Introduction

Hi there, my name is Daniel Walter Scott. I am an Adobe Certified Instructor for bringyourownlaptop. It's time to talk about connecting data to After Effects to help drive your animation. This example is what we'll create. It's looking at the averages for temperatures in Dublin where I currently live. The cool thing about the animation is that it's a chart driven by spreadsheet data. Now why is that cool? It's that, once I have done all my animation like I have here, where I've got all my Styles going, I can easily relink to another file, I'll do that now.

At the moment we're showing Dublin, watch here, it's Dublin, it's got the year, and it's got this data. Let's have a little look, super quick, super easy. Replace with my home country. New Zealand, Auckland is where I'm from. Watch this, hit 'space bar', look, line chart changes. All the data changed, the name changed. The year I'm looking at is the same, so that stays the same. Super quick, super easy, makes me super home sick because it's warmer all the year around at home. It's okay, Dublin has all the Guinness, that will keep you warm.

So if you are newish to After Effects check out my full course where we cover all sorts of data animation, not just this line chart. Check that out on bringyourownlaptop.com. If you're experienced in After Effects especially with Expressions, you'll be flying after this tutorial very quick.

First thing is, you need to have Adobe After Effects CC 2018 or above. We'll work on the earlier ones. If you want to play along exactly, download the exercise files. They are free, there'll be a link down in the description. You can go and grab those, and play along with me. On the download page, it will be called something like Data Animation using After Effects in JSON. I feel like that's what I call it anyway. So let's go and make this thing, and let's go make a new project, and I'll meet you over there. Let’s get started.