Okay, so let's take this animation to the next level. So first let's add a background. So in this composition, our flying, I'm gonna press command y and choose sort of a light blue for the sky and I'm going to rename it sky, click OK and put this beneath the owl and then lock it because I'm not really going to do anything with it. Okay. Next let's actually add the blinking eyes. So we're gonna go into our owl pre composition. And I'm actually not going to do this with the puppet tool, but we're gonna use some skills that we've learned in the past lessons to do so. So zoom in pressing Z to get the zoom tool clicking and using the space bar to get my hand told to move it into the center so I can work with it properly. We're going to use the shape tool to cover up the eye. So take the lips tool. It doesn't really matter what color this is because we're going to use it as a track matte. So but just click the brown right there to make sure it's the same color so we can cover the eye complet...

ely. Now I'm going to click in the center and then holding command and shift down, I'm going to create that perfect circle that we all know how to create. Now until it's about the same size as the eye, pressing V. To get my selection tool and then putting it over the eye. That seems perfect if I need to increase the size, I can go into scale pressing up S and bring up the scale just slightly cool. Now I'm going to call this right I or left. I actually actually it's the AL's right eye, but to me it's left high. So this is going to be a track map for the blinking eyelids. So we have to create the blink the eyelid. So let's take the rectangle tool this time it is important that it is the brown. So use the color picker picker to choose the brown or you can make it sort of like a slightly off brown. And then let me turn off the left eye lid. And then I'm going to just draw two rectangles one. I'm going to draw, it's going to be the lower half of this eyeball and then the next one I'm going to draw. It's going to be the top half and you notice that I just clicked and dragged. I didn't create a new layer for each rectangle. There are two rectangles on this one shape layer and that just makes it easier to work with left eye lids, let's put the eyelids underneath the left eye for the track matte option for left eyelid, choose alpha matte left eye. If you don't see the track matte option, click the toggle switches, modes button, that's right down here. Now the left eyelids only show where this left eye is. So let's animate these eyelids up and down. So drop open the rectangle one and rectangle. Two options go down into transform and go to about half a frame or half a second and set a key frame for the position for each of these for the transform rectangle to And then the transform rectangle one then to make it a little cleaner. Press you just so we have those two key frames open Now go back about five frames. So I'm just pressing command left arrow On my keyboard about five frames. Then take each eyelid and move it up and down. So over the top one I'm going to move up For the bottom one. I'm going to move down now this closes like so Then go five frames forward. Command 12345. That's control on APC. And I'm gonna copy this first key frame that I had just created so that's the up position. So now we have our basic blink. So let's keep easy easy so select them. Press F. nine on our keyboard. Go into our graph editor. And for this one we're just going to go into the middle key frame and I can let me zoom in on my timeline so you can get the handles And to take those handles from the Middle one out because it really kind of slows into that one. That looks pretty good. Okay let's get out of our graph editor. And now what I'm gonna do is just copy and paste these key frames kind of sporadically. So I'm gonna just go up here, paste them Go up here. Do one that's kind of quicker. So again right there One right here and May one at the end. Then maybe I will speed some of these up these blinks and kind of it's a funny owl. It's a cartoonish owl so it'll look funny if some are faster. Some are slower. So for this Middle one I'm just going to select all of these three key frames. Press option on my keyboard and then dragged the last one in. That would be all for pc users. Same for these ones. I'm just gonna make a little bit faster just like so so now if we play through this we have our eyelid kind of going in and out. Opening and closing. I think motion blur would will really help. So click that on for this layer. And then also enable it up here. Now to easily make this do this for the right eye. What we can do is just like both of these layers duplicate them by pressing command D let's rename them so we know what we're working with right I. And then for this one right eye lids. And now if I press P what's cool is you know we animated the position of the rectangle within the right eyelids but we didn't animate the position of the actual layer itself and that's what this position is that I just brought up. So now I can literally just move this to the side and it actually probably helps if I go to the key frame where the eye is closed on the timeline drag to the right and now you can see that I can position it exactly where I want it. What I thought looked kind of funny is staggering. The eye blinks with the al just a couple of frames so I'm selecting both these layers and dragging to the right so now they'll left eye closes before the right eye. So let me zoom out and let's see what this looks like. Awesome. So the reason why I did this in the pre comp is it would be a lot harder to do on this layer that's already having the animation with the puppet pins and the position. And you might be saying well fill, you could have done it here in this sequence or this composition and then just parented the eyes and the eyelids to the owl layer. So even if you move it around what happens to the owl layer happens to the eyelids. Well that's true but not for the puppet pin tool. So when you affect the puppet pin tool it doesn't affect things that are parented to it. So that's why I do it in the pre comp. So that now when I puppet pin the pre comp say that 10 times fast everything within that pre comp is affected. So hopefully that makes sense. So now if I add motion blur to the owl, let's see what this looks like. Alright, bringing this up full screen with the tilde key. Alright I think this looks pretty darn cool. We're gonna add some clouds in the next lesson to give some more perspective to this animation. But this is awesome. This is what you can do with free images that you find online. If you search for free icons or free graphics, there's lots of sites out there that give you free, you know, graphics like this. I didn't design this out. This is something I found for free creative commons, animation or graphic and we're able to animate it like this which looks pretty darn natural. So in the next lesson I'm gonna add those clouds. But hopefully you've been enjoying this. I think this was a very fun project. I've had fun and I hope you're having fun learning

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Philip Ebiner

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Animated Blinking Eyes

Animated Blinking Eyes

Lesson Info

69. Animated Blinking Eyes

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