Animating Follow-Through in After Effects

Joey Korenman : Hey there, Joey here for school of motion. And in this lesson, we're going to talk about one of the principles of animation follow through. Now in the video, I call it secondary animation, which as I found out later is not correct. So when you hear me say secondary animation, just replace that in your brain with follow through my mistake. If you've watched one of our other lessons about animation principles, you know how important they are to make your animations look great. They're that secret sauce that makes everything look better. We only have so much time in this lesson to go over, follow through. So if you really want some in-depth animation training that will give you a foundation to create truly outstanding work, you're going to want to check out our animation bootcamp course. It's a very intense training program and you also get access to class only podcasts, PDs, and critiques on your work from our experienced teaching assistants.
Joey Korenman : Every moment of that course is designed to give you an edge in everything you create as a motion designer. 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. Now let's hop into after effects and get started. Um, so here is just a couple of layers and, um, this is sort of where I started, uh, when I built the, the last animation that I just showed you guys. So the first thing I want to show you is how I got the, the main part of the logo, this, this kind of greenish square. Um, I want to show you how I got that to come into the frame and bend as it came in. Okay. So sort of like the, the body of it is lagging a little bit behind the rest of it.
Joey Korenman : Um, so the first thing I did was, uh, I tried to think about a cool way for this to animate on. And I thought that if it came on like a long, thin rectangle, that would give me a cool opportunity to have it bend. All right. So what, the way I made this box was, uh, with, um, just a layer and then I made a mask for it. Right. And you can see that the mask, um, it was just a rectangular mask, but I added points, um, at, at the mid point between each side, um, knowing that I was gonna want to, you know, possibly have this thing bend, this makes it a whole lot easier. Okay. Um, and I'll show you how to do that in a second. So I started out by, um, by stretching it out. So let's have it be maybe 1 50, 1 X, maybe 20 on. Why? So you just get this long, thin rectangle. Maybe it could even be a little bit longer than that. Okay, cool. So let's start by having it, uh, fly into the screen. All right. So we're working in 24 here
Joey Korenman : And, uh, actually we're not working in 24, working 30. I'd rather work in 24. There we go. All right. So let's go forward a 12 frames, hit P to bring up the position and I've already separated the dimensions here. Um, and if you haven't watched my intro to curves and after effects, tutorial, I highly recommend you do that cause I'm gonna kind of fly through it on this. So I'm going to put a key frame here, go down here, drag this guy down. Um, and I'm going to have this guy overshoot just a little bit. I'm going to go back to frames and drag him. Oh boy. My, uh, notice my tablet tends to double-click a lot more than it. Should we go?
Joey Korenman : All right. So it goes a little bit too high, then it comes down, hop into the curve editor. Let's take a look at this. Okay. I'm going to have this thing shoot in really fast. Hang at the top. Hang there. There we go. All right. Let's do a quick Ram preview and see what we got. Okay, nice. So it's, it feels a little bit, uh, stiff and that's because, um, even if this was a piece of wood or something, it would bend if it was shooting into the frame that fast and that bending that is actually secondary animation, even though it's not technically a separate object. Um, it's animation that is caused by the primary animation, which is this movement. Okay. Now how can we get this thing to bend? Um, you could do the facts and you might be able to make that work, but sometimes the best way to control this is to just get in there and do it manually by animating the mask.