Transcript:
This video is brought to you by premium. Beat calm! [MUSIC] Animation and motion graphics is such an amazing skill set to have because you can create animated videos without leaving your home, which is especially important in a time like this with the pandemic going on worldwide. So in this video. I want to talk about the very basics of creating animation from a beginner standpoint, so you’re gonna learn how to easily start from scratch to creating a fully detailed animation. Hey, what’s going on? Internet, this is Josh Noel from stomach film. Welcome to our channel. If you’re new here, be sure to hit that subscribe button, so this tutorial is gonna be very easy to follow along with, and I’ve broken this video up into two easy parts. So the first part we’re going to talk about gathering our graphics in Adobe Illustrator. I’m going to show you how you can get pretty much any graphic that you’re looking to animate, and then we’re gonna move over to Adobe After Effects where we’re gonna animate that graphic. So after watching this video, you should be able to animate pretty much anything that you want to animate, and you’ll be able to easily follow along as well. No matter what your skill level is with animation, whether you’re just starting off or you have a little bit of experience, so let’s go ahead and jump into our tutorial. Let’s get started so our first step is to go to Adobe Illustrator, But before we do anything here, we need to get our hands on some graphics, and you can wash the toriels on how to create these individually from scratch. It’s not hard to use Adobe Illustrator, but save time in this tutorial. Just talk about animation. You can go to a website called Free Picks Com. I’ll link it in the description and you can literally find maybe over a million different types of vector graphics and vectors are what we need for Adobe Illustrator. So you get tons of categories and in this video? I’m gonna link this one specifically, which is just a bunch of icons. So when you find graphics that you’re looking for just search for it, you can download them for absolutely free. You just need to give them credit. We can come over to Adobe Illustrator, and when you Unzip their files, You’re looking for a specific project file, so you’re looking for usually the encapsulated PostScript, which is the EPS file or an illustrator file so it doesn’t really matter which one you would use? This works the same way. What you do. Is you right-click on that and you just click on open with obviously illustrator and boom. We’re gonna have our file ready to go so obviously. I just wanna work with one icon. I’m gonna find this satellite right here. I’m just gonna copy this. Go file new, and I’m gonna create an artboard. I’ll do 1920 by 1080 and click create. And I’m gonna paste that in there and hold down shift on my keyboard and I can make this bigger and reposition it. It doesn’t really matter about size, necessarily because these are vector objects, and in fact, your object is simply just a piece of geometry that holds its fidelity, no matter how small or big that it gets so the main thing that we have to do here in Adobe Illustrator before going over to After Effects for animation is that we need to organize this, so we can easily animate this inside of After Effects What you’re going to do is go to the layers tab. If you don’t see the layers tab, just go to window layers and we’ll have one layer here. Typically, it depends on, you know the graphic that you’ve downloaded, but we’ll open this up and you’ll see that there’s a group here, and if I select the object, it selects the entire thing, so if we want to be able to select individual objects here, what we need to do is just make sure everything is selected. Go up to object and click on Ungroup now. I don’t see that that group is gone and every layer it has its own path, and that’s great and you might need to ungroup your object Multiple times. It just depends on the graphic that you’ve downloaded and then what we’re gonna do is come down here to create new layer icon and we’re to create a bunch of these. Okay, so our goal here is to put everything that we want to animate inside of. After Effects into its own layer, so for example, if I just want to click on this signal icon which I have selected right here, You can see that’s highlighted blue. I’ll go ahead and select that here in the layers and put it into his own layer. So now boom, that’s his own layer, and then I can click on the second one. Put that into another layer. Then I already name is like signal one, and I’ll do like a signal to. So now. I’ll be able to how that nicely organized inside of After Effects, but we need to continue to put everything that we want to animate into his own layer, so I can come here. Click a layer, hold down, shift on my keyboard, just like multiple layers and then see that we have three selected here and I could put this in its own layer and then we’ll just kind of go through this and set this up as of right now we’ve been putting every single element into its own layers, but you’ll see that these wings or whatever they’re called have multiple, you know, layers inside. So in this case, we can just select them all, and you’ll see everything is highlighted and we’ll put those into its own Its own layer here in Illustrator, and and I’ll show you an after effects how we can explore this even more, but I’ll go ahead and just make sure both those are in its own layer and then just delete any extra layers You don’t need so of course, make sure everything is renamed correctly, so you can easily, you know, have a good workflow inside of After Effects. And when you’re done here, just go to file save as and we’ll make sure that this is saved as an Adobe Illustrator file and we’ll call it whatever we need to call it and before we move on. I wanna say thank you to premium beatcom for sponsoring this video premium. B is a royalty-free music provider for your creative video and motion graphic projects. They have an extremely popular library with thousands of songs to choose from and they have a very easy in depth search in menu filter system that allows you to quickly find the best songs for your video, so for your next video project, be sure to check out premium. Beat comm for your royalty-free music. So now that Adobe Illustrator is taken care of now, we can move over to. After Effects and begin the animation. Alright, so here we are in. After Effects, and I’m going to show you how we can get this animated so first things first, we’re gonna want to obviously go to our project file that we saved from illustrator and we’ll just click this and drag it into our project window right here and after effects, and it’ll ask you how you want to import it. Click on composition and click. OK, and then what we’re gonna do is create a new composition and well. Just call this, you know? Tut or main 1920 by 1080 click. OK, then we’ll go into that project. File that you saved composition in my case is satellite two, and I’m just going to go ahead and suck all these layers and copy them go to the composition that we just created and paste them in there. This way we won’t have any project file sizing to deal with, and now if everything selected. I can move this around so the first thing that we absolutely need to do is select on this continuously Rasterize icon right here, and this will allow us to easily scale things up and down. So, for example, if I have, this turned off and I scaled up one portion of this, You can see things are pixelated, but with it turned off. Bam not pixelated. So that’s why you want to have that on there. So when you scale things, they’ll hold its fidelity and that’s the value of a vector file, so the moment everyone’s been waiting for is to start the animation process, and now that we have everything in its own layers right here at. After Effects, just like we save them in Illustrator. This is gonna be super easy, maybe, for example. I’ll just move this over here for analysis where I want this to be so obviously everyone’s object, depending on what they have is gonna have different animation. You just have to do animation. That makes sense for what you’re working with, so, for example. I have these signals here onto my satellite. One thing that I could do is I could have these like flicker on and off, and that’s pretty easy to do so so, for example here, so I can bring in these out points for these layers, and you know, goes away then what I could do is when we select both these layers, go to edit duplicate and bring them up one, and then I can just move it over. So, for example, boom goes away, just like that, or we can even stagger these layers a little bit better, so that is pretty cool and I can just continue to duplicate these and move them over for this quick animation, and obviously this isn’t anything Over-the-top will kind of get to that in a second, so just by using the in and out points of the layers, I can create my own unique animation on and off, but this doesn’t work for every object, so let’s go ahead and animate some things in here and get an idea with some more keyframe animations, so I can come and grab a certain object here and hit S from the keyboard for scale. And before I do anything I can grow the anchor point right here. I’m bringing this anchor point to like the corner of my layer and this will animate everything around the anchor point, and then I can add a keyframe for scale and move it forward in time. Maybe by a second, you know, maybe by, like 12 frames or so and set the scale down to 0% It’s like both keyframes and make them easy. East Keyframes writing, f9 or keyboard. And I’ll come on just like that. And then I can even copy these keyframes and paste them to a another layer here. So the bigger dish here. I’ll just go ahead and paste that right into there. That’s cool! I’ll go ahead and read just the keyframes that’s looking pretty cool, and then I can grab our rod here. Maybe readjust the anchor point to be on the bottom and I can hit s and shift our to bring it rotation and we’ll add a keyframe for both these and we’ll bring them forward in time, obviously, and we’ll bring the scale down at 0% and we can just offset the rotation and we’ll bring this layer on top of our other layers here, so we can see it before it comes in, so we have pretty much everything animated, but let’s say we want to add some more details. So now what we have left here are the two wings, and I want to show you some further editing capabilities of this, even though we didn’t save each of these paths into its own illustrator layers. So what we can do. If one of these selected is we can right, click it go to create and click on create shapes from vector layer. Now we open the shape layer that was created. Go in the contents. We now are gonna have every single layer editable and go into those groups and you can animate the transform properties. I’m not going to do that in Storia, but I want to show you that layer of death. So if you want to animate those, you can go to each group and animate them here instead of After Effects, But for these, I want to continue the same animation. Grab the anchor point and like scale ease into the center here over to the corner and we’ll just hit a string keyboard for scale and we’ll bring it forward and we’ll bring us down to 0% Make up me easy-easy frames and then. I’m gonna do the same thing for the other one. So with some careful planning with the animation, we can animate in our entire object individually, and, of course, animation is just not done here yet, so if you want to be able to move the entire object around what we need to do is go to layer new null object and we can parent every single layer to the null object, so grab that pick whip parented right there. And now if Arnos selected, you know, one thing I would do is first of all, grab the Pan behind tool and put the anchor point in the center of your object with that new layer selected there, and you know, now we can hit a string keyword for scale, we can scale it down from the center or we can do what people might prefer, which is to maybe add a little bit of just position to this, so we have piano keyboard for position. We’ll add a keyframe for it, and we grow the selection tool and we can just move this or around, so let’s see maybe, perhaps. I’ll have this over here, you know, maybe? I was keyframe in time. So now we can have this animated in here and it can move around. We can also, you know, be hit our keyboard for occasion at a keyframe for that, and we can rotate it by a little bit. You know, yeah, that could be pretty unique, so you can kind of do whatever you want with your animation here. Get a little position and rotation as well and of course we have no background. We have no context for the scene, so obviously you’re gonna want to build out more things. So, for example, on this website, you can also download download like backgrounds or anything for your scene, so I have this. You know, space scene here that I’ve already separated inside of Illustrator and I’ll bring this layer into my composition and turn on that vector icon button and scale it up and now. I have something in here. Maybe I’ll have T my keyboard for opacity and lower it down. I will link this in the description. Of course we have the ability to create our own animation very easily. So now we have the ability to add more elements to the scene, but this is generally the gist of creating effective animation. I know this isn’t much the show for obviously a tutorial, but this is the groundwork to starting to do good animation between Illustrator and After Effects, so the force, there’s always little things that we can do to add value to our composition. So for example, our Youtube channel select film has its own motion graphics pack and right here instead of After Effects. And you know, we can add some extra graphics to help spice this up, so for example, if I when I more detail to this, I can like. Add a cluster of accent. Motion graphics, click apply with our own extension and automatically adds accent motion graphics to our composition just to bring more detail of animation to put more eyes on what’s important, and, of course, in this pack, we have like over 100 titles that you can use for your projects and also animated backgrounds. I will link this one in description. If you’re interested in checking out our motion graphic starter pack. But also if you’re doing a lot of animation, another great tool that I would take a look at is animation composer, and this is specifically a tool that’s gonna help you animate objects really quick. So for example, if I want to animate everything here really fast, I can collect all my layers. Go to transition Presets go to 2d layer transition precess. Grab one out of a thousand motion here. I do whatever I want, maybe. I’ll do like a position in scale preview the animation before I apply it. You know, maybe that’s cool, playas. In now, our entire object will be individually animated, and, of course, coming to more tools, transition shifter easily move our layers around really quick, so I can offset everything, and now within just a few clicks of a button, we’ve been able to animate our entire object really quick instead of doing everything manually because every single animation that you’d want to do is within this pack, so I’ll link this description as well, so you can check out animation composer off a video hive and our very own motion graphic starter pack we’re off of our website, so those links will be in the description and these are both tools to help you produce amazing work and save you a lot of time, so now after watching this video, you should be able to easily create pretty much any animation. You’re looking to create using Adobe Illustrator and After Effects combined it together. I hope you found this video helpful and are able to take away these techniques. And if you’re new here, be sure to hit that subscribe button because we post multiple post-production tutorials every single week right here on the channel. You can also hit me up on my social media networks. Those links are in the video description and always be creating [Music].