Tutorial: The Predki Animation Trick in After Effects

Learn how to replicate Predki's signature animation.

In this tutorial Joey is going to show you one of his go-to animation tricks that he stole from his buddy Kyle Predki's bag of go-to animation tricks. Kyle was an animator at Toil and Joey would often see him animate things a certain way. It sort of became Kyle's “signature move” and Joey liked it so much that he started trying to replicate it. Now he's going to show you this move that he lovingly calls "The Predki". Once you're done with this tutorial start thinking about making your own signature move that you can add to your bag of MoGraph tricks for when you need a fast animation solution. Don't forget to check out Kyle's work over in the Resources tab.  

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Tutorial Full Transcript Below 👇:

Joey Korenman (00:16):

Hello friend, Joey here at school of motion and welcome to day eight of 30 days of after effects. Now I know you want to make everything you touch the most amazing thing you've ever done, but at the same time, you're going to run into small budgets and short schedules, and sometimes you just got to get stuff done. So in those situations, you've got to reach into your bag of tricks and pull out something. You can execute very quickly that you know how to do, and that won't take you a long time. So what I'm going to show you today is one of those tricks. And I didn't even come up with this one, my good friend, Kyle Predki and incredible animator. He came up with this move, which oddly enough, I call the Predki now Kyle and I used to work together and I saw him do this over and over and over again on different projects.

Joey Korenman (00:57):

This was just sort of his go-to move whenever he needed to animate something and he didn't have time to think about it. So I stole it from him and I'm going to teach it to you, which he's actually cool with because I'm giving him credit. And I posted a link to his website, along with this lesson. What I'm hoping it does though, is give you some ideas about some things you can do that can then go into your bag of tricks and you can pull them out whenever you need. Now don't forget sign up for a free student account. So you can grab the project files from this lesson, as well as assets from any other lesson on this site. Now let's hop into after effects and get started. So like I said, this is just going to be a tutorial to show you guys one trick.

Joey Korenman (01:37):

And I'm not usually a huge fan of tutorials that just sort of show you one trick. Um, but this is actually a little different, um, you know, when you're animating stuff and you're, you're flying and you got to get stuff done, sometimes you just got to pull one of your tricks out of your bag of tricks. Now this trick, I call it the Predki and it's named after a good friend of mine, Kyle Predki, uh, who was an animator at toil. Um, and I saw him do something like this on a few projects and, uh, I really liked the way it looks. Um, and so I sort of stole it. Um, and, uh, you know, a wise man once said that, uh, you know, the best artists steal. Um, so I stole this from Kyle, but I am giving him credit. So hopefully that's okay.

Joey Korenman (02:22):

So what I'm going to show you is a first of all, how you can get this kind of bouncy, cool cookie animation, um, and then I'll show you of course, a way to customize it, um, and kind of make it your own and really make it flexible. All right. So let's start out, um, with a new comp, um, and let's just make this, you know, your standard 19 20, 10 80, and I'm just gonna make a star and we'll just do something really, really simple here. Um, just to show you the, the concept of this, you know, one of the most common things you're going to do in motion design is have something, you know, have like a background or an empty screen and reveal something right. Type or a logo or whatever it is. And there's, you know, an infinite number of ways to do that. Um, and Mo we know some of my favorite ways were just by using good animation and making things move in an interesting way.

Joey Korenman (03:16):

So to use the Predki, uh, if we go back and we just kinda look at this, you know, kind of in slow motion here, you can see that there's rotation happening. There's, you know, these letters are scaling up each of them from zero, and it's almost like they're on a spring kind of, you know, swinging back and forth like this. Right. So the way I set this up is I, uh, I first moved the anchor points. Okay. So I'm gonna hit Y and Y lets me click the anchor point and move it around and I'm going to move it. So it's down and off to the side a little bit. Okay. And the reason I do that is because now when I rotate that layer, it kind of rotates like it's on a spring. Right. And the idea is I want to have this thing start scaled down and maybe here, and then as it scales up, I want it to swing back and then kind of land.

Joey Korenman (04:08):

Okay. So let's start by, um, let's start by having this shape B here, let's put a key frame and then I'm also gonna put a scale, key frame. So option S and the first thing I do, you know, when I sort of block these things out is I just try to figure out how long I want that animation to take. Right. Um, and so, you know, what I'm doing is I'm trying to picture it in my head and I'm sorta trying to figure out how many frames it's going to take. So it's going to kind of bounce out, you know, about like that. And I'm thinking how that's maybe a second and a half. Okay. So I'm gonna jump forward to a second and a half, and I'm going to put the final key frames there. So the final key frames are going to be this.

Joey Korenman (04:50):

Then I'll go back in and I'll fill in any other key frames. I need knowing that this is where I want it to end up. Okay. Um, and sometimes I'll work backwards and sometimes I'll work forwards if I was going to work backwards for this. So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to, I'm going to set the scale to zero here. Okay. Cause we know it's going to start at zero and it's going to end there. Okay. But before it gets there, I want it to first way overshoot over here. Okay. So why don't we go to the middle of this and let's have it rotate way past where it's supposed to go. Okay. And at the same time, I'm going to have it scale up way past where it's supposed to go. Okay. So maybe try and give ourselves some easy numbers here.

Joey Korenman (05:33):

Why don't we say one 30 on scale? Okay. So now it goes back and then this way, okay. Now I also want it to kind of feel springy. So it's going to sh overshoot this way, but then it's going to start to come back and it's going to overshoot the other way. All right. So let's, uh, let's go forward a few frames here, maybe six frames and an easy trick is I can just copy these key frames like this and then overshoot them a little bit. Okay. And now, because it overshot on scale, it got too big on the next frame. It's going to be too small. Okay. So let's try 85. Now, when you're doing this, um, you know, it's, it's kinda hard to just look at key frames and kind of see what your animation is doing, which is why I am a humungous fan, the animation curve editor.

Joey Korenman (06:29):

This makes it so much easier to do stuff like this. Um, and you know, I, I tell people and I would tell people at toil and students at Ringling, um, get in that curve editor because you can actually see what your animation is doing. Um, and you know, uh, I might talk about this in a, in a later video, but what's happening with this type of animation is it's, it's sort of like a modified pendulum animation, right? You got, you've got, you know, a value that's awesome rating, which means it's, it's going back and forth between a low value and a high value. Um, and the difference between this and a real kind of pendulum animation is that the key frames are going to get closer and closer together, like it's on a spring. So it starts here overshoots over corrects. All right. And now what I can do, I can hold command and I can click right on that curve.

Joey Korenman (07:21):

And then I can just pull this up a little bit. Right. And then maybe come forward a little bit here, and over-correct a little bit this way. And so visually you can, you can really see what's going on and it makes it so much easier to get the curse with, you know, I can see here, you wouldn't be able to see the, see this. If I was just looking at the key frames, um, let me make sure if you, if you ever click on the curve editor button and you don't see your curves, make sure you select the property you want to look at. Okay. Um, so we're working on scale here. And if I was just looking at key frames, I can't see that there's a problem with this key frame, but if I come into the curve editor and I select that key frame, look, I can see that this Bezier handle is not flat.

Joey Korenman (08:07):

And what that means is the, uh, the rotation or the, sorry, the scale property. It never settles. It never stops changing. Sometimes that's what you want. But if you're doing like a pendulum animation, um, when this thing swings this way, it's going to stop for a second. This is going to come back this way and it's going to stop for a second. It's going to come back. All right. So, uh, if that ever happens, then what I do is I grab enough, this was messed up. I would just hit F nine to easy, ease it. That'll kind of reset it. And then I can just adjust the handles. Okay. And you know, this is where I really like to get in there and think about exactly the speed that I want this thing to have. Right. Do I want the rotation to, you know, what's happening now?

Joey Korenman (08:51):

Is it starts not rotating at all. And then it slowly picks up speed and then it slows down again. Now I know I want it to slow down again and I probably want that to be more extreme, but do I want the star to, you know, shoot out right out of the gate or do I want it to slowly ramp up into that rotation? And you know, there's not really a right answer. It's not like we're trying to mimic some real-world thing. So why don't we try this? Okay. And you can see now our scale has this nice kind of oscillating curve and then our rotation doesn't yet. Okay. What I'm going to do is, um, I am going to click this button here right next to scale. Okay. And what that little button does is it's just gonna keep this curve on screen, even when I'm looking at my rotation curve.

Joey Korenman (09:41):

Okay. And this is just a nice way, so I can kind of keep them in sync with each other. All right. So I know I'm going to need a key frame there, and again, I'm just holding command on a Mac I'm on a PC. It's probably control are all, it's one of the two. Um, and I'm just making sure that I have key frames for rotation everywhere. I put a key frame for scale, and I just want them to be in sync. Right. So I'm just going to sort of eyeball this for now the zoom in a little bit. Okay. And then I'm going to select all of my, all my rotation, key frames, and a quick way to do that. If you're in the curve editor and you click rotation, it will show you your curve. If you click it again, it will select every key frame.

Joey Korenman (10:26):

So then I can hit F nine, uh, this big box that you see that, that it put around my, um, my curve. This lets you scale the curve, and this is actually very useful. Um, but right now I don't actually want to see that box. So I'm going to click this icon right here and you'll see the little help thing pops up, show transform box when multiple keys are selected, I'm gonna turn that off for now. Okay. Cause it's just going to get in the way, and then I'm going to go through and I'm going to do the same thing. I'm going to pull my curves out so that I get a more extreme kind of acceleration and deceleration. And, um, you know, it's not going to be perfectly symmetrical or identical to the scale curve, but that's okay because there's little inconsistencies in the speed, um, can kind of give it a little more life.

Joey Korenman (11:15):

All right. So let's take a look at this now. I mean, you know, I just kind of made all these key frames without actually previewing the animation. Okay. So now if we look at this, that's kind of neat. Right. And I mean, that's essentially, that's a Predki right there. Okay. Um, now one thing I need to make sure is that the rotation actually ends at zero, which it doesn't right now. So let me fix that. Okay. Um, and you know, when I play this, I mean, there's, you know, there's nothing wrong with it. It actually works pretty well on that first, you know, kind of move right there where whips back feels a little fast. Okay. So what I'm going to do is, uh, I'm gonna, and just to sort of show you where that's happening. If you look at the curve, see right there, you see how steep that curve is right there.

Joey Korenman (12:10):

That's why it's moving so fast. So if I want that to be not so fast, I can make this not as steep. So if I push this back this way, that will help. Or if I push this back this way and I might just kind of nudge both of these handles and let's see, that feels better. Okay. So now it's not as jarring of a move. Cool. Um, this type of stuff, it always looks great when you put motion blur on it, too. Cool. All right. So let's say we like that. Um, and there is one Predki. There is a single Predki move right there. Okay. And so if I had five different stars, I would just do something like this on each one. Um, and, uh, you know, the trick I did for this type here is I actually had each little piece, you know, this quotation mark, this one, the PDR, the E I had them all move, um, you know, kind of opposite.

Joey Korenman (13:07):

So the P would sort of come out from here. It would go kind of counter-clockwise, but then the R would animate on clockwise. Um, and I would sort of, you know, offset the timing of them and all that kind of stuff and move the anchor point around a little bit. Um, because the cool thing about an animation, like this is that it's all based on where the anchor point is. Right. So just by moving the anchor point appear, now we get a totally different looking animation. Right. Um, and it's even, you know, I had the anchor point on the left side, but if we put it on the right side, right, then it kinda does a different move. Um, and so you can, you can really easily get variations just by moving the anchor point. I mean, and it's, you know, the anchor points pretty far off of the object.

Joey Korenman (13:56):

If I put it just on one corner of it, right. Then you get something a little more subtle. I mean, it's still kind of bouncing goofy. Um, but it's a little bit more subtle. Cool. So that's essentially it, I mean, you know, if you look at, I mean, this is animation, one-on-one here, you've got, you know, uh, kind of sine wave looking move here, and it's oscillating between two extremes and there's some rules that you kinda need to follow to make these, um, you know, to really make these work well. And that's kind of a, you know, that's kind of an animation class maybe to, to come in the future. Um, but in general, if you can get a nice, smooth looking curve like this, your animation is going to feel pretty good in the, in the key is again, to understand what you're looking at here.

Joey Korenman (14:43):

And, you know, an easy way to remember it is the steeper, the curve, the faster it's moving. Um, by the way, if you're looking at your curve and doesn't look like this, click this button here, it looks like a little menu kind of thing. Make sure you're looking at the value graph. Okay. If you haven't watched intro to animation curves, that would be a great one to watch. But if it looks like this, this is the speed graph. And I don't like this graph every once in a while. You're forced to use it. Um, but this does not really make any sense to me. Okay. Looking at this, I have no idea what my object is doing, but when I look at the value graph, that's when you can really see what the animation is doing. Okay. So now let's talk about how we can make this a little bit easier to manage and to customize.

Joey Korenman (15:31):

Okay. So let's hop in to this comp here. This was the, uh, I just made a Photoshop file with these letters in it. And I made them really goofy looking because this animation is pretty goofy. So you want to, you know, you want to match your animation style to your art direction. All right. So if you're animating something that looks like really techie and robotic, then the Predki is not something you're going to want to use. It's just doesn't fit the character of the, of the, of the style. Um, but for really fun, bouncy, cartoony, goofy stuff, it works perfectly. So, um, all I've done here is I have, you know, each letter right. Is kind of on its own layer and this is going to make it really easy for us to, to apply a little Predki move to each one. My buddy, Kyle is going to, he's going to be tickled.

Joey Korenman (16:23):

He's going to hear his name so many times in this video. All right. So let's start with the P all right. So I'm just going to so low everything. I'm going to solo all the letters in the background. All right. So let's start with this, Pete. So now, you know, the way I just did the Predki on that star was by, you know, selecting the layer, hitting Y moving the anchor point over here. Um, and you know, that's great. Uh, but you know, the, the problem is if I have to do this for every single letter and some, I want to go clockwise and some I want to go counter-clockwise, um, you know, it can get kind of annoying to have to constantly set things up, copy and paste curves, but then adjust them. And also if you, if you have any key frames on your position of these layers and you move the anchor point, it's gonna throw off your position, key frames.

Joey Korenman (17:17):

Um, so I actually figured out a different way to do this, that it makes it a little bit easier to customize. Here's what we're gonna do. We're going to, uh, we're going to use an effect to actually do the Predki. All right. So the effect is in the distort menu and it's transform transform effect. It pretty much just gives you another set of controls for position scale rotation. Right. Um, and you know, it just duplicates the, you know, the functionality of your normal position scale rotation. What's cool about it though, is that it's in effect. And so on top of whatever you key frame here, you can still rotate and scale and position the layer as you normally would, but it won't mess this up. Okay. So first thing I want to do is, um, move the anchor point of this layer, right? So there's an anchor point position here, uh, sorry, anchor point property.

Joey Korenman (18:12):

And one thing that kind of stinks about this effect is when you move the anchor point, you see what happens to the letter, right. It moves in relation to the anchor point. And so then you'd have to go back and move the position as well to get it back where it was supposed to be. That's kind of a pain. So what I do, uh, is I do a really, really, really, really simple expression. Um, what I want is the position to match the anchor point. Okay. Um, so what I'm going to do is I'm going to hold option and I'm going to click the stopwatch next to position, and I'm just going to pick whip to anchor point and hit enter. Now, when I move the anchor point, it automatically adjust the position. So it matches the anchor point. And so the effect is the letter doesn't move.

Joey Korenman (19:03):

Okay. So now I can put the anchor point wherever I want. I can just click and drag it and move it here like that. Okay. Um, greatness. So now what I want to do is animate the Predki. Okay. So, um, why don't we put a key frame and actually, let me see if I can just copy and paste this. All right. So this, uh, the scale value here, right. Um, let's see if I can copy and paste this, because that would be pretty slick. Um, this transform, um, this transform effect, the scale property only has one number. Um, and unfortunately the scale property here has two. It has an X and a Y. Um, and so it would actually, it actually wouldn't, uh, you can't just copy and paste it, right? Like if I, if I select the scale key frames and I copy, and I come over here and I put a key frame on the scale property, on my transform effect to you, so we can see it.

Joey Korenman (20:02):

If I try to paste it, it won't work because you can't paste from three dimensions to one. Um, because scale is a two or three dimensional property. And on this effect, it's not. So, um, what I can do is open up the actual scale for this layer and hit paste. And then I could just, you know, really quickly go through like this, right. I can look at the value here. It's 1.5 and then I can go forward. It's one 30. And I'm just basically typing in the value that I pasted in from the, uh, from the star.

Joey Korenman (20:42):

Right. So that way I don't have to kind of totally rebuild this thing. All right. And now let me turn off the actual scale property. Let's easy, ease these hop into the curve editor, and we'll do our, you know, our same kind of adjustment here. So we get really, you know, some more extreme moves, more extreme eases, which kind of makes it feel a little bit springy air and bounce here. Okay, cool. So that's the scale. And then we need to do the rotation as well in rotation. If I copy that, I believe if I put a key frame on rotation, I believe I can paste those values. So let's try that paste. Yep. That worked. And the reason the rotation values could paste is because there's only one value for rotation. There's not two. Okay. So now, if we look at that, there's our Predki right.

Joey Korenman (21:39):

On the P wonderful. Okay. Let's just preview that a few times. All right. Now feels a little slow to me now for some reason. So what I might do is just take this and compress, sorry. I'm gonna select all of these key frames and I'm going to hold option. And if you don't know this trick, this is very useful. If you hold option and you have to select one of the most extreme key frames. So either this key frame or one of these, and you can actually scale the key frames. So we can say, okay, now it's only going to take a second. And maybe these are actually going to move a little closer together. There we go. All right. So now it's a lot bounce here. Okay. And it feels like it feels a little weird at the end here. Now, for some reason it feels like it overshoots this way very nicely, but then it kind of doesn't overshoot back far enough, maybe here.

Joey Korenman (22:35):

So I'm just gonna adjust that key frame a little bit. Let's see what that looks like. All right. And then, you know, I'm starting to nitpick here. I always do this. I always do this. Um, you know, the curve is, it just doesn't feel quite right to me. Um, and so I'm just going to sort of track what I'm trying to get is a little bit more of a gradual kind of finish to it. Um, because, you know, I had, I had a key frame way up here, but I want it to feel like it's getting closer and closer to this value. Um, every single time it oscillates. All right. That's better. It's still a little bit extreme, you know, when it comes back here, I think it may be going too far. And then definitely when it goes here used to be a little bit closer. Okay.

Joey Korenman (23:30):

Guys, I literally could sit here and do this for like 15, 20 minutes, but I won't. All right. So let's say we're happy with that. That's great. Now this Predki is a counterclockwise move, so the piece starts going counter-clockwise okay. So to make this easier to remember, I'm going to actually name this CCW. Counter-clockwise okay. Now let's say that I wanted the next letter to go clockwise, and then I wanted the E to go counterclockwise and then the D to go clockwise. Um, you know, I could have a different, uh, you know, I could basically copy and paste this effect, put it on the R and then adjust the values and then copy and paste it, put it on the E um, and keep the values. But you know, when you're adjusting animations, I like to always make it as easy as possible. You know, especially Prentky's a short word, but what if you had to do this to like 30 layers, right.

Joey Korenman (24:27):

And you want it to easily be able to tweak which layers are clockwise, which ones are counter-clockwise and all that kind of stuff. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to, uh, I'm going to just duplicate this counterclockwise transform effect, and I'm going to turn off the original one. So the, the copy I'm now going to call clockwise. Okay. And all I want to do on this one. So let me hit you. All right. And I only want to adjust this clockwise one. The only difference is I want the rotation to basically be backwards from what it is now. So right now it starts at 45 degrees. I want it to start at negative 45 degrees. And then when it's here at negative 76.7, I want it to be at 76.7. So I just want to reverse this. Okay. But I want it to end up at zero, same as you know, same as it does currently.

Joey Korenman (25:19):

So I, you know, you could manually do this, but this is where if I select all these key frames, this is where this box comes in, really handy, the transform box, because this transform box, it lets you scale. And if you hold, um, if you hold, is it command or option command, if you hold command and you drag it lets you do things like this, right. And you can symmetrically change the curve. So what I want to do is I want to make sure that this point, the zero point stays at zero. So this is very cool. There's an anchor point to this transform box and you can just click it and move it over here. Okay. So now if I hold command and click and drag, it's going to transform with this as the anchor point. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to come over here and I'm going to look at this value.

Joey Korenman (26:08):

It is starting at 27.7. Okay. So what I need to make sure is a, I need to make sure that when I'm done transforming this, this is negative 27.7. So I'm gonna hold command and I'm gonna pull this down until that value negative 27.7. And let's take a look at that. Okay. Now I think that actually I may have done that wrong. Let me think about this one more time, because this is not the most key. This is here, right? Um, this is negative 76.7. So actually I think I'm going to, I'm going to do that one more time, except now I'm going to keep my playhead here. So let me move that anchor point here, hold command and make that 76.7 or as close as I can get it. Doesn't have to be exact and then just make sure that that last key frame is actually on zero.

Joey Korenman (27:14):

Okay. Um, and then it looks like I screwed up some of the stuffs. I'm just going to grab these and move them. There we go. And then let's check that out. Cool. So that is the clockwise one. Okay. It starts here and negative 58.2 and it goes this way. Now it looks a little strange and it looks like it's going really extreme. Part of that is because the anchor point, if I move this anchor point over here, for example, oh, and you can see another problem we're having here, this position, uh, on this clockwise effect, it's actually not linked to this anchor point. It's linked to the original anchor point. Um, so what I need to do is, uh, let me turn off this key frame for a minute. And then, so I'm going to hold option. I'm going to click position and I'm just going to make sure, let me open this up.

Joey Korenman (28:09):

I'm going to make sure that this position expression is actually picked whipped to the correct anchor point. Okay. All right. So, uh, so now when I adjust this anchor point, it should work out fine. And so now, uh, when we have a clockwise movement, it helps if the anchor points a little bit to the right of the object. All right. So now if I, if I do that, um, it works a little bit better. Um, and I think I am going to tweak this a little bit, cause that does feel like it's going a little bit too far and maybe just have it start a little bit further out.

Joey Korenman (28:45):

Cool. All right. So there's your clockwise Predki. And then what's great is we can turn that off and just turn this back on and have a counterclockwise spread key. So what you can do is you can copy both of these effects to every letter and then just turn on the move that you like. So that's a really cool way to kind of give yourself options with different moves. And then just turn this on, turn it off, turn this one on, turn off. All right. So now, um, there's one other thing that we need to do to make this really, really easy to adjust. Um, you know, because when I copy this to every letter, I'm going to have to adjust the anchor point on every letter and it's kind of a pain. If every time I want to adjust an anchor point, I have to come in here, open this effect and just the anchor point. So what would be great is if I just had a quick and easy control to set the anchor point of each object, all right. So what I'm going to do is, uh, I'm going to grab the handy-dandy expression control effect called a point control. All right. And I'm gonna move this up to the top and I'm just going to call this anchor point.

Joey Korenman (29:55):

Cool. So what I'm going to do is I'm just going to use this effect to set the anchor point for the layer. And then I'm going to set both of these, the counterclockwise and the clockwise effect to grab the anchor point value from this. And that way, all I have to do is set the anchor point and then turn on the effect that I want. And that's it really simple. So let's, uh, let's set that up real quick. So I need to open the counter-clockwise effect. I'm going to hold option and click anchor point. Okay. And then for the expression, I'm going to grab the pickup. I'm going to go all the way up and grab this. Okay. Then I'm going to, uh, I'm going to come to the clockwise effect and do the same thing. Hold option, click, anchor point and pick whip to this.

Joey Korenman (30:43):

And there you go. Okay. Close this stuff down. So now, uh, if I select the anchor point effect, I can move this point to wherever I want the anchor point and it will update both of these effects. And then I just turn on counter-clockwise and there you go. Okay. So this is going to be great. So I'm going to, uh, let me turn this effect off for a minute and let me copy and paste all of these effects. So grab them all command C and I'm going to copy them to these letters, command V. So not every letter has that same setup. So let's go to the ER, select anchor point and let's move that. Okay. Now let's start actually turning on the animations for each of these. So for the P I'm going to do counterclockwise for the R I'm going to do clockwise.

Joey Korenman (31:34):

Okay. And the anchor point is going to be off to the right now. I did screw one thing up. I kind of like letting you guys see these screw ups because, you know, I screw up all the time and it's good to know how to kind of troubleshoot stuff. I, uh, when I hit paste to paste those effects, it also pasted the key frames and it pasted them where my playhead was. So I actually need to move those back to the beginning. Um, so I'm going to hit the Tilda key over my timeline, just to maximize it, grab them all, and then scoot them back to the beginning. Okay. There we go. Great. Okay. Um, another hockey I just did. Um, if you, if I have all of these layers open and I want to close them, I can hold shift and hit the Tilda key.

Joey Korenman (32:18):

And that actually closes the layers up for you. It's kind of cool. All right. So we've got the P with a counter-clockwise Predki, the R with clockwise Preki. So now I'm just going to alternate. So the E is going to be counterclockwise. The D is going to be clockwise. The K will be counter-clockwise the, I will be clockwise. And then I just need to set anchor points for all of these. The E will be on the left side. The D will be on the right side. The K will be in the left side and the eye will be on the right side. And that's it. Okay. So you saw how quick that wasn't, if I play these now, they all kind of bounce up at the same time.

Joey Korenman (33:03):

And so now I get to do is offset them, right? So let's say there's two frame offset between each of them. So I'm gonna select R and I'm going to nudge it two frames forward. Okay. Uh, then I'm going to do the four frames forward, and I do this with the keyboard. I just find it's faster. Um, if you guys, you know, don't know all this keyboard shortcuts, this the ones I'm using now, these are some of the most amazing time savers. I'm going to go. I want to go from this layer and select the one below it that's command down arrow. Then I want to nudge this one forward six frames. That's option page down six times. So hold option hit pays down six times 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, that quick. Okay. And then this one, I want to move forward 10 frames. So that's option shift page down.

Joey Korenman (33:53):

So once you get the hang of that and you kind of develop some muscle memory, you can do this stuff so quick. Okay. And let's move, let's set this preview set the outpoint there let's, uh, turn on motion blur. Oh, and then this is another interesting thing. I'll, I'll teach you guys about, if you don't know, uh, I turn motion blur on cause motion blur is great. When you have really bouncy funny moves like this, it just kind of makes it feel a little more fluid, but there's some weird stuff going on with this motion blur. The reason for that is because I, um, I made this in Photoshop and I used some layer styles to get this kind of fake 3d balloony look. Um, and the problem with doing that is that motion blur gets really screwy when you do that. Um, so I actually used this kind of hacky work-around that worked pretty well.

Joey Korenman (34:48):

I was actually kind of surprised that it did work. Um, I'm going to add an adjustment layer. We'll just call this motion blur. If I can type correctly. There we go. Motion blur. And I'm going to use an effect on that layer in the time, uh, in the time group, it's called CC force motion blur, uh, and what this basically does. It just forces after effects to render sub frames. So in between frame one and two, it's going to render, however many frames is in here and it's going to kind of composite them together pretty much the same way after effects does motion blur. And so when you do this, you can actually get motion blur on your comp. Um, you know, even when you have layer styles and things that normally don't support motion blur, it's a slower render. So it doesn't render quite as fast as the native motion blur, but for stuff like this, it's fine.

Joey Korenman (35:43):

Um, and it's a good work ground. So there's the prep key in, and the key I want you to take away from this as a, it's good to start developing a bag of tricks. Okay. And if you don't have your own bag of tricks, or if you've been using the same three tricks for a bunch of years, you know, just look across at your buddy Kyle and see what he's doing and, you know, and, and use it, right. It's like, it's cool. We we're motion designers. We like to share our tricks. Um, and, you know, change it, modify it, make it your own, but just, you know, sometimes, you know, someone else's brain works differently and, you know, I don't know if I ever would've come up with this kind of motion, but he just sort of, that kind of stuff is what he's great at and what he likes to do.

Joey Korenman (36:25):

Um, and so he, you know, he showed me this, I've shown him other tricks and it's great. Now we both have kind of a go-to thing. If we're animating something that's kind of fun and bouncy, we have a trick. The other thing I want you to take away is even with a simple, simple thing like this, just, just a simple animation, you can always take a little bit of time upfront and set it up so that you can save yourself hours down the road. If I had to do this for like 20 titles, each title maybe has 20, 24 letters in it, right then hand animating. Each letter is clearly out of the question, but even copying and pasting and trying to just modify things on the fly can take a lot of time. If you set up a simple little rig like this, um, you saw how quickly once it was set up, it took me like less than probably 30 seconds to apply the motion to every letter.

Joey Korenman (37:18):

So, um, I seem to use expressions a lot. I have a feeling there's going to be a lot of expressions in this 30 days of after effects. Um, but hopefully these are simple expressions and they're just kind of going to get you used to it. Um, and then later on, we'll do some deep diving. We'll really get into expressions. So I hope everybody learns something. And thank you guys so much. I really appreciate it. And stay tuned for the next episode of 30 days of after effects. Thank you so much for watching it. Thank you, Kyle pred, ki for coming up with this move or stealing it and then letting me steal it and then teaching the entire internet, how to do it. Hopefully you learned some things about animation principles and how to make things feel kind of bouncy and have interesting character to them. And now you'll start developing your own little tricks now of truly honing your animation skills is something that you want to dive deep into. Check out our animation bootcamp course. It's several weeks of intense animation training that will give you an edge in every single thing you create as a motion designer. And if you learn something valuable from this video, please share it around. It really helps us spread the word about school of motion. And we appreciate it. Thank you so much. I will see you next time.

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