How To Make Viral Cartoon Animations For Beginners

1. 1.0 Intro: In this course, you're going to learn how to make comedy cartoons. That got me over 1 million views, almost 200,000 likes, and over 6,000 followers on TikTok in just two months, my channel, DRS chicken achieve those numbers by making short cartoons satirizing Formula One motorsport. My hope with this course is to help you achieve similar or even better numbers by making satire cartoons about a popular niche that people want to watch. By the end of this course, not only will you learn my workflow and pipeline for making cartoons at speed, but you'll also put it into practice by recreating this project, which is a satirical, itchy and scratchy episode by substituting itchy and scratchy with two characters in your niche. For copyright reasons, the original itchy, scratchy audio is replaced with my dodgy guitar cover and voice-over. But I'll teach you how to legally at the original audio on TikTok. If you want to see the video with the original audio, check it out on TikTok, the two characters in my video are Christian Horner and totally Wolf, who are two popular characters in Formula One. But again, you'll be swapping them out with your into characters. So in order to make this cartoon, I'm going to teach you how to find a niche to make content about, right? Short scripts for set Content, record the audio for your script. Draw characters and inanimate objects using Adobe Illustrator, animate and lip-sync characters using Adobe character animator, compile it in Adobe After Effects, and finally, upload it onto TikTok. This course is great if you're new to animation, don't know where to start and just wants to learn as quickly as possible how to produce cartoons and share them with the world. This course isn't a comprehensive Adobe Illustrator course or comprehensive After Effects calls or comprehensive course of anything. Clearly, the focus will be on how to make cartoons as quickly as possible instead of how to be really good in each application, I'm more like showing you how to use enough functionalities of each program to put a cartoon together rather than showing you expert techniques in each application. My hope is once you've applied the basics and created the itchy and scratchy cartoon, you'll feel confident and motivated enough to make your own cartoons about your niche that will consistently get you at least tens of thousands of views per video and eventually over 1 million total views and a couple of months. If you love the sound of everything you've just seen, then let's get started by hopping into the next section, which is about thinking of a niche. I'll see you in the course. 2. 2.0 Thinking Of A Niche: What topic or niche Do you want to make your cartoons about? If you answered whatever I feel like or not sure, then keep watching this section to find your niche because it's the single most important thing you have to do before you start anything. If your aim is to grow on TikTok by making quality cartoons, you want to make sure you're making content based on a popular topic. Otherwise there's a risk you'll be making videos that people aren't interested in watching in the first place. The other problem of creating a channel that doesn't have a niche is that people will find your channel and content to random. They'll lose interest and unsubscribe, like with my channel, DRS chicken, that's specific to Formula One content. A lot of my subscribers and viewers are Formula One fans makes sense, right? Make F1 content for F1 fans. But if I start to make content that wildly deviates from F1, like gardening videos or programming tutorials, people will probably unsubscribe for me pretty quickly. So in saying all that, how do you come up with a niche? If you're anything like me and you've got dozens of channel ideas, you need to narrow it down to one so you can focus all your time and energy on it. Give yourself some direction and avoid spreading yourself too thin with too many nations. And in order to identify your niche of basically come up with this four circle Venn diagram, which consists of passion, relevance, speed, and sustainability. In this chapter, you're going to fill in this Venn diagram by identifying things that you're passionate about. Then out of the things you are passionate about, you're going to find a passion that's relevant, aka something people really want to watch. Then we'll identify if we can do this at speed. And finally, with sustainability, can we do this at scale? Whatever intersects between all four circles is what you're going to be making cartoons about. The Venn diagram is going to help you identify your niche. So for the videos in this chapter, we'll go through each circle in detail and you'll need to do a little bit of homework and self-reflection in each part, but I promise you, it'll be worth it, right? Let's deep dive into each of these four circles. 3. 2.1 Passion: So in order to find your niche, the first thing I want you to do is to grab a pen and paper or a Google Doc and lists down the things that you are super-duper passionate about. Things that you either love doing, love researching, or love talking someone's ear off about the reason why we're starting with passion and things you really love is because imagine if things go really well with your channel and in six months time, you've blown up to like 100,000 subscribers and 5 million views and made like 80 videos. 80 videos. Imagine making 80 videos about a topic you don't even like, chances are, you won't even make it to five videos, let alone AT, it'll become like homework or a saddle job that you just learned to resent and give up on over time. That's why it's important to make content about things that you really love, things you enjoy, things that you're passionate about that way, you're always in love with the topic and you can't wait to share your knowledge, opinions, and keep learning more about it at the same time. Now, my list of passions looked something like this. It's almost like a mind map drawn by kindergartener, but yours can look like whatever format, as long as it works for you. As you can see from mine, I loved booze programming, sitcoms, food, tech, stocks, cars, and video games. And then I've gone into more subcategories where you will see Formula One, they're tucked away. Coming up with this list is probably the easiest part of this course. I want you to take your time writing down your passions because again, it's super important and something you shouldn't skip for me, it took an entire afternoon to do. There's no right or wrong answers and no particular pace you should be going yet. Take your time and write down what you love. 4. 2.2 Relevance: The next circle in our Venn diagram is relevant. And what we want to understand from the circle is from our passion niches, which one of them are actually irrelevant, like how popular is our niche, and how many people on TikTok are watching things about this niche. The reason the circle is important is because you don't want to be making content about a niche that people aren't interested in. And in order to have the best chance of growing your channel and audience, you'll want your niche to be relevant and popular so that you can grab a wider audience. It's like casting a humongous fishing net instead of a small one. So what I want you to do now is a bit of research. I want you to download TikTok from the App Store or from Google Play. Create an account by filling in some basic details. And then I want you to tap on the Search button at the top right and type in your niche. I'll do like Formula one. Then go to hashtags. And we go to hashtags because when people post videos, they often add these hashtags to the video description. And every time someone watches that video, the hashtag popularity goes up. So Formula One is really popular, billions of views, which is great. Then what I want you to do is create a spreadsheet and make note of the niche in this example, it's Formula One. Make note of the view count as well. Also write down the neighboring tags with their view count, and this will come in handy much later. Next, let's try a different nation of my lists, like Python. Again, really popular billions of views over several tags, and we'll make note of that on our spreadsheet. Let's try something a little bit more niche like Daytona USA, the arcade racing game. So less popular, hundreds of thousands but not billions. And let's look at something like Heroes of the Storm. Not that popular at all. Play around with your search terms may be for Heroes of the Storm, people were tagging the acronym halts instead of the full name. So keep researching. Now, this is the first section of your colon. You want to call out topics that aren't popular. So by the end of this exercise, you should have niches that you're passionate about and irrelevant and popular. Now, I'm not saying less popular nations aren't going to succeed, but I think it makes it harder to grow because people clearly on interested in watching videos about your niche in the first place. So to increase your chances of success, I want you to be targeting nations that are popular, which you can identify using hashtags. Take your time with this section. Again, there's no right or wrong pace to be going up. Just take your time to do the research. 5. 2.3 Speed: So now that you've identified the niches you're passionate about and you know which ones are popular and relevant. You now want to look at the third circle in our Venn diagram, which is speed. And speed is all about how often you can make a video about your niche. Before you dive straight into making videos, you should ask yourself, how fast can I make a video? Is your aim to produce three cartoons per day? One cartoon per day or one per week? Yeah, believe it or not, there are content creators out there that post three times a day. Crazy, right? So why is speed important? Because assuming your content is quality anecdotally, the more you post, the faster you grow. And that's because with each video you put out, you're giving your audience more opportunity to engage with your content. In other words, like comment, subscribe, and share. And the more engagement you get, the more TikTok pushes your videos to other people. And therefore, the more you grow. Now, if you're new to making videos, it can be hard to estimate how long it takes to make a video, because you won't actually know until you do one. And the first one is always the hardest and the longest. But I think the more videos you create, the more efficient you get at making them. In any case, here are the steps and timelines are used to timebox the creation of a 22/62 comedy cartoon. Step one, write a short script about one-and-a-half hours. Step to storyboard it half an hour, record and edit audio half an hour, draw characters, inanimate objects and backgrounds. One-hour animate and compile 2 h and finally upload half an hour in total, 6 h FYI. These steps here are going to be the table of contents for the rest of our course. Those are just rough timelines. Some videos are quicker to make because maybe you can reuse drawings you've made in the past, or maybe you only have one scene to draw instead of several. Well, maybe writing jokes and scripts will come quicker than other days. Some videos might take longer because you just can't think of jokes or you're struggling to write a script, or you have lots of scenes to draw. But for now, you've got a ballpark of how long each video takes to make. You now need to ask yourself, factoring in all your life commitments, whether that be school, work, family or friends, etc. How often do you want to be making these videos? Let's say if you want to commit to one video per day, you need to ask yourself, do you actually have 6 h or two-and-a-half hours or 2 h of spare time per day to do this, using these six, our timeline example, are you going to wake up 3 h before school or work? To do this, then dedicate another 3 h after school or work. What if you have commitments with family and friends? For me, family and friends will spontaneously asked me out for dinner. So that's like 2 h. I've lost after work, but I generally wake up early so I can commit to working on this for 2 h per day before work starts and an hour afterwards. Therefore, I can really only commit to making a video every two days at best, because 3 h per day, right? Pick a speed that will suit your lifestyle, not the other way around and set a realistic cadence for delivery, whether that be once per day, third day, or week, just be consistent. So there you go. Feel free to adjust these steps and timelines to your process. This is just what I use and it's not a one-size-fits-all approach. Once you figured this section. Now, let's move on to the next step, which is sustainability. 6. 2.4 Sustainability: The last section of the Venn diagram is sustainability. And in this circle, or you have to ask yourself, is, can you make 30 videos of your niche? Now, back to the six-hour process over two days. This is all good and well, for just one video. But can you do this for something like 30 videos over 60 days without burning yourself out. If you spend 3 h per day over 60 days to make 30 videos, can you wave and picture yourself dedicating 180 h towards this? Well, for me, I already had five video ideas in mind and dedicated the remaining 25 based on satirizing and making fun of breaking news in Formula One. Since there's always a new headline each day and a new race every week or second week, I'd always have new things to make fun of. Can you say the same thing for your niche? I'll cover this in more detail when we get to the thinking of a video ideal lesson. But some ideas for video topics could be satirizing new or old products in your niche. Breaking news, maybe a history lesson about someone or something in your niche with a funny spin on it, educational content or even just tutorials. That's already about six subtopics and urination. And if you can make five videos per topic, you've easily covered you 30 videos. Take your time to brainstorm 30 video ideas. The more you can frontload, the better position you'll be in, the less you have to worry about coming up with new content. For me, I came up with a video idea every two days, which was kind of hectic because there were days I couldn't come up with anything. So my creation process slowed down again, front-load as much as possible. Now, you might be wondering why I keep using 30 videos as an example. Well, that's because I think at about 30 videos, you should have padded your channel out with enough content and also gathered enough information about your videos to understand if what you're producing is engaging or not. If after 30 videos, your view and engagement count is still low, There's something you still need to tweak in your content. Whether that be your topic just isn't relevant anymore, or your content quality has improved over 30 videos, you need to be honest with yourself as to why it's not working out. And this is where my journey with DRS chicken came to an end. Yes. I could do 30 videos over two months, but at this point is why I started to feel bored with it. I struggled to come up with new jokes. I was recycling material. I was tired of drawing and I wasn't interested in growing the channel anymore. I guess this was some level of burnout because it just wasn't that much of a passion anymore. When I started DRS chicken, I didn't have this sustainability section in my Venn diagram. Finally lead to add it. After my 30 videos and 60 days, I mean, up to speed, I knew I could do a video every two days and I never thought I'd get tired of writing jokes. But it turns out I did learn from me and be honest and ask yourself, can you make at least 30 videos of your given topic at a sustainable pace by now, after running your ideas through this full circle Venn diagram, you should have a very targeted list of ideas you can pursue for your TikTok. And you're going to pick one to start a new channel for. Congratulations on finding your niche. Give yourself a pat on the back, and perhaps now is a good time to take a break because in the next chapter, we're going to start the writing process. 7. 3.0 Produce The First Scene: Now it's time to produce a cartoon. And by the end of this chapter, you're going to make a parody episode of The Simpsons, itchy and scratchy, but substituting HE and scratchy with characters in your niche for copyright purposes, I can't use the original itchy and scratchy song. So I've just got a guitar recording for now, but I'll show you how to use the original audio on TikTok without copyright issues later. Sorry, that's the video. And in order to make that, I'll walk through the end-to-end video producing framework from start to finish, which involves thinking of a video idea, which we'll be doing in the next video. Writing a short script, recording the audio, drawing the characters, inanimate objects and backgrounds, animating it, compiling it, and finally uploading it onto TikTok. 8. 3.1 Thinking Of A Video Idea: The first thing you need to do is to come up with a video idea. But coming up with a video idea, let alone 30 of them, can be really hard. And what helped me generate ideas every day or every second day was spending 15 to 30 min reading the news and fighting a headline that I could write a script about. Now, my niece was Formula One. I wanted the latest headlines about the drivers, the teams, the races and so forth. And to expose myself to all that stuff, I started by jumping on TikTok and found as many drivers, teams and content creators as I could and watched and followed their content to see what the latest news was and to see if there was a video that I could parody, I then signed up to read it and joined as many Formula One subreddit as I could to check out F1 news and the thoughts and opinions of F1 fans. I also subscribe to several F1 content creators on YouTube and watched this stuff. I subscribe to several Facebook groups that posted news articles or memes about Formula One. And finally, I read the Daily News articles as well. By the time you watch your skim through all this content, you'll probably end up reading or watching a lot of the same headlines. But here's the golden nugget and here's what's going to help you come up with a video idea. In doing that 15 to 30 min of reading and watching, you should have found a bit of news in your niche, triggered your emotions. Maybe while reading an article or watching a content creators video, there was a headline that a the major law, Major feel sympathy or major WTF. Whatever the headline or emotional response was, if you had an emotional reaction to it, right that headline down, because that could be your next video idea. In the next video, I'll bring this emotional response idea to life by showing you the emotional responses, I had to three headlines which helped me come up with three video ideas that went on to get 500,000 views, 150,000 views, and 47,000 views on TikTok. 9. 3.2 Demo - Thinking Of A Video Idea: Picking up where we left off in the last video about using your emotional response to come up with a video idea, I want to show you some examples of emotional responses I had so I can bring this concept to life for you. The first video we'll go through an example of me just reading the latest F1 headlines at the time. There was this incident about F1 Commentator Martin bundle trying to do a quick interview with making the stallion, but her body guards shunt him away, resulting in a really awkward but entertaining live TV interview. And the emotional response I had was absolute cringe. If That's an emotion, Martin brown dog has this tradition of walking up to random celebrities and interviewing them on the race track before the race starts. But I guess making the stallions body guards were having none of it. And if you look up this awkward TV interview on the internet, you just cringe watching it. Had that strong emotional response led me to be like, Yeah, okay, I can make a video out of this. And this is what I created which got me over 500,000 views and 35,000 lights. Nope. Don't recognize anyone here. A bunch of no buddies. Oh, there's someone I think I know. Serena Williams, How are you? Martin? Joke is that all these characters at the start, our famous F1 people like Lewis Hamilton and Daniel Ricardo, But Martin Brando was like, these aren't real celebrities. Then he spots Serena Williams, runs over to her and just like how megan, the stallions bodyguards shunt him away. Serena Williams just knocked him out. So I'm exaggerating the situation. I chose Serena Williams because I believe there's been a couple of times where she's been at a Grand Prix and Martin printers tried to interview her, but she keeps ghosting hidden. Now onto the second example which came from watching the Netflix F1 Series drive to survive. If you finish in first position, you will win the race. A Formula One car has four wheels every 60 s, and then it passes in Formula One. So the main character here is an F1 personality cold, we'll Buxton any features heavily in the Netflix series where he's sitting in front of a great backdrop saying dramatic things that make really good soundbites. The only problem is the stuff he says. It's like stating the obvious. Like you want to start in front because it means you have the 900s are the drivers starting behind you. And it's like, well, duh, but I love we'll Buxton. So I think the Netflix series did them dirty by only including bits of him belaboring the obvious. Anyway, I was really triggered by the commentary. The emotional response I had was like, no way, captain obvious. Just frustration and annoyance followed by, Oh, yeah, I can make a video out of this, which got me over 150,000 views as 10,000 likes. So for this video, I just came up with more useless facts and imitated we'll Buxton. And it seemed to resonate with others so much so that I'm milk to this idea and created two more videos of the same thing, which got another 30,000 views each. So this one idea got me 210,000 views over three videos. Onto the third video example which came from the 20th, 22 F1 Azerbaijan Grand Prix. And here's a headline from it. Basically there's an F1 driver called Yuki Sonata who raises for the alpha towering F1 team. And the rear wing on his cab broke and his team fixed it with duct tape. The reason why that's kind of funny is because F1 is meant to be the epitome of motorsport. There, the fastest and most expensive cars in the world. So to fix it with Genki, old duck tape just goes against the grain of being the epitome of motorsport. Anyway, the emotional response I had two, this was just surprised and laughter. I remember watching the rice and kicking myself, laughing, watching this duck tape being wrapped around this car worth millions of dollars. And again, I thought it would be great to make a video out of it, which got me 47,000 views and 4,000 likes. Why fix your rear wing with expensive tools when you can fix it for cheap at alfalfa towering hardware, we sell every tool to fix your F1 car, like 20 millimeter re winged duck tape for 399.10 millimeter reawakened duck tape for also 399. Actually, we don't sell any other hardware at all, just various sized duct tapes. So for this one, I made a parody commercial of a popular hardware store in Australia called bindings. I instead called alfalfa salary hardware, just to make fun of the F1 team name. High then used Yuki sonata as an employee and add this hardware store or they sell his duck tape and no other hardware. This one is actually my most favorite video. It was just fun merging different tropes into one video. And lastly, coming back to the itchy and scratchy video, I came up with this idea because there's two popular F1 team bosses that constantly bicker with each other. Christian Horner from Red Bull F1 and Toto Wolff from Mercedes F1. What makes this so good is that Christian Horner is shorter and wears blue all the time, just like itchy. And Toto Wolff is tall and wears black and white, just like scratchy. In 2021, these two team bosses were butting heads quite often. And my emotional response was like, well, here we go again. These two are always fighting. So I made two videos out of this itchy and scratchy idea. One with just the intro, which got me 25,000 views, and one with the full episode, which only got like two-and-a-half thousand views. So I don't know, maybe this wasn't a good example to use for the course. Anyway. Hopefully through these four examples, you get an idea of how using your emotional reactions can help you generate video ideas. 10. 3.3 Writing A Script: Okay, so you've got your niche and you've got your video idea. Now it's time to write a short ten to 20 s script. Ten to 20 s is just an indicative length. You can do lower than ten or longer than 20, and heck, you can even upload up to 10 min. But when you factor in how much time and effort it takes to make a video, the old saying less is more definitely applies. In this case, you could make a 60-second script, but spend 6 h drawing in animating, or make a 20-second script and spend 2 h drawing in animating. There's no right or wrong, but my TikToks will usually under 20 s. Once I have the idea in my head, it's now time to put it onto paper. So open up Google Docs and start writing your script. Nothing fancy. Just write down the dialogue in your head onto Google Docs. It doesn't matter if it doesn't make sense yet, as long as you have a rough draft, That's all that matters. And then you can do several revisions until you're satisfied that you're using the right words you want to use and that it flows well, let's use the alpha towering script as an example. The video was 24 s long and there's probably like 50 to 60 words here. I also did this 22nd video of Lewis Hamilton and there's only like 20 words. So you can see that my scripts are pretty basic. It's not a gold standard by any stretch of the imagination, but just write it down. These videos were quite popular as well. So again, sometimes less is more once you've written your script, the next step, which in my opinion is the most important part, is storyboarding. And that's because it'll help you visualize the video, gives you direction on video production in the next section, and roughly lets you budget your time because you know how many scenes you need to draw, animate and compile. If you don't do this part, you are drawing animation and composition steps are just going to take longer because you won't know what to draw an animate when you get to those steps and you'll be fumbling around for direction. Think of the storyboard as your visual plane. Your storyboard is going to look something like a set of comic panels where each scene is a panel. So if you're doing multiple angles of two people having a conversation that's multiple scenes. You'll have to draw an animate. It doesn't need to look fancy. It can be stick figures and really rough drawings in Microsoft Paint. If we use this alfalfa Tower video as an example, I've got about seven scenes or panels here, but only needed to draw like three scenes because our recycled and cut between the three scenes several times from coming up with the video idea to animating and uploading onto TikTok. I think this video took 3 h to make, whilst this Lewis Hamilton video only has one scene which took about 45 min to make. So a bit of a correlation there. More scenes means more time and work, and less scenes means less time and work. The itchy and scratchy video took about 6 h because there was a fair bit of drawing and animating to do. So. That's pretty much how to write a script. Everyone's got different techniques, so don't treat this as a one and only solution. This was just more of a suggestion or something to get you started. Anyway. In the next video, we'll go through the comedy writing techniques that I used for my TikToks. 11. 3.4 Writing Techniques: There's heaps of different ways to make people laugh. And I'm now accomplished comedy writer by any stretch of the imagination. But here's four main techniques that I kept falling back on for DRS chicken, which are imitation slash, mocking, over-exaggeration, misdirection, and combining tropes. Let's break those four techniques down a little more. So starting with imitation or mocking, it's pretty self-explanatory. Take a popular person or character and pretend to be like them. Now, the wheel Buxton video I did is a perfect example of imitation. Like take something they said, like you want to start at the front because it means you have the 900s are the drivers starting behind you. You want to continue with the silliness of it, like finding more useless facts in this example are finding more silly things to say. If you finish in first position, you will win the race. A Formula One car has four wheels every 60 s, and then it passes in Formula One. The next technique is over-exaggeration, which is just taking a subject and going over the top with it. There's heaps of ways to over-exaggerate. Sometimes I like to write a script and then proofread to see where I can exaggerate something. And the mountain bundle video is a good example of this. In real life, Serena Williams, just Gerson. In my video, she knocks him out. There's another video I did where the FIA, the motorsport governing body, declared no jewelry was allowed to be worn when drivers are in the car. And Lewis Hamilton protested this in his own way by turning up to the next press conference, wearing like three watches and to Nicholas's. In all my future videos with soloist Hamilton, I put like ten watchers on each arm in four necklaces on him. As subtle as that is, people pick up on these little Easter eggs. The third is misdirection, and it's great for writing punchlines. So you set up your joke by talking about one thing, but then you end up going in We different direction that's unexpected and surprising to your audience. An example of misdirection, which got me 115,000 views is this headline of lunch stroke getting an upgraded car for the Barcelona Grand Prix whilst his teammates Sebastian ventral didn't. So I set up the joke and set up the audience by making them think that Lance Stroll is going to get proper performance upgrades towards car like a new engine and aerodynamics. But then I use misdirection to give him really useless upgrades like neon lights, spinning hubcaps and a subwoofer in his F1 car. And then at the end, there's also a bit of wordplay about support, which is another technique, a word or phrase having a double meaning. I added this bit in the end because if I remember correctly, in the previous rice before Barcelona, I believe Sebastian Vetter was saying that his team, when supporting him enough. And on a separate note, he hosts who bought underwear on the outside in protests of the FIA mandating what underwear drivers were and weren't allowed to wear in a race. And this brings me on to the last technique, which is combining tropes or combining subjects. From my understanding, a trope is like a familiar object, character, cliche, just a familiar subject that's recognizable by the audience. And example of this is the alpha tower escape, I showed you in the previous video, where I combine the trope of alpha towering fixing the car with duct tape. So one recognizable subject and combining that with the bindings TV commercial, which is another trope. Another example is the itchy and scratchy parity. You are combining familiar characters from The Simpsons with familiar characters from Formula One or your niche. So there you go. These are the four comedy writing techniques I hope you can use in your video. There's obviously many more techniques, but these are the main ones that I used. 12. 4.0 Audio: In this section, we'll cover how to record your voice with good-quality on a budget, had to edit your recorded audio by trimming unwanted parts, removing moving background noise and heavy breathing, and then how to export it to MP3. 13. 4.1 Record Your Voice: Alright, so you've got your script and you know what your characters are going to say. So now you just have to record it. If you're like me, you probably don't have access to professional sound equipment or recording booths. So this section is about how to achieve clean audio on a budget, my recording setup looks like this. I use $170 microphone with $120 a pop filter in my walk in road. If you're on a budget and you don't want to spend $170, you'll find microphone should just be as good. But I highly recommend the $20 a pop filter, which I'll come back to in a moment. The first thing I want to start with here is where you record your audio for voice-overs like Wow, cartoons. You want to do this in a small enclosed area, like a closet or a walk-in robe, because the clothes and other stuff in here will reduce the echoes in your recordings compared to a large empty room where there'll be heaps of reverb, echo and ambient or background noises like cars driving, birds, chirping, or construction, doing voiceovers in a small and quiet room eliminates a lot of that noise and gives you a more professional podcast sound. The next thing I want to cover is recording equipment. Now, I use a tascam DR. 05x, which I bought a few years ago for 170 Aussie dollar. I liked the tascam because the sound quality is amazing for the money and it's portable. If you have a USB microphone like a Blue Yeti, which seems to be popular among strangers. You can use that too, but I don't think the quality is as good as the tascam, or you can even use your phone to record audio. You could try using your webcam as well, but generally speaking, webcam microphones aren't that good. Here's a microphone comparison between the tascam, DR. 05, the Blue Yeti, a Logitech C9 to two, and a Google Pixel foray. You want to start in front because it means you have the 900s are the drivers starting behind you. You want to start in front because it means you have the 19 other drivers starting behind you. You want to start in front because it means you have the 1800s or the drivers starting behind you. You want to start in front because it means you have the 19 other drivers starting behind you. I personally like the sound of the tascam the best. And I think that pixel for a sounds equally as good as well. But if you're on a budget, my advice to you is use what you have and see what the audio quality sounds like when recording in a smaller area. If the audio quality sounds crisp and clear, bother spending up to $200 in equipment, you don't need. Chances are people are going to watch your videos on their phones or on a device with subpar speakers. And they might be in a noisy environment. So their audio quality, regardless of your microphone, will probably all end up sounding the same to your audience. If you're using a USB microphone like the Blue Yeti, I like to use Audacity to record audio. It's also the same software we'll be using to edit our audio. Just download it from Audacity team.org forward slash download, install it, select your input or a microphone device. In this case, it's the Blue Yeti. Press the record button and record yourself. In the next video, we'll go through cutting and snipping to remove extended pauses, remove heavy breathing, and to remove any background noises remaining in your audio. If you have a separate device like I'm using, and the audio records onto the device that you have to copy it over to your computer. And it'll probably be in an MP3 or WAV format. Copy it to a folder where you keep all your cartoon files. The next thing to cover is the pop filter. This is optional but highly recommended. I put the microphone in front of me and use $120 a pop filter in-between me on the microphone. And the reason I use the pop filter is because without it, when you're pronouncing words that have a sound like pop or pool, the microphone picks up this heavy and base e sound, which ruins your voice-overs. But with the pop filter sounds like pop, that heavy sound, it's eliminated. I highly recommend getting one of these and they're pretty affordable to. The last thing to cover off here is volume. You don't need to yell into the microphone, but at the same time, you don't want it to be too soft generally, I think sitting maybe about half a meter away from the microphone and speaking above a normal talking volume is pretty good. But you don't want to be shouting into the microphone because then your audio becomes distorted and choppy. Alright, That covers it for the audio recording step. Don't be afraid to sound silly. Tried different voices, tried imitating other voices and have fun with it. For our itchy and scratchy cartoon, we won't need to record any sound because we'll be ripping the audio from the actual episode. Next up, we're going to edit our audio to remove any heavy breathing that we did into the microphone, as well as any background noises that were picked up during the recording. And to also remove any long pauses so that we get audio that sounds professional and flows really well without any awkward or overextended silences. I'll see you there. 14. 4.2 Edit Audio: Let's move on to editing your audio. This section isn't going to be an in-depth audio editing course because I'm only going to teach you how to edit your audio to remove heavy breathing, and how to remove extended silences, pauses in between takes. So don't expect to be an audio engineer by any stretch of the imagination after this video. This is really just the basics and enough information to produce your own cartoon. Now, the app we're going to use to edit our audio is called Audacity, and it's free to use. You can download it by going to Audacity team.org forward slash download, and then download the app for your operating system. I'm on Windows, so I'll download this one after installing it, opened up Audacity and download and import the MP3 file attached to this video by either dragging the audio into the program or navigating to file, import audio and selecting the file. Awesome, You've now imported your audio onto the timeline as attractive as you can see when you import two files, it goes onto two separate tracks. So each of these lines here are tracks. This is one lane and this is a second lane or a second track. We don't need the second track, so we can just delete it by closing it here. To navigate the audio, you can move the scroll bar left and right here. And you can zoom in by pressing control and moving the scroll wheel, which will zoom into where your mouse is hovering to play the audio, you can use the Play and Stop buttons at the top left here. Or you can just press space bar as the keyboard shortcut. Moving on to editing, Let's start with the easy stuff by removing the background noise and heavy breathing. Now, if you play this track, you'll hear some heavy breathing and some long pauses in here which we're going to remove. You want to start in front because it means you have the 19th are the drivers behind you. So we can hear a long pause and heavy breathing here. And a long pause and heavy breathing here as well. To remove the breathing, what we'll do is select the entire clip by clicking on Select and all. Or you can just press Control a on your keyboard. Then we'll go to Effect noise removal and repair and click on noise gate. This effect removes lower volume noises from your audio and that volume is measured in the 1,000 ft explanation is, I believe gate threshold here says anything below this volume which is currently set to negative 24 db gets removed by the amount in level reduction, which are usually set between negative 12 and negative 18. The rest of these settings, I won't go into detail because they're quite finicky and you probably won't end up using them. These are the settings I use which worked for me all the time since I recorded in a pretty quiet space. For now, let's press Apply and play the audio again. You want to start in front because it means you have the 900s are the drivers behind you. And that's a big difference. You can hear pretty much all the breathing is removed. You can tinker with gate threshold and level reduction if you want if you're still hearing heavy breathing and background noise. But I don't want to go too aggressive on these settings. Otherwise it may cut out other parts of your voice as well. One thing to keep in mind is if you're still hearing unwanted noises after making these changes, what you can do is select a section of the clip with the noise and just cut it out with delinked. Keep in mind that also cuts down the length of the timeline as well. If you want to retain the position of the length of your timeline, you can use split cut, which can be found by going to Edit, remove special and split cut. But we don't want to do that. So let's undo. Alright, so now that we've cleaned up our audio, it's now time to cut and join our recordings so that it flows well without extended silences in-between takes. To do that, all we have to do is just drag and highlight over the timeline where we have pauses that we want to remove. And we'll just press delete. And you want to keep repeating this until you end up with audio where the dialogue timing is constant without long pauses. You'll end up doing this several times until you get the millisecond accuracy that you're often, if there's audio that you need to split onto a second track, you can highlight the audio and press Control X to cut and then press Control V to paste it onto a separate track. Both these tracks will play at the same time. You want to do this, Let's say if you've got two characters talking at the same time like they're arguing, or two characters talking very quickly and keeping it on one track just isn't quick or smooth enough to facilitate that quick conversation. Let's undo that because we want everything on the one track. Let's play this back and see what it sounds like. You want to start in front because it means you have the 900s are the drivers behind you. So it's not perfect, but you get the idea. You just need to keep chopping until you get that perfect flow that you're after. You can also adjust the volume of the audio here as well. But I rarely ever do that here. I usually save that for later in After Effects when I combine all the sound effects, voiceovers, and background music. For now, we'll just leave this as zero. That's really all the audio editing you need. Once you get the hang of it, a ten to 22nd track takes like five to 10 min to edit. So just with a handful of cuts, the dialogue can flow really well, and the noise gate effect has really cleaned up the audio. 15. 4.3 Export Audio: Now that you've finished recording and editing your voice-over, It's now time to export it to MP3. So in Audacity, click on File, Export and Export As MP3. And the format options you want to select. Constant bit rate, 320 k bps quality and stereo channel Mode. Give you a recording, a proper name like voiceover, dot mp3, and press Save. It will take a few seconds for audacity to process and save it. And that's pretty much it. We'll open up our recording in Windows Explorer. You want to start in front because it means you have the 19th are the drivers behind you. And awesome, That seems to be working perfectly. That's it for audio editing. Next up, we'll move into Adobe Illustrator to start drawing characters, inanimate objects, and backgrounds. I'll see you there. 16. 5.0 Drawing: Welcome to the Adobe Illustrator section of the course where you will learn the basics of Illustrator, how to draw a character faces, and then converted 3D objects into 2D to draw any inanimate object you want. For the bodies and mouths. We'll be using free templates from stock photo websites. The reason we're not drawing them manually is because there's heaps of good templates out there, which you can tailor it to your style. And again, the focus of this course is to get you producing cartoons as fast as possible. I think you'll get the most value from this course by learning to draw things that you can find on the Internet, like people's faces and inanimate objects from any angle. In any case, by the end of this section, you will learn all the tools you need to manually draw a body if you really wanted to. The reason we're using Illustrator instead of Photoshop is because when you draw something and try to re-size it in Photoshop, it gets pixelated and grainy because it renders your drawing using bitmaps. And without getting into technical detail, you can re-size bitmaps without losing quality. Illustrator, on the other hand, resizes without losing quality because it uses vectors to render your drawings which never lose quality. There's going to be heaps of moments throughout this course where you want to re-size what you've drawn without sacrificing quality. The only downside is vectors do consume more computing power. But since we're not drawing anything too big or complicated, we shouldn't experience these issues. So to kick off this section, you'll start by learning how to use some of Adobe Illustrator is basic tools like creating rectangles, circles, selection and direct selection, pencil, type reflect, and several others. After that, I'll do a demo of how to use these tools to create backgrounds, objects, and characters from the itchy and scratchy parody, which you can apply to your own videos. Just a pretty face. We're obviously not going to be learning how to use all of illustrators tools because there's just too much ground to cover and you and I probably won't use most of them anyway. Again, this isn't an in-depth Illustrator calls, It's about producing cartoons at speed. That was the introduction to this section of the course. Let's get started with drawing. 17. 5.1 Install Adobe Creative Cloud: The first thing we'll do is install Adobe Creative Cloud, which is kind of like the central hub for Adobe software. We need this to install Illustrator and other Adobe products. So open your browser and type in. Download Adobe Creative Cloud. Click on the first link and then click on free trial. Click on students and teachers because you'll get charged the least amount after your seven day free trial. Individuals is $80 a month. Business is 122, and students and teachers are only 22 a month. Click on Start free trial, and don't forget to cancel your membership before the end of those seven days. Provide any e-mail address and click Continue. Sign into your Google account. Select a payment method, provide an education status. Once you follow the prompts, you should arrive at your Adobe account dashboard. Then click on Explore under Creative Cloud and install the Creative Cloud App on the side. Click Open File. Took this EGS. This part is going to take a few minutes, so I'm just going to fast forward to completion. When it finishes installing the Creative Cloud desktop app will open by itself. Click on done, fantastic. That's the Adobe Creative Cloud Desktop installed. Next up, we're going to install Adobe Illustrator. 18. 5.2 Install Adobe Illustrator: Now that we've got Adobe Creative Cloud Desktop installed, it's now time to install Illustrator. So it can do that by either finding the card in the available in your plan here, or you can go to the top and type in Illustrator, click on the desktop version and install. This part is going to take a few minutes, so I'm just going to fast forward to completion. When it's finished installing, click Open. The first thing you'll see is a welcome screen and you can create a new file by choosing one of the templates here. And since all our videos will be 1920 by 1080, we can just click this one here. Or if you want a different resolution, you can create a new file on the top-left and then manually type in the width and height of your Canvas. Sorry, 1920 by 1080. And click create. Just a quick tour of the application. This whitespace in the middle here is our Canvas where we'll be drawing everything. The left vertical pane here is all our drawing tools which will be going into more detail with throughout these videos. And on the right here is just a quick access pain that we can customize so we can put our most commonly used tools on this right side here. If you need to adjust the size of this Canvas, maybe you changed your mind about 19:20 by 1080. You can click Artboards and change the width and height here. So if we want a square, so 1080 by 1080, we just choose that. And then click Exit to make the UI a bit easier to use. What I want you to do is click on this layers pane at the top and then just drag it all the way to the bottom until you see a blue line at the bottom right of your screen. And drag lays up about halfway to the top. Then the next thing we want easy access to is our color palette. So what we'll do is click on Window and select swatches. Then we'll drag that to the top right so that it fits in the top-right pain. You can remove these other tabs by right-clicking on it and clicking close. We just want to keep properties. Alright, that's it for installing Adobe Illustrator. 19. 5.3 Rectangle and Ellipse: The first tool we're going to learn about is the rectangle tool, easy and straightforward. Click on the Rectangle tool here, which is this box looking icon. If you hover over it, it'll tell you what it is with a short demo of how to use it. Will then go to our Canvas here in the middle and click and drag your mouse like so. And bam, you've created a rectangle, drag it again, and you'll create another one. If you want a curved rectangle, you can drag these dots inside. Now to fill the rectangle, we use the swatch on the top right here. So if you hover over this box, you'll see a fill tool and a stroke tool. So to color in the rectangle, click on the Fill box so that it's in front of the stroke box. And then click a color like red. If you want to change the stroke or the border, then click on the Stroke box so it's facing the front now and no longer behind the fill box. And select a color like orange. If you're lazy like me and you don't want to keep clicking between Fill and Stroke. You can use the keyboard shortcut X to switch between them. So you will see those boxes switch in front to see the rectangle unselected, you can change to the selection tool up here and then clicking a blank area in the canvas. But if you're still in the rectangle tool, you can hold Control on your keyboard and then click away from the object to de-select it. When you let go of control, you will go back to the last tool you used, which is the rectangle tool. I find it much easier to use control. So we'll hold Control and then click on our rectangle again. So you can see we have a rectangle with an orange border. If you want to increase the stroke size, you can do that by going to the control pain. And we can open that up by going to Window and control. Ends with the rectangle still selected will increase the stroke size to whatever you want. Let's go for 20. Next. If you want to create a circle, hover over the square tool again and click and hold the left mouse button until this little sub-menu appears. And select the ellipse tool. Then drag your mouse over the canvas again. And you've created a circle. If you want to create a perfect circle, you can hold shift as you're dragging to create, to create a circle from the center of your mouse position, hold Alt. And then you can hold Shift as well to get that perfect circle again, the same shortcuts applied to the rectangle tool to create a perfect square. That's it for rectangles and ellipses. 20. 5.4 Selection and Direct Selection: The next set of tools we'll look at are the selection and direct selection tools. We've already touched on selection in the rectangle, an ellipse video. But here it is. Again. It's this arrow icon with no fill inside it. Click on that and it allows you to select entire objects that are on your canvas. So you can drag this circle around. You can hold shift to select multiple objects and drag them around. You can also manually rotate an object by clicking on it. And then going to the corner of the object TC this curved arrow. And then dragging that around. You can stretch the object, you can reflect it as well. And that's pretty much the selection tool. In summary, it allows you to select and do basic transforms to the entire object. That's the key word there, the entire object. But if I go back to the Tools panel on the left and choose the direct selection tool. And let's select this circle as an example, I see the outline of the object again, but I see these square dots along the way. These square dots are called anchor points. I can still move my object around, but I can't rotate or resize it like I did with the selection tool. The cool thing with direct selection is that you can click on one of these anchor points to re-shape your object. So when you click on the anchor point, you'll see it go blue, whilst the other non-active anchor points are kind of like transparent. And then you'll see some circle dots to the left and right off the anchor point. And they're called handles. The handles to the left and right off the anchor point give you more customization when you're reshaping your object. So you can drag these handles to create a sharp point or dragged it out for something more blobby. You can even convert the anchor points so that it has nerve handles. If you want them to reappear again, just click on this icon at the top. We're going to use the direct selection tool a lot to adjust our drawings, like adjusting a character's face. So you can try and morphing the circle into something like a face, something like that. So they have a sharp chin. That's pretty much it for the direct selection tool. In summary, use the selection tool to transform an entire object and use the direct selection tool to select different anchor points inside the object. 21. 5.5 Pencil Tool: Now we'll look at the pencil tool, which is what we'll be using for free hand drawing. So hover over this tool here on the left. Yours might be a pencil or a paintbrush like mine. If it's a paintbrush, hold the left mouse button to this sub menu pops open and click on the Pencil Tool. Then on the canvas just draw some lines. And then maybe a square and then a circle. And if I Control click any of these objects, you can see that I get the direct selection tool instead of selection. And that's just how it is with pencil, which is great because we can easily modify these anchor points if we want. And then we can use the Fill in swatches to color our object like before. Next, let's try drawing a triangle. Notice with the pencil tool sometimes it does this kind of weird smoothing behavior. If you want to reduce the smoothing behavior, double-click on the Pencil tool on the left and reduce the fidelity down too accurate. This way it won't order a smooth for you. So if we try drawing a rectangle again, we don't get that order is smoothing. I like to keep mine in the middle, so I'm going to change it back. For now. I want you to delete everything on your canvas by holding Control and selecting everything. And pressing Delete. With our pencil still selected, let's draw a simple face, so two eyes, nose, and a smile. Now, when we finished our drawing, we have all these anchor points. And a cool thing you can do is continue adding to the object. So instead of a smile, we can make a grin. Instead, we'll hover over the last anchor point so that it's this pencil with a diagonal line. And then we'll complete the mouth to the cursor, changes to this pencil with a circle. Then we can fill this object with maybe dark blue paint. And what we've done here is closed the object. Let's draw another smile. But this time what I want you to do this hold Control and click on an empty part of the canvas so that the anchor points go away and then complete the mouth again. Then if I use the Select tool, notice how these are two different objects. Now, the stroke is in closed off. So if I use this fill tool now, I get this weird result where I don't have an orange border at the top. And that's because we didn't close off the stroke properly. So all we have to do is select the object again, select the pencil tool and hover over the first or last anchor point till you get that pencil with a diagonal line and then draw to the other anchor, 0.2, you get the circle and you've closed it off. That's it for the pencil tool. We're pretty much going to be using this for almost everything. 22. 5.6 Layers: Now that we have a basic understanding of all the drawing tools will need, let's discuss how to organize our objects and shapes using layers. So if we look to the right here, we have this Layers tab. And if you click on the chevron here, you can see it expands with a list of all the objects withdrawn with the most recent being at the top to the oldest at the bottom. They're all called path because we've been drawing paths with the pencil tool. If you use a rectangle or ellipse tool, it'll be cold rectangle and ellipse. Let's call these things sublayers for now. Then let's delete these two objects of the canvas. So control, click this hold Shift and click this one and press Delete. Now at the moment everything is sitting inside layer one, our two eyes, the nose and the mouth. And we can easily rename these sub-layers by double-clicking on the text and changing this one to mouth, nose. And we have two circles here, but we can't tell if this is the left or the right eye. To see which one it is, click on the circle to the right here. And this will select the layer, and this one is the right eye. So let's rename this to your right thigh. And the last one lift is left. Now the problem with renaming paths is that we can't add any more sublayers underneath it, like an I will have a pupil right? And we want that to be under the left and right eye. And the way that you would add a sub layer is by clicking the Create New Layer icon at the bottom, but it's blanked out because it sees these objects as pods and not actual layers. So to get around this, click on layer one and create for new sublayers. Make sure you select Layer one every time you click on Create a sub layer, or you'll get a weird tray of layers like this. I'll undo that with Control Z. So I'll click on layer one. Click Create a sub layer. Click where you want again, sub layer, layer one, sub layer, layer one layer. Then we'll rename each layer to mouth, nose, right eye, and left eye. And then drag the paths into these sub-layers. So now you can add more sublayers into the right eye and left eye. So if I click on right eye and click Create new sub layer, I can now create a pupil. Now let's rename the top layer to face. When it comes to layers, It's really important to put them in the correct hierarchy because the higher the layer is, means that it's going to be higher at the front of the z axis. So if you drag your mouth over the eyes, see how it covers up the eyes. Because the eyes are at the bottom of the hierarchy. It's not super important now, but obviously when you have overlapping objects, makes sure that the object you want to be in front is at the top of the hierarchy. To create a new layer that's outside of the face layer, you can collapse the entire face layer, click on an empty part of the layer window, and then click on New Layer. Alternatively, if you're already in the face hierarchy and you click new layer, you can just drag this on top so that it's its own layer. To delete a layer, you can click on it and click the bin button at the bottom. Let's draw another basic face on the top layer. And let's make this one red instead. Now, if you drag this new face over the top of the old face, It's the top layer in this hierarchy that's going to remain on top. So, yeah, make sure you organize your layers properly. The next two things I wanted to show you with layers is the proper way of copying an object from within the same file and copying an object to another file. Let's delete the second face for now by clicking on the circle icon next to the layer and then clicking the delete icon. Now, if we want to copy this face, your immediate reaction might be to select everything on the Canvas, press Control C and Control V. But if we do that, notice how it doesn't organize our layers properly becomes quite messy, like a lot of doubling up in duplication. Let's undo this with Control Z to copy a layer 12 at backup so that you can only see the top layer and none of the sublayers hold Alt and drag it on the top or below the current layer. And you can see that it keeps everything in the same hierarchy. And then you can select the entire layer and drag it away. So you've got two faces. The next thing I wanted to show you is copying to or from another file. So let's say we want to copy this face to a new file. So let's go File new and create another 1080. By 1080, Let's go back to the first file. Select the entire face layer, press Control C, go to the new file and press control V. And if we expand the hierarchy, you can see it's been ruined again, like it's missing the pupils. And when we start copying objects from a free stock photo websites and we paste it into our blank canvas. This is going to get really out of hand. So to avoid all this, click on the Layers option here and click paste. Remember layers. And if we paste again and expand this, we can see that the sublayers are kept intact. This is going to be important when we start using free assets from the web and we want to copy it into our canvas. So to summarize, from within our own file, we click on the layer, hold Alt and drag it up or down. But when copying and pasting to another file, we used paste. Remember layers. When you're done with it, click on paste, remember layers to turn it off. Okay, The last thing I want to show you with layers is locking and hiding them. So if you want to lock a layer which prevents you from doing anything with it, you can click on the space that's between the I and the layer. When it's locked, it stopped you from doing anything to the layer. So you see I can't drag it around, I can't do anything to it. This becomes useful when we need to trace an object, let's say e.g. we want to trace a car. So let's select a side profile like this one. Then we'll screenshot it with Windows key Shift S, and then paste it into Illustrator as a new layer. Create a new layer and paste. What you can do to make tracing easier is now lock that layer and create a new layer on top. And then start drawing on top of that new layer. So we can just freehand draw this super car. And you kinda get the idea. Just finish it off here. By having the layer underneath lot. It means that we won't accidentally select it or draw on it. And then to make things a bit easier, when you're drawing, you can adjust the transparency of the layer by double-clicking on the empty space between the name of the layer and the circle, and then dimming the image down to something 30-50%. This way it makes it easier to draw over the top of the image. That pretty much covers it for layers. For the next video, I want to show you how to trace this car outline more accurately using the pen tool, not to be mistaken with the pencil tool which we covered in a previous video. I'll see you there. 23. 5.7 Pen Tool: In this video, we're going to cover the pen tool, which is this one here. I think it's meant to be the tip of a pen or something. Let's delete that freehand drawing of the car that we did in the previous video and create a new layer. The pen tool is great for drawing curves and tracing things. Let's start off by drawing a bean with the pen tool. So let's start by clicking anywhere on the canvas. Then clicking on the next point and dragging the mouse until you see a curved line. Then click on the next point and drag. And these lines that appear with circles at the end of them are called handles. And we use them to control the curviness of each line and anchor point that we draw. You can hold Control to adjust them on the fly. It doesn't need to be a totally accurate bean. But you get the idea. If you don't want to draw an object with a curvy line, just don't hold the left mouse button and don't drag it. We just click. Next. Let's try drawing a love heart with the pen tool. So let's start at the bottom. So we'll click, then we'll drag, click, drag, click, drag. And notice how we've come up with a bit of a problem here. We can't make the curve goes upwards without it looking kinda funny. It's kind of stuck down here. If you want to change the direction of the handle, undo the last one you just did and redraw that last line. But before you let go, press and hold the Alt key on your keyboard and change the direction of the handle, then click and drag the rest of the way. So they're the three main ways to use the pen tool, the normal hold and drag, the click only and the cook and Alt key method to change the direction of the handle. Now, let's try tracing the outline of this car for practice or delete everything that we've created. And let's start at the roof of the car. So click on the canvas and we'll go anticlockwise. Click on the next point and make a curved line. And this takes a bit of practice to get the hang of it. But basically you always want the handle to follow the outline of the object. And again, don't forget to change the direction of the handle with Alt. So you can take your time with this. It does require a bit of practice. So I'm going to use Alt to change the direction here. I'm using old here again, and I kinda wanna keep this handle symmetrical with this handle here. So they're kind of identical. Again, I'm holding Alt for this one. And I'm going to hold Alt again for this one to change the direction. This all requires just a bit of practice and trial and error. And to me, that looks pretty good. Then we'll add a fill to it. And maybe just thicken the stroke. And that's how you use the pen tool. 24. 5.8 Type Tool: Now let's look at the type tool, which is what we'll use to add text to the canvas. So click on the T icon on the left here, and click on the canvas and type some text in here, like Illustrator, to increase the size, select the entire text with Control a, and then scale it up to something like 72 points. We can also change the font, type, change the color. And a really fun thing we can do is walk the text. So if you want the eye at the start to be smaller than the r at the end, we can go to Object, Envelope Distort, Make with Mesh. And you'll see our texts get turned into a grid of four by four. Let's just change it to one-by-one for now. And then we can use the direct selection tool and then drag the anchor points. Let's undo all that and just return the texts back to where it was before we walked it. The last fun thing we can do with text is put it inside the car. So let's drag the path sub layer. So it's on top of the text to sub layer. Select both sublayers, then go to Object, Envelope Distort and make with top object. And you can see the illustrated texts is wrapped around the car. Overall, we won't be using the type tool or its features that much, but it's still worth understanding. 25. 5.9 Reflect: The reflect tool is something we'll use often and probably doesn't need its own video, but whatever. If you're working with legs and arms, you only need to draw one side of the body and then reflect it on the other side. And we use the reflect tool for that. We don't have any arms and legs on the canvas, so let's just reflect the car so we can copy the card by clicking on it, holding Alt and dragging it underneath. And then we'll go to Object, Transform and Reflect. And we can reflect it against the horizontal axis or the vertical axis. And that's pretty much all there is to the reflect tool. 26. 5.10 Eyedropper: Eyedropper is what we use to copy the color from one object to another. So if we wanted our red car to be the same as the green text, what you do is select the object. Go to the eyedropper tool here on the left, and click any part of the text and it will change green. It also copies the border or stroke properties as well. And in this instance, since our texts doesn't have any stroke, our car also doesn't have any stroke. So put the stroke back, we just select a black color and increase the stroke width. That's all there is to the Eyedropper. 27. 5.11 Live Paint Bucket: The next tool I want to show you is the Live Paint Bucket tool, which is the most complicated part of this law. But it's a tool that we'll use quite often for inanimate objects. Let's say you're drawing a race car and you're drawing bits of it. And we're probably not going to close off every single stroke that we do. But visually, it looks that way. But the moment we start to fill a shape, we get these gaps and inconsistencies. What the Live Paint Tool does, Let's undo all this so we have the outline only. What the Live Paint Tool does is join all these outlines together and enables you to use a fill tool like you traditionally would in Microsoft Paint or any other photo editing tool. So to show you what I mean, what I want you to do is select the entire car and click on the Live Paint Bucket Tool. If you don't have it on your menu on the left here, click on the three ellipses at the bottom and under paint, I want you to drag the live paint bucket tool into your menu here. With the costumer selected, click on the Live Paint Bucket Tool. Click anywhere inside the car. If you get a warning, just press Okay. And you'll see our car has changed a little bit. If you hover over it, it seems Illustrator has found the outlines and shapes for us. So with the live paint bucket tool still selected, let's select a fill color like green. And if we click inside the car, how cars filled with grain. And if you want to clean up the outlines of your sketch, you can also select the Live Paint Selection Tool, which is this one here, and drag it into the same button as the live paint bucket. Select that selection tool and then hover over the lines that you'll want to remove. Click on it and press Delete. There you go. You've got a card that's easy to fill and clean up. We're going to be using live paint a fair bit for inanimate objects. So if this tool does it make sense, keep drawing some stuff until you get the hang of it. 28. 5.12 Pathfinder: Pathfinder isn't really a tool, but it's more of a window. Anyway. We use it when we want to intersect or cut out two or more objects. This is going to be really useful for drawing eyes later. But for now, what I want you to do is to draw two circles with the Ellipse tool. Then we'll select both objects and open the Pathfinder window. If you don't have it open, go to Window and then select pathfinder. And to make it a bit easier to access, I want you to click on the tab and then drag it into this vertical window here. You might as well do the align and transform ones as well. Now we can experiment with different modes here to see what happens with these intersecting objects. It's easier to show you then to explain each one. So let's select both objects and then click on this one here, which is Unite. And this combines all the layers together and retains the color that's on the top layer. So blue was on the top layer, so it retained or the color for blue Minus Front chops off the bottom layer based on what was on the top layer, intersect keeps the common area between both objects. Exclude deletes the common area between both objects. Divide seems to draw a line between both objects. Trim removes all strokes between objects. Merge, which appears to do something pretty similar. Crop is similar to intersect, but without the stroke. Outlined retains the thin outline of birth objects. Not exactly the stroke but just the edges of the fill. And lastly, Minus back, which keeps the top layer part that isn't intersecting with the bottom layer. Out of all of these will be using Minus Front quite a bit for the eyes, but that'll come later. Don't stress too much about trying to understand each and every one of these path finders. For now, just know that Pathfinder is where you work with intersecting objects. 29. 5.13 Outline Stroke and Offset Path: Let's have a look at the outline stroke and Offset Path Tools. Let's say you're drawing an arm and a torso and arms here. And let's make this orange. And then we'll draw a torso here as well. We'll make it the same color. Now, no matter how I organize these layers, I'm always going to have this awkward black line in-between the torso and the arm. But if you want a cleaner look, which is to remove this black line in-between the two objects, then you need to use Outline Stroke and Offset Path to do this. So what Outline Stroke does is convert this stroke into its own object. So we'll click on the arm, go to Object, Path and Outline Stroke. Then we'll click on the Direct Selection tool and we've got all these new anchor points on the Stroke. Outline Stroke has separated the stroke from the field. And what this will allow us to do is to move the fill on top of the stroke. So in your layers, you will see a outlined here and the fill here. And then what we're going to do is drag the fill on top of the outline and then move these anchor points so that they cover the black stroke. And that looks pretty good. The only problem we have is that this line seems a bit thinner than our torso line here. And this is where we need to use offset path. So in our direct selection tool, we'll click the fill, go to Object Path, Offset Path, and will offset it by one pixel. And what this will do is create a new fill with negative one pixel on the outline. So we'll select the old Phil and delete it. And there you go. We've got the same stroke thickness as the torso again. 30. 5.14 Draw Backgrounds and Objects: Let's move on to drawing backgrounds. To be honest with you, I actually don't draw most of my backgrounds or objects. I download them from stock photo websites because it saves a lot of time compared to drawing it myself. The only thing I actually draw the character's faces, the backgrounds, objects, and even the character's body. I get from stock photo websites. Let me give you an example. If we go back to our storyboard, we can see that we've got a red background, a yellow background here. Just, let's just say they're the same for argument's sake. And then a stadium. So we've got a zoomed out stadium here and a zoomed in version here. Let's just say we cranked the one stadium, but then zoom in on this one. So it looks like it's a second drawing. The first two are easy, right? All you have to do is go into Illustrator, create a rectangle for background one, and create a yellow rectangle for background too. But when we get to the loss background, we have to draw an actual stadium. And if I had to draw this manually, I had on, I'd screenshot this video. I'd I'd paste it into Illustrator. Lock the background and dim the image down to 30 per cent, create a new layer, and then start tracing over the top of it, like we did in the previous videos. And although this background isn't hard to recreate, it still takes time to do maybe like 15 to 30 min of work for a really simple background. And that time spent goes up to over an hour. If you didn't have a reference image to trace, which means we have to create a background from scratch. We're lucky here in that we have a reference image that we can recreate very quickly. So how do we speed up and shortcut this process? We know we need a stadium, but we don't have time to draw it manually. My answer is stock photo websites. And my favorite one is free pic.com. And this is one of the best, if not the best stock photo websites around. So if you go to the search bar, what you want to look for are free and vectors. And we might type in something like stadium. And you'll find some truly amazing artwork that you can get for free. The only catches, you just have to make sure that you attribute the author, which I think is a fair deal. If you have a paid account like me, I don't believe attribution is required. Anyway, this is the vector file that I used. So we'll download it, unzip the file. And we haven't EPS and Illustrator file. If there's no Illustrator file, you can open up the EPS in Adobe Illustrator. And then we can make some simple modifications like removing any resemblance of this being a soccer pitch by removing the goalpost and the center. And there you go. In just a couple of minutes, we've got a stadium background. And I pretty much use the same process for objects as well. So if we go back to a free pic.com and let's type in car. Look at that. We have heaps of free and great looking cause we can use for our project. Now there's two issues you might encounter with this process. The first is, you can't find a free background or a free object that looks great, but you see a premium background that you like, but it requires you to pay for it. If you're planning to directly copy the background, I think you should just pay for it because it takes a lot of time and effort to make this art. However, if you're planning to just borrow the colors and perspectives, what you could do is screenshot and paste it into Illustrator and use as a reference image and then modify it until it suits your scene. The second issue you might come across is you just can't find the perfect angle or perspective that you're after for your object. Like my content is F1. So they would naturally be F1 cars, but there might not be any good pictures of F1 colors. Like there's no good pictures of the drivers cockpit, e.g. it's either a side on we've got some top-down. But I can't get a zoomed in view of the drivers face and the cockpit. In the next video, I'm going to show you this cool trick where you can take a photo of a 3D object from any perspective and save it as a 2D vector in Illustrator. So you get the perfect angle of an object every single time. 31. 5.15 Draw Objects From Any Angle: In this video, I'm going to show you how to draw objects from any angle by taking this 3D object and converting it to this in Illustrator. So let's start by downloading our 3D model by going to sketchfab.com and type in the object that you're looking for, in my case, 2022 S1 cars. If you're not signed into sketchfab.com, you will probably get a different screen to this. So create a free account and then search, then check downloadable. And you're looking for something that looks pretty low polygon, something like this. Low polygon, probably something less than ten meg as well. And let's download the 3D model. The format we want is OBJ. When that's finished downloading wall open it up and extract the zip file that we've got a zip file in a zip file. So let's extract that again. And we don't want the material file. That's just going to complicate things a bit later when we get to lighting. So let's just delete that. Now we need something to open up the OBJ file with, and that program is called Blender. So go-to blender.org. Click on download Blender and download the one for your operating system. I'm on Windows, so I downloaded the Windows one. I've already got this installed, so I'm just going to skip this step, but it's a pretty straightforward installation process. Once it's installed, open it up and you need to change a couple of settings to convert your 3D object into a 2D image. So what you need to do is go to Edit and Preferences and then go to Add-ons and type in SVG. Svg stands for Scalable Vector Graphics and blender is going to export our OBJ file to a 2D SVG file format that we can open in Illustrator. So tick these two add-ons and trust the installed button on the top right from memory, It's pretty quick to do. And then once that's done on the bottom left, click Save Preferences. Once you've done that, we're now ready to import our F1 car. So delete this cube in the middle, go to File, Import and wavefront OBJ, then navigate to the folder where we downloaded our F1 car. And there it is. To navigate around the car with your mouse. You can use your scroll wheel to zoom in and out. You can hold Shift and press the scroll wheel to get this free form user perspective view. And then you can click the scroll wheel and drag your mouse to move around the car. Just to keep things simple, I'm going to go for a three-quarter view of the car. Something like this, maybe. That looks pretty good. Once you've got the angle that you want, press Control Alt numpad zero to lock that view into place. And this is basically your new camera view. Now at the moment, our cars a little bit too zoomed in. So what we'll do is select the camera from our tree view at the top right and go to Object Data Properties. And we'll adjust the focal length here so that it's a bit more zoomed out. And we can shift the x and y a little bit to make sure that it's centered. That looks pretty good. The next thing to do is to go to Render properties. Make sure that freestyle, SVG, export, and freestyle are selected. Next, go to Output Properties and select an output folder. For our SVG file. I'll keep mine in C drive temp. Keep the file format as PNG. And if you've done everything correctly, press F2 and you'll see how F1 car has been rendered. And if we go to C drive temp, there it is. There's our F1 car rendered as an SVG format that we can import into Illustrator. The only thing left to do now is to color and shade it. So let's go back to Blender. And you need to check if you're happy with the shading and the lighting of this render, It's a bit too dark for me. I want the light to be shining on the car. This sort of looks like it's the lights from the other side. So let's close this. Click out of this camera by a holding the scroll wheel and just moving it up and down. And then we've got the light at the top here. Whoops. Got the light at the top here, which is this one. And we're just going to drag that with the move tool so that it's in front of our camera. There's something about there that looks like it's in front of the camera. And we'll press F2 again. And we've got a very bright view of it. That's maybe a bit too bright. So let's maybe move this back a bit. Something like this. That looks pretty good. Now what I want you to do is screenshot this result. So with Windows key Shift S, you just want to screenshot the car and then paste it in Illustrator locket, and dim the images down to 30%. Next we'll import our SVG file. So we'll go File Open. And in our temp drive will click or open one of the SVG files. When you open an SVG, it doesn't come with the color swatches. So what we'll do is just select everything, make sure that pace, remember layers is selected. And then paste it into this Illustrator file line. The two images up, that looks pretty good. Lock the background image and we can start coloring with life pain. So what I want you to do is create a new layer called shading. Now with the pencil tool selected, or you going to do is identify the dark spots of the car and draw around the outlines. So we've got some dark spots here that we can sort of outline. A dark spot, the dark spot here. Another one. And just as a quick example, these are all the dark spots that I've identified with the car. There's a few more as well, but we're just keeping things simple for now. When we're done with shading, what we'll do is grab a picture of an F1 car that we want to draw. And in this example, let's grab red bull racing. And we'll just take a screenshot of this, or we're doing with this, this just borrowing the colors. So we'll create a new layer. Make sure pace, remember lasers off and for paste that into the new layer. Lock it. So now we can use our eyedropper to reference the Red Bull colors for our car. Now, it's time to color the actual car with Live Paint. So select the whole car. If you skip the live paint tutorial video, you can find life paint by clicking the three ellipses here and then dragging this live paint into one of the tools here. So we'll click on Live Paint Bucket, click on the car, de-select it, and then to get the correct blue color, Let's find a lighter blue here. Go back to live paint and just start painting the car blue. So we can see all of this is pretty much blue. We've got some yellow here, we've got some black, got some red. It doesn't need to be 100% accurate. I usually put a little bit more detail and effort into coloring, but just to keep things simple, this is sort of like how we color our color here. Then to make the car pop just a little bit more, we'll select the shading layer, will set the colors to black and reduce the opacity to something like 30%. And you're pretty much done. That's how you can quickly draw any object. It's up to you how detailed you want to go with the coloring and shading. I usually spend a little bit more time on it just to make the image pop a little bit more. But I think this looks pretty good. 32. 5.16 Draw Face - Theory: Welcome to the character drawing part of the course. This video is just a basic example of drawing a character's head and face. In the next video, we'll go through how to trace a celebrity's face. But the steps here are pretty similar to the next video. Anyway, this section of the illustrated chapter is where we put most of our skills together. And probably the only part of the course where we'll be creating our own artwork. Let's start by drawing a basic head and face. Will start by renaming our layer to head, will create a sub layer called face. And let's just draw a simple face and simple nose with the pencil tool. Next we'll create a sub layer underneath the head for hair. And it's a stylistic choice if you want the hair to be behind or in front of the face, I normally go behind because it's less work to do. So just something simple like this. Then next we'll do the eyes. So let's create another layer under head for left eye. And then underneath left, I will create a sub layer for eyeball. And we'll just draw an oval underneath the eyeball will add a layer for the iris. And let's give our character a brown face, a brown complexion. Okay, so at this stage you should have the left eye at the top followed by the iris and eyeball in the sub layer than hair and face at the bottom. Now, the problem we have with the iris is that when we get to animating the eyes, we're going to run into this problem where if the character is moving the iris, it's going to move past the eyeball and into the face. If your artwork doesn't have an eyeball, then you don't really have to worry about this. You can just move the eyes quite freely. But if your artwork does have an eyeball, then you need to do the following steps. What you need to do is create a mask around the eyeball with Pathfinder. So what we'll do is create a third layer under the eyeball. Not a sublime, just Elia under the eyeball. And for toilet moms. And then we'll drag a rectangle on top of the eyeball. Let's give this a different color so we can see what's going on. What we're basically making here is a square with an oval or a circle cutout in the middle, so that when we move the iris, it goes behind the cut-out. It'll make sense in a tick. What I want you to do next is to make a copy of the eyeball. So hold Alt and just drag the eyeball underneath to create eyeball copy. Let's turn off this eyeball here. So we've only got eyeball copy and masks visible. Then we'll select these two layers. So I will copy and mask. And then we'll go to Pathfinder. And you want to select Minus Front, which will cut out the layer on top and keep the layer underneath. So now if we move this eyeball copy on top, which is our new mask, and we move the iris around. It's behind the mask. Let's enable the eyeball as well. And mask is now empty so we can delete that and let's rename eyeball copy to mask. And to really sell the illusion, what we'll do is click on our mask and use the Eyedropper to make sure that it's the same color as our face. We'll get rid of the stroke. And so now when you move the eye outside of the eyeball, it's not overlapping with the face. Now, if you've got a keen eye, you'll notice that the stroke thickness for the eyeball is quite thin now. So what we need to do is select the mask and go to Object Path, Offset Path, and will offset it by one pixel. That'll create a copy inside the mask layer. And we want to delete the old mask underneath it. So let's click on this one and delete it. And there we go. We've got our new mask with an offset of one pixel. To the right. I will draw the left. I lay it back up, hold Alt, and drag the layer below it or on top of the existing layer and call this the right. I will lock the left, I highlight the right eye layer and drag it across. There we go. We've got two eyes. Now for the head, we can give our character. Let's go with a 90% dark colored hair. So dark black there. And it looks kinda funny. Let's just move the hair underneath the face. Perfect. Now onto the mouth, which is quite tricky to draw. So if we click on head and create a mouth sub layer, we can start drawing the mouth, but because we'll be animating the mouth would dialogue will need to draw separate mouth shapes for us, sounds, or four sounds for sounds. And each of these have different mouth shapes which are called vaccines. You could do this manually, which can take quite awhile, or you can get them for free from our favorite website, free pic.com. So let's open up our browser. Go to free pic.com and search for disease. We'll click on vectors free. And the one I like to use is this one here. It will make sense later, but those are the specific mouth shapes that Adobe character animator needs to do dialogue. So let's download this file, open it up, and let's extract the zip file. Let's open up the EPS and there's 12 mouth shapes that we need from here. I know there's 12 here, but will only end up using about ten of them. But we'll end up creating 12 layers. So let's create 12 345, 678-910-1112. And the ones we need, our resting mouth. And D, E, F, L, 0, S, and woo. So let's extract them from the file here. So let's start with the resting one. What we'll do is grab this resting mouth, cut it, and paste it into the resting layer. We'll paste it in position with Control Shift V. Next we'll grab the a. So that's this one here. Cut, select, and paste it there. And you want to position the mouth shapes so they're all quiet center with each other. Doesn't need to be exact, but just sort of roughly can probably delete this BMP as well. Alright, the next position we need is to or D. That looks to be this one there. So we'll copy this one actually, because we might need it a couple more times. Select the D layer and paste it in there. We need e. Copy that one and paste it around the center. We need a copy that put it into the FAO. The next one is l, So that when M is the next one or so, that looks to be the same as the arresting one. So let's just Alt and drag that one down. Rename it to end. All is this one there? So let's copy that and paste it there. We can get rid of that. Oh, we need our next, which is the same as are there. So we can Alt, drag that one down and pull that one, delete the old layer. We need S. So this one again. Center that again. And finally, we need the Wu, which is this bottom one. And then for the remaining stuff, we can just delete that. Then we'll create a new layer at the top and cold mouth. And then select the rest of these vaccines and drag it into the mouth layer so they will become sublayers. Then to complete our face in this file here, what we'll do is select the entire mouth layer enabled paste, remember layers. Copy this and paste it into our file. We'll drag the mouth underneath the head, delete the old mouth layer, and just resize and position our mouth so that it fits inside our head. And just to make it look a bit better, Let's only showed the resting mouth. Awesome. That's our face completed. I know it looks kind of weird for now, but we're going to copy the exact same steps to trace a celebrity's face in the next video, these are the exact same steps I use to create my animations. So for now, this is the theory done for how we create a face. 33. 5.17 Draw Face - Demo: Now, if you want to draw someone famous, then we take the same approach as we did when we traced around that car from the Pen Tool video, Let's say we want to draw a Christian Horner and Toto Wolff, let's start with Christian Horner. What we'll do is open up our browser and find a front-facing image of Christian corner. So again, we want one that's pretty front-facing and this one looks pretty good actually. So what we'll do is just screenshot his face and paste it into a new Illustrator file. Lock the layer and dim the image down to 50 per cent is good. Create a new layer on top. And we're going to start drawing his face here. So we'll create a new layer for head, a sub layer called face. And then we'll create a few more layers on the head for like nose, eyes, and hair. But let's start with phase first. Now I'll be going for speed here instead of accuracy, but I'll attach the Illustrator files that I created of Christian Hornet and Toto Wolff from my itchy, scratchy animation. So we'll start by grabbing the pencil tool and we'll start with a black outline. And let's go for no fill for now. And then in the face layer, we'll just start drawing an outline off his head. So let's just go there. Foster exit, good ones. And white that looks pretty good. Next ones, Let's do his ears. So it's very left ear. Right ear. Probably want these sitting behind the face. So we'll start with the right ear. Probably got something like that. We can just close that off. And then for the left ear, right next we'll do the nose. Then we'll do the hair. Again going for speed here instead of accuracy. Then we'll do the eyes. So go left. I create a sub layer for the eyeball and then a Jairus layer. Underneath the eyeball. The eyeball and zoom in a little bit more and who just trace around his eyes there. And then the RS. It looks like he's got greenish eyes. See if we can just color match something like this. Yeah, that looks good enough. Give it a black outline and then just to complete the local, add a little white speck inside it. Now we can make that white. Okay. I know it looks kind of silly for now, but bear with me, trust me, it'll look decent afterwards. The next thing we will have to create is the mosque, because if we move the RSP on the eyeball, it's going to look funny. So let's create a mask at the bottom. Use the rectangle tool and we'll draw a mask on top of the eye like that. Make a copy of the eyeball, and then select the eyeball copy and the mask, go to Pathfinder and choose Minus Front. These two layers got merged so the bottom one is empty now, so we'll delete that, rename this as mask. Get rid of the border and let's just see what skin tone he has faded it more lighter, something like that. Then we will move the mask on top. And that's made the eyeball thinner. So we'll select the mask, go to object, go to path, and we'll offset path by one pixel and delete the old one, delete the old mask that we've created. And I think one pixel is too much, so maybe it was half a pixel that we need instead. So select that path again, Object Path, and we'll offset by half a pixel. We will keep the new mask and delete the old one. And perfect, yep, we've got a perfect mask. There. Will twirl up the left eyes, select it, hold Alt and drag it underneath. And we'll call this the right eye. Lock, the left I select the right eye layer, drag it across and we'll reflect it by going to Object Transform, Reflect are okay. And that looks pretty good. Then just to round things out. So it looks a bit more decent or select the face, we'll click the eyedropper. And let's make it the same color as he'll say, Hey, we'll give them the same color as the eyes. Probably need to complete the shape here so we can do this. Cool. He is on top of the hair. I'm always like to make the use a darker color than the face. So will I drop the face and just go a little bit darker for the ears? Select the other ear. I drop it. Let's add a stroke to our ears and face. It's pretty good. And then finally, we can copy our mouth disease from the last video. Don't forget to paste. Remember layers. Mouth is too big so we'll make it smaller. Something like that. The final result that I used in the video, it looks something like this. So yeah, I think this looks much better than that one, but the same techniques were used thing I just spent a little bit more time with his face and possibly use a different reference image as well. In any case, I'll attach this face and total wolf's face to the project files of this video. So you can just use this one instead. And that's pretty much how you'd draw a celebrity said. 34. 5.18 Draw Body: On to the last drawing section, which is the body. We're going to download it from free pic.com and make adjustments. It's just easier and faster compared to drawing our own. So we'll open our browser, go to free pic.com, type in character. And we want to filter by vectors and free. And after having a look at all the search results, the one I like is this one here. You can grab the URL up there if that helps. You've got the description of the vector and the artist there as well. And I like this one because it's a front-facing view. The body looks pretty simple. It's got some additional hand gestures and a three-quarter view as well. So we'll download it, open up the file, and let's extract it. Will open the Illustrator file. And we'll start by copying this body without the skeleton and the background. So we'll use our direct selection tool. Remove this background, and remove the skeletons as well. When you select on one of these components, you have to click Delete twice. Perfect. And then what we're going to do is copy this across with pace. Remember layers. Going to copy this across into our Christian on a file. We'll rename this as body. Delete the head group, which is that one there. I would probably want to keep the neck. So direct selection and delete that. Let's keep the neck and make that the same color as that. Perfect. Then all we have to do is probably just scoured this accordingly. Move the head at the top. And that looks pretty good. Remember that HE is quite small so we can even scale this just a little bit more. So it looks like a kid. And that's most of our work done actually, we want to be particular. We can probably just drag the shorts to be a little bit lower so that they become parents. Yep. Then the arms can probably just make these the same color as the torso. And let's start rearranging our layers. So what we've got here is the neck. We've got the left arm. This looks to be the torso. That's the right leg. Left leg. And this will be the waist. Next thing we want to do is just sort of spread out the arms. So they're like wings. And so we'll rotate the arms so they're out like that. Maybe just bent a little bit. And then the right man will do the same thing there as well. This is just going to make our animation a little bit easier, right? We've got a little bit more work to do with the layering. And so we just need to split the arm up into our arm and hand. So it looks like this would be the we can probably just drag that layer up and we'll do the same thing for the right arm as well. And move that up. And then let's do the same thing for feet. Let's just call that the leg and this one the foot. But we don't need the limb for that one so we can delete that and just keep the shoe. And we'll do the same thing for the left leg. So this would be the leg, the foot. And we'll delete that, Lynn. And we don't really need this group, so let's just drag it to the layer above. And you should have a hierarchy that's exactly like this. And we don't need this group, group. So let's just drag this to be at the body level. All right, that looks pretty good, but we need him to look more like itchy because it she's blue and short. So what we'll do is just look up what HE looks like. And let's look for a good reference image here. Think that one of the top was pretty good. Yeah, so let's just screenshot this. Create a new layer, put it at the bottom. I forgot to turn off pace, remember layers, but that's alright. We'll put that at the bottom, lock it and probably moved to the side first before we lock it due to the side walk. And Jim this down to say 30 per cent. So we can see itchy is predominantly blue with a orange jacket and a lighter blue tummy in the middle. So this looks relatively straightforward to copy. So we just select all the limbs, press I for the eyedropper tool and make him completely blew. The only thing we will probably need to make is the stomach and the jacket. So what we can do is just free hand this, Let's create a new layer on top of the left arm but below the neck. And we'll call this jacket. Let's go for something like this. And then we'll make that orange. Then we'll copy this, paste it, Object, Transform and Reflect. And we'll put it on the other side as well. You probably just need to play with the anchor points a little bit. But I think that looks pretty good. Next we need to create his belly. Sorry, that's just going to be another layer underneath the jacket. And we'll draw an oval shape. And let's I dropped one there. I think he has a belly button in the middle, so we'll just draw something in there as well. And that's pretty much done. I mean, you could probably stop here, but if you're being pedantic, you'll notice that our face has a black outline here was our body doesn't. So it just kinda looks like two random art styles at the moment. So we can either remove the strokes on our character's face so that they suit the body or add black outlines around the body to suit the face. It's up to you which style you want to choose. I prefer to have black outlines on my art work, so I'm going to modify the body to have black outlines. So all we're going to do is select the entire body and increase the stroke to one point. And let's see what that looks like. That looks pretty decent. Not a whole lot of work left to do to make this look good. So what we'll have to tidy up are these legs here. We just want this to be all one blue piece. And what we need for that is outlined stroke. So let's start by clicking on the torso, go to Object, Path Outline Stroke. And then we'll click on the fill pot and just add a few anchor points. Click Direct Selection, and then just drag This underneath. Cool, That's got rid of a lot of the lines there. This pipeline is still showing. So let's double-check that the fill is on top of the stroke. It isn't. So all we do is just move this there. And yep, that looks pretty good. By doing this though, it looks like we've thinned out the outline of the torso. So we'll use offset path to make it look normal again. So we'll go Object Path, Offset Path, and will offset it by a one negative one pixel. Will delete the old path here. This one in the middle. I think we've offset it by too much. So let's undo that twice. Object and offset path. Let's try half a pixel this time. See how that looks. Delete the old one. That looks much better. There you go. We've got our HE, Christian Horner completed. We can delete the reference image below. Then you're pretty much going to repeat the same process for Toto Wolff, like your download this image, delete the skeleton and the background and just change the color scheme to be more like scratchy. So a dark gray and a light gray in the middle. You won't need to put a jacket on scratchy. And we're pretty much done to make life a bit easier. I'll include the finished products of itchy, scratchy into this video file. Now that you've got the basics, I'll leave it to you to draw scratchy or feel free to even start drawing your own characters. Now. 35. 5.19 Draw Body (Update): Just a quick update before we go into the character animating part of the course, I've updated this puppet so it's much easier to do the animation with. You'll notice that the layer names from the previous videos were quite unorganized and a bit all over the shop. So I've just tidy this up so you can easily identify the parts of the face so the eyebrows are a bit easier to find. The mouth is a bit easier. The wrinkles, the eyes and so forth. And so these layer names are just going to look a little bit different from what was in the previous videos. I've also updated the jacket to remove the sleeves because when we get to animating, the slaves are technically part of the arm and not part of the torso. I've split the jacket slaves into the arm layers and they're no longer part of the jacket. I've also tidied up his face a little bit, given him a slightly different beard. This B, it's just going to be a bit more easier to manage when we get to the animation previously, I've drawn every single strand of hair on his face, but this time around I've just used the pen tool to draw a beard on him. Just thought I'd let you know, don't panic or don't be alarmed if things have changed in the body here. And we'll be using this updated character for our animations. In any case, you can download these characters from the attachments in the video. 36. 6.0 Character Animation: In this section, you will specifically learn how to animate characters in Adobe character animator will go through a tour of the software, how to import your character from Illustrator rigging, which is adding bones or a skeleton to a character to control them. Automating lip sinking and mouth animations, adding triggers and swaps it to switch between different hands and feet, how to make a character walk, and a few other features. There's heaps of other things you can do in character animator, but we just don't have time to go through all of them. And if you're just starting out, I don't want to inundate you with advanced features that you probably won't use. The stuff we'll be covering in this section. Pretty much the fundamentals. If you're wondering why we aren't using Adobe Animate or even Adobe After Effects to animate our character. The short answer is, I think it's a staple learning curve to use those programs to specifically animate characters competitor using character animator. The long answer is, character animator automates a lot of the work for us with things cold behaviors. So if we want our character to walk, we can just drag in a walk behavior and have our character walking in seconds versus manually animating a walk cycle in Animate and After Effects, which is way more tedious. I want this course to focus on bringing your ideas to life quickly rather than being about manually animating things. Alright, I hope you're looking forward to this section because you're going to be bringing your characters to life, which is really cool. I remember the first time I wrote and animated my first character, I was just amazed at how quick and easy it was. And just a very personally satisfying moment. It was just a wow moment. And I hope I can share that with you in this section. 37. 6.1 Install Character Animator: To get started with animating characters, the first thing we're going to do is install Adobe character animator. I'm going to go ahead and assume you've already got Creative Cloud installed because you needed that to install Adobe Illustrator. If you don't have Creative Cloud installed, then follow the steps in video 3.4, 0.1, installing Adobe Creative Cloud. So I opened it up and then search for character animator. Then click on the card and click Install. This is going to take a few minutes, so I'm just going to fast-forward to completion. It will also install Adobe Media Encoder in the background, which you'll need to export your videos to mp4 or other video formats. When it's finished downloading, open it up. And you'll be graded with the welcome screen. That's it for installing character animator. Next we'll go through a quick interface tour of character animator. 38. 6.2 Quick Tour and Importing Your Character: So this is Adobe character animator, the place where you'll be bringing your character to life. This is the home screen and it might have opened up in pro mode, which is this view here. Or it might've opened up in start-up mode, which is this view. It doesn't matter. This will be the first thing that will pop up when you want to put in the program in the middle, we have some sample puppets created by the Adobe team that are either face only are full body. And I think being in beginner mode, these are more beginner puppets. And if we go to promo code, we've got more professional puppeteer. Each character you import into character animator is referred to as a puppet. So when we import, our character will be calling it a puppet. We wouldn't be using these puppets here, but you can explore them later if you want. What I'd like you to do is go into professional mode. So if you are in Stata, you can switch to Pro and then click on New Project. For some reason at the time of recording, if you go File New Project that wasn't working. So just New Project button here and save a new character animator project. Let's call it itchy, scratchy. When you do that, you'll be brought to the screen, which is called the record screen. You've also got a rig screen which will be using in the next video, and a stream screen which is out of scope for this course, will be alternating between the rig and record screen. The record screen is way we'll do the actual animation of our puppet, like moving its arms and legs, making them walk and all that stuff. The rig screen is where we set up our puppet to give them a skeleton and all that sort of stuff. I'll teach you how to do that in the next video. For now, let's start by importing our Puppet by double-clicking on this project window here, the project window exists for both the rig and record screen. So it doesn't matter where you import from, but let's just use the rig screen because we need to rig our character anyway. So double-click on it, open the Adobe Illustrator file where we saved our character. For me, it's in this photo, but for you it might be in your downloads folder. Double-click on it. Cool. Now we see the name of our file in the project window. If you don't see your puppet appear in the main screen, just double-click on the puppet in the project window and it should pop up. Now, before we start any sort of animation, we have to rig our character, which means putting a skeleton and bones inside their body. So their arms, legs, torso, head, etc. And the animated and we do that inside the rig screen. To get to the rig screen, if you're in Record mode, you can double-click on the puppet in the project pane, and that'll bring you back to the rig screen. Or you can just click on rig at the top. So let's just do a quick tour of the rig screen, starting with the project window. On the top-left, we have the name of our puppet with three little buttons at the bottom, just going from right to left. This button opens up our puppet in Adobe Illustrator so you can make changes to it. So any updates you make in Illustrator automatically gets updated in character animator. So if I move this hand e.g. and save it and then go back to character animator. You'll see it's been automatically updated here as well. But let's go back and undo that. Save it. And again, it's automatically updated. The next button here creates a new folder in our project pane. And you can call it a folder or whatever you want to rename it. You can right-click and rename or just select it and press Enter, and then onto the last button. So click on your puppet again. And this last button here Create a new scene for our puppet and brings us into record mode. Again. This is the screen where it will be dragging and moving the limbs of our character, making them walk and animating them against the timeline, which is at the bottom here. We'll come back to this in a later video. For now, let's just jump back into rig. At the bottom left here we have this thing called triggers, which we will cover off in a later section. Don't worry about this for now, but triggers are what we use to swap between different hands, feet, and other parts of the body, like a trigger might be. If we press number one on our keyboard, the hand switches to a fist. If we press number two, the eyes blink and so forth. The middle left side here is where we have our illustrator layers, which we'll be using a lot in the next video on rigging, we'll be using this panel a lot to create our skeleton. The middle section here shows our character from Illustrator, and this is where we will be tagging our skeleton, bones and joints to the puppet. On the right side is where we have puppet properties, starting with the puppet drop-down. This panel just tells us the location of our puppet, whether or not we want automatic synchronization. So if we leave this ticked every time you make updates in Illustrator and save them, the changes also get automatically updated in character animator, like we just did, if you untick this than the artwork will no longer Sync, will leave this ticked. This option is rendered as vector. And if we take this, it means we don't lose any quality of our puppet when we re-size and transform it. If we own ticket are public, gets rendered as a bitmap, which means our puppet will get pixelated if we re-size and transform. Let's leave this ticked. Since we went through all that effort of using Illustrator, which also renders as a vector. The only gotcha is that this doesn't work with live pink. So if any part of our Puppet use the live paint, it just won't render in character animator, like it won't be visible moving onto the puppet Mesh struck down. This isn't something you'll have to worry about. You can leave these settings as they are. The last and most important one is behaviors. Behaviors are like features or functions you can give to your puppet. If you look at the default behavior is here, drag your lists, you move the limbs off your puppet. When we get into record mode, eye gaze lets you control the eye movements. Face lets you control the nose, mouth, head movements file your webcam, lip-sync enables mouth or visiting swapping. Physics introduces gravity, and there's heaps more behaviors you can add to your puppet, like walk, which automates a character walk. And we'll be using that later. We'll go through several behaviors in more detail throughout this section. But basically, behaviors are the powerful feature of character animator that let's you drag and drop features to bring your puppet to life. Alright, that was a quick tour of character animator. In the next video, we'll go through the rigging process in more detail and record mode in more detail. See you there. 39. 6.3 Rigging - Head: Now it's time to break out puppet aka assignment some limbs and bones so that when we get into record mode, will be able to move the head, arms, and legs around. By the end of this video, you'll have rigged to your puppet head. At the moment, character animator has no idea which body parts are which, which is why in Record mode. So we'll click on our puppet and create a new scene. In Record mode, our puppet doesn't move at the moment no matter where we drag, nothing happens. So we need to go in read mode and specify which layers are the head, the arms, and the legs. So let's first start off by rigging the head so we can move the eyes and then we'll do the body. In the next couple of videos, we'll jump back into rig mode here, and let's explore the lions pane here, it seems character animator has expanded, or the layers and subways for us. So let's just 12 this up. And to the left here we've got a visibility button. And when you trigger this, it makes the layer disappear or reappear. And we've got this crown thing which is called independent. I'll touch on this in a sec. And then we've got these three little icons here, which I'll touch on in a future video as well. Don't worry about these for now. Let's focus on this crown because it's quite important. This crown means that this layer will move independently of other layers. So by default, character animator has made the head and body layers independent of each other. And it knows to do that because when you open a puppet, it looks for certain keywords like head, body, pupil, mouth. And if you name everything correctly, character animator will automatically make those layers independent to show you what this independent stuff looks like, I want you to click on the head layer and then in the preview pane in the middle, say this knob here. Click on that. And for now, I want you to just click this draggable modifier, which will let you drag the layer around with your mouse in Record mode. When we tick that, you can see that that nub has been updated with a draggable modifier or a draggable tag. So our head layer has a head tag and a draggable tag. If we open our scene again, which brings us to record mode, and we drag the head. We can see we can move it around now, granted, it's not moving or pivoting with the body, but we'll fix that in a sec. Let's jump back into rig mode and uncheck the independent option, and then go back into record mode. And now when we drag the head, we can see that the heads actually moving with the entire body because it's no longer independent from the body. If that's what you're after, then fantastic, but for our purposes that's not what we want. So we'll go back into rig mode and make sure that our head remains independent from the body. Alright, let's start rigging our head now. Now when you click on the head layer, notice that a stick figure pops up underneath this section called tags. This is called tagging. And it's way we have to tell character animator which layer is the head, the eyebrows, the eye, the pupil, the nose, the mouth, the jaw, neck, shoulder, elbow, wrist, waist, hip, etc. You don't have to tag every single one of them. We're just going to tag the ones that we need. So we can see here that the head has been tagged for us because it's highlighted in blue. And if you check the preview pane, you can see the head tag there. If we uncheck the blue pot, you'll see that the head tag has been removed in the preview pane. And to add it back in, we just click on the Puppet head or the stick figures head. Now we want to animate the eyes, specifically moving the pupils. Now, other character animator does its best job to tag the eyebrows for us and the pupils. So this particular puppet, it hasn't tagged correctly. So what we'll do is start fresh and starting with head. I want you to delete these eyebrow tags here. Click on the nub and press Delete, and that will delete those tags. And we'll just go down the layers to see if it has added any AI or eyebrow tags to it. So if the left eyebrow, what we'll do is go to the stick figure and tag it with the correct tag. And then the right eyebrow here is this one. Now you will notice, although with cold this right eyebrow, and this looks to be at the right position eyebrow, I'm character animator has called it the left eyebrow. And that's because it looks the position of things from the perspective of the puppet, not from the perspective of your screen. From our perspective. Obviously this is the right side, but from the puppets perspective, it's left. You can easily change these left and right positions. In Illustrator, it won't impact the outcome of our Puppet. It won't impact our puppet in any way. It's really just to keep things tidy. It won't impact our puppet if we've got the left and right parts mixed up, just as long as we're consistent with it, it's going to be okay. Then we'll go to write I and we can see that's been incorrectly tagged there as well. So we'll delete that. Right blink. That's not correct either, so we'll remove that tag. Right. Mask has nothing in it which is good pupil size. Let's delete that for now, right? Pupil or range will delete that. Delete everything here as well. Delete, delete, delete. Let's just double-check this note I tags here as well. Perfect. Alright, so to get the eye moving, what we'll do is go to the right pupil and then tag the correct position pupil in the stick figure, go to the left pupil and tag that one there as well. So if we jumped into record mode and we want to move our pupils, what we'll do is open the eye gaze behavior and will enable keyboard input. That when we press the left and right position on our keyboard, the eyes should move. But at the moment, it's just kinda warping our face. And that's because we haven't tagged the pupils as independent. We want these to move independently from our head, right? So we'll put an independent tag there and here as well. So when we go back into record mode and move our left and right keys are character's eyes. Move along with it. That's pretty cool. Now, if your artwork has more circular eyes where they're not confined. Now, if your artwork has more circular eyes and they're not confined to. Now, if your outlook has more circular eyes, what you would normally do is tag the eyeball with the left I tag here, and this eyeball with the tag here. And what that will do is restrict the pupil to move within the confines of the eyeball. But because our eyes for the specific puppet is already confined to this eyeball here, like you can see, the pupil is already touching against the eyeball. If we were to do this, we'll get some pretty unexpected results. So we can go right either and tag that one. And if we go back into record mode, like we can't move our eyeball up and down because it's already clashing with the eyeball. So if you've got more circular eyes and more room to move, then you can tag these as the eye. But for our Puppet, because it's already touching on the edges of the eyeball. It won't be a good idea for us to tag these as eyes. Alright, so that's the eyes done. Let's move on to the mouth. And if you follow the same naming conventions as I have, character animator should automatically apply the correct tags to the mouth. So if we expand on mouth, you can see that neutral has been tagged here. Smile has been tagged. There are sounds here, D, E, F, L, and R, S. And it's going to be the same thing for our sad looking mouth as well. If you haven't followed that naming convention, then you need to manually go through each one of these layers and tag it to the correct tag. The last thing I want to show you is if we jump back into record mode, if you've got a web camera, you can click this icon here and it'll enable face tracking so that you can use your webcam to control head movement. And later, I'll show you how to do body tracking two, so that your puppet moves with your body. If you find that your head is off-center from the puppet, you can just click the calibrate button and it will move the character's head back into position. At the moment, our heads kind of not pivoting properly from the next. So let's go and change that. We'll jump back into rig mode, click on the head. And at the moment, the head is positioned at the center. And we want to drag that and bring that down towards the neck. Let's go back into record mode. And when we move our head, yep, it's pivoting from the neck, but it's kinda got this weird thing where it can float away from the neck to fix that. So we'll go back into rig mode and then click on the Puppet at the top here, the name of the puppet, expand the face behavior and set the head position strength to zero. This stops the head moving wildly from left to right. So when we go back into record mode and we move our neck, we can see that our puppet is moving its head properly. The webcam can also detect a blinks. So if we jump back into rig mode, and I think we've made our blinks invisible, so it will enable that. And we haven't tagged them yet. So for our blink, there will tag that blink. And then for left blink or tag that one. And in Record mode, if I close my eyes, you can see that the blink seems to be working properly. The eyebrows don't seem to be moving. They're walking our face. So let's have a look at that. So we just need to make these independent. And there we go. Eyebrows are moving independently. And if you want the eyebrows to move separately instead of together, you can expand the phase behavior and untick this move eyebrows together. So if you can move one eyebrow by itself, like the rock, it makes the puppet look a bit more playful. I like to move the eyebrows together, so I'll leave that ticked. And that's pretty much our head rigged. Feel free to play around with the eye gaze and face settings to see what sort of behaviors that can make the puppet do. But these are the settings that I use for most of my animations. 40. 6.4 Rigging - Body: In this video, we're going to rig our puppets body so we can move their arms and legs. In reg mode. Click on buddy, and let's start by taking which limbs we want to be independent from the body or the torso. Now, it's important to follow the rigging steps as I'm doing, because missing one step can result in your puppet doing weird things. Let's start by making the arms and legs independent from the body. So we'll tag the left arm here, the right arm, the right leg, and the left leg. So in the middle of the preview pane, you should see just the outline of your torso by itself there. By making these independent, it's sort of detaches itself from the rest of the body. Alright, let's start by tagging the left arm. So we want the left arm to pivot from this position here. So we'll grab this little nub and drag it to somewhere here so that it's connected to the body. You will see it turned green, which means we've connected our arm to the torso, a joint. The next thing we'll do is add more joints to our arm so we can pivot at the elbow and the wrist. So what we'll do is go down here and click on the handle tool and we'll add a hand or somewhere near the elbow, which is probably about there. You can see a little bend in the arm here, and we'll add a wrist there as well. Then we'll click on this handle here. And we'll tag this as the right elbow, or click on that, and we'll tag that as the right wrist. Remember that character animator sees the left and right from the puppets perspective, not ours. So what should be left is actually right. Then we'll add some bones to the puppets arm by going down here and clicking on the stick tool. And then to zoom in, we'll hold Alt and move our scroll wheel up. Japan. We just press down on the scroll wheel and move our mouse. And so starting from the shoulder will drag a stick to our elbow and then drag another stick from our elbow to our wrist. The stick doesn't need to touch each handle. If anything, you just want to leave it a little bit of space so that it's a bit more flexible. And the last thing we have to do this to make our risk to draggable so that when we go into record mode, we can drag the arm by the wrist. Alright, let's see what it looks like in Record mode. So if we click on the wrist here and drag it, there we go with the arms moving around. That's pretty cool. The only problem is the jacket isn't moving with the arm and that's because it's in its own layer. So I'll fix this up in the Adobe Illustrator file that's linked in the videos. But to fix this, all we'd have to do is open this up in Illustrator. And then for the jacket, will probably just move these back here. Move these points back there. Delete that, join these here. Then for this arm will probably draw an additional spot for it. Like here. I dropped that as orange. Go, Object, Path, Outline Stroke, click on the Fill, move the fill on top, and then just push this out. And then to reduce the thinning will click on the fill, go to Object Path, Offset Path, and will offset it by, let's go by half a pixel and see how that looks like. That looks pretty good. Then we'll do the same thing for the right side. Alright, let's see what it looks like in Record mode. And if we drag the arm around, look at that, that's pretty cool. We've got a working on. And now we're going to do the same thing for the right arm. So I'll go a little bit quicker this time. So we'll move the arm towards the torso so it's pivoting from this position. Add a couple of handles. One for the elbow, which is about there. You can see that's where it bends. Another handle for the wrist that will tag are risks there. Tag the elbow here, add a couple of sticks or bones to it. So one between the shoulder and the elbow, and one between the elbow and the wrist. And lastly, tag the wrist with a tractable modifier. Go back to record. And if we drag this one, perfect, We've got two working arms. Now, let's do the legs, which will be a pretty similar process. So we'll start by moving the leg towards the hip because that's where we want it to pivot from. Then we'll add a couple of handles. So the nice I know somewhere about there. And then the ankle about that. Then it looks like we've got some additional tags here, the heel and the toe. For a front-facing, we sort of hack our way through this. Obviously, if your toe is facing towards the right, like an L, then you just follow the stick figures position on. But we'll sort of fake this a little bit. So we'll just go maybe the heel is there and the total was there. And then we'll assign it the appropriate tags. So this one is the knee, this one is the ankle. That one the heel. And this one is the toe. Will add some sticks or bones tort. And for this one, we don't really need to add bones like this long story short. You can just add a bone like down here and then we'll repeat the same process for the other leg. So drag this, whoops, grab this knob and drag it all the way up here. So what pivots from the torso out a few handles for the knee, the ankle, the heel, and the toe. Tag it. So we'll click on this nub. This will be the knee, the ankle, the heel, and toe. Then we'll add some sticks or bones to it. Let's make the ankle draggable. And that ankle draggable. If we go into record mode, Let's see what happens. Here. We go. We've got two moving knees or to moving legs. The last thing we have to do is tag the neck, the shoulders here, and the hips and waste. And we do this in the parent layer, which is the body. So where are these green dots are? Here in the preview pane? That's where our arms and legs are pivoting from. What we'll do is add a few new handles for them. So we'll click on the handle toward the bottom. Place a handle on top of that green dot. And we'll tag this as the right shoulder. Place a handle on top of that dark, call it the left shoulder. This one will be the hip. The last two things we have to do, the neck and waste the neck that's currently tagged to delete that and add a new candle that's aligned with the shoulders. Add a new handle there and call that Nick. And then for the waste, delete that waste there, put a handle that's slightly above the hip and call that the waste. And if we go back into record mode and just see that and just check that everything's working fine. Yeah, that looks pretty good. Anyway, that's our rigging process done. The only kind of weird things left is that the arms can stretch to the unrealistic sizes and portions. But I'll show you how to fix that in the next video, which is touching on the limb IK behavior, I'll see you there. 41. 6.5 Limb IK: Okay, So we've finished rigging out puppets head and body. But just to put some icing on the cake, we just want to fix these kind of funny issues with it, where we can stretch the limbs to unrealistic proportions. And the legs aren't bending in a natural way. Like they just look kinda funny. And we're going to fix that in this video by looking at a behavior called limb IK. So what we'll do is jump back into a rig mode, click on the Puppet at the top here. And in the behaviors, we're going to add a behavior called limb IK. Ik stands for inverse kinematics and long story short limb IK adds more natural movements too, your limbs. So add that in and we'll leave these default settings for now. And let's jump back into record. And when we move the feet, we've got a little bit of an issue here where they're not moving. So let's go and fix that. What we're going to do is delete the left heel because I think that's what's causing our puppet to stick to the ground. And we just moved the toe into the middle. And we'll do the same thing for the left leg. Delete the heel and move the toe to the center. When we go back to record, we're getting a little bit of funny behavior with our feet. So what we'll do is go into the limb IK Settings and turn off because ground detection so that the feet looked back to normal. Now we can move our legs again, but the movements still looks a bit unrealistic. So what we can do is then tick this reverse leg bend left and leg bend right. So that this looks a little bit more natural now, like if they were to do a kick, that would look better this time around. And we've solved that stretchy problem by limiting the stretching us to only ten per cent. If we move it to 100%, we can see that we can stretch this to something kinda funny. But if we put up to 10%, It's the amount of stretching that the arm can do. That's true problem-solve. The last problem is that when we move the arm above the head, you get this unrealistic movement. It looks like his arms kinda broken. That's not natural at all, depending on the style of movement that you're after, you need to tweak the limb IK settings accordingly so there's no one size fits all solution. It's a bit of tinkering around to see what works for your puppet. For this particular puppet, what works well is if we turn off auto armed end and reduce the bench strength to zero. So when we put his hand on his hips and then move it above his head, this Ben's a bit more naturally than before. We can even turn these settings on and see what happens. Not much has changed there because we've probably reduced the bench strength to nothing. So let's just take those. And then the last setting to show you is in certain cases you only want the inverse kinematics or apply to the arms only or to the legs. So you've got that option to do arms or legs only for our puppet. We want both arms and legs. That covers it for limb IK, again, depending on your puppet, you'll probably end up using different settings to what I've used here. But just know that if you need to make any changes, this menu here is where you will do that. 42. 6.6 Camera Body Tracking: In this video, we'll go over using camera body tracking to control your puppet. So right now, we've finished rigging our puppet and we've added the limb IK behavior. If we jump into record mode and turn on our webcam here and press Calibrate. We have face tracking, which we've covered in the head rigging video. But if we click on this human-looking icon, which is body tracking, it looks like nothing's happening here. It won't let us use body tracking. And that's because we need to add the body behavior to our Puppet. It's not included by default because I think it consumes quite a lot of resources. So let's jump into rig mode, and we'll select our puppet in the layers pane. And we'll add the body behavior, will expand tract handles and will basically take everything. We want to track the handles of all these limbs on our body. Then we'll jump back into record mode and click on the body tracker, which seems to be working now. And look at that. It's already put some trackers on our wrists, elbows, and shoulders. And that's pretty cool. We can already move our arms on the puppet to do the full body will need to stand a bit further away from our webcam. And so what, what's going to happen is that I'll press this calibrate button. It'll count down 5 s. And that'll give us an opportunity to stand in a neutral position so that our Puppet can mimic that neutral position as well. The neutral position is kind of like a reference point for the puppet. So we'll press Calibrate count down 5 s for a neutral position, and then we can move however we want. Alright, so I can move the neck, I can move the arms, which is pretty cool. And I can even move the legs. The legs are a little bit unnatural like you can see when I do this kick it, kind of flips. If you get unexpected behavior like that, you would just need to tweak the limb IK settings to make it look a bit more natural. But the arms were pretty well. That looks pretty good. You'll find if you try and do like movements like this where the arms are a close-up of mine at work, 100% natural or jittering, glitchy motion like that. When you're doing body tracking, you sort of need to exaggerate or do for movements. So if you want the arms to be close to the body, you can't just go from this position, this auto position, and just bring your arms up. You need to sort of guard the long way like that. And obviously, if you do that quickly, it looks quite normal. The settings that works really well for me. We're putting the bench strength to 85 per cent ticking reverse leg bend and only applying limb IK to the legs. Having brown detection and initial foot pinning turned off. And I think that's about it. So if we calibrate, again, everything should look pretty good. Yeah. So that's fixed. The legs has been doing really nicely as well or quite natural. Perfect. The only thing I'll add is that sometimes you might get this unexpected behavior where it's like you move one here, which is on my left side. But then when you go and try to move the limb on the other side, it might not respond that well. I can't seem to replicate the bug here. But sometimes you'll, you'll move this leg and it's fine. Then you'll go and move the other one, but it just it just won't move. I'm in instances like that, you just need to close character animator and open it again. And everything should be back to normal. If you're still getting that issue, don't forget the Refresh button here as well. You can refresh the scene, refresh the puppet, and re-calibrate. And hopefully that fixes everything. If his legs for some reason I like dental the time you can maybe just stand on your tippy toes a little bit and that'll straighten out the legs into a little dance. Yeah. Hello, get ready to fight. But that's pretty much it for body tracking. 43. 6.7 Recording: At the moment we're just moving our Puppet, but we're not recording anything, which means we can't play it back, right? Well, in this video, I'll show you how to record your puppets movements so you can play it back. So if we jump into record mode, you'll notice that we have this timeline at the bottom here, and it's ranging 0-30 s. If you want to change any of those settings, you can click on the scene in your project pane at the top-left and then to the right here we can change things like frame rate. So if you want a smoother frame rate, you can bump this up to 60. So the animations are very fluid. It's not my style of things, so I'll bump that down to 24. We can change the duration of the timeline, so we only want a 10-second animation. We can change that there, but I'll leave that as 30. And you can adjust the width and height of the scene. So instead of 1920 by 1080, we can do 1080 by 1080 if we want, but I'll leave it as 1920 by 1080, then smart replays isn't something we'll cover in this course, but you can leave this ticked. So coming back to our timeline, if you want to zoom in on the timeline, you can hold Alt and zoom in with your mouse wheel. So just move the mouse wheel up and down. Or you can just use the slider at the bottom here to ensure that we're animating our puppet. Make sure you click on the Puppet on the timelines so that the timeline turns blue. When it's not blue, it means the puppet isn't actively selected. Now, there's several ways to record our puppet. And the first one we're going to go over the dragon behavior. So turn off your webcam and basically you can just drag the arms, the legs to whatever position you want. And then we'll press Control E on our keyboard. And control two is the keyboard shortcut for recording a to frame take, which you can find in the timeline menu here, record to frame take. What this basically does is record the animation that we just did over two frames on the timeline. If we zoom in here, we can see that two frames were added To the left ankle, left wrist, right ankle, and write risk because that's where we added the draggable behaviors in RIG mode. So if we just go back a little bit and go a few frames back, we can play the animation back by pressing Spacebar and stopping it with space bar. If you want to make that animation a little bit smoother, what you can do is highlight all the handles and animate it may be over, let's say ten frames. So we got, That's 345-67-8910. And then hover over this square shape on the top left and top right off the timeline. Drag this one out and drag this one out as well. If I scrub the timeline, you will see that the animation plays back a little bit more smoothly. So what we've done here is smoothed out the animation over 1234 frames instead of previously just everything happening in one frame. And then holds that position 41234 frames, and then transitions out 1-3 frames again. So what we're doing here is essentially blending between the two positions. I personally like to use two frames when blending between positions. I think two looks quite professional when you do things over like ten frames, it kinda looks a bit funny or less professional. The second way we can animate is by pressing the Record button here and then dragging our puppet around and then stopping the recording when we want. So it will look something like this. If we just delete these recordings here. And then go back to frame zero and will turn off the audio because it'll record that too. And let's just animate our character putting his hand on his hips. Just like that. Press Stop. And if we drag ourselves back to position zero and press space bar, you'll see the animation is played back, and then we'll do the other arm as well. So we'll bring it back to a position zero. Press record and put this on his hips. So we'll play it back now. And you can see that I think I was a little bit faster with the left arm here compared to the right arm. But you get the idea. Now, you'll notice that when you scrub through the timeline, you can see what your puppet is doing. But the moment you let go of your mouse, that puppet defaults back to its original position, which can be a little bit annoying if you want to see what the puppet is doing at that exact frame without having to scrub the timeline. So what you can do is click on this record icon next to your puppet on the timeline. And what that will do is stop or recordings for your puppet. And that'll let you see what it's doing at that exact frame. This makes it a little bit easier to sink the arms and hips together. So if we were that looks pretty even. Then when we're done, we can re-enable recording using the Record button is great when you want to do more freehand animations, I think it looks a little bit more human or fluid and less robotic than the first way I showed you. But the drawback, as you saw is that it's not great with accuracy. If you need to arms to be on the hips at the same time. The last recording method I want to show you is body tracking. So if you enable your webcam again and enable body tracking here, and we'll delete the recording. We just did bring this back to zero and we can press the Record button here. And that'll give us, I think three or 5 s to do our Starfish neutral pose. And then we can do whatever movement we want. And character animator will record that movement for us. So we'll press the record button. Starfish position. And then we can do a little dance, do a fighting pose. And when we're done, we can just stop the recording. And you can see that's added a lot of stuff to our timeline, right? And that's because in our body behavior, we've added all these handles to it. 123-45-6789, 10 111-213-1415 handles. So that's all 15 handles on our timeline here. So if we play it back, I think that's pretty cool and that's pretty much it for recording. At the end of this section, we will record our character to make that HE and scratchy introduction using the drag the handles. And that'll involve moving multiple limbs around. 44. 6.8 Walking: In this video, I'm going to show you how to animate your character to walk. It's relatively straightforward to do. There's a little bit of tweaking, but let's start off by going into rig mode, selecting our puppets and the layer pain, and then adding a walk behavior to it. If we leave the default mode to immediate, the moment we enter a recording mode, our Puppet, we'll just start automatically walking. That's not what we want. We want them to only walk when we press the left or right arrow keys on our keyboard. If I press the left key, it looks like that. And if I press the right key, it looks like that. Obviously this walk looks a bit funny. There's something wrong with the feet. The arms look quite unnatural. So there's a little bit of tweaking that we need to do to it. For starters, I think the legs on bending correctly and that's because of the limb IK setting we've got here for reverse leg bend. So what we'll do is turn that off and that looks a little bit more natural now. But you can see that the feet still kinda look a little bit wobbly and the head is not moving as well. So we'll need to fix our rigging a little bit and we'll actually need to go back into Illustrator to change the layer positions of our arms to really sell the walk cycle. Let's start with the easy stuff first. By fixing the head, we'll go into rig mode. And what we'll do is turn the independent feature off for the body. And for our head, we'll drag it so that it's connected to the torso. Now, when we go back into record mode, the head's moving with the body. Cool. Alright, so that's one thing fixed. The next easy thing to fix his arms look kind of funny because technically this arm here should be behind the body. Looks kinda weird that both arms are in front when he's walking. So we'll click on our puppet here in the project pane and open it up in Adobe Illustrator. So what we'll have to do is move the left arm behind the torso. So we'll drag this and move it underneath the torso. Let's save that. Go back to a character animator and yeah, that looks a little bit better. The only last thing we have to do is the feet. It doesn't look right, but the feet are facing frontwards, but the character is walking to the left. So let's go back into character animator. And what we're going to do is go back to the file that we downloaded from free pig. And we're going to grab the character's shoes that are facing sideways. So I found it here, this layer here, and that layer there. And we're just going to copy that. Go back to our character and paste it. So we've got our two shoes there and let's just make them a little bit bigger. See if we can get them roughly the same size as our shoes that are there currently, that looks pretty good, I think. And then we'll add some stroke to it and we want them facing the other way. So it's Object, Transform, Reflect. And now we just have to put them into the appropriate layers. What I normally like to do is to put them inside the foot. So for this one which is the left leg, I'll drag this inside the left leg foot and then turn off the front-facing foot and then drag this one into the right and turn off that front-facing one as well. And we'll reposition this here. We'll save that and see what it looks like in character animator. That looks a little bit better, but the leg stool kind of funny. I think it's to do with our rigging. So let's go back into rig mode and update our right leg and left leg here. So now that we know our character is actually going to walk left, what we can do is update the feet so that it reflects better on the stick figure. So the left toe is over here. Now, we need to make a longer stick for this. So that's going to be the whole thing there. And then we'll add another handle for our heal. And to add a little bit of rigidity between the ankle and the heel, will add a stick there and add a stick to the toe. Then we'll go to the left leg and the toes technically over here now, we'll need to extend the stick, the hallway to give some rigidity there. At the heel here. And then a little bit of rigidity here. And let's test this out and see what it looks like now. That looks way better. And then you go just with a few tweaks. We've been able to create a walk cycle or get our character walking and just a couple of minutes. So now we can record our puppet moving. So we'll go back to 0 s, press record and move our puppet. Before we finish up, I just want to quickly point out that you've probably noticed that although our puppet is doing the walking animation, they're actually not moving. And that's because we're going to physically move the puppet when we get to after effects or the compiling phase, I know it seems kind of weird to not move the puppet now, but trust me, when I say it makes life easier to do it in After Effects. Anyway, that's it for walking. Next up, we will animate mouth movements by automatically lip sinking our puppet to some audio and text. 45. 6.9 Lip Sync: Let's move on to automatic lip sinking. One of the most tedious parts of animation is animating the mouth, which normally involves manually key framing the mouth to match its movement. And that takes hours. But luckily with character animator, we can automate that before we lip sync, Let's just double-check that we've rigged our puppets mouth properly. So we'll go into rig and open sad mouth because our character is just always said, I've decided to use the sad mouth, but feel free to use the Happy Math. If you want to use that with either mouth, just make sure that the math tag and mouth croup have been applied to it. I've made my regular Happy Mouth invisible. So this puppet will be using the sad mouth. And we'll just make sure that we've got all the teams tagged here. So we've got M, we've got S, D, E are all Wu, f, l, smile and neutral. We don't really need surprised. These ones will do. Everything. Looks like it's in order here. If yours is different than make sure your names and tags match mine. Because we did this back in the head rigging video. Anyway, let's jump back into record mode. So to lip sync against some audio dialogue start by importing the audio into your project pane. So double-click here and let's import the lip-sync MP3 cause file. Then we'll drag it onto our timeline. And then select both the MP3 file and your puppet. Then goto timeline at the top and click Compute lip-sync from seeing audio, it'll take a few seconds to process. And when we press Space bar on our timeline, we have our visit names sink to the audio. If you finish in first position, you will win the race. A Formula One car has four wheels every 60 s, and then it passes in Formula One. And how good is that? In a matter of seconds, we've got lip sinking done to our audio. Now, you'll notice that for some parts the mouth visiting teams don't seem to match the audio. Like I think when he says four wheels, a Formula One car has four wheels. He says wheels, but it's not really matching up to the audio. So when you say wheels there should be working, you should be like an L sound here. So let's have a look at that. So what we could manually do is right-click there and say we need like an L sound Delic wheels has four wheels. Wheels, that looks a little bit better, but it's quite tedious to go through all your audio and manually add vms in-between, right? So if this still isn't good enough for you and you want absolute perfection, there is a second way to lip sync, but it's a little bit more work. And that's using the compute lip-sync take from audio and transcript. So on top of your audio, you can actually import subtitles off your audio. And it will use both the subtitles and the audio. To compute your lip-sync, you click on the MP3 file, press Import, find the subtitle file, and then it'll just paste it into this transcript here. So what we'll do now is just delete our lip-sync audio and then select the MP3 again and our puppet. And this time go compute lip-sync take from audio and transcript. And if we play this back again, if you finish in first position, you will win the race. A Formula One car has four wheels every 60 s, and then it pauses in Formula One. And to me that looks bang on like almost 100% perfect match with the lip sync. But the question is like petty create subtitles. So the fastest way to generate subtitles for your audio is with Adobe Premiere Pro. So if you download Premier Pro with the Creative Cloud Desktop and you open that up, you can start a new project on the top-left, give it a project name if you want. I'll just leave it as untitled, put it into an appropriate project location, and click Create. Now you'll Premiere Pro is going to be different to mine, but I'll show you all the panels that you need to open up. So if you go to Window, go projects and enable the untitled project that you just created, you should see this project panel open up and double-click in this empty window to import some media. And you'll want to import the MP3 file from the project window, drag that into your timeline. And then the next window you'll want is text, like it might appear as a separate window like it did for me. You can easily drag this text to be maybe somewhere on the left here. And then all we're going to do is click, Create, Transcription and transcribe. And then you can see here the text has been created for us. So let's just have a look. If you finish in first position, you will win the race. A Formula One car has four wheels every 60 s, and then it passes in Formula One. Alright, so that's perfect. I think the only thing we need to do is just add a full stop there and awesome, right, the next thing we'll do is then press the create captions button and we can leave everything as default here. I've liked to have all my subtitles on a single line instead of double. Then we'll click create captions. And let's just check that the subtitles line up against our audio again. If you finish in first position, you will win the race. A Formula One car has four wheels every 60 s, and then it passes in the formula one. That looks perfect. The only thing you might want to do is make sure that when the audio finishes, that the subtitle finishes along with it as well. So this one, he's only saying a Formula One car. And then the second part is has four wheels. So to split this up, we'll click on this and go Split Caption and change this to be a Formula One. Formula One car. Formula One car has four wheels as the second part. So that finishes there. And starts again at about there. For you. Every 60 s. That looks much better now, when we're happy with the timings and the wordings, like everything's correct. Well then click on the three ellipses here. Go to Export and export to SRT, and just call it the same name as L MP3 file lip-sync. Don't see R2. I've already saved it. So I won't save it again. And then once you've created the SRT, you will just click on the MP3 file in your project pane and character animator click Import on the right and then select the SRT. And that's pretty much perfect. In some cases, if your audio isn't clear enough, you might get these compute errors that appear on the timeline here. They haven't appeared in this instance, but it can happen and your visitors won't load properly if you get instances like that where it says compute lip-sync era and these victims don't appear. I think the shortest and fastest way is to just compute lip-sync from scene audio. So what you might have to end up doing is, let's just say this part. Let's just say this part didn't compute properly. You'll have to split the audio up by pressing Control Shift D to split the timeline. Then just click this particular audio, clip timeline and go compute lip-sync take from scene audio. It won't be 100% perfect, but we're going for speed here instead of accuracy. Anyway, that's it for lip sinking. 46. 6.10 Triggers and Swap Sets: Triggers and swaps it, what you're going to use when you need to e.g. switch between different hands like switch between an open palm, a thumbs up, or a fist, or switch between a smile and a sad mouth. The main cases that I use triggers and swaps it's for, but there's heaps of other uses. A swap set is a set of layers from your Illustrator file that you're going to swap between the open palm, a thumbs up and a fist, and a trigger is going to be pressing a key on your keyboard to swap between the layers. So a trigger will be like if you press number one on your keyboard, the puppet will have an open hand. If you press too, they'll have a thumbs up and if you press three, they'll have a fist. So when combined together, a swap set has your list of layers and your trigger is how you control which layer to show. Anyway, let's start with the hand movement. Now, when you put your hands on your hips, thumb is closest to the body, right? And that's what our puppet is doing. But when we raise our hands in the air, how thumb is closest to our head. But for our puppet, the thumb is the most furthest away from our body, and that's not right. And we can solve this with swap sets and triggers. So we'll have a swappable set of hands and in other words, as swaps it and the hands will swap when we press something on our keyboard. In order to do this, we need to go back to Illustrator to create the hand where the thumb is over here towards the right. So let's click on our puppet and open Illustrator. The easiest way to do this is to select the hand, press Alt and drag it down. And then go to object transform, reflect. And we'll reflect horizontally. Rotate this. And that looks pretty aligned. And if we expand the left arm, we want this new head to sit inside the hand here so we can call this one. This will be the default, and we'll call this one maybe this is a foot tanned. Then we'll go to the right side. Hold Alt to duplicate, drag it down, go to Object, Transform, Reflect Horizontal, press. Okay, just rotate this so it fits well with the arm here. Expand the right arm and you want your flipped hand to sit inside one layer. So this is the foot one. And the default one is the one that says group. Alright, so we're done with our updates in Illustrator. Let's go back to character animator. And you can see our Puppet has to hand here, but we only want one to appear at a time, right? So let's go back into rig mode and we're now going to make use of this triggers pain here. So what we'll do is create a new, swaps it. And we'll call this something like hands. And we'll click this Add button again, create trigger. And let's just call this may be like maybe like a risking. These are our resting hands. Then we'll drag our two hands into this resting piece here. And you can see in the layers that we've got our left and right hands inside this trigger. And we want this to be the default hand. So tick default. And let's give this a trigger off number one. So when we press one on our keyboard, it'll show resting. And then we'll click on hands again. Our hand swaps it. Click Create, Create, Trigger. And we'll call this flipped. Then we'll control click flipped to select both of them and drag them into this trigger. Will select latch so that when we press number two on our keyboard, that it remains latch or a stays with the flipped hand. If we don't take latched and we press number two and then let go of number two. It will automatically go back to our resting hand. So we'll click latched. Then we'll go back into record mode. And you can see that we now have one set of hands. So when they're resting here, That's perfect. Then when we move them up, we'll press number two on our keyboard. You can see the thumbs are the ones that are closer to the face. So if we do a quick little animation here, let's just say at frame zero, we want our character with their hands by their sides. So then we'll press Control to take a two frame take, and we'll just expand this out. Then maybe at this point here, we want them with their hands up there. Then we'll do control to, to take a two frame, take. And we'll maybe try and blend these together. We don't need that audio. So we can probably disable this. Select both of the handles. And then let's blend this over 12345 frames just so we can see what's going on here. And then we'll blend this, will expand this out and maybe blend this over 123456 or so. Alright, so somewhere in-between the hand on the hips to the hands close to the head, we need to swap the hands out or flip them around. So I'd say that somewhere around. Maybe here is where we will maybe press number two, then press Control two. We can see that the trigger hands appears on the timeline. And we'll drag this out to about here towards the end. And if we play this back, we can see the hands have been swapped over to the flipped ones. Because the animation is happening so fast, the hand swaps, it is quite seamless. You can't even tell that it's been swapped. And that's pretty much it for triggers and swaps it. But just to round things out, I wanted to show you how to create a mouth swaps it. Sometimes you'll want your puppet to switch between a happy mouth Vizio, and maybe they received some bad news. So then we need to swap them over to a sad mouth. So we'll do the exact same process as we did with our hands. I'll go a little faster this time. So we'll jump back into rig mode. And assuming you've already got I'm your mouth, happy mouth and sad mouth. Museums created. What you'll do is go to Create, swaps it and name this mount. Create a trigger. And let's just say this will be our Happy Mouth set. Click on mouth, create trigger, and this will be our sad mouth set, will give these keys 3.4. And we want the happy one to latch, and we want the sad one to be our default because our character just seems sad by default. Then all we'll do is drag the parent layer, the sad mouth into sad and the regular mouth into happy. I think that will do it. So now if we press three, look, he's happy again. And if I'm recording stuff, this is the Happy Mouth set. And if I let go of three, then he goes back to the SAT math set. And that's how you swap between a happy and sad looking mouth. That pretty much covers it for triggers and swap sets. 47. 6.11 Motion Library: At the time of recording this, a relatively new behavior was added into character animator called the motion library, which basically contains hundreds of cookie cutter animations like walking, dancing, fighting, jumping, and a few others. It's not something I used at all in my animations, which I'll explain in a tick. But I think it's still worth showing. So to use the motion library, we'll hop back into rig mode and then select our puppets in the layer pain and add the motion library behavior. Then we'll jump back into record mode. And at the bottom here will 12 down the motion library. And we can select from hundreds of cookie cutter animations. So if we try break dance one, there we go. We've got our puppet break dancing. Just like that. We can try. Let's see the sidewalk animation that looks kinda weird. And do happy. Has an idol. Dizzy. You can tweak some of these parameters as well to make it look better. But you get the gist of what's happening. I didn't use this much in my animations because a lot of my animations were dialogue and didn't have a lot of body movement. The other difficult thing I found was that some of these presets, off or side profile puppets, only the majority of my puppets or front-facing. So when you go to add these motions, like it just didn't look right at all. Sorry. Yeah, between body capture and the drag, their behavior, I could make all my animations with that. But the option is there if you do want to use the motion library, play around with it and see if there's an animation that fits your use case. One thing I will quickly mentioned as well as I believe you'll need to add the body tracker before you use motion library, or at least have everything rigged up properly. In this view. Otherwise the motion library won't work at all. 48. 6.12 Extra Tips: I just wanted to use this video to cover a few extra tips for character animator. The first thing, and I sort of touched on this in The Walking video. But you want to avoid bulking your pop it up with too many angles or too many layers. What I mean by that is it's tempting to add a pub with multiple head angle, so a front, a three-quarter and aside. So we can do everything in one puppet, right? That gets really complicated. And if you do need to do multiple angles, I think it's better to just have separate puppets. So you have a puppet here for a front angle, a second puppet for a three-quarter, and a third puppet for a side view. Another handy thing you can do is if you're happy with the way your frog jaw puppet and you want to reuse it for another project, what you can do is right-click on the puppet and go Export. Save it. And if you want to reuse it again, you can import this puppet file. And it's got all the rigging done for you already. So this is a really good time-saver. And then you can open the file in Illustrator, make any edits you need, and it'll auto sync with character animator. So this is a great way to streamline and automate a lot of work. If all the characters in your cartoon have the same height, the same face height, and the body height and everything. But you're just tweaking the eyes, the nose, and the mouth to create a different character. You save yourself a lot of time from rigging multiple puppets. You just rig one puppet, change a couple of features and you can quickly animate again in character animator. 49. 6.13 Itchy and Scratchy Intro Pt 1: Now it's time to put everything we've learned into practice by creating the introduction of our itchy, scratchy cartoon. So the workflow for this is import and rig itchy, import and rig scratchy, itchy and animate scratchy. To save a bit of time, I've included the itchy and scratchy Illustrator file is where they're holding the bat to this video. So you can just download them and import them into character animator. Soh CAH bat is itchy, and TW bet is scratchy. Alright, so we've imported both of our characters. Now it's time to rig itchy. So the first thing we'll do is start with the face. And again, we're going to delete all the tags for our eyes. Because character animator might have added some additional tags that we didn't need. That tag, delete, blink. Like pupils, range. Don't need that. Don't need that. Perfect. Then starting with the left eyebrow will tag the appropriate eyebrow in these stick figure. And we'll make them independent because we want them to move independently from the head. The next thing we'll do is tag the pupils and make that independent. And just to make sure we've done everything correctly, let's add a new scene for itchy and update the eye gaze to have keyboard input. So we, when we move left and right, we can see the eyes are moving correctly. Perfect. Then we'll double-check that the mounts are correct. I think for this scenario, we'll use the happy mouth. And it looks like everything has been tagged correctly here. Perfect. So the neutral there is the smile that's just a faint small, but I want a big ones. Let's untag neutral for this one and make the smile layer, but the neutral and the small tag. So he's constantly grinning. Yep, Perfect. Then if we decide that we want a bit of body tracking or head movement with this, what we'll do is go into face and reduce the head position strength to zero so that when you are pivoting from the neck, it doesn't wildly go away from the neck. It's sort of pivots from the central point of the neck. And speaking of which, let's drag our head down towards the neck and the head tag. That is correct. Alright. I think we're done with rigging the head. Now it's time to move on to the body. Let's start by making the arms and legs independent from the bodies. So we'll tag the left arm is independent, right arm as independent, right leg and left leg as independent. And so when you go back to the body or you're left with is the neck and the torso separated from the arms and legs. Then starting with the arms, we're going to move the pivoting position of that armed closer towards the body. And then we're going to zoom in and add two handles. One for the elbow here, which bends at around this place, and one for the wrist there. Then we'll tag this as a right wrist, make a draggable, and then tag the elbow and add a couple of bones there to give it a bit of rigidity. I'm just noticing here that I haven't rendered as a vector. So let's tick that. Perfect. That looks good for the arm. Let's move on to the right arm. And this one's a little bit special because I've included the bat onto the right arm of Ichi, but the pivoting position doesn't change. Let's drag that nub onto the body, so pivots from that position. And then we'll add an elbow and add a wrist, make it draggable. And if I remember correctly, what we'll do for the arm here is add a bone all the way up there. So we'll give a bit of rigidity, give the backbone. And then we'll add a handle or at the top. And we'll make that draggable as well. So that's the arms done. If we go into character animator and have a look, yep, we've got the arm moving there. And we've got that moving there. And we can move the bat as well. Perfect. There's a little bit of an issue with the arm there, but we'll fix that in Judah course with limb IK. Then onto the legs will do the same thing. Again. I don't think my computer's handling rendering as vector and recording at the same time very well. So I'm going to untick this for now to speed things up. So it will zoom in here and we'll make the right leg pivot from the waist or the hip. So somewhere about there. And then we'll add a few more handlers. So one for the knee and one for the ankle, one for the toe. We don't need the heel in this case. So knee, ankle and make a draggable from this spot and a toe. And then to keep the foot little bit rigid, we'll add a stick or a bone at the bottom there. And we'll also add a few bones to the lake. Then we'll do the same thing for the left leg. So I move it up there so it pivots from the hip and the ankle handle a there and the sorry, the knee handle of it and the ankle handler here. So right ankle draggable and knee and a toe at the bottom. Give it a couple of bones. And at the bottom bone for a bit of rigidity. I think that's correct. So let's go into record mode and have a look. That's looking good. It's bending a little bit funny, but we'll fix that again with limb IK. Next we'll go back to the parent layer, which is the body. And we'll add the shoulders, neck, and hips. So where you see the green dots, what we're going to do is add a handle on top of that. So that's a shoulder, the shoulder there and the neck tag that belongs to the neck layer. We're going to remove that Nick tag and add a new neck tag that's pretty pretty aligned on the same horizontal line as the right and left shoulder. It just works better when the next in the same position, when it's up there, you do get some funny movements. So we keep the neck horizontally aligned with the shoulders, the waste. We can untag that and create a new handler and tag that as waste. The way should always be slightly on top of the hips. So we'll add our head tags that I think that's our rigging pretty much done. So everything looks like it's working pretty well. I think now let's add limb IK to the puppet so that it moves a bit more naturally. And the settings that worked really well for me in the previous video was to only apply limb IK to the legs, reduce the bench strength to 85%, removed ground detection. And let's see how this looks. Still getting a funny bend. So let's try reversing the legs. And that looks much better. This is going to be important because in the introduction of itchy, scratchy, they are bending their legs up and down like this. And so we do need to have limb IK enabled for this. Let's have a look at the arms and see if we can adjust that. It's still curving a little bit funny. Let's have a look. We forgot to add bones to this, so let's add that in and see if we added it to the left arm. We did. Perfect. Alright, so let's have a look now. Still bending a little bit funny, but I think this works. I think what we need to use limb IK on the arms as well and see if we can disable auto unbind and reverse then the left hip. So that's looking good. And we can hold that thought up there and move this out here. So it looks like he's holding the bat. Maybe squeeze this in a little bit more. Perfect. That's a pretty convincing pose for itchy there. So this is going to be our opening pose for itchy. And so now would be a perfect time to do a record to frame, take with control to or by going to the timeline and clicking on record to frame take. We'll go control to and I'm not sure if the introduction goes for the full 30 s, but that's okay. We can make it do the full 30. And let's just drag this pose all the way to the end of our timeline. Alright, now we're going to import the audio for the itchy, scratchy intro. Again, for copyright purposes, I can't upload the original audio, so I've played it on guitar very poorly, but I've sync the audio on my guitar to match the audio timing of the original song. So that when you do get to using the audio on TikTok. Um, it's going to sink properly because when it says they fight and fight, and fight and fight and fight. Every time you hear that fight, that's when the weapon drops onto each character. So by sinking the guitar playing with the actual music, you'll be able to know when to drop the bat onto the other character. So now that we've imported our audio or drag it onto our timeline. And this animation is only going to go for about 10 s, 10 s, and ten milliseconds. So maybe it will make our timeline 11 s instead, just to make it a bit easier to navigate. So 11 s, and we can move these three handles on our timeline back to 11 s. Proplus makes it easier to work with. So let's play the audio and see what this looks like. Okay, so you will notice that for the first second here there's no audio. And that's where you're hearing the introduction of the itchy, scratchy song where it's like did it, it, it, it, it, it, it an dentin, dentin. Dentin, dentin, dentin. So this section here is the did it it, it, it, it, it, it, it, it, and that's where they had zooming in from the middle of the screen. I'm zooming in and becoming larger to this position that you say it in this section here, we're going to probably re-size our character. So they'll start off as 0% at position zero. And then at about this mock where the audio is about to start, they'd become 100%, which is what we have here. So let's start off in this position here, what we can do is go to Transform down here, and we'll put a keyframe here for scale at position zero, and we'll make itchy zero per cent. And then at about here, we'll make it 100%. And while they're zooming in the feet, if you watch the animation, the introduction on YouTube, you'll see that the feet are constantly moving up and down like this in a very fast way to match the digital data. To do. So, let's animate that as well. I know we put a 1% keyframe Fourier transform here. But just to make things easier to animate, let's maybe put in those 50 per cent so we can still see him moving. Did it it, it, it, it, it, and so it's pretty fast. I reckon every two frames he moves one leg and then on the fourth frame he moves the other leg. So let's try this wall on frame two will raise the leg. Record a two frame take with control to. And because the animation is moving so fast, we don't really need to blend the animation, right? Like there's only two frames that we have to animate the leg. And then on the next frame, we want this leg to move up. It should look something like this, but the ankle is staying in that position. And that's because we didn't set a default ankle position for our character. So let's just sort of wiggle his feet there a little bit and make that his default position. Cool. So now we've got a baseline or a reference position for the ankles. And we'll move that to the ten second mark as well. Alright, perfect. That's what we need. So he's got 50 per cent. So he sought to 012. And we're going to move this leg up to a two frame take up. And then at frame three, he brings his leg back down. Perfect. And then we'll move that one up. And then what we can do is just copy these two animations and paste them again. So 2345678. And that should bring us here pretty close to where the animation actually starts. So let's check him out. Arc, and that looks pretty good. We could probably tweak it a little bit more, but in the interest of time, I guess we're going for speed again, not so much accuracy that it did it, it, it, it, it, it, it in. Cool. So that's the first part of the animation done. And what we'll do is go back to our zero position, click on the keyframe and change that, scale back to zero and see what it looks like. That's pretty close to the original ICI and scratchy animation. All right, the next part we're going to animate is him hitting scratchy with the bass. So they fight and fight and flight and fight. And 5555555. Okay. So it's when you hear the vein that's when the bat comes down and hits the other character. And I think it's actually Deci, who's the first one to get hit in the itchy, scratchy introductions. So the first one here. Fight. This part here. That's itchy, going to get squashed. So he's not going to lower the back there. So about here because you can see this peak in the audio. It's about here where he will lower the bat. And it's again, a pretty quick take. So what we'll do is just lower the bat to about here. This isn't going to look perfect, but all sort of try and cover this up so that this hands on top, that looks pretty good. You can't see the other hand sort of bending unnaturally there because this hands covering it. The animation is happening so fast. You wouldn't be able to notice it. So what we'll do is to a control to record, to frame, take this one, we maybe, let's have a look. So we play one off, just hold this for a couple of more seconds. Maybe we do want to blend this, but only one frame. That looks pretty good AREC in one frame to blend in and then no blending on the way out. For this section here we're not going to squash itchy because it's actually kind of difficult to squash characters in character animator. We're going to save that for the compilation stage in After Effects. So don't worry about squashing HIM here. We just need to do him with the bat. They find, they find them. So here is the second time that HE will though, his bat. So we'll just copy this and paste it. Paste it in this section. Gets hit, he hits, gets hit, hit, hit, hit, hit, hit here. And then the second one is probably about there. And then what's wonder? Then it gets squashed. And that's pretty much it. You will notice that we've only done one hand or one arm there and the other arm is staying idle. So what we'll do is just go back to our other handle here, which is the left wrist. And we'll copy that and just move it into the same position as as are other handle. Again, I feel it's just better to go limb by limb than it is to do everything in one pose. So sticking to that mantra here, instead of doing four frames, we need to do three. None on the way out. So 121 there, one there, and one here. So right wrist. Let's copy that and see. Do I need a copy of this one as well? Yeah, I do. So we need to copy these two and copy them into the same position. And replicate these. Alright, cool. So if we play this, did it, it, it, it, it, it, it in. Perfect. Alright, so that's itchy animated for the introduction. Now we have to go and do the same thing for scratchy. This video is already quite long. So what am I do is split this up into two videos. In the next video, we're going to pretty much go through the same workflow that we did for itchy Justin, but for scratchy this time. So I'll see you in the next video. 50. 6.14 Itchy and Scratchy Intro Pt 2: Now we have to animate scratchy and we're going to follow the same workflow that we did for itchy. So we'll start off by rigging scratchy and then animating him for the introduction. So let's start by animating his head. And that involves going through the layers and making sure that we have deleted the incorrect I tags. There's nothing wrong with the head here, but while we're here, we might as well just drag this so it pivots on the neck. Mouth looks okay. I think we want them to use the Happy Mouth for this animation. So it will make the SAT math invisible. No tags there. But for the left eyebrow will tag him on the stick figure. So that's the that's the right eyebrow there and the left eyebrow there. For the eye. We don't want anything tagged. Blink. We want the right blink instead, mask looks good. The left pupil, Let's delete that tag and put the pupil one in there. And eyeball will remove that, right? I delete that tag. Blink. This one. Mask has nothing. Pupil delete that and add the pupil tag from the stick figure. And then for the eyeball, we don't want anything there. Face. Alright, that looks pretty good. We do want the eyebrows to move independently, and we want the pupils to move independently from the head as well. So let's click on scratchy and then create a new scene for him. Go to eye gaze and enable the keyboard input. And I think it is eyes, yeah, they're all moving properly. Perfect. So we'll go back to rig mode. And I think we're pretty much done with the head here. So we can just twirl that up. Now we move onto rigging the body. The first thing to do is to make the arms and legs independent from the torso. So that's ticking. The right leg, the right arm, the left arm, and the left leg. And when we go to the parent layer, the body, we should just have the torso sort of outlined by itself. Starting with the right arm, we're going to move the pivot position. So it pivots from the body. And then we'll add a couple of handlers. So one for the elbow, one for the wrist will tag the wrist, make a draggable, tag the elbow, and then add a couple of bones or sticks to give it some rigidity. And then we'll do the same thing for the left arm. So we wanted to pivot from the body at the elbow, handler at the wrist, make it draggable. Had elbow at a couple of bones or sticks. Then because he's holding the bat in this hand, we're going to give the back a little bit of rigidity by adding a huge bone through here. Adding a handler at the top and making this draggable. Next we'll move on to the legs. And we are going to pivot from the hips here. Add a knee, had an ankle and toe, and add a bit of rigidity to the bottom of the foot. Next we'll tag the knee, tack the ankle, tag the foot or the toe, and make this draggable. Then add the bones in. Then finally for left leg pivot from the hip. The handlers tag the handles at some rigidity with bones and make the ankle draggable. Then we'll go to the parent body layer and we can delete the waste tag there. And where we've got the green dots, That's where we're going to add the shoulders and the hips. So we'll add the shoulder, their shoulder here. The hip here. Remember the neck. It has to be on the same horizontal area as the shoulders and the waist, slightly above the hips. Okay. I think we're done with tagging Nick, yet we can delete that tag there. And it looks like, yeah, we've added all the correct number of handles to the public. So if we go back to our scene here and have a look. Yeah, that looks pretty good. I'm bending a little bit funny, but we'll fix all that with limb IK. That's all bending. Not 100% correct, but that's alright. Yes, we do have a problem where he's not fitting within our scene. Let's see if we can actually squeeze him in. He's already a bit too tall. What's the bats here? Yeah, that could work if we can squeeze them in here. Yeah. That looks pretty good. All right. So it looks like we've reached him correctly here. Let's go back to our scratchy character, select them in the light of pain and add a limb IK behavior. We'll apply it to the, to the arms and legs, put the bang bench strength to 85%, removed the order armband, remove ground detection. Let's see if we can get his arm not it's not bending correctly this so what we'll do is adjust the limb IK settings and record and reverse arm bend the right. Yep, that looks perfect. Then we'll just squeeze him in like that. Perfect. That's going to be our reference pose for scratchy. The legs still are bending correctly, so let's reverse bend these. And that looks really good. Alright. So this is going to be our starting pose for scratchy. And with that starting pose or press Control to, to create a recorder to frame take. And this is going to be a 10 s or 11 second animation. Yep, so we've updated that already. And we'll expand that reference pose or the way to the end of the timeline. Then just to sync the audio, I will add the audio to this as well. Alright, cool. So we know on this first one does, That's when HE gets hit. So for this, here will be lowering his bat this direction. But the first animation that we need to do for scratchy is to make him zoom in. So again, we'll click on our puppet in the timeline, go to the transform settings and set a keyframe for scale at, it should be zero per cent. But just to make our animations and visuals a bit easier for our workflow or set them to 50 for now. And it's at about here, he becomes 100%. So I will update that to 100%. And you'll see two keyframes have been added to make him sort of zoom in. I believe with itchy. We did every two frames. So here is probably aware will move his leg up here, then press Control two for two frames, and then move this other leg up here for a two frame. Take a then we'll just copy these two to frame takes and just paste them till we get to the keyframe at 33. Paste, paste, paste. And yet That's perfect with the audio again. Right? That looks pretty good. And we'll just make this keyframe back to zero per cent. That looks pretty good. All right, Next we have to animate him smashing the bat onto itchy. So it's up here that he'll hit itchy. When we scrub the timeline. Here, we can see me still holding the butt and we're going to position the bat so it's down here. And his arm is there as well. Yeah, that looks pretty good. So we've got that position and we're going to go Control two for a two frame take. And with itchy, I believe we've made this over three frames. So that's 123. And we said we'd do a one frame foot blending. So it will copy these three. Fight, fight, fight, fight. This is where HE hits 15555 fight, fight, fight. I'm just looking for peaks in the audio here to know when to pace the the frames. Yeah, cool. So I think that's pretty much bang on. And just to check that this is all sink to properly, what we can actually do is drag the itchy scene into here and see if these to sync up. So just to help with the visuals, what we could do is just position this a bit more to the right. And when we run this, did it, it, it, it, it, it, it, I think that looks perfect. I think that's going to sink very well when we get to after effects. So we can just delete this scene here, the itchy scene. And let's move our scratchy back into position in the middle of there. So awesome. I think we're done with the animating section. Actually, we're going to grab both of these scenes in Adobe After Effects and compile them together. And it's going to look perfect. So congratulations. You're so close to finishing off this cartoon. So let's move on to the next section which is compiling. I'll see you there. 51. 7.0 Compiling: Welcome to the compiling part of the course. This is the phase of the project where we combine all the elements of our project into one place so we can export it to a video. So we're combining any backgrounds and inanimate objects. We drew an illustrator and any puppets we made in character animator. And putting that altogether in Adobe After Effects, that's the software will be using for compiling and combining all our elements. So what you'll be doing in this section is learning how to install Adobe After Effects. We'll do a quick tour of the application interface so you can learn your way around. We'll cover how to import your character animator puppet, how to perform basic manipulation on the puppet, like moving it around and squashing it. How to frame and export your video so that it looks good on your computer and your phone. Just like what the illustrator and character animator sections. This isn't going to be a comprehensive course on Adobe After Effects because there's just way too many things to cover. Again, you'll be learning just enough to produce our cartoon. If you want to learn specific advanced After Effects techniques, there's heaps of tutorials and courses online you can search for. With that said, let's jump into the section where in the next video we'll be installing After Effects. 52. 7.1 Install After Effects: Let's install Adobe After Effects. To do this, we'll open up the Creative Cloud Desktop App and type in After Effects at the top, click on the desktop app and the Install button. If you get this pop-up to install Cinema 4D, It's totally up to you if you want to or not. I'm just going to install it. Installation is going to take a few minutes. So I'm just going to fast forward to completion if it's finished installing, but the Open button is blanked out. Just click back and then open After Effects in the main window. When it opens up, you'll be greeted with the welcome screen. Next up, we'll go through an interface tour of After Effects. 53. 7.2 Application Tour and Importing Puppets: Now we'll go through an application tour of Adobe After Effects. So by the end of this video, hopefully you'll be familiar with the interface and be able to navigate your way around right now where in the welcome page and let's click on New Project. On the top-left will then be brought into a new window, which is the main application. This left pane here is our project window where we'll be importing our character animator, record scenes and any other Illustrator follows that you've created. So just double-click anywhere inside the window and import the CH project file, which is our character animator project file that contains the recorded scenes we created in the previous section. You will then get another pop up with a choice of which scene you want to import. So we can either do the itchy or the scratchy seen. At this point in time. You can only import one scene at a time and we obviously want birth. So for now we'll select the itchy, seen them press. Okay, then do the same thing again. But this time we'll import scratchy. Once that's important, we can click on it, press Enter, and rename it to something more readable like scratchy for this one. And enter an itchy for this one. That covers importing our characters. The bottom section here is our timeline where we will be doing a lot of work like modifying how long the puppet is on the screen, moving it, squashing it, and so forth. But at the moment, we haven't created a composition or a new scene, which is why our timeline is disabled. To create a new scene like we did with character animator or composition has After Effects, calls it, click on new composition in the middle and give it a name like comp one or seen one. Because this will be seeing one of our H0 and scratchy animation. You can leave the width as 1920 by 1080. Leave the frame rate as 29.9, 7.4 duration. I don't think our animation will be more than thirty-seconds, so I think there should be. Okay, so press Okay. So now we've created a blank scene or a blank composition where we can combine or compile all the elements and ingredients of our cartoon together. So let's start by simply dragging the itchy CH project file into the composition. And since our character animator scene was 1920 by 1080, you'll find that a perfectly snaps into position when we've done that, you can see the timeline at the bottom is enabled for our HE puppet, which is about 11 or ten ish seconds. And that's because that was the length of our composition or seen that we created in character animator. If you want to scrub through the timeline, you will see your itchy animation playing in the composition. If we want to hide the layer from the timeline, we can press this button on the left here. And if we want to disable the sound which was imported with the CH project file, then we can click the speaker button here and to lock the layer is this button here, but we want to leave it unlocked. To zoom in and out of the timeline, you can hold Alt, just move the mouse wheel up or down. If you want to start your animation a little bit earlier, you can drag the timeline bar for that layer a bit to the left or to the right. And you can hold Shift on your keyboard and drag it around. And you'll see that the timeline will snap to the current position of your pointer or to the start of the timeline. If you need to make a cut in your layer, you can press Control Shift D. And this is pretty handy if you need to cut another scene, e.g. and then maybe a few seconds later, come back to it. Let's just undo that for now. And on the right side here we have some additional features, changing the settings of the preview pane. Here in the middle, we've got adding effects, changing fonts and text alignment. In paragraph, we will be using them a little bit, but the timeline is where we'll be doing most of our work. And speaking of back at the bottom here, if we want to add another layer onto our timeline that isn't from character animator or Illustrator. We can right-click on an empty space and go to New and add texts or a solid color. Let's go for solid. And let's make this solid color a red, maybe something like this. Press Okay, press OK again. And then drag this layer so that it's underneath itchy and look at that are itchy and scratchy intro is looking much better already. I think the last thing to do is to add scratchy. So let's grab scratchy from the project pane and drag him into the middle of our screen so he's in the composition. And if you look on the left, you'll notice that his audio is enabled as well. And if we have both of them enabled, the noise sounds like amplified. And we don't want that. So what I like to do is disable audio for both characters and import the audio straight into After Effects. Then we'll add it into the timeline. And then to see the waveform of the audio, click on the timeline of that audio and press L on your keyboard twice. Now when we scrub the timeline, we can see that both the animations, our plane. But when they get hit Y here, they're not being squashed. And there's sort of a bit out of position at the moment. And that's what we're going to cover in the next video, moving and scaling our characters. But before we get to that section, I just want to quickly point out that if you're experiencing choppy performance in your preview panel here, That's kind of normal. After Effects, uses a lot of computer resources and the preview pane is pretty taxing. To use less resources. What you can do is go to the previous section on the right and just click anywhere on the timeline and change the preview resolution to half. What this does is reduce the resolution of our preview window here to half of 1080. So we're previewing this at around 540 P, which still looks really good because we've shrunk this preview anyway. So it's not really displaying it. The full 1080 ends. Lastly, when you see this green line across the timeline here, it means that after Effects is ready to display your preview. It's dark blue. It means After Effects is still processing the preview. And when you go to play your timeline, it's going to look a little bit choppy. To play the animation. You can just bring it back to 0 s and press space bar. Alright, so that's a really simplified overview of After Effects. You've learned how to open the app, import your puppet and Illustrator files, and add them to the timeline. Now it's time to do some basic transformation to the characters on the screen, which we'll cover in the next video. I'll see you there. 54. 7.3 Position, Scale, Rotation, Opacity: Moving on to doing basic transformation on our characters, basic transformation is like moving their position, scaling or squashing them, and changing the opacity to bring up the position scale and opacity, or you have to do is click on the layer that you want to transform. Let's use HE as our example. And then to bring up the menu underneath the layout, press P on your keyboard to adjust the position, S to adjust the scale, R to rotate, and T to change the opacity. If you want to see all four at the same time, hold down the Shift key and then press P, S, T. Let's start by fixing the positions of itchy and scratches so they're not on top of each other. So if you haven't already press P to bring up position, and we'll just drag the X position to the left. And itchy is not on the same ground level as scratchy. So let's adjust the Y position as well. That looks about right. And then we'll click scratchy on the timeline and press P. And let's drag the X position a bit to the right. And cool, that looks pretty good. Let's quickly scrub the timeline to check if they're in the wrong spot when they both get hit with a bat. So we can probably move HE a bit more to the left. Probably like here, here. And scratchy. Oh, that looks pretty yeah. Just about there. That looks pretty good. Now let's move on to scaling or squashing our characters when they get hit. So to animate this, what we'll do is press S to bring up the scale menu. And let's find the position where scratchy first gets hit, which should be about here. And then we'll click the stopwatch next to scale. And what that's going to do is create a keyframe at the position of where our time indicator is. Next, we'll drag this scaling percentage down something to maybe like nine per cent and itchy or squash now, but he squashed from the center and not the bottom. So to change that, Let's undo the scaling first and then go to View and make sure Show Layer Controls is ticked. So you get this box around scratchy. Then we'll go up here and change the cursor to pan behind. Then grab the center point of scratchy, which is this little cross hair here, and drag it to scratch his feet in the middle down here. If you want to bring the center point back to the middle, you can press Control Alt Home, but we want it at the bottom in this case. So we'll drag it back down here in-between his feet. Now, when we scale itchy down to nine per cent, it looks like he's being squashed Now, the last problem is when we're scrubbing the timeline before the keyframe, itchy is permanently scaled down to 8%. So we need to adjust that. Let's zoom in a little bit by holding Alt, moving the scroll wheel up. And let's move a few frames back to when we see the bat completely up here for itchy. So at this point is probably where we want to add another keyframe. And we do that by clicking on this diamond here. And we're going to scale scratchy back up to 100 per cent. And then in-between these two frames, it looks like we need to add a couple more keyframes here as well. So that when the bat comes down, scratchy is kinda squashing in sync with the bat. So at this frame here, we probably need scratch you to be down to nine per cent as well. Now when we quickly planet, it looks like scratchy as being squashed but being squashed a bit too evenly. So to fix that, what we'll do is uncheck this constrained proportions. And that'll allow us to independently scale the x and y of scratchy. So we've reduced scratchy down to nine per cent on the x-axis and y-axis here. So all we have to do is changed scratchy to 100% on the x-axis. So in terms of whiteness. And yeah, that looks a little bit better now. So let's have a look here. And it looks like we need to add a couple more keyframes to sync it. Choose bat, with scratchy being squashed. So we'll add a keyframe here by clicking on the diamond. And we'll probably scale scratchy down to just under the bat. Let's go one keyframe before. Let's scale scratchy down to maybe like here. Yeah, that looks pretty good now, this one needs to be fixed, so let's bring scratchy down to five per cent. 5.35, yep. And then wanting to add another keyframe to bring scratchy back up to 100%. So if we were to quickly play this back, That looks pretty good, nice and fast. This keyframe here doesn't look correct because the bat doesn't look like it's making contact with scratchy. But because the animation is happening so fast, you're not going to pick up on that anomaly. So what we can do now is just copy these key frames and then scrub our timeline to see the next point where scratchy gets hit. And we'll just paste those keyframes so that it repeats the same squashing animation. So maybe it's here. And let's have a look. So probably about there. And we'll need to add one more keyframe here For 5%. It looks pretty good. Let's find the next position with scratchy gets squashed. So probably starting here. Perfect. Here again. Perfect. And I think that's the last one here. Yep, that's the end of scratchy being squashed. Alright, now it's time to squash itchy and we're pretty much going to repeat the same process again, just adding keyframes along the scale timeline. So we'll go a little bit faster this time, right? So they come in and here is where we see the bat come down. And it comes down all the way here. So for itchy will then click the timer to put our first keyframe on the timeline. So we'll undo constrained proportions so we can scale itchy independently in the x and y. And then don't forget to move itchy center position down to his feet. And so now I think we can squash itchy down to five per cent we used in the other one. Yeah, we can do 6% there, that looks pretty good. Then if we work backwards from that, we can add another keyframe here with the diamond and then move itchy back up to about here. And one frame back. He looks like he's at 100%. Then maybe here we can maybe move them up just a little bit. Squashed. Then he comes back up over here. So let's bring HE back up to 100% there. Let's move backwards. We want to keep him at five per cent here. So it's gonna be what we said six for this one. Move one frame backwards. Keep him at six. Yep. So he's perfect. That looks synchronized. Then we'll copy these keyframes with Control C. Find the next spot where HE gets squashed, which should be somewhere off to this. Starts there, will paste that and just scrub the timeline to make sure everything is in sync. Yep, Perfect. Scratchy gets hit. He should get hit here again. Paste the keyframes scrub were a bit early with that one. I should have moved forward. Here we go. This one's a bit funny. So we'll copy this keyframe and paste it here. That looks better. Then we find the next spot where HE gets squashed. Must be after these consecutive ones here. And there we are. So we'll copy those set of keyframes again. We'll check if this is in sync. That looks good. This one's jumping the gun a little bit. So I think we only need these four frames here. Or copy and paste that. Yep. Paste that again. And I think that's it. Yeah. Alright, so when we play the full thing now, let's just save it with controllers. And that's pretty much our enemy, and that's pretty much our introduction done. But if you wanted to animate rotation and position, Let's quickly show you how to do that. So the same thing applies. Maybe let's just go at 7 s here. We're going to undo all this anyway. But I'll show you how to move the position, rotation and opacity. So all we have to do is for position start by adding a keyframe with the stopwatch. And then we'll drag our current timeline indicator forward, add another keyframe. And on the second keyframe with added, Let's just move the position. We can either use the numbers here again at the bottom left, or we can actually move itchy. Let's use this selection tool instead and hold, maybe drag itchy up here. Now when we play it back, this is what it'll look like. And if you think the movement is a little bit too robotic, what you can do is click on each keyframe and press F9. And that's going to add some easing to the start and end of our keyframes. So you can see that looks a little bit more, a little smoother and less robotic than the linear one that we had before. If you want it to move itchy and more of a curved line, what you can do is right-click on the keyframe here and then go to Keyframe Interpolation and change these spatial interpolation to Bezier curves instead of linear. Press. Okay? And you'll get this handle that appears at the starting keyframe and you can just drag that along. So he moves in this curved motion. Now when we, when we play this back, kind of looks like that. Now let's quickly look at rotation. So again, at the seven second mark, what we can do is click on the stopwatch and maybe in the same spot. Again, we'll click on this diamond to add another keyframe. And on the second keyframe, you can either add 123 rotations. And when you play that back, we go one rotation, two rotations, three rotations. If that's too many rotations for you, what you can do is just change the degrees, the number of degrees that HE rotates by. So let's do 67 degrees, and there we go. And lastly, for opacity, you will do the exact same thing again, had the first keyframe with your stopwatch at a second keyframe with the diamond button there. And then just reduce the opacity. There you go. And that's pretty much all there is to doing position scale, rotation and opacity or delete these because we don't want them for our animation. That's pretty much all there is to a basic transformation where we've covered off how to update the position, scale, rotation, and opacity of a layer. 55. 7.4 Add Text and Shapes: Moving on to adding text and shapes in After Effects, which is going to make the second scene of our animation. Let's start by creating a new composition. And let's call it seen two. We'll add a new layer on our timeline. So right-click on the bottom left, New, and let's add some text. Alternatively, you can go to the Layer menu, new and text. With the new layer created, you can start typing some text in there. So let's write the itchy and scratchy show. You'll notice there's two fonts for the textbook deity and scratchy show. There's a cursive looking font and a very bold font. Let's start with the bold looking font. So my characters are called Christian and Toto instead of itchy, scratchy. So I'll type in Christian, Christian. Christian. And then we'll select the entire texts with shift and home. And on the right side you can adjust the text properties under character, like the font, whether you want it in italic or bold, the size, the tracking of the font, and a few other things. Just make sure that your entire Texas selected. Otherwise these changes aren't going to be updated. You can also add a border around the text by clicking on this outline column and setting it to something like red and then increasing the thickness here. And then just like the last video, we can do some basic transformation to what by selecting the text in our timeline and depressing position, rotation, scale, and opacity. So we start by pressing P than holding S and T. Now the best font I could find to match the itchy and scratchy logo was a font called Show card Gothic. So let's find that down here. There it is, Charcot Gothic. And the color we're going for is a black border with a little bit of thickness, but the background is black, so it's kinda hard to tell. And the color we're going for is somewhere in-between like a pinkish red. So maybe something like that. Christian and Toto. The thickness can maybe just gonorrhea three, something like that. And then to adjust the alignment, we can center text in paragraph will also give this a yellow background so we can just see how text outline a little bit better. So we'll click on the timeline, go New, and we'll add a solid yellow. So I'm looking for something, maybe something like this that looks pretty good. And we'll move that underneath our Christian and territory texts layer. We can probably make this outline a little bit thick us. So let's go for perfect. And then we'll do the texts for V and show. So what we'll do is right-click in the timeline, go new and texts. And we're just going to add one word here which is a. And we'll just move this off to the side. And the closest font I could find for this one was Brush Script MT. So let's scroll up and find that. And we want this old black. We don't need an outline for this one. Yeah, that looks a little better. Let's duplicate the layer by pressing Control D, and then we'll just drag this down so it's easier to read the Christian and territory show or drag, show down here and change it to this. Okay, that's our texts done. The next thing we have to do is add this green circle in the middle. So what we'll do is right-click New and add a shape layer. And then inside the shape player, we'll start adding a couple of ellipses into this layer. So sort of starting somewhere in the middle top left here, I'll click the mouse button and drag down and hold Shift at the same time while I'm doing it. So I get this uniform looking circle. I want to keep this sort of smack bang in the middle of the composition so that when I export this to 1080, it sort of fits in a square resolution. So there's something about here, looks pretty good. And the color I'm going for here is our green, greenish blue, like this. Yeah, that looks pretty good. And then we need to create a bit of a doughnut looking shapes. So what we'll do is duplicate this layer with Control D. And we'll scale this down just a little bit. So let's grab one of the edges and hold Shift. Just scale it down to something, something like that. And we'll change the fill to be a yellow one. Press. Okay. Awesome. We've got our circle in the middle and we've got a white border on the circle here. So let's change that. We change the stroke. If you want to disable stroke for your shapes, it's up the top here and you just hold Alt and just cycle through these. Colors till you get this one but the cross out. So that's our stroke gone. And then we just have to remove the stroke for this one here as well. Perfect. And then we can probably just make these just a little bit bigger as well. Awesome trick I like to do to make sure that our composition for the main subject stays within a 1080 by 1080 frame, because TikTok videos, I think work a little bit better in portrait or in a square mode to make sure that all the contents of my composition stay with within the 1,082.80 resolution. I like to create a solid layer and just call it like 1080 composition. And I'll set the width to 1080 by 1080, give it some obscure color like that. I'm not going to use maybe like a light blue press. Okay. And then drag the 1080 composition to the bottom, maybe on top of the yellow. And I'll lock that layer so that I can edit it. And so this will let me know that the circle I've created, yeah, that's that's pretty center, probably something like that. And then we can even scale these two circles up a little bit more so it fits more of the screen. Something like there's pretty good. And once I'm happy with that, I'll just make that 1080 composition invisible. And now we can focus on moving the text inside the circle, South Texas being covered by these two shapes at the moment. So let's select both of them in the timeline and drag them underneath the texts layers. And then we just have to move out text into position. So let's start with the text and we will start by rotating that. So click on the timeline. And let's just rotate this maybe about yeah, negative 25 degrees. And we'll move it a bit towards this side here. So along the green edge circle can even make this a little bit bigger. Actually, let's maybe go for 100 and maybe 100 for the texts. Christian Antonio, let's see what 100 looks like as well. Yeah, that looks that looks not bad. If I'm being picky on, maybe change this to 66 stroke and we'll also tilt this was like Christian and Toto, click are, and we'll rotate this negative 25 as well. That looks pretty good. And then for show, we'll rotate this negative 25 and drag this towards the bottom, maybe somewhere like here. And we'll just move a bit closer. Show goes about there and we have a one-hundred size font for that. Yeah, cool. That looks pretty good. So that's our texts done. The last two things we have to do is just add to the head for itchy over here and add the head for scratchy down here. I think the easiest way to do this is to open your course files and find the Illustrator files that you created for itchy and scratchy. So I'll use CH bats and TW bat, open that up in Illustrator. And then what we'll do is just save a copy of that and just call it. Your character's initial was followed by face. And same thing for scratchy. Save a copy as face. Then let's delete the body layer. Save that. Let's update the art board so the face is closer to the edges. You don't have to do this part. It's optional. It's just me being a bit pedantic. Perfect. Then we'll do the same thing for itchy. So until late the body and update the art board a bit more flush with the face. And we'll save that. We're done with Illustrator, so we can close that now. And we should have two new false CH face and TW phase. And then we can just double-click on the project pane and import those two files we just created. Next, we'll just drag their faces onto the screen. And we'll rotate each one just a little bit. That looks pretty good. Rotate that one just a little bit. Perfect. That's our second scene completed. In the next video, I'll show you how to convert all this into one layer using something called a pre-composition. I'll see you there. 56. 7.5 Pre-Composition: So we've just finished adding our shapes and text to a new scene in the last video. But I wanted to show you an example right now where let's say we created our shapes and text in the same scene. We've suddenly ended up with like nine more layers in our scene. One timeline, which is kinda making it difficult to see what's going on here. But we can easily fix this with something called a pre-composition. And a precomposition basically takes all these layers and places them in their own composition or their own scene. The end product of this is everything is represented on a single layer on the timeline. To create a precomposition, simply highlight all the layers that you want inside the precomposition. Right-click and select pre-compose. This new window appears and you can leave all the settings alone. And we'll give it a new name with something like comp to itchy, scratchy. Now, look at that. Everything is now represented in a pre-composition layer. And if we double-click on it, we can still modify the shapes and text as well. So that's made everything look nice and tidy on our timeline. We still get to keep the flexibility of modifying the layers inside our pre-composition. So it can maybe just drag this back to zero. And if we look at our scene one timeline, we can see it's sort of been overrun with our pre-composition, like we can't see our previous animation. So at this peak of the audio here, this peak of the audio here. We'll split that up and delete it so that we can still see our previous animation. So it can leave it like this for now. I guess this is acceptable. It's not the way that I like to organize and structure my timeline though, like having two scenes inside the onetime line, what I'd like to do instead is have one seen on its own, a second scene on its own, and then create a third scene or a third composition called Final. Then import scene one, scene two into it. But we'll go over that in more detail in the next video. So that's pretty compositions at a high level. There are pretty powerful tool to have in After Effects and we're only really scratching the surface here, but that's the extent of our use of pre-comps in this course. 57. 7.6 Project and Timeline Structure: So we've got everything we need for our H0 and scratchy introduction. We've got the actual opening animation and the logo at the end. Now we just need to sequence everything in order onto our timeline. Now, since this animation only has two compositions, we could technically just drag the second composition into sin one and then just move it into the right spot. And finish this at the same time, at the end. And we're done right. Now. This works fine for just two compositions, but what I prefer to actually do here is to create a master composition. Houses all the other scenes. Let's just quickly rename this to seem too for consistency. And we'll just delete the same two composition from sane one. So what I mean by all this is what we'll do is create a new composition. And we'll call it something like you can either call it Mazda or final. And then we'll drag sane one into our new composition. And then drag our second one in. Then we'll position composition too so that it lines up with the music. Let's remove the music from sane one and press L twice on the music layer. I've seen two starts at about here and about 6 s. And 6 s. I will split that up with Control Shift D, Delete seem too that's on the left of the timeline and remove both of these at the end of the song. There we go. We've got our opening sequence, and then it finishes with the logo. The reason I prefer to do it this way is because it just makes timeline management much easier if you have multiple compositions because each comp is just one layer. And if you need to edit that composition, you can just double-click on it and go back into it and modify it. And then to keep things tidy on the project pane, what I like to do is to put all the contents of the project into new folders. So for compound stuff, I'll create a new folder and call it one. And then I'll drag all the components in there. He will go in the scratchy will go in there. These are the character animator files. And anything that's used across all compositions are all things I live in the root folder. Then we'll create another folder for Scene two. And that'll have the face. And then create a loss folder for compositions. And we'll put seen one in the same two. And the final one in there. This is, I guess more of a personal choice. It's up to you whether or not you want to do this. If you're okay without folders, then that's totally cool as well. I personally just like to have a clean project pane. I know it seems overkill to do this for two compositions, but it's good practice to get into because you might end up creating complex projects with ten compositions and 30 files in your project pane. And it will get messy real quick and difficult to say which file belongs where, or which layer belongs in which timeline. This just makes life a lot easier. 58. 7.7 Framing - Widescreen and Portrait Mode: Let's quickly talk about framing, which is about what objects and characters we're including and excluding from our composition, which is going to help your videos look good in both widescreen and vertically on a phone. How are we going to do this is by creating two compositions and exporting two videos. One composition in 16 by nine, which is 1920 by 1080 resolution, and another composition, which is a ratio of one-to-one, which is a 1080 by 1080 resolution. The problem we have right now is if we upload this video onto TikTok in this 16 by nine ratio, it's going to look quite small because we can only watch TikTok in portrait mode. So what I'd like to do is to make sure that the main contents of each composition fits inside a square box, smack bang in the middle, so that when we upload it onto TikTok, it'll look really good. Let me show you what I mean. If we go back into seen one, e.g. I. Want you to create a new solid layer and we'll give it a name of something I know like frame. And we'll make the width and height 1080 by 1080. And the color doesn't matter too much, something a bit contrasting to the red background, like blue and press Okay, then we'll press T on that layer and del the opacity down to maybe like 30%. And we'll just move this under itchy, scratchy so that we can see the contents a bit more clearly. So this frame is going to represent our 1080 by 1080 video. Now, what we need to do is to make sure that the main contents of our composition fits inside the square. So that when we go to upload it onto TikTok, will get a video that takes up more real estate on the phone screen. So we can see here that itchy, scratchy or slightly off center. So let's just move them a little bit by selecting the layers. So I will unlock scratchy and hold, Shift and click on both of them. Press P to open up their position. And we'll just move them a little bit closer towards the center because they're slightly to the left right now. And I think that looks pretty good if I'm just eyeballing it. So now we can delete this frame layout because we're done centering our characters for this composition. Then we'll go into S2. And I think I already did this in a previous video, but yeah, you do the same thing again, create any solid layer. And I'll give it a name like frame or ten AD composition. And we just want to align all our contents so that it's in the middle of the 1080 bucks. And yeah, something like that, I think looks pretty good. Again, when we're done with it, we can just delete it. Then to finish this off, Let's go into the final composition and just scrub the timeline to make sure everything is in check, which looks like it is perfect. And now what we'll do is rename our final composition to final 16 by nine. Then duplicate this one and call it final one-to-one. We'll open up the new final one-to-one composition. Go to the composition settings at the top, go to the composition settings and update the width to 1080. I remove this lock aspect ratio and make sure the width and height are 1080 by 1080. So now we have two compositions that we're going to export. One for widescreen, which is this one here, and one which is a little bit more friendly to view on your phone. We'll go into more detail about framing in the second part of this course where we use backgrounds that are bigger than our 1920 by 1080 resolution and how to bring characters that are off-screen onto the screen. But for now, this is enough to get our animation done. 59. 7.8 Export Video: We're basically done with compiling. And all you have to do now is export our video so that we can upload it onto TikTok. And to do that, we will be exporting the one-by-one composition. If you want to upload onto YouTube or other social media platforms and is 16 by nine format. You can also export the 16 by nine composition. So in the project pane, select both final compositions by holding Control and clicking on both. Then we'll go to File, Export and add to Adobe Media Encoder Queue. You can use render queue as well, but Adobe Media Encoder Queue just seems to work way better. So we'll open that up. This will pop open and it will take a few seconds for our compositions to appear here. And once it does appear, you can select different presets for different resolutions and different frame rates. I usually put Match Source Medium bit, right? Because it's just a bit friendly on the file size and makes the uploading process a bit better. And I don't notice any quality difference between a medium and high bit rate for output file, just select the folder that you want to export your video too. So I'll maybe do animation course here. Save and do the same for your video. If you have a dedicated GPU, like one from Nvidia, and it should be the same for AMD as well. You can change the renderer settings to GPU acceleration, which uses your graphic card, just speed up the rendering time. It's way faster than using software. Only. Then we'll press Play to stop the exporting process. And we'll let Media Encoder do its thing. Depending on how fast your computer is, rendering may take anywhere between 30 s to a minute or even longer. I'm using a Ryzen 7,700 X and Nvidia 30, 60 TI. And our ten second clip should take about 30 s or so to render. So if your hardware slower than that, it'll probably take a few more seconds. And if your hardware is faster than your render, faster than me. Brilliant, that's done. Let's double-check that everything exported correctly. So we'll open it up in Windows Explorer and just play back the video. Fantastic. I think the only thing we did was probably leave our composition timeline on for 30 s instead of 15 or 11. Cool, that looks perfect. So just to adjust the timeline or the composition settings, what we'll do for both of these is go back into composition and change the duration to 1,010.10, ten here as well. And then select both, go to File Export and add to Adobe Media Encoder Queue. Let's overwrite the files that we just created. Press play, and I'll just fast forward to completion. And if we open it up again, goes all the way to 10 s and stops. Awesome, That's all there is to exporting videos. In the next section, we'll upload our videos on TikTok. 60. 8.0 Upload: We exported our video in the previous section, and now it's time to learn how to upload your videos on TikTok. You'll also learn how to add text overlays and your TikToks, how to add TikTok music tracks, and how to add tags to your video so that they'll reach your target audience. 61. 8.1 Copy Video To Your Phone: Let's start by copying our videos onto our phone, which we'll use to upload onto TikTok. We can upload it by PC, but the upload feature is a very limited. I've got an Android device, so this video will go through copying it onto Android. If you're using an iPhone, I believe you use iTunes to copy it to Windows or AirDrop if you're using a Mac anyway, if you're an Android user, start by plugging your phone into your PC. Then drag the notification drawer down and hopefully a notification appears saying your phone is charging and hold tap that and change this, say File Transfer slash android order. Then on your PC, select both of the MP4 files that we exported in the previous section, then go to this PC and you will see your device pop-up here. I'm using a pixel for a, but yours will obviously display whatever model phone you have. Double-click on it, open the internal shared storage. And I like to copy my videos to the download folder, but you can copy it to anywhere you want. And then we'll press Control V to paste. And that's the first step done. Next, we'll upload our video onto TikTok. 62. 8.2 Tiktok Upload: So you've copied your video to your phone in the previous video. Now let's upload it onto TikTok. I'm going to assume you've already got TikTok installed on your phone. So let's jump into the app. Tap the Add button at the bottom, and tap Upload. Find the video which you just created, which should be one of the first ones, and click on and click on it. Next you'll be brought to the editing screen. And there's two things you want to do here. One is to replace the itchy and scratchy audio with the TikTok version. I can't give you the original audio because copyright and to add some text overlay to the top and bottom of the video to fill up the screen a little bit more. So let's start with changing the sound. Click on Add sound at the top and tap the search icon on the right. Then we'll look for itchy, scratchy. And this one from geek music is the one I use. Instead of the 10-second intro that we're all used to, we'll actually get the full 22 second version, but will sink and trim the audio so that we can use the part that we need to tap the tick. And what you should hear on your phone now is both your original audio and the TikTok audio playing at the same time. So we've got the TikTok track playing with our original audio, but it's out-of-sync and it's not playing the part that we need to fix that tap on the scissors icon and move the audio track until you hear both tracks in sync, which is somewhere about here. And that looks pretty in-sync. So what's press done? The last thing we'll do is mute our original audio, so it's just exclusively the TikTok audio. So we'll tap volume at the bottom right and reduce the original sound to zero per cent, will leave the added sound as 100%. And that's how TikTok track that we just selected. So we'll press Done. The next thing to do is to add a header and footer to the top and bottom of the video just to fill up the screen a little bit more. I think adding a header and footer, it makes the video look better. I don't know why, but it just does. The next thing to do is to add a header and footer to the top and bottom of the video. Just to fill up the screen a little bit more. I think adding a header and footer, it makes the video look better. I don't know why, but it just does to me. So tap on the text icon on the right and write some quick Beatty or funny caption like if Christian territory had the shirt, but makes sure it all fits on one line, it doesn't look good to go with multiple lines of text. So for the header, it'll just be if Christian and Toto. And then we'll have had their own show at the bottom. And then we'll give the texts of background by tapping on this icon to the left. Click it again. So you get this white background and press Done. And we'll drag the texts are that it's flush with the edges of our video and smack bang in the middle. You will know what's in the middle by getting this blue line down the middle of your screen. Now let's add the footer, and we'll go a little bit faster this time. So let's click Text and type in, had the urn show. Tap the a to the left twice two, we get that white background. Press Done. Drag it to the bottom, make sure it's flush with the edges of the video. And make sure that it's in the center. So we get that blue line and that's pretty good. Alright, that's the editing done, tap mixed at the bottom right. Now we'll need to give a description about our video and select a thumbnail. The format from my descriptions as a one-liner about the video, usually the same text is what we put in the header and footer or something similar. So it would just be like Christian Horner will use their full names as time and search for wolf. Has itchy, scratchy. Then I'll add a whole bunch of hashtags which are relevant to the video. I personally believe this helps get your video out to your relevant audience because you're telling TikTok what your video is about without the tags that weren't noted. This is Formula One unrelated content. So I'll add stuff like hashtag F1, select that. And then like hashtag F1, memes select that. And I like to use tags that are at least in the hundreds of thousands to billions. Formula one there again, another formula one hashtag, itchy, scratchy hashtag, Christian Honan, hashtag, Toto Wolff. Next we'll choose a thumbnail or cover for our video. And we can only use a thumbnail from our video. We can upload our own. So I like to pick the most funny part or the most shocking part of the video as the thumbnail or something that'll just make the user wants to click on it. I think this itchy and scratchy logo is pretty good. So I'll drag the slider to the logo part. And you can choose to add a caption to your video at the bottom here. But since we've already captioned, I do think we need to add another one, so let's press Save at the top right, then, feel free to tinker with these settings here in the middle, but I like to leave them as they are. Then we can press post and give it a minute or two to upload and your video will be live. I won't actually post the video because I've already posted it. Makes sure to interact with people who leave comments like it and write back to them. Not only is it fun to engage with people with similar interests, but the more interaction your video gets through, likes, comments and shares, the more TikTok will push your content out to other people. All right, that's it for uploading onto TikTok. 63. 9.0 Thank-You: You've made it this far in the course then thank you so much for going the distance, and I hope you've learned a lot from it and enjoyed it at the same time. Remember, we've covered a lot of ground here, starting from thinking of a niche, coming up with video ideas for Sydney SH, script writing, audio recording, drawing, animating, compiling, and uploading. This course covered the full end-to-end life-cycle of producing a cartoon. And you should be proud of what you've learned. So what's next from here? Well, hopefully you feel confident enough to stop producing your own cartoons and uploading them onto TikTok. And if you decide to do that, the best advice I can give to you is to be patient with yourself, be realistic with your timelines. Your first couple of cartoons are going to take the longest because it's your first time doing it on your own and starting out and doing anything for the first time is always difficult. But once you start producing cartoons a few more times, you'll get faster and better at it because you would have improved your workflow by then, like improving character templates. Templates, you might even reuse certain character bodies and backgrounds and certain processes like character rigging become muscle memory. But if you still feel like you need a little more practice than another avenue is to deep dive into the second part of the course where you will produce the next scene, the main episode of the itchy and scratchy cartoon. So think of this as a project that you're doing on your own instead of a detailed tutorial. And if you need some help and guidance along the way, you can refer to the video in the second part of this course to see how it's done, we will be repeating the drawing, character animation, compiling and uploading steps for the next scene. For drawing will have to create a new character, which will be this squirrel telling itchy and scratchy to stop fighting. But we'll substitute the squirrel with a box with arms and legs for character animation. Will animate HE and scratchy for a second scene, which will be similar to the introduction, and we'll animate the box with arms and legs. Then in compiling, we'll add all those elements together into a composition and go over a couple of slightly more advanced framing techniques. We'll be going a little faster than the second part of the course where it will almost be like a live stream style of the video. Like the explanations will be a little more high level and it won't be as detailed as the first part of the course. All in all, I want you to keep going because this course was only the start of your animation journey. Again, thank you so much for doing this course, and I hope you've really enjoyed it. 64. 10.0 Project - Produce The Next Scene: Welcome to the second part of the course. We'll be creating the next scene of our itchy and scratchy cartoon. So the first part of this course focused on how to create the introduction. And the second part of this course, we'll focus on creating the actual episode, which looks something like this. This was inspired from one of the Simpsons episodes where Marge lobbies for itchy and scratchy with no violence. And the producers of itchy scratchy then put her in the episode as a nagging squirrel, and then itchy and scratchy team up to hit her out of the stadium. In this section of the course, we won't be going through the detailed explanations of how to draw animated character or compile, because we've already covered that in the first half. This is more of a project-based chapter where if you feel like taking on this project, you want a little bit more practice, then you can use the videos in this chapter as guidance to how to understand to create the next scene. Think of this section as a suggested solution or answer to the project. Specifically, we'll be covering how to extract the audio from the episode so we can use it in character animator and After Effects. How to draw the nagging character in Illustrator. How to animate the nagging character and character animator, how to compile the episode on top of the introduction and then uploading it onto TikTok. Good luck and see you inside the second part of the course. 65. 10.1 Capture Episode Audio: The first thing we have to do is rip or capture the audio from this episode so we can use it in character animator and after effects. The audio we've used until now has been my guitar recording of the introduction. And then we swapped it out for the real thing in TikTok. But TikTok won't have the audio for the next scene, which is itchy, scratchy, hitting the squirrel. So we need to get the audio elsewhere. So to extract the audio from the episode, let's see if we can find it on youtube.com. So to extract the audio from the episode, let's see if we can find it on youtube.com. And let's type something in like HE and scratchy March. And there's the video here. Now at about the 52nd mark is where we need the audio. So about there, I won't play the video or audio for copyright reasons, but I can scrub through it and it'll look something like this. So we're at the five-second mark and we've got itchy and scratchy hitting each other here. Than a squirrel who is meant to be March comes in and says, Don't do that, don't do that. There are still hitting each other. The squirrel comes in the middle and emphasizes again, Hey, don't do that. And then HE looks at scratchy. Itchy, decides to hit the squirrel and the hinders squirrels head might not be able to see it. There we go. Then the squirrels head comes flying off and out of the stadium and itchy, scratchy celebrate. So that's what we're going to create. So for now, let's go back to the 49 second mark and we'll open up Audacity and I'll show you how to extract the audio from this video will open up with Udacity. And the first thing you want to do is to go to audio setup host. And you'll want to change your host two windows. Whereas API. Then the next thing you'll do is open recording device. And it's important which one you choose here. If your audio is coming out of, let's say, the optical output of your sound card, then you need to select the digital output loop back as your recording device. If the audio is coming out of your 3.5 millimeter audio jack from your sound card, then you select stereo mix. And if the audio is coming out of your USB microphone, like it is in my case, then you will select the speakers for your particular microphone in loopback mode. So I'll select this one, but yours might be slightly different than what you need to do next is press the Record button here to stop recording and then minimize this and play the video again. I won't actually do a live recording of the video or the audio because copyright reasons, but I'll show you what the wavelength of the wave form format will look like. I'll show you the process, but I'm going to mute the audio here. And that's what the recording process looks like. If the recording was a little bit soft, you'll need to do it again, but this time, maybe increase the recording volume at the top here to something a bit higher mindset to around about negative 35 db. So increase yours up a little bit Tool. You hear it loud and clear. Or alternatively, you can adjust the sound settings by increasing the speaker volume windows. Once you're happy with the recording, you can export it like we've done in the first part of the course. So that's File Export. Export As MP3, select constant 320 and stereo and give the file name something meaningful like HE and scratchy episode and save it. Then we can open it up in Windows Explorer and you can double-check that you capture the audio correctly by playing the MP3 file. Again, I can't play the audio Judah copyright, but you can easily check on your end. 66. 10.2 Draw The Nagging Character: Now it's time to draw the nagging character from the episode. I don't think we need to draw a squirrel, so just a box with arms and legs will do just fine. And then you can just copy and paste the math cuisines from the CH bat or the TW that AI files. We'll start by opening adobe character animator and creating a ten by ten AD document and the size of our character. We want our character to be probably around the arm height of itchy, because it's gonna be a short character and the back is going to connect with our character at around this height. So probably wondering about there. Let's cut out that height and paste it into here. And again, we're just going for a simple box with arms and legs. Let's just create a box there. Yeah, probably something like this. Yeah. I'm working around this height. So we can delete that one. Let's give it a thicker outline stroke, maybe like three points. And then we're going to add some text to the middle of our box. And this is just gonna be to poke fun at your niche. Maybe just put some sort of governing body or someone in there who doesn't like fun. For this episode, I use the DFA, the governing body for Formula One and the Motorsports. But if your niche is, I don't know, maybe chess and there's a chess governing body who makes things less fun. Maybe use them, e.g. we can probably make the font a little bit bigger. Let's go 70 to just sort of roughly put it inside the center of our box. Alright, the next thing is to add the math video games. So lets just grab our itchy file and let's just copy the mouth. The mouth. Don't forget to make sure all your sad mouth layers are visible by dragging and clicking the visible icon. Once they're all visible, you can select the whole mouth or the whole sad mouth. I'm going back to your file. Paste, remember layers, and then paste the thing with Control V. Just drag it into the bottom there. That looks kinda funny. Maybe we can drag the FIA a bit further up years and then the mouth's bit towards the center? Yeah. That looks a bit better. Maybe a little higher even. Yeah. That looks pretty good. And let's probably just rename this to body. The next thing we have to do is get some arms and legs. So going back to the original vector that we downloaded, all we're going to do is just, you know, extract the arms from here. Let's grab. It seems to be something in the way there. So let's just zoom in a little bit and select this arm. This one looks pretty good. We need our character to be pointing. So this point here looks perfect. And we'll paste that inside here. And we'll just make this bigger by holding Shift and then dragging this out to the side. That looks pretty good as a arm size there. Then the other arm we need is probably like a clenched fist. So let's see if we've got that hand. If we've got that hand there. So we'll use our direct selection tool here and just copy the hand again. And we'll paste that over there. And it would just line this hand out to be roughly the same size as this one. So reflected. Yep. That looks pretty good. Maybe a little bit smaller. Yeah. Good enough. Let's put this aside for now and we'll also need the legs. So let's bar the legs from here, and let's grab these ones. Let's select the whole thing and copy it across and expand that. And let's reflect it because we want him walking the other way. And that's probably a little bit too big. Let's go for something like that. Cool. We don't need to waste, so delete that. And then what we'll do is split this out into two legs. Let's just say this is the right of screen, so this is the right leg. This is the left leg. We won't need to worry too much about the layers here, but I guess just to keep things tidy, Let's just call this the thigh or the knee. And the foot. To the same thing here as well by n0. And will during this may be around over here. And the left leg bit more to the edge there. Yeah, that looks pretty good. And then let's create the lost arm here. So this was the left will hold Alt and drag that down and rename this to white arm and bring it across the other side. And this is kind of interfering with the face here. So let's maybe, can we bend this to say, that probably looks alright. Maybe bend this a little bit more. Yeah, that looks pretty good. We've got this one pointing and this one just holding their arm back. Let's change this hand to a fist. So we'll delete the hand here or they've been switched off, move to the left arm. So let's just rename them. Accidentally, move the wrong arm around. So if we go to the right arm and delete the right hand, and then we can move this hand into the right arm layer and just rotate this so it's still a little big. Squeeze that down. Yeah, that looks pretty good. That's almost a character done. I think if, if you're being a bit pedantic like me, you could probably just add the strokes around the arms. So we've gone for a stroke three for the body, maybe for the arms as well, we can do. Number three stroke. Hand looks a bit messy. So what we'll do is just remove the strokes for the ys. And this one here as well. We'll select the hand in the layers. Let's do a stroke three. And it's looking kind of messy in the middle again. So we'll use direct selection and delete. You'll have to press Delete twice and we'll delete key. So the inside components cool. And we've just got to do the arm, sorry, three in the legs as well. Sorry, right leg, left leg, stroke size of three. And cool, I think that's our character done actually. I think what we can do is probably just add these two inside the body. So the FIN rectangle and here we can put the FIA inside the rectangle. So this would be torso rectangles, the body, FIFA is the logo. And then we'll put the left arm in here as well. Right arm, left leg, and right leg. And let's delete this objects. Layer and remove paste. Remember layers. Let's just make the arms and legs a white color. That looks good. I think our box in the middle yet that's white. Let's give this character black shoes. Dark gray. Yeah, Perfect. All righty. Maybe we'll just lift this a couple of pixels away from the bottom so we didn't get any weird cropping later. I think the last thing we will do in this video is download a picture of the stadium. So what we'll do if you go to free pic.com and search for flat soccer football stadium illustration, there'll be one created by free pick. And you're just going to download that with the free license. Open that up. So we'll open the AI file, Illustrator file. I guess that's a stylistic choice if you want to keep this pattern of a dark green and light green, I think I'm personally going to remove it, might just look a little bit too noisy when we do our animation. So using direct selection, you can just click over the dark green and press Delete. Don't need that either. That looks pretty good. Yeah, we've got the lighting situation going here. We can keep with that done. Let's save that and maybe just change the documents set up to something like 1920 by 80. And we'll expand this out. If anything, we want this to be bigger because when we do the animation, the squirrel is actually going to be off to the side or off the screen here. So even though we've got 1920 by 1080 as the art board, Let's make our stadium bigger. Probably about here are reckon, just enough to see the grass and enough to say the stadium, and plenty of space for our squirrel to be off to the side there. Alright, that looks pretty good. And let's just save that into our course files as stadium. Okay, I think we're pretty much done with the drawing part, actually, which is pretty good. Next, we'll move on to animating out, nagging character. 67. 10.3 Animate The Nagging Character: Let's move on to animating our neck and character in character animator. So we'll open up our existing project and import our new NAG and character. And we'll start by recalling the body. There's no eyes to rig in this one, just the mouth. And we just want to make sure that that's been tagged properly. So yeah, mouth and all the same to be tagged properly as well. That's good. The only thing we'll have to do is break the body. So let's start by making the arms and legs independent of the body so that we've just caught the torso in the middle. Then we'll start tagging the arms. That's grabbing this origin point and just attaching that to the body. Then we'll grab a couple of these handles, tag them as the elbow, the wrist, at a couple of sticks to them. That looks pretty good. And then we'll do the same for the right arm. So it will move, move this to the body, and then add a couple of handles. I think you get the idea by now. Let's just speed through this. And don't forget to make the risks of draggable. Then we'll do the same for the legs. Move that towards, attach it to the body. Give it a knee and ankle. And since we are probably going to use limb IK and walk this character, Let's also tag the heels and the toes. So he was probably just on the corner there and toe on the corner there as well. He'll at a few sticks to give the character some rigidity. And you just want to make a triangle. I find the stick goes, well when it's underneath the, the handles, you can play around and see what works well for you. The toe, heel, the ankle, and the knee. I think that's everything tagged properly. We'll add a few sticks. The next part will be to make it draggable. So maybe let's make the ankle draggable. So I've got nine handles for the right leg and the left leg and full handles for the left and right arm. I think the last thing we have to do is add the shoulders and the hips to our character. So that's going to the main body there and adding a few more handles where these green dots are. So this will be the shoulder. The screenshot here will be the other shoulder. This one will be the hips. Don't think this will impact it much, but we can probably just move the body a bit towards the center here. Maybe even up there. The only thing we probably have to do now is add a couple of behaviors to our character. So let's click on the main character in the Layer window and add the limb IK behavior. And we'll leave the default settings for now and see what it looks like. And we'll add the wolf behavior. And we'll set the mode to our left and right arrow keys on your keyboard. Click on the character in the project window and create a new scene for them. It's kind of half the thing immediately we say problem with the mouth. The hands are a bit droopy. The legs have a bit of a weird sort of sticky look to them. So let's go and fix it up. Let's start with the mouth. I think to fix this, we'll probably go back to our Illustrator file and just move the mouth underneath the body layer. So we'll click on our puppet there. Click on the Illustrator file. And let's just move the mouth to the top part there. Delete the head layer or save this. And let's just double-check that still intact. Let's have a look at what this looks like now. That looks pretty good, but there's still some weed movement with the mouth there. And we can just fix that by making the mouth independent as well. So it's still in the body, but it's moving on its own. And that looks pretty good. Let's fix the arms now. I don't know why they're so droopy. But if we go into walk and let's move the arm angles. Yeah, that looks pretty good. Just got an issue with the arm on the right side just being sort of tucked behind the body. So let's just move the arm to the top and see what that looks like. So still got this weird arm movement there. So what we'll do is that since we've made it draggable, let's just move on back here. And I think that looks pretty good now. If that staying on point, probably somewhere about there. And then yeah, that looks pretty good. Alright, now let's solve the thing with the feet here, Arkin, that's just the ground detection. And perfect. Alright, here we go. We've got out walking character. We have to do is record it against the audio now. So let's import the audio and this one here. Obviously the audio won't be provided because of copyright reasons. So just import the audio that you extracted from a couple of videos ago. So import this. And if you've listened to the audio, this character only says, Don't do that, don't do that. Hey, don't do that. I don't think we'll need to go into Adobe Premiere Pro to get the subtitles and get seen audio from text and make the subtitle file. It's a bit overkill. So let's just select the audio and our puppet timeline, compute lip-sync from seeing audio. And we're gonna get a whole bunch of designs here that we don't really need. But if we zoom in, Let's just go to the part where the character says, Hey, don't do that, don't do that. And it's about here that we add here. So you can see that little spike in the audio from probably here, this point here. So all the way back, we'll just delete the visitor teams will select it, press delete that. And then there's another spike in the audio here, which is probably, Hey, Hey, don't do that, so we don't need the games. They're the audio drops there, so we probably don't need the name for that one too. And that's the extent of the lip sinking that we have to do. So or the themes are for this we can delete as well. Perfect, alright, That's our lip sinking done. The next thing we have to do now is animate the walk cycle. If you watch the episode, I think the two things that we have to animate when the character first shows up here. When they say Don't do that, don't do that. They're sort of like pointing like, Hey, don't do that, don't do that. Then they walked towards Don't do that, don't to that pointing. And then this section here is when they start walking. And then they stop for the next mouthpiece or the vaccine. And they go, Hey, don't do that. Then at this point, while this is playing, you also just again needs to go pointing again. Like that's the extent of our animation. When the character gets hit out of the stadium, will probably animate that in After Effects because they're going to be spinning. We're going to be scaling the character down to like 0% because they're being hit in the distance. Um, I think it's just much easier to do it in After Effects. So for character animator would just be doing the walking and the pointing. So let's start with that. So over here, I think the easiest way to do it will be to record events or just manually drag it like this and go, Hey, don't do that, don't do that. So press record and then manually drag it and then stop the recording. Alright, let's play that back and see what it looks like. Cool, that looks pretty good. We've got a little bit of the dragon animation hanging over here. So let's just delete it Control Shift D and then delete the excess part. And the next thing we have to animate here is the character walking. So they say, Don't do that, don't do that. And then they start walking. They start walking over. Again. You'll just need to drag this onto somewhere like say, look a bit better. Then as we're holding the left arrow key will just press the record button. And then we stopped it. I've noticed that the character is still talking here, but there's no visitors. So let's just quickly fill that in. Don't do probably a Wu again. And that is a probably a T H here. So we'll split this busy, came up with Control Shift D and then tag the, Don't do that. Cool. I think we're pretty much done with the animation here. Let's just play it back into him and see if it looks all good. Yeah, I think that looks pretty good. I think we're done with animating our nagging character. Like I said, when we hit them out of the stadium, will animate that in After Effects. Next up, we will animate itchy and scratchy hitting each other again. But inside the actual episode at this time. 68. 10.4 Animate Itchy and Scratchy: Now we have to animate itchy and scratchy. And although we did animate them hitting each other in the introduction, we have to create a second set of animations for itchy scratchy because the way they hit each other here is different from how they hit each other in the introduction and the timings are a little bit different, but thankfully we can reuse the same puppets. So that saves us having to rig it. Again, a couple of key points with timing it against the audio. When you play the audio and listen to the music, you're going to hear a whoosh, whoosh, whoosh. And when you hear the wash, that's when it cheetahs being hit and when you hear the thud, That's when scratchy gets hit. Again, can't play the audio because of copyright. But when you hear whoosh, that's itchy getting squashed and thought in the audio is when scratchy kept hit. So that's one set of animations that we have to create. The next set is when itchy and scratchy look at each other when the nagging squirrel comes up in the middle so you can see their eyes move there. So we just need to animate the eyes. Then they zoom in on each other here, since we're rendering as vector, I think we can just zoom in when we get into after effects. So we probably don't need to create another scene for this. The next animation we have to make is itchy hitting the squirrel. This movement here, which we'll do in character animator. And the last scene is these two celebrating and chin shaking hands. But I think we'll just animate them jumping in the air, which is a bit easier, saves us having to redraw itchy and scratchy. Three or four sets of animations there. Let's get started. So what we'll do is start by creating a new scene, by clicking on the itchy puppet and add new scene. And to avoid confusion, let's rename it to something a bit easier to read, maybe itchy, scratchy episode. And then we'll also drag in our scratchy puppet into the scene as well. And there's just quickly position grouchy, somewhere like here. And four position HE a bit more to the left and make sure that their feet are on the same ground level. Cool, I think that looks pretty good. So let's start with itchy and just getting his position already. So we'll probably just start by moving the bat. Let's select itchy in the timeline and just move his arm down to where the same position that he was holding the baton in the introduction. This isn't bending properly, so we'll probably need to adjust something in limb IK let's turn off order on the end and reverse. There we go. Yeah, reverse arm, then lift and shift. That looks pretty good. And we'll just move the bat bit further up there yet. So that's gonna be achieved starting position. So now that we've got that, we'll press Control to take a two frame take. And that's going to be more or less E Cheese static position. Next we'll do scratchy static position. So similar thing again. Just move the arm. It looks like he's holding the back properly. Probably need to change something in limb IK here. So this time it's gonna be the right arm, reverse, reverse bend to the right arm. And then maybe just drag that a little bit. I think we can probably make that a little bit lower. That's bending a little awkwardly, but I think we can just mask it by putting the hand on top of it. That looks pretty good. And that's going to be scratchy static position. So press control to, to take your two frame take and just expand that out. Then we'll import the audio. And then let's just drag out this static positions to the end of the audio. Alright, so the first thing we have to do is animate the wished thud, thud, or them hitting each other. So we're just going to scrub through the timeline. And when you hear whoosh, that's when scratches that is going to go down. So about here is where you hear the first thud. So let's position itchy so that his bat is all the way down here. And we'll press Control to see what it looks like if we blend it in with one frame. Just blend the one in. I think that looks pretty good. Wishes about there actually. This time scratches but has to go down. So we'll click on scratchy. So we'll move the arm down there and press Control to look a bit better this time. Yep, that looks good. And we'll just blend 11 foramen, which requires a bit of zooming in. This one was it choose Animation was only, I think there was only two frames. And then all gonna do describe our timeline and find a thought and a whoosh sound, and then paste these animations in there. So maybe let's start with itchy. So copy these three handles by holding Control and then clicking on the draggable handles on the timeline, press Control C. And then we're going to scrub and listen for a thud sound. So there was another thud here. I think there's a peak in the audio. This little peak fast, That's probably the third. And then we'll click on Scratch, itchy, and paste that in. That sounds good. Let's listen for another third. Another peak in the audio there. So about here, about another third of it. So we'll paste that again. Another third here. And another third very, it's very hard to hear because you've got the square root we're talking at around here. But there is another thud. Thud about here. I think. Another third here. Fair? I think they look at each other. Cool. So that's the first set of HEs animations done. Let's just 12 HE up so that it's a bit easier to see scratchy. And we're just gonna do the same thing. So we're going to copy these three in the timeline and listen for a swish and then paste the animation swish. Swish about here, another swish about the swish about, He'll swish about the cool. So that's the first set of scratches, animations done. The next thing we will have to do is animate the eyes when they look at each other's, probably about here before you hit the tendon. So if I press right while I'm holding right, I can't press Control to this time. Otherwise, his eyes go back to the center. So I'm going to hold the right key and go to Timeline and then go to record to frame take. And if we hold down HE let's see where the eyes are. There it is. We want to expand the time for this by a few seconds. And then after you hear the dentin, is probably where we'll finish the eye animation. That was perfect. Actually aren't going around the 90-second mark is probably where we want to finish that. And then we'll do the same thing for scratchy. So we drag up here. He 12 down scratchy and select scratchy on the timeline will go to the Eye Gaze enabled keyboard input. And it looks like I haven't done the eyes properly for scratchy. So let's just have a look what's going on here. I haven't rigged to the eyes, so let's quickly do that. Will delete all the tags for I. This looks tagged correctly, but let's just put it in again anyway and then left. I not we don't need that. Nope. Nope. Had it in again. I think that's pretty good. Let's just check the eyes yet the eyes look better now, scratchy doesn't look as creepy when he's looking down. So r can, we can press lift and down on our keyboard. And then again, because we can't press Control two at the same time. What we'll do is click on timeline and record a two frame. Take. Cool, That's scratchy eyes. And then we'll push this out to nine or three. And that looks pretty good. So that's the eye animation done. The next one we'll do is the bat. So that's itchy, hitting the squirrel with the bat. Scratchy enable itchy on the timeline. And where you see this peak in the audio around the ten second mark is where HE hits the square root. And this one's a little bit harder to animate. So let's see how it's done in the cartoon here, somewhere about there. So he leans back. So that's shot number one, leans back with the bat. The next shot looks to be holding the bag upright and then the bats on the other side. In order to do this, I think we would need to tag the waist with a NIC for itchy. So let's go back to the rigging process here. Go to the body. Let's make the neck and the waste draggable. Maybe for this we won't make the body independent. Yeah. Okay, That seems to work. So we come back here and at around this mark is where he starts winding up for the movement. So let's move him back. Like that. It's really exaggerate the movement. The back comes back here. And that's going to be the first pose. And then we'll press Control two. And we'll probably just blend that with 11 frame. And it's a pretty quick animation again. So the next pose after this one was him kinda straightening up, leaning a little bit. So that's posed number two will blend that with one frame. Then we'll just drag this on top of the first pose so that it blends together. There you go. Yeah. Then probably here is where the kit actually happens. Probably the me move this here. Press Control to blend this with one frame. Move it on top of the previous two frame. Take let's see what this looks like. Then the last one is him, whether that's on the other side and his arm is on this side, but maybe we can just bring it back to the let's see if we can just put it back to the original position, maybe like back here. See what this looks like. Arguing with this one here, we can probably move that back down a little bit more. So let's just delete that and do it again on sort of leaning a bit more inwards. And that's probably a bit more like this height because our character is quite short. So probably about there. And let's see what this looks like. That looks way better. Then this section is where in After Effects, we'll have the nagging character head out of the stadium when we're not gonna do that in character animator. So that's itchy. Second set of animations done with the bat. The next one will be both of them celebrating. So just jumping in the air about the 11 second mark is where we want both of them to jump. So I'll just make HE jump their hands in the air. That's up there. Let's do the feet. Looking like that. And then we'll do a two frame take control to just have that to the end of the episode. And we will blend this. Let's see what it looks like. The three frames, maybe even five frames. Yeah, that looks really good. Then now we'll do the same for scratchy. Scratchy is much taller, it's not gonna be much room for scratchy to junk. So what we might have to do is go to our scene properties and change the height to something like 2,200. That looks a little bit better. He jumps. I don't want scratchy to jump a little bit as well. So let's select scratchy. And I haven't made the neck and the waste draggable. So we'll go to our scratchy character, scratchy puppet, or untagged the body as independent. Then inside the body will make the neck draggable and the waste draggable. Hurtful you now, we should be able to make him jump up. And during the year. And the legs then boom like that. You need to jump to high. Cool, happy with that pose. Press Control to 12, scratchy down. When this over five frames. Perfect, I think we're done. We can probably just make this a little bit longer, just in case we want our episode to run for a second longer than normal. I think that looks really good. The last thing we'll have to do is just split this into two different scenes because we will be squashing itchy and scratchy in After Effects. And we can't squash them individually when they're in the same scene. So we'll just duplicate this episode with Control D and double-click on the first one. And we'll rename this one too, just like HE episode. And for this one, we'll only keep HE in this particular scene. So we'll delete scratchy and then in the duplicate one will keep her scratchy, itchy. Actually just so that we don't lose anything. Let's do duplicate the third one and keep both of the characters in there. And we'll just name this one itchy and scratchy backup. And we'll rename this episode to as scratchy episode. Then we'll delete it g from this. And perfect, we're done. Alright, in the next episode, we'll compile the episodes. So that's squashing itchy and scratchy, making our nagging character walk from outer frame into the frame and hitting our nagging character out of the stadium. I'll see you there. 69. 10.5 Compile The Ep