2D Character Animation: Create Movement in Adobe Animate

1. Introduction: Animation is such a highly expressive medium and the only limit is really your imagination. Hi, my name is Tanika Pantoja and I am an artist in the animation industry here in LA. I've worked as a storyboard artist, as a character designer, and an animator. Most people know me because of my short films. I was known for a Crown Dragon and Wolf Song and Tiny Nomad. But I've also worked in the industry for other pictures. This class is about getting your character design, getting your character drawing, and making it accessible for animation. First, I'm going to take my character design and break it down into simple shapes. Then I'm going to illustrate key poses and breakdowns, connective drawings, really. Then after that, I'm going to draw on a new layer to clean up and color those drawings. Afterwards, I'm going to show you how I utilize Adobe Animate Library, Adobe Animate other tools to show you how I make the process more efficient and less cumbersome. By the end of this class, you'll have your first animation test of your character, seeing it come to life for the first time. Animation is also all about experimentation and just having fun and playing around with it until we find something that works, we find something that feels good. If you're ready to bring your characters to life using Adobe Animate, let's go. 2. Getting Started: What we'll be doing in this class is, we're going to turn our character design into a fully animated character using Adobe Animate. So in a previous class that I did, we designed a character from scratch to finish, and we did multiple things such as, coming up with the character concept, to the expressions, to the poses. I'm going to be using that character for this lesson. From this class, you're going to be able to take your design, and get it ready for hand-drawn animation. We're going to use those techniques so we can actually animate our characters within Adobe Animate. An animation key posing is, let's say, a character does this, and then we want to have a character, let's say, throwing a punch, they're storytelling. Key poses are, to me, storytelling keys that illustrate, this is the before and the after. Then after the key poses, we're going to move towards the breakdown. A breakdown is the connective tissue, or the connective drawing that connects drawing A to drawing B, or is it first coming from here, or downwards? It's at connective drawing that will help illustrate, or sell the illusion of movement. We're going to do this animation rough at first, meaning that it's going to be scribbly, it's going to be loose. But then eventually, we're going to draw over it on a new layer, cleaning it up with cleaner lines, and we're going to color it with actual colors. I'm going to show you some tips and tricks that I use in Adobe Animate to speed up my process to make it less cumbersome. I'm also going to talk about Adobe Animate's library system, because I think it is efficient when you want to reuse, or store previously made animation. I'm also going to talk about exporting your video, and some other things within Adobe Animate that you might want to know, along with your character animation. I'm going to be using a computer. This will be my operating system. It's got Adobe Animate installed. Make sure you have Adobe Animate installed, or maybe you're subscribed to the Adobe Creative Cloud. That's something that you might need to have on your computer. Second is either a drawing tablet, a display tablet, a graphics tablet.. What I have is a syntique 16 HD. It's a more well-known brand, but there are other alternatives that are more affordable, such as [inaudible], XP pen. These are all other brands that are also just as good. Now, some tablets don't even have a screen, it's just a pad. That's good too. Back in my day, back in high school, I animated with a mouse. So if you really want to try doing that, you can go for it. The reason why we're going to need a tablet, is just so that our lives are going to be easier making those drawings, and also those in-betweens, and those breakdown drawings. We really want to get those joints a bit more articulate, and we want to have a bit more freedom with that. Also it's better for the hand. Once you have your tools ready, once you have your computer ready, or your drawing instrument ready, a tablet, then let's get started breaking down our character design into simple shapes. 3. Simplifying Character Shapes: It's important to try and simplify the shapes of your characters so that it's easy to animate, it's easy to recreate without all these complicated widgets and shapes that you might not need. Now, again, animation is a very vast medium. There's a lot of different styles. Some are super detailed, some are super graphic and economic. But at the end of the day, they're all made of simple shapes. What I mean is that in order to animate our characters, we have to understand the basic shapes and foundations that they're made out of. For this class, I'm going to take an existing character that I have and try to break it down into basic shapes and make notes for myself so I can redraw this character at any angle and at anytime. This is a little robot character that I designed. He is a time traveler. He ended up in Edo period, Japan, where he's just living along side that time. He's got a little sword, he's adapting to that era, and a little tail that represents an electrical socket, just to give him a bit of that animalistic experience and to also make him feel like a little kid just based on his proportions. Now, with this design, I don't think it's quite animation ready. I think the shapes are simple, but I think we can start thinking about how to give notes for ourselves, so it is ready for animation. I'm going to hide all these previous poses first, and I'm just going to isolate this pose. Using Photoshop, I'm going to turn down the opacity of this drawing, to something really, really light. From here, this is where I look at my design and start breaking it down into simple shapes. You can use a different color for this, I personally like to. Let's do that. I like to just draw over it and see if I can just simplify the shapes a bit more. I think that's simple enough. Then for the limbs, it's really up to you, but let's say I want these to be triangles. I think this is easy for me to recreate, or maybe not. Now that I think about it, I want to keep things really, really simple. Even though there's tapering here, I can always adjust that later on during cleanup. What I like to do is just simplify the shapes even more to something really basic. The reason why I'm simplifying these shapes right now is so that when I animate it, I don't overthink too much about how the drawing looks. I want to get the movement and performance done fast. But right now I'm just drawing over the character, and once I have this done, so I'm just going to keep going. Maybe making some crucial notes on where the legs start, or where the hands begin. Then I can start figuring out proportion notes to keep track of myself. For the tail, I think it's just going to be aligned for now, and a little shape, like a little bell. Sometimes I like to describe a bit of form, and the way I can describe a form, three simple shapes, is by maybe drawing cross-section lines. Cross-section lines are, let's say, little hash lines to just indicate where the eyes it, or what angle the faces showing. I know this is going to be the front side of the face. I want to be able to describe the form and the contour of what that shape looks like. Sometimes I like to use a different color to, let's say, make notes for myself to show where the screen or the facial features start, or maybe where his kneecap start. I think now that I look at it, maybe the eyes sit in the middle of this square. Sometimes I'll take this drawing and I'll make little notes for myself. I can grab this character's head and in animation, it's quite common for animators to measure the proportions of their characters through the head count. I'm going to select my draw over. Using the Lasso tool, I'm going to copy that drawing, and then I'm going to paste it, and it's going to paste it onto a new layer. I'm going to put this head next to the character and duplicate it again, and move their head down. Let's say, how big is this character? How tall is this character? This character is nearly two heads tall. I'll sometimes make notes. I'll say like this character is one and three-fourths heads tall. Now how big is the arm? Let's see. The arm looks like it's about three-fourths the head. So the head is used in measurements, especially when it comes to figure drawing, because in an average human body, it's very even in the way things are redistributed. From top to the head, if you take the head, and move it down, it's going to land right on, let's say the nipple line of the figure, and then you take that head and move it down, it's always going to land on the belly button, or the navel. Then you move that down, and it's going to land on the crutch. It's always been used as a measurement tool for figure drawing, and for me it applies to animation as well. Then once you have a measurement of your character in its most simple shapes, I would recommend you drawing your character in different angles. Using the reference and some of the drawing notes that I made, I'm going to try, and recreate some new drawings based on these new notes. Let's see. What if I did a side profile of this character, just by reference. What I'm doing right now, I'm not trying to match the exact measurements of what I'm seeing right now. But right now, I'm just trying to match the proportions. Those are two very different things. What I mean by that is, and I'm going to do that right now. Let's say I decide to draw the head smaller, but then I also want everything else to proportionally to match to the notes. I know that the leg is let's say three-fourths a head, or maybe right in-between three-fourth a head and one head. I'm going to use that note, one, and maybe it's around here where the leg stop. Where the arm begins is right at the top of the marker that I made for the three-fourths. I would say I'm not being super accurate about it, but I'm estimating it so it feels right. This is a side profile again. I'm noticing, now that I look at my design, the hand is just a bit higher than the kneecaps. Then just looking at design again, just seeing if I can constantly match it. Well, I did measurements. I know the eye sits here, and we have our banana here. I would recommend you to constantly draw your character, to practice drawing your character while we're trying to match the proportions of our notes. Let's say if our character is doing a different pose, how can we try and maintain consistency with our notes here. I'm going to keep experimenting, and drawing these poses, and I want you to do the same thing. Once you feel like you have a good handle of your character, then we can start moving on into animation. In the next lesson, we're going to move onto key posing, where we flesh out some strong storytelling poses for our character and our animation. 4. Understanding Basic Keyposing: In this lesson, we're now going to move into key posing. What is key posing? The way I would describe key posing is, coming up with strong poses, or poses that tell the story, or the important parts of our animation. Let's say if a character is starting a punch, I would have a pose of a character widening up, and the next pose, punching. There is clear story between these two poses. One is retracting, and one is pulling the punch. If you were trying to pose out your character, and let's say we don't have any animation in mind, but we can only sell it by a few images, maybe 3-5 images and there's no timing. If I were to flip through those drawings or if I were to flip between those drawings, I can read the character acting bit by bit. I can see how it begins, how it starts to begin, and how it wraps up. The way I would think about it is, try making sequential drawings of your character doing an action in just three to four drawings. Depending on your character, you can come up with very specific scenes or poses. Let's say if it's a martial artists, maybe your character is pulling off a few martial arts. If your character is, let's say, dancing, maybe your poses are going to be related to dancing. But what if you don't have anything specific? What if you don't have a story? Well, one of the most basic things in animation to animate is a walk cycle. We're going to animate a loop of a character, just a side profile of a character walking in place. I'm going to assume that you know the basics of Adobe Animate. If you don't, that's okay. I have a refresh on my class on the basics of Adobe Animate on Skillshare. We're going to change a few options here. On the right, I want to make sure the properties of the stage is not 30 frames per second. I'm going to choose 24, because that is the standard of animation that I'm used to, and a lot of studios use 24. From here, we're going to start animating our character. First I want to drawing a ground. This is where our character is going to walk. I'm going to label this ground. I'm going to draw my character, and I can always make adjustments to make sure everything is in proportion. I'm having the character face stage. This is going to be a side profile. Then we're going to draw our character's legs, and this is the back foot. I'm thinking the arm is somewhere here. I'm thinking, should we have a normal walk cycle, where the character's arms move around or if it's stiff? This is something that you might have to stand up and act it out. This is a pretty flat drawing, and we don't really know which foot is forward, which foot is not. I'm just going to indicate that with color for now. I will say this is our front foot, and this is our back foot. I'm color-coding it for now, just so that it'll be clear. It's hard to read that without that. I'm just going to indicate that for clarity, back leg, and then the previous color, which is a light blue, I would say leg closest to camera. Anyways, I'm just going to keep going. First, I'm going to draw an arm. If the leg closest to the camera, when I think about when I walk, I notice that when my foot extends forward, my hand goes back. Then I'm just going to indicate the front, so this is its eyes. This is a robot character's eyes. This is our first key pose. Now let's do our second key pose. By pressing this button here, I'm going to create, insert a blank keyframe. Now I can draw another new keyframe. I'm going to turn on the onion skin tool, just so that I can see my previous drawing. What I'm going to draw basically is, it's the same drawing, but the feet placement is different, or it's switched. I'm just going to trace over my existing drawing right now. Now, the leg closest to the camera is back here. Furthest away from the camera is now forward. I will color-code it just so that it's clear. I'm going to select the previous course from last time, just to take notes for myself. Now, the leg closest to the camera is behind our character, and the leg furthest away from camera is now forward. I'm going to turn off my onion screen, so I can see what that looks like if I flip back and forth. We almost have the same pose. But notice how the leg placement is different. It's not enough to show that this character is walking, it really is just two drawings that show these feet are differently place. Now I need to make that connective drawing, which is another key pose. I'm going to select my first frame, and hit "Insert frame". You can zoom in your keys by hitting this tab over here and zooming in. Then I'm going to select that and hit "Insert blank keyframe". Now I have an empty drawing in-between them. From here, now I can draw a drawing that connects these drawings together. From here, now I have to show this light blue leg is not moving. If I flip between these drawings, I'll turn off the onion skin. I need to get the blue leg to go back here with this drawing. It's just like it's making contact with the floor and the back leg is going to come crossing. When I think about the walk cycle, the knees are going to drive, the back foot is going it be off the ground. Then I'm going to draw the arm moving forward. I have to keep flipping back and forth. Now we're having clear indication that this character is walking. I'm just going to color that just for clarity purposes. Cool. That's one stripe. You know how we have the front leg or the leg closest to the camera, passing backwards? We want to do the same thing with the leg behind it to complete that loop. We're getting a sense of complete motion already. If I go to "Control", and I hit "Loop Playback", and I press "Play", it's going to go by too fast. I'm going to, let say, extend it by four frames, so 1, 2, 3, so each drawing holds for four frames, 1, 2, 3. Cool, let's play that. Now its become more readable. But the thing is, it's reading the first drawing twice because the first drawing is also at the end. I can delete this later, but what I can also do is hit this button, the loop, and then just select the range to only appear here right before the first-time repeats itself towards the end. I'm going to play that. Now we have a believable walk cycle. Next, we'll talk about breakdowns. Breakdowns are another set of extremes or key poses that connect these drawings together. 5. Exploring Connecting Drawings: Next we're going to make breakdown drawing. Breakdown drawings are another set, they're secondary key poses, they're secondary extremes that connect our main key poses together. If I was, let's say, if you look at me right now, I'm going to be throwing a punch. The first key pose, the second key pose. But how do I throw that punch? It's clear that I'm punching, but on my punching over the head or am I punching under or am I punching straight. The middle drawing between these, that is the breakdown. I'm going to do that for our walk cycle. I'm going to make a breakdown drawing between one and two. I'm going to select somewhere in the middle of between one and two, and I'm going to hit insert blank keyframe. I can turn on the onion skin and see what that looks like. But the thing here is that I don't want to just create a trace over or direct in-between. I want to give a bit of an indication of weights because if I were to stand up and I took a step, there's a sense of like momentum or inertia where when I step a part of my weight is still going to drop and my knee is going to bend to allocate that bend. That's something that I want to think about. Looking at my drawings and constantly flipping, I feel like when this character takes a step, it's going to bend it's knee and it's going to drop a bit down. I know that I want the character to dip just as slightly down. I'll do an example like this first, there's another faster way to do it, but I want to show you how I do it in terms of hand-drawn animation. For the first cycle, we're going to have our character dropped down. Notice how I'm flipping back and forth just to feel it. I'm going to change the brush size. I like drawing with a thick brush. Now we have just a subtle indication of the dip. I know that I want to keep the spacing consistent with the foot placement because I want the character to feel like they're constantly moving. I want to make sure everything is evenly spaced out from the heel and the toe. I'm going to have our front knee bend as it steps. If I flip that back-and-forth and I'm going to turn off the onion skin to show that. Now we're getting a bit of believable way. I'm going to continue the same treatment with the back leg. It's going to bend. I feel like the heel is going to be touching at this point knowing just to sell that believability, that it's constantly moving. Because the head is moving down, that means the socket of the arm is also going to dip down. I'm going to move the arm downwards. I'm going to keep flipping. Now I could make the arm feel like it's newly. It's not like there's no tension. Or I can keep it very tense and keep it bent all the way. I'm just making sure everything about the head dips because the whole head is dipping down. Let's turn off the onion skin and I want to show you what that looks like. Now we're getting a bit of weight. As soon as the character lands, the whole body is going to reallocate that way. Just as really saw that believability. Boom. I'm also going to select the same colors to just indicate the colors for that leg. This is the back leg now. Cool. We have that first step. Now I want to make a breakdown between drawing two and three. I'm going to do that. I'm going to select somewhere in the middle and hit Insert Blank Keyframe. Notice how my timeline is even like this is two frames. This is two frames. This is just so that everything remains consistent. I'm going to turn on my onion skin again and keep track of everything again. Flipping back and forth helps a lot. Now, I noticed that when I cross my leg, I'm going to extend my heel. I think my whole body is going to go up a bit. In the previous breakdown we had the body goes down, but now because the legs are extending, we're going to have the leg boost up and I'm just going to see if I can make the head slightly higher than the previous drawing. I'm going to keep flipping it just to show you what that looks like. Just slightly higher. Again, I can always fix these joints a bit later on. Cool. The arm socket is going to be higher too. I'm going to keep flipping to give a sense of okay, what is a good in-between for these legs? I know the heel is going to be here. Sometimes when I flip between these drawings, it's easier for me to see where things should land. I'll actually put a dot helping me indicate where things should go. Look at the knee, for example, I'm going to be tracking this knee. I'm going to use a red pen just to show you my point. I'm tracking this knee and this knee. If I flip back and I can see where I can see the in-between. I'm going to put it here and that's where my knee between those drawings should go. Let's turn on the onion skin for now. I'm just going to continue drawing that foot. If I roll through these drawings, we already have a somewhat believable walk cycle. Let's play that for now. I'm going to turn on the loop because I don't want to see this frame. It's really just a repeat. Oops. Make sure you readjust your loop cursor. Then hit play. We already have one stride that's pretty much ready. Now let's do the other stride of walk. I'm going to show you a faster way and how you can do this too. Instead of drawing every frame by frame, you can also just modify a bit of an existing drawing. Between frame drawing three and four, so this is where we get the other leg striding. I'm just going to hit this one, Insert Keyframe. It's going to duplicate that drawing. Maybe I don't want to redraw the head because the head is hard to keep drawing over and over again. I'm going to erase everything else. Turn on my onion skin. Now that I have the onion skin referencing, I can just move the head downwards. Then I can actually, I don't have to redraw the head, but now I can just focus on the legs and the arms. I'm just going to try and create an in-between or breakdown for my legs. Again, the front leg is going to bend to absorb that weight. Then the leg closest to the camera is now going to start leading in, leading that leg. Now it's the heel leaving the ground and the toes leaving the ground. I'm going to move the arm. What I can also do is if I want to, is if I don't feel like redrawing the arm, I can just select that arm again from a previous drawing or the next, right-click, Copy, go to my next drawing. Then I can paste it in place and just move it down and alter it a bit. Notice how I didn't really have to redraw things to get this down pose. The thing I did between 2-3, it's going to be the same with between four and back one. Oh, the tail. I totally forgot about the tail, but that's okay. I could just add it frame by frame if I wanted to. I just had to go through each frame, just hit Backspace or Delete, removing the numbers too. There's my walk cycle. I want you to try and animate your walk cycle or whatever key poses that you have. Try key posing it out and try breaking it down. Then from here, we're going to color and clean up our animation. 6. Coloring Your Animation: Now that I've done my key poses in my rough animation, it's time to clean up the animation. This is important because we want to see the animation fully finished, ready for presentation, everything is colored, everything is cleaned up, and everything just feels finalized and finished. We want to get this to that stage where everything just feels polished. What I'm going to do is I'm going to turn my rough animation layer. Actually, I forgot to rename that ruff_anim just for reference. Then I'm going to right-click my ruff_anim layer, hit Properties and turn down the opacity. If you scroll down, look at Visibility, I'm going to select Opacity and I'm going to turn it down to something low, let's say 10 percent. We can still see our walk cycle at least. From here, now I can use this as a reference for my cleanup. Now, let's say I don't want to keep redrawing the joint over and over again. What I can do is just make the head of a drying wants and maybe turn it into a symbol for the library. I'm going to create a new layer and I'm going to label this head. This is where my head is going to go. I'm just going to make one single drawing of my head. I'm also going to fill it with color. Now, I want to turn this into a symbol, something that I can reuse later on in the future. Now, I can actually resist drawing right now as it stands, but with a symbol, let's say if I decide to add a design change on the head, it's going to affect all the frames. That's why the library is great. I'm going to select all my drawing here or the head. I'm going to go to Modify, convert to Symbol. This window pops up and I'm just going to call this head. Everytime I go to a next ruff animation key pose, I'm just going to hit Insert Keyframe adjust the head to match the ruff animation. I'm going to do the same thing with the next drawings. I'm just going to hit Insert Keyframe. It's going to duplicate that. I'm just going to move it. I'm going to keep doing that until it matches with my other drawing. I'm going to keep doing that. If I play this animation now, I have the head matching, my animation. Actually, I need to move this head up. There we go. Now let's play it. Now it's matching the rough animation. Let's say I want to add a bit of overlap or a bit of that tilt every time the weight changes just to sell bit of wait. What if every time it goes down, the head tilts up a bit. Every time it goes just a bit down the head tilts upwards just to really sell that weight. Then every time it show up abruptly goes back up, I'm going to contrast that with the head facing downwards. Let's see how that feels. I'm going to do that for every time the lake passes through. I'm going to play that. It's a bit distracting. I'm going to go back and fix that and I think that should be good. But I just want to see if I can add a bit of weight. I'm going to move this head just a bit back and now we're good. Let's play it. Now we have I didn't have to redraw the head all the time. What I basically did is just make a symbol of this head and just move it around. That saved me a lot of time and effort too. All the energy of the frame-by-frame or for the cleanup, I can just spend it on the legs and the arms. You can do each of these layer by layer if you want to. I'm going to make a new layer on top of the head for the leg closest to the camera. Leg_closest, I'm just call it that. From here, I'm just going to see if I can make very decisive lines. If you're doing cleanup animation, make sure you practice your solid drawing skills, and your clear joining skills so you don't feel like you have to redo or you have to make sketchy lines all the time. Because sketchy lines in animation, especially if you're coloring, it's going to be cumbersome. I'm keeping things simple. There's our front leg and I'm going to draw a key pose for the back leg. I usually like to do it in the order of the drawings in the ruff animation I did first, so key poses. We're just focusing on the back leg. You can do all this animation in a single layer, but I wanted to show what you can do with the power of multiple layers. Again, I'm just keeping things simple and not too complicated. Then I'm going to do the same thing everytime the leg passes through. I can even turn on the onion skin, lock the other layers so the onion skin only appears with the current layer that you're on. Make sure you're focusing on just one leg at a time. I'm going to do the same thing for this drawing. Now, I can go back and make sure all these lines are consistent and to make sure the volumes are consistent, but right now it feels pretty believable. The back leg, I think it's going to be easier because I'm thinking it's going to just be one single color just to indicate that this is covered in shadow. I'm going to create a new layer underneath the head and do almost the same thing as I did with the front leg, but I'm just going to keep things very loose hidden. This is going to be on one color, one dark color and I'm just going to keep doing the same thing as I did. Now this leg is behind the head. I'm going to do that quickly. If I play it, now we have the back leg now animated too frame by frame. If I turn on my layers, you can see that the leg that I just did is behind the head. I'm just going to quickly fill the back leg with a darker value. Cool, let's play that. It's looking good. I think it's looking good. I'm going to keep working on this walk cycle. I'm going to keep cleaning it up. I invite you to do the same thing. Whatever animation you have, whether it's a walk cycle or a ruff animation that you've already done, just clean it up. You can do it like how I did it layer by layer separating everything in different layers. Or you can do it in a single layer as if you're doing hand-drawn animation. You can do that, I'm going to keep working on my walk cycle. In the next lesson, we're going to make our character move from stage left to stage right using Adobe animate tweening functions and then we're going to export that video for our animation to be ready to be shared. 7. Finalizing and Exporting Your Project : Now I'm going to talk about the tweening function and Adobe Animate. What that is is let's say I want to move one objects on the screen to another part of the stage or another part of the screen. I can do that without having to move the object myself manually frame-by-frame. Tweening allows me to do that automatically. Tweening is a very popular and common function in Adobe Animate. It's been like that for years and I want to show you what you can do with tweening. With that in mind, I'm going to make our character walk from stage left to stage right. First of all, I want to select all my drawings. Here I'm going to select everything except the ground and the rough animation so I'm going to go to my timeline, click and drag everything here and hit right-click, and then copy frames. Now I'm going to go to File, New. I'm going to make a completely new file now and I'm going to just make this my new project for the tween. Before I even I add anything on the frame, I'm going to hit Insert new symbol. Make sure everything is graphic and I'm going to probably name walk cycle robowalk. Next, I'm going to right-click on the first frame of layer 1 in the timeline and hit Paste Frames and now we have a walk cycle in our new file. I'm going to go back to our main projects. Right now we're in the robowalk symbol animation, the symbol being its own walk cycle timeline. I'm going to hit this to go back to our main timeline so now I can add our character. Go to the library. If you look at my mouse or my cursor, hit library and then you're going to see the robocycle and the new project. I'm going to click and drag it into the project. I can even flip it if I want to, but I'm going to shrink it. There we go. Then I'm going to make sure in the properties everything reads as a graphic. Make sure this is turned on. I'm going to make it loop. The idea that I want is to have this character walk from stage left to stage right. Now I'm going to introduce the motion tweening. In order to do that there can only be one symbol or one object from the library in the layer. I'm going to right-click my first frame and I'm going to scroll up and create motion tween. Classic tween is an older version or an older way of tweening, but motion tween is a standard now. I'm going to hit Create Motion Tween and you're going to see that it has some frames set out for you already. But you can always modify this so I can actually move. Let's say I want this walk to last for maybe more than three seconds. I'm going to select somewhere in the 100s range, 135 for some reason. You can always adjust this later on and I'm going to highlight this button, insert the key frame and then what I'm going to do is just drag. I'm holding Shift so I don't move it all the way. Hold Shift and I'm going to move it and let's say I have it exit stage right. When I play it, we have our character walking and I didn't really have to animate the character walking from stage left to stage right manually. Motion tween is a very useful tool when it comes to animating characters moving or walking stage left to stage right or even animating camera moves. It's all about your imagination too. Other ways you can utilize this feature is let's say you don't want to do things frame by frame. Let's say you don't want to keep redrawing arm movements or whatnot. You can also animate a character, just motion tweening from pose to pose if you keep everything consistent with the symbol. If I use the same arm for the next key pose, I can just reuse and tween that arm from pose A to pose B without having to redraw those frames, without having to manually animate, I can just motion tween it. Here's another trick that you might want to consider. I can even select somewhere in-between my motion tween and I can even adjust the ease and the ease if you look at my cursor under tweening, ease is basically a way to describe if this object is slowing down or speeding up. Let's say if I set this to ease -100, it's going to accelerate. You'll see what I mean. If I play it it's slowly getting faster. If I do the other way, it starts really fast and starts to slow down. The great thing about the modern tweening is that I can also somewhere in the middle so I'm going to put ease back to normal so there is no ease, it's just constant. I can also just select somewhere in the middle and shift that up and now it follows a path. I think I'm ready to export this animation into something of a video format. Something that's ready to be presented. I'm going to hit File, I'm going to hit Export and I'm going to export it to video or media. I'm going to make sure everything is sound. In terms of the format, I like to use H.264. It's a format that is browser friendly. I've used it to post on social media, to post on YouTube. It exports it as an MP4 and this is just a compressor. I'm going to just hit Export, and it's just going to take a moment to export. If your Adobe Media Encoder just pops up for some reason, hit this green button up here. It'll continue the job. I'm going to double-click the video where it's saved and I'm going to have it play. Now we have video file of our animation. There is me exporting my animation. I recommend you to do the same through Adobe Animate. Sometimes you might need to do it through Adobe Media Encoder if you want to so once you've finished your animation and once you've exported, please upload it to the project gallery. I'd love to see what you've done for this class. 8. Final Thoughts: So we just wrapped up this class. What I just showed was a basic way of animating. I talked about the walk cycle. I've introduced key posing, and I've introduced breakdowns, but there's so many ways you can utilize that. It's all up to you to experiment what you can do with that. Again, this is your first finished looking animation. You have to keep experimenting. Always talk about experimenting with different approaches, finding shortcuts here, and there like I did in this class, and talk about how to find ways to make things a little easier for yourself. This is a big deal. You've animated your character for the first time. Now, there's proof that this character can exist in a finished piece of animation. It came from a simple drawing of a character. We now have our character fully animated, fully colored, ready to be shown to the world. Once you're done, and ready and once you have your animation video ready, please feel free to upload it to the project gallery, because I'd love to see what you've done. So get to work, keep making stuff, because I can't wait to see what you're capable of in the future. Thank you so much for taking this class.