After Effects, Animation Day 4

Objectives

  • Reinforce concepts from days 1-3 through review and practice
  • Learn how to precompose multiple layers into a single one
  • Understand the difference between parenting and precomposing layers, and when to use one over the other
  • Learn how to create and edit text layers
  • Render a composition to a playable video file using Adobe Media Encoder

Link to files: https://files.learnsoftware.org/after-effects-animation/

Outline

Hook:

  • Show an example of the final project we’ll be making today (Combing most of what we’ve learned so far and creating a scene with it)

The Project:

  • Set up the scene:
    • Import the illustrator file as a composition
    • Open the newly created composition and change its length to 7-10 seconds
    • Create a sky using a shape layer (Rectangle Tool), position it beneath everything else.
    • Create another shape layer for the house’s window
  • Begin animating the scene:
    • Darken the sky
      • Option A: Apply and keyframe a brightness & Contrast effect to the sky to make turn into night
      • Option B: Keyframe the shape’s fill color to make it darker for night (Shape Layer -> contents -> rectangle -> Fill -> color) (Allows for more control over the color change)
  • Precomposing
    • Position the sun and moon so that they are on opposite ends of the composition
    • Select both sun and moon and precompose them
    • Show how the precomposition acts as a single layer (and can access individual layers again by opening that new composition)
      • Open up the PrecompositionsExample project file and briefly show how it uses precompositions (multiple precomps, effects applied to different ones).
        • NOTE: Because this project is just for demonstration purposes, only the instructor needs to open it to show to students (REMEMBER TO SAVE BEFORE OPENING)
      • Explain when to precompose vs parent layers (can technically parent instead of precomposing in this case)
      • Reduces the number of layers in a single composition
      • Parenting only affects basic transformation, the effects applied to a parent layer do not apply to its children
    • Make the sun and moon rise and set:
      • Keyframe the rotation new sun and moon composition so that they rise and set as the sky darkens
  • Darken the scenery
    • Select the hills and house and precompose them
      • Apply and keyframe a brightness & Contrast effect to the new composition to make it darken as the sky darkens
  • Text Layers
    • Create a text layer and write something (e.g. “Good Night!”)
    • Introduce the Character and Paragraph panels and let students play around with the font, color, size, and alignment
    • Keyframe a property of the text to make it appear (e.g. rise up from behind the hills or somewhere else off screen, fade in transparency, scale up from a scale of zero, etc.)

Bonus: Could apply a glow effect to the sun and moon

Rendering an Animation as an MP4 (After Effects doesn’t render to any playable video files on Windows)

  • Add composition to the Render Queue
    • Composition -> Add to Adobe Media Encoder Queue
  • Change codec and other settings (Preset)
  • Choose file name and render location (Output File)

If there’s extra time:

  • Help students upload their animation to Box to share with others

Conclusion

  • Recap: Today we learned:
    • How to animate shape layer properties
    • How to precompose layers to make animation easier
    • How to create and edit text layers
    • How to render an animation into a playable video file