Preparing artwork for animation

- [Instructor] We are starting here at Adobe stock with this sports posters set. And this is a free template that you can download from this site. But for now, I'm going to switch to Adobe illustrator and I'm going to go from the home screen and click on the open button and navigate to the exercise files of this course, double click on the footage folder. And this is the template. Note that the suffix of the file is, A I T, which stands for Adobe Illustrate Template. Anyhow, I'm going to open it and I just want to show you our starting point. Now this is just something to bear in mind when you are working with Illustrator and you want to prepare art work for animation. For example, as we can see over here, we actually have four art boards. Now as things stands today, after effects can only handle one output at a time. So if I'm just going to save this document and import it into after effects, I will only get access to the first output over here. Not only that I'm going to see only the four top hierarchy layers. So I'll collapse everything here in the layers panel. And you can see that we've got football poster, basketball one, baseball and American football. In this course, we will only work with the football poster, also known as soccer in different countries. So before I do it, I just want to show you if you do want to take everything into after effects and animate each one of the individual posters, what you need to do. So I'll treat down the layer over here, and then I'm going to select the first one, hold shift and select the last one. Now I can drag them outside of these layer to the top most hierarchy of the project. And then I have this redundant one, which I need to delete, and you need to actually do it for each one of them. If you want to separate them in one go, and this will be the next stage. So I'll quickly drill down each one of the different art boards and I'll just going to take out those layers. And then of course delete their redundant one. Now, because this is a nicely done template. You can see that each one of those layers has different colors which will help you to separate them. But we want to do it automatically. So the next step will be to go to the farm menu and before saving it, I'm going to change the document color mode from CYK to RGB. Remember that when we are working for screens, CYK is not a valid color space. And if you continue to work with it, it may work for you, but you will get different colors. So this is the way to go, now because we are working with a template. We need to actually save it. So I'm going to go through the file menu and choose the save command, and I'll navigate to the desktop. And this is just a temporary step. You don't need to follow this. I just want you to know how this was done. So you will be able to do it if you are starting your work from a multi art word document. So for now I'm just going to name this one poster, click save, and this is very important here in the second dialogue for the options I'm going to enable. Save each art board to a separate file and actually don't need everything because I don't need these master art board. I'm going to use range. So Illustrator will save four different art boards and each one of them will have its own individual layers. So now finally, after this long buildup, I'm going to say, okay, and then I'll go back to the file menu, choose open, navigate to the desktop. And you can see here that I've got four different posters, each one with the appropriate name of the art board that was inside Illustrator. Super easy and very efficient. So I'm just going to select all four of them for now click open. And each one is going to open its own different document. Now I'm going to hold down control and press zero. This will be command zero on the Mac to fit the view. And we can see that only the necessary layers were included in this document. This is of course true for each and every one of those versions that we've saved. So I'm just going to go one by one and show you that. Now this is something that we can bring to after effects and start to work. Now, luckily you don't have to do this because I already took the time and prepared for you the document that we are going to animate. So if you want to take a look at it, go ahead and choose once again open, navigate to the exercise files of this course. And inside the footage folder, you will see a football poster.ai So open this one up, press control or command zero to fit the art boards to the screen. And here you can see that I've prepared the necessary layers as well as named them because in after effects, we want to be able to see those nice thumbnails. And these are some of the most important steps. When you need to prepare an illustrator artwork for animation release the layers to the top hierarchy, switch the document color mode to RGB and if necessary, save as separate art boards.