We learned two more skills in After Effects. The first, parenting, allows you to link one shape to another, so that it follows it, like a child and a parent.
To get our first taste of how it worked, we made a simple animation with two stars in After Effects. First, I animated the bigger star to spin, then I dragged the tether from the little curly-whirly symbol next to the small star to the bigger star. The parent link will show where ‘none’ used to be. Now, when the big star rotates, the little star follows it. You can still select the smaller star and get it to spin independently, which I did to demonstrate more of the capabilities of parenting.
We used parenting to animate planets orbiting around each other. I imported pngs of planets and a space background into After Effects and attempted to recreate the Earth and Moon orbiting the Sun. It was difficult because parenting made the Moon follow the Earth’s rotation, and even if I transformed the Moon to have its own rotation, it didn’t look realistic. I also found problems with the cute faces, which I imported separately and added ontop. I didn’t have too much trouble with the Sun, but the other one’s kept disappearing. I considered my first attempt as a fail, and I wanted to try again from scratch.
The second and third times I tried to do this both ended up pretty much the same way, I used realistic images of the planets this time and tried to do different sizes, and I think I used parenting and rotation better, but I still couldn’t get the exact effect I wanted. The moon was spinning the same way as the Earth, and I couldn’t make it look like the sun was turning because it was perfectly symmetrical. But I do like the improvement from the cute versions, and I think that it looks more skilful overall.
The second skill we learned is called CC sphere, and it again, quite useful with planets, but has a lot of other possible used too. CC sphere allows you to bend any image into a spherical shape, with an automatic light source that can be edited. We chose to use a high-resolution image of the Earth texture. I imported the downloaded image into After Effects and found CC sphere in effects and presets. I dragged it onto the image, and it became a 3D sphere, like planet Earth. The effect controls appear and I found out that you could rotate the sphere and light at any angle, plus change the colour, intensity and lots of different options that can all be animated.
The best part, however, is that anything can be added ontop to orbit the sphere. I added a text layer. Next, in effects and presets, instead of searching for CC sphere, I found CC cylinder and dragged it to the text, making sure of course, that the layer was on top of the Earth. Again, the effect controls appeared, and although there were multiple, I mostly just used the radius to change the distance between the Earth and the words, pull them slightly forwards and put them at an angle. The next, important step, was changing the render option from fall to outside, to no backs. I then opened the layer and went to CC cylinder, where I rotated the text around six times in thirty seconds. The final thing to do was to duplicate the text layer, place it behind the Earth and change the render to inside, and it was complete. The text looked like it was rotating around the Earth.