Transcripts
1. Intro to Funky Letters!: So, one thing is for sure, we love GIFs. Oh, yeah. They're so much fun. They're really cool. Hey, guys. We are Linda and David. We are two designers. Actually, yeah, more broadly creatives, I guess. Yeah. Because we do all sorts of things like design, and photography, and illustration, and hand lettering. Yeah. One thing that we really like to do with our hand lettering is to actually bring it to life and animate it, and turn it into GIFs. They look really cool on social media when you share that. It triggers a lot of attention to the viewer because it's animated and that you kind of loop. It's trendy, even something really cool. It looks more interesting than just having a hand-lettered still image. We always like to make them for our Instagram, for our blog, and whichever opportunity we get. We're going to do this in a very easy way. We're not going to complicate things too much. I guess there's more complicated ways to do it, but we like easy stuff, non-complicated. Exactly. So, it's going to be quite easy. So, this course is interesting if you are already experimenting with hand lettering and you're somewhat familiar with it, and you just wanted to find a way to do something more fun and bring your hand lettering into life with animation, or even if you're not so familiar with hand lettering, and you just want to learn how GIFs work in general, if you want to animate photography or graphics or things like that. This can also be a useful introduction. We're going to show you three different ways that we like to animate our hand lettering. If you're interested in having a look at that and experimenting by yourself, then feel free to join us.
2. What you'll need: All right, guys, so thanks so much for joining us. We're really excited to show you how we do this hand lettered GIFs. So, the first thing that you're going to need is Photoshop. This is the program that we're going to use to actually bring your lettering in and to animate it, so just make sure that you have it. Don't be intimidated by Photoshop. Photoshop can be quite complex, but we are going to use the simple option which is with the timeline and we are going to be doing it frame by frame and it's not going to be too complicated. Exactly. Then, the second thing that you're going to need is to have your lettering already digitized. Chances are if you've already been experimenting with hand lettering, you already know how to do this. Just make sure that you have your lettering on a digitized readily clean layer. On a transparent background I guess. Exactly, so that it's basically ready to use. If you've been experimenting with lettering and you don't quite know how to digitize it, don't worry. There are many resources that explain how to do this online, so just feel free to look at that a little bit, or you can look at our previous course which was about hand lettering. On the last bit, we explained how we digitized our hand lettering. So, this can be particularly interesting if you're doing analog lettering. You know if like me you did this on a piece of paper and you need to get it scanned in and ready on your computer, or sometimes what we like to do as well is to actually use an iPad. We recently got ourselves an iPad Pro with Procreate on. It's an awesome app, where we do a lot of our hand lettering directly on it with the Apple Pencil, and it allows us to then have everything clean and ready by the time we send it onto our computer on Photoshop. So, we experiment with both, analog lettering and digital lettering, so whichever way you're experimenting with, just make sure that you can have your lettering digitized, so we can start to work with it.
3. Preparing your GIF designing process: Okay, let's prepare your process. I guess you need to start somewhere, so let's start with sketching the whole process, which I guess it's like the best thing to do, to have it all figured out as a sketch. Exactly, this is like the first step before preparing a GIF. We don't always do it, but we recommend it. Today we're going to take you through this process because we actually have some ideas on what kind of GIFs we want to make. We actually have a theme for today and it's going to be kitties. Today's cats. Cats. Today we were around here in Osaka, we're in Japan right now, and we went to this coffee shop and there was this adorable cat and we just had such a good time. It reminded us of how much we just adore cats. Everyone loves cats, basically everyone. Of course, that's why we're going to be using that as our theme today. So, the first thing that we did in order to prepare the GIFs that we would make, was to sketch some ideas of how we were envisioning this. The most important thing at this stage is to know what format that we're going to be working with. Depending on the media that you're going to release all your GIFs, it's important to know the format. I mean, if it's for Instagram, probably you want to have it on square or vertical. If it's for a blog post or you share or post directly on Facebook, probably horizontal. Or in newsletter and things like that, it's always good to have a horizontal format. You might to work with whichever format you like. It would just be good that you know more or less in the beginning what format you will be working with, because this will allow you to then plan your design to fit properly in the format and not have too much confusion along the way. So, the first step would be to decide your format, and sketch out some different ideas of how you imagine your lettering to come together. The work's on something quite basic as well. The animation is going to be quite easy for you to understand the basics. But if you want to go further with that, I guess you can, indeed, like even your sketches can be a bit more complicated, a bit more developed, because elements going to appear one by one in the timeline. So, it's up to you if you want to develop or not your sketches as well. You can experiment with that along the way also as you feel more confident with the process. But just to start, just have your sketched ideas and your format ready. The second thing that you're going to need is to, of course, have your hand lettering ready, as we mentioned before, in a separate layer that you can use and drag and drop. It's not just your hand lettering that would need to be ready for usage, but also if you're planning to use any specific colors or patterns or backgrounds, anything that you're thinking of playing with visually, just set it aside so that it's ready to use, so that you can easily drag it into Photoshop and see what it looks like. This is always cool, so that you always have your tools ready for you when you begin to actually animate your GIF.
4. Project n°1 / The stacking effect: So, now that you've got everything ready let's get started and work on those trips. So, we're going to get right into photoshop and we'll take you through our process. Okay, we have the three files that we're going to work on here. One, two, three. The First one is this one. This is the end result. So, our First project is going to be a square format so that it's an easy graphic that we can export on Instagram or something like that. We're going to keep it really simple just so we can show you some basic functionalities. We're going to work with a stacking effect of the lettering. So, this is really cool if you want your lettering to appear in a consecutive way. For example, if you have several words that you want to appear one after the other. If you have a quote that you wanted to get completed consecutively or something like that. This is just one of the easiest ways that you can animate your lettering and make a GIF. So, we're going to start from scratch. We're going to start a new file and your documents are, that's going to be 2000 on 2000 pixel. I'm going to just name it right away, cat one and that's it. Have this empty file with a transparent background. We're going to import our elements. We need, we have here separate the cat eyes from the triple meow wording. So, let's import the cat eyes First. It's here, you see it is on a transparent background. It is just black. So, what we want to do is select our layer and basically, I like to do with this one which is it's pretty easy, it's just you click, you drag, and you keep until the First tab all up here and you release right here. So, that's it. I zoom a bit out and I see that it's too big for our file. So what we're going to do, we're going to convert it right away by clicking on the right with the right click on the second layer and convert to smart objects here. What this will do is that it will preserve its original size and if we have to do any change on it we can always just double click layer like this. You see? Let me close the First so it's no confusion. So, there you have, he creates a temporary layer to point.psb. So, if we have to do any change in here, for example, I'm going to just quickly do something for you to see, I got write like this and I save, if I go back my First document it is there with this change that I just did. So, it's basically linked. So, if I delete here this layer save it and go back to my document, it's not there anymore. So, this is pretty cool. We don't lose quality if we now going to zoom down and up again. Of course, there's always the limit of the original size but we can zoom down and not lose any quality. So now, let's place it. From there up a little bit tension may be, just a little smaller. So, how was it like here, at the bottom right? Yeah. We're basically just doing that because we want to add a little bit of a decorative element with our hand lettering as well. I mean, if you want to keep things really minimal and just focus on hand lettering that's not a problem at all. We just always like to add a little bit of a special touch. But basically, the same principle of bringing a file in and sizing it properly with the smart objects and so on. This is exactly what you're going to do with your hand lettering as well. So it's still interesting for us to show you how we do that. Okay, so we're going to get the other elements which was the lettering here, double click, open up same procedure. Let me close this one First here. That's important First to our document, so drag and just drop it here. There you go. Now, look I can convert this one into a smart object right away because we need to cut it in three pieces. So basically, the best thing in our case is actually to import piece by piece. So we can convert it after into single elements. So, for that let's just take this tool which is like the cutting rectangular mark my key two. Okay? Let's take the First one was selected. We go back to the move to. So it selects this part, if I move now you see it's selected. I can basically just press copy go to my document and paste. Yeah. This is really useful because you might have your lettering all placed in one layer, it might even be a little bit messy. So, right now what you're going to need to do is just take it piece by piece. Every piece that you're thinking of animating just bring it in this way into your final file. That's it. We have the First element here. We can type the name of the layer which is meow one. We're going to do this quickly just for the other elements. Okay, so that's it. We have the three elements here now and now we can basically convert them one by one to each single smart object. So, that's for this one, for this one, and the third one. That's it. Now, we can actually select them altogether and scale a little down until, they actually look good like this size. Maybe a little bit smaller. Yeah. Like this? Exactly. Now, we can place them around. Let's keep this one at last right? Yeah. Okay. So now you're just going to stack them one by one, put them at the right placement. I think maybe the cat eyes could be a little bit smaller so that everything fits into the center, leaving a nice margin all around. This is always something that we recommend especially when you're doing visuals for Instagram. It's nice to leave a bit of breathing room around not to keep things too much going towards the edge. It looks good on the feed as well. So, I like to move things around with that. When you go with the curves are like up and down. It doesn't move so fast if you press with shift it goes a little more. But yeah, sorry. You're going to see like in terms of short because it's now underneath. But yeah, that's just need placing things around. But I guess, this is already good. Yeah. The eyes may be a little lower skip composition like that. Yeah. All right. So, now we're going to add something to the background. We've got that little color palette here that we composed using this one image of cat. Yeah, it's the same cat that we saw at the coffee shop. Yeah, we basically created the color palette being inspired by that. So, we have different tones there from lighter tones to darker tones. We're going to be using this same tone throughout all the three projects which we're going to show you today. We're going to use like which one? This one? Actually no, it's like the First one. This one? The lightest. Yeah. Okay, so the best thing is we can actually take this whole element of colors into our documents, place it here, just to let me move layer around but just to actually pick. Yeah, going here and to put that. I drop a strength, we pick the color here and we just put it in the back and then you later. That's it. Yeah. Basically, if you're really picky about your colors then you can do that with a color palette or so on. But, if you're happy to experiment and just take your color straight from Photoshop just being a bit more random about it, that's totally fine too. That's it. Now, we're going to convert it to animation. Yeah. We have the layers here. Let me just rename this one with the cat eyes. This one was nothing, and the color pallets, we don't need that anymore. That's it. So, we go to the background. Okay. For the animation, the most important thing is to go on window and timeline, if you haven't had it active already. I have it underneath here. It is going to open like a separate little window at the bottom. Exactly. You're going to see this little button Create Frame Animation, which is going to be exactly what we are going to do here. If you click on it, it creates right away the type that we want. But if I just go back, and you see the little cursor down actually. You can select between two things. The video timeline and the frame animation. Now, by default, it's on the frame animation. So, that's why when I click here it appears like that. Otherwise, you have this one, which we have also the button here to switch things around. See? So, the other one is the com- Well, I think it's a little more complicated. You can go really far with these options but we are going to focus today on just frame by frame. This creates like a funky effect and it's much easier for a beginner if you just want to experiment with making some basic GIFs at First. You can still do so much with it. So, it allows you to have a lot of fun with it. Let's get started with that. Basically, you don't have many options here at the bottom as you see. You can see that it will loop the animation like once, three times, forever, or even others where you can determine how many times you can apply. Five times, seven times. Generally, what we do when we create a GIF is to select forever because we want it to go on and on and on and on. In some cases, it's not always possible but we are going to get into that a little bit later when we talk about exporting and preparing a GIF. This frame is going to play for Five seconds if you see here. And if you click on this option you can see as well how long this specific frame is going to take. You can put to no delay. I wonder what effect does that give? But we are going to go for really fast, like half a second in the beginning. Just to see how that will look like. Well, you can duplicate or create a new frame just by clicking here, duplicate selected frames. So, just by clicking once it duplicates everything. So, we have our Five layers again. If you change the frame, everything is on the eyes on every layer. So, if I change now here, one, you see that right away it's between one and the other. The First frame, Five layers are on. Second frame, four layers are on with a little eye, just the last one is not. There is also something really important. Let me duplicate just a few times and just make a few changes here. The First frame determines every other frame. That means that if I go on the third frame here and I deactivate my background, it's only the third frame that has no background if you see. But if I do that in the First frame, all of them lost the background. This is really important because sometimes you want to make a change to all of them since the First frame because you added a new layer or something like that. Yes, but specifically if you add like a layer at the 15th frame, you just want it to appear at the 15th frame. So, you've got to go to the First one, deactivate it for all of it. Go to the 15th and then activate it there, if that makes sense to you. We might see it later again. Or I guess that for this type of animation we are not even going to use that complexity. Exactly. We are going to get a little bit more into detail with it later. So, for now we are just going to focus on the basic functions when you are animating piece by piece. So, now let me start again. I have the First frame. Everything is active. But let's say, what is the First frame? What will be the First frame? There won't be any meow. It will be just the eyes and then the First meow, the second, and the third. Let me also place them around here in an order that makes sense, which is like the eyes at the bottom and then the First meow. Now, this is the, there you go, second and third. Yeah. It's always good to place your layers in the way that you want them to appear. Exactly. Now, for one frame. We duplicate this frame. We activate this one, we activate this one, and as simple as that, with the last one we activate the last layer as well. So, now if you see, we have one, two, three, four. If I press play now, it's pretty slow. We can- But it works. But it works. It works already. It's an animation. Basically, with just the layers, you can activate them and deactivate them. If you understand how this works then you can start doing a lot of things with your lettering. Exactly. So, now we want it a little faster. So, if you select them all with shift, I go from the First one, press shift and go to the fourth, I see that they are all selected. So, now I go on the time and I set it to two or one. Let's see with one. That's really fast. Yeah. Okay, Let's put two or even maybe, that's still too fast. We have to do custom now. Let me go to, let's see, four. Four, yeah, or three. We tend to use these custom speeds a lot when we are doing these kinds of animations. Maybe a little bit too slow. Too slow. Three will be good. Let's put three. Yeah. You can always experiment with that for now and when you export it you are going to see the final result. So, it doesn't really matter it's just- What we can do here is to keep the last one a little longer. So, let's keep 2-5 and maybe if we see already a change. Yeah. It could be a little but let's go to seven. So it does read like "meow meow meow" just a little. Yeah. So that it stays for a while. It doesn't start over again. This is also really cool. For example, if you have been lettering a quote and you want people to be able to read the full quote once it has appeared, just leave the end a little bit longer. Exactly. So, now let's just save our file for now. First one here and here. That's all right. Exactly. We are just going to save it for now and go towards the next project, and then the next one, and then we are going to show you how we export them because there is different ways of exporting it. But this is just so you can get First a little overview of how we actually animate them.
5. Project n°2 / The flickering effect: Now, we're going to work on the vertical format, and it's going to be another effect that we're going to be playing with. So, we call that the flickering effect, and it's basically really interesting if you have a quote or several words and you just want to keep them the way they are, but give them a subtle movement that gives them a funky aspect. So, what we did, personally, was to use a photograph of our cat as the background. We let a cute kitty cat and now we're basically just going to animate that in a subtle way. So, there's not going to be much going on. It's really just going to be this piece of hand lettering, but it's going to just shift a little bit. So, this is always interesting to give it some movement. We're going to start from scratch again. It's going to be that this size and this time a vertical fall. We are going to call it's name it's size. it's share, cat2. All right. There we go. So, let's import the elements. We're going to be using a photo as a background. So, first thing we're going to need to do it is actually a place that photo as a background. Put it, drag it just like before, into our documents, fits perfectly, centered, that's it. Close this one. And we're going to import them lettering here. So, here what we did with the lettering, in order to have this flickering effect, is that we letter to say someone quote, I mean for you it can be a quote, or it can be a word or something like that. In this case, we just lettered it in the same way, but we did it three times, and always in the same size. So, once we placed them all together. You're going to see that. One, and two, see it doesn't make or really a difference, it's the same size, same style, but there's going to be a subtle movement when we actually place them in a gif and animate them. So, this is always like a really simple but cool way to animate your lettering. I can basically get all of the elements will shift here, all the layers at the same time, drag and drop them into our file. Then I see that they are way too big. But this is all right. We're going to first convert just like before, every element, one by one, as into smart objects. ABC is fine. Let's convert this one too, and this one as well. There you go. We select them all, just go a little back, and zoom out, and just scale them down. Put them in the center, probably won't because of it's this size, and then we need to convert, we want them white. Right. Yeah. since the background is dark, what we like to do in each case is just to make the lettering light. So, there's a bit of contrast, and we can actually read the lettering, it's going to give a really nice effect. So, the easiest way is just to go on the layer like the A here, click on the right. No. Sorry. You actually go on a fixed. Sorry. Here, on the date, see a little, I fixed with a layer arrow going down. So, just click on it, and we do a color overlay for this layer. You see now printer it's here. The fact is on with the color overlay. Here are the options. I put it a bit the side. You see, it was actually already on white. But, if you click here, sorry, the blend mold we're going to keep it normal, because it's going to be full color over the color, well, yeah, just color over color. This is where we select which color? This is the result on the top here. So, if you go here, 000 which is white, press okay. So we could play at this point with colors and so on. But since we're using this photo as a background, we want the colors of it to really pop, and make a nice contrast. We going to keep things simple, the lettering is just going to be white, and we're going to do that on every layer of our lettering. You can actually repeat the step by going on airfix, and going on [inaudible] again and add it to B and C layer. But you can also go on the first layer, you click Alt, you see that I have Alt pressed, and you just drop it on B C, and then on C as well. So we have it duplicated so every layer is now white. Exactlly. Easy. So, we have three layers now that they are all white here, every layer has a lettering white. But, let's go back to the original file. If you look at it here, you have to understand the effect that what makes this flickering effect actually interesting, is that these three layers are the same, but are slightly different. It's really as if you would say a word two or three times, you'd never see it the same way. Right? Yeah. If you were to actually do it the analog way, what you could do is actually letter your word first, and then use a tracing sheet, so that it basically the next one looks exactly the same size. Exactlly and not the same. Not the same,there's going to be some slight difference and these are the slight differences that are going to make this interesting flicker effect. They're going to keep it smooth, because if you were to letter it completely differently, and you were there to animate it, it wouldn't look smooth at all. So, then we are basically almost done, because we have all the layers here ready. This is a little back that I'm going to delete. But, we're going to create the animation, and same as before, here there's no specific order, but let's start with the first one because it's just one after the other. In this case, we're going to start right away, because it's just all about having three images that actually flick it. Is just three frames. So, if I duplicated here once, I activate B, deactivate A, and on the last one, activate C, deactivate B. Complicated. So its complicated already to us. This is it. If I now put the timing on the frames, or really short, or let's start with two maybe. Well let's see, what it gives. Too slow, and I also didn't do forever. So we're going to need forever. It's just. So that you can visualize it playing over and over again. Its the loop. So, let's select it all, and put one second play like that. Yeah, you can already see it coming together, and you can see that it still stays smooth, because we're still just playing with exactly the same lettering. It's just these little subtleties that bring this imperfect movement. So, this is like a really cool, and as you can see, it's really simple to do this effect from Photoshop. In the process of creating these letters it's important to have some letters that are almost the same. They see that the Y doesn't change so much. Yeah. But then the T has some variations with it, because, taller, the A is a little fatter or something. It's yeah. It's cool. Because it allows you to play with one word, or one quote, that you're not going to change too much, there's not going to be a lot of movement, but, it's just going to look more eye catching. Okay. Again, we're not going to export right now, I'm just going to save this here. That's it. Let's head over to the last one.
6. Project n°3/ The word switch effect: For our last project, we're going to do something a little bit more complex, because we're going to be playing with switching different words. So, in order to do that, we're going to play with a different hand-lettered words that are going to appear one after the other. But there is one part of the gif which is going to stay static. This is cool if you want to emphasize different things at once. So in our case, what are we going to do is just write out kitties are and then have different words showing up. So like cute, adorable, fluffy, and so on. This makes it like a really eye catching visual and it's a good idea. Like we said, if you want to talk about different words in one go, If you have some different keywords that you want to appear one after the other. For example, I've seen design studios do that from time to time. We offer design, photography, videography, blah, blah, blah. They have these different words showing one after the other, and one part of the gif stay static. So, this is also like a really cool way to animate your lettering, and we're going to take you through it now. Okay, let's start a new document. This time it's going to be- A horizontal format. Horizontal, say, it's 2,000 on this. Yeah. 72 on that, then we're going to name it, Skillshare-Cat03. There you go. Let's import our elements. In this case, the cat fur pattern. Yeah. We created this little pattern. And the lettering. That we're going to put over a dark background. So it's going to stay really subtle. We just tried to imitate the cat's fur, and we're going to put the lettering over it. So, it's still going to pop, because the rest is going to stay pretty dark. So if my color palette as well, which I can actually drag and drop again to my last documents here, just to pick up the colors out later. Close here, the fur, same procedure, drag and drop into our documents. There you go. Let's not care too much about sizes at the moment. Close this one, and the last one is the sheet with the words. Yeah. Okay, this has a lot of layers, so we may be going to clean up this one first. So we have here, that's the basic first layer which has nothing. The color palette, we're going to keep or actually just put the background already. Exactly. Yeah, actually. I'm just going to prepare the background for now, so that then we can focus on the lettering that goes over it. I put this color which was the last one. Okay, that's it. The fur, I'm going to create the smart object but once again, I zoom a little out because I don't see the limits. So there you have it. I click one corner, and then, basically with alt and shift, I can proportionally scale them down, and placed into our sheet here, something like that. All right. If you're playing with different textures or backgrounds and things like that, it's always a good idea before you make a complex gif like this one, to already have that sorted out. So, perfect your different layers and your different patterns that you're playing with first, and then you can start importing your lettering. Okay, for the wordings, I guess I'm going to just put them one over with the other. So it's going to be a little easier, because even if it looks a little messy, at least they all look the same position. Lovely, that's okay. If you happen to separated your lettering, all your different hand-lettered words already, please do so, so that they're all in separate layers, and then you can start to place them into your file with ease, like we do. Now, we have this little trick of just stacking them all together, and then you can finally start playing with them. Okay, I convert each element into a smart object here quickly. Let's put these, and the last one's kitties are, and then I can scale them down. Cat fur needs to go. Let's scale them a little bit down. Okay, so we're going to just put the cat fur here. Let's put it down, and these elements, we're going to put them just like before with the fx. We're going to color them with the color overlay, just white. Okay. That's good. And we're going to duplicate this, all the other elements with alt pressed. That's it. The kitties are, it's going to be white as well, right? Yeah. So there we go. At this point you can start playing with different colors as well if you want, and you can even imagine how you could even make the color switch, and so on. But we're going to keep this really simple, just so we can show you how we plan to do this, that maybe we can experiment a little bit more, and go a little bit crazier. Let's close this one which we're not going to need, right now. Like kitties are, let's compose our frame. Just with kitties are, probably a little smaller, wanted to the centered, then all the other letterings underneath, probably around here, a little smaller as well. Something like that. Well, we see it as a real mess. It's a real mess. But yeah, you can start to have a look at them and see if they are at the right sizing, in the right placement. We also see that this one, it is a little white line here, which is this one. We can double click it, and actually correct that. It's probably just a line that is underneath. So for that, you can just get this selective tool and go the limits and just delete once, maybe two until the lettering starts there. That should be fine. If I save now and I close it, you see it's gone. Exactly. So if here, lettering is still not completely clean, that's nothing to worry about. You can always clean it along the way as well. Okay, so that's it. The size seems all right. I would say that Kitties, the top part can be a bit smaller, so that there's a little bit more contrast between different words and the static part. All right. So if I now, compare with the other ones. Let's put a little, the rulers, a little half here. All right. Let's keep a line around here. Put these words, so the cute around here. Yeah. Fluffy. Kawaii. Okay, so this should be it. Yeah. We have them all at the right size, the right position. So if something is not exactly at the right position or not the right size, now you can just do adapted, so it's still going to be easy along the way for you to animate it. Just make sure that everything is set properly, and then we can start to animate that. We just want to call there or maybe defer, right? So, let me just quickly get my color palette, because we can give it a color. Put that back. The cat fur, fx, color overlay. When selecting a color, you can pick one of these. I would say the darkest so thst. This one, right? Yeah, yeah. So, this is cool. Okay, so now we can delete the color pallete. That's it. Just activate the rulers, and we create our animation. Okay, so the timeline is going to be about showing kitties are, one word, kitties are, another word, always have kitties are in between empty. Yeah, I said it's static. Exactly. Yeah. So for that, let me deactivate. So the first one is empty, let's duplicate it already, and activate one word. So the adorable, and keep on doing that, like duplicate, empty, duplicate, next word, duplicate empty, duplicate fluffy, and so on, kawaii, and empty, and the last one, Iovely, and that's it. So you can see, how much time that saved us, just by having prepared that properly, then we can animate as we like. So, the basic timeline is ready and now we're just going to look at the timing. Exactly. We select them all at 0.2 seconds for all of them, and then we deselect, and we just take the ones with the wording. Show it already, so that we can to see what it looks like. Okay. As you can see, the words, they appear a little too fast now. So whenever a word is appearing, we're going to specifically select that frame and make it a bit slower. So, with the command, I can actually select just the frames I want, which is the ones with the words, and I'm going to five. So from 0.2 to 0.5. If I go to the first one and the play now, so this looks pretty good. Yeah. The timing is nice, it's composition. We're getting all ready to start exporting them the 3D animations. Let me save this one here. We're just saving it on phtoshop right now, so that we can show you afterwards how you can export these different gifs. Okay, so you see that all three of the animations are still pretty easy and basic. We encourage you to go of course further into the details and to experiment with the compositions. Because basically once you understood how this timeline works, and how you can make different elements move within every frame, then you can start experimenting with anything you like or you can try to experiment with different colors, and make your lettering switch colors. Whether it's the lettering or the background, you can create different effects, like a neon effect or add a different pattern, or go completely crazy with it. This is the same process, the stop motion as well if you take picture of yourself, and you want to animate yourself in the stop motion effect, you can with that, It's the same principle. Yeah, exactly. So, if you understood that principle, then it's limitless. You can do whatever you want, and we highly encourage you to experiment with that and make some really interesting gifs that fit with your style.
7. How to export your GIFS: All right. So, now that we've been experimenting with making the GIFs, we're going to show you how you can export and share them because there's different ways, but we'll take you through. Going to start with the first one here. Let me play to see if everything is okay. Yeah. Okay. So, we're going to export that. We're going to start with exporting as a GIF and then as a movie. So, for the GIF, we're going to go to File, Export, and Save for Web here. Let's see these options, this window looks a bit complicated, but let me go here zooming out so we can see the whole animation. It basically says the original file on the left. If you put it here on 2-Up, the original on the left, you can see that it's Skillshare-Cat PSD. Here on the right, the GIF. This is the original size of the document, which is 15 megabytes. In the end, we're going to end up with 224.7 kilobytes, which is pretty good as a size. It's really light. It's going to stay pretty light, yeah. So, you have a few presets. I guess GIFs, and then JPEGs, and PNGs. What we want to focus is having a GIF. So, you don't actually need a preset, you can just select it here again. So, here on the right, on the colors, you see that we can go from two to 256 colors and everything in between. You can also type a specific number, if you want, like 123. But, the thing is that this can be quite dramatic for your exports when you have a real photo in the background. Like our second example with the cat. Exactly. There, we cannot really expect the really high quality because, since we cannot play with that many colors in the end, we're going to have a little bit of a quality loss when it comes to the colors. So, it will be easier for you if you're playing with fewer colors like in this case, but if you're playing with a photo or something like that, that is more complex, just don't expect it to be super high quality, this is simply not possible when you're doing GIFs. But it's- It's also a thing from the GIFs. I guess if you see a GIF animation online, it's not about having in high quality. I guess it is also the charm of seeing them with this low-color spectrum. Exactly. Yes. That's what makes the GIF likes at the end. It adds to the funky aspects of the GIF. Exactly. So, it's fine. Just keep that in mind. It is not a limitation from the software, from Photoshop or anything like that. It is really a limitation because GIFs need to stay lighter. I guess they're just limited to 256 colors. So, for our example here, we can go really low with the colors, because we basically just have this beige tone with the black. Yes. It's so simple. So, yes. So, from two, let's take eight because, you see in the color table here, there's still some nuances from the colors. So, it's not pure, like straight black, so let's keep it to eight so it's still super light, though. Yeah. There's absolutely no problem. I guess that even with 256, you see it's just around 200 kilobytes, so this is just fine. Let's keep eight for the sake of keeping it small. All the other options here with selective, perceptual, adaptive, and all that; just keep it selective. You might see some changes sometimes. You actually see some drastic changes sometimes but this is when you use a more complex background. Here, it's so simple. Let's just keep it like that. We can also play it here. Looping options, forever. Don't forget that. The size is correct. If I play it here, see that's exactly what we wanted. So, that's it. So, we can now save. Save it here as Cat-01. That's it. So, if I go on the finder to see the results, this is it. I press space, there, it starts to play. There we go. So, this is a simple way to export your GIF as a GIF, which will play in a loop forever if you set it up that way. This is perfect to create a file which is going to be light and ideal to use for your website, or your blog post, on your newsletters and things like that, because GIFs are literally just made to embed and place in these places. For it to play online, you just need to upload on your server, or on Facebook now, it starts already automatically. Yes. So, if you upload it on Facebook, it starts right away. Exactly. So, that's it. In most cases, this format is going to be perfect. In some cases, though, for example, if you want to export a GIF and post it directly on your Instagram, it would be better to export it as a movie file. You have to. Exactly. You can't put a GIF. Yes. You're going to be obliged to export it as a movie file, which is what we're going to show you now. So, for the movie, what we want to do now is to actually duplicate these frames in order to play it longer, because we will not be able to make it automatically with a certain condition to make it play forever. Yes. A movie just plays from the beginning to the end. From A to Z and it doesn't really repeat. So, this is a limitation when you're exporting as a movie file. You will then have to actually repeat all the layers by yourself, so that it can play several times, like three times or five times. Just multiply your layers as many times as you need, so that it plays as long as you want. So, to do this, we're going to just select all of our frames, and press the duplicate selected frames. If I press this a few times, you see that we're going to end up having exactly the same. It's basically creating some sort of loop, with a definite amount of time. So for that, I can even select now the 16 frames now. All together, and just click once. So now, we're going to end up with 32, which will give us probably a right amount of length. So, let's just test it out. If I go on File, Export, and Render Video, this time, instead of this one was the one for the GIF, and this is for the movie, and then we select the name of the file. It's going to be an MP4. You select the folder the way you want it to appear, to be saved, and we select Adobe Media Encoder. For that, we're going to leave the format H.264. We're going to leave on high quality. We leave the size as this, and the document frame rate, we need it also at 30 frames per second, which is going to be really smooth, and we render. Let us going to export a video file that you can then check out and see if it fits with what you want it to look like. Let's have a look at our file here. We can see that it's 13 seconds long, three megabytes. It's still a bit heavy maybe, but if you put it on Instagram, it's going to be just fine. Also, for the length, if I press now space, I see the preview. With the timeline, Instagram will loop it anyway at the end forever. So, you just need a minimum amount of time. I guess 12 is pretty good. That's it. We can now export our second and third animation, here. Let's start by exporting the GIF first. For that, we're going to go once again to Export and Save for Web. Here, we're going to clearly see the change with the colors. Yeah. It kept the- Actually, yeah. It's still on eight colors. Yes. This is why it's going to-. So, if we go to the maximum of 256, yes, it looks pretty good to me. It's just that it's going to be 2.4 megabytes, which is quite a lot. So, if we reduced now to 128, it'll be a little small and the quantity hasn't degraded so much, which is pretty good. Even here at only 64 colors, you start seeing it, maybe here if you're going to- Yeah. The colors are a little bit flatter, but in the case of this photo, since it's not too complex in terms of color, it still looks fine. Yeah. So, yeah. You can try options like with the WebSnap. If you go up, you're going to see that it might do some changes. You have to see if it's adapted for you or not. Here, it creates really some weird colors, but you gain in size. So, I don't like to play too much with that, I'd rather go low with the colors. But if it's two, you see, you don't win so much with the size. So, whatever. Let's just keep at 64. I guess it's pretty good to me with 1.3 megabytes. So, let's just save it, it's looping forever, that's it. Let's just save it. Let's see the result here on GIF. There you go. Looks cool. Yeah, it's nice. I like it. Now, we're just going to export a movie from that as well. Since this one was so short in time, basically 0.3 seconds, we will have to duplicate quite a few times here to have a minimum length. Let's keep these 15 elements. Duplicate it once again until 30. Once more, because, at the end, it's not really important, it just needs to be at minimum. So, File, Export, Render Video for the Movie, we select the right folder, render. So, this is a result from the second animation. It lasts for five seconds, which is probably still not enough. So, yes. I duplicated it quite a few times. We had 45 frames. But it's okay, you can still select everything. Well, now, if I duplicate once again, I'm going to end up with the 10 seconds, which is pretty good. So, let's just do that. This export, render video, and that's it, I'm going to actually override the other one. Let's see the result. All good. It's taking nine seconds now. Okay. Because before it was probably four point something, so it depends how many times you have to duplicate it, but in this case, it's already pretty good. Let me close this one, and just do it quickly for the last GIF. Yes. Let me check if everything is all right. Oh, I just need to click Forever here. Yeah. Just play it. That's it. So, first, let's export the GIF. Export, Save for Web, zoom a little out, and we're going to see that the colors, we don't need too many here as well, probably 16 or eight is enough. Yes. Yes. Basically, I don't see any difference. It's small. The size, we keep. Everything as is, looping forever, just click Save. That's it. Let's just go see the result on the finder. Third one. It's actually here. So, that's it. This is the animation. Yeah. Looks good. That's nice. Yeah. Let's export it quickly as a movie, and then we have them all. So, here, select all the frames, just like before, duplicate a few times here, select all of them from 18-36. There you go. File, Export, Render Video. We select where we want to save it here. All the options are all right. Render. Let's see the result. This one lasts for 13 seconds, which is pretty good. Yeah. It looks like this. There we go. So, now we have all these files readily exported as GIFs and as videos. So, just remember that in most cases, you wouldn't need to actually export in video files. Just exporting as a GIF is mostly enough, because if you want to just put it online, on your website, or on your blog post, or on your newsletter or something like that, GIFs are usually more than enough. You would just need to export it as a movie if you would like to put it on Instagram, where there's a certain length of time and a certain type of file only accepted. Instagram doesn't accept GIFs for now, so this would be the only case where you would need to get it exported as a movie. If you want to work with the movies, you work with high quality. So, you don't need to care about the colors limitation part. Exactly. That is correct. On one hand, you have an easy uploadable file that is light and quick to upload, and on the other hand, you have a high quality heavier file. It depends what you need it for.
8. A few last technical tips!: And since we're going through some less technical tips here, we're going to just remind you of a few more tips that we consider to be important or things to look out for. So, definitely look out for the length of your video. Make sure that it's long enough, if you want to upload it on Instagram or something like that. But again, if you're just exporting as a GIF, this is not important at all. It's just going to replay automatically, and another thing to look out for would be the speed of your GIF. So, let's start your file when you're exporting, it if something is a little bit too fast or a little bit too slow, upload it to where you want to upload it. Give it a little test, see how it appears, and if you need to adjust the speed of certain frames, and so on, go back to your file, and adjust it until you are extremely happy with the result. And for the quality we saw, the GIF hasn't doing one hand, a limitation to 256 colors, which the movie doesn't have. The movie can really go into high quality, but it's going to become really heavy. So, you have to see what exactly you want to use that for. You might have to make some compromises. For example, if you're using a photo, and you want to turn it into a GIF like you saw before, you might have to reduce the amount of colors, and so on. But like we saw, it gives it an interesting charm, and if you are working with something that is much more minimal in its design and you're normally not going to have any issues with that. So, yes, just keep that in mind. So, yes, that was it pretty much. It's quite easy to do, and yes, once you get familiar with the process then your creativity with all of it can be pretty much limitless. So happy to see what you are going to come up with. Hope you get inspired with our course, and feel free to share your project, your GIF here as a project. Yes. So that we can be able to comment on it. Yes, we're so excited to see what you're going to come up with. Thank you guys so much for joining this course, and have fun. Cheers.