Animating an infographic icon in Adobe After Effects

Course contents
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Camera – 1 Node 9:36
SECTION: 5
Preview & Playback 6:45

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Course info

52 lessons / 7 hours 1 projects Certificate of achievement

Overview

Hi there, my name is  Dan. I’m a Adobe Certified Instructor and I LOVE animating infographics & bringing potentially boring data to life using After Effects.

This course is for beginners. You don’t need any previous knowledge in AFX or any motion graphic experience. We’ll start with the super basics, taking simple icons breathing life into to them with After Effects.

We’ll work through a real life projects, connecting Excel into After Effects to transform your boring spreadsheet data into approachable visual information. We’ll experiment with lighting & cameras. We’ll do some fun things with masking, looking at how important sound is in your presentation, all the way through to exporting for Youtube, Powerpoint and all sorts of social media including animated GIFS.  

There are projects for you to complete, so you can practice your skills and use these for your portfolio. There is a cheat sheet and I’ve got exercise files so you can play along. I will also save my files as I go through each video so that you can compare yours to mine - handy if something goes wrong.

Know that I will be around to help - if you get lost you can drop a post on the video 'Questions and Answers' below each video and I'll be sure to get back to you.

What are you waiting for? Lets get making!


What are the requirements?

  • You will need a copy of Adobe After Effects, Illustrator & Photoshop CC 2017 or above. 90% of the course will be done in After Effects but a few things are better done in Illustrator & Photoshop. A free trial can be downloaded from Adobe.

  • No previous motion graphic skills are needed.

  • No previous After Effects, Illustrator or Photoshop skills are needed.

What am I going to get from this course?

  • 48 lectures 5+ hours of well structured content.

  • You'll learn to take Excel spread sheets and animate this in After Effects.

  • You’ll learn how to make animated pie charts, line charts & bar graphs.

  • You’ll learn how to create percentage counters.

  • You’ll learn how to animate icons making beautiful infographics.

  • You’ll learn how to create 'voice over' infographics.

  • You’ll learn all the animation techniques needed to bring your data to life.

  • You will have the finished files so you never fall behind.

  • Downloadable exercise files & cheat sheet.

  • Forum support from me and the rest of the BYOL crew.

  • Techniques used by professional motion graphic designers.

  • A wealth of other resources and websites to help your new career path.

What is the target audience?

  • No previous After Effects experience is necessary.

  • This course is for people completely new to After Effects. No previous animation or motion graphic design experienced is necessary.

  • This is a relaxed, well paced introduction that will enable you to produce impressive video for your business or organization. Only basic computing skills are necessary - If you can send emails and surf the internet then you will cope well with our course.

  • There is a 100% refund if you don’t find this course useful. Just message me, no questions asked, I’ll refund your payment in full.

Course duration 5.5 hours + your study.

Daniel Scott

Daniel Scott

Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor

instructor

I discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.

Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.

Certificates

We’re awarding certificates for this course!

Check out the How to earn your certificate video for instructions on how to earn yours and click the available certificate levels below for more information.

Downloads & Exercise files

Transcript

Hi there, in this video we're going to do this where it fades in, and then, goes for a little bit, and then, this guy appears. We'll play with the Scale. We're just going to do some basic animation, it's quick, it's easy, let's make it happen in After Effects.

So I'm in my 'Value of Sleep' Comp. Double click it there. I've got my two audio files locked. And I'm going to lock the background layer. And what we'll do is we'll get this text to fade in, then we'll get our Icons to pop out. So, make sure your Play Head is right at the beginning. And what we're going to do is twirl down this arrow here I'm going to twirl down 'Transform'. And what we're going to do is play with the Opacity. At the beginning of my Time Line, I'm going to click this stopwatch. And what happens with that is it sets a Key Frame here at whatever setting this is. So I've set the Key Frame at 100% Opacity. I can adjust it by clicking, holding, and dragging across, or you can just click it once, and type it in.

So I want it to be at 0 here and after a bit of time, how far? Generally what I do is I just hold down the space bar or click the space bar once. And then turn it off again when I feel it's been long enough. That feels long enough, it's been about one second. And all I'm going to do is click, hold, and drag that up. You'll see that, as I drag it up, it's created a second Key Frame. So first Key Frame is at 0, next Key Frame is at 100, so now, hopefully-- and what we'll do is, after some time, I want it to then fade out.

Now one of the problems that happens with everybody that's new in my classes is that they'll now go and turn this down to 0 to fade out, but they don't add any pause because what happens now, watch this, it goes up and then just instantly starts coming back down again. Think of it as a ramp, starts at 0, gets to 100% and then starts coming down straight away. What I'd like to do is have a little bit of a flat area where it stays at a 100 for a while before it fades out. So I'm going to undo to get rid of that Key Frame. To do that is about 2 seconds and 21 frames. What I'm going to do is, see this little diamond here, click on him. That forces in a Key Frame without you having to adjust first. So it means that, that is 100. Now that is a 100, now if we move along a little bit further, I'm going to set it down to 0. So, ramp goes up. 0 to 100, stays at 100 for a while, and the ramp comes down back to 0. "The Value of Sleep for Creatives".

So next bit of animation is going to be when this house appears. You can kind of-- that's where I say it. You can't hear the audio very well through my microphone but that's when the house kind of appears, so what we're going to do is, twirl up this, get it nice and clean. I'm going to drag in my house, where's the house? He's down the bottom here of my Libraries panel. I'm going to put him over here somewhere. I'm going to zoom out, just keep him in the top corner. This one here, 'Fit', we'll make sure the Comp is perfectly centered in the center there. With these icons, you can re-size him by grabbing the corners. Now, a little bit weird in After Effects, if you know some of the Adobe products you want to make sure the height and width doesn't change. And you want to drag these corners here because without holding anything down, they scale weirdly.

So what you do is you start dragging so it's going weirdly, then hold Shift. And I'm holding down my mouse key, and my Shift key. And you can adjust the sizes. We're not going to, because after I made them all pretty good in Illustrator in the last course they're at the right size, so I'm going to leave those. So what we're going to do now is, at the moment it starts right at the beginning, I'd like it to start just before I said the word 'House'. I want to click, hold, and drag this colored part. Drag it, drag it, you see the beginning comes along, so now you can see, it kind of starts a little bit later on.

So we'll get the timing right in a second, but yes, it's about right. So, what I'd like to do is I'd like to put my Play Head at the beginning of this layer here. Now I can kind of zoom in and make sure it's perfect but our first little shortcut is going to be holding down the Shift key while you're dragging your Play Head, near the current time indicator. So hold down the Shift key. And what happens is it will jump to significant parts in your Time Line. You can see, it jumps to the beginning of this. It also jumps to those markers, can you see? Jumps to the beginning, so just a really good thing to hold down, holding Shift whenever you're dragging your Time Line.

So first thing I want to do is I want to twirl this down and I want to find this Scale. So I'm going to set the stopwatch going on Scale. So we've got a Key Frame and this guy's at 100, I'm going to turn it down to 0. I'm just going to drag it. Too far. Now we'll just type in '0'. So it's at 0, then a bit further along. I'm going to drag it up to 100. So now, starts there. And very slowly, it appears. So what I'm going to do is zoom in a little bit on my Time Line. To zoom in, just type the '+' button on your keyboard. Just '+', nothing else, '-' zooms out. What I want to do is maybe just bring this inserts, happening a bit faster. It's about right. We'll play around with Easings, and a few other things but it's kind of there. So, I'm going to twirl this in, so it's nice and tidy.

And now we can start bringing in all the rest of them. You can see, the wife, okay. And I'm going to bring in, kind of my wife. And I'm going to drag it along, and start this. A bit further along, so it starts here. Holding Shift to get it to the front. I'm going to twirl this down, 'Transform' turn this guy along, set it to '0'. Move it along a little bit. And then drag it up to 100. You can drag it past 100, it's times of 100. I can keep going through and doing this for all the different Icon appearances but what's going to happen is, I'm going to do it for all of these and then the next thing I want to do is Easing, so I'm going to have to go and do that to all of them separately. Then I'm going to have to add some sounds, I'll have to do all of them separately. So what I intend to do is, I'm going to delete the Girl and just going to work on the Home. Get it perfect, get it popping and bouncing, a little star burst. And then we'll duplicate it, and just switch it out, the Icon. That's a lot easier than trying to do it repetitively for all the separate Icons. So let's work on Home, and then later on we'll go and switch them out for all the different Icons.

All right, let's get on to the next video where we get rid of this kind of lame, Powepointy zooming thing when I add a little bit of life to it. And that is called Easing.

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