How To Use After Effects: Beginner to Pro Full 2025 Guide

welcome to After Effects we're going to learn the very Basics by creating four clean animations from start to finish which covers the most common and fundamental techniques that will prove most useful to your After Effects journey in After Effects there are many different styles of animations so I'm going to show you the ways that I think are best for those who are new to the software

now wo it's okay to feel overwhelmed going into this journey it's the same feeling as learning a new language or facing a scary new challenge but luckily in only 60 minutes I'm going to make you feel comfortable in the software now this tutorial is a lesson extracted from my online program 6figure editor but I'm releasing this tutorial on YouTube for an incredible Kickstart

to your After Effects journey and to teach you as much as possible with only 1 hour of your time the rest of the program is available to check out at 6figure editor. comom but for now you can download today's project files for free below this video so when you load up after effects for the first time this is what you're going to see and as you can see that it split

into multiple different sections because each of the sections has its own uses and I really want to get into all of the kind of sections before we get into building the animations and these beautiful kind of scenes because it's really important that you get familiar with the software and know exactly why everything is the way it is and um I just want to say that you know at any point if you

get too confused if I'm going too quick for you you know pause it you know rewind and just kind of follow follow me along you can also play this video in you know 0.75 time speed um um but yeah basically we're just going to get into each of the sections and this is going to be raw I'm not going

to be cutting things down I'm not going to be like you know trying to Jazz up this to sound really you know clean I'm just going to be honest with you and just you know from my experience I've been editing over 10 years and using after effects for pretty much that entire time so I'm just going to kind of tell you from my opinion what everything is useful for so if we're over in this section

as you can see it says project now when we're building an animation when we're building a seen um you know a piece of work that we're working on we have it inside of a project and you can save projects under any name and you can kind of turn them into a file um and a project is a a place basically that localizes all of the things that you're working on um for example for a

specific project for a specific piece of work when I um create YouTube videos um myself um I'll have you know maybe even 10 to 20 different projects that I have After Effects projects that have different animations inside them now you can put all of them inside of one project and kind of just

use the same project but I like for organization purposes to save them as different ones as I said at the start of the video that you can download the you know the file the project file uh down below this video um basically what you can do is you can just download that and upload it straight into after effects and you would have all of the things that I worked on because that's

how a project Works a project just hosts all the things that you worked on in a organized place and as you can see over here it says project and you you know you can see all of these um pieces of information what you can do is you can double click here and it'll basically bring up whatever folder you know you you have and with all of the images and files that you have on your computer

which then you can import so you need to do is just double click in this section and then you can bring in something you know um uh whatever you want to do so I'm going to bring in this uh image right here as you can see it is here but you can't see anything else change this is because down here this is the timeline of an animation if you use different editing softwares um for example Da

Vinci resolve or Premier Pro or whatever uh Final Cut you know that you have a timeline even on cap cut for example and it's a bit different on after effects and I'm going to be breaking down how it works however this is where the timeline is going to be so over here where we have this this image this is just the project file so basically this is where we can just host files inside so this is

not currently in our animation it's not currently in our scene it's kind of just in a in a list of files so if we imported another image they would just kind of gain a big list and it just you be able to scroll down and see a big list this just means that we have access to any files that we want at any point whilst within After Effects and bring them into the timeline okay so what

I'm going to do is just grab this image and I'm going to drag it into this section and as you can see now it basically has created a uh like put the image inside here okay now what we want to do is create a custom size for our animation because this is not ideal you know because we just direct

this image is going to create a scene that like a composition uh we call it that is the same size as this which is not ideal I'm going to press command Zed on Mac just to go back and to undo that what we can do is we can head up to the top bar on our computer go to composition and then new

compet composition at this point we can basically create a custom size custom uh composition and a composition is basically the scene that we're creating if you have a video that is 4K um you know resolution on Premier Pro like you know the video that you're creating on an editing software

um or you know a pro a client needs a 4K um you know quality animation or like a 108p animation you basically can come in here and customize it so firstly let's customize our composition name I'm going to put it as first animation you can do it to whatever it just means that you'll have good

organization by naming things properly I know as you know editors we end up putting you know like some random names and then everything becomes confused so let's just take this leap and do this then we can change the width and height and as you can see also the aspect ratio here so if we type in um just right here 1920 by 1080 we know that that is the 16x9 standard video size so when you

watch a YouTube video usually they 10 uh you know 1080p that's what it would say which is 1920 by 1080P and um what you can also do is click this lock aspect ratio here um and when you do that basically means if you upgrade the width it also does the height in proportion to the 16x9 ratio if

you undo that then you can basically control this freely which would make a you know a very random size as you can see this would be a really random sort of aspect ratio what I'm going to do is just go back to have 1080p by um 1920 Sorry by 1080 now as you can see in this section where it says

preset um if you do this for the first time saying custom this will allow you to basically create the perfect sort of um composition and at that point you know if you have something that you want to reuse for example a nice 1080p composition or or a 4K composition you can go into here and create

your own preset so for example I could put this as Tom's um 1080p preset and as you can see then it's saved down here as that um keep this as Square pixels right here this pixel um ASP ratio we don't need to get into this right now uh the fra frame rate I'm going to keep at around 23.9 976 because

the general just sort of film FPS frame frames per second is around 24 or this kind of like Mark I was just have it set to this um I feel like it has the best look now if we come down to start time code and duration basically if you need a certain duration of an animation for example if it's 30

seconds then you can go in and and change this to 30 seconds right here and that just means that the entire timeline will be 30 seconds long there is no um you know no worries in terms of setting this because you can go in and change it at any point anyway now we have this so let's press okay as you

can see we have a black screen right here you can actually use your sort of scroll to zoom in and out and this is where your composition is this is this is basically the playback of the composition now if we drag in this image into the timeline section everything is in proportion to that you know the 1080p uh resolution that we created now in the timeline section down below as you can see

we have what says 5 Seconds 10 seconds 15 seconds this may look a little bit different to you but what we can do is basically scroll the timeline if we want to get a final look using this which we can just drag along and then you can have a basically more zoomed in uh view of the timeline or we can go straight back to being the most zoomed out which is the 30second time frame which

is obviously what we created in the composition you can additionally press these buttons so if we click this it'll basically do uh one zoom in at a time and the same for the zoom outs too okay now as you can see this section is split into two this is the timeline so it actually shows exactly what's going to be happening by every frame on in the entire sort of scene okay over here

you see the lay layer information so this layer is directly linked to this if we have bring in another one you'll be able to see that there's two now now over here you have the options to change some details about the um layer but we're going to get going to be getting into that very soon in terms of this timeline right here how do we make a piece of footage basically shorter than others how

do we make it longer than others what we can do is essentially go to the very end of this piece this clip right here because it's 30 seconds long this image is going to be in the timeline and we can basically get this end and drag it back to whatever duration we want so for example we could

do it to around 5 seconds then we can maybe zoom in to get a better look okay and this means that you know after 5 seconds if we play this back by um by pressing space be able to see that at five 5 Seconds it disappears okay and we can also move around this clip on our timeline by actually just

clicking down and dragging this clip around so if we want it to come in at two seconds we can do that by dragging it to that that Mark so if we go to the very start press space bar you able to see that after two seconds it comes in and uh we can basically play around with this with all

of the layers and all of the pieces of you know um footage and resources that we bring into the project itself now what I want to do right now is basically create our first animation together with a very simple principles and I'm going to show you how to do that so first of all I'm just going to press backspace on this layer to delete it and basically just have a fresh animation space

what we're going to do is create this animation that is on screen right now and as you can see there's lots of moving elements and we kind of getting into this moment where now we're going to be actually moving things around and making it work as you know a naturual fluent animation and let me just tell you this is going to be very simple um and this is going to involve shapes

so it means that we don't need to import anything into the software itself now we have two methods of making shapes we can either go here to where these layers are on the timeline and right click new and then go to shape layer however there is no need to do that what we can do instead is we can

just go up to this right here we can actually hold down and you'll be able to select you know what kind of shape that you want for us of course with this animation we are just going to start with the rectangle tool because we want to create these side sort of paddles that are being hit against the ball so if we just create this we basically now have this on the cursor you'll be able to see

this sort of like shape um like overlay so if we basically just go into the center and we're just going to drag and let go like this okay and as you can see now if we actually just change to have this which is just the general selection tool you be able to see that we now have a general

shape layer inside of our composition and we can freely move this around by do doing this with the selection tool or we can actually go to the shape layer one and you can press press p on your keyboard and this now you'll be able to have position um like options okay so what you

can do now is you can drag and as you can see um on different axis this shape will now move on the composition so you have the full control to move it around now the reason I'm telling you to press p and press different shortcuts is because I want you to get used to shortcuts because they're going to make your animation creating a lot more simple and a lot quicker than you know than basically

just going over manual things for example I could just press this drop down I could go to transform and then go to position however all I needed to do was click on the layer press p and you already have access to position okay so this is really useful now how do we make this centered into

the general like into the middle of the screen we can go to this side section and scroll down until we get to a line click on align and then we're going to press these align horizontally button and the Align vertically button and now you'll be able to see that that is in the dead center middle of the screen right here okay which is perfect now how do we create the movements well

this is a thing where we need to introduce key frames so what are key frames essentially over time in your timeline we can basically set a start point and an end point of a value a value can be position it could be rotation it could be size um basically any value that can be change you know can be changed in some regard and we really have as much Freedom as we want with this but as

I said it allows you to have a starting value and an ending value so this could mean that for example we have a starting value of the the shape being up here and an end value of the shape being down here so how do we do this if we just go to the start of our timeline right here just drag

this to the to the very beginning what we can do is press this button right here which is basically allowing you to now start creating key frames if we have this on you'll be able to see that on the timeline this kind of dot has has appeared and that is a natural key frame itself we can change the value of this key frame in any way we want I'm going to change the value by actually making

you know the uh shape being up here for example okay in fact I'm going to bring it to this side section like here okay now that basically just sets a value of this key frame and if we go to 5 Seconds right here so we just bring this over to here and then we change the value to being

all the way down here you'll be able to see that line that appears in the composition uh viewback and what this allows you to do if you go to the very start and play be able to see that there's now movement because you set a basically a difference in values between these two key frames so how can we make it go back to the top again so it's doing the same thing as the animation

if we go to the 0c um sort of fra um Mark we OB see that the value you know this sort of um uh vertical value is 3 310 okay so if we go back over to let's go to the 10c mark and then we're going to go into this value and put in 310 as you be able to see it goes back up so now if

we play this back be able to see that it goes all the way down this is going to take a moment but then it bounces all the way back because it has three different values now on the sort of time um you know the time line so right now we can make this go quicker by bringing the values closer to

each other so if I bring this really close to this one you have to see that it moves a lot quicker now but there's a bigger space between this next key frame which means it's going to go a lot slower and that's just generally how it works so let's just create the second paddle and basically get this working um we're going to set some variables right here so if we go to

0 seconds I'm going to zoom in very quickly we're going to have this value at 2 seconds so it's like this and then bring this next one to 4 seconds so we have things very nicely even I'm

also going to um create one at 6 seconds 839 okay so 839 there we go what I can do to make an exact repli replica of this shape is basically click it and then go to command d now you've made

an exact duplicate even with the the you know the different key frames and the different values that have been set for it um basically duplicating it so if I press p on this layer too you'll be able to see that also the key frames are on this layer now what I can do is essentially uh you know

obviously we want the paddle to be on the other side what I can do is granted that you're on one of the key frames so you can see over here that you know we're kind of sitting on one of the key frames right now if we just drag our cursor so we click and drag so all of them are highlighted and

then we're going to drag this across as you can see the entire sort of movement of it is also going to be align like all of the key frames are affected so I can bring it to here for example if we go to the very start be able to see that both of them are operating at different sides of the um

like the um composition okay so what I'm going to do to stagger this so basically they're moving at different rates and you know they're not actually just kind of moving in a parallel um you know way these are all selected still if I move them back slightly so I'm going to move them back right here now if we start from the beginning be able to see that now they're not uh working you know together

and this is where we're going to be getting into sort of a multim motion sort of level I'm going to bring this over to the 2 second Mark so they are complete opposites now okay so if we play this now they are complete opposites okay I'm going to go to the 0c mark and I'm going to uh actually

set a value 839 on this one which means that it's going to be starting from the very start anyway so there we go we can see that they're moving at complete opposite okay now as you can see after a while that it kind of the motion stops okay and basically we can continue to you know set these

key frames going whatever and we can keep doing this for forever we can set it all the way to the 30second timeline however there's a better way to do this as you can see there's a bar just above our timeline here and you can see the two sort of blue endings this is our working area essentially if we drag this right down I'm going to drag this to around here as you'll be able to see

now that this is the only thing that's going to be playing if we kind of drag this right down even to the beginning section you'll be able to see that it keeps looping when it hits that end blue Mark which is really important because you know when we're working on a certain project and we kind of just want to keep a certain section looping and just to work on a certain section we can

just have this working area selected okay but for now we're going to drag this out a little bit now how do we create our ball how do we create this ball that's going to be bouncing in the middle well once again we're going to go to the shape area we're going to hold down and we're going to

go to ellipse tool okay and what we can do when to uh create an ellipse if we just actually drag you'll be able to see that it creates a very free um like shape it doesn't have any certain size to it okay but when we're creating the shape if we hold shift it basically creates it as a perfect um

like um like Circle it's the same if it was like a a rectangle or a square for example it does it to exactly the same proportionate values so I can keep moving this freely as soon as I start holding shift it makes it basically lock to doing a full shape so we're going to do it to around this size

let go once again we're going to go to a line and we're going to align this in the middle now just a quick rule which is going to help you um to understand everything going forward what is this dot right here well this is an anchor point this is essentially whatever layer that you have selected there is an anchor point for each of the layers okay and for these two I should have you

know actually told you about you know getting this thing aligned but it doesn't really make sense to do it for these rectangles however with this ball I'm going to show you so basically what you can do is you can head over to this tool right here I would actually do it which is the Anchor Point basically that matches with this and Anchor Point is basically the starting point of a shape it is

the center of the shape so if we rotate a shape or if we move it it will go via that Anchor Point okay so C is the dead center of a shape or an object or whatever might be and you can use this to your advantage for example if you want it to a shape to rotate around a certain uh like point for

example like a corner of a um like rectangle then basically you could set the Anchor Point to that bit and then it would start rotating around this anchor okay but we're going to basically set this to the dead center of the ellipse right here and if it doesn't snap for you into the middle what you can do is Click toggle this snapping thing right here um and basically yeah it will just snap

straight into the middle okay and that's simply it now we want to make this snap essentially between the two uh paddles right here okay um I'm actually going to make this full screen you know if you start zooming out and in then it's like you can get a bit messy but you can do is just go to this drop down and press fit and then it will just fit into this nice into the box nicely

um so what we want to do is basically go and onto this you know Circle layer press P once again for position and I'm going to start this position um at you can actually drag this yourself as I said before with a selection tool I'm going to turn off the snapping so it doesn't start snapping right

here and I'm going to basically bring it to to hit uh the corner of the composition sort of uh View and then the next part is going to

hit this paddle so what you're going to see now is this motion okay which works really well now we have this initial you know animation that you've just been able to do out of thin air and um as you can see we have this sort of working area I'm

going to extend this a little bit because I want the ball to continue so now that the ball is hit from there we need to think from a physics point of view you know kind of the the natural movement of animations this is like the key to animation is to make things seem as realistic as possible to have kind of like realistic movements of objects for example if

you ever had a human that you your animating you want them to have human characteristics how do they move how do they react to certain things you know and it's the same with balls for example in this scenario you need it to actually move properly because if we then kind of for the next key frame we went all the way down you know this now just mitigates the

whole realism because that is not what a ball does you know when it hits an object so where would it Go of course the ball would go sort of to here okay now if we just bring this down

actually needs to be a little bit more like here I think put a bit closer because there's shorter distance between going to here and to

here as you can see now this is realistic so well done you've made your first basic animation in After Effects you have a basic understanding of the software and how things move and operate and now we're going to move on to the second example which you know just makes things a little bit more uh Advanced and we're just going to progress nicely so if we stop this video we're going

to go up to composition drop down and then click new composition and we're going to create second animation with the same preset click okay as you can see now we have two different tabs if we go over to first animation we'll be able to go onto you know what we've been working on this one and then we can go over to the second animation Tab and basically create our own you know separate

animation within this one so in this animation we're going to be using a bit of text so how do we create text well the simple way is just to go up to this T icon up here and then going over to your composition and clicking and as you see if you be able to type in now you'll see it appear

so we're going to just put animation right here press the selection tool just to get off this and go down to align I'm going to align this in the centers again now a cool way to just see exactly how things are positioned in your composition um there's a little trick here so if you go down to this drop down you know hold it and then go to proportional grid and let go you'll be able to

see how things are proportioned in your animation itself so you can see if things are symmetrical and nicely aligned in the middle okay so this is a nice little way just to see how things are centered um I'm going to go off proportional grid um but basically back into the properties of this text layer and you can basically change the text font here and the weight of the

text here the size of the text here and also the fill so for example you want to change the color of the text you can do so here and just change it to anything that you possibly want and press okay so for this animation how did I create the cool pattern that goes across the pieces of text you

know as you can see we can edit the color but how do we have that pattern well this is where we're going to be using a thing called mat and the cool pattern is essentially footage which I'm going to import now so now that this has been imported as you can see if we double click on this we able to just view the footage itself so it's this just cool pattern that moves alongside by itself now

I'm just going to press X on this and go back into the composition I'm going to Dr this into um this timeline area as you can see now you can't see anything you can't see the text uh in in this um sort of frame this is because layers stack on top of each other if I drag this below the animation

layer you'll be able to see now you see the animation plus the pattern uh in the background because things are stacked on top you know from top to bottom and just to show you what I mean is if we just drag in this piece this image right here as you can see because it's in between the background and the pieces of text it's in between them here so which means you know anything that

is uh further to the top in terms of this timeline is going to be literally at the top whatever is at the bottom of this list is literally at the bottom it's the last layer you know behind everything um so I'm just going to delete this right here so how do we achieve putting this pattern on on the text well because this is way bigger I'm just going to make this a little bit smaller okay

so it's just going to be the size of the text itself so around there and I'm going to press this thing where it says track matat so track matat is the thing we're going to be using if we basically click on the pattern layer and select the animation so the text layer as you able to see now the background has basically been inserted in the shape of that object so the text so when we

match something we're basically taking whatever object it is and turning into the same shape so we're actually molding it to the shape of whatever other layer we select if that makes sense so um I'm going to just move the the position of this down a little bit but as you can see this is still quite dark you know even if we play it it's still quite dark so how do we make it brighter this is

where we can start using effects so if we go over to this right section and click on effects and presets I'm going to click it right here we can go into search and I'm going to type in brightness and contrast which is here okay and what we can do is just drag an effect whatever effect we choose

onto the layer that we want and of course we want it on the um like the pattern layer because that's what is being visible you know so if we go to the brightness and we just start whacking this up to a higher brightness as you can see now we have a nice Clear View because it's been made a lot

brighter so now if we play this from the start as you can see this it looks really really cool cool however I still think that this is a little bit too dull and it's not bright enough what we can do is duplicate effect because what we can basically see if we're selected on this layer is all the effects in this section okay if we click on the animation we Have No Effects pre

you know that is present on this text layer but I still want this brighter so how can I do it we can do the same thing we did as layers which is duplicating so if we select this effect we go to command d as you can see see now we have a very bright layer if I play this from the very start

as you can see this looks absolutely beautiful this is like apple level stuff where it's just like you have a nice bit of text with u you know a background that's attached to the text and this is just looks so so clean now the one thing that I think we can add to this is the kind of sizing

of it because it feels a little bit too still the size of the text isn't getting any bigger and you know for example if we do make it bigger as we you know know the the background size is only this big right so if we made the text size bigger sure it would get bigger but also we would run out of the

pattern because it was only a certain size right so what can we do in this situation I'm going to go back to the original size it was so what can we do to make it just gradually get bigger as the timeline goes along but together we can use a thing called pre-composting um things together if we go I'm going to click this layer I'm also going to hold shift and then

basically both of the layers are selected we can then rightclick and then go to precompose what this does is basically makes a sort of composition a subcomposition as we know um you know a composition is kind of just like the general animation right we can make a

pre-composed um together of multiple layers inside so then we can just basically do what we want to do with it whether it's the position the rotation whatever might be to this pre composition as one and we can still edit what's inside so I'm

just going to put text um as the name and we're going to press move all attributes into the new composition which means all of these things are going to move inside of the promos I'm going to press okay now as you can see we just have one layer which is the um every everything

okay right here okay so what I'm going to do now I can basically affect is the scale so now I can make this bigger and everything stays the same because it's the exact same things that were inside right we can actually still go into by double clicking uh the text this sort of

pre-positioned to make this ridiculously bright okay and then go back into this animation layer it's changed it automatically Ally changes we have the full you know choice of what we want to do we can add more layers we can do whatever we want to do to it inside whilst

it you know live changes essentially so what we're going to do is we're going to create two key frames one at the scale of 100% And then in 5 seconds we're going to have it at 110 okay and I'm going to bring this working area right down and what you can see now is we have

this beautiful pattern movement whilst the scale is changing and this is just ridiculously clean as itself so now that we have these two animations done I just want you to take a moment right now to just make sure you understand everything if there's anything that hasn't been made clear just go make sure to go back and just kind of you know try to understand more because um although Project

based learning is incredibly difficult to get at first um because it's very fast-paced and you know you kind of just thrown into the deep end it's the quickest way to learn and especially I found with creative um you know Endeavors whether it's learning how to edit and for motion design and things like that the fastest way for you to learn is to just basically throw yourself into

the deep end so now we're going to be moving on to something more advanced with the third animation and uh let's just get straight into it so let's just create the third animation composition of course just like we did for the others and in this one this is the animation that we're going to be creating I'm going to put it on screen right now um as you can see we have a few different

colors going on we have obviously a shape going on and also some effects where it just basically stylizes uh the animation we have going on so how are we going to create this so first of all what we're going to do is create a background and how we're going to do this is we're basically going to create a solid background so how do we do this because as you know as you can see this is black

currently in the composition um and basically this isn't a solid color because if we actually toggle the transparency you'll be able to see that it's just actually just transparent we just have a background color of the composition okay so how do we create a solid so what we can do is

we can right click here and press new and then go to solid and we can set this as anything we want I'm going to change the the name to background um as you can see it's the same size as the composition which is what we want it to be and a color now the color doesn't matter too much right now because we're going to add an effect to have have this nice gradient background so we're just

going to press okay as you can see this is already here as a layer as a um basically solid layer what we're going to do is we're going to head over to the effects and presets and we're going to find a Effect called gradient ramp and drag this onto the layer as you can see now we have basically an

a gradient of two colors as you can see there is black and there is white um what we're going to do is basically create uh it red okay um however as you can see that this is we we basically want it to be red at the top and black at the bottom so we're going to get this black Uh current uh color

right now and change this on the colors to Red we're going to go for this red I believe and then this white one to Black and as you can see now we have a nice gradient so what you'll be able to see is that we have the control over the start of the ramp and the end of the ramp and if we bring

this down you can see exactly where the start is right here I'm going to put it to select it maybe here and then of course you could do the same for the bottom of the ramp which is right here but this is good this is our nice background and this is all we need for the background so as you

can see in the animation we have a square that's moving it's rotating if we go over to this shape layer uh this shape selector hold down and we're going to go to rectangle what we're going to do is we're going to do the shift trick so basically instead of it being a free uh sort of shape we're going to hold shift and that makes it uh kind of like a solid uh shape and we're going to

probably make it around this big we're going to go down to align it in the centers and we're going to change the Anchor Point to being uh in the middle there we go so that is everything now we can also go into the proportional grid and also see that everything is centered and as you can see you

know these little tricks that I've been you know telling you over the last animations they come in handy you know just to make sure things are nicely smooth so we have a shape in the middle and now we can see that you know also this layer has a gradient um in the you know the final animation however we're going to focus that on that in a minute first of all let's get

the rotation so as we know we need to set a uh you know two key frames on the uh timeline so what we can do instead of pressing P for position for this shape is we can press r r allows us to change the rotation um there's also other ones for example if you press s will change the scale so we can

actually go in and change the scale right here I'm going to press back um if we press R then we'll be able to change the rotation so as you can see now this shape rotates so what I'm going to do is I'm going to create a um key frame number one and because this is going to be our final sort of

position right final position I'm going to put this as actually the later part of the animation I'm going to put it at the 5sec Mark and you'll be able to as I said you know you'll be able to see exactly if you're on the key frame by this part coming blue so I'm just going to kind of

zoom in and get to the point where we're on the key frame I'm actually going to zoom in a little bit more as you can see now we're on the key frame okay so that is that value now at the start I'm going to change the value to being minus uh let's say minus uh 300ish we can actually just type it

and as you can see right now because there it's just Standalone it's just basically from one value to the other um that's what it's going to look like however in the animation we can see that it's actually smooth you know it's a smooth animation it's actually got this kind of like characteristic around it and this is introducing a technique called easing okay easy ease and this is

one of my favorite things in animation and motion design and basically how we can do this is if we select both key frames on the time frame frame okay on the timeline sorry if we select both key frames we're going to right click and then we're going to go down to key frame assistant and easy

ease okay or you can press F9 however this is just uh I'm just showing you how to do it okay and what this does automatically if we play the clip now as you can see now it's a lot more smooth because at the very start and at the very end it slows down okay so it's slow at the very start

and then it becomes quicker and then near the end it slows down again and that is just ridiculously smooth right but what we can do is we can play around with this ourselves we can actually have a manual kind of um control over how quick parts of the um you know between the key frames are and how fast they are but if we just click one of the key frames we can select both of them but

also you can just simply select one of them and we can head over to this thing right here which is the graph editor if this is getting getting confusing just take it step by step if there's anything that you don't understand you can also re Research into it more and more so for example this graph editor you can also type into YouTube and type in graph editor and you would have a full

tutorial on how to use a graph editor but in this tutorial I just want to give you a well-rounded sort of beginning intro to After Effects now as you can see this matches uh we're going to this is actually on a speed graph um as you can see right here um we get once again you can you know look into more tutorials on YouTube in regards to the graph editor but for now we're just going to

be going over this as you can see this matches how it is in terms of speed so as you can see starts slow then gets fast and then as it comes to the second key frame it gets slow again if we dragged this last one okay right back as you able to see it reflects the exact same sort of shape

that we have right here so it goes fast and then it goes really slow near the end okay and that's exactly what we want okay that's exactly what the animation looks like we can play around with this even more by even dragging this one forward which means that it'll be a very slow start fast and then back to slow again and that's where we're going to leave it as now all we need to do

is add a gradient similar to the background onto this shape however we need it to be the complete opposite so what we're going to do is basically copy the gradient that we had on this uh sort of um solid background and we're going to paste it onto the shape layer okay as you can see

because it is the exact same gradient there is now nothing visible because it would be the exact same gradient as the background right like it has the very same starting points however if I pull down this right here which is the starting point and brought up the end of the ramp be able to see that now it's you can slightly just see it because we've just changed the um you know the

start point of the ramp and the end point of the ramp but what we're going to do is we're going to flip it okay I'm going to press swap colors okay just this button which means it's just flipped on its head essentially now and as you can see now we have this opposite of the background right I'm going to zoom out and just change the working area so we just have this area on

show great that looks really nice I'm going to make the Reds slightly more bright so I'm going to put it around here and the next one uh the same exact red but just the opposite as you can see this is looks really really clean you know this looks cool but it looks nothing like the

square in the final animation so how can we add this cool little effect to it this shine effect if we go over to the effects and presets panel and we type in CC light sweep and then drag this onto the layer you be able to see now we have this nice little kind of like um light that's shining down

on the object okay this is just a a cool little um effect that we can add on however what we can do is we want the light to just go directly down right we want it to go directly down from the top okay to kind of match this gradient we have of the background so what we can do is change the

direction of it to just zero just 0 degrees okay so now we can see that the light is shining from the top to the bottom okay we want to make this light wide so we up the width right here so as you can see we have this nice kind of width but we want to make it red so we can change the light

color to a red okay a really bright red and now as you'll be able to see we have this really cool effect I feel like this light is too sharp though going down the middle so we'll change the shape of it to linear and that has more more sort of like um you know less focused sort of just you know

shine down the middle so I'm just altering this width to around I think 100 um let's make it 100 we'll make the sweep intensity 20 so it's not as intense in the middle but more so on the edges of it and as you can see now we have this really cool effect and now you've made your third animation

and this looks really really cool okay so this is really cool like the shape looks really nice and stylistic you know the actual sare this you know the square in the middle however the background just feels a little bit too plain you know there's nothing really happening in the background what we can do is we can head over to the second animation panel okay and what we could do is probably just

take in this background that we have you know this background right here um that's behind the text and maybe add it into the background of this you know so what we can do is we can head over to project and we can find this video so the sort of this p thing and in between the background

and the shape so obviously the color just doesn't match because you know we have this really like vibrant blue and we want it to be the same as the gradient background right so how do we do this well this is where we can use modes okay you can see this section that says mode right and we can

change it by a drop- down menu right here now just one thing to quickly say if you cannot see all of these you know options right here you can go to click toggle uh switches SL mode mod um you know just in case you can't see it um and basically this will allow you to see it right here but if

you go to the modes we can then choose something so for example how this overlays onto the layer before it so the background layer okay if we went on modes um for the the shape layer it basically be affecting how it um you know overlays the layers before it okay so specifically the

layer before it so we're going to do this for the background if we just went on basically just like screen for example you'll be able to see that now like it screens the red from the background um so it looks like this however this isn't this isn't perfect yet okay it doesn't have what the look that we're looking for so if we go over to for example saturation now we're getting into some

cool territory you know this looks really really nice and I think this is really effective um let me just test around to see what others uh might look okay okay Luminosity looks really really cool okay nice now let's stylize it a little bit because this is too sharp because we want still

the center sort of like um object to be this one it doesn't we don't want people to be looking at this background so let's add some blur what we can do is add G and blur drag this onto this abstract layer and then up the blurriness and now as you can see now this is quite blurry okay so we

haven't got finer details I still feel like it's a little bit too in our face so I'm going to go into the effects and presets and add uh brightness and contrast and bring this into the layer just going

to bring the brightness a little bit down to maybe minus 50 or so and this looks really cool this looks really cool okay nice so this is a really cool animation and I feel like it takes it up um

to a new level considering just a few minutes ago we were producing this level of Animation is crazy you know we're just starting with such a basic thing of just kind of understanding the physics of moving objects and then moving onto you know this text animation which then shows you know this nice kind of effect in the background to now being able to produce this which is like next level

compared to you know what we were just at now I want to create a fourth animation real quick just to have a you know a new kind of understanding of After Effects and um a new kind of style so let's go ahead and create in a new composition and the final one and then after this I'm going

to show you how to export uh animations okay uh so let's just create this fourth one and what I want to do of course because this background is automatically black in the composition um what we can do is we can either go into you know the composition settings and just change it ourselves however I just want to add a good practice make a solid okay and we're going to create

a white background I'm just going to rename this to white background and there we have it okay what I want to do is basically create an animation that kind of says hi I'm Tom it's kind of just an introduction kind of like apple effect um like animation so like the Apple text kind of Animation

so what we're going to do is we're just going to make a new text layer and I'm going to make it save okay hi um I'm Tom and it's gone off the screen I'm going to select this all and I'm going to make the size of it smaller okay I'm going to make it probably around this size I'm going

to change the color of it to Black and I'm going to center it and I'm going to change the Anchor Point to being in the middle okay so now we have some basic text in the middle I'm going to change

the type of font this is I'm going to keep it the same font however I'm going to make it uh probably a uh you know what I'm just going to I'm going to make it semi bold that looks good okay I'm actually going to change this to be lower case um and yeah I think this looks

good cool okay so I want to animate this and I want to animate them basically all individually so the high and the I'm and the Tom um I want to animate them separately however I find the quickest way instead of creating just you know three new text layers and just being like okay I'm

going to make one high and then make another one I'm you know and going into this process and then trying to align them up and all of this you know issue there's a quicker way to animate so I want to make them go basically from down the screen to to come up and have this kind of like Smooth you

know transition to up right so what I'm going to do is I'm going to select the layer I'm going to press P for position I'm going to select the 5sec mark and the position to kind of like this being the final um you know place that the animation is going to be and I'm going to make it so um

you know the the starting point of the animation is around here let's say and we're going to select the key frames and we're going to go to key frame assistant and easy EAS okay so right now we have

this okay I'm going to go into the C the open um I'm going to open the graph editor just to change this okay because I want it to be a bit of a more sudden start but then a gradual ending so we'll

go like this okay going to be a bit more sudden at the very start and this is what we have right here okay what I can do now is basically uh introduce a thing called musks now musks are basically a way

to select a certain area of a layer and basically make that thing the only thing visible okay mask is basically to to create a shape uh on a layer that only shows that part visible if that makes sense I'm going to show you what I mean right now okay so with this layer if we basically

uh uh grab this rectangle tool we can create a mask ourself what we can do is just by having this layer selected is we just drag over a certain section of the um layer and now this is a mask a mask is basically just showing this portion of um the layer okay so now we just mask the high okay

and I'm going to go back uh right now I'm just going to duplicate this three times this layer okay three so we have the high I'm and Tom what I can do is basically just select the first layer and select with our rectangle Tool High and this will mask this layer itself okay and a way we can

check this is by making the other two layers not visible so I'm going to actually select this which basically makes a layer not visible and as you can see now we on this first layer it's just High selected as a mask if we now make the second layer visible and then select use the rectangle tool to

make it a mask and we're going to just select I'm as you can see now this is the only thing that's visible on this layer if we bring in the third layer I'm going to basically mask out this one and now for each of the layers basically they have have just one word selected okay and as you'll be

able to see when we play this back it's still the same animation you know however if we now pull this one back and this one back on the timeline you'll be able to see now there's different starting points and they're kind of staggered in their animation okay and this is a really cool

effect what I'm going to do is now select all of the layers I'm going to make them a pre-positioned them as we've talked about before we're going to put text animation as the name we can use mask

once again and by this entire promposal tool and I can mask this layer and what this does is just make this portion of it visible so if now I play it from you know the point where this animation

starts you'll be able to see now we have this really cool animation and I'm going to go back and uh make this uh kind of the only working area I'm going to just do it between these points right

here as you can see we have this really cool animation and what I can also do with masks is introduce a feather a feather basically means that the the lines of the Mask are not as harsh so if I up the feather right here as you can see now it becomes more soft of a you know a

line so what I'll now be really cool with is now with the animation it's nice and soft for that mask so we have a really cool effect you know of an animation here we have this animation which looks amazing you know it's amazing text animation we have this one which looks really really cool

as you can see we have this one which is a nice text animation too with the background and of course we had that first one which we just started at and your progression has been incredible in this last you know you know how long we've been recording and now there's a lot more functionality of after effects that we haven't gone through of course if we go up to this bar

um at the top where we've obviously selected um shapes and text there are other ones so if we actually use this hand tole what we can do is we can just move this canvas so we can have a better look on things for example if we zoom in with our just you know our Mouse essentially we

can still just move this around so we have good you know view viewing of the animation that we're creating okay I'm going to go back to fit right here so we can see everything nicely um we also have the zoom tool okay so if we just have the zoom Zoom tool we can go and click and zoom and

then if we hold option uh we can basically uh zoom out and click okay that's how that works I'm going to press fit again um the other thing that really I think would be beneficial to you is the pencil um because this allows you to kind of draw lines okay so I can draw um I'm going to change the uh

the stroke which will basically mean a stroke is a line I'm going to change it to black color but we've just selected this point uh with the pen we can select a second point and then pull and as you can see we can create these nice little curves and then you can create another point and make you know kind of like a nice drawing for example um you can see this color here that's filling it

we can just click this fill and then uh no fill and as you can see we have this line right here um obviously you can be stylistic with it you can change the thickness of the stroke itself uh right here with this uh sort of drag drag thing here um I'm going to delete this of course we have the

text tool and the things other than that I really don't think you need at this point because you're just starting your journey you're just getting a basic understanding and you need to just kind of start playing around with After Effects itself and just you know using the things that you've learned today um how to use the software generally just play around you know create your own text create

your own shapes create your own scenes and just have a play around with it now the last thing to just go through is to you know how to export project objects at this point because we've created these cool animations how do we export them what we can do is go to file go to export and

we can go to um all of these options people a lot of people use render Q of course you can add it to a premier pro project so actually directly into a PR Pro uh project um S A 4D exporter when you're doing some um Advanced sort of 3D animations um which of course is just like that's a bit

down the line from now um what I'd recommend is doing adob be media and cod Q I'm going to show you why because it's very similar to if you're exporting in Premier Pro so if you had have any any experience in premere Pro uh this will be a bit more familiar for you so now that this is loaded up you'll be able to just see this first animation so ignore all of these ones here because

these are just past things that I've worked on um however you'll be able to see your animation and it'll say ready okay what you can do is basically go into here and change the output file so you click on it and you'll change exactly what is the output so where does it go on your computer um so for example you can just set it to desktop or a folder that you created and then you can

go into this section you can click this and as soon as you open this up it's very similar to um you know what it's like in Premier Pro when you're exporting uh things in Premier Pro of course um and what you can do is just scroll down these settings um the one thing I would just change because all of your settings should be pretty good to start with um is the vbr um you can you

can just whack this up to whatever you want it to be if it's 4K I'll do a lot more um I'm just going to do 15 for now um as we're on 1080p um and then all you can do is press okay and then press this play button right here and I'll start the queue and basically start rendering your um

animation so as you can see it's already been done it was that quick and that'll be it and you already have the exported video so hopefully this is giving you a good enough Insight on how to kind of start your after effects journey and just you know how to uh use after effects to make some really cool simple animations so this module would have given you just a basic understanding

of how to create your first animations in After Effects and just have a basic understanding of the software we have tens and tens and tens of modules to go through in terms of after effects from now in the rest of the program and we have obviously video editing sections of Premier Pro D resolve and blender and all of these different things to come up from now and obviously building

your business so basically uh get prepared for the later modules I hope this has been a useful one for you and um I look forward to seeing you in the next one six forget editor is built for your success with all of the templates and resources that you need your new family by your side in the community us on weekly Q&A calls for guidance and of course the world class program

itself so take advantage of this opportunity and I look forward to welcoming you inside