Animation 101: Follow-Through in After Effects - Easy Tip for Better Animation

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Animators often try to mimic the way things move in real life, using the principles of animation to recreate what they see with their eyes. Learning this skill is the key to creating beautiful movement regardless of the software or medium you're working with. Follow-through, or overlapping action, is a principle that can add loads of visual interest and realism to your work once you grasp it.
In this tutorial, Joey, who teaches Animation Bootcamp and our free course The Path to MoGraph, shows you one way you can apply follow-through to your After Effects work. This trick is incredibly handy because it doesn't rely on having artwork that was divided up into layers for animation.
Follow us. Follow us to follow-through.
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Auto-Generated Transcript Below 👇
Joey Korenman (00:00): Howdy. I'm Joey Korenman. And in this short video, I'm going to teach you a really easy way to add life to your animation by using follow through in, after fast, This technique is an example of what we go over in our animation bootcamp class at school of motion. So make sure to check that out. If you like what you learned today, also you can download the project files I'm using in this video to follow along or to practice this technique. After you're done, watching details are in the description. What is follow through well follow through also called overlapping action is the idea that when an object moves different parts of that object move at different times, here are some examples. This project from Bee Grandinetti has followed through in a few places like in this moment when the girl jumps back and her limbs and hair move at separate times. And during the type reveal at the end in this piece that Andrew Vucko did for Google, the overlapping action is a bit more subtle, but definitely add some visual interest.
Joey Korenman (01:07): So here we have a really simple logo reveal and we've already animated most of it. And what I want you to notice is how stiff that feather feels feathers are soft objects. And so if it really was rotating up like this at the end, it wouldn't feel like a stiff board. Now, if you notice this feather is just one layer that came in from Photoshop, if it was on multiple layers, maybe we could sort of parent them together and rotate them a little bit manually to make it feel like it's bending. But what do we do when we have artwork? That's all on one layer. So here's our goal. When the feather finishes writing on this line and starts to rotate up, I want it to bend naturally like a feather using follow-through AKA overlapping action. There are two steps to this process. And the first step is to use puppet pins, which can be found up here.
Joey Korenman (01:55): The puppet pin tool works by letting us place pins inside of artwork like this. And then we can manipulate those pins to deform the artwork any way we want. Now I'm going to undo that because I need to set this up a very specific way. What I want to do is place pins along the spine of the feather like this. So I'm going to put one down towards the bottom, and then I'm going to put, I don't know, maybe three or four more up along the length of it. And then one at the very tip like this. Now, if we look at the timeline, you'll see that there have been positioned key frames set for each puppet pin. As I set them down into the feather. And what this means is I can now select my puppet effect and I can move these pins around and actually hand animate the deformation of this feather, the problem with doing it this way. And it may already be obvious to you is that if I'm not careful, I could stretch the artwork out and doing this by hand is going to be really, really tedious and not very efficient or easy to do. So what we need is a way of keeping the distance between these pins constant so that we don't accidentally stretch out our artwork.
For the full transcript visit: som.bz/2vZknr2

[@AliHassan-fb8oo]

"That's quite lovely...isn't it?" was more smoother than feather movement!!

[@sergiof107]

I just came looking for that comment 😆

[@mqms71]

It's actually a promo for Animation Bootcamp, but I love it, it shows the teaching skills of the instructors 👍🏻🔥

[@busimo]

everything is promo for everything. you are a promo for yourself. enjoy the value

[@daannielism]

@@busimo you're momo

[@davidp158]

Brilliant! I never noticed the transform tool in the graph editor.

[@abdessalem2069]

Excellent and great tuto ... Thank You

[@by.machin]

Excelent!! I love the way you teach guys! From Venezuela I desire you health for everyone

[@marlison.vinicius]

I'm in love with this channel 😍

[@oakhousemedia]

So good to hear Joey teaching again.

[@LucasNoce]

We are the oldies now, only we remember Joey doing the 21days of motion

[@jimmwagner]

This is great. Thanks!

[@karungany6968]

Super helpful! Thanks Joey & co. 😅👍

[@Mohammed6297]

Cant wait for animation bootcamp to start!!!!

[@osmannurit]

It seems like im gonna spend a lot of time in this youtube channel. Great content. You keep my motivation up!

[@zohaibmalik994]

Great tutorial.

[@giaselma9281]

so lovely and graceful ~!

[@PanewsONE]

Quite lovely indeed!

[@olghinavideo]

this is SO SICK!!!!!

[@sweetisland3410]

very helpful, thanks

[@2592Thomas]

thanks a lot!

[@sheepseaexplorer]

I need to take this course immediately.

[@marwamustafa5329]

Very helpful tutorial.. Keep it up 🙏

[@jaminhtaylor4771]

Incredible

[@sepidehAhmadi_1989]

amazing ...

[@bleupencil]

I was working on something related to this just a few days ago and all the videos I searched and watched couldn't explain it in a way I could understand, where you've done it in less than 10 minutes...... thank you so much for this T____T

[@quizzzy7657]

Just peeped your youtube. Amazing stuff you got going on, Amanda! I'm inspired!

[@rohithande9750]

thankyou for this man,ill surely tag you .it was very helpful

[@realpixelsaga]

Lovely

[@artur_ry]

Tnx!

[@vamboo8918]

Thanks

[@rizkiaprita]

SENSEII!

[@kiandraplummer2095]

that was lovely, HA!

[@user-ux1un9dd4o]

thanks

[@aim__freakz8499]

nice!

[@TutorialsZone250]

Love from Nepal

[@wesleyphung738]

the cc bend effect is super fast solution and it works for simpler designs

[@rananawito3526]

It does yes, but it doesn’t have an offset option, so it’s not always the best solution.

[@alentomal3248]

Is there a transform option in the graph editor panel???!!! :O Great stuff. I will join this school surely.

[@FranklinNin]

Very good, but there should be a way to do it with expression, like using "index+" or something like that.

[@ceylonecreativetv7512]

Good

[@artifexrex1578]

ily

[@hurray5083]

I am a newbie in this kind of animation. Do rubberhose have this kind of function?

[@karmanderdimdung223]

i wish you had shown how to add bones the vanilla way. using plugins and extensions is faster but not knowing underlying techniques can be harmful in the long run.

[@fullhdismorethanenough]

After effects is all about tricks

[@ashaagrawal4800]

i can t get the bones tool

[@JeahnLaffitteAdventures]

The OG! The big enchilada! The head of Baldness! Joey Korenman 😎

[@realpixelsaga]

The head Honcho

[@2098gian]

i dont know why i can´t download the project

[@BelaribiAbdelkader]

Hi , what is the name of this programme

[@girlshapedrobot]

For some reason my artwork gets weird and will kinda distort or be cut off. Or the puppet pin doesn't follow the artwork as it's transformed. Am I missing something here?

[@anassabih8420]

disable continuasly rasterize on the layer and it should work

[@amitdalvi1491]

This is treasure. I want to learn animation boot camp course but cost is too high in Indian currency 😶

[@ripwildy2022]

(pssst...there are some forums/torrent sites where you can find courses like these for free 😶)

[@itsspanache]

do you receive a certificate after completing the course?

[@schoolofmotion]

You certainly do!

[@itsspanache]

@@schoolofmotion thank you for the response. can i ask what kind of certificate?

[@schoolofmotion]

That would be a certificate of completion or a certificate of attendance based on the percentage of work that you complete during the session :)

[@alisrryegenoglu2481]

could be done a lot easier with cc bend

[@karimmamdouh6246]

what is cc bend ?

[@kakuhikirekanengyere7881]

The project files are hidden on MARS

[@banigrisson]

Its beautiful! But this guy has never had a frather in his hand... They just dont bend like that lol

[@Alienbikers-in-India]

Men, did you see real feather-pen?! It not bend at all. Except if it is made from ostrich's feather.

[@shawn.m.schmidt]

Cool video, except a feather, doesn't actually move that way. At all.

[@kakuhikirekanengyere7881]

I am sorry but I will give you a dislike and probably another for claiming there are project files and making it hard to find them because you have another agenda.