The Predki Animation Trick in After Effects

In this tutorial you'll learn about the importance of having a "go to" move for your animations in After Effects.
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Partial, Auto-Generated Transcript Below 👇
Joey Korenman (00:16): Hello friend, Joey here at school of motion and welcome to day eight of 30 days of after effects. Now I know you want to make everything you touch the most amazing thing you've ever done, but at the same time, you're going to run into small budgets and short schedules, and sometimes you just got to get stuff done. So in those situations, you've got to reach into your bag of tricks and pull out something. You can execute very quickly that you know how to do, and that won't take you a long time. So what I'm going to show you today is one of those tricks. And I didn't even come up with this one, my good friend, Kyle Predki and incredible animator. He came up with this move, which oddly enough, I call the Predki now Kyle and I used to work together and I saw him do this over and over and over again on different projects.
Joey Korenman (00:57): This was just sort of his go-to move whenever he needed to animate something and he didn't have time to think about it. So I stole it from him and I'm going to teach it to you, which he's actually cool with because I'm giving him credit. And I posted a link to his website, along with this lesson. What I'm hoping it does though, is give you some ideas about some things you can do that can then go into your bag of tricks and you can pull them out whenever you need. Now don't forget sign up for a free student account. So you can grab the project files from this lesson, as well as assets from any other lesson on this site. Now let's hop into after effects and get started. So like I said, this is just going to be a tutorial to show you guys one trick.
Joey Korenman (01:37): And I'm not usually a huge fan of tutorials that just sort of show you one trick. Um, but this is actually a little different, um, you know, when you're animating stuff and you're, you're flying and you got to get stuff done, sometimes you just got to pull one of your tricks out of your bag of tricks. Now this trick, I call it the Predki and it's named after a good friend of mine, Kyle Predki, uh, who was an animator at toil. Um, and I saw him do something like this on a few projects and, uh, I really liked the way it looks. Um, and so I sort of stole it. Um, and, uh, you know, a wise man once said that, uh, you know, the best artists steal. Um, so I stole this from Kyle, but I am giving him credit. So hopefully that's okay.
Joey Korenman (02:22): So what I'm going to show you is a first of all, how you can get this kind of bouncy, cool cookie animation, um, and then I'll show you of course, a way to customize it, um, and kind of make it your own and really make it flexible. All right. So let's start out, um, with a new comp, um, and let's just make this, you know, your standard 19 20, 10 80, and I'm just gonna make a star and we'll just do something really, really simple here. Um, just to show you the, the concept of this, you know, one of the most common things you're going to do in motion design is have something, you know, have like a background or an empty screen and reveal something right. Type or a logo or whatever it is. And there's, you know, an infinite number of ways to do that. Um, and Mo we know some of my favorite ways were just by using good animation and making things move in an interesting way.
Joey Korenman (03:16): So to use the Predki, uh, if we go back and we just kinda look at this, you know, kind of in slow motion here, you can see that there's rotation happening. There's, you know, these letters are scaling up each of them from zero, and it's almost like they're on a spring kind of, you know, swinging back and forth like this. Right. So the way I set this up is I, uh, I first moved the anchor points. Okay. So I'm gonna hit Y and Y lets me click the anchor point and move it around and I'm going to move it. So it's down and off to the side a little bit. Okay. And the reason I do that is because now when I rotate that layer, it kind of rotates like it's on a spring. Right. And the idea is I want to have this thing start scaled down and maybe here, and then as it scales up, I want it to swing back and then kind of land.

[@maurotunes]

man, i really apreciate the proper way u speak english! so that i can understand 100%. thanks a lot

[@TheJohnRowley]

I started off watching this thinking "yeah, I can make that easy", but as I continued to watch my thoughts changed to "This way of making it is far faster and more flexible than I would have made it". Thank you

[@TheJohnRowley]

(learnt some things about editing in the graph editor too - will now go watch your graph editor video)

[@3432773]

thank you so so much for sharing this with the internet! you are awesome! and your solutions are really cool!

[@sentiny]

Thank you, It was very helpful.

[@Iluhastecenko]

Хорошый урок! Thank u so much Joey 👍

[@alenajalakas6710]

Thank you very much! By the way predki means ancestors in russian

[@VideoChoreography]

This seems so obvious I suspect I may be wrong but instead of inverting the transform box to go from CCW to CW, why not just add the expression -value to the original keyframes on rotation?

[@Evie_Ruby]

15:38

[@Evie_Ruby]

18:08

[@AdventuresinFabrication]

How do you uncompress a X-Zip file, I can't open the project files and can't find anything on the web on how to do it?

[@schoolofmotion]

you can just change the file extension to .zip

[@hassanabulwafa1382]

Hey Joey, how are you? I face a problem that I can't download the project file if you can help me, please it always fails when I try to download it I don't know why. thank you for your effort.

[@hassanabulwafa1382]

I got it I must use WinZip program to extract the files

[@SaurabhKumarr245]

He little bit looking Johnny sins

[@dublinphotoart]

Where is AMY! 😢😢 I would listen to Amy every day! She is the coolest! 😂😍

[@veroniquerenault1324]

Pourquoi ne pas mettre le début du tuto ! Beaucoup trop long les courbes 20 minutes ! Puis vous n'expliquez pas la suite ! Bref ! Du temps de perdu pour moi ! Dommage ! Le final était bien sauf que je ne pourrais jamais le faire toute seule ! Merci quand même !