After Effects tutorial day 2

The second After Effects tutorial was largely a recap of the first session. We revisited a lot of techniques from last week and were shown how to utilise them in a different way. The biggest difference is that last week, we were provided with video footage and simply compiled it together; today we had to create movement using static images.

We looked at importing and working on PSD files within After Effects in a little more detail; we were shown how to keyframe individual attributes on each layer. We were able to animate the wheels on the quad bike simply by keyframing the rotation on each wheel layer. By providing a start and end point, After Effects calculates the difference between the frames and creates simple in-betweens automatically.

Because the wheels were separate layers from the body of the quad bike, we were only able to move each layer independently which caused some problems with key framing. The solution is to make the wheel layers "children" of a parent object — in this case, the quad bike. It works similarly to linking layers in Photoshop. Whatever the parent object does, the child follows. This allowed us to move the layers as one object.

The only trouble is that parenting objects resets the anchor point so that it scales and rotates from the centre of the object. This is no good for a wheelie; we wanted it to rotate from the rear wheel. We were shown how to create a null object (literally, nothing) which would act as a new anchor point.

Unfortunately my After Effects knowledge is still limited so it's pretty crude!

I simply used a couple of keyframes on the quad bike's wiggle effect parameters to make it go a bit crazy before the wheel flies off. The wheel's path was, again, a simple keyframe job on the "position" attribute. I tried to adjust the scale of it as it moved along the path to give it a little bit of squash and stretch, but it isn't terribly noticeable as it moves too quickly.

I followed a tutorial for the sparks — they were surprisingly easy and created using a 'CC Particle World' filter, with only minor adjustments to the basic settings required. Though I don't fully understand all the options the effect I was able to gain a basic understanding of how it works just by playing with the parameters. They're all fairly self-explanatory — things like velocity, gravity, birth rate, etc. The birth rate was keyframed gradually down to 0 to give the effect that the sparks were falling and diminishing.