Intro to Adobe After Effects Animation, Part 4

Hi, welcome back to educator.com. This next lesson is animation, part four.0000

This is a dissolve montage.0006

A lot of times I am asked by clients to create sort of a montage whether it is a wedding or a funeral.0008

And I thought it would be nice to teach you a quick way to do this.0015

Usually I am given like a whole CD full of photographs.0019

And you know they are just slowly dissolving on each other over and over.0024

So, one thing I like to do is I like to open up Photoshop.0030

And I kind of like to get in there and make sure that.0038

Again, the more prep work you do in situations the better.0040

So, for instance, we are going to kind of break this scene down here.0048

This is the scene in six gun Sally where we have kind of a photo montage.0055

This are all the men she is about to get revenge on.0061

And do a quick little RAM preview to remind you of what we are doing here.0066

That is a real simple effect but when you have 50 to 100 pictures it can get overwhelming.0074

So, what I can do is once I have all the photographs in my possession.0080

What I can do is take them into Photoshop.0088

And in this case there are only 6 pictures.0090

But here is where I can kind of crop all the pictures.0092

If you are scaling the pictures or zooming into a person in a picture.0097

You might want to have your pictures a little bigger.0101

So, let us go through this real quick.0105

There are 6 pictures. Real simple.0106

If I wanted to make any tweaks in the pictures I can do them here.0110

I can also add effects in After Effects.0113

So, I will close this and let us jump into After Effects.0117

So, here we have our photomontage.0122

Now, in that comp if I double-click this.0125

Here is the breakdown. This is what it looks like inside that composition.0129

You can see they are just basically dissolving on each other.0136

Now, if we select all of these and open them up.0140

As you can see they all have the opacity key frame stopwatch turned on.0146

So, just see that we can hit T. It is for opacity.0153

And as you can see, here is our kind of map of what is going on.0158

It is always good to get into project in someone else dialectic.0160

You can actually purchase premade After Effects project.0163

You can see the whole breakdown, you know.0166

It is nice to study the way things are built.0168

So, as you can see here what is happening if I were to go frame by frame here.0173

Is, you know, this first layer starts with this here. This group of men here.0178

Let me turn off our title safe for a moment.0186

And if we page up frame by frame we can see the next picture dissolving in.0190

So, basically it is kind of an editing term when a scene or photograph is dissolving on to another.0200

There is a cross dissolved or you are fading in, fading out.0208

In this case it is like a cross dissolved.0211

So, as you can see go to the next picture, frame by frame.0213

So, these are about, you know. These are about 10 frames.0220

At the end of each layer here it just stacks on each other.0227

So, if we did this from scratch.0231

Let us jump over to this comp here. Old photos dissolve.0235

And there is nothing in these layers. They have not been treated yet.0242

Which, by the way, this black solid at the top here.0246

This is if we want to add sort of a vignette on the top there.0250

And we kind of do that with a mask.0254

You want to open this up because there is a mask that has been applied.0256

If you want me to turn on the visibility, there is our mask.0259

We can turn that on and off. This gives it more feeling.0264

OK, so let us lock that for now.0271

So, here we have our 6 layers from Photoshop.0273

You can see if I move them around they all appear.0277

But in this case we want them to all to have the same properties.0283

So, a quick way to do that would be to select all of these.0287

And instead of spacing them out manually we can select all the layers and go up here to animation.0293

We go to key frame assistance and there is a little option here called sequence layers.0302

And what we want to do is we want these to overlap. So we turn on overlap.0309

In this case we want them to go dissolve front layer.0316

And you can even set the time of how long it should dissolves.0321

In this case let us try 22.0324

So, you can see while we open this up real quick.0331

Hit T and it is applied. It dissolved to every layer.0335

You want to get a RAM preview here. That it is ready to go.0341

Again, if you have got like 20 to 100 pictures this comes in handy.0350

OK, so that is our dissolve montage.0356

Thank you for watching educator.com. I will see you soon.0359