 Hey everyone, welcome back to another Adobe Illustrator slash After Effects tutorial. We use both products, or both products, but actually this is more After Effects than anything. Guys, real simply, I'm going to show you how to animate a .ai or a .adobe illustrator file. Basically, you create a really cool thing in Adobe Illustrator or a really ugly thing like I did right here, and then I'm going to put that inside of After Effects and normally you can only just move it around a little bit. You can move it scale, size, position, etc., etc., but I'm going to show you how to turn it into a vector layer inside After Effects and move the various little points around. It's awesome, trust me, let's get this ball rolling. The first step here is I've gone ahead and just made a very simple Mickey Mouse Adobe Illustrator drawing and I just used the pen tool and again this is just for demonstration purposes. The second step is we go into Finder, you take your .ai file, your Adobe Illustrator file, and we're going to drag and drop that bad boy into After Effects. So let's go ahead and do that. Boom! The next step, if you're following along, is you want to create a new composition. So I'm just going to create Comp 2. Notice it's 1920 by 1080, that's just standard HD for video, but again this can be any size, guys. We're just teaching the technique here. And then I'm going to hit OK. Now I've got a new composition and it's got a white background. You can change the composition. When you create it, you can always change the background color depending on what colors your Adobe Illustrator file is. But I've gone with black and white because that's got the best contrast. Alright, the next step is I'm going to drag and drop this bad boy right on top here and boom! Now we've got the Adobe Illustrator file. The vector file is loaded up and it's in here. Now when I move across the timeline in After Effects, nothing happens. Now here's where it gets interesting. If you're just an illustrator or better yet if you're an animator or a wannabe animator, you can do your work inside an Illustrator, put it in After Effects and then we can create a vector file inside After Effects that has movable points and movable properties that a lot of people don't know how to do. So let's just go ahead and show you how to do that. Before I do that, I'm just going to drag and drop, move this around here. I can go ahead and do some basic movements to this thing. So if I want to make it bigger, move it to the right, move it to the left, up and down, all that other stuff, this can all be done here. But if I want to move the points and parts of the line here or the drawing, we've got to make another change. So real simply here, you want to click on, left click on example.ai or whatever file you're using, then you want to right click on top of it, go down to create and here's where the magic happens. Create shape from vector layer. Watch what happens. When we do that and we zoom in, you're going to see that it looks like there's a line running through it. And more importantly, when we go ahead, you'll see actually, well I got you, you're going to see that this created something called example outlines. I'll just expand that a little. And the original example.ai, or our original Illustrator file, lost the eyeball and the eyeball went to example outlines. So basically that means it's replaced it and now we've got this instead of the original file. All good. I hope you're following along with me. The next step and this is where it gets a little tricky is you want to click on the new layer, the new example outlines or whatever it's called in your Illustrator there or your After Effects. Drop it down, go down to group one, go down to path. Now when I click on path and I hover over it, you're going to see here that it's got points. These are manipulatable points that you can now go ahead and change. Watch. Right? There we go. We made a change. Go ahead a little further here and I'll just do an example. We made another change. You're going to notice that what was originally a static drawing has now become manipulatable over time and space. This is how you go ahead and take Adobe Illustrator drawings and stuff like that and make them animatable. If I was to go ahead and drop this down a little more, you're going to see the stop watch and when I click on that stop watch, this now says, okay, this path is now open for animation. So at zero seconds, this is where we're at. Let's go ahead to like, I don't know, something like three seconds, somewhere around three seconds. Sure. And we're going to move. Nope, never mind. You got to go ahead. This is actually quite tricky, but you have to be clicked on path and let's see if I got it. There we go. I got it on top of one of those points and now I'm going to move it down and I'm going to just distend it very strangely just to show you kind of what I'm working on. And I'm going to move this one over down at five seconds. And here's what's happened. I'm going to go back to now fit. We're going to move to the beginning and I'm going to hit space bar. And you're going to see here that the static Adobe Illustrator file that we drag and dropped in now can be basically animated and changed over time. This is an awesome technique for those of you that are getting into animation. I hope this video helps. I got a ton of more cool stuff coming up. All right. Thanks for watching. Cheers.