12 Principles of Animation in After Effects

In this lesson, we're going to learn how to apply secondary action to help enhance and help our audience read our primary action. So I've opened up 09_begin and just open up this main comp here. And what we have is a very simple animation. Just going to hit zero and let this play through. We have this piece of text falling into our scene from off frame and then hitting the ground and doing a little bit of squash and stretch on it. So it's an OK animation at this point, but it really needs more. So at this point, I might begin evaluating what kind of secondary actions can I add to this animation to heighten the impact of our primary action. So we could come in and add in some camera shake and that would help to create the illusion of an impact. But in this case, let's actually come in and have the A-R-Y portion of our secondary text actually drop off and hit the ground because this impact was so strong. So to do this, let's begin by selecting our top secondary action layer. And this is just our text. And let's grab our rectangle tool, and let's just isolate the A-R-Y portion of this. OK. With that done, we can select the layer. Hit control D. Hit M and invert that mask so that we have essentially the same thing. But now these two pieces are separated. So to make sure this is nice and clear, I'm going to come in to rename these-- whoops and accidentally delete one of them. So we have second action and we have "airy" or "r-y", however you want to pronounce it. So now let's say at the beginning of our impact, we want to rotate this A-R-Y to hit the ground. The impact is so strong it's actually breaking our text. So let's rotate this down. And as you can see, we're getting a little bit of a strange rotation. I'd prefer to have it acting like the D and the A are connected by some sort of beam. And then that beam is breaking. Right now, we're rotating around this anchor point here at the bottom. So let's grab our pan behind tool with our A-R-Y selected. And let's just move this up between the D and the A. And now our rotation will work much, much better. Now we're getting a little bit of scaling, stretching, because we're using a parented to a null to do our scaling just so our anchor point changing doesn't mess up our layers. But as you can see, it looks pretty good. OK. So we want to start at a rotation of zero on the frame before our impact. And let's say the frame after the impact, we want this to be hitting the ground. And let's actually have this inner penetrate the ground a little bit for a little bit of exaggeration. And now, we want to go forward and eventually let this rest on the ground. So we'll come back. Dial that back a little bit and bring it there. OK. So let's take a look at this. So we're hitting. Our text is breaking. We're impacting. We might even want to pull that impact frame back one. So we're coming down. We hit. And I'd like to do a little bit of an ease in or a slow in, slow out. So I'd like to bounce back. So let's go forward two frames, and let's have this A-R-Y actually bounce up. And then let's go forward two frames, and copy this so it hits the ground and forward two frames. And let's just do one last tiny little bounce. So 21, and then we rest. OK. So let's take a look at this. So we have our text falling, hitting the ground, and bouncing up a little bit because that impact was so strong. And again, we might just need to tweak a few of these key frames to just continue pushing them forward. All right. Looks good. So let's play through this and take a look. So here we have our animation. Now, of course, there's always some more tweaking we might want to do. But this is a nice addition to our animation. It definitely adds an interesting accent to our impact. Our impact was so strong, we broke our text. And if we want to play around with some different looks, we could actually go in and change the anchor point. So let's actually move the anchor point up a little bit so that it is next to the A. And what we're going to get is, again, a slightly different animation. So play around with this. And always after you've got your primary action sort of roughed into your scene, if it's missing something or if it's not yet fully readable, take a look at it and think about what you can do to add in some secondary action. What else can we animate? What else can we change? What else can we add? And by going through this sort of layering process of adding in secondary animation continuously, we can create some really nice and really engaging animations.