Animating With Ease in Adobe After Effects
Jake Bartlett · Motion Designer
A deep, hands-on dive into After Effects' graph editor that turns competent keyframe animation into genuinely polished, elastic motion design.
What it actually teaches
This is a graph editor course dressed up as a house-building project. Jake Bartlett spends the first two lessons on unglamorous but necessary groundwork: taking a flat Illustrator file, releasing its paths to layers, renaming every element by hand (upper window glass, lamp base, siding, trim), and importing it into After Effects as a composition rather than footage so those layers survive intact. It is not exciting material, but it sets up a real project the rest of the course keeps returning to, and the warning about shape layers needing solid fills and no gradients or patterned strokes will save a beginner real frustration later.
The core of the course is the distinction between the speed graph and the value graph, and this is where it earns its keep. The speed graph shows velocity over time and is the tool for classic ease-in and ease-out timing. The value graph shows the actual property value and is what lets an animator sculpt a motion path directly, dragging Bezier handles on a position keyframe the way you would draw a vector curve. The course is honest that you cannot have both at once on separated X and Y position values, only on a locked position property, and it walks through the tradeoff clearly rather than glossing over it.
The techniques that make it worth the time
Two techniques stand out as immediately usable outside this specific project. The first is the overshoot, built by taking a scale or position keyframe past its resting value (110 percent instead of 100) and then easing the curve back down, which is the mechanical secret behind that snappy, elastic quality good motion design has. The course shows it built up in stages, from a simple two-keyframe bounce to a more dramatic multi-keyframe wobble adjusted with the graph editor's transform box.
The second is rove-across-time keyframes, a genuinely underused feature that lets an animator reshape a motion path's curve without touching the timing or velocity between the surrounding keyframes. It is a small feature explained well, with a clear before-and-after against auto-Bezier and linear keyframes so the difference is obvious rather than assumed.
The siding and roof sequence, where a single animated rectangle is duplicated fourteen times and cascaded with Sequence Layers, then non-uniformly retimed so the boards do not all land at once, is a strong demonstration of turning one keyframed idea into a much richer composite animation cheaply.
Where it falls short
The course front-loads a lot of Illustrator housekeeping before it gets to graph editor content, which will test the patience of anyone who came for animation technique specifically. The final export lesson, covering GIF compression through Photoshop's legacy Save for Web dialog, is useful but noticeably lower-value than everything before it and feels tacked on. The bonus lesson unpacking the trailing-circle expression demo is dense and assumes comfort with After Effects expressions that the rest of the course does not require, so it will land as either a delightful extra or a confusing detour depending on the viewer. None of this undercuts the central material, which is thorough, specific, and demonstrated on a real build rather than isolated toy examples.
The standout
The overshoot technique, where a scale or position keyframe is deliberately pushed past its final value and eased back, is the single move that separates flat keyframe animation from motion that feels alive.
What you will learn
- Reading and manipulating the speed graph versus the value graph for different animation goals
- Building overshoot bounces by pushing scale or position keyframes past their resting value and easing the curve
- Using rove-across-time keyframes to control a motion path's shape independently of its velocity
- Prepping and organizing Illustrator artwork into named layers and shape layers for After Effects
- Pre-composing repeated elements and staggering layers with Sequence Layers for cascading reveals
- Exporting a finished animation as a compressed, loop-ready GIF through Photoshop's Save for Web
Best for: Animators who already know basic keyframing in After Effects and want to control the feel of their motion rather than just its timing.
Skip it if: Absolute beginners who have never opened After Effects or set a keyframe, since the course assumes that foundation and moves fast.