Learn to Animate! Classical 2D Animation for Beginners

1. Learn to Animate: Classical two D hand drawn animation is the most exciting and the most creative way to bring your ideas to life. It's the foundation that sets you up for life as an animator. My name is Shevorne. I'm an artist and illustrator and a top teacher here on Skillshare. I've got over 15 years experience working as an artist in the animation industry. This class is a complete guide on learning how to animate from scratch. This class will teach you everything that you need to know to get started animating and will provide a solid foundation on which to build an exciting career as an animator. That foundation is encapsulated in the 12 principles of animation that you hear so much about. This class will not only teach you those principles, but will give you three projects where you can put those principles to use and which will give you the actual hands on experience of why these principles are so powerful as a framework to animate anything. If you're a complete beginner, this class is perfect for you. But I've also designed this class. If you're somebody who has a fair idea of animation already, if you've maybe been using software to move stuff around, but you want a deeper understanding of the core principles and techniques. We'll be working inside Adobe animate for this class in order to learn classical frame by frame animation. I'm going to guide you through the UI, through all of the tools and the properties. I'll show you how to make simple animations that you can progressively build up in order to create motion that has character, appeal, and personality. You're going to learn how to add ease to your animation, when to use it, how to apply it for effect. You'll learn all about the bouncing ball project, why it's so important. I'm also going to show you a really easy and simple tool that will help you to make an animation like this correctly right on the first pass. From there, you're going to apply the same principles to a character jumping. This project will give you an opportunity to animate a complex character with moving parts. By the end of the class, you'll have three standout projects for your portfolio. You will have gone from not knowing how to animate something to being completely versed in the principles that will help you to animate anything. Learning to animate is complex. It can be a bit confusing. My goal in this class is to help you navigate through the complexity to share shortcuts and insights that I learned as a professional so that you have an easy and direct path to your goals. If you're ready to dive in and develop an exciting new skill set today, then let's get started. Okay. 2. Welcome to the Class: In this introductory lesson, I'm going to give you a brief overview of the class so that you have an idea of how you're going to progress. And I wanted to talk to you about your three class projects. So there are three main sections of the class. The first covers the basics of setting up. I'm gonna walk you through the Adobe Animate UI and show you how to set up your workspace specifically for Animation. In the next section, we'll start to unpack some of the more technical aspects of animation, like keyframes, in-betweens and breakdown drawings. Understanding these is going to provide you with a clear system for animating and a really easy way to tackle complex animations. Then we'll start to look at how the principles are applied to animation. Will look at animating in Arcs using timing and spacing, as well as easing in key frames. The last section, we'll complete the final two projects for the class, the Bouncing Ball and the Character Jump. Now these two projects are the cornerstone projects for any beginner Animation student in any curriculum. These are the projects that you learned in your first year. And they're really important to know and to have in your portfolio. Finally, I'm going to show you how to render and Export Your Animation so that you can share it with the world. And by world, I mean the project section of this class. Be sure to check that out. Check out your fellow students projects, and leave feedback on their work as well. If you have any questions or need any help with your work, be sure to leave me a comment in the discussion tab. I've left some resources for you to download for each of the projects. So you'll find those over in the Projects and Resources tab. You can access them from your desktop and save the message and have a look at my animations in more detail. So the software that we're using in this class is Adobe Animate. And there are two reasons why we use this. The first is that it is industry standard. So if you can demonstrate to prospective studios that you know how to work with software like Adobe Animate, That in itself will be very impressive. The second reason is that Adobe Animate is really straightforward to animation. It's literally Drawing and making keyframes. So once you know exactly how the UI works, it's really easy and straightforward. So head over to adobe.com and check out the downloads there. You can certainly get a free trial, run that for a few weeks and see how you like it. The other thing that you might need as a graphics tablet and a stylus. Although I will say this is not completely required, I do have a lot of students who have managed to do the projects by just using a mouse. This is my setup that I use. It's a welcome into us Pro. And I've used it for years and it's definitely the one that I will recommend. Okay, so in the next lesson, let's open up Adobe Animate and take a look around 3. Introduction to Adobe Animate: When you first open up Adobe Animate, what you're going to want to do first is click on Creation. This will open up this little window, which gives you quite a lot of options for making different types of documents. If you're creating animations for social platforms or games or the web, there are a bunch of templates for those. But since we want to be creating character animation, just go with this option here. Full HD is fine. I usually leave the width and height at 19:20 by ten 80 because that's a standard size for screens. And the only other thing that I want you to check or to change if it isn't like this is the frame rate. Make sure that you're on 24. I'm going to explain why later, but for now, just set that to 24. These ones here, you don't have to worry about this option. Leave that as it is, and then click Create. And now you're in. So welcome to the animate UI. What I'm going to do is give you a brief walk through here of everything. If it looks a bit confusing or overwhelming, don't worry. None of this makes any sense until you actually start working with it, and we will definitely be getting very used to that in this class. But for now, let's just take a quick look around. So I'm going to hit command and control and the minus button and just sum out of it. This white area is called the stage. This is where you will do all of your drawing and animating. You can think of this area as the screen where the final animation gets played out, or is the camera view that's capturing the action. Basically what you see on the stage is what the camera captures. Anything that's off to the side of the stage will not be exported in your final movie, but you can certainly make use of this area if you wanted to have objects or things you know, move on screen or move off screen. Down here, you've got your timeline where you'll be defining the length of time that you want to set for your animation. Over here on the left, are all the drawing and painting and creating tools. You've got a pen tool, you've got some shape tools. If you've worked with any other drawing or painting software before, then these tools will be very familiar to you. But just bear in mind that everything you're working with here inside of animate is a vector graphic. Unlike photoshop, if you paint a brush stroke like this, you can actually go in and change the nature or change up the shape of that of that brush stroke. Over here on the selection tools, you'll see that there's a regular selection tool and a sub selection tool. This selection tool allows you to select the object, where the sub selection tool will allow you to actually grab the individual vector points that make up any shape and move them, edit them, and adjust them how you want to. I'm going to hit V, I'm going to click and drag over all of these and just hit backspace to delete them. Underneath the drawing and painting tools, there is your color swatches. You have color swatches for your fill and stroke. Over here on the right is the properties tab. You can have properties for your document. You can have properties for the tool that you're using or the object that you're creating. Let's say I choose the brush tool over here, the properties for that tool will appear here. Again, over here, you can also adjust the color and you can adjust the size and things like that. Okay, that's a basic overview. In the next esson, I'm going to talk in more detail about the stage and the timeline and how these two parts of your workspace relate to the two cornerstone concepts of animation, namely time and space. When you're ready, I'll see you in the next lesson. 4. Time and Space - the timeline and the stage: In this lesson, I'm going to explain the two foundational concepts of animation and how they relate or how they are represented in this workspace. Those two concepts are time and space. In order to animate anything, you need to have both of those elements. You need space for the animation to unfold or to move around and you need time in order to define the action of that animation. Within this workspace or this interface here, time and space are represented or controlled in the timeline down here and in the stage up here. Now, as I explained previously, the stage is where you will draw and create your characters, and the timeline is where you will set the key frames in order to animate them. So if we've got a very simple stick figure, he could be walking around or waving, whatever that animation is that's happening up here, we need to have the time defined down here. Okay, so I'll just drag this up a little bit so we can see it a bit more clearly. And using the space bar, I can move around the stage as well. So at the moment, my drawing is on frame one. If I had no drawing up on the stage, then that frame would be empty. There'd be this empty circle in that frame. As soon as you draw something on the stage, that becomes a black dot, and that means that the action or the drawing on the stage is recorded down here in the timeline. As you can see, your frames are all numbered out and above these frames, you can even see that the seconds are numbered as well. So 24 frames equals 1 second of time. If the timeline, by the way, is too small, simply drag this slider up and down here to scale it up or down. I'll just leave mine like this for the moment. Now the next thing that I want to point out is that this button here, this is the one that says Insert keyframe. Essentially, that is a key frame because it has a drawing on it. If I were to go forwards in the timeline and let's say click on frame 20 and then come up and just click on Insert keyframe, that's going to create another key frame of that drawing right there. So now we've got two drawings. A drawing on frame one and a drawing on frame 20, and all of these are frames of that first drawing. In this case, it's the exact same drawing, so there's no animation. There's no change. What I'm going to do though is quickly make some difference or some change here. So I'm going to use the lasso tool, which is L on my keyboard and just select this arm. Then I'm going to press Q on my keyboard, which brings up the transform tool and just rotate that arm down. And now, because there's a change in the pose, you have an animation. But you'll notice that if I click and hold on this button, there are other options. What we'll be working with are lank key frames, key frames, and frames. Now, as I mentioned, all these gray parts of the timeline, these are frames. They're known as, you know, just a regular frame. There's no new drawing, so it's the same drawing that's held for all of these frames. If I click anywhere on this timeline and choose, insert blank key frame, what's going to happen is it essentially starts a blank page for me to draw on. It gives me the opportunity to make a new drawing here. So what you could do is either redraw the character with a slight change. But just for the sake of fastness, I'm going to copy the first drawing, paste it into this blank frame here and make a slight change now. So now there are three poses. There's more to the animation. We're building up our animation slowly. So with that simple concept in mind, let's take an example of this ball. I'm going to go down to 1 second, that's frame 24. I'm going to insert a key frame. The drawing is now set at that point, and on the stage up here, I'm going to change its position. I'm going to hold down shift and drag it across the stage. Now I've got a ball that goes from here to there. But as you can see, as before, even though it's a new drawing and it's in a new position, there's no real animation taking place. It just hops from one position to the other. So in Adobe Animate, just like any other animation software, you have the option to automate your animation. All you need to do is click anywhere in the timeline between these two drawings, right click and choose Create Classic Tween. I just want to show you this process so that you know what it is. And also, I want to explain why it's not really that useful for our purposes. So I'm going to just choose that. Immediately, I'll get this message that says, you know, the selected frames need to be converted to symbols. You can just click for now, and there you go. You've got a very smooth motion of the ball moving across the screen. That's great. That's all well and good, but there are a couple of things that I want to point out about that kind of animating. One is that you still don't really know how to in between your animation. And as an animator, creating your own in betweens is where you will get to have total control over the quality or the character of your animation. You get to decide exactly how the action is going to play out or how it gets created. You get to decide, is it going to be a flat, even monotonous motion, or is it going to have some nuance to it? So that's one thing that animating with tweens, right out of the gate is not really ideal. The other thing is that in order for anything to between, as you saw earlier, you need to have everything converted to symbols. And what I want to teach you in this class is frame by frame, hand drawn animation, so we're not yet working with symbols and tweens. I want you to learn the craft of animation yourself and get really to a point where you fully understand the principles of classical two D animation. This way is the best way to learn those principles. In the next essen, I'm going to explain the 12 principles. I'll explain where they came from and how you can prioritize them in your animation. 5. The 12 Principles of Animation: In this lesson, I'm going to give you a very brief introduction to the beloved 12 principles of animation. This is something that you will hear a lot about on your animation journey. The principles of animation, I mentioned everywhere. And it's very important to know what these principles are and how you know how to apply them to your work and how to prioritize them. So very quick history lesson. These principles were first formulated in the really early days of the animation industry. At the time of the Walt Disney Studio. Back then, animators, or only developing their craft. And they needed to come up with a set of guidelines or a set of principles. So they could easily pass on a standard of practice to the new animators. Coming up. A group of animators at the Disney Studios called the nine old men came up with these 12 principles. All of these principles together form a really solid and fundamental approach to animating characters and for telling compelling stories through animation. They encompass things like how to draw appealing characters. How to present your action clearly, how to have dynamic action, how to have natural and believable motion. And above all, these principles help you to achieve a sense of character and personality in anything that your animation. For our purposes in this class, we're only going to be focusing on six out of these 12 principles. And those six that I want you to look at and to really get to know how to animate pose to pose. So that means making keyframes, adding breakdowns and in-betweens, and approaching any animation in a methodical way. Then I want you to get to know all about timing. That's how to adjust the keyframes in order to make sure that the action is, is realistic. Along with this principle, I'm also going to be adding in a principle called spacing. That means how you can adjust the speed and velocity of your action. You will also learn how to apply easing to your animation so that it doesn't look mechanical and so that it has that sense of life. You'll learn how to change the shape of an object in order to indicate speed or impact. And lastly, you'll learn all about how to use anticipation to give any action and much more realistic and much more appealing quality. Hopefully, by the end of the class, you can come back to this list and you can fully understand how each of these principles fit together to form a cohesive framework. And more importantly, how you can integrate them all into your own approach for making your characters and your stories come to life 6. The Drawing Tools in Adobe Animate: In the next few lessons, I wanted to cover some of the technical aspects of Adobe Animate that I think are very important for you to know about before we move into working with the classical Animation Principles and applying them to our projects. The first of these technical aspects or the drawing and painting Tools. And then I'm going to explain frame Rates and why frame Rates are so important to know about when it comes to animation. As I said before, these are all your drawing and painting Tools. I've got my more or less grouped into categories like this. These are the selection tools. These are the shape tools and the Drawing Tools. I've got the paint bucket down here and the eraser and things like that. Now, if you don't see any of the tools that I have on your toolbar. All you need to do is come down to these three little dots. Click on this button. That will bring up a whole nother panel where you might find some of the tools that you're missing. Or you need to do is click on them and drive them over. The main Drawing Tools that I work with are the pen tool for one. If you've worked with this tool before in Photoshop, than it pretty much works the same way. You click and drag out these vector points. And you can make some really nice fluid shapes. This is going to create an outline that you can then use the bucket tool to fill with color. I personally also like to work with the line tool to create shapes. Just like this. The pencil tool is great for drawing lines. And just note that when you draw the pencil tool, you can make use of the sub selection tool to click on the individual vector points. You can change and affect your line that way. Whereas when you make a line with a paintbrush, the vector points are gonna be all around the boundaries of that shape. You can actually really make a creative shape if you wanted to affect the brush tool like dash. But the main thing to know is that because you're working with vectors, the shapes are the lines that you create a much more versatile than if you were working with bitmaps. You can chop and change them. And it gives you a lot of flexibility when it comes to creating artwork. For the shape tool though, it's important to note that when you create a shape like this, for example, if you click and drag out a circle, then that creates both a fill and stroke. In other words, a color and an outline. Now if I wanted to grab the shape and move it around, you have to be careful that you're not just grabbing the inside and leaving the outline behind. If I double-click on the very edge, you can see that's where the liners, in order to select the whole entire object, what you need to do is either click and drag, ran the whole shape or double-click in the middle. And that will select everything. Obviously to select and move things. V is the go-to selection tool. That's the quickest, easiest one to use. But you can also use the transform tool. So hit Q on your keyboard. That brings up this free transform tool. Once you select something, you'll see that it creates this boundary box around it. So this tool, you can use it to move, you can use it to rotate, but also to Squash and Stretch your object. And we'll be talking more about squash and stretch later on. Okay, so we've covered the pen tool, the brush and shape tools, and the pencil tools. Let me know if you have any questions about these or any of the other tools. What I would recommend though, is that maybe pause the videos and just take a few minutes to practice working with drawing and painting and using this shapes inside of Adobe animation. See what you can come up with. Get familiar with how these tools work and get a feeling for the potential and the possibilities that they offer for creation cool characters when you're ready, then meet me in the next lesson and I'm going to explain what frame Rates are 7. Frame Rates for Animation: In this lesson, I'm going to break down frames and frame rates because it's a really important part of animation. But it's also an area that can be a bit confusing. A frame rate is the frequency or the rate at which consecutive images or frames appear on the screen. You've probably heard of terms like for K at 60 frames per second, or four K at 120 frames per second. That sounds complicated, but essentially, a higher frame rate means smooth or Motion. A higher resolution means more detail within that image. Now you've heard me talk all along in this class about 24 frames per second. That might sound a bit boring. When technically 60 or 120 frames sounds a lot more exciting, especially if it makes everything look smoother. You might be wondering why on earth are we working with 24 frames? Well, 60 frames per second, or 120 frames per second, is generally used for high action film or gaming. A lot of the way that we animate for cartoons or TV shows is done in 24 frames per second, not in 60 or 120. For the most part, 24 frames is a standard frame rate. It's been standard since really the beginning of film. Back in the day when we were shooting film on celluloid, you'd have 24 of these little frames per 1 s of film strip. It was decided on 24 frames per second because that's what the I can easily read to recognize Motion. Now the point that I want you to be really clear about is that not only as 24 frames per second, the standard across the industry, but this is very important. 24 frames per second is the easiest frame rate to work in if you want to animate on twos. Now, animating on twos means that you'll only ever need to place a Drawing on every second frame. Animating on ones means that you'll have to animate or draw a picture Omega Drawing on every single frame, 1-24. But by making a drawing on every second frame, it works because even though you just have 12 drawings, you will still be able to read the motion exactly the same. And therefore, as animator is, that gives us the opportunity to cut workload and half. For example, on a TV show, if you're trying to put out an episode per week, being able to cut your work time down in half is quite a big deal. Working in any other frame rate will really start to make animating on twos very complicated and a bit messy. You'll wind up having to animate on one's for a lot of it. Since you're just learning animation and getting to know about the principles I'm going to teach you in this course is frame-by-frame animating on twos. Now I highly recommend that you follow along and work in 24 frames per second. Then later on, when you're much more advanced in Your Animation and you're making complex character animation. And you're much more comfortable with the principles, then I would encourage you to experiment and try working at a different frame rate or animating on ones. But for now, that's the logic and that's how we'll work as we move forward through the Class 8. How to Use Keys, Breakdowns and Inbetweens: In this lesson, I'm going to explain the different terms that you need to know about when creating hand-drawn animation. Those are key-frames, breakdown drawings, and in-betweens. I'm going to take some time now to explain these. And one reason being that inside Adobe Animate is often feels like everything is called a keyframe. Toward keyframe refers to any of these frames down here that has a drawing in it. But knowing the difference between a keyframe, a breakdown, and an in-between will literally help you to plan and execute your animation faster and way more easily. So a good way to think about keyframes is to think about key poses. So take this really simple example. Here's an animation of a little puppy doing a very simple action. He's sort of tilting his head up. On our timeline. All of these frames with the black dots inside animation are called keyframes. But think about the poses. In this action. The puppy moves his head from here to here. So he changes his pose from this pose to this pose. That's where key poses come in. So a key pose is like the defining pose in an action. It's often the start and the end of an action. A key pose will mark a major change in action or change in direction. And the action that goes from here to here is completed or filled out by in-betweens. These are all the drawings that come in-between the key poses. So it'll become much more clear when we do start animating. But I wanted to illustrate the fact that if it's helpful to think of the term key pose instead of keyframe. When you're building your action, then that's fine. Because as I said, in Adobe Animate, every frame with a drawing is a keyframe. Now, the way that I want you to animate is to think about key poses or key-frames. First. Then secondly, add a breakdown drawing and then thirdly add in-betweens. Let's do a very simple, very easy example. I'm gonna go ahead and create a simple ball on the stage. And on my timeline here, I have a keyframe indicated by this black dash. I'm going to go forward in the timeline to frame 24. Then I'm going to click on Insert Keyframe. And now I'm going to drag the ball to a new position over here. So I've essentially now got two keyframes are two key poses for the action of the ball going from one side to the other. If I go into the middle, I'm going to create a new keyframe here. I can now define that part or that motion that the ball travels from a to b by placing a middle drawing. Now to see the trajectory, you need to see the frame where you're coming from, the frame that you're going to. And to do that, you need to turn on onion skin, and that is this little button here. So onion skin allows you to see a ghosted image of the previous frames and the subsequent frames. And that's going to allow you to easily place your current frame where you want it to be. Now what I've done is created a breakdown drawing. That breakdown drawing is a drawing that will indicate how the action develops between point a and point B. Think of it as defining the direction in this animation of the ball traveling from left to right. That breakdown drawing will tell you that it's just going in a straight line. But you could also have a breakdown drawing that say up here, and suddenly it's a very different path of action. Or you could place your breakdown drawing down here. And again, you've got a very different action. So the breakdown is often overlooked or not really discussed. But it's a really important concept or it's an important parts of your animation because it defines the direction. And it's also a great way to literally break down your animation into easy parts. It gives you a roadmap. With a breakdown drawing. You can now animate the first half very easily. And then animate the second half very easily. And you'll have nice smooth motion and you're not animation without a plan. So that's my advice, is to use this plan for animating. Make your starting pose, make your end pose. Then add a breakdown drawing. Then add your in-betweens on one side and then your in-betweens on the other side. So because we're animating on twos, what you would do is just animate or place an in-between on every second frame. You step ahead two frames, insert a keyframe there. Turn on onion skin so you can see the previous frame and the subsequent one and drag the ball across. Now if you scrub through the timeline, you can get a sense of how your emotion is going. Then repeat that process, go forward to insert a keyframe. Use onion skin and drag your drawing across Ford's two spaces. Insert a keyframe. Drag the drawing across, go forward two spaces, insert a keyframe all the way into this breakdown pose. Then once you get to the breakdown, just repeat the process for the second half of the animation. And that's how you can achieve easy animation is very smooth and evenly paced. And that's our formula to animate anything really. Key poses or extreme poses. Your breakdown drawing, and then your in-betweens. Now, in the next lesson, we're going to start to add layers of finesse or nuance onto this. The first thing that I want to talk about is how to work with arcs. That's one of the most important components that will make your animation look natural. When you're ready, I'll see you in the next lesson. 9. Animating in Arcs: The last lesson was all about how to animate with Keys, Breakdowns and in-betweens. And in this lesson, we're going to cover the next important concept and that's animating in Arcs. The basic idea here is that any motion or action that is natural will happen in an ark. Things that move in a straight line are usually mechanical. And things that travel in arcs are more natural movements. Even something as simple as lifting your arm up. That motion follows an ark. When you run, your feet, follow a little arcs. When you walk, your arms swing at your side in arcs. And we can use this as a really helpful way to create guides for anything that we want to animation. Arcs are going to help us plan and define our animation. I'm going to demo this by building up on the animation that we've just done with the ball going from a to B. This is a really simple application, but it's one that you can easily do if you follow along with me. Okay? So with onions getting turned on, you can see that our Ball goes in a straight line from start to finish. If you wanted this to move in a nice smooth and natural motion though, you just need to add an ARC. I'm gonna make a new layer in the timeline. And on this layer I'm gonna draw an ark. And what I want to do is just simply use this as a guide. I'm going to literally follow this line for the Animation. So you can use a line tool and adjust it into a nice curved line. So now make sure that you lock that ARQ layer. And then on the timeline of the Animation, simply start to drag each of the drawings down to the ark. Click on the keyframe in the timeline so that the Drawing gets selected and drag it down. Click on the next keyframe, drag it down. Click on the keyframe, drag the drawing down all the way to the end. And that is how you can make a very nice smooth Arc. Now, this might seem overly simple, but it has huge implications for animating. Anything that you will ever do really is a cornerstone to Your Animation skill set. You're going to use the idea of an Arc as a guide in much more complex character animation. And a pro tip is if you ever animate something and you look back at it and you think it just really looks off, doesn't feel right. There's something not working. The very first thing that you should check is your arcs is the motion that you've just animated, travelling along an ark. Chances are that it's not. There might be just one Drawing that's out of alignment with the ark. And by simply changing that one Drawing, you're animation will look, Rajesh. Have a go at creating this yourself. It only takes a few moments and it's a really good exercise to get used to playing around with this idea of using a guide, using arcs and moving your keyframes in the next S. And I want to progress with this one step further and show you how to space out the drawings in order to make it look even more realistic. So when you're ready, meet me in the next lesson. 10. How to Space Inbetweens: Timing and spacing are the two components that you have control over. If you want to make unique and creative animation. In this lesson, I'm going to show you the basic concept of spacing out your in-betweens. And I want to explain why it's so important. So the timeline is where you get to define the length of time that you're animation takes. You set your keyframes, and that establishes how long something takes. In our case, here in this example, it's 1 s. Using an Arc, you can create natural motion, one that looks fluid and doesn't look mechanical. But in and of itself, emotion in an ARC is not really enough to give it that sense of life. There is a more important components that actually distinguishes natural motion from mechanical motion. And that is the speed. You can control the speed of your Motion by the way that you space out the drawings on your stage or your in-betweens. Now this is going to enable you to give character and personality to your motion. It's the most creative part of the whole animation process. So let's imagine, for example, that this motion here is a pendulum or something similar. It's not just a flat circle moving from a to B. There is a way that you can animate this to make it look like a pendulum swinging. So what do you suppose would define the movement of a pendulum as being different from what we have right now? Well, the answer is that it would swing slowly at the start and at the end. And it would speed up in the middle. You would get that sense of slow at the top. Fast in the middle, slow at the end. Right now, this swings in one monotonous even motion. The speed is pretty much constant throughout. And we can see that as well visually. We can see more or less the spacing between all of the in-betweens is the exact same. So the breakdown drawing, we determined that that are halfway point between our two key Poses. What I'm gonna do now is adjust the first half of this animation so that it starts off slow. And to do that, I'm going to select each one of these drawings and drag them back a little bit so that they're more closer together and sort of bunched up at the beginning of the Animation. When you have drawings that are close together, that will always create a slow speed. And when you have Drawing set are far apart, That's going to create a fast speed. So I'm sort of nudging them and making sure that they squeezed up into the first drawing. But I'm making them slightly more spaced out as they reach the breakdown. On the other side of the breakdown, drawing the second half of the animation, I'm going to Space everything up towards the end key pose. And that way it will slow down as it comes into that final key. If you can see, the animation starts slow and then it speeds up through here, and then it slows in to the final pose. So just to recap, drawings or in-betweens that are spaced close together are going to make your animation appear slow. And drawings that are spaced far apart are going to make the animation appear fast. This simple idea is crucial to making any Animation. And then the next lesson, you will see how this works exactly. And you'll get to animate and ease out and an ease in. Plus, I'm going to explain exactly when you would use any of those. So when you're ready, I'll see you in the next lesson. 11. Adding Ease to Your Animation: In this lesson, we're going to break down the concept of spacing your animation a bit further, and I'm going to explain what easing is. Here I've got an animation of a ball with completely even spacing, and the corresponding drawing is evenly spaced between the previous drawing and the subsequent drawing. The timing here in the timeline is 1 second. I've got 1 second with even speed. Now I want to show you how by using the exact same timing, you can make a completely different animation just by spacing out your drawings. The reason you want to do this is because you might want to give some character or some life to your animations. You don't want to have a constant even motion. It'll look really dull and lifeless. If you have all of these drawings bunched up at the beginning, it's going to make the animation slow out of that first pose and then shoot into the end pose. Or if you have all of these drawings squished up at the end here, it's going to make it look like it shoots out of the start and then slows into a stop. There's a particular way of doing this, which I'm going to show you right now. I'm going to start off on a new layer. I'm going to copy this frame, and I'm going to go over along in the timeline and make the exact same timing, make a key frame over here, drag my drawing across. I'll just turn off this layer for now. In this example, what I'm going to do is animate and ease in. I'm going to have this ball travel really fast out of the first pose and slow into the end pose. So the first thing that I want to do is determine where the midpoint is or where my breakdown drawing is. On my stage, that's going to be halfway roughly between these two keys. But on my timeline, what I'm going to do is place the key frame for that drawing at the beginning right after the first pose. I'm going to make a keyframe there, and then on my stage, drag the ball to more or less that halfway area or just before halfway. So now if I scrub through, you can already get an idea or get a sense that we're going to be speeding out of that first pose. Okay. So the next drawing on my time line, I'll make the next key frame here, two frames ahead. But on my spacing, I want it to be. I want it to be halfway between that one and that one. So I'm working in halves continuously. Every in between is placed way exactly between the one that's gone before and the one that's after. So I'll drag that to the halfway. Then go forwards two frames, create a keyframe, and drag my drawing halfway between there. Then I'll go forwards, key frame it, and drag my drawing across halfway. And you can already see or get that feeling of the motion. So I'm going to keep going, keyframe it, move it halfway, Now, I'm judging the halfway points all the time by just eyeballing the outer lines of the circle, trying to find it halfway between those two edges. Now, for the very last two or three frames, I'm really just nudging it across using the arrow keys on my keyboard, just to nudge it over one step. So now you can see the quality of the animation. It speeds out and then it slows in. But it's the exact same timing as the first animation. Even though this one looks like it arrives first, it still arrives at the end point at the exact same time. So this is called a slow in. Now, let's animate a slow out. The process is going to be the exact same. But instead of starting at the beginning, we're going to start at the end and work backwards. I do this because this is the easiest way to keep track of those halfway points. So coming down to the end of the timeline, make a keyframe here at the end, but then drag your drawing to the halfway point on your stage. And then working, make your key frame and drag the drawing to the halfway point and continue on all the way to the very end one. And now you've got an animation that's a slow out. So you have, again, the exact same timing, but an entirely different feel or quality of motion. So that's what's so powerful about easing on your animation. And this is how you can really start to affect the style of the animation that you're doing. In this final example, let's make what's commonly known as an easy ease. That's where you combine the slow in and the slow out on the same motion. So very similar to the pendulum that we just animated in the last lesson. But now we're going to be a little bit more precise and a little bit more systematic about it. So the way we approach this is make your breakdown drawing in the middle by assigning a keyframe in the middle of the timeline. And placing the drawing in the middle of the stage. Now we want to slow out of this first key and then slow into the last key. We continue to work in halfway steps. For the slow out, we'll work backwards from this point. Make a keyframe here and drag your drawing to the middle. Step back to frames, make a keyframe and drag it to the middle. Step back to keyframes. Key frame it, drag a drag it to the halfway point. And that's looking like a really nice slow out there. So let's just do it the same on the other half and this time work forwards. Step ahead, make a keyframe and drag your drawing to the halfway point. Step ahead keyframe, drag it to the halfway point. Step ahead key frame it, and drag your drawing. You get the idea all the way into the last one. Okay, great. That now slows out, it speeds up, and then it slows down. Awesome. Easing is the essence of good animation. If it doesn't fully make sense yet, don't worry. I would encourage you to try this simple exercise out for yourself. Have a go at creating some slow slow outs on your own, following this method so that you really get a feeling for what the speed does to your animation. In the next lesson, I'm going to show you how to make a timing chart so that you can actually plan your in betweens and speeds before you start animating. When you're ready, I'll see you in the next lesson. 12. How to Plan Your Animation with a Timing Chart: Before we start animating our first project, which is the bouncing ball, I want to talk to you about working with a timing chart. A timing chart. It's a holdover from the old days of hand drawn animation. It's a little bit analog, but it's definitely something that can really help you to get to grips with timing and spacing if you're still not entirely comfortable with the concepts or, you know, the application of the concepts. So timing means the rhythm of your animation. It refers to the timing of your key drawings and how long it takes for those keys to be played out. And spacing is where you place your drawings in relation to each other. So I'm going to go back to this very simple animation of the pendulum. We're going to look at making a timing chart with this animation, and I'm going to show you how it works. So I'll make a new layer, and then I'm going to just draw my chart up here on this layer. So I'll hit B on my keyboard. And as I explained, the timing chart comes from the olden days of animation when everything was hand drawn, and animators used to indicate a keyframe or a keypose with a circle, and they indicated in betweens with a line. So the breakdown drawing always was a longer line and the in betweens are shorter lines. So that's just a shorthand kind of indication of your animation, basically. Okay. Looking at our animation of the pendulum, we've got a slow in and a slow out on this. So here's my first key. It's represented by the circle. I'm going to draw straight line across random, really, the length of it, it doesn't matter. That's not what's important, but I just want to represent the last keyframe here with that circle. I'm going to put my breakdown drawing in the middle, and that's just going to be a little line like this. The slow out of the first keyframe was all about working backwards. We find the halfway point between the breakdown and the first key. I'm going to draw a line there, so that's halfway. Then I'm going to draw another one halfway between that and the first key and another one halfway between that and so on. So those are my first in between, represented on my timing chart. On the other side for the slow in to that last pose, you do the same thing, but now you're going to work progressively forwards. So just draw a line at the halfway point to represent that first in between and using little halfway steps, draw lines to represent all the other in between. Okay, and that's it. That's a very simple timing chart that's almost like just a diagram that helps you to build out and plan your animation. As long as you've got something to refer to when you're starting to animate, then it's just a really helpful guide. When you start animating things that are a little bit more complex, you know, it can get very confusing and having a guide like this just helps you so much. Well, I'm going to be using a timing chart like this to plan out my bouncing ball animation. And in the next lesson, we're going to get started on that project and create our key frames for that action. So when you're ready, I'll see you in the next lesson. 13. The Bouncing Ball Animation Project: In this lesson, we're gonna get started on our major project for the class, which is the Bouncing Ball. And if you're wondering why on earth everyone always goes on about the Bouncing Ball and makes such a big deal about it. Well, it's because of this animation is one of the most important projects that you will do in your first year of studying Animation in any Animation curriculum. The Bouncing Ball is either the first major project or definitely one of the most important ones that you need to get under your belt. Simply because project that demonstrates all of the major Animation Principles. So it's one you really need to get to grips with, but it's also a project that you need to have in your portfolio to demonstrate to anybody who wants to hire you as an animator that you can do something like this. So the way we will proceed for this project is in this lesson, we'll plan out our animation. Then we're going to add our keyframes. In the next lesson, we'll work out our timing chart for Spacing our in-betweens. And we'll add on some squash and stretch planning Your Animation is really important. It's something that you need to be comfortable doing when you start to animate anything. The way you plan things out is you first of all, visualize the action that you want to animate. So it's very important to sort of play that out in your head and get a feeling like visually what you want to see, then what I would suggest you do is you make a little diagram or a little thumbnail of that animation. So I'm just going to hit B on the keyboard. For this Bouncing Ball. What I want to see happen is on the ball to start there, Come down, it's going to bounce to this position. It'll go up like this, come down and maybe up again, land, and then roll off the screen. This is a thumbnail representation of the final animation. And I think it's a really good practice to always do this first. With that in mind. The next thing that I wanna do as adding a ground plane where the ball is going to bounce off in a new layer. And the timeline, I'm just going to draw literally a straight line going across. And that's gonna be my ground plane. I can even come down and double-click on the layer name, adding ground plane. So that's good and that's my little thumbnail sketch. The next step then is to add in arcs that we're going to use as a guide for the animation. So I'm going to grab the pen tool. I'll create a new layer. And up there I'm going to just click and drag out the Arcs. The pen is great for this because if you click and drag and hold down shift at the same time, you can drag these anchor points or these handles out to make a nice curve. I'm going to hide the thumbnail layer. I'm going to grab this sub selection tool or you can hit a on your keyboard that allows you to drag the anchor points. Just neaten this up a little bit. I don't think this second bands is going to be so high that grayish. So we have got our thumbnail of the action. We've put in the ground plane, and we've got our arcs. And I'm just going to double-click on that layer arcs. And I'm going to right-click. I'm going to make that layer a guide. So that's a cool thing that you can do inside Adobe Animate, is you can change your layer to be a guide and you'll see that it has a new icon there. And when you go to Export Your Animation, that layer will not be exploited. So that's good. Okay, So the next thing we can do is add in our keyframes. So the key frames are gonna be at these points here, and these are called the contact positions. And I'm also going to put a keyframe at the top of each of the bands. So let's make our Bouncing Ball. I'll move it into the first position over there. The next step that you need to do is visualize how long you want your animation to be on the way I find, the way I do this. I'll play the action out in my head and kinda get a feel for the balances. There's two or three balances. I'm imagining that it's going to take 1 s to get to there and maybe 1 s because it slows down by the time it gets to this place. So maybe 12. So that's the kind of rhythm that I think it's going to be. But will only know for sure once we put all the keyframes in. But for now Let's go ahead in the timeline to vote frame 25 and literally just drag through the timeline like this keyframe. Everything. Lock these layers so we don't do that. And one, that means that about frame 15 or maybe 13 keyframe there. And that can be the first contact position. Now it's going to contact, bounce contact. Let's go ahead to say frame 45 and key frame there. And there. And work backwards and make a halfway mark there and place our frame there. Now let's see what that looks like and hit Enter on my keyboard. We can't really get a sense of it yet until we see the balances in the air. And I'll go long to frame 19 and drag it up to there. Then frame at C31, maybe keyframe there and pull up. I should drag these out a little bit actually. And it's going to roll off. Okay, so let's play those keys. I think that works, okay. Alright, so this first binds takes way too long. It should, it should really drop. Maybe it lands. Here. Feels a little bit better. I'm just going to neaten this up a little bit when you drive that back. Is that feels better. I think though, from the last contact position, let's say at about frame 51 is Ball has an ash. So if you're following along with me, I want you to just double-check that your keyframes are on the same exact Keys is mine. I've got my starting position on frame one, my first contact position on frame nine, the violence is on frame 17. Second contact position on frame 25. Second balance is on frame 31. And the last, well, more or less the last contact position on 37. And then it's either gonna do a little minivans or just roll out. So just check that you've got you've got the same as me. Now if you've got completely different timing, but you think you're timing works better. By all means, stick with ash, that's totally fine. This is a very subjective part of the process. You don't have to necessarily follow my timing at all. I'm just be completely wrong here, but I think this is going to work for me. And as I said, if you want to use different timing, That's totally fine. But just put I do want you to have, are these two layers. I want you to have Your Ground Plane and you're arcs. So I think we can get rid of the thumbnail drawing for now because we've got our animation already. Flush it out. And the ground plane, and the Arcs don't necessarily need keyframes. So I'm just going to select all of those keyframes. Right-click and choose clear keyframe. Now, you should have something that more or less matches my document. Check that you have these two layers and that you've got your keyframes. On the next lesson, we're going to work on the spacing of the in-betweens 14. Inbetweens for the Bouncing Ball Animation: I'm ready to add the in-betweens into this animation. But before I do, I do want to change this very last bounce here because I think that this last bands should be a lot smaller. So all I'm gonna do is I'm going to move this keyframe over. Rabbits. Move it back in the timeline to frame for G1. And I'm just going to add the key or the contacts at frame 45, at 41. Obviously, this tiny, this is gonna be a tiny bounce in the air, just a very slight little bands like that. That's the last tweet that I'll do. The next step is it's not required really necessarily, but I am going to show you how to plan out your in-betweens with a Timing Chart. If you find this a little bit too tedious, then feel free to skip this step and just go ahead to animating your in-betweens. But personally, I really find that planning it out first makes a huge difference. So very quickly on a new layer, I'm going to plot out all of my Keys and plot out my Breakdowns. The first of all, I'm going to draw all the keys. So I've got a key at frame one. The first contact position is on frame nine. Then I've got the first bands at frame 17. Moving along. The next contact is frame 25, the next bounce is frame 31. Then I've got to keyframe. The contact position on 37, my small tiny bones on 41, my last contact key is on 45. And then the very last Poses on frame 51. So those are all my key poses. Now I'm going to apply the spacing on this first section is to slow out of the first key and have a fast drop into the contact. So that means that my breakdown will be halfway in-between and that'll be on frame seven on the chart. I'm just going to mark the halfway point with a number. I don't need to number my in-betweens. I know that I just have two in-betweens, really 1-7 and I'll just draw little lines like this. That's one at 3.1 at five. Okay. So from that contact position up to the bones, That's gonna be gonna go fast by spring up the contact and slow into that top position there. Therefore, I want the breakdown to be on frame 11. And I've got two in-betweens into that keyframe at 17. So that's 13.15, just indicated like that. Then again, the ball is going to slowly come out of the top of the ark and then drop into the next contact. For that, I really want more or less the exact same Spacing. But just to slow out of 17, the breakdown will be at 23 and then two in-betweens there. Okay. That's the key at 31, the key pose. And for this little smaller bands, I've only got two in-betweens. So that means the halfway point really is at 27 and then I've got one in-between coming in there at 29 and the same coming out the other side. There'll be only be one in-between Drawing at frame 33 and Breakdowns Drawing at frame 35. The same thing for that last little bands. Just one Drawing or one in-between on either side of the top of the ark like that. And then for the last rollout and just going to spread it out. And I'll make the end pose actually at 55. I want, I want this to be a little bit longer, I think. Okay, So that is my plan. Now as I said, this is not essential to do. But for me it really makes all the difference because I tend to place in-between a bit erotically if I don't have an exact plan. And that's something that I really struggled with when I was learning animation. I used to think Animation was quite creative and intuitive process. But an actual factors are large of structure to your work and a lot of formulas to follow. Especially for an animation like this one, when you're working pose to pose. It's very formulaic. It needs to be like that in order for the animation to work seamlessly. So you can think of it as essentially following a basic formula. And the timing chart is just a very good shortcut to that formula. It does feel like a lot of work, but I'm now going to show you how quickly it makes the actual animation. So let's put our in-betweens in. I'm gonna go to frame seven, insert a keyframe, and then drag my drawing halfway. And do the same for frames five and then frame three Then I'll go ahead and my next breakdown is at frame 11. So I'll make that one. And then place my two in-betweens there. And they're making sure that they're in the halfway steps. Next, 23, insert a keyframe, drag it over. Now I'm going to work backwards to frame 21 to get my halfway steps and then to 19. So already that's looking very smooth. I don't have to fix or change anything. Moving ahead to 27, I'm going to create that keyframe and then I'll go forwards and create the in-between. And on the other side, make my breakdown at frame 35 and make my in-between app 33. Now, I just have on this section one Drawing 37-41, the same here at frame 43. Lastly, my in-betweens for this tiny end bit of animation is just straightforward enough. All I want you to do is make sure that it actually slows down into the end pose. Okay, Now let's hit Enter and Teller. There's your Bouncing Ball Animation and it looks pretty smooth to me. It looks natural. It's great. And the really cool thing is, honestly, I can't stress how great this is. The really cool thing is that by following that formula that we worked out beforehand, by making a plan, there was actually very little, if anything, that I would change here. This is pretty close to perfect for our purposes. Usually in animation, you spend ages and ages going back in and adjusting Keys and trying to change up the timing and spacing, but this is smooth. This is correct, right off the bat on the first pass. Amazing. So hopefully you can follow this. And I do appreciate that it might seem like a lot of tedious work, but just follow it step-by-step and you will be able to achieve very smooth results. You can tweak things from here if you want to. But personally, I'm gonna leave this as it is. And in the next lesson, I want to show you how to add on a little bit of Squash and Stretch to make this animation a lot more cartoony. So when you're ready, I'll see you in the next lesson. 15. The Principle of Squash and Stretch: In this S and I want to show you how to add a little bit of cartoony personality or character to your animation. As it stands, this Bouncing Ball feels quite solid. In its bounds. It looks like it just, it's almost like a, maybe a ping-pong ball or some kind of very rigid and inflexible objects. And what we wanna do is give this a little bit more elasticity, literally a little bit more bounce. And the reason that we do that is because that makes something look much more cartoony and have a lot more life. And the way to achieve it is to add squash and stretch on to Your Animation. Squash and stretch is one of the main principles of good classical 2D animation. Essentially, it refers to specific Poses that are manipulated or changed in some way to make them be either squashed or stretched. Now, a stretch pose is going to indicate fast motion. You would put a stretched pose anywhere that you want to emphasize the speed. So we want to put a stretched pose in here. Like if you can imagine the ball is being stretched almost by gravity as it moves from this point to this point. And the squashed pose, you probably guessed is at the impact. We want to emphasize that when the ball hits the ground, it hits it with weights, so it impacts the ground. And we want to emphasize that by using a squashed pose. So there's really not a lot to it. We're literally going to do what it says on the tin. We're going to stretch this pose. I'm gonna go, go ahead and the timeline. I'm going to turn on my my guide so as he can see what I'm doing, make sure you're Drawing is selected Q on your keyboard. And then I generally hold down Shift. And I push these things in at the side like that, not too much. And then you can also pull up at the tops there. So that has squished the Drawing into a bit of a stretched pose. Now I want to just rotate it though so that it matches the curve. So it's gonna be coming out there, it's going to start to stretch. And then this pose, we can Stretch even more. Make it quite pronounced. Then the impact pose, we're going to squash it down. So squash it like that. Make sure it's on the ground plane. And then it will spring up. And when it springs up in this pose here, that's also a very fast, speedy pose that we want to emphasize. So we'll stretch that one out, I think. And let's just kind of taper that in a little bit. Search doesn't go, so it reads a bit more smoothly. Okay, then let's do the same on the other side. So go to the breakdown drawing, which is that one there. That's gonna be our fastest pose or fastest pose in this section. And stepping back one, we just want to begin the speediness by just putting us not so much of a defined stretch on that one, just a simple one, and then work ahead to your impact. Now this is a small bounce. I don't imagine that there's much speed happening in here, but we might just see what it looks like. If we affect this very slightly, we can always go back and undo it if we, if we think it doesn't work, and I don't think we need to do the rest of the balances because at that point the ball has slowed down. So let's go back to the beginning. Hit Enter and see what that looks like. Much more cartoony. I hope, I hope you would agree that looks a lot more quirky and interesting. That's a pretty cartoony bounce. I definitely think so. Okay, well there's one final change that we can make, which I'm going to show you again like before this is not necessary. But I just want you to be aware of the fact that there is a big gap here. And I just want, want you to know that if you were to grab this drawing and actually drag it down to the analysis, looks a bit extreme, but just drag that drawing down to the contact position and maybe Mr. Turner Arcs back on. Maybe this comes becomes more of the halfway point. What that will do if you've got a drawing in this first half that actually contacts the ground before it squashes down like dash. It's going to really make it look a lot more readable. I'm not sure if you notice that, but to me it definitely feels a lot punchier. Have a go at that. Experiment with your squash and stretch. See if you can make your Ball have as much Character and cartoonists as you can also experiment with that idea of placing your impact drawings together. You could try and maybe go ahead and do this one and see if that makes a difference. This is the part where you can start to experiment a little bit and play around with your spacing. Once you've established a seamless and fluid motion, you can then see if you can make it look a little bit, a little bit more unique or a bit more different? So now it's over to you. I want you to go ahead and finish up your work, finish up Your Animation, and post your work in the project section, I really want to see how you've approached this Bouncing Ball exercise. And I'd love to see your work. I can't wait to see it. So please send me a message if you've got any questions whatsoever. But otherwise, I'm going to leave this over to you to complete the Animation. Alright, see you in the next lesson. 16. The Principle of Anticipation: In this lesson, we're gonna go over the Principle of anticipation before we move into the next project. I'm going to use this very simple character. This is a sack of flour. And when we were studying animation, we worked on this character to try and understand how to get a bit of life and different posing into something as ordinary as a sack of flour. If you want it to, you could spend a little bit of time practicing drawing this simple shape or the simple design in different emotional Poses or in various, in various different Poses. It's a really good practice, especially if you want to be a character animator. But it's useful to use this little kind of simple design character as a way to explain anticipation, overshoot, and settle. Anticipation means that in order to give any character or even an object a sense of believability or life. These three Poses of Anticipation plus overshoot and settle. We'll add a layer of polish to your animation and give things a much more natural field. So if you look at this little simple animation, I've got the sack of flour jumping from this pose to this pose. And it's a very simple animation. And it's building right on the idea or the concepts that we covered in the Bouncing Ball. So there's a stretch pose, moves up into the squashed pose, another stretch pose on the way down and lands there. And for all, for all of dash, it's fine. It's pretty wild looking Jump, but it's a Jump. And we can all read that. However, what I want to demonstrate to you is what happens to the sort of feeling or the quality of this animation when you add an anticipation at the beginning. So at the start of his action and an overshoot and settle at the end of the action. Let's have a look at that now. Immediately, you can see that suddenly the simple action of this, of this character jumping seems to have a little bit more personality. And that's what we want to try and achieve in our Animation. We're literally bringing things to life. So by adding this tiny little motion at the beginning, you're imbuing the sack of flour with character and personality. The Anticipation, generally speaking, always happens in the opposite direction of the action that is going to come next. So we're going from starting position into this Jump or stretched pose up here, the Anticipation will be in the opposite direction. The Anticipation will have the action going down first and then springing up. And the same as at the end when you want to bring your character into an ending pose. Let's say this is the end pose here, the overshoot and settle will, usually, as the name implies, will overshoot this last pose. I'll actually turn on onion skin. So you can see this on this side a bit more clearly. So this character comes in to land. But between the landing, the contact position and the end position, overshoots that and then settles back into that final pose. The basic idea, we're going to explore this and apply this in the next lesson when we do our Character Jump. When you're ready, meet me in the next lesson. 17. Key Poses for the Character Jump: In this lesson, we're now going to do our last project, which is an animation of a character jumping over an obstacle. I want you to have the chance to animate a somewhat complex character with moving parts and get to use all of the principles and the concepts that we've been working on throughout this class. So here is our simple Plan. The very first step is we're going to plan out the action by drawing a very rough thumbnail. Next, we're going to create keyframes for the action. Those are the main drawings that will describe the entire action from start to finish. Then we'll add in a couple of break-down drawings. And once we have that, we can play around with a Timing, move the keys to adjust it until it feels right. And at this stage now, you could also make a timing chart if you've, if you find that helpful in order to identify the spacing of the in-betweens. Following that, I want to identify the Ark of the Animation and make sure that everything is going to follow a nice even AHRQ. And lastly, we'll animate the in-betweens by creating all of the drawings. This is a simple plan that you can follow for absolutely any animation that you wanna do if you are doing hand-drawn frame-by-frame animation. So what I'm gonna do for this, for this project is really just use a very simple stick figure. I don't want it to be too complicated because I'll be drawing this character is for each and every frame. Okay, so he's going to be going from this position, let's say to this position jumping in the air. And I know that I wanted to have that all-important anticipation pose before he jumps. So that's can be another key. And then this stretch pose, as he comes, goes up and then comes out with Jump on the other side because that's my thumbnail. That's my plan. Let's get started drawing the keyframes. At frame one. This is my starting pose. That's straightforward and all I'll do is copy it over here to the end. Then somewhere in the middle, doesn't matter yet. I'm just going to insert a blank keyframe and turn on onion skin and draw the pose at the top. So if you need to, you can definitely trace over the previous drawings just to make sure you're getting volumes correct. Okay. Those are my three main Poses. Now I'm not going to worry too much about the timing yet. It's okay. That's not right. All I'm trying to do is get my main action or key Poses down. So now I'll draw the anticipation pose. That's going to be the pose where the character anticipates down before he springs up into the Jump. After this is the stretch pose. Again, if you wanted, you could copy this stretch pose since it's more or less the same as the first one. But personally I like to draw them individually because I think it gives a better feeling to the overall animation, but it's up to you. Right? So that looks like it's coming together a little bit. Lastly, I'm gonna do the overshoot pose. That's the contact position where he lands onto the ground and overshoots or goes past the final and pose. Okay, so let's see if that timing feels right. Now this part takes a bit of playing around, adjust the keys as you need to in the timeline. You want the timing to feel right. But you also want the key frames to be in logical places for your in-betweens. For example, I think that I'm going to need two in-betweens at the top of the ark here. Therefore, I'm going to need to, on the other side, I want to definitely have two in-betweens that slow into the settle at the end. So go ahead and just check that you've got the same as me if you're following along with me step-by-step. From the first pose, I've got two in-betweens. Then I've got the anticipation pose. Then that goes straight into this breakdown drawing. But from there into the top of the ark, there are two in-betweens, and there are two coming out of the other side. Alright, so now we can actually create a timing chart for our spacing. Remember, this is just a good tool to use in order to Plan the easing of your in-betweens. So that's my first pose of my next key pose is at seven. And I want to slow into that particular pose, place my two in-betweens there. Now, the next pose, as I mentioned, is actually a breakdown. So really going from pose, from key pose numbers at seven to a key pose at 15. So my breakdown is at nine. And then I've got to slow ins into frame 15 like that. Then coming out on the other side, the key is at 23 and the breakdown is actually 21. I think we're all set. The last thing that you can do, if you like, is just to draw a simple Arc in order to ensure that your drawings will stay on this ark when you go to do your in-betweens. So just, I would suggest draw a simple Arc and adjust the keyframes now if you need to. Okay, perfect. Now, in the next lesson, we'll animate the Inbetweens 18. Inbetweens for the Character Jump: I'm going to drag this layer over or up to the top of the stack so that you can see it a bit more clearly. I'm just going to lock all of the other layers and we're good to start. So as I said before, I'm drawing on each frame from scratch. And I'm using the onion skin to trace things like the head and things like that. I want the head actually to be very consistent throughout the animation. You could copy it each time. But I think the appeal of hand-drawn animation is that it has these little quirks and differences, not completely plastic, perfect throughout. There are subtle differences in each drawing. It's fine if you do make little mistakes, but try to at least draw consistently. You'll often hear people saying that you have to keep the volume consistent from pose to pose. And what that means is that you can certainly change the pose. You can change the shape of your character, squash it and stretches. But for realistic looking animation, the volume of that shape needs to stay the same. So in a squashed pose, you still want it to read as being the same volume as in a normal pose. Alright, well, here we go. That's the anticipation done and I think it's looking really good. I'm going to go ahead and I'm gonna do the two slow imposes between the stretched and the top. This is where I was talking about volume becoming really important. This pose here, or this area where these two in-betweens are. It's very common for beginners to lose the overall volume of the character in this area. So just be aware of that. As I said, if the shape gets squashed Up, say from the top to the bottom, then makes sure it's squishes out at the sides as well. Those are technical terms. Okay, so that's perfect, That's looking great. And it all looks quite realistic in terms of a jump. All I need to do now is finish off the overshoot part. And again, this part is actually really simple. Just going to be a slow back into that final pose. The work here is what makes the animation come alive. The reality is, is that at this stage, you've, if you've already planned your work in advance, this part goes really quickly and really efficiently. And that's what you want to achieve in your animation and in your workflow. The craft of animation is actually very ordered and very methodical. But once you understand that, that's when you can start to get creative. But I would say, stick to your plan and formula at the beginning. And you will have lovely, smooth and successful animations. Okay, let's play this back now and see what it looks like. I think that's great. It's a pretty springy jump for sure. But it's lovely. It's very smooth. It reads really well, and it's got a bit of personality. I don't think it's too floaty. I think it has an offspring and it has enough impact on the landing. Okay, Awesome. As a very last touch, what you could do and what I'm gonna do now is just adding a really simple background. I'm going to leave this over to you. This could be anything you like. What I'm gonna do is just draw a bit of grass along the ground. So it's not just one line. So maybe he's in a field or walking through a forest or something. I might have the thing that he's jumping over be something like a tree stump. Okay. So he's jumping over that. But as I said, you can draw whatever you like, leave it up to your imagination. And remember, if you are putting in a little bit of a background, you don't have to get too detailed or complex here. This is just a really simple line drawing to match the stick figure character. So keep it very, super quick, very nice and cartoony. Over to you. I'm going to let you have a go at this. I hope you've been following along with me step-by-step. If you have, it's time to finish off your projects, put your final in-betweens in your animation and add in a background if you like. Then when you're ready, I'll show you how to export your movie. I'll see you in the next lesson. 19. How to Export Your Animation: Now when you want to finally export your animation from Adobe Animate, there are a couple of options, but the best way really is just to export a video file. So the first thing though, is I want you to make sure that your timeline is consolidated, that you don't have any layers that you don't need or make sure that you don't have any layers that are hidden. Only the layers that you want to be visible in the final movie should be in your layer stack. So for example, let's say I'll just create a layer here and scribble on it. But if you had a layer with a guide on it, for example, and that layer is hidden when you go to export your movie. That layer will also be rendered in the final exports and it's going to appear in the final animation. So if you don't want that to happen, delete your layer. But let's just say, for example, you have a guide and you want to keep it there in case you need to work on it further, then what you must do is just change this layer to guide. So right-click on the layer and choose guide. And now that layer will not be exported in the final render. So I'll just leave that there as you can see what happens. But I'll just make it hidden. Now, once everything is here is okay. Then go up to File, choose Export. And here you'll see a few different options. Now, you don't want to choose Export Movie. Weirdly enough, I, I would, I would have thought that's the option that you should go for it. But what happens is that that will create a movie version that can only be played back inside of Adobe Animate. So in other words, it creates what's called a dot SWF file. And those files, you need Adobe Animate to open them. So what you want is a video file that can be opened by other people who don't have Adobe Animate or a video file that can be posted online and shared and all of that. So choose Export Media. Then you get this settings box. The render size is fine, that should match the stage. But then this option here, ignore stage color, generate alpha channel. That means that if you wanted to export your animation onto a blank or a transparent background, like say for example, you wanted to overlay your animation onto another video or something like that, then you would check that box. But because my animation and yours as well is a line art, it's not going to be really visible on a blank background. So I want to make sure that the the white background gets exported. So I just leave that unchecked. Now the rest of the defaults are fine. Youtube is likely a good option or setting here for the video. Then lastly, just choose the folder that you want to save your video too. The only thing is just make sure this box is checked. So this one says that essentially the render queue will start immediately. The reason for this is that when you click Export, what happens is is that Adobe Animate sends the animation to a separate video encoder sound. It makes it feel a little bit complicated, but it's actually fine. It's just essentially saving out your video. Okay, So then go over to your folder that you chose in which to save it. And your file should be there, ready to go, and there you have it. So that is well done for getting to the end of this class. I am so proud of you. And now I want you to render out your animation and posted up in the project section. If you count, upload the video file directly to the project section, what you can do is upload it to YouTube or Instagram and tag me or send me a message with the link. I can't wait to see your work. I am so excited for you to be starting your animation journey. And don't forget that I am here to help you and to support you along the way. If you're wondering what's next, well, that we use, take this opportunity to plug my other class, go check that out. It's my next animation class in this animation series. It's a direct follow-on from this class. And it's a class that takes you through everything that you need to know about. Creating a character inside Adobe Animate and bringing that character to life in a walk cycle. It's essential next step to take. So do let me know if you join me there and make sure you let me know that you've come from this class. I'll be looking out for you. And I can't wait to see your work