2D Character Animation: Dialogue and Acting

1. Introduction: Hi there. Thanks for checking out this class on 2D character animation for dialogue and acting. In this class, we're going to learn how to build a rig and animate it to a specific piece of audio. I'm going to guide you step-by-step through the exact process that professional animators use to add lip-sync and set key poses for their character animation for any scene in a TV show or a movie. My name is Siobhan. I have over 15 years professional experience working in the animation industry. I worked for studios whose clients include Disney, Sony, DreamWorks, and Canada's YTV. I'm focused on teaching and sharing professional tips and techniques with you. This class is the third in a series of classes on how to animate from scratch. If you're completely brand new to animation and you want to learn how to set keyframes or learn about animation principles, then I suggest that you check out the first two courses in the series. This class focuses solely on how to rig and animate a character for dialogue. At the end, you'll be able to animate a character to a short dialogue clip and be able to set smooth and fluid acting poses. Here is an example of a short six-second clip. What's it worth to you for me to keep my mouth shut and just fade away? To start out, you're going to learn things like the proper order of rigging and how to build a simple character in Adobe Animate. From there, you'll learn how to create assets and build out multiple frame options inside of each one so that you can have things like eye blinks and facial expressions. Then you'll learn all about animation mouth charts. I'll show you exactly how to make your own mouth charts and how to set them up inside of your character so that when it does come to animating, all you'll have to do with use Adobe Animate's powerful frame picker to speed through your dialogue scenes. This is going to save you so much time and it allows you then to focus on the fun part of animating, setting up the acting poses. To do that, I'm going to teach you the template that's used for making any key pose read like a fluid and natural movement. I'll show you how to set your anticipation, overshoot, and settle, and I'll explain why you're animating these three steps. As you progress through the course, there's opportunities to do many assignments, to get feedback on your work, and to ensure that you stay on track for the big final project. When you are finished, you'll be a fully fledged animator with the crucial dialogue scene under your belt. With this, you'll be able to finalize your animation reel and know that you've got a professional grade portfolio piece to show to any studio. I can't wait for you to join in and get started and spend the next few hours with me to improve your animation skills today. 2. Your Project Files: Throughout this course, I'm going to be working in Adobe Animate. If you want to follow along with me and you don't have it yet, you can go to their website, Adobe.com, and you can even download a Free Trial, use it for the duration of this course, and then see if this really is the software option for you. If you're comfortable to work alongside me and another software option, that's totally fine. The reason that I wanted to use Adobe Animate to make this course is just because it's a professional-grade software that many big studios use in order to make TV shows and shorts. For that reason, it's really an industry standard. I believe it's worth investing in it now if you really love animation. But if you've got any questions at all and you want some suggestions on what other software you can use, feel free to send me a message and we can discuss it. In this course, I'm not going to be going over the details of every aspect of Adobe Animate, especially within the workspace, the tools, etc. If this is your first time ever opening up this program then I highly recommend that you do go and check out my other two courses first because both of those will give you the proper overview of all of the technical aspects of either drawing or animation in the software. This course is really focused on design and animation techniques. With that in mind, the files that I've left for you are all Adobe Animate files and that's.FLA files. I want you to be able to follow my steps exactly, so I've left all of my rig and animation files for you to download. If you don't want to build a rig or a character yourself, then you can just go and grab my character rig and work with that. It's totally fine. But I do suggest that you watch the videos where I am building out the character just so that you get a good understanding of how this particular rig will work for animation. Now when it comes to the audio files, I'm using a specific piece of audio, but I also have included some alternative sound clips that you can practice animation with. These you're going to find in one folder when you get to that lecture on adding a sound file. I think this will be very helpful for you and you can learn a lot by seeing my file, especially if your animation isn't working out exactly the same as mine on the video. Then just open that up and check your work against mine. But above all, again, just send me a message if you've got a question. Then lastly, before we start, I have to give you a heads up that you will probably get prompted to leave a review or a rating. I would appreciate if you do leave a rating, this course actually gets ranked based on ratings, not on the content. Your feedback is what helps other students find this material. That's most of the housekeeping done. In the next video, I'll explain the structure and the outline of the course so that you know what to expect. 3. Overview of the Steps: In this video, I'll go through the steps that you're going to be taking to go from a rough drawing to a fully animated character. What should worse be, for me to keep my mouth shut and just say it away? I want us to have a checklist so that you will have something to refer back to and so that you can monitor your progress as you go through the course. There's a lot to get covered. I don't want us to get halfway through and lose track of where we are. I find it very useful to have a checklist that you can check off. Okay, I've done this step, this step and the step, and you know exactly where you are and how you're getting on. The first thing that you're going to do is import your drawing. Then I'm going to show you how to build body parts for your character. We're going to use symbols throughout the course, and I'll explain exactly how those work as we go along. That's going to result in the composite of the character. Once the body parts are all built, then we'll go into the head and we'll rig the eyes for animation, as well as the mouth. After that, you're going to add a sound file. I will show you exactly how to import that into your library to make sure that it's working. Then we'll key frame the dialogue. After that, when we've done one pass of the key frames, then we will come back, we find them, we get the dialogue matching the mouth shapes. After we've done the match shapes, then we'll animate the expressions on the face and once that's done, the final thing that we'll do is animate the big acting poses. To do all of these steps, we'll need to convert everything into symbols as we go along at each stage. I'll explain exactly how to do that. But just know from the outset that a symbol is something that can be used multiple times without you rejoin it, and it's also something that can contain its own key frames. All of this will become much clearer once we actually get started. In the next video, I'm going to explain how your character comp is basically built and what the different levels are that you need to know about. 4. Anatomy of a Character Build: This video is going to be very useful for you to refer back to as you build your character because I'm going to explain the exact hierarchy and order of symbols and layers and parts. Whenever you receive a character rig for animation, you'll likely always get a file like this. You've got one layer, it's locked. This is called a character comp. In order to animate it, you need to access all the different parts. You need to double-click to go inside this. Here, you can see all of the layers that make up the character, and in this instance, you can see all of the keyframes that have been used to animate them. But when it comes to the mouth and the eyes and also hands, for example, you need to have options to make your animation come to life and much more appealing. To do that, you double-click once more inside of these assets, and this will bring you inside to where you can create keyframes of different shapes and different poses. Now, this doesn't mean, here that this is the animation. This just means that you can pick which one of these frames that you want to use that goes on your main animation. So don't worry, this will become much clearer when we start animating. But I just want you to be able to come back to this video and get an overview or a clear understanding of the three different levels that a character build is going to take. Your absolute basic level is where you've got different options and different poses, or different mouth shapes, for example. Then the next layer up, you've got the different parts of the character that you're going to move around and animate. Then the layer above that is the actual full comp, which can either be itself animated and twinned or it can just be handed off locked and ready to go. Remember, as we progress and as we start to build out our character, we're going to make the main comp first. Inside of that, we'll make body parts, and inside of the relevant body parts, we'll make the different frame options. As I said, the whole concept is based on the fact that you can have a bunch of animation inside a symbol, then come back out of that symbol and animate it again, completely in a new way. So in that sense, it becomes very easy to animate something that looks quite complex. With that in mind, let's take our first steps towards animating a character. In the next video, we're going to import the rough drawing and start building out the comp. 5. Importing the Rough Drawing: I've got a very rough sketch of a character that we're going to bring into Adobe Animate and build this character out, create a rig so that we can animate some lip-sync, some expression, and some emotion. You are more than welcome to take this character design if you like, or work with this sketch, or use your own sketch and follow along with me step-by-step throughout the process. But I just wanted to show you how I would normally just prep the file in order to bring it into Adobe Animate. This file is too big. It's not necessary to have it so wide. I'll quickly just crop it down and save it out. I'm going to hit C on my keyboard to bring up the crop tool. Then just click and drag around the drawing like that and come up here and click on the checkbox to commit to that trans, or to commit to that cut or that crop. Now I'll save it out. You can either save it as a PNG or a JPEG. It doesn't really matter. I'll just save it out as a JPEG in my Characters folder, like okay. Then I can go over to Adobe Animate. I'm going to create a new document. Again, under character animation and full HD, I'll just go with that preset, which is 1920 by 1080 pixels. The frame rate here is set to 24 frames. I'm not going to change that. It doesn't really matter a huge deal in this case because I'm not animating yet. I'm just literally building the character, so it's fine, but it's good practice just to leave it on that. Then I'll hit "Create." When new document opens up and it looks a little bit like this, which I think if I come up to this little icon up here, which is workspaces, and I hold it down, I think it is under classic. What I'm going to do is just basically rearrange my workspace to the way that I like to work, especially when I'm making artwork. To do that, I like to have as much screen space as possible. I make sure that my tools are all lined up over to the left and my windows or controls are all lined up over here on the right. Now the timeline doesn't need to be all the way across the screen while I'm just making my character. I'm going to actually drag it out, release it, and then just narrow it down a little bit. I am going to be building lots and lots of layers. That's why I like to drag this out like this and almost a little bit like Photoshop in that sense. I'll be able to see my layers. When it comes to animating, creating keyframes, then I'll move my timeline back so that it stretches along the bottom. Now if for any reason I pull up a window, say the Properties tab or the library, and you don't see it on your workspace, simply come up to Window and you can look for it here. There's nothing that I'll be pulling up that isn't here. Properties and library are the two main ones at the moment. Similarly, with the tools, I just want to point out especially in Adobe Animate 2020, they've changed a few things. If I drag this toolbar out, not all of the tools are here. If there is a tool that's missing, you need to actually come down to this little three dots which is edit toolbar, click on that. Here there's some other tools that for some reason are not included by default. You can drag and drop them. We might keep all of the painting tools out. I like to keep them all in the same section. Here are all my painting tools. I'll put my shape tools together as well. We've got the rectangle. I need the oval down here, rectangular and oval are the main ones. Then I've got my pen tool, the bucket tool, eyedropper. We'll just leave it at that for now. If there are any tools that I start looking for or using I'll make sure to mention them and if they're not there, you can just check if they're underneath here. On my first layer, I'll import my drawing. I'm going to go to "File", "Import". Now, you can choose "Import to Library" or "Import to Stage". It doesn't matter at this stage, at this point. I'll just choose "Import to Stage" since I'm going to be working directly on the stage, and he arrives onto the stage, I'll scale them down slightly. Hit "Q" on the keyboard. If you want to constrain proportions in Animate to hold down Shift and Alt and then click and drag. Or you can hold down Shift, click, and drag, does the same thing. Now, I'll just name this layer rough or drawing or something like that and I'll lock it. Now, we're all set up and ready to start making our character built. Join me in the next video and I'll walk you through the process step-by-step. 6. Creating the Head: There are many ways to start creating the artwork and coloring up this character. A lot of people will use the shape tools to design and to build, or you could use the line tool or the brush tools. I'll probably use a combination of all of these, but my go-to prefer tool is the pen tool and I'll explain why as we go along. The first thing I'll do in my layer stack is create a new layer. This is the layer that's going to contain my character comp. This character is called Joe, so let's just say Joe_comp. The first thing that I'll do is make a shape for the head and turn that into a symbol. I'm going to hit P on my keyboard to bring up the Pen tool, which is there, and I'm just going to start to create a shape. Now, with the pen tool you basically click and drag. You click on a point and drag the pen, and that creates these handles. If you wanted to go back and change the direction of the handles, you can do so like that. If you make a mistake, you just hit Command or Control Z to undo. I'm building out the underneath shape of the head. I'm going to do the ear separately as well. I'll zoom in a little bit now at this point. That's a general shape. To just edit or change the shape, you can hit V on your keyboard and you can just hover over the line and you can drag the points into place. Let me hide this. Look, it's looking pretty close to the drawing. Now I'm going to fill this area with color. Over here, these two boxes represent fill color and the stroke color. As you can see, the stroke is black at the moment, fill color is white. If you click on Fill, you do have the option to choose from, these are called the default swatches, and that's fine. That's okay. But what I prefer to do is come up to Window and come down to Color. If I click on that, it opens up the color picker in a separate window, which if I drag out and have it floating like this, then it's a much easier sort color picker for me. As you can see, mine is set up in this way and that's because I've got saturation checked. Yours might look like this. That's just what you checked on. It doesn't really matter, it's the exact same set of colors, it's just a different way of looking at them. Let's just pick a skin tone. I'm going to hit K on my keyboard and tap into that shape. What I'm going to do now is double-click on the line and delete it. Before I go any further, I should just say that's a totally a stylistic choice. You can leave your artwork with outlines if you like. But I think for the way I'm going to be building this character, I think I want him to have that kind of look that doesn't necessarily have an outline. I might add in some outlines, maybe around the ear, around the limbs, but for now I'm going to keep my paint without any outlines. Now I'm going to click and drag around this shape, and then I want to turn this into a symbol so that my comp is ready to start filling out. To do that, you can hit F8 on your keyboard or right-click and choose Convert to Symbol. From here on out, naming convention has to stay the same, it's just good practice to keep your naming conventions in order. I'm going to go Joe_head. Make sure that the type is set to graphic and not anything else. You do have the option of movie clip or button. Button is for interactivity. Movie clip, you might think it's more intuitive to go with movie clips since we're animating and we'll have motion, but actually animations always work with graphic symbols in Adobe Animate. You'll see that now you've got a symbol on your stage because it's got this blue box around it. You can't edit this. You can move it around, but you can't change the edge of the shape or anything like that. In order to access those two changes, just double-click on the symbol, and now you're inside. Now you can edit away, delete parts of it if you want, change the color, add to it, whatever. Just so that you know, up here in the top left will always show you where you are in relation to your main stage. Right now, this little bread crumb trail shows us that we're inside of the graphic called Joe_head. If you want to get back out onto the main stage, just hit on Scene, or let's say you're inside it, just double-click on the whitespace, that also brings you back out. I'm on the main stage and as you see, I've got my rough drawing and I've got the Joe_comp. But I've named this symbol the head and I don't want to do that. I'm going to just right-click and say Show In Library, and it's right there. I'm going to double-click on the symbol to change the name. I want it to be the same as my layer, so Joe_comp. Now, when I click in, I've got this on one layer. I'm now going to make this into a symbol. Right-click Convert to Symbol Joe head. Instead of right away starting to do the features like the nose, the eyes, and that, I'm actually going to continue on and create the rest of the body. That's simply because the hierarchy is going to be that within Joe_comp, we'll have all of the body parts, and within each of those body parts like the face or the hands, we'll have different symbols for mad shapes, eye blinks, and hand poses. In the next video, I'm going to continue on and start building out the rest of the body. 7. Building the Torso: Next up, I'm going to start creating the body. The first thing I'm going to do is the neck. I'm going to come over to the layers, make a new layer. The neck is very simple, obviously, it can just be rectangular shape. I click and drag out like that. Get rid of the line. I might turn off the visibility of the face layer and just try and manipulate the shape to how I want it. I'll then click and drag around this, right-click and convert it to a symbol, and that's going to be called Joe_neck. It should really be underneath the face or underneath the head. There we go. Now, on top of this, I'm going to make the shape for the body or the torso. You'll notice I'm not really naming my layers as I'm going. I'm going to show you in a few moments exactly how you can really easily name your layers so that they're the exact same name as your symbols. I find personally that I tend to always make a mistake when I'm naming my layers and my symbols, they don't match up correctly. The way I'll show you in a few minutes is just a very handy way to make sure that they're all properly named. Let me do the torso very quickly. I'm going to go back to the pen tool. I'll just first of all, click and drag out the shape that I want. I can see that this is the shape of the character's t-shirt. The drawing is really just a guide. I mean, it's got a definite look and feel to it that I'm going to try my hardest to capture in this very graphic builds that I'm doing but I don't need to be totally exact. I can make any changes that I want really at this stage. Then let's choose, a color a bit generic at this stage, give him like a light-blue t-shirt. We can always change these colors up later, it's not a problem. Double-click the line work to delete it. Convert that to a symbol. You don't have to right-click every time, you can just hit F8 on your keyboard. Say torso, click "Okay". Now, quickly do the arms. I'll create a new layer. I want it to be above the torso layer. I will go back to the pen tool. You can also lock your layers and then just keep the active or the layer that you want to work on unlocked like that, I find it's an easier way to work. Make sure you're on your layer and then using the pen tool, I'm going to click and drag out shape like this and I'm going to use the same color. Now, I'm not finished with the upper arm, but I will go ahead and turn it into a symbol right now. "Convert to symbol" and I'm going to call it Joe_ upper arm and it's going to be the left arm. It's obviously his right arm, but I really struggled to get my left and right sorted in my head, so I always name is just the way that I'm looking at it, but you can definitely name this right arm if you want to be exact about it. Now, inside this symbol, I'm going to create a new layer and drag it underneath the sleeve, hit P on my keyboard, and just draw out a shape for the arm that's going to be part of the upper arm. Make sure that you've got a rounded edge to the end of the arms. The arms and the legs always need to have this round edge for animation. It'll become clear when we do get into animation, the character, why we do that, but it has to do with the rotation. I'm going to double-click on the white space to go back outside, I need to select this skin tone, I'm going to hit I on my keyboard. Select this, go back to V, double-click on my symbol, and just tap that paint in there, and then I can get rid of the line by double-clicking on it and hitting Backspace. Now, if I come back out, you can see my upper arm is all one symbol and it needs to rotate. Right now, when I rotate it, I can see that this is happening, which is a bit of a problem, so I'm going to double-click inside and drag that down. I want it to be the same. I want it to match into the t-shirt. When I move the points around or the paint around, the reason why that's happening is because I've got Snap to Objects turned on. I'm going to go up to "View", "Snapping", and I'm going to "Snap to Objects", I'm going to turn that off and I'll be able to move this with much more control. Let me see if I go back out and rotate this. Yeah, that's looking okay. We could probably nudge it down a little bit so that it fits in, but I think for now, that's pretty good. The next one will be the lower arm and I can do that above the upper arm. Hitting P on my keyboard, I'm going to click and drag that shape, hit K to finish, and then I'll just double-tap on the line work to delete it, then select it and right-click to convert it to a symbol. Now, the last thing I'm going to do is draw the hand. This might seem a bit tricky at first, but you really just want to have a basic shape for the hand almost like a bit of a cube or a bit of a rectangular shape. Fill it. Let's get rid of the line. Now, I'm going to switch to the line tool, but I'm going to go back and put my Snap to Objects back on because when you're working with the line tool, you've got to make sure that the points of the line actually match up and do snap closed. Select the eye dropper tool. Now, for the hands, I actually do want to have some line work present, so I don't want the outer edge of the line to be there, but definitely between the fingers, I'm going to need to have some delineation. What I will do though, I don't like the thick black heavy lines, so I'll just select the line work and change that color to something that's a little bit darker than the skin tone. A darker, maybe a richer color like that. I'm just going to double-click the whole hand, then convert it to a symbol, Joe_ hand_left, click "Okay". I'm going to quickly do the other arm and then that's the top half the body done. I'll create a new layer and back to my pen tool, click and drag add shape for this arm. I for the color selector, and then double-click to delete. Just to check that I'm doing okay, let me convert that to a symbol. Go inside to that symbol. Now, I can see that it's a little bit wonky up here. I'm going to turn off my Snap to Objects so that I can properly move this around. Another thing that you can do if you are struggling to manipulate the edges and get everything exact is. If you hit A on your keyboard and click on your shape, you can actually see the individual vector points and if you wanted to, you could delete one of them by clicking on it, hitting Backspace, then go back to your regular selection tool and move the paint around, that might help you out a little bit just to finesse the edges, it's not going to really make a huge difference. I'm going to create another layer, drag it underneath my sleeve, and do the rest of the upper arm. There we have it. I don't think I converted that to symbol. That's the last thing I'll do for this video, just conversion to symbol. Joe_ hand_right. We're almost there, I'm just going to do the legs and feet in the next video and then come back in and start rigging the face for animation and dialogue. 8. Adding Legs and Feet: Let's get the legs and feet sorted out. To do that, the very first thing we want to do is create the pelvis. You create a new layer and going back to my pen tool, I'm doing this so that when I animate the character walking or animation's legs moving, it's going to have something to be couched in or hidden by because you don't want a corner to stick out much in the same way as the arm always needs to be built with rounded edges at the elbows and the shoulders. The legs will also need to have round edges so that they don't look so obvious when you animate them. Hit K on your keyboard. What color should we choose? Let's just choose any color for now, we can always change this later. If that happens to you ever, what happened there was I changed the color over here. But for some reason, stroke color was active and so it made the stroke this color and the paint bucket stayed the same color. All you do is you can swap colors on this little icon or over here on this little icon. Now, my paint buckets is purpley colored. Double-click on the stroke color to delete it. Let me just convert that to symbol before I forget, so Joe_ pelvis. Hit "OK", create a new layer, and go back to P or with the pen tool. About here is going to be where the knee joint will be. I'll just do like that to fill it. Select that shape and convert it to a symbol. Upper leg_ left. That's my left, not Joe's left. The lower leg on a new layer, P on my keyboard, and K to fill it. Delete that layer or delete that line work. Convert this to a symbol Joe_ lower leg_ left. I can see it's looking a bit strange at the joining part. Tweaking it just to get it into the proper shape that it needs to be. If you're finding this part where you're pulling the paint a little bit annoying, another option that you can do is click and drag over it and delete that completely to be drastic. But that's much easier. Look at that, you're only dealing with two points instead of a bunch of points. That's done. I'm not going to get too detailed into the feet right now. I can just make a basic shape for the feet, the shoes. Let's find the shape. I'm going to switch over to the N tool just to put a little bit of detail into the shoes. I don't want to get too carried away, but obviously just a little bit would help at this point. Just correct that. Let's finish off this design by doing the other leg and then we'll be able to focus on the face and the facial features. I'm going to create another layer, and in that layer, I'll do the exact thing that I did with the left leg. That's looking good. I'm going to select this foot, copy it, create a new layer, paste it down, and then go to Modify, Transform, and Flip Horizontal. Normally I wouldn't recommend copying one leg over to create the other leg because you'll get into trouble if you've copied symbols over. You need to have separate symbols all the time because any changes that you make in one symbol will then appear in the other symbol and we don't want that when things are supposed to be different. Also, to make it just look more realistic and appealing, a character's limbs, and arms, and legs are often quite different one from the other. Now I'm going to just turn them into symbols, Joe_foot_ left. Believe it or not, we've got the most of our character built. Now, it doesn't look like anything, I will agree with you on that, but we haven't finished yet, but at least you've got the main comp done. 9. Arranging the Layers: Now I'm going to do what I mentioned earlier, where instead of having to layer or name all of the layers as you go, I've focused on naming the symbols only. Now I'm going to select everything. If I click and drag over the whole thing, you can see everything has a blue box around this. If you do that, if you click and drag and one thing doesn't have a blue box, then you know to go in and create the symbol for that piece. I've just noticed that something is missing, I'm going to unhide that so it's the neck. Now click and drag over everything. I'm going to hit "Command" or "Control plus X" on my keyboard. That cuts everything off from the stage and as you can see, every layer is not empty. I'm going to choose one of these layers. Layer 2 is fine. Then I'm going to go Command or Control and V to paste that down. Now all of the symbols are on just one layer. Everything is still selected. Right-click over that and come down to distribute to layers. What has happened is that Adobe Animate has placed everything on separate layers and has named the layers according to every symbol. That is super handy. I can now delete these empty layers by selecting the first one, holding down "Shift", selecting the last one, and then just hitting the Trash Can. Now I'm actually in a good position because I've got everything on separate layers and everything named. If you can't see the full name and you want to, try dragging this out a little bit and you should be okay there. Now I want to move things around so that they're in the proper order. The pelvis needs to be underneath the torso and the legs need to be underneath the pelvis. The feet need to be right at the bottom, so foot right, foot left comes down to the bottom. The neck can probably go above the torso and we're going to sort that out later. The upper arm left, lower arm left, so that's fine. That's on top of this T-shirt layer. Then these need to be underneath the T-shirt. Joe hand right, arm right, and arm right. Oops, what happened there? Drag those underneath the torso, which is there. Now everything is in the proper order and the only thing that looks a bit weird is the neck, so I will quickly go in there. You could even create a new layer underneath it and click and drag out your oval. We get rid of the stroke color. It could be like a dark blue color or a much lighter color. see what it's like if you make it a brighter color. There, that looks okay. Now if you're not happy with the colors of your model at this stage, you could go in and change the colors. What I did was, in Photoshop, I made some swatches. If I'm just going to import to the stage for now. Here's a bunch of colors that I thought might work for this character. Let's say we change the top, then go into the top, [inaudible] Maybe his jeans are this color. 10. Adding Hair: I have pretty much finished my rig. I just need to finish off the head. I tweaked the legs and the shoes a little bit, changed the colors up. Again, I might go back and change them even more, but for now, I think it's time to move on. Double-clicking into my comp, you can see, as I showed you before all my layers are numbered and in order, and what I want to do now is finish out the head. I'm going to double-click to get inside. I think I'm going to just add the hair and ear on and then we'll be able to start the rigging the eyes and bringing the mouth for animation. To do the hair, I think I'll turn the face layer off, or at least turn it to outline so I can see what my drawing is underneath. I'll create a new layer on top of that, and then zoom in, and I'm going to switch to the pen tool. We just want to point out when I'm using the pen tool and I want to make a curve going this way, but then a curve going the other way, or even a straight line going the other way. All I do is click back on to that point and that closes off that curve and allows me to make a different shape on the other side. You can see what I mean. I'll just do it like that again. Click and drag out, tap back into that point, and then create a brand new curve. This one I want both handles to be out and active. But here I'll close off one corner. Then go do the ear next. Couldn't close off the shape so that I can fill it with the skin tone then delete my exterior layers. But I do want just to have a little line on the inside so I hit N on the keyboard. Make sure that the stroke is a dark color for now like that. Just put two little lines just to delineate the ear a little bit. 11. Rigging the Eyes: Now it's time to really dive in and get the facial features working. We're going to rig the eyes and read them out for animation. I'm going to double-click into my symbol, and then on the head layer I'm going to double-click into there. What I'm going to do to start drawing the eyes is just turn the face to outline, I'll lock everything and just create a new layer at the top. There's very specific way that you need to rig the eyes in order to be able to animate the eye blinks or have the character look from left to right. I'm going to show you exactly how to do that. We'll go through this step by step. The first thing you want to do is draw out an oval shape, so I'll just grab my oval tool, click and drag out and then I'll change this color to white, and I'll make sure that the outline is on black. I'll just turn that whole thing into an outline just to see that I'm matching the drawing. That looks about right so that's cool. Turn the outline back on. I'm not going to convert this to a symbol just yet, but I am going to name my layers. I'm going to double-click on the layer name and call this eye white. I don't need the outline on this layer, so I'm going to double-click to select it. Hit "Command" or "Control X" on your keyboard, create another layer and hit "Command" or "Control + Shift + V" to paste that outline in place. Let's now paste it back down in the exact same spot. I'm going to double-click on that layer and call this eye shape. Click off. Now I've got a layer with the eye shape, a layer with the eye white, and in-between these two layers, I'm going to put the pupil. Grabbing the oval tool again, I'll click and drag this shape up turn it white to black and I can delete the outline on the pupil, and then just drag that over into place. Let me just set everything to outline. I can set every single layer to outline mode by just clicking on this "Show All Layers as Outlines" button, that will make everything. Now I can just move the pupil into place and maybe effect-ish change the shape of it a little bit. In the drawing he doesn't really have an exact perfect circle. Throwing those back on. I will convert this to a symbol. I'll right-click and call this Joe_pupil left. Hit "Enter". The reason that you do this is so that you can now separately moved the pupil around. Say, he's looking over to the right, or if he's looking over to the left, but what we want to do is to make sure that the pupil doesn't show beyond the shape of the eye. Above the pupil I'm going to create another layer and I'm going to make this layer be a mask. It's essentially going to mask the pupil layer. Let me double-click there and call this one mask. I'll just call this layer pupil so we know where we are, and then come down to the eye whites, click on that key frame to select that, hit "Command" or "Control C" to copy it. Then in the mask layer hit "Command" or "Control + Shift +V" to paste it in place. Now you can see that the pupil is behind the mask. Over on the layer stack, right-click over that layer and select "Mask". As soon as you do that you can see that, for one thing the icons for the layer have changed, the two layers are automatically locked, and indeed it is masking out the pupil so that if the character is looking off to the right there, that pupil is safely within the eye shape. However, we can't move the pupil now because it's locked. What you need to do, you can unlock the pupil layer, and then to see it you can just change your mask layer to outline. Now you can see the pupil, the mask layer stays locked and you can move this around. You cannot see the effects of the mask at this point but don't worry, if you go back even at to the very first layer, to the scene the mask is effective. It is actually working. Just remember to keep your mask layer locked and keep it to outline. Let's go ahead and start making an eye-blink. We going to come up to the "Eye-shape" layer, we're going to right-click and convert it to a symbol, put Joe_eyeshape_left. The way a blink works is that you need to give at least three or four frames for the eyelid to come down and then generally speaking the standard sort the convention is that you just have one more frame for the eyelid to open. That creates a very realistic natural blink. In our timeline, let me just grab and pull this out a little bit, let's go ahead and create a new key frame on frame number 3. Frame number 1 is our outline shape. We'll go over to frame number 3 so that's 2 frames ahead and insert a key frame there. That key frame is not the exact same as this. It's just but it copied itself over. Then we'll grab this "Line Tool", and I'm going to go up to 'View" "Snapping" and make sure that "Snap to Objects" is turned on. What you want to do is create your first eye pose or your first eyelid coming down at about one-third of the distance down, hit "V" on your keyboard and select and delete the outline lines and then you can just nudge this up a little bit. Then on your timeline, go forward to frames. Now you're at frame five. You can right-click and insert a key-frame there. Then select that eyelid line and you can nudge it down. You don't have to delete it and redraw it. You can nudge it down to about there and drag it the other way. Then the final one. So now we go forward two spaces we are at frame number seven, right-click, insert a key-frame. This frame, the eyelid is going to be fully closed, so let's just delete that. So now what we've got is open, closing, almost closed, and closed. You You hold dash for maybe one or two key just to see what that looks like, insert a key-frame, so it's closed. We're now at frame number nine, and then at frame number 11, insert a key-frame again and it's going to be open. So don't make much sense now because we can't see it in action. So I'm going to pop out, back out to the head layer. I'm going to select hit K on my keyboard for the paint bucket tool and select the skin tone color. Then double-click on the eye shape, go back in. On frame one, it's open, so that's fine. Frame number three, I'm going to fill in the top eyelid, frame number five, so the eyelid in like that. Frame seven, it's fully closed. Think we kept it closed for frame nine and then it's open fully for frame number 11. I'll just add in an extra frame at the end because everything has two key-frames. So let's see what that looks like. Bring your play head back to frame number one, you can hit Enter, and that's a very realistic, natural-looking blink. So because we've put 11 frames, 12 frames into this eye symbol in order to see it play out in every other layer like we're in eye shape left, we need to see it in Joe_head, in Joe_comp, and in scene. We need to add in 12 more frames to each of these sections. So let's go back up to the head, and outline dash, and at frame 12, insert some key, or insert just insert frames. You don't have to make any key-frames yet. Go back to entire comp, and then on the scene itself, let's insert frames all the way up to frame number 12. So if I I Enter, there you go. Now, you might think that it looks a bit slow, if I play it back, it does look a bit tiny but slow, so what I'm going to do, is just get rid of dash hold that we put on this. So we have a closing, nearly close, nearly closed, closed. I'm going to get rid of this key-frame. So I'm going to select this and I right-click and go to remove frames, and now I've only got 10 frames animation. But I think that's a better blink because I want the eyelid to open much faster than that works for me. Okay. Come back to the head. Yeah. Let's quickly move through making a second eye, and then we'll get on to doing the eyebrows. This is eye white, and that is right, Command or Control X to cut dash, create a new layer, Command or Control plus shift and V paste in place, and that is the eye shape on the right. Okay. Click off. That's good. Let me create a layer between these two and make the pupil. Now the last thing I want to do is about the pupil, I want to make the mask and I'm going to copy the eye white from underneath, so Command or Control C, create a new layer above the pupil, and Command Shift V to paste it in place. Now I'm going to double-click first and then call this Mask_right and then right-click, change the layer to a mask layer. There we go. It's locked. Turn the mask to an outline and unlock the pupil if you need to move it around. So before I go any further, I'm going to make all of these things symbols. Let's double-click in there and create our 10 frame of animation for the blink. So we going two frames ahead, right-click and insert a key-frame so that did the exact drawing is copied over to frame number three. Then we're going to grab our line tool and make dash eyelid coming down ever so slightly. Nudge it up so it looks like it's curved and select and delete the extra bits that we don't want. Going ahead two frames to frame number five, right-click and insert a key-frame there. Then drag this line all the way down. Make sure that it has snapped to the edge there. That's okay. Drag it down. Then the last pose, I click insert a key-frame is going to have no eye lid. Okay, now we'll go back out and select my skin tone color. Double-click on the eye shape and for this one, fill that eyelid, fill that eyelid, and fill this closed eyelid. Then for the open eyelid, I'm just going to go back to frame number one, hold down Option or Alt on my keyboard and just as I do so drag that key-frame all the way over to frame number 9, and then right-click and insert another frame, just like the dash. Now we should have a really good blink there. Let's see if both blinks are working. Come back to frame number one hit Enter. Yep, there we go. Let's put the face back on. So if you've gotten this far, you've done really well. You've gotten quite a good bit of animation done, a good bit of rigging, and you've got a working eye blink, which is awesome. Meet me in the next video and we'll start rigging the mouth. 12. Choosing the Mouth Chart: So far, we've done quite a bit of work on this character rig. As you can see, I've tweaked it a tiny little bit, and I've changed the pose of the character to be facing to the right. What we're going to do in this video is look at the mouth charts, because when we start to animate dialogue in animation, we're going to need different positions of the mouth for a different sounds of the dialogue. This is an absolutely standard thing across all animation, especially 2D animation. You're going to want to work with something called a mouth chart. A mouth chart is essentially a series of mouth shapes that correspond to sounds of the alphabet like an S sound or an O sound. You can just even right now, say a sentence and be very aware of the shapes that your mouth makes while you're speaking. Those are the mouth shapes that we want to get. You can even go to Google, type in mouth shapes, or Pinterest, that's another place where people get a lot of mouth charts from, and immediately, you'll see what I'm talking about. There are tons of these things which are the mouth shapes for lip sync. If you're stuck and you don't know which mouth shapes you want, have a look here and you can see the most common, the most universal ones. I see this chart and this chart a lot. What we'll do, is we'll download something like this as a reference guide and bring it into Adobe Animate. But then we might just tweak things to make it suitable for our character. For example, if I'm looking at this one, all of these mouth shapes are straight on from the front, and if you pop back over to our character rig, I'm going to need something that's a little bit more three-quarter. In a three-quarter view, what we'll do first is bring a chart of mouth shapes into Animate so we can use as a reference. I'm going to double-click into my symbol of my character, double-click into the head so I can go inside the head, and I'll just drag my timeline out again so I can see all of my layers. The first thing I'm going to do is make a new layer on top of everything else and just bring in a mouth chart for reference so I can work from. I find two mouth charts that I think are cartoony enough and will give me a bit of a guide. The reason I've got two is because in either of one, it doesn't have everything that I need. Let's just take a quick look at them so we know what exactly we are talking about. This mouth shape is going to be used for all of the M or B. This mouth shape is for D sounds, then you've got this mouth shape R, and then you've got Ooh, the L and D shape, and the F and V shape. This is indicating that the bottom lip is underneath the top teeth. That's what those three lines mean, you'll see that a lot in animation. The only thing for me that's missing out of here is the TH sound, so the TH like that, and there is made with the tongue touching the teeth. You can say that yourself and you'll see what I mean. L and D, the tongue goes behind the top teeth, and for TH it touches the front of the top teeth. That is why I chose to work with two mouth charts because on this mouth chart, you can see it does have a TH. This has got pretty much, there's that L shape. I just like the more fluid look of this one. But I'm going to look at both of these charts when I make the mouth shapes with his character, and just use these as a reference. Let's just lock that layer so I don't have to worry too much about it. Then in the next video, I'm going to dive in and start drawing out the mouth shapes, putting the mouth shapes on each successive key frame, and then I'll show you exactly how that can be used to animate the dialogue. 13. Mouth Shapes Part 1: Above the eye shapes I'm going to make a new layer, and in here I'm going to just first of all draw a basic shape. Simply following the shape that I have for my character, and that's really just a line. We could do one of two things. We could use the line tool, or we could use the brush tool. Let me lock every layer first and unlock the blank layer so that I have a bit more so I'm not going to draw on anything else. If I go to the line tool, and draw a straight line, and bend it into shape, it's all right. It doesn't look great to my eye. Let's change the color to a dark math color. The same color as that line there, and what I'm going to try and do is see if I can make this look a little bit more appealing. I've selected the line, and I'm going to go up to modify, shape, and there's an option here that allows you to convert lines to fills. I'm going to click on that. What that does is it essentially changes this object from a line with only two vector points to a paint layer or a paint object, and I can now drag the edges of this and manipulate it a little bit better. Alright, so I've just changed the color to black. We can always go back and change it again. Let's now turn this into a symbol and we're going to call it your Joe-mouth, and then hit Okay, and double click on it to go inside. What we're going to do is make a whole set of new keyframes, much like the way we did for the eye-blink, and we're going to put different mode shapes on each keyframe. The only thing that's going to be different from this to the eye-blink is the eye blink was an actual animation loop. It was timed out. I made sure that my keyframes run every second frame, and that it looped back to open. We're not going to do that for the mouth because you're going to want to be able to just click one keyframe, and choose that per mode shape in your dialogue. The general sort of standard practice is to make a row of key keyframes with each containing a different mode shape. Let's go ahead on the next keyframe over. I'm going to right-click and insert a blank keyframe. Then I'm going to just drag this out a little bit and click on the onion skinning so that I can see my previous drawing, and I haven't decided yet which magic I'm going to do, but maybe we'll go for just what seems to be this order. Let's do the close teeth sort of shape for these lectures. I'm going to choose the line tool again. I'll do one for the top lip, and then draw another line for the bottom lip, and come up to modify shape, then shape convert lines to fill. Now I can try and just refine the shape a little bit, make it a bit of a more nicer, appealing kind of shape. Then inside this shape, I'm going to fill it with white. You could leave it there, but what I might do is indicate two little lines at the edge for teeth. Could also use the Lasso tool if you want to freehand, draw things out like that so that little tiny area selected, I'm just going to tap in the color window for black to select. That is the S, T, Ch sound. Now let's move on. The next shape that I want to make is a kind of E shape. You know, your mouth really stretches. The lips are going to be a part of the teeth will be apart, and I think I'll approximate this shape a little bit more. Going one frame over in my timeline, I'm going to right-click, and insert a blank keyframe, and now turn on onion skin again just to provide position, and I can do n for my line tool. It's going to be a bit more stretched out. That's the basic shape, and for the E sound, I'm seeing the top of the teeth and I don't see the tongue in this. I need to draw the teeth in first, hit N on my keyboard, and another tip that I'll tell you about is if you want to draw a line, but you don't want to be so big. Go over to properties, and underneath line, you have the option to set the style to solid or this one hairline, and if you set it to hairline, it's going to be super, super thin, so that's easier to work with, I think. Let's just do a row of top teeth. In this area, I'm going to fill this with white. I can fill the area for the mouth in a dark red color, and fill the area for the teeth in white. Now if I double-click on that hairline, the whole thing is selected, and backspace to delete. All right, so we've got three shapes done. Make a little modification to this shape and all I'm going to do is rotation, so it is not so hugely towards the side. If I turn on onion skinning, I can see where I'm going a little bit, and that looks a lot better. 14. Mouth Shapes Part 2: Let's keep going. We're three down and a few more to go, but it's looking good and I really think it's coming together. All I want to do now is these few more mouth shapes, and maybe one extra for the TH sound. Double-click on that, go over to Properties and change it to, I wanted to go back to solid, and I want the width to be 2, Enter. Then again, going to make the mouth quite open here, a little bit more open than what we've had previously. When I'm happy enough with that, I'm going to double-click on the line, go to Modify, Shape and convert my lines to Fills. Zoom in and just refine them a little bit. Turn off onion skin. Now, this shape, we see the teeth as we do in the previous one, and we also see the tongue. So I can just pop back over to the previous frame, click on that teeth that I painted. Click "Command" or "Control C" to copy. Come back to this one, and I'm going to first of all just paste it anywhere and then move it up into place. Zoom in a little bit. Now, go back to my line tool and for the line to make a shape over here. I'm going to go to this frame and grab this color pasted around the teeth and the tongue. But then for the tongue, I think we should probably go with more pinker color. Like that. The next one over, click over to that frame, right-click and insert a blank keyframe there, and I'm going to do this U or R sound. Zooming right in, going to switch on the line tool, and it's definitely a smaller, smaller mouth shape than the rest so let's keep it like that. Going to have the teeth and just put a little line there for the teeth. Actually, I think I'm going to delete the outline around the tongue; here we go. Moving swiftly on, next keyframe, right-click, "Insert Blank Keyframe" after R we want to get the Ooh sound. That's very easy. That's just a simple, we could even just do an oval. Fill it. What I did there was just shift the Ooh sound over to the right. I might just exaggerate it a little bit more so that we get the impression that the mouth is moving around the base as it's speaking because you don't want to have it just open and close in the same spot, it must move forward. Even there you can see that's looking okay. If I go from that shape to that shape, there's a bit more of a movement. Let's just really emphasize it and see if it works. Ooh Ah Ooh Ah E Ooh. The last three mouth shapes I'm going to make, are the L sound, the V or F sound and the TH. The L sound is very similar to the Ah sound L, Ah. So I'm going to just copy this mouth shape and then adjust it for the tongue. Select the keyframe, Command or Control C to copy and go to the blank keyframe and Command Shift V to paste it. The way I'm going to edit this is just simply click into that shape and fill it all with this color. Now I'm going to do something by, just to make it easier on myself, create a new layer above that. Insert a Blank Keyframe right there. Now I can lock that lower one and just draw in the shape for the tongue. I'm going to select these two lines. Cut them, Command or Control X, unlock my layer, click back down onto this keyframe Command Shift V to paste, and then I can hop back over and eye drop for that color. Moving on, I'm going to do the V sound and that mouth shape is a little bit by that with some modification. So I'm going to go grab this S mouth shape, which I think is the second one over. I've to drive my, it's the second one over, click on that keyframe Command C to copy, come over to my Blank Keyframe, run Shift V to paste VC. I basically want to not see the lower lip, just see the top teeth. What I'm going to do is delete that, switch over to the brush tool and just try and draw a line along like that. Can fix it up later if I want and increase the brush size one bit, and this now and just tidy that up. That looks better. That definitely looks like a V shape. Let's move on to the very last mouth shape Insert Blank Keyframe. I'm going to do the TH. I'm going to go and grab that L mouth shape, copy it, paste it into the Blank Keyframe. I'm going to use B on my keyboard and fill in that. So for now, I will leave it there. I think that's more than enough. We've got nine different mouth shapes, and I think we should be okay. We're going to test it out, at least with our lip-sync. If we do need to create any more new mouth shapes, we'll just come back in here and add in a new frame. Now the work is done. If you've gotten this far and if you've been working alongside me step-by-step, well done, congratulations, I'm really thrilled. I think it's exciting because now we get to the actual fun part. The rigging section of character animation can be tedious and it can be very time-consuming and persnickety. But once you've set that up, you've now got a character that you can use over and over again in so many different animations. You've really done all of the hard work, now the easy part starts. I hope you're excited. I'll see you in the next video. 15. Adding a Sound File: I can now finally get rid of my rough drawing altogether. I've got my character model and now I'm going to import my audio file. For the purposes of your final project, I've actually included a number of files for you to choose from. These are all very short audio clips. You can have a listen through and select whichever one you want. We will listen to them together. I got them from a website called freesound.org. There are royalty free audio clips on that website that you can download and use in your animation. Because I just wanted you to have a short audio clip, I chose things that were just a few seconds long so that we can get through the lip sync in a very clear and understandable way. I've got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. I've got about six files here, we'll have a listen to each of them now. That boy he had never gone to Mountain Ervin. Then there's this one. Hold on tight, this is going to be a bumpy ride. All right, come on get the news over with I want to hear the music. Okay. When I suppose you think that's funny. Birthday party clone. What's it worth to you for me to keep my mouth shut and just to fade away? I think I'm going to use this last one, but it's totally up to you. You can choose whichever sound file you like, or you can go to Freesound and look for some audio files yourself. Now I suggest that you search for something like male voice or a female voice. You really have to sit through quite a lot. You can see when you put in male voice, you've got 136 pages of little soundbites. Not all of them are going to be suitable. Some are screams, for example, but there are quite a few to choose from. For my purposes, I'm going to just stick with this last soundbite here. Just to review the animation process, the first thing that we're going to do is animate my shapes to the dialogue. The second thing that we'll do is then add any expressions onto the face like eye blinks and eyebrow movements. Then the third and final thing we'll do is add the acting. If you think of that three-step process, we have to go down to the head layer first for our first stage of animation. Because we want to animate this mouth shape in different shapes according to what the dialogue is. For that reason, I'm going to take the sound file and place it into a layer within this head symbol. Notice I've gone from my main scene to the body symbol and then down into the head symbol. Let me drag my timeline down. At the very top of my layer stack, I'm going to create a new layer. Then I'm going to go up to file import, and I want to import to the library my sound. Let's see V0, Scarlet Street 01 click ''Open'' and then we'll go to our library and should be there. There it is. It's always on the last. If you just click on that, it'll show you the waveform of the sound file that tells you that it's there, everything is good. What I'm I to do at this stage is drag my library panel out and put it underneath the properties so that it stays open or let's put it on the top. Now I've got my properties tab down here, and I've got my library in case I need it. The other thing that I'm going to need is my frame picker. The frame picker is going to allow me to change my mouth shapes very easily. You can, if you don't see it, come up to window and look for it in this drop-down menu. Brain picker, there we go, and you can have it as a floating window or you can attach it to up here. That's fine as well. My top layer, I'm going to click on the first key frame and from the library, I'll drag the sound file onto the stage and release. Now you can see that there it is, it's up there. This sound file though is six seconds long, so that's about 170 frames or so. Let's go all the way down to maybe 200, just to be on the safe side. Click and drag all the way through the stack and then hit ''Frame''. Don't insert key frames or blank key frames, just hit frame and that will extend out your timeline. There, as you can see, my sound file actually ends on frame 166. I'm going to click and drag this empty space that we don't need and then right-click and choose Remove Frames. Now let's go back to the beginning. I'm going to just click on the ''Mouth'' symbol, make sure that I've got my looping window open. Let's just do play single frame for now so that it's not opening and closing. Actually, I'm going to bring my library back over here, so really I just need properties and my Frame picker. Let's just give the audio and listen. What's it worth to you or for me to keep my mouth shut and just to fade away? Perfect. Come back to the start. Believe it or not, this next part is incredibly easy and it's very straightforward. All of the hard work is done, making all of those mouth shapes, spending as much time as possible to get them rise, and to really draw them nicely. That's all behind us and now we just get to play around with those and match them to the sounds. There are a few conventions that animators work with in terms of lip sync that I'm going to explain that will make it much easier to do. Generally speaking, you will try to animate on the vowels. If you scrub through the timeline, you can see that the a is there. A worth and me, those are the vowel sounds that you would hit with your mouth shapes. That's one tip. What people like to do, and you don't have to do this, but it's an option that is there for you is to create a new layer above your sound file and to go through and just write down like you can create a keyframe here. In that keyframe, give it a label. Say what and what's it worth to you? Type in Worth or that you don't have to type the actual words, you can just type the sounds. I might just quickly do that just so that we have a visual that we can work to as well. Because scrubbing through the timeline might just drive you a little bit crazy. But I have to say welcome to the world of being an animator because this is what you'll be doing pretty much all day long and you need to be able to do that without making yourself go totally crazy. But we'll try and minimize that scrubby, awful dialogue sound by working with labels as well. I've labeled all of the sounds that I have heard on my waveform and they correspond to the peaks as well. Let's just take a quick listen. You can read along on the top layer the sounds that I've identified. What's it worth to you for me to keep my mouth shut and just to fade away? I don't have absolutely everything noted simply because for one reason we don't make the mouth shape for every single sound that comes out. What is it worth, we could get away with probably just making one mouth shape there, one mouth shape there. We'll see how that looks. But I wanted to just point out the very important ones. Let's see. Keep my mouth shut and just fade away. One thing I didn't mention at the beginning is that if you do not hear your sound file when you're scrubbing back, you don't hear anything. Make sure that you click on anywhere on the sound file in the timeline. Come over to Properties. This is really important. Go down to sync and this drop-down menu. Make sure that it's set to stream. Sometimes if it's set to event, you won't be able to hear it playback and that's obviously not going to work because you need to hear it. That's an important one to know. Just set it to stream and then you'll be able to play it back. In the next video, we'll start doing the mouth shapes. 16. Key Framing the Dialogue: I want to be able to access the mouth so I'm going to lock all of these layers and then unlock the mouth layer, that way I won't make any mistakes. You can also highlight this layer if you click on this little dot that creates a highlight line underneath, which is very useful when you've got a lot of layers and you're only working with one layer. But what I'm going to do is change the color of the highlights. I'm going to right-click, come down to "Properties" over here and this will allow me to actually change that outline color, lets say to something redy or pink. Click "OK." So now you can clearly see the layer that I'm working on. I'm going to drag my frame picker out and I want to place it on top right over here above Properties. If I click on the mouth layer, you can see all the different shapes, all the frames really they're inside. You can scale up the thumbnails or scale them down by dragging that slider. Make sure that your sound file is set to Stream in the Properties. I will find my layer where I made the notes. There it is on the top. First thing you want to do is click on the mouth layer, make sure that it's set to Single Frame and that that Single Frame is set at 1 so it doesn't start looping as you move forward in the timeline. I'm going to go over to my first sound. Just click on the mouth shape and it automatically creates a keyframe. You don't even have to create a keyframe for this, you just place your playhead at the sound that you want. Click on your thumbnail, then we're going to do open mouth there, what to worth. W, sort of. We've got the t-h sound. Maybe that one doesn't necessarily work there, comes in a bit sooner. But all I want to do is get my keyframe for the sounds down. I can come back later and finesse the frames and move them around and change them. I'm going to keep going and obviously, you can follow along with me if you're using this particular sound track or if you're using a different sound altogether, just follow the steps that I'm doing. As you can see, it's a very straightforward process. I'm going to rustle through this whole section very quickly. It'll only take me probably about five or 10 minutes and then I'm going to loop back afterwards and finesse anything that I need to. I'll keep his mouth closed up to about here, then slightly open, close and then close, keep my mouth. Close again and then I'm going to go straight into the S sound. T sound goes there, and then maybe he closes his mouth again, so I'll just do a transition shape and then close it all together. Maybe he goes back to his little smile. Then I want him to come straight into that FV sound, so create a mouth shape just to open a little bit, and then F, and then wide-open, and then a W for here, and then an A. Hold it for a while and then move back into a closed mouth shape. Fade away. That top layer has one frame too much so I'll just right-click and choose Remove Frames which is there, Remove Frames. Now I can play it back and have a listen. Hit "Enter". What's it worth to you for me to keep my mouth shut and just fade away? I can see this part here immediate is not really working for me so I'm going to get rid of this keyframe. Move that one in. Fade away. What's it worth to you for me to- Right about there, hang on. This is where I'm going to loop back and just adjust things slightly. What I want to do is just move my keyframes one or two frames to the left. The idea for lip-sync for a lot of people say is that you see the mouth shape before you hear the sound. That comes down to the fact that, for one thing, sometimes a character's mouth might open before they actually speak in preparations almost like an anticipation that they are about to say a word. A general rule of thumb that people have often talked about is think about thunder and lightning. You see lightning before you hear the thunder. A good practice is to drag your keyframes for each defined vowel sound just one frame sooner, and that actually makes the animation look a lot more natural. What's it worth to you for me to keep my mouth shut and just fade away? That's looking a lot better to me now that I've just made those very small changes. But I think you'll agree it does look a lot better. Fade away. That's ground, I'm very happy with that. It doesn't look like he's got any emotion or anything while he's saying that, but that's what we're going to start layering on top in the next video. But I think the timing is right, the mouth's shapes fit the sounds pretty well. I'm going to keep going. Join me in the next video and I'll start to add eye blinks and eyebrow movements. 17. Adding Expression: In this video, I'm going to add eye blinks and eyebrow movements to this animation. On each eye, I'll create a key frame. Remember it's the eye shape that has the eyelid animation. With that selected on the stage, I'll come over to my Looping options in Properties. I want it just to play once, so click on that button "Play Once". Make sure the first frame is set at one. If I hit "Enter", let me go back to the start and hit "Enter," you see that it has one blink. Let's do the other eye, eye shape right we're looking for, which is just there, eye shape right. What I might do is highlight both of these layers right now so that we can easily see where we're going. At frame number 5, I'm going to create a key frame. Click onto the item on the stage, so it comes up in the Properties. Then just choose play once for the Looping option, and the first frame is set at one. I've turned off the sound to the dialogues, you can't really hear it. But I know for a fact that he says, "What's it worth to you for me to." Maybe around here Joe's voice is, "Keep my mouth shut." We'll do two more eye blinks, key frame that, key frame that. Again, click onto the eye shape on the stage. I want to come down. It's already set to play once, but the first frame is now gone on to 10, so I'll just double-click on that and hit "1" so it goes back to one. The same thing for that one, click on the eye shape, and you want the first frame to be one. There's another, let me see. I might move it back a little bit just so that it anticipates the dialogue. Then one more eye blink, say about here. He says, "Fade away." Let's just give him a little eye blink here. Well, we gave him a little one. It's either one or it isn't, but you know what I mean. Let's see how we get on. Click on that playing once. First frame is one, that's good. Click on that, play once, and the first frame is playing once. Let me just double-check that that one actually is the right one that we're on. No. After putting a key frame on the wrong one, I put it onto the mask instead of the eye shape, so I'll just clear that key frame, make my key frame there. Now click on it. Yeah. First frame needs to be one. Let's play it back, see how it looks. What's it worth to you for me to keep my mouth shut and just fade away? That's okay I think. What's it worth to you for me to keep my mouth shut and just fade away? Now I'm going to add some eyebrow movements. In the timeline, I think right about here, I want to have his eyebrows move up. So create two key frames. Then ahead slightly in the timeline, I'm going to create two more and nudge the eyebrows up. Then I'll come back and simply insert a classic twin. There we've got a nice, smooth motion going up like that. Then about here, I want his eyebrows to come back down again. What I'm going to do is go back to the very first two key frames and simply hold down "Alt", drag them along so that they're copied in place. I can twin the eyebrows to go back down to normal again. Then right about here in the animation where he starts to say this line of dialogue, I think I want his eyebrows to come down in something like a frown. Then the last bit of eyebrow movements will be towards the end. We'll have the eyebrows go back to normal. I'll go back to my first frame and I can copy these. Right-click, copy these frames. Come over to here in the timeline and select and paste the frames. I just need to clear those empty key frames. Just right-click and go Clear Keyframe. That's that. That's where they're back to normal. Let's just create our classic twin in between these two poses. Then in between there create a classic twin. That looks okay. Now, I can play around with the timing if I want. I can also just grab one eyebrow. If I want it to be offset a little bit, just grab one eyebrow, move it out so the timing's a bit better. That looks okay. That was very simple. I could possibly come back in and change it later on. But I think right now I want to move on and start doing the acting poses. Join me in the next video and I'll show you how to set things up for that. 18. Creating Hand Poses: In this video, I want to show you how to create a multiple set of hand poses. I also want to show you how you can easily swap symbols out from assets that are already in your library, if there's, for example, a hand pose on the stage, on your rig that you want to swap out for another set of poses. What I did, I basically just drew out very rough and very sketchy whole set of different hand poses for this character. I think I've got about nine poses done altogether. Then once I had the rough drawings done, I was able to go in and start drawing over them using the line tool and the fill and bucket tool. This process was done in exactly the same way as we've been working throughout the build of the character rig. There is nothing new dawn at all. It did take me a little bit of time, but I managed to get as much of them done. I left the outline on for the whole hand. For now, I'm going to go back in later and refine it once I've matched the hands up to the actual character rig. But now that I've got all of these drawings done for the hands, I want to show you how you can swap out symbols. I made all of these into one symbol, and now I'm going to go over to the rig and I'm going to swap out the character's existing hand with the new set of hand with all of these poses inside of it. Now I'm in the symbol Joe hand right, which is this. But I've just drawn all of my new hands in a symbol that I think I just named hand poses. I'm going to double-click into this symbol, and what I want to do is get all of these onto different keyframes. Let's start off with the neutral pose, we'll just have the hand like this. It's going to be the neutral pose. Go Command X, create a new layer above it, and paste it in there. Come back down to this layer. Essentially, I'm going to go one frame ahead in the timeline, insert a blank keyframe. I'm just going to paste it in. Then I'll come back to Frame 1, lock the top layer, and simply repeat that for all of the rest of the hands. Now I've just got one hand shape left. That's it. Everything is now on this top layer. Blank keyframe and paste it. Now I can delete that bottom layer altogether. If I scrub through, you'll see all the different hand shapes. I've got up to nine. Coming back out onto my character rig, I'm going to now swap those hands out for these hands here. I'm going to swap out for the ones I've just created. To do that double-click, I'm going to select the hand, right-click on this and go down to Show in Library. Let's go ahead and delete that symbol. Come up to my hand poses. But first of all, I'm going to duplicate this symbol and I'm going to rename it Joe_hand_right. Then drag that out onto the stage and scale it into place. Q on my keyboard to scale it down. Now what I want to do is come in and edit this hand in order to match the body, and that means taking off my lines. It's looking better. Then I'm going to go through each frame and do that. Just match it up to the rig and delete the exterior lines that I don't want. I'm going to now select all of these frames, right-click, go Copy Frames, come back out onto the stage. Select this frame, right-click and Show in Library, right-click, go Show in Library. There it is Joe hand left, I'm just going to delete dash and then go insert new symbol, Joe_hand_left. Click "Okay", and now paste those same frames. Those are all of the left hands, but I might just want to orientate them for the other side of the body. So I'm going to go back out to the stage, double-click back into my symbols, and go to the library, find Joe hand left, drag it out, and then scale it down. Come up to modify, transform, flip horizontal, scale it down a little bit more. That might work. Those hands are now much better looking, and they fit the rig. Now everything is done. We're now ready to dive into character acting and posing. So meet me in the next video, and we'll do the final layer of animation. 19. Pose 1: Now, I'm going to double-click into my head layer because this is where all of the animation has been done up until now. I'm going to delete out the dialogue and bring it onto the next layer up, so that I can animate the gestures of the body. I don't need my mouth words anymore, so I'm going to just highlight that layer and delete that. Then on this layer which says Joe_face, I don't know why it says that, but it's the dialogue track, you can see it there. I'm going to right-click, and I'm going to go cut layers, then come back out. This is the part of my symbol, the layer order of my symbol, where all of the body parts are. Again, at the very top, I will right-click and paste layers, and there is my sound file going all the way out to frame 165. Now, I'll just fill in the rest of the frames here. So ''Right-click'' and. ''Insert Frame.'' As you can see on the hands, I just want to point out that we haven't set these to single frames, so they are looping through all of the different poses. Let's just quickly click on them. Come over to the Properties tab under looping, select ''Single frame,'' and make sure it's on one for now, and do the same with the other one single frame. I've actually got it set to two just to offset, just to have different time poses. Now we're going to tackle the first pose. I don't need my rough drawing anymore, delete that, and then double-click into the comp. In here, this is where all the body parts are. You can hear the dialogue track at the top there. What's worth to you for me to keep my mouth shut and just fade away? This is where I'm going to start building up my acting animation. If I scrub through, you can hear at this point and at this point, these are the main beats. That's the second one, and this is the third one over here. Scrub through. I know I've got about three main major poses that I need to hit to match the soundtrack, possibly four. But the three big main ones are here. At the first one, it's going to be on worth. I'm going to keyframe the whole rig at this point in the timeline, that's about frame 18 or so. Just keyframe everything over there. That's where he's going to his, his first big major pose, and as I said before in anticipation of that pose, we're going to have a pose just before that. I'll give it two frames for that, I'm going to keyframe everything there. I had about frame 10, so about four or five frames are for that keyframe everything. Now I've got three main key poses that I've timed on the timeline. It's really good practice to just make your keyframes first so that you don't lose sight of the neutral pose. But now that I've done that, the first thing I'm going to do is go in and animate or pose out my anticipation. I know for the main major pose he's going to be sort of leaning back with his arms out. For the anticipation, I'm going to go a little bit opposite to that and I'm going to have its arms coming in, I'm going to have him leaning forward slightly. It's just really a matter of tweaking the rig so that I get it into the position that I want. I'm not worried if I make a mistake here because I've key-framed the other two poses and they're set the neutral pose. So even if I go away often this all I need to do is clear out the pose to go back to the normal pose that he's in. I know his head's going to be going back, so I'm going to tilt forward slightly for this pose. This might look really weird, but when you [inaudible] it next to the other product, it'll be okay, so that he's going into that anticipation. I can also if I want at this point get put a tiny bit of a squash onto the character. I think that looks pretty good. Now move over to the main pose, the actual key pose, and put him into that position. Again, I'm just going to grab the whole upper part of the rig and bring the pivot point down low and scale him or rotate him back. Arms go out. His head's going to be looking upwards. Now I'm going to swap out the hand. I think I want to have his hands be open a little bit. It's just a matter of clicking on the hand and swapping it out from the frame picker, and let's rotate that lower arm and hand up. Now it's good to have the arms offset from each other. I don't want them both in the exact same pose. Otherwise, it will look weird if its arms are doing the exact same thing. So we'll keep this arm like that, but maybe I'll rotate it up ever so slightly. There you have it. Standing anticipation key pose. Good, let's move on. That's one major pose done. I'm going to do the next two poses, or the next two or three poses in exactly the same way. Building it up from an anticipation to the key pose and I'll also probably add settle or an overshoot depending on us. So join me in the next video. Let's get through the next couple of poses. 20. Pose 2: That's my first pose. He springs into dash key pose, and then down the timeline divided by here. I want him to go into his next main key. At about frame number 38, I'm going to keyframe the entire rig once again. Holding down Shift select every layer, hit keyframe. Now that's where I know my next main major pose is and in the same way, I'm going to set a set of keyframes for the anticipation. Set a row, just two frames of four dash. I'm going to have anticipate first and about five frames before that I'm going to have him go from pose 1 into the anticipation, so keyframe dash. Once again, just setting up my three main poses for timing, and that's perfect. Obviously, I'm going to come back later and tweak these key poses. What I'm doing right now, and this is a very useful way for you to work, is to really just do it in a broad sense. Without getting too bogged down into details, animate your poses in a very broad sense. We're going to loop back around after we've set everything into keys and anticipation poses, and we'll add the necessary settle or the necessary overshoot. Right now, let's just do the anticipation quickly. He's going to come from this wide, open armed pose into a pose where I want him to be pointing at himself, where he says me. To anticipate that movement. Let's just get him going even wider first. Lifting his hands up, going to select the whole upper body, tilt him backwards just to emphasize the anticipation a little bit more and again, add a bit of a squash on this pose. Then he's going to spring into this one where I want him leaning forwards, select everything. Make sure I've got the torso selected. Move the pivot point down and tilt him forwards, and now I'm going to reposition the arms for this pose. As I said, I want his arm to be pointing to himself where he says me, so I can just rotate that fore all the way like that, I'm going to grab the hand, bring it over, and then on the frame picker, let's see. I think this clenched fist at the bottom would actually work quite nicely. It looks like maybe he's pointing at himself, something like that. That'll work excellent for just pointing at himself and now I just need to nudge the arms into the position a bit better, let me just bring it out a bit and bring the forearm and hand in slightly. Then I'm going to have this arm just down by his side. Just rotate that back down and swap the hand back out. Let's see what that looks like. Anticipation. Can tweak it a little bit better, maybe he's head drags back a bit. I think I'm also going to bend his legs so that it really looks like his body is coming down. It'll look a bit weird if I only move his torso on this pose. Let's have him bending his knees, so it really gives the impression that his whole body anticipates downwards. Just bending the knees slightly gives us that bit of room to nudge the torso down. Now I can grab the whole upper body and using my arrow keys, just nudge it down a little bit. Better, much better. What's it worth to you for me? That's good. I think that looks good. This pose probably does need an anticipation or a bit of an overshoot. Two frames ahead, I'm going to key everything, and now the key points that I just did will become the overshoot pose. I'm going to go in and I'm going to grab the top half of the body, move the pivot point down and skew and stretch him a little bit in this pose and just exaggerate this so that he can actually settle, overshoot this and then settle into the key pose. I've already made those keyframes, so I think that's going to work much better. It's a tiny bit of overshoot. But it works because we're going from such an extreme anticipation to key pose, we're going to need to overshoot it slightly just to sell it that better. In fact, I might even just pull it out a little bit so its got more room. Just grab all the keyframes, pull them out. Perfect, happy with that. That's my 2nd pose done. I'm ready to move on to pose number 3. Meet me in the next video. 21. Pose 3: The next beat in the dialogue is round about here and because I've just done two big poses, I'm not going to do another big pose here. It'll look a bit too monotonous. I'm just going to make what's called an accent. I'm going to keyframe the whole rig once again. That's where you know, we had the accent. Now we just want to get his arms back down to normal before we do the pose. Going back in the timeline at frame Number 47, I'll have keyframes here so that I can get the character's hands. I don't want him to be standing with his hands in the same pose for the whole length of time. Here, I'm just going to get his arms and hands back down into a neutral pose. The same with the other arm, I'll just make my key frames in the timeline and then rotate it back down. Now, let me just quickly drag these across over to the key pose, select all of these keyframes. Hold down Alt on my keyboard and drag them over. This now is going to be where I'll anticipate, set my keyframes and that's going to be the accent pose. I'm not going to change him too much from what he's doing here. I think I want him to stand and maybe just tilt his head back. Maybe bring a little bit of life and a little bit of movement into the upper body but not huge. It's not going to be a big huge, exaggerated pose, just something very subtle. I'm just bringing a little bit of movement into the arms as well. You don't want them to be totally static if the upper body is moving. Just give a little bit of life and naturalism to the arms, have been moved slightly. Great, I think that's going to work well because it sort in with the seriousness. Like his eyebrows are coming down at that point. He's got a bit of a serious look on his face. We want the actual acting or the body movements to be quite simple. That's pretty much pose 3 done. In the next video, we're going to do the final big acting pose. 22. Pose 4: Around about here is where I'm going to do my last and final pose, right where he says, "Fade". I'm going to select all of the layers in the timeline, create my key frames for the entire rig, as per usual, and then create a row of key frames for an anticipation pose. He's going to move from this neutral standing pose which we set up in the previous video, and he's going to move into his final big acting pose. Again, I'll give about 4, 5 frames for him to wind up into the anticipation. He'll hit the anticipation, and then he'll go into his main pose, his key pose. Let's do the anticipation. For the key pose, I want him to again, fling his arms out and reach forwards. To anticipate that, I'm going to tilt him back, wind his arms up almost. I want to fold them up in front of him. I'm also going to bend the legs so that we can get his torso moving down, so it's a bit more realistic. Just moving the upper leg outwards, rotating it outwards like that, and rotation the lower leg. Let's see how that looks. He's going to really scrunch down a little bit, getting his arms scrunch down, maybe a hunching shoulders up. Let's see. There, anticipates down and then spring up. Cool. Let us spring down and spring up. For the key pose, I'm going to have him really leaning forwards, and his arm is going out again. That looks good. I could just tweak the pose now as much as I want, and I think that's the main action that I want to see him do. For the last pose, I'm just going to do another settle I think, because I think it needs that it's quite a big change in movement and shape from the anticipation pose. I'll go a few frames ahead this time, and give them a lot more room to settle into that final pose. That'll be the final pose. Now, I'm going to go jump back here and make this pose be the overshoot. He's going to overshoot this and then have about 4, 5 frames to settle, which I think will work very nice. Selecting the whole rig, I'm just going to skew it over very slightly, not too much, you don't want to make it too obvious. I'm just going to turn on skinning to see where I'm going, just to make sure. That looks good. Just rotate him forwards. His head maybe is going up like that, and then his arm can also overshoot. Either away. There we go. I think that's fine. That's all done now, we've got all our main key poses, we've got our anticipation and overshoot poses. In the next video, I'm going to show you how you can now add your classic tweens onto these key frames to make the whole action look a lot smoother, a lot more natural. 23. Smoothing the Animation: What should work to your formula? Keep my mouth shut and just to say the way. What should work to you? It looks a little bit jumpy at this stage. But in this video, what I'm going to do is go through, add a bit of a settle onto a couple of the poses, and then I'm going to tween everything to make it a bit smoother. In this first key pose, let's add a settle. This is his main pose that he hits. That's the anticipation main pose. Then I think we could give him a few frames for him to just settle into that pose. I'm going to tweak the arms and bring them down slightly so that he has room to settle into the pose. Let's see what that looks like. Yeah. That's a little bit of a settle. I hope you can notice it but it will make a big difference. They'll have the pose to not look so jumpy. That looks totally fine. Now I'm going to go ahead to this middle pose. It's just the accent pose. I'm just going to give this just one more set of key frames so that he can settle nicely. Let's make it a bit slower. This time will come out about three or four frames. Select the whole row of layers, key-frame everything, and give a little bit of movement to the arms, so the arms are going back like that. In this pose, we'll just nudge them back very slightly. There we go. Then going forwards in the timeline, let's see. I've now changed that pose because I made him settle. The following pose is going to be wrong at the start of the anticipation. I'm just going to select all of these key-frames, hold down Alt on my keyboard, and drag them over, and that has copied that pose. It's going to be nice and smooth going into that one. Now I'm going to come back to my first pose, select everything in between the key-frames, right-click and create a classic tween. Do the same on the second pose. Just click and drag through the stack of layers. Right-click, choose Classic Tween. Create classic tween here. Then do the last pose. Select everything in the timeline between all of these key-frames. Right-click, Create Classic Tween. Now I've got all the tweens in. As you can see, there's a couple of issues often when you put in a tween, your tween will break. I'm just going to go in. It's very easy to fix. For example here, the arm didn't tween. The arm and hand didn't tween at same time. Just wherever scrub through the timeline, select the point where the break happens, which is there, create a key-frame for that position, and then just drag, in this case, the hand. I'm just going to drag it down to where it's supposed to be. The reason that this happens in Adobe Animate is because I have rotated my symbols around a different point other than the registration point. Sometimes that can't be avoided, especially if you are flipping symbols. All it means is that then you go back in and manually just fix up the broken tweens. In this pose, last poses change, so I'm going to move the new set of key-frames out and then go in and create my classic tweens. It's a little bit wonky. That's no problem. Just choose where I see the tween breaking and key-frame it and nudge the symbols properly into place. That's better. That's working fine. The next pose is fine. Then in the last pose it's just another jump with his left arm. I'll just quickly zoom in close and fix the arms. Perfect. The very last thing that I'm going to do is add an ease onto the tweens because very often the tweens will make the motion look very monotonous, and even and you want to have the ability to add either an easy or an ease out. It just gives a very subtle quality to the animation. Let's go back to the beginning. Let's select this last row of key-frames here, the one where he settles in. I'll drag it out a couple of frames. Then selecting the tweens in every row, come over to tweening and the properties, and just set that to 100. So it's a nice easing out. We'll see how that looks. To my eye, that looks a lot smoother. I'm not going to do it for every single pose. I'll leave it at that pose. If you wanted to, you could play around and experiment with adding an ease. There's one last final thing that I want to show you in the next video and that will wrap up the acting. Now that you've added tweens, the head can sometimes lose it's looping. Remember, we've animated the mouth shapes, the eye blinks or with inside the head symbol. I want to go back in and just double-check that the correct frames are assigned to each key-frame in my main action. Let me explain exactly what that means in the next video. I'll see you there. 24. Checking the Frames: The very last thing that you're going to need to do for your animation before it's completely finalized is to now check that the animation that you've done for the lip-sync, for the eye blinks actually corresponds to the new keyframes that you've set on your timeline within the comp. This is something that happens in Adobe Animate when you use the tween function. Wherever you've made new keyframes this level of your rig, you just need to double-check that any other animation on subsequent lower levels of the rig, like the eyes and the mouth, that they are going to match up. There's a very easy way to do this. Just go along the timeline to anywhere where there's a keyframe. I'm only check the head because their heads, the only thing we put animation in, click on the symbol on the stage and come over to the looping options underneath properties and just make sure that that number corresponds to your timeline. Here we can see we're actually on frame number 8. We need to change this for the first frame to be eight. Scrub through, go to the next key frame, that's on 14, click onto the symbol and under properties looping, change it to 14. Again I'm going to do this for every keyframe. That just means that the mouth shapes are not going to match up correctly unless they correspond exactly to any other new keyframes that we've made in the larger comp. Again just to recap, it's a matter of going through the timeline, clicking on the keyframe, establishing it's at 33, click on the actual symbol and change the looping for that symbol to be the exact same frame. It doesn't take long at all, it just takes a few minutes. You go through your timeline, you make sure everything is fine, and you'll find that the animation actually does match up much better. Now let's take a listen back. What's it worth to you for me to keep my mouth shut and just to say it away? What's it worth to you for me to keep my mouth shut and just to say it away? 25. Adjusting the Timing: We finished our animation, believe it or not, that is a fully animated scene, and as simple as it is, I really want to stress how important this approach to the workflow is. If you just dial it down and approach your animation with the idea that you just want to get the main poses to correspond to the main beats of the dialogue. Set those poses, and then add an anticipation and an overshoot. That's really the best way to approach 2D animation. I'll just play it through once again. What's it worth to you for me to keep my mouth shut and just to fade away? I did want to point out that if if you feel comfortable at this level, if you've gone through all of these stages and everything still makes sense to you and you're still with me, then I did want to show you that the next stage up, if you are feeling that you want to advance it a little bit, is to go in and tweak the timings. What I've done in this file is I've basically with the exact same poses of animation, I've just adjusted the timing of each pose and I've offset the arms. So I'll play this through for you so you can hear. What's it worth to you or for me to keep my mouth shut and just fade away? It's quite different to the first animation that's for sure. What's it worth to you for me to keep my mouth shut and just fade away? But this is all you need really and truly it is, but if you wanted to come back in and just add another layer on top, then I'll show you what I did in this file. For example, if you look at his arm and hand over here, I just got them moving first into the pose. Then he goes to his anticipation, hits the key pose and I adjusted the timing on the settle, so he takes a little bit longer to settle in, and then if you look at this arm and hand, I offset dash and kept up a little bit of motion in on dash. The second pose is straightforward, it's the same but going into this accent pose, I worked on the arms and hands just to make the movements so it's not so completely static. I wanted the movement to go in and I just offset that a little bit. Then he goes into his accent pose and the only other thing I did was I added a shoulder shrug in this section, which I think worked very nicely with that little hint of dialogue. That was literally three key-frames. Shoulders up, shoulders down, and shoulders back down. Then for the last pose, I might have gone a little bit overboard here, but I adjusted the timing, I pulled the key-frames out and tried to offset the hands a little bit, and had this arm continue. I wanted him to go from that big main pose back into a standing pose. All I did was. What's it worth to you for me to keep my mouth shut and just fade away? Those basic tweaks really add another layer to the animation, so I will leave this file for you to study and to see if you feel like adjusting the timing of your animation file. In the last video which is coming up next, I want to show you some more advanced options in case you feel like you want to add more expression into the facial features. I'll see you in the next video.