Subtitles of the Movie

In After Effects you are presented with a Motion Path that shows the start and end of an animation in your Comp window, or Panel. Let me go ahead and show you how this works. I'll create a brand new Shape Layer and I'll just draw a star on the first frame, so I'll just put it here for now, right at the left edge. I'll go ahead and grab my Selection Tool and then I'll hit P on my keyboard to give this guy a frame on Frame 1 and then I'll move all the way to the end of the animation and then click on my star and move him up here. This line that we're looking at is the Motion Path. So, I'm going to grab my Pan Behind Tool and just reposition the pivot point of this guy here, or the center point, and I'll just turn that off temporarily, so I'll go to the end and we can see that we have this Path. This is the beginning of the animation and this is the end of the animation. Now, a Motion Path lets you see where your object's going to go, but as you can also see, I can change that at any time. Now, I can animate with this as well by simply moving the Current Time Indicator elsewhere in the animation and then I can grab the object and move it. Notice that we have a new Keyframe in our Timeline, and just like the other ones I can reposition it at any time to manually change the animation as I'm working. So, you don't have to just, you know, go in your Timeline to a position and then mov your object and add a Keyframe, you can simply create two Keyframes, as I have here, and then as you scrub the Current Time Indicator, move your object where you want it to go, and it's a really interactive way to animate. Don't forget you can also change the position at any time and even change the Bezier handles themselves, so you click on a Keyframe and grab the handle and you can stretch it like so, or squash it back in to change how sharp the animation's going to play back and how smooth. So, as you can see, I have this nice bulge here by simply dragging the handles away and when I play it back the star does its little rise and then it comes down, and it slowly goes back into the next rise. And like every other Keyframe in After Effects, you can simply click on it in the Timeline and reposition it as well. The closer you have your Keyframes, the faster the motion between them, and the further apart the longer it's going to take for that motion to occur. So, from here to here very fast, and then it takes forever to go down and down until the next Keyframe. Don't forget, you can also click on the Keyframe and hit Delete on your keyboard to get rid of it. Likewise, it gets rid of that Keyframe in your Motion Path. So, this is a really nice way to animate, and you might find it's really enjoyable because all you have to do is have two Keyframes and then play it back by scrubbing it, and then change the position of your object.