Squash and Stretch in After Effects

Joey Korenman : Hey there, Joey here for school of motion. And today we are going to talk about one of the principles of animation squash and stretch. If you're not sure what animation principles are, they're kind of the secret sauce that makes your work feel good. Squash and stretch is just one of the principles. And there's many more that we can't cover in this lesson. If you really want some in-depth animation training that will give you the foundation you need to create truly outstanding work. You're going to want to check out our animation bootcamp course. It's several weeks of intense animation training. You also get access to class only podcast PDs and actual critiques on your work from our experienced teaching assistants. Also, don't forget, you can sign up for a free student account so that you can grab the project files from this lesson, as well as assets from any other lesson on the site.
Joey Korenman : So let's go into after effects and take a look. All right. So here is the animation we built in the previous tutorial. Um, and I'm going to kind of walk through, um, where this started from and how it developed now. Um, whenever, you know, I do an expression like this, or like, uh, this is actually multiple expressions. Whenever I build something like this and after effects, it's not a process that's linear and goes from a to B and I know every step along the way, um, I'm basically experimenting and tweaking and thinking up new things and then having to go back and revise. Um, so I want to try to give you guys a little bit of the sense of that, because if you ever decide to try something like this, um, it can be very frustrating, but I want you to know that it should be frustrating.
Joey Korenman : That's just how this is. It's, it's, it's programming and it's animation and it's all wrapped into one and it's, and it can be very complicated when you get into stuff like this. But, um, if you just keep bashing your head against the keyboard, eventually you can get something really, really useful, hopefully that you can share with other people. Um, so let's make a new comp, all right. And, um, let's add a circle and by the way, just so you guys, if you didn't know this, if you want to add a new shape layer, um, you can select, you know, one of these options here, I pick the ellipse tool. If you double click it, it creates a shape that fills your comp. All right. So now if I hit you, you and you just double tap you, it brings up all of the, uh, options for a layer that are, that have been changed or are not the default settings. So it's bringing up the size of this layer. So now I can just set this to, let's say 50 by 50, get a nice little ball here. We're good to go. Okay. So first, why don't we just create a simple motion path just to try this out. All right. So we're going to start the ball here, position, and then we're going to go forward one second and move it up to the top right corner.
Joey Korenman : We are going to easy, ease those quickly coming to the curve editor. Um, and of course I am going to need to, uh, actually I'm going to use the shortcut method here, which, uh, I normally don't do, but just to save time, I'm going to use the speed graph editor. And I'm just going to pull these handles out, which is basically the same as creating a really strong S curve in the value graph editor. So if I do a Ram preview, you'll see that I still get that slow acceleration, quick movement in the middle, slow deceleration at the end. Okay. So now if we wanted to be able to just simply with one control, figure out the squash and stretch of this, how would we do that? Okay. So here's the problem I was having. Um, and I'm just going to make a quick little example here.
Joey Korenman : So here's another, uh, another circle for us. Now, if I set the anchor point of that right in the middle, and we just adjust the scale. All right. So if this circle was moving side to side like this, it would be easy to stretch it. Okay. You could stretch, stretch it on X squash on Y. Okay. Um, if it was moving up and down, same thing, you could stretch it on why squash it on X and get the shape you're looking for. Now, our circle is moving diagonally. It's moving, you know, like a 30 degree angle or something. So how do you stretch something at an angle and after effects? Well, um, as I showed you guys in the previous tutorial, you can go to a fact, grab a transform effect, set the anchor point and position to the center of your layer and then skew it.