Intro to After Effects: Working With Animation

         Animating in After Effects is quite easy when you understand the tools. One way is that you can add a main keyframe, then you can add your final main keyframe. Once you find your Inbetween, you easily move the frame, then edit the movement to the way you want it too.

          After you figured out where you want to shape move, you edit the speed and flow of it using the graph editor. Using the graph editor is like the editor in Maya. All you have to do is to set the frames to move slow or fast based on the position of the graph.

         After doing all that, you can also edit your animations on your windows tab. You can move the compositions in the tab by sliding around the tabs, the keyframes, or even delaying the frames by the amount you want.

       One thing that can help you set up your animations by using their anchor points. The points are there to move and rotate your shapes. You don't have to worry about the points when moving, but rotating is crucial for points. Depending where the points are, it will rotate or shrink to that point.

      To help animate or set up a scene, you can create a null object. When you have multiple objects and you like position of shapes together but not the composition, you should parent them to the null. Once you parent them to the null, you can move around as you please.

      Another bright side of null is that when you animate the null object, and attach a shape: it will move the same way as the null. All you have to do is make a path and parent it, the object the shape will follow it.