After Effects Apprentice: 03 Advanced Animation

- Hi, I'm Chris Meyer of Crish Design and welcome to After Effects Apprentice: Advanced Animation. In this lesson, I want to share with you a number of tip and tricks you can use to help craft and refine your animations inside After Effects. A lot of the lesson is going to be spent on the After Effects Graph Editor. That's the most powerful tool at your disposal to help refine your movements and your speed changes and coordinate movements across multiple layers and multiple parameters. But there's a lot of other cool tricks inside After Effects, as well. For example, there's the often overlooked Anchor Point.

It's the center of all your transformations in After Effects, but also it's a great thing to animate if you're trying to create a Ken Burns-style movement across still images. There's Motion Sketch, where you get to hand draw your own animation path. There's Smoother, where you get to smooth out kinks in that motion path. There's Auto Orient, where you can have layers automatically rotate to follow your motion path. And then, there's also really nice things like Roving Keyframes, a little-known feature to control the speed across a complex motion path with just the start and end keyframes. There's other nice things in After Effects, like Motion Blur, the ability to automatically blur objects depending on their movement.

There's Hold Keyframes, the ability to create stop-motion and slam-down animations. And there's also a few other tricks to create a really nice, smooth, elegant movements in After Effects, as well. But, first, we're going to start with the fundamentals. How do you navigate between keyframes and what information exists in keyframes underneath the hood that you can manipulate to help smooth out your animations? So, let's get started and let's have some fun.