[flow_default] Transcription: 02 - artwork-prep.json

transcriptions/02 - artwork-prep.json

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+{
+  "audio_file": "02 - artwork-prep.wav",
+  "text": "Alright, first I just want to say thank you so much for taking this class. It really does mean a lot to me. And I am so excited to be teaching you about the Graph Editor. It's my favorite feature of After Effects, and I truly believe that it's the most powerful way to take control of your motion. Once you start understanding how it works and implementing it into your own animations, you're going to see a night and day difference with the way that your animations will look and feel. If at any point in this class you have any questions or you get confused about something, do not hesitate to ask me a question on the community page. I do my best to answer those questions as quickly as possible. All right, let's do this. The first thing you'll need to do for this class is create your house artwork. Now I've gone ahead and created mine in Illustrator. I'm not gonna show you how I made it because it's very basic and I wanna focus on animation, not design in this class. But you can see this is my reference image. This is the house that I grew up in and I just used it as a reference to recreate it in a very basic, simplified, geometric way. Like you see that I took some of the detail out of the windows, I didn't want to overwhelm myself with all of the details, but something that represents the house and is identifiable. And like I said, it's very geometric. There's just a whole bunch of rectangles making up everything within this design. And then on some of the finer details, I had to do a little bit of work to get it to make the shapes that I wanted it to. But it's purely vector and it's all very, very basic. Now you do not have to create your artwork inside of Illustrator. If you're more comfortable in Photoshop, you can do that. The reason that I'm using Illustrator is because I know that my vector artwork will translate to vector layers inside of After Effects very easily. But if you'd like, you can do a completely different design style. It doesn't have to be this 2D flat vector look. You could add textures and patterns or even use real photo references within your artwork. Just keep in mind that you'll need everything to be on its own layer so that you can animate it inside of After Effects. Now, it could bring this straight into After Effects as it is, but if we look at the Layers palette, you see that everything is on one single layer. If I open this up, I have a whole bunch of paths inside of here. None of them are named. Nothing is organized. And so, it before I go into After Effects. First of all, I don't need this photo reference inside of After Effects, so I'm just gonna save a copy of my artwork on the desktop and call it house underscore AE for After Effects. That way I have a copy and I can do whatever I want to this without worrying about losing my original. I'm going to delete that picture and now I'll start breaking up these pads into their own layers. Now in this design I don't actually need to do it for every single element and that's because a lot of these elements are identical. So all of these upper windows, they're all exactly the same and these four bottom windows, these four bushes, they're all exactly the same. So I can just make one of these bushes on its own layer, and then in After Effects, I'll duplicate them across the image using the artwork as reference. But that way, I don't have to do quite as much work in here. But I am going to start by breaking everything into its own layers because that's actually much easier than making a selection of the individual elements I want and separating them out. So I'm just going to make a selection of everything, and then I come over to my layers palette into this little drop down right here and say, release to layers sequence. If I click on that, now all of those elements are placed on their own layers. They're still contained within this layer one, but I can now grab any of these layers and drag them out to be their own individual layers in my document. And that will translate into After Effects as layers as well. And that's exactly what I want. So I'm going to start by just grabbing the roof. We'll start at the top and work our way down. So top, this is the roof. So I'm going to double click on that layer name and rename it roof. And then I'll just click and drag that layer out above layer one. So now I have roof separated from the rest of the art. Next, I'll do these windows. So I just want to start with this one right here. So I'll grab this layer and I'll rename it upper window upper glass. And then while I'm at it, I'll rename this one upper window lower glass. And I'll grab this layer and rename it upper window frame. Then I'll grab all three of these layers by clicking on this one shift clicking on the one, and then click and drag that all the way up to the very top of my layer stack, so they're out just below the roof. So now those three layers are separate from everything else. I don't need to worry about any of these other window layers, so I'm just gonna ignore them, and I'll move down to this window. I'll grab the top, and rename it Lower Window Top. Grab the glass, lower window upper glass, and lower window lower glass, and finally the lower window frame. Okay, I'll select those layers, move them to the top just below the upper window layers, and then I'll grab this bush and just rename it bush and then move that up. And that can actually go above the lower window because I want it to appear above those layers. And then I'll come over here to this lamp and I'll grab this top part and I'll call it lamp top. Zoom in and grab this layer. Name it Lamp Glass, Lamp Lower, and Lamp Base. I'll make sure I grab those layers. Don't want this one, so I'm holding down Command or Control on a PC and clicking on the layers that I want to make that selection. And then I'll bring those up all the way up and I'll put them just below the bush. And I'm just going to continue this process for all of my elements. Now on this particular element I have a couple of different shapes making up this artwork. I want to merge these two together because they really don't need to be separate. So I'm going to select both of them by clicking and shift clicking on them with the selection tool. And then with my Pathfinder open, you can find that under Window, Pathfinder, I'm going to click on this first button which is Unite. And that'll just bring them together. And that made everything else disappear because it joined it at the top of those layers. I'm just going to drag it down to here. So now it's below everything. And for these individual glass panes, I have these stroke paths just overlaid on top of this semicircle. So I'm going to select those three paths and outline them by going up to Object, Path, Outline Stroke. And now they're just rectangles. And it looks like this one is a little off-center actually, so I'm going to select this layer, Shift-click on this layer, and then click one more time on the glass. That makes it the key object, and I'll then align that rectangle to the center of the semi-circle. There we go. Now that's nice and centered. I'll select all three of these, as well as the glass. Go back to my Pathfinder and click on the Merge button. Now those are all merged together. I'll double click to go into the group and just delete this white part. And that way I'm left with these blue glass pizza-shaped paths. And then double click to get out of that and ungroup them by pressing Command Shift G or Control Shift G on a PC. Now those are all individual paths, but they're all living on the same layer. But we have some empty layers here from all of that Pathfinder work that I just did. So I'm gonna just cut one layer at a time, Command X, and paste in front by pressing Command F or Control F on a PC on the new layer. So I'll name this Door Glass 1. Then I'll just continue this process for all the other pieces. Okay, that's all sorted out. And I'm actually gonna just go ahead and rename everything else before moving it up because that way I can then just see which layers were renamed before dragging them all up at once. So Threshold, got the Siding, the Trim, and the Background. Then I can make a selection of all the layers that have been renamed and know that those are the only ones that I really need. Everything else can be taken care of inside of After Effects. So I've got all of those, I'll drag them up to the top, and that's going to hide a bunch my layers. And actually, it looks like I have one renamed incorrectly. So, yep, that's not what it's supposed to be. I'm just gonna drag that back down, push this back into the Layer 1, because it's not actually important. And remember, as long as that's contained within a layer, After Effects isn't going to see any of the contents. It's all just gonna keep it contained into that one single layer. Now, the reason why everything else is being hidden is because that layer 1 is below everything else. If I moved it up to the top, then we're going to see all those elements come back. But these are the only elements that I'm actually going to need inside of Illustrator to be separated out on their own layers in order to animate them inside of After Effects. Again, because I can just duplicate these layers for the other windows, for the other lamp, the other bushes, and everything else is unique. And now that that's done, I can save and bring it into After Effects. And you can do the same. So at this point, go ahead and decide on what house or building you'd like to create and then create the artwork for it. Again, you do not have to do this in Illustrator. If you want to use Photoshop or another program, that's totally fine, as long as you can bring it into After Effects as layers. The key thing to remember is that you need all of your elements to be on their own layers if you want to be able to animate them independently of other objects inside of After Effects. If you're making something that's a little bit more complex and using things like textures inside a Photoshop, I would recommend that you merge all of those textures onto the individual elements so that you're left with a structure very similar to this one, where you have all the elements that make up the glass of a window on its own layer, all of the elements that make up a roof on its own layer. And that will make it easier to animate inside of After Effects. Another thing that I need to point out is the size of your document. Work at whatever size you plan to animate at. My document is 1440 by 1080, so that's a 4 by 3 aspect ratio at an HD resolution. This way I can always expand this out to the side if I want to put it into an HD comp, but it also will scale down nicely for some place like Dribble. Along with that, if you're working inside of Illustrator, make sure that all of your artwork is contained within your artboard. If you have a shape, go outside the art box like this, you're going to run into issues later on once we're in After Effects. Another extremely important thing to keep in mind is that if you want to work with shape layers in After Effects, like I will be, you have to use only solid fills or solid strokes. What I mean by that is no gradients, no patterns, no transparency, no blending modes. If you're using a stroke, you cannot use any kind of a styled brush like this. Even if it looks uniform, this is actually using a five point round brush. And After Effects is going to ignore that brush and just convert it down to the basic brush. So all of your strokes need to be basic and uniform. If you keep all of that in mind, you're gonna save yourself a whole lot of headache once we get into After Effects and start breaking this apart. Now that doesn't mean you can't use gradients in effects. Those are things that we can recreate inside of After Effects, but you also have another option, which is not using shape layers inside of After Effects. And I know I'm probably getting a little bit ahead of myself. I don want to overwhelm you, but if you really want to use patterns, gradients, transparencies, things like that inside of Illustrator to create your artwork, then I would suggest that you just plan on not using Shape Layers inside of After Effects, and that's totally fine. You'll still be able to follow along and do everything I am. You'll just be working with Illustrator artwork inside of After Effects instead of Shape Layers inside of After Effects. But the animation process is identical, and as always, if that's confusing, feel free to ask questions. I'm happy to help. The Once your artwork is designed, save a copy of the file so that you don't lose the original artwork and then organize all of the layers for After Effects. Remember to keep any object that you want to animate on its own layer. And if you're adding any textures or anything like that inside a Photoshop, make sure that you merge all of those layers with the object so that you have one single textured layer for every object. Once all of that is done, you can export an image of your artwork and upload it to the class project page so we can see what you'll be working with. And as always, don't hesitate to ask questions on the community page.",
+  "language": "en",
+  "confidence": null,
+  "duration": 799.64
+}