Anyone Can Animate: Easy Animation for Social Media

1. Introduction: Today's the day. Today's the day I start animating. All right. Ideas. You don't have any ideas. Stop it right there. I got you. Don't worry. Animating doesn't have to be hard. Let me teach you some things. I am Danny Casale aka Coolman Coffeedan. I am the self-proclaimed BAD animator. You might have seen a few of my videos across the Internet. Most people think when it comes to animation, you need a bunch of fancy equipment and a bunch of fancy software. You do not. I made my first animation that got tens of millions of views without any of that. No matter what you have, I have a way for you to bring it to life. Today's class is going to be about how to make a short loopable 15-second social media animation. It's going to start off with brainstorming your idea, scripting out your skit, sketching out your characters. Then it's going to go into the actual audio recording, animating, sinking the audio, and then finally, making sure everything's exported correctly for your animation to go out there into the world. I'm also going to be talking a lot about the very human and emotional connection that comes out of these. We are going to be talking about how we could do that with your life and your animations. If you're worried about coming up with the perfect idea, that's totally fine. What this should be for you is just a super simple way to figure out how to animate. I'm ready to get this party started so let's get animating. 2. Getting Started: Really anybody can animate whether you're a kid in school or you want to find something to do after work or you need a new hobby. Animation although it's so much magic, there's really just a school step-by-step way to go about doing it and I'm excited to share some of that with you. Let me take you back on a flashback to summer of 2017. Here I was just a 21 year-old, young lad with not much going for me, to be honest with you, I was doing like random projects to pay the bills. I had this middle of the night idea as I was brushing my teeth about a snake. I just saw a snake with a pink background and I was like, oh, visually, that's cool. I didn't really think, Oh, this would make a good animation or whatever. I just thought that's a cool visual, before I go to bed let me explore this because I don't want to forget it in the morning. I sat down and I drew that snake that I was imagining on an index card that I still have with me framed to this very day. I had this mole skin app on my phone at the time that allowed you to take photos and what that did is it allowed me to get, for the first time in my creative process, this doodle that I had on physical paper onto my computer. I'm like dope. Okay, cool. Well I know how to do some light video editing. I know how to draw. Let me see what happens when I marry the video editing knowledge and skills to the doodles. Super accidentally. Again, just because I didn't want to forget this idea when I woke up, I banged out a super quick little edit of this snake slithering in which is, I got in just like key frame them him, in final cut, super-simple, added some slithering sound effects, added some background colors, thought it looked super cool. I ended up adding a punchline about fake news. I ended up adding another character into the mix before I knew it, I had a 60-second fully fleshed out an animated skip, even though I had no intention of doing so when I was going into it. I was going down my Facebook timeline. Yeah. It said snakes have legs. No. Yeah. I got to go tell everybody. Yeah, you go tell everybody man, because true. Are you a snake? Yeah, man. I'm a snake. I heard that you have legs, man. That's some dump shit. Did you get this information from a reputable news source? A quick while after that animation was made, I uploaded it to the Internet, within a week really, it was completely and totally viral. I'm talking in every crevice of the Earth. There was politicians in Brazil sharing it. There was teachers in Europe showing their entire classrooms this. It was translated to every different language. One night it had one million views and then I checked back the next night I had nine million. For me, that was the first time I ever saw something that I created everywhere. That's when I realized, oh, people really liked that. I'm going to do more of that. Nowadays I'm posting a new animation a week. It's an entirely new concept or a new song or a funny joke or a new beat every week and I have my match clothing on the side. I have my paintings as you see behind me. I'm also doing very cool collaborations with brands like Samsung, like with Wix. These are all things that I never would have thought would have been possible and it's all becoming possible because of my art. But that was to date, my most viral hit ever and it was just a random, totally, I don't know where idea that I had at 3:00 in the morning and I'm very thankful that I didn't go to bed that night. A big part of the alert of that video, big part of the magic is how simple it is and it inadvertently gave like reason to my style as it is today. It's very simple. It's not over animated. It's really just two characters talking, some slight movement and a punchline. The reason for that is directly tied to me having no equipment, no know-how, no proper animation software, just some light video editing knowledge and a sharpie and a post-it. That's why I truly think anybody can do with whatever they have. If all you have is a series of post-its, you can make a flip book and you'd still get the joke across the table. You could still tell the punchline. That's what we're going be covering in this course, is how you don't need a crazy amount of know-how and you definitely don't need the equipment as long as you have the right idea. Don't worry about getting 10 million followers tomorrow because it's a hell of a process and that's not the reason you should be doing things anyway, you'll get caught up in the world of animation for the wrong reason. What you should be focusing on is the process and having fun while doing so is the main part. Throughout this class, we're going to be touching upon all the main points that I find important along the process and what you should be thinking about and expecting as well. First we have the brainstorming process then it's going to be bringing it to life, planting the foundation like the scripts and making sure it's all story-boarded out. Making sure you know the exact actions you want to hit, the actual production of it. Making sure you're recording properly, audio wise, making sure you're animating within the software they have access to and that you find yourself comfortable in. Then finally, we're going to make sure that we're exporting everything the right way, making sure it's all looking good. Making sure there's no glitches. That final pass before you have your grand debut to the Internet and you upload your little baby out there into the world. Right off the bat, you're going to want to make sure you have all your tools ready. That could be as simple as pen and paper, a sharpie and a post-it. I've had plenty of my first animations be an expo marker and a whiteboard. Then for audio, really anything that can record sound, it could be your camera. I used my phone voice memo app forever. I still use that sometimes, whatever you have sitting around that's capable of recording sound, perfect. If you're able to get that sound file off the device and into an editing program, that's all you need. Feel free to go down whichever direction you feel most comfortable with and whichever direction has the resources that you have access to. What I'm going to be using for this course consists of procreate on my iPad to be drawing the assets and characters. Just doodling those guys, Adobe Animate to bring the characters to life. We're going to be in tandem, be using Final Cut Pro as well. I'm going to show you how to animate using those two different programs. The final touches will also be used in Final Cut to make sure your end product is perfect. But don't worry about software right now. Don't worry too much about technology. We're going to be focusing purely on the creative for a little bit. This is probably the best part to be honest, it's the most fun part. Feel free to let your mind wander. Feel free to go to the resources tab, download the workbook that I made, that'll take you through my brainstorming process. We'll be doodling things a few times, a few different ways. We'll be writing things a few different times, a few different ways. Really, we want to make sure we find the right idea that suit your project and suits you. Go ahead download your workbook. I'm excited to start your journey into making your masterpiece of an animation. I'll see you in the next lesson. 3. Generate Your Idea: So much of my ideas and video material come from my own life. I lived in New York City for most of my life, and I just most recently moved to LA. Two of the most active and strange and straight-up weird, wacky cities on earth. There's no shortage of just material naturally happening around me. A lot of my best ideas would happen on the New York City subway when just the weirdest and strange things are happening. I really implore you to think about your own life and the experiences that you've experienced recently, maybe that would be incredible animation content. A few examples that I can think of specifically from my cartoon universe are, one day I was starving, one of the many days, I should say, and I just couldn't figure out what I wanted to eat. I didn't know if I wanted to cook, I don't know if I wanted to order Postmates, I didn't know if I needed to go to the grocery store. It was this dilemma. It was a whole psychological problem. I was going crazy, I was starving, and I ended up making a song called, ''I Don't Know What I Want To Eat.'' Perfect loopable beatbox song went viral on TikTok, went viral on Instagram directly from my life. That's exactly how I was feeling. I don't know what I want to eat but I'm still very, very, very, very hungry, yeah. Maybe soup, maybe chips, maybe string cheese I don't know, I just want to eat something. The inspiration could really come from any area of your life. Even if you feel like, I live in a boring hometown, nothing really happens around here. Trust me, there's plenty of things that you could see or think about that maybe you would make a great animation. Whether you see a bug on the floor or whatever. Diving right into the workbook, you'll see I have a whole page dedicated to exactly that. Finding out what your idea for your animation is going to be, and structuring it in a way where you could list what exactly it is that you want your audience to feel. Do you want them to feel happy? Do you want them to feel melancholy? How you would execute, conveying those emotions to your viewers. Listing the things that happened to you recently that would make you feel those things. Then finally, figuring out what your final destination is going to be, and we can just dive in. Let's say I wanted to make my audience just laugh. I want to make them have a good middle of the day, maybe they're at their job or in a boring class, I just want them to have a nice little giggle. I want them to feel joy, I want them to feel happy. I also want them to feel like they want to share it with their friends, it makes them think of their friends or family, relatability. That could be a few different things. Let's think about, what if it's about that feeling when you feel like there's too much on your plate, you feel like you're tackling too much, or you're a little stressful. Sometimes I feel that way. You're too busy with school, homework, regular work, you're like drawn in a million different directions, a lot of people can relate to that. Maybe something that made me feel like that would make people laugh or joy was this cute little kitten I saw at the supermarket. Someone had a backpack that had this cute little kittens' head popping out of it. Maybe that's a different idea that we could do like cute kitten who's this hidden evil scientist on the side. Cute kitten who is evil? Then finally how about that feeling when you eat something, you know you shouldn't eat it, you know it's going to hurt your tummy or something. I do not eat dairy, but every once in a while I see something that just looks so delicious that I sneak a bite, you always regret it. Everybody could relate to that whether someone's on a diet, or they just know they shouldn't eat something. That's always going to hit, it's always going to make someone laugh. Let's write knowing you should. We're going outside the lines, which is a whole analogy for this class. Not eat something. We have three really great ideas here. Go a little deeper into it. Fill out the rest of these boxes, fill out the rest of these lines. See what's on your mind, see what you've experienced lately so you have a slew of content to choose from. Then finally, I definitely want to post it on TikTok, definitely want to post it on Instagram. We're going to focus on that for when we figure out how we're going to export this thing, but that's ways away. As I look at this page, we have a bunch of really good ideas, but I think about, what do I want to make sure ensues a laugh? What makes me laugh most is this one right here. Knowing that you should not eat something and then eating it anyway. Let's use that one and we can dig deeper into this idea a little bit on the next page. Character development. This is huge. This is making sure we know who the characters we're going to be working with are. Are they humans? Are the monsters? Are they animals? Definitely name your characters, I would suggest, and then figure out the story. Let's dive deeper into what exactly is the food that they're coming across? How exactly are they coming to the fact that they know they shouldn't eat it, but they do so anyway? Then what happens as a result? We'll unravel that here. Maybe for the age-old question, are they humans, monsters, or animals? I really like working with my main character, Spesh who's like an animal rabbit cat thing. Then maybe we make the character number two. They'll be the one who eats the thing that they know they shouldn't eat. Maybe we make that a monster who eats a pile of pizza or something that he knows he shouldn't. Again, I'm taking it from my non-dairy lifestyle there. Let's say it's an animal, and it's my character, Spesh, that little cutie, and a monster, and his name will be Bobby. Let's draw just a little placeholder here, great. Maybe you have a few different ideas, maybe it's all animals, maybe it's all monsters, maybe it's fairies, maybe it's ghosts. Definitely don't box yourself in. It could be whatever you want it to be. If we wanted to come up with a bunch of different names, say you came up with a ghost character, his name can be a Spooky boy. That's a cute name for a ghost. Maybe you come up with the cat evil scientist, and his name is Dr. Meowz with a z. That's cool, you can have fun with it. It's the perfect example of any of these things could be your next beautiful masterpiece of an idea. Let's go off in my original idea about the animal, Spesh, monster, Bobby. How did they get there? Maybe walk into frame, they see a pile of pizza, the monster eats the whole pile. Then what should happen from there? Let's say his tummy blows up, cool. We have the loose story here. They walk into the frame, they see a big pile of pizzas, the monster eats the whole pile in one byte and his tummy just gets huge, blows up, it makes a funny noise, all of that. I think a really important part that shouldn't be overlooked is what's the shot order here? How are we revealing the joke at hand? Should they automatically in second number one, be eating the pizza? No, we want to build up to that. We want to establish the scene a little bit, that's why I have them walking into frame. They see a pile of pizza, establishing to the viewer that maybe that's something that'll come into play into this skit. We'll have a shot of the monster maybe contemplating like, oh, should I eat this? I'll be fine. Maybe we'll have Spesh talking for the audience a little bit, "Won't that hurt your tummy?" Things he could be saying, and the monster then the whole pizza, which thanks to our whole setup we know won't be good for him. That'll execute the punchline in a very natural manner given the limited amount of time we have, because we only have 15 seconds. When you're crafting up your scene, really think about where do you want to start? What do you want the first visual to be? From second one, frame one, it's going to be the thumb stopper. It's going to be the thing that keeps people from scrolling past your video. Then think about what you're going to want to tell next, and then after that, and then eventually think what you're going to want to land on. Keep in mind, it is going to loop, so what you land on is immediately going to be followed by what you started on. If you're stuck, I've been there. Don't look to my process as the end-all. You can get as wacky and wild as you want to get. This is all you, you're the artist, it's bringing your art to life. Feel free to get funky with it. By the way, this worksheet isn't going to be there for you at all times, it may not be there for you when you have your random 3:00 in the morning idea or that idea that you're having when you're walking down the street or in your car or whatever. Make sure you document it in some way, whether it's your phone or random piece of paper. If you're at a restaurant. Draw it down on a napkin, make sure you capture your idea. You really want to catch your idea like it's a butterfly and your pen is the butterfly net. Make sure you get that because you don't know which idea is going to be the good one, and which is going to be the one to take you to places you never would have imagined. But for the sake of this course, definitely make sure you get some of your starter ideas on this worksheet so we can work together and follow along. In the next lesson, I hope you follow me, we're going to be making sure we're shaping this up real nicely and making sure it all comes together while we script the action and get it all teed up for the animation process. I'll see you in the next lesson. 4. Script The Action: You can go into the recording session with zero script. But, I don't advise it. I've tried that in the past. It's very easy to get frustrated with yourself that you're not coming with absolute gold on the spot. Unless you're a professional comedian, definitely get some ideas down on paper beforehand. I have a loose idea of what the start, middle, and ending is. Also, leaving room for ad-libs, leave room for improv, leave room for you to be a little silly when you're on the microphone, because that's, again, a very fun part. Let's dive right into it so I can show you what I'm talking about. I'm imagining, again, maybe with them walking into frame, we have the monster doing something silly and dumb because the monster, the silly and dumb one in this skit, he's about to eat something he definitely shouldn't. Maybe he's singing a song. Maybe he's humming a song. Monster and Spesh walk into frame. Monster singing random song. You could on the microphone be humming, happy birthday, your ABCs, or you could be singing a straight-up Rihanna beat. Like whatever kind of comes to mind in that moment. Again, that's a perfect example of leaving some room for that improv magic when you're actually recording on the microphone. What are they saying? What happens when the monster realizes that there's a pile of pizza right before them? The monster could say, "Oh my God, look at that pile of pizzas." Boom. To the point. Establishes the scene. Talks about the prop that's right in front of him and Spesh will speak for the audience and say, "what are you talking about? Won't that hurt your tummy?" Scripting can be really as formal or informal as you want. You could have a brilliant script read on a bar napkin. It doesn't have to be anything too algorithmic or professional. Get the ideas down, make sure it's sounding and bouncing off each other the right way. I don't really know what I want the monster to say, but let's have the monster come back with something snarky. Again, that'll leave us with some room for improv once we're recording on the microphone and we could have some fun with that line. Monster comes back with something snarky and eats pile of pizzas. Boom. Let's have beat bit of silence and then monster's tummy rumbles loud. Cool. That'll be a sound effect that we find, some gurgling or something. Super informal, we just get the ideas on paper. This is something that we can just refer to when we're actually recording. You could flash it out, you could finalize it a ton, or you can just bring this piece of paper in and just read right off of it. When it comes to the looping this animation, you could go in two different ways. Maybe the comedy lies in the tummy's rumbling super loud, and it's a hard cut and it goes back to square one. You could have some fun with that. What I like to do is, have that seamless loop, series of frames that almost leaves the viewer not realizing that they're watching it multiple times. Maybe what we could do with this script is that monster's tummy rumbles super loud and an explosion happens, like maybe he just totally blows up. That would be super random and funny. The characters fly out of the frame. It would tee us up perfectly for them to walk back in frame. You have the action that makes them leave the frame. Then it goes back to frame number one with them re-entering the frame, causing a really seamless loop. For first-time animators, maybe you're feeling, well, I don't even know what to do with any of this. I know it sounded like a whole lot of hoopla right now. Trust me, I've been there. But think of it more like if your character wants to stand perfectly still and say one line and have maybe one action happen. Maybe he's raising his arm to say hello and he puts his arm right back down. That's like a quick little, oh, hey, hello sequence. That's fine. That's really as simple as it could be. You don't need to be doing any rocket science here. So, don't get overwhelmed. Keeping all that in mind, let's flash out the script a little bit. Make sure we know what we're about to be recording. Make sure you're feeling good about the lines and make sure you're going to be excited about it when you're actually having that microphone whipped out, ready to go and join me in the next lesson and let's go right into audio recording. 5. Record Audio: You made it to the record audio part. It's the most fun, guys. I'm not going to lie. This is when you get to have all your childhood dreams fully realized of just being silly, being a dang goof ball into a microphone, and make it something that really dope and cool out of it afterwards. This is how I do my thing. There's some animators who may do it a totally different way. For this example, we're going to do it my way. I cleaned up the final script a little bit. I later had some follow-up ideas, like let's definitely do that explosion part. Let's definitely do that idea where monster and Spesh fly out of the frame, monster bobby. So that when we loop back to frame 1, it'll be that seamless transition. Now that we have the final script and now that we have the mic all set up, we're ready to dive into the audio recording. Making sure you're recording audio properly is incredibly vital. You don't want to be feeling really good about it at the end of this session just to realize that there's cars beeping in the background or your baby crying in the background. You don't want any of that happening. First thing you're going to want to do is to find that quiet spot, your bedroom or your studio. Or if you need to, if you have that noisy window or noisy sibling or something, you could definitely lock yourself in a closet. Believe it or not, closets are excellent DIY versions of an actual recording booth. The clothes and all the junk that is naturally found in a closet absorbs all the sound and it works really well. Finding one of those types of situations, making sure there's no background noise, turn off your air conditioning if it's particularly loud, make sure nobody is talking in the background, making sure there's no echo, all of that is super important so that the time you'll spent recording the audio is well-spent time and you don't have to redo it. Today, we're going to be recording on the Shure SM7B Mic. It's probably a little more industry standard than it needs to be. Again, this is just what I've come to acquire over the years. The first microphone that I ever recorded on, for years, was a $40 microphone that I got on Amazon. I think it was called CAD, C-A-D, microphone. Nice, cheap, high-quality microphones. Whatever records decent quality audio works perfect. I definitely suggest your phone just because it's easiest and you can just AirDrop or email that voice memo file straight to your computer or whatever you're working in. This is going to be going straight into GarageBand. You could record straight into iMovie, Final Cut, any program that's capable of recording audio and making sure you can slice it up. If you need to or export it in different types of file types, I use GarageBand; that will work great for this as well. We have my mic all set up. I think it's about that time for me to do my first take and jump right into this script and see what magic comes out. Hopefully, it's a good magic. Make sure you're recording. First and foremost, it's like making sure the lens cap is off of your camera and then we're off to the races. The title of this video is Eating Something You're Not Supposed To. Special monster walking into the frame. Monster singing some song. La la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la. Oh, my God. Look at that pile of pizzas. Oh, my God. Look at that pile of pizzas. Make sure you're using your hands, really get into it, believe it or not, it helps sell that audio bit. It gets the audio sounding that much more genuine very naturally if you use your hands. Oh, my God, look at that pile of pizzas. Special response. Pizzas. Won't that hurt your tummy? Pile of pizzas, won't that hurt your tummy? Nailed it. The monster says, when he come back, this is that improv line. I'm just going to open my mouth and see what comes out. Spesh says, "Won't that hurt your tummy? Don't you have to go to the ugly store or shut up?" That's perfect, that beautiful, beautiful. That will work. Nice and awkward. We have the beat of silence. That's natural. That'll come in editing. We can get some white noise. You can get some of that background noise if you want to use it for safety and that beat of silence, so we could just do nothing, which is easy for a few seconds. Then we have the monster's tummy rumbling loud. That's a sound effect. We have the explosion, which is also the sound effect, and we have monster and Spesh flying out of the frame. Now, we can just fill it up with ad lib, stuff that would happen during that time. Maybe I'll do like a few like uh's and oh's. I could also do a few different mouth sounds of him eating that pile of pizzas in one fell swoop. Cool. Give it a few different takes of that one. Then him realizing his tummy is rumbling. Uh-oh. Explosion and maybe they fly out of the frames. We get some screaming. We get a ahh. Back up away from the mic for the loud parts, ahh, whoa, no, not again. Every time. Oh, no, not again. Perfect. We got a few different sound base there that we could toy around with in editing. See what did I tell you? Super silly. No need to take it too seriously. Definitely make sure you take it a few times. I'll read through it again in a few different versions. It's better to have more to work with later than less, just because you want to have options and you want to see what flows best, What's funny or in the end product. I'll read it again and we'll make sure it's sounding perfect. La, la, la, la, la, la. Oh, my God. Look at that pile of pizzas. Pile of pizzas, won't that hurt your tummy? Won't you hurt your head because it's too big and ugly man? I don't know. Shut up. Uh-oh. There we go. No. I need a lactate build. Something like that. Just take it a few different directions. Peep back to that checklist at the end of the day. Make sure you're warming up. Make sure you're having that fun. If you want to scream into the microphone before you record, that counts as a warm up to me. Just really make sure you're getting all your anxiety out and maybe make sure you're not going to feel nervous going on the mic which a lot of people do. It's scary hearing your voice back, but get all that nervousness energy out there. Just scream it out. Say some silly words, say the alphabet super fast, say some gibberish, whatever you want to do, and improv a few different versions a few different times. I suggest five, because that way, you have plenty of options and you get familiar with it every time. You get that much more familiar with it, so you have that much more to work with at the end of the day. Moving right along, we're going to take all that audio that we just recorded. We're going to take that whole file carried over into some software and start bringing everything to life. We'll tackle all of that in the next lesson. 6. Nap Time!: Okay. Don't freak out. Don't tell Skillshare about this lesson either. Yes, I'm in bed, but I'm totally sneaking in some tips and tricks about how to take a nap. Yes, a nap. Hear me out. Naps, not everybody takes them, not everybody feels like they need to take them. Why would I go to sleep? I'll just sleep past my alarm. I'll wake up hours later feeling groggy, wasting my day, no, I've heard it all before. Naps can be super refreshing to your creative process. They'll have you feeling revitalized, re-energized, and it's a good way to break up your day if you take the nap correctly and get back to your work with a new flair. Without further ado, let me teach you some tips and tricks on how to take the perfect power nap. Step 1, ask yourself, will anybody get mad at me for taking a nap right now? If the answer is yes, then it's probably not a good idea to take a nap. Are you at home? Is your mom expecting you to be productive, do some chores, do your homework? She doesn't want to catch you taking a nap, it might end badly, so I would refrain from doing so. Or maybe at the job, and boss man or boss lady is like, "Hey, everybody get their work done," and you're like maybe I could sneak in a quick one, hide underneath the desk, get in like a quick little snooze, you're probably going to fired and then you're going to lose everything. No nap is worth losing everything. If nobody is going to be mad at you for taking a nap, it's probably an optimal time to take a little power nap. Maybe during your lunch break, maybe during a little low in the workday, I think that's the way to do it, to be honest with you. Step 2, don't go under the covers, please. If you go under the covers, it's not a power nap. You're going to get way too comfy, you're going to start dreaming about muffins and cupcakes and butterflies. You don't want to be dreaming about muffins and cupcakes and butterflies in the middle of your workday. You want to keep it productive. Stay on top of the covers. Just lay on top of it like I'm doing right now. It'll still be comfortable, you'll fall asleep, you'll get a nice little REM cycle and then boom, you're back at it again in about 20 minutes. Which brings me to my next step, step 3. Set that phone timer for 25 minutes. From my experience, the perfect amount of time to nap. Thirty minutes is a little too long, 20 minutes is a little too short. Twenty five minutes, perfect nap, gets you feeling good, and speak enough, quenching your thirst for sleep, quench your actual thirst. Drink a full glass of water before you take that nap so that you're not waking up dehydrated, wondering where the hell you are. You want to make sure that you are feeling refreshed when you wake up from this nap ready to take on the second half your day. Drink that cup of water beforehand. Step 4, nap. Go for it. You deserve it. Dream about all the things you have coming to you in life, treat it as a positive manifestation of everything that you want to happen in the days to come, but really you're just going to sleep, so sleep up, you don't have to overthink it. Just nap. Step 5, as soon as you hear that dreaded ringtone alarm pop, back up to your feet, there's no use trying to hit the snooze, the snooze is for the nighttime sleepy, save that for another time. This is a productive power nap, 25 minutes, boom, you hear that alarm, get up and it's time to get back to your day. Step 6, as you're walking back to your workstation after your power nap, rejoice, really check in on your body. Appreciate how good you feel and maybe how horrible you feel. But with practice, the more power naps you take when you need it, the better you should feel. I am a seasoned power napper at this point in my life, I've been doing it for years, and every time I take one, oh my God, I feel like I could take on the world and at least the second half of the day. Appreciate that feeling. Step 7, you're back at it. Continue killing the second half your day just like you did with the first half of the day, except now you got your perfect power nap behind you, speaking of which I'm going to take one right now. I'll see you in the next lesson. 7. Choose Your Tools: Art, like for anybody who's a creative, is a hell of a journey, to find your specific style, to find your specific process. For me, it definitely took a few years for me to land on where I'm currently at, and how I currently do my things. I've had very humble beginnings. All I really had was literally markers and papers and pens and pencils and my phone. I found a way to make it work. I had no issues, I was able to actually have an example right here. This is the very first animation I ever made. Snakes have legs as I brought up before. This is my most viral hit to date, and this is the snake from that video right here, right now, on this index card sketch to write on there. I took a picture of it on my phone, which I'll dive into which app that I used to do that in a little bit, scanned it in, brought this little guy to life. Just to show you how simple it is, I had a whole little series that I started early on called Shape guys. I would sketch ideas out in something as simple as this goofy little notebook. I had an idea where these two characters, one's a triangle, one's a rectangle. They're at a diner, they see aliens, they're freaking out, they don't know if they're seeing things or whatever. Then they do a pseudo sketchy deal, which actually did end up making it in the final cut of this. But this is like we did on the worksheet, just getting ideas down. Over the years, I've gone through many different versions and many different ways of honing in on my style and on my process. But for you, we really want to figure out, what's the best process to hook you up with at this current point in time. As one of the options, if you have a pen, if you have a piece of paper, and if you have your phone, this is all you need to get started on option number 1, which is how I got started. I had the Adobe Moleskine notebook where I drew everything on. By no means you need that, you can just use any piece of paper. I drew a bunch of stuff up in this notebook, a bunch of weird wacky things. Specifically, if you were to look at this page, literally made the final animation. I had a whole skit about a guy ordering lemonade at an origami stand. You'll see all these different animated assets that I drew. I drew the lemonade, I drew the money, I drew his arm. You can see all those things moving in the final cut. You'll see through the moleskine camera app. I could just literally point it at the page, it'll auto crop and line up with the page. It takes the picture. It asked a few things. Hey, do you want to adjust the crop? You say, Sure, Mr. AI robot. You click Upload. Boom, it gets saved to your Adobe Creative Cloud. You can open it up and see it all of a sudden changed into a digital file, that you could customize on your computer and use it for any which way that you want. Right there, you can see now that's a digital sketched out image. We have all those prompts that we'll use in the final sketch. You could drop them into iMovie and start fidgeting around with them in that way. This is one of the very simple ways that, if you have access to those three things, your phone, a pen, and a piece of paper, you could really get your start. Then there's another free program that I see a ton of people use and do super incredible stuff with called Flipaclip. This is something that you can download for free on your iPhone or iPad. For just the example sake here, we'll use my trusted finger. We'll just draw a simple bouncing ball. You can choose whatever canvas background, you can get it super customizable. All my coumarin coffee Dan animations are some version of a solid bright color background. That's super cool. You could do that right in there. You can have it export size, you can have it set for YouTube, for Instagram, for Tiktok. Makes it super simple on that front, which is awesome. You could set the frames per second. Just for this example, we'll have it at the default, which is 12. When you open it up, it's pretty simple. You have frame-by-frame. You can add drawings as you go. You could set the brushstroke width, you could set the pen type, you could set the color of the pen. Then you just get drawing with my finger here. If you wanted to just do a super simple bouncy ball, boom, there you got it. You play it, and you have that super simple ball bouncing across the screen. Super simple free app way to make some cool animations. Finally, we're at present day the way I currently do my thing, which consists of a few more industry standard programs. If you have these programs, this is how I'm going to be explaining how I make my animations today. That's great. Maybe have some alternative programs that you're more in tune with, feel free to use those. But for the sake of this class, I'm going to be using Procreate on iPad with my Apple pencil. We're going to be using Adobe Animate on my MacBook, and Final Cut Pro finally, on my MacBook as well. Choose your adventure weary traveler. I want you to choose which one you think you're going to stick with. Is it option 1? Is it option 2? Is it option 3? I don't know. You tell me. Depending on which option you choose, in the next lesson, we'll talk about how to bring everything to life, and how to do it properly and have fun while doing so. I'll see you in the next lesson. 8. Design Your Character: We're going to bring our character to life. This is one of the coolest parts. I'm going to be using my iPad with the Apple pencil. I have Procreate currently open on a blank canvas. We're going to start filling out what this monster should look like. I already have Spesh my main character pre-existing. We already know what he looks like. If you have two characters, you're going to be figuring out what two characters look like or three different characters. But I'm going to be figuring out what the monster, Bobby, looks like. Let's start right away with some of the eyes that I imagine him. Maybe he's a little stubborn, so he has downward eyebrows. I have my signature, just not really anything of a mouth, it's just super line art E. I'm imagining him fuzzy. We'll have the horns up here where maybe he's like a cave dweller of sorts, super fuzzy cave dweller. Boom. Then draw out the rest of his body, give him arms. This by no means should be a super frustrating process. We're doing what any preschooler would do, which is just sketching imaginary characters. I'm liking how this guy is looking, I like to get super weird with it. All my characters have their nipples showing. Since he's maybe a cave dweller he has some weird x's on his chest or something, but that's our monster. In Procreate, we could do super simple color drops like this. Maybe his horns are going to be yellow. I like the yellow horn look. Maybe it's a little too bright for the fur, so we'll tone it down. No need to have to lock yourself in on whatever your first move is. Feel it out. Have fun with it. See what you're vibing with. Get funky with it. At the end of the day, you're sketching a monster who's about to eat a ton of pizzas. There is no rules here. I don't know why this would be the case, but I think we're going to make his ex nipples purple. Yes, Boom. Here he is. We have Bobby, the pizza-eating monster in the flesh. That came out gracefully weird, just as I expected. But let's take it a few different times. There's no shame in drawing something two times, three times, five times. Take it a few different ways until you're faced with something that you are totally stoked about. Let's imagine a totally different version of Bobby the monster. Maybe he has a triangle head. Maybe this is taking place on a planet where the monsters just naturally have triangle heads. Maybe he has one eye, who knows? If he lives in a cave on this planet, maybe the darkness that shows up in a cave gives people that live in the cave red skin. There are no rules on this planet. Green eyes. Maybe he has a little bit of a cowboy hat situation going on up here. The fashion does not know any limits. It certainly does not end at Earth. It could go as far as Mars. Who knows? The cowboy hats are in on Mars, I've checked. Just really get weird and wild with it. I think all too often people think, "Oh, I don't know how to draw. I definitely don't know how to do anything more than a stick figure." It's like fine. Maybe Bobby is a stick figure. If you could draw a bow tie boom, how hard was that? We have a very fashionable western cowboy version of Bobby, the red Fashion Nova cave dweller from Mars. Great. Maybe we'll do one more, totally re-imagine again. We'll figure out which version of Bobby, the monster that we like best. But maybe in this version he has three eyes. We're really getting crazy with the eye count here. Let's go on the fuzzy thing again. I really like fuzzy monsters. I think it's a vibe. Keeping it fun, maybe there's tentacles. Maybe he's an octopus type. Maybe he has a super big, scary, sharp teeth mouth. This guy is looking insane. Look, I just messed up. I didn't close that eye properly so the color bled in there. Totally fine. Art is supposed to be trial and error. We're just going to fix that super-quick there. Boom. Maybe we make his eyes orange here. The atmosphere on this planet is super strange and messed up, so we give him orange eyeballs. I think that'll be a vibe there. When coming up with the story for these characters, coming up with the whole background for them. How did they come to look like this? Like I said at the beginning of this class, animation is so fun because there's no limits. You could really get as wild as this or as simple as this, take inspiration from anywhere. It could be the people that you surround yourself with every day. Maybe your teacher, your science teacher looks like a hippo or something cool. Make a hippo science teacher. That's sick actually. That's a great idea. Or you can get as wacky as wild with it, as I am, like just letting your imagination run rampant and see where that takes you. There's really no limits. Now we have this totally different version of what Bobby monster would look like. Which I think is pretty cool. In the next steps, we'll settle on, which one of these do we imagine would be the best Bobby to use? Which one of these would look best eating a pile of pizzas? Which one of them would look best paired next to the Spesh character that I have interacting with him? We'll take it from there, but boom, check it out. We have Bobby 3. Bobby 2. Bobby 1. All just in a matter of a few minutes. Then we have a whole cast of characters to choose from and have fun with. This is obviously a whole fun little process which by no means should be taken to a serious degree. You shouldn't be holding your head down low, really focusing, trying to get every idea as perfect as you can. It should be an experimental process. You should be just putting pen on screen, so to speak, and just getting your thoughts down, seeing what comes out, seeing what you find cool, seeing what works, what doesn't work. Really just making sure that you're getting your thoughts down and you're getting your imagination to unfold before yourself so that your characters could be what you imagine them to be. We have a whole gang of wacky guys here. I honestly think I'm going to settle on a version like this, I think paired with my other character Spesh. There's some really good visual comedy to go down here, but feel free to take it a few different times. Take it 10 times if you want. Feel free to use your worksheet. We have all those boxes there. See what happens, see what your hand does, see what you think looks cool. Maybe ask a friend like, "Hey, which one do you enjoy the most? Which one stands out to you?" Once you have all those different versions sketched out on your workbook, and you choose which one of those you are happiest with, you're going to want to get it over to your computer. If you're sketching on your notebook or your physical pieces of paper, you're going to want to make sure it's all scanned on your Moleskine app and upload it to your computer. What I'm going to do over on my end is I'm going to AirDrop this over to my MacBook and make sure it's all looking good for it to be dropped into Adobe Animate. We're going to bring everything to life that way. I'll see you in the next lesson when we start bringing him to life. Are you excited, Bobby the monster? That's awesome. He's so stoked about this. I'm really excited to hang out with you in the next lesson, Bobby. Yeah, Me too. Cool. I'll see you in the next lesson. 9. Create Movement : We've reached that super magical part where we bring these characters to life and start animating. Animating at the end of the day is just like making a movie, you're setting up shots, you're going about making sequences, you're going about telling a story. Much like in a movie, there's a series of frames. It's just pictures that are tightly packed together to create the illusion of movement. That's really all that's being done in animation, except the main difference is these frames are being drawn, which at the end of the day, provide for so many more possibilities. You can really do anything. You can draw end frames after the fact, you can have a brand new idea while you're editing and animating, and then draw it right in. You don't have to schedule a re-shoot, which is pretty awesome. Diving right into Adobe Animate, we have the basic layout here. We have all of our characters. We have the pile of pizzas as our prop. It's formatted for TikTok or Instagram reels. We have that all sorted out. We're going to be playing within that canvas and make it all make sense visually. We have the blue monster, Bobby, to the right of the pile of pizzas, we have Spesh to the left, and we have that pile of pizzas right in the middle. It just makes for the perfect [inaudible] for what's about to happen. As you'll see, these characters look very simple on the surface. When you click the drop-down menu, you'll see that I actually split it up based on the different body parts that'll be moving, and even the expressions that will be changing on the different characters. You'll see right here we have the eyebrows that'll be vital to the monster Bobby's character expressions and emotions throughout the skit. You see the arms on their own layer. You see the mouth on its own layer, which is how I do all my characters. It's just open, closed mouth. You see that opening and closing there. You see the face on its own layer, its head on its own layer. We'll have some movement there and we have the body. When he goes to eat the pile of pizzas, we just have that wiggle room to toy around with our puppet a little bit and see what he's going to be doing exactly once he does that. We have the same situation for Spesh, arms. These are all things that'll be moving the mouth, obviously, the face, and the body, again. Those are all things to keep in mind when you're designing your characters and designing your props, is to make sure anything that's going to be moving is on their own layer, so that once you start making everything move, you could puppet those things into moving the way you want them to move. Maybe you're asking what should be moving and what shouldn't be moving? What should be on its own layer, and what shouldn't be on its own layer? I have a very simple solution for you and it's actually quite fun and it's actually, again, quite industry standard. What if you wanted your animation to have a character kicking the ball? Stand up out of your chair and act it out a few times. Maybe film it on your phone or your camera and see what body parts are moving. Now you know for a fact, that's going to be the part that you need to isolate on its own layer so that you could animate that leg kicking the ball. In the next step, we're going to start pairing everything to the audio skit that we have going on. When we have the audio skit dropped into Adobe Animate here, we can start playing with your characters, base it off on what's happening in the audio skit. What I wanted to do, like we thought about on our worksheet, is we thought it'd be very funny if Spesh and the monster are walking into frame to see the pile of pizzas, and then they start commenting on it, and the monster starts talking about how much he wants to eat it, even though he shouldn't have. We have Spesh, we have the blue monster here, and we have them walking into frame. There's no walk cycle. Again, keeping it super simple. You'll see as I play the audio skit, as we have the audio of the monster walking, we have them entering the frame to the left of the pizza. Check this out. La, la, la. Oh my God, that pizza looks so delicious. A pile of pizzas. But won't that hurt your tummy? Don't you have to go to the ugly store or? Shut up. Great. You see how we have all the basic movements and set-ups. They enter the frame, they go to one side of the pizza, they go to the other, monster eats the whole pile of pizzas and then his tummy rumbles. Those are the super basics. We know what points we want to hit when, and now it's time to get down and dirty with it and really see what's going to be happening during this skit here. I'll show you exactly what I did here and how we ended up figuring out what this sequence is looking like. La, la, la. Oh my God, that pizza looks so delicious. A pile of pizzas. But won't that hurt your tummy? Don't you have to go to the ugly store or? Shut up. Awesome. You'll see right at the very beginning we have that super-simple reveal of the characters coming into frame. You could just have them panning in. There's different programs that handle it in different ways. But if you could have those characters just sliding on in very simple. We have them reveal to the audience that they're looking at the prop. Then you have both of them gasping at the pile of pizzas. That's our movement right there and then from the get. You'll see right here as we drop down from the blue monster, Bobby, folder here, that those arms are not there when you turn that arm layer off. That's that moving factor right there. Same deal with Spesh. If you go to Spesh's character rig, you'll see the same deal. You turn his arms off. Those are the ones that are moving, so they're not there when you turn that layer off. Then let's move to a section where the monster does some expression, like he gets a little mad or something. You'll see that his eyebrows right here on the expression layer get a little more intense because he's getting a little mad. He's saying, "Don't you have to go to the ugly store or something?" Because they're on their own layer and we have freedom to do whatever we want with those eyebrows. We have them slope downwards a little bit because he's getting a little pissed off. He's saying, "What the hell, Spesh. I thought we were on the same page together, man." Then we have him flip around. We have his arms up again. Again, because those arms are on their own layer, we could do whatever we want with them and then, boom, here he goes, the final act. We have him eating that whole pile of pizzas. This is where things get interesting. We go back to the whole thing about frames. We have maybe the most animated sequence in this whole skit so far where his mouth gets big and he eats the whole pile of pizzas in one fell swoop. Something pretty cool here is we have something called an in-between frame. The in-between frame may not even be noticeable upon first viewing, but to the subconscious, it's super important to keep something looking smooth, especially in animation. Instead of going from this point where the monster is pointing at the pizza, he's about to eat it to this point, fully engulfed in his mouth pizza pile, we have this in-between frame where he's just almost eating that pizza. We see his mouth open all the way wide. Although it's there for only a few milliseconds, you might not even notice it when it's playing at full speed, it fills this gap in your mind that the motion is much smoother and much more realistic and maybe it serves the punchline a little better. Check it out when we play it back now knowing about that in-between frame. Boom, only there for a few milliseconds really, but it really helps you process the movement and how funny it is, that he's eating this whole pile of pizza with just one bite. You'll notice that there's no in-between frame on the way back. That's just a stylistic choice. I always like it when the characters snapback, it's a bad animation at the end of the day, I like to keep everything bad and simple. Not playing by the rules too much, but I think a nice in-between frame has a nice place there. Here's another great example in the final act of the skit, monster Bobby's Tommy starts rumbling. He knows he shouldn't have eaten that pizza. He's lactose intolerant and his stomach is responding accordingly. You'll see that his stomach lines are vibrating. This is another great example. You draw something a few different times and it creates this natural movement to it. I drew his stomach with squiggly lines, that's why we have the body layer so we could do that, and it's looking like an upset monster stomach. You'll see it's just a different version of the squiggly stomach drawn over and over again a few different times on loop, played at full speed. It just looks like it's vibrating. Those are some really simple ways to create movement. There's like 30 frames here during the monster vibrating stomach but you're not redrawing the stomach 30 different times. That'd be a huge waste of your time. You're going to want to really maybe only draw it three times like I did here. You'll see I drew the stomach very certain squiggly way here onto the next frame, slightly different, on to the next frame, different again. Then that's just looped over and over again until the end of the sequence. I'll play it again so you can see, keep that in mind. It's just three frames drawn differently on loop a bunch. Pretty cool. Speaking of frame by frame, you might be like, wait, this is a 15 second long animation. How many frames is that? If you were to look super technically at the timeline here, it's saying we're at 371 frames by the end of this 15 second project file. But you're not drawing something 371 different times. There's actually a lot of still motion here or lack thereof where it's telling the story that the characters are standing still for a few seconds, but there's no need to create any movement where you don't need any. There's so much still movement where none of that even makes sense and it would honestly be a huge waste of time. I only have it where there's movement definitely happening at parts like body parts moving and when the characters are walking around. But every other part is dialog driven and that's why we spent all that time there nailing down the audio and nailing down the punchline and nailing down the lines because we want that to be super-strong too. You have your characters moving around. You have all the basic body parts moving and there's something missing and you don't know quite what it is. I'm going to tell you what it is. Their mouths aren't moving. You're going to want to make sure that the open mouth layer is on top of that closed mouth layer every time the characters are speaking, you're going to want to find different patterns in the audio, in the line delivery. Remember when you were younger and maybe you would find like a sock and you would use your hand to move the puppets mouth like this. Think of it like that. Every time I talk, the mouth is open. Ah, buh, bah, bah, bah, buh, I don't call them bah, bah mouths for nothing. That's like what I ended up calling them, but they are open and they go bah, bah every time the character is saying something. If we were to use that hand puppet example on our characters here, and you go into monster Bobby's body part layers here, you'll see on the mouth layer that the mouth is only open during the parts where it makes sense for him to have his mouth open. During the part where he's like, oh my God, it's going, oh my God. But you'll see here on the mouth file layer that it's all very open, closed. There's no pattern to it. It's just you listening along to the audio, seeing what makes most sense for the mouth to be doing. With that kept in mind, check this out and see how the mouths are moving here. La, la, la, oh my God, that pizza looks so delicious. A pile of pizza, won't that hurt you, Tommy. Won't you have to go to the ugliest store? Shut up. You're definitely going to want to make sure that everything is looking good with the mouth as well. You can see how many times this mouth layer is popping up depending on who's talking when. There's a lot of room for error, typically, the last thing you want to do is when you think you're all done and you go to export this thing, you see like a random mouth like floating up here or floating over there. Especially if your characters are moving around make sure that mouth is moving with your character. Talking about the open mouth, look how simple mine is. It's my go to. I literally drop it into all my projects. This is as simple and as basic of an open mouth as you can get. It's really all uphill from there. Like you could add teeth to it, you could add a tongue to it, whatever you want. You can have fun with it. See what the open mouth of your character would be. By no means, is this like something you have to have or just be a black circle as your open mouth. That's just my style and how I've always done my thing. This part definitely takes the most time, but at the end of the day, it's going to be the highest reward to see your creations alive, telling jokes, eating a pile of dairy, it's going to be a party. Take your time in this, no rush, really get it right, really get it to where you want to get it. When you're ready, I'll see you in the next lesson and we'll tackle everything, audio, everything syncing, everything that's going to make it that extra 10 percent better for the grand debut. I'll see you over there when you're ready. 10. Sync the Audio Track: You really want to make sure the concept of your skit is understandable by the viewer. The best way to do that is making sure the audio is sounding good, sounding super crisp. There's no issues, or random glitches, or misplacements there. I'll show you a little bit of how I do my thing in Final Cut Pro. I'm going to go ahead and export from Adobe Animate here. We hit File, Export. Then Export Video/Media. Make sure all your settings are looking good. Make sure you're exporting at the highest resolution you're able to. I always like to suggest either using QuickTime as your file type to export or H264 file type. Even MP4 file type, whichever one you feel comfortable with. If there's anything very specific that you're trying to do, I would Google it, but for this example, as we're just carrying it over to Final Cut Pro, we're going to keep it simple. Export it as a QuickTime. It's going to do this little loading thing. You maybe just sing a little song in your head. Cool. Then you're going to head over to Adobe Media Encoder. That's going to reflect right up over there. This is the latest file, the most recent file that you exported. You're going to go ahead, make sure it's looking all good. Hit Interpret Footage. These are the final little settings that you're going to tinker with before you completely export out of here. Again, whatever settings that you're looking to have on your final export. Then hit that Play button. It's like you're playing a song, but you're playing your future. That didn't make any sense. It's going to export right out of there to the export location on your computer, which I had as my desktop. If you go to your desktop, you'll see, boom. Here it is. You can literally drag and drop right into your Final Cut library. There it is. Ready for us to play around with. Depending on how familiar you are, maybe a little less familiar with Final Cut. The library is separate from the projects. Just start a new library, start a new project. You'll have your timeline there to drop everything in. Now, we could dive in. Start tweaking a few little things here, decorating a few little things there, and putting the final icing on the cake. I like to just make sure, first and foremost, that the audio is absolutely synced up with the action, with the sequencing of the movements, and with the mouth open-close pattern. Because if the mouths aren't moving with the audio brings the viewer completely out of it. If we drop it into the Final Cut timeline here, we have the audio track right here, we have the video track right here. Let's make sure that it's looking good. La la la. Oh my god. That pizza looks so delicious. A pile of pizzas, but won't that hurt your tummy? Won't you have to go to the ugly store? Shut up. Perfect. It's looking pretty good. The mouths are moving along with the audio. We have all the arms up and down. We have the action, we have the munch on the pizza. That's all working perfectly with the audio. What if you were to drop it in, and it looks something more like this? La la la. Oh my god. That pizza looks so delicious. A pile of pizzas, but won't that hurt your tummy? Won't you to have to go to the ugly store? Shut up. It's a little delayed there. It's not too delayed, but it's definitely not perfect. What if there was a glitch right in the middle? La la la. Oh my God that pizza looks- Oh my god. Where's the audio? Where's the audio? Then it comes back in, and it's totally- Won't that hurt your tummy? Wont you have to go to the ugly store? Those are some super easy mistakes to make. Here you are. You've done all the animating work, you've done all the scripting work, you've done all the voice-over work, but if the stuff's not matching up, it's totally unwatchable. You're going to really want to make sure that the audio is matching up. Just do a little pass or two. Watch it 10 times, if you need to. You have that audio track on a separate layer here. You can move it around a little bit, make sure it's all lining up as you intended it to. 11. Add Music and Sound Effects: Now that your audio is sounding perfect, it's time to decorate it out and make it sound even better with sound effects and music. The best place by far that I've ever used to do this part is Epidemic Sounds. I actually have a discount code just for you as a thank you for enjoying this course with me. If you go over to the resources tab, there's a nice little link there for you. If you go over to Epidemic Sound, you're literally going to go over to the sound effects tab. I'm looking for a bite sound effect. I want the monster who's munching on that pile of pizzas to have this huge bite type of munch sound effect. Let's see what we got in the search here. We got the top one here. It's pretty good. Let's see if we got anything else. We have Caterpillar Bite. That's nice and munchy. It's nice and crunchy. I think we're going to go with that. You could literally download it straight to your computer. We'll drag that into Final Cut and I'll show you what that looks like right now. You're going to line that up with the pizza munch part. We'll adjust the volume a little bit because it's a little loud, I can tell already. Let's make it something like that and let's play it back and see what it sounds like. To the ugly store. Shut up. Perfect. I find that with sound effects sometimes they very pleasantly work out perfect timing-wise. Let's check out an instant replay. Shut up. Oh my God, music to my ears. Amazing. Since we're trying to do a nice looping animation here, let's find a song or a track that loops super well. The other really cool thing about using Epidemic is right on the homepage, it'll use its algorithm to suggest a really good slew of tracks for you. Let's see what we've got. We got float, which says it's dreamy, laid back. Let's see what that sounds like. Maybe it'll work well with this monster pizza skit. We've got a good beat there. It's super low-fi, which has the magic algorithm gods predicted. That's my vibe and my brand. Let's see what else we got here and if it works with the skit that we have at hand. I like that, That's really cool and it's a little more upbeat. I think it'll loop really well. The amazing thing that honestly blew my mind when I started using Epidemic is that you could download the stems. Say you only liked the drums from that track that we just listened to and you're like, "Oh, Dang, I wish I could just have that drum beat." You can, using this feature where it says download on all stems or download the full mix. I like the full song though, so I'm going to download full mix and it's going to download right to my computer and we'll drop it in. I really like once it drops into the beat, so we're going to cut right to that part where the drums come in. I can already tell that it sounds a little loud for the audio that we have going on out of our characters. I'm going to lower the track a ton and make sure that it's not stealing any of the f-under from our beautiful cast. Let's see what this sounds like. Oh my God, that pizza looks so delicious. A pile of pizzas. But won't that hurt you, Bobby? Wouldn't you have to go to the ugly store? Shut up. It's still a little loud. I'm going to drop it down another notch or two. I think for the comedic effect, something that I like to do is cut out the music once something funny happens so we could really hone in on the magic of the moment. I'm going to just slice out the rest of that song once he goes for the munch. That'll be funny because he'll realize that his stomach is gurgling. Let's see how this all plays out. Oh my God, that pizza looks so delicious. A pile of pizzas. But won't that hurt you, Bobby? Wouldn't you have to go to the ugly store? Shut up. Cool. It definitely focuses more on the moment of how weird and funny it is that the monster eat this whole pile on one bite and his stomach is reacting to that. I think now that we have this, let's see how it loops. I love using Final Cut because before you even upload it to Instagram or TikTok, where it will inevitably loop for the rest of time, we could see right out of the program what it's going to loop like. If you go to Help, I like to just literally search whatever you're looking for in Help. Just type in loop and boom, it's saying, "Do you want this to playback loop automatically?" I have that checked out as, "Yes, please." That makes my life so much simpler. You can hit "Command L" if that makes it simpler for you. Let's see what this masterpiece looks like when it's looping for infinity. Oh my God, that pizza looks so delicious. A pile of pizzas. But won't that hurt you, Bobby? Wouldn't you have to go to the ugly store? Shut up. Perfect. So it loops over and over and over again. You could really get that feel for that right out of the program here. Now, you could upload this and say, okay, the hard cut is like the comedic magic here. You don't know what's going to happen next. It leaves some stuff up for imagination and it loops like that, which is totally perfect. I like to experiment a little bit with the seamless loop, where almost the viewer doesn't know that they're watching it multiple times. What I think in my wacky imagination is that an explosion would work perfectly here. It's like analogy to what will happen to Monster Bobby's bathroom in a few minutes. Totally funny and explosion is always warranted, especially in cartoons. I have a really good green screen explosion on deck here that I'll just drop into Final Cut. I'm literally just going to chroma key this explosion out and layer it on top of what we already have animated. You'll see how I do that here. I'm literally just dropping it in. Going to the effects here, typing in key because we're going to key it out, and then boom. Here, you drop the effect right on there. The explosion is fully customizable, no green background. I'm going to modify it a little further, again, depending on how far you want to go with this. I'm going to speed this explosion up a little bit so that it really comes out of nowhere. Let's see how this looks. Still a little slow. We're going to speed it up a tiny bit more and we need an explosion sound effect. What's an explosion visual without an explosion sound effect? Let's go back to Epidemic and let's find a nice explosion. Wow. Yeah, that was a lot. Let's find something a little more of a single explosion maybe. These are intense. Let's try one more. No need to settle on the first thing you come across. Really click around and see what you got there. Okay, let's use one of those. I think I really like the third one that I clicked on. Let's download that right to our computer. Drag it into our editing program. That's a loud explosion. Let's definitely lower that a little bit and let's line it up. Make sure everything sync to the right way. You see that we needed it to be a little bigger, so that covers our cast there. You can just scale that up. Awesome. I think I'm in a good spot. I think this is going to really land the joke in a funny, unexpected way. The explosion comes out of nowhere. The sound effect is sounding just right. We're going to have it do a hard cut so that it flows a little better once it loops. You'll see what I'm talking about. Oh my God, that pizza looks so delicious. A pile of pizzas. But won't that hurt you, Bobby? Wouldn't you have to go to the ugly store? Shut up. That just flowed real seamlessly from the last frame back to frame 1, we have that visual extra joke in there. It's so funny because it's naive animation that's like a real explosion that we just chroma keyed right on top of our animation layer. That's why I like using Final Cut Pro, it's like the final decoration stage, and you could loop so many different ways. Keep honing in on it, keep toying around, see what works best for your skit. This is one of the final steps, so don't rush through it. You'll regret it. Make sure it's as good as it can be right now. In the next lesson, I'm going to show you a little bit of how to export and just the general best practices that comes with exporting videos to platforms like TikTok, Instagram, really anything social media. Take your time on this. Make sure everything is looking proper and I'll see you in the next lesson. 12. Finalize and Export: You've reached your final lesson and it's making sure all the export settings are looking good and proper. I know maybe you're like, "This is the last lesson." It's about export settings. I thought it was going to be much more exciting. This is anticlimactic. Where's the fireworks? The fireworks are coming. Don't worry, I got them coming, but how much would it suck if you spent the past bunch of lessons making sure everything was absolutely perfect in quality just to mess up a little bit and overlook an export setting, and you put it out to the Internet. I'm going to make sure it doesn't happen. We're going to go over what are the best practices in making sure that your file is perfect for uploading to places like Instagram and TikTok. The beautiful thing about Final Cut Pro is that you could literally have a slew of different options. Depending on what you're trying to do, there's really an export setting for all of that, but I'll show you what I like to do, and what I found is the quickest and easiest way to make sure you have the highest quality video with the smallest file size so that you could AirDrop it over to your phone or something. The way to export out of Final Cut Pro is to go to File, Share, and then you have a few different options here. If you were to go to for example the Master File option and say you're like, "I don't know what the hell I'm doing. I'm new to all this. I'm just going to export it however which way I want." Then you hit "Next" and you're like, "Okay. Cool, it's working. It's going to be exporting to my desktop," and it loads and loads and you're like, "Awesome, here's the file," and you upload it when really what you have is this. Oh my God. That pizza looks so delicious. A pile of pizza. That doesn't look great. It's blurry, it's small. It should be taking up the whole screen, but it's like much smaller than what it should be. If you were to upload this to TikTok, if you were to upload this to Instagram, it's going to be the lowest quality video on the feed for everybody to see. It's not going to look great is what I'm saying. Let's find out the right way to export this. Again this is what I've come across over the years as the best way to do it. I like to go to File, Share, and then Apple devices 1080p. What that's going to do is it's going to make sure it's a nice snug little file so you could AirDrop it to your iPhone, to your iPad. You could email it to whatever device you're using. That's awesome. If you look at the little do hickeys here, I'm going to show you the little specific things that you should be looking out for. On the Mastering under Settings, make sure it says video and audio. Both of those things are important here. You don't want to do just video, you don't want to be exporting just the audio. I like to export it as H.264 and you see that default 2160 by 3840? That's going to make sure it's its absolute best quality. You're not going to lose any quality there. You'll see the difference and you're going to see, "Wow, this one's going to pop out much more as opposed to the other one that was exported incorrectly." Here's the incorrectly exported file. It's a little blurry. It's not as sharp, it's smaller, not going to look good. Here's what we just exported. Very crisp. It's almost like you're watching a Pixar movie or something and it's like boom, there it is. In all its glory, it looks like it's ready for Hollywood. Oh my God, and it's big enough where it could be blown up or shrunk really depending on whatever phone size, maybe someone's watching it on an Apple TV, on YouTube or something. It's going to adapt perfectly because it's full quality and we exported it to be that way. If you're a freaking out like, "I'm exporting some weird niche video that needs to be this long, don't worry about it." This is literally a perfect example. If you type in Instagram video dimensions 2021 or something, you'll see like the slew of different options there are for what you're trying to do. There's a different best-practice depending on the more niche stuff you're trying to do for sure. If you're ever stuck or if you're ever totally unsure, just go over to good old Google and ask them what's up. Definitely make sure your export settings are looking good. You put a lot of hard work and energy into it, and this final step will really make sure it's all being presented the right way, the best possible way really, so take your time on that. While you're doing that, I'm going to AirDrop it over to my phone and boom, once it's finally all done in on your phone screen, it's the closest you'll really get to seeing your video in the palm of your hands. It just really pops off of your smart phone screen. It really looks good and you get a real idea of like, "Wow, this is what it's going to look like to people as they're scrolling on their Instagram feed or TikTok For You page." It looks pretty dang good. I mean, you be the judge of that. I would say you're honestly officially an animator. Your ancestors would be proud. Your caveman, great, great, great grandfather would probably say something along the lines of "Uga, buga," and that's fantastic. Wherever you're at in the process, whatever your animation is looking like, whether you're stoked about it, whether you're feeling about it, post it in the project gallery. I would love to take a look at what you're doing and go check out my TikTok and Instagram. I mean, you're going to see the final product up there in the world for everybody to engage with and sent to their friends. You'll see what it feels and looks like once the audience gets engaged which is pretty cool. 13. Final Thoughts: You did it. You're animating, you're off to the races, you're posting on social media. This is incredible. If there's anything that I've learned over the past few years through posting my animations online, is that you could have your animations be something special for so many people out there. There's going to be animations of yours that you post that some people may cherish forever and send to people that they love. So, the fact that you're doing this means you're doing something amazing, not only for yourself, but for other people, and that's what art should be. So that's amazing, congrats for starting the journey, and I can't wait to see what else you do over time. Thanks for joining this course with me. Thanks for having some fun and making some cool art along the way, and for all the fellow OCD viewers out there, I'm going to tinker with everything. I know you wish I did during this whole thing. Oh my god. Happy animating.