Animated Images Part 2

Full Video Transcript

Recap and Project Setup

Hey everybody, welcome back. This is the second part of our tutorial on how to animate still images in Adobe After Effects. So like I said, this is the second part, so if you're not sure what's going on, I suggest going back to see the first part of this tutorial to figure out where we're starting at over here. Let's keep going with this project.

Now that we're inside of our composition here, we had double-clicked our hot air balloons layer. It looks like this nickname didn't take, so let's just rename that. Great. So I just want to show you, if you grab any of your assets over here, like the layers, I can move it around and we have a nice blue background right underneath it. So it was great that we set it up this way.

Animating the First Balloon

Now we're going to animate. What we're going to do is I'm going to actually animate the left one first, and then we're just going to repeat the process with all of them. Click on any balloon that you want to animate and hit P for position on your keyboard. Let's hit this stopwatch here—that's going to set a keyframe at the very beginning.

Then I'm going to move my playhead about a second and a half in. I'm going to pull my Y-coordinate down here, the vertical component down, and then I'll move it over here. Playhead maybe about like to three seconds in, I'm actually going to copy (Command+C or Ctrl+C) my keyframe over here so it actually loops around.

Using Loop Expressions

The last thing that I'm going to do over here is I'm going to Alt+click the stopwatch and I'm going to type in "loopOut." Now this is a snippet—it's just a little bit of code, barely even—and we actually have a tutorial on that. But basically we can use this bit of code to automate certain processes.

So I'm going to put "loopOut" here, and if we hit play, you can see it's going down, it's going to head right back up, and it should loop again right here. Great. And it dips down again, but I only have three keyframes—it's automatically going on its own. We're actually going to do the same thing with the other two balloons. I'm going to cut ahead, but you get the idea.

One last thing to note: don't do the same exact animation. Offset it maybe by like a half second so they're not all going up and down in sync, because that'll just look weird. Great, so now we've animated all these balloons. I'm going to select them all with Ctrl+A or Command+A and close them.

Adding Text Layers

Next up, we are going to put in some text. So let's head up to Layer, New, Text. Let's type in "Some Company Name"—sure, this will be our company. And I'm going to place this one on the very top of my layer stack.

Now this is important because the way that your layers are organized, it's kind of like a deck of cards. If I had put it underneath like this middle balloon here, it would get kind of clipped out. You see, like that. So I'm going to undo that because we are going to save that for our next text layer.

Layer, New, Text, and let's put in some tagline. Let's say "Hot Air Balloon Rides." I'm actually going to shrink this. Going to open up my Align tool set here—you don't really have to do this, but to do that I went over to Window, Align, and I'm just going to click this so they are aligned.

Text Animation Presets

Now I'm going to take this tagline and I'm going to bring it underneath the middle balloon. Looks like my layers got jumbled a bit—I was messing around with them before. So now you see that it's actually hidden behind this balloon over here.

The way that these text layers animate in is not such a big deal, but I'm going to show you just quickly how I did this. Let's head over to Effects and Presets on the right-hand corner, and I'm going to choose let's say "Fade Up Words." I'm going to drop it onto my timeline here. I'm going to do the same for the tagline. As I scrub through, it automatically animates in. These presets are really great for quick work.

Working with Null Objects

Okay, we're almost done. I know it's kind of been a long haul. So the last thing that we're going to be doing is that we're going to animate this all together. We're going to open up a new layer: Layer, New, I want a Null Object. I'm going to actually bring this one up all the way to the top. I'm going to color code it so it's not red, so I won't mix it up with the text.

Now, if you're unfamiliar, a null object essentially is an empty layer, or more accurately it's more like an invisible layer. You can attach different layers to your null invisible layer, so it's a bit like a marionette—when you move the main controls, everything attached to it moves as well. So it's good for animating a bunch of layers.

Parenting Layers to the Null

Now that we have a null layer, we're going to select in fact everything, all together. You see this little swirl over here? You want this swirl near the end of the row over here, and we are going to parent it. We're going to parent this chunk of layers over to our null.

What that essentially means is that all of these layers are going to look to this null for direction. So if I open up position and I shift it down, everything moves together. One last thing: I'm just going to move these text layers over just a little bit so they start appearing after the zoom-in starts.

Animating Scale and Position

Okay, so let's open up S for scale, Shift+P for position, so we have position and scale present. Let's hit the stopwatch to set a keyframe for both. I want to essentially follow the letters as they fade in and kind of rise up with the motion.

So let's scale this thing up as if we're moving into the picture, and we're going to be using position to keep everything centered. So we're going to keep adjusting our X and Y coordinates. You can do it manually by clicking and dragging everything, but I just prefer this way.

I actually want this to move a little bit slower because it's heading in in one second. And then the last thing is that I'm animating it moving up a little bit. I'm actually going to push this keyframe out, and then you select everything together. Remember: right-click, Keyframe Assistant, Easy Ease. I've moved this keyframe all the way out to three seconds just because I want it to kind of pan upwards like the balloons are rising, but I wanted to do it very slowly. So I'm going to actually trim this by hitting N, and let's preview our animation.

Practical Applications and Wrap-Up

Okay, so that's how you can animate a still image. You'll be seeing this technique used pretty much everywhere, like I mentioned. Think of motion graphics on an ATM machine, Instagram ads, even some kinds of animatics. Just the prepping image step is also really super useful, as you can leverage those skills into animating your own art as well.

So yeah, that's all for this tutorial. I hope you've enjoyed learning how to animate still images in Adobe After Effects. If you have any questions or things you want to see in future videos, let us know in the comments. Tell us about any projects you're working on or any topics you'd like us to cover. This has been Soporta for Noble Desktop.