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Tziporah Zions/2 min read

Animated Images Part 2

After Effects Essentials

Compositions

Time + space container — your scene at a specific resolution and length.

Layers

Stack them — text, footage, shapes, solids, lights, cameras.

Keyframes

Define values at specific times — AE interpolates between.

Effects

Hundreds built in — stylization, distortion, color, generation.

Master After Effects at Noble Desktop

Noble Desktop's Video Editing & Motion Graphics Certificate teaches After Effects alongside Premiere Pro and Cinema 4D.

Learn how to animate a still photograph in this continuation of our Animated Images tutorial series from Noble Desktop!

This is the second part to our Animated Images tutorial! Learn how to animate a still photograph in this tutorial from Noble Desktop!.

This tutorial is a continuation of our Animated Images Part 1 tutorial.

Balloon Animation

1. In After Effects, select one of the balloons. 2. With the Playhead at the beginning, set a Position keyframe. 3. Move the Playhead around one second in. 4. Move the selected balloon downwards. 5. ALT-click the Position stopwatch. 6. Type in LoopOut(); 7. Repeat steps 1-4 for the other two balloons, with each animation slightly offset. 8. Easy Ease all of the keyframes.

Text

9. Create two Text layers and type some text into each. 10. Move one Text layer underneath the middle balloon layer. 11. Go to Effects & Presets. 12. Navigate to the Text Animation—Animate In options. 13. Choose any animation preset and apply it to both Text layers.

Animating Entire Composition

14. Make a new Null layer. 15. Parent all the layers to the Null. 16. With the Playhead at the beginning, set keyframes on the Null layer for both Scale and Position. 17. Move the Playhead about two seconds in. 18. Increase the Null layer’s Scale. 19. Adjust the Null layer’s Position to ensure the composition in the center. 20. Select all the keyframes. 21. Apply Easy Ease to all of the selected keyframes.

Video Transcript10 sections

1Full Video Transcript

2Recap and Project Setup

Hey everybody, welcome back. This is the second part of our tutorial on how to animate still images in Adobe After Effects. So like I said, this is the second part, so if you're not sure what's going on, I suggest going back to see the first part of this tutorial to figure out where we're starting at over here. Let's keep going with this project.

Now that we're inside of our composition here, we had double-clicked our hot air balloons layer. It looks like this nickname didn't take, so let's just rename that. Great. So I just want to show you, if you grab any of your assets over here, like the layers, I can move it around and we have a nice blue background right underneath it. So it was great that we set it up this way.