Animation: “Tricks & Treats”
Tricks and treats you can use to make your animation process easier and faster.
This year I took on the task of learning more animation. It started off as something to do for fun in the evenings but has really helped my studio work.
Explaining the ideas and interactions of a website or ad whilst showing static mockups are a thing of past now. Putting together an animated gif or video can make it easier for all involved in the project. Developers can mimic the timings, project managers can show clients and get smiles instead of blank glares and I can be happy that others understood how I envisaged interactions to work.
My choice of program is Adobe After Effects which I use to chop up elements of designs that I had previously made in Photoshop. There are some great classes on SkillShare.com.
Here are some of my beginner tricks & treats for those interested in getting dirty with keyframes and easing.
Shortcuts
There are a lot of keyboard shortcuts. Here is a sheet of my go-to and not so easy ones to remember, which I like to have in front of me whilst working.
Hide control outlines — ⌘⇧H
Centre objects axis — ⌘⌥ HOME
Move keyframe 10 frames forward — ⌥⇧→
Write expressions — ⌥ ‘Click stopwatch’ e.g. time*50
Duplicate layer or shape — ⌘D
Move layer 10 frames forward — ⌥⇧ PAGE-DOWN
Trim layer to current time — ⌥ [ or ]
Move 10 frames forward — ⇧ PAGE-DOWN
U — Reveal Keyframes
P — Position
S — Scale
T — Opacity
R — Rotation
⇧F3 — Toggle Graph Editor
⇧ 0–9 — Add number marker to timeline
0–9 — Go to marker
⌘’click’ — Delete marker
Shape Layers
I learnt this one recently. Believe it or not, you can have more than one shape in a shape layer. It’s so handy — just duplicate the shape and it will have the same properties.
Copy paths from Illustrator
For those more complicated shapes, it’s often easier to build them with Illustrator then copy paste onto the shape path. Only one at a time though otherwise they’ll just turn into a mask.
Rendering
Want a nice manageable filesize which can easily be emailed or shared? Choose H.264 in the format options or use Handbrake to convert them to mp4s.
