Animating With Ease in Adobe After Effects
Jake Bartlett · Motion Designer
A near-complete graph editor and precomposition workflow taught through one full house animation, but the maker's own on-screen disclaimer sends viewers to a newer version instead.
The course opens with an unusual move: the very first lesson is the instructor telling viewers to stop watching and go find his updated version instead. That framing matters, because everything that follows has to be judged as a still-functional but self-admitted first draft of a subject the teacher later handled better elsewhere. Taken on its own terms, though, the remaining 13 lessons hold together as a coherent, project-based walkthrough of one specific skill: using After Effects' graph editor to turn stiff keyframed motion into eased, weighted animation.
The spine of the course is a single class project, animating a simple illustrated house, and the structure follows the natural order of that build. It starts in Illustrator, where a flat vector file gets imported and converted to shape layers, then broken apart group by group into individually named layers like "upper window," "door," and "lamp." This early stretch is slower and more procedural than exciting, heavy on right-click menus and renaming steps, but it sets up a genuinely useful habit: precomposing any object that needs multiple sublayers so the main timeline stays legible. Anyone who has opened a messy After Effects project with fifty unlabeled shape layers will recognize why this matters.
The middle section is where the course earns its title. It treats the speed graph and value graph as two views onto the same motion data, showing how a straight diagonal line in the value graph corresponds to a flat horizontal line in the speed graph, and why the same easing can look and behave differently depending on which one is being edited. Rather than just naming Easy Ease as a button to click, the course walks through manually reshaping influence handles, snapping them for smoothness, and separating a layer's X and Y position into independent properties so each axis can be eased on its own timing.
The anchor point material deserves particular credit. Demonstrating how the Pan Behind tool changes where scale and rotation originate from, and pairing that with the snapping feature to lock an anchor to a specific corner or edge, turns a commonly misunderstood setting into something concrete and testable. Building on that, the overshoot technique, adding an extra keyframe that pushes a scale value past its final resting point before settling, is the clearest payoff in the whole course. It is demonstrated repeatedly across different objects (window frames, door panels) so the technique sticks through repetition rather than a single fly-by example.
The closing lessons on looping, rendering, and exporting to GIF are functional but comparatively thin, covering time remapping and reversed keyframes briefly before handing off to a short Photoshop export segment. They round out the workflow without adding much depth.
The core weakness is less about content quality than positioning. Because a newer, longer version of this same subject exists from the same instructor, this version reads as competent but superseded, useful mainly to someone who already owns it or wants the shorter runtime. The pacing also assumes a viewer who already knows their way around layers and keyframes, so it is a poor starting point for anyone new to the software despite the marketing language suggesting otherwise.
The standout
The overshoot technique, where an extra keyframe is pushed past the resting value and its handles reshaped in the value graph to produce a controlled bounce, gives one concrete, repeatable way to add personality to otherwise flat eased motion.
What you will learn
- Converting Illustrator vector art into After Effects shape layers and splitting a single traced layer into organized, individually named sublayers
- Precomposing complex objects (window, door, lamp) so each can be resized and animated independently without cluttering the main timeline
- Reading and manipulating both the speed graph and the value graph, including separating dimensions to edit X and Y position independently
- Using the Anchor Point (Pan Behind) tool with snapping to control exactly where an object scales or rotates from
- Building deliberate overshoot and bounce into scale animations by adding extra keyframes and reshaping influence handles
- Looping a finished animation with Time Remapping and time-reversed keyframes, then exporting via the render queue and converting to a GIF in Photoshop
Best for: Someone who already keyframes basic moves in After Effects and wants to stop relying on default easing presets to get smoother, more expressive motion.
Skip it if: Complete After Effects newcomers, since the class assumes comfort with layers, keyframes, and precomposing before the graph editor content even starts.