Transcripts
1. Intro: Hi, my name is Chris Piascik. I'm an illustrator and animator. I've been working in the creative industry for the past 15 years. Within the past five years, I've started incorporating animation into my professional work as well. Are you an illustrator that wants to start playing around with animation? Are you also intimidated by the idea of having to learn new software? Well, guess what, you don't have to. In this class, I'll teach you the frame-by-frame animation technique. You'll learn how to setup a file for animation in both Photoshop and Procreate. You'll learn how to make your illustrations wiggle, or vibrate naturally. We'll learn how to use smears to create a dynamic movement with just one single frame. We'll learn how to morph one object into another object, and then we'll learn how to combine these skills to make an even more dynamic and engaging animation. After that, I'll show you how to export your animations in a number of different ways for whatever application you want to use these for and share them. By the end, you'll be able to create your own simple animations. You don't have to have any previous animation experience to take this class. The class is aimed at illustrators, or really just anyone comfortable drawing freely and expressively. Over the years, I've done illustrations for clients like Nike, Google, Nickelodeon, The Washington Post, and countless others. I learned animation through experimentation, and I did it all without learning specific animation software. Learning animation skills from someone like me can be helpful because I'll be approaching it as an illustrator. I'll also be using the software that you're already using. In addition, I won't have the tendency to slip into any technical animation jargon because, let's face it, I really don't know any. Learning some basic animation skills will breathe new life into your illustrations and open the door to all kinds of new work possibilities.
2. The Project: The project for this class is to create a simple animation using two or more of the techniques that I will cover in the following exercises. What you choose to animate is up to you. But if you're someone who prefers prompts, here's a suggestion. Animate two of your favorite things, merging together to form the greatest thing ever. Because we will be learning a number of different techniques, the skills you'll develop are more important than one single project. In each exercise we'll be creating a standalone animation. I thought it would be fun to take a couple of these different skills that you'll learn, and combine them into one more engaging animation. Please share your final projects in the Project Galleries so we can all check them out. As always, I'll be providing feedback for each and every one. In addition, please share the animation that you create for each of the exercises. It'll be really fun to see those as well.
3. Setup: Before we can get started with the fun part, we need to set up our files correctly to avoid any hiccups as we move forward. In this lesson I'll show you how to set up your files in both Photoshop and Procreate. It's pretty similar for both, but they each have their own unique features and settings that I will go over. Before we get into the specifics of each, we should go over some fundamentals. We're going to be animating frame by frame. What that means is that, all of the movement that'll happen in our animations happen as a result of individual drawings transitioning from one to the next. The most basic example of this is a flip book. Each individual drawing changes slightly but when you flipped through them quickly it turned into a magical little video that tricks your eye. Each animation is made up of frames, and one frame equals one drawing. You might be thinking, how many frames do I have to draw? Those are very good and a very important question. To answer that we'll need to talk about frame rate. Frame rate is the amount of frames or drawings that happened within one second. Standard video is 24 frames per second. Again, you might be thinking, wait a second, every second I have to do 24 drawings? Not really. Lucky for us, animation is often done at 12 frames per second. This is usually referred to as animating on twos, meaning that in a standard of 24 frames per second video, each frame of the animation appears twice. In the applications we're going to be working in, Photo-shop or Procreate, we can set this up as just a 12 frame per second document at the beginning and not have to worry about any of the complicated math. Let's get started setting up a file in Photoshop. We'll go file new, and here we will choose our document size. This will obviously largely depend on what you're planning to use your animation for, but for our purposes and the purposes of this class, I'm just going to use a square format which is a good size for posting on social media, or maybe using as thumbnail on your Website or anything you might use a square image for. One thing to consider when choosing a size is that you want something that is not too big that it can be cumbersome and make your computer lag and have a huge file size, because remember, our animation is going to be made up of individual drawings. If you have a large file that has tons of different drawings, it could get pretty big and as you're starting to try to preview it and play it back, could become slow and laggy. I find a good place to start is 2,000 pixels. Two thousands pixels gives me a high enough resolution where I can export this large, and it also allows for the best drawing experience. You'll find that if your file is too low resolution, you won't have enough pixels to get the brush detail that you're used to and not have the control over your drawing tools. If you have an older computer or maybe you are lagging in a hard drive space or memory, you could probably go down to 1,500 or a 1,000 pixels and still have enough room to play. I have a newer machine here with plenty of memory. I like to use a bigger size because it gives me the most flexibility. I'm going to go with 2,000 pixels and hit create. We're going to need our layers. Our layers are where our individual drawings will be. I'll get into this further later but each drawling will have its own layer. Those layers that we're going to need to send to a timeline. We're going to open up our timeline, under windows we go to timeline. The timeline window pops up, usually at the bottom. It doesn't pop up there. The bottom is a good place to put it. I'm going to hit create a video timeline. You'll see at the bottom it says 30 frames per second. We definitely want to change that because we don't want to be drawing 30 frames every second. If you click on these lines over in the right corner, we can go set timeline frame rate. Here we can change it to 12 or animating on twos like we talked about. We've got our layers, we've got a timeline. I'd like to open up my tool presets which is where my different brushes are that I'll be drawing with. I click on tool presets. We got our layers that are tool presets, and if you're fancy and you're getting serious about wanting to do more animation stuff, there's an extension that I love to use called animators toolbar pro. What this does is it makes buttons for a lot of features that you would have to do manually. It really makes things easier and I'll show you some of the benefits to this as we start animating. But I'll also show you how to do what you need to do without using animators toolbar if you don't want to. I have to go out and buy an extension just to learn animation. You certainly don't need to use this to start animating. This just streamline some of the process and it's something that I really like, so I thought I would share with you. That's the basic setup for Photoshop. Let's go see how to setup a file on Procreate. Let's set up a file and Procreate. I'm going to go ahead and open up procreate. I'm going to go to a new document. As I mentioned in the last one, I was going to go with around 2,000 pixels. Procreate has a standard set-up with 2048 by 2048. I'm going to just pick that one because I'm lazy and 2,000 was just an estimate, so this is pretty close. I'm going to click on that. We've got our new document. We've got our layers over here, just like in Photoshop. What we need to do to start animating in Procreate is to click on this little toolbar, tool icon in the top left, and then go to Canvas and then animation assist and then we want to turn that on. What that does is it opens up a little timeline at the bottom similar to the timeline in Photoshop. Down here we've got a little settings button. Here you'll see frames per second. Remember we want that at 12. We're just going to drag this down to 12. We've got 12 frames per second. Procreate has a built-in onion skin feature. What onion skin is, is that it turns down the opacity of the previous frame and shows it to you while you're drawing the second frame. That way, you can see where the animation was in as you making slow changes to trick the eye into making it looks like movement. This will be very beneficial and helpful. If it's confusing to you now don't worry about it, it'll make more sense as we start drawing and start animating. We've got some settings for the onion skins here. We've got onion skin frames max. What that means is that it's going to show us relative degrees of transparency all of the frames. They think that's not helpful at all, I like to just have this set to one or two. What that does is, it will just show you the frame from before your current frame and the frame after your current frame. Again, if this is confusing, don't worry it'll make sense as we're going. Then you can control the onion skin opacity here. That's just how light or dark it shows up. You can change this as you're going if it becomes annoying or distracting. This other setting I think is really cool, the colors secondary frames. This goes along with the onion skin thing. In addition to making it transparent it also makes it a different color. This can be very helpful because when you're starting to transform things and it gets a little abstract, it can be confusing which layer is which. When you have the previous layer in a different color, it becomes much more clear. I like to turn that on. Then below that, we've just got some options for [inaudible] and we've got the one shot which just means that when you play the animation it starts at the beginning and stops at the end. Loop will just continue in a cycle, when it gets to the end it'll go back to the beginning. Ping-pong, it'll play to the end and then bounce back and play in reverse. We can play around with those as we get started, but these all I need to do to get a file setup to start animating. In the next lesson, we will choose and make the subjects for our animations, but sounds like fun? Very well, I'll see you there.
4. Choosing Your Subject: In the previous video, we talked about getting our file setup. But before we can begin animating, we'll need something to animate. The next lesson, we will choose the subjects of our animations. That could be a character, an object, or even a random shape. Whatever you choose, you'll want to keep it simple. Just stick with one color line work for now. Later on I'll address how to add color, but it's much easier to learn the basics without that added complication. For animation, we're going to need one main subject, that being the character, object or random shape and another to morph that character into. That can just be another character object or random shape. To keep things easier, I'd recommend choosing something that has a similar shape to the other side. For example, a slice of pizza and a traffic cone, or the moon, and a doughnut, or a car and roller skate. After you've decided what to make, the next step is to start sketching. You can do this on a piece of paper if that's more comfortable for you, or start working directly in the file that we set up. At this point, it doesn't really matter. We're just trying to sketch out ideas and whatever is the most comfortable way for you to do, that is what you should do. I'm going to start sketching out an idea for my character. I like to just do sketches on new layers that way. You can delete them, they're bad or you can turn down the opacity and trace over them if I want to redo them to make them a little better. Go ahead and get a brush and maybe use a pencil, brush one of Kyle Webster's brushes because his brushes are great and I'm just going to start sketching. I've decided to go with one of my ghosty characters. I decided to do this because I like drawing these, they're usually my go-to when I start drawing a character and they're fun to animate because they have this organic wiggly shape. Let me give him some feet, though, I don't know how crucial the feet are, because ghost can fly. I don't know. The feet will give more a better character. But anyway, let's not get caught up in the details here. We got some feet, it's a ghost, it's got a tail, it can fly. It's going to need some eyes. Well, let's put some big goofy eyes on this guy. Some bagging out of his ghost head and give him some ghost cheeks, and a big mouth. You're going to need some big teeth to go on his big mouth. Now that I've got the sketch to a good place that I'm satisfied with, I'm going to do tighter version. I'm just going to bring down the opacity on my layer, so that it's dark enough so that I can see it, but light enough that I can draw all over it. I'm going to make a new layer and this is where I will draw my tightened up version. Zoom in a little bit and just going to trace over it. Taking things up, get rid of all the extra sketchy lines so that we just have a simple line drawing to work from. I'm just going to smooth out all these lines. Figure out what this shapes actually look like since I've got all these sketch lines. I just want to simplify things as I go. Sometimes when I'm doing a line like this, I will go right through the legs a little bit and then I'll just erase them afterwards, that way I can get that angle nice and smooth. Put a lip on this guy for a little character or ghost lip and get these teeth in here, get the tongue, show this end. Again, I'm just tightening things up, just making these lines nice and clean. I need eyes. You just draw them in first and then we can go in and erase that overlap afterwards. You got these superfluous feet of a flying ghost. Let's just get that erased and I think he's good to go. Now we can delete our sketch layer, we don't need that anymore. I'm going to move him up to the top so I can reference him and start working on my next character. I'm thinking like a dog type situation for this guy. I'm thinking that because I noticed that these feet look like they could be ears on a dog. It remind me of the ears on Odie from Garfield. I'm thinking as I do the morph, they could rotate up to the top like this and it will be a little visual joke making the feet into ears. I'm thinking that this back part of the body could be the mouth, so maybe the dog will be facing the other way. As the ears come up that can morph into a mouth. This is what I was talking about when you have similar shapes. You've picked something that follows the lines of the other thing can make things interesting and fun. But you definitely don't have to do it that way, but it's a trick to make things easier. We got this little body on him, we'll do some bug eyes similar to the other one. I want this to definitely be its own unique character, but also have some similarities visually so that when we morph them between each other, it'll be a natural transition. I go and tighten this guy up a little bit. Just reference the other character, have similar eyes and this round shape. But this guy will have more of a separation between his head and his body. Say we'll fix this mouth up, make it a little bit more natural. Got this back area. We are going to figure out how to make this head work on his body. Think making it into more of one shape. Well, make things a little easier. Give him some little feet and we'll just speed things up here. Now that I have my sketches done, I'm going to go ahead and do my final tightened up drawings. I have my sketch on its own layer here and I'm going to bring the opacity down again just like I did before and make a new layer, and this is where I will do my drawing. Now I'm just going to grab an inking brush. I want to use Kyle Webster's brushes because they're great and I like them. But you can use whatever brush you want. I find that using a tighter cleaner brush makes this easier, but you can experiment with trying to more rough brush. It'll just vary the line weight a little bit more and give you interesting effects. I'm going to speed this up so that you don't have to watch me tediously trace this over. As you'll notice, as I'm drawing, I'm rotating the canvas a lot. I do that because it helps me to draw lines a little bit smoother and cleaner at different angles. Sometimes pulling through a curve or pushing through a curve is easier and gives better results. I'm working on my second character here, just tightening things up. Again, zooming in and out, rotating my canvas. They're just little things that help me get my lines nice and clean. Post your true illustrations on the project gallery so we can see your progress and see what things you'll eventually morph into each other. In the next step, we'll make our illustrations wiggle.
5. Wiggles: The Line Boil: In this first exercise, I'll show you how to make a simple illustration, wiggle or vibrate like a traditional old-school cartoon. This movement within the line work is known as line boil. Line boil is a result of individual drawings that make up an animation not aligning perfectly, whether it's slight differences in how the lines line up or line weight or brushstroke could be any number of those things that are a result of hand drawing the individual frames of an animation. But when they're just slightly off, there's just a little bit of movement that happens. In the early days of animation, this was definitely considered a mistake so animators tried their best to avoid this at all costs. You can imagine how difficult this would be to avoid any movement when hand drawing countless frames for even a short cartoon let alone a full length movie. However, this imperfection is something that I really like. Just like slightly offset prints or old records, this imperfection gives a human touch to a piece and gives it a warmth and bit of life and energy that it wouldn't necessarily have otherwise. I love the way this looks. I love the little imperfections. I love the little bit of hand that shows through in this work. The good thing about doing this is because we're only human, you don't have to do anything special besides just try to draw the same thing three times. Let's dive into Photoshop and I'll show you what I mean. Let's get ready to make our drawing wiggle. We're going to take the first object that we created or character, whatever your first subject is. We're going to open up that file. I have mine open here, and we already have the drawing set on our layer. To do the wiggle, all we have to do is draw this two more times. The great thing is you don't really have to try or do anything special to make it wiggle. It's just going to be a natural result of tracing it and not being completely perfect. Don't try to not be perfect because if you try to make it imperfect, it's probably going to shake too much. As I go, I'm going to try to trace it pretty accurately. What I'm going to do is just go ahead and bring the opacity down and then make a new layer. Sometimes it's a good habit to get into to label your layers when you're doing animation because it get confusing. I'm going to call the first one 1. I'm going to call it second one 2, and I'll go ahead and do my third layer now just so I don't have to rename them later. So 1, 2, 3. These will be my wiggles. A second one, I've got my brush among that layer, this one is turned down and I'm just going to trace it. As I mentioned, I'm not trying to make this imperfect. I think sometimes when people are learning this technique and trying to do this vibration line boil, they assume that they have to exaggerate the imperfections and you really don't. This is just a natural vibration that happens when you redraw something. But if you look, there's just subtle imperfections and that's all we really need. You want to be pretty close. Don't worry about trying to get too close or trying to exaggerate it. Basically just trace it and don't worry too much about it. You can always experiment with doing a looser tracing and see how much that vibrates and see if that's something that you want, but for me I like a little bit of vibration that doesn't feel too jumpy. The other thing is because we're going to be repeating these three frames to give the illusion of constant movement. If they are two different, it's not going to be a very good loop because it'll be too jumpy and it'll look repetitive if there's dramatic movements in between. Let's just fill this in. We get our second one done, and we're going to draw a third one. I like to just turn the second layer off and then retrace the first one again as opposed to turning down the opacity on the second one and drawing from that one. I find it works better to go back to the original, because if you just keep tracing your tracings, the image will start to change more progressively than a natural loop. Because when you're redrawing it the lines might get a little bit bigger. Then you're tracing that one, it's almost like a visual game of telephone where one person says something and then it changes a little bit and changes a little bit. By the time it gets to the end it's unrecognizable. Now that we have all three of our drawings, when I go back and turn the opacity back up on our first drawing. Now that they are all fully opecisized that's not a real word, but now that they're all the same, we're going to go ahead to our timeline window that we opened up in the setup. If you don't have that open up anymore, that's fine. Just go up to window, choose timeline, open it up, and we're going to click on create video timeline. There's two different ways to use the timeline here. For this first exercise, I want to show you the very simple way, which is about as close to the equivalent of the foot book as you can get. To get to this, we're going to click on these little boxes in the bottom left-hand corner of your timeline window. Click on those. It's going to switch over to this much more simple thing with just this one little thumbnail in the bottom left corner. With a five second-level underneath it. Now that we have this, we're going to go over to the right side of the timeline window, click on these lines and we're going to do make frames from layers. We click on that. What happens here is that it takes all of our layers that we just did our drawings on and sends them down to the timeline to be individual frames. As we mentioned each drawing is a frame, and now our drawings are converted into frames. The only thing here is that it uses the background as a layer which we don't want. What we'll do is we'll just click on this little trash can on the bottom right and now we will have our three frames here. We want to turn the background and photo them because I want to back around here. You don't have to do this, but I want to have the white background. To change all of these layers at once, I'm just going to click on the first one, hold on shift and then click on the third and you'll see that all these layers are selected. Once they're all selected, I can go over to my layers and then just toggle on the background layer. You'll see that each of these has their backgrounds. Let's reselect all of these layers by clicking on the first one and then holding shift, clicking on the third. Now we can change the time for how long these frames will be up on the screen. These have default settings here, 0.1, 0.2, 0.5. These are simplified versions of the frame rate because this is the most simplified version. This timeline is best suited for someone who's just trying to make an animated GIF and doesn't really care too much about timing. But you can just choose the 0.1, and that'll get you pretty close to the 12 frames per second we're talking about. But this is just a real simple way to start animating and not worrying about a timeline and stuff like that that I'll show you next. But this is a real simple way and I think it's nice to learn this because you can experiment and just not worry so much about learning things. This is the fastest way to start animating something, which is fun. We've got these all set, each one when we click on the first frame, you'll see on the layers window. Frame 1 is visible, we click on two, two is visible. If we click on three, three is visible. That is what we want, that is perfect. This is our transition. This is our wiggle notion if you will. Down on the bottom, we've got this thing that says forever. If yours doesn't say forever, that's what we want. Forever means that it's just going to keep looping and that's what we want. We want to this to loop. I'm going to make sure that's on forever. From the first one and when we hit play, you're going to see some wiggle action that you made. Just be ready for it, 1, 2, 3 we goes on. All that, is not fun? It's just got a little bit of vibration to it. As I mentioned, I didn't try to make this wiggle, I just traced it two more times. Now that I showed you the simple way to do this, I'd like to show you the real more robust timeline that will be more beneficial and give you a lot more flexibility when you're trying to do more advanced animations or just trying to have some be a specific amount of time. This just gives you a lot more control and option. We're going to click on create video timeline again. We're going to go and make sure our timeline frame rate is correct. Then change that from 30 to 12. Now, you'll see we have all of our frames just defaulting to being 12 frames long or something like that. This will pull thing down here controls how far zoomed in we are on each frame. Helps us zoom in to get really tight on our timeline. If we want to see individual frames or if we want to zoom out to get more control. What we do need to do now is make all of our frames just one frame long because it says 12 frames per second. All you'll do is just drag these down as far as they'll go. Now we can zoom in on that and you'll see that each of these is one frame. You'll see the little one frame marker there. What we want to do now is put these in order. Two will start after one and three after three. Now, we're back to where we were the other way so we can go ahead and play this. Cool. Now, what we could do since we have this all the timeline is we can consolidate these things, make it a little bit easier. I can take this layer, that frame, put it down there, and now we can put these all on one little group together, this video grouped and we can go ahead and label this so we could call this the character 1 loop. Now we've got these three frames that we can repeat over and over again to have our character stay in one place, but still have that vibration that we want. Now we know how to make our character or object or whatever you're making, we go and vibrate it to give it a little bit of energy. In the next lesson, I'll show you how to take this technique in using some other applications for some fun results.
6. Wiggles: Other Applications: Now that we've made our illustrations, wiggle and vibrate. I'm going to walk you through some other fun examples using procreate on the iPad. I got a procreate document open here and I'm going to go ahead and turn on my animation assist, under Canvas animation assist. A fun way to use this technique is to animate words like a logo or something. I've seen a lot of cool people's logos on their website animated and that's something that you can do pretty easily. Let's just animate a simple word here. I'm going ahead and write the word wiggle, to demonstrate the wiggle. When you're using the timeline down here, after you draw one frame, you just click, "Add a frame" and you'll see that it automatically gets lighter so that we can draw on top of it. Add another frame. Let's go into our settings, to see these new. First let's bring this down to 12 frames per second and then onion skin frames. Let's change this from max to one and that way we're only seeing the previous frame, not the one before that. The opacity is okay. Maybe you could do that. Bring that down a little bit and let's do the color secondary frames option. This will let us bring the opacity down even more if we wanted to and you can see that it's red, which makes it very distinct as we're tracing over it. Because, procreate automatically did the transparency thing with the onion skin features and the timeline. We don't have to go in and make sure our capacity is turned up or anything like that, so we can just hit "Play" and we got some wiggle letters here. Ain't that fun? Let's experiment a little bit more and try and draw a little differently. What if we want to exaggerate things a little bit? What if we start with something like wiggly letters? Also I think it's fun to use a brush, a little bit of grit like this one when I'm doing animation like this. Because the imperfection in the line quality and like the texture, if you like, really adds to that traditional animation style. Add a new frame here. What if we try to make the lines of wiggle more by changing a little bit as opposed to tracing it directly? Since we've got these curves going this way, what if we reverse them to see how that looks? When you're doing this stuff, definitely experiment and have fun. I learned pretty much all of my animation stuff this way, because I never set out to be an animator. I never thought it was something that I'd be doing for some of my work. I was just playing around and experimenting and I think doing it that way gave me a little bit of a unique style and perspective about these things. Which I think can be beneficial to give you your own little visual voice. Definitely play around and experiment. I'm going to be honest with you, I don't really know how this is going to turn out. I think that's the fun of it. For this one, I flipped on the previous thing. I flipped where the direction was going, but I don't know really what to do on this third one. I'm trying to do one that's in between the two directions of the wiggle lines, if that makes any sense. Just like a less extreme version. I think it all might serve as a good middle ground. All right, let's see. Look at that. That's super wiggly. See, that it's fun and you can do all stuff like this. Let's try one with a face. Make a character here. Character head, plus big eyes like this and make them look surprised. That will be good for a loop, because it'll just be like a blank stare with his mouth agape. Yes, as you can see, it's just, you draw one thing and then just draw two more times and just loop it and that's how we go fun. It's really fun. Now that we have a wiggly image. Well, let's get ready to smear it. I'll see you in the next lesson.
7. Smears: In the next lesson, I'm going to teach you all about smears. You probably thinking that sounds weird. What a smears have to do with animation? They have a lot to do with animation. Smears are magic trick. They are a tool used by animators to trick people and have a lot of fun. Blur is an optical illusion. It depicts a blur of motion in a single frame or drawing. This is obviously super-helpful because it avoids having to draw countless frames just to depict one quick movement.There is a ton of different ways to do smears, and that is one of the reasons why I love them. Some animators will stretch an image across one single frame, others will repeat an image or an object a whole bunch of times within a frame. There is really no wrong way to do it. You can get as weird as you want and experiment and see just how much you can trick people because that is what we are here to do,isn't it? Animation is all just one big trick. Old Warner Brothers cartoons were some of the first ones to use the smear regularly. Other greet uses are in Spongebob, guess you've heard of spongebob. Spongebob has tons of weird, awesome smears. Smears are so cool that there is an entire tumblr dedicated to them called animation smears. Maybe just pause this right now and go check that out and get excited then come back, and we are going to start making some smears. I am going to walk you through a very simple smear, I am going to use procreate for this first one. I have right now setup my three living drawings for the wiggle. This character that I am going to use as the holding places for this character. What we are going to do with this smear is we are going to turn him around so he is facing the other direction. In order to do that, I am going to duplicate my three frames here. Duplicate one, then am duplicating them and moving them so that they maintain the same order that they're in. So 1, 2, 3. That way the loop is the same. In procreate because we do not have all the features of Photoshop when we want to loop something like this, we just have to manually repeat like that. It is a little bit tedious but it is one of the drawbacks with being really simple software, those are the kind of things you have to deal with. Since we are going to have him turn around, what I am going to do now is flip this second set of three images. Then go up to the era at the top to transform.I am going to click on flip horizontal. Then do the same thing for the other two. Now you will see it is swishes and it does not look that bad,but we are going to use a smear to make that more natural. Doing the smear like this, the secondary color thing will be really helpful, and making sure that we have our onion skin friend set to one so we do not have to look at lots of things at once. What I am going to do is, you see the first three frames are facing one way and then the three or the other way. I'm going to click on the third frame, which is the last one we are spacing right and I'm going to do add a frame. Here, we've got green and red. The red is the previous frame where the monster facing right, and the green is the following frame where it is facing left. We are going to make a smear here.What we are going to do is try to emulate the blur of motion that would happen as this character turns around completely. What you want to do is think about continuing this movement in one blur. I think what I would do here is connect these two mouse so that it is one big blend. I am going to just grab this line, want to I make my brush a little bit smaller to match the line work. I'm just going to bring it over to where it starts and do the same thing for the bottom following that line. As you can see I am just drawing a line from where it starts to where it is going to be. Using the curves, sort of match it a little bit. Since the teeth on all the way across, there is a few different way we can do it. We can stretch the teeth out and make them longer, or we could repeat them. Maybe we could do a combo of each and see how that works. For the teeth, I am just going to go ahead and repeat them. Then maybe for the tongue will do a stretch and do the iteration. Bring the tongue like this and then have that line in the middle, so it is one big tongue. Then we have got this center area, the inside of his mouth but smear with black. A lot of viewing smears is playing around and experimenting. What you can do for the eyes is extend them as to one big shape,or maybe let us use this cheap thing here and just make this one a bit smear then maybe we can repeat the other eyes. This one long pupil, then we have got the highlight in the middle so we can stretch that out. It's definitely weird to talk about how to do this thing, because it is about sort of playing around and experimenting and making shapes. Keep that in mind. I'm going to just repeat these eyes, just like a way to bring in the outside eyes. I feel like the smears themselves are most fun thing. The head is very simple because we have just got it moving slightly over. Let us just do a normal stretch right here. Then this tail situation, I think we can just do something like that or just connect it, then I can just make the bottom part of the body all in shape. Got to close those lips. The feet are facing one way and then facing the other way, so maybe we can just do a middle ground where the feet are forward, and then maybe put some extra leg lines in there. As you are going you can sort of flip back and forth here to see how it is working and see it is pretty fun. We can go back to the beginning and then hit play. Let me rotate that back to normal. Look how weird that is, but when you play it, it just looks like a fast blurred movement. I told you is magic. You will see that since we have those frames repeated, the character stays looking one way. If we didn't have those, that would just be flashing back and forth really fast. But now we have got that sort of moment where he is looking at one side and looking at the other side. Now that we have created our first smear, let's move onto the next lesson where I will show you how to create a smear using Photoshop.
8. Smearing in Photoshop: In the previous lesson, I showed you how to create our first smear using Procreate on the iPad. For this next demonstration, I'm going to use Photoshop so that I can show you the similarities and differences between the two. Earlier on I mentioned that I like to use Animators Toolbar. I'm going to show you some of the benefits and features of that plug-in. But I'll also show you how to do everything without using Animators Toolbar. For this smear, I have our initial loop of our character. Just the same thing, repeated three times, and then I've gone ahead and drawn another position for this character. So here we have a drawing of our little monster crouched down into a little ball. I have simply just traced that three times so that we've got that with a loop. What we're going to do is create a smear to transition from this to that. So before we get started, we'll just do a little recap here. We want to make sure that our frame rate is set to 12 frames per second. You can check this by looking at the bottom of your timeline and you'll see a little 12 frames per second. If yours is not set to 12 frames per second, we'll just go ahead and click on our little Timeline window over here and to set timelines frame rate. Here we'll just make sure that's at 12, if it's not change it to a 12, and we are good to go. We have our first position and then we've got this little loop of our second position, so we need to do the smear and between them. As you'll see here, I have the first position and then the squirt position in separate little groups here. These groups are called video layers. Within a video layer, you can have several frames, which are layers in Photoshop, so we have our monster position one and then the squat position as its own video group. For the smear, I'm just going to go ahead and do a new video group. Even though it's just one frame, it'll help to organize it and keep it separate. That way, if we want to repeat anything from either ones, we'll have this as a separate thing. The first thing we're going to need to do is get a frame in here that we can draw on to do our smear. With Animators Toolbar Pro, if we just click this little Plus button, just makes us a nice little frame, then we drag it into position and it's already the right length. If you don't have Animators Toolbar Pro, I'm just going to go ahead and undo that. You can click on your Layers over here and then just do this little Plus in the bottom right and that'll give you a new layer. The only tricky thing here is that it defaults to this crazy length. Which is fine, we just have to go to the end and then pull it back down to one frame and to our 12 frames per second, then we would go ahead and move it up in between. We've got our loop of the monster in position one, and then we've got our blank frame, which is where we'll draw our smear, and then we've got the other position here. If you're not using Animators Toolbar and you end up needing more than one frame, dragging it down to the right size can be a little tedious. A quick little tip for that is to just go ahead and make a new video group. You'll click on this Arrow to the right side of the video groups and do Add Video Group. Now we've got a blank video group. Since we have this frame that we already made and dragged it down to the right size, you just hold option and drag it. It will copy it there for you. Now we can use this Video Group 2 as just like a placeholder of blank frames, so that we can take from. So if we needed a new frame, this one's already at the right size so we would just go ahead and hold option and then drag it back down and now we've got two frames there, and we still have more up there. If you want, you can grab both of those, put them up here. Now we've got three and if you needed a whole bunch of them, you just do this a whole bunch of times. Go ahead and hold Shift, select all those layers, hold option, and then drag them up and now we've got just a big bank blank layers up here. Let me go ahead and undo that because we only need one frame since this is a smear demonstration. I'm just going to delete that extra video layer to keep things nice and simple. I talked about Onion Skins in the Photoshop, in the Procreate demonstration rather and Photoshop has these as well. To turn on, Onion Skins we're going to go over here to the right side of our Timeline window, click on that, and then click on Enable Onion Skins. As you'll see, our monster pops up immediately. If we go on to our smear frame that we're going to be drawing on, which is in the Group 1, let's just go ahead and just name this Smear so that it's less confusing. This is our Smear frame, and you can see that we've got the previous position available and then the second one. So it's a little hard to tell what's going on here, because it's so dark. We can go in and try to fix our onion skin settings to make that a little bit easier to see. You go and click on these lines in the right side then go to Onion Skin settings. We'll click on that, this controls how much we're seeing. Frames before means that we're going to see a preview of one frame before and a preview of one frame after. I think this works best because anymore gets a bit confusing. There might be a time where you need to see several in a row, you can go ahead and change that. Here we've got the max opacity and the minimum opacity. This shows the most, the one that's right next to it would be 50 percent and then the next one would be 25 percent, so let's go ahead and change this so we can see what that means. If we change this to a 100 percent, both the before and after frames are a 100 percent and it's completely dark. This wouldn't be very helpful at all, so let's go ahead and change that to 20 percent. It's a little bit lighter. If you're only doing one frame before and after, you don't need to worry about minimum capacity. When you're doing several frames in a row, the opacity will slightly change as it gets further and further away so you can tell them apart. Photoshop doesn't have that nice feature that Procreate has where it'll automatically change the colors of the before and after layers, so it can be a bit confusing to see what we're doing here. There are some tips and tricks that I can show you if that gets a little bit too weird. This is our smear layer, this is where we will draw our smear and as we're previewing the past frame and the next frame, you can see it's a bit confusing where the lines overlap and it's hard to tell what is on which layer. A quick tip that I have is to add a new video group. If you go over to our timeline, we can go and add a new video group and we'll use this as a place to make a copy of our drawing layer that we can modify so my select the layer that we're seeing in the preview. Then I'm going to hold option. Then just drag that to the new video group. That way I have a copy of the drawing on its own layer that I can modify without having to worry about messing up the original. Now I'm going to go ahead and turn off our original sequence of the monster position one. Now that I have that new layer, I'm going to hold Command and click on this layer to select all the line work. Then I'm just gonna go ahead and pick a bright color or use a red. I'm just going to grab the paint bucket and fill this in. Now we have basically just a red version of our drawn. Now when we preview our smear layer, you'll see that the previous drawing is read. The next drawing is black. Now we can tell very clearly what is on what layer. Now we can start drawing. I going to switch my color back to black, grab a brush. I'm going to go over to my tool presets. Select the inking brush that I use to do the other drawing that everything matches. Let's get into it. You just want to pick a place to start? I usually like to pick the easiest spot or just the eyes for some reason I like to start with the eyes. We'll do that here. What I'm going to do now is draw a line connecting the sides of the eyes from where they start. Then from to where they go. See, you'll see I'm just grabbing the size of the eyes. Then I'm going to go in and fill in the top. Then just take that line from the bottom. Then just bring them together like I connect the dots. Then we'll literally connect the dots with the pupils. Fill in both of them. Then you can just connect them. Just have it follow that line. Do the same thing on this side though the eye moves a little bit, but it's the same process. We'll fill that in. Next, we'll have to address the tail. You'll see when he's crouched down, the tail is over his head bowed in the standing point. It's just sticking out there to be technical. What we're going to do is try to find the middle ground between these two places. What you can do is find the spot in between and just start using that as the line. I'm going to pull this line right in between the first and then the next for him. Then I'm going to bring it about halfway. I want to go all the way up because this smear layer will give us a little bit of an in between. That extra movement has it goes to the next frame, we'll make it a little more dynamic. We've got the top of the head here. We're going to do the same thing or we're just going to go in between. This one's a little bit not really as much in between because it's closer to the top. But let's just pull that line in. Then I'm just going to bring this line all the way down to the mouth. What's next? Let's see the feet. Feet are pretty much the same in both situations. Those are easy thing to do. The outer leg gets completely obscured by the body. Let's just draw the body almost all the way down as a little bit of an intermediate between these two points. You'll see when he standing up, the leg got a little bit of a bend to it and it's almost more of a 90 degree turn when he crouched down. We'll just find a middle ground will just bend the leg a little bit. It's almost like a halfway point, just like that. You can't even really see what's happening with the other leg. We'll just draw that line in there. But learning to worry about too much about it because you won't really be able to see it. The mouth is a little bit tricky because it's mostly being obscured by the eyes. But that's okay. We don't need to worry about it would just start here. Maybe let's start with the lower mouth. We'll just do this lower lip line. If a lip is what you call this thing. Let's go up to the top. We'll just start that upper lip line just a little bit lower to start that downward motion. You'll see that the mouth is a big black void here. In the second place it's almost completely, well, it is completely closed. To match that visual obit we could make the teeth come down because there's more white space there to obscure some of that black void. Let's finish this upper lip line. Then just close this spot over here. Then we can get the tongue in. Let's just start it. You can see where it starts. We can just use just a little bit of that space and pull it down like that. It's almost starting the same spot but just a tiny bit lower to keep that downward motion intact. That's our smear. Now we can go ahead and delete this temporary layer because we don't need it anymore. It's served its purpose and now it shall go to the trash. Bye, bye. Now we will be able to preview this thing quite a bit better and look at that, we've got a smear. Let's go down here and turn off her onion skins. Now will be able to see things a little bit better. We shall look at that. In order to make this loop, we're going to need to repeat this smear at the end. To do that, we'll use our little new video group. Trick. Will go ahead and make a new video group. We'll just hold option and drag our smear layer into that new video group. There we go. Now we will move this right to the end of our frames. Now you'll see it goes right back to the beginning, because the smears just that one frame. Now we've got a perfect loop in which I look at that. That's pretty smeartacular to me. We've now created a smear in procreate and Photoshop. To finish up this three-part smeartacular, follow along in the next video, where I'll show you a few more different options for smears.
9. Even More Smear Action: In the next video, I'll walk you through a few more examples that I've created. In this animation, I just made our little monster character's eyes bug out of his head. I'm going to show you the steps I did to do this. It's pretty simple. I have this set on the ping-pong feature, which Procreate has, where it just goes to the end, and then shoots back so you're able to make a loop without having to actually loop the sequence. It just goes to the end and then bounces back. I utilized some smears here but instead of just using one, I used a couple things. With the green and red line work, you can see that the difference between these frames, the smear from the eyes starting to where they finish is not much different. You can see the outline is the same pretty much on both except for this little area on the side where it tapers at the final state. Then the pupils just are extended. I also did a mid-ground for the tongue, where the tongue comes about halfway out and then fully finishes at the end. When we play that, eyes bug out. On this one, I just have the eyes go even further and just bug out of his head. Over this one, I added in a little bit more expression. I did this by using some timing and some anticipation. What I mean by that is I have some movement that prepare us for what is coming next. This anticipation helps prepare the viewer for what's about to happen. In this instance, it's this little characters eyes just blowing out of his head. Let's go through and I can share this a little bit more clear. Before the eyes bug out of his head, I have him lean back a little bit. Not only does he lean back, he blinks a little bit, and then leans back. Having this extra movement, where he goes the opposite way before the eyes bug forward, gives it some more expression, and just makes it a little more dramatic, and more cartoony, and have a little bit more energy. Not only did I do this stuff beforehand, I used some follow through. The follow through is that, once they get to the end, it goes just a little bit further, and then settles back to where it was. As the eye blinks, I'm also using the squash and stretch principle. It gives the illusion of gravity, weight, mass, and flexibility. Using this with this character helps give it some more expression and gives it more realistic movements and showing that this face is actually made up of things. When we're using the squash and stretch, it's important to keep the object's volume consistent. You'll notice as it blinks, eyeball itself is getting shorter, but it's getting wider to maintain that same consistency of volume. A quick note about the blink. To make a blink look natural, you want to hold it for longer than one frame. As you can see, his eyes are shut for a few frames here. If you don't do that, it'll end up looking more like a glitch. As you can see, there's a couple frames for when they shut, I think I have two frames here, but then they pop right back open. Another principle I'm utilizing here is that of follow through and overlapping actions. When objects come to a stop after they're moving, different parts of the object will stop at different rates. In order to make this look more realistic, I had him just continue through. As the character stops coming forward, the eyes just go a little bit further, and the tongue goes a little bit further, and the body lunges a little bit forward before settling back into place. In the next lesson, I'll show you how to morph from one object into another object.
10. Morphing: In this exercise, I'll show you how to create a looping morph. This will take one object and morph it into another object. We'll use some of the things that we've learned in previous exercises. But this will be a little bit different, because instead of moving an object from one place to the next or from one position to another position we'll be changing one object into another object. It will be a slightly different way of thinking about things, even though we'll be using similar techniques of changing things a little bit at a time from one frame to the next. For the first morph, we're going to do something simple and we're going to do it in Procreate. What we're going to do is we're going to morph the letter A into the letter B. I'm going to click on Add a frame, and now we've got our A transparent and secondary color, which is gray. As you can see as soon as you click on the new layer, we get the lighter version can draw right on top of that. I'm going to use this as a guide to draw my B. I'm going to go ahead and simply draw a B right over the A so it's roughly the same size to keep things nice and easy. I'm going to an add another frame, but first I'm going to click back on the A because I want this new frame in between the two. All I'm going to do now is try to move the lines that make up the A, so that they become the lines of the B. What I mean by that is we're just going to move each line a little bit at a time. This can be a little confusing at first, but an easy way to do is to focus on the first one at the beginning. I'm just going to look at the lines on the A. We've got these lines on the side, and you can pay attention to where the A lines and the B lines overlap. The green and the red lines. What we can do is start filling in the lines where they overlap and pushing it out a little bit further to get closer to where we're going to with the B. There's this area of the A that overlaps a little bit and we can bring that in a little bit and make the the width of the leg of the A a little bit skinnier in the middle, and a little bit wider on the outside to get it closer to the B. We've got these areas where there is a little bit of overlap and the B sticks out. Basically, I'm finding a middle ground between these points. If we pull this line up and then go right in between the red and the green. It's like a step in between the process. If that makes sense. I'm going to go down and these are totally overlapping here, and the green isn't much further out, that's pretty much dead on. There's that spot with a big kicks in so I'm just going to take a little notch out of the A and fill this in, and then the crossbar on the A and the center part of the B or pretty close. What we can do is shift the crossbar from the A up a little bit and narrow down to get it closer to the B. As you can see it's not that big of a change when we look at it overall, but we've pushed things in a little bit and got it a little bit closer without having it be a real dramatic change. We can go back in and add a little bit more by going over the green areas and pushing our line into the green areas a little bit more to speed this transition on a little bit. Now we'll add another frame and we'll use this new drawing that we did as our starting point. Now we're getting already closer to the B. We can just fill this whole line in because it's already very close, and then these little parts on the side, we just push those further so that they're closer to joining in the middle. I'll speed this up a little bit. Here we go. We'll get these a little bit closer without jumping too far, and as you can see, we're already pretty close. That's really pretty much all it takes to have this seamless transition so if we hit play, you can see that it just pretty naturally morphs. There's just a little bit of a change just slowly making the lines a little bit closer to each other. We're doing this with the A and the B to get started because it's a real simple way of showing how this process works. To make this loop, all I'm doing now is duplicating those frames and reversing the order. Now it'll switch into the B and then switch back to the A. Let's play that, here we go, let's turn this to Loop, and now we'll have a loop. When you're doing a morph, it's nice to have the main keyframes being the A and B up on the screen for a bit longer. Since we didn't make them wiggle, we wanted to draw it three times. We'll go ahead and duplicate this. Our layer number naming is getting a little crazy. I'm going to rename this to make it a little bit easier. Let's see. Duplicate these eight times so that we can see each letter a little bit longer so it's not just morphing all the time.
11. Animating Your Morph: Now that you've learned how to make a simple morph, changing the letter A into letter B, let's move on to the main event where we transform our first character into our second character. To get started, I have both of my files open here. This is my first little monster loop, as you can see, we've got our three repeating frames here. I hit "Play" we've got our little loop there. So, what we're going to do is morph this guy into this guy. We want to get these two files together. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to click back on our little dog character, and I'm going to go over to my layers window, and I'm going to just select this full group here, and I'm going to just drag it over to our other file. So now we've got those three layers, you can see in our time line, we've got that wiggle loop frame right on top there. So I'm going to select all those Layers again and then just move those over so that they're centered on top of our other character. We're done with this one, we can minimize that and I'm going to change my viewing to full screen with menu bars so that way we get this full screen and have full control over it and we can see everything that we're doing. Right now our two characters are stacked, we don't want that. I'm going to click on our dog Layer, hold "Shift" to select all the frames within that group, then I'm just going to drag those over. So now they're right next to it. But because we are going to be doing a morph, I'm going to drag it a little bit further so we have some space in between to include our frames that we'll be using as the morph. I'm thinking this is going to take maybe three frames to do this morph, I'm just going to drag this over so that we have space for three frames between them. So what we need now is to create a video group for our morph layers. Just like we did in the past, I'm going to click on one of these little arrows on our video group. I'm going to do a new video group and then to be extra good, I'm going to go ahead and label that, the morph. In that way, it's easier to keep track of here. It's not as big a video when you're just doing some simple animations, but if it gets more complicated and you have lots of different elements, making sure you label things is really helpful in the long run. So just go over to our Layers menu and then click "Plus" and then we've got a new frame right there. The only problem is it's really long, so we'll just go down to the end and then drag that down to the right length. Then we can move this to the right place and we can just plus that because it's already the right length, we just duplicate it. There we go. So these are our morphing layers. Before I start drawing, I want to get my Onion Skin Settings right and easy to use. So if I click on my first smear layer, the default Onion Skin Settings, I can see this first monster but I can't see the second one because I've got these blank layers that I created ahead of time. One way to avoid that would just be to move our second layers over and then just keep moving them as I need to. Another way around this is to use the trick that I taught you last time where we make a duplicate of our drawing that we can modify and change the color of to make it a little bit easier to see what we're doing. I like to do this especially for morphs because it can get confusing. So I'm going to do that here. Let's do a new video group, and then I'm going to go ahead and select my first dog Layer and I'm going to hold "Option" and drag that up to its own layer. Then I'm going to turn off the other set. So we've got this, I'm going to go ahead and hold "Command", click on that layer so it's all selected and then I'm just going to choose bright color and then go to Edit, Fill, Foreground color. So now this is in its own layer, we can just drag it over. Now when we go to work on our first morph layer, you will see that we've got a good vision of our first layer and the next one because it's the red color. It's still a little bit dark. So let's go ahead to our Onion Skin Settings, and I'm just going to bring this max opacity down to, let's try 35. That way there's a bit of a difference between the lines that I'll be drawing and the lines that are there. Now, we're ready to start drawing. So let's get to smear started. As always, first thing I'm going to do is figure out where we're going to get started. I usually try to find the easiest thing to start with or just start with the eyes. I like to start with the eyes because, I don't know, I think they're the most fun. I'm going to rotate the Canvas so I can draw this better. I'm going to focus on these two middle eyes first. I'm just going to connect them. So I'm going to draw a line on the outside of one, and I'm going to draw a line on the outside of this other one, and I'm just going to connect them to make this long oval shape merging the two sides together. So we get this little cheek line there. We're not going to really need in the second part, but I'll just add that in right there so that the transitions a little more seamless. Now, we're just going to do a little bit of a connect the dots with this pupil. Move that fully across and I'm just going to fill it in, and you'll see that there's a highlight on this character's eyes but on the other one. So I'm just going to let that blend in and disappear into the rest of the pupil. So, for these other eyes, let's do the repetition thing. Well, I'll just draw a lots or a few of the eyes repeating as they go across in the transition. So put two here, then we go over to the other side, pull those eyes in. So, if you look at the mouth on both of them, they're in the almost the same spot just on reverse sides. So what I'm going to do is, just draw a line connecting both sides being the dogs mouth and a little [inaudible] character's mouth and just connect those all the way across. Then we'll do the same thing for the bottom just to make this into one seamless line connecting the two because the mouths are in the same spot and makes this nice and easy. So we've got these little lip line on the dog, but then it's a full line and the other character. So I'm just going to bring that all the way across. Now, we've got the tongue to deal with. So I'm just going to make that mill hump all the way across. [inaudible] Mega tongue hump. So we get teeth let's just put teeth all the way across. So that'll be like that. They're repeating thing that we talked about earlier, where you just repeats up a whole bunch of times to show the movement. Since there's no lip on the top I'm just going to carry that all the way across, pull and these are their mouth lines and just fill that in. We've got the front of the ghost body and then the tail and then the dog's body. What I'm going to do is just find a middle line between these two to bring it across. Just going to draw a line right between the red line from a doll character and the faded black line from the next character. The top of the head is nice and easy they're the same height we're just going to pull that line all the way across. Just add in that little I bold thing, put this nose in here and I'm just going to have it's sneak in from behind the eye. It helps with the illusion it makes it seem like one of these circles that are moving across the page. Now we've got to think about these feet and as I mentioned that I wanted the feet to rotate from the bottom up to the top to become the dogs ears. What I'm thinking is we'll do a couple of different smears to get these feet to start moving up the side of the body and onto the head. I'm just going to start that movement by pulling them out a little bit further then put a few extra little lines for the legs and that'll get us started to bringing them up to the top where we want them to be. At the arm to deal with and a few other things here but this is probably a good place for our first smear or not at first smear first frame rather. I'm going to go ahead and shift that little red dog over further so that we can use as reference for our next frame. When you're making a morph what you're trying to do, you're trying to get each frame in the animation a little bit closer to the final endpoint. Let me zoom in to show you what I'm talking about. If you look here you'll see the red line as that eye is where we're trying to get to. In this gray line is from our previous layer and that is the motion of our eye getting from its initial point to the second point. What we're going to be doing is just trying to move this eye slowly over to get to the final endpoint there. What I'm going to do is just draw a middle ground between the two and put the pupil array in-between them. As you can see it's just in between the two states. I'm going to do the same thing on this one, I'm going to fill in that eye but instead of tracing the red line exactly, I'm going to have it come out a little bit further so that it's not as much of a dramatic change from that big initial smear that we had done. We going to trace the nose and I'm just going to finish that off though the way it's going to be in the final endpoint because it was already pretty close. Back here is a little more complicated you'll see we're trying to get to this backside of the dog's body. What I'm going to do is just make it a dramatic change. But again we're utilizing a smear to make this movement happened really fast. I'm just going to take advantage of that smear and get rid of a whole bunch of space pretty quickly. I'm just going to go in here and draw the mouth but I'm not going all the way to the end point, I'm still giving it a little bit of room so that motion is happening. Now I'm just going to go in here and trace the teeth and we can put them right where they're supposed to be because they are just about there anyway. Sometimes it's helpful to click back and forth so you can just reference what's happening because it can get a little confusing. Now we need to come back to address this feet situation. We started with that big feet smear things. I'm just going to continue that and do another big movement that's similar to what was happening there. I'm going to go about halfway up and then draw that same stretched out feet thing like a smear and then we can go in and add some motion and to carry them up the top and help that visually make a little more sense. Because this movement was happening we can sneak in the old feet almost as if they were behind the other thing so it won't look weird as it comes through because it was something blocking it for you to begin with. Let's just a sneaky little way to put those in there. So now we need to address this arm. There was a lot of stuff happening in this areas because either side of that body, so it's can appear here and it won't look too weird because there was a whole bunch of lines there anyway. But let's just do a little smear thing where we just started at coming in from the side instead of having it just fully appear out and we're supposed to be on the body. Alright. Let's fill those mouth in sometimes at this point I'll turn off Onion Skins. That way I can just swipe through and see how it's looking without the other stuff. As you can see it's already coming together, I think we just need one more frame and this will be pretty much perfect. Let's turn the Onion Skins back on and move our red reference layer over once more so that we can reference the morph full frame that we just drew and the red one. Now things are getting pretty close I'm just going to go in here and draw this line right in between the two. Bring this down almost perfectly over in the feet in here and we've got this arm line here and it's almost there. We can do like a little smear here where we make it almost as wide as the space it needs to fill. We can just stretch that out so it looks like it's moving over and a big blur of movement. Go through this pretty quickly, speed through this draw the eyes halfway in-between and now we've got these ears that are almost where they need to be. We just need one more little stretchy smear for these ears. I'm not going to go all the way to the ends but am coming pretty close. That way in the final position there's just a little bit more movement going on. I'm just going to draw these ears in, speed this up a little bit probably just add in a few more motion lines just to finish this off since we're using them before I think that should work well. I'll just go and fill the mouth in, and at this point we have everything we need. You might want to go back and afterwards and tighten these frames up even though they only be seen for a quick second. We can delete our red reference length we don't need that anymore. Then we can go back and turn on our Dog Wiggle sequence layer or video group And let's turn off Onion skins so we can preview this and see how it turned out nice. In the next lesson we'll take what we've learned so far and combine them together into a single, more dynamic and engaging animation.
12. The Final Project: In this lesson, I'll be putting together my final project. I'll be combining a few of the things that we've done so far and merging them altogether into a fun animation that's a little bit more dynamic than just a simple movement or morph. For my final project I decided to combine my morph with a couple of the smear demonstrations that I had done. I've combined a lot of that into one file right now that I'm going to walk you through, and then we're going to finish it up together or rather you'll watch me finish it up. What we have here, I'm just going to scrub through this. We've got our secondary character and I have him morphing into our original monster character. I used the same morph animation that I had done before. I just reversed it because we had morphed this one into this one. But here I wanted to start with the dog, so he morphs back into this monster and then I use the smear demonstration that I had done where his eyes are bug out of it's head and its tongue comes out. I want my final animation to loop. I need to get from this character back into this character. My idea is that when this guy morphs into this guy and his eyes are bug out of his head, his eyes are bugging out because he's seeing himself. I need the camera to pan over so that we can see that he is looking at himself in his original state as the little dog. I'm going to make his eyes pop back into his head so hard that it pushes him backwards, and as it pushes him backwards, we're able to see the original character and he will go off the screen to get us back to the starting point. Let's start drawing that sequence. We've got a new frame already, and I've got onion skins turned on because I want his eyeballs to pop back in and look like there's a lot of impact where it's pushing him backwards. We need to make the movement very quickly. You need to have less frames so that it happens very quickly. We're going to have them come almost all the way back almost immediately. I'm going to draw the starting point for the eyes, and I'm going to bring them to life right here, right off the that, then we'll just trace over the rest of the character as is. Let's get a new frame here. As I mentioned, we want this to look like it's happening fast. If it's happening fast, there's going to be some impact to it. What I want to do is have his body shift because of the impact. Let's knock his head back and then maybe we can make it look like the eyes are going back into his head. Let's draw these two circles here, but maybe well, make a black outline so it looks like they're going inside of his head. Then we don't need this cheek line because they're just going straight into his head. We can leave the tail where it is so it's just his head popping back and somehow his feet are staying on the ground, but maybe the tongue can swing a little bit from the impact. We're doing this thing, it's definitely a little bit of an experiment you're going to see what's working. Even though his head is kicking back, I don't think it's enough movement now that I'm watching it. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to take the character and move him physically back a little bit and maybe even rotate him a little bit. It doesn't reveal a little bit better. Can I transform it and kick him back, and then I'm just going to line up the heels so that he's in the same spot. Let's turn off the onion skin to see how this looks. I think that's pretty good but since he is rocking backwards now, I think we should have his foot sticking out a little bit. We keep that one on the ground and then maybe this one is starting to swing up. Let's turn onion skins back on so we can see if that's making sense. I think we'll try one more frame where he's starting to fall backwards before he starts sliding out of frame. Let's get the tongue to start moving out a little bit here. Maybe we can exaggerate the head even more. Maybe I can make the eyes even smaller in there. We'll see what it looks like if we pull the head back, like the eyes are smashing back his head, the back of its head, if you will. I'm going to rotate this even more, maybe we get both of these feet just sliding. As I mentioned, when you're drawing these frame by frame thing and you're figuring things out, they get a little rough. Like this drawing could use some work. I might go back in and tighten this up afterwards to make it a little bit better. Since we're launching him out of the frame, I'm going to move him back even more so that we're starting that progression. I'm just going to start sliding him back and I'm going to hold the shift key to keep him on that same baseline. Now, we see that he's starting to go back, and we want him to go fast. I think I'm just going to do one more intermediate frame where he's in motion. I think I want to exaggerate this movement even more. I'm going to pull this head, just have him back like that where his feet just fly out in front of him. Since this is the last frame of the sequence, I'm going to move this character back so he's almost off the frame so that we can see the movement happening a little bit better. Let's play it and see how it works. I still feel like the snapping movement isn't happening as faster as dramatically as I'd like it to. I'm going to go ahead and try removing one of these intermediate frames that I made to try to make that process just a little snappier. Let's see what it looks like if we just get rid of this first frame. I'm just going to drag this up into this extra video group so that I can preview it without getting rid of it in case it doesn't work. I'm just going to go ahead and turn that off. Let's just see what this looks like with that one frame removed. I think we can do one more thing to make this even better. What we're going to do is a little bit of a preload here. What I mean by that is just an extra movement to accentuate the character popping back. Let's go ahead and add a new frame and then let's drag this to the front so that we have a blank frame right at the beginning here. We'll turn the onion skins back on so that we can preview what's going on. I'm just going to drag these extra frames over so they're out of the way, so we're not seeing them in the onion frame. Now, I can just see the frame that's before and that'll make this a little bit easier. What I want to do is just add in an extra movement here where he just slightly leans forward to accentuate when it pops back. The more dramatic the anticipation or preload is, the more cartoony and fluid the animation will be. If we don't have any anticipation movement like now, the movement will make the motion feel a bit stiff. In order to make this movement a little more dramatic, we're just going to come in here and pull his eyes just a little bit more forward, just to give the character a little more lean. I'm going to do the same thing with the body, let's just lean it a little bit more forward to follow the eyes, or keeping the body on the same axis. When we get to the feet we'll keep them in the same spot. We just want the character to lean slightly more forward. Here with the tongue we'll just droop it down a little bit further, just to follow that lean that is happening with the eyes and the body. Just draw the teeth as they are, pull the tail in, and then as I mentioned we'll keep the feet right in the same spot. Again, this is just a little bit of a lean to accentuate the movement when he pops back. Cool, that's definitely better. Now we just need to slide our little dog character back into the frame to complete the loop. I'm going to show you a little trick on how to do that. I'm going to go down here and grab a loop of our wiggle sequence for our dog character. I'm going to hold option and drag those up into the video group that I was using as a temporary placeholder for that extra frame before. With these three frame selected we're going to go over to the little menu on the side of our layers window, and we're going to go down to convert to smart object. This smart object is going to give us some controls that we wouldn't normally have with a regular frame. It also neatly packages this low loop into one sequence. We're going to make this whole loop sequence move as one unit. I'm going to drag it over so that it's on at the same time as our other character going off the screen. What we're going to do is go into this little menu underneath our video group, and you'll see this transform option. We're going to click on this little stopwatch. What that's going to do is it's going to let us control the position of where this thing is so that we can actually move it along the timeline. As you can see, I just zoomed in a little bit so we can see what we're doing a little bit more and add more space. Let's go ahead and click on this little stopwatch and you'll see this yellow little diamond that appears. What this is doing is marking the position for where that video group is at that point in time. If we drag this out to the end and then click it again, we have another position. Now if we change this position, it will move our character across the sequence. Since we want him to be off-screen, I'm clicking on that first little diamond and just dragging the character back off screen. Now, when we scroll through this, you'll see the character slides into frame. The only issue now is that he comes into frame a little bit too fast. I'm just going to slide him back a little bit and then let that first frame of the sequence finish that movement from off the frame to his starting point. Now that I'm happy with how the animation sequence is working, I'm going to go ahead and tighten up these frames. Even though you only see them for a very small amount of time, having the animation to be a little bit better and a little bit tighter would just make the animation that much better. In the next sequence, we're going to tighten these up and then add some color and some finishing touches.
13. Tightening Up and Adding Color: In this lesson, we'll tighten up the drawings for animation key frames that we did in the previous lesson. Then after that, I'll show you how to incorporate some color and a background to really bring the animation to life. I'm going to go ahead and turn off the things that I don't need. I'm going to name this layer because I should have done that before because it can get a little bit confusing. We go ahead and call this morphs sketch. Then I'm going to turn off the other dog layer. I'm going to make a new video group and here, I will place layers that we will use to trace over our sketch layers to make art, to end up drawing. I'm going to drag this into place and then add more frames for each of the ones I'm going to be tracing over. I've got my sketch layers and then my new drawn frames. I'm going to click on the Morph group over here on our Layers menu. Then I'm just going to bring the opacity down so that I can reference them and trace over them and tighten them up as I go. In my new video group that I just created, that I will now layer name, rather more funnels and grains. Now we have got our re drawn frames we going to leave the sketch layers and then turn on the other stuff. Now that we've finished redrawing our animation frames, are ready to move on to the next step where we will bring in a background and add some color and to really bring our animation to life. I have our full animation sequence here. I'm going to show you how to bring a background into this to help make this movement and look a little more real. I created this background, and to do it, I just made a file that was twice as wide as our animation file, so that I could move it across the background and look like he was traveling through space. I'm going to go ahead and select all and copy this. I'm going to go back to our animation file and make a new video group called BG for background. Then I'm just going to activate the video group and then paste it in place. I'm going to drag this down to the length of our video. Now, our background is the same length, and I'm going to click on this arrow to show our options for this video group. We're going to do the same thing we did to move the little dog character back into the frame, we're going to do it with the background. We don't want this background to be moving the whole time because he's standing still nearly the whole time. We just want to scroll down to where the movement starts. It's right about here where he starts to fly backwards. We're going to click on this little stopwatch. That's our starting position. Then let's scroll back. I'm going to click there, put another one. We want our background to start here. I'm going to scroll over to this new position. Click on it, you'll see that it's yellow so it's highlighted. Now I'm just going to drag this over to the other end. You'll see the background moves. Let's put another position for the ending point. For that, we need to pull it back to the beginning. That way, when we're back at the beginning of the animation, our background is in the same spot. For the coloring process. I'm going to speed things up quite a bit because to watch the whole thing would be very tedious and take a long time. To start coloring, I'm pretty much doing the same thing that we did to redraw our rough animation frames instead of putting a new video group on top of the other group and redrawing them. I'm doing a new video group below and naming that color. Here is where I will just make frames that I'll use color. You might notice that I'm not doing a color frame for every single drawing. The reason for that is you can get away with not coloring all of them individually by extending it for the things that repeat. How we did the wiggle, those are like three different frames that are looping. Anytime that there is a loop, we can just do one color frame, usually because the line work overlapping that will hide the fact that we're using the same color for each one. I'm coloring a number of different ways. One way, as you just saw here is using the magic wand selection tool, where I'll make a selection and then I'll use the paint bucket to fill it in. Then I'll go back in with a paint brush and fix things up. I'll be scrolling back and forth on the timeline, seeing where I filled things and seeing where things are leftover. You might fill one and then scroll over and you'll see that there's a little bit of extra white space where it slightly different in size so that you can just go in there and colored in with the brush. That way it hides them all so there's no extra white spots. I do, however, leave some of those in sometimes because I like the imperfection. But for the most part, any big ones, I try to clean up. Or there's more action, more movement. You can't really just use one color for him. See, you will have to go back in and do individual color frame for each of those because there's just too much movement in the line work. That's our colored in. Let's preview it. Cool. I think the color really add that led to this than helps it be a little bit more coherent with the transition from one frame to the next or one scene rather. In the next lesson, I'll show you how to export your animations to share them in a number of different ways.
14. Exporting and Sharing: Now that you've created these fun animations, the next thing you're going to want to do is share them. I'm going to show you a couple of different ways to easily export these to share them for different applications. Right here I have opened up one of my animations so I'll just hit play, just one of the examples I made for this class. The first way to export this is to go down to your timeline over to the right where you see are little lines over here, and we're just going to scroll down to Render Video. This is going to pull up this little dialogue box and got some options here, you'll see Adobe Media Encoder and then an image sequence. You don't need to worry about the image sequence option for now, so we're going to go ahead and choose Adobe Media Encoder, and then we see some options here. Your best bet is to choose the H264 option, and then we've got our preset quality can leave this at high-quality, and we've got a document size. This is just defaulted to 2048 by 2048 which is the file side I was working with. If you're making this to use on social media or something like that you can go a bit smaller to make your file smaller. I think something like 1,000 by 1,000 works if you have a square image. But if you want to go bigger you can go bigger, you could always default to 1080 as that's a default high-res setting. We've got our frame rate here so it's using the document frame rate make sure that matches the frame that you're working with or your timing will be off. Then here we've got range and you just want to make sure this is all frames. It could be set to just a working area if you were just previewing one section at a time. So we'll just hit 'Render,' exporting video and we have a working video file. Then you can go ahead and open up your file and check it out you see we've got a little MP4 video file hit "play" and we have our video. The only problem with video is that it doesn't loop as a GIF would loop. However, if you're posting this on Instagram, Instagram will automatically loop the file because you can't upload a GIF to Instagram. So this is the best way to post it on Instagram and just make this little MP4 and then this is ready to go on Instagram. If you're not posting on Instagram and you'd rather have an animated GIF, the way to do that would be to go up top here to file, export, and then save for Web. We've got our little save for Web dialog box here, and the first thing you're going to want to do is change this to GIF if it's not already at GIF. When you're working here the save for Web option has a great little helper which shows you the file size down the bottom left corner so here it says it's 2.19 megabytes. That's pretty big for a GIF that you'd want to share online so we're going to try to bring that down to make this less of a big file so that it loads faster. This is especially important if you're trying to use animations for thumbnails on your website, you don't want your website to load really slowly because your files are too big. There's a number of different ways that we can do this, first of all we can bring our image size down that's one step. We can bring this down to about 1000 pixels it could be even smaller especially if you're doing at thumbnail for your website, this could be exponentially smaller. But let's just see what happens if we bring it down to 1000 we're already down to 623 K which is pretty good. I would say an ideal size is under 500 K for super-fast loading but for an animation that's sometimes not possible. This is a pretty good size but we'll see if we can do a few more things to make it a little bit better. We can go up here to colors and 64 colors which is just a black and white thing, so we can bring that down. I'm going to bring it down to eight, even though it's just black and white I find sometimes if you bring it down to just those two colors, it might get distorted a little bit because I think some of the motion has some maybe gray scale on it. But just doing that brings our file down to 264, which is really small, really great and so we're going to go with that. You can click on the bottom here on Save then we'll choose where we want to save this. So save this in my old files area, click "Save", and that'll replace it and there you have one there and we'll just replace that. Let's go find that and check it out we've got a little looping animated GIF that will continue on forever and it's nice and small. Animated GIF or an MP4 video file are the two main ways you would export this and it's that simple. Now you're ready to use this however you want to.
15. Final Thoughts: I hope this class proved to you that it's not difficult to start playing around with animation in your work. Throughout the exercises, I've shown you a bunch of different ways to expressively add movement to your existing work, or to create new animations from scratch without having to learn any complicated new animation specific software. Animating in Photoshop and Procreate allows you to utilize the tools and brushes you're all ready using, you're all ready comfortable with. How good is that? To recap, we learned how to set up our files properly in both Photoshop and Procreate. We learned how to use the timeline features in both applications and the Apps and features of each. We talked about the different frame rates and the benefits of working at 12 frames per second, half the work. We learned how to change one thing into another thing fluidly by just tracing and changing it a little bit at a time. We learned about the magic of the smear, giving us the power to use one frame to trick the viewers into thinking. It was a much more complicated transition. I can't wait to check out all the animations you create utilizing these techniques so please share your animations in the project gallery. Seeing your work will inspire your fellow classmates and myself as well. If you pushed animations elsewhere online, make sure to tag me, like here or comment there as well. If you liked this class, please leave a view and follow me so that you can keep up to date with all my new classes.
Chris Piascik, The illustrator formerly known as designer.
