Animating graphs in After Effects – Bar graphs

In this short tutorial, I explain the basics of animating graphs in After Effects – Bar graphs. Animating graphs in After Effects is easy and fully customisable. I’ll go over how to make as many bars as you want, how to animate them to accurately reflect the exact numbers in your data, how to change the colour and thickness of the bar, the style of the bars and add an animated counter above each bar that ‘counts up’ to whatever value you want.

Keep an eye out for other tutorials on how to make other graphs and graphics to tell the story of your data or how to animate amazing infographics.

0:00 - Intro
0:38 - Making & customising a bar
2:12 - Animating a bar
3:25 - Create & animate a number counter
8:54 - Duplicating bars & number counters
13:23 - Staggering indivuidual bar animations

I hope you find it useful, and please get in touch if you want anything specific and I’ll do my best to work it out and post a video on it. Subscribing will really help keep this going, so please like, subscribe and get in touch through my social media or my website through the links below.

[glen_meyburgh]

Awesome, thanks Tom.
Why not set your slider value to the trim path end value?
This then negates having to set it each time.
Then precompose the value and bar, then duplicate for as many bars as you need.

[gabriel-mckee]

Fellow PhD student here (computational linguistics). Thanks so much for making this! Data viz is generally not one of the strengths of the academic world --I hope that changes with our generation!

[allmarketing]

Hi Tom, what I was most impressed with was your teaching style. Then I saw you are a PhD student, and the penny dropped! The expression for the % - I've changed it to a dollar sign, and it displays the dollar sign after the numbers, do you know it this can be changed so the dollar sign precedes the numbers?

[ZnCmoAr]

Just started with After Effects today and your video helped me a lot with animating some charts, thanks a lot. 😊

[rubberbumm]

Hi Tom this was such a great little tutorial. I've used this in my current project I'm working for and it has A LOT of data... Thank you so much for getting to the point quickly and explaining this so well.

+respect

[clarenancy]

Very well done! You made it easy for this newby.

[bruhdamartinasty]

What if I want to animate a highly detailed chart/graph? For example: All Academy Award nominees and winners in the past 50 years by category (acting, editing, cinematography, costume, etc.). And let's say I have all of the information in an Excel spreadsheet. I want the data to move, appear, disappear, change colors. How do I create this in a video/film? Is After Effects the right tool?

[vikash]

What If I want to show a bar graph of more than 100%? Because currently, the Trim Path is not allowing more than 100%

[martijnlancee]

Thanks Tom, any chance you could share the project file somewhere?

[bensumma]

Hey Tom, great video! Wondering how you would add a comma for the counter (slider) portion? I imagine it has to do something with the expression... Some help would be greatly appreciated. Thank you!

[GoodlyRogue]

great tutorial, well spoken thanks a lot

[lmid]

I just found your channel online, and it fits my exact needs and interests. Thank you for making your available creative content online! I will be utilizing data extracted from R. Do you plan on creating tutorials on how to develop animations using Comma Separates Value (CSV) files?

[OaklynMediaLLC]

What if my stats don't rely on percentages? Like what if I want to make bars counting the number of something. There's no percentage

[Kai_]

How would I convert this to a mogrt file?

[gextionadesign]

Hi Tom,
Thanks for the video.
I've got a question for you.
Is it possible to order the bars on a graphic depending on its size so show the change with time? I mean, I'd like to animate a graphic with a time serie and show how the one with the highest value at the beginning can be the last one with time by displacing its bar to the left as it get smaller than others.

Thanks again. You've got a new suscriptor

[grimmteam]

Hi, how to make a bar graph up to 1, 000, 000?