Motion Science Takes a Look at Creating Spiral Camera Moves Using Various Levels of Parenting

Cameron Pierron of Motion Science offers up a quick tip for After Effects for working with 3D camera moves. How could you make a camera in After Effects move in a spiral motion? This ten-minute tutorial has Cameron walks us through two different methods.

Quite a few answers in animation can come from isolating moves to specific controllers. For example, one Null will be designated for position only, while another null will just handle rotational keyframes. That is how the first solution works, and it is a simple one. It uses a set of Nulls that are parented together. Each Null is for a specific task. One Null will move on the Z, while its child only rotates. The child will take inherit the back and forth motion from the parent while it is doing its rotation.

The second method involves merely making a spiral in Adobe Illustrator using the spiral tool and pasting that as a motion path for the camera. Fun fact: Illustrator’s Spiral tool only creates Logarithmic (or equiangular) spirals. You can manually create an Archimedean spiral by copying a circle at an equal distance. I show how this works in a short demonstration I did years ago.

Both camera animation methods work great, while one offers a bit more control over the camera moves.