12 Principles of Animation in After Effects

In this lesson, we're going to learn about the important animation principle of timing and spacing. So you can open up zero to begin. And let's begin by just taking a look at a very simple tiny example. We have our leaf falling and hitting the ground. Now, we're not going to be winning any awards for this animation. But let's take a look at the timing, or where the keyframes are, and then the spacing, or the amount of time between the keyframes. So you can think of timing as the beat of your animation. And the easiest way to see this is your keyframe. So whenever you have a keyframe, think of that as a beat in a song. Now, the spacing is the time in between your two keyframes. So timing and spacing is very important for animation. And you do it whenever you set any kind of animation. So let's play through this. And we can see this looks like somewhat of a light leaf falling to the ground. Now, if we reduce the spacing and make it fall much, much faster, let's take a look at what it looks like now. And we can see it looks like a much, much heavier object. So this is the first lesson of timing and spacing. Weight is incredibly important. Or defining weight is one of the primary uses of timing and spacing. And we can see here that an object that moves or falls faster is going to be heavier. Now, if this object was being blown up by a fan, it would move slower if it was heavier. And if it was light, it would move very fast. So timing is very crucial for creating the weight of an object or the weight of a movement or the amount of energy it takes to move an object. If we make the spacing very extreme, we can see this leaf almost looks as light as a feather. It almost looks like it should be weaving back and forth. And again, as we bring the spacing closer, we add weight to this leaf. So maybe it's a wet leaf. Or maybe it's made out of iron or something. Now let's take a look at a real example for when we would need to modify the timing and the spacing. So let's go into our main comp. And we just have this very simple animation. I'm just going to hit zero to RAM preview this. And we've just set some keyframes here and gone in and made them to not have very good timing or spacing. So at the beginning, we have sort of this random sporadic movement. We've got a little bit of nice moving holds over our text. But overall, it feels very jarring and disjointed. The speed of it, the beat of it, doesn't make sense. So let's take a look at the timing and the spacing to create a more rhythmic animation. So we're going to want to slow the beat down whenever we have to read text or whenever we want to stay still on an object. So right now, these two keyframes are defining the movement or the amount of camera movement on our timing. And I'm just looking at this NULL here, which has some position keyframes and our camera is parented to. So let's begin by reducing or pushing the beat back when we hit this, so that we come into this rather quickly and then slow down when our text appears. And then after this, let's actually speed back up. Now, the reason we're going through this exercise is to show contrast of timing. When you have the beats on the same-- let's say every two seconds, it can get a little bit boring. So you can use timing and spacing to add some contrast to your movements. So in this case, I would like the movements to be relatively fast. And then when we get to our text, we slow down until we move fast to get to the next text. OK, it looks pretty good. Let's maybe reduce this even a little further. Again, reducing the spacing makes things move faster. We slow down and then we move at-- maybe move a little bit faster here. So move faster, and then this speed-- this speed might actually be OK. It might be a little bit too fast. So we might pull that back. And then this part's a little slow. So we'll reduce the spacing there. And then we'll zoom into this Timing. And instead of having it completely ease in and stop moving, I would like to have this be a slow pan in. Normally, when we're in motion, we almost never want to stop moving things because it's jarring. So if you can add just a little bit of motion in there, that's usually a good thing to do. So let's take a look at this after tweaking our timing and spacing. And we can see that this feels so much better because we now have a much more consistent look. We move very fast, and then we slow down. We move fast, and then we slow down. This animation has a beat. It has movement. And it has a rhythm that we can understand as humans. Before, we had sort of just a random movement. Now, this later part here is still-- let's see. It was moving a little bit too slow at this part. So let's move this back a bit. And let's see here. Let's maybe move this in just a little bit. So we have a little bit more consistent spacing and timing. OK, great. So let's once again RAM preview this and take a look. So contrast is incredibly important when timing out your animation. Again, we get very bored when we have a lot of either quick movements or a lot of slow movements. So remember to try and add contrast to your movements so that you have a little bit of interesting movement. Mixing slow movements with fast movements keeps the mind guessing and keeps the eye viewing and interested in what we're showing it. So to wrap this lesson up-- timing is when we set our keyframes, or the frames on which we set the keyframes. And then spacing is the time in between keys. And for a nice, appealing animation, we have to think about both of these factors whenever we're setting keyframes or manipulating keyframes. So this comes into play any time we hit a keyframe.