Expressive Animation: Combining Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects

1. Introduction: Food is really fun to animate because it has so many different characteristics. I definitely get inspired by food a lot. I'm Sylvia Yang, I'm an illustrator, animator, and GIF artist based in Brooklyn, New York. For my professional work, I do a lot of an animated illustrations for video series, explainers, and products. But what I really love doing on the side is to create fun and quirky animated graphics that makes people smile. In this class, I'm going to introduce how to use multiple mediums to create a character animations that you can share. We will be using Adobe Illustrators, Photoshops, and After Effects to keep the character alive. We will go through the steps from how to sparks to ideas, from photos to illustrating and animating your cute character. If you're a big fan of a food and you will like to create something fun and quirky, you should definitely take this class. Even if you never animates in After Effects, you'll be able to follow me step by steps and feel confident to use the tool to create anything you can imagine. 2. Having Fun with Animation: I'm really excited you decided to take this class. I grew up in Taiwan and studied fine arts school when I was little. I always enjoyed drawings, but I slowly felt stalked by a very traditional education style. Also, felt that I couldn't really express my own voice and personality through the traditional art tools. But learning those fine arts certainly helped me build a foundation for where I am now. I switched to design school in college and then moved to New York for the Grad school at Parsons. That is when I started experimenting and learning the animations and digital arts. I discovered that the animations gave me the power to combine the motion and illustration to tell the stories visually in such a dynamic way. Designing can be really fun. French fries character animation, it's part of a series of gifs I created before. The gifs I have shared on Giphy already have like 7 billion views. Food inspires me a lot because it has a lot of characteristics. Take an example of a spicy pepper. On the spicy peppers, spicy flavors, and red colors could be the emotions of irritations, anger and fortuitous. We can use this idea with different foods and then find what the emotions it will present to you and what type of characters that we can work with. Nowadays, people love the gifs with a strong emotional expressions that they can share as their reactions in a message. That's why I think it's really important for your gifs to have one one emotion that is relevant to people. Today I'm going to choose french fries. Every time I have french fries, I feel really satisfied they're happy. In my mind that represents cheerful emotions. For the first steps, we will be exploring the ideas and concepts for the character design, and then we will go ahead to look for the image and photos either on the Internet or take your own photo. Once we have the image for a character design, we will add it to the image and work on the texture design with brushes in photoshop. After we built the character's body in photoshops, we will bring that image without the background to procreate and then sketch the character designs for face, arm, and legs in procreate on iPad. After we have the sketch ready from procreates, we will export the image and then bring it to illustrators, and then we will refines the character design in Illustrator. Importantly, you want to organize the layers and name each layer in illustrators before you bring the files to After Effects. Finally, what we need to do is to set up the keyframes in After Effects and then bring the character to life. Last up, once the character animation is made and complete, I will show you how to export the animation file to Gibbs file that you can share widely, either to your portfolio or social media. I know it sounds a lot that there are lots of programs you have to go through, but I believe that you will find the beauty of combining the different elements together through the different programs. It could be so powerful. Also you will find that your character designs were unique, interesting, and cute. After you complete all the assignments, I would encourage you to upload your video files for character animations and give files to the project gallery. Next up, we will be working on the concepts and exploring the ideas of character design. Once we decide the one direction, we will be preparing the assets for the character design and animation. 3. Planning Your Project: In these steps, we will be exploring the concepts and the ideas of character designs. Once we have an idea, we will go look for some assets that you need or you can even take your own photos. Normally, when I seek for the ideas, I will sketch and then this will really help me to think visually. Here are some examples. I usually will start draft the ideas and then see how the French fries will look like. Maybe give it a face and then see what emotions it will represent too. The emotions from the French fries are like cheerful, happy, fun, and then maybe apply these emotions on their characters. Also, I'm thinking what if a bunch of fries coming together? What it could be? This is going to be really rough. Then the fry characters themselves, maybe the arms, having the half bunch over the fries. That looks like a cheerleader, it's dancing with a bunch of pom-pom. After sketching, we want to choose the photos and images to build your character designs. There are a few websites I like to get the reference image or any photos that I need for the animations are iStock, Adobe Stock, or Shutterstock. Sometimes you can easily find the image on Google search. I have the suggestions for Google search. If you type in the keywords that you will like to search, I would go under the setting and then make sure that your usage rights is select to the creative comments. Once you select these settings, the image that you see here should be pretty safe to use for any creative purpose. When I'm searching the image and photo I really like that on the fries and cartons are supposed to be the separate asset since they can be animated individually. I can search the fries first and then probably download the most clear close shots of fries that you can find here, or search the fries cartons and see what the result would come up, or you can download the image that I prepare for the class and you can download it and practice with. Another way I like to collect the assets the most is to take your own photos. For this project, I will arrange them on the black cardboards for the background and take a photo of it. You don't need a bunch of French fries, you just need a few. Then later on, we will take the image to Photoshop and then add it and remove the background. The benefit of taking your photo is to have more creative freedom to take control. You can pick your favorite French fries that has the best shapes and after taking the photos you can eat them and enjoy them. Now it's your turn. It's totally your call to decide how you want to gather the assets. Next steps, we will be editing the photos and work on the texture designs with the brushes in Photoshop. 4. Photoshop: Preparing the Characters Body: Now you have the photos ready. This is the time we want to add the photos and also work on the textures with the brushes in Photoshop. I here drops the photos to the computers and have the image files ready and opens in Photoshop. Now I have a French carton's image and an image of a fries that I took. Let's get started. Now I would start the new file. I will starts with a square ratios for the animated stickers. I would like to also set up my canvas like 1,000 by 1,000. Usually, I would start with a higher resolutions because it's easier to size down than size up if you change your mind or one has reached the sizes for different purpose and use case. Make sure your resolution is 75 digital pixels, which is cool, create. Then we go back to the editing photos. Now I have a fries carton image, and then I want to remove the background. I don't need it. I would use Magnetic tool here and then drop the shapes of the objects that I need for character's body. I want to select the place I actually don't need. After the shape of objects have been selected, I will add the mask layer. Now you see the shapes that you just selected and then the area that you didn't select are removed. This is looking pretty good, but I just want to make sure the details. The Magnetic tools would do a really good job, but if you zoom in, maybe there are some areas like here, and some places are missing or maybe the edge of the shapes are not so smooth. The way I would dig in and check that the tell I would add another layer and then apply the color. I can see the edges are a bit better. Now I can see here we don't need it. I will go into the mask layer and then use the brush, and then use the black color brush. Then work on detail and then remove the area we don't need. Here, maybe the edge is not so smooth, let me change the size of a brush a little bit smaller. Just small details that you can work on and polish with the brushes. Now it looks pretty good to me. So we know we're going to have a French fries sitting in the box, so I want to separate the front parts of a cartons and the back parts. What I would do, I would just duplicate this layer again, and then maybe named it as a front, and then this layer is back. Then I want to remove the backside of fries carton. Going to the mask layer, use the black color. That would be invisible. I like to use brush sometimes more than the Magnetic tool because I can work on more details with it, or there is another quicker way. You can use the Lasso tool and then draw the bigger area you don't need quickly and then select the area that you want to erase and apply the black colors like on the area you just selected and you will see the black colors that you apply is erasing the image here. The bigger area you don't need has been erased, and now we go back to the brush and then draw around the shapes. Make sure the right side side the shapes is similar as the left side. It seems like this is more area that you want to smooth out. The front side of a fries carton looks pretty good to me, and then let's go back to the back. For a back, we just want to keep the area besides the front side. I would do the click selections here. Let me draw the area that I need, and then delete the area I don't need here, and then see the front sides and back side are good together. I want to make the back. These are a bit smaller here. Then seating behind the front and then resize down a little bit. Move down. Now, it seems like there, it's like weird image on the corner. Maybe the way I would do it, it's using this color and then expand down. I will use this Clone Stamp tool and then plus options. Then basically, you will select the area that you can copy from. It doesn't need to be so perfect here, you can just quickly work on here. It looks pretty good to me. The backside of our carton looks pretty good. I will just copy this layers, the body, back to the project file that we just created. Again, we right-click, and then duplicate the layers and go to the one new projects file that we just create, and now it's here. Again, I will apply the background color so you can see the object, they'll be more clearly. I'm thinking maybe I want to give out maybe more colors on the body. Here, there's a little icons that you can click. It's where the layer style and I will do the color overlay. You can apply to any colors you want to give for the characters. Then for here, generally, default setting will be normal. But I want to choose to multiply because the multiply colors will look somewhat more natural and it will keep the lighting from the original objects and then the shadow as well, and then you can change the capacity if you want. For me, I think 100 percent looks good to me. It looks good. Then for the back, maybe it's too bright. I will give a color as well, and the mixture has multiplied color mode as well. It's pretty easy. Now we are done our character's body. 5. Photoshop: Preparing the Fries: Now we have an image of fries and now you can just say like, I will only need three different fries for the characters. This one looks pretty good with a nice curve and this one, straight and has a nice colors. Just pick the three that you like. For me, this one looks good and then the two on the right side looks good. I will show you, maybe pick this one to work on and it's like the same technique as we do for the character's body and the cartoon's image. Once it's done, you can totally apply the layer mask, if you need. Now it becomes just one single fried image. After I'm done one fry, I'm going to use the same technique to remove the backgrounds for rest of the fries, and I'm going to jump ahead, and then once I'm done with the rest of the fries, I will assemble all the fries together with the fry cartoons as a one character's body. Now the individual fries look good to me. Because the colors right now looks a little bit off, and now I'm also want to give it a bit more cartooning look by increasing the saturations or the contrast. I will convert this layer to smart objects. Then the power of smart objects is to add the contents, and also you can double-click, and then you will see this individual fries here in the end on a screen. Then you can give a different color corrections by the layer style or go to the "Image" and add adjustments. Once the color adjustments looks good to you, you can close the window and then right-click and then select "Rasterize Layers" that will take you from the object's layers to just one singular layers. 6. Photoshop: Finishing Touches : Those are the three French fries that I have added and removed the background. I will duplicate the layers back to the project file I have. They look giant, let's resize it. I want those fries sitting in between front and back cartons. Then you can work on the arrangement here. For giving our variations, sometimes you can just rotate entirely and then you have a different look of a fry, so you don't need to work on so many fries. It looks pretty good to me, and now I'm going to just simplify the naming for each layer. Right now I think I want to give it some shadows and highlight. I can give it a bit more depth on the bodies for a character, so you will have a little bit more 3D looks. By that style, I would use the brush, maybe the texture brush, or styles brush for the shadow. I use the Kyle brush here. If you haven't downloaded the Kyle brush, you can go to the setting here, Get More Brushes, and that would lead you to the Adobe website's Photoshop brush page, and then you can download. This is the one I download, the makeup pack from Kyle, and another one I really like is the Keith Haring-inspired brush that just recently launched. This is the one I have download and it's been ceiling on my Photoshop. I will use one of them for the lines animations that I will show later. For the brush, it's the Kyle's spatters brush, organic noise one. Then size 100 looks good. i will use this brush just for shadow. I would add one more layer, new layers, and then name it shadow, and then draw around the edge. Here we want to give a little bit heavier, darker look. We would press the pen a little bit harder and here we want to have a lighter brush style. I would just press the pen a little bit lighter. It looks good for me. Sometimes I want to reduce the density of a brush here. I would add mask layer and then select the black colors, which is invisible, and then I would just draw, so you can see some part of the grainy texture has been removed from the top. Here, probably a little bit too heavy, I want to make it lighter. Maybe you can choose the white colors and then make the brush that you just draw back by clicking the light color. So it looks okay. Now I want to see the textures, it's sitting in the body. I will right-click and select create a clipping mask and you can see it's perfectly masked. Now it looks a little bit dark and probably I want to make the colors a little bit more natural. So I will select multiply and then change the capacity a little bit so it will not stain up too much, edit the value or setting style which looks the most natural to you. I'm going to apply the layer mask, then maybe I want to add a little bit more shadows here and then now we'll work on highlights. For highlights, I would choose the border color over blue. You can also choose this color on the body and then change the color to the brighter side. Then click on Create Clipping Mask. Then you're sitting on the edge and then being masked perfectly on the body. Right now it's normal; maybe I want to put a highlight. I want to pick the screen mode, changing the colors of the highlights here becomes the brighter side over the color. For the shadow on the back, I will pick the color of the back cartons and then move the colors to the darker side over the dark gray, and I use the same brush, drawing, give a bigger size of a brush. Then right-click to select create a clipping mask, so the top graphics will be masked from the back layer. I can work on here and it'll be more. I would change to multiply and then adjust the capacity. Now we have perfect character body with some style, textures, shadows, and highlights on it. So now you can see the graphics has more depth and then have a more 3D looks. After the shadow textures on complete, I will select the Merge Layers, and then I would just become the one single layers. I renamed it to the body then same thing for the shadow with the back. Do the merge layers, I will just [inaudible] the back. Before you save the file, you want to make sure that every single layers are pretty clean. That looks good to me. Then background could be really optional, so you can keep it or without it, that's totally okay. Now we'll save, Export to the PNG, save the file and then we can use that image and bring in the image to Procreate for the sketches. Now we've got the body set up, and file has been saved as a PNG file. Now we can move to the next steps that we're going to explore some drawing style in Procreate. 7. Exploring Facial Expressions: Now we have the body designed for characters and do the editing process in Photoshop. Now we want to jump to the Procreate and explore some design drawing styles for the facial expression or any character design like eyes, arms, and legs. If you don't have Procreate or iPads, which is totally okay, we can totally stay in Photoshop and then sketch there after the photo editing. I like Procreate because I like to sketch with digital files in Procreate, and then just flatten surface and then drawing here, the similar way that I draw on the notebooks. Before we jump in the sketching in Procreate, I prepared a few references on the boards for your character design. In the facial expressions boards, I include some character design and study for facial expressions, and in there also few characters I usually reference one and get inspired by. Today, we're only focusing on the joy emotions. This one will be a very good reference, valuable study that you can learn and take the reference from. From this study, you can see that usually when you have like joyful emotions, you can see the muscles tend to move up a little bit more so that the distance between the eyebrows and the eyes are getting larger when your muscles are getting loose, and then when you smile, the muscles between your eyes and mouth it's going up a little bit. Those details are really good things that you can keep in mind when you are designing the character expressions. 8. Sketching In Procreate: After seeing those reference, we can jump to the procreates, and this is a time I want you to be creative and then try your best to explore as a much as the drawing style you would like to create for the character's design, let's start with that. Now I have imports the PNG files that I exported from photoshops, and now I have a one image here and I named it as a fry. So I want to create a lot of variations for the different drawing style. I will duplicate, few fries image, and then if you select this arrow tool, you can select one individual layers and then just arrange them, looks good, and then we can group them, so you have a new group, we can just rename and then copy, it duplicates the layers again, just duplicate one layer and then track down. Now we have multiple bodies that we can work on, and now I will create another new layer, just name it as a face. I will start the facial expressions design, I will do the face here, now I can just like start drawing, then I can choose the color, change the brush size here, and you can have lots of different shapes of eyes. You can even do something bigger, or sometimes it doesn't need to be like circular, could be more like a rectangle, but with a round edge. Sometimes it doesn't need to be like white, it can be just black, or maybe one eye is closed, and then keep some colors available, you can stay with black if you want. You want to give it the colors, the bright lime green color, maybe I want to change this shapes here, use the eraser, then go back to brush. Let's play around with the mouth, give it a black color, mouth can be that line. All right, so those the mouth, and I would like to give a little teeth, make it a little bit more cute, maybe one teeth, tongue, I'm thinking maybe I will like to give the characters some eyebrows as well. Once you have done some faces, now we can create other layers ,it could be the explorations for the arms and legs. For arms and legs, they can be different styles as well, so for this animation, we are going to use some simple character animation. So I will keep the designs, put this symbol for arm and leg, and then give some like cheerful gestures, maybe this can be like jump and open arms. What if we explore, not just a line design, we can give it a kind a little bit more of arms with legs. There are so many like possibility and design styles that you can explore here. I will just jump to the explorations that I have, that you can take a reference from, and then once you're done here, you can totally pick your favorite ones and think about what kind of movements or actions that character can be any mates. Today I'm going to just focus on the one I already have my top one, this one, so now I will be thinking, what kind of the next frame could be, or like the actions that a character can take. Now I would just focus on this character directions and then thinking, maybe I can add some upon Java like fries as a cheerful pompon that the character can be holding, I will pick the color similar to the fries by pressing on a screen, you can see there's a little tool, the color selection tool here, and now I will just choose a color here, and then go back to brush, the pencil, is good to me. Make sure we're on the right right maybe we name pompon, and then just draw some pompon they should be under the fry, just quick sketch so you will get a little bit more idea of how final look could look. Then you will be also could get reference for you to illustrates and refines in Illustrator, that looks good, and then I group them together, and then duplicate it, I'll rename this one duplicated, then select it. Now I have another duplicate layer here, and it's good that we can kind of like change the gestures here and then think about what kind of movements the characters could have. I'm thinking in the beginning, the character can be squatting down and then jumps and then lift the one arm up. I would kind of change the limbs here and move the body rotations, can change the angle, and then move out a little bit, then the face, we could rotate as well, seven numbers as we had before, and I want to move the face and the body up a little bit, it jumps. This is a process that we can see as like building story boards. Just give you a better sense of how the character movement could be. After you have done the sketches, you can save your final sketch as a JPEG file and then send to your Gmail or Airdrops your computer. This will be a really good reference for you to refine your vector shapes in Illustrator. 9. Illustrator: Preparing Your Project: Now we already have a sketch and design styles that we have from Procreate. Now we're going to refine the final vector shapes for the character designs. The vector shapes will be mostly for face and arm and legs. Then later on after the vector shapes are complete, we are going to organize the files in Illustrators before we import the design file to After Effects. Now we have our Illustrators open here and then open, say, a Photoshop file that you just created. Open with Adobe Illustrator. From this screen, just make sure that you have the Convert Layers to Objects, the selection's on, and then "Okay". Then all layers that you created in Photoshops will be open here. Then I would bring the sketch we created from Procreate to this file. I will just have this image on the side as a reference for a character design. This is the body. I select everything, and I just group it. This is the reference. We named it, the layers, and then group A will be the body. I'm going to start drawing the rest of the graphics that we need. I will add the one layer. Just name it as a face. I think we are going to just include some more drawings in our board. I thinks the body right now, it's a little bit too large. Doing proportionally scaled down here, maybe 70 percent is good. 10. Illustrator: Expressions: Now we can just start building the face with the vector shapes. We'll start with the eyes. I think, you can totally draw the shapes, adding AfterEffects. But the reason I really like to refine the vector shapes in Illustrator is you can definitely work with the shapes more precisely in Illustrator. Then also, in a professional industry, sometimes the illustrator will be only hired for illustration work and then the illustration work will be transferred to the animator. For some Illustrator, they don't know how to work on AfterEffects, but they have to prepare the file for animator, so the ideas about how to organize the file and create the vector shapes for animator to animate with. This is the process will be helpful for any animator to learn to prepare or refines your vector shapes in Illustrator. Every vector shapes are combined with a mostly geometric shapes, smaller mouth, also form a circle. Then we can cut down on that line. Then find the pathfinders here. Then choose the divide. Basically, the divides functions will cut down from the two shapes style you have between the circle and in the line. Now you can see they are divided, but still, they're in the same group. I would just ungroup here. This is a mouth. It doesn't look like a mouth yet because it's white color. Let's give it a little bit maybe orange-ish-red in color, maybe lighter color. These edges are sharp to me. I'm going to use the round tool. If your mouth hop on the shapes and then you can see there's two little white dots. Then there is basically, you can drag it. Then you can see it just rounded the edge here. This is a very useful tool if you want to round the shapes. I will give the eyeballs here. It looks like smelly eyeballs that we'll do here. I want to change from the solid color to outline. The black color is good. Now, the stroke weight, it's a little bit too thin. Let's change the stroke weight, I'll do 13. We have a smiley eye here and I also want to cut in half. What I would do is to use the Scissors Tool and then find the anchor points here, and then just click on it. Then you will see the shape has been cut in half. This looks good to me. You can totally bring this one and then rotate it. Then I'll copy another half. I would like like to have the stroke have a rounded edge. You can change the cap to round cap and the corner could be round as well. The simple face can be just built without a loss of geometric shapes here. Then looking good. Then maybe give a little bit complete face. By adding the eyebrow. That looks good to me. Copy. This seems like it's a right angle to me. I can just join the two lines. Now they are in one shape. Okay. [inaudible] Maybe I want to have more curve here. Looks good. From the sketch. We have a little two here that I want to keep. I will go back to the mouth and add the small little to, change white color here. Then again, same process. You want to round the corner, select two corners here that you want to round it, and then drag. Then you can see the numbers next to it. If a number is higher basically just how rounded it will be. This looks good to me. Then I'm thinking maybe I should give him another little teeth. Bottom, it looks good. Rounded, same thing. That looks good. Now, I want to have the teeth to be mask with a mouth. I would just select two and then group them, and then select this one. There is the shortcuts that you can do by clicking on it, and then do Shift Command C, and then Shift Command V, that the copy layer would just seat on the right positions from the shapes that you just copy from. Those are selected. Then make sure your max layer, it's above the graphics that you want to mask. Click here. Right-click, and then make the clipping mask. Now you have the pretty good face that has been built. Looking good to me. I'm thinking maybe we can give the fries guy some brushing. Give a little bit more cute elements in the same tone as the mouth color. A little bit lighter. We can change the colors later on when we are finalizing know character design in AfterEffects. Just like getting the idea. Nice. The face looks pretty symmetrical. It looks good. 11. Illustrator: Legs and Arms: Now we want to add the legs and the arm. I will move the entire characters up to give her the more room for a leg. We can add a number of layers for the limps. We want to have, it's a line instead of a solid shape color. Pick the stroke and then change the colors to black. Then I want to make sure that the stroke weights stay in ascend so the image will look more cohesive. Change back color and then make sure that the stroke states the 13, yes, that's what I want. I want to copy this maybe give it a little bit angle, and then round it the straight lines a little bit. I will add another point here. Then move up and then find the round circle again. Then we have our one leg here and then we just need to mirror it for the end on that one. Reflect, vertically, copy. We have a set of our legs now. Now we just need the arms. I would borrow the fries, so I can select individually. Let's copy the few fries I have here. Now want to copy them to another new layers. I will add another layers. But now the fries here still stay in a body layer, I would just cut it by Command X and lock the layer I don't need to work on. Then go to the [inaudible] and then do Command V, paste the fries that I just borrow from another layers. Now the fries looks a little bit too big. I will proportionally scale down maybe 50 percent. Looks good to me. You can copy more and even size down if it needed reflected, or you can even reflect horizontally. So you will be different look on the top, we're really getting there. We have a [inaudible] This looks like a good amounts. Looks good to me. So we have down the one side of the arms [inaudible] we can just easily copy everything together. We can press Command C and then Command Shift B, so they will stay the same position, and now there is a copy here. We can reflect it vertically and then move them to right side. Okay, so now the character looks pretty complete. 12. Organizing For After Effects: Now, what I would do is to organize the files for After Effects. We probably don't need this reference, so we can delete it. What I would do here, think about at each layers here needs to be animated individually in After Effects. I will want to make sure that the layers here, it's not under any layers, each layer should be independent layers. What I would do is to open, click on each layers, and then click on the "Release to Layers Sequence". Once you click on that, you would discover that each layers, the end of each layers will have a name in itself as a layer. There is some numbers, but you can change the name later on. But the layers shouldn't sit inside of a big group. I would grab up those layers to the outside of a group. Then we can delete this layer, and then same things that you want to do for an on the layer as well. Make sure those path are layers. The way I want to convert those path as an individual layers, I would do the same thing, click on the big layers, and then release to layers. Those individual path will be the layer. Now, I want to see the graphics and image are in the good arrangements. I will make sure that the body and then the face are on the top of everything. I will see the legs are behind of a body. I'm going to move it down to the most end, then the to left leg, right leg. Then the arms here with the fries. Let's then click on them by also pressing the "Shift" so you can select to get there. It seems like they're sitting right above the right arms that we just worked on. That looks good to me. Naming is really important here. It really help you find the layers and artifacts. Because animations could be really complex, you definitely want to find the right layers to animate. As you see, there are so many layers. So if you've don't name it, you would just have to use your memory just to remember like what Layer 25 or 29 means, it will get really complicated. It's good that you can name that to make everything's organized for you. But for animation, I don't want these teeth to be mask. I can mix that in After Effects where here I would just release the clipping mask. Move the shape that it's very simple and I don't need it. Okay. Looks like we're doing pretty good here. Everything is named it. Then include it in a file. Yeah, it looks good. Save this file by clicking the "File" and saved it. Then we can rename that to Step 4, for Illustrator, and it saved it. Now we'd refine some vector shapes in illustrators and organized at all layers. I think we are ready for the animation work in After Effects. 13. After Effects: Prepping Layers: We have all illustrations file ready for the animation work. Now with this step we are going to organize files and prepare the character designs in After Effects. Now I have the final illustrations file that I created in Illustrator, and then simply dragging to the project's window. Then there's a window that pops up. We want to choose the composition and then make sure that the documents size it's same and then select "Okay", and now we have the one composition showing here. Then we can check. Name means here it's looking good, you will feel really happy you already did the organization in your Illustrator. Make sure that the composition setting it's looking good to you. The size 1,000 by 1,000 looks good and then we can name that. We can name it to fry guy. For the frame rates, usually for longer animations that I work on, I would choose the 60 frame rate, which is the really smooth one, but for GIF or for a shorter animation, I usually want to have the reduced size, so I would choose the lower frame rates. I will do 30, looks good to me. Sometimes if you want to really have reduce size for GIF, some people would also working on the frame rate 15 for GIF projects, but I want this project to be both of a GIF and animations work, so I will choose something in between, 30 looks good to me. The durations, I'm thinking this should be pretty short. The most GIF animations that I created is around 3-7 seconds because we also really want to avoid the large projects file. I think this 10 second is a pretty good duration to work on. This looks good and click on, "Okay". Mainly for this step, I want to make sure that the vector shapes that we created in Illustrator converts to the vector shapes. But right now, this is just like a simple layer, but it's not like the vector shape layers yet, so I'm going to work on that and then change this layers by right clicking and find the Create. There's one selection called Create Shapes from Vector Layer. Those vector layers will become the shape layers, so the layers that you created from Illustrator will be invisible. Those layers you actually don't need it. You can totally delete it. Make sure that you select the vector shape layer. Body is the image that we don't want to convert to shape layer, so I just locked it, and then fry our image as well, we don't need that for the shape layer. Mouth, brows here looks like they need to be animated as a shape layer, and so we are going to convert those shape vectors to shape layer by right-clicking and then find the Creates, and then select the "Create Shapes from Vector Layer" and then we can move it to the top. Now you can see the vectors that you convert are, this is locked right now, so we don't need that, just delete it. Now the shape layers are created here, you can double check. Here is the shape layer. The reason that you want to change the vector to shape layer, it's we can animate the shape by the path here. For example, you want to change the shape of the eyebrow, you can do it by adding those key frames, and then change the shapes like this. You can see the shapes from the starts key frame to the end key frames will be changed. But I believe that we don't want eyebrow to move like that. This is simple. Later on we are going to make sure and on the vector shapes are converted to the shape layer. The fry to our image, we don't need it. The legs in the right should be the shape layers, so we can animate the shape. Create a Shape From Vector Layer, delete the ones we don't need. The arm should be the shape layer as well, convert to shape. It looks pretty good to me from converting the vector to shape layer. 14. After Effects: Anchor Points: Now I want to make sure that the anchor points are sitting on the right positions so I can't animate it. By clicking here you can just review the layers individually. If you slacked the view dot things, and then now you can see the anchor points it's not really sitting on the fry. Basically the anchor point it's the point over the positions that the objects will rotate and scale from. We want to make sure that the anchor point it's sitting on the right positions that you want to animate from. Now, if the anchor point is sitting from where it seats originally. When you rotate it, it's not really rotated from the bottom of the fry. We want to make sure that the anchor point, it is sitting right here. The way we're doing that, it's to a select anchor point tool, and then drag the anchor point to the place that you want, or you can place the [inaudible] and that you would automatically drop to the center of the image or bottom. I would do the similar process for most of the layers. This is a little bit time-consuming, but that will be really helpful when you animate it. The animations were rotating scale from the position that it needs to be. For moving anchor points. Sometimes I will use the blocking code Motion 2 which make everything's really easy and quicker just to replace the anchor point in the right position. For the fry I want the anchor point sitting on the bottom of an image, or maybe center. Looks good. We can check individually as well. It's a little time-consuming, but it's also necessary to do since we want to animate individual fry here. Even the transparent spake Grant looks a little bit too hard for you to find the anchor points. You can click on the transparency grid, and then when you right-click the transparent background will be gone. Now you probably can see the anchor point a little bit easier with a black background. The arm I want to see it around the shoulder, that looks good. This is the layer I don't need. That looks good to me. Now the animation file looks pretty organized and anchor points are sitting on the right positions for animation work. Now we can move to the next step for adding the motion. 15. After Effects: Parenting Layers: Before we add in the key frames, I want to set up the start frame from one second and then estimates, maybe this animation will be five seconds. Starting from one second and I will move it to six seconds for the total five seconds animation. I'll type in six seconds and then doing a shortcut press, you will see the work area has been [inaudible] from one second to six seconds. When you preview the animations, the animation bar will be playing within the one second and six seconds. The reason I will start from one instead of from the beginning of a timeline is I want to give her a way more room before the animation started. Sometimes, for example, when you are adding the key frames and motion on the body and then you want to move the key frames once the animation actually starts from a little bit earlier, so there is a room that you can actually work on the adjustments. This is a little tip that you want to keep in mind. For character animation, you want to make sure that the layers are parenting to the main graphics, for example, the face will always move and singly with the body. Maybe I would try to parents the face as a one-face layer. I will also use the motion too here and the nearest null tool. I can just slack the all face layers and then click on null. All the face layers will be linking in one null tool and I can right-click, rename it and then just save null face. Then I can simply drag this parents and link to the body. Basically body will be the core element for the character animation. I'm going to highlight here for the red color. So it is easier to find when you move around looking for the layers you can design. This is a red layer, that is for body and the fries here should be moving with the body as well. The top back should be moving to the body. The right arm, the arms should be moving the body as well. If you cannot find a body here, you can move a link up and you would find the body or you can also look for the layers you want to parents by this window, click and then it will shows the layers that you can parent too. This fry palm should be moving with the arm, I believe. When arm is moving on the palm and the palm will be moving with the arm but the arm is linked to the body. So if you move the body, the whole palm and arm will move together. Leg should be linked with the body as well. Now the parenting is looking good to me. 16. After Effects: Character Rigging: For the animation's rig setting, I usually use the RubberHose. It is the most easiest the plug-ins that I work with for character design. I can quickly show you how it works. RubberHose actually would creates the legs or the limbs for you. For the leg design, we just actually keep the feet parts. I will go to the Path, cut down the points I don't need. I just need to keep the foot and then make sure the anchor points will be sitting on the foot. I would just stick to that. Then I always like the hip and anchor for the leg and then click on "New RubberHose". From here, it's behind the character, so you probably can't see it. But I will only select the layers I want to see here. Now the leg design doesn't match our original illustration style, but we can add a spy, the Hose layer here. I want to make it, the leg should be black color and the stroke weights should be 13. Now, I want to make the anchor points. It's sitting and connected with the foot and the hip should be around the body. Now we can make the hidden layers visible now. Now the legs looks a little bit too curvy, but we don't need to worry about it. We can add it the look in anchor layer, in an anchor layer there it's the effects in the effects window next to the project's effects tool. Then you can change the value to fit in the look that you want. For the left leg, the length, I would do 400 and the radius, I would do 13, and I would do the bend direction. Right now it's a bending on the right side. I want to make it bend to the left just by changing the value here. It looks good to me. Maybe we can just do zero. That is the right leg from the character, it's done. For parenting, make sure your anchor it's parent to the foots, maybe we should just change the name foot left. This is a foot right. Then the hip should definitely connect to the body. When you are animated the positions on foots, you can see the legs is connected perfectly. When you built the RubberHose on the one foot and then the parenting is like the anchor goes to foots, and then hip goes to body. Then if you move the body, you can see how the leg syncs with the body movement. It will be the same technique and procedures on their right right once you are done, the left one. This is the character rigging setup for character design. Once we have the leg setup, we are going to work on the arm. For the arm, it's the similar concepts like you want to just animate it the foots only. Then for arm, you want to just animates the hand. You can just have the parts that it's created by RubberHose. I want to adjust the shapes on the hand and arm here. Only have the hand here and then use the RubberHose to create the arm. We can choose the hand by clicking shoulder and wrist and then New RubberHose. Select the layers you want to work on and then make it visible. Again, the style it's not looking like the design we want. We can change the size of a stroke and color in host layer and close 13 stroke weight and the color it's black and wrists should be connected to the hand and shoulder, connecting to the body. Let's see all the layers together. Now the arms looks like too long. We can change the style in effect control and then changing the value here to 210 maybe. Looks a little bit off. We can reference the right side and then see how it looks. Seems like we can change the positions on shoulder, dropped it a little bit. Looks pretty good. Looks like pretty close to our original design. After you're setting up the RubberHose for the arm, I'm going to make sure the parent name is correct for the wrist, you want to go with the arm, maybe I should rename that this is hand. Then shoulder should be connected to the body. Let's just making sure if everything's connective. All right, looks good to me. Now you can see the character is dancing, but we haven't set other key frame yet. Just make sure the arms and legs are connected to the body. Now we have the right arm setup, we have the left arm. It looks a little bit repetitive here. Now I want to create the right side of the arm and hand. Here, I only have a reference. It's like a tunnel of flats layers. I grouped them up because I want to make it as a reference. I would change it to the capacity down as a reference and work on the actual graphics layers that I want to animate. Now, I want to draw a right hand and then create the arm in RubberHose. Make sure the anchor point, it is sitting on the right position. Let see, it's right here. That looks good and then click on the hand layer and then creates a new RubberHose. Then changing the style as we did before. Let's see what the setting we have is 400, then 99. Let's do the similar value and then maybe the band direction, its opposite. Probably want to drop down the points for the shoulder. Looks good to me. Then now we don't actually need the reference layers that we have in the background. You can totally delete it. After we have the rigging setup, we want to also make sure that parenting is connected to the right place we want. For the rest, you should be connected to the hand, we can just track by linking and shoulder should be connected to the body. All right, just do a quick testing. Looks everything it's moving or it looks like the right hand is not moving with the body. Let's make sure that it's connective. The right hand on the right side should be connected to the body. All right. Looking good. 17. After Effects: Keyframes & Motion: The setup is doing pretty good for character animations. I would start adding keyframes and make the characters come alive. Go to the beginning of the animations. The first for the animation characters, I will start with the movements on body, because this is like core elements that moves and raise up a graphics, will sync with the body movements. I want to work with the body animations first. I want to separate the position here, separate the X and Y position by right-click, and there's a separate dimensions. For this purpose style, we can just animate the X position and Y position separately. Sometimes for the objects, not only needs to move left and right, we can't just only sit at a keyframe for X position. We want to add a keyframe and also add the rotations by clicking "Shift N Alt" and then final rotation here. Then the actions that I want to give to the character, it's like maybe the character could squat down first, and then quickly jumps up and then there will be the bounce back a little. But I want to give a motion that it's like before it jumps. Character actually squat down. Now it doesn't look that smooth. We will work down the motion a little bit more in the Editor Graph. Then maybe when it jumps, it cannot rotate to right. Seems like we don't need to work on the X position. We don't need a keyframe here. Somebody see this. The animation was looking a bit be more linear. Now I want to make it more smoother by right-clicking and then select "Easy In" and "Ease Out" here. It looks pretty smooth but I want to give it a little bit more interesting and dynamic style. I would go to the Graph Editors here, and then find the keyframes that I have here. Now I will go to the Graph Editor and then make sure I'm editing on the Value Graph. The way we can add it, the motion is here, it's like moving the handle on the top and bottom. The graph here is a little bit more steep. That means the motion gets a little bit more steep because the curvy line is getting more extreme and the fattest movements will get faster here. If at the handlebar it's longer, that means it was smoothing and slow down a little bit more, and then the motion gets fast in the middle and then slowing down again. I want the motion to slow down in the beginning but it's like having the quicker and faster moments when the character squat. I will move this handle a little bit shorter so it will be less slower. Like this. So you can't see the movement, there'll be more extreme. I want the characters, this is slowing down. Now we replay the animation again and then see. Now it has a little bit more dynamic look. I once like, having a lower details when it squat. I want to have the little bounce back making the motion. It'll be more extreme, any end by just editing the handle longer here. Now the motion looks a little bit more cartoony, like word dynamic. I'm thinking like jumps and maybe the legs will kick at the same time. I would go to the right leg and then add a keyframes on that. I will separate the dimension first. When I want to change, is to move the position. Now the motion looks like putting a millionaire, and you can see the path. It's like linear line. I want to change the interpolations, change from linear to the [inaudible] so you can add the path here in the Graph Editor. You can see the path is changing with the cut line. [inaudible] to the plan should be Ease In, Ease Out as well. I want to have the foot cannot rotate when the leg reach to the high point. Maybe make the leg kick higher. In the mixture the keyframes are ease in and ease out. Looks good to me. Maybe make the motion a little bit faster and then half the foot bounce back. Just a little detail star we can add. Any method I noticed I can now once the leg's actually look straight. I'm thinking maybe we can go back to a Rubber House and then change the bend direction and having this straight stretch leg look better for me. I want to change to the right side as well, Right? I think the motion right now is a little bit running slow. I want to make the timing a little bit more correct. I will select all keyframes and then press ''Options'', and then make the keyframe getting closer so the speed will be faster. Now the leg is animated when the body movements is created. It looks good, and then now I want my characters move back to the original positions. He goes down, and then squats again, we can totally copy here, go up back again, and then jump to another side. Now this is a rough motion that we give to the body and I'm going to animate the food back to where it was. Basically copy the keyframe from the beginning and make sure the keyframe is copied from before. Let's go back to here, and then when it jumps again, I want the body to move to right side as well we have it in another position. Maybe we want to give it a little bit more timing in the end, when it jumps back. I want to make it stay in the middle a little bit longer. Just keep playing and then see if the motion looks right to you. It looks pretty good. Now, I want to work on the details on the motion a bit more, I will go to the graph editor and see if it looks good to me. I want the motion to start slower, I would drag the handle longer. Again, the longer handle means like slowing down, so it jumps, when it jumps back, I want to give it a little bit bounce. Maybe in the ending, the curve can be a little bit more curvy. The motion will be more dynamic as it would be the GIF, we want to make sure that the ending frame and then the star frames will be the same so it can make the perfect loop. Now you can see that the end frame now is not really matching the first frame. You want to make sure that the NDK frames are the same as the beginning. I would maybe start it to go back the original position. I will add the key and then copy the keyframe from the beginning, make sure the beginning frame and the end frame will be the same. But I want to have this movements back to the beginning, so it will not have the all cord stop here. I will move end frame value to the beginning. You can see the rotations will be the same from the end to the beginning. I want to add it, the motion will be more here, and then see which parts I want to emphasize a little bit more. Maybe on the rotation, find the graph you have, and then maybe we can make the motion be more dynamic. The way we are doing, we can adjust the handle here. Now the entire movements on a body, it's perfectly loop, and then what we're missing it's the left side of leg should be kicking as it what another leg is doing and this is the time the right leg should kick. We want to add the keyframe on the foots on the left. Make sure the positions is separated. When each squat, jump here, you want to have the leg kick, and then having added the rotations on the foots, and then make sure it has a bouncing effects that will make it kick and bounce back a little. Have the Easy Ease Out. It looks good to me. Now you will see the leg are not really in a perfect loop. I want to make sure the ankle keyframes, here are staying the same from the beginning. When the body bounce back, this is the moment that the leg should go back to the standing position. Looks very close. Now the character animations, leaking or hold down the motion a bit more on the leg, so when it kicks, I want the motion a little bit more interesting. I want to start from slowing down from the beginning, having a little bounce by adjusting the graph here, and they're having the handle a little bit shorter so the speech will be faster. When the character squats, I want the legs to bend. I was working on the adjustments on the bend direction again. Now the body movements and legs looks pretty good to me. I'm going to move to the arms animation that it's connected to palm palm for the hands on the left. Now I've found the anchor point is actually not sitting on the right position. I would move it to the point of a position that the objects will rotate and scale from. I'll change, animate the positions, separate the dimension. When the character move down and up, and the arm should be moving up, and then once the rotation here change as well and then bounce back. Give it the Easy In Ease out. From here, we want to go back to the beginning scene, make sure that the keyframe will start the same. When the characters move back, I want the arm move back to where it is in the beginning, the way the timing is a bit off. We want to make sure the arm would take the actions when the body is reaching to the top. Here we move the arm a little bit down, make sure the value here is the same. Animation in the left arm looks good. The reason why I didn't have the fries palm palm on the right side is because I think I can totally animate one side and then copy the entire composition on to the right side. We don't need to worry about that now. Now the body and the limbs animations are looking pretty smooth and good to me. 18. After Effects: Animating The Face: The face can move a little bit too. When the body squat, the face can move down a little. Move back again, move down, and then move back. Just give it little extra motions in details. Ease in, ease out. In the graph editors. You can make here, a little more dynamic speed graph. Then when character squat again, I want to have this similar movements on this, but maybe happens a little bit delayed from the body movements. Looks good. I want to give the mouth some movements that looks like the character is chilling or laughing. I would animate the mouth here. For shape layer that you want to animate the mouth, you want to go to the path and animate the shapes. Can maybe scoop down and then when you scoop down, maybe change the shape of the mouth. Change the shape, make it more rounded and circular to form the keyframe now you can see here. On the second keyframes, you change the shape and then you can see the shape gradually change from what you did. Then I want have the mouth move back to previous big smile. Ease in, ease out again. Now the teeth looks a little weird, but it's okay for now. We will mask in out later, once the mouth movements happens, at this moment again too. It's looking pretty good to me. The eyes looks a little deep. I want to give a little bit motions on the eye. Select the eye layer and then you can search the path here. You can animate from the path layer. Here. Maybe I will give it a little just really subtle shape change. The face is moving, body is moving, change the shapes on the second keyframes. It will be squeezing. Let me go back to the original look. Ease in, ease out. Maybe have it happen again. Want to change the timing here, and I want to have the same animations on the right eye. We can copy the path animations here and then go through here. We can have the same animations on the right side and on the eye here. Apply the ease in, ease out, and then copy again here. We can also add the motional eyebrow when the character is jumping, find the eyebrow and class P. Find positions that you can animate, and then separate the dimensions. Then I think we just need to animate the white position and then having the eyebrow go up when the body is reaching to the tallest position and then drop down when the body bend. Here, we can have the eyebrow go up again. Then make them ease in, ease out. The eyebrow is moving in very strange way. It seems like the end keyframe here and then the beginning keyframe are different. Let's make sure they are all from the same position in the beginning and make sure that the end keyframe and beginning keyframe are the same, so I copy and paste. The end keyframe to the beginning. Eyebrow drops here again. It should be pretty good sets of animation and I have them ease in, ease out. Now, [inaudible] a little bit too slow. The timing is a bit strange. Right now, the body motions, the character rigging is complete. I think for next steps, we just need to work on the details, like the bounds on the face and adding textures. I know this is a lot. Animation could be intimidating, but once you practice more, I believe that animation could be really exciting. Now the character rigging looks pretty good to me. For the next, I would animate the fries and adding a bit more detail on a tags animations. For that part, it will be a little bit more additions. It could be just an inspiration for you if you want to add it, it's all up to you. 19. After Effects: Finishing Touches: I already cleaned up the animations that we built before, and then adding slightly the details on the characters and key frames. Now, the character is working [inaudible] and looking good to me. What I want to focus on in this tabs, it's some bouncing effects on fries, so you can see the fries are responsive to the body movements. The fries should move down when the body move down. I change the position down, and then move up when the body jumps. I want to give a little bounce back in the end. When it bounce back, it can jump to the original position. Here I will just "Copy" and "Paste". "Copy' and "Paste'. "Copy" the beginning key frames to the last. You can quickly see here, looks good. Then AC is out. Looking good and may be work on the rotation. Press U, you can see all the key frames that you built. For the rotations, I would just randomly give a different numbers on that. Doesn't need to be so precise. They're just a found effects that you can add and then bounce back. The last key frame should be matching the first key frame. Apply the ease in ease out and the rotation. Now it looks good. I just copy the motions here. Again when the characters squat down and jump, let's "Copy", "Paste", "Copy" and "Paste". I think for this bouncy effects, it looks a little bit more random. I would move some of them a little bit delayed. Some of the fries delayed. Some few of them can bounce or be earlier. Okay, it looks good to me. Now, I'm going to move to the fries animations, in a hint. The pompom. Here press R for rotation. We don't need to move the position here, we just need to animate the rotation. Just give it a slight movements. Some of them can rotate to left and some of them can rotate to right and then bounce back. Again, last frame should match the first frame. We just want to give it a little bit like bouncy effects. It doesn't need to be so precise. Then we have an ease in and ease outs. Looks good. Then move them around. Also we have another fries. Some of them can be a little delayed. Good. Then while they're packed there jump again, we want the bouncy effect happen again. I will copy the animation we built and then paste to the moments we want to have it happen again. Then make them a little bit delayed, right? Looks good to me. Now we have done one side of pompom and for the other side. I think we can simply just copy from the left command C and then command V. Then we can change them to the one compositions by pressing Shift command C pre-comp. We can just say fries, pompom and make sure that this pompom is parenting to the right arm here. Then we can move the composition of pompom to the right. They go behind the arm. So arm, it's above it. Because it is on the inner side of the arm, I want to flip it horizontally and then move back around the hand and change the rotation a little. We move down to the arm. Now, we have the same pompom animations on the arm. We have done the fries animation just giving the bounce effects on the fries just that it makes the entire character animations way more natural and smooth. I will say the character animations here has been pretty complete. But if you want to work on some more advanced animation or want to give a bit more flavor or more firm visual elements, I was thinking the extra firm animations could be the lined animations on the body. I created the lines in photoshops and I would bring the files on a folder. Just dragging and a slab the composition. You can see there are three different lines design that I make. I want to make it as a texture animations. Trims the comp to Work Area that you set up two seconds. Now this composition will be only two seconds. I will chop down the layers and then arrange them. This looks good to me. Change the work area, trim the comp again. You can see here has a simple line animations. Now I copy this composition back to the main comp and pass it on the body. Now I can see the line animation here, but I want to make a loop. The animation loop. I will right-click on the composition and the slack time. Then enable time remapping here and then write down the expressions for the looping effect. I'll do a loop and loop out here. I can select enter. You can see the line animations just keeps playing on the time line and I want to make the line animations on so be faster. I will move the end key frame close to the first key frame. Then I just need to max out with the body. I will copy the body layer and then on the top of a line animations and then select Alpha Matte. Now the line animation should be perfectly max out. Additionally, I also want to give the textures on the brushings. For this, I also draw the little textures. You can find this textures that I'm making photoshops in a project resource. Dragging in to this image and then around it, on the top of brushing and have been masking. Place the textures on the top of the shape layer and then pressing the Alpha Matte to max the blushing textures. Now you can see there's a little textures on the brushing, when he moves you can see the textures not really moving with a body. I want to make sure that the texture is linked to the actual ship layers. Looks good. I want to do the same thing as in another the side. Having a texture layer here and then select Alpha Matte and have the textures is masked by the brushing layer. No it's not really linked with body movements. Mimic shares, link parenting to the brushing itself. Okay, looks super cute. Now I want to give everyone one natural look. I will change the capacity down to 80, maybe 90, right? I think now the animation looks really awesome we've finished it. 20. Exporting to Share: Now that the animation is done. We are going to export the animation to either like video files or GIF file. Animation looks great. Usually I would export the video file in After Effects so you can add to the Render Queue by clicking it. Once the animation is in a Render Queue, you can slag the formats that you need. Usually I would do ProRes 4, 2, 2 or 4, 4, 4, now you can render as a video file, click "Okay", and then "Render". You will have the video files ready in a photo that you choose. Or if you want to export the GIF file, I have two methods for the exporting. The first, there is a really useful and helpful plugins in which is a GifGun but you can perch on the AE scripts.com. If you make sure your work area is correct to you on the timeline. By playing the preview, it looks good, and then you can go to the GifGun here and then press the "Setting" and in a Setting make sure that the Keep Alpha, is selected or you can resize to animations. Current animation is 1000 by 1000. I think it's pretty big to me, so I always size down to 500, but it's totally your call if you want to keep the original size, that's totally okay, then make sure is an infinite loop, of course is a GIF. Before you select down, you want to make sure that your file, it's in a set of folder that you want to go to. Go down and then just make the GIFs, now it's rendering. Another way I would explore the GIF file is to use the video file with the Alpha background, and then import the video to photoshops, and then we can convert the GIF from there. I would render the animations to the video file with the Alpha background. The formats I will usually choose is ProRes 4, 4, 4, 4, and then select the color channel here, make sure it's RGB and alpha, so it will maintain the Alpha background and then click "Okay", then having the videos on your desktop. Fine out here, looks good, save it and then render. Then go back to Photoshop and drag the video that you just rendered into your photoshops and then you have video here. Then you want to explore the video, save it from web, so now you can see the video is in the web view and then this is basically the place that video will be converted into the GIF file. You can see the file, it's GIF and now the file is huge, usually we want to keep the GIF files small and sweet. The first thing I would change is this image size, I probably want to change it to 500 by 500 and enter it. You can see the size drops from 12 to 4 megabytes and the colors I don't need, like 256 colors, I can just move it down to 128 and maybe transparent is selected and convert to RGB is good. Then maybe I would change the size, that'll be smaller to keep the file smaller, it looks good. Then before you save it, you can preview from here, looks good to me and save it to the place you want to save, so it's done. You can find your GIF file that you just convert in Photoshop in your computer. Now you have the GIFs files ready and then you can totally share the files to a social media or your portfolio. But now I will just quickly show you how I uploads my GIFs to Giphy. Click the "Upload" and drag the files here and then maybe change having a tag like fry guy, happy, cheerful. I'm going to give you the orders and there after all these accounts. Every time if I tag the GIFs here, you will see those gifs in the Instagram GIFs Research. That's why, the keywords for the tags are putting [inaudible] so if you type in, happy, this french guys will potentially show up in a research or type in dance or french fries, typing any key words that you'd like, and then upload to Giphy. Of course, you want to upload to the project gallery as well. 21. Final Thoughts: Congratulations, you made it. By this time, you will have animated characters that you can share or upload to the Projects gallery. I'm really excited to see your creativities. Now you can use all the techniques that you learned in the class and adopt these techniques to any subjects or objects for the character animations. You can totally bring everything to life. Just have fun with that. Thank you for watching. I hope that you enjoy the journey.