How to Animate a Street Scene Using Parallax in After Effects

Today we will explore how to use the Parallax effect in After Effects to animate a scene. The Parallax effect can create an illusion of a vehicle moving down a street, bringing your animations to life.

Understanding the basic principles such as the proximity of objects to the camera is key to achieving this effect. Objects closer to the camera should move faster than objects farther away to create a realistic sense of depth.

In our scene, we have a vehicle, buildings, and hills in the background. These background elements will remain static, while objects like the street lanes and lights closer to us will be animated to create the illusion of movement.

We start by selecting the layers we want to animate and adjusting their positions. As we move forward, objects closer to the camera, like a lamp post or the grass, move out of the frame faster than those farther away, creating a feeling of forward motion.

By repeating these movements, we create a loop that gives the impression of the vehicle moving continuously down the street. Fine-tuning the animation speed of each object based on its distance from the camera can make the animation even more realistic.

To wrap up, we add the loopout expression to make the animations continuous. This final step truly brings the scene to life, creating the impression of a car moving down a street, with the surroundings whizzing past.