Transcripts
1. Welcome!: Welcome to this class on how to animate camera moves. My name is Johannes Fast and I'm a traditional animator from Sweden, currently living in Canada. Have you ever watched your favorite animated TV show and wondered how they made those camera moves look so good? Or maybe you've seen some of my work and you're curious to know how I made it. In this class, I'm going to teach you step-by-step how to animate camera moves. With the techniques taught in this class, you'll be animating your first camera moves in no time. We'll look at what makes a camera move move, and how to apply this to our own work. I'll show you some tips and tricks on how to improve your drawing skills to make animating things like this easier. We'll then take the leap and try animating our first camera move. We'll progressively step up the complexity of our camera moves and we'll apply what we learned in each lesson to the next. After each lesson, I'll give you an assignment where you practice what you learned in the previous lesson and apply it to your own work. After you finish each assignment, please share it in the student project folder so I can give you feedback. I love to see students helping students. Sharing your works helps us all learn from each other. If you encounter anything difficult or if you learn something amazing, please make a post in the discussion tab and share your difficulties and successes. If you're looking for something a bit easier to start with, I'd recommend you checking out my class on the basics of traditional animation, or maybe one of my effects classes to warm you up. Finally, if you found this class helpful, please leave a review and let me know what you think. Follow me here on Skillshare to make sure you don't miss my next class. I'll see you in the first lesson.
2. 12 Month Giveaway!: To celebrate the release of this course, I'm doing a 12-month Skillshare Premium giveaway. The only thing you need to do to enter in the draw is to post an assignment in the student project folder. The winner will be selected one month after the publishing date of this class. Good luck.
3. Parallax: What is parallax? Parallax is the perspective shift that we can observe between an object and its background as our viewing point changes. This might sound very complex, but it's actually very simple. Imagine you're looking out of a car window, and you'll notice at the mountains far in the distance seem to move a lot less than the trees in the field next to the road. You'll also notice that the lamp posts along the road slip by much much faster compared to the trees out in the field. A simple way to observe parallax where you're sitting right now if you stretch your arm out in front of you and point your index fingers straight up. Then close one eye, observe the finger, and then blink back and forth in-between each eye and watch as the finger appears to change location back and forth in relation to the background. As you can see, this effect is something we'll observe. It's a phenomenon that helps give us depth perception. Now to animate camera moves, we simply as apply this effect to our own work. Like in this case, I animated the signs and move at one speed. I have the mid-ground moving a bit slower, and the buildings in the far background is barely moving at all in relation to the mid-ground and foreground. The same principles have been applied to this scene here. Here you can observe how the foreground is moving in relationship to the mid-ground and how the mid-ground is moving in relation to the background. Now that you know what parallax is, Let's move on to our next subject.
4. Perspective: Another important part to camera moves is perspective. As the viewer or the object moves, the perspective of the object changes. A simple way to break this down is to imagine a cube traveling across your field of view. You'll start out by seeing one side of the cube and as a cube travels towards the mid section, you'll see less and less of that side. As the cube crosses the midsection, you'll start seeing the other side of the cube. The further away it travels, the more of that side you'll see. The last thing I wanted to talk about regarding perspective is size change. We all know that an object looks smaller and smaller the further away it gets from us. But this is something worth mentioning because I sometimes see beginning animators forgetting the fact that the objects and characters exist in 3D space, even though they're 2D animated. Adding depth movement by just making your subject gets smaller or bigger, helps bring life to your camera moves. Now, let's move on to the next lesson.
5. Tips! : If you find yourself struggling to convey depth in your drawings when you add them in your camera moves, here are some quick tips on exercises I recommend doing on a daily basis. First, I recommend practicing placing boxes and other shapes in perspective. To practice this, I recommend looking at one, two, and three-point perspective. This will help break down your drawings into simple techniques using vanishing points. There's a great free website called drawabox.com with tons of exercises on drawing shapes in perspective. For any 2D animator, I heavily recommend doing daily figure drawing exercises. Learning to draw the human body in different poses, angles, and depth will help train you in conveying depth and perspective in your own animations. This is something I practice every day and often multiple times throughout the day. To do this, I recommend the website a Line of Action. Here you can generate your own figure drawing lessons. Now, let's look at our first camera move.
6. Simple Camera Moves: Let's start out by looking at the simplest form of camera moves. That being this move where the main animation is happening in the background. Our main object is just slightly wobbling back and forth to convey the movement of the camera. To make it easier for me to animate this jet, I made it into something called a symbol. Symbols allow us to put several layers into one single object. In this case here, I have my symbol of the jet. I can then go into it. Inside here, I've animated the flame. This makes it so that I can animate my flame in place here. Then in our main scene, I can move this around and the flame will follow. I'll quickly show you how to do this. Start out by making a new layer. On this layer here, I'm just going to do a scribble and then I'm going to select this scribble and go into Modify, and then click "Convert to Symbol." Then I can name it here. Make sure that this is set to Graphic. Then I hit "Okay", and now our drawing here has been made into a symbol. Now, we can double-click on this, and now we're inside the symbol. To see your hierarchy, you can look here. Here, we can see that we're inside the jet symbol. Here, we have our scribble. Then inside here, you can do your main artwork, and you can add more layers and add animations on top. Then that will track when you're outside. Now, let's look at how to animate this camera movement. I start out by just adding a simple background like that. Then I'm going to make a new layer on top of our background here. That will be our speed lines layer. Now, to animate our camera move, I'm just going to start drawing in a few speed lines here on our first frame. I'm going to start doing my first speed lines here. Of course, they're going to go in the same direction as our plane. I'm just going to randomly add in a few lines here. Here, we've got our first frame. Then I'm going to cut this layer up and delete that. Then I'm going to cut this up into twos. Now, I'm going to go ahead to our next frame. I'm going to turn on our new skinning like that. Now, I'm going to do my next frame here. For this frame, depending on how fast we want this action to be, I could either make this completely random. That will make it so that this feels extremely fast. But I don't want it to feel like it's going super-fast. So I'm going to make a few frames where I'm hinting towards where the previous lines were. In this case of the line over here, I'm going to make one line that is here, so it's traveling backward. This will also help us sell the idea that we're traveling in this direction. Because if the moment is too random, it can be hard for the eye to understand what direction we're traveling in. Then I'm going to do the same here. I'm going to make this as travels backward a bit. The same here. For the lines that were close to the edge in the previous frame, I'm just going to let them disappear. Then I'm going to add a few more lines, that is coming in to the scene here now. Here's our two first frames. Now, I'm going to go to our next frame and I'm going to do the same. I'm going to keep ease some some of the speed lines. The ones that are already down here, I'm just going to let them disappear. Then I'm just going to go in and add some random lines coming in here. Here's how it's looking with our first three frames. As you can see, yes, with these three frames, we're already selling the effect that this airplane is traveling. I'm just going to go ahead and add a few more frames so the loop isn't as apparent. I'm just going to keep going like before. Here's our speed line loop. Now, I'm just going to duplicate this loop and space it out on the timeline and then animate, we can do that simply by dragging here and holding Alt and then dragging these frames out like this. Here's our extended loop. To finish up this camera move, I'm just going to add a slight movement of this plane going side to side and back and forth. To do that, I'm just going to go to our next frame here and cut this frame. Then I'm going to use my arrow keys to slightly nudge this downwards into the side. Then I'll go to our next frame. I'm going to do the same. Then turn my own is getting on here. To make this easier to see, I'm going to turn off our background and that click this button here. That makes it so that our art turns into line mode here. This will be a lot easier for us to see now. Then I'm just going to keep going here, nudging this downwards into the side here. Then I'm going to ease this movement in. Now, I'm going to pick another direction. I'm going to make it start going backwards and back up. This is how it's looking. I'm just going to keep doing this, and I'm going to make sure that every time it changes direction, I want to ease that in and ease it out. Otherwise, it's going to feel like it's bouncing and hitting an edge and then going back. Because we're flying through the air here, we want to make it slowly ease in and out as it's changing direction. Now, I'm going to ease this in. I'm going to make each frame here a little bit less. Then I'm going to start easing out and go in the opposite direction. Then I can speed this up a bit. This is how it's looking after we've added a bit of shake on our plane here. As you can see here, adding this slight wobble to our main object really helps to tie together this movement with our background. That's how I animate our simple camera move.
7. Assignment 1: For your first assignment, I'd like you to animate a camera movie using the techniques I just showed you. You can use a design I used in this example, or you can create your own design to animate. Feel free to play around with the subject. It doesn't have to be an airplane. It could be an arrow, a ball, or whatever fun object you can come up with. Just make sure to keep it simple, because we will gradually step up the difficulty with each assignment. Once you're done with your assignment, please upload it into the student project folder so I can give feedback on it. I'm looking forward to seeing what you create.
8. Forward Moving Cameras: Now, I'm going to show you how to animate a simple dollying camera move. The dolly shot gets its name from the cart that you would mount the camera on. This cart will then usually be put on rail tracks so you could push the camera back and forth as you are filming. The difference with a dolly shot and a zoom shot is that with the dolly, the environment moves with the camera, and with the zoom shot, we're just changing our lens and pushing forward to the subject, thus, the environment around will not change perspective. Like any good chef, I've prepared an animation to show you what we're going to make. I'm going to show you how to do this on a quite short shot. But the techniques used in this lesson can be applied to a longer movement where you have a camera flying along the ground towards your subject. Now, to animate this camera move, I'm going to start out by cutting up our frames. I'm going to go forward it to our end and cut these up. I found that when I'm animating a move like this where I know where the move is starting and ending, it's easier to plan my camera move by doing the key poses first and then filling in the in-betweens. I'm going to start out by placing our final position of our subject here. I'm going to grab this and scale this up and place it where I want it, somewhere around there. Then I'm going to draw in this ground plane here. As the camera is traveling towards the subject, I'm going to make the ground bend down a bit like this. This gives us this cool effect of a simulated lens distortion as we're getting closer to our subject. Now, I'm going to go ahead and do our mid-ground layer. I've already prepared and made this into a symbol so it's easier for me to quickly scale this and place it. Then I'm going to go ahead and do my background layer. This will move a lot less compared to our midground. Here, we have our key poses. Now, I'm going to go ahead and hide these layers, and only focus on our subject. I find that a lot easier to do one part at a time. If you're animating a character or say a vehicle or anything complex like that, I find that it's a lot easier to break this down into one simple shape and do the move on that shape first and then apply your design later. My idea with this camera move, is that we're quickly going to build up speed and then we're going to ease out into our final position. One thing to keep in mind when you're animating camera moves is, that objects that are further away from you will look like they're moving slower than they actually are. I'm going to start out by easing this object out of its original position. I'm clicking this button here to be able to see the outline of my field drawing here. Then I'm going to go ahead to my next frame here. I'm going to scale this up and move it to where I want it. Then I'm going to start speeding this up like that so we have a movement that is going like this. One thing that is really important when you're animating camera moves is to make sure that you keep your easing really smooth. It's really easy for your animation to start looking very jenky if you're not careful with how you are placing your frames. I'm going to keep going here and I' gradually making this speed up. Now, I'm going to start making it speed up even more here. Let's see what we have this far. I'm going to keep going and I'm spacing this out now further and further away from the previous frame. Now, when we are getting closer to our final position here, I'm going to start easing this out. I'm always making sure that I'm placing my frame correctly in between the previous frame. You don't want your frame to end up here now. Always make sure that you're placing your frame the correct position. Let's see what we have. Here, we have the movement of our main object. Now, I'm going to go ahead and start drawing in the ground. When I do this, I'm going to match the movement of the ground to the movement of our main object here. I'm going to cut this up and delete these frames, and then I'm going to cut this layer up into every other frame. In the beginning, I'm just going to copy this previous frame and paste it. Then I'm going to scale it up ever so slightly and move it downwards. Then I'm going to copy this frame again, paste it, scale it a little bit more, and move it towards our keyframe here. The same principle here, I'm making sure that I'm erasing this out evenly and matching the movement of our main subject. Now as we're speeding up here, I'm going to start drawing in the frames by hand. The reason why I copy paste in the beginning, and I will do the same in the end, is because it makes sure that my line is perfectly straight here. It's easy to make this wobble quite a lot when you're doing very, very small movements. Now as I'm drawing the ground plane here, I'm making it start to flatten out towards our final position here. I'm going to keep drawing in my ground plane here. Now we're starting to ease into the final position here. I'm making sure that I'm placing my drawing exactly in between the previous one and our final one. Now for less frames here where the ground plane is easing into its final position, I'm going to go ahead and copy the last frame here and do this backwards. This makes sure that my ground plane isn't wobbling too much. Here we have our main subject and our ground plane. Now I'm going to go ahead and animate our midground layer. Because our midground layer is a symbol layer, I'm going to show you an easy technique to ease this in that is very useful when we're doing very small movements. Because I've keyed this out, I can simply just let the program do the in-betweens for me. To do that, I'm just going to go to insert and create classic tween. The program has now automatically in-between the frames for us. But as you can see, it's a completely straight ease, so we want to tweak this and make sure that we're matching the easing that we drew in on our main subject. To do that, I'm going just go ahead and pause this and click this layer here, and that will open our tweening menu. I will then go ahead and click this pen here and that will give us a graph editor where we can select the curve of our ease. Making our graph look like this here, we can see that we're starting out slow, we're then picking up speed and then we're slowing into our final position. We can then play this and make sure that it's matching our movement. I think we need to make this a bit steeper. As you can see, finding your perfect ease takes time, especially with a complex subject like camera moves. It's a lot of trial and error and testing things out and seeing what works and what doesn't work. Don't be discouraged if you don't get it down on the first try. On complex scenes, I can sometimes do 10 to 20 different roughs just trying to find the correct speed of the movement. Here we have our tween midground. But as you can see, the midground layer is now on ones and I want to make sure that everything is animated on twos in this project. To do that, I'm just going to right-click on this layer here and go over here and this will split this layer up into twos like that. Now I'm going to go ahead and do the same thing for the background layer. I'm going to click this layer here and go into insert, create classic tween. I'm then going to make sure that I've selected the first frame here, and now the beauty with animate is that our previous ease has now been saved as a custom ease. We can go into our classic ease here, go to custom and select our last ease here. That will now apply the same easing curve that we did on our midground layer to our background layer. Then I'm going to go ahead and just split this up and now we can see our final animation. Now, if we want to convey that this is a really fast movement, we can go ahead and add some speed lines to our animation. I'm going to make a new layer here, split this up. Then on our fast frames here, we can draw in some speed lines. I'm making sure to point them to the center of our composition here. Here me is doing what we did in the last lesson. I'm drawing in my lines and then I'm hinting towards where they came from. Here we have some really rough speed lines. Here I showed you a very simple way of doing this camera move. But you can use this technique and build on it. You can add side-to-side movement. The camera can go up, down wherever you want it to. The only thing you need to do is to make sure that you're drawing your perspective changing of your ground and your subject. When it comes to the background, you often don't really have to redraw the perspective-changing. A good example is looking at a lot of animations and you will see that the background plane is usually just a single painting that they're sliding back and forth and up and down. That's how I would break down a camera move like this.
9. Assignment 2: For your second assignment, I want you to animate your own doling camera move. Feel free to play around with it. You can make it as long or as short as you want. You can even try adding side-to-side movement or up and down movement to your camera. It doesn't have to go straight to the subject. Once you're done with your assignment, please upload it into the Student Project folder so I can give feedback on it. Good luck.
10. Anime Style Camera Moves: So for this lesson we're going to take a look at how to animate this kind of anime style camera move. This is one of my favorite camera moves to animate. Instead of planning it out, we're just going to use our intuition and animate straight ahead, but we're going to keep the principles from the previous lessons in mind as we do this. So what are we going to do is we're going to use a shape and a tail of this bird to convey the camera move for us instead of animating complex background. Here I prepared my first drawing. The idea here is that this energy bird is going to come fly around and get close to the camera here and then it's going to fly away into the distance. So animating this camera move, we want to use the tail here on this energy bird to convey where this movement is going. If I want the bird to travel this way here, I want this part to go this way, but I want the tail here to be pushed backwards. I'm going to go ahead and draw my second frame here. I'm going to roughly place in my main shape here. I'm going to make it get bigger because the idea is that we are traveling towards the camera here. Then I'm going to make this tail here disappear in this direction. I'm being really loose and rough when I do this shape here, that will help us get this organic feeling in the curves. As this line is traveling away from us, we want to make sure that we're making the line thinner and thinner, and the parts that are closer to us are also slowly going to sort out. Here we have our second drawing, and because the bird is close to the camera now I'm making the movements here quite small. As it's going around, I'm drawing the next frame here, a bit bigger as it's getting even closer to the camera. This part here is being pushed backwards, and same with the tail here. We keep pushing this backwards and slowly making it smaller as it's going away into the distance. As you probably notice is that, even though we haven't planned this out, I'm still making this follow an arc here and I'm treating this tail here as a wave motion being pushed out. The key here is that we have a very clear path that this is traveling along, otherwise, we will get a very jittery movement. I'm making it bigger here as it's getting closer to the camera. We want to keep playing to see what we have so we make sure that we're placing our lines at the correct place. Now as this is whipping around here, I'm going to make this move a bit faster, because I'm going to push this further out here. I'm going to draw this going out of frame. Then I'm going to treat this hair as a wave movement. So as its whipping around here in a circle, I'm going to push this outwards. This tail now, is going to travel like this, and that is going to help convey this movement that we're traveling towards us or away from us. Now I'm going to draw this bird coming back in here, and now the idea is that this is going to go and travel away from us like that. I keep pushing this wave motion out from the middle. Now I'm going to draw this bird flying further away from us here. Same here, I'm going to make the tail get pushed out this way. Because the tail is close to us here, I want to make sure that I make it big enough. Then I'm going to ease this out here like that. We're getting this spiraling motion of the tail here. I want to keep our easing in mind. We had this slow movement here and then it's starting to whip around and now I want to make this movement speed up. I'm going to make this bird smaller here as it's traveling away from us and I'm going to make the tail spiral up here. Then I'm making the tail wider, the closer to the camera it is. Now I'm going to make this bird go this way and spiral inwards. I'm going to draw it smaller here and I'm going to keep making this tail go this way, but I'm going to make this tail here get pushed this way. We're having a wave motion pushing away from the bird here. Now for our next frame here, I'm going to draw the bird right there. As I mentioned in previous lessons, when things are further away from us, even though they're traveling fast, it looks like they're moving at a much shorter distance. I'm making this main shape here and not move too much, and then I'm letting that tail here convey the action. Now you might wonder why I'm changing direction here, that is because I'm imagining that this part here is now over here. To clarify, this is what it would look like if we could see this part. I'm going to keep drawing our main shape in here and then I'm going to join my tail here following this wave motion. The trick to make this movement feel really dynamic is to really exaggerate the shapes that are close to the camera here. So we make the tail get really big the closer to the edge it gets. Now a trick we can do to make this feel really nice and dynamic is to add some slow movements to this right here. We can make a few frames where the wave motion here appears to slow down a bit. To do that, we just draw our frames closer together like this. I'm going to do one more frame here where we're moving just a bit slower at the end here, but we're still going quite fast in how far we're separating the distance here. Then we can add some fast parts now. So now I'm going to draw this a bit further away and then I'm going to make the movement here a lot bigger. Then I'm going to really exaggerate the size of the tail here as it gets close to camera. Then these parts that are close to the camera, I'm going to make them ease out as they disappear out here. What makes this kind of movement feel really nice is that we have a lot of hectic and faster stuff happening towards the middle here, and this stuff here that is further out get some time to move out of the way. When we combine that fast and slow movement, that's when we get this really beautiful wave motion. Now I'm going to keep making this disappear slowly here, but I'm going to keep the movement towards the middle quite fast. I'm just tweaking the arc here for this one drawing, making sure that we're following a smooth arc as it goes around here. Now I'm going to add my few last frames here before this is, suppose, explode so I'm going to make this twirl in really fast. I'm going to do this corkscrew-style spin here. Then, I'm making my tail really big here towards the sides, and I'm making it thinner and thinner the closer we get. Now I'm just going to ease out our spiral here. I'm imagining that the bolt has now exploded and we're just seeing this final movement of the tail as the camera is flying towards the explosion. I'm going to keep easing this out here. Let's take a look at what we have. Here we have the basis of this type of camera move. Now we can just go ahead and add some explosions at the end here. I'm going to do an anime style sparkle. I'm making a new layer here, and I'm going to do this little star shapes here. I'm going to add some circles at different sizes, and then I'm going to add these star shapes to a few of them. For this kind of effect, I usually want to do it all once because it's so fast. For our next frame here, I'm going to make it bigger. I'm going to add star signs here. I'm going to add some more of these round ones. We can also add some of these energy bursts like this. Then want to ease these shapes out. I'm going to add a few more frames here to this little sparkles. I'm just going to add a few of these random little circles here and there. That will help us get that sparkle effect. Here's our finished animated energy bolt. Now, if we want to, we could go ahead and add some speed lines to this or maybe a background. I'm going to show you how we could go ahead and animate maybe our star background. To do that, I'm just going to make a new layer here and put it at the bottom, and I'm just going to roughly draw in some stars here. I'm not going to make this too complicated for the purpose of showing, but I'm quickly going to show you now how we can expand this background back and forth to convey this camera move. Here, we have our stars, and I'm going to cut this layer up. Then on the next frame here, I'm just going to stop here and we're going to look at where the tail is going, and then we're going to match this by moving our stars. Then I'm going to go ahead and add some more stars here on this side as we're panning. Then for our next frame, we're going to go ahead and do it the same. We're just moving this and matching it with the movement of our tail. Then to convey that the camera is traveling away or towards us, we either scale this up or scale it down. Here, I wanted to feel like the camera is flying backwards, so I'm going to grab these stars here. I'm going to put them to the side but we're also going to make them smaller. Then I'm just going to copy this for the sake of showing here and copy and paste this around so we have a bigger background to move. As the camera is flying backwards here, we cannot make these stars go even smaller and move them to the side. I want to move this frame a bit more to that side and same with this one here. Now that we're starting to whip around here, we want these stars to act as speed lines and come out from the middle here and travel outwards. I'm going to grab these stars, paste them here, and then I'm going to start moving them out from the middle. Then for the next frame here, let's going to start doing this by hand. The idea here now is that we're going really fast, so they are traveling away from the middle at a really high rate. For the next frame, we're going to treat this more as speed lines. We're only going to see maybe two frames of these as they whip by. I'm adding new ones coming out from the center here. Now, I'm going to make them go way faster out from the middle. We can even add a little streaks to them to make them feel like they're starting to become speed lines because of how fast it's moving. Now, as the ball is picking up speed, we could even start dragging these and adding a motion blur effect. In man how it looks in Star Wars when they're jumping into warp drive. We're basically as adding speed lines at this point. As they're getting closer to the edge here, I'm going to make them longer. I miss adding them randomly here and there, but at some places, I want to make sure that we are hinting towards where they came from, so we have one here and then we have the other one here. We can play around but just keeping in mind that we want to make sure that we're feeling like the movement is going inwards towards the middle. Here's our finished animate style action camera move.
11. Assignment 3: For this assignment, I want you to try animating this loose anime style camera move. I'd like you to try animating this straight ahead, but if you struggle, don't be afraid to rough it out first. Once you're done, please share it in the student project folder. I'm looking forward to seeing what you make.
12. Action Camera Moves : Now I'm going to show you how I animate a tracking camera move like the one you see here. I'm going to break this scene down into a few key principles that you will then be able to apply to your own work. Here I've prepared a file where I have my jet fighter as a symbol, and I also have a layer for my missile separate here. When we animate a camera move like this, we want to make sure that we have a clear arc that our object is following. I'm going to go ahead and make a new layer and then draw out a rough arc for how this muscle is going to travel. Here I have my rough arc. This is the movement I'm imagining this missile will take. Now an easy way to test out your camera move quickly is to animate a ball reference before you start applying your design. I'm going to go ahead and make another layer here and cut this up into multiple frames. Then I'm going to start animating a ball traveling along this arc here. There's a few things we want to keep in mind when we start animating our reference here. The first being that an object that comes closer to us will appear bigger and as it goes away, it will appear smaller. As we animate our reference here, I'm also going to start animating the scaling of this ball that will then correspond to the scaling of the missile. We also want to keep in mind that as an object travels along an arc when it comes to these corners here, we want to make sure that we put more frames here because we're traveling further away from us to make sure that we're perceiving that the object is traveling away from us and keeping the same speed that it has coming into this arc here. I'm going to start animating my ball reference here now. I'm imagining that the easing will be something like this. We're starting out slow here and then we're falling down, and then we're going to stick in this area for just a little bit. Then we're going to shoot off and gain speed, I'm going to flow along the arc, and then as we come around here, we're going to have what will feel like a slower part because we're traveling away from us. Then as we come around here, we're going to start speeding up again. I'm going to start out by animating my second frame here. I'm going to turn onion skinning so we can see our previous frame. I'm going to move this a bit down and you scaled it up ever so slightly like that. Then I'm going to do the same for our third frame here, move it down, scale it up. Then as we're starting to come down here, I'm going to slowly make this speedup. At the same time, I'm slowly making this get larger as is coming closer to the camera. I'm going to keep going, moving a bit further now and scaling it up a bit more. I'm going to do the same and move it even more and place it out. This is what we have this far. Now I want to add a bit of an ease here before the missile takes off. What I'm doing here, is I'm imagining that the engine of the missile is going to fire once it's fallen a bit from the plane. But the missile would keep going at the same speed of the plane because it still has momentum from being attached to the plane. Doing this by easing it in first and giving us a time to rest here is going to make the movement when it shoots away at a high speed feel much more dynamic. We're playing with slow and fast movement here to make our scene feel dynamic. Finding a balance between slow and fast is what's going to make your scene feel really nice. Now I'm going to start slowing in here a bit. But I'm going to keep scaling this up of course, because we're still getting closer to the camera. This is what we have this far. Now since the missile has dropped down here, I want to make the engine kickoff. Before I do that, I want to give it a bit of anticipation so that our movement will read a lot clearer. To do that, I'm going to make the missile level. Start going a bit backwards here. It's starting to lose speed in relation to the jet due to the air slowing it down. Now I'm imagining that the engine of the missile is going to kick in and we're going to shoot off. For my next frame here, I'm going to move the reference along the arc, scale it up a bit more and I'm thinking that we're going to start speeding up here. Now as the missile takes off here, I want the camera to follow this missile. To do that, we need to animate the jet and the background too. I'm going to leave that out until we're done with the ball reference though. But what would happen here is that the jet is going to go further away from us. I'm going to go ahead and go to my next frame here. I'm going to move this along, scale it up because I'm imagining that we're coming closer to the camera here as we're whipping around. Looking at this now we can see that we are moving a bit too slow in the arc here. I'm going to delete this frame here. I'm going to leave this in and see how this looks. Then if our camera moves are going a bit too fast to be readable, but we're finding that our arc and easing is feeling good, we can go in and add some one's later to make sure that our eye can see the movement a lot clearer. Now I'm going to animate us coming into that arc here. Now we will start scaling down again as we're getting further away. I'm adding more frames here so that this turn is readable. Then I'm going to speed up out of the arc. Then same here. I think we want to make this movement a bit faster. I'm going to tweak this reference here and move it further away. Now you can see why it's important to do a reference like this before we start applying our design. Animating camera moves is hard to nail on the first try. Animating a reference like this makes it easier for us to quickly tweak and test our camera move before we start applying the design. Now that we have our finished reference here, I'm just going to go ahead and do a rough of this missile. I'm going to grab my missile layer here and put it at the top and make sure that we can see it clear. I'm going to make this into a symbol here to make it easier for us to animate these first few frames. We can now easily as we move this and scale it. Like I mentioned before, I like using symbols in the beginning of movements like this when something is moving really slow. This makes sure that our finished animation doesn't really boil and it bump around too much. I'm going to go ahead and go to our second frame here and I'm going to cut this up. Now I'm going to follow our ball reference here. I'm going to move this down and scale it up a little. I'm going to go to our next frame. I'm going to keep following the reference like this. I'm just keep going here and following the reference, and we're starting to ease in here. I'm going to turn these layers off and just take a look at how this is looking. Now I'm going to start animating our anticipation. Now as the rocket is taking off, I'm going to animate it so that it's twisting towards us as it comes close, and then it's going to turn around and twist away from us. I'm going to draw in this frame here. I'm going to make it so that the rocket is starting to face us now. If we break this rocket down into a cube right now, we'll have something like this. Now as it comes towards us, I'm going to give it a bit of a shape like this here. It's coming closer. It will look like it's widening out at the top here. It will look like it's narrowing down at the bottom. Then for this frame here, I'm imagining that we're getting really close to camera. I'm just going to animate the end of the rocket here. You can see that I'm using this reference really roughly, interpreting how much we would see here to find what looks the best. Then for our next frame here, I'm going to animate the rocket, starting to twist around here. Now I'm imagining that the rock is starting to face away from us here as it's traveling along the arc. I want to make sure that we're following the arc here as we're coming around. I'm going to keep this drawing rough here, just to make sure that everything is looking good before I do too much. Here I'm imagining that the rocket is now starting to turn more horizontally here. Now, I'm just going to make this rocket align here because I'm imagining that it is so small now we barely going to be able to see any details. Okay. Now let's look at this and see if we need to add some frames anywhere. Looking at this, I think we need to add some frames in this area here as it's twisting around. It's moving a bit too fast for me here. I'm going to turn on my onion skinning and look at the space in between these frames here. I think what I want to do is that I want to add a frame in between this frame here and this frame here. I probably want to move this frame a bit back. I'm going to try out doing something like this. Then I'm going to go in here, extend this frame, cut it up, and make it an empty frame. Then I'm going to draw in a new frame here. Then this frame here, I'm going to just tweak this a bit so it's following the arc a bit here. I keep playing this back to try to identify any problem areas that I can see. I'm still seeing an issue in the curve over in this area. I'm going to go in here, make sure that our arc is clear. I can see here that this frame here needs to turn a bit less away from us as it's coming around. I'm going to go in here now and make this easing a bit slower. I'm going to swap moving these frames a bit closer to each other so that the easing isn't too even as it goes around. I'm going to double-check the scaling here. I think this frame here needs to be a little bit bigger. It's closer to the previous frame here. I'm actually going to try and moving this a bit here so that we have a wider arc. I think I'm going to add one frame more here, in the arc so that will slow down just a bit more before we take off. I'm going to try putting this frame in-between these two frames here. I want us to slow down just a bit before we take off. That will help the take off feel a lot nicer because we have this slow movement before the fast movement, which helps our scene feel way more dynamic. Now, we have a slow release here, short anticipation before we take off, and we whip around. In this whip around, we slow down a bit, and that helps these last frames here feel really fast. Now that I have my rough here, I can sort over this and add my details. I'm just going to rough in the fins here. As we're going around, we can make this missile spin around by tweaking the placement of these fins. Then here, I'm just going to rough in the fins approximately for the rough like that. Now that we have the missile animated, we want to take a look at a jet. I want to make it feel like the camera is following the missile as is dropping. I'm going to make the jet go away in this direction, and that will help make it feel like the missile is coming towards us, and we're following it as it's falling. To do that, I'm going to do the reverse of what we did with the missile here. We have our first frame. Then on our second frame, I'm going to make the jet go up this way, and I'm going to scaling it down a tiny bit in the beginning here. I can go to my next frame. I'm going to make it go up to the corner a little bit more and scale it down. I'm going to keep doing this and matching our missile but in reverse. We want to make sure that we keep playing animation so that we can see what's working and what's not working. Camera moves are really tricky to nail, so we want to keep playing and making sure that we're viewing each part of the animation so that nothing feels out of order. Now, as the missile is slowing down as it coming towards the camera, I still want to keep the jet going away from us at a high speed. You can imagine that the camera is now following the missile at a fixed distance, but the jet will of course keep flying away from us because we're actually falling towards the ground. I'm going to keep making this smaller and smaller and move it away from us faster. Here, we have our jet disappearing. Now, we want to add the horizon to this because the idea here is that we're looking up towards the airplane, and then the missile is falling towards us. As it whips around here, the camera is following for a bit, but then we're staying above the missile and looking down at it towards the ocean. I'm going to make a new layer and I'm going to name this horizon, and then I'm going to step our animation here, and I'm going to figure out when we're going to start seeing the horizon. As the missile is starting to whip around here, and the men at the horizon's going to start coming in from the bottom. On this frame here where we're starting to go around, I'm going to start making the horizon come into view. Then as we're going further around, I'm going to make this start going up even faster. Then I'm going to match the movement and I'm going to start slowing it down a bit. Then as it's taking off, I'm going to animate the horizon going away from us fast. Now, the ocean would completely fill this scene here. This is what we have this far. Now, I'm going to go ahead and add some speed lines. This is going to help convey the speed of this camera move, and it will help convey the way we're traveling. I'm going to make a new layer and cut this out, and then I'm going to apply the same principle that we use before. I'm going to rough in this lines here. For the next frame, I want to hint at where they were coming from and add new ones, and I'm just going to keep adding few of this. Now, as the missile is taking off, we're going to warp the speed lines a bit and that will help us convey the direction we're traveling in. I'm going to draw in this frame here, and then for this frame here where we go in towards the camera, I'm going to start warping these lines a bit. I'm going to pull them inwards in this direction. I'm remaining with the vanishing points of this rocket, and I'm making these lines go towards that point. I'm going to keep doing that here, so I'm going to make these lines go towards where the rocket is pointing. I keep changing the perspective of these lines here as we're warping around. Now I'm going to make these lines go this way here, so we can start going with the rocket. Here as we have twisted around, I'm going to start making these lines travel this way. Now because we're further away from the rocket here, I'm going to make the lines that are closer to it travel a bit slower, and then we can add bigger lines closer to the camera that are going to travel faster. But this is all up to style, so you can experiment with what you find looks good, just make sure that you are trying to match the move of the rocket with your speed lines. I'm just going to change the color of these rough-speed lines so they don't take up too much attention here when we're looking at our rockets. If you feel like there's too many speed lines here, we can just go in and delete a few, and that will make our scene feel a bit less hectic here. Now, for the final part of this scene, I'm going to show you how I would animate the smoke coming from these rockets. I'm going to go ahead and make a new layer under our missile here, and I'm going to cut this up into art frames. Now animating a smoke trail on a scene like this can be quite tricky. But there's one main thing you want to keep in mind, and that is that we want to make sure that our wave motion is clear as the smoke is coming out from the rocket. Here I'm imagining that the ending is starting up, so I'm going to just rough in some smoke or fire here, and then here we're starting to take off. Now I'm going to join a rough wave movement here making sure that I'm always going back towards where we came from. Now the trick is to keep this wave movement going. So I'm going to do something like this here where we have this part here traveling backward, and it's like it's being pushed back here by the force of the engine. We have this part here sticking to its previous location. Just for a moment here. Then here I'm imagining that we have traveled so far from this part, so this would be out of our view. But I want to keep the movement going here and always hint towards where we were. Here I'm imagining that the smoke is traveling towards us here as we're looking at the end of the missile. I'm making this wave motion fast here, and we're just going keep some areas of the wave hinting towards wave warp, and that will help make this smoke trail field really readable. Here I'm reminded that the smoke would be outside of our view, and then here, we're starting to warp around. Then we're going to do the same here now, so I'm adding a bit of a wave motion. Then for our next frame here, I'm hinting toward where we came from, and I'm going to add these dynamic swirls and warps to this wave. As the missile is flying here, the camera is traveling this way with the missile. The smoke here, this part here would be out here, and to make it readable here, we want to make sure that we're placing our wave motion correctly here. Because if we start to go too much back and forth here, it's not going to read like it's the same wave motion. So I'm imagining that this is traveling this way, like this basically, and then I'm adding these wavy swirls in here to make it feel dynamic. This is what we have. This is the basic breakdown of this jet fighter scene. There so many ways of animating these camera moves, and that's why it's one of my favorite things to animate. Using the techniques from the previous lessons, we can play around with this camera move and end up with something new and interesting each time. In the next video, I'll give you your final assignment.
13. Assignment 4: For this final assignment, I want you to try animating a camera move using all the techniques we went through in the previous lessons. I want you to try animating an object that changes perspective as the camera is moving. You could try animating a missile like I did, but feel free to do whatever you can come up with. If you feel stuck, please reach out in the student community. I'd love to help you as best as I can. Once you're done, please share your work in the student project folder and I'm looking forward to seeing what you make.
14. Conclusion: Congratulations, you made it through this course on how to animate camera moves. Hopefully, by now you have the tools needed to start animating your own camera moves. I really hope this class has been helpful for you. Animating camera moves is a complex subject to master so don't feel shy about asking questions in the community or re-watching parts of the class if you feel stuck. I'd really appreciate if you left a review on this class, letting me know what you thought. I've got multiple classes on character animation planned for the future. I want to keep building on this subject on camera moves. So knowing what you like in [inaudible] is super valuable. If you're feeling hungry for more, you can check out some of my other classes. Just head over to my page here on Skillshare and scroll down and here you'll find all of my previous classes. If you share any of the work you make in this class to Instagram, please go ahead and tag me in it so I can see it. Remember to follow me here on Skillshare so you get notified when I post my next class. Thank you so much for taking this class. I hope to see you in the next.
Johannes Fast, 2D Animator
