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415-462-1982

A friend asked me to create an animation of continental drift for her earth science class presentation. I did some research on the net to find images of the stages of the earth's movement. I used this graphic as a guide.

This project will show you some advanced masking techniques, morphing your masks, copying masks from other programs, mask management, and it might make you crazy at the same time!

Instructions

1. Let's start out by tracing each stage of the world. I started out with the modern day earth because it was the most complex and detailed. I brought my template into Illustrator, pasted it and locked the layer. I created a new layer to draw my world onto. First, I traced the main continents, then went for the islands. If you take a look back in history, India used to float about the ocean, not connected to Asia, so I traced India by itself, too. There are some land areas that do this as well, so keep an eye out. To make things easier, I traced each bit of land in a different color, on it's own layer. Save often. This is a pain in the @$$ to do over.
2. Once you have modern day earth drawn out, copy all of your outlines to the next stage back in time. Line your North America, Antarctica, etc. up and move your points so that they follow your new coastlines. Continue with this until all 5 stages of continental drift are drawn. If an island disappears, imagine where it broke off of a continent and move your island into the land mass. DO NOT DELETE ANY POINTS OR SHAPES! This will mess everything up. It sometimes helps to write down the order in which you drew the outlines.
3. Draw your globe and paste it into a new project. Save it as "globe.ai". Don't close Illustrator!
4. Open After Effects. Import "globe.ai". Create a new comp called "Pangea". Mine is 720x540 and 3 seconds long. I made the background blue or black. Drag "globe.ai" into the comp.
5. Create a new layer and make it green. This layer will contain your land masses. You can call it Pangea if you like.
6. Okay... now here is where things begin to get confusing. Go to your Illustrator project of the outlines of earth. Select all of the outlines you drew of the modern day earth only. Copy them to your clipboard.
7. Go back to your AE project and select the green layer. Paste. You should have an outline of earth that looks something like Fig. A.
8. Select the Pangea layer and hit the M key to reveal all the masks. Notice how many say "Difference" as the transfer control setting. You want them to be set to "Add" You may have 20 or more masks and instead of changing them all one by one you can select all of the masks. To select them all, just drag your mouse over all of your mask layers. Change one to "Add" and they will all change! Amazing!
9. Just to make things easier later on, it's sometimes helpful to rename your masks. Select the mask and hit the enter key, and enter a name such as "Asia", "Antarctica" and "New Zealand S. Island".
10. Go to the last frame and set keyframes for every mask's mask shape.
11. Go to your Illustrator project and copy all of the outlines for the Cretaceous era (65 million years ago - when the dinosaurs ruled the earth!)
12. In AE, create a new layer and call it "Cretaceous" or "Stage 4" or whatever you like - just make sure you know where it goes in geologic time!
13. Paste your Cretaceous keyframes onto this new layer. Repeat step 8 and 9. Go to 2:10 in your project and set keyframes for mask shape.
14. Continue with the rest of the stages, making sure you keyframe them at the right point in time.
15. You should end up with 5 layers, and if all goes well, you can copy your keyframes from each layer into one layer. Create a new layer called "Pangea Moving". Go to your first stage of earth movement and copy all of your keyframes. Paste them into "Pangea moving". Go to the second, third, fourth and fifth stages and paste your keyframes.
16. Preview your comp and watch how it moves. Does it look like mine? Do all of your continents stay in place or do some accidentally swap places? If they play fine, you are golden, and you can skip the next step.
17. If everything doesn't look right, you need to fix some of your masks. If you were a good doobie and named all of your masks as you went, this will be a breeze. If not, go back to the places where the errors occurred and get fixing. Sometimes it's just a matter of layers getting out of order. If this is the case, just put them in the proper order.
18. Now that your earth is moving properly, duplicate your "Pangea Moving" layer. Select the back layer and add a stroke. Effect > Render > Stroke. Check the box that says "All Masks". I set my mask color to black and the brush size to 6. Everything else is left at the defaults.
19. Duplicate the Globe.ai layer and put it on top. Set it's transfer control to "Stencil Alpha" so that the areas of the world that go off the map are hidden.

That's it! Yes, this got a bit complicated, and it is quite difficult to explain. Taking a look at the project (if you have AE 5.0) will help. I would also recommend checking out the book "Creating Motion Graphics with After Effects" by Chris and Trish Meyer. Chapter 13 is called "All about Masking" and covers masking quite in-depth.