this is the first of a five video series where we're going to be creating this animation from
scratch inside after effects using surprisingly simple techniques
and exploring the new features that after effects has to make our workflow even more efficient
this video is proudly brought to you with the help of adobe the other videos in this series are
already available on the adobe video and motion channel on their essential workflow playlist
linked up here and down in the description as well so you don't have to wait at all
in this video we'll be creating this animation using the new properties panel in after effects
which will serve as the essential foundation for all of the other instances and need effects that
will just be the icing on top this whole scene is created essentially by animating one shape
and then creatively looping and duplicating it to get the illusion of some sort of jellyfish-like
ocean creature now i'm using the beta version of after effects which at the time of recording
is where you can access the new properties panel but it will be added to the next version of after
effects in early 2022. until then you can download the beta from the creative cloud app select
beta apps and then install the freshest version of after effects alongside the current release so
we're going to be using the properties panel which is exactly like the properties panel in other
adobe applications this is all the properties of the layer that you've got selected here we've got
a square on a shape layer previously we would have had to toggle down all of these in the timeline to
get to these settings and while we're here a handy shortcut to know to open all of these at once is
to hold ctrl or command click this once and it will open everything but that kind of makes your
timeline really difficult to use because all of the space is taken up by just one layer
so it's much easier to just select your layer and then adjust its roundness and other properties
up here in the properties panel without having to change the view of your timeline and interrupting
your flow as you're animating down here so let's delete this and create it from scratch
so the rectangle tool selected we're going to click and drag holding the shift key to keep
it square now it doesn't need to be in the exact middle we can open up the align panel
and align it to the composition horizontally and vertically and we can see in the properties panel
that its size is a pretty arbitrary number let's change that down to 50. so it's much smaller and
we're going to animate three properties of this square its position its size and its roundness
in our final version our square is essentially going to be bouncing up and down and turning
into a circle as it moves upwards and let's start with our square a bit away from the center because
we don't want them all meeting in the middle once they're duplicated so let's move its y position up
to around about 320 there and let's keyframe its position here and then about half a second later
which in this case is 12 frames let's move its position even further up around about 100 pixels
now let's select those keyframes and easy ease them with f9 so that motion is a bit smoother
there now we do want this to bounce back down and loop and we can do that with a very simple
expression so let's hold alt or option and click the stopwatch here and type loop out and then
in parentheses type ping-pong and what that does is loop these keyframes by bouncing between them
so we get a nice bouncing square going up and down and because these keyframes are half a second
apart we get a perfect one second loop and if we want it to bounce higher we can change this state
to a higher position and we've got a larger bounce now now by using a looping expression like this
and later by using precomps we make this animation really adjustable so we can add all of our effects
get up to the final render and if we want to change anything to this base animation we can do
that very easily with a simple adjustment of just these two keyframes very useful and a professional
workflow where client changes come in often now let's adjust its size we'll keyframe it here and
then at that half second mark let's make it larger maybe up to 150 and easily use those keyframes too
and we want this to loop also so very easy way to do that is to select our position property which
already has that expression right click choose copy expression only select the size property and
paste it with control v so now we've got the size looping two as it bounces now to turn it into a
circle we can do that with its roundness property so let's keyframe it at 0 here and then at 12
frames in let's increase it to 75 which will make it a perfect circle then let's easy ease again and
paste on our looping expression and there we go now i want to animate one more property one that
is going to mimic a squid or cuttlefish changing color which they do by expanding these pigmented
pouches called chromatophores and we can mimic that using the stroke of this shape at the moment
we've got a 10-point stroke but let's animate that property let's keep it at 10 points when it's at
its largest point where it's a circle keyframe it's stroke width here and then at the starting
frame when it's a small square let's increase that way up to about 30. again easy ease and paste our
expression and now we've got this nice breathing quality to the animation looks very organic almost
like a muscle contracting and because the yellow is more prominent at this state it looks like
it's changing color just not completely but in the animation there's only one frame where we do get
these sharp corners and that's a little jarring so to remove that let's just change the roundness
from zero at the start here up to one so now it's much smoother and to amplify that breathing
motion we can make an adjustment to the motion curve in the graph editor so let's select all of
our keyframes head into the graph editor and in the speed graph select them all and drag both of
these handles inwards to create a higher point of acceleration in the middle so that there's
more easing and there our breathing animation is more intense and our main animation is completed
in the next video linked right up here we're going to use a bunch of pre-comping tricks to
turn this one shape into our completed abstract sea creature and get closer to our final result