making a new composition.
new compostion = ctrl + N. it brings up this dialogue box. from here, you can choose the settings of your after effects composition before creating it. you need a composition as a base in order to add frames to your animation, or video. these settings include framerate, resolution, aspect ratio and duration
anchor points.
anchor points are the position from where an object (shape) will rotate around in after effects. once the layer of an object is selected, you can use the pan behind tool (v) to move the anchor point to a specific part of a shape, in order to animate the shape around the anchor point later (by either scaling it or rotating it).
the blue hightlighted tool is the pan behind tool, and as you can see, i moved the anchor point to the bottom right corner of the red square. now, if i were to rotate the square, it would rotate around the point at the bottom right corner, rather than the middle of the shape, or the middle of the screen.
basic animating.
this is the composition panel. from here, you can add keyframes to the timeline to animate objects in your composition. to do this, select the drop down arrow next to the solid colour square where your layer is to open a drop down menu, and from there, select the arrow next to transform. this displays the different ways you can animate and move the object – changing the anchor point, the position, scale, rotation and opacity. i clicked on the stopwatch icon next to position. this will allow me to move my red square around screen, and creates a keyframe on the timeline wherever the playhead is. i created my keyframe at 0 seconds.
from here, i selected a point on my timeline where i wanted the animation to stop, and then i moved my shape to wherever i wanted on the screen. the position on the timeline relates to where the animation ends, so if i want the shape to move slower, i would move the keyframe to a point on the timeline that is further away from 0, increasing the length of my video.
here, you can see i used the selection tool to move my shape to create a simple 2 second animation.
simple render.
go to composition > add to media encoder queue. it opens up media encoder. right click file to edit export settings, change length of video to length of animation. click green play button. render.
here is my final video.
creating the sunset.
after taking all the files from insight, i started on the sunset animation in after effects.
The first thing i did, before ordering the layers, was renaming the layers based on what images they were. e.g renaming the layer that’s a picture of grass to “grass”. to do this, i hovered my mouse over each layer, right clicked and selected ‘rename’. i also used the eye icon to make layers visible or invisible to help manage what i was seeing on screen.
this helped me get my layers organised so that it was easier to recreate the starting image from the board using the assets in after effects.
next, i ordered the layers according to the composition of the image on the board. (grass in the foreground, hills behind, then city, then sky as a backdrop etc.)
here’s my recreated image, with the layers ordered so that it replicates the composition of the original image.
i wasn’t able to finish, but i did at least name the layers, order the layers and animate the sun going down with keyframes.