Now, I would like to get started on this animation by adding a few more pieces to the room and then we will start working on a little animation for our Dad character. One of the pieces in the library folder is this family portrait and I think that will look great hanging on the wall here. Let us give a little bit of warp to the room and kind of stage the area for our user to see that dad is working out in his living room.

Now, the first thing I am going to do is add a layer for this and probably one of the most common things you will do as you working to the movie files. We are going to use those to separate our elements and to keep track of everything that we have got going on in our movie. I will just give this later a name. I will call it “Portrait” and I will go over to our storage library and I will pull out the family portrait, drop it right into that layer. Probably looks better already.

Now to get our animations started, we are going to start this off with a little close up shot of our dad. He is going to introduce his workout video and then, we are going to go right on to the exercises. To set up our animation, we will be using the timeline window to choreograph all the elements and set up when they are going to be appearing as our movie progresses.

Now, I am going to set those two shots up right away. I am going to give myself a little bit of space in the timeline window and I am going to add something called “The Key Frame” that will allow me to make changes to the timelines so we can create that close up scene and the full screen version of our dad for his exercises.

I will just select the frames that I am interested in and insert my key frames right out of the timeline menu. Since I have got a couple of key frames now, I can go back to the first one by dropping my playhead back in frame one and I can make changes to the original scene, so we can zoom into the dad’s face and give him his little close up. Let me back off on the stage here just a little bit and select all those elements and I will just use a resize tool over here to scale that up and by doing so, we will zoom in on the dad’s face.

Now, I am also going to set something up so I know the crapping area for this. My graphics are extending well beyond the stage and I can see that by hiding my stage layer’s graphics. In there I can see my white stage behind there. I am just going to pull out a couple of guides from the rulers and these will help me to see exactly where the crop of my stage is just going to be for a final a movie file.

And then, we can set that close up. I will go ahead and bring my layers back and there you can see within that green rectangle, that is where my dad character is going to show up. We can center his head up in there and maybe zoom it up a little bit more. We want a good close up. This is his chance in the spotlight.

Alright, we will zoom back in and see if we can preview that. There you can see our green lines indicating the outside of the stage and that looks like we are seeing just enough of the dad character to give him a chance to introduce himself at the start of our animation.

Okay, so I will center him up there just a tiny bit more right inside there. So, we have also got some context for the room and we have got our two scenes. Our close up scene and far a little bit further away scenes, so we can see the full figure of the dad.