Subtitles of the Movie

Motion Sketch is a really great way to have After Effects lend you a hand and assist you in animation. All you have to do is click on a layer and move it, and After Effects will add the Keyframes for you. So, open up the Old Man Puppet Comp in the Work Files folder, and we want to bring in another file in the Images folder called Glowing Eyes, after all, the Old Man's expression looks like he's seeing something coming up the stairs, so it could either be the IRS, or a pair of glowing eyes Ð both are quite scary. So, I'm going to go to File, Import, File, clicking on Glowing Eyes. PNG, created in Photoshop and saved as a PNG so we'd have a transparent background. I'm going to drag them right on into the Comp like so, and then I'll scale them down just a tad manually. OK. So far we have our Glowing Eyes, we have our Old Man, let's go ahead and lock the Old Man Layer down here so that we don't accidentally click on him, so we can just grab the Glowing Eyes at any time. So let's go ahead and think about what the animation should entail. The Old Man is gasping. He's scared of something coming up a flight of stairs, so you want to animate these eyes coming up, like so, and instead of adding the Keyframes ourselves, we're going to go to Window, Motion Sketch, and then I'm going to drag the Motion Sketch Panel up just a little bit so we can see it more clearly. We have the ability to capture this as we manually move this in our Comp at a certain speed. I'll just keep it at 100 percent, but feel free to change that to 50 percent, or whatever you want to, to change how fast or slow the capture occurs. We can also change the Smoothing. The lower the number the more Keyframes we're going to have; the higher the number the fewer Keyframes, so we'll have a smoother animation. We can also show our Wireframe and a background so we can have some more visual stimuli as we're working and we can see what we're dealing with. I'll leave them off for now to show you what happens when we start our capture. So, I'm going to be on my first frame by hitting Home on my keyboard, and then I'll click Start Capture, and I'm going to move the eyes. Now because I don't have Wireframe or the Background on, all I can see is this motion path. I'll let go and here we have a whole bunch of Keyframes. Now what I'm going to do is press the Spacebar and we can see that we have this motion. I'll hit Home again and I'm going to actually delete that by hitting Command or Control Z to undo that. This time, let's go ahead and increase the Smoothing. So I'm going to just drag and add a lot of smoothing here, and I'm going to put Wireframe and Background back on and Start my Capture again. This time I get a box that shows me where the artwork is and I can still see the Background, so if I had something back here, like a staircase, I will be able to see that. Now you'll notice that when I let go of the mouse we have far fewer Keyframes so the animation should play back more smoothly. I'll go ahead and hit the Spacebar after hitting Home on my keyboard, and now we have these creepy eyes coming up the stairs. "We're going to audit you Old Man." "No-o-o!" So, as you can see, Motion Sketch is a great way to animate things without you having to do all the hard work of Keyframing, but, as with everything else, you always have the ability to twirl down your Properties and you can still find your Keyframes. So we have our Keyframes for our Motion in here anyway that we can always tweak when we're done with the Motion Sketch.