Back to the Principles

Creating a compelling digital animation requires much more than simply adding transitions (appear, disappear, move up/down) to assets in After Effects. It relies on the development of interesting assets and on adding appeal as each component is introduced in the screen to tell a story, no matter how simple that story may be. It requires attention to detail!

Let’s start by looking at the following example: a simple title sequence for an animation called ‘Ultra Burger’.

As seen in Lesson 4, first we need to create our asset, separate it in layers and import them into After Effects. We can then start animating each element. Here we animated the position of the different elements of the burger (bread, patty, cheese), the rotation and scale of the right-hand shimmer, and used a mask for the title:

This title sequence has all the assets that were previously defined, and they all appear following some of the basic animation properties we have learned, but this animation is not complete yet. The movement of each element is very linear and unappealing, and the animation lacks weight. So how can we improve this animation?

To address this question, we can look back to some of the always very important Animation Principles:

• Timing and Spacing
• Ease in and Ease out
• Squash and Stretch
• Exaggeration
• Anticipation
• Follow through and Overlapping action
• Secondary Action
• Appeal

One of the principles that relates directly to this case and could significantly improve the animation is Ease in and Ease out. We have already seen how this principle works in frame by frame animation, so let’s take a look at how it works inside After Effects and how we can apply it to create a more appealing ‘Ultra Burger’ title sequence.