Animation Fundamentals: Squash and Stretch

1. Bouncing Intro: Hey everybody, it's teacher Nick again with another great course. This one is an animation, frame animation in Procreate, we will be learning the skill called squish and stretch. And it's a simple technique that most animators need to know as a foundational course. Since it is frame animation, that's going to be very, very simple to do today. And so I'm going to look forward to seeing your projects today, which will be mimicking whatever you learn today in class. We will be using shading techniques to give it a three-dimensional field and adding emotion as well. To give cartoon field to the bouncing ball, this will be a perpetual bouncing ball, which means it won't ever stop. We'll just keep going up and down and up and down. You'll be learning some great skills today. You'll be learning about Frame Animation, onion skinning. You'll be learning about background and foreground. So when you're doing your own animations, you can see how that will affect all of your animations. And then you'll also be learning some will be using the warp function, the distort function, and I think that's pretty much it. But we'll also learn about delays and timing. So it's a great course. I look forward to seeing your projects. Can't wait to meet you. And I'll see you in class. 3. Animation Production: And so now that's our bounding box. This one, what this means, it's going to stay on every single page that we do, every single frame that we do. And it's going to be there as a guide only. At the end, we will remove this frame as well as the grid. Now here you can see that it says Add a frame. And if I do that, that is the first frame that I will be drawing on. The background again, there it is. It stays on every single page, so this will appear. So it's really nice when you're doing longer animations, you'll have, if you want to have a background and the color of the ball, I'm going to choose red. And so I'm not going to use a stroke, it's just a pure color. And there are two ways to do this. One is drawing each circle by hand, going down the line. The only problem with that, and it's not that that's a problem so much. But if you want to keep a consistent look of the ball, you wouldn't wanna do that. Now I'm not saying every ball should be perfectly round. Could be a rock or something. But for this purpose is we're going to keep it nice and simple. And so when we open up our layers, you can see that frame one is there and it's also tied down to this one over here. So when I draw my circle, I'm going to just go back to my paintbrush. And mono line again is selected. I'm going to draw a very small circle right here. And by holding down, it's going to snap shut. And then by using my other finger, it's gonna give me a perfect circle. Now you can see that it's off-center a little bit. I go up to my arrow button, make sure that's selected and you see that it's offline a little bit. I just want to tap here a little bit and then we'll come back to the center. There it is. Now I could do a snapping magnetics and snapping and that way it will always snap together. And so now I'm gonna do something different. I'm going to go ahead and duplicate this line or this frame. Now you can see down at the bottom there are two frames there, and there are two frames here. So now I'll have to do is go back to the arrow key. Now I have this perfect circle and all I have to do here is now you can see that it's snapping and magnetics. And now I can just keep it nice and neat right there, and it stays together. A quick little tip is that if you want your animation to go slower, you want to keep your circles together closer. And if you want them to go a little bit faster, you would put them farther apart. Now we're not going to be able to see that here because it's short distance. But I do have another video I'll show you at the end. Mimics a roller coaster of when it's going to slow climate stays up there for awhile and then it shoots down. And it's a simple thing of just having lots and lots of circles really close together. And then down here, it's one big space or gap. And we'll see that a little bit later that video. Now, I'm just gonna do this one more time. We're going to duplicate it. And then go to my arrow key, again, my arrow. And then I'm going to bring it down a little bit like that. So now we have those three. You'd see the onion skinning and what it's doing is it's representing it with a solid red. The current screen will always be red or your color of choice. My next frame will still duplicate it, but it will not be circle. We're gonna go back to our arrow and select, make sure that you're selecting here, you might accidentally make it bigger or whatever. So we don't wanna do that, make sure that's not moving. And it usually it would be under uniform down here. But for this purpose of this third I think it's third or fourth by now, it's already the fourth frame. We're going to change a little bit, go back to the arrow, make sure it's selected and we're going to click on distort. Distort is going to allow us to, can it turn it into a little bit like a football? Now the only problem with this and see what's happening. What do you think is happening there? Well, because it's snapping and magnetics is not going to let me do it. So I need to turn those both off and go back to my circle and turn it into an oval. Now, I don't wanna go too far down and maybe just about right there. But when we're talking about a circle, a circle has a certain mass. And when we squish it, if we squish a ball, we will change the shape of it. So usually when you squish something, it goes in and it will go in little thinner. So we have to adjust for that. We have to make sure that we don't change the mass of the ball. So we're going to approximate. We know that it can't be as wide as the circle because then the mass would be equal. You can see that can I went down a little bit in there? So now we can take that and we can drag it down here. Of course I'm gonna, I'm gonna lose my snapping. But now you see that it's actually stretching. And then we're going to duplicate this one again. We're going to go back to the arrow and maybe make this go a little bit down further. And we do it one more time. And this time we want to make sure to click on the arrow, make sure it's selected. We're going to touch the bottom. And you can just do that right there. Because that's our bounding box that sir, think of it maybe as a wall or the floor. You can't go beyond it, wouldn't make any sense. So we have to have some rules in the game. So now we're going to go in and do it one more time. Let's do a couple of more times. We're going to do another duplicate. But this time we're going to make sure that it is squeezed rate. So we have to make sure this is the only part that's tough. We have to make sure that that stays at that point. We can bring this down. And now we have to go out sideways. Right? Now it's gonna be going out this way. And again, this doesn't have to be perfect. It's just an approximation of how it's going to go. But the force of the ball is moving at a quick rate, a fast rate. So that's got to now change from a vertical and a horizontal. And now we're going to do that again. Duplicate it. And you can see every time I'm duplicating frames, this also gets longer. But now we have to make this a little bit flatter and have it really have a lot of force and make this go down to the bottom. And that one I can use Warp can make that go down like that and bring that one down a little bit more. So it kinda has a more of a impact at the bottom. So it looks almost like a a flattened almost like a flattened Stonewall. And then if you want to, you can go one more. If you wanna go one more, you can do it. Duplicate it again and we're going to squeeze it, go back to distort and make squeeze it down a little bit more like that. Now, let's go back to let's click off the arrow button and let's just for the heck of it, go to settings and I'm going to show you what if I maxed out the onion skin frames, what that would look like? You can see now where everything is straight and that's what we want. We want to write in the middle. If you want, you can play it, but it's very close to being finished. So now that we're go back to my settings and go back to about four frames. I want to go back to the last frame. Don't don't stay where I was. Sure I knew the last one there and you can double-check it here. We know that those are the last frames we chose. Now here, we're going to duplicate again. Okay? Or you can just copy one from one that you've already done. But for this case, we're just going to click the arrow again and we're going to bring it back up again. And I'd like to do a little bit differently. So there's that duplicated again. Click on the arrow button. And you can start seeing that's going to start now it's starting to get into form. So we don't want that at all. So we're gonna go in here and we're going to delete that. Let's go back to this one would be good. Or even go back to this one. Let's duplicate that and then drag it to the very top. Now that is our last frame. And we can just move it up a little bit like that. And then duplicate it again. Then again after this one will be going back into the circle. And you can make slight adjustments. This one's a little bit off there. And you can make it go, make sure you're in distort and just push it a little bit more if you want. Of course that one would wouldn't be fat or would it it'd be the one before that. So it had to be this one. And then you can distort it a little bit more if you want. It's really up to you. So let's go back arrow. Make sure you're on your last frame. Now we can just go in and copy the circle again. So the circle is way back here. And we would duplicate that. And then copy it, copy it all the way to the top, and then duplicate it. Move it with the arrow again. Apologize for my big hand. And then one more time. And bring it back to the beginning. Now we're going to run this. You're going to see how simple that was. Alright, so we click off that, makes sure that you click back over there on the arrow. And we just do a simple play. Then you see that something is off. And I may have done it too fast. Let's take a look at this. Yeah, it looks like this one of these is off center. I think it's this last one. But really not by much. Let's EMS, when you have something that goes up, it doesn't go immediately back down again. It goes up, fights gravity, stays there for a second when it comes back down again. And so that's what we're gonna do with this animation. We're going to click on them the last frame and we're going to see where it says Hold Duration. We're going to change that. Let's try to just see how it looks and then play it. Now it looks like it's holding too much. So we're gonna go back to the last frame and we're going to change that back to one. You may not even need this at all, but you can see it's a little bit better. 4. Coloring, Faces, Shading, Shadows: Now, for this next video that we're going to be doing, I know a lot of you probably know already know how to use re-color. Unfortunately, we will not be able to use recolor here because we don't have all the circles on the screen at the same time. But I will go back to one and then we can just click and hold that in and the next one, hold it till it's filled. The next frame. And unfortunately they do this like 20 times, but we could have done it at the very beginning. That's an option. But I chose not to. And this is just spin. Take a few seconds, so I'm going to speed this up. So you want to enter this, okay, We're back and then all colored and we're going to go back and do a test run here. It looks really fun, doesn't it? It's going down there. You can make slight adjustments here and there if you want. It's perfectly on that line. And this is what's called the perpetual bounce. Now, if you want to, if you want to stop this, this pause it for a minute. If you want, you can go in and make that an alpha lock. We can pick up a little bit darker color here, though, darker red, and put in a nice shadow. I would do that. I would go into airbrushing, soft brush, and then we could just put a little bit of a shadow, maybe on it like that to give it some dimension. And if you can see that, I'm not sure if you can see that. So it gives a little more dimension. Then we can also go in, and now here's where we can go back to black. And we can put a funny face. Right? So here I go a little bit. I mean, I bring it up little closer and I just go back to mono line, which is where you, if you want to get a finer when you can do that too. But calligraphy, mono line makes sure that it's probably size 2%, maybe smaller. Then we can just put a funny face. Actually. Go back here. Put a little dot. That's a horrible duct. And then we go back here and we can get pure white. And we can fill that with white. And now we have a face. Alright? So you can do that for all of your, your characters, your balls. And when you go to here at the bottom, let's be real. A lot of fun for you is when it's actually hitting the, when it's hitting the wall or the floor down here, you can maybe make a little bit, Let's go back to black. And maybe showing a little bit of a grimace face. And then flatten them out even more. So you can have a lot of fun with making your own little characters in it. Again, once you get this down, this process of doing this down, you can, you don't have to use circles. You can use maybe a head or whatever else you want to do. The next animation that most, most animators will use is a sack of flour. And the reason why they use a second flower in a second flower could be something as simple as this. The reason why they do a sack of flour is because it's a way to show emotion through posture. And by bending this are making it smaller. You can look like he's slouched or sad or up and he could be happy. And so that brings it a lot. Without even drawing a face, you can give it some emotion, which is nice. That's usually what mentors do after this. I do have a video on that. Alright, so that's that. And then after that's all done, what you wanna do is go back to the beginning and you want to make sure that you shut off at the wrench, shut off Drawing Guide. You don't want that anymore. And then here at the very first screen, you want to click that to always have it there. Okay, so that's it. You can also turn off onion skinning, go back to settings. And you can shut off onion skinning and player little animation. Now the only thing I didn't do in this animation was shadows. And so if you want to draw a shadow from far away, it would remember, it would be fuzzy, very fuzzy and light. And the closer it came down to the bottom, you would put, let's say for instance, this one. You would have. And then just draw. Let me make sure this is turned back on so I know where I'm doing. And I was draw a simple oval down here at the bottom. That's out of control. And then I could fill it with black. And then go to the one next to the wrench and do a Gaussian Blur. Something like that. Remember if further away it's the fuzzier that shadow will be. And then here all I would do is just merge down. And so now it's there. So you do this for every single frame. The closer came, the darker and less of a Gaussian Blur. Would there be? 5. How to Set Your Speed: So here's the roller coaster idea. You can see how what I did was I just have them here and they're really close together this way at play it. So there's a little more speed there. You can kinda see that where that happens, it goes up, it stays there for a little bit, comes down real fast. And that's something that you can do. Again. Well, how would we do that? And go back to our, we would draw our line and follow that line. So that's my line, that's the background that would appear on every single page. And then I have something to follow. And that's a lot of fun. You can do a lot of fun things with that. So I hope you've enjoyed the class and I look forward to seeing your work for the project, a separate video. And thanks a lot for taking my class. I appreciate it. 6. Bouncing project: Okay everybody, this is the class project. You can do a bouncing ball looping if possible, and it can be any color, any design you can have faces without faces, doesn't matter. I want to see what you come up with. The animation on the right was something I tried. Was obviously it's not a ball, but it's something fun that we can try. Let's see what happens here because it is a different shape. I actually spun it around. And you can see that now this isn't set to loop. Unfortunately here, you can see how it looks. And so you can have fun with this class project. I hope you enjoy it. I hope it's something that you're getting a value out of it. We've talked about onion skinning, we've talked about distort and warp a little, just a little bit there. Frame assist, sitting up your parameters. And we've talked about drawing guide and setting that, the grid and everything. So it's a great foundation for you and I hope you get a lot of value out of this project and keep on doing as many. You know, you can post more than one. It's okay with me. I want to see what you're able to come up with. The more creative. I don't know, a lot of creative students out there and really appreciate you're taking my class. I can't wait to see your work. 7. AlternativeProject: Okay, I wanted to share something with you. Additional type of animation. And that's just a 11 time. It's not going to be perpetual, it's just going to land and have a little thing at the very bottom there. And one of three ways you can save it is, one is the time-lapse recording. You can, if you're going to do something on your procreate file, it'll take from the point you started your new file to the ending. It'll record everything that happened in that timeframe. So that's one way we can do that. And another way we can save it, of course, is my animated GIF. Animated GIF, you can do max resolution or you can also do web ready. I think I've saved it in all four of these ways. I did Max resolution, radio, Geoff, and then I also did time-lapse. And then the last one, of course, would be to do in an mp4. So what's fun about this is that you can create to your heart's content. There's so many different ways that you can create different objects. You could do Friends head. You can do various body parts, of course. And then of course the animated MP4. And but it's a simple graphic. It's a ping file, so there's no background. And all I did was I took the file and then kept them duplicating it and changing its position so that it looked like it was being dropped from the sky. And so there's the different, This is Max, onion skinning. So you can see every single move. If you don't want to show that. You don't want to show that, but you can see each subsequent term that I did. I do this manually, by the way, that turns oral manual. There is a setting that you can do a 45-degree angle. But if you want a smoother transition, I was just doing it on your own. And if I wanted to, I can make it even smoother by putting in more additional layers. So that's just another option. So you have different, some different options. You have the ball and you also have any kind of object you want.