So in this lesson assignment, I'm going  to demonstrate the last two animation principles. We discussed overlapping action and secondary action. And I'm gonna use a bit more of a technical program to do  that called Adobe After Effects. Now, if you're uncomfortable using that software,  you've never heard of it, that's okay. You can still follow along and learn something here. You can also take some of my other classes that teach  after Effects to beginners, um,  but there's still something that you can gain from following  along and watching these principles at work  and see how they're applied.

And you could also recreate this animation yourself using  stop motion or drawing  or one of the other, uh, ways of using claymation. There's a lot of different ways you  could recreate this yourself. If you don't want to use a computer to do this. I'm providing a project file  that already has the main actions animated. So all we're gonna do is just focus on these two  principles in this lesson. And if you're curious, I, I made this, um, the artwork  and procreate and maybe in the future I'll also have courses  on procreate as well, which is a fun tool.

And you can also use that for animating. So the main action is done for you,  which is a fish eating another fish, and it's going to loop. And what we want to do is add overlapping action  and secondary action. The overlapping action is going to be the tentacle,  the little distracting, um,  glowy orb light that you find on angler fish. So when the fish moves, there needs  to be overlapping action applied to it, meaning it's going  to react after the main motion  and settle on its own time and terms. So the other principle we're gonna apply is  secondary action.

Now with a fish eating another fish, what's a way  that we could plus the animation of that? And the way that I thought about it was we could  animate the tongue licking his lips  before he opens his mouth to bite. So it's still a secondary action at subordinate  to the main action of him eating the actual fish. It's not too distracting. It supports the idea that he's hungry and he's about to eat. So it just adds that extra little something  to make it a secondary action at work.

So let's get started in After Effects. So I've created this file, if you are familiar  with After Effects, you might be  more comfortable dealing with this. But let me just explain what I set up real quick. The only two layers you're gonna see initially are  the two that you need to work with. And if you hit you on your keyboard,  you can pull up the key frames that are currently on there. And let me just play through the animation real quick  so you can see part of what we're gonna be doing.

So the little fish comes in, he wakes up,  licks his lips, eats the fish. Now the licking I've, I've done, I've animated, um,  I'm gonna going to delete that, um,  so that you can animate that. And the one I'm going to demonstrate,  and this is the overlapping action of the tentacle  and how to animate a little bit in after effects. But if you did wanna dig a little bit deeper into  this scene, I hid the layers that you, you can't see here  with the little shy layer here. So if you click this little shy icon,  you'll get all the other key frames  and fun stuff I spent time doing  and analyze the animation a little bit more. But to keep it focused  and clear about what the assignment is about,  I put those on shy layers as they're called an  after effects so  that we can just focus on the tongue and the tentacle.

So again, if you hit you, you can pull up the key frames  and the tentacle is going to be animated  with the puppet tool effect. And there's basically only two pens we're gonna  have to animate for that. So we've got the one at the apex and the one at the point. Now let's, let me just walk you  through the animation I did real quick so you can kind  of see some of these animation principles  we've already learned at work. We have the main action fish eats another fish. Well how do we do  that in a more appealing way if it just opens his mouth  and eats it if it's not very appealing?

So I added some anticipation. So part of that anticipation was also squash and stretch  and I added squash and stretch on the eye. If you watch the eye blink open, there's squash and stretch  because it's only two drawings there. I wanted to add a little more motion by squash  and stretching the two poses I did have the two drawings I  did have and the same on the antic,  the fish squashes and stretches. And you can also see the overlapping action on the,  on the fish's fins. Look at the bottom there.

As he starts to go backward,  his fins go back. He also squashes and stretches there  and then he moves forward  and there's no more anticipation there  because I did want the attack to be a bit quick. So there was that slow anticipation in  and then the quick attack. But there's still squash  and stretch here right in through here, the whole drawing  because this is only two  drawings for the whole body as well. It's an open mouth and a closed mouth. So add a little extra motion, you can uh,  add the squash and stretch on there.

It adds a lot more um, kind of squishy feeling  to it, a lifelike feeling to it. Um, and then the fish kind of goes back into a rest pose  and we again, we can see overlapping action on the fins  as the fish goes back, the fins  because of the friction of the water,  are also gonna get pulled backward  and then they're gonna come to a rest. That's overlapping action again seeing  where the fish bodies coming to a stop  and the fins are still moving, right? So that's overlapping action as well. So it's already applied here quite a bit. And again, the secondary action that we add is the tongue.

So I'm gonna let you animate this. You can kind of see where I put my key frames here,  but I'm gonna delete those for the project file. So you have to do those yourself. But I will include the final end thing as well. So if you just want to open up the end animation,  but the start one won't have this. So I animated rotation and  and position, um, not on the same key frame.

So things are happening on different frames. So it's rotating  before you can see the rotation key frame here  before the translation key frame. And then there's ease in and ease out  and applied to these key frames as well,  which is another animation principle we've covered. And that's on a Mac using function F nine  or if you're on a Windows just F nine,  you can also right click on one of these icons  of the key frame and go to key frame assistant  and choose easy ease through the menu. You can also choose key frame velocity  and get even more specific about the percentage of um,  incoming velocity and outgoing velocity  that you wanna add to those eases. This little button over here is also the graph editor.

It shows you the values charted over time. So this is a very important thing to um, learn  and understand because it's a part  of every animation software basically. So it's basically just a value change over time. It's as simple as that. So  that represents the key frames we see over here. So let's get started animating the tentacle  and it's overlapping action.

Now the main one I'm concerned about isn't this,  even though there is motion here  because it's attached to the body that squash squashes  and stretches, it is also getting that treatment  of squashing and stretching. So if I wanted to get very particular, I could maybe  use this puppet pen to hold this in place  on every frame, but  that's would be more time consuming than we  have time for this lesson. So what I'm wanna focus on is the overlapping action we'll  find after this big movement  because the fish is the driver of the force  and the tentacle and the orb is along for the ride. And so they shouldn't be moving at the same time  the tentacle should be following the body. So if the body moves first,  the tentacles should move after it. And right now they're all moving together  and that's what we need to break up with overlapping action.

So let's get to where the main motion of the bite begins  and we'll set a key frame on these two puppet pins. Command arrow and I believe it's control arrow on a PC  or or how you frame by frame. Go through an animation so I can get on the exact frame  where that begins. And I can tick these little icons  over here to set a key frame. So we have a key frame now on where we know we want  to start the overlapping action from. And then I'm gonna go to where the motion begins to stop.

So that's around in here. We can see the orb kinda stops its  forward movement right here. So this is where I wanna bring it back  because it shouldn't stop at the same time as the body. So I'm gonna go to that end pose. I'm gonna bring both of these puppet pins further back  because it should be dragging behind much more  because the body's what's forcing it forward. So I'm going to go forward a little bit  and then I'm going to copy and paste these key frames  because, because we want this to loop, we want the animation  to continue and keep looping.

We wanna make sure that the end key frames are the exact  same as the beginning ones. So I always like to copy  and paste those in as reference points as well  to make sure I'm not going too far off  what the end pose is eventually gonna be. So we have this end pose and I know I wanna go past it  because again, overlapping action tends to mean  that the kinetic energy isn't just going  to all of a sudden gonna stop. It's gonna go past the rest position and back  and forth until it comes to a settle. So knowing this is the end pose, now I know as soon  as I go past this, that will be a good  overlap or  or follow through of going past  where I know the final rest position's gonna be. I'm gonna bring the apex down a little bit so that  the tentacle can extend out.

And then I'm gonna copy  and paste that final rest pose back in. So again, I have the kind of finish line in mind of  where I can again go past  that finish line in the other direction. Now bring the apex of this tentacle up. So we're gonna get this kind of back  and forth swinging motion until it comes to a stop. I'm gonna go a few frames forward  and then I'm going to paste in the final position again. And this is not gonna look  that great, I can already tell you.

But it gives us these kind of mile markers of where our,  our key frames, uh, and po uh, poses should be. So I can see that this animation, these key frames here,  if I hit plus I can zoom in here. If we look at the spacing, if you remember about spacing,  I can kind of keep track of the orbs here. Now the orbs here and I'm moving my mouse cursor to kind  of keep track of that distance. So it should continue moving here. This is where it gets stuck.

So now I know I need to move these key frames in a way  that on that On this  frame, it's gonna keep moving. So now we've got it to a point where  it can actually follow through correctly  and I'm gonna easy ease those by hitting function F nine  or F nine if you're on a pc. I'm gonna play that first one back now. Now we have the first, the first one working  and then I'm just gonna easy ease these last two just  to see if that gets us pretty close to what we want. I mean that's the general idea. You don't have to do a ton more than that  to have the principle be applied.

So if we wanna take this just a little bit further,  we could add a few more overlaps. So each one should be less than the one before it  because we're losing  that kinetic energy every time the orb passes  its finishing point, it should slowly come to a stop. It shouldn't go further than the last overlap, it just did. So it should always go less and less and less. So we can just keep adding those  until it feels about like the right amount of settle. So I'm just gonna add a couple more by copying  and pasting the end impose in here  and then going back to this one, knowing that that is going  to now be an overlap key frame.

And I just wanna go just a little bit  and then I'm going to easy ease these key frames here  and it's going to be a bit more of a nicer subtle. And again, we can retime these just by clicking  and dragging these out if it, if we feel  that it's a bit too fast. So that feels pretty good. And again, you can do more and add more  and even have a follow through  and overlap on as the fish goes back. This should actually drag here, right? So this should extend out here, have both selected.

So I'm just gonna click down here anywhere just  so I can get back to selecting a single one. This should drag behind the fish as it goes backward. It's happening a bit too soon  'cause the fish hasn't started moving yet,  so the fish should start moving back  and then this will extend out to drag behind it. So again, this is follow through  and overlapping action at play at every  point of this animation. So you can finess that a lot more than what we have time  for in this lesson, but you can kind of see  these principles at play and it will come to rest  after the phish has come to a rest. So we can pull that way back out here,  copy paste this stretch position before it comes back,  and it could settle into that one as well.

So you can have, you can go really far with this. Um, and I'm just kinda showing you those po those areas  where that's possible. And you know, part of animation is it's time consuming  and it can be difficult  to teach this stuff in a very quick way  and still produce, um, animation that makes sense  for the lesson and demonstrate the  principle we're discussing. So I encourage you to,  to go further than we did in this lesson. You know, you can do things like instead of the follow  through just being in a linear line, it kind of went back  and forth, back and forth this way you could,  you could go in a circle, it could go  down and up and around. And when you get into 3D animation,  then you also have the Z axis.

It could go in a diagonal up and down and around. So it's good to slowly build on these skills and,  and realize how far you can take it  and always have somewhere. Uh, uh, next goal that you can push for,  but just focus on these two things. Animating the tongue is the secondary action. Animating the tentacle is overlapping action. And if you wanna render this, just hit control m  or choose it from the menu here.

And then you can select here to change the codec. I like to select QuickTime and then apple ProRes 4, 2, 2 lt. And then I can convert it in hand break  or something like that later if I want  to compress it down more. And then once you've done that, you can change the name  of the file and choose where to save it by clicking here. And then just hit render. I will see you in the next lesson  where we will learn more principles of animation.

Thanks for watching.