Animation in After Effects

As an introduction to animation, we will look at the first two courses in the Animation Fundamentals series of tutorials. To get to them:

1. Click Help in the AE main menu
2. Click After Effects in-app tutorials
3. Scroll down to Skills and Projects
4. Click Animation Fundamentals
   1. We will look at the Keyframe Animation and Animate an Object to Follow Along a Path tutorials. 
   2. There are more if you want to go deeper.

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.
   • Animate Shape Layers Tutorial
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.
   • Add Animation Properties to Shape Layers Tutorial
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.
   • Animate an object to follow along a path Tutorial
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.
   • Easy Text Animation using Presets Tutorial – the file for this is below: 2- Text Animation Presets.aep
   • Animate Text Letter by Letter tutorial – the file for this is below: 3- Animating text Letter by Letter.aep
   • Create and Animate Text Links to tutorials to learn about text animation.

Tips and Tricks

These will help with your animations.

• How to Center and Move the Anchor Point YouTube Video [2:47]
• How to create a Solid Layer (you need at least one of these in your project) YouTube Video [2:31]
• Morph one Shape into another YouTube Video [2:10]