Transcripts
1. Introduction: One of the reasons I love animation, is that I can tell a little bit longer of a story than I could with a static image. It gives the opportunity for me to add a beat of humor to my work. Hi, I'm Libby VanderPloeg and I'm an artist, illustrator, and designer based in Michigan. In today's class, I'm going to share with you my process for creating animated illustrations. So, I'll take the process step-by-step. First we will do storyboarding to hone in an idea, then we'll create our character in Procreate and then we'll export to Photoshop. Once we're in Photoshop, I'm going to show you how to create your animation and then I'll show you how to export it to whatever platform you choose to share it on. If you make a drawing, people see it in a second. But if they know that there's an action that's about to take place, you start to peak people's curiosity and make them want to stay and watch and see what's going to happen next. Even if it's just a five second video, a lot of things can happen in five seconds. I didn't go to school for animation and I didn't train as a typical animator, so my process for animation is really tailored to illustrators and designers who want to add just a little bit of motion to their work. Animation isn't just for the pros, it's for everyone. I can't wait to show you my process, so let's get started.
2. Storyboarding: So, today I'm going to be drawing a woman riding a bicycle and enjoying an ice cream cone. I chose a woman on a bicycle because a bicycle wheel can add a little bit of motion without having to do too much elaborate drawing and adding in a prop like an ice cream cone will give me another opportunity to add a little motion. The first part of our process is storyboarding. So, let's open up Procreate to get that started. So, we're opening up Procreate and the first thing I'm going to do is select a square size. I have a square specified here at 2048 by 2048 and that's definitely big enough for what we're going to do and actually a little bit bigger. So, I'm going to start a new file here and it's a blank canvas. So, once you have Procreate open just make sure you have the brush you want to use selected, right here. I like to use this dry ink brush, and then you can select your size right here, if you need it bigger or smaller, I kind of land somewhere in the middle for this. And then you can just start drawing some different thumbnails. So, I like to draw my thumbnail into a square frame like it's going to be. It doesn't need to be big, just big enough to get the idea across. So, I'm going to draw maybe four different layouts for what this might look like. Looking at the first sketch, we're not going to see much of the bike, there's not going to be very much opportunity to show movement here except for in the hair. So, I think that's not the best contender. And then if we look straight at the image of her straight on, we're not going to be able to see the wheels move, and her legs aren't going to move because she's going to be coasting, so the only opportunity for movement here that we'll see is just the hair. So, I don't think that's really quite the right direction either. If we look at the three-quarter view it's working and you're going to get some opportunity to show the wheels moving and the hair moving, but I think in the end I really like the geometry and the balance of the profile view. So, we're going to eliminate that and we're going to go with this profile view of the cyclist so that we can show her hair moving, we can maybe add a prop, I'm thinking maybe an ice cream cone could be fun because you definitely need to stay fueled up when you're riding your bike. And we can show the wheels move as well. So, now that we've picked our animation sort of storyboard, I'm just going to take the selection tool, get the other stuff out of the way here, and cut those out. I'm going to just move this into the center. We can just look at this one now and think, all right, we have a sort of environment starting, she's going to be moving in this direction on her bicycle, so everything that is attached to her is going to be pulling in the opposite direction, like her hair is naturally going to blow in the reverse way, so that's going to flutter out that way, and maybe these balls of ice cream are going to start to tilt in this way just a little bit as she's moving, so that will feel that direction that she's pushing in. The tires are going to move and jostle just a little bit, just to give that feeling of the road being a little bumpy and a little uneven. So we can add that element of movement there as well. The tires that we end up drawing in the final piece, we're not actually going to spin those and capture every revolution on the spin because it would just move too slow. So, really just going to draw two versions of the tires and flip those back and forth, and just that one flip back and forth is going to give you that feeling of speed and motion. So, now that we have our character sort of designed, I'm going to blow her up and have her fill up the frame. In order to bring up the copy and paste dialog box you'll need to use your three fingers to swipe. And I'm going to delete my other layer so I have just the character. I'll just blow her up to fill the frame. I had a brainstorm that it might be fun to make her even a little bit more competent of a rider and have her ride no-handed. So, I'm going to move the back arm, handlebar holding arm, and have her holding her hip. So, now I'm just going to go ahead and keep cleaning this up a little bit. The goal for this phase is not to have a final drawing, this is really just to get a framework for the rest of the animation and how your character is going to be structured within that frame. Thinking, going to give her cute jumper and some high top sneakers. We're pretty close here. I think that we are close enough in this sketch to start to work in color now. So, I think we're basically done when the storyboarding phase now and none of what we just did is really going to be used in the final piece. We'll just use it as a framework to draw our character. Next up, we'll start to create the layered pieces that are going to become our animated character.
3. Building Your Character: So, now I'm going to start building my character using layers. In my work, I use a lot of pink and blue, and kind of fresh, cool spring-like colors. I don't use too much yellow. I do like yellow and sometimes I use it as an accent. But, in general, I try to keep a minimal palette. Limiting the number of colors you use can be a great tool for when you're animating because if you're exporting things as a GIF, the more colors you add, the heavier the file size is going to get. So, I'm going to take my sketch, which is this inserted image layer. I'm just going to turn it to the multiply function, which is going to make it transparent. Then I'm going to scale the opacity down. So, now it's just a little ghost image that's going to help me as I draw. I'm going to go and add a layer, and then I'm going to put it behind that inserted image layer. I'm just going to rename this sketch to make it easier to know what's what. All right, and now we'll start drawing with some color. I'll open up my palettes here, and I'm going to use this palette I've created at the top called bicycling. For this piece, I've landed on nine colors, and in general, you should probably hammer out your color palette before you get started. In that way, you won't find yourself going down a rabbit hole of infinite color. The first thing I'm going to do is pick a skin color, and I'm going to start to draw that body. I'm going to try to be careful about creating a new layer every time I draw a new body part because when I'm done with this animation, it's going to be a lot easier to organize and export my layers if I can move things around that and they're not all attached to each other. To create a new layer, I'm just tapping on this plus icon, and that gives me a new layer. So, I'm going to break the body up into a few major parts: the head will be one part, the arm in front is going to be another part, the torso, and then the leg in front, the leg in back, and the arm in back. Don't worry about having too many layers at this point. I'm also going to just organize these layers quickly because I realized that I worked from front to back, and the things that are in the back, like this back arm right here, should be in the back of the layers. So, I've drawn all of the body parts, and now I'm going to start to draw some of the additional elements such as the hair and the clothing and accessories, maintaining layers so that everything can be moved around if it needs to be at this early stage of creation. One of my little tricks is that I usually don't use bright white. There's usually just a little bit of tint in the white, maybe it leans toward pink or maybe it leads towards yellow, but I think it helps all the other colors pop a little bit more. Since I've decided to give her white jumper, I'm also going to change the background color here, so that I can really see what I'm drawing. So, to change the background color, you go to the bottom layer, the Background Color layer. Click it, and then just pick a color and then it'll drop it right in there. I like this kind of neutral color here. I'm going to give her some high top sneakers, some sunglasses. We're almost ready to hide that sketch at this point because we've got all of our pieces. We still need to draw the bicycle though. So, I'm going to go back to the bottom, add a new layer, put it behind, and put the bike there. When you're drawing this bike, you don't need to go overboard with details. We're just creating a very simple framework that will make the viewers say, "Oh, yes that's a bike." I'm still working sketchy here because I just want to get all the colors and pieces in place, then I'll hide the sketch, and we'll make everything a little tighter and cleaner. But I'm going to make sure that I draw the wheels on their own layer because the wheels are going to be moving independently off the frame. Now, I'm going to go ahead and hide the sketch, and I'm going to brace myself because this is not going to look like a finished piece. But we're really just getting everything in place. So, it's pretty rough. We can see now where things are overlapping and where things need to go further back in the layers, like the back leg needs to move back behind the bicycle frame. Now, things are pretty well in place. So, now we can go into the individual layers and just tighten things up.
4. Refining Your Character: The goal of this phase is really to get all your details drawn and all of your foundational elements ready so that you don't have to add any more drawing details later on. So, now that we've hidden a sketch, we can see this is pretty rough, we're going to start cleaning things up. So, I'm going to start fleshing out these body parts, and I just noticed that I'm on the wrong layer right now so to undo that I'm going to double-tap with my two fingers and that'll undo the move. So, when I start to clean this up sometimes I'm going to use a different brush to kind of fill in areas more quickly, like I like this chalk brush to kind of cover bigger areas and add a little texture, which I'll do right here on her jumper. And sometimes I'll go and add just a little too much and then I'll just clean it up with the eraser once I'm done like so. And then I'm going to do this for the rest of the layers. So, I want to bring this ice cream cone a little bit closer to it because it seems a little bit implausible at this point. I have my ice cream selected and then I swipe right to select both layers. Now, I take my selection tool, I marquee that area, and then I take my arrow tool, and just scooch it over. If I want to zoom into an area to further refine it, I'll just use my two fingers to pinch or expand and then I can really start to refine those details and clean up those edges. To just move something without selecting an area, you can move all the contents of a layer just by tapping the arrow. When I was younger, I hated drawing people in profile, I thought it was the hardest thing to do, but I guess maybe I've just been trying to practice that and now it's kind of fun. Whenever I'm drawing people on bicycles, I like to include helmets because it is so important to be safe whether you're an animated character or an actual human being. I like to keep the edges just a little bit fuzzy or a little bit jagged here and there because it just feels more hand-drawn that way instead of when you're drawing in a vector-based program like Illustrator. Having a little bit of tooth to your line, is going to make it feel a little bit more handmade and might connect a little bit more with people. I can also rotate the canvas by pinching and rotating my fingers. So, I'm going to do that just to kind of work my way around this wheel and really get it perfect. But I want to mention that we don't want a perfect circle because then if we flip a perfect circle, we won't see any difference. And just to save a little time, I actually really like this circle that I did here and I don't want to have to redo this circle or get it perfect. So, I'm going to show you how to just copy and paste that tire. I'm going to draw the marquee around it and then I'm going to triple swipe to bring up my dialog box and then I'm going to copy and paste. Now, I have another one of these and now I'm going to flip it vertical. So, it's a little different and now I'll just move that wheel over here and I have two nice wheels. Now I'll just go back to that layer on which I had both of the tires and I'll delete the extra. A little secret too, if you want to draw a straight line in Procreate, you just draw your line and then hold it for a second and now you can draw a straight line in any direction. So, now we have the foundation of the drawing pretty much ready and we can just go in and add some fun details now. Some dots on her jumper and how about a stripe on the bike frame, and if we want we can select the bike frame by pulling over this side menu, selecting that, and now I can just kind of scribble on top and still have it be within just the selected area. That's a nice little detail. We'll give some flavors to this ice cream cone. Actually let's add another scoop too, right in the middle, a nice white accent. Adding that little white scoop will kind of balance out some of the white that we see in the other elements of the drawing. Let's give it some chocolates stripes and some mint chip would be good, and the pink scoop will just be plain because we don't need pattern everywhere. So, now that we have the foundation drawing done and have added in the elements, we're going to start to merge those layers down.
5. Consolidating Your Layers: So, now that we've got our drawing done, we're ready to start organizing layers. So, some of the elements we're going to want to merge down into one layer and other things we're going to want to keep separate. We're going to want to keep the wheels separate from the bike frame, we're going to want to keep the woman's figure separate from the bike frame, we can keep the ice cream as one unit. So, we'll just go in here and we'll start doing things like take the bike frame, take the wheels by swiping right, we can select all three. Then, if we select this little toggle layer icon here, we've created a group and we'll name that group, bike frame. Okay. We'll close that. We're going to keep this back leg right here, we're going to just call that back leg. We don't want that to merge with the front of the figure, so we'll keep that separate and we'll keep it behind the bike frame. Now, everything else here looks like it's the woman and the ice cream cone. Now, let's keep the ice cream cone separate from the figure, but we'll merge it down into one by pressing merged down and we'll call this ice cream. I see we had sunglasses, let's put the sunglasses with the helmet and we've got sunglasses, helmet, and hair. So, let's merge those down into one thing. We'll call that helmet hair. We just put that on the very top, just get it on the way. The rest of this stuff, it's all going to be moving together or not moving together. So, we can just merge all of this down. All right. So, now we have the body and we'll rename this body. So now, we really knock down the number of layers and that's just going to make it easier to work within Photoshop. I've isolated certain elements of the drawing, because those are elements that are going to involve movement. For instance, the hair, we're going to have the hair flow. So, I need to be able to adjust that layer independent of the other parts. The ice cream, we're going to have those balls move a little bit, so that we see a little motion from the wind and bouncing on the bike. So, we're going to keep those separate and the same with the wheels in the bike frame, those are going to move, so they need to be on their own layer too. Actually, we can merge those two tires down, just to make a little less layers. Now that you're looking at these layers, you might think to yourself, "Why don't we just put the body and back leg together?" Well, that's because the back leg needs to be behind the bike frame to make sense. If we take the back leg and move it above the bike frame, as you can see, now she's riding side saddle and we don't want it to ride side saddle. So, I'll put that back leg, back behind the bike frame and we'll just keep it separate. I'm also going to delete the sketch there, just by swiping left you're going to pull up some options. So, delete.
6. Adding Layers for Animation: So, we're done merging layers at this point. Now, we're going to have to do a little bit of extra drawing from the layers that we've already created in order to have the additional drawing elements that we need in order to illustrate motion. So, now we're going to swipe left to duplicate the hair layer, helmet hair layer, and I'm going to just dim this a little bit, and you'll see why in a second, because I want to have this hair kind of fan out and I want to watch what I'm doing to see how the two layers line up. So, I'm just now drawing and adding a little bit onto that layer and making that hair at flow out a little bit more. We're going to do that again, with this layer we'll duplicate it, and now, well, just the opacity down again. Then we can see all the layers together once I've draw on top of this layer. They are all the same value of black, I've just adjusted the opacity only so that I can see how the three layers are going to line up together. We want to create a fanning motion. So, you can see there, you see all three layers and they're all together creating an undulating motion, which we'll use in our animation portion. It may look like you're not seeing a lot of movement here because the three layers aren't that different from each other, but you're going to see a nice span of size here when you put it all together. So, what looks like a little bit of movement in this drawing, will actually look like a lot of movement once you animate it. You can think of the way we're drawing this sort of as like a flip book. So, when we go into Photoshop and start doing the frame-by-frame animation and we're showing one of these layers at a time, it's going to work like a flip book where even a little bit of movement ends up becoming a motion when you string all of those frames together. Now that I see all the three layers together, I think I'm going to see if I can make that hair just lift a little bit off of her back. So, I'll just hide these now. We're at the bottom, hair layer. So, I'll just add a little bit down here along her arm, and then the next layer will naturally start to lift up. Now, I'm just bringing the opacity up to a hundred there. I'm going to hide that one. Now go to this one, and we'll just shave off a little bit of the bottom there, and now it will have a nice upward trajectory. So, the hair is ready, and we'll put those in a folder together now to keep things organized. So, I go back to that layer folder icon and we'll rename this hair helmet, or helmet hair to keep things consistent. Now, we're going to do some iterations of the ice cream to create that same feeling of motion. So, as we did before, we're going to duplicate that ice cream layer, and we'll just bump down the opacity on it and now, instead of drawing on top of it we're just going to tilt with the selection tool. We're going to select the top two scoops of ice cream and we'll tilt them towards her. So, with my fingers, you just adjust the angle. So, you can see the scoops are slowly moving towards her. Now, we'll duplicate that layer, we'll bump down the opacity, and select the top two scoops. I don't have to be too exact about it. I will just tilt those two scoops. Now, we have a very subtle little fanning motion there as well. So now, I need to go and clean up those layers because there might be some gaps where we cut things. I'm just going to bring up the opacity and make sure it's at a hundred on all of those. Now, I'm going to hide the bottom too and actually it's looking pretty good. I'm just going to zoom in, you can see the mint chip needs a little touch up. So now that we have all the ice cream scoops adjusted, we're going to group those together as well, and we'll call that layer or that group, Ice Cream. So now, I'm going to go into the bike frame folder, and I'm going to take a look at these wheels, and I'm going to create a second set of wheels just by simply duplicating the wheel layer. I'm actually going to label these as well. I'm going to call this Wheel2 or Wheels2 and I'll call the other one Wheels1. You'll be glad you labelled things clearly when you get into Photoshop. So now, let's adjust the opacity on one of the wheel layers. As we'll see, you don't see any change because I haven't flipped them or anything yet. So, let's now go ahead and flip them and see if we get enough difference here in wheels, or what if we flipped vertically. Now, if we flip them vertically, we can start to see there's a little bit of a difference there, but it's not very noticeable. So, maybe I should squash one of the wheels a little bit just to give a little bit more difference and distinction between the two sets of wheels. So, I'll select the wheel area and I'm on the wheel two, let's just see here. Can make a really skinny and then it'll be too different, can make it really wide still too different. So, let's just bring it in a little bit here just so that we can just have a little bit of difference between the two layers, and we'll do the same with the back wheel. We can go right about there. Right. So now, we have two sets of wheels, we have three different ice creams, we have three different hair frames or three different hair layers, a body, and a bike frame. There's only one more thing I would recommend and that's taking a last look at the Canvas, and maybe pull away a little bit. You can see here that the art isn't quite centered on the mat. So, let's just grab everything just like this, select all the layers, take that little arrow tool and just center it. You see when you look at the marque, just make sure that the spacing around her looks even and it does now. So, looks like we're all centered here, I'm just going to take one last look at my layers and make sure everything's organized within the folders and I see here, I'm probably going to want to layer these hair layers with numbers at the end so I can keep them straight. So, we'll put three on the end of this one, two, one, and we'll do the same in the ice cream folder. Now, I think we are ready to export these layers. So, open up the wrench icon and in there you're going to find the share button, click on the share button and export as a PSD. Now you get to select where you want to export that to. I use Drive myself, so I will select Drive. Now I can pick my folder that I want to drop it into or I can just drop it into the top level of Drive. I'll just save it right in there, and we'll title it as well, just to keep it organized. We'll call it Bike girl.psd and upload. Export successful. So, we're ready to go to Photoshop.
7. Animating in Photoshop: So, now that we have all our layers we're ready to open up that file in Photoshop and use the Timeline panel to create our animation. So, I'm going to go to File to the drop down menu and click "Open". Go to my desktop and there I see it, Bike girl.psd. I'll open that up and now as you can see here in the Layers panel I have all of those layers labeled and they're all maintained after the export. So now, I'm going to open up the Timeline panel, and you're going to find that under Window. Scroll down to timeline, it's near the bottom, and that pops open the bottom bar underneath the image window. Here's where we're going to build our timeline animation. So, we haven't choice here. We have to click in the center and select either video timeline or create frame animation. Since we're gonna do one frame at a time and show and hide layers to create the illusion of motion, we're going to use Create Frame Animation and that will populate the first frame of the timeline. So, now we're going to start to add frames to our animation. What we'll do here to create that illusion of motion is show and hide different layers since we drew different hair layers for instance. Here we go. You'll see that when we show and hide those layers we're going to get the illusion of motion. I noticed here that when I exported the file from Procreate I have both of the wheel layer showing, so I'm just going to start by hiding one of those wheel layers and just show Wheels1 for frame number one. So, we have our first frame created and now we're going to add a second frame which is really just a duplicate of the frame before it. So, now we have two identical frames, we see no motion. So, let's start to add some motion by hiding and showing things. We will hide hair number one and show hair number two, and we'll hide Ice Cream1 and we'll show Ice Cream2. Now we'll use Wheels2 and hide Wheels1. We can see here that we didn't have the opacity adjusted on Wheels2, so we'll change the opacity right here at the top of the layers box to 100 percent. Great. Now, we'll make sure that when you go between the two you can start to see a little bit emotion. So, let's add another frame. Third frame, we're going to show wheels number one again, and we're going to move to a ice cream number three. We're going to do hair number three, and that's great. Now you'll really start to see some motion happening. So, now we have three distinct frames, and let's go to this menu here that says once and we'll change it to forever. That'll allow this loop to play infinitely so we can watch it and critique it. So,I'm going to start at one and I'm going to hit the spacebar on my keyboard and that's going to play the video. That looks a little weird, right? It's a little too fast and choppy, and we're definitely going to want to adjust the speed of the frames. So, let's do that first. So, if we select all of the frames at once by holding the Shift key down and then clicking on the last frame, now we can see all the frames are selected. Now, you go to this drop down menu where it says zero seconds and adjust here. I personally like to do things for 0.15 seconds to start and that's on Other, Custom, Time. So you just enter that in, hit "OK", and now let's try that playback again. Okay. The speed is looking all right but as you can see there's a little bit of a pause with the wheels. The reason we're seeing that pause is because if I stop the video and I look at frame number one, and go to my Layers panel, I see that we have Wheels1 showing on frame number one, and we have Wheels1 showing on frame number three. So, we're seeing that twice in a row which makes it too long. We need to show wheels number two as the last frame in our loop. So the easiest thing to do here would be to duplicate the second frame and take us back to that middle step of our animation. So I'm going to hold the Option button down and drag frame number two to the end. That'll create a duplicate of that middle action which will step us right back down to our original starting point. Now, let's try playing the animation. So, much more fluid. I think we could make it go just to touch faster though. So, let's try adjusting the duration of the frames again. So, I'll click the drop-down menu, and let's try 0.1 seconds this time, it's just a little bit faster. I like that. It's a little bit more energetic. So now that we have our animation pretty much set, I like to just pull away, zoom out a little bit and then play the animation to make sure that all of my motion is still noticeable, so if somebody's looking at it on a small screen size they can still see that motion without it being too minimal, or on the contrary it being to exaggerated. I think here looking at it smile you can really see the motion and it's not too exaggerated, and I think it's just right. That's it. See how easy that was? When you take the time to get organized and layer all your files before you bring them into Photoshop, then when you go to create your animation it's really just clicking a few buttons and pressing "Play".
8. Adding Elements in Photoshop: Now, I'm going to show you the kinds of things you can add at this stage of the animation, and I'll also touch on some of the things that are a little more complicated to add if you hadn't planned for them in your original drawing. So, the easiest way to really adjust your animation at this point with drawing is to add new things on top. So, I think something that would be fun to add here would be some shoelaces fluttering. So, I'm going to zoom in to this shoe here, and make sure I'm selecting that body layer which is what that shoe is on. Now, I'm going to draw on top of that body layer by starting a new layer. So, Command Shift N will give us a new layer and we'll call it Shoelace one. Now, we're going to get our paintbrush. We're going to go into our paintbrushes, and as you can see, I've got a whole bunch of Kyle Webster brushes here that look and feel like paint. So, Photoshop does come stocked with some of these Kyle Webster brushes but if you want to purchase additional ones, you can do that through his website. Check out the class resources to find the link. I like this Sketchy Sketcherton. We'll try Sketchy Sketcherton to make the shoelace, and that should have a similar line quality in what we've used before. If I press the Option button, I'll get the Eyedropper tool. So, I'll press the Option button, and I'll click this white circle with my touchpad and now, I have white in my palette so I have a nice white shoelace. So, I'm just going to draw like that, it looks nice and hand-drawn, draw nice big shoelace. All right, and instead of drawing a new shoelace for every layer, I'm just going to duplicate this and rotate it. So, I've got Shoelace one, I'm going to hit Control to bring up this menu and I'm going to select Duplicate Layer. I'll rename this Shoelace two. To rotate the shoelace, I'm just going to hit Command T for the transform box, I'm going to take the center point here and I'm going to move it to the center point of where shoelace will pivot from, which is where that knot in the shoelaces. So, I move the center point there and now, I can just rotate it up, and we're doing that same thing where we're going to create a fanning motion. So, I'm going to take Shoelace two, hit Control to bring up the menu, hit Duplicate Layer, rename this one Shoelace three because we're doing these in multiples of threes. Now, we're going to hit Command T for the transform again. We're going to move the center point to where the knot on the shoelaces again, rotate it up a little, and now, we have three shoelaces. So, let's see how that looks. We'll zoom out, we'll hide Shoelace three, we'll hide Shoelace two. Now, we can just go to frame two, we're going to show Shoelace two on frame two. Now, we'll go to frame three, we're going to show Shoelace three in frame three, we'll go to frame four and we'll show Shoelace two, which is our intermediary. Now, we'll press Play and see if that shoelace added anything. It's just the most subtle, little detail but it does add just a little bit extra motion to the whole piece. So, it's easy to add things, but the one thing you can't do when you're animating in Photoshop is rotate things without them affecting every other frame in the animation. I'm going to give you an example. So, let's say you're thinking it might be cool if she pops a wheelie on the third frame of your animation. Let's see what happens when we try to tilt her in the third frame. So, here I am, I'm on frame three, and I'm going to select all of the layers and I'm going to hit Transform Command T for transform. Now, I see that center point, it's in the very center, I'm going to move it down to the bottom center of her back wheel, because that's where she would tilt from. Now, if I go up to this upper corner and I just tilt her back, should let us preview this for a second. Let's give it a second. So, now we have her on the third frame popping a wheelie. But if you look down here, you can see it in the preview, they look like they all tilted. So, now if I play my animation, she's just basically flying in the outer space and that's not what we're going for here, although it is interesting. So, I'm going to hit Spacebar to make it stop, and I'm going to undo that. The one thing we could do here though, is make her bump up a little, maybe she hits a bump in the road. So, let's try that. On frame three, we still have all the layer selected, so let's just move her up a couple pixels and then on frame four, we move her up one. So, let's see what happens when we play that. So, now she's bumping along the road. I still like it more simplified without her bumping along the road, so I'm going to hit Pause and I'm going to hit Undo. There we go. So, to recap, there are some things you can do in Photoshop but for the most part, you're going to want to have everything drawn and planned out before you get there. In this next video, I'm going to show you how to export your animation in a couple of different ways.
9. Exporting Your Animation: Now, that we've created the animation, I'm going to show you how to export it. I'll show you how to export it both as a GIF and as an MP4 because you're going to need different formats for different platforms. GIFs are great for websites and MP4s or videos are a little bit better for social media. So, first I'm going to show you how to export it as a GIF. So, we're going to go to the file menu and go to the dropdown, go to export and you'll see here save for web. We'll click that. This is going to bring up your export window for when you want to make a GIF or a JPEG or PNG. So, in the upper right here we're going to go to this dropdown menu that says JPEG, and we'll select GIF. Now, you can see here it pulls up different options that you can scroll through. Before we start adjusting things over in this right-hand panel, let's take a look down here at the lower left corner. We can see the file size, it's 515.5K. That means it's under a megabyte which is really small for GIF. So, we're in really good shape sizewise. I like to keep things smaller than three megs tops, if I can. It just makes files load a lot faster on websites and that's important if you're working with a client who is trying to optimize their page load time. You'll also want to note that the more frames that you have in your animation, the bigger the file size is going to get too. So, keep that in mind as you're laying out your frames. That also brings up a point about color. If you remember when I was designing this earlier, I really limited the number of colors that I use. That's because the more colors you use, the bigger the file is going to get. So, not only do I like design wise keeping my colors pared down and keeping a concise palette, but it also makes my end product load a lot faster and be a lot more efficient. So, just so you know, let's say that this was maybe five megabytes and I wanted to try to reduce the colors at this stage. I can definitely do that up here in this box. It's highlighted now. Right now we are at 256 colors, but if I go to that dropdown menu I can go down to 128 colors. Once I do that, you can see it shaved off about a 100 kilobytes which isn't really important here. But we can see that it doesn't really change the way the file looks. So, that's good. Now, if I wanted to go and make it even smaller like say, well maybe I can get it down to 16 colors. Once I do that, you can see it changed some of the way the colors show. So, now my green isn't as bright. So, that's not something we want to do. If you can avoid it, you're going to want to probably avoid making your file less than a 128 colors. Since we have so much wiggle room here, we're just going to go with 256. Now down here, we can change the image size. Down under image size, we can change the size of our final export. We're really not going to need this at 2048 pixels square. We're probably only going to need it at a max of 1080 pixels. So, let's just make our GIF 1080 pixels square. You can see it made the file smaller because it shrank in the window and we can preview the play here if we want by pressing Play. It just plays back a little bit slower in this preview mode but don't let it trick you. It's still moving at that point when frame second link that we specified. So, I'm going to hit stop and now we're ready to just hit save. So, I hit save and now I can name that GIF. We will call it Bike-girl and hit save. It'll save it to my desktop because I have that selected. So, now let's preview our GIF in a web browser and make sure it plays as intended. So, now I'm going to open up Google Chrome and I'll just drag my GIF right into the window, just drop it right in there, and look it plays, and it's playing as we wanted it to. So, that GIF is great to upload to websites, but if you want to upload to something like Instagram or some kind of social media then you might want to export it as an MP4 video. I believe the minimum length that you can upload a video to Instagram might be three seconds but these things are always changing. So, I try to aim for around a five second video. That way I get a nice loop, it's a good length and it's not too choppy. But since it's five seconds and I only have 0.4 seconds of video, that means I'm going to have to duplicate some of these frames. So, I'm going to select all four frames by hitting the shift button. So, we've got all four frames selected and I'm going to hit the option button and drag starting from the one to after the fourth frame. Now, I have all four frames duplicated to make a total of eight frames. I'm going to select one, hold the shift button down to select all eight frames, and I'm going to hit that option and drag again. So, now I have 16 frames and now I'm going to start at one again, hit this shift button to select up to the 16th frame, and I'm going to hit option and duplicate again. Now, I have 32. I only need 16 more frames. So, I'm just not going to select all of them. This time I'm just going to keep my selection at the last 16, hit option, and drag out to the end after the 32, and now we have 48 frames which is plenty for our five second-ish animation. So, we're going to go back up to the file menu, to the dropdown, and click on export, but this time we're going to hit render video. So, we have some new choices to make here. We want to select Adobe Media Encoder and then H.264 is the format we want. We want high quality. We can set a custom size here and this is something you're going to want to experiment with. In my experience, I don't think you need anything bigger than 650 by 650 for Instagram, because the app's going to compress down anything larger. But you can export it in a larger size. If you want to have a 1080 by 1080, higher-quality video, you just might not need it for Instagram. And you'll want to select 30 frames per second. I don't mess with any of these other options down here. I think they'll just be fine as whatever the default is. Now we hit render, and it's ready to preview. So, to preview the video you can actually just have the MP4 selected on your desktop and hit the space bar, and now it'll just play. As you can see, it looks good. Once you are ready to share the video on Instagram, don't forget that you have a fun opportunity to add another layer to the story by coming up with a fun caption, something like, look ma, no hands.
10. Conclusion: That's it. We created a drawing in Procreate, and turn it into an animation in Photoshop. Now, that you know the basics of how to create an animation like this, you can get more creative and more elaborate in your future projects. The one thing I'd like you to take away is that, to create an animation like this that really feels pretty simple, you're still going to need to draw. There aren't really any shortcut apps that can do that for you. Your own hand is going to make this piece individual. Hope you enjoyed the class. I really can't wait to see what kind of projects you create from the lesson. I just want you to remember that, knowing how to make a gift is an important skill whether you call it a gift [inaudible]. But remember, with gift power comes gift responsibility. Use your gifts wisely.
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Libby VanderPloeg, Artist and Illustrator
