2D Hand Drawn Animation Essentials

1. Intro: Hi, I'm sorry, Good Sam. And I've been an animator and an illustrator since 2004. And today, I want to show you how to do this. If you don't know my work, check this out. Alright, let's get started. 2. Pendulum - Easing and Inbetweening: Hi. So today we're going to have a look at how to animate this pendulum. It's a simple exercise. And point of this exercise is to understand in-between ing and particularly easing, how to ease into position. But keyframe. And also it gives us an insight into ox and timing in animation. But what's really important about this one, It's easing and in-between. So let's get started. Okay, So as usual, I'll be using Photoshop to animate this. But you can animate this in any animation software that you wish. You should know that I'm going to make this on 12 frames per second frame rate. And that's it. So, okay, so I've got a blank canvas here. I'm going to start by maybe drawing some lines to position my animation. So what I've created here is just sort of a background, a guide for my animation. I positioned a pendulum. Pendulum. And this position here, Let's key-frame key a, and that is frame key B. So this is just going to say on the background. Now I'm going to just draw the first two keyframes, position a and position be on top of mine. So this is my first frame. I'm going to go over and select the second frame and draw the second, the second key frame. So that's it. I've got my two joints. I can switch between them. As you can see. My objective is to make the glandular move from one to another. So the first thing we're gonna do is just move from a to b. We're not going to worry about going from B to a. You just going to do from a to b? I have colored my keyframes in red here just to mark them as red. But I'm going to use different colors for the in-betweens. So here we go. So the question is, how do you go from a to B? How, what is the best way to do this in a realistic way? You may have noticed that when you have a pendulum and it's going like this at the beginning of the movement. It's kind of slow and speeds up at the bottom of the curve. And then it slows down when it gets to the second position. So we go like a slow, fast and slow movement and it kind of goes like this, right? So this is what we are trying to recreate here. So we have the keyframes, we want to draw the in-betweens. We want to draw these in-between so that I slow down and speed up at the right time. So how to go about this? Your first instinct might be that you might want to draw just the next key, next drawings. So let's say I want to add a drawing in-between here and then start doing the next frame, maybe close to a. And then the next one would be a little bit further. Maybe the further and further as it picks up speed, you need to extend the distance between the objects. That's how things speed up. Then what were the closest drawings are? Slower the animation. So you might want to do this, but it's kinda difficult to, to, to know how many. If you want to ten frames say to do this. And what is the spacing that you need at the beginning and the first one and then the second one. The third one is difficult to measure that distance and get it right. There is a simple way to do this that is very efficient. That's what we call easing. Easing is just a process that we use a lot in animation. So we're going to just use a simple way here. I'm going to erase this. And so here's, here's how it goes. Instead of drawing the first frame as we did here, instead of starting from a and going to be, we're going to jump in the middle, enjoy frame right in the middle here. I'm going to draw this. This is the first drawing we're going to draw. And I'm going to call this, maybe, See, if you want to give it a name. Then from this point, I'm going to ease into the first position and easing to the second position. So how, how do you do this? How do you ease into your position? It's quite simple. Every time we draw, we only draw the in-between in the middle. So C is in the middle between a and b. So that was an easy joined to do that. We're going to keep doing this. We're going to keep doing in the middle. So let's say I want to go towards B and I want slow down into the pharmacy. The next drawing I would make would be something here. Right in the middle. Notice it's between C and B in the middle. Next drawing will be between the new joint and be our kids getting closer to me. So the next one will be in the middle here between those two joints. And the next one will be again between the last drawing that I've done. In doing this. This is how I will have, if I keep this process, I will have many drawings close to beat and few drawings close to c. That means that around c the limit will be quick. And it was slowed down towards this, how I do it, I just draw in the middle and get closer to certain key frame to create an easing into that keyframe. So let's, let's do this one first. I'm going to just remove these ones. So I've got this first drawing the circles see that first drawing between two keyframes is often called a breakdown. So I'm going to give it a color, different color. Often people use a blue. So I'm going to just color this in just so we know what it is. And you'll see me doing this again in future exercises. So now I've got C and B there, and I'm going to grab a new empty drawing and put it between between C and B. And I'm going to draw right in the middle. So in order to do this, I'm going to use the usual onion skin. So the skin, a lot of software, animation software have this, so use that, we're going to bring it down. So I removed the background for a second that we just see the keyframes that we need. And one thing I forgot is to draw the line that holds prime c. So I'm going to draw that line quickly. So here we are. We just have B and C on the screen. I'm just going to draw a second in-between. Okay, that's fantastic. We've got a second in-between. Now let's do another one. And again this, the next one will be between the new drawing that I've done and the next key. Right? As you can see, the joints are getting closer and closer together. I'm going to keep this process a couple more times, I think. Okay, let's do it one more time. Alright, so let's have look at this quickly. So I've got quite a few drawings down here. I'm going to remove the onion skin and let's see what happens. Okay, so I hope you can see how from C to B, we have a slowing down of the movement. You can see how it's easing into B. So how many frames do we have now? We have 1234. Between C and B. You've got four joints and I could keep going, I could keep adding frames, getting closer and closer to b. That means using more and more into B and we get an even slower movement at the end of it. So I feel like maybe we could have an extra one. We have four frames. I'm going to have a fifth frame just to slow even more into B. So you can see how the joints are getting really, really close. What's good about this is that the closer two drawings are, the easier it is to draw an in-between because those lines are so close together, they're just easy to find the middle ground. As you can understand. I've only ever had to draw in the middle between two drawings. So that's what's easy about this person. Now I'm going to do exactly the same thing. Now I'm going to go back to a between C and a so that we get an easing out of a quick through B and ease back into being so quick to see an easing back into p.sit. Just have another look at that. You can feel how it's slowing down even more since I added one frame. So now I'm just going to go ahead and do the same for the other side. So I'm going to add one drawing between the red and the blue. So between a and C. I bring back my onion skin. Here I go again. Right? So this is it. It is quite simple. We have an easing out of position, a, quick move in throughput, position B, and then easing into position. So position C and easing into position B, let me actually just add a little ANN. So we've done half of the movement of the pendulum. Now it's easy to do the other side because you can just use the same frame that you've done. Multiply this times, duplicate them, and then invert the order of the frames. So I'm going to do this quickly in Photoshop, but I don't need to take you through this. Here we go. This is it. I've reversed the frame. Ucf have knocked them in yellow here. This is the exact same name, same amount of frames, the same joints, but just I reversed the order of the frames. And we, we are, we have the full, the full pendulum. So this easing in and out of a keyframe is very important because we use this a lot. So this process of having two keyframes, creating a first drawing in the middle that we call the breakdown. This is the blue key to drawing down here. So this is right in the middle. And then every time we just draw a drawing in the middle and we get ease into position. So that's it. I hope this was helpful. And I'll see you at the next class. 3. Bouncing Ball - Squash and Stretch: So now we're going to have a look at the classic bouncing ball exercise. We're going to start with something simple, just to ball bouncing up and down. What we want to have a look at precisely today is again a little bit about easing and also the little bit of squash and stretch. Let's do this. So as usual, I'm working at 12 frames per second here, so not, not 24. So every, it's like as if every drawing was staying on screen for two to five. So as usual, I'm going to work on 12 frames per second. So bear that in mind. So first thing I want to do is to have a little background, just a little line to decide where the ball is going to bounce. And I'm going to draw, just sketch out two keyframes. First keyframe is going to be the bowl on the floor. The second keyframe is gonna be the ball as high as it gets. And we're going to just have a loop where the ball is bouncing back and forth between those two key poses. Okay, so first two key poses, we're going to have the key pairs a. And the key pair is being, Apple is gonna go from one to the other. So first of all, I want to try to just move the ball as it is login to worry about this question stretch, we're going to look at this environment. The first thing to do is to do an ICE movement that is smooth. So as you may know, as something bounces up and down like this, it kind of slows down towards the top and then it goes, starts accelerating again as it goes down. This is another case of an easing in and easing out. So we are going to be easing into a frame B and an ease out of family to speed up again and form a. So it's like this like spent a lot of time of that and really low time and water, right? So again, I'm going to use the same technique as I did with the pendulum. And I'm going to start by drawing my first break down key, it right in the middle between a and B. So as before, I'm going to use the color blue to mark the Middle Kingdom, the Migdal drawing, because this is what we would call a breakdown. In this case, it's not really a breakdown, but just to keep this decided going, that we draw keyframes then break down standing in between. So let's just draw that first breakdown. So I'm going to put it again. Bang in the middle was as much in the middle as I can. There we go. We have a breakdown drawing. Now, I want to ease into B. So as I did before, I'm just going to draw in the middle every time and I'm going to show a series of maybe four or five extra drawings. And here we go. This was one of those five drawings at it. We're gonna remain on your skin and we're going to have a quick look at this. So we've got the pole going up, of course, and as you can see, it's slowing down nicely because we have used the system of easing into B. Now the other way round, when the ball comes back down, the ball would do the same thing. It will take exactly the same time with the opposite order of things we will loosely. So instead of redrawing all these joints, I'm just going to duplicate very quickly and change the order around to the other ball goes down. So you go, That's quite simple, right? That was pretty quick and straightforward. We have a bouncing ball. It's very smooth in the way he approaches me and that's makes it very, very nice and believable as a suspension. Now, I want to look at the biggest threats questions trying to see double by now feels very stiff. It bounces off a little bit like we would say ping-pong ball or something like this keeps it. But what if the ball was a bit more elastic and as it hits the floor, it squashes a little bit and as it goes back up and picks up speed, maybe it stretches along. This will give the ball a bit more life to it. It will make it feel a bit more flexible. So there's two important things to look into here. There's a moment of what we call the contact frame. So it's the moment when the ball is falling down and is touching the floor just before it really contacts strongly with the first touches barely with the edge. That's when the bull is still going and high-speed and it will be stretched. So I want to see that frame just before it touches the floor. Then I want to see a frame when the ball is quashed, guess if you want. And then very quickly the ball bounces back up. So I want to see another frame, another context triangle. The bowl is stretched up, is still touching the floor just before it takes off. That's three drawings I wanna I wanna work around that impact. Let's look at it. Let's go back to the first one. I'm going to make that a squashed as they can. But first I'm going to duplicate it and keep a copy of it so that one I will withdraw. Notice as I squash it from the top are also stretch it on the side because I want to keep the volume of the sphere. So if I, if I compress it from the top, it has to expand on the side to compensate to keep the same volume. So this is my new, I've changed my keyframe now my keyframes is this flat bowl. I'm gonna move to the next frame when it starts bouncing up. And this is what I'm gonna do when we look at this. A, I'm going to simply transform using a transform tool and watch what I do. I just stretching this side up. And then as quasi, on the other side, we get this lovely stretched bowl. And that will give us a sense of speed. And I would like to do that to the next frame as well, because the next time is moving at very fast. The C now I'm going to do the same negative. Then from the next famous, I think the ball is moving slower so we don't need to maybe stretches so much. Maybe I'll just wandered for the next one. And then I need to do this again for the other frames, obviously when it comes back down. So it comes back down here. So I'm going to take that joint is stretches. And straight after that, we should have the ferry first frame again, one is quashed. Now let's play and see what it looks like. I'm going to remove the background for this one. And here we have it. You have a lovely stretching and squashing of that bullet at the bottom, which makes it feel very flexible and bouncing. It makes it more line. So that's it. That's all for our little bouncing ball. We've looked at the easing again and we've looked at the squash and stretch. 4. Bouncing Ball - Timing and Arcs: Now we're going to animate a bouncing ball, except this time the ball is moving across the screen. So what's particularly interesting about this exercise is that we will consider the arcs, the movement, the path of the ball, which is something quite useful for all kinds of animations because there are all sorts of things move along, arcs. And the other things as well that we're going to pay attention to is timing. So as the ball falls down, it bounces. Each pounds will be a little shorter. And that means there will be a little shorter in time as well. So this is how we're going to look into arcs and timing. So the first thing I want to do is simply draw a line for the floor where the bounce is going to, where the ball is going to bounce it on. And then I'm going to place that the arcs that the ball is going to follow. Okay, now that I have the flow and the arcs, as you can see, the OXO getting shorter and shorter but also Chilton height and also in width because they spend less and less in time bouncing. And then the next thing I want to do these create keyframes. So just like we did before, I'm going to put these key frames on the top position of that very top of the cars and other very bottom. And after that, we're going to continue this in-between. Okay, So now I have all my keyframes. As you can see, the ball is bouncing up and down. And I think I've even got the ball to scrolling at the end. It stops bouncing. So the next step is to create the in-betweens. And as before, we're going to start with the first thing between being button right in the middle. So again, that's what I would call the breakdown frame. And then we're going to do an easing, easing into the top positions. Difference we're going to face is how we go about doing. So let's place first the breakdowns. So I've got my keys in red, and we'll add breakdowns in blue in the in-between each keyframe. So the first in-between has to be between these two joins. But obviously it can't just be exactly in the middle because it exactly in the middle would be somewhere here. And that is not what we want. We want the ball to be on the curve. So ideally I want to put this somewhere as close as possible to the middle position, but on the curve. So let me try this again. And let's say that it will be somewhere here. Okay, so I think that looks pretty good. And I'm going to do this for every other, but every other breakdown. Okay, so here we are, all our keyframes by dams created. Let's have look at what it looks like. Right now. Right now this is a ball bouncing up and down, but there's no timing to it, right? The movement it hasn't got it's not slowing down when we go to the top. It's the same speed, whether it's bouncing higher, up or down. So we want, we want the ball to spend more time on the bigger arc and less time on the smaller arms. So I'm going to go and add frames. I'm easing into the top positions and I will eat. I keep adding frames so that they are more frames that tall arches and fewer frames for this morphologies. Let's start with the first one. What I wanna do here is add frames between this drawing and this drawing. And I'll keep getting close to the top position. So I've added just four frames between the breakdown and the top position. This is what it looks like. You can see how it goes and picks up speed from the top and goes down. That's, that's why we want to get the realistic movements. Now, we're going to do exactly the same thing for the next argument in the next talk. This one, I've got two to four. Drawings, but I'm going to add one less drawing every time. So the next second arc and probably going to use three of those. And the next one on E2 and the next one we want. And that will make the movement faster and faster because I have few and few frames. So let's do the second one. And notice that I'm going to have to ease into the part where I'm going in and ease out from the pattern going down. So I'm going to have to add frames on either side of the tab key position. Okay, so after I've just added three frames, so one less than before to go into the top position here. I'm going to do the same on the other side. Okay, so now I've got three frames on either side. So let's have a look how this looks like. Now we can see, thanks to this, easing into the top position, that it's spending more time at the top. It feels quite natural. And as we keep going, we have spend even less and less time on top. We had a less in-betweens, but I'm gonna do the next one. Next month will have only two extra joins. And I'll extend the following one. I'm really wondering I wanna do this too, by the way. Okay, so here we go. I've added all these extra frames. Let's have a look at what it looks like. Okay, so here we are. We have a nice little bouncing ball advances, lovely, nice way and less and less. Now notice how it's rolling at the end. It's picking a bit of speed. And if it's going too fast is because I don't have enough frames, I need to slow down the movement at the ends by feels like it's cooling at a normal speed. And all I need to do to do this, It's add some extra in-between to slow down the movement of the hand. We'll have. The next thing we're gonna do is look at adding a bit of squash and stretch. Okay, so I think I've got everything now, so I'm happy with this on all going to do is add some squash and stretch. So for this, we can do exactly as before. We're going to add an extra little frame before and after the bounce so that we can have this trach born in the squash ball. Stretch bold again. So becoming to touch the floor with a stressful, we haven't squash. Stretch again. Takeoff. I'm gonna do this for the first bounds. Then the second bounds, I'm only going to use the one stretch ball. And then I'm not going to use any stressful for the next month. The reason is that bounce gets lower and lower and she also spends less time bouncing on the floor because it's crashing is crushing moon because it has a lot of speed on the first bands. After that, it just bounces really quickly. So we don't need so many frames. So I'm going to add two frames on the first bounce, only one frame and the second pounds, and that's it. And that should give us a nice feel that the board is pushing a lot on the first bounce because it has a lot of speed. But then not squashing so much afterwards. Afterwards because it's just bouncing light. First thing to do is to squash that first pound mountain frame. Okay, then I'm going to add a frame just before that. I wanted the contact find where the ball is, just touching the fruit. So it's a stressful because it has adult speed. It's good to stretch it to make it feel the speed. So that's the when the ball is coming in and I'm gonna do the exact same thing. They're just following the curve on the other side as it goes up. Okay, So let's do it. I'm gonna do one more of this for the next pounds, but only on one side because otherwise it'll be too many frames and I think it was slow it down a bit too much. Also, the stretch on that poll is not gonna be as dramatic. It's gonna be just stretching and not so much. Okay, I think that's it. I think I've got all the frames and I want to just extend the timeline a little bit. And then I've looked at this. Heiko. I hope you can see the bounce and how effective it is to give the feeling that the ball has a lot of stretch or squash, it touches the film. So this is it, this is important to understand the why we use arcs. In this case. You don't need to keep the arms and can just hide them. Now we get the same result without the odds. And this is the fact that the bowl is following the arcs so nicely that makes it feel more natural. Alright, I hope you enjoyed this. 5. Hammer - Breakdowns: Welcome back. So in this exercise we're going to animate the hammer. The idea is to explore such things as breakdowns, anticipation, and reaction. So we're going to push things a little bit further with this exercise, but we're gonna keep it as simple as possible. So let's start by drawing a hand and a hammer. So here we are. I'm just going to start by doing one single drawing. And we simply going to reuse the same drawing for the whole animation. Pretty much. So I want to make it as easy as possible. I just want to explain properly what a breakdown is, what Annunciation is, what a reaction is. And we're going to also explore things like easing and the ox, things that we've already explored. But we're going to put them in practice in this exercise as well. So let's start by drawing. So here we go. This is my simple MO. You could also draw something else like if you wanted to unmake that or tennis racket or something like this, it doesn't matter. Then I'm just going to draw something in the Hammond's gonna hit on, that's gonna be my background layer. And I'm just going to animate the hand, the hand momentum. So we're gonna do this in several parts. The first part we're going to do the simplest kind of automation. And for the sake of it, I'm just going to make it very simple way. I'm just going to take the hammer, move it up and down. Most linear possible way. So no easing. Just, just a few key frames. I will follow the arc, but that's about it and we have a look at what it looks like. So first I want to create two keyframes. And what I want keyframe is gonna be on the hammock, write down another keyframe or they're having his way up, and that's it. Okay, So these are two key frame positions. Now I'm just going to draw a simple arc between the two positions. So just so I can use this as a guide for the animation. Okay, so we've got two keyframes where there's an ox to serve as guides. So we're gonna do that first animation. And again, I'm just going to move between those two keyframes in a very linear way. And we'll see that they took a workspace not mislead. So interesting. I'm doing it first frame, right in the middle. And I'm going to do two new frames, one between the first two drawings and another one between the next two rooms. Okay, so here we have just a hammer and moving up, as you can see, it's just very linear. And so that's how often the movement am I taking the position. And then we're going to hover it down by simply inverting the same, the same frames. And here we have it, the hammering, hammering. And you can see there's no other works that emotion is hospice plausible. I suppose it makes sense, but it lacks a bit of energy, likes a bit of a rhythm to it. Feels like the hammer doesn't have any weight. It feels like if you put a nail underneath this hammer, you wouldn't put energy into it. So what we wanna do is to try to make it feel a bit more real like the hamulus and wait. And, and when he, when we actually hitting the nail, it will actually feel like there's some energy into it. So this is the first sort of default animation we can do. The next thing I wanna do is make it a bit more realistic by simply easing to the top position so that the movement slows down as it would do probably naturally. And then accelerate and go faster as we hit the hit with a **** about that. That's what we're gonna do for now. Alright, so let's have a look at this, just easing into the top position and easing out of the top position. Very few frames like as fast. Okay, so now you can see I have five frames. They're going up and slowing down into that position than a great quickly back down. But just one train moves and then middle frame, and we pulled that one all the way down. Let's have a look at how this looks. All right, so this is a change. This is different than easing makes to dissemination. It feels already been more realistic. It feels like it takes a bit of time for the Hamilton gets into that position as it slows down. When it goes back down with time this where it's quicker, it's got a few frames because faster it feels like there's been more energy. They said it still feels like it's quite a stiff animation. I think we can put more. I've been more sensitivity to something a bit more realistic. The truth is that probably we lift the hammer. You would live to him with a hand first and then hammer would follow a difference of timing between the hand and take the hammer. So that means that if we could create a middle position where the hand is moving up, the hammer is kinda following with a bit of delay. Then I think we'd have a more interesting animation. So that's what we're going to do now. We're going to create what to do this, we're gonna do want to create what we call a breakdown keyframe. So it's a, it's a frame between two keyframes that shows how things are moving between positions. And you can use that to delay some parts of the animation compared to other parts of the equation. In this case, I want to delay the hammer and the hand moving faster. So let me create first the breakdown. I'm going to basically erase everything I've done now and just create a couple of breakdowns. Okay, so I've created my tube breakdowns. So let's have a look at the first breakdown is you can see I'm going from this position here. The hand is moving a lot more up. The hammer is the anaconda stays very close to where it was before. Any cell has all that distance to move. The hand is already nearly moves all the distance to the next key. This is that difference that will create an interesting movement, more realistic moment because it's the hand that's pulling on the hammer. The hand will start moving first and the hammer will follow. Now it should make the animation a bit more realistic. Then when the hammer goes down, I'm going to do something similar as well. This is the, in this case is the opposite again because we're starting from the top. The Halley's moving fast again and the hammer is lagging behind. So this is, I'm just going to quickly play this and see what it looks like. Okay, so it's an blacks in-between eng, it's a bit too quick. But I think you can start feeling that is an interesting movement that happens between those two keyframes. So now what I'm going to do is I'm going to add some in-between. I'm going to do the same thing when it ease into each keyframe, but by going through the breakdown key. So e.g. if I want to create a first drawing between the first key at the bottom and the first break down. I'm going to just create a new drawing and we'll have a look at how to position starting from the bottom. And I'm just going to create one in between whether the hands kind of starts moving again, but the hammer is still firmly on its initial position. This is only the hand that's moving just a little bit that will create a simple frame that starts movements. Stop. You want to go with that? Then I'm going to do some in-betweens between the breakdown and the final position. And for this I'm gonna do the classic easing that we've looked at before, which means that I'm going to draw the first drawing right in the middle between these two. So somewhere here. And then another one will be in the middle of the last 2.1. And I'm going to add 34 frames maximum. Alright, The first frame, second frame, bang in the middle again. We've got 1 mol just to smooth it out even nicer. Okay, Let's have a look at how this looks now. So I hope you can feel how this measurement of the lifting the hammer feels a lot more realistic. It feels like the hammer has weight because he drank spelling today, lags behind so that the hand goes first and now it goes already. We can feel there's a lot more weight. I think the way down, it needs to be quick, so it doesn't mean many frames already won fame is pretty efficient. I think we need to ease into that movement to the base. So I think maybe just the one in-between, between the top position and the next breakdown will be enough to just add a little bit smoothness damage. Alright, just this one file. Let's see what it looks like now. Okay? Does it look nicer? I think so. Okay, so that was interesting thing. So the next thing we're going to look into is how to, how to create a reaction and an anticipation and the reaction. This is, you can look at this as an anticipation, this movement. But we can have actually a second and station and then reaction when the hammer is actually heating. What happens? So this will add even more an extra layer of realism to this animation. So that's what we're gonna do next. 6. Hammer - Anticipation: In this part, I want to add an extra anticipation. Anticipation is something that gives you an idea that something's about to happen. And basically before e.g. you hit the ball, when you playing tennis, you need to pull your arm back and hit forward. Let's kinda what we're doing here with bringing up and then we bring it down. That's kinda non-spatial already. But I will say that in this case, we're just going to ringing. We're bringing the hammer into position. And then we're going to anticipate and hit. That is to bring it up, anticipate and hit. So that's the inspiration I want to do optimum citation. Typically because we were trying to move thing to do certain direction, we kinda step back to move forward faster. That's how often? That's often how transportation work. They don't you don't go straight for the target. You saw that go back and build up momentum and then hit. So this is what we're gonna do here. In order to do this, I'm simply going to add an extra keyframe where the hammer is on the top position. We're going to bring it even higher up with a demo of an angle. And then we're gonna go straight down. So this is going to be a continuous motion. So the hammer's not consciously going to stop into this new apps patient is going to go through the anticipation rather quickly and then, and then come back down. So it's not called the same dynamic with bringing the hammer first into position. Then we're going into your patient and the patient is only there to go with the hitting motion. So let me first create that first, the new extra anticipation keyframe. You can see I'm not taking it too far, just a bit of movement backwards before we go forward. So how did the question is, how do we go into that position? So it's a similar idea you can have if you want to easing into that position and then you go into the management. And the same some breakdown are going to apply. But I'm going to want to have the hand leading again, that movement and then leading towards the hips. So the first thing I want to do as usual is to create the breakdowns before I go into any in-between. So I'm going to mark the keys in the breakdowns in the right corner. So this one is gonna be read again and the breakdown, let me introduce one. So this is my first back down again, as you can see, I'm moving the hand quite a lot, but a hammer only a little bit. Now I'm going to prepare the next breakdown, which is going to be similar to the first breakdown that we did for the heating motion. Okay. So this is the breakdown I'm going to choose to go down as you can see, the hammock, can I go straight up and it's pretty much vertical at this position, this position. But again, I'm concentrating on the movement of the hand moving away and the hammer lagging behind. Also, you might notice that generally this spread out. I've kept it closer, generally closer to the top position. That's because I know that the speed is going to increase a lot when he goes down. So I won't few frames when it goes all the way down. I wanted to frames to be quite far apart. Let's have a look at it. See how it looks with just those couple of breakdowns are ready because this movement is going to be rather quick. We might not need to add too many in-betweens, but let's have a look at that. Okay, So you can see now how there's this extra anticipation before the movement goes. It gives, it gives you a bit of a warning of what's going to happen. And it makes it feel yet at the more realistic. And it feels a bit stiff at this moment. And I think it could be a bit smoother. And that's why we're going to bring in a few more in-betweens to make things very smooth. And again, I think we need to do is to just add a few in-between zero and then maybe just one in-between, between every one of these frames will be enough to smooth everything out. Let's try that out. Okay, so I've just added one in-between, between every one of those key frames and breakdowns. That's all as you can see, you go from a key to in-between breakdown and in-between the key, It's a tough. So let's have a look at poison. We go. So I think this is a little more interesting already as an animation. There's a lot more going on. It's so simple, so very simple gesture, but we can, while we are doing now, gives him more realism or weight and more and more realistic timing as well. So there's one more thing I wanna do. I want to add some reaction. So we've had some breakdowns, we've had some anticipation. And now we're going to look at a reaction. Basically when the hammer hits, what's going to happen is it's going to bounce, is going to be distorted. What I wanna do is something that feels like it's hitting it hard so it needs some kind of reaction. So what we can have is maybe just a hammer, maybe changing shape about squash and stretch like we did with bouncing ball. There could be good. And also maybe bounces off a little bit and then come and bounces back a couple of times. We're going to have a look at this. This is the next thing. 7. Hammer - Reaction: Welcome back. So this is the final part of this animation where we're going to have a look at the reaction on the impact of the hammer. So what I want to do again is to try something simple, maybe a little bit of squash and stretch to cart to have a cotton reaction to this. Maybe the hammock bounce up the bands have a couple of times. So it goes like this. I'm just gonna do it, maybe just a couple of them to be good to have some sound effects as well. That'll be fun at the time. Alright, so what I wanna do is look at this last keyframe and add just an extra two keyframes for the bouncing. So another keyframe with bad weather, the hammer is a little bit higher up. It goes back up and then comes back down. So that's another two keyframes. And another one, we're going to do that again a couple of times just to set a bit higher up and not so much come back down. So it bounces a couple of times. So let's start. So I've created those extra key frames. So this is the first key fan, normal key fella we had. Then it goes back up a little bit. Because back down, take us back a tiny bit and it goes back down. This is the double bonds. Now, let's see what this looks like an animation now. Alright. Can you feel the weight and the bounds there has a lot of energy to, right? I'm really, really happy with this. I'm, the only thing I could add, I think now is maybe a tiny bit of squash and stretch on that first frame when it first hits. Maybe could be nice to have just an extra fact whether the hammer sort of squash is a little bit and that's all we need. Let me try this out, see if this works. So it's in that position that I want to see it squashed a bit. I'm going down a little bit. I'm going to push it, to push the whole thing, pasta, the point in a way. Then I'm going to squash that homopolymer. So the idea is to compress in one direction and expanding the other direction so that the volumes remains the same. So same idea as the bouncing ball. If you remember, let's have a look what this looks like now. We can feel how I hope you can see how the hammer strain and the impact, and it feels even more and even more so comedic effect to it also makes it more real. I think this is, this is the result of adding layers of complexity to automation. You can have a simple movement with a linear in-between. But you could also add some timing with some easing into these positions that makes it more natural. Then you can think about the breakdowns. Having a delay between some parts of the animation. Here's the hammer, the satellite compared to the hand. And then you can have an anticipation before we do a strong movement, you go, You often the opposite direction before you go forward, we go back before you go forward, if you're going to go left when he goes slightly right before you collect etc. etc. So image in here as well. If you're jumping, you want to go down before you jump up, right? It's often the case. Then you can think about a reaction. Here. The reaction is the hammer hitting and it bounces off a little bit. And it makes it, if you have a good reaction, something that feels a bit realistic, you get even more impact. You can add more to this. You could have effects that sound, particles and things like this. That would be a lot of fun, but it's something we can look into. Much light. Alright. So I hope you enjoyed this and I would love to see, to see what you do with this exercise. 8. Flour Sack - Bouncing: Welcome back. This time we're going to animate a flour sack. Jumping in a very simple way is just going to come in. Just do one jump and come out of the screen. So this exercise is a way to try to start animating something a bit more complex than a simple object. Still, we're going to keep it simple. A flour sack is simple object. We're going to explore the moles squash and stretch for this character. And otherwise we're going to look at the simple gonna use the same, similar principles before. Including timing, arcs, keyframing of course breakdowns, easing and the sort of things. So let's get started. Okay, so first things first, we need to design our character, okay, it's only a flour sack, but we still need to design what it looks like and then decide, you know, what style we're going to go for. So you don't have to follow exactly what I'm doing. You can design this in your own style. But the one thing that I want to pay attention to this time is squash and stretch. So we're going to just look at how we design this character and then how we squash and stretch. Just to see how we can do this in a way that's efficient. So let's start by just designing a simple flower sack. So a classic is a little bit like a square that has been just distorted and it has all this flower inside it, kinda soft fabric, so it has a bit of a belly. It's like a square or cube with the belly. And it also has these, we're going to add these two, these four endings at the top and the bottom. And they can act in a bit as is or as feet if you want. It's just a classic look, lovely cartoon. Fires acts. So let's say this is the basic shape of the fast sac. Now I'm going to try to give it a bit distorted a little bit because of the mass that contains the flower. So here we go. You see how I distort the top and make the top thinner and the bottom would be larger. And also drew these extra lines to help me get a sense of the volume of the character. You can add as many lines as you want just to get a sense of the shape and volume of your character. And I've got these little feet here and his little ears up there. So this is the character I want to animate. Now let's have a look at how would, what would happen to it if I were to squash it from the top? So the idea is that you square something. If you press on something like a bowl or something, it will lose that dimension vertically. It will diminish, but in width it will get bigger so that you keep the volume of it sets the idea. So I'm gonna do this, I'm going to squash it from the top and extend down the sides. So you see, I'm trying to retain the volume of the initial design. It's much shorter. I went to I went quite far, pushed it down about halfway through its kinda halfway half the height that it was before, but it's nearly twice as large as well. So that would be a proper squash. So let's say e.g. when the character is trying to prepare for jump, we could use we could use that shape. And also when the character is extending its body to really push forward and go, go right up into its jump. It needs to extend and basically stretch its whole body. So I'm going to try to do the opposite now I'm going to try to stretch it up. And that means that it's going to increase in length and height, but at the same time you will get thinner. You can see here how I'm stretching the character quite a bit. But I'm also shrinking it from both sides today, retained its volume. And also you'll notice that I drew this at an angle because the idea is that the character is gonna go and jump following an arc, just like the bouncing ball that we did before. So now I'm happy with those extreme poses and squashing and stretching. I'm going to try to draw the angst for the movement. And I'm going to draw some just rough thumbnail keyframes for these extreme positions. So let's do that. First. I'm just drawing the little line for the, for the floor. Okay, this is the arc I'm going for see. I want to see a full arc in the middle of the animation window of the screen. And then the OCS before nafta. We're not going to directly animate those. I'm going to reuse the animation that I have for the main argument middle. We'll see how we do this in the end. Next, I want to just sketch out some key frame for these extreme positions at the bottom of the arcs and it's top of the arc. Okay, So I think I drew that most of the important drawings for this animation, I'm anticipating that. I'm going to have a bit of a squashing here at the bottom of these keyframes. Up there, I decided to go and create a new position for my character, the cactus of bending, to folding on himself at the top of the curve. And then here we can see again the stretching as a ghost for London before, before it gets, it gets squashed again. This disjoint is gonna be very similar when the character jumps up the other way. We're gonna go for a similar position in that direction. That's why I'm going to go through. So let's go ahead and create this keyframe. So good. Now I'm just going to stop on my first keyframe. I'm going to reuse that same squash drawing. Okay, I'm gonna keep it rough at this point. I don't really need to keep to make this cleaned up, but if you want at the end of the exercise, you can go ahead and clean up and cover everything if you wish to. So next I'm going to do I'm the top to the top. Okay, I'm happy with that. So these are essentially the two main keyframes ready for that whole animation. I'm going to use exactly the same key frame for when the character is London. So duplicate that drawing. And I'm going to simply move it along. Okay, So we go now three keyframes and we can do the complete arc. So what's next? Next, I want to try to This animations of energy and this is why I want those to use a stretch keyframes. So the character is going to really stretch somebody to give itself momentum to go up. So you can look at these framed as what we call breakdowns between two extremes, two key positions. And I need to do more than simply drawing in-betweens that transform slowly from one to the next, I need to give them character. And in this case, the character really push all its energy, stretches it by two jobs. So that's an important breakdown. The breakdown will really give you animation feeling that is energy from the character that's using to push itself out. So let me draw on others. I want to use the same color code. I'm gonna make my keys red and my breakdowns blue. Okay, this is my first breakdown between just at this, it starts jumping and then I need to send you a breakdown when the character will land to the other, to the next keyframe on the floor. What I can do again, I can be clever about this. I can simply reuse that drawing and just maybe flip it and then maybe touch up a little bit. And I should be, I should do the trick. Okay, so I think that's it. I've got my I got my keyframes by breakdowns, etc, etc. So this is looking good to me. Now. I need to I think I want to extend another little bit of a breakdown basically between this position and a tough position. The character will go from being there to there and change its shape. Okay? I feel like I want to keep that shape for a little while. I feel like I want to keep that shape just maybe for a couple of frames, That's it goes up, it's quite fast, going to be quite fast before it starts folding on itself. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to repeat this drawing and bring it a bit closer to the top position. This will be like if you want a second breakdown. In fact, you can add as many breakdowns as you want between two keyframes. The point is to try to make your animation a bit more interesting. I'm going to keep that shape for a little longer because I think it will be good. It's been like it's flying a bit like Superman for awhile. And when it gets to the top of the curve, is going to start folding and start pointing its feet to the front to go and land for the next. For the next key frame. So let's just duplicate that drawing. Let's move it along. See what happens. This, this might be a great way to save some time. I think in this position it looks good. It's about halfway to the top and it's still has that stretch shape. I think there'll be good. And then from that point on they can stop bending and turning into that next keyframe. And I'm going to do the same again to the other side. So this is just to show you why it looks like right now, but it's obviously too fast. We need to add more in-betweens to slow down the animation. But that gives you an idea of how it's going to look like. I would like to just to, to pay attention to the difference between those two drawings. I want to make sure that the top of my flowers ikea is still lower than a tub of that flour sack over here because I still want the top to keep moving up because it's easing into that position. Same on the other side. I'm going to keep everything moving down this time I decided. Okay, So now the question is, how many frames do that we add to this animation to that, It's a good speed. And where, where are we going to have our easing in and out of each position? So I think from the exercises that we've done before with a bouncing ball, you probably started to think, we need to ease into that top position. That's right. Because the character has to slow down at the top, lose speed as it slows down and prepares to fall back down and then accelerate again. So we need to ease into that position. I would say we probably need an extra least I would say an extra two drawings between just before the keyframe and then after the keyframes, other two joins as well, maybe even three. So what we're going to do is as usual, we're going to start by doing something in the middle between those two keyframes, those two frames. And then another middle between those two remaining frames, and then maybe even a third one. Now, we might feel the need to have some more in-betweens here as well. So maybe you would add one in-between between this two and maybe another in-between between those two joints. So I think if we did start by this, by simply drawing one in-between, between every one of those drawings. But already have something that feels slower and a bit better animated. And then we're going to look finally to add more in-betweens at the top to slow it down if it feels more natural. So let's go and draw all these in-betweens. First, one in-between, between every drawing. And let's see what happens. So I'm keeping my breakdowns blue and the in-betweens, I'm going to keep them great. So Sadat and have their own column. So let's look at this e.g. to start with. Now I need to do something in between those two. So this is a bit more complex than just a bowl, okay, so it's a bit more difficult to find where the middle is between these two joins. And I want to find the exact middle, the best middle icon between those two. So a way to make this easier is to look for particular points that will be easier to locate. So e.g. I've got the is here, then what I could do is maybe just mark them a little bit by doing something like this and like that. Now I can see them clearly and I can decide where the middle position is between these two drugs. And I think middle position will be somewhere here. And same on the other side. I think I'm going from here to here. The middle position would be somewhere that if it helps, maybe draw a line and try to find the middle in the middle of that line, and then draw a little ear, then you can erase everything else they don't meet. Next thing we could do the same with the feet, e.g. I've got here, I'm not going to fit there. So my new foot in-between should be somewhere. Yeah. Makes sense, right? Same here. I can see this one. I can see that one. So I'm going to draw some lines. Yeah. And then I can erase the ones I don't need. And then now I've got the four corners of my flour sack. I can try to draw the rest of it. I think that looks quite good. Actually. It looks like a flat side, doesn't it? So I'm going to keep doing this between every drawing. So if I go to now the next one, this one, well, let's do joins are actually the same. I duplicated them, right? So I can be in between. It's gonna be an easy one here. I'm just going to have to duplicate again one of those two joints and just move it in place it right in the middle. I'm going to do that. So this is more or less than the middle. Number doesn't knock. So it should be exactly in the middle. We should actually follow the arc and it's slightly on the outside. Because the arc bends towards the outside, obviously. Instead of being right in the middle like it is here, I'm going to move it slightly off that states have been more towards the arc. Okay? Alright, that's it. Let's continue. Let's do the next one. Same idea here. We're going to do what we just did before. We're going to look at all these four corners and try to place them. And this will help us decide where the character goes. We've got something here is something that should be somewhere in the middle. Right? Good. This here. You will notice here. I want to keep going. I think this is a good looking in between. But now remember again, there's an arc here that we need to fill up. So this in-between is exactly in the middle, but I need to push it up a little bit along the curve. So it's not difficult. Just move it up a little bit like this. But again, I don't want to go so high that this goes over there. So it doesn't have to move up too much. Just a little bit. Okay. I think I'm happy with that. I'm going to keep doing the same for the other two on the other side of the curve. Okay, So I've got all my in-betweens now. Slowly. This is how it looks like I'm just playing in schooling. I'm going to hit Play. Here we go. It's quite nice already, Right? But I feel alright at this point, I think I'm quite happy with it, but I feel like it needs to slow down a bit more of the time. So I'm going to add an extra, extra drawing to ease into the very top position. So an extra in-between on either side of the very top. We'll add another two joints. And I think it will slow it down a bit at the top and I think it would look better. And this might just be enough afterwards. Well, let's, let's do that first. Okay, I hope you can see the difference, but I think he feels normal, natural now. It's slowing down at the top. Okay. So I think this looks pretty good. I'm happy with it. The last thing we wanna do is to make sure that the flour sack jumps in from the side, from the outside and then tips out on the other side. That's an easy thing to do. We've got all these friends, all these drawings that we can reuse. I'm just going to reuse all these frames and move them before and after so that, you know, this kid couldn't live and can continue. All you need to do is to line up the first and last frames while that's right. Okay, I'll just go down very quickly. And here we have it. Here's a little jumping GSSAC. See, that wasn't too difficult. But it's interesting to start animating characters have been more complex and you can see how it can be tricky sometimes to draw some in-betweens as well for a complex character. But we're training. You can get better at it and it becomes, it becomes easier and easier as you go. So I hope you enjoy this. And we probably going to do another exercise with flour sack again to try something else. 9. Flour Sack - Running: Welcome back. In this lesson, we're going to have a look at another flower sack animation. In this case, we're going to have the flour sack simply running and jumping. We're going to do a very simple, basic walk cycle. A run cycle can be a bit tricky to get right? But with this simple character, we can simplify things and get a very quick run, and then it'll jump. That can look really good with minimum amount of effort. So let's get started. So first as usual, I need the background for my cactus to run on. So I'm just going to keep it simple with a simple line for the background. Then the next thing I want to try it, some thumbnails. So the idea is to have this flower side just run across, coming in from the left and then just jumping up just like we did before. Like a simple job. But this time I want to, I want to make sure I have also the inspiration, the characters just before the jump. So when we approach a walk cycle or a run cycle, usually the first keyframes are allies in place. Other keyframes when a character is, has its two legs fully extended. So usually the legs are crossing like this. There's always a moment when the legs are as flexible as possible. And this is an interesting keyframe because you know where the foot is on the first step, in where the foot is on the second step. And then you can line up those keyframes one after the other, where the feet are basically lining up with each other. And that's a great way to know how long it will take, e.g. how many steps you will take for your character from one point to the next. If every drawing as the legs fully extended, you can just move the next drawing. And the next drawing didn't have very good idea of how he's gonna go from one point. So again, I'm going to draw this flower sack. And I want to start by drawing one parsec thumbnail. So I'm just going to rough out the positions quickly to have an idea where they are. So these are thumbnails if you want rough, rough sketches of the animation. So here's my first thumbnail keyframe. If you want. You'll notice that the character, I tried to make the character look twisted. When we walking or running, we have our hands and moving in opposite directions than our legs. So if my right leg is forward than my left hand will be forward. So that's what a character is doing. It's the twisted version of flour sack. Now what's interesting is that I can simply use Daniel thumbnail and duplicate it a few times, because every key is looking very similar. So the step before you will see will be very similar except that instead of having the left foot forward previous drawing and be the right fit for it. So I want to place, I'm going to duplicate our layer and place it just before where the key frames should be. And then I'm going to make the modifications needed. So this is where it should be for the key-frame before. However, the body is twisted in the wrong way. It needs to be twisted the other way. But you'll notice that it's often the case with book cycles from the side or one cycle. So one side is that the silhouette, whether you All right, for this forward or you're left of vertice forward, the silhouette will remain the same. The silhouette here will not change, but what happened inside will change. So what I'm gonna do is I'm going to do a bit of a magic trick here. I want to change that what's inside to make it look like the cactus twisted the other ones. I wanted to remove those lines inside. And I'm just left with the silhouette name to store the other side. So this is the same drawing, just pulling the other way. So you can see that that was quite easy. That was an even easier trick. So I would draw everything there. But in this case, we could have simply taken the whole shape, flipped it around. So I'll just show you quickly. I could just have taken this and done this. And I would have caught pretty much the same drawing again. That's okay. It's okay, I've redrawn the cactus, so now I've got my two main joints. And then I know that these two joints can be repeated again and again for the character moving in. So let's duplicate those two dorms for now. Okay, So this is it. I've got these four, these 44 keyframes. I think that should be enough for my character to come in and out. And then next I want to make to add a drawing for when the character is anticipating going up a little bit down on the floor, jumping up. So in order to do this, I'm going to just add an extra step. But this time I'm going to redraw the whole drawing with the character just going down. So this is a, this is the drawing for the anticipation before the character jumps. And then all I need, now it's another drawing, some on the top where the cactus high up. It's up with the character right in the corner up there because I want the character to jump and just exit the screen that way. Then we can have an animation that loops through the connector coming in, running and jumping, coming out and coming back the other side again. So now I'm going to need to add, I want to keep these drawings is my keyframes. So I'm going to transfer them in my timeline. And then I will simply add some in-betweens. First, let's put these on the timeline and see what happens. Okay, so these are my first drawing. My drawings lined up on the, on the animation. And obviously it's all way too fast. So now I want to show down this animation by adding more in-betweens. And so I'm going to concentrate on the running cycle. And so what argument do is simply add money between for each one of those. And this will obviously scale it down quite a bit already and we'll see if you need to add more to that or not. So we having to draw an in-between here again, as before, we can use this little trick to help you find where things are. So e.g. between the two, this part and this part, you can draw something in the middle and then try to find way could be in the middle between these two drawings. It's here, but between these two as well, it's also in the middle. So there's two little ears will cross and B together on top of one another, right down the middle. So that's okay. Next we go to the bottom, same idea, somewhere in the middle. Then we've got the feet to the back here and those ones are moving across. So there'll be somewhere in the middle as well. But that food diets moving because it's moving, it has to be a slightly, but it's also moving into the back of the character because the side of the cattle, this side will be facing us and decided that foot will be facing the other side of the cactus. So we actually know them see that effort. So I don't need to draw it, but I need to draw the whole, full, full body now between these two positions. Now I think it will be something like this quite simply. And so what's interesting is that this drawing is quite symmetrical, and I can actually use this in-between for the other in-betweens as well, between each position. So we can simply going to copy this drawing and then move it across so that it exists between every one of the other keyframes. So you can feel ready just by adding that one key frame that the character kinda looks like it's working now or running rushing towards, towards the junk. This is kinda alright. In my view, this is already working. The cactus moving really, really fast. Now if we wanted to have a even smaller, slower, so you could just keep adding in-betweens. And that's perfectly fine. I think I'm happy with that. I'm going to keep it that way. And then the next thing I'm gonna do is I'm going to add an in-between when it's anticipating the jump. And then the in-betweens for when it's jumping. And again, we're gonna do a similar idea, things that we've done before. We're going to use a photo, an OK, and we're also going to ease into that top position. So for this in-between, I'm using the colors to make sure I can see the join before and after are different colors and new drawing in the middle, it's gonna be Billy. So for this year that we're going to look again for a middle position and it's gonna be this one. And for the ears or the back between this one and this one, it moves across like this. Again, you can see that it's going to land very, very close. So I'm just gonna join the side here so we can still see a little bit depth. You go. Alright, lets should do. Then in terms of feet, the foot, this foot stays in the same place so the fittest landed and the rest of the body is moving with that foot is staying place. I'm going to draw that exactly Then. The Nashville, he is moving from here to here. So somewhere in the middle ear. Then I need to find the shapes of your body. So the body shape is changing quite a lot from being straight and twisted to being folded. So I'm going to observe e.g. the edges, the edges of the shape. So here we go, the edge of that pink shape of the bank. Then we've got the edge here of the green sides. So then the next term, so we want to shade that's going to be between this in-between. And you could see that now that I've highlighted those lines, you can see it's gonna be somewhere in here, right? Something like this. Right? And then I can just erase the other ones. If I look at the other side, we're going from a shape that's over here to a shape that's over there. It's the same idea. We need to find some way in the middle and I'm thinking something like that. Then I can erase the lines. Right? So now there's also the, the edge of the shoulder, the edge of the character. We've got line here, and I'll go line there. So the new line is going to be somewhere in the middle and it's going to be like but also there's also the line underneath the cactus. So we can see that in the previous drawing, I'm going to go back a bit. You can see that the line was kinda bad. It's likely long stretched line. For the green one, It's at the bottom here. So the line here is between this sort of stretch, the back. And that's what that line of Watson's is somewhere in the middle. I'm going to just draw a straight line here will come straight from the tube. Alright, this is an in-between, right? We call this, this. And now I feel like because the cactus is doing this anticipation, it's kinda crunching before it jumps. I think we need to ease into that position. So I feel like we should add an extra keyframe, yet another one between marijuana, the one that we just drew, and the next one. To ease even more into that position, you can keep using as much as you want by just adding new in-betweens towards the frame that you want to stop at. So I'm going to do that. I'm just going to add another drawing hand. And I'm going to go through the exact same process. Okay, but i extra drawing coming in. Alright, so let's have a quick look at what this looks like. Colors. Now you can see the character running and then slowing down into that position before he jumps. Obviously the jump is too fast now it's still jumping really, really quickly. So what are we gonna do for this job? Well, I think I want to see one important frame. One of those frames, or we have to call the contact, find the moment where the character is fully extended, pushing on its little legs, and trying to leave to take off to leave the floor. That movement is called a contact frame because there's a change of contact between two characters with two objects. And this is the moment when before the character loses contact with the floor. It's a very important key because it helps you read the animation for premium. It's also going to be a moment when the tax is we fully extended. So that's why it's quite important. I was just going to draw that one before, before that, I'm just going to draw the arc that goes into the top position. So let's do that. This is the arc that I'm imagining a little work for him. And now I'm going to draw the extension has a frame jumping. Alright, so this is the key when he's jumping and just about as contact frame just before leaves to fill and you can see how the body stretches up. Like that. I feel like it maybe I could stretch and live in one. I want to push things. It's useful in cotton animation to really push as much as you can, tweet extreme poses. So we've got the character really stretching here. And then it's gonna go from here to there. So this is where we're going to have the character easing into that top position as usual because it slows down as it goes up. And so I'm just gonna go ahead and add more in-betweens. You know, as we've done before, you've seen it now the process, so I'm just going to be equivalent to this one quickly. So here you have it. I've added total four frames between our initial keyframe and then a second keyframe easing into that position. And I even went ahead and added an extra thing to be bright. Character can exit the screen. And then after that, I'm leaving a blank frame to make sure it's cactus left. And that's it. So let's have a look at what is the point. And here we go. Here's a very simple jump, run and jump for our little flour sack. I hope you enjoyed this exercise. And there's plenty more to the cast. So stay with us and I'll see you in the next lesson. 10. Head Turn - Linear VS Arcs: Welcome back. In this exercise, we're going to do a head-turn, a very simple head-turn. So the idea is to try two things. One is going to be a linear head turn from one from side to side. And the other one is going to be using the same keys, but we're going to add an extra breakdown, an extra key to make the movement to be more interesting. Just to add an arc to the movement of going from one side, maybe go down and up again. And then we're going to compare the two. So in this exercise we're going to explore breakdowns again and also we're going to use easing again. So let's get started. For the sake of the exercise, I've created this null character face. So I have two positions. This is one side, this is the other. So these are the two key frames that we're going to use for this animation. So the first thing I'm going to do is simply a linear in-between, in-between the two. Except that I want to have some easing from the first key frame to the second keyframe. So we start slow, pick up speed and slow again as we've done before. So I'm just going to again quickly sketch the ideas. So if I go from figure from a position a here and into the position b over there. I'm going to start by drawing a picture, a drawing in the middle. So I'm going to have the initial drawings here. I'm going to start by drawing one in the middle. And I'm going to do that again on either side. So right now it looks like a very linear. And then I'm going to keep drawing closer and closer to a and B. So I'm going to do in the middle here, somewhere in here somewhere. Then another one here, somewhere, here somewhere. And I might draw, this is 33 in-betweens, between the middle one and the key. I might draw more if I need, if I felt like I need to the void, draw them all the cactus easing into position or easing out of the position. So that's the first one I'm going to do. The second one, I'm going to do them. The breakdown, a special breakdowns. That middle row is going to be a little bit different. It's gonna be basically like an extra key. Let's call it C. And once I've done this, then I'm going to do the same process of drawing frames closer and closer to b and closer and closer to a in the exact same way. But this time the middle drawing will be slightly different and this should make the animation a bit more interesting. But let's start with the first case in. The first challenge is to draw that metal frame. So as we've done before, this is about in-betweens, about finding the right drawing in the middle between two other drawings. So this takes practice. It could be a little confusing. Sometimes you're looking at a drawing and see all those lines. Well, you gotta keep going between back-and-forth, between all the drawings until you can locate exactly things. So I strongly suggest to pick some elements that you are easily to recognize. E.g. we can look at the nose or we could look at the hair and try to position these first. If we feel confident about where they should be, then move on to other things that feel a bit more tricky to position. I'm going to start with the nose, e.g. the nose should be right in between the two, there's two noises and bear in mind that in this particular case, the phase will be looking straight on to us. So it should be right in the middle. Maybe let's try the halo. Something like this should do. Random it all again. I could draw the neck. The neck looks like something rather easy to draw. I think that should. Do. You see maybe this one is not quite in the middle. I'm going to draw this one again. You see, I'm trying to position that blue line right in between the pink and the green. And same on this side as the little pointing back here, needs to be on a line in the middle as well. Okay, so maybe next, I'll try to draw the shape of the head. Then eventually I'll place the arms for the shape of the head. It's got an ear as well. So you see how it's getting a little bit confusing that all these lines, if need be, you can always turn off your onion skin and look at your drawing. You can also flip between frames. So go back and forth like this and trying to see what's missing. And look at the next one and see what's missing. By doing this back-and-forth. That's one way to notice where things should go and should be. So it's another way, it's an alternative to using the tip of the traditional onion skin. So it's a matter of habit. The more you do it, the more of these lines will look a little less confusing. So I'm gonna go ahead and finish this off. Okay, I'm quite happy with this one. Let's have a quick look at it. Kept the eyelid on. Maybe I need to remove those eyelids. Should be fine. So you see how I tried to draw everything in smallest in the middle, the expression is in the middle, in his side is not happy, mouth is not happy and decided math is happy. The middle position should be something carbon-neutral. The eyes are more or less close and I'll try to find a position. I'll be honest. I need to be removed the eyelids here, so we'll just take that off. And now I want to continue, now I want to continue with this idea that I'm going to draw the next drawings. This is the middle drawing. I'm going to keep drawing, drawing closer to the first key in one, place it in the next key. I wanted to repeat this a few times. Let me start by doing this one's okay, So that's another in-between gonna keep going. What's interesting about I think in-betweens close and closer is that the drawings looks more and more similar to each other and becomes easier and easier to do, to do some extra keyframes. Systemic two in-betweens. So you might think it's daunting to do all these in-betweens. But in fact, the more you do them, the easier they become in a way. So those extra key in-between. So you might want to do that. They might actually be twice as fast to do them. Very first ones that you've done. So sometimes it's worth putting in the extra effort. Okay, so these are my first three in-betweens right now. And this makes for linear in-between because we have essentially just to mean keyframes, one in the middle and another copper in the middles. And that means that every drawing is separate by the same amount of time and distance. So, but if I keep going again, here and here and here, I can get closer and closer and I can get smoother movement. So I'm going to go ahead and do all these extra frames. And then I'll get back to you. Okay? So this is it, This is our first animation of the character turning its head. It's a linear movement. This node, basically it's following a line. Or we've done to this is having some easing from the beginning and easy at the end. So it's nice and crucially the animation a little bit. Now we could, we could push this a little bit further and have that first frame. Do you know that we drew right in the middle? First frame? We could maybe give it an arc. So we could maybe could imagine the character looking down as it turns its head. So it kinda looks, it looks on. We could do this or anything else. You could add the character, lean their head, e.g. so I think we're gonna go with just a character come down. And it will be the same pace, the same amount of frames. We're going to in-between it the same way. It's just that first in-between. It's going to be the character looking down and that's called a breakdown. And this will make the animation interesting. So we have the first half of the animation of the character going across one direction. The second half we're going to go back the other way so that we can have a nice animation that loops. So the first part will be linear and the second part will be through an arc and looking down. Okay, so I'm gonna, I'm gonna follow exactly the same process first, I'll do that break down frame, and then I'm just going to quickly go through the in-betweens for the rest of them. Let's do the breakdown frame first. So here I am between the two keyframes again. And I've got to do this first frame. First breakdowns. So just the same frame, the same character looking down. This is a, this is my character looking down. I'm keeping it simple again. And as you can see, I've moved the features in the face further down, the eyes or semi-closed. And even the, the piece of hair is kinda going down on top of the head, on the front of the head. So it looks like this is how the movement we're going to have. Hopefully this will make the animation just a little bit more interesting. So that's it. Now I'm gonna go ahead and do exactly what I've done with the other two frames. Alright, let's keep going. And finally, here we are. This is it. You can see things too, going one way in a certain way and the other way different path. And we have these two animations into one. And it's nice because we can really compare the difference between the two. Both, okay? Both conservative and purpose. But the point of creating, creating these interesting first in-between those breakdowns that you can add. Something interesting to the animation is not much to do. You have to do that first drawing anyway. So if you're going to do that first drawing, then you might try to give it something that makes it more interesting and the rest of the work is similar and you just get more interesting result or N. There you go. I hope you enjoy the exons. And I'll see you at the next lesson. 11. Character Take - Vertical VS Horizontal: Welcome to this lesson. In today's exercise, I want to show you how to animate a character, take a simple character Take. This is a classic kind of animation, something you'll see in every bit of animation, every movie does have been made. It's typically a situation where character changes expression. So they go from maybe being looked, looking no more than two, you're going to Prize e.g. looking angry or anything with a change of situation, with change of attitude in a character. And often this in cartoons. While extraordinary things happen, and cactus tend to be surprised. So this surprise moment is often the most typical character take that you'll find. And so what happens? Well, it's just the characters standing there, e.g. I. Can go surprise. But to emphasize that movement, we tend to do something like a bit of an adult patient or would count and spatially where the cactus goes down, frowns maybe. And then it's very surprised and then settles into that position of surprise. So it kinda goes a bit like this. It's yummy. And this is an example where the character goes down, then up, then settles. But you can also do it in different ways. In fact, you can go in different directions. Let's say maybe the character is looking to that side. And then a surprise looking to this side because something happens on that side of the screen. Then you could go, you could go forward and surprise and then settles. Right? So it kinda go from. And that's, that's also another character type. But you see the difference is the way you move it with the direction, which means typically the idea is to go from point a to point B. The anticipation kind of goes away from point B first. So instead of moving from a to b right away, we start moving away from the destination. Then you move forward and you move too far and then pull back. And so what's that mean? That means that we'll have two keyframes for both expressions. And the character will then go through two breakdowns. So two extra drawings to define that movement, anticipation, overshooting, and sets. So let's have a look at a simple character that we're getting tabulated. Here's a character I've decided to draw. So this is the surprise expression that would be my second keyframe. While this would be the first keyframe, let's say the character just looks kind of gone and it goes from here to there. So in a typical cactus take situation, I'm going to take to make this character go down fast, slightly his head goes down, mummies shoulders go up a little bit frightening. And it gets really surprised and then settles into that position. We're going to exaggerate the surprise movement. So I'm going to go ahead and create our first break down frame. So first to start with the elements of the face and I'm making the face look down and look, I'm bringing everything down a little bit and it shows into his eyes. Next thing I wanna do is take the head, the whole head down a little bit and I'm going to squash in a typical cotton way. I want to squash it like this and stretch it horizontally little bit. Look, I'm quite happy with that. And next I want to do decent thing with the shoulders are bare metal. Make the shoulders go up slightly. Okay, So this is our first break down. Next, I'm going to do a similar thing. This time on the way to this one. It's gonna be very similar to this drawing. Just a more extreme. Let's do. This. Is the face exaggerated, but also it's, the face is supposed to go. So I'm going to bring the whole head up a little bit, something like that. And then I want to send the shoulders the other way, absolute bringing them back up. I'm going to bring them down this time to locate the whole silhouette of the character. So here we go. We go four frames. Now I'm just going to scroll through them quickly. Right? Do you see it? It started to work already. We only have two extra drawings and we get the feeling that the character is coming to life and being surprised. Now if we want to make this feel smoother and more finished, we just need to add a few more frames to make this a bit more in between. So we're going to add those in-betweens. What I'm gonna do is simple. I'm just going to do a classic easing into the second, the next keyframe every time. So I'm going to go for that first from my first drawing into this one, e.g. but adding just probably just two drawings. And if if the first drawing is this, It's a. If the second drawing is here and it's B, then the two joints I'm going to do, you're going to be one in the middle. Let's say A1, and then another one in the middle again. And that's gonna be, let's say A2. I'm going to keep going like this. Just one drawing in the middle and then one closer to the next one. So that means that every elevation will slow down slowly into the next five. I think this will help make the animation feel a bit more realistic. Let's see what happens. Okay, So this is the first two in-betweens, between the first two frames. Here he goes, he started It's like just two drawings and caseloads each. That position can keep doing that to his next breakdown and then to the last keyframe. Okay, So this is it. I've got all my in-betweens now let's just take it out. That's it. See, it's quite simple and it feels quite smooth. Just a couple of people betweens. And now I would like to try the other way. So this, this was the first way where we go down and then we'd go up. So we vertically. But what if I had the character turning its head as the same time as it's changing expression. So it would be a little bit like a head-turn that we tried before. But as well, we're going to do this anticipation and overshoot thing. We're gonna do this horizontally this time. So let me place first, I'm going to reuse some of these drawings and place them in a new way just for the head term. So these are the two drawings I have for the character turning this time. So it's looking one side. Now it's looking on the other. I'm going to reuse the exact same drawing that I've done for my anticipation, which is this one and that one. But I'm going to flip on at them again states in the right direction for the end of the animation, which is this one. I'm gonna do, is it like this? Sorry. Like so. But this time I'm going to move it so that it goes too far to the right in a way rather than going a lot up. I want it to go right. I'm moving too much there, right? I'm overshooting. And for this one, I'm going to ask this patient at the beginning, I'm going to move it too far to the left. I'm taking this one. I'm moving too fast. So let's see, let's see what happens with this. We got this and it does this. So it's different. But it works as well. There's plenty of occasions where you might have to choose one or the other. So I'm gonna do the same thing again. I'm just going to add the similar in-betweens as we did before. And then we can compare those side-by-side. So here we go. This is a sideways movement with anticipation and overshoot. As you can see, it works too. And it's the same, same idea, just a different, different movements. So let's put them together and see what happens. Hey, this is simple character take its typical. You, you would be doing this a lot if you were to animate. And it works every time. So this one is actually a little bit slow. You could, you could even use few in-betweens and still work quite nicely. I hope you enjoy the exercise and I'll see you at the next one. 12. Character Breakdowns - A Closer Look: Hi, In this exercise, I want to concentrate a bit more on breakdowns. So for character animation, particularly, the idea of a breakdown is usually once you have worked out all your keyframes, you want to decide what's happening between the keyframes. The default thing would be to have a simple linear in-between and you go from a keyframe, aid keyframe be just in the shortest path possible. But it's more interesting if you can try to do something different and something happened between them in that transition, you can create more interesting animation. And life is often like that. So her arm perfectly linear. And to break that linearity a little bit is often a good thing to make your animations would be more believable. So typically let's say you have a, my hand is moving from here to here. I can try to decide whether he moves linearly with nothing special happening. What could decide, e.g. to lead the measurement with one part or the other? My hands. So let's say e.g. what if I lead the animation with the top of my hand and then I will do this e.g. before I eventually settle here. So it would look like this. And if I decided to go with the bottom of my hand, e.g. I. Would lead the wrist and BB do something like this. So that's the difference between this example or this, right? I hope you can see the difference. So we're going to try this with a character, some very simple character moving sideways from side to side. And in one instance we're going to make the character lead with the head. And in the other instance, we're going to make the character lead with the hips. And we're going to see that it makes difference. And therefore, when you animate, you can choose to your breakdowns in a way that makes that in-between them more interesting. So let's, let's have a look at what we'd have. So I just created this little character. Very simple. I've just got two positions. Yeah, just just moving sideways. That's all it's doing. And the first thing I'm going to do is to draw a breakdown. I decided to go from here to here. I'll, I'll go and lead with the headfirst. It's the character is going to meet its head further. What does that mean? Basically some way when we are in-between, I'm going to just place quickly drawing here. So I have my two keyframes visible now. And instead of just drawing something that would be exactly in the middle here, e.g. I'm not gonna do that. That's why I'm going to avoid. Instead, I will try to maybe lead with the head. That means that the head will move first. So that means the head will be closer to the second keyframe. The rest of the body would be closer to the previous keyframe. So we're going from here to here. So we're going that way. So the head e.g. or to be closer to the second keyframe while the body, or to be closer to the first keyframe. So roughly something like this. So I'm going to redo this drawing, make it a bit cleaner. And also just one little thing when the character Lean's like this, probably the head would go down and then it wouldn't because because you leaning into the measurement, I would make you go down slightly. So I'm gonna take this down a little bit. So here we go. I'm just keeping this very simple. You can see that the cactus clearly leaning towards the second key frame. And obviously I'm exaggerating this. You don't need to always exaggerate things like this, but it can be interesting to do that as well for cartoons, exaggeration is a very useful tool. So now that I have the breakdown, that that's really on all the information, I need to stop building the in-betweens. The in-betweens I'm going to do as we've done before. I'm just going to ease into the second keyframe and ease out the first keyframes. So I'm using the usual drawing in the middle process and getting closer to the keyframes. I think I just need maybe three drawings on either side. And that should, that should do the trick. So I'm gonna go ahead and do that. So this is the first half of that relation. As you can see, the character's leaning into the maintenance. My starting slope, because I've got a few frames, more frames at the beginning where we picking up speed, then we get into that breakdown and then I still need to add the rest of the drawings and the other side. So let's continue. Okay, So this is it. We have a character moving and you can see this interesting leaning into the movement and then getting into the second keyframe. I hope you can see how this brings up an extra level of life to this character and it makes the animation interesting. Now, I could have made a different choice. And that's the point of breakdowns. You have this freedom and going whichever way you want. So here I'm leading with the head. But what if we were doing the opposite, leading with the hips? Well, if you think about it, it would be exactly the same animation except running the other way around. So if I actually just take the animation name reverser, change the timing. Then instead of going from this side to that side of the screen, will be going from that side of the screen and back through that keyframe and to that side. So if see if I play it backwards, we get the character moving back, leading with the hip. This simple animation allows us to see both by just reversing the animation. I'm going to do quickly is I'm just gonna do both movements by just changing the key frames, the frames quickie on my, in my timeline, I'm going to create the character moving once, reading with a head on both directions at once, leading with the hips. And let's see what happens. So here it is after character doing twice, leading with the head on both directions. And then the same character leading with the hips on both directions. And so I hope this shows you how interesting breakdowns can be. And they really help giving an extra sense of injecting an extra bit of life in your characters. So I hope you'll be using this. I hope this was an interesting Thank you.