Encounter – AE Animation Tips & Details

For this manip, I used After Effects to animate it – if you also want to do this, there are some tips you might find useful listed below 🙂

For animation in AE, there are some things you need to keep in mind that feel a bit “off” when you are used to Photoshop:

When you prepare your Photoshop file for import to AE, make sure that you get rid of all folders that have layers with different blend modes in them – when you import a PS file all folders end up as pre-composites and the whole thing acts as one layer with one blend mode, which makes you loose the effects and can look super strange on import
On the same note: make sure you reduce your amount of layers and keep only what you need to keep the look and the possibility of animation – otherwise you will get lost in your layers easily; don’t forget to name your layers!
Animate the details first, for example the swan’s wings – this was done using the puppet warp took which works similar to what you know from PS, but you can animate each pin individually
Make sure you don’t forget to animate any light effects that belong to the thing you’re animating. For example I also animated the swan’s highlights to follow the movement; where I couldn’t make it work because some parts were too small to be caught by the puppet tool, I added a mask in AE in faded the effect out where it didn’t fit.
Once you are done animating your image, use the composition that was created for whatever else you may like: now you can scale and pan and fade your complete animation into and out of whichever size of frame you want, for example for use in your instagram story or feed without having to worry about the right ratio and size from the start.