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After Effects — connect the moving dots
As a person who is obsessed with diagrams, connected dots represent relationships in the clearest way, and the change of the overall form portrays the evolution of the data. In After Effects, just by keyframing objects won’t let you create an animation of moving dots that are connected with a line easily. However, Evan Abrams explains a simple solution that lets you do that easily without using any external plugins. Here are some animations that I created using his techniques. I would like to make a note about the steps. For better understanding, please view his embedded video toward the end of this entry.
Wiggle Shapes: make dots that move around
The first step is to create dots that move, or wiggle, randomly with a single adjustment layer, which allows you to keyframe different Random Seed values which serve as different degrees of randomness to each dot.
1) Create a new Shape Layer and add an ellipse for a dot.
2) Add a new Adjustment Layer at the top in layers. This Adjustment Layer is going to control the animation.
