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Now I am just going to scrub the timeline back to ten frames in, because this is where we are going to introduce the first of our other graphic elements. Before I add the element, I want to change one thing in my preferences that will make it easier for us to work from this point on.

I am going to go up to the After Effects menu here on the Mac and preferences is down here. If you are on the PC, you will actually find those on underneath the Edit menu and down at the bottom. So if you are just wondering where those are stored when you are on a Windows system. Go across to After Effects, choose preferences and just go across to general for one second. We are going to come down to the second option here and turn off create layers at composition start time.

What this does is it means that any layer that you add to any timeline in After Effects will always come in at zero seconds. In this case we want to add them at the point we are in the timeline, so turning this off just makes it a little bit easier for us to achieve that without using extra shortcuts as we go along.

So make sure that is turned off. Go ahead and click okay. We are now at ten frames across in the timeline. I want to create a quick white bar that will mask off the bottom of our title sequence. The fastest way to do that is come up to the layer menu, go down and choose New and go across and select solid. The solid is simply a blank layer very similar to a Photoshop layer but it is previously filled with color.

However we can get it to the right side just by telling it here that the width is 720 that the height actually one is going to be 100 pixels. Down here under the color swatch I am just going to click to bring up the color picker, and then drag all the way up into the upper left hand side here to select white. Click okay, click okay again and now you will see our white bar has been added. More importantly the layer is here in the timeline and you can see it starts at exactly ten frames across, so that was why we changed our preference just then.

Then I am going to drag this down off the bottom of our composition because we are going to animate it coming on screen. So as long it sits just dead on the bottom or a couple of pixels below, that is absolutely fine. What we are going to do is add key frames to the position property in order to animate that.

So that can be accessed by hitting P on the keyboard down here on the timeline that now shows us the current position of this layer. We are going to turn on a key frame by clicking on the stopwatch just like with the scale value and then move ten frames along in the timeline and adjust the position.

The quick way to move ten frames along is simply to hold down the shift key and hit the Page Down key on your keyboard and you will see your timeline should now progress to 20 frames along. We can now either drag the layer up on screen or even just drag the Y axis value here in the timeline and drag this layer up until it sits on the bottom of the screen just where we need it to be.

So a very simple couple of key frames now slide that on from the bottom to its final position. Now once we are at 20 frames in, we also want to bring in another layer that will shot up from behind this one when it has arrived in its final position. Once again this will be an illustrator layer.

If we come over to the illustrator files folder in the project window, we have one called city. This is simply a silhouette of the London landscape. I am just going to drag this down into the timeline, but this time instead of dropping it in at the very top, position it one layer down so it is actually between the union jack wheel and the white solid that we just added.

Now it will appear in the center of the screen as before, but if we do drag it down you will see that it goes behind our white solid. And that is exactly what we are looking for. Now again we are going to drag this further down so it actually starts behind the white solid at this point, 20 frames in and then add yet another position key frame. So hitting P on the Keyboard to acces

Now I am just going to scrub the timeline back to ten frames in, because this is where we are going to introduce the first of our other graphic elements. Before I add the element, I want to change one thing in my preferences that will make it easier for... click to read more