Set up anchor points - After Effects Tutorial

- [Narrator] When you import an image file that you want to use for character animation, generally it's best to bring it in as a composition if you've already prepared layers in either Illustrator or Photoshop. You see here I'm importing Angie side layers, which you can find in the exercise files, into my anchor points dot AEP. And I've chosen to use layer size for my footage dimensions. We'll talk a bit about that in a second. So I'm going to click OK, and that's going to import it in. And you'll see it's placed it inside my images folder, cause I have that selected. So I'm just going to drag that out, and close up my images folder. And I can just take a minute to rename that 02_Angie_Side_Layers. Just helps me keep track of things. So I'll double click it to open it up, and you'll see that I have this little character. And it's got all these different body parts. Now what I'm going to do is drag it in to the Brighton Seafront scene I've already created. I'm going to do that by opening the Brighton Seafront scene, and then dragging it in to there, and placing it on top. You'll see it comes in as a ready made composition. If I want to get access to the layers, double click to open that up, and you'll see that all the layers are there intact. Now I want to start animating. So, I'm going to start by animating this front arm here. Just so that you can see the layer handles a bit clearer, I'm going to change the label color to yellow so it stands out a little bit more. Okay. Now you'll notice if I open up the arm, and I rotate the arm, it's rotating around the anchor point of that layer. It is in fact the center point of that layer. And that's because I brought it in as layer size. So the handles are around the edge of the layer, as opposed to being around the edge of the comp, which they would be if I'd chosen composition size. The first thing I want to do is move that anchor point to where I would expect the arm to rotate. So I'm going to grab the pan behind tool, and just drag that up to here, and that's where I would expect the arm to rotate. And now when I rotate, it rotates around that point, which is the correct point for a swinging arm. I'm going to do the same for the back arm. So I'm going to select that. Let's make it yellow. And then with the pan behind tool still selected, I'm going to drag it up here. And then we're going to do the legs. So I'll select back leg. Again we'll color label that yellow. Just drag that up. And quite often what I'll do is I'll color label different sides a different color. So maybe do the front leg, let's do it orange. And the front arm orange. Just so that they're a different color. Makes it easier for me then select the front leg and the front arm. I know that everything in front is orange, and everything behind is yellow. And if I rotate that. You'll see that now that's rotating almost around the correct point. I'm just going to move it over a little bit more. And let's just try the back leg. You can see that's animating quite nicely. Now the other thing we're going to do, is just adjust the anchor points of the body. So let's make that green. Okay, and I'll move the anchor point down here. And that means if the body then rotates, it rotates around that point. Now you'll notice that the arm and the head aren't following the body at the moment. But we're going to fix that a little bit later. And then finally we're just going to grab the head, and let's make the head blue. And we'll drag that point there. So now the head is rotating in that direction. Okay. So now we're ready to animate the body part.