12 Principles of Animation in After Effects

In this lesson, we're going to learn about the animation principle of follow-through and overlapping action. Now, follow-through and overlapping action happen whenever two or more objects are connected together. Think of titles with subtitles coming in, or even something as simple as a light bulb and a wire connected onto that light bulb. Now, we have the animation on our light bulb, and we have all of these pieces of the cord parented to each other. So if we rotate one the rest of them rotate as they are children of the cord above them. So now obviously, this motion right here is not realistic in the slightest. It's almost a static piece of geometry with a light bulb. So by adding follow-through and overlapping action, we can actually bring this cord to life. So let's begin by dropping key frames on these. I believe I already have key frames on pull cord one, because this is almost our stationary object, or our anchor. In follow-through terms, this is our primary object or our main object. So let's drag and let's grab pull cord two all the way up to end pull. Hit the R key to drop out on the rotation values, and let's key the rotation. And I'm going to hit F9 to make them ease in and ease out. OK, so here's where we start. So now let's go to the first pose, or the first extreme. All the way up to here, we're just having follothrough. So what follow-through essentially says is whenever an object or whenever the main object moves the child objects, or appendages of the parent, will move with the parent but slower. So if you think about when your body moves, your shoulder moves, and then your elbow moves. And then your hand moves. They don't all move at one time unless you're frozen like a robot. And in animation, we want to not have robotic motion. We want to have smooth motion that is appealing, unless we're animating robots. But in this case, we want something to act like it would in the real world. So let's begin by going to the first pose, or the first extreme, where the primary object is putting a force on the children. And we're going to hand key, and later on this course, we're going to take a look at an expression that actually automates this for us. But in the case that doesn't work, we need to learn how to apply this. So let's begin by, with everything still selected, dragging the rotation so that we have a reverse bend. In this case, the object, or the primary object, is moving one way. So we want the children to be kind of holding where they should be in the real world. So again, physics, objects at rest want to stay at rest, so the children of this want to stay where they were. Now this is a little bit too strong on some of these later ones, so I'm actually going to reduce this just a little bit. OK. That looks a lot better. And now, to provide the overlapping action, we'll add another layer of follow through when we get yet another force from our objects. So when the object moves or when the main body moves or changes direction, we need to add in more follow-through. And this is called overlapping action. So in this next case here, I'm going to select all of these, and let's give it the opposite action. So let's pull it back here. OK. Now for these top ones, I'm actually going to set them to their sibling values. So setting everything back to where they are. And now we're sort of at the ease in and ease out point. So now let's just go to the next key frame. Select all these, and let's do a reverse pose at a slightly lesser angle. And let's go forward. And again, we're just easing in and easing out at this point. Since the primary object is no longer changing direction. This is now ease in and ease out and not follow-through. So to finish this off, let's just bring this back down to zero. So let's go to negative 2 and then zero. OK. So now let's take a look at our motion. And it's not going to be perfect just yet, but it'll be closer. So now we can see that our cord is moving with a little bit more natural movement. It's a little bit weird, and that's because we haven't yet done the offsetting step. follow-through-- remember follow through is about a primary object affecting the children or affecting what's connected to it but at a delay. So let's select our key frames now, these children objects. And let's begin by offsetting them one frame. So we'll offset them one frame to the right. And then we'll select that new object's children. So we'll select the rest of the children. Move those to the right. And again, continue selecting, moving one frame to the right. And finally for this last one, moving this to the right. So what you see now is very stepped key frames with the parent having an effect and then affecting the children one frame later for every sort of layer away the child is from the main object. And what we get now is a delayed effect or a delayed reaction. So you can see here, this looks much more natural with the front of the object moving with a delay from the original. Now at this point, you may need to play with the timing or the spacing, so I'm just trying to move these back and take a look at this. Let's see here. Gives it a little bit nicer movement. Of course, we can continue tweaking this and adding in these various or tweaking these key frames to make it a little bit nicer. But as you can see now, by applying follow through we now have a much nicer animation and something that looks a lot more realistic. So just to sum this lesson up, follow-through happens when multiple objects are connected together, when the primary mass, or the heaviest part of that changes direction, either starts moving, stops moving, begins moving in a different way, that is going to have an affect on each of its children or each of its connected objects with a delay. So it's important that we add that delay in, but continue to have those children and the primary object easing in and easing out and following the rest of these animation principles. And again, later on in this course, we're going to take a look at how to automate most of this with an expression.