Your first animation

In this walkthrough you’ll build a lower third (a name and title that slide in at the bottom of the frame), then refine it the way you would with a colleague sitting next to you. It takes about ten minutes and roughly 15–30 credits.

You’ll need the panel open and signed in. If it isn’t yet, start with Getting started.

1. Set up a comp

Open a project and make a new composition: 1920×1080, 10 seconds, any frame rate. Drop in some footage or a solid as a background, so you can judge the lower third against something.

You can also ask the panel to do this:

Make a new 1920x1080 comp called “Lower third test”, 10 seconds at 25 fps, with a dark grey solid as the background.

2. Ask for the lower third

Be specific about what you see in your head. Here’s a good first request:

Add a lower third in the bottom left: a white bar that wipes in from the left, then the name “Maya Okafor” and the title “Producer” slide in on top of it. Use a clean sans-serif font. Everything should be in by 1 second.

While it works, the panel shows each step in plain language: creating the shape layer, adding the text, setting keyframes, adding easing. When it’s done, it usually renders a frame or two and looks at them to check the layout before it tells you it’s finished.

3. Look at what it made

Press the spacebar to play, or scrub through the first second.

Then look at the timeline. You’ll see real layers with sensible names, like “Lower third bar”, “Name” and “Title”. Select a layer and press U to reveal its keyframes. Everything is normal After Effects work: you can drag keyframes, change the font in the Character panel, or recolour the bar by hand.

4. Refine it

This is where it starts to feel fast. Keep talking to it like you’d talk to an assistant editor:

Make it snappier. The bar should be fully in by 12 frames.

Ease out more on the text, with a tiny bit of overshoot.

Stagger the name and the title by 3 frames.

Make the bar our brand orange, #FF6A2A, and 80% opacity.

Each of these is a separate request, and the panel lists what each one changed.

5. Add the exit

Lower thirds need to leave too:

At 5 seconds, animate the whole lower third out: the text first, then the bar wipes back to the left. Mirror the timing of the entrance.

6. Undo something

Suppose the overshoot is too much. Every change Cue makes is a normal step in After Effects‘s undo history, so Cmd+Z (Mac) or Ctrl+Z (Windows) steps back through them one at a time. A request usually makes several changes, so open Edit ▸ History and click the step just before the request started to go straight back. The panel lists each change the request made, so you can see how far back to go.

You don’t have to undo, though. “Less overshoot, about half” works just as well.

7. Make it reusable (optional)

If you’ll use this lower third again:

Put the lower third in its own precomp called “LT – Maya”, and add sliders for the bar width and the animation speed so I can tweak them later.

It will build the controls with expressions so you can adjust them from Effect Controls without opening the precomp.

What you learned

• Describe what you see: position, timing, colour and feel.
• Look at the result, then refine it in small steps.
• Every change is a normal step in Edit ▸ History, so experimenting is cheap.

Next: Writing good requests has more examples, or try learning from a tutorial link.