[music] [Nol Honig] This is S6603.

You guys all in the right place? The plumbing convention is, like, one room down that way. Right on. So we're going to talk about some animation secrets today, Great Motion Transitions in After Effects. Are you guys ready for this? You psyched? Not really. Okay, great. It was like a... Well, anyway, cool. Let me begin and let me introduce myself real quick.

I am Nol Honig. I am a director and a designer and an animator and an educator, which means, yes, I'm pretty good at doing stuff, and also I'm fairly good about talking about the stuff that I do, I think, all right? So I think you're in good hands here. I got to say that I have about 25 years of experience in the industry, and I've been teaching for about 25 years as well. So I think you're in good hands. And I just want to say before we begin that I have a pretty impressive list of clients and studios that I've worked for on some really big projects, and you should all be really, really impressed by me, I think.

Right on. So what are we talking about today? Well, we are talking about something that is very, very near and dear to my heart. Yeah. Come on in. Hello. Near and dear to my heart. We are talking today about match cut transitions, okay? So we got any editors in the house? Yes. All right, lots of editors. That's what I figured. So what I imagine is if you're an editor and you hear a match cut transition, this is what you're thinking about. Tell me if I'm wrong. Stanley Kubrick, 2001, the ape throws the bone up in the air, and then we cut, and we're looking at a spaceship that's spinning, right? Okay, this is, like, the most famous match cut in the history of cinema, okay? In this one cut, Kubrick manages to sort of chart the technological development of humankind from primitive apes all the way to space dwelling creatures, okay? Well, we're not doing anything that cool or anything that deep in this room today, I promise you.

What is that? Thank you. Well, just try to ignore that large rumbling noise that's happening. Right on. So match cut transitions, rather than me try to describe to you what we're talking about, I'm just going to show you a project that I made that has all match cut transitions in it, okay? So let's check this out.

Well, that is really loud. Right, this is a very short piece, and I can play with the audio off, but I made this for NBCUniversal, and I made it with the creative director, Ventura Castro. Hi, Ventura. He's not here right now, but he did give me permission to play this today, all right? So check this out, it's very short. We'll just watch through it once, and then we'll go back through it again.

Thank you. Thank you very much. No. No. No. Really. No. No.

Cool. So I'm kind of hoping when you watch this, the way that saw this was as a very fluid piece, okay? There's some transitions in there, but it kind of hopefully all flowed nicely from one shot to the next shot to the next shot, right? Kind of imagining that's the way you saw it. But I'm hoping that the way you did not see it was a series of very harsh cuts that were very obvious, right? Anybody see it that way as harsh cuts? Okay. Well, actually, I'm going to look at this frame by frame. And what you're going to see is there are some pretty harsh cuts in here, which is fairly surprising, okay? So if we look at this first transition straight up, I'm going to just kind of click through this frame by frame, right? I'm going to cut from this frame to this frame, okay? Did that feel like what I did here when we watched this down, that there was that much of a change between frames? Not really, okay? And let's check this out. Next transition looks like this, right? So my point here is that I'm not really, like, graphically matching the two ends of the cut, all right? This is two things that don't really necessarily match graphically, okay? But it still works really well, right? Let's actually watch this down again. And now that I've showed that to you, let me see if you can watch these a little bit differently.

I think it's actually still really hard to see the harshness of those cuts, and it still seems like a fairly fluid piece, right? Okay. So you know, why is this? Hold on. Switch over.

Well, in order for me to teach you to do this yourself, which I'm hoping to do here today, okay, and to explain to you why that worked, we need to really get in and talk about some fundamental ideas here, all right? Yeah. Come on in. Come on in, everybody, sit down, settle. Right on. So the fundamental idea is I've broken down into three different fundamental ideas, okay. One, I'm calling the big secret about timing, okay, which I'll talk to you in one sec. And then I need you to understand the role of acceleration and deceleration in this kind of cut. And then finally, we're going to talk about maximizing screen direction to make this as seamless as possible, all right? Are you guys with me here? Cool. So I'm a big blabber mouth. You might not know this about me, but as soon as I tell somebody there's a secret, I have to, like, immediately reveal what that secret is, okay? So I'm going to start out by telling this big secret, and I hope this is really excellent, which is the best time to hide a cut is when the objects on screen are moving their fastest, okay? And this took me a long time to figure this out. I used to see people doing cuts like this, I didn't really understand this part of it. And once I finally figured this out, this started to, like, kind of all make sense, okay? So in order for this to make sense to you, though, we have to talk about something else, okay? I say when the objects are moving their fastest, so we really need to talk a little bit about acceleration and deceleration so you can get this idea, okay? So I should begin by saying that acceleration and deceleration are just pretty fancy words for things getting faster and things getting slower, okay? I think you probably all know that. And in the real world, everything accelerates and decelerates, right? So for example, we're here in LA, so I'll bring up this example of driving, right? When you're driving, you press on the gas, and the car doesn't just start moving it, like, 40 or 50 miles an hour away, right? Well, why? Well, because cars weigh a lot, right? And we're here on a planet that has gravity and so on and so forth, we're getting out of my area of expertise here, but, basically, it takes a lot of energy to get something that weighs that much to get rolling at a certain speed, right? And similarly, when you brake, like, just say you're pulling into a spot, you're not just, like, cruising along at 50 miles an hour, then you press on the brake and you just stop on a dime, right? You have to... The car weighs a lot, so it's going fast, so it needs to kind of slow down more gradually, right? Acceleration and deceleration, right? Everybody following with me so far? Yes. Okay. So I'm not really an expert in physics, so I'm going to go ahead to talk about what I am more of an expert in, which is acceleration and deceleration in After Effects, okay? So let me lay down some fundamental ideas here about this, which is to begin with, who's ever made a keyframe in After Effects. Yeah. Okay. So the default keyframes in After Effects are linear, right? They are these diamond shapes, okay? Now linear keyframes have no acceleration and deceleration. They move at a steady rate, okay? And nothing, as I was just saying, in real life, moves this way. I mean, the only thing I could think of is something in free fall, maybe, like, once it reaches maximum speed, if it keeps falling, I think it falls at a steady rate. But, again, I'm not a scientist, so I don't know if this is true or not, okay? But basically nothing in real life moves this way, okay? And this is why After Effects has easy ease keyframes, okay? So have those of you who have made keyframes ever made easy ease keyframes? A smaller number of hands have gone up here. Okay, cool. That's actually what I expected. Now easy ease keyframes are excellent because they have built in acceleration and deceleration, right? So they're meant to look more like the way things move to us in real life, okay? Now the other really cool thing about ease keyframes is that you can adjust the acceleration and the deceleration, okay? Now of those who have made keyframes and have made easy ease keyframes, who has adjusted the eases on those? Oh, more people just raised their hands than those... All right. I'm not going to... Okay. So not really sure what that's about, but, okay, great. You jumped right from linear into the advanced thing. Cool. Well, in any case, if you've never adjusted the eases of your keyframes, you have to do it in the Graph Editor, okay? So I assume all those people that just raise their hands are familiar with the Graph Editor. Is that right? Yes. Do you love the Graph Editor? Yes. All right. Well, yes. I do too, okay? And the reason why is because the Graph Editor is the heart of dynamic motion and After Effects, okay? So if you've never made a keyframe, if you've only made linear keyframes, if you've only ever made easy ease keyframes and you've never even did anything, right, rest assured that most of the animators whose work you really like, they adjusted the heck out of those in the Graph Editor, okay? It really is, as I'm saying here, the heart of dynamic motion and After Effects. And I kind of want to show that to you right now in After Effects, all right? So got this kind of chart that is going to compare linear versus generic ease versus adjusted ease keyframes, okay? So up here, I've got my linear keyframe representative, easy ease, and this is my adjusted ease, okay? And as you can see down here in my timeline, these really do have the kind of keyframes that I'm mentioning here. Linear, ease, and you can't tell at a glance, but these are adjusted, all right? So I am going to play these down, and we can watch them all together. But what I want you to keep in mind is that all three of these objects are going to be moving the same number of pixels in the same amount of time, okay? The only thing that's different about them is the keyframes.

Hello? I'm going to keep going. All right. So right now, we're looking at three different types of keyframe interpolation, okay, they're moving the same number of pixels over the same amount of time, but they're moving very, very differently, okay? And if I had to guess which one you enjoy watching the most, I would guess it's the bottom one, okay? The most dynamic one is on the bottom, right? And let's go through these frames individually, actually. So let's look just at the linear for one sec, okay, just so you could see what this looks like. The linear keyframe is the car where you press on the gas and you're just going 50 miles an hour and then you press on the brake and you're 0 miles now, okay? There's no acceleration, no deceleration. And I don't know how this looks to you, but to me, this looks kind of robotic and stiff and unnatural, right? Nothing in real life moves this way.

Okay, so let's check out the ease, like a generic ease keyframe, okay? And right away, this kind of feels... Should feel a little bit better, as I was saying, because it has built in acceleration and deceleration, right? Does that feel better to you guys a little bit, right? Less robotic, it feels a little bit more naturalistic. All right, so check out this bad boy.

Whoa! So much more dynamic, right? Okay? And we could never have achieved this result without the Graph Editor, okay? So all you Graph Editor fans, you're vindicated up there, right? What I want to do is really quickly show you, just in case you've never made any keyframes in After Effects, how I would convert from linear keyframes to ease keyframes and then how I would adjust to those eases, okay? So I'm... Whoops. I have my adjusted ease keyframes here, and I'm going to control, I mean, command click on this. And now I've converted these back to regular linear keyframes, and let me actually display all three.

Right? So now you can see that the top and the bottom ones are moving exactly in lockstep. They're both just linear, okay? So if I were to grab these linear keyframes now and there is a beloved shortcut in After Effects for converting from linear to ease keyframes.

F9. Okay, say it louder.

F9, the beloved F9, okay? So I'm going to press F9, right? And now these have become generic ease keyframes. So when I play this down, now the bottom two are moving in lockstep.

Right on. So as you can see that. Now let me go ahead and show you how to adjust the eases, the most fun part. So I'm going to select the keyframes, and then I'm going to press this little button here. Anybody ever seen that button before? Right? I'm going to press that and that opens the Graph Editor, okay? And actually, what I'm going to do first is show you how the Graph Editor works a little bit. So let me click on my linear keyframes because those are easier to see. Now the way to read the graph is that at the bottom here, this is zero. And as we go up in the graph, things are moving faster, okay? This graph's the speed of the objects, okay? So as I said, this is the first keyframe here, and it's like we're pressing on the gas, and this linear action is happening at... Let's see, it's just over 1,000 pixels per second, and it's just moving at that rate steadily. And here, when we press on the brake, it goes down to zero, okay? So it's not moving at all in this part, so the graph's down here at zero. Does that make sense? Zero's at the bottom, and the faster you go up, you're moving faster, okay? So now look at the regular ease keyframes in the graph, okay? These are very different. First of all, this starts at a stopped point, okay? It stops... It starts at zero, right? And then it gradually gets faster until it peaks about, in this case, 1,600 pixels per second, okay? So this is like you press on the gas, and it takes a second for you to get going faster, right, much more natural. I'm going to take questions at the end unless it's really, really urgent, okay? And then we're getting slower and slower. It's like we're pressing on the brake again. We're getting slower. Then it holds. And, again, it gets faster and slower, okay? So what might not be clear to you about this is that these points here, okay, have handles on them, and these points also are exactly where my keyframes are. So those are just, like, the representation of the keyframes but in a different form, okay? So this is, like, my first keyframe here. And this handle that I've got allows me to either push this this way or pull this this way, okay? So if I pull this really hard this way, for example, right now, we stay closer to zero, closer to moving slowly for a longer time. You could see that, right? So we're kind of, like, going really slowly and then we go fast, right? You guys all see that, okay? Something else to point out here is that I move this back and forth, you could see that there's, like, a little yellow box there. Right now it says speed 0 pixels per second because that's referring to this keyframe before we start moving. But then there's this number that says, like, influence there, okay? So you can either pull this 100%. Can you guys see that number? Yeah. Or you could push this back to, like, 0%. I'm talking about it's, like, right over here, when I pull this, right? I'm going to set this at something like 90%, okay? And then I'm going to grab this one, and I'm going to pull this this way and also set that at like 90%, okay? This is how you adjust your eases in the Graph, all right? So now I've only done one of them, but check out this bottom one now. Whips through the first one, and then it just regularly slides back, right? Whips over, and then it sort of slides back with the ease, right? So I've adjusted this here in here, right? So that makes sense, right? But let me actually do a little bit of a review of that just in case in case, and we can kind of compare them together, right? Linear, the one on the left. You press on the gas, and you're going 50 miles an hour. You press on the brake, and you're stopped. Very unnatural, okay? Easy ease. You start from zero, you get faster, and then you peak, and then you get slower again. Adjusted ease, it's just crazy, right? You're just going really slow for a long time, then you whip fast and then you slow down really quick, okay? But this chart that I'm showing right here actually has a kind of built-in lie, right? This implies right here that when they're all going their fastest, that they're all going the same speed, by the way, that I've laid this out, but it's not at all like that at all. Like, check this out, this is the way it actually is, in terms of speed. Remember, the farther you go up, the faster the objects are going, right? So the linear here at the bottom, as we said, is going about a 1,000 pixels per second, all right? The easy ease at its peak is going about 1,600 pixels per second, all right? But this adjusted ease is up here, this is going like 15,000 pixels per second, all right? So this is my big test to see if you guys are paying attention at all. Remember that I said that there was a big secret. I spoke about this a long time ago at the beginning of this presentation, right? The big secret is that the best time to hide a cut is when the objects on screen are moving their fastest, okay? So it's clear here in this chart how we can get objects to move really fast on screen, right? It's by using the Graph Editor and adjusting these handles, right? So let me show this to you in After Effects now, I think you will like this...

Okay? Demo this here. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to have this number one turn into this number two here, okay? And I'm going to just use this method that I'm talking about, all right? I'm just going to have them animate across the screen together, and I'm going to adjust these keyframes, and then I'm going to cut from one to the other, and it's going to be a very, very convincing illusion, okay? So now dig these, right? And I'm going to press, that's right, to put ease on there. And now I'm going to go into my Graph Editor. Thank you. All right. And here are my... Here's my animation right now, all right? And what I'm going to do is I'm going to pull these handles, and I'm going to exaggerate this a bunch. I think I'm going to do, like, 90% influence, something. So it's just going really fast through the middle there to make that point, okay? There, something like that. So now here's my big peak right there. Right, am I getting closer to it? That's exactly where the objects are going there fastest. Everybody following me so far? Okay. So what I want to do is put this cut here. So this is one, my one layer here, so I'm going to Option trim it there. And I got to go one more frame, and I'm going to Option and trim my two there, all right? So are you all ready for this? Are you all ready for this magic? Yeah, right? And that's really seamless, right? Let me actually shorten the work area here. I don't know why it's so long. Who knows the keyboard shortcuts for that? Right. Anyway, right. So check this out. So I think this is a really seamless illusion that, like, obviously, any of you could do. And actually, if I was ever tasked with, like, morphing or trying to transform one object into another, this would be the way I would suggest first because I think this is a very seamless way to go, right? Y'all following me here? Yes. Okay. So the question I have for you, or which really is for me, is, you know, why does this work, okay? Well, the three things that I already talked about is why this works, all right? We're cutting when the objects are moving their fastest, okay? And we're understanding that we're accelerating into the cut madly and we're decelerating madly out of the cut. But there's a third thing at work here that's actually possibly the most important thing. That is screen direction, okay, or going with the flow, as I like to call, all right? So screen direction is the idea that things on screen, you know, are, well, screen direction, right? If things are moving right to left, they continue moving right to left, whatever. Here's my rule of thumb for this kind of match-cut transition. I'm sorry this is so clunkily worded, but I wanted to get it just as accurate as I could, right? And I'm going to read it out loud here, which is "To achieve the most seamless transition possible, all objects on screen should move in the same direction before and after the cut," okay? In other words, in order to make... In order to hide the cut the best, things should continue moving in the same direction, all right? And this makes sense, I think. But let's look at this in After Effects.

Okay. Oh, actually I skipped over something, I'm sorry. I wanted to talk about some other thing, which was I really enjoyed playing the game Asteroids when I was a little kid. So I kind of wanted to show you this thing. We had an Atari, one of those original Ataris, and we used to play the game Asteroids. I don't know if you ever did. But Asteroids is... I actually did not enjoy playing the game that much, but there was this one really cool feature about it that, like, as a little kid, I loved. I don't know why exactly, but obviously, I was a... Going to be a future animator because... And future giver of presentations about match cuts, okay, because this kind of universe here on screen is a match cut, okay? And this is when this thing moves off the top of the screen, it comes back on from the bottom of screen. And when it moves off the right of the screen, it comes back on the left, which just means you're kind of, at least to my little kid mind, you were like in the center of a spheric universe where you were looking at a 2D representation of space or something. I don't know. It used to really excite me. I was a weird little kid, but actually the best thing was this. You guys remember this part about it? Yeah. Okay. This is another kind of match cut using screen direction, all right? Basically, the object keeps moving in the same direction, so it provides the continuity that makes it feel like it's one thing for us rather than two or three different things coming on in screen in different parts, right? And let me show you this in a sort of simpler way, okay? So I've got this sort of simple ball here, and it's going to move off screen and cut and come back on, right? Right now, when it cuts and comes back on screen, it's moving in the same direction, all right? So I think the way that you're perceiving this right now is a fairly fluid thing almost as if there's no cut in the middle there, right? It just seems like one seamless kind of animation. And I always find this pretty strange because actually, your eye has to move from the ball all the way over to the right in one frame back over to the left and then follow it over. So it doesn't really seem like it should work, but it does to me, okay? Everybody following me so far? This works pretty well, okay? Now what would happen if we changed the screen direction? And the thing started moving left to right, and then instead of continuing left to right, it went back in the other direction, all right? What would that look like? Well, let's check this out. It would look like this, which is also known as a bounce, okay? That's a pretty good bounce. If we were to turn the screen over to your mind and think about somebody's dropping a ball, that looks like a bounce, right? Okay. So that's really interesting. Because it's got the same acceleration and deceleration. But what's different about this is the screen direction, okay? And that's why I say that screen direction is kind of the most important part about this, all right? And let me show you something else. Let's check this out.

Yeah. Okay. Now I've broken the screen direction in a different way. And then oddly, I think this sort of works and sort of doesn't work. Like, there's something appealing about this, but it's just not a fluid match cut. I think this is a very successful jump cut, okay, for your editors in the house here, right, which is to say that it matches but not in terms of the direction that it's moving, right? And if you wanted to see what I would consider, what's in this example, like the most successful kind of match cut, it would be like this.

Where you have something change size, but it really still feels like one object to me, in any case. So like, we've gotten closer to it or something, but it feels like one object. It feels continuous from beginning to end, even though it's a different size, and it's in a different place or whatever, right? I think this is primarily because of screen direction.

All right. Well, let me make this bigger. So basically, so far in all these examples, I've only spoken about position animations. And I kind of wanted to point out that this doesn't only work with position animations, okay? Actually scale and rotation work very, very well with match cuts as well. So I wanted to kind of demo this for you, in After Effects as well. And the reason that it works is because scale has screen direction as well. Scale is like moving toward you or away from you and rotation, it's a little bit more complicated, but it has screen direction as well. Like, the top of rotating object might be moving to the left, whereas the bottom might be moving to the right or whatever, right? But they both involve motion on screen so you can do match cut transitions with these as well. So let me demo this. I kind of... I got, like, a kind of a silly example here for scale. I was thinking of, like, a sports promo. That's like, "Are you ready?" Okay? And the words are going to, like, each one zoom and transition into the next, right? So let me animate this for you right now, okay? I'm going to put a scale keyframe on here. Jump back, like ten frames. Actually I got to this is like a sports pro. I'm going to do, like, five frames. One, two, three, four, five. This is going to be quick, all right? I'm just going to copy and paste that scale keyframe. And let me go to the end here. I'm going to make this like 200, all right? So the animation is just from 100 to 200, okay? I got one more frame. And I'm going to do the same thing here. Actually... So at the beginning of this cut to the word you, should the word you be bigger or smaller than it is right now, all right? Think about it. This is getting... Going this way, okay? So the word you should be smaller at the beginning and be getting bigger because we want it continuing in the same direction to make this match cut work, okay? So I'm going to set this down to, like, 20 or something, right? And let me get in here and do... Oops, SS and go to the end, and I'm going to make a scale keyframe at a 100, and I'm going to go back. And I set this on ten frames, didn't I? One, two, three, four, five. Sorry.

And then one, two, three, four, five. I just think because this is so fast, it would be better that way. Okay, so this is going to get bigger here at the end of the cut. So it's going to go to 200.

I wrote 2,000. Okay. And then this one at the beginning is going to be smaller as well, right? So I'm going to set this to, like, 20. And I go one, two, three, four, five, and put this back to 100. All right, so everybody followed that so far, that wasn't really that complicated, right? Okay. And then I'm going to take these, and I'm going to press...

Thank you. And I'm going to put some ease on there, and then I'm going to go into my graph. And let me adjust these, okay? So this is a slightly different kind of graph than we were talking about earlier, right? Earlier, we had one big peak in the middle, okay? This is not going to look exactly like this, but it's going to be similar, all right? So I'm going to take this first keyframe, and I'm going to pull this this way. And these, I'm just going to do a 100% because this is a sports promo, okay, so it's very bombastic, right? And then here, and I remember, this is the cut right here, okay? So we want to be accelerating fully into that cut. We don't want to be slowing down at all. So I'm going to push this this way so the peak is right there at the cut, okay? And then similarly, I'm just going to take this and I'm going to push this way to push that peak up, and then you'll see it better when I grab this handle, oops, and pull that that way, right? Now we've got a big peak. Now one's going from 100 to 200, so that is higher than the one going from 20 to 100, but whatever. Don't worry about that, right? This is the way we're going to adjust these. A big peak in the middle where we cut. We accelerate into the cut and then we decelerate out of that cut, all right? Let me do this on the other side as well. All right, I'm going to pull this handle, I'm just going to do it 100%, push this one 0%, grab this this way, and pull this one that... You can also move these handles up and down, which I don't want to do, but it's possible. All right, so I'm going to jump out of my graph and zoom back, and let's check this out, right? You actually see these kind of scale pop transitions all the time, like a social media post and stuff, right? They're very easy to do this way, all right? And they're very effective. And, again, the screen direction thing just really works. Even though it goes from being big to, like, little, your eye just follows it as if it was one continuous thing, which I find really interesting, but cool. So everybody following me here, right? Let's look at rotation for one sec because the rotation one I spent a lot of time thinking about this, okay? And this is... You don't know me very well, a little bit, but, I'm a philosophical guy, okay? So what I'm going to animate here is the word positive becoming the word negative, all right? I know, this is kind of deep. And then it's going to rotate back to positive. Whoa, all right? So like, I know you didn't sign up for, like, a philosophy lesson, but you're getting one here right now, right? All right, so what I'm going to do is go, like, ten frames, and I'm going to edit... I'm going to animate these together, and the negative one needs to start out upside down for this to work, okay? So let me just go ahead and set negative to 180, which is upside down, and then I'm going to make keyframes for both of these, okay? Now I will say with rotation, a word of warning is you don't want to rotate things on screen too fast because it tends to kind of dazzle the eye and kind of make people pass out, all right? So I'm not going to do that to you, although it'd be kind of fun. I'm going to go 20 frames for this transition, okay? And I'm going to turn the negative to 1 and 0 degrees and the positive to 180. So now negative is right set up and positive is upside down, okay? And I'm going to pause ten frames and I'm going to press this, and then I'm going to go 20 frames, and I'm going to turn them back around again, okay? So I'm going to make this 1 and 180 so it continues in that same direction. And I'm going to make this one whole rotation in zero degrees, right? So that made sense, everybody, what I did, or do I need to go over what I just did? Like, basically, the word positive starts upright and turns over and then turns over again, okay, and negative's the opposite. All right. So take all these. And you know what I'm going to ask next? - [Man] F9. - Thank you, okay? And I really want to drill that in, if you learn one thing here today, it's F9. You might not know what it means, but you know F9, okay? Great. So I've got some ease on here. And let me jump into my graph, all right? And this is more like the situation that we had the first time where we're just going to have a big peak in the middle that we're going to set, okay? And then we're going to pause, and then it's going to happen again. So let me get in here in the middle and grab this, and I pull these, like, again, you don't want to over rotate or do it too much. So I'm going to do this, like, 85%. I'm going to do this like 85%. You do want this to be roughly symmetrical, okay? And let me do the other side as well while I'm here, 85, and something like 85. Cool. Now, right here, it is lined up exactly at the fastest point and they are right up, straight up. So I've actually done a good job finding symmetry. So what I want to do now is cut my positive right here. Remember, I'm at the peak of the animation right here. Oops, I need to press this to see that, right? So the objects are moving there fast, so I'm going to trim one layer here. Actually, I lied. I'm going to do that. What I'm going to do is split the layer because I need it at the other end. So I'm just going to drag this back somewhere, and we'll deal with that later, okay? So this is my first frame of negative here, so I'm going to Option trim that there. So we go like that and that, right? And then finally, I'm going to go back here, and I'm going to trim negative here where it's moving its fastest. And I go back, and I'll just pull this back so that that starts there, okay? Are you ready for this amazing animation that's also incredibly philosophical? All right? That really works well, doesn't it? Like, it's really hard to even see when one changes to the next, I find. Also, I hope this has, you know, influenced your outlook on life going ahead, right, which is so that if things get negative, guys just turn it upside down. Come on, right? So I think this rotation one kind of works the best in some sense, and I really think it's a powerful illusion, all right? Now all the examples I've given so far are, like, one thing turning into another, one thing turning upside down or not. When you're doing your work in real life, you're almost never transitioning from just one thing to another thing. So for my final example, I wanted to give a more complex, like a complex design that I could do a bunch of transitioning on so you could watch me, all right? So I've got A and B, okay? Just pretty deep as well, I think. And I'm actually going to do that over here so I can do it full screen. And additionally, when I do this animation, I'm going to build in some parallax, okay? So let me just define parallax for those who don't necessarily know what that means. Parallax is the idea that in 3D space, objects that are closer to you appear to move faster and objects that are farther away appear to move slower, right? You're on a train, you're looking out the window, and the things in the foreground are whipping by, and the mountain in the background is, like, barely moving it all. That's parallax, okay? In fact, it's an illusion, but, right, it appears good to us, right? So the way that I'm going to do that is the objects that are closer to us, AKA the things that are on top of the stack, essentially, of the layer stack, I'm going to move those farther and faster than the things that are, like, further down in the stack, right? You don't have to do it this way, I just think it's more interesting, right? So I'm going to go to the end here, and I'm going to kind of animate this in a funny way possibly where I like to, like, make blank kind of keyframes with interpolation on it and then actually do the animation. You'll see what I'm talking about, all right? So I'm going to do this as position first. So I'm going to Option P and make position keyframes, then I got to go back ten frames, and I'm going to press this button here for all these layers to just duplicate the keyframe, okay? So right now I have generic linear keyframes with no animation, and I'm going to press F9. Didn't make you say it that time. All right, so now I've got ease on here. But no animation, yeah. Okay, so now let's do the animation. All right, so I'm going to start up here with this little scribble layer, and I'm going to grab this. And I'm going to move this just off screen, okay? And then I'm going to take my A. I'm going to move this, like, so it's sort of off screen, okay? And I'm going to take the next layer. And basically, for each one of these, I'm going to move it less. So it's moving slower and has parallax, okay, as explained. All right, and I'm just going to do this really quick. And what you could do is you can kind of press J and K to jump back to see what it looked like before you started this, right, because what I want is this feeling that they're kind of peeling away in the, you know, it's pulling away, right? And so, okay. So next thing is this. I'm holding down Shift, by the way, so these move exactly in parallel. And let me go ahead and just sort of kind of quickly do this. And I'm actually even going to do this background texture here, just a little bit, okay? So how does that look? Yeah, it looks pretty good, great. So I'm going to go now and I'm going to do my other side, right? I'm going to select all these. I'm working on the tiniest laptop screen. I'm going to go to Option P, position keyframe, go ten frames, and let me just...

Press this button here for all these layers. Great, so now I got two sets of keyframes, and I'm going to grab these and press.

Thank you, and now I've got interpolation on there. And now let me go ahead to the beginning and make the actual animation, all right. So here at the cut, which way does the B want to start on the left or on the right? On the left. Okay. I think people said that even though you whispered it down there, right. Right, so let me go up here and do all this animation.

Oops.

All right. Move this.

Not all the way off screen. I don't think it's necessary to have things move all the way off screen. Okay, so I'm going to put this leg here. And this little scribble, why did I make so many layers? All right.

Do you like these layers, by the way? - [Woman] Yeah. - I made them in Midjourney.

Isn't that weird? I like this. It's so cool. Anyway...

It's the first time I've ever done anything good in Midjourney.

I'm sorry. I meant Firefly.

Oops. All right, so I'm just still dragging everything over. This is incredibly boring for you to watch, and I apologize for that. Each thing a little bit less, hopefully, texture, which I've actually got two texture layers on here, great. Okay, so let me back up, and let's look at this first one in the graph.

Okay. Yes, And it looks like I did my parallax well. So here's the parallax. Each one is going a different speed. The ones on top are going faster, and then each one's, like, a little bit less fast and a little bit less fast, right? You see that. You can see the parallax at work. All right? So here you go. Going to take this and I'm going to drag this back like this. And let me set this around 90, okay? And here, which way do I want to do? Do I want to pull this or push this? Push. That's right. I'm going to push it this way, okay? I'm going to put it at, like, not all the way, something like 5%. Something like that. Great. All right, so let me grab my other keyframes here.

Okay, get into my graph. Looks like I did my parallax pretty well there as well, not quite as well. Things group a little bit more, all right. So here at the beginning, pushing this or pulling this.

Pushing it. That's right. Yeah, and do like five, okay. I really think after this presentation, you'll all be able to do this, basically, all right? That's my hope, okay? Let me set this, like, 95, all right. Great, So let's check that out and see what that looks like.

Yeah, I think that's a fairly convincing illusion. Oops, something is wrong there, something is moving down at the same time. Yeah, hold on one second. This, what are you doing? It's not you. Sorry.

Sorry, now I'm going to find which layer that is. Oh, my goodness.

It's this one. Yay, okay. What did I do? I'm just going to go ahead and delete that, and just try that again. Many apologies for that horrible teacher error, folks. And let me make sure the interpolation is still the same. Looks like it is. Oh, my goodness, great. Okay, so oops, that's still soloed. Oh, that really rattled me, all right. So let's check this out. Whoo-hoo. Now this is pretty good, right? A pretty good illusion. I think it could be improved, okay? And the way that I think that it could be improved is right now what I've done is I've put symmetrical keyframe timings on both ends of the cut, okay? And I've just sort of did that. I don't really know why I just did it because I'm kind of neat that way or something, right? But actually, I think this would look better if these second sets of keyframes, the B was, like, a little bit longer.

And that's kind of one of my points here of what I'm getting to. Gosh, darn it.

And so let me make these, like, a little bit longer. Let's just see how that looks different. Even like five frames.

Kind of like drifts in a little bit more. Okay, so things don't have to be perfectly symmetrical in this. This is just sort of the way I had set this up out of neatness, but, okay, so let me show you something else. I could take my B, and I can kind of, like, push this back even a few more frames, right? And then I could go back and do sort of the same thing for the A and push that, like, a couple frames so that it really focuses your eye first on the A and then on the B, right? So the A starts moving a little bit first. Sorry, I got to run preview this. Here we go.

Yeah, and then the B kind of glides in. And, like, you really wind up looking at that B in that case, all right? So just want to say the keyframe timings don't have to be symmetrical here at all, okay? And now what I'm going to do is I'm actually going to do a transition from the end of the comp back to the beginning, and I'm going to use scale, all right? So I'm going to select all and press S. And great. I'm going to do this one also, like, ten frames. Set this here.

And make it a scale keyframe. Go to the end, okay? So I'm going to make these bigger at the end, and I'm going to use parallax as well. I'm just going to do this really mathematically. I'm going to do 200, 190, 180...

170...

160. Guess what's next? Nope, it's 140.

A little humor for you there while I'm boring you to death. I'm running out of space 115, 108. All right, am I almost done here? Yes. Okay, 105, great. So now let me go ahead now that I've done that. And yep. Boop. Now I'm going to say what I just did because I think you all know now that I pressed F9, all right? So now I'm going to go back to the beginning, all right? So at the beginning, does the A want to be bigger or smaller? Smaller. It wants to be smaller, guys.

Have I taught you nothing? All right, so I'm going to make this ten.

I'll make this 20, all right...

30. I love how you're all hanging on this. Oh, what's he going to do, 15, all right. Watching people animate is so boring. I just want to apologize. Okay, great, so I got them all there, and let me go ahead and boop. I'm not going to say it anymore or ask. All right, great, so I've not done the interpolation. I've not jumped into the graph yet. So let me go ahead and do this. Look at that. Now that's some perfect parallax right there. I mean, mwah! Those are some graph lines to write home to your mother about. Okay, great, so here at the beginning, moving fastest, okay? It's hard to think about this, but this is the second part of our cut, even though we're at the beginning here. So we want to push this this way, okay? And then pull this this way again something a lot like 85 or whatever.

And let me go to the end and widen out a little bit. And boop, okay, and grab all these. Let me do this at the end here. Press that. Ah, that's where I skipped that one, to be funny, anyway. Okay, so here, I'm going to pull this this way because we want to accelerate into the cut. And then I want to push this all the way here. Oh, I did it like that. All right, so let me back that off a little bit.

Yeah, great, all right, so cool. So let's check this out.

All right, build on and here you go.

Pretty seamless, right? Thank you, thank you. You're going to applaud now. Yes. Thank you.

Great. Now we can make the same adjustments on here that we did before. For example, like, have the B start earlier, have the A frames, the sort of second set, kind take a little bit longer if we want. We can make a lot of adjustments on these. And, like, what I want to leave you with or we're not done yet, but we're getting there is that you should try this out on your own for sure after this if you're interested in it and try mixing it up, okay? Like, the way I've shown it here is not the only way to do it, all right? So if we make the A a little bit longer... People are leaving already, bye.

Don't do that to me. Make the A a little bit longer. No, they've already gotten everything they needed out of this.

Cool, yeah. So I don't know, so here we go. The A just, like, drifts a little bit longer, and the B starts a little bit earlier. Right, there's really nice ways to direct the eye and make this kind of animation better, right? So I would urge you to mix it up. And, actually, if we look back here at this piece again real quick, you'll see that I'm mixing it up in here, okay? So even on this first transition, I'm combining position with rotation, right? This central object is rotating, okay? But it has the same screen direction as the objects that are moving, AKA, it's kind of right to left. So I'm able to mix rotation and position together. Now you can also mix position and scale together as well. I think I do that down here on this last one.

Yeah, some things are moving, and they're moving to the edges of the screen, which is the same direction as scale, which is moving kind of forward and back, right? So you see kind of going like that. Yeah, cool. So mix it up. Try that out. Try a bunch of different things with this, all right? Which I say here on this slide. So let me say it again, mix it up, experiment, try to figure things out, right? Let me go over this all again even though it's pretty obvious, but I do want to talk about the sort of three fundamental ideas that I addressed in this, like, lesson, okay? Oops. Oh, my goodness.

I am so sorry that that just happened. I accidentally put pictures of my cats in the... I'm so sorry, this is Frankie and Sebastian here, by the way. They're very cute. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

Very proud of those guys. Anyway, I'm doing that in all my presentations.

So the three ideas that we really draw into here, I guess, is the best time to hide a cut is when the objects are moving their fastest, okay? Now that does not mean that they always have to be moving really fast. That just means that they have to be moving at the fastest that they're going to move for themselves. You see what I'm saying? Right? It's not like everything has to be, like, zipping around, okay? Definitely, I think you learned to accelerate into the cut and decelerate out of the cut. And please, if you've never used that Graph Editor, try it. It's actually not as intimidating as it looks. I hope I've showed that to you. But the real, real secret here actually is maintaining green direction. And, again, try mixing that up. Try some bounce cuts or some jump cuts and see how that feels to you as well, all right? I want to thank you so much for being here. I really appreciate giving this talk.

If for whatever reason... I'm getting to you, let me just plug myself here for one sec. This is my social stuff. So if for whatever reason you want to follow me and not that I care at all about that, but please, please. No, I'm just kidding. I run a studio in New York called The Drawing Room, tdr.nyc and I teach two classes at School of Motion. So if you liked this, all right, I'm just going to say check out, especially After Effects Kickstart is the basic level class at School of Motion where I teach you everything about After Effects, okay? Right on. Thank you so much. And, oh, and I got to say, rate me highly, okay, 10 out of 5, I would say, if you can do that. And, oh, by the way, you might win some stuff, one of these e-books or this handy dandy little gizmo here, all right? Thank you so much. And I'll take Q&A if anyone wants to come up here and ask me any questions.

Thank you. Thank you so much, everybody. I really appreciate you. I hope you learned something here today.

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