12 Principles of Animation in After Effects

In this lesson, we're going to learn how to exaggerate our animations. So here's where we left off, and we have this title. Now exaggeration to me is one of the most universal principles that we can apply here in After Effects. It even applies to non-moving elements. And what exaggeration says is that for our audience to understand what we're trying to convey we probably need to begin by identifying first what are we trying to convey. So in this case we have tight deadlines, and we want the audience to have the feeling of tightness and constriction and being squeezed. And so exaggeration says, OK, now that we've identified what message we want to send with this, we need to exaggerate it to more clearly show and feel like what we want it to. Now exaggeration can be applied in hundreds and many, many different ways. So in this case, we're going to be using it to exaggerate the feeling of constriction and squeezing. So let's begin by just exaggerating some of our key frames. So let's go into tight and deadlines. And we have this tracking amount key framed. I just hit U to bring up the key frames. So at the beginning, let's exaggerate this motion by increasing the size of these out to the edges of our window. So now our movement is going to be a bit more exaggerated. We're going to start from a more spread out feeling and then come together much, much tighter. So this is one way we can exaggerate animation by increasing the values or increasing the contrast between our various poses or our various pieces of the animation. Now towards the end, I would like to actually distort the text to make it feel like this text is being squeezed. So an easy and fast way to do this is to add an adjustment layer. So I'm going to go to Layer, New Adjustment Layer. And on this, let's add something like a distort bulge. So I'll go to Effect, Distort Bulge. And if we do a negative bulge height, we get a squeezing effect. You can see here that the edges are being squeezed in. Now, we need to define the radius for this, because that's going to control a large part of this effect. So you can see here by turning this adjustment layer on and off this latter one, the one that is exaggerated, feels much more tight and feels much more constricted. OK, so let's come in here and let's animate this. So I'm going to end on these values. So somewhere around negative 1, negative 9. And because of the effect of this effect, we're going need to animate this to move with our text. So our text begins sort of stretched out. So let's go to our adjustment layer bulge and let's stretch out this effect. And let's shrink it down to match sort of our squash and stretch. And let's turn off the bulge height. So we're not going to start with this effect on. And as the deadlines get tighter and tighter, we can see that now our text is being squeezed. And we have this constriction going on, up and to the point where it's almost unreadable. Now at this point, we sort of go into staging and readability. So we might want to just scale these up just a little bit. So when you go to the scale here on our null, and let's just increase this just ever so slightly so that we can still kind of read this. And of course, whenever we modify that, we're going to modify this bulge, so let's pull this out. And now, we have this really nice exaggerated animation. So I'll just hit zero to play through this, and what we have is a tightening and a constriction of this text. And by modifying our text and titles to show more of what we're trying to convey, we make it much easier for, again, the audience to read and understand and feel what we want them to. So exaggeration is again one of the most universal principles, and it's defined by two things. First, what message are you trying to convey, what feeling are you trying to convey? And then how can you exaggerate or heighten, or enhance that feeling in your audience. Let's take a look at our ball bounce. So let's go to our comps, our ball bounce complete. And here again, we can enhance this. At the beginning, we want speed. So let's actually enhance or exaggerate the scale changes we have, or the squashing and the stretching. So let's make it thinner. And let's make it much longer. And we can see by just exaggerating this motion, we are changing the animation and making it more appealing. And exaggeration doesn't always have to be increasing values. If you want it to be a more placid scene, you might exaggerate by decreasing the values. So in this lesson, we took a look at the principle of exaggeration, which is all about defining what you want and then modifying or heightening those areas of your comp and of your animation that convey the message that you want.