Where to begin?
First and foremost If you haven’t used the "wiggle"command: the expression in After Effects that gives your object layers a little shake, then you are missing out. Luckily, my team and I decided to jazz it up a little.
At first I was thinking of animating a basic info-graphic about the super incredible powerful "Wiggle command" in After Effects: making it pretty basic and straight to the point with some very cool detailed looking assets, and then we thought: "No! Let's have some fun with this. Using my voice (as the cool radio late night voiceover guy) with a mix of raunchiness and sexy awkward humor, using the simplest objects to fulfill our info-graphic: "geometric shapes".
Naturally I'm a sucker for geometric shape animations and Electronic-New Wave-dub-reggae fusion-alternative dance music (like "Santigold's"), so working on this personally with the help of a few friends, was well worth it esp. for our passion and love for After-Effects.
About the "Wiggle" Command in AE | BASIC (in general):
Rather than adding several random keyframes for certain properties to animate your objects like: "rotation", "scale", "opacity" and so on, a much faster and more flexible way to do that is to use a Wiggle expression (plugging in a set of numbers), which automatically creates the animation in your objects for you.
About the "Wiggle" Command in AE | (MORE IN GENERAL)
Wiggle allows you add randomness to a property of a layer. For example you can cause a jittery chaotic motion to a layer by applying the wiggle expression to the Position property of a layer. To create the wiggle expression Command+Click on the layer property stopwatch and enter the formula wiggle(freq, amp ,octave). The elements of the expression represent how the wiggle will be calculated. [an error occurred while processing this directive]For this discussion, open After Effects, create a New Composition, and create a 200 pixel by 200 pixel solid. With the solid layer selected in the Timeline, press the P key to display the Position property for the layer. Command+Click (Alt+Click in Windows) the Stopwatch Icon, and in the expression window add the expression wiggle (15, 50, 1).
Frequency defines how many wiggles happen each second. In this case 15 wiggles are happening every second, or every other frame.
Amp is calculated in units of the property for which it is applied. In our example, since we are applying the expression to the position property, 50 says that the layer can move 50 pixels in any direction.
The final value, Octave is the level of detail the wiggle should have. It should be noted that you don’t have to use this third value in your expression. If you do not include it, After Effects will use the default value of 1 will be applied. So the expression could actually be written wiggle (15,50).
There are also plenty more tutorials on how to create the "wiggling" command expression in your animations for After Effects. Here are a few and enjoy!
- vimeo.com/45575790
- youtube.com/watch?v=KKYK2eEMaWo&feature=related
- youtube.com/watch?v=nFn64hPokXo
Creative Direction: Switzon S. Wigfall, III
