Animating an infographic icon in Adobe After Effects

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.