Mastering Layer Sequencing and Animation Techniques

Now, animation has 12 properties. OK, I'm not exactly, I don't remember. When I did this, I tried a couple different timings for the animation.

I eventually settled on an 11 frame animation. I don't know what I was thinking, but it just worked out when I tested it many different times. 11 frames worked nice, OK? So here's what I'm going to do.

Load 11 frames. I'm going to highlight all of these layers. Now, here's a note.

If you click on the topmost layer, Noble End, and then Shift-Desktop-P, what's technically happening is they're selecting an order. So that one's first, and that one, and that one, that one, that one, that one. Now, when you're just trying to animate or edit something, it doesn't matter.

But there's a command later that's going to sequence them, stack them out in time. It's based on the selection order. So depending on how you select it, they'll literally determine which one starts and which one ends.

OK, so you might not care, but be aware of its initials. Now, here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to go to my Properties panel.

I'm going to turn on Position and Scale Animation. All the layers are highlighted, so all of them get keyframes. Then I'm going to go back to the beginning of the timeline to make my starting keyframe.

Now, here's the problem. Some of you have seen, and I assume all the people on Zoom are doing the same thing. We give you numbers in the instructions, and some of you, what you do is you click on the numbers and you type them in.

OK, this is my argument for why I shouldn't have numbers in the book, OK? Just have more pictures. Because when you do that, you start to think that that's a good idea. Here's a problem with that, OK? I have multiple layers selected.

I click on this, and I say 1,000. And I press Return. They literally all go to the same exact place.

You have multiple layers, so then you type in Position. Whenever you type in, everything gets that same value. Now, if you were doing that to scale, no problem at all.

But Position, because again, it's based on not the layers settings, but the comp settings, by the way, will always do this. My problem is I need to move them over all relatively. I want to move them all maybe 200 pixels to the left, so they'll slide in.

If I type into it, we got a problem. However, if I use my arrow keys, that will move them all relatively. If I freaking pick them up and drag them, hold Shift now, by the way, that will move them all relatively.

If I hover over these empty number spaces, that moves them all relatively. Only it doesn't, it's typing in the field. So the instructions give you a number, but if you try to type it, it's going to break.

So I just kind of want to move it over a little bit. And I said, I'm sorry. I think the instructions actually tell you to use Shift and the left arrow to nudge it over like 20 or 30 pixels.

Yeah, that's what it says, actually. Shift and the left arrow, that's step seven, by the way. But again, as long as you don't physically type in there, your changes are relative to each layer.

By the way, for scale, I am going to say zero. Because again, it's scale is both of these layers. So here's what happens.

Boo, like that, they do that. They do that. They move over and scale up.

That's not bad. I like that, but I want to overshoot. So at six frames, I'm going to basically add some more, another keyframe.

There's a problem. I don't actually know where it's supposed to overshoot now, do I? So here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to go after my last keyframe before I add my third.

I'm going to do this. View, rulers, we'll drag guideline in. Now I know where it is supposed to stop, because that's the end of its animation.

Now when I go back to six frames, I know exactly how far I'm supposed to move in over. And then I'm going to make my scale like, you can make it whatever you want. Let's just say 115.

Now I get that. But I want to make all of those keyframes ease, but I can't see them. On your keyboard, there is a key, the tilde key, the one above tab.

When you hover over any one of your panels and press it, it makes it full size, full screen size. You can also double that on the name of the panel. That would also make it full screen size.

I can select the entire row by just dragging a box around. While the program understands that these are related to position, it has no way of selecting like a column of them because it's not a thing in the program. I'm just going to right click, keyframe assist and ease.

Now, by the way, one note, if you want to be able to select those all at once, here's how to do it. Once they're selected, right click, assign them a label color. Now, when you right click on one of the label colors, select keyframe label group, okay, on all layers.

So you can colorize keyframes and then select based on the colorization. But you still have to manually select them once to be able to do that. If you know you might come back here and edit these, you want to adjust their properties or something, you can do that.

So again, the tilde key makes whatever panel you're hovering over full screen size. Terrasin again, goes back to none. For the record, it's any panel, by the way, okay? If you manually resize them, they'll stay that way until you manually unresize them or reset the workspace.

If you do tilde, it's a min max toggle. So like I said, if you want to label them, so then you might want to edit them again. So then all at once, that's how you select keyframes, you label, and then you just select the label.

That is nice, I like that, I like that, that's fun. It's good. By the way, I need to select my layers again.

So noble to desktop thief that he selected them. Then the instructions have you create a staggered animation. Here's the thing.

There is a command when you have layers highlighted to sequence the layers, one after the other. Here's the problem. First layer starts and second layer starts after the first one ends.

Third layer starts after the second one ends and so on and so forth. So it's based on the length of the layers. Here's the problem.

All the layers are actually the full length of the timeline. If I ran the sequence command now, the first layer would show up. The others are like pushed off the screen.

They don't exist anymore. So I need to basically shorten the length of all these layers down. So I'm thinking that I would like to have a six frame delay, which is about half of the animation I built between each layer.

So I'm gonna shorten these to six frames, which means by the way, I'm gonna go to five frames. Option right bracket. It pulls their end to line up with the current emitter.

Why did I go to five? I wanted six. It's always one frame extra. See, right there.

I wanted seven. I'd go to six and then it would cut down and add in one extra frame. It always adds one extra frame.

Okay, I'm gonna hide all the properties. I'm gonna save them for this by the way. Animation, keyframe assistant, sequence layers.

Okay, do not turn on overlap. Just leave them where it is. Okay.

And it does that. But now they vanish because they're only six frames long. Now this is actually what you discovered in the previous lesson, which I discovered is effectively that command that shortens layers can also lengthen them.

I moved my CTI to the end of the timeline. Same keyboard shortcut, option right bracket. Extends the layers to it.

If your current time indicator is to the left of the end of your layers, the command pulls it to it, it shortens it. If your CTI is to the right of the end of your layers, the same exact command lengthens it. Now what I have is this.

Now, by the way, if I press U to see the keyframes, what sequence did is move them over to slide them over. It's the equivalent of me sliding each of them over six frames at a time, which would just be annoying. And that is how to make a sequence animation, a stagger animation.

Now that's cool. That's fun until the art comes along. Can you speed that up? There is a lesson in this because that has happened to me.

Okay. Okay. Adjusting a stagger animation on page 101 is literally because this happens to you all the time.

Can you change the speed of that? Can you change the delay between them? Okay. Here's what it is. The first thing is I have to slide all the layers back to the beginning.

So all the keyframes line up at the beginning again. So I move to the beginning with the CTI, left bracket to slide them all over there. The fact that their ends are jagged is irrelevant.

I'm going to cut them down again. So maybe I want to have a two frame delay. I would go to one frame and trim them down and do the same exact command.

I want to have a one frame delay. So I'm at the beginning, option, right bracket, trim them down. And then I run the same command again from assistant sequence layers.

I go to the end of my timeline, option, right bracket to extend. And then I'll have that. Now I don't like that, but I do what I'm told like an obedient lack.

That is what the art director wanted. They were trying to mimic something they built someplace else. So they wanted a really fast like wave effect.

Not a fan personally, but it's cool. And if I decide I need to change it, I can do it again. I pull them all back to the beginning.

I figure out the duration I want, maybe three frames and do the run command again, again, again, again, again, until I get the timing we like. That's adjusting a staggered animation. So this entire section of the lesson is about the idea of animating multiple layers simultaneously by setting all the keywords at once, but also really about getting into the shortening versus moving effect.

It's kinda cool. Now, by the way, there is an add-on not for free called stagger layers that would automatically stagger this so you wouldn't have the extra steps of trimming things down. We'll just go on.

So by the way, if you like doing math, you could keep the layers at their full length and use the overlap function. But I hate doing math, so. So let's do short because it's easier doing this.

So that's 4A. Now, so this is where we're gonna stop this lesson. I do wanna show one cool thing though, that's from here.

I'm gonna unsize out of those layers. I'm gonna unlock them, which is command shift L or just layer unlock all switches. Look at the order.

N7, N6, N5, N4, N3, N2, N1. That is the order that they were separated in Illustrator. But this annoys me because I want that one to be first and this one to be last.

A college student, one of my college students started this 20 something years ago, by the way. I love this girl. Because here's what she taught me.

I click on N1, I hold down shift, click on N7. I cut it, which is command X. When I paste it back in, it pastes it in the order it was selected. It's very easy to reverse the order of layers by cut and paste here.

Because that can't be done in other Adobe programs. It doesn't do that. Here it does, it's very easy.

That's reading the layer, the layer order, the layer selection order. The same thing when it did the sequencing, it was based on the order they were selected in. So cut and paste and that sequence command runs based on selected order.

So for example, when you did the sequence, if you arbitrarily selected layers, in any order you want, the order I was selecting them in would be the order that they end up sequencing in. First to last. So in this program, selection order is remembered as you select things.

So it's kind of fun. That copy paste thing is actually really great. That paste thing is really great.

Now, questions? Okay, so by the way, the rest of the lesson that we're not gonna do is based on the idea of, effectively for the in rectangle, use the pan behind tool to move its anchor point over there so it can scale from the side. Why? Because that's what the art director wanted. I have no better defense than that.

That's what the art director wanted. They wanted it from the side. You can move that anchor point wherever you want to control how it moves.

And then it basically had you take in one through in seven and then basically one appears, next appears, next appears with that sequence command. That's all it did. Okay.