Learn how to rig a shadow to automatically fade. In this episode, Brandon walks you through using expressions to generate values for the scale, opacity, and blurriness of a shadow based off of the Y position of the layer casting it.

� Why not just keyframe those properties? �
Good question! If I had 3 keyframes, I would totally just keyframe those properties. But what makes having a responsive shadow so useful is that any animation the object does (animating in, bouncing off the ground, or in this case - floating up & down) the shadow will respond appropriately without having to keyframe it. And if you have expressions on the object, it becomes impossible to keyframe the shadow's properties accordingly.

� Shouldn't the scale of the shadow decrease as the platform gets higher? �
It depends on the light source(s) causing the shadow. In this case, it's blocking the "light source" from the top of the frame, and so the closer it gets to the top, the shadow size increases. The inverse of this would be more of a contact shadow, and you would just need to subtract an amount from the scale, instead of adding to it.

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00:00 Intro
00:18 Basic Setup
00:56 Opacity
01:32 Blurriness
02:36 Scale
03:40 Nulls for Top & Bottom Points
04:13 Final Thoughts