Common Animation Workflows with Adobe Illustrator and After Effects

So for the lesson, you need, well, basically. I want to show you what the file we're working with is, which is an Adobe Illustrator file. You do not need Illustrator to do the lesson at all.

Um, but it helps to kind of like understand the structure of what we're dealing with. Okay. Okay.

So yesterday the files were JPEGs, EMG for the logo, um, blah, blah, blah. What else? Uh, video file, audio file. Okay.

So yesterday's lesson is based on the idea that you can create some assets like text and After Effects, and you can import like regular images and that sort of thing. Okay. Which is fine.

That is a workflow. The problem is, is it's not a problem per se. It's depending on where you work, it's not a common workflow.

If you do certain things like, um, infographics, um, corporate stuff like charts, graphs, uh, corporate communications, marketing materials, most of the people who create those things are creating them in Adobe software, Photoshop, and Illustrator. Okay. So most social media ads, for example, are created in Photoshop.

Most charts and graphs you see in anything are, well, when they're,  when they're pretty looking, they are, they are probably Illustrator. If they're not pretty looking, they can be made in Excel or something. I don't know.

Okay. But if they're pretty looking, they're probably made in Illustrator. So logos are Illustrator, that sort of thing.

So a very common workflow is to actually start with Photoshop and Illustrator files. Like if I've got a ad to animate, more likely than not, that's a Photoshop or Illustrator file being handed to me. Okay.

Now, and that's basically what the most common workflow in After Effects is. It assumes assets are created in Photoshop and or Illustrator and then brought into After Effects. Okay.

So for example, this screen is, uh, got three charts, um, X (formerly known as Twitter), which I will never call X, X, X, Instagram, and Facebook were the three. And there's a little title on top. How many years did I do social media and a background.

Okay. That's basically the structure of this. Hey, so in Illustrator layers, this is a layered system.

Okay. So the Facebook logo, okay. Is that layer that includes the actual F graphic, the white circle, and the drop shadow.

Okay. By the way, in Adobe, in Photoshop and Illustrator option or ALT click on the eye hides every other layer. Okay.

Now the problem is if you've been arbitrary, start turning some on and off that the command then fails, but it's kind of fun. So the Facebook wedge is basically this one right here. Okay.

If you have layers in Illustrator like this, and if you have your assets laid out, like they very often would be for an ad, cause like if it's a ad for like a static purpose and very often a static ad or a static graphic, someone decides, can you animate that? Sure. Okay. Okay.

So a lot of times, especially in corporate communications, assets are not built for animation. They are repurposed for animation. Okay.

But it's fine. Here's the thing. Very often Illustrator users do not create individual layers for every asset because Illustrator does not require that.

I admit, okay. However, After Effects requires it. Okay.

What's going to happen is each of these layers is going to be imported as an After Effects layer, which means even though, for example, the Facebook logo may contain like three different graphics on it, when it gets into After Effects, it'll be one single layer and therefore one single graphic. So keep that in mind. Now, Photoshop files are by definition layered.

Everything's a fricking layer. You copy paste a layer in Photoshop, but the same thing applies. Layer by layer is how After Effects will import the file.

Okay. One of the advantages of this system is it will come out in that position. Whatever you see in Photoshop or Illustrator is what it will be laid out and organized in After Effects.

So it saves us all that layout and movement time. So technically I could have made a Photoshop file of what we did yesterday with everything in its final position and literally just imported that now to save us all the movement around. In that case, we'd have been animating everything into its final position.

So it's very common. Okay. Now there is one thing about this.

I should remove the drop shadows from the logos. Anything that can be done in After Effects should be done in After Effects. Okay.

Here's why. That's the bounding box of the logo layer. Notice how it's not centered on the circle of the logo.

It counts the drop shadow as well. The drop shadow will not be editable once I bring it into After Effects. It's going to be that graphic and unchangeable effectively.

And the way it calculates the center is going to be over here. If you wanted to do a rotate or a scale, you'd have to actually move the anchor point around. So I really should get rid of that.

I just, I just didn't. That's what it is. Um, I did actually do that on this.

This text originally had a drop shadow on it. Um, I removed it because of what we're going to do to screw it up the drop shadow. But I forgot to do that from here to have you reapply.

Okay. But you should, I mean, you should go to it and do it fine. But it's fine.

It'll work without it. So one other notes, you can copy and paste assets from Illustrator in. So I did take a look at shapes.

There are also plugins to the program that basically would send Illustrator graphics, even if they're not layered over to After Effects as layers. So there's all sorts of workflows if you're using Illustrator and After Effects together. Okay.

You don't have to be an Illustrator expert. What you may though want to do is learn enough Illustrator to be able to make changes. Like if I want to like, I can't drop period of that drop shadow.

I need to have an idea of where that drop shadow is and how it's applied to get rid of it. Okay. Um, keep in mind, that's what sold to me several times in my career.

No one makes graphics for you to animate. Okay. You are repurposing stuff, which means somebody has had to prep that.

That original graphic was not layered. I had to prep it. There's a one we'll do later, which is the Noble Desktop logo.

By the way, that thing was giving me flat as actually an EPS file. I had to separate into layers to be able to animate it because After Effects understands layer by layer. Okay.

So this is 3A. So what we're going to actually make is in three parts. Okay.

Hence the preview movie being in three of them. Okay. So this is going to be infographic screen two.

Okay. By the way, one note, don't name things like this. Infographic screen one, infographic screen two, infographic screen three.

Don't. Because I named it like that, it causes a problem. We have to make sure we disable later.

Okay. Name them without the same words and numbers at the end. The program, when it sees this, thinks it is a video file and it wants to bring that in as frame one, that in as frame two, that in as frame three, if this is like a time-lapse basically.

So I should have named them like infographic screen and then describe what it is like intro ending screens. But that I shouldn't be, I should not have named them like this. I admit that.

Now. So the infographic done, this is the final result. This is actually a couple of different lessons in here, by the way.

So this one I just showed you is the second screen. We're going to animate that first. Then we're going to animate the first screen.

Okay. Then we're going to combine them together in to make this transition from one to the other. Like that.

Okay. That's basically an animation. It's basically zooming in, scaling up that layer, that text layer,  basically is what it's doing.

And then it does this. The background of the screen two and the color of the text is the same thing. So it gives you that, like that big, this is basically how you combine multiple longer animations together.

You use basically a scene or a slide based system where you animate from one to the other. Technically, there's no limit to how far you could go with this. An example of that approach.

That looked frozen. It's hilarious. Okay.

So scene one, animates to scene two, animates to scene three, so on and so forth. There's no limit to how far you could string this together. Okay.

Sometimes you'll basically mimic video editing transitions, like this will fade out basically. But animation programs allow you to have more interesting like things in that. It's kind of cool by the way.

That's what it is. When I say transition, I'm using it, not like in the video editing term, but this is getting from one scene to another. Okay.

And there's a lot of ways to do that, by the way. So it's kind of fun. Okay, so that's what we're going to make.