Transcripts
1. Introduction: Are you an aspiring artist or someone who's
just gotten into drawing and you've always been fascinated by 2D animation. But every time you look at it, you just can't help but think, God, this just takes
too much time. I could navigate into that. If that sounds like you, then you might share my
story and I'm here to tell you that it gets better. Hi, my name's Jayden. I'm an editor, motion designer, and almost by pure
happenstance animator. I'd always been interested
in 2D animation. I thought it was an
amazing medium that was only limited by
your imagination. But it wasn't until my
first full-time position as an editor where I was given the chance to work on a lot of 2D animation projects, that I realized exactly why everybody says the 2D animation, specifically full
animation, is so difficult because it indeed takes
a very long time. Such a long time in fact, that it takes an average
studio production anywhere between 6-12 months just to make one episode of a
television production. I was being asked to make two-minute ads in less
than a week by myself. I don't know how
I'm still alive. With the Internet
and the modern age comes a double-edged sword. It allows animators of incredible talent to
build a self-made, fulfilling career all from
the comfort of their home without needing to be part of
a big studio or move to LA. But you're still
expected to have that same level of
quality with less time, less budget, and all
the responsibility. In this course, we're going
to cover how to achieve that sparkle of traditional
hand-drawn 2D animation, but with as few
drawings as possible. I'm going to show
you the tips and tricks that I've
learned over the years just to streamline the process
and make things easier. This will be done by leveraging the power of the
12 principles of animation and particular
limited animation techniques. The term limited might
sound a little bit buggy, but limited in this case
doesn't mean low quality. It takes knowing some
fundamentals of animation. For your project, you
are going to be making a short animation that
feels alive and amazing, all only using
three key drawings plus some supplements
here and there. I'll be using Adobe
Animate to animate mine. Some of the
keyboard-specific shortcuts are going to be
specific to that. But this is not a
software-specific course, so please use whatever
you're comfortable with. You don't even need to
have ever animated before. The only prerequisite
is you just have a little bit of prior
drawing abilities. Sorry, that's the Holocaust. We'll start at the planning
and storyboard stage by deciding what kind of motion
will be easiest to achieve. We'll then go on to make
two or three really solid, well-drawn keyframes,
and then after that, we'll learn to
leverage the power of those animation
principles to make those three keyframes move. For example, we can use the
power of follow-through and inertia to make the hair or
clothing wave and bellow. By the end of the class,
you'll have turned something like this into this. Not only will you
have a stunning, high-quality piece of
character animation, that only you and I will
know you've cheated on, but you'll have learned a
myriad of techniques and approaches that you can use
to create high-quality, consistent animations
in your further career. Some purists made a cry some of these techniques as being
bad habits or cheating. But those purists
must have access to a time machine that the rest
of us unfortunately do not. If you're ready, let's dive
headfirst into the sea of animation and let's see if we can at least shrink
it down to a lake. I hope that analogy works.
2. Class Project: [MUSIC] Let's go over what you'll be doing
in your class project, as well as answering the
question, why animate. You are going to be
creating a piece of character animation from
storyboard to a color finish, but with a catch of limiting yourself to only three
main key frames. By this, I mean that
though you might add some extra drawings in the sense of hair
and clothe motions, blinking and other
little small details. The base poses will only be
based on three main drawings. You'll start by choosing
your character. It can be one that you've
created or a pre-existing one, and then we will go
over planning and story-boarding to
plan out your motion. The motion can be absolutely
anything you want, but if you're out of ideas, I will provide four prompts that I will go over
in more detail later. For now they are character dropping
down from the screen, a character catching something, a character being startled, a character falling over. I will be animating
the character dropping down and I
will be including all my main animation files along with all the
files of my examples, if you would like to
take a peek at those. For this piece, you can
use whatever piece of animation software that you
are most comfortable with. However, I will be using Adobe
Animate throughout mine. But if you're also an Adobe user and wonder
why I chose it over, say, Photoshop, which I
cannot have animated in. The key difference is the integration of
layers and key frames, Photoshop's animation
timeline is actually just making a new layer and
offsetting its time, making it closer to say
something like Adobe Premiere. This is okay for small things, but navigating through the
layers gets incredibly tedious and time-consuming
on bigger projects. After Effects lacks
good drawing inputs and while Procreate
is excellent, it's raster-based
like Photoshop, meaning it is based
on a set resolution. Since Animate is vector-based, it allows me for greater
control over scaling, composition, coloring,
file size, and a lot more. Like I said, any software
is fine to do this course. Just keep in mind that some of the keyboard specific
shortcuts that I'm using are specific to Animate
and you might have to look up the equivalent in
your program of choice. For an alternative to
Animate or Adobe in general, I recommend Open Toonz, which is a free
open-source program that has both raster and vector capabilities
and has been used by the likes of Steven
Universe and Studio Gently, like this is some
heavy duty stuff. I recommend checking the project description
where I've put some links to some
fundamentals of Adobe Animate, and also to familiarize
yourself with the 12 principles of animation, where I include a link to both an article and a video
series covering them. I will cover some of them in
more detail in the course, but it never hurts to have
more of a foundation. I encourage you to upload
and share your progress as you go in the
discussion tab below. Please don't be afraid
to ask for feedback from me or your fellow students. When you're finished,
I would like you to upload both your
exported finished movie file and your
original project file in the project gallery below. Without any further ado, let's get animating. [MUSIC]
3. Core Concepts: [MUSIC] Now let's go over some of the core
concepts that we are going to be covering
in this series. Now, animation has a lot of
jargon, and terminology, and vocabulary that even now still kind of
makes my head spin. So I figured this video will
just help to kind of give a refresher and kind of clear the air on
some of these terms. The first thing we need to
do is to define the terms full animation and
limited animation and how they are different. In the simplest terms, full animation refers
to when each drawing is a completely new
and original drawing. No reused elements, no reused drawings from earlier, everything is fresh and
redrawn from scratch. Some people confuse this with every frame being a new drawing. But as I'm going to explain
later in this video, this isn't always the case. Whereas limited animation,
on the other hand, is where all or
part of a drawing is reused for various purposes. Now this is very broad and it encompasses a lot of techniques, but I'll just try to
list some of them here. A character whose
body stays completely still except for one
limb that moves. The body is one drawing and the limb a completely
new drawings. Character who's standing
and the wind is blowing in the hair and billowing
their long flowing clothes. Or it could be things
like tweening or animating the same drawing back and forth using keyframes, things like camera
tricks, pans and zooms. Limited animation is everywhere. Some people write off
limited animation as being always inferior
to full animation, that it lacks the level of effort and depth that
full animation does. I think this is a bit too unfortunate because
limited animation is sometimes just necessary. Full animation in
this day and age, especially if you don't
have the weights of Disney or DreamWorks'
resources behind you, full animation is just
not time efficient. So you need to be
able to use a mix of both these days if you want
to make it as an animator. Both have their usages. Full animation is great for
fluid and dynamic pieces with lots of action and various
points and high energy. Whereas limited animation
is great for comedy, it's great for pacing, and it's great for those
silent, quiet moments. Now to come back to the 12
principles of animation, all of them are
really important. But in this series, I'm
going to highlight a select few of them as
the main ones to cover. But before I do, I just want to talk about something
which is that these are called principles and
not rules for a reason. I think too many people try to think of it as
like a checklist. I need to have the
squash and stretch. You need to have this. Let's make sure
that you have this. You need have this, you need
to have this, and they end up making the piece too busy. They're giving
themselves a headache. It's too complicated. It can end up being messy. I like to think of the 12
principles more as tools. Think of it like a toolbox. If you're making a table, you're not going to
grab the hammer, then the hot glue gun,
and then the mallet, and then the screwdriver, and then the buzz saw, and
then the electric drill. You're going to pick the tools that you need to make the table. I think of the principles
more as tools than as rules. That should be a slogan.
Not tools, rules. Not rules, tools. I
already messed it up. [LAUGHTER] The
first one I want to highlight is squash and stretch. If you watched my
previous Skillshare class on how to animate a logo, you'll know how
important this is. Squash and stretch refers
to how the shape of something morphs and changes
throughout the animation. To use the classic bouncing
ball animation as an example, as the ball hits the ground, it's squashes from the force
and the weight of gravity, and then as it springs back
up for its counteraction, it kind of elongates. It stretches like a bullet as
the counterforce comes up. Squash and stretch
is necessary to sell the weight and volume
of your piece, and it can also change the mood depending
on what you have, and it can also change
the actual material. To use that bouncing ball, if there's a lot of
squash and stretch, maybe it's this
kind of gel putty. Whereas if there's no
squash and stretch, maybe it's a bowling
ball or a marble, something very, very dense. The second principle I want
to highlight is anticipation. Anticipation is the sort of
prelude to the action that's sort of telegraphs the audience
want is going to happen. A classic example is the
sort of boxer's punch. Rather than just going straight from regular pose to a punch, you can tell I've never thrown a serious punch in my life, with an anticipation frame, the arm would cock
back before coming up. Rather than just going like
this and looking very weak, you pull back and then punch. This is necessary for readability and
feeling of the piece, just to give things
power and make it seem like these are things that
are actually happening. The third principle I
want to highlight is overlapping action
and follow through. These are very,
very similar terms, but basically they refer
to delay slash-drag, slash sort of offset effect
where different parts of whatever is moving move at different times
to the main action. Again, this is another
one that's very necessary to sell the
physics of something. I think this one in particular, overlapping action
and follow through, is one of the ones
that can help sell limited animation the most because just by offsetting
a few drawings, just a few drawings
by a little bit, you can create an
amazing dynamic effect. Now this one isn't officially
one of the 12 principles. It's a technique
called overshoot. This is kind of the flip
side to anticipation. To go back to that
punch animation, once the punch actually
hits the mark, if we add an overshoot
frame where it goes past where the
final resting is, almost like it was so
heavy that it missed the mark slightly before
being pulled back. Fast actions can always benefit from having one or
two overshoot frames. So please make it a technique
that you use often. The next technique is
pretty straightforward. Again, especially if you watched my previous
Skillshare video, I promise I'm not
shilling it, I promise, but it is slow in and slow out. This means rather than
actions happening mechanically like a robot where they just kind
of stop and start, it means when they start, they start slow
then pick up speed, and then when they stop,
they also slow down. This just make things look
more organic and graceful, and it can really help sell
that it's not just a robot. A really, really important
one to talk about, as this is more
about the function and actual technique
of animation, and that is pose to pose and
straight ahead animation. This is another one
where it's very important to
distinguish the two. Straight ahead is when you
draw each frame in succession. So you go 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, etc. Whereas pose to pose
is where you draw the key poses of each animation. For example, you might do 1, 4, and 7, and these drawings
are called keyframes, and then you go back and fill in-between with frames
called, well, in-betweens. Now, just like with full animation versus
limited animation, they both have their uses. For example, pose
to pose animation is great for character
movement as you can get a rough sense
of how it's going to work out before you
do too many drawings, and you can maintain
shape and volume. Because if you do
straight ahead animation while drawing a character, you can end up with situations where the head suddenly
gets a bit too small or the character stops growing in size,
things like that. So it can help
maintain consistency. Whereas straight ahead
animation is best for sort of organic and
unpredictable things. For example, hair, or fire, water, any sort of natural occurrence. It's best to do it straight
ahead because it gives it just this real sort
of organic feel. As a side note, I want to point out
that on bigger, more traditional
projects, keyframes are further categorized as
extremes and breakdowns. Extremes being the furthest that a character's body moves
in a particular bit, and breakdowns are how the
extremes are connected, and then the in-betweens
are how the breakdowns can connect it to the,
yeah, you get the picture. But for the sake of this video, we're just going to refer to any completely new drawing we create as a keyframe and anything else that we
do as an in-between. It's not exactly correct, but it will just make
things a bit more easier and simplified for
the purposes of this course. The final principle
that I think is really important for
this course is timing. Traditionally, timing refers to how many drawings
there are in a particular piece of character animation and what
that means for the speed, and the style, and the mood. Traditionally, more drawings
meant to slower action, and fewer drawings
meant to faster action. But obviously, the point
of this series is to try to use as few
drawings as possible. So that's kind of
thrown out the window. In this series, I want to kind of repurpose timing
as being more about rhythm, and pace, and mood. The final concept that
I want to explore in this video are the
terms animating on 1s, 2s, 3s, etc. Animating on ones is that scenario I mentioned
in the beginning. Assuming that your project
is 24 frames a second, a standard film frame rate, animating on 1s would be every single frame
is a new drawing. This is that classic sort
of Disney Bambi style where everything is just moving
and alive and bouncing. Also, Richard Williams'
The Thief and the Cobbler is another
famous example of which meticulously
animated on 1s. Animating on 2s, however, is where each drawing
is held for two frames. For example, if you had
24 frames per second, it would go 1-1, 2-2, 3-3, 4-4, etc. Animating on 2s is a very,
very common technique. Even the giants like
Disney and DreamWorks, etc., used animating
on 2s all the time. Animating on 2s, I think, is the optimal way to go
these days especially. But I want to make a note
that I want you to still set your project to
24 frames a second. The reason of this is that if it's set to 24 frames a second, you will have control
of the timing and you can mix and match 1s, 2s, and 3s. I'm going to give
you another example. Here is the same bouncing
ball animation from earlier. These use the same
nine drawings. They're both 15-frames long. They go for the same
amount of time. The one on the left
is set exactly at 2s, so it's 1-1, 2-2, 3-3, etc. It looks fine. It's sells
the action very well. But for me, I'm not
quite happy with it. So I played around with
the timing a little bit and mixed and matched
1s, 2s, and 3s. As you can see, it gives a completely different
feeling of bouncing ball, a completely different sense
of weight and physics. Even if you decide
that everything is just going to end up on 2s, set your project to
24 frames a second, it will just give you a much
greater sense of control. Those were the
core concepts that we are going to be using
throughout this series. There are some more things that I'm going to explain later on, but I didn't want
to make this video too overloaded with information. These are the foundations
that we will be using. We've got a lot of
material, I know, and this is the longest
video in the course by far. Don't get too overwhelmed if you don't think you
retained everything. I will refresh these concepts
when they come up later. For now, I want you to
look over these concepts, especially the main animation principles that I mentioned, and start thinking
in terms of them. When you watch a new
animated show or movie, try to see if you can
spot some of them. Also, start to think about
what motions would be good to use these
principles for. Join me in the next video where we are going
to be planning out our character and what that
character is going to do, planning out our
actual animation. [MUSIC]
4. Character Designs & Storyboarding: [MUSIC] Let's start planning
out our character animation. I recommend using an original
character you already have or a character that you are very familiar
with drawing. It will make the whole process
a lot more comfortable and easy if you can already draw them fairly well, fairly easily. However, if you are
going to design a character from scratch
just for this video, then I recommend doing as many sketches as
possible beforehand, trying out different extremes. For example, experiment
with their body weight, how tall are they, had they have long
hair, short hair? What kind of facial
structure they have, go as far as you're
willing to go, then go as little as you're
willing to go and whittle it down until you get to a place that you're
comfortable with. Character design is a
whole other series, a whole other course that
I'm not really comfortable with just lumping it
all up down here. If you are needing
some ideas for inspiration for how to
design your character, of course there are plenty of great videos on skillshare.com. From here, I recommend
making a model sheets. It doesn't have to
be super detailed. It doesn't need to be from
every conceivable angle, but I recommend at
least a basic pose that shows off the main
parts of the character. Maybe a couple of head shots in a profile from the back of the head and a few expressions that you might think the
character would have. Again try to go
for the extremes, go for perplexed, saddened, emotionally drained from
everything in this world. Maybe not that one, but try
to go for the extremes. This will give you a reference
to always check back on if you ever get stuck
and need some inspiration. With your character finalized, first we need to
give him a name. I'm going to name this
character, they're called Holly. Now that Holly has
been designed, it's time to start
planning out your action. Now I know in my
introduction video I said one of the
amazing things about animation is that there's no limitations apart from
time and imagination. I firmly believe that but
because I'm a pedantic mini, I'm going to throw
a couple of other limitations on you right now. Okay. This is just so you don't get too
overwhelmed and too lost with what's supposed to be a relatively simple exercise. The first limitation
is that it should be something that's from
point A to point B. What I mean by this is there's a starting state and
an ending state, not too much in-between. Anything else that's a
bit too complex with C, D, E, F, G and the rest of the alphabet is going to become a bit too overloaded and it starts to defeat the point
of this exercise. The second limitation
is that it should be a horizontal or
vertical movement. I had pointed to those the incorrect way, but
it doesn't matter. It should be up, down
or left and right. Moving on the Z axis, so in 3D space is a very difficult thing to do if you're not an amazing draftsman. Like I'm not an
amazing draftsman so I find 3D movement
very difficult. There will also be
a bit to show offy and they might overshadow these techniques because
people will be too focused on," Wow it's coming right
at me" kind of thing. Other than that, it can
be any action you want, anything you can conceive of. Just go ham. However, if you're struggling
for inspiration, then I have four prompts
here that you can use. One, a character
dropping down into shot. Two, a character
catching something. Three, a character is scared
or startled by something. Four, a character falls over. These should be simple
enough for you to decide how to put
your own spin on it. The who, how, what,
when, where, why, and this should
mean that even if everybody ends up
choosing the same prompt, that no two animations
should look the same. For this series I'm
going to be animating the drop down into a frame as I feel I can best show off all of the techniques that I
want to demonstrate here. Once decided you should
plan out your motion. What kind of tone do you want, what kind of mood, where is it set, those things. Even if you don't end up
drawing a background, having an idea of where
it takes place can help you decide what
emotion I want to sell. Drawing basic figure or even stick figure sketches
can really help you to conceptualize and visualize what you want to do
with the animation. Another idea is actually
acting out your motion. Now, it'll feel a bit silly and make sure no one's around
then you close the blinds. But it will help you give like an innate sense of what
that motion feels like. It really actually does help when you come
to actually draw. Think about what type of
animation you want to make. What kind of character do you want to be performing
this action? Think about your style. Do you want a bouncy energetic
Looney Tunes animation, a shop and dynamic action piece? Something more dramatic or
down to earth. Think about it. Also if you're
struggling to think of ideas and want to
use the prompts, think of which prompt best suits your answer to those questions, or which one best suits
what you want to make. With that, we should have our character and
our action decided. In the next video, I will
go over how to set up your project file and some
basics of Adobe Animate. If you're using another program, please still watch it as
there will be some pieces of advice and settings that are universal across all programs. Look forward to
seeing you there. [MUSIC]
5. Setting Up & Animate Basics: [MUSIC] Let's set
up your project. As I've been saying, I will be creating this
file in Adobe Animate, but most of what
I'm doing will have an equivalent in other programs. Please apply these settings
to your program of choice. First things first,
let's go to File, New, and create
our new document. There are a couple of presets
that are already set up. Let's base ours off of
this full HD preset here. Make sure the aspect
ratio is 1920 by 1080. You can use your own custom
resolution if you want. But since animate is
a vector program, we can scale and
reposition this later with ease without
losing resolution, and 1080p is basically the standard across the Internet and broadcast these days, so it's almost
always a safe bet. As I explained in the
core concepts video, we want to set our
frame rate to 24, just to give us greater
control over the timing. At the moment
that's all we need, so let's go create. If you are completely
new to animate, I would recommend familiarizing yourself with a few of
the basic features. But all things considered, we aren't actually
going to be doing too much in this course. We aren't going to be
using symbols, tweening, multiple scenes, or anything like that in the more
advanced category, so I will just briefly
touch on what we need in this video and then gets
dotted with animating. This white space here
is called the canvas. It's pretty self-explanatory. It's what we are
going to be drawing on and anything outside of the white box won't
be visible on exports. You can click the
mouse scroll wheel to move the canvas around. You can hold Control and use the scroll wheel to
zoom in and out, or alternatively
Control plus and Control minus to
zoom in and out. To recenter the
Canvas hit Control 0. To zoom the Canvas back
to its full resolution, you can hit Control 1. To fit the canvas to
your current screen, you can hit Control 2. Now for our purposes
in this course, we are mostly going to just
be using the brush tool to draw and the eraser tool
to erase, nothing fancy. They're located here and here. Or you can hit B and E on the keyboard to switch
between them respectively, which helps speeds up the
process when actually drawing. Hitting L on the keyboard will bring us up the Lasso tool, which will allow us to draw a shape around what we
want and then we've made a selection which we can
alter in any way we want. For example, we can scale it up, scale it down,
corner pin it, etc. Over on the right-hand side
is the Properties tab. With the Tool tab selected, we can change what brush we want and how we
want to use it. You can do some cool
things with it, but I would recommend
these settings for this particular animation. You want to make sure that this use pressure
option is selected. This will allow you to create varying line widths
when drawing by adding or removing pressure with your tablet
pen when drawing, which in my opinion makes for more natural looking drawings. Of course, if you like
them all uniform, uninterrupted line art style, you can turn it off
and draw without it. That's totally fine. I generally keep my brush size around five. I like a medium line thickness, but if you want
something finite, go maybe around 2-3, something thicker,
maybe about 10. Down here we have the
smoothing slider. This will affect how much
animate will correct and curve the brushstrokes
that you make in animate. For example, if it's set to 0, it's pretty much going
to be 1-1 once we draw, and it's going to be a lot
more bumpy or messier. If you have it set to 100, it will make everything
curvier clean and very smooth. Finally, I recommend having zoom size with stage selected, which means that if you zoom in, the brush will
scale accordingly. Otherwise it will
stay the same size, resulting in either a too
big brush when zoomed out, or a too small one
when zoomed in. Sync settings with eraser just makes everything
easier too, so I would recommend
putting that on too. Below is the timeline where the actual animation
keyframe information is. For example, if we
draw a shape on this latest keyframe and then right-click on the
empty block next to it, hit Insert Blank Keyframe, and draw another shape. We now have two separate
drawings on the same layer at different points in time,
in different keyframes. One block represents one frame, which are 24 frames a
second is 124 of a second. You can drag these around to position them however you want. The circle, if the block
indicates the start of a new drawing and if it extends out here
and it's all blank, it means it's just
going to hold on this circle drawing for however long you have this full
rectangle here. Of course, we are going to
be working with many layers, so to create a new layer, we want to hit this
Plus box here, and to delete one
with that layer, you want to go on highlighted, hit the Trash can icon here. These are pretty much all the basic features
that we are going to be using to get started with
drawing in our project. These are pretty standard
universal settings, but when it comes to
things like brush style, frame rates, etc, it will depend on the individual
style of the creator. If you're fairly comfortable
with the basics of animate or you want to try
it in future projects, make sure to consider
your own animations, and what you want to do
with them stylistically. We're all ready
to go. Join me in the next video where
we're going to do the most important step
of this whole process. Drawing those three main
keyframes that will form the backbone of
our entire animation. Let's get started. [MUSIC]
6. Main Keyframes: Let's begin the
process of actually creating our main keyframes. We are going to
take our storyboard sketches that we
made in Lesson 4 and turn them into two
or three solid drawings that look like this. These will form the basis
of our entire animation, and I promise you this
is the most drawing you're going to do
in a single video. Before we actually
start drawing, it's important to
have an idea of how you're going to
approach things. I would start by
renaming this layer here Construction
drawings and then begin sketching out
your idle pose or the pose that will be seen the most throughout the animation. This will typically be
either the first or last. In my case, it's the last, so I'm going to start
there and work backwards. Let's start sketching
this first pose. These can be simple wire
frames or detailed sketches, whatever you feel the
most comfortable with. But it's important to
get this step right. In particular, pay attention to the proportions
and the posing. It's better to make a mistake
here that you can fix in this sloppy chicken scratch setting than to notice
it later down the line. I like to start with
the skeleton poses and then do a second layer of
more detailed sketching. Let's look the bottom
reference layer by hitting the padlock. This way when we draw
our line art layers, we won't accidentally draw on or over the construction layer, which I've done before, it'll happen to you, it
gets really annoying. Once this is done, I like to fully complete
the line art of this main frame as it can help give a fuller reference
for the later frames. Now before we draw the line art, I think it's a good idea to
try to think about which parts are going to be moving separately with follow through, overlapping action, anticipation,
those kinds of things. In this example, I
think her hair and her clothing are going to
be fairly free-flowing. They're going to
be moving fairly independently from
the rest of her body. So I'm going to make
three line art layers. Take your time with this. Try to make it as
smooth as possible. But don't be afraid
to "cheat" such as resizing or repositioning
sections like this. If you feel an arm is pretty good but just needs
to be slightly stretched or slightly rotated or repositioned, just do it. Some purists might
say that this is not good for draftsmanship
or anything like that, but this is a
time-saving tip class. So anytime saving tips are okay. I think this is totally fine. Now that I've
completed the body, I'm going to now start on the
hair and I'm glad that I've made that separate layer
because now I can do this. But if you've run into
the problem like I did, where actually in this example I didn't make one for the shirt, you can easily separate layers, especially at this early stage, by selecting the lasso tool, you can hit "L" on the keyboard, drawing around the area
you want to cut out, and then simply
Ctrl+X and Ctrl+V, which simply cut and paste and make sure to put
this on your new layer. After you've made
this main pose, I'd recommend taking a breather, even sleeping on it to make sure that you're 100 percent happy with it because this is going to be what the audience
sees the most. We've come back from
our lunch break or it's the next day, and we're going to move
on to the next frame. Now for this one, you
have a few options. You can either decide
to go straight to the next pose or move
to the final pose. There's no real
right way to do it. I personally like to get
the extremes down place. If this is your first frame, you can create a new keyframe by dragging the playhead across, clicking and dragging
down the column like this to highlight all the
layers you want to create, which in this case
is all of them, and then right clicking
"Insert Blank Keyframe". If this is your last
frame like mine, then still click and drag down, selecting the whole column, click and drag across
to the right-hand side, which will automatically
make a blank keyframe and move out
keyframe information over to the side like this. While we're at it, hit "Ctrl" and this yellow
line should pop up, and click and drag that just to extend how long this
keyframe will play out. In this big chunk of
blank keyframe here, I'm going to add another
blank keyframe like so. As technically,
this animation is going to snot without
her in frame, so I need some blank white space here at the beginning
to get the full effect. We want to make sure that
onion skinning is on. Onion skinning is
what allows us to see frames before and
after while we draw, which is invaluable for
maintaining consistency. To turn on onion skinning, click on these two circles
up here and we'll have a blue and a green icon which
moves with the playhead. We can extend the
range of these by clicking and dragging
these like so. Just like with the main frame, we're going to start sketching
out this extreme pose. For these next two, I want to get both of
the construction frames down before starting
the line art. This will let us
alter the drawings in these early stages as we see fit through testing the motion. Now if we turn on the
loop playback button, which you can select here or hit "Alt+Shift+L" and
extend this out, it's going to loop this section every
time we hit "Enter". So let's see what
we got. I would play around with the
timings of this. Just like before, moving
these sections around until you get the
held timings for what feels about right. Consider your style and
what feeling you want, whether faster or slower
would work better, and settle on something
that works for you. Now that we're happy
with the motion, let's go ahead and
finish up the line art. [MUSIC] With those three drawings, we have completed our keyframes
for this main project. I really want to stress
that it's important to get these three drawings right. You want to spend
a lot of time and making sure they're
solidly drawn, you're happy with them
because these are going to form the foundation of
everything else we do. If there's something,
some little tiny mistake, or something you're
not happy with it you notice later down the line, it's going to be very
difficult to correct it later rather
than doing it here. As I said before, now's a
good time to take a breather, to sit on it, maybe sleep on it, come back a little bit later, check to see if
there's anything that really stands out to you
that you don't really like, just so you can come back
with a fresh perspective. Remember, look at your own
animations and figure out exactly what it is that needs to be shown with
these three keyframes, what three key poses are going
to best sell your motion. It might look a
little bit janky, but you should be able to
tell what is happening just by those three
key poses alone. Really sit down and think, are my three poses
selling the motion alone? Please see me in the
next lesson where we will cover basic skewing. [MUSIC]
7. Basic Skewing: In this lesson, we're
going to go over basic skewing and start to form our foundation of
how we are going to manipulate these three drawings. To clarify what I
mean by skewing, this is taking an existing
drawing or image and simply altering it or
distorting it slightly, usually by stretching
it, scaling it, slanting it, or
cone appending it. To visualize this, let's
use our old friend, the bouncing ball animation. For the impact frame, when the ball sort of squashes
when it hits the ground, if we didn't have anytime to
actually draw an ellipse, we could just sort of skew it to simulate that squashed
elliptoid shape. In my experience,
skewing works best for fast motions and between two drawings that are
already fairly similar. I often do this step
actually at the very end. As if you truly
want to save time, it's best to do skewing after all the coloring and extras
have been finalized. However, this step can
add a lot of possess, for lack of a better term, for very little work. I've decided to show it
off here for two reasons. One, as a little
bit of a motivator, you can start to
see some animation going really quickly, and two, because doing this step early, even just as a test can
help you figure out what actually needs new drawings
and what can be fine as is. Remember, the aim of the
game in this course is to do as little
drawing as possible, rest your poor little
carpal tunnel hands. Let's start at the
beginning and move one frame before the next. Select all the frames
that you want to alter, and this time we're going to hit just "insert key frame", not "insert blink keyframe". This will make a
duplicate of the previous key drawing rather
than completely blank. Again, make sure they're
all highlighted. Hit Q, which will bring up the boundary box
and scale options. This is how we can skew
or manipulate our image. For this animation,
I want to squash it down a little bit when her
foot touches the ground. I'm going to alt click and drag the center square of
the top bar here. I'm going to drag it down a little bit to the
side and there we go. With skewing the name of
the game is subtlety. One, because if you
do it too much, people will notice that
it's the same drawing just really skewed and two, because too far can mess
with the vector data and animate and you can get weird
little glitches like this. Let's repeat the same thing, but on the next key drawing, making sure to add a new key and all the layers we
want and this time, leave this new one alone and
step back to the old one. Let's go with that
overshoot principle that I mentioned in the previous
lesson and squash her down. Let's go ahead again one
frame and this time I want to overshoot a little
bit more coming back up. Imagine like with a bouncing
ball there is once again, this sort of shoot back force. Because she dropped in
sort of this direction, I want her to sort of bounce up slightly towards this direction. It's also good to
imagine things in arcs. Yeah, think of the
physics of it, even if it's cartoon physics, just think of the physics of it. Let's go ahead and do one
more just a little sort of settle in slightly with some
easing in or easing out. Actually, just before
we play this back, I want to go back to the fall. I just want to make a duplicate of her falling and drag her up a little bit so you
can sort of see her legs start to drop down, move it just a little bit out of focus just so you can get it a little bit more of the fall
before it actually happens. If we play that back, we can see we've pretty much
solved the illusion of her dropping so much just by
altering these two drawings. Let's do the exact
same thing for the next drawing remembering to make new keyframes when needed. It can be difficult
to keep track of everything so if
you feel like it, you can label your main
keys by selecting them, going to the properties tab, hit "label", and
type in the name. Remember to keep some of
those animation principles like anticipation in
the back of your mind. In this case, I want to add
an anticipation frame before she sort of spruces backup
like a frog preparing to leap. Again, consider arcs, ease in and out, overshoot those sorts of things. Feel free to mess around
with the exact timing of the frames by
clicking and dragging. You can do it on
twos or even threes, or you can mix and match. Make sure they hold
for as long as feels comfortable
and if in doubt, just go with your gut. When skewing your animation, try to think about
how much you need. Is this a big arching
movement that needs a big overshoot or
something small and subtle. Do I need just a single
skew frame to imply motion or many ease in and out frames to make
it feel smoother. It will depend on
each case so keep these things in mind
when experimenting. As you can see with about
five minutes of work, we've turned this into this. Skewing is a powerful tool. It has its limits
such as only really selling fast motions
for slow motions, you're going to
need more drawings. But if you're in a pinch
or just want to spruce up what feels like too
few drawing slightly, it's an absolute lifesaver. If you were down to the wire
and the client was happy, you could even call this done. However, there are a
few more things we can add to make it even
more full of pizzazz. I need a better word than that, but it will make the
hand drawing nature of this shine without
doing too much drawing. Remember, that's the
name of the game. Join me in the next lesson where I will be covering one of my favorite features of
animation, smear frames. Hope to see you there. [MUSIC]
8. Smear Frames: [MUSIC] Now we move on to one of my favorite parts of
animation, smear frames. Smear frames refer to those frames of
animation that a very exaggerated or stretched in order to replicate motion blur. For example, let's
say you have a shape that's moving across the
screen very quickly. You could add just
several frames of that same shape
directly in-between, but this makes it
look very stiff. Instead, we could put a single smear frame
of a stretched oval, and this will make it feel
much more organic and alive. Smears can vary from the
subtle to the extreme, and can sometimes lead
to awkward moments to pause on all to
take a screenshot on. But I think that they are a very valuable and
important technique to use. Let's go over some of it now. How much you use smearing
depends on several factors, what the action
is, the art style, the overall tone, and mood of the piece. For example, if you're
doing something very wacky and comedic with
lots of big motions, then you can go all out and
create some insane smears. But if it's something
quieter, dramatic, and serious with a very
realistic odd style, then it might not
be appropriate to use any smears at all. Let's go over some
smear techniques. Probably the simplest is
an extension of skewing, and that is to simply
stretch a drawing. For example, using the
same skewing principle, we can make a keyframe of
the crouching drawing, stretch it up to where her head roughly ends up in
the next frame, and if we play that back, we have a nice, flexible, stretchy,
smooth motion. That was a lot of adjectives. Smear is a very much a
matter of personal taste. Try it out on your own and see what motions you
can come up with. Stretching has its
limits though, as realistically, only the parts that are moving
should be smeared. For example, say you have a long rectangle standing
up that is falling over. The base of the rectangle is
barely moving in position, so it wouldn't make much sense
to stretch this path out. However, the top of it
moves considerably, so it would be
better this frame to form a more of a triangle shape. Testing out with basing shapes like this can help simplify the motion or make things clear what should
actually be stretched. For example, if you chose
the falling over prompt, imagine the head as the
top of this rectangle, it's going to blow
more than their feet. For my main piece, I've decided that I want
it to be subtle, I don't want that much smearing and I want a thumbs up
at the end to look a little goofy in contrast to the rest of a cool
and confident pose. I'm going to move
my finished hand pose over towards the
end of the animation, create a blank keyframe on this hand layer and then
with onion skinning, just try out a few shapes. The great thing about
smearing is that you can get pretty fast
and loose with the drawing leading to some absolutely
wild-looking poses. This blob on its own, it looks nothing like an arm and you'd be embarrassed to share
this drawing to a friend or family member, but when played,
it does wonders. I'm going to make a midway
key of sorts with her arm extending like this,
again, anticipation frame. Then I'm going to add
two more smears as her hand comes down with
another overshoot frame. Remember to always
be keeping some of those 12 principles in mind. In the second smear
I have done here, you can see another tick that
I use a lot with smearing. Let's call it trailing for now. Instead of the crazy
stretchy, blobby shapes, you draw a fairly solid drawing, erase some of it, and then considering the
direction it's moving in, fill in with these directional
blobs in that space. This is a good thing
to use if you're using a few smears in a
row as it hints much more as to what the full actual shape
of the object is. For example, in the man
getting hit by the ball, you don't really get to
see that bowl still, it's always in motion. Doing it like this with those directional
blobs will still give the viewer
enough of that hint as to what the
object actually is. After playing around with
the timing and adding a few skewed ease
in and out frames, I think this is pretty good. This example, I don't
want to go overboard, but there's still a few
more smearing techniques that we can go over. Another very simple
one is speed lines. Let's go back to the beginning
when she's falling down, and to give it a sense of gravity along with some
trailing of course, you can see I've already
gone ahead and done this, I'm going to add a handful of lines in the direction
she is falling. Pay attention to
where the extremes of the corners are for
the starting point. For example, her limbs feel
pretty appropriate to have some lines or two
trailing out behind them. You can even draw over her body and cross
over the line naught, but use this sparingly. In certain circumstances
and again, depending on the
tone of the piece, you can even get
away with a frame of nothing but speed lines. For example, when this man jumps back up from getting
knocked down, the frame between him on
the ground and him shaking his fist is just a
bunch of arched lines. Again, by itself, this looks pretty goofy, but when played, you
don't even notice it. The final technique is to draw a duplicates of sudden
elements or edges, such as eyes, hands, the edge of the face, etc. Almost like an echo effect. This is great for implying intense shaking or repetitive
motions back and forth. For example, maybe in
the catch animation, the character rattles a bit from the shier effort required
to stop the ball's motion. Smear frames take little bit of time to get your head around. But I think once
you master them, they are one of the most
fun things in all of 2D animations to
actually animate. It will depend on the
piece, on the tone, on the actual motion itself, exactly how much
smearing is necessary, which technique you should use. Again, please look at
your animation and decide how stretchy
can I get with this? Or alternatively, how much
can I get away with this? Smearing is one of those
elements of 2D animation where your actual skill as
a draftsman or just like how well you can draw an image isn't
really as important as your intuition as an animator for what's
going to sell the motion. Because oftentimes a smear frame does not look well drawn, but when you play it
back, it's seamless. Join me in the next video
where we are going to be covering idle poses, hope to see you them. [MUSIC].
9. Idle Posing: Now we move on to idle posing, which is a very important step. Most of the time when creating a piece of animation like this, this character in there standing
or idle pose is probably going to be seen for longer
than the animation lasts for, leading you having
to stretch out and hold on this frame for quite
a long period of time. This can look a little
awkward and stiff, especially if it's held for
an extremely long time, let's say 10 seconds or more. So let's go over
a few little tips and tricks you can use to make this single standing pose just feel a little
bit more alive. Probably the simplest
and most common one is making them blink. Sometimes this
alone is enough to sell that they're not
just a cardboard cutout. An average blink animation
only needs two extra drawings, eyes half-closed and
eyes fully closed. I recommend making a
new layer and drawing our new eye poses on top
of the base drawing. We have to be careful
to make sure they have blink keyframes both
before and after it, so that we don't cover the
original once it's done. This really should be
done at the very end of the process after coloring. For now, I'm just going to put white underneath
and fix it later. Luckily, to paint
under our line art, we don't need to
make a new layer. We can go up to the
Properties tab, make sure the Tool tab
is selected and click on the brush mode drop-down menu and change it to paint behind, which means that every
new brushstroke we add will be painted
under everything else. Once that is done we have a simple and clean
blinking animation that we can copy and paste
as many times as we want. But to go a step further, I like to use blinks to hide changes in facial expressions. Let's say after this, I
want it to look smug, like she was just
like, "Oh yeah, did you see this [inaudible]?
I'm pretty cool." First I'm going to create my new facial expression on
the blink keyframe after the full closed frame and
then later go back and change that eyes closed frame to make it a more neutral expression. We can go even further
and use a little skewing, adding a keyframe
on the main drawing and making a very subtle
bump frame or tuck. We play this back, I think that looks pretty good. This technique can
be incredibly subtly powerful and can be used
any number of times. For example, imagine a
character on a phone call. We could use this
technique to have a very wide range of emotions
go across their face, like they're having the
most serious phone call of their entire life. So think about in your own
animations for this exercise. How does your character feel
after all is said and done, after they caught that ball, after they got knocked down, are they happy, sad? Is there a change in
their expression? You can use this technique to make it pop just that
little bit extra. Another technique we can
utilize is the boiling line. This is a neat little
effect where the line art wiggles in place. Think something like Dr.
Katz or [inaudible]. This is another effect where
it will be case by case, a more comedic, fast, and loose style will
be perfect for it. Or it's something more serious, it could be inappropriate. The most organic
way of achieving this style is pretty simple. Simply take your idle drawing and just for the purposes
of demonstration, I'm going to merge all of
these into one layer by selecting all of the keyframes
here, hitting control C, making a new layer, and hitting Paste, which will put all
of our information together onto one nice
clean line of drawing. So we've taken the idle drawing and going two frames forward, making a new blink keyframe. You want to trace over it using
the onion skinning tools. You'll want to trace
this drawing twice. Make sure when you do the
second trace to do it to your original drawing so
it will be even closer and then simply loop
these three drawings on twos and you've got
something like this. The subtler you want the effect, the more accurate
you will need to be. But if you want something
wild like this, you can go pretty haphazardly
and create something that looks pretty cool
depending on the art style. With this technique,
if you change the poses ever so slightly, you can make some
nice little loops. For example, you can make a laughing animation
just by raising the chest face up and down and making the mouth shape
larger and smaller, or show a character
struggling to lift something. There are many, many ways
you can use this technique. Hopefully now you'll be able
to look at you're piece of animation and see the moments where the character is idling, where the character is pausing, and apply a few little
tricks just to make it seem a little less stiff. Especially if you're
making something that's very dialog heavy and explain a video that has lots of texts and this kind of thing, and the actual length
of the video is more important than
the animation itself, these sort can be
absolutely necessary. Join me in the next video
where we're going to go over one of the more flashy
steps that will really make it stop to
pop in adding follow through to animate the
hair and the clothing. Hope to see you there. [MUSIC]
10. Follow Through & Overlapping Action: [MUSIC] Let's make
our piece really shine by adding some
follow through and overlapping action on
the hair and clothing. This is going to be the
most drawing that we do outside of the main
three key frames. But trust me, when
I say it's going to more than makeup for it. For a quick refresher
on this dual principle, it might be helpful
to think of it as the inertia principle. Let's say you have a flagpole on wheels and you suddenly
stop the pole moving. The flag is going
to continue to move forward due to
physics before being pulled back because
of gravity and vice versa if we start moving
it again suddenly. It's a very important
principle for generating realistic motion but smart application of
it is also one of the easiest ways to
cut down on workload. Let's start with hair. A couple of things to consider. The amount of follow
through is going to depend on a couple of things; the force and speed
of the motion, the direction, and the
length of the hair. The faster the motion, the more drag or inertia there is going to
be. Very simple. The longer the hair, the more curve and complicated motion
there is going to be, because the closer the
hair is to the scalp, the less it will move. For example, someone with a medium-length bob cut is only going to waive slightly for a brief moment and likely
not change shape much and someone with a very short cut probably isn't going
to move at all. But someone with a long
mane or a long ponytail, it's going to be a lot
longer and chaotic, possibly with several
pendulum swings and curves. As for the direction,
the hair will drag with the edges
pointing towards the opposite direction of the main action and once
the main action finishes, the hair will then
catch up and then some. For my main animation, let's start with the drop-down. I'm going to start by clearing all my key-frames on
the hair layer between the point her foot touches down and when she
comes to a stop. I'm also going to draw a temporary red
arrow so I can keep my direction in mind and with onion skinning on,
start drawing. With this, I'm
personally going to draw this straighter head to give
it more of an organic feel. But if you feel more comfortable drawing this pose to pose, that's perfectly okay too. As I draw each of these, I'm always keeping in mind
that the closer to the scalp, the sooner it's motion
is going to end. So as early as the
second or third frame, the top of her head will
already have started to settle while their ends
are still falling. I'm going to start these on ones and as it gets
closer to the end, I'm going to slow
it down onto twos. The exact length of time this whole animation
will take will depend on you'll gut feeling. Feel free to go back and add or remove frames based on what feels right and mix
things on ones and twos. Don't be afraid to use a
skewing frame here and there, especially for
easing in and out. Remember, we're trying to save
as much time as possible. Let's play this back. Wow, it's a world of
difference, isn't it? Let's do the same thing
for when she jumps up. This time due to the smear
frame that we have here, I don't really see any point
in drawing anything new. Let's start from
this point and clear all the frames on the hair
layer up until the end pose. First I'm going to draw her hair very straight and heavy with that initial drag and then have the middle and end
start to curl up. I want this to have
a very wavy and bouncy and stretchy feel. Remember, the longer the hair, the heavier it is too. Let's play the whole thing back. Wow, we're starting to
make a L'Oreal commercial. See how much life this adds. It is possible to overestimate, so don't go too far on this. If the hair just kept bouncing back and forth over
and over and over again, it would really highlight
that the main drawing is, well, just not moving at all. Try to keep that in mind. Now we can also add follow
through to the clothes, though it has a more
limited application and there are two more
limitations to consider; the type of clothing and
multiple points of contact. The material and how
tight the clothing is will change depending
on the animation. For example, a long like summer
dress is going to bellow and flow in the wind whereas tight leather
jeans will not. Unlike hair, which only has the scalp as the
point of contact. Clothes have multiple, such as the arms, chest, ankles, etc. A good rule of thumb is
that only jackets, dresses, and loose t-shirts will ever
really need follow through, which is why I only drew her jacket on the
separate layer. My approach of the jacket
is essentially the same as the hair, just
more constrained. I'm starting by having these
parts that are closer to her arm settle
first as she falls, and then when she hops backup, having it flare up for a moment
before coming back down. Clothes can be a little
more difficult than hair because drawing a
realistic fold is tough to convey as even in very simple animations and simple drawing styles like this, so subtlety is king here. I'm only going to be drawing
two or three more frames. Follow through is
amazing and it is the most important technique for creating believable
motion in my opinion. It takes a fair amount of
investment, but trust me, when I say it's well worth
it and it'll make everything just feel more dynamic
and fluid in the end. It gives the illusion of having more unique frames
and fluid motion than you've actually put in and so one one of those
like wow principles. It was one of the ones when I first figured out how to use it, that it really changed the
nature of my animations. Look at your animation
and consider your motion, consider the direction of your motion and
consider which parts of your character can move
separately from the main action. Join me in the next video where we're going to go
over a principle we've been subconsciously
doing this whole time, but we're just going to
make it more literal in the forefront and that
is secondary action. Hope to see you there. [MUSIC]
11. Secondary Action: Final principle we're
going to talk about in this course is secondary action. Now we've been doing a
subconscious application of this all throughout
this course. But I just wanted to go over it here just
so you can think of a few more ways
you might be able to apply it to your animation. Secondary action refers to any motion that supports
the main motion. For example, if the
main motion is a punch, the secondary action might
be what the character does with his other arm
or his facial expression. It's a great way to add
personality invariants to your characters. In my standard boxer example, he's got a very rigid
posture and face, hinting that he's focused
and professional. If he make his other
arm go flailing, it now implies
he's a newbie with bad form or maybe
he's showing off. If we top it off
with a sleazy grin, we've now made a completely
different character. We didn't change the
main action at all, the punches exactly the same. But these three clips feel
very differently to each other due entirely to
the secondary action. In my main clip, I already have several examples of
secondary action. Thumbs up at the end or her change of smug
facial expression. I'm pretty happy with these. I'm not really going
to add anything new. But if I wanted to, I could change them and
create a new feeling. For example, I could change her expression
throughout to have her eyes always closed like this is taking
a lot of effort. Or I could keep her arm lazily at the side to show that
she's very nonchalant. She's not actually taking
any of this very seriously. Like I said, we've been doing this subconsciously all course. But now's the time to
really try and sell it. Look at your animation. Is there a limb you can
reposition slightly? Is there a different
facial expression you could give them? Is there something you could do with another
part of their body? Just add a little bit of extra
character and really sell. This is a different
person through the main prompts that
I put together. I think secondary action will be the thing that
ensures that even if everybody ends up
choosing the same prompt, which you will submit,
but no two animations submitted in the project
gallery will look the same. Join me in next video
where we are going to lock this baby down
and add some color. Hope to see you there. [MUSIC]
12. Colouring: [MUSIC] Let's color
this bad boy. Now I'm going to
say something here, even though I've set only a
single video of the coloring, never underestimate
how much time coloring is going to take. I see animators do it all the time and I do
it all the time, where you get to the end of
the project and you've been going gung-ho this entire time. You are only giving yourself a day or as little bit of time for coloring and then you're rushing to get something
out by the deadline. It's faster and easier in
vector software like Animate, which have really
powerful bucket fill tool options
and their like, and of course, it
depends on the level of detail in your piece. Something simpler is going to be quicker than
something more detailed. But even then I would set aside at least 2/3 of the
time it took you to animate this whole
thing and put it at the end to give you
enough time for coloring, just so you have some leeway. You don't want coloring
be the thing that destroys you at the very
end of the project. There is so much to talk about
color, too much in fact, that I don't feel right even beginning going
into the facets of color theory since it requires
a whole another series. For this video, I'm
going to be keeping the color very minimal. I'm using no shading
and I'm going to use the exact colors from my
character design sheet. But think about
what type of color scheme you want to use. Do you want no shading
a little or a lot? Do you want a lot of
colors in effects, or do you want a more
monochromatic look? Do you want it to be brightly
saturated or soft pastels and muted tones? It will of course depend
on your art style. Something very
geometric and simple will benefit from
being flatly colored. Something more detailed and realistic might
need more colors. Even this isn't
an ironclad rule, sometimes if there
is a lot of motion, even a detailed art style looks better with fewer shadows. My advice for this
exercise would be to go with as little
to no shading as possible as it will just distract a little
bit too much from what the point of
this course is about. If you're struggling to come
up with some color ideas, I recommend a site and an
app called coolors.co, which allows you to
do many cool things. The main one being
the generation of a five-tone color scheme at random with a simple
press of the space bar. It will also give you
the hexadecimal codes so if you like what you see, you can just import them directly into your
program of choice. First things first, we need
to clean up this line note, since it's a bit messy and
all over the place right now. Essentially, before we
want to start coloring, we want all our
major lines to be connected to make
filling them in easier. There are two ways to do this, both with pros and cons. The first is to consolidate
all our layers into one. Start by going over
the whole sequence and erasing any areas where
the lines might overlap, such as hair and clothing or any limbs that you've put
onto a separate layer. Make it all look like it's just one neat, uninterrupted drawing. Once they are all
nice and clean, delete any unused layers such as the original construction
lines or the like, select all the layers and
right-click "Merge layers." This will technically
turn everything into a symbol where in order to fill you're going to have to
double-click on the symbol when the blue bounding box appears and then going and color up, and since I haven't really
covered symbols or bitmap, so I'm editing in the
image in the series. If you feel a little bit more comfortable with just
what we've done before, then I recommend selecting the
keyframe and going modify, break apart, and do
this for all of them. It'll be a little bit tedious, but it might save you
headaches down the line. The benefits of
this method is that everything is nice and
clean on a single layer, allowing you to just move
forward when coloring. The downside is that with our
limited animation tricks, you'll end up having
to color things twice or multiple times. For example, at the end of
the first hair motion here, even though the base
layer is a static image, it's repeated in the
one keyframe after it, so you'll have to
color it in twice. Now you can get around this
by doing the coloring of those static pace frames first, and then going back and
doing your skewing and adding all the extra bits and pieces, that's totally fine. But for the sake of
clarity in this series, I have done it linearly so if you're following along with me, then you'll have to probably
double up. Sorry about that. It also makes it a
little less flexible if you decide to change an
element in the line note. Let's say if you want to
play around with the timing, adding or removing some frames of the hair of the jacket, this one is best chosen
for when you are 100 percent certain
that you're finished. The other option is to
simply keep it in layers. For this one, instead of
erasing the overlapping lines, you want to close them over points where
they will be hidden. If we hide certain layers, we can see that
things like the hair, the arms, etc, have these huge gaps so we
just want to connect them up. Since they'll all be
hidden by other layers, you don't have to
be accurate at all. Usually, I just do this
quick lazy blob shape. Once all the layers are
successfully closed off and making sure that all the
layers are from top-down, so for example, her hair is supposed to be the
very back layer, so let's just move
that down there, you can begin coloring. This method is a
little bit messier in terms of the
timeline but allows greater control of a motion if you decide to
change these things. Lets you hold onto your keyframes without
having to recolor them. Either of these methods is fine, I use them interchangeably based on I got feelings
for this course, I've done it with
the first method of making everything
onto a single layer. But you'll be able
to decide which is best for you and your animation. We're really lucky in
Animate that we have a very powerful bucket fill
tool effects for coloring. Unlike the one in Photoshop, because it's a roster program, sometimes pixels
aren't always perfect. Because Animate is
a vector program, it will always be colored
in perfectly to the line. You simply select your
tool, your color, hover over the closed space
on the layer that you want, click, and too
easy, you're done. It is very important, however, for these lines to
be fully closed. If they are even a
little bit open, it will either color parts that shouldn't have been filled, or it won't fill anything. If you still have some gaps at this stage as you
most likely will, I have so many throughout here. You can either fill in the line notes by going back
to the black coloring over. You can drag with
the point of fill to expand and just close
it off a little bit, or make sure that the pen
tool is set to paint behind, and using the color
you want to fill, just plot down a line
or a little dot or two to close it off and
then hit the paint bucket. If you want to add shading, by the way, this is
the way to do it. By drawing a line with
paint behind set on where you want the
shadows to start and end, and then simply fill it in with your base color and
your shaded color. Now it's simply the
tedious process of going forward and filling
in every single frame. Like I said, it's easy to underestimate how much
time this will take. Make sure you set enough
time of it aside to not let coloring be the thing that destroys you just
before the deadline. [MUSIC]. With that, we've fully
colored our piece. It's amazing what a little
bit of color can do to add life and
vibrance to a piece, whether it's just a
little splash against the monochromatic look
or something very vibrant with three times, four times of shading. I really, really want
to stress to you, look how energetic
and vibrant we made our piece using
only three key drawings. I really can't
stress that enough. Again, look at your
piece and figure out what can color do for me? How much color do I need? I'm I overcoloring?
I'm I under coloring? It'll be case-by-case for each individual
piece of animation. Now we're just about finished, whether you're ready to finally export it and put it
up or you want to do a few little compositive things and to add to
effects, that thing. We just need to get
this out of Animate or whatever program
you're using. Please join me in the
next video where we are going to be covering exporting. [MUSIC]
13. Exporting: [MUSIC] Now let's
cover exporting. Animate is actually pretty
good with exporting options. However, it unfortunately
doesn't have some of the same benefits of
the like of Photoshop, After Effects, or
Adobe Premiere Pro with the dynamic link
updating on the fly. If you're using a program
other than Animate, then this exact process
might differ a little bit. But the same principles about file format structures
still apply, so please watch through to get my recommendations for
your final output. First things first,
let's just clean up our timeline a little
bit so that there are no unnecessary layers
that we don't want as they have a tendency
to show up on exports. There are two ways
I recommend to export from Adobe Animate, natively and through
Adobe Media Encoder. Let's cover natively. To do so natively, let's
go to File, Export, Export Movie, and it brings up a very simple save as styled box. Our options here are limited, but old school and powerful. We could save it
as a PNG sequence, which will save literally
every single frame as its own individual image. That if we save into
its own folder, we can import that folder as a grouped image file
almost like a GIF. This method almost never fails, but I would only really
recommend it as a last resort if every other
option has failed, as this is little bit
clunky to work through. You can do it as a
JPEG sequence also, but JPEGs don't support alpha transparency channel
so I don't recommend it. Personally I love to
save as an SWF file. This is a vector file
format instead of a raster file format
like PNG or JPEG, which does mean fewer
programs are going to be able to open or import it. For example, Adobe
Premiere cannot. But it has a huge advantage over raster formats, the resolution. If we look at our PNG image and import it into
another program, in this case After Effects. If we decided we wanted
to make the shot a closeup when we
scale up or zoom in, eventually it's going
to get too pixelated as there was only the regular
HD resolution to work with. But with a vector image, which is all math and data, we can turn on this continuously
rasterized option here. This will mean that we can scale it up as high as we could possibly want and the resolution
will scale accordingly. It won't be an issue at all. It's like an episode of CSI Miami where they
zoom in on a screw, it's like that but
actually real. Though I love SWF files, it has its drawbacks, mainly that it will render everything in your project file. You've got multiple
sections or layers that are turned off
or multiple scenes, let's say because you wanted
to export them separately. You have to separate them into different files and
then export like that. Otherwise, if you just explore
it without separating, your SWF file will
look like this. Yikes. Separating everything
like that can get tedious, so let's look at
the other way to export with Media Encoder. For this one, we want
to go to File, Export, and Export Video, the option below Export Movie. This brings up a
dialogue box that gives us many more
options to play with. First, you can change the resolution here, which is nice. If you decide that you want
to export it in for 4K, you can change that here. There is also a dialog box
that allows us to create either an alpha transparency
channel if you want to use this for compositing or
just fill everything with white if you're not concerned
with stuff like that. Down here, you can select
your scenes to export. Now we didn't go over this in the main clause since we
just did the one motion, but you can create
multiple scenes within the same project file if
you're doing multiple shots. All of my examples that
I've been using throughout this class were
created like this. This is a much better
option if you just want to export one of them
instead of all together. You can also choose just to export a certain section
of frames if you just wanted a
certain endpoint and add point if you wanted to. Finally, down here we have
the codec and file format. There are way too many
of these to go over, so I'm just going
to recommend two. The first is if you
want to export it to After Effects,
or to Premiere, or another program for
compositing or editing, let's say you're not
finished with it yet. In that case, you want
to choose QuickTime and Apple ProRes 4444 with alpha. Although if you didn't
choose alpha transparency, you can just do the
regular Apple ProRes 4444. This will create a high-quality near lossless file
that will allow you to edit and compose without loss of data when
you reexport that. The other option, which is the final
delivery format for uploading and what I recommend across the board
for all programs, is H.264 for the codec and the preset to this
YouTube 1080p HD. This is the format
that I want you to upload your final project as. Whether you're using
Adobe Animate or not, please look at these settings and try to replicate them in whatever exporting
program you're using. Make sure that this open
Media Encoder queue box is checked and that your
destination folder is correct, and then just hit "Export". Let's just go to the folder just to check that it
exported properly. Beautiful. Strictly, this is the end of the animation
section of the course. However, there are a few little compositing
tricks that I want to teach you if
you want to elevate this just that little bit more, plus a couple of other
strategies that I wasn't able to incorporate
into this main example, but then I think are absolutely
vital in the future, especially for planning out not just individual shots but entire scenes using
limited animation. Please stick around
for one final video on other strategies. Let's do it. [MUSIC]
14. Other Strategies: Here at the very
end of the course, I want to go over a few
other final strategies that you can use to improve
your animations. These don't all have
to be used together. In fact, it's impossible to use all of them together
otherwise it gets too cluttered and messy. But especially if you're making entire scenes out of limited
animation, hopefully, you can use some of
these to elevate and save yourself a little bit of
time in what you're doing. Maybe, just maybe, you'll create a bone on in such a way that it looks
like these are all smart auto decisions and not just because you
ran out of time. First, let's go over some color grading and
blending mode tips. I will be using Adobe After
Effects to color these. But many programs have
the exact same layout so please find the equivalent
in your program of choice. I've imported my main animation and for the sake of the example, the stock background
that I found as well. Let's say you think these colors are just a little bit flat. We can use the adjustment
layers to make them really pop. Let's go to layer,
new adjustment layer. An adjustment layer
is a layer that will affect all of the
layers below it. For example, if you put a black and white filter
on an adjustment layer, it will then apply it
to everything below. It's just a very nice, clean, neat way to apply effects
to a lot of layers at once. On this adjustment layer,
we want to go to Effect, Channel, CC composite. Now this effect
is very powerful. It is a little difficult
to explain, but for now, let's just say that what this
has done has copied all of the visual information below the adjustment layer and put it into the
adjustment layer. Essentially now it's acting as a duplicate file or a duplicate layer of
everything below. This is important because
we're going to go to this drop-down box here and change the blending
modes of our layers. Blending modes are
essentially how that layer is going
to be shown and blended over the
others below it in terms of pixels, colors,
brightness, etc. To demonstrate, I'll show you what blending modes look
like on a regular layer. On normal, which is the
standard as the name implies, everything is at 100 percent. But if I were to change it
to multiply, for instance, essentially all of the
white values become invisible and the black ones get burned onto
the layers below. If I choose screen instead, the reverse happens
where all the black becomes invisible and
the white is burned. Generally, I think overlay is the go to blending
mode if you're unsure. It combines screen and
multiply it together, meaning you get these
colors and contrasts and the image just pops
at 50 percent. If we change the blending modes
on our adjustment layers, the ones with that CC
composite effect on, we are essentially
multiplying screening, overlaying or whatever
effect we choose, that layer on top of itself, allowing us to create some very powerful
filters and looks based on what pixels and what color information
we want to be added. Now we have these really
contrasted, interesting look. If it's a bit harsh, I can hit T on the keyboard and change the opacity
to turn it down. We can go further on
this adjustment layer. Let's go to Effect, Generate, Fill, and then choose
a color that we like. This will produce this really interesting tint effect
that we can then play around with and change by changing the blending
modes and capacity. Or we could go to Effect, Generate, Gradient Ramp. Now we're playing around with directional shadows and lighting where we could move
the points around. Maybe the sun is
up here and it's casting higher amounts of
light and shadows down here. Or we could even
add a blur effect, make sure to have repeat
edge pixels on and then if we blur this out with
our blending modes on, we create this soft
balloon lighting look perfect for a
summer or a beach vibe. You can even use all of these effects at
once if you want, by creating individual
adjustment layers and applying these effects in a stack with all these
blending modes on. Now we've turned
what was very flat, simple image into something
that is much more vibrant, full of life. Just like that. Experimenting with
adjustment layers and color effects can completely change and elevate
the tone of the piece. It's well-worth even
setting aside just 10, 20 minutes at the end to play around with a variety
of combinations. After Effects is a
whole other beast and I know it
intimidates some people. However, if you want
to get into it, I have already created
a whole other course on animating any logo
in After Effects, which you can start even if
you've never used it before. Please check that out
if you're interested. Next up is the humble
Ken Burns effect, otherwise known as
panning and zooming. Maybe you have a shot that
needs to hold for a long time, so long that it becomes obvious that this is
just a single drawing. Well, sometimes just a simple
pan or zoom can be enough. Before we do
anything, we want to pre-compose this so that
we can apply all that key frame data to a single layer rather than
all the individual ones. To do that, we just
highlight all of our layers. Right-click, pre-compose,
just name this, whatever is easiest for you. Now we can apply it to as if
it was just a single layer. We can still go into that
layer by double-clicking on it and now we are inside
this new pre-composition. An important thing to
note is always make sure you have a little
bit of visual buffer. For example, if you're going to do these position
pan key frames, you probably want to zoom in a little bit
just so that there is this buffer on the edge of frame so that when you pan across, you don't get any of
these black bars. Let's simply add some position
key frames to this piece. Automatically both of
these two examples just feel subtly different, subtly more full of life. We can go even further
and add parallax. Parallaxing is the effect that the more distant an object is, the slower it appears to move. If you've ever stared
out of a car window and notice that the trees
close to the road zip by, but the mountains
in the distance stay relatively the same. That is called parallaxing. For this, you can just
simply key frame each layer but have them move at
slower and faster rates. For example, the closer
something is to the, well, let's call it a camera even though
isn't the camera. The closer something
is to the camera, the faster it's going to move, and the further away it is, the slower it's going to move. You want to be careful about hiding the seams of the layers. For example, in this one, it would look that she's just
sliding along the ground. It's smarter to simply change the composition so that
her feet are not visible. Let's re-frame it, rescale things up so it's
more of a mid-shot. With just that simple chains, we've made this shot
feel incredibly dynamic with just the single drawing
and a couple of keyframes. Being smart with your shot
composition can allow you to make entire
scenes out of nothing. Let's take an example
of two characters that are having a
very serious talk. If you compose the
shot flat like this, the fact that they aren't
moving will be incredibly obvious and the audience will expect some motion to happen. You're probably going to have to end up doing
a lot of work, otherwise it will
feel like very lazy. But let's split
this shot up into two shots and do an
over-the-shoulder shot, reverse shot close up. Suddenly the scene takes on
a much more dramatic role without adding any extra
character animation. If we go even further and add
in our pan parallax effect, now the tension is absolutely palpable like something
is about to pop off. This can be one area where
studying live-action films and television can actually
be a big help for animation, especially if you're going for big dialogue-heavy
serious scenes. Always keep in mind though
that it's really difficult to get z-axis motion
in 2D animation, especially if you're
strapped for time. Focus mainly on the horizontal
and vertical motions and the shot composition
of live-action films. Sometimes you just have no time at all and your only
option is a cut. But if you know
what you are doing, this can also work to
your advantage by using a film technique known
as the Kuleshov effect. This refers to the idea
that the relationships between shots is what
gives the meaning, not the individual
shots themselves. Here's a classic example. You have a shot of
someone looking, then a shot of a puppy, and then back to
that person smiling. This is a scene of a nice
man looking at a nice puppy. But if we change that
middle shot to something of someone falling over
and hurting themselves, this scene now becomes
one of a jerk, being happy at
others misfortune. We've only changed
the middle shot, but we've completely
changed the meaning. In animation, you can use
the Kuleshov effect to hide that lack of
motion between states. If we add these two frames of this person's face back to
back with no transition. It would look horribly
junky and we would probably need to add in some in-betweens
which could take time. But if we insert a shot of their point of view of
what they're looking at. The audience will 100 percent understand and it will
feel 100 percent natural. Think about ways that you can create the meaning
through the cut. How can you imply motion through the combination of shots rather than actually
having the motion? I personally recommend
checking out the anime, Neon Genesis Evangelion, as it is a masterclass in using limited animation
shot composition, and editing in particular
to tell your story. The first episode is
action-packed and full of dramatic scenes and
lots of things happening. But there's a total of only 1000 drawings throughout
the entire 22 minutes. The final strategy, just
embrace your limitations. Sometimes this is where some of the most memorable and
creative choices come from, and especially for comedy, it can work amazingly. check out this joke from
SpongeBob SquarePants. There are no in-betweens
from Patrick being awake and
him being asleep. But that serves to make the
joke that much funnier. If all else fails, just embrace your limitations
and try to think of ways to make them work for you. How can you make a hard cut funny or impactful or dramatic? How can you make someone sliding or moving
around interesting? [MUSIC] I really
want to stress how much I believe that
limited animation is not lazy or cheap or bad or any other negative adjective that people want to
throw towards it. In many ways, I'm
often more impressed by a well-executed piece
of limited animation, than I am with a
full animated piece. Because of course, the
full animation piece has a lot of talent and creativity and a lot of
effort and sheer ability. But limited animation piece
one that shines really well, speaks to the creativity and problem-solving skills
of the animator. Sooner or later, every
animator in the world is going to have to make a
piece of limited animation. Rather than deride it or
think it's cheap or like to bemoan yourself that you have to make something that is limited, own it, make it work for you, and make something that
looks really special at the end of the day [MUSIC].
15. Outro: Even though we only had
three drawings every time it is, messes up my wrist. That brings us to the
end of this course. I hope this has been
useful for you and I really hope I have helped you understand that you don't need
every single drawing to be completely unique
in order to get that sparkle of 2D animation. Sure, it's nice and
whenever you can do it, please go for it. But in certain real-world
practical applications, it's sometimes
just not feasible. I hope that you've
been able to get a few little tips and tricks along the way that can help
you in your further career. The point of this
exercise isn't that every single time
you should only make animation using only
three drawings. More so just to help
you understand that there are ways that
you can show motion. There are ways that you
can tell the story without creating new drawings or without creating more headaches
for yourself. Over the course of this series, we went over the 12
principles of animation, as well as some other limited
animation principles and how to leverage them
best for your animation. Like I said in the beginning, I still believe that animation
is a wonderful medium, only limited by imagination, but unfortunately time as well. Hopefully, now you are able
to leverage the power of those techniques to use
your time most effectively, to let the imagination
part do its thing. Thank you very much
for being through the course and I look forward to seeing all your wonderful,
amazing animations. [MUSIC]
Jayden
