Let's add a background to give some more context so I could add this background to this composition. But to keep things a little bit cleaner, I'm going to take this hero to drag it into a new composition and now that's a pre comp within this hero three comp which I'm going to re title into our Hero Comp version two First let's add a background so I can take my shape tool, change it to the rectangle, turn off the stroke, changed the filled too, sort of like a light blue for the sky, something like that. And then double click. And now this is a shape layer. You could do this with a solid layer as well and I'll just rename this to sky. Next let's add a ground. So taking the rectangle tool, changing the color. I don't have anything selected in my timeline so I can change the color too. So like a brown or gray or something like that. And now let's create a rectangle down here. I'll rename this ground and let's just put it, I'll put it behind our Hero, something like that. You'll notice that...

in my original version there's like these stripes, which I thought just add a little bit more texture. I mean it looks a little bit more well designed anyways. So what I can do is just take my rectangle one, duplicate it, let's change the color with that. Selected just to something a little bit lighter and then now with this selected, I can just press down on my keyboard, shift down to move it down just a little bit, Let me duplicate it one more time. With that selected, I will change the color again, something maybe even darker and then with it selected, shift down on my keyboard. Okay, so now we have sort of a layered ground which I think looks good. And then let's add the buildings in the background. So take my rectangle tool, let's just pick gray and let's just create so these buildings and we can actually, you know, change the colors and shapes but we can make our superhero a little bit smaller if we want something like that looks pretty good, whoops me like that. Okay, so now for some of these let's just click in, change up the color just a little bit two. Yeah, that looks pretty good. Let's put these behind our ground. I'll call this building. Okay now let's make our superhero just a little bit smaller so press scale, Change it to 75%. Let's put him on the ground still. So if we scrub through this, we can still see he does his sort of squat on the ground and next we have to animate our background. So we want to have the ground in the buildings moved down after he jumps up and then we'll add some clouds to see that he's like flying through the air 1st. Let's parent the buildings to the ground. Just take the pick, whip comparing it to the ground so whatever happens to the ground happens to the buildings, let's go right when he starts to leave like when he would leave the ground like something like there set a key frame for position and then go forward depending on how fast our superhero flies and dragged down and we can change this up. So let's play through this little bit that looks pretty good, we can add some easy, easy just to give it a little bit more of a pop. That looks pretty good actually. And let's also add some motion blur to the ground and the building layer and enable it once the buildings on the ground leave the frame though, it's kind of hard to tell what this superman is doing. Is he flying is he's just stuck in the middle of the air. That's why we need to add more context with clouds. So what I'm gonna do is take our lips tool and we've created closet before in this class so you know how to do it, I'm not going to do it with a mask of a solid layer actually I just want them to not be feathered, I just want them to have solid edges. So I'm just going to take the ellipse tool, create our cloud just like so I'll call this cloud one now let's animate it. So this one we can have right about here press P to bring up position, move it up above our frame and then go down or just forward in time just a little bit until you think it would be below our frame and drag it below our frame and we can play through it and see it didn't go too fast. Yeah, I went way too fast so let's extend these key frames. Cool. Now if we think oh well we want that to appear a little bit earlier we can just take this whole layer and drag to the left. Cool right, and we probably want to add some motion blur to it, but while I'm building it out I'm just going to leave motion blur off so that I can work a little bit faster. Okay cool so now what I can do is take my tool, my lips tool and create another cloud. So let's just create maybe something that's a little bit bigger that will appear in front of our superhero again to give him just a little bit more context, call it cloud too, move it in front like so I'll put here cloud one behind our hero and actually behind our buildings to not that it necessarily matters, yep. No it won't matter. And I can actually just copy and paste the position key frames for this other one in front of on this cloud. So here I can paste so now I might have to adjust them. So if I press P and go to this first one, I got to make sure that it's off the frame, then go to this last one and yeah it's off the frame too. So let's just play through this. That looks pretty good. Now the fastest way to sort of create more clouds based off of these two is to duplicate them. So if I press command d. for cloud three and then I press a to bring up the anchor point, I can move it to the left and that doesn't mess up my position animation. Then I'll just take this layer and drag to the right so it's happening a little bit later. Then I'll just duplicate cloud one, press a to bring up the anchor point, drag it to the left. This one should be happening a little later so I'll just drag the whole layer to the right, the timeline moving around like so awesome. And then just keep doing that. Alright, so I've added a bunch, I think that's pretty good. Maybe we end our animation a little bit earlier. Let's just go in and I'm going to close everything down, make sure I have motion blur enabled for everything except I'm not going to actually enable motion blur for our hero itself. And that looks pretty good after watching this, I realized that his he stands in his squad a little bit too long so what I can do is go into our hero too open up our key frames and let's actually take these first two key frames and drag them to the right so that the squat happens and it's a little bit shorter. Yeah, maybe even kind of just squats and then goes right into his leap. So we might want to just start this comp a little bit later. Something like this awesome. Now we have the basic motion of the background of our superhero. We're getting really close. Hopefully by now you understand if you want you can animate you know, a kneel down instead of the squat that's perfectly fine. To me you can even animate a walk cycle of him walking in. You just have to animate the legs that way and move the torso from left to right however you want in the next lesson. What I'm gonna do is add a couple more details, a little bit of movement to the cape and then add that texture effect to make it look a little bit more designed.

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Philip Ebiner

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Adding the Animated Background

Adding the Animated Background

Lesson Info

88. Adding the Animated Background

Lessons

Class Updates & My Favorite CC 2020 Updates

Understand the After Effects Workspace

Starting a New Composition

CC 2018 Update - Starting a New Composition from Footage

Adding Media to Your Project and the Timeline

Using the Basic After Effects Tools

Create a Perfect Circle, Alignment, and Shape Colors

Working in the Timeline

Layer Properties

Quiz: After Effects Basics

Animating in After Effects

Position, Scale, and Rotation Animations

Tips to Make Your Animations Look More Nautral

Using the Graph Editor

Challenge - Bouncing Ball

Solution - Bouncing Ball

Quiz: Animating with Keyframes

Working with Solid Layers and the Ken Burns Effects

Working with Shape Layers, Strokes, and Paths

Adding Layer Styles like Drop Shadow, Bevel, and Gradients

Shape Effects - Trim Path Animations, Wiggle, and Zig Zag

Quiz: Shapes and Solid Layers

Track Matte Animations - Make Layers Appear and Disappear

Using Pre-Compositions to Group Layers

Easily Reverse Complicated Animations

Playing with Time

Blend Modes

Stabilize Shaky Footage

CC 2018 Update - Previewing and Favoriting Fonts

CC 2019 Update - Responsive Design Time

CC 2019 Content Aware Fill

CC 2019 Create Motion Graphic Templates

Quiz: Important After Effects Skills

Intro to Motion Graphics Projects

Clean Lower Third

Logo Reveal Animation Bumper

Colorful Transition

Text with Mask Path Animation

Text Bubble Animation

Weather App 1

Weather App 2

Weather App 3

Quiz: Motion Graphics Projects

Flat Animation Challenge

Phil Designs his Flat Animation Scene

Animating Fireworks with the Repeater Effect

Removing Green Screen Background

Adding a Background that Matches the Foreground

Adding Motion to a Still Image with the Puppet Tool

Adding Movement with the Ripple Effect

Quiz: Flat Animation Challenge

Intro to 3D

Swinging 3D Text Animation

Build Out Your 3D Composition

Animating Our 3D Scene

Create Stars in After Effects

Quiz: Green Screen (Chromakeying)

Using the Rotoscope Tool

Cleaning Up Your Edges

Finishing Our Rotobrush Animation

Quiz: 3D Animations and the Camera Tool

Easy Screen Replacement with Masks

Replacing a Screen Version 2

Screen Replacement with Mocha

CC 2019 Update - Native Mocha AE Plugin

Quiz: Rotoscoping

Using the Puppet Pin Tool

Animating Your Puppet Pins

Animated Blinking Eyes

Adding Perspective with Animated Clouds

CC 2018 Update - Advanced Puppet Pin Tool

Quiz: Screen Replacements

Applying Text Animation Presets

Create a Page Turn Effect with CC Page Turn