Animating Still Objects

Lesson Info

Animating Still Objects

No medal what a night even lightning books helped him then lights stars have this up there from site has no moon atal don't make it so doc even final was afraid to mark what a perfect chance to back and there's no moon at all should we want atmosphere for inspiration dear one kids is going to make it clear that tonight is right and brighten like my hand in a fee this is nothing like they told us just to think we fell in love in this noon at all wait a day both way pursued we want that must beer for inspiration one kiss is going to make it clear that tonight is right in brighton might my e no this's nothing like they told us just a thing with love but there's no morning no no no no no no no no no okay so um let me open up the after affects fall for that and kind of walk through what happened in there um we talked about a file missing what's missing tell me some things medicines that was missing what's missing that's not good stars okay if we can find it this good when things like this h...

appen because sometimes they just do so let's see if we could do a replace here and sometimes it's just a matter of doing this find stars stars don't know if that's mine where is it work dr yeah it's there okay sometimes it just loses stuff for some reason the u move stuff from one hard drive to another um after effects sometimes freaks out and luckily there's that way of finding your stuff and I've had that happen where maybe I've reorganized I build something exported all and I have it all organized and I move it to another hard drive and oh, you know I'm good tweak something there um let me do that and then it gets moved into another directory and it loses where it went so you just have to go in there and replace it and it it's how you can find it and sometimes you move several things that'll get you've got seventy three things missing the freak out you go ok no, I know they're there so you just go find one and then it will automatically find all the others for you so they wait that's that's how that works uh what what I started with here again I started with a lot of aa lot of different pieces absolutely started with the audio that's how I built the whole thing is the story that had to be told here um if let me hide this and we got a little more time line to show here we go and bring that up a little more here so you can see I have all of my sections I broke it down to the song the sections and b section instrumental and everything's I broke down the song by you know universe first course our bridge whatever you want call it so that's how I built it and you'll see I've got all of these stair stepped cops in here that's actually a serious of different animations and this is one of those times jim where you would mention earlier uh what do I do when how do how do I approach in animation how do I do I know ahead of time what I'm going to do on this one I really didn't I needed to feel like I wanted to be pulled into this one and let the animation kind of create itself I knew the types of things I wanted to do I wasn't quite sure from scene to scene exactly how I was going to build it yet and originally I was going to give due all car to anything with eyes and moons and it's gonna be really fun and corny and that that ok well you know she's putting so much emotion into the song that had to kind of you know what let's make it more of like a love song or love scene scene because it really is it's a classic jazz standard tune you know and so but it's still kind of fun to us let's add both of that in there so the dog thing kind of came up just I don't know why it just kind of came to me because we have a dog and and any time you're show affection she's got to be right there in part of it so I thought ok this is great you know any time anybody is getting attention the dogs right there anybody has a dog understands that so I just started pulling this altogether uh with just different elements that I got off from my sock photo and um came up with all of these these little pieces so if I look and just things like the grass in the trees that's just one graphic element it's huge if you look here it's only seven percent um so but it's huge but I just I just pulled it out and that gave me the latitude to be able to zoom in and zoom out even though it's a not a vector image the stars was another thing that was just a a graphic image out of the library a zabel to utilize that um the mountains wass just this this amount of graphic data so it's all these different elements that aaron here moon was another photographic reference um more grass so you can see there's just all these layers and then when you start adding all these layers up in three d space then you get a really nice rich environment so just looking at this first animation and again, it's broken down that way. If I double click it, it opens this up and that's just this first element and again, I use the audio for just this portion of it. So if I, uh, render this and rendered it a quarter resolution here, I'm just going to do a couple of seconds worth of it, so oh, I think I turned the audio off in this channel know what's on jeff? Yes, I don't know if I may be missed it on the last the last logo that we were working on, but did you show how you add audio? Audio is just brought in like anything you just dragging intothe khan, so I want to add that just click here, drag it in. The thing is with this because I've got two of them and they're good take one out. Um, what I was able to do is from each segment I knew that she ended at a certain phrase, so let me just render the last second or so here don't don't so you find where your segment and so I actually overshoot it, usually for something like this it's a song, so it starts to go into the next one and then when I opened that one up let's, look at the next one, then I start here and that gives me overlay some overlap because I ended up fading these end together, so I wanted them to have some kind of face don't make us don't make it so you can see that's your utilizing the, uh, the audio to set your timing, and some of these I put markers in and some I didn't, but in this case, I've got some different things going on here, and you'll see that I've got a lot of, er, sub cops, so, like, the little lightning bugs that come through here, let's make that so we could see the whole thing. There we go, so I got the lightning bugs. I'm moving that cop through time, so he says an animation, but the animations moving well, what is that animation? If I open up that calm, you'll see I've got little yellow, solid layers here with a mask on them. We didn't get into masking or any of that today, because it's, which is not enough time to do everything in after effects in one day, but there's a little masks around each of those made with the pen tool, and they are then the whole thing is just is animated in this kind of radical, random sequence, so these little guys, they're just buzzing around, flying around each other like that, so that is brought in as a comp let's go back to a one. There we go. The dog this is something that I wanted to show because the dog is actually just a single layer graphic and I've got him kind of like, you know, panting and barking and what not? And then he sits it's like ok, well, I had to hide his legs because they didn't really give me good legs to work with there. I didn't really want to spend much time trying to articulate his legs. But how did I do that? It's? Just a single air graphic. Well, I use something called the puppet tool and that allows you. Teo, let me duplicate this real quick it's an effect it's all duplicated so I can show the puppet tool being used. And since it's an effect, you can turn it on and off or even get rid of it. So I'm going to get rid of it. Okay, s oh, there's! My dog is just a just a png file, but I want to animate him over time and stretching around, turn him into a rubber dog. Then I used the puppet tool and that's this little here, the pushkin, this is puppet tool, right up here at the top. Looks like a pushpin on a bulletin boards. Just click that and what this does is it allows you to set some points that you can animate with. So say, I want a wag his tail, so I'm going to come somewhere out here, middle of his tail, and I want his head to kind of go up and down. Um, I want to be able to move his hind quarters, keep his body steadies. I'm just kind of making some some points in here that I can I can animate. So what I've done is all of these little pinpoints here will automatically generate key frames for me as I go down in time. So I come out here and I met like, one second here, saying I want tio make his tail wag guy just grabbed that little pinpoint and go up. I see there's a little bit of black left around there. I need to expand my search area here, so up here, it expansion has set that, like, eight. All right? And see how that works if that helps, there we go. What it was doing, it wasn't looking out far enough. There's there's my original if I hover over it, there we go. You can see the original outline, so now I've got his tail wagging over time. And you could see the rest of his body's moving a little bit which is kind of nice it gives you a little more of an organic flows just not just you know, cut up in pieces and flopping around on dh say I want his head to go up and you know, do a few things like that go up and then down tail comes back down this way so you just do that over time I want him to sit down here and let's just speed this up I need to move his legs out of the way of course I'm breaking thanksgiving in here. We're not looking at I don't please don't report me to pita, okay? No yes legs were all tangled up now it's really bad it's tails all stretched out you gotta take your time with this stuff, okay? All right, so we've got this all happening and he's moving around so it is it just kind of turns him into a like a liquid rubber here so that's how you get get him to do things legs no man it's sad that poor dog ok, but but that's how I move, move all those things I had the people kissing I had her hair kind of whipping around it almost looks like medusa though, but but that's how I made the hair move around if we look at those elements, you'll see that all of those things animate inside an animation again we're nesting animation's inside animations inside animations that what we're doing, we're nesting this I need something to move and then I need that something to move to move in time like the lightning bugs I needed the moon toe look like it was rolling over the hill, so I had the moon rotating and then rolling that along uh, you know, the couple under the tree I've got them if you see them, they're kind of moving back and forth just a little bit emotion now, if I really wanted to take time ah, and had the ram to do it, it freaked out when I tried to make the tree kind of sway a little bit because it has to look at all this data in there and it's just says that's too much for me to try to figure out so the simpler the outline of the element in your alfa channel the better again, I separated them from the trees to so that really helped it didn't have to look at too much just looking at the couple so is able to animate the couple moving a little bit there and that's how I was able to make that work um now let me go back here too I'm going to go over that in just a second that's mats here we go here's more of the animation here now this one I've got a camera moving and I've got a lot of things going on I've got this couple here again it's puppet two of the couple um and they were facing the other direction when I first started and I just flipped him around in there so again there's just puppet tool looks like snakes on snakes on her hair um that's that's just getting that to move and then this you can see I've kind of got a three d plane going on here I've got this camera moving so if I go to two views and we go back to here like this one the uh say top view and let's see where we are here our camera if I see here uh scroll down and we see it just moving in well, instead of trying to get the camera to figure out how to get that camera to movin all by itself, I parented the camera to know layer and that's probably getting a little advanced here for this class but I was able tio get that and then I was able to move the no layer like anything else in three d space the camera just follows along and I don't have to worry about the camera going on wonky on me or zooming in and zooming out or doing anything weird I just apparent id that again that's the kind of thing that's more advance and I do cover in my other other aftereffects classes here but that was able to allow me to move it around here and then zoom in on them here in the way that I got my, uh fade on all of this was I just applied and effect to an adjustment layer which is another layering at up here new layer adjustment layer and just like you would and photo shop you can have ah, you can have an effect on the adjustment layer which affects everything underneath it and I added my camera blur so it looks like we're pushing in on the camera and then pulling the rack focus on the camera out he see that really nice boca on those lights of the star lights back they're totally exaggerated but beautiful and I was just really made that shot. I thought so let's look at this one where I've got the the eyeballs all animating in here and again back to telling a story with very little to work with the eyes were a simple process of just making the eyes first so I start with uh the pupils air separated from the eyes and if we keep going down the rabbit hole will uncover this um this is one I'll be able to download any guys can can play with it and see in reverse engineer it so I'll be able to download this s so you can see it um is well but you can see that I only created a a mask that I moved in time we didn't really get to get into masks today but they're just drawn with a pen tool up here the pen tool just like you would in photo shop or illustrator but the thing is you can key frame so we've got our mask uh is key frames so I can move it so I kind of made the eyelid clothes and that comes back up again so I just kind of created a mock shape basically of the eye so the boy's eyes were a little rounder the girl's eyes were a little more almond shaped and more feminine on and so they just blink I just duplicate that loop it's not even a loop is just one sequence of the blank and I duplicate that where I needed to just by cutting and pulling out what I didn't need like I didn't need it to blink so soon against I took another segment and kept it kept it not blinking for a bit I wanted to change the time means that wasn't just blank blank blank every second so it's a matter of timing there and then moving the pupils around um I again I created two of them and parented one to the other. So this one I think, is just just position. Not sure if this one moved it all. This one didn't move at all. He's. Just looking one way. In one of the other animation sequences, his eyeballs are moving around like that's a girl's eyes here, tio are moving around so no she's just looking to, they're looking at each other. Um, and then the dog, of course, the dog's eyes are their own entity as well. Own animation. That one. I've got a moving around so you can see the one pupil is moving. The second one is only parented there's no, a no instruction on the second one. I wanted them to move in in a pair so that that was able to be linked together. So those are the eyes, and then the rest was just told. In the three d story, the camera moved around, they focused. They zoom in on his eyes because he stays in position. And blank's, I did a little three d tilt there, the boy's eyes you can see, he tilts a little bit in three d space, two and a half t space. Then I moved the camera over using motion blur. Of course, it helps sell that her eyes do move around a bit she's looking around in the dark. Then we're looking at the dog and the tongue was an afterthought as actually my wife's idea should say, you've got to give it, get a tongue to the dogs. That's okay, great let's do it, and that gives a comical reference to it as well. So, um, but again it's telling stories, you know, you tip the eyes a certain way that indicates the head's moving a certain way. And that was evident in the very end as well. This this and one where a couple moving to kiss and then the dog bumped his head up there, bumps them out of the way and again, you can see they're kind of chuckling. The eyes are going up and down there laughing and you know the dogs all happy, everybody's happy and then goes out to the end it's again, it's storytelling uh, with with you graphic elements with text when you do need text. But in this case, we we left the text out of it. Just let the words and the music tell the story and then enhanced it with the animation, so

Class Description

Lessons

1. Class Introduction and Animation
2. Working between Adobe® Illustrator® and Adobe® After Effects®
3. Setting Keyframes
4. Parenting Layers
5. Animating a Figure with Keyframes
6. Interpolation, Motion Blur, & Nesting Compositions
7. Vectors and Shapes
8. 3D Space and 3D Camera
9. Animated Text
10. Animating a Logo Graphic
11. Animating Still Objects
12. Working with 3D Footage
13. Stabilizing Footage
14. Green Screen Compositing