Hello and welcome to the sixth video in this Beginner's Guide to Adobe After Effects.
In this tutorial I'm going to introduce you to the key animation
principles in After Effects. In a previous episode I demonstrated how to
bring media elements into After Effects and manage them in the project panel.
Now once you have media elements in your composition it's time to start animating
and adding effects. Now to understand how to animate and add effects you will
first need to understand the animation principles and how they work in After
Effects. In this video we are going to learn the key animation principles and
how they are applied. So let's get into it! So here I am in After Effects and I
have a project open here demonstrating the key animation principles in After
Effects. In After Effects there are four key principles: Position, Scale, Rotation
and Opacity. When it comes to animating in After Effects you will most likely
use one of these principles. In some instances you may even use multiple
animations on one media type. What you will come to learn as you use After
Effects is as you build your video presentations and start to animate your
media content and create transitions, they will all utilize these four
principles in some way. So this is a composition I have put together to help
you understand how animation works in After Effects and how it is applied. In
After Effects animation is applied to our media elements down in the timeline
panel. So let's take a closer look. Now if you want to follow along with this video
you can open this document I have prepared especially for you. This can be
found in the introduction folder in the project folder and you can download this
project folder for a small fee the download link with instructions is in
the description. The download folder comes with lots of exercise documents we
will be using on this course that have been carefully developed to aid your
learning experience. The folder also comes with document resources such as
videos, graphics and images you can use to build your first video presentation
from scratch later on in this course. To get the full learning experience I
recommend you get the project folder, download link with instructions is in
the description. So with the project folder open click into the S-1
introduction folder, then into the sixth folder, animation principles and open the
animation principles After Effects file and you will have the same document I
have open here. OK so right now I am in preview mode, so I press spacebar to stop
this for now. Now if we come into the timeline panel below we can see the
shape layers that are animating in the visual composition panel above. Aow we
can tell their shape layers because of the icon next to them. In After Effects a
shape layer is represented as a star and in this instance the layer bar colors
are set to purple. So first I will click on the top layer bar, called position,
notice when the layer is selected the object is also selected in the
composition panel above. So I'll come over to the left in the timeline panel
by the file name and I'll carefully click the triangle next to the colored
square. This will drop down the properties for this layer. So initially, we can see
contents and transform. This time I'll carefully click on the drop-down
triangle for transform and now we can see the animation properties for this
layer. From the top we have: Anchor point, position, scale, rotation and opacity. Now
it's important to note that whatever media type you place into your
composition you will always have these transform options. this is where
animation is applied to layers in After Effects. As a beginner you will need to
familiarize yourself with these transform options as we will be working
with these soon and often as we progress in this course. So notice that on this
layer, we can see we have keyframes set for the position property, we can see the
stopwatch over on the left is blue and we can see some keyframes adjacent to
this over in the timeline. Notice we have no other property set,
here only position. so next I'll scroll down and select the scale layer and
here I'll do the same. I'll click the triangle to the left of the
name to toggle the properties down and again I'll click the toggle transform down. So
this time we can see that for this layer we only have scale keyframes applied. So
I'll do the same for the rotation layer, again just rotation keyframes applied
and lastly on the opacity layer again just opacity keyframe applied. So for
each shape layer here in the timeline I have only applied one animation
principle. So now I'll just click on the main triangles next to the name of each
layer and this will snap them all closed like so. So now we can just see the bars
in the timeline panel. So I'll drag my time indicator to the far left to the
start of the timeline and press spacebar, this will begin the preview and we can
see how they animate. so this is how animation is done in After Effects. To
recap some key things to remember are: The four key animation principles in
After Effects are: Position, Scale, Rotation and Opacity. Animations in After
Effects use one or all of the principles and animation is set in the transform
properties in the timeline panel. OK now if I click the top layer bar hold
shift and click the bottom purple layer, upon click I will select them all. Notice
they are also selected here in the composition panel above. Now with all the
layers selected in my timeline panel, I'm going to simply press U on the keyboard.
This keyboard shortcut will expand the layers out but only reveal these shapes
below and if we look carefully we can see they are adjacent to each animation
property applied to each layer to the left in the timeline panel. Now these
shapes are called keyframes and these keyframes are what set the parameters
for all effects over time. Before we move on there are some more details you will
need to know about keyframes. In the next video we will be taking a closer look at
keyframes, learning more about them, how they work and how they are managed over time.
So see you in the next video!