After Effects Cell Behavior Challenge

Hope you find these helpful!

This has become a cool little repository of how you might go about animating cell behaviors, each one is rooted from a request we received from a student in one of the courses we support.

Secreting cells

I want to illustrate a cell "secreting" things, such as antibodies and circles that represent pro-inflammatory factors - How do I make it look like a circle/cell is doing this?

• It's an interesting question, in that the process of "secreting" something away is rooted in social behaviors, so you're required to consider how someone acts when they're secreting and just apply motion that emphasizes those actions. In some ways, this also requires "peers" to be the ones that are being secreted from, hence all the other circles in the animation.

Applying a Throb Effect

Are there ways to animate objects, like circles, so that they look like they are throbbing? I want to give an abstract representation of an inflamed cell/tissue.

• This is a great opportunity for an aesthetic challenge. The actual animation itself is actually extremely simple, just to scale up ~20% and then scale down ~20%, repeat. We took the opportunity, though, to highlight how you might punch up the style of this a little bit, you can find it linked above.

Divide and Multiply Animation

I want to illustrate cancer. Is there a way to have a bunch of circles, representing cells, to rapidly divide and multiply in a way that forms a tumor-like cluster?

• This is by far the more complicated animation of this set. Here is how you might approach creating it using simple, if repetitive motions.

Fading a Shape Layer

I want to illustrate a dying cell by having it gradually fade colors from white to gray to black?

• This is a function, that while simple, may be a bit unintuitive. The action of keyframing a Fill value is something that can be replicated in hundreds of applications within After Effects alone.

Scaling a Composition

If I have a flow chart/diagram is there a way to "zoom into" individual elements of the flow chart to further elaborate on an individual step?

• This is a conceptual challenge, although the idea is extraordinarily simple. It's a bit like laying all your materials out on a table top, and then zooming in onto each individual material.

Animating Along Paths

How can I have multiple path-following animations going at once? I'm not sure how I will integrate this yet, but anticipate that it'll come up.

• This is a cool effect that After Effects has that simply enables shape layers to be seen as "paths". All you have to do is stack a few series of paths and attach them to the objects you'd like to move along them.