Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hi, my name is a Johannes Faus. I'm a traditional animator from Sweden and I'm currently living in Canada and working at a studio called Janas. I create animated content for the TV and Web. Like some of the things you see here. In this course I'll teach you the basics of traditional animation. I'll be using Adobe Animate, but you can use any animation program you want. We will start out by looking at the principles of animation and we'll then apply these to different kinds of animations in rising difficulty. By then a bit, you'll have your first work cycle to kick start your portfolio and I would love for you to share your work in the community during this course, so we can all see it and learn from each other. In every two weeks I'll pick three of my favorite animations and post them on my Instagram stories. Remember to follow me here on Skillshare because you don't want to miss any of my upcoming classes.
2. The 12 Principles of Animation: In this video, I will cover the 12 basic principles of animation. These 12 principles are the most basic rules to create beautiful moment. Number one, arcs. Almost all actions follow arcs with few exceptions. Arcs help your animation look smooth and natural. Number two, squash and stretch. Squash and stretch gets your animation character. Does the ball squash as it hits the ground, or does it stay solid? What does that tell you about the object? Number three, anticipation. To make an action of feel big and important, you need a pre-action to stage your main action. Like in this example, the character bends down and gather energy before he jumps. Number four, secondary action. Secondary action is an action that follows your main action to emphasize it. Like in this example, the leg emphasizes the main movement, which is the angry button smashing. Number five, staging. Staging is the act of presenting your subject to the viewer as clear as possible. Number six, straight ahead and pose to pose. Straight ahead animation means to draw from one frame to another. This way of animating is great for organic movement, like smoke and fire, because it makes your animation more dynamic and random. Pose to pose means to plan and draw the big poses of your action first and then after filling the drawings in between. This is great for character animation where you had to hit specific key poses throughout the scene. Usually though, a combination of the two is used. Slow in and slow out, all actions need time to start and stop to not feel stiff. To create this illusion that your object is speeding up or slowing down, you draw more pictures closer together to convey a slower movement or you draw your pictures further apart to convey a faster movement. Number eight, timing. Timing is the amount of frames your action takes. Good timing is critical for good animation. For example, a light ball will bounce differently to a heavy ball. If the timing is wrong, your audience won't understand the kind of object you're trying to portray. Number nine, exaggeration. Exaggeration is the act of pushing your actions beyond reality. But don't overdo it, stay somewhat within reality just make it more fun. Number 10, solid drawing. This means that you need to take into account that your 2D animations exist in a 3D space. Always stay true to your subject's volume, weight, balance, etc. Number 11, appeal. Appeal is like the charisma for an action. Your actions has to be beautiful to the viewers eyes. Number 12, follow through and overlapping action. Follow through is an action that comes after your main action, like a flame trailing behind a match. Overlapping action is an action that tends to move slightly out of sync to the main action, like a head bouncing stayed out of sync with the body or arms swaying along as a character is walking. That's it for this lesson, and I'll see you in the next one.
3. The Tools: Adobe Animate: Now I'll show you the basic tools we'll be using during this course. For this course, I'll be animating in Animate CC but you can use any animation program you want. When you start your program, you'll be greeted with this screen. Up here, you select your canvas size, and down here, you select your frame rate. I almost always work in 24 frames per second. The platform type, you can just leave that as is. This is what the program looks like. To the side here, you have your tools. Here, you can find your brush tool, your eraser, whatever you need, and to the side here, you'll have your menu settings. Any animation program will have a timeline, and this is what the timeline looks like in Animate CC. Here, you have your layers, and here you have your frames. To create a new layer, you will click this button up here, and you'll get a new layer structure here. If we want to add frames to this layer, you press "F5." As you can see here, I'm adding frames to this drawing. This here is one long drawing being held for 25 frames. If I draw something here, it will play for 25 frames. To cut up this drawing into smaller frames, you press "F6." Now up here, I have a drawing being held for two frames. This is what a drawing being held for one frame looks like. If I animate on these, this is what it will look like. If you wanted to delete frames, you click "Shift F5." If I want to split up this layer into increments of two frames, I can right-click up here, and go to Convert to Frame-by-Frame Animation, and then every other frame, and it will cut up this into increments of twos. Another important feature of an animation program is the onion skinning. Onion skinning makes you able to see the frames before and after. In Animate CC, you will find your onion skinning up here. If you click this button, you will be able to see the drawings that are before and after the drawing you're on. Like this. Now, if I move back, I can see the frames before and after. I can adjust this, and see more or less. If you're familiar with any other Adobe program, you have your basic selection tools up here. You can draw something, and then you can click this one, and move it around. You can also twist and skew it if you want by pressing "Q," and then you can pull on these. By pressing "Command," I can pull the corners like this, and by holding Option, you can skew your art like this. If you want to fill your art, you can go to the pink bucket tool here, and just drop in the color by clicking on it. If you have a lot of layers, you can create folders to sort your layers. To create a folder, you click the "Folder icon" up here, and then you can take these layers, and put them in the folder, and you will have a cleaner timeline. In some cases, you might have artwork going outside your art board, and you still want to see it. To be able to view the art that is outside the art board you can click this button up here. This would reveal everything that is outside your canvas. That's it for the basics of Animate CC. In the next video, I'll show you how to export gifs from Animate CC and from Photoshop.
4. Exporting an Animated GIF: Now I'll show you how to export an animated GIF from Animate CC. When you have your finished animation, you use go up to file, export and export animated GIF. To decide here you have your settings, I usually leave these as is, but if you say I don't want a transparent background, you can uncheck this box here. Down here. You can compress your gift and make it smaller. This will make the output GIF as smaller in canvas size and also smaller in file size. Once you've selected your settings, you can go down here and make it loop once or loop forever and when you're done, you just click save. Here you have your GIF. If we're animating in Photoshop, I'll show you how to export a GIF. When your animation is done, you go to file and export. Here, you go to Save for Web. In the Menu here you select GIF, and here you have your settings. I will use these as they are like an Animate CC here you can change the size of your GIF and down here, you select the looping option. After that, you click Save and here's your GIF.
5. Animating Boiling Text: Theory: To warm up into this course, we will start by animating some boiling texts like the one you see here. Animating boiling texts is pretty simple and we only need a few drawings. In this case, I have three drawings being shown for two frames each in 24 frames per second. This is called animating on twos. This is how your drawings would be spaced out when you animate on twos. Here you can see 12 drawings over 24 frames. But in our case, we're just going to have three drawings and then loop them, so the spacing will look like this. Animating ones though means that you have to draw 24 pictures for every one second of animation. In the old Disney movies, they would animate them ones often. This is a lot of work though, and most modern day traditional animation is animated on twos because it cuts to work in half. Animating on ones is sometimes done for really fast actions. Adding those extra frames helps in making the action clearer. But sometimes even lower framework work. Like in this case, the robot is animated on fours. All right. That was the theory part of this lesson. In the next video, I'll show you how to make the actual animation.
6. Animating Boiling Text: Practice: Go ahead and open a preferred animation program and make a new project at 24 frames per second. Pick a text you want to animate. In this case, I'm using a calligraphy font called Raph Lanok future. But you can make your own text by hand if you want to. When you have a drawing of the texts you want to animate, makes sure it holds for two frames and create a new frame after it. Turn on, your screen so that you can see the previous frame. Now, you simply as trace over the previous frame. The sloppier you trace the texts, the more it will boil. Once you've traced this frame, you will add another frame and do the same thing again. Make sure all three frames are being held for two frames each, and you're done. Go ahead and press "Play", and you get yourself your first animation. For this assignment, I want you to try to animate a boiling texts. I want you to animate on 24 frames per second on "2s". Once you're done, export a GIF as 1080 by 1080 pixels and post in the community. Good luck.
7. Animating a Bouncing Ball: Theory: In this lesson, I will cover that theory of animating and bouncing ball. The bouncing ball is the most basic and important exercise for any starting animator and is one of the easiest exercises for students to practice in different principles of animation. It is by using a few principles you can completely change the character of your ball. The two main principles we are going to use is timing and squash and stretch. Both these principles will work together to convey how heavier ball is, how big it is, and what material it is made of. Here is a rough animation of a basic ball bounce. On the side you can see the spacing of the frames. Everything that falls will accelerate. That means you need to space your frames further apart as the ball falls towards the ground, and vice versa, gravity will slow and it will be going upwards. Thus, you need to space your frames closer as the ball nears it peak. It's important that the spacing of your frames are correct. Otherwise the illusion will break. With timing and squash and stretch, you can convey different kinds of materials, sizes and weights. A small and light tennis ball will bounce high and fast. A beach ball will bounce a bit lower and slow, and a bowling ball will barely bounce at all. Here is an example of a bowl following an arch. For every bounce, the ball will lose some of his energy, like you can see in the arch here and like a straight ball bounce, the ball slows down as it reaches the peak and speeds up as it goes down. So now you might be asking yourself why it is relevant to know how to animate a bouncing ball for other types of animation. Thing is, even a walk cycle can be broken down into a bouncing ball. Both the body and the head can be broken down into bouncing balls before you add the arms and the legs. All right, that is it for the theory of the bouncing ball, in the next video, I will show you how I make it.
8. Animating a Bouncing Ball: Practice: Let's animate a bouncing ball. When I animate a bouncing ball, I always animate straight ahead. That means that I start with the first pose and I animate from there. Start by drawing your first pose and then it can be smart to mark out the height of this pose, because for every bounce, the ball will lose some energy. Here you have your first pause. You go to the next frame. Make sure you have getting on so you can see the previous frame and then you make your second drawing and move this down just a bit. I like to really make my easing slow in the beginning to make the bounce feel really dynamic as the ball speeds up. We go third frame, and we move it even more. Now our fourth frame, we move it even further. Now go to our fifth frame and here the ball is starting to stretch out because of the speed. We can even make this pose here. The fourth one start stretching. To make the balance feel impactful, we can make an impact posture where the ball is just starting to touch the ground before it squashes. You probably want to move these frames up a bit. Now we make our squashed pose here, the ball hits the ground. We can check what we have. Then the ball bounces off the ground and it has a lot of energy now as it goes up. We make it stretch out as it goes up. Then we draw our next pose and here, starting to lose some of that energy because of gravity working against it. Now we can make it start easing in a lot more. Here it's starting to lose a lot of energy. It slows in and it's reaching its peak here and it should go down again. Speeds up. We can start adding some stretch to it. We can make an impact pose and it squashes again, but it squashes a bit less now since lost some of its energy. Now we check out this is looking, see if we need to fix anything. It's looking good. Then the ball comes off the ground again, I'm stretching it a bit less now, because its lost even more energy. Comes off. I'm going to make the next frame. Now, doesn't go high at all. Slows in, then start falling again. Now it doesn't stretch much at all. The impact is even less now. [inaudible] how this is looking. Now it's lost even more energy. It barely stretches at all. Slows in really fast, as you go down again. Now it's not squashing much at all. It bounces up again. Now it barely gets any height and so I should go down. We get just a little squash. It goes up again, slows in, goes down. And it has a final little squash as it reaches its final position. Now we make this frame whole. That's a basic ball bounce. For this assignment, I want you to animate a ball bounce. I want you to animate on 24 frames per second on 2s and I want you to animate at least one ball. Before you start animating, I want you to think about what a ball is made of and how much it weighs. Then by using the principles of animation, I want you to convey the correct weight and material in your animation. Once you're done, I would like you to export a GIF and post it in the community. Please comment with your Instagram handle, if you would like a chance to get featured. Good luck.
9. Animating Liquid Text: Theory: It's time we tried animating some liquid text. To animate a text like this, we need to use a few principles, the main being arcs and easing, but we will also do some stretching and overshooting. To make animating texts easier, I like to split it up into separate parts and do each part on its own instead of animating the whole thing at once. I start by taking the text I want animated and draw over arcs for the color blobs to follow. I try to vary the arcs to make them animation more interesting. When I have my arcs, I mark out roughly the timing I want for the color blobs, and I like to make it pretty snappy by making it go fast around the curves of the arc. After this, it's just a matter of drawing your frames. You can play around with different kinds of animations as the blobs settle into the letters. Either do some overshooting or maybe a secondary action of smaller blobs separating from the big one. Sometimes when I make this liquid texts animation, I break the principle of solid drawing and squash and stretch the blobs as I see fit. In the next video, I will show you how I make this animation.
10. Animating Liquid Text: Practice: Start by creating a layer with the texts you want animated. After that, create a new layer and draw the arcs that you want your blobs to follow. I like to vary the size and shape of my arcs as much as possible to make the animation more fun. On the arcs, you can roughly draw in the there, easing your planning. Pay close attention when you plan your easing. You don't want your animation to speed up or slow down at the wrong moments. After you have your arcs planned, you create a new layer and you start drawing in your frames. I animate at 24 frames per second, and I hold each drawing for two frames. Like I mentioned in the theory part, it's easier to split each part of the text into separate layers. Here I'll show you how to animate one part of a letter. Make sure your animation is following the arcs correctly. Otherwise the animation won't flow very well. I like to add the small blobs breaking apart from the big one. This makes animation feel a bit more interesting. It's easy to make too many though, so don't overdo it. For this text, I decided not to overshoot the main action as it settles into its final pose. But instead, I added some secondary action with blobs flying off the main one. But this is totally up to you and how you like it. Once you've done your first part, you only need to apply the same principle to all the other parts. I'll speed up the next part of the video so we can see the final result. But feel free to skip to the end of the video for the assignment. Okay, so that's how I animate a liquid texts. So for this assignment, I want you to design a text or find a font that you like and that you want to animate in this way, come up with a fun word or maybe your name and create a liquid animation of it. I want you to animate in 24 frames per second. And I want you to hold each drawing for two frames. Make your art board 1080 by 1080 pixels, and your finished animation shouldn't be under ten seconds. For this particular assignment, I want you to practice your easing and drawing good arcs. But you can also experiment with secondary action, squashing and stretching, overshooting, add whatever you want. Once you're done, I want you to export a GIF and upload it to the community for the fellow students to see.
11. Animating Flags and Wave Motion: Theory: We're going to look at the theory of animating a flag, and animating wave motion in general. Knowing how to animate a flag well, it will help you with a lot of other animations too, as the same way motion can be used in many different places. For example, smoke can be broken down into basic wave motion like you see here. Grass swaying in the wind is also a wave motion back and forth. It can also be applied to lot of other things, like clothes on a moving character, hair swaying in the wind, etc. Depending on what kind of wave motion I'm doing, I either animate straight ahead or post to post. For the more organic movements like smoke, I animate straight ahead. But for a looping flag, I always make my key poses and then in between it. Here's a breakdown of a basic wave motion. When you animate these kinds of wave motions it can be nice as I'm overlapping action by dragging the end of the wave like this. This has to be dictated by what kind of object you're animating. A basic flag can be broken down into two key poses. The first is a basic wave like this, and the second post is the inverse of that wave, like this. When you have your two key poses it's just a matter of adding the frames in between. The more in-betweens you add to the loop, the slower the flag would move, and the less in-betweens you add, the faster to flag will move. Remember, that one and that the flag is of course stuck to the pole, so it won't move, while the other end can move as much as you want. Make sure the pick is always traveling in the right direction or your flag will flicker back and forth. All right, that's it for the tutorial of the flag. In the next video, I'll show you how to do it.
12. Animating Flags and Wave Motion: Practice: Now I'll show you how to animate a simple flag. When I animate a flag like this that is supposed to loop,I always animate pose to pose because it makes it a lot easier. But if I want to make a more dynamic flag, I would animate straight ahead to really get that organic feel that you get when you're drawing one frame after another. I start by making my first pose, which is just going to be a simple wave, and we only need to do one wave because we got to take this whole layer and we're going to get it duplicated and put it down here so we don't have to make both waves. Here's your first pose. You want to go ahead of your frames and turn on your skidding on and then you want to make the opposite pose. Keep in mind that this is where the flag is connected to the poll. This spot here will always be in the same place. You draw the opposite of this pose, something like that, and I made this on frame seven here, and we're animating on 2s. There will be three drawings before we reach the next key pose. Then we will loop on frame 13, so these two are the same poses, and then the middle one is the opposite. Now I go to my second drawing here and I've still got my skidding on getting on so I can see my two key poses. We want to draw the pose that is quarter way in-between these two poses. We don't want go all the way here. It will look roughly something like this. This point here, will reach here. We can actually make this a bit higher. Now we draw a frame in between here, this bump here will now be in-between these two bumps. Something like this, and if we loop this, we get this. Now we do the same thing from the second key pose, back to the first key pose. That's all the frames we need. Now we delete this last frame here that is the same one as the first frame, and then we loop this, we have a basic wave motion. Now we can take this layer and duplicate it, and once its duplicated we want to grab all these frames, we pull them down, we place them there. Now we almost have a flag. To make this just a bit fancier, we can grab all these frames and on Mac you can press "Alt" and drag them. Now we've looped them twice and then you want to delete these five frames here. We offset the wave by one frame. We can delete this frame here. Now these waves are offset with one frame. The final thing we need to do now is add another layer, and now we just tie this flag together. Now you can press "Play"and we got ourselves a really basic flag. This assignment is split into two parts. First, I want you to animate a flag loop. For this part, I want you to practice your pose to pose animation, separate your two key poses and then animate the in-between. For the second part, I want you to practice straight ahead animation with more organic movement. I want you to animate a flag straight ahead and this one doesn't have to loop, so you can go a bit more crazy here. I want you to animate in 24 frames per second on 2s and once you're done please export a GIF at 1080 by 1080 pixels and post it in the community. Have fun.
13. Animating a Walkcycle: Theory: The basic walk cycle is one of the most important things for our beginning animator to master. Walk cycles are a very common thing to have to animate when you work as an animator, and it's one of the most basic actions of a character, and it's also something that you can vastly build up on. A walk cycle can tell a lot about a character. Is the character happy or maybe sad? Is she thinking about something? Or maybe he doesn't even know what he's thinking about? Is a character doing an action, like playing the drum? Or is a character even running from someone. It's also very common for studios to have a requirement that animators applying for internships or junior roles have to have at least one walk cycle in their portfolio. The goal with these last lessons is to give you your start. First time animating a walk cycle, it can feel a bit overwhelming. But fear not, the walk cycle can be broken down relatively easily, and I'll show you how. Like with most animation, the easiest way to approach the walk cycle is to break it down into key poses. The two most basic key poses of a walk cycle is the contact pose, and the passing pose. Just with these two poses, you basically older to have something that looks like a walk cycle, just not a very good one. We need to add two more poses to make the walks like look good, these two process are the down pose that comes after the contact pose as the character is catching his weight on the front leg. The fourth pose, is the up pose, this comes after the passing pose, and it's a pose where the character is as high up as it possibly can be. Once we have these four key poses of the walk cycle, the result won't look too bad. This would be enough for some stylized cases where you work are extremely low frame rate. But of course, we want to make it look smooth. Normally, people take one step every half second, completing a full step cycle on one second. Knowing that I usually add one between the down pose and the passing pose, and one in between the up pose, and the next contact pose, totaling six drawings for one step and 12 drawings for one full two-step cycle. Here's an example of a very basic walk cycle where everything is moving evenly. As you can see, the walk cycle can be broken down into two bouncing balls, to make that animating easier. I usually start with my two key poses, the contact pose and the pass and pose, and then I draw over them with a ball for the head and one for the body. I then proceed to animate the up and down movement of the head and the body. After this is done for the full cycle, I draw over the character on top. Separating the head and the body like this makes it a lot easier when you want to offset the head movement to the body. Something else to recommend when you make a walk cycle is split up your character on different layers, so that your arms and legs all have their own layers and your body and head is also separated. This makes it easier to offset the swing of the arms, and the bobbing of the head. Offsetting the arms and the head is an easy way to make your walks like a look a lot more interesting. Here's an example of a basic walk cycle, and here's an example of an offset walk cycle. For a basic offset walk cycle, you just need to offset the head and the arms by one drawing. But if you want to stylist your character and make him feel happy or sad, you can try pushing the frames backwards or forwards with one or more drawings. That's all for the theory. In the next video, I'm going to show you how I animate a walk cycle.
14. Animating a Walkcycle: Practice: Okay, so now I'll show you how to animate a basic walk cycle. When I animate, a walk cycle, I animate pose to pose. This makes breaking it down a lot easier. Here I've started with the Contact Pose. This is the pose we're both legs are touching the ground. One step takes roughly half a second, so we want to copy this pose and inverted it at Frame 13. I'll split this character into three layers because we want to offset the head and the arms to the rest of the body. I'll go ahead and copy this over, but I want to invert this pose. So this leg here is now going to be in front. I'll go ahead and invert the legs and the arms like this, and here we have of two contact poses. Now we want to add the passing pose in between these two poses. I'll go ahead and paste everything on here. I want to turn on scale's getting now so I can see the two previous poses. All right, so with the passing pose, the leg that was in front is now going to be straight under the body, and that will push the body and the head upwards. We're going to move this all up, and then we can draw in the leg straight under here, like this. Now, you have this leg here going under the body and then back. We want to draw this back leg here, passing under the body, roughly like this. Then we want to add the arms, and during the passing pose, the arm will be almost straight along the body like this. We want to see the back arm. But you can draw it in hinting out too if you want. All right. So that's our three key process. Now, we can go ahead and add the poses in between here. After the contact pose, we had the down pose. This is when the character kind of leans in his weight onto the leg. I'll go ahead and place the foot here. It's good to keep an even spacing here, so that you walk cycle will be even when you play it. Otherwise, your character will be sliding around if you place the feet unevenly. This foot would be here, and for the next frame will place the foot somewhere around here. Okay. So here I'll draw the leg bending down a bit and put the body even further down here. Here the foot is starting to come off the ground, something like this. Now for the head, the head would be going down with the body here, and the arms will start to come in towards the body something like this. All right. Then we want to add the in-between the down and the passing pose. It turned on your skidding on. We see the process. We can go ahead and copy the head. Here the head is going up, and same with the body starting to go up towards the passing pose. This foot will now be around here starting to straighten out and pushing the body up and in-between the leg here, like this. Then we'll add arms, so the arms will be in- between here. Here we have half a step. Now, we want to do the same for the last two frames here. Straight after the passing pose, we will have the up pose. This is where the character is going as high as possible. We draw in the body here and here he's starting to come up on his toes so he is pushing the body up like this. The back leg is starting to come out. We can make feet the drag a bit behind. All right. The arm is going up, and the back arm is coming out here now. All right. Now we want to add the in-between, so the character is falling into recontact pose here. There we want to add the last frame of the arms here. All right. So here we have our first step, and now we can play and see if it works. That's looking pretty good. Now, I'm going to go ahead and do the same thing. But with the other leg,so will get a full two-step walk. Okay. So now I'll go ahead and copy the first contact pose and paste on Frame 25, and that's going to be our loop. We're not going to see this frame, because then we will have the same flame playing twice, but we will paste it in here so we can in-between it easier. Now, I'll just proceed and do the next step. After this, we're going to offset the head and the arms. I've gone ahead and animated the second step. I just copied the frames we made an I inverted the arm and the leg, so this what we got. We can go ahead and delete the last contact pose here because it's the same as the first one. An easy way to make this a bit more fun is just to offset the arms and the legs with one frame. To do that, we want to take this last frame here and put it in the front. I'll go ahead and move this frame over same with arms. Now we can delete this copy, we got a head offset to the body and the swaying is offset to the body too. All right, that's how we make a basic walk cycle.
15. Your Assignment: For the final assignment of this course, I want you to take everything you've learned and use it to animate your own walk cycle. The specs for this assignment is 24 frames per second animated on twos, and the final g should be 1080 by 1080 pixels. I want you to make a full two-step looping walk cycle. I want you to design a character of your own, or you can use one of the characters I've attached into resource tab if you don't want to make your own design. When you start roughing out your walk cycle, remember to use the correct key poses. You can go back to the theory part if you need help with remembering what those poses are. I first want you to make a rough animation of your walk cycle, like I did in the last video. Draw over your design pose and start drawing the keys from there. After you're in-between your rough and made both steps of the walk cycle, I want you to make a new layer and draw over the final design. Once your looping walk cycle is finished and cleaned up, I want you to export it as a gif and post it to the community for everyone to see. Like I've said before, every two weeks, I'll pick three of my favorite animations from the community and share on my Instagram stories. Good luck.
16. Conclusion: Congratulations, you made it through the basics of animation. I hope you found this course helpful and that you've learned a lot about traditional animation. During this course, we have gone through everything from the principles of animation and how to apply them to our own work and we made our first animator walk cycle. In the future, I would love to see how you apply what you learned here to your own work and I would love to see you to be active in the community. Finally, I'd like to thank you so much for taking this course and keep your eyes spilled for any upcoming classes.
