in this video I'm gonna break down my workflow and process for creating this
animation in After Effects
in this episode of animating great artists I'm
tackling this design from Yohan Erickson crazy talented designer and
animator working a buck in New York we'd previously collaborated where he
animated my design of this floppy disk Youhan sent me this design beautifully
layered and labeled in Illustrator because we always label our layers I was
particularly impressed with these gradients looking so natural these were
all using the gradient fills set to radial and the aspect ratio stretched I
imported this straight into After Effects by pressing ctrl + I selecting
the file and importing it as a composition retaining for layer sizes
which gives me a comp looking like this my first step is to tidy this up I spent
about 10 minutes color coding everything and parenting
all the objects so the blue-skinned elements will color blue and the eyes
and ears are all parented to the head it's really important to start as
organized as possible it'll make everything to come much easier from here
I went straight into blocking which is the most important phase blocking is
where we animate the minimal amount to get the story across and established the
timing it's very tempting to animate straight ahead from start to finish
making sure the head turn feels nice and smooth here but that can lead to a lot
more work later on if the overall timing isn't established and we need to make
changes I'm only animating three things here the position of the head the
pupils and this top purple ball I've animated all of these with hold
keyframes to turn your regular keyframes in to hold keyframes select them all
right click and select toggle hold keyframes this removes any motion
between them and they will jump straight to that position no in-betweens and
these additional neck objects are just appearing on it might look really basic
but this sets up the whole animation where most of the decision-making
happens from here on in all the additional animation is reacting to this
so take your time to get this right this is a great time to get input from your
art director or even get timing approvals from your client the next step
is turning those hold keyframes into regular keyframes so instead of that
head snapping from side to side there's a motion between that I'm still not
adding any easing because I know that'll get messy once that happens and I want
to figure out where all the motion will be first
I added a little anticipation and follow through to the springing up and
down at the head so before he springs up he goes a little bit lower building up
energy for that explosive thrust upwards and then he extends a little further and
settles down to its final position also animating the head using a null
controller which is just a null of the head parented to this is so that I could
do some independent animation with the head maybe with the scale that wouldn't
affect everything parented to it and it gives me a few more options that I might
need later the next phase was adding easing and I'm only adding that to the
head at the moment because these other neck bits would react to that head
motion once I've finalized it for most of the easing I pressed f9 on my
keyboard to add an easy ease I went into the graph editor and then push those
handles to make it a bit more severe and more of a snappier motion for the head
position I separated the X&Y dimensions because I really like to work in the
value graph when fine-tuning anticipation and follow-through and
separating the dimensions makes that much easier for the bounce I really
wanted to have a lot of control where it slowly eased downwards in position and
then shut up really quickly and it's great to be able to just concentrate on
the Y position for that I also added an adjustment layer to the very top of
everything with the posterise time effect set to 12.5 frames per second
because I thought a lower frame rate would suit this design the next stage was
animating the neck shapes for the bottom two pieces they just scale up and rotate
slightly rotating the opposite way to the piece above them as the head looks
around for the top pieces as they appear they're launched up a bit further by the
main head movement and then settle back down with a bit of a bounce the bounce
is made by key framing the up and down positions of the balls and then only
adding an easy ease to the topmost positions you can see here they
alternate between a linear keyframe and one with easing as it's hanging in the
air waiting to fall down this gives the balance feeling like it's a rigid object
next I added the secondary motion the body turns slightly by animating the
shape path the head turn was animated by unlinking the scale property and shifting
the x-axis so when he's facing forward it's a hundred percent on both and when
he's a bit more to the side it's only 89 percent scaled on the x-axis so he's
less wide when he's turning away to give the correct ear in front and behind the
head what I did was i duplicated each ear so I had a left and a right ear in
front and behind the head and with the front ears I animated the opacity
property of each from 0 to 100 with hold keyframes so when one is
0% opaque the other one is a 100% turning one off and one
on when the head turns and I added a small secondary bounce to the head as
the purple ball hits it on its way down the last step was adding the details for
the shadows I created a black shape layer added the set matte effect taking in
the matte from the layer below it and then parenting it to the shape above so it
only appears when the objects get close these styles were animated by just
increasing the scale position and then decreasing it again after these
exploding little line bursts for the three in the bottom-left I extended the
drawing so they were longer and they almost touched the edge and then I've
animated them just using a mask on each one so each one has a mask and that
moves from the center outwards revealing part of the line underneath and that
gives the illusion that they're bursting out words for this squiggly one up here
I used trim paths and put this on a separate layer so these little loops
would work nicely and look like it was drawn on which I couldn't do with the
mask and this was the final product I find it really useful to only
concentrate on one element at a time working from the most important movement
down to the little details we end up with a lot of keyframes and reactive
animation at the end here and that can be really overwhelming to get started
with if you don't have a clear process I made a short playlist or some related
videos that'll think you'll enjoy if you've made it this far I'll see you in
the next video and please consider subscribing if you'd like more of these videos every week
Subtitlee: Zoe J Marriott