Ive lost my timeline in After Effects

Help, I'm lost in after effects. That happens quite a bit when I'm teaching and there's pretty much one main culprit. So if you're new to after effects you'll get lost this one way probably loads to get started with. So lets cover it now.

Essentially it is I can see my Bring Your Own Laptop here and people like to double click things and if I double click this, it’s gone where did it go? I've got my animation still there, my timelines still there, if I play it, I can only see these little guys here and this weird little timeline. So I can only see parts of it. You might have done something separately, you might’ve double clicked on the text and you can only see the text. All it is is that you can see here, here is my composition; we've jumped into this isolation mode. We jumped into, we double clicked the layer and we’ve gone into that layer just by itself just to see alone and just by himself. Which is kind of handy, its never handy actually, just a bit of a pain. Especially for my students that are new, it just means we’re back at square one here, stop lets double click the text, ill be on the key frame here if I double click the text, double clicking the text doesn’t work, it just starts editing the text but if you double click the background or some sort of layer that you’ve got or type what it'll do is it'll jump in here.

That’s how you get unlost by just jumping back to that tab. Hopefully that helps, if it doesn’t help, drop me a comment below, say I've got some other thing that I've got lost in and I will help you. Screen shot would be super helpful so I can know what you're looking at but dump it into the forum below or the comments and I will try and dig you out from where you are. Alright, that’s it for getting lost in After Effects.