12 Principles of Animation in After Effects

In this lesson we're going to learn two primary methods of animating-- pose-to-pose and straight ahead action. Now if you're watching this video, I hope you've done a little bit of Animation and After Effects. And you've probably encountered both of these methods. And these are both methods of setting down key frames and creating your animations. However, understanding the strengths and weaknesses of each method will let us know when to use which and how we can use them together to create some amazing animation. So let's begin animating this with straight ahead action. And this is very simple. We just start at the first frame and begin animating. So in this case, we probably want to zoom in a little bit. And I just open up the camera dolly and hit the P key. Or you can, of course, drag it in here. So we'll set a key frame here. This is where we want to start. And now we want to move forward a second, move down, move to the right a little bit probably. Let's take a look at this. We want a little bit of a hold here. All right. So pose-to-pose. And in the middle of this we want it to actually be down and to the left. And let's pull these beziers down, as well. So we have this nice motion where we sort of go down to this next one. So here, again, we'll have a little bit of a hold to read our text-- probably around three, four seconds. And from here let's move to the right where we encounter this object. And then we want to begin moving down. And so as you can see here, straight ahead is great for roughing in animation very quickly and creating sort of a spontaneous feeling to your animation. What it does not do very well is it does not allow you to really plan out your shots or plan out your animation. And throughout all of this, we should have been going back and changing our animation and tweaking it and making sure it was the best possible animation. Straight ahead action is all about getting every single second polished before moving on to the next second. In that way, it has some weaknesses. For example, if you polish the first 10 seconds and then it gets cut, or it gets changed, all of that polish was for naught or it was wasted. So let's just finish this out. We'll continuing moving this down a little bit to coincide with this curve here. And let's move forward. And let's see. We've got a little bit of a problem. We're too close. So let's zoom out a little bit. And let's say this will be our last frame. All right. So let's take a look at this. And again, this is off the cuff, very energetic, very random animation. So pose-to-pose plans out the animation. Straight ahead just kind of jumps into it and is unstructured, starts at the beginning, continually tweaking. Both have their uses. However, I prefer a pose-to-pose to straight ahead technique. So let's take a look at this with the pose-to-pose method. So to begin with we want to analyze our scene. So I'm just going to jump into the front view or whichever view you have that lets you see everything. And let's actually plan out our animation like this. I prefer to see, for this kind of a movement, if we have the entire landscape available, we know we've got four beats that we need to get into. And if we take a look, we've got 12 seconds to work with. So probably around every three seconds we want to be focusing on a piece of text. If we start directly on the pose-to-pose, that's two seconds or one and a half seconds, we can stay there. So let's begin by setting that first key frame. Now, three seconds later, we're going to move ahead to straight ahead action. So let's move our camera here. What we're doing is we're setting the poses. We're setting the primary key frames of our animation. And what this lets us do is it lets us worry about getting the strongest key frames or the strongest poses, as opposed to worrying about all the little stuff that we have to think about every time we set a key. Now for this to be really classical, we should use hold key frames, so that we're not looking at all this interpolation to begin with. So I'm going to select these four key frames. And let's go down to our key frame interpolation. And let's set this to hold. And what this is going to do is it's going to jump us from a to b to c to d. So we never have to look at the frames in between. And now we can go, and we can set up our poses exactly how we like them. So we can in, really tweak these out, maybe even rotate the camera little bit. And from there we can just jump to the next pose and make sure it is as strong as it can be. So if you can't hear it in my voice I am a big fan of pose-to-pose because it allows us to really plan out the animation and focus on the important parts first before having to worry about the motion and everything else. So this one's a little off. Let's come in and fix this. Let's maybe zoom in a little bit, maybe set to the right. And this last one, I'll center this up. Let's maybe move up a little bit. And let's zoom this out just ever so slightly. OK. So now that we have our key frame set, we can come, and we can now either do another pose-to-pose, sort of pass over these key frames. Or we can change these to linear and begin doing straight ahead animation. So to begin with I'd actually like to start-- let's do another round of pose-to-pose, and then we'll go to straight ahead. So I'd like to start a little bit higher and then move down. And so we'll start higher. And then here, halfway through, after this I'd like to have this actually come down to the corner. So I'm going to set that key frame here. And wherever we have these two key frames, we're actually going to want a moving hold. So I'm going to move these back a little bit, copy, and paste them to give them each around two seconds of time. So we want these holds here. And then at the end, we have a nice hold on this. So this kind of defines where we need to animate. So here we start out at a moving hold, jump to a moving hold, jump to a moving hold, and end on a hold. So now we have very specific places where we need to define the animation-- essentially in between these two key frames, in between the next-- or in between these two key frames, and in between these last two. So you can see how post-to-pose allows you to plan out your shot and really focus your efforts where they're needed most. And it allows you to take a look at all the animation, sort of at a whole, and then come in and begin modifying it. So for the straight ahead, if we're in the straight ahead action now, so let's move this to the left, create a bit of a moving hold here. And let's pull these to the right a little bit. And let's go to this last key frame here. And let's move that to the right. And some of these tangencies are a little bit not very good, but we can fix those later. And then this next one, we want it to move up and to the right here. So we can move that over there. I'm just trying to align this to create that nice arc that we're going to learn about in a later lesson. And see some of these arcs are not going so well. But we can do that after we have our stage set. All right. So now let's go here. Let's start this at the top and then have this move down to the bottom. And, again, we can come in here and modify this tangency to control that movement. And our last area, we want the animation, again, to have that nice kind of an arcing motion. So we'll pull that back until we have that arc. And then we should be good to go. And finally, I'll add a little bit of maybe a zoom in here at the end. OK. So let's take a look at this. We've got our pose-to-pose. And the tangencies, or the bezier arcs, are not exactly where I want them. So we can, of course, come in and move that. All right. Much better. Slow. Nice beat here. And here again we have that tangency issue. So we can pull this back just a little bit so that our beziers are nice and flat. And again, we're going to go into this in much more detail, modifying these curves for arcing in our arcs lesson. OK. So let's take a look at the combination of our straight ahead and pose-to-pose. And I'm just how hide this dolly, so we can see it nice and large. And let's select off of that. There we go. OK. So I'm just going to RAM preview this. And then when it is finished RAM previewing, we can take a look at our final animation. OK. So here we are. We start with a moving hold, move into the straight action. And then we move ahead. And, of course, there's still going to be a little bit of tweaking. We're always going to want to go back and tweak this a little bit. But as you can see, pose-to-pose and straight ahead action both have their strengths. Now, I obviously prefer to start with pose-to-pose. I think that's the most organized animation method. And it allows me to really plan out the timing of my shot, as well as the positioning of my camera. However, once we're done with setting up our primary poses, that's a great time to go into straight ahead action and really go in and tweak it and finesse the curves and create those nice arcs and create those nice contrasting pace of motion. So do not think of these as completely separate or completely two different cities. These are mixable. You can mix them together however you like to get whatever kind of an animation you like. So remember-- two ways to create key frames primarily is straight ahead action, which is just start at the beginning and throw down keys, and pose-to-pose, where you see set out and only define the specific key frames and then go through a refinement process.