Transcripts
1. Introduction: If you're curious
about animation, you want to make short
films around the get-go, Adobe Animate is a
good place to start. My name is Toniko Pantoja, and I'm a full-time artist
in the animation industry, working as a storyboard artist, as an animator, and as
a character designer. I've worked on films like How to Train your Dragon
3, The Croods 2. I had a brief stint with Kipo and the Age Of
the Wonderbeasts. I'm currently working at
Amazon with Invincible. Animation is quite powerful
because nowadays you can make a whole film by yourself
with just a computer, a mouse, or even
a drawing tablet. You don't need to
have a whole crew to make a single film. Today's class is about
learning Adobe Animate, and how to animate
basic things with it. In this class, we'll go through an overview of the
program itself, and its user interface. Then we're going to
animate a bouncing ball. Then after that, we're going to do frame-by-frame basics, using character
animation as an example. By the end of this class, you'll have a basic
understanding of Adobe Animate, but enough to make a few short films or
even an animated piece. If you're ready to start your animation journey,
let's get started.
2. Getting Started: Hi there, it's Nico. Thank you so much for
taking this class. I'm going to be teaching how
to animate on Adobe Animate. Teaching Adobe Animate
feels like it's a full circle for me
because this is a program that I've used when I was a teenager and now I'm
going back to it and reflecting it as someone who is in the industry
and I give credit to Adobe Animate because
without flash or Adobe Animate, I wouldn't have gotten
it into the industry. I wouldn't have known
what the industry was or what animation was, and I still use it to this
day because it's quite easy to get into and
the library system that Adobe Animate has is quite
good because it's easy to save and reuse drawings
when you need them. Let's say I have a mouth
flapping or a fire effect, or maybe even a drawing
that I want to reuse, I don't have to
redraw and redo it, I can just take it
from the library and put it back into
my main animation. But hey, don't worry about
this library stuff yet. I'm going to go through this step-by-step and we're
going to get there. I think being able
to animate and to make things move is quite essential when it comes to motion design or animation
or even storytelling. What you will definitely
need is a computer. You don't need to have a
very powerful computer. Anything is fine as long as
it can run Adobe Animate. Over here, I'm using
a display tablet. This is a professional
brand called Wacom. This is a synthetic 16 HD, but there are other brands
that are less expensive, like Huion or XP pen, they're are a lot
more affordable. You can even use
a graphics tablet where it doesn't have a screen, it's just a pad
that acts as a USB, but when I started, I was only using mouse. You can also start with that. If you're not yet ready to
invest in graphics tablets. You can subscribe just
for Adobe Animate, or you can get the
Creative Cloud, the whole subscription for it, which comes with Photoshop, After Effects and all these
other programs that you can use to make a fully
visualized film. In this class, I'm going to go through an overview of
the program itself, the layout, the tools, what the timeline is,
and what the library is. I'm going to do a demo
and talk about animating a bouncing ball using
the basic flash tools, and then right after that, we're going to
gradually move into frame-by-frame or traditionally
hand-drawn animation. We're also going to be
exploring the library, how I use it, how to use it, and why it makes Adobe Animate
such an awesome program, and then we're going to export it into a video where we can share it with people
we care about. The point of this class is just to start somewhere,
to just do it, because animation
takes a long time to perfect or even master. There's a lot of
animation styles too, each with different philosophies
and different teachings. I think it's important
to just start somewhere. If you have Adobe Animate downloaded and
ready and your PC, we can start towards
the next lesson.
3. Exploring Adobe Animate: Here is Adobe Animate. One thing that you're
going to notice is this overall layout. Now, I'm just going
to generalize what each of these are. On the left side
you get the tools, you get your paint brush tool, you get your shape tools, you even get your
flood fill tools or your paint bucket tools, text tools, pen tools
here and there. All that is on the
tools on the left side. On the bottom side we
have our timeline. This is where we actually get animation information,
our layers, and how many frames
there are in animation, how many drawings
or in animation, and just how long it is. On the right side we get
things like properties. For now I don't
really have anything selected in the tools. It's going to resort to this stage and I changed
my frames per second to 24 because that's the standard
of most animation formats. Over here we also have the
library system on the tab. Now, I've talked about
the library before but it's where we can save an animation or try
it and reuse it later on if we want to reuse it. Down here is the timeline. From here we can add new layers, we can remove layers, we can put them into groups
in these buttons up here, this will allow us to
add a new keyframe. This will allow us to add
a new blank keyframe. This will allow us
to add or extend a frame of an existing drawing. I'll talk about these tools
as we do the animation. This tool over here
is quite important. It's called the onion skin. It's going to allow us to
see our previous frames and drawings and our next
previous rooms and drawings. This button here allows us to play the animation,
to preview it. This will allow us to
loop a certain range of the animation just so that
we can flip back and forth. Over here we can also adjust the size and the thumbnail
of our keys so we can see them clearly because sometimes
maybe that's a bit too small and maybe we
want to see something that's a bit easier to read. What you're looking
at in the timeline is the length of your animation. If I extend this
drawing and I hit this little button up
here and if I play it, that's going to indicate
the animation in real time and how long it
is and just seeing it play. Whatever drawing we have here, it's going to hit a
certain frame of that. If I create a new blank
and if I play it. Now we have a bit of animation. Each of these, they're known as
frames, like a film. Now, what these are over here are key drawings
or keyframes. Each drawing here as
you can see holds for uncertain number of frames. This drawing lasts for about seven frames and this
drawing lasts for about 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, six frames. You can see that
there's only like three different drawings and you can even add a new
drawing in between these. That creates a new drawing that's going to take up the
rest of the remaining frames. If I hit the onion
skin tool I can see in-between my
key drawings here. I can draw a new
mark over there. Now it's going to
create another drawing. If I play it, now we have
a little in-between. I'm going to talk about
these other buttons here. I'm just going to turn down
the onion skin for now. This button here,
insert a keyframe, is going to take this
existing drawing and turn it into a new drawing information
or new keyframe. Even though these are similar drawings or the same drawing from this one and this one, I can make a little small change because now it's treating it as a completely different
key drawing. Now if I toggle between
that and I make changes, it's going to appear there. Then this over here, if I hit that, so it's not going to work
in-between the drawing. What I have to do is actually select a part of a drawing
and if I hit that, now it's going to remove
that joint completely. Let's say if I want to create an in-between this drawing
and this drawing, I can select a random frame from between these
drawings and hit that and now it's going to create a new key
but that's empty. I turn on the onion skin
tool to see between those drawings and I can
create a new drawing. One thing that you might
want to be careful about is this button up here. Auto insert keyframe. Let's say I want to
edit this keyframe. Let's say I want to add a
stem of an apple or cherry. If I'm off by one frame from where the keyframe starts and I just
draw that stem, it's going to create
a new keyframe out of that so it can cause problems. It's going to confuse
you even more. What I usually do
is I turn that off and so let's say
I forget to move this cursor towards a
keyframe and I have it off by a frame and I draw a
little stem of the apple, it's going to remain consistent. This button over here, insert frame is going to allow us to extend the length
of our current drawing. I'm going to tap that
and now it's adding a frame for that drawing. If I play it it's going
to hold for longer. Let's see, I don't
have any frames here and I need a frame
to be able to draw it. It's not going to
allow me to do that. I'm just going to hit
this insert keyframe and I'm going to draw
a dot or a ball. If I hit this again, it's going to make
another keyframe but using the same drawing. But it's really a different
key drawing because if I move this it's going to treat it differently and I
can do that again, move that again, do that again, move that again, do that again, move that again and now I
have a bit of animation. Now I'm going to introduce another button which is
insert blank keyframes. If I hit that, now
it's going to create a new key but it's empty. There's nothing in there. Now this allows me to
create a new drawing. This tool is important for frame-by-frame or
hand-drawn animation. Now let's say I have this new drawing and I
hit that button again. Now I can just keep making
new drawings with that. If I play it, now we have a bit of
animation but sometimes this animation is
going by too fast and I want to hold some of
these drawings even longer. There's a button for
that. What I'm doing is I'm selecting my cursor, I'm moving it around
and whatever it's on, it's going to affect
that drawing. If I hit Insert Frame, it's going to extend
that drawing by one frame and I move
to the next drawing by dragging my cursor and I hit Insert Frame and
it's going to extend that drawing and I
can repeat that. There are times where I skip out just to create that
stylization of timing, meaning that like some drawings
will go by really fast, some will go by really slow. Let's say I want to hold this
drawing for a bit longer, the first two drawings. I'm really experimenting here. When I play it, now you can tell that some key drawings
hold for much longer than the other ones
and if I don't like some of the frames I can always remove them by pressing this
button over here. Remove frames. If I hit that, it's going to delete
some drawings. I can delete a joint completely or I can just delete an
extended part of that drawing. If I want to create a new
frame after this animation, I want to be sure I hit the
empty space next to that and I press Insert
Blank keyframe or insert a keyframe if I
want to reuse this drawing. But let's say I want
to create a blank key. Now I want to see my
previous drawings without having to
roll back-and-forth. I can do that using
the onion skin. Let's do a different color and I'm just going to
keep continuing the animation by constantly
pressing this button, Insert Blank Keyframe, and just trying to
recreate or create new drawings while using the previous drawings
as reference. Let's play that. That's a
very simple bouncing ball. If I only wanted to play
a certain section of it, I can press this button
over here and it'll loop an animation but
it will also load up a new little function
here that allows me to select what I
want to preview. It's only playing a certain
part of the animation. You don't have to play the
whole thing if you wanted to see one part of the animation.
This is pretty useful. I encourage you to try
out using Adobe Animate, the timeline and experiment
with these tools. Just have fun with it and
get used to the program. In the next lesson I'm going to be talking about
everything you might want to know about animating your first
bouncing ball.
4. Animating a Bouncing Ball: In this lesson, I'm going
to teach you how to animate a bouncing ball
using Adobe Animate. The reason why the
bouncing ball is so important in animation
and why a lot of animation schools introduce the bouncing
ball is because it introduces a lot of important
principles like arcs, weight, squash and stretch, timing, and even spacing. Things slowing in
and slowing down. These are things
that I'm going to be talking about as I do
the bouncing ball. I am going to create
a new file or a new window using the
same settings as earlier, 1920 by 1080, 24 frames per second. Before we animate or before we actually do the animation, I like to plan, and I think planning is a
good way to think about the motion and the layout of our animation before we
actually start animating. What I'm going to do
is just draw a guide. I'm just going to
indicate my floor and I'm just going to
call this layer grass. You can double-click
on the "Layer Name" and just call it grass. Now, we're going to
create a new layer. This is where we're going
to illustrate our guide or the motion that I'm
planning for the animation. There are many ways
you can do this, but I'm just going to
do a very simple way where I draw an arc, so it's going to
bounce like this. Arcs is one of the
main principles of animation that showcase
believable animation. Now that I've drawn my
motion path for my ball, I'm going to use this as
reference as I animate my ball. I'm just going to
do this straight ahead to make it a lot more fun. I'm going to create a new layer. First of all, I need
to name this as guide. I'm making a new layer again. Then on my third layer, this is where I'm going
to animate our ball. I'm going to do something
really simple here. I'm not going to do
frame-by-frame animation, I'm going to be doing this using Adobe Animate basic tools. Frame-by-frame is where you're drawing a new drawing
every new frame, like hand-drawn paper animation
whereas what I'm going to do is I'm going to just make one drawing and just reuse that, manipulate it depending on the animation without having
to redraw the drawing. In the next lesson, I'll talk more about frame-by-frame
animation. Now, I'm going to draw my
ball, but before I do that, I want to lock my previous
layers that I make so I don't accidentally touch
them or draw on them. I'm going to toggle this little padlock on
each of these layers. Now on my layer 3, and I'm just going to
call this the ball, I'm going to draw my oval. You can even hold Shift, so it doesn't turn into an oval, you can just hold Shift
and make it into a ball. Actually, let's make it smaller. From here, I'm going to animate
this one frame at a time. I'm going to turn on
the onion skin so I can keep track of my
previous frames. This is where I'm
going to talk about the concept of slowing in, slowing out, spacing,
acceleration, and deceleration. I'm going to create a new keyframe by pressing
this button over here. That's going to create a new keyframe with
the same drawing. But I'm going to
start moving things. I'm using the onion skin
as reference to see where my previous drawing was at without having to
flip like this. I'm going to keep going. Now I'm seeing three frames before, I hit that again, and
I'll just keep going. One thing you're
going to notice, what I'm doing is I'm actually
creating a larger space. What I mean, is the spacing between these drawings are
gradually getting bigger. That is to show things
accelerating and speed without having to do
some weird curve tool stuff. As you can see, I'm making that spacing bigger than the last. Even if I'm not
playing the animation, you can tell that it's
accelerating just by me flipping between these drawings without
me having to play it. That's a constant with spacing, slow ins and slow
outs, and animation. I'm going to turn
on my onion skin again and make this
hit the floor. Then I'm going to
insert another key where now this one is
leaving the floor. Now, I'm making the
spacing gradually smaller between my
previous drawings. But here's the
thing, I'm trying to keep the spacing horizontal, the ball traversing from stage left to stage
right, consistent. It's only when it
goes up and down. Then there's a reason
why I drew these arcs earlier is to guide me. Now I don't have
to do the work of second guessing where the
arcs are, I planned it. This is how I plan animation and this is why the bouncing ball's such an
important assignment. I'm going to keep going. Now, the spacing is getting bigger. Boom hits the floor. It's slowing down as I go up, but gaining speed
when I go back down until it starts to dwindle in terms of
how much it bounces. Let's play that and see
what that looks like. Go to Control and
hit "Loop Playback". Now I'm going to press "Play". Now we have a very
simple bouncing ball. But we can definitely make
this a lot more believable. The great thing about
Adobe Animate or digital animation in
general is I can actually go back to my previous frames and start making
adjustments on the fly. Now I want to apply a stretch, a smear, or a motion blur. I like to roll my drawings like this
where I hold the cursor and traverse back and forth to feel the
flow, and I think, because there's so
much spacing here and because it's so drastic, what I can do is I can
select this ball and now, what if I let say start
modifying it a bit? This is the concept of
stretch in animation. Then as it keeps going down, I'm going to make it even
more narrow and more longer. Now we're having a bit of
more believable motion. As it hits the ground, what if we stretch
this ball out? Boom, so now we have a squash. Then as it leaves it, I press "Free
Transformation Tool", I select my shape and
I modify it a bit, so the reason why I'm not
just doing this is because I want to make it more believable in terms of
retaining the mass. If there's a squash
on that going on, then the sides of it
are going to expand like a real life object would. I like to do things normally in vertically and then just rotate
it according to the arc. Now this is a perfect
opportunity for a stretch here. Now I'm going to apply a squash. I apply squash any time let's
say a ball hits the floor, just to sell that
sense of weight and that elasticity of our ball. I'm going to do that, boom. Then I'm going to go back. No, stretch it. I'm just going to do that for
the rest of the drawings. But as you notice, the drop and the bounce, it gets less drastic. I'm not going to
apply the squash and stretch all the time
because if it does that, it's just going to look way too distracting or way too active. I like to subdue
it when the motion starts to subdue just to sell that believability
even more. I'm still going to
apply the stretch but not as drastic
as my previous ones. Same thing here
when it squashes, when hits the floor. I'm just going to
leave it as that. I don't think it needs any vicious squash
and stretch here. Let's play that. Now, we have a very classic animation friendly
bouncing ball. I want you to practice
the bouncing ball. Draw the arcs as a
guide in another layer, and then animate a ball on
another layer on top of it, moving the ball frame-by-frame. Now, as a bonus, I'm just going to
quickly animate a tail. I'm just going to animate shapes quickly frame-by-frame
as I track my ball. Now, because we have this frame that extends all the way
matching to our ball, we have one drawing that
just keeps holding. As I keep moving forward, I'm going to hit
this button now, "Insert Blank Keyframe". I'm still going to
turn on my onion skin, I'm going to lock my
ball layer so I don't see the onion skin of
that ball and just keep drawing the tail
frame-by-frame, just tracking it. This is where you can feel
the overlapping action. In animation, overlapping action is things like cloth, or hair, or a tail, where it really
is just following the ball. Here's a perfect
example for that. Let's say this ball
lands but it's going up, I still need to complete the trajectory of the tail
following the ball still, so it needs to go down
or whipped down first. You can just do that
with very simple shapes. I'm just going to keep drawing
shapes. Let's play that. Now we can hide the guide so now we can just look at
the ball by itself. What we can do is now we can start maybe extending the length of some
of these drawings, so I can select all the
drawings or other layers, I select those frames and
I hit "Insert Frame". Now those drawings
are going to last longer than just a mere frame. I'm only going to do that for maybe the first three drawings, turn that into ones. When it goes up, then
maybe I'll slow that down. The way I'm choosing
how to extend some drawings is
based on what if, let's say an object is
slowing down in space, maybe I want to exaggerate that even more but without having
to add more drawings, I can just do that by prolonging the length of the drawing to
capture that same feeling. I'm extending the
length of each drawing, that's where the ball
is hovering in the air, because that's when it's
slowing down as it goes up. I'm going to not extend
drawings as it's going down to really sell
that fast impact. Then I think for
the last drawings, maybe I'll just slow
them down completely. Now when I play it, it just
feels a bit more stylized. I recommend just experimenting
with a bouncing ball. There's no rule to what a perfect bouncing
ball can look like, you can add a tail to it, you can add ears to it. You can turn it into a key
character or an animal. What I'm showing you
is a fundamental, and a foundation, and a
lot of animation learning. Join me in the next
lesson and we're going to go through
frame-by-frame basics.
5. Learning Frame by Frame Basics: In this lesson, we're
going to talk about frame-by-frame or
hand-drawn animation, the basics of it, how I do it with Adobe Animate, and what it is essentially. Think about hand-drawn
animation done in paper. Every drawing is a
completely new drawing or a new keyframe. I want to show you
an example that I did to give you an idea of what I want to talk
about for this lesson. We're going to do
something as basic or even more basic than this. It might seem a bit
confusing, it's intimidating, what's happening,
the background, all these effects, and
these camera moves. Don't worry, we'll go through this step by step because
that's what it is. It's all just building
blocks one at a time. It starts with
something very simple and we're just putting
layers on top of layers. I'm going to create
a new file, again, 1920 by 1080 and now
we're going to talk about classic
frame-by-frame animation, but before we do that, I'm going to do what I did
with the bouncing ball, which is to plan a bit. For a bouncing ball, it
was just a flat ground, but for this one, I want to give just a bit of perspective. I'm just going to draw out some perspective lines for
a one-point perspective. If you're wondering why I'm
making the perspective line, it's because I use it as
a guide to show depth. For this rabbit, for example, the little rabbit is coming towards us from all
the way in the back. I'm going to create a new layer. I'm just going to call this a perspective or persp. I'm just going to draw
various poses or guides of where our little rabbit guide is going to be, so that's one. Maybe he'll come towards us and again I'm not super consistent with
this rabbit design. We're having fun really. That's drawing number 1, drawing number 2, and then maybe we'll have
it end closer to us, maybe facing us, 3. I'm going to do the same thing like I did with
the bouncing ball, which is I'm going to draw
arcs to illustrate how I want the rabbit to bounce
and maybe I'll have it bounce back to number 1. I feel like maybe there's just too much visual
information here. It's a bit too messy. What I usually like
to do is I go to properties for each layer and turn down the opacity to
maybe something really low. Let's say the
perspective is maybe 8%, I can still see it, but it's not as distracting. Maybe the same thing
for this rabbit. Maybe I'll turn that down to
let's say 20% and hit "OK". Now, it's not as
distracting for me. I can still see it and now I can just use
this as a reference. Now let's draw our key
poses for the rabbit. Let's choose a nice
color for the rabbit. I'm going to choose
something gray. In the example that I showed, I drew the line art of
the rabbit and filled it, but for this case, we're going to do
something that's a lot more experimental and fun. What if we just animate shapes? I'm just going to
draw a shape of a rabbit with the brush tool and then fill it with
a paint bucket tool. What you can also do is, let's say if you're
drawing over your guide, you can move your animation
right below the guide. The guide is on top
of your animation. Now I can still see the eyes
and the ears of the rabbit. Let's give this
rabbit pinkish ears, and then let's give
it beady eyes. I like to use the
eyedropper tool to select the same color of the ears and
maybe use it for the legs. Now, I'm going to hit
"Insert Blank Keyframe". Now I'm going to draw my next key pose
and I've already drawn the reference
for rabbit number 2. Again I'm just drawing
through brushstrokes and fills, nothing too complicated. Now I have three
keys of our rabbit. It's first position, second
position, and final position. Now we're going to make
connective tissue or connective drawings
for these key poses. In animation, we call
these breakdowns. For this case, I need
to draw a key of rabbit 1 going to
rabbit 2 by jumping. What I'm going to do, is go to my first drawing and hit "Insert Frame" and I'm going to select that and now turn it blank. Now we have an empty drawing
between these drawings. I'm going to turn
on my onion skin to adjust the sliders on my onion skin so I can only
see rabbit 1 and rabbit 2, the sliders here allow me to
adjust the onion skin range. As you're seeing, if I extend my last onion skin to let's say the fourth drawing that includes a third rabbit, it'll show but I
don't want that. Now I'm only focusing
on those two rabbits. Now I'm just going to draw
our connective tissue or our breakdown drawing from
rabbit 1 to rabbit 2. Now that I have my onion
skins turned down, blue being the previous one and the green being the next, I'm going to just
use that as a guide to figure out what my next
drawing could look like. It's leaping. Again, I'm not super precious about maintaining solid
driver consistency. Right now I'm just
trying to get what feels right or what feels good. I think it extending its low arms like that
it's pretty funny. Now we have a connective tissue. I'm going to do the
same thing with 2-3. You don't always have to
have the onion skin on. Sometimes I like to roll
between my drawings, turn off the onion skin so I can actually feel the movement, and figure out what feels
appropriate because sometimes seeing multiple drawings at once might not be that helpful. Maybe I'll do that
for the next one. I'll just flip between
these two drawings or hold my cursor and keep
going back and forth, so I can get an idea of what the next drawing
might look like. We'll do one more, so maybe I can make it
go back to number 1. I can select my first drawing, hit "Copy Frames" and then
paste it right over here. I'm just going to select
my other layers and hit "Insert Frames" to extend those drawings just so
everything matches up. Then I'm going to
extend this drawing over here so I can create a blank one right in between
and maybe for this and pose, I'm thinking, what if
it does a backflip? We're going to see
its underlegs. Again, this is just me having
fun so that's its legs. We're looking at underneath it. We probably won't see its ears because it's going to
be behind the body. Now when I roll between
these drawings, we have an idea of the movement. I hit "Control" and
hit "Loop Playback", to allow me to loop
the animation. But it's going by really fast. What if I just space out or extend these drawings
a bit longer? Let's say I'm going to hold
this drawing for four frames. I'm going to select my
drawing or move the cursor to my first drawing and hit
1,2,3,4 so it can hold longer. I'm using the third
button over here, insert frames to extend each
of those drawings 1,2,3,4, I usually go for fours because it feels like
it's very safe number, you can still get a sense
of motion and movement and the timing still
feels watchable. I need connective tissues
connecting these drawings. Right in between these
frames or these drawings, I'm just going to select a
random spot in the middle for each of these drawings
and hit "Insert Blank Keyframe" and I'm
going to keep doing that for every other drawing and this
will be our in-betweens, or our connective tissue. That's what animation is. It's really connecting drawings together to form that
illusion of movement. When I play it, we
have blank drawings. Now we just need to fill it in. I'm going to do this
fairly quickly. I can turn on my
onion skin again, adjust the range of
the onion skin so I can actually see my
previous and next drawings. Let's see what that feels like. We have animation. That's
animation right there. I'm going to do something a bit extra because I feel like I want this rabbit to end pretty
extra or dramatically, and I want to really
sell that weight. What I can do is maybe
between these two drawings, I can add an overshoot drawing. I'm going to do
the same thing hit "Insert Blank Keyframe", and I'm going to turn on my onion skins
to see the guide for it and I'm going to have it squish just for that
very brief moment. Maybe the ears are going to be still up to saw that overlap. Both of these drawings instead of lasting for one
frame for each, I'm going to just make
them last for two and make sure every other
frame is synchronized. Let's play that. Now we have a bit of weight
when the rabbit lands. Let's turn off the guide. Will keep the perspective
line it's a nice touch. There's the rabbit.
I want you guys to experiment with
your own rabbit. It could be a rabbit,
it could be a dog, it could be anything you want. The idea is just to explore how to make those key poses
and how to connect them. In the next lesson, we're
going to explore the library.
6. Exploring the Library: In this lesson,
we're going to be talking about the Library
in Adobe Animate. The Library is a place where you can store pre-made animation, graphics, sound effects,
and a bunch of other stuff. The reason why the library so important to know especially for someone who is a
beginner in Adobe Animate, is because it's essential
to have when you want to reuse animation or
assets like mouth flaps. I like to keep things separate. I like to keep things in a different file all the time just to not clutter up
the space so much, but we're still going to use this file that we
have for the rabbit. I'm going to go to File and
I'm going to hit "New", and I'm going to keep all
the settings the same, 1920 by 1080 for the
width and height, 24 frames per second. What I want to do
is I'm going to try and animate a little effect for the rabbit when the
rabbit leaps off the ground. I'm going to do something
like a little spark or a little burst of fire or
a little burst of energy. We're going to do
this frame by frame. I like to start with a point
where the effect starts, so I'm going to draw a
little mark from there and then by hitting "Insert
blank keyframe" again, I'm going to create a new frame. I'm just going to leave
the onion skin on so I can see all my
previous drawings. I'm not going to be
flipping as much. I'm going to have a strong splash or a
strong burst coming up. I'm going to create a new
Insert blank keyframe, and I'm just going to
let that effect start to dwindle as I keep track
of my previous drawings. I'm going to keep doing
that until it gets smaller and smaller
into a few specks. The great thing about frame-by-frame animation
is I can always go back and probably add more
colors or different effects. Let's add maybe
another splash here. Sometimes the onion
skin can get a little bit hectic or there's just
too much information, so maybe it is time to close it. Or what you can do is you can actually hold
down the onion skin, go to Advanced settings. You can even change how
it will look like from full color to just line
information. Let's just do that. I'm going to loop the playback
so I can watch it loop. Let's preview that. We have a very basic effect, but I feel it's still
going a bit too fast, so I'm going to select
my first frame, and I'm going to keep
inserting frames. Let's start with just adding
one frame per drawing. I'm moving the cursor to each different drawing and
hitting "Insert frame". Now let's play that.
It's feeling a bit good. Maybe let's make the
last two drawings last for a bit longer just so it feels like it's slowing down without having
to add more drawings. I'm going to add
another Insert frame for those last two drawings. Let's wrap it up by selecting
the next frame and hitting "Insert blank keyframe"
to show that there's no more drawings at the end
and I'm going to hit "Play". Now we have a really
simple effect, and now we're going
to turn this into a symbol for the library. What symbols are, they're like little
mini animations or mini files with
their own timeline and you can always open
them up and edit it, and you can change
that on the whim. I'll show you what
I mean. I'm going to select all these frames. Right-click and
hit "Copy frames". Next, I'm going to go to Insert, New Symbol, and now I have these settings
for a new symbol. Let's call this effects. For the type, I'm going
to ignore movie, clip, and button because
these are best served for flashes older versions
with their own action skip. I'm going to hit "Graphic" and I'm going to hit
"OK" You're going to notice that a new window pops up and now we're editing effects and it loads its
own little timeline. Now I'm going to paste
all my animation here, and now we have this animation under the symbol called effects. When I go back, and if I create a new layer, I'm going to turn
off my onion skin. Now if I go to Library, I have this thing
called effects in it. So I can put multiple versions of the effects and if I play it, it will all happen
simultaneously. Now that we have that, let's put this with a rabbit. I'm going to right-click on
my symbol and hit "Copy". I'm going to go into
my rabbit file, and now I'm going to
add an effect every time the rabbit leaps
off the ground. Let's double-check. Our
rabbit is on layer 3, and I'm going to
rename that, rabbit. Next, I'm going to
create a new layer below the rabbit and paste. One thing you're going to
notice is it's going to add the effects from the other file to the library of the rabbit. I'm going to plant
one right here, so when the rabbit leaps,
there's an effect. Something you noticed
is that it loops. You can change this
setting actually. If I click on my symbol with effects and
go to Properties, I can turn off looping, and I can hit "Play once" by hitting this
button right here. You can even select the frame of where the animation starts. If I want the animation to
start somewhere near the end, I can do that, but
let's start at 1. Now it only plays once. Personally, I like to create a new layer where I
can put the symbol. I'm going to copy this again. Now let's create another layer for the other symbol
or the other effect, and I'm going to paste my effect right here,
so I'm going to paste. Make sure you select the
frame before you paste it. If I play it, now
we have a bit of effects synching with the rabbit and that's why the
library system is great. What you can also do is, let's say I want to turn this rabbit into
a symbol itself. I can select all the frames in my timeline featuring
the rabbit, right-click, Copy Frames, Insert, New Symbol. I'm going to call
this just rabbit. Now I can paste the rabbit here, and I'm going to
hit this arrow to go back to my main timeline. Let's say I want to add any rabbit now I already have a symbol of the same rabbit. I'm going to drag and
drop. Very simple. Now we have two rabbits, but let's say I
want to flip this. I'm going to make sure
I right-click this, go to Transform, and hit "Flip Horizontal". Now we have the
rabbit mirroring. But maybe I want to offset it, meaning that I
don't want it to be synchronized with
the other rabbit. I can select my rabbit, go to Properties, and maybe
start somewhere else. Maybe I'll have it
start at frame 9. Let's play what that looks like. Now we have two rabbits
just jumping around, having fun all differently. Now I want you to try using the library, make
your animation, turn it into a symbol, put it in your library, and just drag and drop
it into your animation. I invite you to keep
experimenting with the library. Maybe you want to make a crowd of characters and you don't want to
keep redrawing it. Maybe you want to draw different sets of
characters, limbs, and orientations, so
you don't have to redraw that character
again and again. Join me in the next lesson, and I'll show you how to export your animations so
you can show it to your friends and to the world.
7. Exporting Your Project : In this lesson, we're
going to export our bunny animation into a file format where
people can see it. If I want to show it to my
friends or to the world, I have to export it in a video format that
can be posted online; on my social media, on YouTube or anywhere
online so people can see it. Now, before we export, there's a few things
that we might need to do before it's ready. Let's check all the layers, and I think it looks good. But there's something
that we need to correct. We have a hidden layer
with this rabbit guide, and the thing about exporting
your animation is that it's also going to export
your hidden layers, so you have to turn that off. What you need to do
is select your layer, right-click on it, and turn this into a guide. It'll tell Adobe Animate
that this layer is a guide, and when you export it, it will treat it just as that, it won't show up, so you need to have that. If I go back down, I do have a perspective
layer where we see the guide of
our horizon line. Maybe we don't want to see that. Again, I'm going
to right-click on that perspective layer and
turn that into a guide. Even though we can see it, it's not going to appear
in our final export. Now we're ready to export. Let's hide our
perspective lines to get a glimpse of what this
animation looks like. Let's try exporting. I go to File and I hit "Export", and I make sure I hit
"Export to Video and Media". There's a lot of other options, but this is the most important
for exporting video files. Then I'm going to
export the video. Now this new window pops up. I think everything looks good. I usually use H.264 as a format. It's going to
export it as an MP4 that reads well in Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, even YouTube. This is a format that I usually use when I put stuff online. Now, I'm going to select a folder where it's
going to put it in, and I'm going to just put
it in this folder for now. Let's just call it bunny Skillshare, I'm
going to hit "Save". Now you're going to see
a tab here that says Start Adobe Media Encoder. We're not going to do that, we're going to uncheck that. We're going to export
directly from Adobe Animate. Now I'm going to hit "Export", and we're just going to
wait for a few seconds. Now, it's already exported
and we're going to go to the folder and
where I exported it to. Now this is the file that
I just recently exported, bunny-Skillshare,
lets double-click on that to see what that
looks like. There we go. We have a video file
of our animation. We have something that's
ready to be uploaded. Luckily, because this
file is so small, it's only 524 kilobites, but you can use a program
like Adobe Media Encoder, it's free, you can
download it through Adobe, that has a more robust
way of compressing files, changing it to a
different format, maybe trimming it
if you need it to. But for now, we
have an animation made from Adobe Animate exported directly
from that program, so now we can just upload this to whatever online
platform that we use. Now I want you to try
exporting your animation, whether it's a work in progress, whether it's a finished
piece of animation, to export it into a video file that maybe you can later upload
it if you want. Maybe you can just save
it into your computer, you can probably send it
as a text to your friend. I usually like to animate
a joke about my friends. I usually like to animate
my friends dancing and then being really goofy and then send the animation to them
and see how they react. Now you have the basics
to use Adobe Animate from starting from
scratch to animating, to understanding a bit of some of the tools
and the library, some of the timeline
settings for Adobe Animate, and then exporting that to
a finished piece of video.
8. Final Thoughts : We started from zero towards having a finished
animated piece. Now remember, this isn't a onetime thing of being
able to animate something. You're going to want to keep exploring different styles or maybe different projects using Adobe Animate and using different approaches
with Adobe Animate. Remember, it takes
a lot of practice, it takes a lot of
experimentation, and it takes a lot of
different approaches. I want to see what you created, so upload it to the project gallery so we
can all see it together. If you're thinking about taking this animation journey
pretty seriously, I would say keep
taking inspirations, keep talking to other
people in the community, and keep experimenting so you can actually
find your own voice. Because there's a
lot of rules and philosophies and ideas when
it comes to animation, but at the end of the day, we're all
problem-solving it as we go like I did with this class. If you've enjoyed this class, I have a bunch of other
classes on Skillshare, where I talk more about
other topics on animation, ranging from character design, story-boarding and scripting
to more on Adobe Animate. I hope you stick
around for those. Thanks for joining me
and I can't wait to see what we create
from this class.
Toniko Pantoja, 2D Animator, Character Designer
