2D Animation For Beginners With Adobe Animate

1. Class Introduction: Welcome to Wicked Skills video, on Skill Share. We will be learning the basics of 2D animation with Adobe Animate. In this class, I will be covering the basic techniques behind animating, there are to art. We'll start by learning a bit more about the software we are using, and getting a good feel for it. Once that's done, we'll learn how to draw with vectors, and dive straight into all the ways you can create animation. I will be covering, drawing the vectors, frame by frame animation on key frames, animating motion, and effects using tweening, creating intricate movements using motion guides, combining multiple animations on the same scene,and making animations more interesting, and believable. I will be covering these topics by showing you how to make a short promo video for a make believe video game. My name is Walt, and I will be guiding you through this class. I am a digital designer by trade, and I like to take on projects in UX design, web development, game design, and of course animation. Who should take this class? This class is aimed at students who have an interest in computer animation, that have little to no experience. We're going to start from the basics in order to give you the foundational skills to get into animation. If you already have skills in animation, and want to learn more about Adobe Animate, this class will be a good way to get acquainted with the software, and it's capabilities. Your skills can aid you in making animated content for YouTube videos, video infographics, animated gifs, animated illustrations, web page content, or cartoons. The applications are endless. By the end of this class you will know how animation works,can experience in working with vector art, have a good understanding of how to create realistic looking motion, have a good feel for working with timelines, and nested animation, and have an over all good foundation in 2D computer animation.[MUSIC] 2. The Project: Every cool smartphone game, has an impressive promotional video. For the project, I want you to go into your app store, and have a look at a few game trailers. Then, think up your own make-believe game to design a video for. Roughly sketch out a scene with a character, some prompts, and give the game a name. This will be your inspiration for a 10-second video game trailer. Create a class project. Then, post your sketch and the name of your game as soon as you've had some time to think about it. We will cover some animation principles along the way, and I'll show you how to put things together into an animated scene. I will guide you in starting your project. When you're ready, you can make your own video and post it. 3. Introduction to Adobe Animate: When opening up Animate, you are meet with the welcome screen. From here, you can select the preset that you need for the task at hand. For this class, we will always be selecting the H-D preset under character animation. This is for any type of animation you intend to export to video. Under the details to the right, you will see the video dimensions and the platform. Actionscript 3.0, a scripting language for controlling playback and interaction. Once I create a document, you will see the interface populate with all sorts of panels. At the very top we have the menu which houses all the functions on the one side and on the other side you should see the current workspace. Workspaces are layout presets meant to make your job easier. Take a minute to check them out and return to essentials. If any of your panels has disappeared or shifted in position, you can reset the essentials layout by clicking back on the workspace drop down and clicking "Reset Essentials". Next we have the document panel labeled Untitled one, currently contained the scene. Below that we have a timeline, where we can set the speed of the video, add layers, and work with individual frames. To the right is our properties panel, currently displaying the documents' properties. The tab next to that is our library, which stores props and characters. As you can see, the library is currently empty. Finally, to the far right is our tools panel. You'll notice the default tool selected is the Selection tool, useful moving objects and modifying drawings. The stage similar to an art board or canvas, is where all the action takes place. This represents what is currently in the frame of your video. Drawings outside of it will not appear unless they move into frame later. I'm quickly drawing a few shapes, some ovals and rectangle, so we can have a look at how to move about the stage and work more accurately. The most obvious way to pan around is to use the vertical and horizontal scroll bars or we can use the mouse wheel. The best way, however, is to hold down the Space bar while clicking and dragging on the stage. Whatever tool you are using before we'll switch back as soon as you release the Space bar. To zoom, I prefer to use the shortcut keys. You can also find zoom settings at the top of your scene panel or in the view menu. To zoom into an object of drawing, select it first using the Select tool, and zoom in using your shortcut keys. Notice how sharp this oval is. Even though we zoomed into it, we can't see any pixels or blurring, that is because the shape is a vector, and vectors are made up of computer generated points and paths. We don't ever lose and quality until we export the animation to an image or video format. In the next video, we'll get a better feel for drawing with vectors. 4. Drawing with Vector Shapes: In this lesson, we will be briefly looking at how to draw and composition vector shapes to great characters or props to animate. In front of us we have a new blank document consisting of one layer and one frame. The shape drawing tools are located in the center of the toolbar. Here you find rectangles, ovals, stars, and polygons, as well as tools to make lines, brushstrokes, and free form shapes. Hover over tool with your mouse to see what it is and it's keyboard shortcut. First, I'm going to select the rectangle tool. This changes the cursor to [inaudible]. Notice that the properties panel display settings for the act of tool. Here we can easily set the full color as well as the strokes, color, thickness, and width variation. Clicking on the color box next to the full icon reveals the color picker, which has a range of 256 colors to choose from, or click on the color wheel to mix your own specific color. I will leave the stroke color black and increase the stroke width. Click and drag to create a rectangle, or hold shift while dragging to create perfect square. The same goes for the oval tool. Shapes don't always need strokes and can be drawn without simply set the stroke color to nothing. You will quickly notice that shapes and animate work a little bit different from other software. Let me demonstrate. If I draw two shapes of the same color overlapping each other, they folds will combine to make one big shape. You can see this when I select and move the result with the select tool. If I draw two overlapping shapes with different full colors, instead of combining, they will subtract. This is animates default drawing mode. All shapes flatten on the current layer. If you prefer keeping overlapping shapes intact, switch on object drawing mode in the properties panel and draw a shape. This time when we click on the shape to move it, it now has a box around it. To convert a drawing object back into regular shape, used the break apart function, and you will see it flattened down. We need some space. To select all the drawings on the layer [inaudible] frame one that selects everything we see on the stage. Next, tap delete all backspace on your keyboard. I'm selecting line two first. If you look at the Properties panel, you will see that the full option is not available. I'll select the stroke color and turn off object drawing mode. Just like before, click and drag to make a straight line. Alternatively, to make free form lines, use the paintbrush tool and click and drag. Like shapes, lines joined together too. This is pretty handy if you want to turn line drawings into custom shapes. To do that use the paint bucket tool and full the empty space, just like using Photoshop, make sure that lines are completely enclosed where you want full. You can also use the paint bucket to reform existing shapes with new colors. Similar to the line tool, we have the paint tool. It's a very complicated tool to learn, but if you're lucky, you might already know it from Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator. This tool is used to create smooth curvy lines or custom shapes with flat or curved sides. For a flat sided shape, single click wants to start and once for every new corner points, close the shape by clicking back on the starting point. For shape of curve sides, also start with a single click and do the next point with a click and drag action. Release the button once you are happy with the direction and magnitude of the curve. Continue to click and drag or single click to make corners. It takes a lot of effort to become totally comfortable with the paint tool, don't expect to master it in a day. Unlike the other shape tools, shape drawn with the paint tool reveals its path and ankle points. [inaudible] edit those, I'll use the sub-select tool. Just to review and edit any line or shapes parts and anchor points. Click, drag on a point to move it. To adjust the curve, select the point first and carefully pull the handle to adjust the curve. If you are unable to select the point, de-select first by clicking on the stage and try again. Let's go back and have an in-depth look at the select tool. It does much more than just moving shapes about. I'll clear the stage again and draw out one joint object and one normal shape. Make sure that you always switch back to the selection tool after drawing a shape. That way you can immediately move or modify whatever you just drew. To demonstrate this tool, I'm going to click on the regular shape. There are two things to notice here. Firstly, there is a [inaudible] mesh almost completely covering the shape. That indicates that the shape or a portion of it is selected. Secondly, notice that the properties panel now displays properties of a shape. From here you can change the full color. The stroke options appear to be grayed out. This simply means that you have the full selected but not to stroke. Animates strokes and folds are not necessarily permanently connected. I'll single click on the stage to deselect. This time I'm double-clicking inside the shape and you will notice the [inaudible] mesh appears on both the full and the stroke. Properties can be modified for both. Selecting part of the shape is actually quite cool. For instance, we can separate stroke from it's full. If we make a drag selection by clicking and dragging from the outside of a shape. You will notice that only part of it gets selected. Once modified, the part becomes its own shape. I can even move the selected piece away. It really feels like working with clay. This however, does not work on a drawing object and only selects the whole thing. Like the sub selection tool, the regular selection tool can also modify anchor points and paths. First, make sure that the shape is not selected. You can't do anything but move the selected shape. Pay close attention as I approach the corners, because it indicates an anchor point with the right angle icon. I simply click entry to adjust the corner quite naturally. Next, pay attention to what happens when we approach the sides. The curb icon appears next to the cursor. When I click and drag, a straight side becomes curved and I can continue to adjusted just like sculpting. Sculpting also works on drawing objects. Drawing an animation is really easy, but it can be tricky to get used to. I suggest you pause the class and spend some time making drawings and playing with each of the shape tools to get a good feel for it. 5. Drawing a Character: For this section of the class, I will be working in detail. So you're free to work along if you'd like. We will be drawing a Mario parody called Angelo. He's a simple character drawn with rounded rectangles. Once drawn, we will animate him walking. If you would like to skip the drawing and go directly to animation, view the project suggestions at the end of this video and jump to the next lesson. I'll start with the head. Select the rectangle tool. Set the color to any skin tone or type this color code. Next I click and drag a nearly square rectangle. Before releasing the left mouse button, we can press and hold the down or up arrow keys to round the corners. Angelo only has a round chin at the bottom right. Normal shapes' corners can't be modified easily. So we need to delete this and set the corner separately in the properties. To set roundness on the fly, I will switch to the rectangle primitive tool. I click the rectangle tool and click again to select the rectangle primitive tool from the drop down. With this tool, we can draw a rectangle and adjust to corner radius afterwards. I draw the head again as before. Then I switch to the selection tool. To adjust roundness we drag the controls on the selection box. To un-link the corners, I click the link icon in the rectangle options. Now each corner can be adjusted separately. Next I draw the mustache. I switch to black and reset the corners. I'll draw this on the side first and move it in. As you can see, we can still adjust the roundness on the fly using the up and down arrow keys. Before drawing the next part, I use the select tool to deselect and choose the primitive tool again. I set the color by clicking on the fill and moving the cursor outside the color picker to sample the skin color on the stage. Like before, I draw this part, switch to the select tool and adjust. I then click and drag a selection box over both pieces and drag them into place. To make precise adjustments, any selected shape or object can be moved using the arrow keys. Next, I draw the eyes directly on the face. We choose a white fill and draw. Un-link the corners and adjust. Similarly, I draw the black pupil. Notice that primitive shapes like drawing objects do not combine together, which means that we can overlap, resize, and reposition them. The eye and the pupil belong together. I click once to select the eye and shift-click on the pupil. I then choose group in the modify menu. Now both pieces stick together. We can un-group at any time with the break apart function. I'll keep them grouped. Next we duplicate the eye. Hold the alt or option key and drag out to duplicate. I select both eyes and position. Next I'll draw the hair. Once again, I choose the primitive tool, reset the corners and draw. I position it and draw the bit on the top. Then draw the ear with the same skin color. Next I draw the hat. I select the primitive tool and then we can choose any blue or type the color code. Then the rim of the hat in a slightly darker blue. To finish it off, I'll create a big letter A. I select the type tool and set the family to Arial Rounded, the size to 35 and a white color. I single-click to start and type a capital A. To move this, we can use the select tool. Lastly I drag select all three parts and group them together as the hat. This can then be placed easily. We now have a full head and we'll group everything together. Moving on, we draw the body, starting in the same way. For this, any red will do, or we type in this color code. The red part is Angelo's overalls and his undershirt's going to show near the top right. Let's be clever here. Since this shows us basically just recolored part of the body, I'll modify this primitive. To do that, double-click it. This warning tells us that it would now be converted to normal drawing object, which means we can't modify the corners anymore. That's okay. Double-click "Broadcast" into "Isolation Mode". You can see that as the top left corner of the document. In this mode, you can't interact with anything other than the shape. As you can see in the drawing object, this is irregular shape. Here I'll select the normal "Rectangle Tool" and reset the corners. I set the "Fill" to none and the "Stroke" to black. From the outside, I'll draw the shape of the shirt and adjust the rounded corners with the keyboard. With normal shapes, if we make a mistake, we can just undo and try again. When I release the 'Mouse" button, the shape is combined and I can select the intersecting part and recolor it. I did double-click on the line to select all of that and press "Delete". We exit "Isolation Mode" by clicking the "Back" button next to the Scene name. Now I'll draw the buttons. I disable the "Stroke" and select "Yellow". Then select "Object drawing mode" so that the shape can stack. Click and drag while holding Shift to draw a circle. Then I position. Then I'll drag out to duplicate, double-click to edit. I'll select the right half of it and press "Delete". We click "Back" to exit "Isolation mode". To draw the arms, I'll go back to the "Primitive tool" and draw a blue upper arm. I drag out a duplicate and select the "Free Transform tool". I then move the mouse cursor to just outside the corner and drag to rotate. Hold down Shift to snap to 90 degrees. Finally, I draw a hand and position the pieces. We group everything together, and then drag out to duplicate. Finally, the legs we do in much the same way. The issue here needs some extra care. I'll put the leg together and this time we don't group it. We can drag out a duplicate of all three parts to the left. Let's darken the right leg a bit. I select the two red pieces, click the "Fill" and select the "Color wheel", and then choose "B" for brightness and push it down a bit. I do the same for the shoe. The darker leg will be at the back. We select all the leg pieces and group. To put Angela together, I need to adjust the stack order of the groups. To put the head above the body, select from the "Modify menu", "Arrange", and "Bring to front". The front arm goes above the head, once again, "Arrange" and "Bring to front". For the back arm and the legs, you use "Send to back". Now for the fun pose, we will draw Angela's legs in eight different poses to use for animation in the next lesson. Take a look at this walk cycle. As you can see, there are eight snapshots of legs in motion and the last pose, it's identical to the first. Before we can animate, we need to draw them. I'll duplicate Angela's legs and break apart to ungroup. We'll start with the back leg and bring it over to the left. Next, we select all three pieces of the back leg and choose "Free Transform" to rotate. Then select the foot and lower leg, rotate and position. For the front leg, we also select all three parts, but this time using "Free Transform", move the pivot point, the white dot up to the hip position. Then we can easily rotate around the pivot. I finalized at this point by grouping the pose. We then draw the other seven poses in much the same way and line them up in order below the scene. Use Adobe Animate and draw one or more characters you want featured in your video. Like with Angela, keep any moving parts such as heads, wheels, arms, legs, or wings in separate groups before combining. It is not necessary to draw poses for a walk cycle if you do not maintain the character to be walking. Export a JPEG of your character and post it to your project. To export a JPEG, go to the "File menu" and click on "Export Image". 6. Frame-by-Frame Animation: Open up Lesson four in the Exercise Files folder. This file contains all eight sets of legs Angelo needs to walk. A link to the exercise files have been provided in the class description. If you do or pace yourself in the previous lesson, you can just continue. In this lesson we will be putting Angelo's legs in sequence, frame by frame.[MUSIC] Frame-by-Frame animation is traditional animation. This type of animation takes ages to do, so I reserve for things like walking or dramatic facial expressions. If you were ever born in school, you might have made one or two of these animations in the corner of your workbooks. The amount of pages we use, frames in this case, depends entirely on the type of action we want to show. The kind of walk cycle we're animating only needs eight frames. A frame seems like nothing, less than half a second but for a fast walk, it's all we need. This eight poses played on loop will create the illusion of walking. Let's begin. First, we'll put all the moving parts into separate layers. We already have one layer. Let's use this for Angelo body and head, rename it to Angelo body by double-clicking on the text. Next, create three empty layers, name them and order them as shown.[MUSIC] I'm ordering them by simply clicking and dragging on the layer title. Next move each part to the correct layer. Drag-select all the leg poses. Notice that, once we click on any one of the legs, it's layer gets automatically selected. Now we cut the selected objects and change to the legs layer. Right-click and select paste in place. You should see the empty key frame become full. To check that the legs are on the right layer, click the "Visibility Toggle". If they are on the layer you had, they should all disappear. Now do the same for both arms[MUSIC] Lock all with the legs layer to avoid switching layers accidentally. Each layer now has a timeline and different things can happen on each. Currently all the layers have one key-frame, we'll start with the one on the legs layer. Delete Angelo's standing pose and move the first pose into place until it looks natural. Now we need some sense of where the flow is. Go to the view menu and switch on the rulers. Using the selection tool, drag the top ruler downwards. You will see a guideline follow your cursor. Release when you hit Angelo's heels. For the rest of the leg poses, we need seven more key frames,so let's insert them. Click on frame two, to view frame options, right-click on the selected frame. Choose insert blank key-frame. This is a key-frame without any joints on it yet. Now the stage appears black. Before placing the second pair of legs on this frame, it will be better if we could see Angelo's body on the other layer, so we need to add a frame for that as well. The body layer does not change, so we don't need a key-frame. Go right-click on frame two in this layer and choose insert frame. A normal frame just copies what happens on the previous key-frame. Let's have the body appear for all eight frames. Luckily, we don't have to select each frame we want to fill, just the one on the end. Do the same for both the arm layers. Now when we return to the legs layer on frame two, we can see where the leg should go. Move to frame one and select the second pose and cut it. Move back to frame two and paste. Move the legs to where they look natural. Click on frame three and insert another blank key-frame. Do the same for the third leg pose [MUSIC]. Scrub the timeline to make sure it all looks natural. Repeat this until all eight poses are distributed over eight frames. To play the animation, go to the control menu and click "Test." It is quite fast at 24 frames per second, we need to adjust the timing. We can do that by inserting normal frames in between each key-frame to hold a pose for one frame longer. This is a bit tedious to do for due for all eight key-frames. I'm going to undo and rather highlight the frames I want to adjust timing for. To do that, please select your key-frame first and click and drag to highlight all eight frames on the legs layer. Next, drag the highlighted line on the right, all the way to frame 16. Extend the other layers the same way, all while just inserting a normal frame on frame 16 for each. The leg animation now holds each pose for longer, slowing the animation. It looks a little choppy, so we won't make the timing any longer than two frames per pose. Lastly, we'll animate the arms in the same choppy way. Select a third frame on the front arm layer and this time insert the key-frame. This makes a copy of the last key-frame but this time you can record a new change. Select the free transform tool, adjust the pivot to the shoulder and rotate it backwards. Now on frame nine, we want the arm to move back, instead of inserting a new key-frame and rotating the arm back, let's copy the first frame and use that instead. It's easier than recreating a pose that already exists. Right-click on grame one, choose copy, and then right-click on frame nine and choose paste. From here the arm can go up, choose frame 11 and insert a key-frame, rotate the arm up. Now we will rotate the bottom arm in the other direction. To see what you're doing, toggle visibility for the body layer.[MUSIC] Finally, test the video to see what it looks like. You can play with the timing if you want. [inaudible] highlight a key-frame and drag it. I will undo this because I worked out the timing beforehand. To celebrate a job well done, let's export this walk cycle to an animated GIF. Pick the file menu and choose export to animate GIF. [inaudible] and click "Save". 7. Setting Up a Scene: In this lesson, we will go the scene for Angelo. If you're working along, continue with your document or open up lesson five in the exercise files that are three. Before we start remove the guideline by pulling it back up into the ruler. Deadlock all four of Angelo's layers so they don't get into the way. I'll start with the sky. We create a new layer, rename it and then move it to the bottom. Next we select the rectangle tool. Turn off the strip color and save the font to any blue or click on the color code and type in this value. Click and drag a rectangle over the entire stage. Now for the floor, with this sky layer selected, create a new layer above and rename it to floor. If it's not above the sky layer, just drag to move it like before. We select the rectangle again and set the font to any green color or type in the color code. Click and drag to make a wide floor. We can adjust its size, by switching to the free transform tool pulling the handles on the edges. We will import some pre-drawn props into our scene. I drew these props in Adobe Illustrator before hand. Vector art from Illustrator is 100% compatible with animate. Click on the File menu and select import to stage. I'm selecting the Adobe Illustrator file from the assets directory. Click import using the default settings. A new layer has been created with full join groups on it. When I click on the mountain, the properties panel gives me properties for a group. Double-click on announcement itself takes us inside the group. Notice that the shapes from illustrator are normal drawing objects. I'm double clicking to exit isolation mode and return to C 1. Since these props are going to be moved along Angelo's part, we need to convert them to graphic symbols. Graphic symbols are something that we can animate using twins. With the mountain group selected. I go to the Modify menu and choose convert to symbol. We name it mountain and choose the graphic type. Notice that mountain is now safely stored inside the library for use later. Next we convert the cloud group. Then the sky turtle. I just call it an Airboy. Then the mushroom. All the props for this video is now in the library and can be instance on the stage. I really want Airboy to be looking down. Let's edit him by double-clicking on his picture in the library. Notice that Airboy has its own timeline and layers separate from the main stage. Double-click on the drawing group to get to the shapes. Here we deselect first and then shift select both eyes. We tap down on the keyboard to position the eyes lower and click back to scene one. If you look at Airboy now, he looks down in the library as well as on the stage. When an instance of a symbol is on the stage, it is just a copy of that in the library. It is now okay to delete the layer from the import. Create a new layer above the sky layer and name it Clouds. In drag an instance of clouds onto the stage and position it. Add a layer above clouds and name it Mountain. Like before, drag the mountain from the library. Our scene is now set up. In the next lesson, we'll add motion to the clouds and mountains using twins. Draw some props to accompany your main character and put them in graphic symbols. Put them each on their own layer if you'd like to animate them later. Add more layers to draw backgrounds, battlegrounds for foregrounds export a JPEG will take a screenshot and add it to your project. 8. Animating with Classic Tweens: In this lesson, instead of joining each frame, we will be doing the key positions and auto-generate the in-between frames. In Adobe Animate, tween is short for in-between. Take this circle animation for instance. In traditional animation, the animator draws a starting position and an ending position a few frames later.An In-between authors will then come in and draw all the frames between the two key positions. In this case, everything between frame one and twenty four. If we animate on five frames per second, we can see that less frames in the same motion makes for choppier animation. The timing of both animations is set to one second, but the result is much different. For our purposes, we will keep the animation speed at twenty four frames per second. To create a tween, we need a symbol instance on its own layer. The mountain and the clouds have already been set up in this way. Let's move the mountains to a starting position all the way to the right. Next we click on frame sixteen on the mountain layer and insert a key frame. As you know, this makes a copy of the previous key frame. Making sure that you stay on frame sixteen, drag the mountain all the way to the left. At this point, all the frames in between is just repeating frame one as it should. Let's convert them to do more. Right-click on any normal frame in between your two key frames and choose "Create classic tween". Do not select motion tween for this class. To see the tween animation, scrub the timeline. The frames in between the two key frames have been also generated. If you need to adjust the mountains position, move the scrubber back to one of the key frames, and move the mountain. I've just shown you how to move mountains. Let's do the same thing with the clouds. Insert a key frame on frame sixteen, and move the clouds a little to the left and create the classic tween like before. Since the clouds don't cover the same distance, they will appear to move but slower. Let's also make the clouds fade out of us. We go back to frame sixteen, and select the clouds on the stage. From the properties panel, set the color effect. We'll choose Alpha at forty percent. We do not get the Alpha option with regular shapes or drawing objects. Test the movie to see the animation in action. The movie is incredibly fast. Let's add some more frames. Hold all the layers on frame one hundred and twenty and choose" Insert frame". This is exactly five seconds in total. Now, we will extend the timing of the clouds and the mountains to make them move but slower. Select the key frames on frame sixteen and then drag them over to one hundred and twenty. Angelo Akin stops on frame sixteen while the terrain continues to move. He was a small looping animation before, but now it takes too long to loop back because of all the extra frames that's been inserted. Looping animation like Angelo obeys, kept in their own timelines. To copy Angelo, drag select, all four of this layers from frame 1 to frame sixteen, then right-click and choose copy frames. Next we'll create a symbol for him. Instead of converting a drawing object on the stage, we will make a fresh new symbol from the library. Name this symbol Angelo Walk. This time set the type to movie clip. A movie clip is like a graphic symbol, but is specifically for grouping animations. It also has its own layers and timeline. On the fresh new timeline, right-click on frame one, layer one and choose "Paste Frames". The layers and all the layer names have been completely transferred. Click back to exit oscillation mode. Angelo is now on the Library. Click on the small "Play" button in the symbol preview to see him walk. Now it's safe to get rid of all the original Angelo layers. Select them and click on the trash can. Let's replace them with a new layer called Angelo. On the new blank key frame, we'll drag out an instance of the middle club. It looks like a still drawing, but it will play on a loop when we test it. Angelo keeps looping on the regular frames following the key frame, while animation on main timeline plays independently. This is known as nesting animations. Lastly, let's animate the background to fade the sky into night time. Select the blue rectangle and the sky layer, and on frame one, you can convert it to graphic symbol called sky. Now that the sky is a graphic instance, like before, we set a second key frame, we want the fade to go on for a whole five seconds. Insert a key frame on frame 120. We click this guy instance on the stage and in the properties panel, this time we'll choose tent and set the color to dark blue at seventy percent. Create the classic tween and test the animation. 9. Tweening with Motion Guides: Previously between motion in a straight path. For this lesson, we will draw a path for an instance to follow. Let's bring Airboy into the scene. First, we will create a layer on top of the mountain and name it Airboy. Move to frame one and from the library, drag out a new instance of Airboy. He's going to come from the distance. We'll select a free transform tool and scale him down while holding shift. Let's move him to right below the floor line. For convenience, hide the layers above. Airboy is going to outrun Angelo, set a new keyframe but before the end of the animation, at frame 110. Now we scale him up and move him out of frame to the right and creates a classic tween. Pull tests and have a look at what we have so far. Using immersion guide, we'll make him move in a more interesting way. First, right-click on the Airboy layer label and choose add classic motion guide. We'll select the guide layer and work on the blank keyframe. Using the paint tool, we draw a curvy path for him to follow up and past Angelo. Set the structure black, and for this deactivate Object Drawing mode. Click drag close to Airboy stage position to start. Then click, drag a new point roughly a third in from the left and then one outside the stage to the right. You can use any line tool to do this. I'll switch to the Direct Select tool to play with the curve. To make the guide work, we need to place the instance on the guide at both keyframes. First the frame one, you want to bring the instances pivot point close to the line until it snaps into place. We do the same at frame 110. Check both keyframes and scrap the timeline to see if you did it right. We'll [inaudible] layers to visible. Finally, test the animation to see if the motion path needs adjusting. You are now ready to start animating your project. Make sure that you convert prompts and characters into graphical movie clip symbols if you haven't done so already. Use classic tweens and, or classic motion guides to bring your scene to life. Remember the golden rule of classic screening, one layer, one instance. Take a screenshot of your progress and closer to your project. Also add a sentence or two to share what you have in mind. 10. Creating Believable Animation: Going on from where we left off, we put A boy on a motion guide, wishing past Angelo. At the moment, he doesn't appear to move believably, since his flying speed is constant, even from very far away. To believe that he's coming from a far, we need to start his motion of slow. Take a look at this circle animations. Both complete the motion in exactly one second, 24 frames in total. The timing is all the same, but both of them look very different, the reason is spacing. The top circle moves in a linear constant speed, which means all the frames are evenly spaced. The bottom circle animation however, moves with an ease. Some frames are spaced closer together at the beginning, which will make it appear to move slower at the start and speed up near the end. This is done to show acceleration. There are many ways to add ease, as shown here. Ease-in starts slow and ends fast, ease-out starts fast and ends slow, and ease-in-out starts and ends slow. Easing motions gives your animation realism, and you will see this in this lesson. Let's add an ease to the tween. To add an ease to any classic tween, click on any one of the in-between frames and look at the Properties panel. Here, you can see frame properties, and if the frame is part of a tween, we can refine the motion. We apply an ease-in and select "Cubic." The graph shows us an acceleration curve, rising slowly at first, and then datching up. For now, just remember, ease-in means it starts slow and speeds up. Double click to apply. Test the video to best see the effect of the ease. We finish off the scene with a little trick to make Angelo look like he's part of the environment. Let's give him a shadow. We'll duplicate the Angelo Layer and rename it to Angelo shadow, then move it below Angelo. To work with ease, I'll lock the other layers. Click to select the Angelo graphic instance on the stage. We then choose the Free Transform tool and move the white dot, the pivot point to the bottom so we can flip the instance to below Angelo's feet. Next, let's skew it. To do that, we move the cursor a little bit to the side of the bottom handle on the Transform box and click and drag to skew the selection. To become a shadow, we will add a dark ring tint 100 percent. When we test, notice that even though the shadow has been tinted and transformed, it is still the same Angelo movie clip and plays all the same. The shadow can also be animated for an interesting effect. Let's add a second scene. Go to the Window menu and switch on Scene. We click on the "New" button to create a second scene. We can switch back to Scene 1 at any time. This scene will display the title of the game. We start by renaming the layer to background, and we'll add an instance of sky to the stage. Let's make it nighttime and change the tint of this incidence to very dark blue like before. It remains blue for a bit. We'll add a keyframe on frame 20 to mark the start of a new tint tween. The end keyframe is on frame 35. Click the instance and set the tint to a coral color, 80 percent, then create the tween. Off the frame 35, the background will remain the same for the duration, which is 120 frames total. Next, we'll draw the game title. For now, we don't want it on the stage. Let's make it in the Library. Click on "New Symbol," and name it Title, with type graphic. First, rename the layer and select the Type tool. In the properties, I'll set the color, family, size, and ledger spacing. We then click on the "Stage," and type MEGA in caps. Click outside the type box to make more text. Set the size and type the text. Using the Select tool, we position. Finally, create a new layer below called Label. We use two black-rounded rectangles and draw frames around the text. Click back on the text and change them to white. Then click the "Back" button to exit isolation mode. We'll keep this in the library for later. First, we'll make a fun little animation to do with the mushroom. Create a new layer and rename it. The mushroom will animate into the scene at frame 20. Drag an instance of the mushroom to above the stage and position it at the center. I'll now show you how to animate a full and an iconic mushroom balance. We add a keyframe to frame 35 and move the mushroom nearly all the way down, then I will add a keyframe to 40 and 45. The two keyframes at the start and end is 35 and 45, is the position on the floor. Frame 40 is the highest if it will bounce, so we move it up. Then we'll add the tweens. When playing on the timeline, we see that linear constant motion looks very robotic. First, we need an ease-in to accelerate the falling down. Double-click on "Circ" to apply. Then an ease-out to slow down while going up, and finally, another ease in. To make the mushroom look like it's part of the environment, let's make a shadow. Make a new layer below the mushroom and rename it. We'll start where the mushroom starts and make a keyframe. Unlike Angelo, we can just use the circle as a shadow. Use the oval and draw a disk. We then convert it to symbol and adjust the final size. We'll make keyframes on the bounce positions. Let's set the size and an offer for each, starting with small and dim to big and dark. Create classic tweens and add the same easing. That looks more believable. Once the mushroom falls in, we can add the title. I'll create a new layer at the top and name it Title. We create a keyframe on frame 50 and position the title graphic instance on the center of the stage. We're going to bounce the title in. We create another two keyframes on 55 and 57. Resize the title like this, starting small, hitting the screen, and settling. Create the tweens and add a circular ease in at the first. Next, we'll add a few shooting stars. We'll create a shooting star movie clip. First, we need a star graphic. Make a new graphic symbol in the library and name it Star. To draw a star, choose the polygon tool and in the options, select Star. Change the color to black. Drag from the center of the stage and go back to Scene 2. We want to tween the star animation in the main timeline because if we want to tween many stars, we'll need many layers. Make another new symbol, name it Shooting Star, and set the type to Movie Club. This will be our star animation. We'll add a star instance to the center of the stage, add frame 24, add a keyframe. We want to start to spin around once. It won't help rotating at 360 degrees and then creating a tween. In animate, that's the same as zero degrees. Instead, click on one of the tween frames and then the Properties, select clockwise rotation. Now, we'll exit Isolation mode and return to Scene 2. Let's make a new layer above background called Shooting Stars. We'll add a keyframe on frame 5, and add some shooting stars. We'll start with one, size is smaller, and tint it white, then drag out some duplicates. With movie clips, we can add many instances to the same layer, as long as we don't tween them all on one layer. Test the scene to see the effect. 11. Adding Sound & Final Touches: In this final lesson, we'll put the finishing touches of animation on this movie and add some sounds to make it appealing. First, let's modify this dog movie clip. To edit a symbol, you can also do it from the stage to get an idea of what it will look like in context. First we move to frame five and double-click on any one of the star instances. As you know, this will modify all of them. We see the chosen star turns black. The symbol's original color before we applied the tint. Now let's make the star fall. At this stage, we don't want the star to leave every second. So let's extend the time to 120 frames. Remember, first highlight the keyframe, then drag it. Now we move the star, a full-screen-like down. To look more exciting, we can increase the amount of rotations to four. Lastly, we go back to frame one and make the star a little smaller. Exit oscillation mode and test. I'll rotate the star in the main timeline to give them some variation. Move them all up a bit and test the scene again. That looks cool. The final animation we'll put it in is super-simple. A lightning flash. At the very top, create a new layer and rename it to lightning flash. Here I'll select the Rectangle Tool and set the full to white. The second flash is on frame 5. So we'll insert a new keyframe there. To make the flashes appear, we can insert blank keyframes on frame three and frame six. Finally, we can add some store stickers to let the viewers know which by the game. Go to the file menu and choose import to library. From the Assets folder, we will select the two PNG images. We'll see them appear in the library. The stickers will come in right after the title. So we create a new layer at the top and name it Stores. Then create a new keyframe at frame 58. Next, drag all the instances of both images to the stage. We are now ready to taste the whole movie. It has a total running time of 10 seconds with both scenes. A video that is very unappealing without sound. So let's see how to add some. I've downloaded some free wav and mp3 sound files off the Internet. We can import them to the library from the assets folder. Let's go back to scene one. Create two new layers and name them sound effects and music. First I'll add a whooshing sound to a boy as he passes by. We'll select keyframe on the sound effects layer and in the properties panel, choose flyby under sound. Next we click on the keyframe and the music layer and add the music track. Play the the timeline to have a listen. Sound makes a big difference. Let's go back to scene two and create a sound effects layer at the top. Now we're going to add thud sounds to the mushroom. To time the sounds with each bounce, we'll create a keyframe on a 35 and 45. And select thud sound on each. Lastly we make keyframe on frame 50 and choose the zoom sound to bring in the title. Let's play the movie one last time. I hope you've been following along and posting about your progress. The next step now is to add appropriate uses to twins and enrich your movie with sound. Check the project details in the description. Once your video is done, upload it to YouTube or any video platform and share the link in your project. 12. Exporting Video & Conclusion: Now that we've created a whole movie, we can export to video or other formats. To hear the sound in scene one when we export, select the two sound key frames on frame one and move them to frame two. This is a work around for an unfortunate animate bug. To export simply click on the "File" menu and "Export Video". We have the option to send it to Adobe Media Encoder, which is best if you want a smaller file size. For this you require Adobe Media Encoder to be installed. In this class, we covered drawing, animating frame by frame, using instances to create tween motion, we worked with motion guides, we learned how to add "Ease in" to create realism, and we combined everything together with sound to create an animated movie. If you're a beginner in animation, start small, build up your expertise project by project. If you have a vested interest in 2D animation, I suggest you use your new skills as a stepping stone to learn more about animation principles. In addition, the animation techniques covered in this class are great starting points for learning other animation software. If you liked this class, please leave a review below. Thank you for attending and see you again soon.