechanical. So what I'd like to add is an easy keyframe to the second keyframe. To do this, place your cursor over the second keyframe and use the right click button. If you don't have right click enabled, you may have to go into your system preferences to enable it. Also, if you don't have a mouse that functions with right click, you can use Control and click. Once you've opened up this shortcut menu, move your cursor to the Keyframe Assistant. Then select Easy Ease. Easy Ease functions to provide easiness on both the entrance and exit of the keyframe, which means movement into the keyframe and out of the keyframe is smooth as opposed to being linear. It also changes the symbol of the keyframe. Previously, all of our keyframes were these diamond symbols. Now we have a kind of hourglass-shaped symbol. This symbol represents a curve or a Bezier type keyframe. So the temporal interpolation is now Bezier or easy. Let's play it, see what it looks like. Go ahead and hit the zero key on your alphanumeric keypad. One of the things I noticed about this playback is that it rises up to the peak of motion and slows down like we want it to, but then it kind of drifts up before it makes its movement down. This is based on the way that it's moving through space. Remember I mentioned 2 types of interpolation--time and space. Temporal, or time, has already been modified to make it easy. But spatial interpolation has not been modified as this point. Our default spatial interpolation is referred to as Auto Bezier. We can modify this by clicking on any keyframe and going into the keyframe interpolation. I'm going to do this for the second keyframe. Go ahead and right click on it and select Keyframe Interpolation. You'll notice that it has both temporal, which we've modified, and spatial, which has not been modified, also symbolized by the term "Auto Bezier." Let's change this so that the spatial interpolation is on a linear path. What's happening here is that when you have 3 points in an animation, the way that a layer moves between those 3 points is largely influenced by the spatial interpolation. This is only for the position attribute. So with scale and rotation and all the other attributes, you don't have to worry about spatial interpolation. It's just for position. There are 3 main types of spatial interpolation-- Linear, Continuous Bezier, and Bezier. Linear is moving in a very straight line between those points. Continuous Bezier is moving on a continuous path where the center point is smoothed out between the 2 outside points. Bezier is similar to the Continuous Bezier point but allows your handles to be reshaped to create some very custom paths. We've adjusted the temporal interpolation to make it smooth. So now we just want to make sure that the path that this layer moves on is in a straight line. To do this, change your spatial interpolation to linear by selecting the pull-down and selecting Linear. Then, to confirm this change, click the OK button. Now let's preview it one more time. You'll notice that something's slightly different about the composition. Hit the zero key on your alphanumeric keypad, and it will initiate playback. The other thing I want to modify is that it comes to a stop in a very instant way. It rises up and then it falls, and then it just snaps into its destination. Let's make it so that it slowly comes to a stop. This again is keyframe interpolation, but this time instead of doing Easy Ease like we did for the second keyframe, we're going to do Ease In. Right click on your third keyframe, then select Keyframe Assistant, and select Easy Ease In. This will again change the symbol to a different icon, symbolizing that this keyframe is now an Ease In keyframe. So let's check this out. Notice that it comes to a gradual stop instead of an instant stop. The next thing I'd like you to do is to to add motion blur to the layer. Motion blur is a phenomenon that occurs in film and video cameras where things in motion are slightly blurred based on the speed that they're moving. To enable this, you'll see a little circle icon with little tracers behind it. It's in 2 different places--on the composition as well as on each layer as a layer switch. Each one of these things is called a layer switch, and by clicking it on your timeline, you can enable or disable the layer switch. We're still not seeing it yet because you need to see it on for the composition as a whole to see it in the preview. To enable it for the composition, move your cursor to the top of your timeline, where you see that same icon slightly larger, and click once. This will enable motion blur for the layer as well as for the comp as a whole. Then when we move our current time indicator to between one of those 2 keyframes, notice the dramatic difference in the way that the text looks. It's blurring now. It's not sharp when it's in movement. This is more consistent with the way things would look through the lens of the camera and therefore, it looks more realistic. Let's preview it and see what it looks like. So that concludes the second scene of the animation. We've got more to build, so join me in the next episode when we introduce masking, duplicating layers, and some basic effects. [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]