Frame by Frame Animation Basics

1. Introduction: My name is Kyle Cernicky. I'm an art director and designer currently working in New York and I specialize in digital design, which is really any type of design that can be found online. Anything really from web pages to social media content and everything between. One of the really cool things that I love about digital design and what really makes it interesting to me is that you have the ability to utilize animation and motion graphics. That is what I am going to be teaching you guys a little bit about here today. In this class, we're going to be creating a cell animation. I'm going to show you guys three different basic styles of illustration that will create a different look and feel in each of the final products and also three different examples of how cell animation can be applied. We're going to start with cell animation on its own and then move into cellular animation on top of an image, and then end with cell animation on top of video. Really what I want you to take away from this class is that design at it's most basic definition is really just problem solving. But with design, there really is no right or wrong answer to how the problem is solved and I think you will see that in this class when we take one basic solved animation and turn it into three very different final products. Don't forget to follow me and also review this class. I would love to hear your feedback and then when you've completed the project, don't forget to post your final project in the projects gallery. 2. Class Projects, Tips & Tricks: All right guys, I'm going to start out this class by showing you some helpful tips and tricks to keep them in mind during the lessons. Here I have the final versions of what we're going to be creating. This is the cel animation on its own. Just a frame-by-frame illustration of, I illustrated my dog. You're free to illustrate whatever you want. Part two is a cel animation on top of an image. I chose to use this product image here, this perfume. Then part three is the animation on top of a video. Now with these three parts, if you're doing frame-by-frame, which is what we're going to be doing for part one here, then it will export as a gif. You can see that here, we can export it straight from Photoshop as a gif. But for the on top of an image and on top of video, those will export as MOVs or MP4 files so I'm going to show you guys really quickly how to turn those into gifs easily. What I do is I use a website called EZGif, so it's E-Z-G-I-F. Then do video to gif. Choose file. I'm going to use this perfume one. Open. Upload video. You can see in the corner here it's uploading. It'll show you a preview of what the video looks like and then you can compress the video down here. I'm just going to do 500 pixels, convert to gif. It's converting and this cap is dancing. There you go. It will show you a preview of the gif and then you have to just select Save. It'll come down here and save for you. That is how you take a video file and convert it into a gif. Now this is a gif that I'll loop. It's also a compressed file so it's easily the share, via certain mail. Another helpful tip here is onion skins and this is something that I'll call out when we start using it also. But an onion skin is basically a layer that will allow you to see the previous and the next frame. This is my animation on top of video, which I'm going to get more into detail later in this class. But really, this is what it looks like without onion skins and this is when you enable onion skins. This is really helpful when you're doing frame by frame and you want things to use subtly or move slightly with each frame. You can see where the last frame was and place the next frame appropriately according to that. Onion skins are your friends. We definitely want to use those on when we're using a timeline in Photoshop. Some other things here, guys. I'm just going to start a new document to show you some Photoshop shortcut if you are new to Photoshop. Let me get rid of my timeline. Some shortcuts here. B is the brush shortcut. We want to use the brush to do our frame-by-frame animations. If we want more of a hand, illustrated or sketchy look, P is the shortcut for pen so this is the pen down here and the pen is similar to the tool in Illustrator. It'll let you draw anchor points. If you want to draw custom shape there it is. Then A is the shortcut to move individual anchor points. If you draw a shape and you want to refine the points, it's with A. When you're using the pen tool, we select P and you want it to be a shape. Make sure you're selecting Shape in this drop-down arrow up here. This drop-down menu up here, not Path. Path is for if you want to type on along a path, what we are going to be using the pen tool for we'll be using a shape. What I'm doing right now is Undo. That shortcut is Command Z to undo. Also a helpful tool, the eraser that shortcut is E, eraser. Then for the brush and eraser. To make it larger, you're going to want to use the up bracket, the big bracket. To make it smaller, you're going to use the down or smaller bracket. These two keys are located beside the P on your keyboard. Bigger is the larger bracket, smaller is the smaller bracket. This is for the eraser and the brush tool. To adjust the softness of the brush or eraser, you hold down Shift and use the same brackets. To make the brush harder or make the edges more sharp, you hold down Shift-big bracket. That's as hard as the brush can get and to make it softer, you hold down Shift-smaller bracket and that is to make the edges softer so you can see the difference there. Same with the eraser. Then to easily zoom in and zoom out of your canvas Command Plus is to zoom-in, Command Minus to zoom out. Then if you hold the Space-bar down, you can click and drag anywhere. This will be helpful when you are getting detailed with your illustrations. You can easily zoom in and zoom out and drag around to make things look how you really want. Those are my tips for you guys. Just some things that I would like you to keep in mind as we move forward. We're going to go ahead and start on the cell animation on its own. It might be a little tough to start out with, but keep in mind, in my opinion, this is the most difficult one just because you can't rely on external media. If you can get through the first part of this class, you can easily move on, to doing the animation with image and animation on top of video. With that, let's get started. 3. What is Cel Animation: Hey guys, let's get started. Before we jump into the brainstorming part, I just want to better define a little bit about what cel animation is. Basically, cel animation is just a series of illustrations put together to create one animation, or one motion graphic. I think this example here really shows that really well. Because up top you can see the basic sketches that this creative started with, and then down below you can see the final product. Then I'm just going to quickly show you guys some other examples. I thought this one was really cool. It shows you that you can use cel animation for more than just illustration, like basic illustration or cartooning. It can be used for expressive typography like we've done here. This one I thought was a cool style of illustration. It's not that complex of an illustration, very simple style, minimal color palette, but really effective, especially with the looping that this creative has built. That means that the last frame of illustration, and the first frame of illustration are the same so that the animation can continually run without break. Then if we want to go ahead and look at a little bit more examples of cel animation as well as start to brainstorm on what you guys want to create. We'll come back to the homepage of Pinterest and just search cel animation. Then it'll give you a ton of examples. 4. Basic Animation: Brainstorming: First off, we're going to start by brainstorming for our first basic cel animation. To do that, we're going to start here on Pinterest. This is where I like to start a lot of my projects. It just really helps me get my creativity flowing, helps me think of new ideas and gets me inspired. So this is how I begin a lot of my projects, just coming to Pinterest. I think for my first cel animation, the cel animation without any external media, just basic frame-by-frame illustrations to create an animation, I'm going to probably do something pretty simple. I'm just going to come to Pinterest and search simple illustration style. Then here, it'll give you a ton of examples, and like I said, this is what I typically do when I'm beginning a project. I just scroll through and I look for things that interest me, styles that I think are cool or styles that I could see myself doing, the ones that fit my creative tone of voice. Then you can just create a board. I'm sure a lot of you already know how to use Pinterest. Another place that I typically look for inspiration for is just in my real life. I'm going to take the inspiration that I've gotten from Pinterest to animate my dog. Here she is. Her name is Sydney. I have this picture which is always great to start from an image. That's basically how you brainstorm. 5. Basic Animation: Sketching: Picking right up where we left off here on my Pinterest board, as you can see, I did some searching around and found some additional imagery that I thought was pretty cool for my first elimination. I really in particular like this one here. I think the style is really fun and playful and it really shows the attitude of the dog, which I'm definitely going to do pink for my dog because she is a diva like that. I think this style also gives you a little bit of wiggle room as far as precision of the illustrations. This can be a little bit more free hand and you can be a little bit more liberal with your drawings and it'll still come out really, really great. So that being said, let's get started on the sketching here. There are really a number of ways you can sketch. You can do free hand. You can use a tablet. I am going to use a Wacom tablet that is attached to my computer, with that being said, I'm going to come down here to my Photoshop. Just let it open up. Then I'm just going to go ahead to the Open button that's right here and then my image that I want to use as a base, I'm going to go ahead and open it up. Open in this window right here. Great. Just unlock this because I want to keep it a layer, not a background. Then I'm going to come up here to the opacity and just drop it down a bit because I want to be able to see it, but I also want to be able to see what I'm drawing on. About 90 percent is great, depends on the image. You might have to go lower a little bit. Then I'm going to come over to my toolbar and select the brush. Or you can push b and then you can see with my pen how big the brush is but you can scale the brush up and down on your keyboard as shortcuts. Using the bigger bracket to go up and the smaller bracket to go down. You can also adjust the softness of your brush by holding shift. So if you push shift, large bracket, it'll make the brush more hard. So you can see that stroke. Then I'm just going to Command + Z to get rid of that. Or you can make the brush softer by pushing Shift and holding in the smaller bracket. So you can see that that line has a soft edge. Then I'm going to push Command + Z to make that go away. So once you have your brush ready here, the first thing you want to do before you begin illustrating is create a new layer with this little folded over paper icon. What this allows you to do is draw on top of the image without affecting the image underneath. You should create a different layer every time you want an independent part of the image to move. So for example, if I wanted to draw a circle up here, and then I wanted this circle to move independently from this triangle. Now since they're on the same layer. I'm just going to select the movement tool to show you this or you can press V for a shortcut. See these two items move together. Rather than if I create a new layer for the triangle down here. Then you can see we're moving this layer, I can move the triangle separately and then the circle separately. You really want to think about your final animation so you can set up the proper sketch files. So her head, I just want to be able to tilt on an axis as it's moving, the body will remain pretty much in the same place. Just the details of the fur will move slightly. So I'm going to create two layers. Then I'm going to label one head and label one body and then we're ready to start illustrating. 6. Basic Animation: Building: All right guys, welcome back and as you can see, I've added some colors to my illustration on my dog Sidney here. You can see the crown is separate, the body is separate, and the head is separate. This is so that we can move these pieces independently of each other as we're creating the cellular animation, as well as the background is separate. Then if we shut them off, you can see the original image here. If you did decide to hand sketch your illustration, that is 100 percent fine. Now is the time where you need to bring it into Photoshop. We're going to be using this timeline down here. If you're not totally satisfied with your illustration, that's okay. It's all a learning process and this class is on specifically cell animation, not illustrations. What's important is that we're understanding the steps of animating that illustration. What I've done is just create an artboard here. My Canvas is within one artboard. Then I'm going to go over to the Layers Panel and select that Artboard and then just push Command J. What I want to do here is make the fur glow a little bit and make her head tilt in the crown hover. In order for me to do that, I'm going to have to modify the fur a little bit and just slightly tilt the head and move the crown. Moving or the crown is the simplest part, I can simply select the crown layer and hold down Shift and Arrow keys to move it around, or I can just slide it like this wherever I want it to. I'm just going to go to keystrokes up and one to the left. Then I'm going to select head push Command T for transform, and just tilt it a little bit. Then push Enter and I'm just going to nudge it over so it lines up better. Then I do want the for to move a little bit ,so I'm going to select the head. For this, I'm going to go to the Liquefy Tool, go to Filter Liquify. Then you can see it's up here, Command plus to zoom in. There it is. Then my liquefied brush is enormous right now, I'm going to shrink it way down. Then I'm just going to move the lines slightly just so you get a subtle movement with the head tilt, but nothing drastic. Then I'm going to push Okay. You can see if I push Command Z, you can see this is what it looks like now, but that's what it looked like before. Edit, Redo, this is what it looks like now. This is what it looks like before, super subtle. Then I'm going to do the same thing with the body. This is what it looks like now, this is what it was before, Edit, Redo, see how it look like now and before, ever so slightly. In that step you can see we've tilted the head, we've raised the crown and slightly adjusted the first. We're going to go ahead and repeat that step here. A little trick that I've learned is build off of the prior frame. Instead of starting with the original image, will start with the second frame. I'm actually going to copy the second frame, rename it frame 3. Then here you can see the crown is in the same place and the fur is in the same place, and the heads in the second place. We don't have to make as drastic of a change. I'm going to keep making the crowd move up slightly. One nudge and one nudge. Then do the head tilt ever so slightly more. Then we're going to adjust the lines in the fur of the head and body like we did on the last one. We're just going to keep doing this step. Building the layers off of the original layer into, we've made our way back to the original illustration. Now here you see I have all my six frames are fully illustrated. I think probably the most clearly visible difference in the frames or the different positions of the crown. You can see it going up here and then back down into place. Then it'll loop back around here and go up and down. Same with the head tilt in the wave. You want to make sure that each frame is illustrated properly. If you want it to loop, you have to make sure the first frame and last frame look closely identical, or if not, are identical. Then what you do from here, I'm going to save this document, Save As. Then what we're going to do is File, Export, Artboards to Files. When you do this, make sure you're selected on one particular artboard because then it'll only export that one artboard. Make sure you're selected on a layer within one of the artboard, File, Export, Artboards to Files. Then you want to make sure you know where you're saving it. I'm going to save it in the folder. Then you'll see here this is what each of the JPEGs will be named, followed by the name of the artboard. I'm just going to name it Sidney illustration and then it'll say frame 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6. I want to export it as a JPEG here. Then just push run. Great. Then what I'm going to do is Open up a new document and have the base layer be frame 1. Just open up frame one of the JPEG that you just illustrated and then come back down where it says create frame animation. This will be our first frame. Then we're going to add in here all the other frame or just open up your finder and then drag and drop the rest of the frames onto your image. My animation has six frames, I'm going to create six frames in the timeline down here, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6. You can see the numbers in the corner. You're going to go back to the first frame and hide all of the later frames and make sure this is the first frame because then it will apply that action to the following frames. As we go down, we're going to click on frame 2. Then let frame to pop up, frame 3, let frame 3 pop, four, let frame 4 pop up, five, same thing and so on and so forth. Right now the timing is set to zero seconds, which is really fast. I'm going to do 0.2 seconds. Then right here you can change if you want it to loop three times, once or forever. I designed mine to be a loop. I'm going to say forever. Then I'm just going to let it go. There you have it. Again, you can adjust the speed so I can make it go. No delay, which is the quickest speed, which is a little bit too fast. I can make it go a bit slower. I can do one full second per frame, which I think gives a bit slow. I'm going to do 0.2 second., I think that's what I want my animation to be. But again, you can adjust your animation to any speed that you want. Then tune into the next lesson to see how we export these animations. 7. Basic Animation: Exporting: All right guys, congratulations. You just finished your first cell animation here. The last step, wrapping it up is just exporting. Really for this type of frame-by-frame animation, there's only one way to do it. Super simple. You're just going to go File, Export, Save for Web, and then this little window is going to come up and you're going to want to go, GIF, the different numbers or however many colors are in the GIF. Sometimes you see a GIF and the colors are off, that's probably because it's at a 64. The Dithered versus No Dither is how the colors diffuse into each other. For this really basic style of illustration, there's not really an issue. You could do a 64, no dithered and it'll still look fine. But I typically just for best practice tend to export at 128 dithered and you can see all the colors that are going into the illustration. If you want to resize your image here, that's totally fine. I'll probably size it down a little bit. It doesn't really need to be that large. I'm just going to size it down to 80 percent and it'll do the pixels here. As you can see, it still looks great resolution wise. Then you're going to click "Save". I'm going to save it in my sid folder here, and I'm going to name it just sidney.gif. Save, and then here I'll bring it up. You can see it here and it's a GIF. There you go. That's how you do a very basic style of frame-by-frame style animation. If you want to click into the next lesson, we'll go into how to combine this format with imagery. 8. Animation+Image: Brainstorming: All right guys, welcome back. Here we are again, starting the second part of our three-part lesson back on the Pinterest where I said I'd like to begin most of my projects to get inspiration and just get my creativity flowing. For the second part, we are going to continue expanding on the cel animation that we learned. This time we're going to use imagery, which sounds more complicated, but it's actually makes the process a bit easier. So you'll see that. Just for you to get some ideas, I pulled some examples of what that looks like. Here's a really great example using cel animation with imagery and it's not to be confused with stop motion. A lot of this is stop motion, which is a series of images. Cel animation is a series of illustrations. The typography in the beginning in particular is what is using cel animation here, as well as some of the added illustrated elements at the end. I let it play again. Then here's some more. You can see the imagery itself is not moving. That would be stop motion. It's just the illustration that is moving and that's what makes it cel animation. Again, you can also see different styles of illustration that are coming into play here. Here's another example. This again does utilize some stop motion. The images of the apples in the back are the stop motion, but the animations and the splashes, those are cel animation. This is something that you'll see being used a lot with product. Then here's another example. Here the glass in the middle or the bottom and the middle never really moves. It's just the illustrations and the topography around the outside that are giving the video any animation or motion effects. So, you can really do a lot of cel animation. Just for practical use here, I'm going to select a basic product image and create a cel animation around that. For that, we're going to go to this website that I like to use. It's called pexels.com. It has free imagery and free video. For that, I'm going to just search a bottle as my generic product. Just based on what you've looked at on Pinterest and what you felt inspired by, you can select any sort of products that you want. You can take your own image that you want to add cel animation to, totally fine. Food photography is great for it. So I'm just going to select this image. I like the flower and I think having flowers growing at the sides of the bottle will be something really cute and playful that we can animate here and as well as fit the aesthetic of this image. I'm just going to go here and "Free Download". That's going to download to my computer and then we can start the sketching process in the next video. 9. Animation+Image: Sketching: I just downloaded my image here. I'm going to go back into my Photoshop. I still have my last animation open up here. I'm just going to go ahead, and open up my new image, which is in my downloads folder, since I just downloaded it. Here it is. I'm going to rename that, and save that in a different location. For the sketching part, I'm just going to do some rough outlining, and play with the colors, and figure out what exactly I want the cell animation to do. I'm on the brush here. I'm thinking maybe it could be nice to have some flowers come out here. I just play around with it. I'm going to do a more refined style of illustration. This is just helping me get ideas as far as how the physics of the animation will come to life. Working with an image, I think is a little bit easier than just doing a cell animation on its own, simply because you have the product to work with, and you can go off of it. What I'm doing here is I could have an animation common wrap around the side of the bottle, and then unwrap. Like I said, the flowers blooming here could be nice. Maybe having the perfume missed. Just keep playing with it, and figure out what it is that you want to do, and get your sketch into a place where this is what I want it to look like when it has the most animation happening. Then that's when if it's not already digital, will bring it in to a digital space, so we can start building the animation on top. 10. Animation+Image: Building : In the last lesson, we finished our sketches on top of the image that you've selected. As you can see here, I've finished my sketch. I did a little bit more refined style, the last illustration, which was a bit more free hand, but this time I use the pen tool with the brush tool on top for some of the details. You'll see more of how that works when I dive into start building this cel out. I want to start this animation with your sketch pretty much built out, so you have it to build on top of when you're building out the frames. What we're going to want to do is file, save as JPEG. We're going to open up a new window with the flat JPEG. There it is, great. Then I'm just going to start by cropping this a little bit. There's no really illustration element over here, so I'm just going to cut that side out and bring it more centered. You can crop by using the shortcut C and then just dragging it, and then enter or check mark. This is going to be my background layer, and then I'm just basically going to draw frame by frame on top of this, in order to have it wrap and press and squirt. What we want to do now is go back to window and timeline, and instead of creating a frame animation, this time we're going to do a video timeline. There we are. This looks a little bit different, instead of the frame-by-frame, you're going to get this timeline. This again is going to be the layer that I'm tracing on top of. I'm going to lower the opacity a bit, and then what you want to do is File, Place Embedded. You're going to want to add in your original image and then just line it up. There we go. I'm going to just put that behind and also lower the opacity a bit. Great. Now you have these two video layers, this layer zero is just to trace. A couple of different tips to make this easier is you want to enable onion skins, which basically an onion skin lets you see what the previous layer has, or the previous frame has. Basically, if I were to draw something on the first frame, just like a big smiley face here, and then I move to the next frame. You can still see it transparently, but it's not actually on that frame. If I were to disable onion skins, you wouldn't see it, but go back and it's on that frame. I'm going to erase that, and then enable onion skins again, and then something else you want to make sure is you want to set timeline frame rate, 30 frames per second. It's going to give you a lot of detail. It's basically saying that you're going to do 30 different illustrations or 30 different pieces of illustration per second, which is a lot, and that's not really necessary all the time. If you want a super smooth animation, you're going to have to do more frames per second. However, I think for this scenario, it would be fine to do 23 or 15 even frames per seconds. I'm going to cut it down to 15 frames per second. It's going to be a choppier animation, but it will really limit the amount of frames that you have to create in order to build this animation. I have my base image in the background and this is going to end up being a part of the animation, the final product. Then I have this layer that I'm going to be tracing throughout, that I've already illustrated out based on the sketching phase. So then I'm going to go ahead and grab the pen tool, and I'll show you guys how to use this. Like I said, this is a different style of illustration that I think the pen tool is better suited for than the brush. I'm going to go ahead and use the pen tool down here. When I start using the pen tool, it's going to create another shape layer down here in the timeline. I'm just going to start at the base of the animation where I want the motion to start. There you can see it started a new shape layer, and then I have my sketch layer and my image layer. I'm just going to move it one frame, and then I'm going to cut this layer right here. Make sure the Shape layer is selected, and then you press the scissors and then you can delete this; but then if you look closely, because you have onion skins enabled, you can still see what the last shape was without it being present in this frame. This is when it's in the frame, and this is what the onion skin, you can subtly see it. Now you know how to move the shape continually so that it's the next step after this. I'm just going to go like this. Just using the pen tool drawing anchor points right there, and then move on to the next frame. Make sure you selected this shape and then press the scissors, and then there you go, you can subtly see the shape again, but this is what it will look like. This is what it will look like in the animation, and then this is how an onion skin enables you to see it. Onion skin is super, super helpful for cel animation because it lets you build upon itself. I'm just going to continue to do this using the anchor points to build out along my sketch. We move it over frame-by-frame until the complete motion of my sketch is complete. Really this sketch is just a guideline. If you find that you start making it and it doesn't follow the sketch exactly that is totally fine. Again, so animation moves very quickly, so not every frame has to be entirely perfect, because you're only going to see that frame for a second. Then what I'm also going to do here is I'm going to add a new layer, new blank video layer. You'll see it appear in your timeline. I'm going to slide it over, so it's over the entire timeline. What I want to do, when I want to start adding the brush strokes that are on top of my sketch here, those are going to be drawn in the video layer. So make sure you're on the video layer here, you're not drawing it on top of a shape in case you want to be able to remove that in the final animation. If you know for certain that you're going to want to have that in the final animation, you can draw it on top of your shape, but I like to keep my layers separate and independent of each other in case there's something I want to change later on. So then I'm just going to select my brush and go up here, and I used a calligraphy brush to do these details. I'm just going to make sure I'm on that brush again, and then I'm going to come back down here, raise the opacity for a second so that I can get the proper color. I'm just going to color drop this right here, then lower the opacity so you can see your onion skins. Select the layer, brush, make sure you're on the right color. I think I'm going to want this to be a little bit lighter. Again, not everything has to match your sketch perfectly, it's just a rough guideline. I'm going to start this here and then move on to the next frame. If you see, you can still see this line. I'm going to go right here and extend it, so it looks like it's moving, and then I'm going to do another shape with the pen. If at any point you find it difficult to use the onion skins, you can change the settings. You can lower the opacity of the onion skin or raise the opacity, so this one is making it more easy to see. You can also change the blending mode. It depends on the color of your image, as to what helps you the best. I think mine is best at multiply and about 75 percent. Let me use the pen, draw another shape. I want my brush strokes to be slightly moving as this ribbon is wrapping up around the bottle. I'm slightly moving the brush stroke as it goes. You can see it starting to come together, and you'll see your layers getting built out as you go. This is just again, the very beginning, but you can see the red one coming across the bottle, as well as the gold brush stroke starting to form. I'm just going to continue with this all the way up until the bottle fully wraps. As you can see, these previous layers have been steps so that when the new shape begins, the other shape is not visible anymore, but this one I'm going to want two shapes visible at the same time, so these layers are on top of each other. As you can see here, I have a lot of layers going on and that's just because I'm moving slightly frame-by-frame. Just because I want this ribbon to nicely flow around into the mist here. I'm almost done. I've almost drawn everything out. I'm just going to disable onion skin tier so you can see. Even if you just scrub through, you can test it out. I'm just going to continue here and finish up with the spray, and then in the next lesson, I will show you guys how to save and export this. 11. Animation+Image: Exporting: All right guys. So I have just finished all of the layers to build my animation. I do have a lot here, just because there was a lot going on in my animation. Each of these purple shapes or each of this purple layers is a different shape. Then this blue layer has all of my brushstrokes on it. Just because every time you create a new shape, with the Pen, it'll create a new purple layer. You can see in my layers panel, I've 41 shapes to create this animation. Then the one layer has all of my illustrations. When you finish all the layers, you can zoom in and out of your timeline here with this so small mountain range in a big mountain range. You can zoom in by going towards a big mountain range and zoom out by moving towards the small. If you zoom out, you can see that you can adjust the length of your timeline. I'm just going to address mine down to where my animation is completed. You can see here, this is the last of my spits coming out. I'm just going to drag this little marker down. That's where my animation starts and ends. Then if you want to scroll back through, back and forth, you can see the animation come to life. Now keep in mind this is with onion skins on. I'm going to go ahead and disable the onion skins. Then this is what my original image looks like. You can scroll or you can scrub back and forth here to see the animation happen. Then what I also did is I brought up the opacity here. You are just using this image as a template. I brought up the opacity and I also removed this player that had your sketch. Just hide that layer. Then I'm going to scrub back to the beginning. Then you can hit "Play" on your timeline. Play button here. Watch your animation come to life. If you see any mistakes, you can always push play and then stop it. Say I saw mistake there. I don't like something about the way this brush stroke looks. All you have to do is select the layer that has your brush stroke. I can use the eraser which is shortcut e, and I can just erase it. No biggie Command Z will get it back. Same with all of your shape layers. They're all easily adjusted. Some other quick shortcuts here, if you pause it and you can't seem to get it on the right frame to move one frame forward as this here. One frame backwards this is backwards key here. You can just move frame by frame. It's also cool to see your animation move slowly like this. Now we're going to export this. How we do that is go to this hamburger icon where you enable onion skins. What you're going to select ''Render video.'' It's going to take a second. Then what I typically render out is H.264. This will give you an Mp4 file. If you want to export with a transparent background, you're going to want to do a quick time video. If you want a transparent background where you've created a cell animation that you want to lay on top of something else, that's going to be QuickTime. But for this, I want it to be on top of the image. I'm just going to do H.264, which is again an Mp4 file, which you can see up here perfumes sketch. Mp4. I'm going to change this to perfume animation and then I'm going to select the folder that I want to export in this on image folder that has all my working files from this. Then we're just going to select "Render" and it's going to render exporting video. But it looks like it's done exporting here. I'm just going to go over to my finder, to the location that I've saved it at. Then here it is. Should be exploited as an Mp4, which is a video file. That is how you create a cell animation on top of an image. Feel free to post your final projects in the project's panel. I'd love to see what you guys have done and tune into my next lesson which I'll show you how to create this effect on top of a video file. 12. Animation+Video: Brainstorming: Guys, welcome back to Part 3 of learning about cell animation. Here we are again back at my favorite place to brainstorm Pinterest. For this lesson we're going to brainstorm on what we want to create for our cell animation on top of video. Again I have pulled some examples for you guys to check out. Animation on top of video is the similar concept. It's a series of frame by frame illustrations put together to create motion. This time we're incorporating a video background. I thought this was a really cool example. I think it illustrates the motion in the video really well, and this is a very advanced cell animation. This is probably going 23 frames per second if not 29 or 30, so it's super smooth and very detailed. Here is another example. This is a little bit slower and a little bit choppier. Slightly less frame per second, I would say. That's another great example. Here's another one. Often times with cell animation, I have seen just using white sketch effects. Just a white brush, just because the white stands out against the moving background. Then another cool one I wanted to show you guys I saw on my Instagram, and they actually did a sketch effect with it looks like a brush, but then they added a glow so it looks neon. For me, what I am doing, so animation on top of video, I typically use it to emphasize the motion. I think other than this video here, this video it looks like it's utilizing sketch to backup the storytelling elements of the video. But I think it's really fun to use when showing motion, which is what this video does, as well as this video. For this project, I'm going to ask you guys to pick something where you can show some motion. For me where I like to go, I'm going to get stock footage and stock imagery is Pixels. We're going to go to Pixels, and the homepage will take you to imagery. But we want to make sure that we're looking at Pixels video, so search for Pixels video. I'm going to look for skateboarding videos, because I think that would be something that's really cool to add a fun effect to. You can just scroll through here. Pixels has a lot of options. If you want a dancing video, you can look that up, and there's a lot. But for me personally, I think I'm going to go with a skateboarding video. Go ahead and take some time guys to figure out what you want your cell animation to be on top of. I'm going to go ahead and pick out one of this skateboarding videos. If you guys want to film something on your own, on your smartphones, that is totally fine and that'll definitely work. In the next lesson, I will teach you how to storyboard out and plan for your cell animation on top of video. 13. Animation+Video: Storyboarding/Sketching: Welcome to the next part of cell animation on top of videos. This is where we left of, looking at pixels videos. This is the one that I chose to download. I think this one is great because not only shows in skateboarding, which we can do some cool effects, but it also shows the fall. Which with the illustration on top, we can really show the impact of. I just went ahead and downloaded it here. Then it went into my Downloads folder. Then what I did was I opened the video and then I just scrubbed through and paused it in different areas. When it's paused to take a screenshot, I did Command Shift 4, and then it's not a full screen shot but you can drag this little cursor to the size of the screen and then let it play for a little bit. Paused. Then screenshot, Command Shift 4. There we go. Same thing I just did that every couple of frames. Then what this does for us is it provides a base of images that we can use in our sketches as thumbnails to sketch on top of so we can plan out or storyboard. Then once you have those screenshots, here's all of mine. You can lay them out and print them and then use tracing paper or just a marker or something to sketch over top if you prefer sketching by hand. I prefer sketching digitally. I went ahead and laid out some art boards here. I have 12 frames and my sketches. The first one is no illustration. I want to just start playing as the skateboarders coming around the corner. Then I start with some really simple illustrations. I chose to do just white, very sketchy style illustrations because I think that goes with skateboarder grunge effect of the video. Then you can see here when the fall starts to happen, I start to highlight the ground to show an impact. When his foot hits the ground, and then down into when the rest of the body hits. Then he rolls out of frame and the scribbles, just follow him out. When you set these up, if you're sketching digitally, I just opened the first screenshot in Photoshop and then layer, new art board from that layer. Then you just copy that are bored with the Command J duplicate function, like we did in the first part of this course. Duplicate for however many frames you have, drag each screenshot and then I just use the brush tool here. What you would do, I'll show you in this last screen. What you would do is you have your screenshot here, create a new layer, select the brush tool, B is the shortcut. You just draw what you want. If you don't like something like, for example, I am drawing into him, you can use the eraser tool. You can also try out different options with different layers. Say this is one option and I want to hide the layer, create a new one and then maybe I want this one to be a thicker brush and a different color. Maybe I want it to be red. Then I can use the eraser tool to erase so it's not in front of him. This is why I prefer to sketch digitally because it allows you to say, "Okay. Do I like this? Or do I like this?" Maybe you want both. But I think digital it gives you the option to really test and play around a lot more. But again, if you prefer a pen and paper or physical sketching, that's also totally fine for that. That is the process of story boarding and sketching out your idea for solid information on top of video. This can also often be referred to as rotoscope animation. With that, let's Segway into the next lesson, which is actually building out your cell animation on top of video. 14. Animation+Video: Building: All right guys, welcome back. We left off with showing you how to storyboard out your animation on top of video. Now we're going to jump right into actually building out the animation. I have my storyboard here open in one in photoshop. What I'm going to do now is open up my video in another tab in photoshop. Here we have it. You can play through it and it's going to be pretty choppy. That is to be expected. It's because photoshop wasn't made to play an edit video. You'll see how we have to export this differently in the next lesson, because photoshop is not made for video. What we're going to start with is we're going to scrub back to the beginning. I am going to trim off some of this video just because I'm going to have the animation begin. When you can see the skateboard and trimming the video will make it easier to work with. I'm going to trim it about there. Just select the video layer and press the scissors. You guys should remember this from when we created the animation on top of an image and then delete. Then there I have the smaller clip that I want to edit. The first thing that we want to do is create a new video layer. Layer, new video layers, new playing video layer. Then it's going to pop up in the same video group, but we want to have it on top of the original video. We're going to drag this layer on top of the video group like this. Then we're going to drag it over top of the video. The reason that we're doing this is so that we can draw on this video layer. Then we can make it disappear or make it appear and not have the video underneath affected by it. We can also erase it without erasing the video underneath. If you were to have the video layer selected and you draw on top of that video layer and then you wanted to erase it, you would end up erasing the video itself also. That's what we want to avoid here. Go ahead and select the video layer again. I'm going to zoom into my timeline and enable onion skins. Then you're just going to scrub through frame by frame and make sure you have this layer on top of the original video selected. Select the paintbrush with the shortcut key b. Then just go ahead and make sure you have the correct color selected down here and start drawing. Again, I'm doing a very freehand, sketchy look and feel. Just because I think it's grunge and goes with the tone of my video. But if you want it to be more geometric and you want to use the pen tool, or if you want to use shape, whatever you want. As long as you're going frame-by-frame, it's all the same. Then you just scrub through to the next one. As you can see, my onion skin will allow me to see where the last frame looks like. I'm just going to draw roughly on top, that way it moves slightly. Make sure that you're scrubbing one frame at a time. Otherwise, you'll get a frame where an illustration isn't visible unless that's something you want. But if you scrub too far, you won't be able to see the illustration with your onion skin like this. I can't see any illustration. That means that I've scrubbed more than one frame away. If you zoom in more, that is helpful with scrubbing more slowly. It's easier to move the cursor only a little bit if you're more zoomed in. Again, similar to the animation on image, it's really okay if you don't like how an individual frame looks. This is 29 frames per second right now because it's video that's something you can always slow down if you need to, but it's very quick. It's 129th of a second that you'll spend on each frame. As long as you get the general motion of each frame down, it doesn't really matter what the individual frame will look like. Just continue to go frame by frame until you get to the end of your video. All right, guys, so I have completed my frame-by-frame illustrations here. You can preview your animation by scrubbing through frame by frame. If you push play and couldn't also watch a choppy version of it. But to see the smooth version, we're going to have to export it and then layer the animation video on top of the original video in after effects. I'm going to show you guys how to do that in the next lesson. 15. Animation+Video: Exporting: We just finished our cel animation on top of a video. I'm going to show you guys how to export this and then put it together for the final product. Like I said in the last lesson, Photoshop isn't really meant to edit video. What we're going do here is we're going to hide this video layer and export the illustrations with the transparent background. We're going to click this hamburger icon down here, render video, and I talked about this in one of the earlier lessons. We're not going do H.264 because that's MP4 and you cannot have transparent channels in MP4, we're going to do a quick time and this quick time will allow us to have a transparent background. Then we're going to go down to alpha channel, Straight-Unmatted, and the alpha channel is the transparent channel; so Straight-Unmatted and then you select the folder that you want to export to. I'm going to do working on video, choose this, and say, skateboard animation, and then go ahead and render. When you're rendering, you want to make sure that your timeline is set to the beginning and end of the animation. Then go ahead and look at that in your finder when it's done rendering. Make sure that it is a transparent background, and as you can see here, it is. If it's on black, that means that it is transparent. You can see the animation happening here, but it's without the video in the background. What we want to do now, make sure we save it in the correct place, on video. They're saved and you can replace. Then we're going to go ahead and open up After Effects. You're After Effects is open, we're going to go ahead and drag and drop the original video into the project file. It'll come up in here in the project, then drag it onto your timeline, there it is. It should play easily, and if you're having trouble buffering, you can lower the quality so that it plays easier. You can see my green bar here, that means it's buffering. I'm just going let it play through and buffer so that it's easier to watch back. I'm just going to push the space bar, that pauses; and then I'm going to grab my animation and drag and drop also. You can see it, but what I want to do here is line up this clip with the skateboarding. I want to go back to the frame that I began the animation at. It was when the skateboard was present or when it was out from behind, probably about there. Maybe a little bit further. That looks right. Then you can go ahead and watch it and test it out. Then if you want to cut it down, I'm going to cut it down to just right before. I'm going to select the video clip, and to cut in After Effects, the shortcut for max is Command Shift D, and then I'm going delete this, and I'm going to cut it down towards the end also, just right here. Command Shift D, delete this, and then select both of the clips, hold shift and click them, drag it back to the beginning of your timeline, and then grab this and slide it back, and that is the active part of your timeline. I'm going to show you guys how to export this. I'm going to go, File, Export, Add to Render Queue. If you prefer Adobe Media Encoder, that's also fine. But for this lesson, I'm going to say Add to Render Queue because Media Encoder requires additional software. I'm going to go Add to Render Queue and then Output to select this if it says not specified yet, and then that's where you can go and save it. I'm going to save in my project file, Skateboard Animation Final, and then hit Render, and you can watch the process here. Here I am in my finder and then here is the final skateboarding video. There you have it, and with that guys, congratulations. You've just learned how to do cel animation on top of video. 16. Till Next Time...: Hey guys, it's me again. I just wanted to personally thank you for taking my class. I hope you learned a lot. Don't forget to rate and review. I want to hear your feedback. What did you guys like? What did you guys not like? Also don't forget to post your projects in the project's panel. I want to see your work. I want to see what you guys have created and with that, thank you guys. Thanks for tuning in.