Intro to Keyframing in Adobe After Effects

🛡️ Intro to Keyframing in Adobe After Effects

Courtesy of @millionframes
⠀
🔭 Part 5 of Adobe After Effects Micro Course
⠀
🔍 How to create a basic animation in AE using keyframes?
⠀
1️⃣ What are the keyframes?
⠀
2️⃣ How Keyframes work?
⠀
3️⃣ How to add keyframes?
⠀
4️⃣ Important tips regarding keyframes.

What are Keyframes?

A keyframe or keyframe is a location on a timeline that marks the beginning or end of a transition. It holds information that defines where a transition should start or stop.
Values between keyframes are interpolated or animated over time.

How keyframes work?

When you use keyframes to create a change over time, you typically use at least two keyframes, one for the state at the beginning of the change, and one for the new state at the end of the change.

How to add keyframes?

Click the Stopwatch icon next to the property name
which you want to animate to activate it. Here, we are animating the logo in the x-axis position. So we have to change the values of the x-axis of the position property. After clicking the stopwatch icon, After Effects creates a keyframe at the current time for that property value.

What to keep in mind?

As you saw in the video during the start, I changed the values from 250 at 1 sec to 750 at 2 sec and when I played the timeline on pressing the Spacebar nothing happened, as in there was no animation.

Why that happened?

That happened because we haven’t added any keyframes and we wanted AE to interpolate what we actually didn’t tell AE to record as in (keyframes).
In the second part, we tell AE to record the information we have given on particular time sets using keyframes and when we press the spacebar, the animation happens. Thanks to AE.

Important,
Keyframes hold information

Keyframes are essential in allowing After Effects to know at which point you want to change a value, and at which key point you want to change the value back — or even change it to a completely new value altogether.

Property which you want to animate

Here we selected “Position” property which you can access by pressing “P” while selecting a layer but this is a part of a different slide which we will call “TRANSFORM PROPERTIES” and in that, we will see in detail about all properties we can animate.

Animation or motion happens the same way on every design tool you’ll find.
Without a keyframe, you would have no animation.

Check out Principle for Mac in keyframing action.

A simple 2 screen interactive prototype keyframes view

Every motion is triggered by these keyframes at different time duration.

Bonus — 4 tools that may be useful in your designer way:

Webflow — all-in-one web design tool that allows users to design, build, and launch responsive websites visually.
Crello — the simplest online image editor. A simple but powerful tool to create awesome designs for any social media format — posts, covers, graphics, and posters using the best software on the web. It’s easy! A lot of animated designs.
Flowkit — allows designers to create frighteningly fast user flows within Sketch and Figma.
Funnelytics — an incredible tool that helps you build the best marketing funnel mapping.

Be free to send us any feedback by reply or reach us in DM on Instagram
Do you want to receive insights using FB Messenger or Telegram or Email? 👈 Subscribe now.