Lessons

Lesson Info

Animation Basics

We open up after effects and we see that we've got some, uh, whole bunch of panels and major areas in this toolbar up at the top and we're not going to go into every single tool and what it does all at once will kind of introduce those as we go on throughout the day but as we open it up we it opens up a cz an untitled project by default and we would start by putting some we can either start by creating the comp which the cop is basically the shell that we're building everything in what is the final project going to be what's the production going to be is it going to be broadcast video? Is it going to just be a simple web animation do you have you know, a size in mind already? Are you just creating something to test with or whatever? Eso knowing that ahead of time helps you just like you would if you're doing your video editing your video production or if you do imprint you know that you're you have a page size and resolution and all of that to consider so it's no different here you hav...

e to know what is my end result going to be and so starting with building a composition is a very important so we come up the composition and then new composition or you can do command in or control and on the p c and there are some pre sets here, and they may vary a little bit between mac and pc, but for the most part, we're going to just be staying in this space today, the seven twenty twenty nine nine seven, which is thirty p ah it's twelve, eighty by seven. Twenty pixels and that's, typically, where I will generate things for for general hd animation. We also see here that we have different aspect ratios that come up when I'm creating animation. I always keep everything in square pixels. That means that there's, no re re sizing going on, we're not squishing video down and then stretching back out during playback. We keep everything it's square pixels, we get the highest resolution, and our pixels are all true and square, and that also makes things easier when you're going back and forth with, like, photoshopped elements like a round ball are things like that, you're not having to deal with things squishing and compressing and distorting on you, so I keep things in square pixel format here, and then our resolution, depending on how complicated the, uh, the project's going to be, we also can change that again in our comp window. As we get to that point, I leave that by default on full than our duration that's important to know how long is the duration of your comp goingto how long's this animation or this segment of the animation going to be it's just set up for right now we leave it at that for seconds and so that creates a composition this is the shell this is where everything is going to happen and of course we it opens up our time line down here and we see all of these really scary things down here so s o by starting with this it populate something in our project window here and that's our cop that's our first comp that's this comp window and you can rename it by right clicking on it and going to rename on then we'll call it our you know, first comp so that's my first comp, so now I've got to put something in there I can start with importing something from from photo shop or video or whatever or I can add text or something I'm going to import something first so I'm going to just right click in here and go to import and then file and I'm going to pull something out of uh my folder here and we'll go to what's going to be our first project as I opened it up I'll just pull this ball in its just a ah layer on a photo shop file we'll see it's a psd file and we can import it as footage or we can import as a composition now the two are going to vary depending on how many layers you have in your photoshopped file. If I've got one layer in my photo shop file, then I may want to just bring it in as footage because I don't have to deal with multiple layers. If I have seven or one hundred layers in my photoshopped file, I may want to bring them all in esol select composition, and what that does is that actually brings it in, creates another folder full of of content and creates another composition that is the size of the photoshopped file. What we're going to concentrate on this one since it's only got one layer in it, we're just going to import it as footage and we'll come back to this dialog box several times today, so we'll be able to go over that some more, so I'm going, teo selected his footage click open and now it comes up with another dialog box and that is, do I emerged the layers? Basically, that means flat num used to photo shop and you emerge all your layers. That kind of comps compresses them together or do I choose a layer? I'm going to choose the layer because I want to retain the transparency behind. The element I've got this little ball I don't want anything behind I don't wanted to bring a background in so I'm just going to select that first layer and I just select ok and okay it's not on my screen where is it? Well it's right here in my project panel I have to actually drag it either down to my timeline or out here into the window one of the other doesn't matter which way you want to do it if you want it to snap to the centre, drag it down to the timeline and let go and it will center it automatically for you so now I've got a comp I've got a layer and nothing's happening, but you'll see even the timeline changes a little bit down here I haven't told it to animate anything yet, so what I've got is a layer on um on my timeline and then I've got this little aargh or sometimes they call it a carrot next teo the tag so I click that troll that down and then there's transform here well, what does that do? I twirl that down and I can see all of my elements here uh we zoom in we can see that they're all in their anchor point position scale rotational passivity and that all looks really scary because there's numbers to deal with here and things to click on so taking out the fear for one thing ignore anchor point right now we'll get to that later position is really simple that's where on this screen does this exist? We're working in two d space right now when we get to three d there will be more options to deal with will have ze space right now it's x and why so x is the access and why is the up and down so we've got those elements and see those numbers change right down here next to position as I drag this around, the numbers all change well the beautiful thing about aftereffects is you can click on that number, click and drag and you can play by the numbers here and that's really important because as you are moving things by the numbers, you can set something specifically to a number and go that's perfect then you can go to another element, another layer or whatever later type in that number and it's going to snap it right to the same place. So it's really important to get comfortable with clicking and moving on numbers as well as it is just clicking and dragging stuff on the screen I see under position when you were removing that around, you see a single number and you mentioned an x and a y on position there's two numbers there's this is x on the left and here is why on the right god okay, thank yu yes there's there's two numbers for two variables I need my glasses that's okay that's why I'm wearing mine so for scale, you'll notice there's a little chain link here and if I roll over that and I get the tool tip there you'll see that that is what constrains the proportions that means if I move one scale one direction it's going to scale both x and y if I unclipped that or I guess click it, which means that de selects it now if I scale it, then I'm scaling just one dimension as I'm clicking and moving, so if I want to go back type one hundred for one hundred percent and hundred hundred percent and re link it now I'm back to where I wass that locks it into position. Another way to scale is to come out here and drag just like he would in photo shop if you're in transform mode so you can do it that way as well. Command z is your friend and unlike photo shop, you don't have to do a step back or step ahead command z lets you undo is many times is you've got set on your preferences who will go over preferences in a minute uh, right now I believe the default is thirty two thirty two undoes because again, when you're working on something that's not working commands easy easy you just going that a rifle and through there and that that really helps rotation there's a couple of ways to do rotation and you can use the numbers which is the way I prefer that does you know, three hundred sixty degrees or you can do how many times it's going to rotate that many degrees so as you're zipping through time that's going to be really important another way is this tool up here at the top right now by default we have the selection tool that's the little arrow cursor that lets us grab stuff and move it around select things do are scaling and all of that well there's a tool here's the rotation tool and you congrats that and drag it and do things is well the danger in this that I have discovered that if you are going a long time and you keep rotating and moving sometimes you may go too far one direction and it will counterintuitively change things for you or you may accidentally turn when too many times and so you manned up getting things going all crazy and wobbly that's why I really suggest that you go by the numbers when it comes to rotation it's very very important that you really keep control especially if you're going along the timeline on then finally we've got opacity which is um fairly self explanatory it's how opaque something is I'm going to hit reset here to get that all cleared back now uh if you don't want to look at the whole transform menu you may have your fifty layers in here and have fifty layers with this theworld down so you see all of these elements at the same time that tends to be a bit crowding one thing that it does allow you to do with the interface is to grab in between the pallets you can see how my cursor changes here too this little double bars there as I roll over it in between these pallets so I can grab that and move it so I can kind of give myself a little more real estate as I need to or expand it a little bit I've got the cop is right now it's on a fit up to one hundred percent mode so it you can see that it's scales and adjust as I'm dragging things around here the same thing happens here on the size if you need a little more real estate to look at something it will allow you to do that all of these pallet panels can be scaled to accommodate your screen are accommodate your your wishes and needs but if we have ah lot of layers in here we may not want all of these theworld down so there are some keyboard shortcuts that do help selecting certain elements or certain attributes and trance formations so you p is for position that's a very logical one, so just pee on the keyboard opens up the position transform so aiken going there and tweak things hippie again and it goes away so you can see if you have a lot of layers in there you could just touch a layer hippie for position, make your adjustment hit it again it goes away in your layers off compress again the for scale obviously is s for scale and so I can go in there and scale up and down and then hit again and it goes away are for rotation and do my rotations hit it again and it goes away but for a passage e you have to hit thi like in transparency, why don't they call that transparent instead of opacity? If that's the keyboard market I don't know that's always been kind of comical, so you have to hit thi the letter t to get opacity and then a for anchor point and if you have a mask, you can hit m e for effects and we'll get into that later we start adding elements to it effects in different things, so a tte this point I'm going to open up in existing file because I don't want to overwhelm me with too many things there let's look at what the uh timeline khun dio I don't want to say that I do want to come back out here and going here and open up our ball bounce project so you can see that I've got one layer that's the same basketball layer that we looked at before but I've got several different compositions in here and the compositions are just different stages of this whole animation, so we're going to start here with the start it's a great place to start is the start uh, we're going tio spread this out a little bit see any time I move a, uh, move my cursor over when he's a little horizontal bars here I can kind of move my timeline elements around and kind of compresses and expands, so that gives me a little more real estate, especially if I'm working on a laptop or a smaller monitor such as we are here that gives us a little more room here I like is much room as I can out here in my timeline. Well, one thing about the timeline uh, you can zoom in and out just by grabbing this little slider here, or you can just click on the mountains the mountains will make it grow or a small mountain makes it zoom out because you're farther away and you can like right now I'm at about twenty frames there in this animation or this this cop, it will be an animation when we're done s o that way I'm only looking at this part of it I don't want to look it too much, I just want to look at what I'm going to be working on now what I've done here is I've created a guide and just like in photoshopping drag guides out from the rulers and that'll help you place things on screen or if you're going to have something coming back and forth or you want a line several objects, you just grab these guides right out of the rulers and I've got one guide placed here this is going to be the top my ball balance I'm going to bounce this ball it's just a photo shop player so how would I do that? Well, I want to move its position eventually, right? I wanted to go up and down I wanted to bounce up and down so I'm going to start at the top of my bounce now how do I make it move over time? It's a very simple process see this little tiny icon here next to the word position it's a little stopwatch and they call that the time very stopwatch I just call it the stopwatch so if you hear me refer to the stopwatch that's it I click that once and you notice that it changes color and it shows a little little dial on it. That means we've set the time and also notice that right here to the right is this little yellow diamond that's a key frame it created that for me, so also something that shows up here is a little yellow diamond over here on the right that is the ad to remove key frames, so if I wanted to remove that key frame, I just click that and notice it turned the stopwatch off for me as well. So anytime that I want to add, any time I want to start to animate something, I'm going to click that stopwatch if I want to delete an entire animation, I've got five hundred key frames in there and it's going, this isn't working, I'm starting over, I click the stopwatch and it wipes out all of my key frames. Now the danger of that is accidentally clicking the stopwatch and wiping out all your friends. So you really gotta pay attention, especially if you're going fast because you can command z and go right back, you know that will that will save you because your heart stops and they go commands e I can get back there it's good, I got a couple commands ease I could do so I could go back a couple steps, I can save it but if you do that and then you move on and you forget or you did it on like layer thirty seven and things can go bad so it's always good number one save often save your projects so you've got somewhere to go back to two so I've set my first key frame that's the top of the bounce ok and so I'll just come out say about halfway I wanted to bounce off the ground so I can either click and drag this ball down and notice that gives me that little spring line in there I can hold down the shift key which will constrain it to the direction that I'm dragging it and that makes sure that I'm moving it up and down in a straight line and not sideways or often another angle so I've now created two key frames and I've got the first half of my bounce then it stops so the ball goes down then nowhere that's because I've only got two key frames that's a beginning point and the endpoint now there's two things I can do I wanted to bounce back up again because I want to keep it bouncing so I can either click and drag it up here and try to guess at where the top of the linus and sometimes you don't want a perfect you know like upon game where it goes perfectly up and down sometimes you wanted to go somewhere else but if I want something to loop like this and I want it to be perfect, then I can delete that key frame sometimes you can just hit the delete key if you're if you just have it selected, but what I can do is I can copy this first key frames I come back here and I select that first key frame and then I can just do a command or a control c to copy it or you can you'll use the ifyou're a clicker you can come up here and do copy right from the menu on dh then paste it, which is command v or control the if you're on a pc and that pace it right where my time indicator hit isthe so anywhere in here that I've got this and I paced in a key frame it's going to add that key frame right at that time so that's great if you want to go through in duplicate, you know, key frames a lot I don't want that one there because I just want it to be, uh in the beginning and at the end so I want to preview what this looks like there's two ways to preview things, especially when they're this short one is to just use the space bar and that just does you preview but it shows all of the hidden elements too I prefer to do a ramp view and there's a couple different ways to do that up here in this preview panel we've got this button right over here on the right just called ram preview you can click that and you'll notice that all the other hidden elements go away we just see the animation itself and right now it looks a little crazy and we're going to fix all of that in there several steps and making that look better my favorite way is using an extended keyboard if you're going to do a lot with after fix its really important even if you're on a laptop to get an extended keyboard because that's going to help because they're the most important part of it is this zero key which is your ran preview button I love that just one button I can ramp reeve you if you're on a laptop or a shorter keyboard it is control zero uh control in the number zero and that will do iran preview as well. So the several ways to get to the rand preview so depends on how you like to work I'm kind of a hybrid of clicking and keyboard shortcuts so you're not going to get a ton of keyboard shortcuts from me I know some people are like all keyboard driven especially video editors are totally used to that keyboard you know they're tied to it I you know I still like to visually click things and that's just kind of my work flow so you'll see me clicking on things was like why doesn't he just do that keyboard shortcut it's just that well sometimes it's just my work flow so so now I've got this this ball is just bouncing frenetically here and it looks like a game of pong it doesn't look like ball bouncing at all so what I want to do is kind of slow this thing down a bit I wanted to bounce but I wanted to kind of look more natural and this is just an animation technique based on the law of physics basically if you think about it you want somethingto look rhea what does what happens in the real world and when a ball bounces what happens does it does it hit the air and bounce right back down? No if about it comes up gravity takes over there's a little hang time they're right same thing that somebody jumping or character jumping something goes up it's going to come down because gravity while ball comes back up because of the impact of it hitting the ground so at its top point we wanted to kind of slow down so we wanted teo slow down and then bounce and go back up so what we do is we do in these property on these two key frames that up key frames and ijust right click on the first key frame and I come down to key frame assistant with the contractual manu and then I select eazy e's out because what I'm doing is I'm easing out of this position at this position this first position is first key frame easing out of that so just think of things moving if you think in the physical world of things moving something starting here and it's going to take off that's your out it's a little counterintuitive is to you know, terminology but if you if you think of it is something moving as a car sitting there and it's easing out of that position it's taking off it's easing off the finish line er out of the parking spot and we want to do just the opposite when we come back to that same place which is our last key frame I selected right click on it key frame assistant eazy e's in that means I'm coming into that parking space are into that that position so that means it's going to ease in and ease out go to where it's going to go and then he's in so now when we hey they've turned that on um then we'll see there's a little more realism in this balance now there's a little hang time as it goes up it seems a little more natural now yes question high so the key for beginners I guess is to really visualize in our mind ahead of time before we attempt a project here it's a visualize how we envision the ball bouncing and returning and you know the natural movement so I guess the the first step would be to build the up and down motion and then take it the next step is looking at possibly the position or turning it and then ease in and just trying to get like a workflow in my head of how I would actually start building this animation since I have zero experience her after effects so that's exactly it it is envision it anything with animation is there's you know there's a reason why you're moving something you know whether you're going tio fly texting on the screen that's a really big one people want to go well they want the text of flying off the screen or my client wants to drop down and and there's, you have to have a purpose for it. You know in this case we want the ball to bounce so we want to look like a natural bounce so we already know what you know what form we wanted to do. But if it's in an object that doesn't typically move uh you know, like the example I showed with the pineapples earlier pineapples don't bounce but they do when you bring him to life in a cartoon characters out of him and we can go the next step with the ball too, and make it kind of a cartoon character, and that is to exaggerate things, so having that purpose is to why you're moving, something will help you understand of what to move and when to move it. And in this case with the ball, I've got it bouncing. But do I have a bouncing too fast to have it bouncing too slow? Well, what I can do is move my key frames a little closer if I move them closer together it's going to bounce faster if I move them farther apart it's going to balance slower so if I do this and this is my workspace here, you see me move this little bar, I just grab the end of it and I khun drag it a long time and that means when I do a ram preview it's going to just render what's in that work area, so I just that to what I'm doing there doing, I've got bouncing really fast now I moved my key frames closer together because that's, what that's telling us is this is how many frames I'm looking at. This is only twelve frames long right now and our project, our cop is thirty frames per second, so its understanding video terminology, animation terminology is all part of that how many frames per second? It means how many times something's going to be there or move or chances for it to move uh over time so if you think in those terms thirty frames per second if that's your your animation uh then you've got your thirty different possible positions or thirty ticks of thirty frames within that time frame that you can move things now if I wanted to make this bounced slower, zoom out a little bit uh convey move my key frames out a little more moving out here a little more extreme okay actually it's making a full second longer we'll just cut that in half I'll move my workspace down here so I'm looking at one second and going to do iran preview got a really slow balance now so just by moving the key frames a long time expanding them or compressing them that's going to adjust how fast that animation is going to happen over time. Another question no, I just want to say thanks for explaining that because I was trying teo understand how do you slow it down over the timelines? Sure well good, good. So basketball in space yes hey, quick question jeff s o beats a for thirty five ass and this is from a little bit earlier when you're changing the number for positions what part of the object cornet is at the center or is the top of the object for that for that specific coordinate and can you change that? Yes that's that's a very good question actually I was going to get into that little later but we might as well address that now what we're looking at when something comes in and it's centered when we first see it come on screen and we see that it's it's centered if we bring this right to the centre here way see here's our outer corners and that's from the original photo shop file itself that's that's the dimensions of the photoshopped file that have the basketball in it and that's what that layers coordinates are even though this is all transparent around the ball it still holds that space now right here in the very center that is the anchor point uh and as we look at a little later this morning as we look at different different ways of parenting things with moving things animating thing's rotating it's really important to understand where that anchor point iss by default when you bring something in it's usually dead center of this whole layer now if I had created this in photo shop if I had created this ball but it was up here in the upper right hand corner of say, this rectangle uh then it would still be looking at this anchor point which is dead center of that that uh frame so if you think of it is like a like well, like you look at photo shop earlier, I like to think of them as pieces of plastic with things on them, you know? So if you think of it that's a sheet of plastic with a sticker on it, so this is a piece of plastic with sticker on it and basically you are moving the whole thing because that's what you've got, but we're only looking at the sticker in the middle of it I see so what we want to do is if we want to do things with that ball, we have to make sure that that anchor point is dead center and two ways of doing that one is this tool up here in the toolbar roll over that's called the pan behind tool they finally after several revisions added anchor point in the in parentheses because that's our anchor point tool it also has serves a function in video editing is a slide at it tool so I think that's why they've maintained the name but what that tool does this fight click on that I can come out here and I can grab that anchor point and I can move that somewhere else will notice because I've got an animation going here it's going to have a great impact on what's going on and it's got throw my animation way off here bless you so playing with that mid animation is a no no you don't want to do that but if I was tio start my animation and I move that somewhere say I move it over here to the edge of the ball I can still move it up and down yeah by clicking my stopwatch um and move the ball up let's move it up to the top and that's the first key frame come out here move it down and I can do this by the numbers too if I was to just slide up and down the numbers here I like to do that sometimes too lets you find tune it so now it's still moving up and down even though I moved the anchor point but what happens this if I wanted to rotate this ball somewhere so say ah hit are for rotation and I hit my stopwatch there and what happens if I rotate it well it's going to rotate around that anchor point not the center of the ball so what I've done there's I've created this crazy whoa rotation thing and it's because it's not centered right on the object so it's always important if you're going to do any kind of rotation specifically to make sure that the anchor point resides in the middle the very centre of whatever object is on the layer don't count on the layer to always have whatever you've got in there centered it's not always correct sometimes you want something to rotate on its base so it does this instead of just rotating and center where it's doing this so it's understanding how things move and rotation is another crazy animal that can really throw you off so let's skip ahead here a little bit um I've got let's go to this one I believe this has motion blur added to it this is really an important part of making something look believable other than the hang time of the position I've got my three key frames just where we left off but what looks different about this animation is that the ball has a little more of a natural feel it looks a little more like what we're used to seen either in real life or on film or on tv it seems like it doesn't look his computer generated that's because we've added some motion blur to it what is motion blur motion blur actually, uh is applied with this uh little icon right here this button says that enables motion blur if I turned that on uh that will let me go back back back there we go um if I turn it off actually, then we'll see that it has more of this computer generated look here when I do iran preview you see it kind of strobes a little bit on the redraw there but I do two things I've got a box right here on the layer itself, which means that that says, ok, I'm goingto add motion blur to this layer, but what activates motion blur for the whole comp? Is this button here? So if I've got fifty layers in there, I don't want all of them to have motion blur. Maybe I've got some, uh, or I want to speed up my rendering while I'm just positioning things and I don't want bog the machine down too much, I may turn motion blur off globally that way, it's it's not having a process that much for one layer moving like this just leave it on and work with it that way. But you can see it's in between stage is here that it's been added, and then when it hits it, it keeps going because the object is still in motion. Now, if I had something like a piece of video in there on something was moving on it or something there's, a pre rendered animation and the things are moving in that, uh, it may not it won't see those move because those air pixels that are moving. So what I typically do if that's the case, is that's when I'll use the real smart motion blur effect, we'll get into that a little later, but if it's actually some layer that's moving or text that's moving if something is actually physically moving in there, you turn on the motion blur that's going to give it a lot more realism and that really helps a lot. Let's, take it to the next level let's, have some fun and bring this toe life a little more. Well, I'm doing something more with key frames. I've now got a cartoonish balance. We're giving this ball some character now we've taken it out of the real world and we're going a little pixar with it here, and this is where you would want you to make your own sound effects. Boing, boing, boing! In to help with animation, you've got to be able to make your own sound effects. You'll drive everyone else around you crazy because they'll hear you doing all these crazy sound effects but let's, open this up and see what is happening in our transform here. I've got a couple things going on remember how I showed you if I unclip that chain for my constrain proportions for scale, I can modify things over time and again, it's just key frames. I've got my three key frames for position, which is the top, the bottom and the top again, but notice I've got some other key frames added in here for the scale well the scale I've set where it's just one hundred percent at one hundred percent both x and y one hundred percent but when I get down here to the bottom I've squished it I have changed my uh why dimension quite a bit of squished it down and I've stretched out the x dimension so you see it's one hundred sixty nine one way and sixty three the other so I've squished that ball down I've moved it down and then as it takes off I exaggerate it going a bit the other way see and that's kind of a cartoon thing you know you overdo it you exaggerate to make things feel like there's fluid motion when it's actually going and then by about half of the way up it goes back to a normal state so that is just a very subjective move you don't have to use the exact same numbers, but again you can download this project and reverse engineer it if you want if you pay for the course so that's just an exaggerated bounced. Now I want to loop that in my project I can either copy and paste all those key frames a whole bunch of times and put them back to back to back to back all in one comp or I can do what I've done here where I've created a new calm and I've brought the other camps are actually in this case I just created the layers with all of that information and I've just duplicated it bunch of times so there's a couple different ways of doing that I can grab this layer here and I want teo kind of make it shorter so I could visually see where I'm at. What I'll do is I'll split that what I do is do shift command d and that breaks that layer right there and I'm just going to discard that I just selected and delete it. So now I've got this this layer that's chopped a little short, it's it's all what I need, they're actually did it a little to undo undo I did it one frame too soon, I believe uh, because I don't want I don't want to do come on one more undo, please undo their ago today I'm going to go one more frame and then do it because I lost my last frame there by getting rid of it too quick. So now I'm back here. So now I've got this this one layer I can duplicate this layer just with command d I'm a duplicate it two or three times command d command e on dh then what I can do is spread these all out so you can manually do it or you can select all the frames and so what I'll just do finale just dragged these out the kind of snap into place and this will allow me to create a repeat sequence of all of these and we'll stop spread out our work area to the end do iran preview and we'll see that it will just repeat itself so that's just a quick and dirty way of doing this without having to create new sub compass and everything will get into the sub coms in a bit but that's how you can repeat a loop without having to actually go in and copy a whole bunch of key frames just cheat again I'm all about shortcuts and cheating and making things it's simple and easy as possible you know why reinvent the wheel if it's already there just make it spin so that's where we're at here where it's looping now what I've done is to take this a step further is I've created uh this as a cop this is one solid comp I've got how many instances I've got six so I've got this going out to four seconds so what I can do is create a new cop and I do that down here in my project window I can click just create new composition I can come up to composition, click new composition or I can do uh command end for a new composition just like we did from the beginning so I'll just call this uh books not master master okay as just a new blank comp well I want to bring that animation in so what was that called it is cartoon bounced loops I could just grab that go to my master comp which is a tab here there's nothing in it and I can bring in my basketball bounce loops I just bring that in okay so now I've got that animations already done in there well, what I can do is bring this I want this to bounce across the screen so it's not just gonna bounce in one place how do I make it bounce across the screen? Well, I've already made my balance my balance is looping in here okay, so what I'm going to do is change my position again I want to start off the screen and I'm gonna hold down my shift key dragged this off the screen where I can't see it click my stopwatch to create my first key frame then they come all the way to the end of my animation and I can either click and drag it from here all the way across or I can do it by the numbers either way doesn't matter so it's that simple I've just made it bounce across the screen with two key frames I can bounce across the screen buying boeing but god do the sound effects and if I wanted to bounce faster I just moved my key frames closer. Case is going to bounce a little faster across the screen.