Animating an instructional page: Bicycle essentials

- Let's take a look at an instructional type page, with bullets or lists that need to be animated. I'll show you how organizing the Layers panel makes the task of applying animations to multiple objects much easier, freeing you up to design the layout and apply animations you want, to make a compelling page. Let's take a look at this example. "Things to Consider When Buying a Bike". Every part of the bike is very important, and this page outlines for you why each part is important, and what it does.

At the end, off goes the bicycle. Let's take a look at how this was put together. First of all you'll notice that our Layers panel, which I've put out here so you can see it a little more easily, is very organized. There are several layers, but they all have a purpose. They all group things together that we're going to need to use. For instance, if I turn off the Text layer, you can see that all the text is in one layer, the boxes are all in one layer, and the bicycle is all in one layer.

Let's take a look at the Timing panel. The Timing panel is also very structured, because each box of information has to come in, and then the text, and the bicycle part, have to come in at the same time. Let me show you exactly how this was put together. I'm gonna turn to the second page of this file and go out of preview mode, and we'll put this page together. Because the items are organized in layers, in this case, I can actually just select an entire layer, and select all the items on it and then apply the animations.

I'm starting by selecting all of these background boxes, and I'm gonna set them to "Appear". I don't want them to come in quite as quickly as the defaults, so I'm gonna change that duration to 0.75 seconds. Let's check the Timing panel, and make sure they're animating in the right order. That looks right. Next, I'm gonna select the Text layer. This selects all of the text frames of information here. And I'm also going to set those to "Appear".

Now those can come in a little bit faster, so I'm gonna leave them at the default duration. Now, let's look at this BikeBuilding layer a little more closely. Each piece of the bike is built one-by-one. There's a HidingBox that comes into play, that's going to hide the elements before the bike starts moving. Here's the bike that moves, and then each piece has one less piece on it. It builds up from there.

I'm gonna turn off this HidingBox for just a moment. And now I'm gonna apply an animation to all the bicycle parts. One last thing, is that the last part of the bicycle, the complete bike, which brings in the seat, is actually part of our moving bicycle, so it's grouped with a different set of objects. Still, I can select it. I'll start from the bottom, and go up. This is the order we want things to animate in. And for the bicycle parts, I want those to "Appear" as well.

I'll just leave it at the default. Now that we have our basic animation on all the pieces, we need to adjust things in the Timing panel. We want the first box to come in, followed by the graphic for wheels, followed by the text for wheels. And we want the graphic for wheels, and the text to play together. So we'll link them in the Timing panel. Next, the frame. And I'm just gonna go through this list, and make sure that everything is listed so that it's going in the right order.

Next will come our gears. Those are very important. And before is the fork, so I'll bring up the image, and then the text. You can see really clearly here, how important it is to name the objects that you're working with, especially when you have complex animations like this, or not so much complex as, a lot of pieces going on here. So we'll link these. The other thing I want to do is, after the box comes in, I want a slight delay before the wheels and the text come in.

So I'm going to command- or control-click on these items with the graphic from the bike, and I'm going to put in a very slight delay. Otherwise things will happen much too quickly. Now, let's go back to our Layers panel. Under the "6-Seat+Complete", this is where we're going to have our moving bicycle. There are lots of polygon pieces here, but I'm going to go down to the rear wheel and the front wheel, because when it starts to move, I want those to spin.

So I'm gonna set the default to "Spin", and set it to Loop. Now, I'm gonna select the group "BikeMove". This is this entire group, it's the entire bicycle, and I'm gonna set it to "Move Right". I need to extend the motion path so that it goes off the page. So I'm gonna move my Layers panel over, and click on the path, and drag it out here. I'll turn on the animation proxy here, to make sure that it's going off the page.

Let's see. Perfect. Finally, I'm gonna turn back on that HidingBox. That's going to hide the pieces we've been building the bike with, and just leave the complete bicycle ready to roll, chilling. I need to select this HidingBox, and make it "Appear". After the bike is built, I want it to come in, hide all the pieces, and then on top is going to be my complete bike that's going to move. The last step is, the timing of when that HidingBox is going to come in.

I actually want it to come in when the last complete piece of the bike is built. Finally, we'll link the pieces of the bike that moves. Let's see what we have here. Here come the parts. Everything's coming in one-by-one, as it should. That Hiding frame comes up, and off goes the bike. Looks great. When it comes to the animation effects themselves, almost everything on this page has "Appear" applied, one of the simplest presets, except for the motion path for the moving bike, of course.

But imagine how long it would take to put all this together, without using the animations panel, and the Timing panel's best friend, the Layers panel. So be sure and organize your Layers panel all the time, but especially when you have steps, or bullet points, that need the same animation, but need to come in at different times. A little organization goes a long way.