How to add a solid background or image to your infographic
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Course info
Overview
- 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.
- 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.
- 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
Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief 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
In this video we're going to bring in a background image, and lock it. It's going to be easy, let's go do it.
It's a weird feature of After Effects, we talked about it before. If I make a new Comp, and I pick a color, doesn't really matter, when I export it, it goes black. It's just, there is a background color. So, we're going to turn ours back to black. I'm going to click on it, go back to black. So that's most of the Comp start life like. And if I want to put in a colored background, we put in just a big rectangle. Now, we could draw it, but it's easy just to go to 'Layer', 'New', and there's one called 'Solid'. Click on 'Solid'. I'm going to call this my 'Background Color'. And it's going to match the height and width of my video. Great! Everything's perfect, pick a color, any color. Any color that you like. Click OK, now when I export it, it's going to be green in the background.
What I want to do is, not move it around, so I'm going to lock it. Awesome! That's how to put a background color in. So I'm going to bin that color. Sorry, we just made it, but we're going to bring in an image. So I'm going to double click anywhere in this gray area. And I'm going to go to 'Infographic Exercise Files'. I'm going to go to 'Icon Pop', the first one. Let's go to the one called 'Background'. We'll bring it in, put it into my Files. Then I'm going to drag him onto here, and he's too big.
You can, like a lot of programs, you can kind of zoom out. I'm using the wheel of my mouse, but you can use 'Command + or -' if you're on a Mac, or 'Control + and -' on a PC. What you'll find though is, you can grab the edges, and it's fine, but weirdly, that's true of lots of Adobe products, but down here there's one in here called Transform and Scale. You can just drag it down. I don't know why, but it is easier to use these controls down the bottom here, especially when you get multiple layers. So I'm going to twirl that back up. It's up to you. So I'm going to lock that layer, boom, background image. I'll just drop the lightness of this in Photoshop. We'll do it later on in an exercise using one of the effects. Easy, so we got our background in. Next video please.
