Transcripts
1. Introduction: Every movement in the
body has an intent and animation is the art of
decoding the magic of movement. Hello, I'm Debjyoti Saha, an Animation Filmmaker
and Illustrator. I started my animation
journey five years ago, and now I'm the founder of my own animation studio,
Goppo Animation. I've had a lot of
fun working with amazing artists such
as Prabh Deep, Divine, see and also have an animated title sequence for the Netflix film Looop Lapeta. All my life, I was very
interested and fascinated with animation content
be it in films, CDs or cartoon shows we
used to watch as a kid. As soon as I got to know about the process behind
animation film-making, I completely got hooked. Each one of us have
very unique lives and unique experiences
to tell and rendering this out in the form
of animation when bringing them to life
is what I strive for. In this class, I'm going
to take you through the step-by-step process of making an animated
reel for social media. Reels have become our
primary source of consumption of content and
effective storytelling through the medium of reels
is going to help you catch those eyeballs and going to
make your work stand out. When I was starting out, I would have really liked if there was a course that would give me concise approach
towards animation, rather than giving
me a huge overview. What I've done for this class is keep the process very concise and step-by-step so that it's
easier for you to follow. I'm going to take you
through the process of making an animated
reel for social media, ideating, storyboarding,
animation, cleanup color, and rendering with sound. This small exercise
will help you gain confidence and more patience to set yourself
for the long haul. You will not only
know how to make an animated reel
for social media, but also the understanding of effective storytelling
and how to transform that
amazing idea that you have in your head
into your animation. I'm so excited that you joined this class so let's get started.
2. Getting Started: Well, my professional journey
had started five years ago, but my creative journey had
started since I was a kid. I remember during my
childhood watching so many cartoons
all day, all night, and playing with my GI Joe's
and commandos and whatnot, and just making up
stories in my head. I used to be fascinated by the effective storytelling of all these cartoons such
as SpongeBob SquarePants, Courage the Cowardly
Dog, Tom and Jerry. Ever since I was a child, I was always drawing. But I never took it very
seriously until, I think, in the year 2012, I stumbled upon this course in
multimedia and animation. That was an eye-opener into
the world of animation. Then moved on to
pursue my masters in animation film design
from NID Ahmedabad. The creative environment
I was part of, along with my peers
and teachers, helped me grow as an
artist and figure out my voice as an
animation filmmaker. In 2016, I landed an
internship at Disney, India. It was fascinating to see
what goes behind making of these animated cartoons
that I used to watch as a kid and making these
drawings come to life. The sheer amount of effort
that goes into each of these processes of making
an animated content, got me very excited. I've had a formal
education in animation, but I don't think it is quite necessary for
you to have one. If you think you have
the motivation to learn, there are plenty of avenues on social media and of course
classes like this that you can take to further
advance your knowledge of the animation process
and learn on your own. I've always been making the
short animated content on social media long before the
word reels was introduced. I was making these videos out of self-motivation and
an urge to learn. Posting on social media has personally given me a
lot of benefits in terms of understanding who I am as an artist and what
I want to talk about. You can use social media to
not only further your skills, but also to find an audience
and a voice for yourself. Your social media
channel also becomes a portfolio and helps people
to reach out to you easily. Animation is a
very long process, and this short
animated drill will help you build on
your patience level, build your confidence
and storytelling. It is very important for you
to find your niche audience. Your niche is basically a
combination of what you want, what the industry wants, and what the audience wants. A good combination would be 50% of what kind of
stories you want to tell, 30% keeping in mind what the
industry requirements are, software proficiency,
production process, and 20% of what your
audience wants. This will help you connect to your audience and help
tell better stories. What you need to follow along
for this class would be a laptop or a computer,
a pen tablet. The softwares that we'll be requiring are Adobe Photoshop, Adobe After Effects,
and Adobe Audition. There plenty of alternatives
available in the market, either paid or free, including TV Paint, Clip Studio
Paint, and even Blender. Adobe Photoshop is
probably now the go-to application for
making animation. I'm comfortable
with the software because I've been working
with it for years. If you're an
illustrator like me, you know your way around the Photoshop software and
you'll be able to learn how to animate on Photoshop much more faster than in any
other software. Photoshop After Effects and Audition are all part
of Adobe Media suit. I like to use this
combination of these three softwares because it takes care of pre-production, post-production, and
production altogether. I animate on Photoshop, take all these
animated layers on After Effects and
composite them. I record and mix my sounds
on Audition and bring them back into After Effects and finally render the animation. Before getting to the
basics of animation, I'd like to talk a little about the importance
of storytelling. Your film has a story and
the story has a message that forms the integral part of what you want to say
to your audience. In today's day, because
of social media, content has become much more bite-sized and consumable
in the form of reels. In turn, this has led to the evolution of storytelling
in the digital space. Social media is also
very forgiving, which is why you get to experiment with
your storytelling, make a lot of mistakes, and also learn from them. The student project for
this class is how to create animated reels
for social media. Wherever you are in
your animation process, feel free to share your project in the project gallery below. Let's move on to the next
lesson, basics of animation.
3. Understanding the Basics: We see a lot of
different kinds of animation in today's world, including 2D and 3D animation. In the aspect of 2D animation, we can look at 2D hand-drawn traditional or
digital animation, paper cut animation, and all things that
are two-dimensional. In the case of 3D animation, we get into stop-motion, puppet animation and
3D software animation. My personal favorite is exploring 2D animation
frame-by-frame, only because of my love
for drawing and animating. The 12 principles
of animation is a concept that
Disney came up with. Don't think of these principles as rules set in stone, rather, think of these as
ideas you can take off your animation and
make your animation much more believable. The first principle
we're going to talk about is squash and stretch. Squash and stretch is a
concept that is very important to understand for the
believability of volumes, say for example, we're
seeing an elastic ball that is bouncing in its
place in a loop. Now, without the squash
and stretch properties of the elastic ball, we would see that
the ball is just moving without any
change in volume, which is quite
bizarre in real life. In real life, if you notice
that an elastic ball, the moment it falls
or hits the ground, it's hit by a force that allows its volume to squash
in towards the ground. Squash and stretch
properties help you move the volume of an object believably when a force
is applied to it. The second principle
that we're going to talk about is anticipation. Anticipation is the
action before the action, say for example, you want to
throw a punch in the air. Of course, you need
that energy to build up somewhere here so that you
can pack a punch properly. You need to go back,
wrist your elbows, take that energy from off your
elbows and then go punch. This part of reaction
is the anticipation. The greater the anticipation, the more is the suspense that is building up to the action. This brings a lot of
credibility to your animations. The third principle
that I'd like to talk about is staging. Staging basically means
choreography of a scene, say for example, in a scene, there are two
consecutive actions that are happening
simultaneously. Your eye doesn't
know what to look at or where to draw
your attention from. Rather, if you time and space these particular actions in a certain way so that
one follows the other, the eye exactly knows what to look at first and what
to look at after this, and that is how
you lead the eye. The staging is a perfect
principle to help you direct the audience's
eye to wherever you want. The fourth principle is almost like two ways of animating. One is pose to pose and the other is straight
ahead animation. Pose to pose refers to
a type of animation where there are two poses
that we have already drawn. That are the two extreme poses, basically we're going
from Pose A to Pose B, filling in key-frames in the
middle of these two frames. This is very relevant
when you're animating actions that you know the
course of, say for example, you're swinging your
feet while hitting a football Point A would be your anticipation
pose where you're wiggling your knee and
going to hit the ball. Your second point is going to be the extreme pose where
you've already hit the ball. These two points are your two extreme
poses, and in-between, you will fill in
these in-between key-frames that do
justice to emotion. You're going from Point A to Point B and animating
pose to pose. On the contrary,
straight ahead animation is great when you do not have a particular course
of animation or a particular part of
animation, say for example, when we're looking at the
motion of water and fire, we have a fairly good idea about how water moves or fire moves, but we can't really pinpoint a particular trajectory through which the animation of water or fire might move
frame-by-frame. In cases like this, you go
for straight ahead animation, where you tackle the animation
one frame at a time. The fifth principle that
we're going to talk about is follow through and
overlapping action. Follow through and overlapping
action always caters to a certain part of the animation of an object
that is secondary to it, say for example,
there's a bunny, and that bunny is turning its head from one
way to the other. If you see this animation without any follow through
and overlapping action, all of the elements
in the bunny's face, including its whiskers,
including its ears, are going to start moving at the same time and stop
at the same time. Which is looking a little bit
weird because we know that the bunny's ears are fluffy
and they lag behind. If we add a little bit of lag behind for the ears
and the whiskers, you will notice that there is a little more
believability in how soft or how long the
ears of the bunny are. The longer the ears, the longer it takes
to come to rest. The sixth principle
that we're going to talk about is slow
in and slow out. A lot of people call this
ease in and ease out. What this does is bring about a little more believability
to the motion of the object. Say for example, we have a car that's
starting from zero. Now if you examine the
motion of the car, you will see the
car accelerating at a steady pace until
reaches 0-100 say. You will notice that the car takes a bit of time
to accelerate. That's slowing in into the
fast motion of the car. The same thing happens when
a car comes to a stop. The car takes awhile
and gradually comes to a stop rather
than immediately stopping. This is because the friction between the brakes and
the ground acts as a force that goes into the opposite direction
and makes the car stop. This principle comes in
really handy when you really want to
enunciate the fast to slow and slow
to fast movements of animation and make your
animation more believable. The seventh principle
is known as arcs. Every character or object doesn't move
arbitrarily in space. It always follows some arc that helps the motion feel
more believable. One great example for arcs is studying the
motion of a pendulum, the pendulum always
seems to flow in an arc, slowing in and slowing
out at the both ends and going really
fast towards the middle. This is because of
the laws of gravity. The eighth principle
is secondary action. Secondary action can be
defined as a small action that enunciates the power of the
primary action, for example, if we see a person want
to pick up a heavy load, the person can either
jump right into it and try to pick that
heavy load up by himself. Or before that, he
can actually wait and look at the heavy load
and rub his palms together just to
bring that little bit of more credibility into
what he's about to do. It is important to understand
that any secondary action never precedes or overpowers
a primary action. It only helps enunciate or bring credibility to
your main action. The ninth principle
that we'd like to talk about is exaggeration. Exaggeration really brings out the best of your animation. In the animation world, we see a lot of
exaggerated movements that help us register an action
in the truest sense. Say for example, you want to take a big punch and you want to hit
this guy really bad, what you do in reality would probably
be something like this, where you go back and you punch. But you want that intensity
to flow into your animation. What is possible in
the animation world is impossible in reality. What you can instead do in
animation is really exaggerate the anticipation of
that movement and really go into a
whirlwind of sorts, or while you're clenching
your fist and then bring a huge blow
onto your opponent. That is what we have the
liberty to do in animation. We should make the
most of it by using exaggeration in the right
amount at the right place. The 10th principle
or solid drawing, basically talks about
a larger concept where we can involve two or
three principles together. Say for example, we stage a scene where we have a baller with the ball and he's going to throw
the ball really hard. What we need to make this
action more believable is solid poses that have proper silhouettes in
doing that action, say for example, while he's lifting that ball and going back and throwing it. The last frame would be to
throw the ball right away. Each of these solid
poses will help make the action much
more believable. The 11th principle
would be appeal. Appeal is not
merely a principal, but also a larger concept. Appeal denotes what is
appealing to the eye. This is a combination of
staging, solid drawing, and exaggeration that
puts your character audio action in the best way possible or to make something that is appealing to the eye. Now, I wanted to talk about timing and spacing
at the very end. Because to me, personally, it's the most important aspect
or principle of animation. Timing and spacing forms
the basis of all motion. Timing talks about how long an action takes
from start to end. Spacing talks about
how in that amount of time frames are manipulated to form the magic of movement, say for example, we talk about the coin
that moves from Point A to Point B if the coin
moves at a steady pace, it takes one second for the coin to move from
Point A to Point B. If you want the coin to
act as if it's a car, you will want a little bit of acceleration when the motion starts and a deceleration
when the motion ends. We have a little bit of ease in and ease out or slow in and slow out and the two
ends of the trajectory. Now, if you compare
the two timings of it, the timings match, but the spacing of each of these
frames rapidly differ. I think since timing
and spacing forms the crux of every
motion or every action, it is probably the most important of the 12
principles of animation, and something that you
should grasp early on. The student exercise
for this lesson is practicing a few
animation exercises, keeping in mind the
animation principles that we just learned about. Especially a few basics
such as bouncing ball, pendulum motion, and
walk or run cycle. Now that we have an
understanding of the basics of animation, next up, ideation.
4. Ideating: [MUSIC] The first part of pre-production
that we're going to talk about is ideation. We are going to jot
down the ideas that we have and see what
makes for a good film. In this crucial stage, it is very important for
you to make sure that the most important
bit of your idea is the story and
the message it has. It can either be personal or
for a social cause as well. You should definitely keep
in mind that you're telling visual stories and these stories should communicate
to an audience. Let me quickly take you
through my process. The first thing that
I like to do is write down a few ideas
that I want to talk about, and the idea that I want to talk about today is the monsoons. When I was a child, I used to really enjoy the rain. I used to enjoy
jumping and splashing water all over the place
whenever it is to rain, there's only one image
that is coming to my head, which is me completely
drenched in a yellow baggy raincoat
or something to do with puddles and I think
I want to make something like that
for our animated reel. What if it is a story about
this little kid who's jumping into puddles and probably something unexpected and
magical happens at the end. Since the idea that
I want to talk about is purely personal, I would look back into my
childhood memories and use them as reference to cook
up a fictional story. I just want to write
one sentence or premise of what I want to
tell the story about. The story is about a young
little kid who loves jumping on puddles and in the end
he is met with a surprise. I think with this
little premise, we can dive into
making thumbnails. Thumbnails are very spontaneous, rough drawings that you
make to tell you a story. Do not worry if the
drawings are bad, you'd want to focus on telling
the idea and trying to formulate a solid narrative in your head and trying to
put that out on paper. The first frame will probably have our little kid coming in. He's splashing around a lot in a puddle and this passer
by is getting annoyed, and this kid is having
a gala laugh here. Then he sees a big puddle, he gets very excited
that he's going to make a big splash. He smiles. He prepares himself to
take a big leap into the puddle and he
jumps right into it. I want something magical
to happen over here. I was thinking, what
if this little puddle is not exactly little, and our kid disappears into it. That would be a surprise. I seem to quite like this idea, this is fun and has a little bit of
magical experience and a little surprise and also the message is getting a
taste of your own medicine. But at this point, with the
kid disappearing and this is giving us a little
ED or a sad ending, I'm pretty sure our story
is not ending there. Let's see what else we can do. After a while I'm thinking
I'll introduce the kid again. I think the kid
will come out with his hands right up in the air, and then land up on the
shore gasping for air, and I think this is a
good place where we can stress upon our main
message of the story. At the beginning, we saw him laughing at a random passer-by. Probably this time we're
going to hear a voice off screen that giggles at the kid. I think that's a good place
to end our little reel. Now that the shell
of our idea is ready with the help
of thumbnails, we're going to move
into the next phase, which is character design. I'd like to make a
few rough doodles off our main
character over here, the protagonist of our story. My yellow raincoat was a favorite thing of
mine when I was a kid, so definitely I want this
guy to wear a raincoat. I used to wear the raincoat
when asked to go to school, we can have a backpack and probably a cute
water bottle over here. This design looks like a longish
version so it looks like a teenage boy so maybe we need to play around a little
with the shapes. Maybe we can have a
triangular or boxy shape for the body and a pair of
boxes for the boots. I think this hoodie is creating a little
bit of a problem. The character is not breathing. It's feeling like it's a little condensed and probably
in animation we won't be able to move around
with it so I feel that the character should lose his hoodie and the hoodie
should be behind him. Now if you compare both
of these silhouettes, this feels like a more
freer version and a little more animatable
version of our character. Now that I quite like this
particular silhouette, I'm going to add a little
bit more detail into it, give him some blocky boots, give him a nice backpack, get the water bottle back, give him a cute little
hairstyle and a nice smile. Once you're happy with
your character doodles, you can take this to Adobe
Photoshop where you will flesh out your character even better with the help of shapes
and character design. This part of pre-production
is one of my favorites, where we get to get inside the psyche and the
mind of a character, built our character
from scratch and see what works for our
story and message. We'll go ahead and
make a new document, we'll pick a New Layer. The first thing that
you should keep in mind while designing our
character is that it should design your
character in such a way that it fits your
story and your world. Say for example, you want
to tell a story about this cowardly
character who emerges a valid hero by the
end of your story, you should keep in mind
that the character in the beginning should be
looking cowardly or shy. But it'll be quite odd to see a very muscular and
heroic character play the role of a cowardly
person so you should keep the story and your motive in mind while designing
your character. We'll quickly try to understand what the motive
of this little kid is. We want our main character
to be nice and sweet, but also a little mischievous. He loves jumping
puddles in the rain and doesn't care about
what others think. I've also taken out
some images that I can refer to for my character
design and it is completely fine if you're
using references in the right way to
make your designs much more rooted and believable. I've given this guy
a baggy raincoat, a pair of big gumboots and a big head with a sweet
mischievous smile. I think this little of
drying carries a lot of energy and motive that
is great for our story. When you're designing
your characters, make sure they're animatable. What I mean by this
is a lot of times we get carried away in our
character design process. Something that you should
also keep in mind is the target audience and
the platform that you're using to put out your work. You're making an animation
for social media, you wouldn't want to
spend a lot of time making a very heavily
detailed character. The more the details,
the more effort and more time it'll take
for it to get finished. What I've done is
make sure that I have limited my character
to a bunch of basic shapes. We have our character's
head as a circle, a triangle for his body and also big rectangular
blocks for his gumboot. The silhouette that
the shapes are creating is quite interesting. It's giving me a feeling
of the character being clumsy, round, tubby, characteristics a kid
will generally have. Taking these references and a bit of my childhood memories, I have developed
character sketch of our main character and I'm
quite happy with this, I think will develop
this character a little further and get
to know it a little more so I've prepared something that we
call an action sheet. A character action
sheet is basically a bunch of poses that our
character is drawn in. Poses that gives an idea about the nature of the character
is personality or probably a few shots even from the scene or particular action that the character
is going to perform. It is a very insightful
way of knowing your character better and
giving life to your character. What I've also done is a character turnaround
that we can refer to, which gives us a 360 view
of what the character is, what are the prompts,
what is the shape, what is the size of each area. We usually use these
character turnarounds to know a character
from all angles. Let's move on to the
next part where I'd like to talk about the
style of the film, the look and feel of
the design of the film. Style is a very
important aspect. I see a lot of artists
especially beginners, chasing after what is called
having your own style. Something that I also
wondered about a lot, but I have one thing
very clear in my head. Narrative always dictated style. Every story has its
unique characters and unique messages, which is why it is very
important for it to have its own distinct
and unique style. I want to pull up an example from one of my recent projects and animated music video for artists Pradeep song, Cheetah. The story or the
message of Cheetah was heavily lead and had a lot
of political connotations. For the style of
the music video, I went with a black
and white approach, with yellow or gold being the central color that
everyone is seeking. You'll see throughout the
video that every word is after something and that something
is always made of gold. The style that will
be going for would be a very simple and
minimalistic design. The reason being,
I want to focus on two main elements
of the film, our main character
and our puddle. These are the two main
things that I'd like to be highlighted and keep the background very
minimal in design so that these two standout. To start with, I've a
very rough drawing of our main character and
our puddle over here. So we'll try and give this
drawing a little bit of style. For this particular reel, something that you
should keep in mind while coming up with a style for your film is that it really comes down to
what brushes you're using and what way
you're drawing. Everybody has a significant
way of drawing something. For example, Da Vinci has drawn the Mona Lisa a certain
way, and of course, if you're going to
draw the Mona Lisa, it wouldn't be a carbon
copy of it and that is what is unique about
the choices that you're making as an artist. I also wanted to bring about
a little bit of contrast between the styles or both
domain elements of our film. We have taken a
few poppy colors, especially our yellow raincoat that we really wanted to keep. I've also used a few
complimentary colors that go very well with the
overall design of the character and the film. It'll be good for you to have
a basic understanding of foundation basics such as
color theory and perspective. Our main character has very blocky approach with strong silhouettes
and bold lines. On the contrary, our puddle is basically free and languid, and hence it is not
bounded by bold lines. Since these two are our
main characters and I want to put as much attention
and focus on these two, I want the background to
have a very minimal design. I just want to give a hint
of where this is happening, which is a foot path and a few lines would
do just the trick. I'm just going to
add in some shadows and highlights for the character and now we have
already style frame that we can refer to for
our production ahead. Of course, having a
good understanding of your basics or
essentials, is important. At the end of the day, you
are the artist and you'll decide what rules to make
and what rules to break. Now that we're done with
the process of ideation, we're going to move
into the next step of the process, which
is storyboarding. The student exercise
for the lesson, is to pick an idea for
your animated reel, make thumbnails,
design characters, and finally, develop a
style frame. [MUSIC]
5. Storyboarding: [MUSIC] A storyboard is a collection of
frames which when viewed in a sequence
tells a story. It's a very watered down static version of
your final film. What we're going to do right now is bring our
thumbnails that we did in our previous lesson and use them as reference
for our storyboards. For the storyboarding process, what I usually work with is
somewhat of a grid like this. But since we're making an
animated real for social media, we will probably go with a vertical aspect
ratio for the same. Make a new layers and
zoom into our first frame where we draw our little puddle. I want the name or the title of this little reel to pop
up somewhere around here. It's untitled, so I'm just
going to name it this. The second frame would be what is exactly
happening right after. Storyboards actually help
a lot in the process of troubleshooting a lot
of problems that you may face during production, including staging,
what's the best way and most appealing way of
showing an action? I think all of these problems can be sorted out
during the board. We want our protagonists
gunboats come in from top of the frame and make a big splash over here
and the title disappears. These are very
loose drawings that are really important
during this phase. Do not go into making these drawings very neat
and very rendered because eventually the main motive
for this is to figure out continuity and see if all is making sense when
viewed in a sequence. I wanted to introduce
our little character in a very different way. I wanted to keep a little
more of a suspense of sorts, and I wanted to show
his personality before revealing who
the character is. Here we see a little kid jump on puddle and a passer-by
citing a remark. This denotes a little
bit of mischief, a little bit of play in our
young protagonists mind. Then we reveal the
character in a long shot. While discussing the
thumbnail phase, we went over what do we want
to show and how do we want to show it in our
thumbnail phase. A storyboard version
is where you decide on the shorts and what
shots you would prefer to best tell the story. This is a great
playground for you to understand and figure out what is working and what is not, and if it's not working, well, you can just
erase and start again. This saves you a lot of time
during production because this is the place where you are figuring out and doing
all your groundwork. Otherwise, you might end up animating something that
you actually do not need, or if you see in
the large scheme of things or while
on the edit table, it doesn't really make sense. This little kid overhears of a passer-by getting annoyed by his jumping onto the puddle, and he does a little hehe, a little giggle, and he turns and moves
on to the other puddles. This is a place
where you get to do whatever you want and try
to make a story work. In all my self-motivated
or commission projects, this is the part I really enjoy. Also what you need to
probably focus on is the breakdown of
shots that you're using in your animation. I'll give you a small
example of that. In the beginning, I have
a close-up of a puddle and a close up of a pair of gunboats come in and
there's water splash. We got to a long-short of introducing the character and long shorts the greater
the establishing shots, very fair and
square, very simple, and just straight ahead
introduces our main character. From here, we are actually
going into a horizontal pan. The camera is traveling
with the kid as he is jumping from
puddle to puddle. The camera at the end of the horizontal pen comes to a stop where the kid also comes to a halt in front of
a big pool of water and the kid looks
at this in all. Don't worry about the
form or the volume, we'll have plenty of
time to come back to it. Now I'm going to go ahead and finish off the
rest of the frames. Here we have our
finished storyboard. As you can see, in
the first frame, we start with the
close-up of a puddle, we have our title come in, and as soon as that happens, we see a pair of
gum boots come from above and make a big
splash on screen. We still don't know
who these pair of gunboats belong to, so there is a little
bit of suspense, we just know about
this menacing, playful nature of
this personality. From there we cut to
a long shot where we see our main character
or protagonist, who is a little kid
wearing a yellow raincoat, he's just messing around, jumping around puddles
on the footpath. As you can see, he's giggling
to passerby's comments. Now the kid turns and starts
jumping across the puddles. The camera follows the
kid in a horizontal band. As soon as the kids stops
in front of the big puddle, camera comes to a
stop and we see a close up of the kid
looking at something in awe. From here, we cut
straight to a shot, reverse shot of this little kid's
reflection in the puddle, and the reflection
giggles and laughs. We have a POV shot
right over there. POV stands for point of view. We suddenly see this
little kid's giggle, change into a mischievous
grin, still POV. From there, we cut to a
close-up of his feet. Why I'm cutting to close-up
of his feet is because I want that idea of suspense of what the kid
is going to do next. Why was he graining? The kid takes two steps back, we cut to show a
long shot again, which is known as LS, where we are seeing the
kid take two steps back and push himself forward
and sprint in full speed. The next shot is
another close-up of the feet right now
sprinting rapidly forward, just to build up
that tension and that rhythm of that scene. Again, we cut back to a long shot where the kid is in front of the puddle and he squashes and stretches and takes a big long leap into the puddle. The time slows down over here
where we see a moment of the kid looking
at his reflection as it is falling down
into the puddle, and right when you know it, sadly the unexpected happens. The kid falls all the way through the bundle and vanishes. There's a huge splash that
happens, and after awhile, the bottle of water bloats
up because it's buoyant. I want the audience to think what just happened right now. Just when they're thinking that, I want the kid to jump out of
the water and gasp for air. In the last shot, we hear the giggle of a random passerby, and the kid gives him an angry
face and reaction to that. That brings us to
the end of the film. This is a very short
and simple story about a mischievous kid who gets back a taste of
his own medicine. I think what is very
interesting to note here is the fact that the story can be told in 1,000 different ways. Everybody would have a
different interpretation of the same story and everybody's
story will be different. Also, storyboards can be short and simple like this or very extensive and very
detailed depending on the length of your project or your production value
of your project. As I said, there's
nothing like a bad story, there's only good and
bad ways of telling it. One of the ways you
can get really good at storyboarding is
watching a lot of films. Watching a lot of films helps
you build a vocabulary of shots and sequences that you can refer back to
from time to time. You get a very good
idea of staging, of choreography
along the sequence, and where to direct the
eye and to what action. This will help you get better
at storyboards over time. Now that we have all the frames
of the storyboard ready, we're going to take
individual screenshots of all these frames and keep them in a separate
folder. [MUSIC]
6. Creating An Animatic: [MUSIC] Now you're
going to move into the next aspect of
pre-production, which is the moving
storyboard or the animatic. An animatic is really a
moving storyboard and you can really understand how the final film is
going to look like, what is the pacing
of the final film, what are the shots involved
in the final film, and what is the final duration. It is in a way a blueprint
of your final film. Here I have a folder of all these individual frames screenshotted from
our storyboard. What we are going to
do is select all of these and open After Effects. After Effects, we'll go into this composition menu and
open New Composition. Usually, our formats
are always horizontal, fitting into a 16:9 ratio. But for the purpose
of this reel, we're going to make a vertical
resolution of 9 by 16. Basically, we're going
to switch the width and height and that will give
us a vertical format video. Also, another thing
that we need to keep in mind is the frame rate. We're going to go with
the standard 24 frames per second frame rate. The duration of the
composition can be a minute because the reel
would be less than a minute. It's good to always keep
a little more time here. We press "Okay" and we have
our ready composition. First things first,
we're going to hit this little button over here
and create a new folder. We're going to name
it Storyboard. Always name your
layers because it saves you the trouble when
things get really complex. We're going to
switch right back to our folder and we're
going to drag and drop all these images right
in the storyboard frames. We don't need to worry about
sequencing here because all these screenshots have been taken at a particular
time interval. What we need to do is directly drag them
into our timeline. We have something like this. Now if you notice, our main Canvas area is much larger than our
storyboard frame. We'll just increase the size. Hit "S" on the
keyboard and increase the size for scale just
when we're happy with it. Another thing that we
need to keep in mind is we don't need all of these
frames to be so long. We're going to cut this
out somewhere around here. The keyboard
shortcut for cutting a layer somewhere around here would be Control Shift D or
Command Shift D on a Mac. The moment you hit that, you notice that the
layer has been cut and you press "Delete"
or "Backspace." Now what you have
is all the layers, one after the other. What you need to do is sequence
these layers in an order. The best way to do
that is select all of these frames by shift
selecting from top to bottom and right-clicking on top of this layer or
any of these layers going right into this
option called Key Frame Assistant and this is where it is going to make
your life really peaceful. The moment you hit on the
only available option here, which is sequenced layers, and you hit "Okay", don't worry about this, you have all the
layers in a sequence. You have a moving
storyboard now. But wait, there is a little
bit of an issue over here. No action or no shot
seems to be timed well. Everything is equidistance and
that is what we don't want and this is the place
where the real fun begins. Firstly, I'm just going to hide this transparent
layer because this hasn't covered up
the layer properly. I'm going to create a new solid. The color I'm going
to pick is white and bring this down all
the way to the bottom. Now we have a plain
fully white Canvas with just the drawings visible. Now what you'd like to keep
in mind is trust your gut. Editing actually requires
a lot of intuition. This intuition is not arbitrary. It has been developed over the years watching and
learning how to edit. The shot is taking a while. I want the title to
appear around here. It's just a matter of
holding down the edges of these layers and
pulling them back and forth to reduce and increase the time of the separate layers. Once you play it, you have the title
somewhere around here and you want this frame to
last only till this much. Here you want the next shot, which is the boots coming in. The boot wouldn't
take so much time to come down because of gravity, so you can cut
that down shot and immediately you have that
splash on the screen. Somewhere around
here we want to hold this shot a little
more longer because we want to give some time to
the audio that we hear offscreen of a random passer by getting irritated
by this action. From here, we have
the next shot, which is the long
shot of the kid who giggles a little bit and then turns his head and
starts prancing across all of these puddles. What we're going
to do right now is go ahead and finish
off manipulating the timing and
spacing of each of these frames until I have
something I really like. [MUSIC] That's the end of our film. I think the story and the message is coming
across quite well. If you're not happy with any
part of this, of course, you can go back to
your storyboard and draw out a couple of more frames and try out different options and
see what works best. Obviously, if you're not
happy with the timing, it just takes a way
bit longer just to manipulate all these extra
frames simply like that. Now additionally, what I've
done to this animatic is a practice that is going to help you a lot in your
future projects. What I do is make a box somewhere
around here at the end, any end of this screen, and I put down shot numbers. This is Shot 1, this is Shot 2, and the likes. Every shot along with the
animatic is timed and we know which shot is which
and cause no problems whatsoever in understanding
what shot comes next. This will also
help when you have bigger teams to take
care of or cater to, you will always know
what is on priority. Numbering these shots
will greatly save you time and help you in
the process of production. Once we are done with
the animatic and we're happy with the timing and
spacing of everything, we go into composition and we
hit this button right here, which is Add to Adobe
Media Encoder Queue. Adobe Media Encoder is like a render engine
for After Effects. This saves you a lot of time when you're giving all
the rendering power to a separate render engine and you can continue
your process of production in After Effects when you're doing certain
things simultaneously. Here you have nothing
to worry about. The basic default is Match
Source High bitrate. Don't worry about that.
We click on this. H264 basically means
a codec of MP4. MP4 is the widely used and most common type
of video codec. Don't need to worry
about presets. Match high bitrate. That is completely fine. Don't need to worry about
anything else except for the output name. Here you can say where
you want to save your animatic and you hit "Okay." As soon as you're done, you go and hit this little green button over
here to start rendering. Now that we have it rendered, we go in and see the
render itself play out. Here we have a blueprint, which is the animatical film. I haven't put any scat
sounds or voiceovers on this particular project because
this is purely personal. But if you'd like to, you can definitely go
ahead and make this as nicely as possible just to render out your story
the best possible way. This marks the end of our
pre-production phase. Now we're going to move
into the next step, the production
aspect of animation. Your student exercise
for this lesson would be make your own storyboard for the story that you
have in your mind. Another fun activity that
you can try is watch your favorite film and pick your favorite
sequences from there. You can study the shots, pause and draw the frames as storyboards and
really understand how these shots come together and tell the story in the
best effective way. [MUSIC]
7. Drawing A Rough Animation: [MUSIC] I hope
you're having fun. Now we're going to deep
dive into production. The first aspect of production
is rough animation. Let's get right to it. What we're going to do is come straight back to Photoshop, where we're going to do
our rough animation. Now, we open a new document
which is of the same HD 1080 into 1920 pixels,
create new document. First things first, we hit this little
drop-down button over here and change
the Photoshop from essential step to
the motion tab. The motion tab is where all the magic
of animation happens. Here, I'll just give you a brief overview of
the animation tab. If you click on this
little drop-down box, you will see two options, one is Create Video Timeline, and the other, Create
Frame Animation. Both of these are used in their own unique ways to make your animation
process smoother. For the sake of this project, we're going to go with
Create Video Timeline, and the reason you will get
to know in the process. What we start with
is what we have. We have our basic
background layers, and we have something which
is also a layer over here, and we have a similar
edit timeline, similar to what we are having
in Adobe After Effects. This is your background layer, we're going to make a new
layer on top of this, and immediately you
will see that there is another layer forming
right over here as well. The secret to
animating on Photoshop is to imagine these layers
as individual frames. If you notice over here, there's 30 FPS
written in brackets, which means that the
default frame rate of this particular
project is 30 FPS. What we need to do
is bring it down to 24 and animate on tools
like we discussed. We hit this small dropdown menu, and there's an option called
set timeline frame rate, you go into that and you
hit 24 FPS over here, and [inaudible],
you have a document that has 24 frames per
second as frame rate. Now, we're all set to start our animation
process in Photoshop. What I'd like to do in this part is figure out the area of work. Usually during the upper and
lower aspects of the video, a lot of things go unnoticed, so we'd like to keep
all the action and all the good stuff
happening over here because we want
the eye of the audience to linger around in
this particular area. What we're going to
do right now is open our folder and get our animatic, drag this into our Photoshop
document and hit, "Okay." Four short is roughly of this length according
to our animatic, so we're going to drag our
timeline according to that. Now what we have is a
layout of sorts with the animatic acting as the base on which we can do
our rough animation. We have this puddle and we
know that around this time, our pair of gumboots is going to come in and stash on screen, and we draw our first stream where we see the boots
for the first time. We have both A over here
and both B over here. Now we know, since this is a jump and we're
ending the jump, we're already in the
midst of an arc. If the art comes over here, we know the foot is going to
fall somewhere around here, the foot is going to come
in the same exact way. This is Point A and
this is Point B. We're going to draw the
in-betweens over here. The in-between
would be somewhere, I'm guessing around here. It is not easy to do
this arbitrarily, so we're going to switch on another option right over here that is going
to help us a lot. We're going to go to the
drop-down menu and we're going to hit,
"Enable Onion Skin". What this is going
to do is expose the frame before this and
after this, for one frame. You can always go down to your onion skin
settings over here, and manipulate to two, three, four, whatever you want. I keep it at one, so I'd stick to that. We have our first frame
and our last frame, and the middle frame would
be somewhere around here, which is going to go
ahead and draw this. This is interesting
because we're drawing on the basis of our
knowledge of the arc and also keeping in mind
a little bit of stretching before a squash that is going to
happen upon impact. I've drawn something
like this, very simple. Right ahead we're going to
go into the next frame, which is going to be in almost the middle of this
frame and the final frame. But here I'm going to play
around with it a little, where I'm going to stretch
the boots out nicely, at least the tip of the boots, and see what it does when
we'll play this in motion. Just rough volumes right now, just to understand the motion. If we disable onion skin and
we just cropped through it, we're already seeing a little
bit of squash and stretch happening just because we have elongated the tip of
the foot over here. Right now it's
coming to a still, so we also need a frame
that is our squash frame. We're going to quickly get this layer also inside
of our animation group, and that's how the timing is playing out right now if
you play it by Spacebar. If you notice, all of
these frames have been dragged to be a part
of this video group. A video group is essentially
like an animation ledge where you have a particular
number of frames that shows a motion on
a piece of animation. When we play out, it
plays out like this. We're going to draw a
squash version of the same, but we're not going to
draw another from scratch. What we're going to do
is cheat a little bit, we're going to duplicate
this layer below this, so this becomes your
frame in front. We're going to hit
"Command T" or "Control T" and hit this mesh
icon over here, and what this does is
allows us to manipulate this frame even more without actually
having to draw again. This gives us a fair amount
of freedom over here, of course we'll need to actually exaggerate
the squash frame a little more so that it
does make sense upon impact. Let's see this. We have a
stretch frame right before impact and boom down and pop, it comes right back in
action, this is interesting. Let's see how it plays out, let's see the timing
of this, pop. Something I'd like to do, always make sounds of the kind of action that
is happening so that I have all vocabulary in my head of how this
might play out like, and try to have that as reference for what
I see on screen. You see for example, if
this was a piece of cake, we would like a little
more jelly like motion just to give it that feel of
that super soft fluffiness, but of course we know
gumboots are not that fluffy, so we're not going
to go ahead and do that extra squash
and stretch on this. This is our primary
motion of a character. Another aspect that we
need to animate of this, is the water that is splashing. We already have a rough
diagram of our water body, now we're going to go ahead
and animate the splashes. We're going to create a
new layer on top of this, we're going to reduce the time, of course for how many
frames it's going to stay. Right about around here
is the impact frame, so of course the first frame
is going to be a big splash. Now we're going to draw these bunch of frames
for the splash. What do you need to
keep in mind here is that we're going to
animate the splashes in straight ahead animation
because there's no particular way we can
do this pose to pose, and trust me, this
is going to turn our way nicer in straight
ahead animation. Remember when we
were talking about animation principles and as I talked about pose to pose and straight ahead animation, and I had mentioned that
elements like fire and water do not have a particularly
defined way of movement. This is where our idea of straight ahead
animation comes in. We have our impact frame and we know that a
couple of frames later, I'd like this same
water to spread a little more before being
impacted by gravity. Again, we're going to
cheat a little bit and manipulate this
same exact frames, but creating a duplicate of it. We're going to stretch
out these areas really nicely so that it creates that
elastic, watery approach. Let's see how that
plays, pop, boom. You're seeing it's
spread a little more, that is registering fine
right now. Next frame. Again, take the marquee
tool, delete your Canvas. Now you have a new
blank frame and you turn on your onion skin, if this is getting confusing, you switch off your
animating layer because it's difficult to work with so many transparencies
working at one time. The next frame would be where the water is digressing
towards the side. I'm just drawing arbitrarily
or where I think the waters next frame can be so that the motion
is believable, blank new frame, and just draw this bit with as much
fun as you want. You can also add in water droplets just
to show how all of these streaks of water separate out into water
droplets before falling. The next frame would be
a continuation of that, we're reaching the ground, we're coming to ease again
after the huge splash. I think we need one
more frame over here where the water is
almost come to a standstill, something like this. Great, perfect. We're going to
disable on onion skin and we're going to play back. Let's see how that looks. I think there is
a bit too much of a pause over here
on the first frame, so this can really be there for two frames,
let's try two frames. Exposure for the first
frame, let's see. Better. This's interesting, but we can actually also play along a little
more with this. Also, if you see the motion, the particular art the water
is following is very small, and I really want
to ending bits of the frame go out a little more. That makes the animation or
the arc a little fuller, rather than keeping
it concise because water is free, water can move. What I'm going to do is, for these frames, I'm going to just stretch this
out a little more, we don't need to get
the exact thing right, but just to get the motion right around here,
this is great. I think also this frame is stretching out a lot
more than intended, so we can actually
reduce this bit, and also in this frame, this can go a lot more
closer to the ground grid. Great as you've seen, that animation is
quite intuitive. This process of
back-and-forth is a very common thing in the
process of rough animation. We have our main character that is animated
in pose to pose, and we have our water
effects animation or the water splash animation that is animated
in straight ahead. That's the end of Short 1. This is the place where you mess around with the
timing and spacing and also the drawings
until it really clicks for you
because in clean-up, we're going to focus on details and style
and stuff like that. Feel free to just go back, make all these little tweaks
and little enhancements that will help your animation really breathe life [MUSIC].
8. Finishing Inbetween Drawings: [MUSIC] Now that we
have a good idea about the rough animation of Shot 1, let's go into something
a little more extensive. Let's take a look at Short 8. Shot 8, I think is a
very good example of some extensive
character animation that we can really
have fun with. First things first, we're going to change
the frame rate of the document to 24 FPS
so that we are in line, and then we're going to make a new layer which is
going to get the animatic in our document and just going
to go to our final shot. If you notice, this kid is
jumping and jumping into the water and there's a cutaway to this shot of this
POV of the kid. Then again, we come back to our long shot where the
kid is jumping inside. A smart way of going
about this would be to animate Shot 8 and Shot 10 as a whole
because it's part of the same shot and we're cutting
away in the middle of it. We're going to go to the
beginning of Shot 8, trim the area, and this is what we have. Just reduce the opacity
of our animatic layer, what we want to do here is lay out what we're going
to do in this scene. An animation layout helps
you understand and plan what is going to
happen in your shot before you actually
get to animating it. What I'm going to do
here is just draw out a few poses for our main character of what
exactly is happening. This guy is going to
come into screen. Notice that I'm making some differences in
scale because I want the puddle of water and the character to be
visible properly, and in the same shot, again, we're just going
to bring this into this layer and now we
have a video group, which we can treat as
an animation layer. The first pose would be of our character
getting into screen. The second pose would then be of the character getting
ready to take a leap. The plan is basically all of these characters fit
into the layout. Whenever you are having a
little confusion in visibility, you can always switch the
layers on and off and keep checking for
errors or whatnot. Here the character comes into frame and takes a big long
leap into the puddle. I want the character to come
in squash a little bit. Probably the next shot is
going to be it stretching out. Just planning the shot. I'm doing a cross-section
of the head so that I don't need to put
in details right now. Maybe I can figure
that out later. What I want the character
to have is an arc. We're tying back to our animation principles
of squash and stretch and arcs so that
the action is exaggerated. In this position, I want the character to
be somewhere around here. Again following the arc. It's so much easier
when you have a set arc that you have drawn
and you follow that arc. These are great for
beginners because in the beginning you are
confused and draw or animate arbitrarily
and these are concepts that will
help you grasp and make your foundation
a little stronger. Of course, when you get
a little more advanced, I'm sure you won't be using these basic concepts because these will already
be in your head. In the extreme up pose
of our character, I want the character to
squash a little more. Constant stretch, squash, and stretch when
you're going up, really brings out the
action very well. This is the idea. Our next pose would be somewhere
around here where he's free-falling all the way
into our little puddle. It goes all the way in. This is our basic
layout that we have. This is our plan of
action for this shot. With this layout
already planned, I think we're going
to dive right into our rough animation. I'm actually going to start
with the second pose because the character I'll
draw all the way in. I'm going to use a version
of this as our first pose so that we already don't need to manipulate
or draw again. The frame of a character
coming in, it's going down. The next pose as planned would
be somewhere around here. As you're seeing, I'm
duplicating these layers, animating them instead of
drawing because it's just saving me those little
milliseconds and these milliseconds
really count when you're meeting a deadline and you want to
finish up what's the fastest and the most
efficient way of working. We're moving on to the stretch
pose of our characters. You see that immediate change in volume from squashing
to stretching of that character and
this really provides that punch or the energy that is required for
the character to jump. The next pores would be
somewhere around here, which is the top extreme pose. We're going to just manipulate
it a way bit because I think it was taking
a little less space. Now I think that space over
here is completely fine. We still have a character's
hands clenched up in our extreme pose and we see a little bit of squash
in the up pose. From here, it's all
the way down here. I want the character to really
free up and stretch again. Hands can actually go like that, the eyes open up. We'll come to the little
details of the face, mouth, and hands later. The next frame would basically
be somewhere around here. Our final pose would
be somewhere around here where it's almost
submerged in the water. Probably we won't keep any
more frames towards the end. Now let's just see with
this equidistant timing, how does the actual layout. We're just going
to switch off our layout layers for once, just going to bring
out our paddle layer. Let's see how that works. You see the squash, stretch, and the
arc being followed, but I think the arc is a
little too steep for now. I think I'm going to
push out our squash pose from where the arc begins
to somewhere around here. Now let's see if the arc
is being followed well. I'm also going to rotate
this character a little more so that it fits the
position of the arc. Don't want a very
steep arc otherwise, the action looks a little weird, goes all the way up, I think this can come a little
more down. Much better. Overall, arc is there, overall, squash and
stretch is there. You have your main poses or
key frames right over here. You might as well go down and
draw out the in-betweens. Absolutely, you need an
in-between right over here where the
character comes in. What you can see right now here is the onion skinning
of the first frame. What you can't see over
here is the second frame. Whenever I'm doing in-betweens, I always expose the in-between
frames for one frame. That helps me see both of these other two frames that
are preceding and following. Now that we have our two poses, it's easy for us to fill in
the in-between where the guy steps in and we want a little
bit of a stretch over here as well where the guy is making contact to his position grid. We draw the little hands and I think we have
an in-between. Let's see. Comes right in. A little more squash
would be nice for this character
around this frame. I am going to use the Mesh Tool, hit "Command T" and stress this character
down even further. It is important for you to
understand the consistency in volume so you do not squash and stretch beyond
a realistic point. Our character does a little drop there and it leaps
and the leap can actually be shorter
and will have an in-between frame between this frame and the next frame. I'm purposely doing something that might be very
important here. If we look at the
arc in our layout, we know that we are going
to have a shot over here, which is our squash shot. Again, in the extreme up pose, we also know that we have drawn
a stretch pose over here. Our arc here becomes
our timing chart to plot out the points
where we're going to put the keyframes
and the in-betweens. We know for a fact that whenever a character on an
object is jumping, there is a force of gravity
acting at all times upon it. At the most extreme pose
at the top over here, it is going to get slower. Slower means more
number of frames. Also to make a
little more impact, it's going to get slower
as we go towards the top. There's going to be an
in-between over here as well. Similarly, when our character is coming out of its medial pose, we're going to have
the same amount of in-betweens over here. Sometimes we can also
make another in-between between these two frames just to make the motion a
little more slower. Let's see if we'll need this for the character animation
for this shot. With this in mind, I'm just going to reduce
the opacity much further. Just open up our main animation. Shifting to our animation, we do have a frame around here, which is mid pose, and the mid pose won't be so stretched out like the
previous ones so that the stretching has already
registered and the volume cannot be consistently
stressed out. It returns to normal
and then again, squash. We know that we need an
in-between between these two because if we follow
our timing chart, we already have done there. It's easier for us
to follow along. We enable onion skin so
that we can see both and we draw the head over here. Something to keep in mind
while inbetweening is that inbetweening also doesn't
happen just like that. There is a science to it, and you need to understand a few laws of physics
if not entirely, but somewhat grasp
the concept of it to understand
your motion better. While I'm inbetweening, I'm also keeping in mind
that the knees need to curl up to fit the motion of
the knees over here. Also, the hands need to
curl up a little more. If you'll notice, inbetweening
is also about focusing on all these little points
of the animation that make it more enriching
and more believable. That's nice. I think we can increase timing to
double of this. Let's play now. That's nice. Like how it's
inbetweening over here. We don't need so much of a
hold on this extreme pose. We can reduce this
timing and use it to fit in an in-between
between these two. Again, we're going to
switch on our onion skin and just going to take our duplicated
frame and in-between them. Here, the feet are going to mostly be almost
stretched out and the hands as well
are going to be curled up just about to
liftoff in the next pose. Once we disable onion
skin, let's say that. I'm going to increase
the timing of this a little bit to twos and the overall motion
can be a little faster. This is looking a
little unnatural. I'm going to
manipulate the frames a little bit. Let's see now. I'm happy with the first
part of the action. Let's see what we
can change when the character is
going down the arc. The thing is just
a timing issue, reduce timing so that it doesn't look like
it's caught up in the air or it's holding for too long in it.
Let's just see now. In this phase, I want the character to really
go all the way in. I want that impact. I'm not putting any
more frames over here. I like that slow-to-fast
motion grid. [MUSIC]
9. Adding Secondary Actions: [MUSIC] Now what we can do
to enhance this further is actually what we
call secondary action. I'm going to bring in secondary action and a little bit of follow through and overlapping to enhance this
animation further. In secondary action,
I'm going to use the head to enhance
the motion of this. In this position,
I actually want the head to tilt down further. Why? Because the head is aiming towards
where it's headed. That will be interesting to see. Then you see immediately
there's more of a curling up or more of a
squash right over here. As soon as we did a little
bit of that head turn. I'm going to enhance
this further over here by tilting the head
just a way bit more. Also, in the down pose, I think I'd like the
character's head to tilt a little up. The moment it's falling, the head is doing a little
bit of follow-through. We have this motion a
little more believable. Same goes over here. The head is going to be tilted somewhere around like this. At the very end I want the kid to actually notice
what just happened. That little frame, I
want to keep where the head is tilting down and is looking at what
exactly is happening. The kid is getting
devoured by the puddle. Let's see this all in action. I think there's too much
of a hold on mid air. We can reduce that by one frame. Let's see now. I'm
quite happy with this. I think we can play around with the head of this character
a little more in this pose, it's tilting down while
it's preparing to jump. Also a little bit
of follow through in the stretch pose
after it slipped. I think I'm quite happy
with the way it looks. I'm going to move on and get
into some secondary action. For this we'll make a
new animation layers or a video group where we'll focus on mainly the extensions and
the probes that is carrying. We know that we have the
water bottle over here. Yes, we want the bottle to actually not move along with
the motion of the body, but follow through it. When the body is going down, the bottle is going to
lag around a little more. We want the bottle to tilt up. Notice why I'm doing
this just in a bit. I'm going to make one more
frame somewhere around here. Animating in video groups
also helps in animating and timing each element in your animation
scene differently. When our character leaps up, the water bottle tags along this making up for some
great secondary action. Next frame, almost when
it's coming to a stop. Here I want the bottle to
come closer to the body. As the character is going down, the bottle is actually
going to move up. We're just going to continue animating our little
water bottle. You will notice that the
water bottle is also falling sort arc while it's
going up and down. Now we're going to
animate one more part, which is the bag and the hoodie. That is also going to
have the same laws of physics that are applying
to our water bottle. Say somewhere around here, we actually see the bag stretch, is stretching quite a
bit and also following through our main
characters primary action. Just when our main character
starts descending, bag moves even more above. See a nice squash and stretch
action on the bag as well. I think this kind
of action works. Also we're going to animate
the flaps right over here. Let's see the animation. I'm very happy with this. Now that we have a
character animation ready, we can move into our water splash animation
and I'll make a new layer. We go to the point
of contact where the kid jumps right
into the water. We know we want a big splash of water
somewhere around here. Going to go enhance that. We want the splash to split
form in-between and fall. For better systems, we
open our onion skinning and we draw frame by frame. Even if we don't know about these particular
frame positions, we have a fair fair
about how water flows. We're going to go with
our intuition about that. Now let's see how
that turned out. Quite happy with this. I think in the second
frame I'm going to reduce the time a little. If you notice when
something falls in water, there's always a little bit of a delay block of sorts that
follows in the water puddle. I'll just tell you
what I mean in a bit. Make a new layer and start
animating right away. As the volume of
water spreads apart, there's another small body
of water that rises to the top and then the entire
volume comes to rest. Next frame. This is the point
where it really goes like narrow because the force of gravity is constantly
pushing it down. Again, a little bit of
slowing in over here. Just going to manipulate
these frames, spot it and this
thing falls along. This stays and lags a little bit behind
and following through. Gradually this water droplet
also keeps falling along. Let's see how that plays
out. This is good. You see that smooth
motion towards the end, that is what is giving
the idea of it being a deep body of water and
something heavy falling into it. There we have it. This
is how you can plan even the most extensive
and complex actions and animate them. [MUSIC]
10. Cleaning Up: [MUSIC] Now we'll begin
with the cleanup stage. In this stage, what
we'll be doing is fading out our rough animation. What we need to keep in
mind at this stage is line consistency,
and volume control. To start out, we're
going to delve right into the cleanup of our first
shot that we just animated. We see the puddle, we see
the title come in and the pair of boots jumped right after and the water splash. This is our rough animation
of our first shot. Let's go ahead and
clean this up. There are two aspects
of cleaning this up, one is the character animation, which is the pair of boots
and also the water splash. Let's just focus on the
character animation for now. We reduce the opacity of this and make a frame
right about here, which is obviously going
to be the same length as the rough animation
layer below. Here you're just going to
keep in mind the consistency of line and volumes because right now
you're going to fill in all the details. This phase is quite
important because honestly cleanup can either break
or make your animations. We're going to the second
frame, similar line quality. We're trying to
maintain these volumes. Cleanup really gets
complicated when there are several
aspects to a character. If the character
design is complex with various secondary props that the character holds,
say for example, a jacket, jeans, checkered hat or
something like that, the complexity of it
will keep on increasing. You might need to
keep in mind how much you will need to clean up while you're character designing. For this simple exercise, we have a very simple character, but still it does have a few props including the
water bottle and the bag, and also the hoodie flap. This stage of animation can also easily get a
little monotonous because you're not making
something out of scratch, because I've already done
that in rough animation. But actually drawing
over your rough bits. What I like to do is sometimes listen to music at this phase, that helps you tune in and focus on what is
at hand right now. Also, a lot of care goes into this phase because depending on the intricacy of your style, you need to pay a
lot more attention to keep the line quality
as consistent as possible. There's a lot of fun in cleaning up on Photoshop
because there are countless number of
brushes that you can experiment with in
your cleanup phase. Here you can also notice I'm not erasing
the entire frame, but erasing only parts of it
depending on what I need. The reason is that I want a certain level of
line consistency, and starting from scratch would mean drawing something
separately and it might create a little bit of jittering if I'm drawing
every frame separately. A lot of times your style might demand a bit of jittering
in line quality, having some bubbling of lines. But that is completely
a stylistic approach, so I leave that up to you. I want to fill this up just to create that depth
in the rain coat, for this frame, I
think we can duplicate right about now so that we
don't have to draw that again. Next frame we'll
need to draw again. Almost there. I will choose to
draw this instead of manipulating this little
end of the raincoat simply because I'm
confident that the volumes will stay consistent and line quality as well. You might see in
this cleanup phase, I'm undoing and redoing the lines until I
get it just right, and that is a very
common thing to do. Leg goes up, your wrist position and one more time,
this comes in. So duplicating those frames and then the feet come to rest. We're going to
rename this layer as cleanup characters and switch off the rough animation layers. Let's see now how the
cleanup has turned out. Very nice, very bold
lines, very consistent. I'm quite happy with the
way it has turned out. For the water splash, I think we're going to
use something different. We're going to make use
of not just the brush, but other tools that
Photoshop offers. With the help of the Lasso tool, I have made myself a bit of a puddle and I have
also gone ahead and animated just two
extension frames of the puddle because as soon
as the feet come and fall, the puddle needs to
expand a little bit. What we're going to do is use the Lasso tool to animate
this splash as well. We will quickly reduce the opacity of our
rough animation splash and use our Lasso tool
instead of our brush tool, just going to pick that color. Now that we have
our area selected, we're going to hit Alt
or Option and Delete, and that is going to give
us a very neat silhouette. You can also keep
using the brush and the Lasso tool together as
in when it's convenient. Here I'm not going to
draw any borders around the water body or
any of the splashes. We are going for a
very lineless style for the water and
the water splashes, and just bold lines for
our character animation. We're done with the
cleanup of our first shot. I'm going to go ahead and
finish the rest of the shots. [MUSIC] Now that we're finally done cleaning
up all our shots, let's move on to the next step, which is color and compositing. The student exercise for
this lesson is to finish all your rough animation and
clean up all your shots.
11. Filling Color: [MUSIC] Now that we're done
with cleaning up our shot, let's move on to color filling. In color filling basically, we're going to color our
cleaned up animation. Referring to the style frame
that I had created earlier, but let's just switch that on. This is our style frame
that we had created. It has solid colors
and a little bit of highlights and shadows
on the character. It also does have
a little bit of reflections that we
can see in the water. Otherwise a very minimal
design, very minimal style, just focusing on the two
main aspects of this story, our main character,
which is our kid, and the puddle of water. What we can do here, is actually pick color from this style frame for
the character and the water so that
there's no difference in color and we don't have
to color pick from scratch. We're going to hit
our brush tool and we're going to
hit Alt or Option, you'll see this eyedropper
or color picker tool. You just need to
click on this and immediately you'll
see your color change to yellow in the foreground. We're going to move back to our Photoshop file of the
cleaned up animation, we're just going to make a layer below our cleaned up animation. We want to color the main
character so we can switch off the rest of the layers and we can come back to them later. This is our first frame
and we see the boots here, so we're going to pick the
color of the boots from here and just paint it. The easiest way to paint in Photoshop is with the
color bucket tool. The shortcut for that is
pressing G on your keyboard. This gives us our
color bucket tool. You can also find this in
your toolbar with this icon. What you need to do
is just click on it, immediately, you have
your color filled. Let's move on to the next frame, duplicate this layers and
bring this down so that it acts as an animation
layer under Video Group. Now switch to this layer off, you don't really
need this right now. What I'm going to
do here is pick a slightly darker color
for the feet behind so that there is no problem
in understanding which one is in the front and
which one is at the back. Since this process is
taking a little while, I think I'm going to color
each boot separately, but in the same layer so
that I can come back to the second boot and fill that up when I'm done
with the first boot. Now when I'm
coloring this frame, you'll notice that the entire
frame is getting colored. This is happening
because there are gaps in the clean up lines
in the layer above. One quick fix for this is just
hitting your brush layer, picking the same color. You just fill in the
areas that you think are not covered by
the line art layer, and we're good to go. We're going to go ahead and do the same thing for the
rest of the frames. Shortcuts really help, so you can use your keyboard to switch between these tools, so B for brush and
G for color bucket. Now that we have already
the frames in place, it'll be much easier to fill in. We don't need to create or
duplicate any new frames, and it's just much more easier. We're done with the boots, so we'll go ahead and pick
the color of the rain. This is also another
part, just like clean up, where you can relax,
listen to some music. Let's see how that plays out. Lovely. Now that we're done coloring up our
character animation, we'll quickly go and fill in
our shadows and highlights. For shadows, let's
create a new frame right between our clean
up and our color frame. Needs a little bit of
shadow on this boots, so I'm going to pick out
a gray that I'm okay with and moment I paint in, it appears to be gray. But there's a trick to this. Using layer modes or the
multiplayer layer mode, you can change this immediately
into a shadow layers. See how the shadow
falls on the boots, and now we're going to
replicate the same effect on the rest of the
consecutive frames. For that, it might
be a good idea for you to turn this
into a normal mode. Duplicate this, so that it makes another
animation layers. You'll fill in this area
again and fill it in. Now what you can do is change the layer mode of the entire
animation layers as a whole, so that you don't
really need to get into the layer modes
of each layer. Now, if you are painting
with the same gray, is going to paint as
a multiply layer. We're doing the same thing, which is figuring
out any area where the shadow will fall,
start filling in. I think we need to enhance this wave motion of this part of the rain
coat a too more, it is out a little bit of
the shadows from here, just so that it all
flows well in motion. Now, we're going to add some
highlights to the boots. This is our shadow layer, let's rename every
layer so that we don't get confused and
a new layer on top. We're going to use
the same gray, but we're going to
shift the layer mode from multiply to overlay now. Mostly, I work with multiply for shadows and overlay
for highlights. Let's just go ahead and add in one highlight for our boot. Let's just add in a
little gray dot over here for the shine on the boot. Let's just go ahead and try out a few layer modes to see what works best for
our highlight layer. Let's go down to our layer
mode drop-down menu. This is quite interesting, which is color dodge, overlay here is quite faint. Maybe what we can do is change the color
to a much lighter gray and see how that translates in the overlay
mode. This is quite nice. Depending on patterns
or depending on the stuff that you
want on your characters, you can always have animation
layers that are set to different layer modes to
give you the best results. You might be noticing that all these little details are
also quite time-consuming, which makes animation
a little tedious and also requires you to have
a little bit of patience. But when all of
these little details add up to your final animation, I'm sure it'll be worth it. Let's just play that
out once, lovely. For the water, I've already
filled in a layer over here. I'm also going to add in our splash layers and
see how this flows. I think it is a good idea to take our splash layer and put it up above our character
animation layers. Much better. Since the puddle right
now feels a little flat, maybe we're going
to go in and add some reflections
texture into it. We're going to make
a new layer on top of this and we're going to stretch out the
entire thing to the end. Let's pick a nice texture brush. Photoshop offers a lot of fun brushes that you
can experiment with. The brush that I'm using
is a chalk texture brush. Let's go ahead and try
painting reflections here, we're going to reduce the
size of the brush slightly. We're going to put some
paints on top of this so that it feels like there's some reflection
happening in the water. What we'll do now, press Alt option
on your keyboard and come in between
these two layers. You'll see the change in
this icon and just hit it, and it will create
a clipping mask. Maybe I think I'll use a
little harder brush over here just to exaggerate that
reflection effect and we're good. One last thing that
we're going to do, change the color of the water
body and now we're done. Now that we have our color
for the first shot done, we're going to dive
right ahead and color the rest of
our shots. [MUSIC]
12. Compositing: [MUSIC] Before
starting compositing, we're going to take all
these individual layers from Photoshop and bring them
back into After Effects. That'll be easier for
us to manage as layers. In the compositing phase, all the layers that make
up a scene including background,
foreground, midground, and character animation, as well as a lot of lighting
and special effects, come together and
make up the scene. Now, we have four layers. One is our character layer, splash layer, our water
body, and background. For all static layers, we're going to save
them as PNG because the file size is relatively
low and easier to manage. We'll now go into File, and we'll go to Export. But this time, instead
of Quick Export as PNG, since this is not
a static layer, we're going to go all the
way down to Render Video. Another thing that we
need to change here is the format from H.264, which is MP4, to MOV, which gives us the extra
option of rendering in Alpha. All of these, you do not
need to worry about. Come right here at
Render Options. You'll see something
called the Alpha Channel. By default, it is
always set to None. Go to the dropdown menu and always hit
"Straight-Unmetered". This is going to
help you render out your animation layers in Alpha. Now that we have all our layers here, for the first shot, we're going to drag these
and drop into After Effects. We're going to hit
"New Composition". Width and Height
would be 1080,1920. Frame Rate, 24 FPS. Just like we did
in the animatic, we're just going to hit "Okay". It'll be a good idea to drag and drop your
animatic layer. Again, so that you just have a reference for your animation. You make a new layer
over here called Shot 1. You might see all of these are a little jumbled up,
but not to worry. Shot 1 BG. From here, you have your splash
layer on top, then the character,
then the puddle, then your background. First thing that we're
going to try and do is bring the title
somewhere around here. We're going to go
into Text layer. Let's call this film Puddle. Increase the size. From here, we can change the color to
somewhat of a dark blue. Also, change the
font. I like this. For animating the title, I just want a simple faded. What I'll do is hit "D", bring out the
Opacity properties, hit a "Keyframe" over here. Hit another
"Keyframe" over here. Just reduce this to zero. When the feed comes in, we need to mask this
out so that it feels like our main character
just jumped on our title. Let's play that.
Comes in perfectly. Lovely. After Effects gives you a lot of liberty
in trying out and experimenting different
effects that it makes your animation stand out
or be more authentic. I'm going to duplicate this
layer by hitting "Command D". This is our character
animation layer. We're going to bring it
on top of the puddle. We're going to hit
"Right-Click" on our Shot 1 character, go into Transform properties, and just flip vertically. Now, we have a perfectly vertically reflected
layer of the same. We're going to do some
manipulations and reduce the size of
this just a wee bit. We're going get this down to match the
lining of our foot. Lovely. Now, we're going to just reduce the opacity of
this layer a little bit. I just want a little bit
of a haze on top of it, which is why I'm going to
try using Directional Blur. We're going to increase
the blur length. This is something that is
not possible in Photoshop, and it's quite comfortably
done in After Effects. We do not want the reflection
to fall on the footpath. Just limit it to
our puddle area. We're going to duplicate
the puddle layer, put it on top of our
character animation that we just put
a blur effect on. We're going to go to
this dropdown menu , which says None. We're going to hit
"Alpha Matte". Alpha Matte is basically the same concept as
a Clipping Mask. It allows you to move around
your particular layer within the boundaries of the layer that it has
been alpha-matted on. Now, you see that it
is only limited to the areas of the water splash. Title appears, title goes. The puddle title is appearing
on top of our gum boots. This is what we do not want. So we're going to go frame by
frame and just reduce this. I think we're good
to go now, yes. We also want the sides of the
reflection to be a little faded and not go up entirely to the boundary of our
water splash layers. What we can do for that is
use a mask on top of this. We go to Pen tool. By keeping our reflection
layer, select it. We're going to draw a little bit of a mask right about here. One more thing that I'd
like to add is go to Masks, open up the Mask properties. Go to Mask Feather and increase the feather to 62 pixels or so. This is good for a nice gradient
fade. We're good to go. Once you have composited
all your shots, your film is ready.
Well, almost. [MUSIC] We have reached to the final step of the
process, which is sound design. The student exercise
for this lesson is to fill colors for the cleanup animation
and move on to composite your
animated film. [MUSIC]
13. Adding Audio: Sound design is probably the most exciting aspect of making your film
more believable. Sound lends a lot of
credibility to your films. Since the actions in
our animations do not have any real
sound to begin with, the idea is to create the same effect that
we'll hear in real life. With that being
said, animated films have a lot of
exaggerated action, which gives you the liberty to experiment with your sound
while making your film. For the sound design of our animated film
we want to create layered sound or a soundscape that best replicates reality. In reality, when we hear sounds we hear them in various layers. Say, for example, we're
hearing some noise coming from the background
from far away or we're hearing a bird
chirping just at a distance or even the
rustling of our feet. All these sounds play in
our head in various layers, giving us a complete
understanding of sound and the
environment we're in. Let's see what all sounds we
require for our first shot. The first thing that we need is to create a sense
of environment. This is probably happening on a busy street on an
overcast day so we probably need a little bit of rain sound and also
some crowd chatter. Of course, we need
a water splash and a little more
splashes over here. We also do need a
random sound of a passer-by who is annoyed with
all this water splashing. The two sources that
I use for sound are YouTube and Freesound mainly because these are in
the public forum, which means there are
plenty of uploads by various people so you might
get what you want for free. I'm going to search for
busy street sound effect, we're going to
look for something short, something like this. Let's hear this out. Maybe I'm going to use
this at a very low volume. Since I'm downloading
the sound from YouTube I use a
website that not only allows me to download
but also convert this from MP4 to MP3. Let's figure out the next sound, I want a little murmur
sound effect of people. I think this is creating a nice ambience and
it is not too loud, there's not too many people. You download this file as well. We also need some water
splash sound effects. Lovely. I think we have this. Now that we have these
three sound effects to give us good idea about what
the environment is like, we're going to drag and
drop these into After Effects and level them out. So that we do not mess around with the animation
one, it is locked. Maybe we can precompose
this as layers. Think of pre-compose like
grouping of different layers. We shift, select all
the layers that we want then we go to
our keyboard and hit Control or Command Shift C. We're going to
call this SHOT 1. With that done, we'll get all our sounds and
paste them here. If I play now, is just going
to sound like a cacophony. But if you notice,
it has already giving you a sense
of environment. We're going to switch
off our splash layers and we're going to mainly use these two layers
of voice and traffic. Think the sound is
starting to loud so you can hit this drop-down
menu and click on audio. We're going to turn
it down just a wee bit to about -16 decibels or so. Let's see. Is a little too low, maybe -10 would we fine. This back-and-forth is quite necessary and this will
help you experiment. I think around here I want
the splash to really come on. Let's find a good splash
first. Let's try this. This is nice but it's
just a little too much. We need a sound that
is not as intense. Lovely. I think it fits
in quite well here. It's hitting at a wrong time. What you can do is actually sink the sound to your action
frame-by-frame and to To that you can actually drag your time indicator by holding the Control or Command
key so that you can listen to the sound while
it's coming through it. See me scrub through
the whole thing and the moment I press Command you'll be able to
hear sound as well. Let's push it a little back. Lovely. Now we're going to do this small little
splashes as well. I think we have it. I really like this part of the sound, I think it fits in perfectly. Great. I'm very happy
with this shot. Now that we have downloaded
all the sound effects and put them in and we are
happy with how it sounds, we're still missing
the last voiceover of this random passer-by. Many a times, especially
during voiceovers, you might not find what you're looking for on the Internet. Rather than relying
on outside sources, you can very well record
your own voiceovers and you can play around with it to
best suit your animation. All you need is a quiet room and a cozy corner with your
phone and you're good to go. We're going to take
all the voiceovers and bring them into
Adobe Audition, where we can experiment
and modulate with various effects and see what works best
for our animation. We open up Adobe Audition and we take our voiceover
and bring them in. This particular area is
where all the magic happens. You bring that in right here. You're going to try
out all these effects that are present over here. Once you're done you head
to File and you export. You can either export this as MP3 WAV file or various
other audio formats that are available
in Adobe Audition and hit "OK" so it is going to render out
your audio file. Once you're modulated voiceover is rendered out from
Adobe Audition, bring that back
into After Effects and render out accordingly. Now that we have
placed our voiceover, let's see how this looks. I'm very happy with
the first shot. Sound is actually creating a
very immersive environment. Similarly, we'll now design the sound for the
rest of the film. Finally, we're done with the sound design of all our shots. I think we're finally
ready to render this out. I'll just talk a
little bit about the render settings you
need to keep in mind. We need to go to composition
add this to render queue. Once in the render queue
we'll go into our properties. For the sake of the class, and just because we're
uploading on social media, I think we're fine with an
H.264 format or an MP4 format. Everything else is
going to be matching source so we don't need to
really worry about anything. We just need to change
the name of this, figure out where do you
want to see the final film. Just going to name this Puddle final and save
this and hit okay. When you are good to go, you
just hit the render button. Once you have the
film rendered out, you can finally
watch it and you're animated reel will be
ready for Instagram. Let's see how the final
thing looks like. Wow, that turned out to be
just the way we wanted it.
14. Final Thoughts: [MUSIC] Congratulations
on finishing this class. Don't forget to
share your project in the project gallery below. If you want to
check out my work, you can find me on
Instagram at Debjyoti.saha. Through social media,
I've been able to become a part of the vibrant community of artists that India has. It has immensely helped
me better my work, always stay inspired because I'm seeing so much of good work
happening all around me. I promise that this will
happen with you too as long as you keep
practicing and keep creating. Thank you for joining me. It was so much fun teaching you.
Debjyoti Saha, Animation Filmmaker
