12 Principles of Animation in After Effects

In this lesson we're going to learn about the animation principle of staging, which is all about camera placement and how we frame our scene. So I've opened up 11_begin, and I've just opened up the staging main comp, and this is our current shot. Now, at the beginning, I like the balance of our shot. We have a little bit of contrast with some element on the left, nothing on the right, and some nice stuff going on in the foreground. However, as this shot progresses, we have text coming in that we need to be able to read. Now, of course, as an After Effects artist, you know that readability of text is paramount, But it's also important to identify what the main point of the scene is, or the main point of this shot is. So to begin with, we want to take a look at this picture, and then we want to be able to see more of the entire scene as the text comes in. Now, another thing we have to keep in mind is this object here in the foreground. We want to keep it in the foreground, but we do not want it to cover up the text. So these are the type of things we need to think about whenever we're looking at the staging or the framing of our scene. So to begin with, I'm going to jump to the beginning, and we have our camera dolly 2 here. The camera set up is a little bit complex, so I've just shy guyed away most of the layers so we can just focus on this one animation element. Now, from here, I'm going to open up the rotation and the position by hitting R and Shift+P. so let's key frame our position, F9, ease that in, and let's take a look at when our text starts. So it looks like about a second in, it's not starting but around two seconds, our text is beginning. So right around here, I'd like to get to our next shot. So I'd like to be able to see this text. So let's come in here. And let's reframe this shot. So let's fix this staging a little bit. So to begin with, I'm going to reduce the rotation. Not quite that much. And maybe zero out the rotation of these other two axes just to give myself a little bit of a more basic framing to understand. And let's come in and let's shift the position a little bit. Let move it up a little bit, which in this case is negative z. Let's take a look at this. The text is readable, it's inside of our frame here. So let's move forward a little bit. And this text is actually coming in rather slowly, so I'd like to move the camera whenever the text comes in. So let's rotate this down a little bit, so that would be on the x-axis. So we can see on our camera here. So let's rotate that down. And again, I'm trying to get this foreground element into the foreground and create that nice depth. So let's take a look at this. So we're moving around. We see the text appearing, and now the text is beginning to appear. All right, so here is the second line. So we don't want to have the text appear under this foreground, so let's now rotate this up just a little bit. And let's maybe move our camera up just a bit. So again, a little bit more negative. OK. So now, let's let the text unfold a little bit here, or continue to unfold. And we don't want to set too many key frames, So let's just jump to the end and set up a final pose. And so that's going to look like around 14 seconds in. So let's frame this and set the stage to be able to see these elements together while keeping them inside of our frame. So, I'm just going to reduce the x rotation and increase that until we get to a point where we can see that the text and the foreground element are not going to compete in terms of the stage we have. Now at this point, we might need to do a few things. We might need to rotate it a little bit in the y-axis to be able to see this text a little better. And, depending on the importance of this left picture element, we can move our camera or continue tweaking the rotation to be able to see this entire frame. So let's move the camera back a little bit. So a little bit negative in the x value and a little bit negative in the y value. So we're doing a pull back. And again, let's continue to raise our camera upwards. OK. So here we're taking just a more global bird's eye view of our scene. And now to finish this off, let's just add one more key frame here at the end so we do not have a static hold. So let's give ourselves a little bit of a moving hold. And this is important whenever doing these kind of modifications. I really do not like having things moving and then coming to a complete and sudden stop. So I always like to come in and see how we can continue keeping the camera moving while keeping the staging that we want for the focusing or to focus on the element that we're looking at. OK, so this is pretty good. So let's just jump through our animation. Take a look at this. Now again the audience focus that we want wants to go from the foreground object to this background image. And then, as the text starts coming on, we're of course going to begin reading this. So we need to make sure that the text is continually in frame, in shot, and readable, because as this text is coming in, most of our audience is probably going to begin reading it. So we want to make sure that that experience is unimpeded. And finally, we have this nice little moving hold here at the end so we do not abruptly stop our camera motion. All right, so I'm just going to pause the video and RAM preview every other frame so we can take a look at this, and we'll finish off this lesson by looking at how we can use the proportional grid here in After Effects to show us the rule of thirds so that we can quickly and easily place important objects at the rule of thirds cardinal points. So I'm going to pause the video and we'll take a look at that here in a second. So it just finished RAM previewing. Here is our animation. Now, it has a little bit of a hard hit here at two seconds. And we can of course come in and fix that, but for the most part, what we want to take away from this is making sure to survey our scene and identify what the most important part of the current action is. So in this case, once the text began coming on, we wanted to make sure to be able to focus on that text and that no elements are in front of that. So we added in some subtle camera movements to be able to see the text unimpeded. OK, great. So let's take a look at one last thing here, and that is how to apply the rule of thirds with our proportional grid. So let's go over here, and you probably know you have the title and action safe, and you have the proportional grid. Now, by default, it's set to a pretty high value. Usually, I like to work based on the rule of thirds, which says, if you split your screen into essentially nine squares or split it into threes, those are the points that you should focus on when placing elements or setting up your camera. So to change your proportional grid, we can go up to Edit, Preferences, Grids and Guides, and we can change the proportional grid horizontal and vertical to three and three. Just run that in there, hit OK, and now we have a rule of thirds that changes based on the proportions and dimensions of our comp. So, as we can see here, a few of our elements are not exactly on the cardinal points. Now, this isn't a 100% always rule, but it's a good guide to be able to see if the placement of your elements are working well for this kind of a distribution of imagery. So feel free to play around a bit more with this scene with the rule of thirds guide on, and remember to always evaluate your animation for what's most important and make sure to have that be front and center.