10th Grade — Adding Motion: Your First Keyframe Animation

⏰ Do Now — Start Here

Think of any animated logo or title you've seen online. What actually moved -- position, size, opacity, or some combination?

🎯 Today's Big Question

Your video timeline edit already moved clips through time -- what happens when a single object moves, fades, or grows within one clip instead?

📈 By the End of Today, You Will Be Able To

Explain what a keyframe is and why animating any property needs at least two of them.
Animate a text or graphic element's position, scale, or opacity over time using keyframes.
Connect this technique to how professional motion graphics and video titles are actually built.

🧰 What You'll Need

Your Timeline Edit project (or a new short clip)
Video editor with keyframe/animation controls (CapCut, Premiere Rush, or Canva video)

📋 Your Plan for Today

Day 1: Learn & Try

Do Now (5 min, above).
Mini-lesson (15 min): what a keyframe is, using the free companion book The Motion Path (Ch. 4.6) as a reference for the concept even though it's written for Premiere Pro specifically.
Practice (20 min): animate one simple text element moving and fading in using at least 2 keyframes.

Day 2: Apply & Export

Independent work (30 min): add a keyframed animation to a real title or graphic in your own video project.
Export (10 min): export the finished clip.

🖥️ Today's Slide Deck

Short, on-the-board pacing slides — project these to follow along. (The full details are in the handout above, not here.)

Day 1

⬇️ Open / download this slide PDF

Day 2

⬇️ Open / download this slide PDF

📚 Key Words

Keyframe: A saved value for a property (position, size, opacity) at a specific point in time -- two or more keyframes let the software calculate everything in between automatically.
Easing: Controlling whether motion between keyframes speeds up, slows down, or moves at a constant rate.

✅ What Your Finished Work Should Include

Finished clip assessed for a genuine, deliberate keyframed animation (not just a built-in template effect) applied to at least one element.

Exit Ticket: What property did you animate, and how many keyframes did it actually take to get the motion looking right?

📊 Before You Leave

Quick, anonymous class check-in -- takes less than a minute.

Class Check-In

📤 How You Submit This — For Credit

How you submit today's work depends on what kind of work it was. Physical/paper work (most of this semester so far): photograph it with a classroom camera, upload the photo from its SD card onto a computer, and save it into your portfolio -- that upload is your submission, and the physical piece itself is yours to keep, the same as in Grade 9 (your notebook is the one thing with a home base in the room, and even that's your call to bring home when you want it). Digital work (once you're producing files in Photoshop, second semester on): no camera needed -- instead, EXPORT the file. Export your finished project as a JPG, as a PNG, AND save a copy as a PSD (all three), then upload all three into your portfolio. Either way: the portfolio upload, with a description, is what actually counts as turning the assignment in for credit.

📁 Portfolio Update — Once a Week

Once a week, add your best finished or in-progress piece to your portfolio (the Google Drive folder you started in Grade 9, becoming your Google Sites portfolio in Lesson 10) with a 1-2 sentence caption: what it is, what tool/skill it used, and one thing you learned. Keep it current -- don't save it all for the portfolio-website lesson.

✍️ Example description for your Google Sites portfolio (fill in YOUR blanks -- don't just copy this):

For this piece, I made ______________ (name what you made) for “Adding Motion: Your First Keyframe Animation.” This project asked: “Your video timeline edit already moved clips through time -- what happens when a single object moves, fades, or grows within one clip instead?” I used Keyframe by ______________ (explain how you used it in THIS piece). The hardest part was ______________, and I solved it by ______________. I'm proud of ______________ because ______________.

🎓 ACP Exam Prep

This lesson connects to the Photoshop Adobe Certified Professional exam: Domain 2: Project Setup and Interface

🔗 Want to Learn More?

The Motion Path (companion book) -- Ch. 4.6, Keyframes

🚀 The Extra Mile

Cross-Class Connection: The same cause-and-effect, rate-of-change thinking a Physics class uses for velocity and acceleration.

Career Connection: Directly ties to Animation and Video Design — keyframing is the one skill every motion software shares.

Go further -- turn this into a portfolio piece:

Animate a short (5-8 second) keyframed intro sting for your own portfolio site or a real club's social posts. Start here: set your first and last keyframes for one property (position or scale) before adding any others, and preview that single motion until it feels right before layering in more.
Take the same animation and rebuild it with drastically different easing (linear vs. heavily eased) to feel the difference for yourself. Start here: duplicate your original keyframed layer first so you keep the linear version intact, then change only the easing curve on the copy.