Spiraling Out of Control
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Step 6: Repeat this process two more times for 50% and 40% scale. When you are finished, your Timeline should look like the image below.
Step 7: In order to help us keep perspective on the many layers we are dealing with, we should go ahead and change the transparency of the layers before proceeding. Change the Opacity of the layers as follows:
70% layer – 50% Opacity
60% layer – 40% Opacity
50% layer – 30% Opacity
40% layer – 20% Opacity
Step 8: Add a Null Object to your Composition (Layer>New>Null Object). Since the Null Object never renders, I usually prefer to move the Null Object to the bottom of my Timeline stack.
Step 9: With the Null Object selected in the Timeline press the R key on the keyboard to bring up the Rotation Property for the layer.
Step 10: With the 70% layer selected press the R key on the keyboard to bring up the Rotation Property for that layer. Now activate the expression control for the Rotation Property by holding down the Option key (Alt on the PC) and clicking on the Stopwatch Icon.
Step 11: In order to link one property to another, you can do one of the following:
You can type the following expression
ThisComp.layer(“Null 1”).rotation
Use the Pickwhip to link to the Rotation Property of the Null layer
For the 70% layer, we won’t have to do anything else. In this case the rotation of the layer is basically parented to the rotation of the Null Object.
Step 12: Do this same procedure for the other layers, but in order for the other layers to spin faster, we can modify the amount by adding a multiplier. Use the following expressions for each of the layers:
60% layer – ThisComp.layer(“Null 1”).rotation*1.5
50% layer – ThisComp.layer(“Null 1”).rotation*1.75
40% layer – ThisComp.layer(“Null 1”).rotation*2
The upshot of all of this is of course that the 40% layer will rotate twice as fast as the 70% layer.
Step 13: Animate the Rotation Property of the Null layer. The initial keyframe should be 1x103 degrees. This distributes the layers appropriately thus mimicking the television show open. How much should you rotate the Null Object over time? Upon close observation, the foremost layer (in our case the 70% layer) begins at the top of the screen, and rotates 180 degrees to the bottom of the screen before reversing and going in the opposite direction.
When you are finished keyframing the rotation, make a RAM Preview and view the results
Source: Digital Media Online, Inc.
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