Learn how to create follow through in After Effects using expressions.
If you're looking to add polish to your animations you're going to want to learn as much as possible about the principles of animation. In this tutorial Joey is going to show you how to animate follow through. You may have already seen one of his lessons on this subject, but this time you'll be doing things a bit differently. Instead of doing everything by hand you'll be learning how to use a very simple expression to get automatic follow though on a lot of your animations. We want to give a quick shout out to Matt Nabosheck, the very talented Designer / Illustrator and good buddy of Joey's that created the Boston Terrier named Steadman that Joey uses in this tutorial. Check out his work in the Resources tab.
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Tutorial Full Transcript Below 👇:
Joey Korenman (00:17):
Yo Joey here at school of motion and welcome to day 11 of 30 days of after effects. What we're going to talk about today is part two of the tutorial, which includes a Boston terrier that my good friend, Matt Novacek illustrated it's name is Steadman by the way. Anyway, what we're going to do today is animate Stedman. And we're going to talk about the animation principle of follow-through. We're going to talk about some strategies to use, follow through in after effects. And then of course, I'm going to show you an expression that will do it for you. Of course, we can only cover so much injustice, one lesson. So if you want a deep dive into animation principles, you're going to want to check out our animation bootcamp course. Also don't forget to 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 the site.
Joey Korenman (01:01):
Now, without further ado, let's hop into after effects and get started. Welcome back to the room. So, uh, in this video, uh, as I said, I'm going to show you guys how to animate the dog that goes in this room. Um, by the way, the dog's name is Stedman, um, illustrated by the brilliant Matthew Napa shack. Um, also the haunted Matthew Napa shack. Um, if you guys like the way his, this dog looks go to Matt navo.com, M a T T N a B o.com and check out his illustrations. The man has such a unique way of drawing things. It's amazing. Um, he's also a big never-ending story fan. So, uh, you know, here we go, we've got this cool kind of 3d room that we made from the last tutorial, and we've got a nice little camera move going. Um, and so what I want to show you is how you get this dog to animate and do something interesting.
Joey Korenman (01:56):
Um, and maybe just a way to think about animation. Um, and then of course, I'm going to show you a little trick tube. So, uh, why don't we start out by hiding all the stuff we don't really care about right now, I'm going to go into full Rez here, by the way, the hot key to go into Rez is command. J a lot of people don't know that. So we've got our dog and the speech bubble I'm going to hide the speech bubble for now. Um, I went into illustrator and I separated all this stuff out into layers would be easier to work with. Um, and actually, I don't even want to, I don't even want to see these layers right now, so I'm gonna select all of them and I'm going to shy them. So I don't have to worry about them. All right, cool.
Joey Korenman (02:33):
So we've got the head and the body in, you know, essentially what I want to do is have the head kind of like turn back and forth and, and have the ears follow and just have it feel pretty good. So I'm gonna click on the head layer and I'm going to move the anchor point. So you hold, you know, you hit Y which brings up this tool called the pan behind tool or the anchor point tool. And then you can click the anchor point and move it about where the dog's neck is maybe right in there. And just to it, if I rotate this head on Z, look at that rotates back and forth. That's wonderful. Um, now here I'll let me put a quick rotation on there. Okay. So why don't we go forward a few frames, put a key frame on Z. Um, and let's just have it, you know, I don't know, 12 frames.
Joey Korenman (03:18):
It's going to go like this. Right. There you go. All right. So here's, here's a quick little recap for you. Why does this look like crap? Okay. Um, I mean, there's many reasons there's no easing, um, there's no anticipation, uh, there's no overshoot. There's none of, none of the hallmarks of good animation, right? Um, I'm telling you this, this is the kind of stuff that really makes you seem like a pro like, you know, what you're doing is when you understand animation principles, um, and, and you know how to apply them. All right. So first things first, I'd say a hundred out of a hundred times. I don't ever leave linear key frames unless I make them easy ease, and then make them back to linear because there's some reason most of the time key frames should be set to easy ease, and then go into your curve editor.
Joey Korenman (04:12):
Right. And massage those curves, make them look nice. All right. But here let's just take a look at this. That's better. It's a little more natural. Okay. But it's still just seems kind of stiff, still not working for me. So one thing you can do, uh, to help that instead of just having the movement, just start like this, right. It just kinda goes, um, go back a couple of frames and have it first anticipate. Right. So let's go back a couple of frames and the head turns counter-clockwise. So let's have it turned clockwise just a little bit. Right. And it just kinda helps it, like, I don't know. Maybe we want to do a little bit more.
Joey Korenman (04:52):
Oh. And I'll tell you what I did this backwards to let me delete that key frame back to frames and just copy and paste this key frame. And now go back to the original key frame and have it go clockwise. There we go. So you see now how it kind of like, imagine the dog making a noise like this right now, it's working a little better. It's not working perfectly though. And that's because even though the, the actual motion kind of works, the timing of the motion doesn't work. Right. Um, before we mess with the timing, there's one other thing that can help this. Right. So you've got a little kind of preceding movement called an ANSYS patient, and then you go back like this and let's have it kind of go a little too far. Like, you know, that this head, this dog has a big fat head and it turns, and once it gets turned in, it kinda can't slow it down fast enough.
Joey Korenman (05:42):
So it kind of goes too far this way, but then let's go three frames for it and it kind of comes back in it. That's kind of where it lands. Right. Cool. So that's that, or it's still feels very stiff though. It just doesn't, it doesn't feel good. And this is where you got to get in that animation curve editor. Right. Uh, watch the intro to animation curves and after effects, video, if you're not comfortable with this and I'm not going to get too far, I'm not going to really go crazy and hammer you guys right now with exactly why I'm doing this. But, you know, essentially I want this dog's head to feel like it weighs a little bit more. So I'm messing with the animation curves to get that feel. Um, by the way, if anyone is really interested in learning how these animation curves work, let me know, because I don't know if anyone actually cares or if you guys really would like to understand this better.
Joey Korenman (06:34):
All right. Um, so let me just get this motion to feel a little bit better. I just want it to happen a little faster, some mood, this key frame up one. I'm going to move this key frame back a couple. Um, and then I'm going to come into my curve editor and I'm really going to pull these two curves. So now there we go. That feels a little better. Let me move this key frame over one. Yeah, that feels good to me. Okay. And I can tweak it more, but we're going to say that that's good for now, now with a movement like that. Okay. That feels okay. But it just still feels kind of loosey goosey. Right? It's like, it's just like the whole head just moves as one unit and there's no weight to anything. Um, and this is a rabbit hole you can go down, but I like to try and add a little bit of what is called follow through.
Joey Korenman (07:26):
Um, I have another video actually called introduction to follow through, but, um, this video, I'm just going to show you what follow through means in terms of a Boston terrier. Okay. So if a dog turns his head like this, what would happen? Right. The jowls would kind of jiggle and some other things would happen. But the main thing you'd notice is the ears kind of leaning a little bit. Right. Kind of following the head like with inertia. Um, so what I need to do is first, I got to separate the ears out. Um, so, you know, I didn't do that in illustrator. So we're just going to do that real quick and after effects. Um, what I'm gonna do is I'm going to duplicate the head and I'm going to call this ear dash L. So this would be the left ear and I'm just going to zoom in.
Joey Korenman (08:14):
Um, and anytime something's got to rotate like this, um, it kind of helps if you keep the transition point, right? Like if you keep this edge a little bit rounded, like that, that will help kind of blend the two shapes together. Uh, and then I'm going to, uh, duplicate the head one more time and I'm going to call this ear dash, not Earl. I'm gonna call it ear dash R and we're going to do the same thing. We're just going to kind of draw like a rounded mask like this, and there's the ear. All right. Now let's put the anchor points in the right spot. So I'm gonna hit the Y key and I'm going to move the anchor point for the right ear, right. About there. Okay. Where the year rotates from, and then the left ear is there. Right. And just you thinking in terms of where's that ear actually attached to the head.
Joey Korenman (09:07):
Okay. Uh, then I wanna click on these two layers and hit you. I don't want these key frames on there. Okay. I want no key frames on there at the moment. And then I want to pair those two layers to the head, right? So now they'll move with the head. And the last thing I want to do, let me turn these layers off for a minute. I don't want the ears on the original head layer. All right. So an easy thing to do is take a click, one of these layers and hit em. It'll bring up the masks, click on mask one and copy it and paste it onto the head. Hit em again. And it'll show you this mask. Let's rename this a one and the set of Atlas set it to subtract. Okay. Then I'm going to do the same thing on ear dash.
Joey Korenman (09:49):
I'm going to copy the mask pasted onto the head, hit em, let's name this oh two and subtract. Okay. So now we've got the ears separated from the heads and he sees silly little, these Willow one pixel lions here. Well, that's going to get even worse when I actually start rotating these ears. Right. If I rotate this ear, that doesn't look good at up. So what you also need to do, you know, there's a couple ways to do this one. Um, I could sort of reshape these masks on the head to bring back some of the ear that I'm cutting off, right. To leave like a little overlap between them. Um, but maybe an easier way to do it because this is such a simple, flat shaded thing. Uh, I'm just going to make a new layer. I'm going to pick whip and make sure I use the exact same color.
Joey Korenman (10:36):
I'm just going to call this cover. Um, right. And I've just got this black solid layer behind the head. I'm going to turn it into an adjustment layer just temporarily. So it hides it. And then I'm gonna use my pen tool. And I'm just gonna sort of draw a little shape like this. And all I'm trying to do is add a little bit of a rounded shape behind those ears so that when the ears rotate, you don't see this, like w you know, you don't see empty space behind it. Now I'll take that adjustment, uh, switch off right now. You can't tell there's anything there, but when I rotate the ears, it's going to work a little better. And you're still going to get a little bit of, I'm still going to get a little bit of like a cutout. So, you know, a good thing to do whenever you're doing something like this is first rotate the ear and then adjust the mask on the ear and try to make it look good.
Joey Korenman (11:33):
Okay. And, and just do the best you can. All right. And now rotate it the other direction. Right. And adjust the mass, do the best you can. Right. And it's not gonna be perfect. That's okay. Right. And so now you've got a little bit more of leeway, right. And you got to watch out for stuff like this, this point here might intersect one of those spots. So I might just move it up a little bit, and I'm a zero that out. Okay. So I fixed that ear. Let's do the other one rotate a little bit. Um, this is sort of a standard thing you do with any kind of rig that you make, even in a 3d program, you sort of, you move layers into extreme positions so that you can see where the rig kind of shows you, you know, the ugliness and then you fix it.
Joey Korenman (12:20):
Alright. So there you go. And, uh, move this point. So it doesn't hit these dots. All right. So we've got our ears now. Here's the easy way to do, to do follow through. Okay. And again, follow through is, think of it like inertia that the ears are going to keep moving. The easy way is to do this. Um, first, make sure everything's parented correctly, right? So you got the ears parented to the head. Uh, this cover layer needs to be parented to the head also, and then the head needs to be parented to the body. All right. And if you don't know about parenting, um, I don't know if I have a tutorial about that, but that is something you can Google. That's not, that's pretty simple. All right. So we've got the head and let's just check it. You know, it rotates, everything moves with a fantastic, this is how easy follow through can be.
Joey Korenman (13:07):
Uh, if you just copy all of these key frames, boom. All right. Make sure your play head is lined up right on those. And then just paste that onto both of the ears. Right. And so here's what this does. Right? You see how they kind of move with the head and it looks better, but that's not follow through. Follow through actually is it's kind of a lag between different parts of the object. So when the head turns, the ears don't turn right away. And when the head finishes turning the ears, don't finish turning right away. It takes a minute. So I'm going to grab all these key frames. I'm just gonna move them forward to frames. That's followed through right there. Okay. And you see how all of a sudden, the whole thing has a lot more life. It's kind of cute. Feels good. That's follow-through.
Joey Korenman (13:54):
So now we want to animate another head turn. Okay. And this is where I want to show you guys a little trick. This is really cool. Um, you know, if I, if I'm animating the head and I'm tweaking animation curves, and I'm trying to get it to feel exactly the way I want, every time I change it, I'm going to have to copy key frames to the ears and move things around. Um, there's actually a little shortcut. Okay. Here's I'm gonna do, and of course it's an expression. I know I should probably get an expression tattooed on my body somewhere because I use them so much. Um, what I want to do is I basically want each ear to mimic the rotation of the head, but like minus two frames. Okay. So two frames later. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to put an expression on Z rotation.
Joey Korenman (14:41):
Now, first watch this. If I just put an expression on Z rotation, hold option, click the zero rotation stopwatch. And I pick whip from here to here. Okay. If I do that, it just mimics it. Okay. You can see that this is negative 20. This is negative 20. All right. And what I can do though, is I can add a little bit to this. Okay. What I'm going to do is I'm going to add, um, and this is sort of common after effects, expression, notation. Here, you can add two expressions by adding a period. So I'm going to add a period and I'm going to add a little function called value at time, spelled just the way I'm spelling it. Okay. And then in parentheses, the time you want to look at, and this is named very clearly. I want to look at this comp the layer called head, the transform property called zero notation and the value at time, time minus.
Joey Korenman (15:40):
And let's say, I don't know, three frames. Okay. Um, now I mentioned this in another tutorial, but, um, when you are writing an expression in your referencing time, you may want to say time, minus three frames, just like that. But expressions don't work in frames. They work in seconds. So if you want it to be three frames, you actually need to write in parentheses three divided by 24, because we're working at 24 frames, a second three frames divided by 24 frames a second. That's the correct number to use. I hope that makes sense. All right. And now to close the parentheses out, put a semi-colon and hit return. Okay. And now if you look at this, okay, you can see that now the values are different, right? If we go to this first key frame and this starts moving, right, Z rotation is 2.3, but this is still zero because it's looking backwards.
Joey Korenman (16:37):
Three frames. If I play this and you just look at this year, cause that's the only year that has the expression on it. All it's doing is it's doing the exact same motion as the head, just three frames later, that's it. I'm going to copy. I'm just going to slug the rotation. Copy, paste it onto this. And there you go. And now both ears are going to follow whatever that head does, minus three frames. It's awesome. Um, I could very easily make this expression a lot more complicated and add controls. So you had a slider that would actually set the delay and then maybe a multiplier to multiply it. So it doesn't rotate as much. I'm trying to keep this a little bit simpler. So we're going to leave it there. Okay. Um, then what's cool is then you can just do the same, you know, do another motion, put a key frame, maybe go forward a couple of frames, maybe three frames this time, and we're going to anticipate this way.
Joey Korenman (17:28):
We're going to jump forward, have the head rotate back. It's going to overshoot. It's going to go a little too far, three frames, and then it's going to come back here. Okay. Uh, and we're going to select those key frames, go into the curves editor, click our little fit graph to view. And actually I want to click this button fit selection, to view let's turn off our transform box and let's just adjust curves. So again, the head should feel like it has some mass to it. Okay. Um, and let's jump out of the curves editor, come back here, take a look at that. All right. And the ear is, will automatically follow through for you. Okay. Um, you can see the masks. Aren't perfect. You kind of getting some little jaggy edges there. Um, and uh, you know, normally the anal retentive in me would fix that.
Joey Korenman (18:17):
Um, but I just want to show you guys how you can get automatic follow-through in the ears. And I think hopefully this is demonstrating that, um, I want to show you guys a few more tricks, um, before this tutorial ends. One thing that I like to do a lot, if, um, you know, if the head's doing one thing in the ears or doing one thing, I might want to add like a little bit of a secondary motion to this, right. Just to, just to give it a little more life, especially when you're using a 2d piece of artwork like this, and you don't have it all broken up into legs and it's not rigged and you don't have joints. And so you really have to just do a lot of faking to give the animation life. Um, but you can still use the principle of follow-through.
Joey Korenman (18:55):
So what I mean by that is have motion sort of pre-seed this motion, right? What we have is the head rotating followed by the ears rotating. Well, what if something proceeded the head rotating, for example, we could grab the body, let's move the, let's move the anchor point down here to the foot. Okay. Cause that's where the dog is standing. Um, and I'm gonna open up the scale property. And for now I'm going to line the scale grief, key frames up with the rotation key frames, just to make sure it's happening at the same speed. So I'm gonna put a key frame here. I'm going to move forward and I'm going to unlink the properties, uh, the XYZ. And let's have that dog shrink down a little bit. Then I'm going to go forward to this key frame, uh, by the way, Jane Kay. Also very useful keyboard shortcuts jumps between key frames.
Joey Korenman (19:43):
Um, so it shrinks, then it scales up. Okay. Kind of overshoots. And then it comes back down. Right. And I'm actually going to have it overshoot a little bit on the way down to just cause, and then it's going to go back to 100, let's select all these key frames, easy, ease them, hop into our handy-dandy animation graph and make sure that this really feels like there's some mass behind it. And let's see. All right, now let's set our outpoint here. Take a look. Okay. So that's kinda nice, right? It's not bad, but it's gonna, it's gonna really help sell that information if I maybe move these back three frames. Right. So now it feels like the scale is kind of helping the dog get momentum to turn its head, which in turn is helping the ears turn. Right. And that's what follow through is it's sort of a chain of motion traveling through whatever object is moving.
Joey Korenman (20:46):
All right. And it's pretty simple. Um, and you can use an expression to kind of automate pieces of it, right. An ear or a tail or something else. Um, but really it's just, it's just sort of, you know, preceding or continuing motion and that's about it. And what's cool is now that I've got that scale set up, um, I can just come up here to the next head turn and go back three frames and just copy and paste those key frames. Beautiful. Right. So now I've got the dog doing two nice little moves. Okay. Um, and for the animation that you guys saw in the beginning of this demo, um, let me, un-share all my layers. I just, all I did was, uh, I kind of did the same thing to all of these. I parented, you know, like the hello words to the bubble, the bubble to this dot, this.to this, that this.to this dot all these little dots to the bubble and I offset everything and just did follow through with it.
Joey Korenman (21:41):
And that's basically it. Um, and so the last thing I'll show you, um, because the tutorial let's check the time, look at that 20 minutes already. Oh, the last thing I want to show you is I just kinda wanna, you know, get you guys used to seeing like, you know, how fast you can do things because, um, when you have a bunch of layers like this, and by the way, this isn't a ton of layers, but it is, you know, it's a good amount. You've got 20 layers here. Um, you can very easily talk yourself out of doing things that might look really cool because they're going to take a long time to set up. Okay. And I've fallen victim to that. I understand it. Um, but I want that same sort of over, you know, that kind of overlapping animation with follow through. I want the same kind of thing.
Joey Korenman (22:25):
Put speech bubble and all those little dots. Okay. So here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna hide the dog. Right. I'm gonna visually simplify it. And what I want to do is first just parent things correctly. Okay. So this is the first dot, that's the very first one that should actually pop out. Um, so I'm gonna move that to the bottom. All right. And then the orange, this orange.here, I'm guessing that's B one and B3. Those should be next. And I'm just trying to visually help myself out here. Uh, the speech bubble, that's the big, uh, kind of teal speech bubble. Here's the hello layer. And then all of these dots are just sort of the dots that are sprinkled throughout that. Okay. So let's parent these things together correctly. Hello. Parents had the speech bubble speech bubble parents did out with parents it to this orange dot, which is B one.
Joey Korenman (23:18):
Okay, cool. All these little dots can be parented to the speech bubble, right? A B3 should be parented to this black dot, which is B two and B one should be parented to B2 and B to should be parented to the head. Okay. Um, when you're doing follow through, you need to have, whatever's going to actually be doing the follow-through parenting to the initial thing. That's creating the motion. Otherwise it doesn't, it's not as easy to get that, um, that motion to work. Right. All right. So here's the trick, right? So you can already see that things are parented to the head, but let's not worry about that at the moment. All right. What I'm going to try and show you guys a very fast way to do this. Okay. So here's what we're going to do. Um, let's figure out where we want that speech bubble to open up.
Joey Korenman (24:07):
Okay. So it goes like this, and then right there, that's where we want it to open. Um, we don't want it to open, like, you know, that it's, it's all kind of funkily rotated. Let me turn the dog on for one second. Let's just set up the position of this thing. Right. Everything in this speech bubble chain is parented to be two. So I'm going to rotate B2 backup like this, and I'm going to move it where I want it. Let's say right there like that. Okay. Let's rotate it kind of like that. Cool, lovely. Right. I kind of liked that the heads, the dog is angled this way and this is angled kind of against it. It feels good. Excellent. Okay. So, um, what we need to do is I'm going to select all these layers. All right. And I'm going to hit the left bracket and that's going to line them all up for me.
Joey Korenman (24:59):
Then I know I'm going to want to animate them on scale. So I hit option S I'm going to want to animate them on rotation. So I had option R right. Um, but I don't want all those rotations. So let me hit undo for a minute. I only want zero rotation. So what I'm gonna do is I'm first gonna hit the Tilda key. I'm going to make sure my mouse is over the timeline and hit Tilda. So it's going to scale just my timeline up temporarily. And I'm going to hold space bar and I'm using my hand icon to kind of move down and I'm going to select all of my speech bubble layers. Come back up here in the search box, I'm going to type Z row. I'm going to start typing Z rotation, doing that. It's going to just reveals your rotation for me, select it and activate animation all album.
Joey Korenman (25:45):
Okay. So just trying to show you guys some shortcuts, next thing you want to do is have an animate on Y position. So if I hit P on all of these, you can see that the position property, it's still all linked together. X, Y, and Z. And I don't like that. So I'm gonna, now I'm gonna click in this little area right here where there's nothing, and I'm gonna click and drag so I can get all the positions. And then I'm going to control, click those and say separate dimension. Then with everything selected, I'm going to come up to the search box and start typing Y position. So now it automatically hides everything except Y position. I can hit the stopwatch for it. I can then hit you. And I can see all of my properties, right? Y position scale and rotation have all been key framed for me.
Joey Korenman (26:28):
All right. Now, what do I want to do? I want to basically do the same thing. I want this thing to maybe start rotated down here and swing up this way and then overshoot a little bit and bounce back. Okay. So to do that, um, me get out of my graph at her mode. Let's go forward 10 frames, right? Maybe 12. And then I'm just going to click up here and drag my mouse right down this line, like this hold space bar, drag up, and then put key frames there. Then I'm going to go forward for key frames. I'm going to do the same thing backwards. Okay. So just really quickly adding key frames here, getting it all set up. Nice. I'm going to then go down and select every key frame and I'm going to hit F nine. So they're easy east. Okay. Then I'm going to go into my graph editor.
Joey Korenman (27:17):
Okay. Um, and actually before I do that, let's think about the initial value of this thing. Okay. Um, what I'm gonna want to do is, um, I'm going to want to S let me think about this for a minute. Uh, I'm going to want all of these rotations to be, here we go. I'm going to want the Z rotation of all of these to kind of rotate this thing down at the beginning, at the beginning. So, so clockwise. Um, and so what I'm going to do is I'm gonna, I'm going to select all these layers again. All right. I, here's a cool keyboard shortcut for you. Command a selects, everything shift Tilda will close everything down for you. So that way I can quickly just grab the layers I want. Uh, and I'm going to make them all a different color. So it's easy to see what's what, and then I'm going to hit, I'm going to go up to the search box and hit Z starts to type in Z rotation so that I can just grab my Z rotations like this.
Joey Korenman (28:13):
And on that first key frame right here, I'm just gonna select every layer and I just want the zero rotations to, to change. Okay. Um, and now if I hit Tilda again, I can kind of see what I'm doing. Okay. And I just want it to kind of be like that. Okay. And then on this frame, I want it to overshoot a little bit. Okay. Um, cool. So then let's come back here. Let's hit S on these now. I want them all to start scaled at zero. Okay. Let's go to the next key frame. I want them all to overshoot a little bit. Okay. Let's come back. Let's start type in Y position. Okay. I want all of them to start a little bit lower and then overshoot a little bit. Okay. So just like that, with all those things selected, I've set all the key frames.
Joey Korenman (29:05):
Now it's going to the graph editor. So I'm gonna, I'm gonna hit Tilda. So I have more room select all my layers. I'm gonna hit the X here in the search box. Get rid of that, hit you on all of these. So I can see every single property that's probably going to give me trouble, but let's take a look. If I select everything and go to the graph editor, what's a mess. So let's not do it that way. Let's hit our, um, so we just see the rotations. Okay. I'm just going to select all of the rotations like this. I'm just holding shift and clicking and dragging a box. Um, and what that's led me, what letting me do is it's letting me just select all the rotations. And so now I can really easily see in my graph editor, these are all my rotation curves, and I can select them and edit them all at the same time.
Joey Korenman (29:53):
Okay. Um, so if I want, if I, if I don't want any easing out of that first key frame, I can just select everything and change it. All right. And I think that is how I want to do it. Then I'm gonna hit S select all the scales. All right. I'm gonna click this button here so I can zoom in. Let's do the same thing, select all the key frames, point that up. So there's no ease. I screwed this. I screwed these up. So I'm gonna select them all and hit F nine. All right, come here. And because I have so many selected, it's giving me a little lag. So that's why I keep screwing it up. There we go. And then the last thing is the position. So I'm gonna hit P and select all of these. Um, now the problem is when you select, uh, when you select more properties than you need, you're going to see graphs that you don't want to see.
Joey Korenman (30:43):
So actually what I should probably do is select all the layers, start typing in Y position. And then I can just select all the white positions like that. All right. And then I'll do the same thing. Select the beginning here, move these down, grab this, pull this out. Um, by the way, this is why I really, I really prefer to use the curves editor. I'm not a huge fan of scripts and plugins that try to make you not do this, because this is how, you know, w how things are moving. This is the only way to really understand what the motion is that's happening. All right. Let's take a look at this. Okay. Do a little Ram preview here. Okay. So the dog turns, the set turns the set again, and this nice little animation pops out. Um, but there's no follow through, cause it's all happening at the same time.
Joey Korenman (31:33):
Okay. Um, and so now you've got all these layers, and there's not that many, but sometimes you might have hundreds of layers that you want to do this too. Um, and I want them all offset by two frames. There's a really simple trick to do that. What you do is, um, you select all the layers that you want to overlap, and I'm going to hold option. I'm a first, I'm going to go forward two frames, one, two. Then I'm going to hold option and hit the right bracket. All that does is it moves the outpoint of all the layers. So now this, this layer is only three frames long. Okay. 1, 2, 3. Um, if I want them to overlap by two frames, it actually needs to be two frames long. So let me jump forward. One frame hit option, right bracket. Now it's only two frames long.
Joey Korenman (32:17):
Okay. Then this is important. You need to select the layers in the order. You want them sequenced? I want B2 to pop out first. So I'm gonna select that first and then shift, select. Hello. So it selects in this order. Next step is you go up to animation, key frame, assistant sequence layers. Okay. And the D a you leave overlap off. And when you hit, okay, it sequences them for you. All right. It's just like this little known thing. And after effects, it's super handy. And then I can just go to the end of my comp hold option and click that and hit the right bracket again. And now it sends the out points all the way to the end. So now all the layers exist all the way to the end. And then now you've got follow through all the way through now. Um, you know, these little dots that are supposed to be showing up inside the speech bubble, but are actually underneath it.
Joey Korenman (33:13):
Um, I want those to happen after the speech bubble actually appears. So now I can go in and manually tweak it, but I didn't have to do all that setup. Okay. And I'm going to kind of scrub through, figure out where I want those dots to start appearing. Um, and then we'll just frame P that little part and see what we got. Um, but hopefully, and it looks so cam not like totally in love with it. I, you know, I, I would probably speed up a lot of that animation. It feels a little bit slow. Um, but what I would definitely do is try to figure out when I want that speech velvet to pop out, which is probably right when the dog starts to move into its second movement. So we'll scoot that over, like that move these out points. And I want it to feel like the dog's movement is kind of triggering that.
Joey Korenman (34:04):
Yeah, there we go. Okay. But I want it to have follow through, which means it should be delayed. So I'm going to nudge these key frames. I'm going to nudge these layers forward, maybe 2, 3, 4 frames, a easy way to do that. Hold option page down and just nudge it a few frames. Right. Maybe a few more. Right. So I want it to feel kind of like it's, it's throwing that thought bubble out of its head with the momentum there. Okay. Let's try a few more friends. Yeah. It's starting to feel nice. Okay. So we've got a lot of follow through in this animation. Um, some of it is automated by expressions. Some of it is hand key framed, and then for the speech bubble with all these different pieces in it, uh, we used a cool trick and after effects to sequence everything for us.
Joey Korenman (34:52):
Um, and we use the search bar to make it really easy, to put key frames on everything at the same time. So, uh, I tried to jam pack this tutorial for you guys to hopefully show you a lot of different ways and tricks of, of making your animations feel better and save you some time. Um, once you're done, it's literally, you know, you take your, you take your layer and you adjust your anchor point so that it's on the foot of the dog, make it 3d layer, parent it to your Knoll. And just like I showed you in the, in the last video you set the position of the dog to 50 50 0. One thing I did forget to do by the way is select all these layers and turn on continuously. Rasterize, um, they are all 3d layers, um, already, but if I have this button on, now I can go back in here and hit the button here and now my dog won't get pixelated.
Joey Korenman (35:43):
All right. So that's a very important step too. And then we'll just scale that dog down and, and, you know, we need to move them a little bit. I think he needs to be a little bit closer to the camera, but there you go. Now the dog is in the room and I can't see the hello, which is, which is a shame. So let me scale them down a little bit like that, but there you go. There is Stedman in his 3d room with some personality and some follow through. Um, if you look at the Photoshop file, there were some other nice details, like a little shaft of light. I added a shadow to him, but you guys can, can take this as far as you want to. I hope you really learned some cool techniques. Um, and, uh, you know, you, this is just an example of using after effects in a way that, um, I don't know, I haven't seen too many people use it this way.
Joey Korenman (36:29):
Um, and maybe it's just, you know, the people I hang out with, but, um, you know, I think the combination of CINAware and a few expressions and just understanding some animation principles, um, very quickly you can get something pretty cool and interesting. Looking like this. It also helps if you have a friend who can draw a really interesting looking dogs, but, uh, I hope everyone enjoyed this. Thank you so much. And I'll see you next time on 30 days of after effects. Thank you so much for watching. I hope you enjoyed learning a little bit about the animation principle of follow-through and how it can really help bring your animations to life. And remember, check out our animation bootcamp course, if you want an in-depth interactive learning experience, focused on the principles of animation, you'll get weeks of intense training along with access to podcast, featuring industry leaders, critiques from our amazing teaching assistants, tons of project files for you to pick apart and a whole new network of motion designers from all over the world for you to learn and grow with. That's it. Thank you so much. I'll see you next time.