Okay, how animation is done in After Effects is by the use of keyframes. So here I just created a composition with two squares. It's a blue background on here. So if I want to move these across the screen, the way I would do that is layer one, and it's here and I can hit p for position. And the stopwatch right here will set what's called a keyframe and you'll see that show up right here. Now mine shows up as this little diamond.

The default for After Effects is to do an auto Bezier curve, which we'll get into here. Down here there's little auto Bezier which are the handles just like when we were using the pen tool, you have the Bezier handles. I have changed mine If you go up to After Effects to preferences, and general and here I checked marked as default spatial interpolation to linear. I like to have more control over my keyframes within the graph editor and the interpolation, I want it to be linear. And I can always change it back to auto Bezier. And I'll explain why this is important once we get into the graph editor, but if you want to follow along or wonder why your keyframes and the graph editor look a little bit different than mine, it's because I change this right here, this default spatial interpolation, spatial interpolation to linear.

So what I have here is I set this at the beginning. And that locks it into this position. Now if I play this, obviously, nothing happens. It doesn't move, even though we have this keyframe because after effects doesn't know where it wants me to move this to what point and how far does it know how fast it doesn't know any of that stuff? All it knows is that okay, you want me to remember where this is at this moment in time. So let's go ahead a couple seconds and you can do this a couple ways.

Usually use the numbers here just to get it a little bit more accurate. But you can also in the selection tool, you can just grab this and move it. Now, it starts to create this line which shows you the direction it's going to go and it's straight, which is fantastic. If I hold Shift, it allows me to only move in the initial direction I started. So if I move it all the way to this side, a couple of things are showing up here. One, it shows the path.

And this path is always on the anchor point. So the anchor point is in the center, which we talked about the anchor point how you can move this and how it's very important, which we'll get to, especially with rotation. But here, and if you is where it moves, and these little dots show how quickly It's moving. Now notice it's very static it to set this here. So it's going to move at a constant speed. starts and it ends very abruptly, because it's moving at a constant speed.

Now we can change that. This is the constant speed. This is what it comes up as this is what it looks like in the speed graph. There's different types of graphs you can use here. I don't want this to be super extensive on the graph part. But you do have to understand a little bit what's going on here.

So this right here is a speed graph. There's also a value graph, which I don't use too much, I use mostly the speed graph. So this shows me that at this point, it starts moving at 689.3 pixels per second. And that's it just constant until it is at zero. and it stops. That is straight across.

There's nothing happening there. It's straight, and that's represented here with these dots. They're all evenly spaced, so you can see that now if we take shape to actually you know what I'm gonna do, I'm gonna delete this. Take this duplicated it here. So we have these exact same keyframes and you select the layer and then hit you, it brings up only the keyframes in that layer so you don't end up with having to drill down all these menus to find it. I'm going to grab this and just move it down and notice that the entire thing is moving.

That's important. And the reason that's happening is because I'm on one of the keyframes and I selected, where the keyframes are for position, which is what I'm changing, therefore it moved the entire thing if you don't do that, you will actually end up making another keyframe and it'll go from that keyframe to the next keyframe and it gets really bad. So now what we have is these two moving exactly the same. straight across, it's linear. Okay, so let me take this one here. I'm going to hit f9 And it changes these two E's.

So it's easing out of here and easing into this spot here. So and if you notice the dots are much closer together here and farther apart here and closer together here, meaning it's going slower here, very fast here and slower here. What do you have to think about what these dots is, the farther apart they are, the faster your object is moving, because it has to get from this point to this point in one frame, each of these frames, and that's a long distance to travel in one frame. So let's go really fast if you're over here, and it's really close. Now, let's zoom in here. Now you only have this distance to travel in a frame and you could go nice and slow.

Hey, so here extremely fast as to get between these two dots very quickly in one frame, here in one frame is going hardly any length, so it's going to go slower. So Let's see how these two compare this one's still linear, this one is ease with F nine, just your standard easy's. Two they both take off and they both arrive at the exact same time at two seconds. But notice the difference. Okay? Now if you want to change this even more, you can go to this one that's easy.

And notice it starts at zero and ends at zero versus this one starts at the speed and ends at that speed, which we talked about. Here, if I want to influence this, you can select your keyframe and then this gives you an influence handle. And if I pull this over, notice what's happening to my dots. They're getting much much farther apart here, much tighter and closer here. Which means if we look at our graph, and we look at the dots, compare them, it's going to start up really fast goes and then slowly ease into this. Our graph is telling us the speed at which it's going if I push this even more this way, now it's going extremely fast up to very, very fast and then down.

But again, the, the distance it's traveling, start and stop and starting and ending time is going to be exactly the same as the one on top, just what happens between them. Now it looks like this one at the bottom arrives before this one, but it actually doesn't it's easing into that final keyframe, very slow here at the end. So it's actually still moving, even when it looks like it has stopped because of this. And you can grab this handle and ease that over a little bit more. We can ease this one over a little bit more and it goes even faster at the beginning. Okay, this is important because this is what is going to create our movement and when I start animating cup.

And I want to get different motions in there, I'm going to be messing with these keyframes and the easing in and the speed to get that nice, even natural looking flow. See if we move this way over like this. We're back to something that looks a lot like the top one. Except the differences, it starts at zero and ends at zero versus this one starting at that speed and ending at that speed. So let's look at what this looks like compared to the top because it's easing from zero and has to kind of start and then it has to slow down versus just start and stop, boom, boom, straight across, which is what this one's doing. It takes a lot to the graph editor is very tough.

It's like the pen tool in that it's just going to take practice trial and error but dive into it. Do not be scared of it and force yourself To use it because the more you use it, the more you understand and I'm still learning, the better your animations are going to get. Now when I make these, let's make a third, make a third one here. And I'm going to I'm going to hide this one. And I'm going to grab this, and I'm going to bring it down to here, okay? So this all being linear, it's just going to go straight to here, and then straight down to there.

And stop. So let's look at that. Here. They're kind of like Pac Man, Pac Man messing around, like we can make this look like a ghost to be cool. Okay, so now when I open this up, now look here what we have, this is where the interpolation and when I went to my preferences, it's split this one to make it linear. If you make these What it normally is, which is the auto resume.

That's what it looks like. So it becomes much more of a flowy that eases in and out. So it's After Effects tries to help you out to make your animations flow and to give it a little bit more fluidity. But I don't always want that. And so I want it to be linear. And the reason I want it to be linear is so that I have full control over what is happening here.

And I don't end up with a curve when I don't want to curve. Okay, so sometimes you sometimes you don't want that, like if I move this up here. Now I'm creating this curve, and maybe I want that curve. But now I can grab this, move it all the way to zero. And now I can start influencing these. And you can hit this button here will fill it to view.

So now it's only the graph itself. line these up like this. And maybe I want this to start at zero. So you can see that now I have full control over For everything and I can influence each one individually it gives me much more control. Now of course, it's going to be a little bit more work. But it's not as much work as if you had to mess with the auto Bezier ones.

Snappy grab this here is fine. Let's have this ease in like this. We want this to be kind of straight. There we go. Alright, so let's just give this a look. speeds up.

Now again, remember that this is not the path. This is not the path, this is only the speed at which it's going. So it starts up speeds up to there and then quickly drops down. Okay. Like I said, it can be very confusing. jump into it, use it You're going to use it a lot when we use this animation as well.

It can be very confusing. If you don't want to deal with any of this stuff, do not change your effect up here. And you can just always have this auto Bezier like this. But see now with this one, if you notice they stay together. But now it makes it a little, a little tougher to manipulate as well. Okay, so just just an option.

You can also just always go to here, and I have all those and I can just hit f9 with all of them. Now let's look at it. Now f nine goes from zero is into zero, he's out and back to zero. That's what it does, then you can grab this, and really it's just a Bezier. It's an auto Bezier again, give it I'm going to take that bow out of there a little bit. So now it's going to ease from zero across It's fun.

It takes a lot of work, but get into it dive into it. Alright, let's start anime or coffee cup.