Animation basics in After Effects – Part 3: How to animate text

In this episode of animation basics in After Effects, I go over how to animate text in After Effects. I cover how you can use the scale, position, rotation and opacity options both individually and collectively to create animated text with just basic skills. I also go over how you can use shapes to effectively hide or reveal text withing a composition.

CORRECTING COLOURS IN FIGURES & IMAGES FOR USE IN AFTER EFFECTS

Sometimes, we want to animate and image or a figure but we don’t have the original code to export it so that the colours are ‘correct’ and match those in After Effects. Maybe a collaborator has passed on this figure or it’s from an old piece of work that we can’t find the code for, so this is all we’ve to work with.

In this video, we go over how to simply change the colours in a figure or image in Adobe Illustrator so that they are the same as those in After Effects. This is important if for example, we want to make sure that the solid background colour of our animation, matches the background colour of our figure so that the figure appears to seamlessly blend in with the background.

How to animate any object along a custom path

In this episode we cover how to animate any object along a custom path in After Effects using two examples. To animate objects along a custom path, we first download a free vector graphic (links below), briefly prepare it in Illustrator and then cover all the basics of animating objects in After Effects.

How to prepare and animate maps in Illustrator and After Effects

In this quick tutorial I cover how to prepare and animate maps in Illustrator and After Effects in 2021. First we download a freely available species distribution maps as an SVG file (link below), then we prepare the layers in Illustrator before importing this Illustrator file into After Effects and demonstrate how we can easily animate different components of a map using scale, opacity and position settings.

Infographic animation in After Effects: Part 2

In this short tutorial on animation basics in After Effects 2021, I cover how to make and animate infographics in Ater Effects using simple shapes and basic animation tecniques to make simple but visually striking animated infographics. By modifying just the colour, stroke, opacity, scale and position of circles a crazy amount of diffeent styles can be created and combined with other graphics or number counters to help tell the story of your science, research or data.

Infographic animation in After Effects: Part 1

In this short video, we explore how to create an infographic animation in After Effects. We start off demonstrating how to create an infographic in Illustrator, then we import this inforgraphic into After Effects and use masks and counters to visually depict the proportions of males and femaes in a hypothetical scenario.

ANIMATING GRAPHS IN AFTER EFFECTS – BAR GRAPHS

In this short tutorial, I explain the basics of animating graphs in After Effects and focusing on bar graphs. Animating graphs in After Effects is easy and fully customisable. I’ll go over how to make as many bars as you want, how to animate them to accurately reflect the exact numbers in your data, how to change the colour and thickness of the bar, the style of these bars and how to add an animated counter above each bar that ‘counts up’ to whatever value you want.

HOW TO PREPARE ILLUSTRATOR LAYERS FOR ANIMATION IN AFTER EFFECTS

In this video I go over step by step how to prepare vector graphics and Illustrator layers that you may have found on the interenet or designed yourself so that you can animate them in After Effect. Starting from downloading a free vector graphic I cover preparing illustrator files for After Effects and then animating all of these illustrator layers independently in After Effects. This video is designed to be an easy introduction to Adobe illustrator and After Effects for beginners and covers how to animate shape layers in After Effects to quickly and easily make complex looking animations in just 10 minuets.

TOP 10 FREE RESOURCES FOR YOUR ANIMATION PROJECT

In this quick video, I’ll cover my Top 10 online resources and places that you can find FREE graphics for animation in 2021. This video covers where you can find high resolution images, royalty free music, HD video or a mind blowing selection of millions of free vector graphics to use and animate in your next project.

ANIMATION BASICS IN AFTER EFFECTS – PART 1:

SETTING UP, SHAPES, STROKES AND COLOURS

In Part 1, we look at the basics of setting up a new project and composition in After Effects, assuming no pre-existing knowledge. We then look at how to organise our basic file structure and navigate around the different panels in the After Effects interface. Next, we move onto how to make basic shapes, change their colours, modify the stroke (outline) width and colours of different shapes and apply both linear and radial gradients. In the Part 2, we introduce the basics of animation.

ANIMATION BASICS IN AFTER EFFECTS – PART 2:

KEY FRAMES, SCALE, OPACITY & POSITION

Having looked at how to set up a project, create some basic shapes and mosify their colours in Part 1, here in Part 2, we introduce the foundation of all animations in After Effects – key frames. Key frames control the start and end point of an animation, inbetween which the animation occurs. Here we demonstrate how a simple but effective animation can be produced purely from animating three key elements – the position, scale and opacity of an object.

EXPORTING GGPLOT FIGURES & GRAPHS FOR USE IN AFTER EFFECTS

In this video, we cover the basics of saving a figure or graph created in R using ggplot to make sure that the colours in the exported figure are the correct colour when we import this figure into After Effects. This is important if for example, we want to make sure that the solid background colour of our animation, matches the background colour of our figure so that the figure appears to seamlessly blend in with the background.

BASIC ANIMATION – ANIMATING A GRAPH IN AFTER EFFECTS

In this introductory video, we go over some of the basics of animating a line graph in After Effects. We start off in R Studio where we import our data (the code and data used in this tutorial are both downloadable for free on the left), do some basic data wrangling, create a line graph using ggplot (a figure in R) and then export this figure as an EPS file. Then, we import this figure into After Effects and use it as a template to demonstrate some of the basic tools that we can use in After Effects to make a simple, but effective animation.

Some of the basic skills we cover in this video include making new shape layers in After Effects, changing the dimensions, colours, style and outlines of these shapes and then how to animate them using the ‘trim paths’ effect and keyframes, which do all the animation ‘heavy lifting’ in After Effects.