LT 4.1 Timing, spacing and easing

In this lesson task, we’re going to be doing our first project in After Effects: a ball bounce!

You might be asking yourself why we’re starting with a ball bounce. The answer is that it’s the simplest way to demonstrate key principles without complicating things with complex characters or design decisions that might distract from focusing on the motion.

In this task, we’ll ask you to create a simple ellipse in After Effects and ONLY use your position values to keyframe a ball bouncing up and down in a continuous loop.

Remember, your value graph for your Y-axis should look like the one below. If you’re struggling to get it to look like this, please ask on the forum for guidance.

Finishing up

Once you’re finished animating, add the composition to the render queue or send it to Adobe Media Encoder. Render out an H.264 (high-quality) video and upload it to your blog!

FINISHED RENDER:

LT 4.2 Arcs, smears and squash and stretch

Let’s continue with our previous project and add some arcs, smears and squash and stretch.

Arcs

Start by making sure your dimensions are separated by right-clicking and selecting Separate Dimension.

Then using your X-position, create two keyframes so that your ball bounces from left to right.

Squash and stretch

Remember, when adding squash and stretch to keep the volume of an object the same. In After Effects, the scale should always equal its original value when combined.

Smear

Lastly, when adding smears, you can quickly achieve this using the echo effect in After Effects and adjusting the number of echoes and the delay.

Finishing up

Once you’re finished animating, add the composition to the render queue or send it to Adobe Media Encoder. Render out an H.264 (high-quality) video and upload it to your blog!

FINISHED RENDER:

LT 4.3 Mass, weight and anticipation

As we get to know After Effects better, we can dive deeper into one of the essential components: the graph editor. In the graph editor, we can play around with the keyframes and tweak them until our animations look the best they can.

Once we’ve done that, we can tackle the subtle art of anticipation and use anticipation to make visually appealing match cuts!

Ball bounce match cut

Using the principles we’ve learnt in this lesson, create a ball bounce that uses weight and anticipation to create a match cut.

Here are some pointers for what we’d like to see in your animation:

• Think about how heavy your ball is and how gravity would affect it.
• Look at your graph editor and tweak your value and speed graphs until it looks good.
• Animate anticipation using position, rotation or scale by going in the opposite direction of where you intend to animate.
• Match cuts are clean cuts. As in, it cuts between two completely different shots without any transition.

Finishing up

Once you’re finished animating, add the composition to the render queue or send it to Adobe Media Encoder. Render out an H.264 (high-quality) video and upload it to your blog!

FINISHED RENDER:

LT 4.4 Drag, overlapping action, follow through and exaggeration

The last principles are done and dusted! Now we get to put them into practice by implementing some overlapping action, follow-through, drag or exaggeration to our ball bounce.

For this exercise, pick two of the above four principles and add them to your ball bounce. Below you’ll see an example of overlapping action and exaggeration applied:

Finishing up

Once you’re finished animating, add the composition to the render queue or send it to Adobe Media Encoder. Render out an H.264 (high-quality) video and upload it to your blog.

FINISHED RENDER (OVERLAPPING ACTION AND EXAGGERATION / DRAG, FOLLOW-THROUGH AND OVERLAPPING ACTION:

MODULE 4

This assignment is all about taking what we’ve learnt in this module and applying it to the things we learnt in the previous modules.

Take any one of the ball bounces you’ve already created in this module and start transforming it into anything you like. You could keep it simple and turn it into a tennis or soccer ball or add some limbs or extensions and turn it into a creature. It’s up to you!

You can take this as far as you want – there are no limits. You can even add a background and animate that if you feel comfortable.

Here is an example of a ball bounce turned into a tiny dragon:

FINAL RENDER:

I decided to make a basketball, with a court-side background to fill out the animation more. To bring some more life into the animation, I added some movement to the supporters and roof-light.