Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hello, welcome to this
lesson where I will show you how to make an
animation using Adobe Photoshop and
video editing software like iMovie or Final Cut Pro. My name is Sam the builder
and I'm an illustrator and cartoonist with a background
in contemporary dance. As an illustrator, animation was always
very appealing to me. And especially these days when social network sites
favor moving images, clips over just
normal illustrations. But yeah, there's a lot of animation software out there and they also all have
a learning curve. But I realized that I could make animations using the software
I was already using, which was Adobe
Photoshop and iMovie, which comes free with any Mac. Later on I started using Final
Cut Pro for the editing. And I basically haven't
looked back since. But in this course I will show you how to
use both of them. I will also show you three
different ways to animate. The first one is the
frame-by-frame animation like this guy over here. Then there's the jump
cut style that's used often in
Japanese animations. And then there's animating using keyframes in editing software. You can make really
cool and interesting animations combining
these three styles. My goal for this lesson is
that after watching it, you could be sitting in the
evening in front of TV, get struck with an idea. And then using the
tools I will show you, be able to create
this animation and have it up that same
evening on Instagram, e.g. a big part of working
quickly is knowing the shortcuts of each
program. So e.g. when you're drawing
with your right hand, you have your left hand on the keyboard and you
use older command, command Z to undo
Command B, etc. So I will show you
those shortcuts, which will speed up
your process a lot. So, yeah, let's get cracking. I'll see you in lesson one.
2. Comparing iMovie and Final Cut Pro for animation purposes: Let's start with comparing
the two editing programs. Like I mentioned, iMovie comes free with
any Mac computer. So it's probably the first
option for beginner animators. Final Cut is available for free for a trial period for
a couple of months. And after that it takes
a onetime payment. Imovie as many limitations. But that also means it's a very simple and quick
program to learn how to use. It's very intuitive. Final Cut Pro takes some
time to learn how to use. And it basically has
all the possibilities of wheat, but then many, many more on top of that good example is
the number of layers. As you see, I can add a figure
on a background in iMovie. But if I try to add
one more layer, I can. So it's only two layers. Final Cut Pro has an
infinite amount of layers. I will explain keyframing
in another separate lesson, but both programs
have keyframes. Imovie only has left to right and up and
down possibilities, which is enough for
simple animations or explainer videos, e.g. Final Cut Pro can do almost anything you can
think of with keyframes, also rotating in any degree. And you can also see
the actual nodes. So it's very easy to edit and make precisely timed animation. To summarize, I would
say iMovie is best for simple frame-by-frame
animations. And Final Cut is best for complex and precisely
timed animations.
3. Adobe Photoshop - drawing for the three styles of animating: The base of animation is drawing multiple frames and then moving
them like in a flip book. An easy way to understand
this concept is by looking at that famous first
movie of a horse running. Or look at this running
cycle I took from a movie. I took screenshots each frame. And if you play them
back in a loop, you have a running cycle. Then this can be
turned into animation. Regardless of whether
you will be using iMovie or Final Cut Pro, will start making
the actual drawings and Adobe Photoshop. It's very important to
sketch on a layer and draw each moving parts
on a separate layer. I'll explain the three styles of animating using this
little waving grandma. In the flip book style, we draw the whole picture
again as much as needed. You can reduce the opacity of the previous drawing
to stay close to the underlying shape that I recommend not sticking
too close to it. If the body is a
little bit different, even though it
shouldn't be moving, it gives the animation life. When you export the files, it's very important to turn off the background and
export it as a PNG file. There are two ways to do
this in Adobe Photoshop. Be click on the layer to
access Quick Export as PNG, to export it in
the quickest way. It'll be saved automatically to your desktop under the
name of the layer. In the other way, you go to Save a copy and save it like
that also as a PNG file. The difference though is
that quick export saves only the drawing cropped without its relationship
to the art board. The second way keeps that art board as kind of a ghost
in the background, even though it's transparent. This comes in handy
later when we start editing and
the other software. So yes, that's the flip
book style waving grandma, hello, a jump cut. It's easy to understand
from looking at this example, grandma surprise. So instead of drawing
multiple frames to have her go to the side, I instantly cut
to the mainframe, like when Johnny Bravo hits his pose or the background
characters in anime. The third way, keyframing is used in video
editing software. And it's very useful to speed
up the animation process. Here, e.g. I. Could draw just the
body of the grandma without the hand and
then draw just the hand. And later with keyframes, I make the hand move. But more on that later. Let me show you the
shortcuts I use most when I use Adobe Photoshop
for illustrating. When you open a new file, you'll just have a
background which is locked, and you'll want to turn the lock off and create a new layer, which you can do easily by
clicking this plus on this, I'm going to put in
my first drawing, which I have drawn
with the pencil. One easy way to see
what all the shortcuts for everything is
hovering over it. So you can see the
paint bucket tool has G written next to it. Which means if I'm in my
drawing and I press G, I'll automatically go
to the Paint Bucket, Tool them so I can pick a color and make this
a little green man. Back to the pencil clicking B. Okay, so I'm going to
make his hand move. So I can just drag this to
the plus to make a new layer. This is also a shortcut. The regular way would be to be to click beak lake
and duplicate layer. Okay. I'll test three steps, right? And dragging it
was just one step. I can also even drag it to the trash can to delete a layer. And as always in most programs, Command Z undoes my last step, which was deleting this. So I don't need you. An easy way to animate is if I'm going to change the arm in
this second layer here, is to reduce the opacity
of the underlying layer. And then E is the Eraser tool. Erase that part of the arm
back to the B for the brush, and just draw the loop. As you see, I'm still in green. Now I can use the, I press I to pick that black
color and back to the brush. So I didn't have to go
all the way over there, slide back to black, go all the way over there. I could just, with my hand, which is already
on the keyboard. Pick the color picker,
picking a black spot, spot, back to the brush
tool and draw my arm. Not just the things on
the side have shortcuts, but every option you can think of is possible to be a shortcut. The most of them have been
decided for you, e.g. undo Command Z, like
I mentioned before. But I want to have
flip horizontal. I want to create a shortcut
because I don't always want to go all the way over
there and find where it is. That takes too much time. So what Command Z, undo? That's why there is this
keyboard shortcuts option. And the option was in edit. So click Edit wants
to love bottom. Here, flip horizontal. And I can create
my own shortcut. I will use command underscore. Now, if I enter something that exists already
like Command Z, it'll show up because
you don't want to overwrite another shortcut
that exists already. Unless you want to, of course, but better not to, better to find something
that doesn't exist. So Command underscore. Okay, and now if I
highlight something, flip his head, then
I can just select his head command underscore
and it's changed. So instead of
looking to the left, he's looking to the right. So yeah, there are so many
ways to speed up the process because going up or going there just takes a few
seconds of course, but when you're illustrating
for a few hours, all those seconds add up. Keep your left hand
on the keyboard, and keep using all
those shortcuts.
4. iMovie - animating the 3 styles: Let's look at iMovie
for animation. Like I mentioned
in the comparison, iMovie has less options. So I suggest keeping
it very simple. But that doesn't
mean it can't be really cool animation like this. Nude, nude, e.g. this was a viral hit. And so many people made their own versions
of this animation. And it's very simple
if you analyze it. First, it's just a few
frame-by-frame animations, not even that many. I count about 24. Then it's just one
colored image with a zoo. And that Zoom is called
Ken Burns in iMovie, which is a very
easy trick to do. So let's use these techniques
with our grandma example. One important thing is that we only have two layers,
like I mentioned. So if you find a
nice background, let's say I want to put grams on this checkered background. And I drag the PNG of
grandma into this, turn it into picture,
picture, in picture. Then I will actually have
grandma on that background. Of course, now I've taken
up both of my layers. So a better way
would be to not have a background and just make a similar
background in Photoshop. And then exported as a JPEG. Do that for each grandma. Grandma. Drag them in the timeline. We have our grandma
already in time and space perfectly
adjusted for animation. Now, when you draw a, Enter a JPEG or a file, it would automatically
be set to 4 s. So that's very long
for our purposes, 1234, so we just
need a split second. And the good thing about
iMovie is that you can select multiple frames and all turn
them into the same length. So let's say 0.2. Okay? So I have grandmas
hand on the left, in the middle and on the right. So I need grandma's
hand in the middle of one more time to
create a smooth loop. Click Option, drag it out. Select everything. Option, drag spacebar to play. And do. Yes, perfect. So now we're still
only in one layer. So if I wanted to, I could add something else. Just because I have it handy. Let's use this hand here. Picture in picture to
make it transparent. Like this. Transparency is because iMovie automatically feeds images in. So slide this all the way to the left to make it
visible instantly. So let's say the thing she's surprised about
is this floating. Grandma's waving hello. All of a sudden
at hand shows up. Its market in space
and time drops. Here. Keyframe it, this,
now it says little x. So if I wanted to
remove that keyframe, I'd have to click it again. So now there's a keyframe. Then let's have it drop out and get it again. Drop the hand. And it automatically added
a keyframe. Let's see. Dropped. Right, perfect. Then of course, audio. And there's always
sound effects. So what would be funny? Racecar driving by
when they hand drops? If you wanted to. You could add some music. See you bye. Command B, also in this
program for a cat delete. And we have our animation. I'll say hello, Good. One more trick to
speed up your process is to work with fewer layers. How many frames do you
think this animation has? Only for the trick
I used here is to only use two frames for
the basketball dribbling. And because I used half transparent balls
in the background, it creates a sense of movement. And you just toggle
between up and down, up and down, up and down. So that is, uh, to
frame-by-frame loop. So flip book of two frames
and then a jump cut. And I use the sound effect of the camera to accent
that jump effect. And then with the sound effect
of the swish of the net, you also get that
sense of closure. A very quick way to animate e.g. explainer videos, or to put
a funny idea into action. Here is that concept used
again for a boxing speech than just a couple of frames looped over and over with a
cool sound effect.
5. Final Cut Pro - animating the 3 styles: Let's go to Final Cut Pro. Make a new library
and a new project. If you're uploading
to Instagram, sent to your video
size to Custom, and then 1080 by 1920. That will give you that
long portrait view that Instagram Reels have. Now just dropping all
the illustrations you made in Adobe Photoshop, making sure that they are all
PNG files for this project. Most of them I saved with the
whole art board in the bag. That ghost background
I mentioned in the Adobe Photoshop lesson. But some moving parts
like arms and eyes, they saved as quick PNG files
without the background. So I'll show you the
three illustration styles which fit perfectly
in this project. First, I have the frame-by-frame flip book movement in his hand. I did split the body
into a separate layer, which is now in the background. And on top of that, I have my three arms frame-by-frame
flip booking. For the left and right
moving of his arms. I used jump cuts. But for the arm's
going down movement, which is the highlight
of this clip, I used keyframes because I want this to be as
smooth as possible. This is where the exporting
as quick PNG comes in handy. You see when I
select the arm in, draws a box just around the arm. And this makes it
easy to rotate. If I still had the
Holy Ghost background, I would rotate according to
the size of the background, and that would make it
very tricky to edit. Let's do a little
quick side lesson on how to use keyframes. This is a picture I took and then I moved
his keep a little bit. And three times, three
different settings of the cape. And then I just looped. So it looks like to keep, is moving into width. So let's give ourselves some space to work on
as a moving backwards. So Command C for copying this and Command
V or pasting it. So now, in order to make this easy to edit and we'll just highlighted
be click my mouse. New compound clip. Let's have this as the ground. Now. My background layer is
just keep in the wind. And I have this PNG. So I took a picture of this man and deleted
the background. So it's a PNG file of just
this little guy here. Now. Click Transform is to see. So let's make him about his big. Okay, perfect. So now the good thing about Final Cut Pro
is that you can see nodes of your keyframes. So you beat click on a
clip, show video animation. As you see, there is
a shortcut Control V, which you'll be using a lot. So let's just use
a Control V open. This transform has
position rotation scale on every access which I was
using before or x and y. All can be keyframes. And if you click in the clip, you also have Add keyframe here. So what I want to do is I want to have an off-screen
at the beginning. So I drag him off screen, having fly in and add a
keyframe to start with, as you see now, let me zoom in. Here. There will
be a keyframe at it and you can see which
keyframes, all of them. So this Lego man
is marked in time, position, scale, rotation, etc. Now, I want to have in, fly in. As you see, it creates a line to see where
he started from. Maybe a little. Rotation is cool. Now I can preview by
going to the timeline. And maybe it might be nice to have in kind of sway a little, then a little higher and
rotate a little more. You can see it automatically
adds a keyframe. Then maybe a little higher up. Sorry, I was still
haven't moved my time. Control Z, moving the timeline, the timeline down, rotate. Now if we wanted to preview, press space bar, that
was way too quick. So let's make it slower. Drag it out. Now. We have more time. And you can just click these
keyframes and drag them out. Very easy to edit. This preview again. Walk Perfect. That's it. Now you have this
wide white box. So I would suggest when
you're finished with it, highlighted and Control V again. So it just becomes final Cut. Pro has an infinite amount
of layers possibility, which gives you a lot
of opportunities. In this project. E.g. I.
Could detach the audio from the original movie
clip and animate separate mouth shapes to
put onto another layer. The mouths are a mix of frame-by-frame and
sometimes keyframing. In Final Cut Pro editing
is very intuitive. You just drag the length of
the clips along the timeline. Whichever one you
put on top gets priority over the bottom layers. The shortcuts that will speed up your process in
Final Cut Pro are spreading two fingers
open and close on the trackpad to zoom in
and out of the timeline. Spacebar to start and
stop playing a clip. Hold option and drag
a clip to copy it. Command B for splitting a clip into and Control V for showing the keyframe
nodes in a clip. These are the techniques I would suggest you use
in Final Cut Pro. And yeah, that's my advice. Use those shortcuts.
6. Final remarks: Thank you for
watching this lesson. I hope you had fun and that you're ready to start animating. If you use these
three techniques, you can become very quick
and pick your battles. They tried to spend a lot of time on certain parts,
the main parts. But other parts might be
better to use jump cuts for. Because if you're uploading
to Instagram, e.g. you're at the whim
of the algorithm. If you've spent 20 h on an animation and you're hardly get likes or views.
That might be tough. So spend enough time
on it that you're intrinsically
enjoying the project regardless of the outcome, and then likes or views
or just the bones. Because in the end, the
point is to have fun and to get better and more efficient at your artistic expression. So, yeah, let me see
what you come up with and I look forward to
seeing your clips. Thank you. Bye bye.
Sam De Belder, Cartoonist - Illustrator
