Login Screen Challenge Part 2
This week I wanted to teach Anthony a few basics of animation in Adobe After Effects (AE). To get started, we discussed a simple animation for a loading screen that could pop up in between login screens. Thinking about loading bars and objects that spin we came up with the classic windmill obstacle in mini golf.
I first created 2 pieces for the windmill in Adobe Illustrator. The base, and the fan that catches the wind. I dragged both of these elements into the AE project window to load them into the program. From there I explained the 3 main panels we would be dealing with today. The project panel, the composition panel, and the timeline panel. The project panel contains all the assets you will be using for the project. The composition panel contains the screen your animation will be taking place. Lastly, the timeline panel contains the elements you see in your animation across a certain amount of time.
The next step was to animate the windmill fan. Dragging the windmill assets from the project panel to the timeline instantly creates a new composition containing the assets you dragged over. With the fan selected in the timeline, I hit the letter R on the keyboard. This hotkey opens up the rotation options for the fan layer. From there, clicking on the stopwatch icon next to the word rotation creates a keyframe on your timeline.
Keyframes denote when we want something to change in the animation. So far we have created one keyframe. We need to create one more at a different time on the timeline to tell the fan to rotate from one keyframe position to the second. To do this we dragged the playhead on the timeline from zero seconds to two seconds. Then, with the playhead at the two second marker, we change the first zero next to rotation to one. This means the fan will spin 360 degrees within two seconds. That’s it! We have successfully animated our windmill. From there I added the Loading text and clouds that look like the top down view of a golf course to keep everything within the theme of mini golf. Maybe I should change “loading” to “Fore!”
