How to manually make an animated bar graph in After Effects

This lesson is exclusive to members

Course contents
SECTION: 4
Camera – 1 Node 9:36
SECTION: 5
Preview & Playback 6:45

Questions

1
1
0
0
0
1
1
1
1

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, it is time to visualize data. We're going to start with Bar Graphs. We'll start with this one where we manually do it in After Effects. Then we're going to switch out and do it from Illustrator using its graphing tool, making it a little more accurate. And then going out to Excel for the Excel people who want to animate charts directly from Excel in After Effects. All right, let's go and make these beautiful graphs.

The first thing we're going to show you is, we're going to manually do the Bar Graph in After Effects. Actually we're going to get it started. Why? Because there's times when we just need to do that. And you might find that that's the nicest way for you. So let's go to 'File', let's go to 'Open'. I have kind of done some basic stuff to get us going. So go to the 'Exercise Files', '03 Bar Graphs'. And there's this one called 'Bar Graph - Start', open that up. And I want you to be on this one. There's the finished version, and the start version. So the finished version is what we're going to be working towards, but we want to go to the start version. And I've just kind of laid out the title, and these axis in here.

We're not going to go through how to add these. It's just the Pen tool, and the Type tool. But it can take a little while to get going. So I'm going to make sure I can see the whole thing under Fit. So the first thing I'd like to say is that this way can feel a little bit long. And I don't like it mainly because I find it very hard to calculate percentages, and do the Math myself. We're going to look in the next one how to use something like Adobe Illustrator or use Excel itself to generate the graph. All of them take a little bit of work. So have a look at all three, and go, "That's the one I feel like."

So what I want to do is put our Play Head at the beginning here. And I've locked all these layers, so we can't mess with them. Let's grab the rectangle tool. In terms of Fill, I'm going to use my Eyedropper and pick one of the colors that we did in the last tutorial. I'll go for the lighter version. In terms of the Stroke, hit the word 'Stroke', and let's set it to 'None'. Up to you. When you first start setting up your Axis, what I did is, when I drew these lines here I actually matched them to the Grid. So if you go to 'View', 'Show Grid' you can actually draw lines and then get them to line up to this grid in the background. It helps us a little bit when we're drawing out the Bar Graphs.

So I've got it on now. I'm just going to make sure 'Snap to Grid's on as well. So I'm going to try my best, because this is going to be my 100%. Now it is a little funny in terms of drawing. That's close enough to me. Grab the Selection Tool. I'm going to drag it down so it's on the right kind of cubes. We have to zoom a little bit just to make sure. Snap to the bottom, snap to the top.

Next one, I'm just going to kind of line it up here. So, the first thing we're going to do is-- it's going to be quite easy, we're just going to animate it up. Now, the problem is the Scale Position. If I can click on my Layer here, actually 'Rename', 'Shape Layer 1', let's call this one 'Bar 1'. And I'm going to hit 'S' for Scale. And if I start scaling it, it's doing it from its center anchor point which is in the middle of the screen. We've run into that problem a few times.

What we're going to do is actually adjust the center. Grab this one here, the 'Pan Behind' tool or the 'Anchor' tool, and grab this. Now if you can't see it, sometimes you have to click off, click back on, and grab this. Now, we want it to be perfectly down the bottom here. So what key do we hold down? It's the 'Command' key on a Mac, or the 'Control' key on a PC. And that should snap to the center, down the bottom here.

Now when I start doing Scale, it's going to do it from the center of this. Awesome, so I'm going to turn the Grid off, because it hits my eyes. And what we're going to do is make sure our Play Head's at '1'. Hit the 'Scale'. We're going to break this link, so that we can separate the height and width. And we're going to play around with… which one? It's this one here, we're going to set the second to '0'. Come along a little bit. I'm at 7 frames. And I'm going to set it up to 100. So we've got our first little Bar Graph animation. I know that that's correct because I set this axis. This is my highest milligram value. So this is going to match it, and everything else is going to be a percentage of this. That's where I run into trouble myself, and I'm like "All right, Maths, not good." So I'm going to use some of the other tools to do it but you might be totally fine in here.

So we're not going to carry on too much and do every single one of them because it's step and repeat. But what you do is, you copy Bar 1, you got Bar 2. And I'm going to make sure I've got my right tool. Selections tool, I'm going to step along a little bit, so that it starts a little bit off, or after this one here. And then I'm going to grab my Selection-- actually I'm going to use this one here. Use Position, and just slide it along. The wrong way, this way here, to the above filter. And in here we need to go to our Scale. And we need to calculate what this 'Filter' is compared to 'Brewed' being 100%, and 'Filter' is—

I've got some data here for us. So Filter is-- if that's our main 100%, we need to calculate that. You can use this data here to go off and finish completing the Bar Graph. Couple of little just tidy up things we do before we go. I'm going to bin Bar 2. Here would be a good time to go through. Select these two guys here. We're on Scale, remember, hold 'Alt' on a Mac or 'Option' on a PC. Okay, it's the opposite of what I just said. It is Alt on a PC. And grab, remember, our Expression. Come to here, delete him, paste it. And we'll get just a nicer Bar Graph going up. And also you can turn on the Motion Blur. And make sure the Motion Blur is on this layer. And things start looking a little nicer. Nice.

So, it's not all lost because that same technique of putting the anchor point down the bottom here, I'm getting him to bounce. It's going to be what we need to do still when we're using either Excel or Illustrator. So let's go and learn those other options in the next video.

  • Powered by Marvin
  • Terms of use
  • Privacy policy
  • © Bring your Own Laptop Ltd 2025