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Solution - Bouncing Ball

Let's build this from scratch. So the first thing I'm going to do is create a new composition. This composition is 1000 by 1000 pixels wide The time could actually be four seconds. My animation is a little less than four seconds and I'll call this bouncing ball to So that's pretty good. Fres rate 23 976. That's fine. And I'll click OK first let's just set up the background. So what we'll do is use our rectangle tool to create the sky and so I'll choose my fill color as sort of a light blue. And one thing that I don't know if I taught yet, but if you want a square or a rectangle to fill your frame, all you have to do is double click the rectangle tool up here and that creates a new shape layer and it fills the frame. Cool, right? And I'll rename this sky. So clicking on the shape layer, pressing return and then calling it sky. Now let's go back to our rectangle, change the fill to gray, whoops. Now actually that's a good lesson for you if you have this sky layer selected and then I chan...

ged the color, it's going to change the color of this layer. So I have to actually select off of that sky layer. Now choose Phil color and change it to like a gray and then I'll just create a rectangle for the bottom and I'll rename this ground. So these are our two background layers and I'm going to lock those so I don't move them. Don't do anything to them. I'm going to wait to create the clouds. So now I just want to create the ball. So I'll take the ellipse tool click filled to change the color. I like this bright red than to create a perfect sphere, shift, click and drag. Okay, so it doesn't necessarily matter how big it is, but something like that looks pretty good. I want to make sure that the anchor point is in the center because I'm actually going to add a little bit of a stretch to this ball when it bounces. So choose the pan behind tool. It's kind of confusing because this looks like it's the anchor point for the layer, but it's actually the anchor point for the ellipse itself. So make sure that you don't have the lips selected but the shape layer itself. Now you see the anchor point. Now I can click it and then using the control button on your PC or command button on a Mac, just drag and it locks it to the center when you kind of drag it to the center. Now, let me rename this ball. And one thing that will help me out is just to color this red. So change the color. So now I know that this layer is the red color awesome. So the first thing that I want to do is add some motion to this. So basically it's going to start up from above the frame, bounced down, hit the ground and then bounce up a few times. So I'll show you the original 11 more time. So it starts out, drops one bounce and then kind of like a little tiny bounce at the end. So let's use our key frames to create this animation for position, bring a position with the keyboard shortcut. P. Now let's move this up above the frame of our composition holding shift so it locks it in the vertical or the horizontal axis so it doesn't move to the side. Now once it's above frame just set a position key frame. Now I want to start out doing this kind of orderly. So what I'll do is go to 12 frames and now drag it down holding shift again until it reaches and it's just touching the cement. So if it goes a little bit over it's fine because that kind of looks like it's you know on top of the cement and not just like hitting it and your view is completely vertical with it, So that looks good. And then we'll go back up to 1/2 and I'll just use this number right here to drag up the vertical position something like so we can play around with the positioning later because if it goes too high it looks a little natural unnatural depending on the speed. Now I'm going to go to 1. seconds. Which is basically where this 12 frame mark is. And I want to move it exactly where this key frame was so I can just copy and paste this so copy it, command C on my Mac control C on your Pc and then command V to paste. Now I'm going to go to two seconds and I'm going to move it up but not as high as we went before. And the cool thing is that you can kind of see the key frames. It's kind of hard for you to see. I know, but there's these little squares. Those are where the key frames are that we set. So if we go here, that square is right there on that key frame and you can see it. So I know I don't want to go above there, Go to 12 frames. I still have that key frame copied. So I can press command v and paste that key frame. Now let's go to three seconds. Let's go up just a little bit back to 12 and then we'll just do like a little bounce at the end. It doesn't have to be as long just up and go forward and paste again. Now let's play through this and you can tell me what you think is wrong with this. The motion is all wacky the way that a bouncing ball bounces and the speed of it does not look like this. We can add motion blur, which will help a little bit. So check on motion blur for that layer and then also for the timeline itself still not great at all. Another thing we will do is add easy ease. So select all of these right click key frame assistant. Easy. Easy. So that ramps the speed but it doesn't ramp it the right way. If you think of a bouncing ball, what it should do is should go down really fast, hit the ground really fast and then when it goes up to this point, that's when it slows down, it slows at the peak of the bounce and then it goes down and it gains speed and it's gaining speed until it hits the ground and then it shoots back up. And so what we're going to do is that these key frames where it's at the top. We're going to go into the graph editor. So click graph editor. If you don't see this and it doesn't look like this, make sure you're on the speed graph, not the value graph. And now with these key frames we can select them and take the handles and drag out. So for both handles of this key frame, we're going to drag to the left and to the right. So that eases the motion and it kind of hangs there in the air bounces down. Then go to that next key frame, then let's drag out those handles go to the next one where it's up in the air, drag out the handles. It doesn't have to be perfect. We can play around with the speed later and lastly for this very last one you got the little handles over there. So let's play through this. Okay? It's getting better, right? It's not perfect, but it's getting better. one thing that I don't like is that it comes down to slow and so there's different things we can do. One thing we can do is shorten the distance between this key frame and this one. So if I move this over here to the right, it speeds up another thing we can do is actually move the ball further away so that the the distance that it has to go is further meaning it will go faster. So let me zoom out and show you what I'll do. So if I change this to 12.5% then I go on this first key frame and then I drag up actually start the ball from way up here. Now, if I show you it goes a lot faster. All right, so this looks good. But the motion when it bounces on the floor doesn't look so good. It's still sort of ramps down. We don't want it to ramp down. We want it to spring back up automatically. So with the graph editor selected go into your position. And now for these handles for each of these key frames where it's bouncing on the ground, drag them in so it's an even faster bounce. So I'll go to the next one drag it in like, so This one drag it in and then for the last one right here we'll drag it into. Okay, so now if we play through this one nice, it's looking better. Okay, there's one more thing that's kind of a natural and that's the fact that between each balance, it's the same amount of time. So it's one second from the time it goes down and bounces to the top and then from this top to when it pops up again. And that's not natural because when a balancing ball bounces the amount of time it takes for each balance gets shorter and shorter and shorter and you can see this if you bounce the ball outside. So what we want to do is make these key frames for each bounce shorter. So for this first one I think it's fine. But for the 2nd 1 we should make it a little shorter. So let's take all of these key frames, drag them in a little bit, take all of them drag them in. Now we could keep doing that for all the key frames but let me show you a quicker way to do that. It's a little bit better So I'll undo what we can do is I select all of these key frames, not the first two. Then I clicked the last one holding option down on a Mac or if you're on a pc, click the last one and drag in and now that squeezes all of these key frames together and it keeps them uniform. So those last ones, even though these ones are a little bit closer together, it's still squeezing them together at the same rate as these ones are being squeezed together. So that looks good, a little bit faster for this bounce. Now let's select these ones, not the first four now and again holding option down, we'll click the last one and squeeze it in and now let's just see what this looks like. Okay, this last bounce right here is definitely a little too long. So let's actually just take these in, dragging him quite a bit. Probably this last one to just drag these in. So it's a combination of using that all click and just moving things around. That's how I use after effects anyways. Okay, maybe it's a little bit too short for this last one. So we'll just extend it sort of a dramatic bouncing ball, in fact. Cool, so this looks pretty cool. I think the motion is very close, you can go in and tweak it and keep playing with it. But I want to move on to another technique that I did which was actually adding a little bit of a squeeze to the ball. You can see here when it reaches the ground, it kind of squeezes and then it bounces back up and that's to show the impact of it hitting the ground. Okay so we'll use a scale animation. So bring up the S or scale key frame and we want to go to when it hits the ground right there. How do we know that's when it hits the ground? If we actually bring up P we should actually put our timeline indicator there first and then scale. So let's first just set a key frame. So now if we press you we can bring up both key frames or all the key frames set for this and We're going to start out at 100% so we can move this key frame over to the left. But here we want it to be squeezed. So let's unlock the constrained proportions lock. So now we can change the width or the height individually. And then let's just squeeze the height to something like 70. What this does though is it also moves the ball up or it doesn't look like it's hitting the ground. So we'll just actually with the selected we can just hit the down arrow keys or shift down to move it even further. one click at a time or one but impressed at a time. Make sure you're on the key frame where this position is though. So now let's go to this next one and up here it should be at 100%. So let's just copy this first key frame. paste it. Let's go to this next one and you'll see that there's sort of an error. I can't move my time indicator right on this key frame. And that's because when we use this little trick where we selected multiple key frames and we did the option or the squeezing of these key frames. Sometimes it moves the key frames off of the exact frame of our composition. I know that's a little confusing but what we can do is just take this key frame and just move it to the side slightly. Now let's squeeze it. I'm gonna squeeze it a little less. Last time it was at 70. This time I'm going to be at 80 again. I'm going to move it down though so it's hitting the ground at this key frame, Let's make sure that we have our scale selected and then paste it so it's at 100%. Again here we can't get to this key frame exactly. So I'm just going to go close to it, move this key frame to the side and now I'm going to set our Scale squeezed to 90%. And then just make it go down just a little bit. Another way you can quickly go from key frame to key frame is the J and K buttons on your keyboard. If I press K. It goes to the next key frame. If I press J it goes to the previous key frame so I can just scan through these and now here I can With my selection tool selected, I can set it at 100%. So make sure I have it selected. And then press command pace because I still have that selected K. To go to the next key frame. This one will just set to 95%. Move it down slightly. Okay, again to go here And select the layer and press paste. And now I'm just going to leave it at 100% because for that last bounce there's not as much pressure and it's not going to really bounce that much. Let's easy ease these bouncing so or the scale. So let's select all of them F nine on your keyboard. Now one thing that looks a little funny is that it starts to squeeze before it even hits the ground, which doesn't make sense. Why would a ball squeeze while it's in midair? So we're going to have to go into our graph editor for scale. So select scale key frames, click the graph editor and now we're actually going to go to the value graph. This is how we adjust the value. So you can see that here on this first key frame, the height of this ball is 100% here at this key frame is down to 70, so we don't want it to be at 70 at this point. So I'm going to take this handle and drag it up kind of like so so it actually doesn't really squeeze until it hits the bottom and then it bounces up, reaches full peak size and then again for this one going to drag select that key frame, Drag this handle up so you can see that we're actually staying at 100% until right about there where it bounces on the ground. And then lastly for this key frame. Same things like that key frame points, drag the value up for the beforehand of this animation. Awesome. I really like how this is coming out. I think it's even better than the original one that I made. Now let's add just that last detail of the clouds. So take your rectangle tool, make sure you don't have anything selected on your timeline. Let's change the fill two White. And actually it's the ellipse tool. Sorry, not the rectangle tool. Now let's just click and create one circle. Remember how I talked about shape layers. You're actually creating individual shapes within this one layer. So if I just keep creating circles, I can create sort of a cool cloud and it's all within this one shape layer that we can animate but it has all of these different ellipses. So if I close that down and let's rename this cloud one and I'll drag this down beneath this ground or at least beneath the the ball so that the ball goes in front of it and now let's add a little bit of motion. Press p to bring up the position. Set a key frame wherever you want. And now I'm going to drag that key frame to the very beginning of this composition. Now I'm just going to drag to the left, just a tiny bit subtlety is really good with animations and now I'm going to move this key frame all the way to the right, see how I did that. Sometimes instead of moving my timeline indicator all the way to the end or to the beginning to set my key frames, I just said it and then I moved the key frame where I want it to go so that cloud is moving, you know, it's it's moving actually relatively quickly. Let's create another cloud. So with the lips tool with no layer selected down here, I can just again click here and I'll make one for this one a little bit smaller so it looks like it's more in the distance and in fact when you have a cloud or something moving in the distance it appears as if it's moving slower. So I want to make sure that I make sure that the position animation is slower than the cloud 11 is. And by slower I just mean it moves less. So at the beginning press P to bring up position. Set a key frame. Now let's go forward in time. Now let's just move it. I'm just gonna move it to the right a little bit, it creates a little bit more of a dynamic effect where the clouds are kind of parting. I thought that was cool. And so now that last cloud in the behind you know, it looks like it's further behind really it's you know, it's not a three D. Space in this after effects composition, even though we can do three D. Work in after effects and we'll go over that later in this course. But here we have this cloud moving in the background, cloud moving a little bit faster in the foreground and are bouncing ball awesome. What do you guys think? Were you able to get something relatively close to this? I know there were a lot of sort of more intricacies that I went through with the graph editor and the scale and the squeezing, but I hope that you were able to follow this project, you know, maybe this isn't something that you're going to use in a real world situation for your own brand or company or one of your videos. But knowing these techniques and knowing how to be intricate with it, have those little subtle motions. Have the little subtle sort of squeezing of the ball after it bounces, making sure that the timing is good, making sure that you have that motion blur is all good. We can turn on motion blur for the clouds as well. But since the clouds are moving so slowly, you're not going to get much motion blur. If they were moving faster you would awesome. I hope you enjoyed this lesson and this section of the course. If you have any questions, please let me know otherwise, we'll see you in another one.