Advanced Layer Animation

Animation is all about making changes to specific channels, like position, rotation and scale, over time. Mastering the art of keyframe animation is critical to the success of our motion graphic designs. As animators and motion graphic designers, we need to constantly ask ourselves a simple question, " Will the audience understand this movement?". Leveraging the power of the After Effects animation system will help us answer that question.

As motion graphics designers, we need to honor the traditional animation techniques established by the pioneers of this industry. Way back in the 1930's and 40's, the animation industry established a series of principles that help establish the quality of our movements. Incorporating these principles of animation into our motion graphics will help us create dynamic movements that convey weight, character and emotion. Today, we're going to take a look at how to incorporate the principle of "Easing" into our animations in After Effects. Basically, this principle establishes how fast an object needs to move and determines the speed of the movement at the beginning and end of our animations. It is really easy to apply this principle of animation in to our work in After Effects by applying various Keyframe Assistants to the keyframes in our timeline.

We are going to look at two different animation systems during this week's lecture. The first animation system will establish a few new key framing principles by exploring the graph editor. Here, we can easily change the speed of our animations and creating an "easing" effect on the movements of our layers. In addition, we're going to take a look at a more advanced animation technique as we begin to explore programatic animation using Expressions. Fun stuff today!

Project Due: Week 07

Adobe After Effects provides several tools and effects that let you simulate motion video using a layered Photoshop file. In this lesson, you will import a layered Photoshop file of the sun appearing through a windows, and then animate it to simulate the motion of the sun rising behind the planes of glass. This is a stylized animation in which the motion is first accelerated, and then slows down as clouds and birds move through the window frame at the end.

Please follow the directions in Chapter 6 of the Adobe After Effects Classroom in a Book for specific instructions on completing this project. Please ensure your project includes the following required elements before you complete this assignment:

After you have saved the project file on your personal external storage device (like a thumb drive), please upload your After Effects Project File (.aep) and your rendered Quicktime Movie (.mov) to the Sunrise dropbox on D2L.

Before you upload your files to D2L, please ensure your files meet the following naming conventions:

Project Due: Week 07

In this project you will be animating the spinning hands of an alarm clock. Using Expressions, animate the hands of the alarm clock. Both hand of the alarm clock need to move, but only one hand is allowed to have keyframes. Apply a simple Expression to one of the hands that will drive the animation of the other. Lets have some fun with this animation, so have your alarm clock go off and ring at a certain point in your animation. You'll have to animate the clock shaking and rattling, so make sure you apply the correct type of keyframe to recreate the movement. When you are all finished, render out your movie using the H.264 codec and upload it to D2L.

After you have saved the project file on your personal external storage device (like a thumb drive), please upload your After Effects Project File (.aep) and your rendered Quicktime Movie (.mov) to the Alarm Clock dropbox on D2L.

Before you upload your files to D2L, please ensure your files meet the following naming conventions:

Check out these awesome learning resources! I've collected a number of assets that I think will help you conquer this week's homework and laboratory assignment. Please download the following materials to your local hard disk or flash storage device (AKA thumb drive).