How to add a solid background or image to your infographic

In this video we're going to bring in a background image, and lock it. It's going to be easy, let's go do it.

It's a weird feature of After Effects, we talked about it before. If I make a new Comp, and I pick a color, doesn't really matter, when I export it, it goes black. It's just, there is a background color. So, we're going to turn ours back to black. I'm going to click on it, go back to black. So that's most of the Comp start life like. And if I want to put in a colored background, we put in just a big rectangle. Now, we could draw it, but it's easy just to go to 'Layer', 'New', and there's one called 'Solid'. Click on 'Solid'. I'm going to call this my 'Background Color'. And it's going to match the height and width of my video. Great! Everything's perfect, pick a color, any color. Any color that you like. Click OK, now when I export it, it's going to be green in the background.

What I want to do is, not move it around, so I'm going to lock it. Awesome! That's how to put a background color in. So I'm going to bin that color. Sorry, we just made it, but we're going to bring in an image. So I'm going to double click anywhere in this gray area. And I'm going to go to 'Infographic Exercise Files'. I'm going to go to 'Icon Pop', the first one. Let's go to the one called 'Background'. We'll bring it in, put it into my Files. Then I'm going to drag him onto here, and he's too big.

You can, like a lot of programs, you can kind of zoom out. I'm using the wheel of my mouse, but you can use 'Command + or -' if you're on a Mac, or 'Control + and -' on a PC. What you'll find though is, you can grab the edges, and it's fine, but weirdly, that's true of lots of Adobe products, but down here there's one in here called Transform and Scale. You can just drag it down. I don't know why, but it is easier to use these controls down the bottom here, especially when you get multiple layers. So I'm going to twirl that back up. It's up to you. So I'm going to lock that layer, boom, background image. I'll just drop the lightness of this in Photoshop. We'll do it later on in an exercise using one of the effects. Easy, so we got our background in. Next video please.