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Class on Wed, Nov 5

Today, many of you may be locked out of Brightspace if you haven’t set up MFA (Multi factor authentication). If you can’t log in to CUNYfirst or bright space, you may need to go to the Help Desk and have them help you get MFA set up.

BMCC Service Desk
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Room S-141

Animation Information

AE Interface

The interface for AE can be intimidating at first. We will go over it in class, but it really helps to practice on your own and get to know it.

Interface Terms

  • Panel: an area of the AE interface that supports a specific functionality.
  • Project Panel: This is where you can put in source content, also known as assets, (images, video, sounds) that you can use in creating your composition. You can add things here by dragging the file into the panel. NOTE: you can use Illustrator and Photoshop files.
  • Composition Panel: This is like the Canvas in Photoshop or the Artboard in Illustrator. It’s where you see what your animation will look like. You can also make some adjustments to items directly in this panel.
  • Timeline Panel: This is where you arrange and control when objects appear in your animation and the timing of the animations. The timeline is like Audacity in that it visually represents the time something is on screen, and it is also like the layers in photoshop or Illustrator because items are visually stacked in layers. One new thing is that many of the controls for your animation are done right in the Timeline.
  • Keyframe: This is a marker that sets when a specific part of an animation starts (or ends for the previous keyframe). In order to animate objects you can set keyframes and change properties at each keyframe.
  • Properties: shapes and objects have properties that you can animate in After Effects. The four basic properties are:
    • Position: Allows you to animate the position of a layer in the composition.
    • Scale: Enables you to animate the size of a layer, making it larger or smaller.
    • Rotation: Allows you to animate the rotation of a layer, giving it a spinning or turning effect.
    • Opacity: Enables you to animate the transparency of a layer, making it fade in or out.
  • Transform: This is the name for the areas in a layer where you can transform the properties (listed above and more). Note that there is a transform area for each individual shape and a transform area for an entire layer (that could have multiple shapes).

Tutorials

Get to know the After Effects interface

We will look at the After Effects Overview tutorial in the hands-on tutorials:

  1. Click Help in the AE main menu
  2. Click After Effects in-app tutorials
  3. Click on After Effects Overview

After Effects Workflow Terminology

LINK: https://creativecloud.adobe.com/cc/learn/after-effects/web/aftereffects-workflow-terminology

This tutorial video walks through the After Effects interface and explains the main concepts. The first part is very general and what you should focus on. It also shows a workflow for adding video files to your project. This is in the later part of the video and is a workflow you don’t have to do in our class, but may be interested in.

Create Shape Layers

LINK: https://creativecloud.adobe.com/learn/after-effects/web/create-shape-layers 

Sample Files: https://learndownload.adobe.com/pub/learn/aftereffects/create-shape-layers.zip

This shows how to draw shapes in layers. Very important for the animations we are going to do.

Four Types of AE Animation

There are four types of animation in After Effects (each of these links to a video tutorial with sample files):

  1. Manual Keyframe Animation: in this style you manually set keyframes and then change properties of objects or entire layers at different points in the timeline.
  2. Auto-generated Animation: in this tutoral, you will use the Wiggle Transform to give clouds a random, floating movement. You can use this and other effects for various types of movement that would be hard or tedious to do with keyframes.
  3. Path-based Animation: in this style, you create a path (you can draw with the pen tool or others) and then apply that path to the position of an object so it moves along the path.
  4. Text Animation: There are some separate properties and Effects that you can animate for text. One is to use Animation Presets, another is to use Animators to animate the text letter by letter or the entire text.

Tips and Tricks

These will help with your animations.

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