Subtitles of the Movie

This movie will cover how to set up a layered Photoshop or Illustrator file for transform animation. Once you have imported your file, adjusted your composition settings and background color, as well as composed your image, it's time to set our anchor points. Each layer should have an anchor point, or pivot, to determine at what point it should rotate or scale from. We set this before we begin animating, otherwise things start to get complicated. Choose the pan behind tool to change the layer's anchor point in the comp view. Like so. Click drag the anchor point to set it. And depending on where that anchor point is set that's where it's going to rotate or scale from. Once you have your anchor points set, it's time to set the initial key frames for our layers. Because animation is based on the concept of images that change over time, in order to create animation, we have to have at least two key frames set apart in time on at least one property, such as rotation, scale or position. Our initial key frame should set the positioning of where our logo is at its together state. We'll set these two seconds from the beginning of the timeline if we want the logo to start in one piece and then burst apart, or two seconds from the end of the timeline if we want the logo to start in pieces and then come together. I want this to be at eight seconds, so 8-0-0. There we go. Select all of your layers by pressing command A on your keyboard if you're on a Mac, control A if you're on a PC. Swivel open the triangle to the left of the layer name and then swivel the triangle to the left of the word transform. Do this for all of your layers. Click drag down the stopwatches to create key frames for these properties on all the layers. Now, the way that the stopwatches work is like this; the stopwatches should be activated only once; to begin the animation process. It's as if we're telling After Effects ready, set, animate. After the stopwatch has been pressed on any property, we get additional key frames by moving the blue current time marker either later or earlier in time and then simply changing a value. See? A key frame magically appeared. Clicking the stopwatch again will delete all your key frames for that property, which is helpful if you want to start animating that aspect all over again. It's not helpful if you liked your animation. So I'm going to undo that. We want to turn on the stopwatch only once and then create additional key frames just by changing the values. It does not work like Flash, which requires a create new key frame command every time you wish to make a key frame. Ok. So we have our initial key frames to set our logo at its together position, scale, rotation and opacity. In the upcoming movies, you will learn how to animate these properties over time to have the logo come together or burst apart.