Transcripts
1. Intro: Hi, I'm Lauren [inaudible]. My background's in graphic design and illustration. I'm really excited for this course because what we're going to be doing is creating a sequence of illustrations and then putting them into Adobe After Effects using media encoder to export it to an MP4. So we're creating a really basic animation with one element that's animated. I would really recommend this course specifically for people who are a little bit more on the intermediate level. The reason for that is we're really going to deep dive into Adobe Illustrator, so it's good to have some knowledge on using that specific software. During this whole process, this course is really going to work on conceptualizing, so really creating and choosing from a couple different ideas. Planning and sketching; really thinking about how your different sketches interact with one another in order to build out an animation and then also looking at building a sequence, how does one illustration lead to the next. We'll also take a look at new tools inside of Adobe Illustrator. Some of these you might be familiar with. We're specifically going to look at drawing side, setup in exporting and combining different software. So we'll be using Adobe Illustrator After Effects. My background isn't specifically in animation, it's more in illustration. But I think the good thing about that with this specific course is it really looks at animation from like an illustrative artistic perspective. I'm really excited to jump and we're going to start first with sketching. Let's go ahead and start this journey together.
2. Sketching, Ideation, and Planning: In this video, we want to have a couple of different takeaways or deliverables. We're going to end up with some sketches of potential ideas for our animation. That'll be this first image on the left. Then the second image on the left will be our planning sketches. A sequence of sketches that when placed together they create the animation, we'll use that, we'll create that in this video as well. Then for the next two images on the right, that's what we're going to do in the next upcoming videos. This part of the project is really exciting for me. Sketching planning ideation really helps inform the rest of the project. I'm really excited to get started and to talk about. First, how did we come up with a couple different ideas? Second, how do we choose from those ideas? And third, how do we build out those ideas in order to start planning out our animations. Before setting a timer and really jumping into ideation, and thinking about different potential ideas for this animation project, I want you to think about a couple of different things. Here's a few tips for what you could include in your ideation sketches. I really want you to think about having a background, a foreground, and an animated feature. The next tip I want you to think about is, what direction is the animated feature going to go in? For me, I created first a snake that goes in a spiral direction, really fun. Then I was thinking about something that goes side to side. I created a boat, a small boat in the ocean and really focus on that movement in that direction. Of course, then I created my rocket ship taking off and going upward. That's another direction that I focus on. Then the third is an apple falling from a tree. Make sure that you did really think about what are some different directions, some different opportunities for creating a really simple animation. When you're ready, we're going to talk about making a selection. What we're looking for when we're making a selection, is we're looking at, does the animation makes sense? We're looking at, is this something that's exciting? And now we can carry through for the rest of the project. Then we also want to look at the composition. You'll want to look at some of those elements that I discussed earlier. I've selected the rocket ship. Now I'm going to start sketching out a couple different frames in which I'm going to move the rocket ship up a little. So that when I combine these together, it'll create an animation. I would really love to see your sketches. If you can go ahead and post those in the class projects, that would be great. We'd love to see them. Then same thing with anything else that we create in this specific video. I do want to keep these sketches as a reference for when I go into Adobe and Illustrator and start building things out. I might not exactly follow this to a t, but it is going to be a good reminder to me for what I want to create and what I need to create. I'm really excited to continue working with you. I can't wait to see you in some of the upcoming videos.
3. Setting up the Artboards: Now that we have an idea for what we want to design out what we want to create, we're going to set up the art boards on which we are going to place our Adobe Illustrator illustrations. These illustrations are what we're going to combine together to create our final animation. So to start, we want to go into Adobe Illustrator, so you're going to go to File and then New, and then this box should pop up after you hit New. You can go ahead and name your projects. I'm going to name mine Spaceman, and then I have to go to Pixels and then set it up to 1080 By 1080, this prepares my artwork for Instagram. After this, I want to take a look at the number of art boards, so I'm going to have four different images for my sequence, and then I'm going to go to RGB Color. CMYK would be for print, but this is digital, so it's RGB, and then for screen I want it to be 72 dpi, so 72 dpi RGB color. Once you're done setting this up you're going to go ahead and go to Create, and then you should have your art boards ready to go.
4. Creating the Background: For this section of this project, we're going to look at compositional elements, specifically the background. We'll create this separately. I am going to focus on creating the ground and the flag. Then for the sake of time, I'm going to separately create the stars and some additional details on the flag. Then in the next upcoming videos we'll really take a look at creating our foreground. In my case, it'll be the astronaut. Then looking at creating the animated feature, building that out, and then moving into creating a sequence. I want you to pull out your sketches. This is an opportunity to go back and look at what we created in the ideation sketching planning phase, and use that as a reference. Once you have those sketches pulled out, let's go ahead and go back to Adobe Illustrator, to our art boards. I want to make sure that we're all in essential classics. It'll make it a lot easier if we're in the same settings. We have our four art boards. What I'm going to do now is; I want to make guides so I can center everything. If you go to your rectangle tool or M and just drag over, then you can hit Command R to have your ruler showing and drag rulers into the center. That'll create two different guides that help create an intersection to show us where to place everything. We'll do the same thing for the next art board. Just click and drag using the selection tool. Move that rectangle or square around. Next, I'm going to choose something from my background. Now, I have my guide setup. Since I'm going to be in outer space on the moon or some planet, I want a dark gray color. Now that I'm satisfied, I'm going to go to the Ellipse tool, which is going to be L. You can just hit L and your Ellipse tool will come up. I'm going to click and drag this O to a good size. It doesn't have to be quite as big as the art board. Then I'm going to put it on the guide so that It lines up in the middle. Then if you look at draw inside, if you click on it, it'll be under the color swatches. You'll see these brackets that start to form around my circle. That means that whatever I draw is going to be limited to the confines of that shape. I'm going to draw this background with the pen tool, this little landscape, inside of my dark circle. You'll see that it sticks just to the circle. You'll see I've drawn outside of the circle but it should stay inside of it. You see now I accidentally clicked out of it. I'll show you in a second how to click back in. I'm going to pick my next color. I just want to do a flag. I'm going to do a top color for now. You can always go back and change things and I'll walk you through how to do that. I'm just going to rotate this into my rectangle tool and draw the remaining part of my flag. But you see, since I'm not in drawing side anymore, it sticks out. You can also draw pieces that are not drawn inside, but you have to tuck them back in. If I want to get back to draw inside, I use my Direct Selection Tool. Click on what I want to draw it inside of, and then click on draw inside and that will get you back in. I'm going to fast-forward through this really quickly. You can see now my flag is confined, just to my circle, which is really important for me. Then if I use the Direct Selection tool, I can click on the pieces inside and change their colors, which is a really big deal as well. If I just use V or my selection tool, I can't really click and change the colors. It has to be with my Direct Selection Tool. Now, we're ready to work on our astronaut.
5. Building the Suit: I would really love to see the backgrounds that you created, so please go ahead and share those. You can export them in Adobe Illustrator and then upload them from there to our class projects. Now we're going to go ahead and start building out the next section of our illustration. For me, it's my astronaut, which is in my foreground. I'm going to go ahead and use some of the same techniques that I used in the last video, but I also want to go over adding gradients. We'll talk about that a little bit as well. For now I'm going to go ahead and hide my stars, my starry background because I really want to focus on my astronaut. I don't want to be distracted by it. I also decided to add some more details to my flag, so I decided to do that after this video. Those two things you won't see created in this video, but you'll see them added on. Now that we have our background setup, we're going to go ahead and create our space person. I'm going to just pull out the circle tool and create the head of the suit. I'm also going to create the body. I'm going to try to line this up, and I'll change the color in just a second. We're going to play around with gradients a little bit. Now I'm going to go ahead and make the body. I want to make sure that these line up together. I can click, and drag, and pull this down. I want you to remember, I could use a direct selection tools, so I could use it to expand or it could also go in. After I line this up, I can go ahead and go in and click on some specific points within this circle and pull them into the body of the suit. That's what I'm going to do really quickly. Now that I did that, I'm going to select the head part. Then I'm going go ahead and go over into the gradients. I'm going to click on the gradients to fill up that shape. If I click on the white dot and use the eyedropper, I can apply blue which is really cool. That's one way to pick different colors for the gradient. Then I can also click on the black. I can double-click on it, and then it opens this panel. I can go in and select a preset of different colors, but I could also go into this palette as well. The rest of this video is just a continuation of using the same techniques, adding in the gradient, adding in different shapes. We're just going to fast forward through this really quickly. I'm going to get a stopping point for my suit, I think it looks pretty good. I'm going to bring my stars backup, so I'm going to show them. I've added those details to the flag that I wanted to add. I think this would be another good part to share this space suit as well. Whatever you created for this video sharing it. I think it's just really great to look at process and be able to see how everything's being built out slowly. Share that with your classmates, and let's move on to the next step.
6. Creating the Animated Feature: In this video, we are going to finish out our first illustration of the series. I want you to think about your sketches as well as the other techniques that we discussed in the previous videos. What I really want you to focus on in this video, we're just going to speed through most of it is taking a look at choice. You have a choice to draw, use a drawn side feature or not. I am going to create my rocket ship inside of my bigger shape, but I'm not confining it specifically to my helmet. The reason I'm going to do this is because in the next video I'm going to talk about what to do if you want to crop part of your image being used drawn side. In the next video, I'll show you how I'm going to cut off part of my rocket ships so it doesn't overlap with my helmet since I didn't use drawn side when I created it. The second part of the video is looking at how to use drawn side in a smaller shape that's inside of the bigger shape, so I'm going to use drawn inside, going to do the same thing I did with my bigger circle, I'm going to use my direct selection tool and select the smaller circle, that's part of my helmet, and then draw my smoke clouds inside of it. I'll show you that really quickly. Now we have our first part completed, our first image completed, let's go ahead and move on to creating our sequence.
7. Setting up the Sequence: I'm really excited that now we have our first illustration of this series. If you could please share I'd really love to see it. This part's really exciting because from here it becomes a little bit easier for what we have to do next. We just have to move around a couple different pieces. We'll move our animated part in the direction we want it to go in. So in this specific video, we are now going to paste this first illustration into the other three artboards. Then from there, once we have that, we're going to move into adjusting the animated features. So for me, it's the rocket ship. I'm going to move that slightly up in each one. Once I have that put together, I'll be ready to export to Adobe After Effects. So let's go ahead and dive in into moving and applying each illustrations into its proper art board and adjusting the animated feature. For this, as well as the last video, I want you to take a look back at your original sketches that we did in the beginning. Next, I'm going to select everything by going command "A". Then I am going to go into "Artboard 2", hit command "C"to copy and Command "V" to paste. This should paste the image exactly in the same spot on "Artboard 2". You're going to go ahead and do the same thing in 3 and 4 as well. You'll click on 3, and then you're going to hit command "V". Then we're going to go to 4, and then we're going to hit command "V" again. This should line up our images on the same exact parts of each art board, which is really nice. If you don't have everything lined up exactly in the same spot, you'll see that your animation will look like different parts are moving that you didn't intend to have move. Now what I'm going to do is I'm going to focus on adjusting the rocket ship in the clouds, the smoke clouds. This will really help with animation. So I'm just going to zoom in here. I want to make sure that I select the different pieces. So I'm going to go with my direct selection tool and hold Shift as I'm clicking on the different pieces so that I can select all of them together. When I'm ready, I'm going to hit "V". Then I can move everything down. I'm going to just adjust my small clouds as well. So now that I have that adjusted, I'm going to go to the next artboard that I want to adjust. I wanted to take a look at this third one, specifically because I have the top of the rocket ship being cut off. So I'm just going to move this up really quickly. We want to have the tip go above the screen part of the helmet. I'm going to grab my pen tool. You can hit "P". You can click and drag over the top of an image if you do need to cut it. You're going to just create another shape that covers lines up with the screen part. The reason why I wanted to show you this is in case you forgot to do draw inside. I did not do draw inside for my rocket ship, so it's not inside of this smaller circle in the helmet. Then you're going to use "Shift M". You're going to use a tool. This tool is called the "Shape Builder Tool". That when you press option, you can remove whatever the top object is covering. So that will cut down the top of the rocket ship. So you can hit "Shift M" or you can just go to the tool itself. Then if you move your cursor on top and you hit option over the part you want to remove, it can remove the little piece that is where your pen tool drawing overlaps with the shape that you're trying to edit and remove pieces from. So I'm just going to go ahead and skip over adjusting some of the other images in the sequence. I went ahead and just moved my rocket ship in some of the small clouds. Go ahead and adjust your images as well, and I'll see you in the next tutorial.
8. Exporting the Artboards: So before I go into After Effects, I just want to make sure my artwork looks good. This last one, some of the pieces look like they're a little bit too wide or too big. So I'm just going to go ahead and adjust them really quickly to make sure that I'm happy and comfortable with this final scene. So I'm just going to fast forward really quickly through this. Now, I can go to File Export As and I'm going to make sure that I use the art boards. I want to leave it under JPEG, so that I have a white background consistently. You'll go ahead and hit export when you're ready. RGB is going to be for screen, so we're going to keep it under our RGB. I do want this to be a pretty high res file, so leave it on high. Then, I'll put it on 150ppi and hit "Okay".
9. Building and Finishing the Animation: For this next part, Adobe After Effects, I think at first is a little bit intimidating, but I wanted you to export into JPEGs because we're just keeping it really simple. This is really just an introduction to animation. The main focus was on the illustration aspect of it. Now we are going to really think about the timing of our animation. We're going to think about how to upload and integrate our JPEGs into Adobe After Effects. We're going to really look at does this make sense? This is really where everything comes together. Those sketches that we started with, the illustrations we made an Adobe Illustrator. This is where we start too see, does our animation makes sense? Once we have everything animated, once we adjust our images in Adobe After Effects we'll jump into media encoder, but let's go ahead and just really dive in into the section of this lesson. Now we're ready to go into After Effects. Just go ahead and open After Effects. Go to "New project", "New composition". You can name the component whatever you want? I'm still going to do the 1080 by 1080 for Instagram, although everything will be resize, you'll see in a second, and duration about four seconds is what I'm going to be happy with. Hit "Okay", when you're ready and go to "File Import" after that and go ahead and click on the images that you want to import. I'm going to hold down Shift while clicking, go to "Open". Since all of them are highlighted already, I'm going to click and drag them down into comp one. You can see that it's not fitting, the art board is too big and this is something the After Effects just always does even if it's the same size. I'm going to click on the down arrow since everything is selected and go under transformed to scale, I'm going to put in 50 percent. This will resize all of my rocket ship spaceman images since they're all highlighted. Now I'm going to click on the first one individually and I'm going to pull this cursor to the time frame. This is when you're deciding how long each segment is going to be, how long each image is present. Once you're happy, you're going to use the right bracket to cut off the segment, cut off the image, then if you want to, for example, for this second one, I want it to start at the cursor, so I'm going to hit the left bracket while it's highlighted and it'll trim it. Then I can move the cursor again for where I want this segment to end, and I'll hit the right bracket. The bracket should be next to the letter P on your keyboard. I'm going to keep doing this and just going down. I'll click on this third one, hit the left bracket for where I want it to start, and then drag the cursor to where I want it to end, then I'm going to click on this final one and do the same thing. I'm going to hit the left bracket for where I want this segment to start, and then right bracket for where I want it to end after I drag my cursor. Now I want to double this. I wanted to loop it. I'm going to select all of these images 1, 2, 3, 4. I'm going to go ahead and after I grab them, I'm going to hit command C or control C, then command V to paste. I'm going to click and drag now that these are selected, there still highlighted and I'm going to drag the new sequence to where the marker is so that my animation loops. Let's go ahead and play it to see what it ends up looking like. I'm pretty happy with it. Now that I'm satisfied with it, I think it looks pretty good. Let's go to File and then we're going to export it. We want to make sure that we can turn it from After Effects file into a mini movie. Let's actually save it really quickly. I'm going to rename it. Let's rename it to something else. I'll put rocket ship animation and now I'm going to go ahead and export it now that it's saved. Let's go to "File export", add to Adobe Media Encoder. That should pop-up. Sometimes it takes a little bit for the media encoder to pop-up. A pop-up in just a second here. Now that it's up. If you turn the upper right hand side, you'll see comp one. I do have it saved. I'm just going to click on it and then I'm going to hit the green flag and you could see that it'll start encoding it. It looks like it says done. I'll go ahead and just click on that link and open it up. Just play it to see how it looks. Cool, it's pretty good. Awesome. Thanks for joining me in this class. I had a lot of fun with you guys. I hope you had a lot of fun too and I'm really looking forward to seeing your projects.
10. Until Next Time : Congratulations. We finished our project together. I hope you had fun using your sketches, coming up with your idea, going in, and creating your illustrations in Adobe Illustrator, and moving them into Adobe After Effects to create your animation. I hope that we can work together again in the future. Please let me know what you think of this class and until next time.
Lauren The Illustrator, Lauren Gombas, Illustrator & Designer
