Transcripts
1. Introduction: I love simple and easy to understand messages, and I think that anticipation is that element that also brings that into animations. Giving people clues of what they're supposed to expect and it's helping the message being communicated better. I'm Bee Grandinetti and I'm a Brazilian born and raised, animation director, designer, animator, illustrator, holder of stuff in between, and I currently work and live in London. If you don't know my work, you can always go to my website, beegrandinetti.com. It's a lot of colorful, happy, quirky stuff mostly. I am also a teacher at Skillshare. I have this class called Character Animation Basics, then slope combining After Effects in Photoshop. On today's class, we are going to talk about anticipation, which is one of the 12 principles of animation. But we picked one and we're going to go a bit deeper into it. I chose anticipation, I think, because it might one one of my favorite animation principles. It distinguishes really good animation from bad animation as well, and how it has the power to lift the animation by creating more contrasts, by creating better timing. I will be telling you guys about anticipation, I'm going to be showing you some examples, we're going to be talking about those examples as well, then I'm going to briefly show you how to think about anticipation and show you one example in After Effects, that we can go along and do it yourself as well. I'm going to briefly touch on that and the process in Photoshop as well. One thing to note is that this session was recorded live, so I was interacting with students on the chat and responding to questions that they had on the spot. Enough talking. I hope we have fun and I hope you'll learn or do something today. I anticipate it's going to be good.
2. Principles of Animation: Hi everybody. I'm Becca. I work at Skillshare. I'm on the classes and content team. I'm really excited to be hosting this session today which will be on animation. Without further ado, I'd love to pass it over to B. To get us started. First of all, I just wanted to thank you all for letting me be your teacher today. I mean, this is going to sound very cliché, but I do love getting the chances and experiences to teach because I do learn so much when I teach my other people as well. Yeah. So as I said, I'm born and raised in Brazil, and studied graphic design for 4 years in Brazil. Then went to Sweden, and studied motion design for 1 year, and ever since, so that's been for 6 years now, I've been working with animation. Today we're going to be talking about anticipation, which is one of the 12 principles of animation. It was really crazy for me when I started to learn animation that no one really taught me about. I never heard in the beginning about these 12 principles of animation, which I find really crazy because it's as if you're learning about Illustration and seriously you're learning how to draw people. No one tells you about anatomical principles and proportions. I'm a big believer that for you, the steps is you get to know the rules, you dominate the rules, and then you break the rules. This is the basic principles, the basic rules of animation that you should be learning them, you should be getting those principles and then afterwards you can flip the principles. These 12 Principles of Animation, they were originally introduced by these two Disney animators; Frank Thomas, and Ollie Johnston. They released this book on the '80s called The Illusion of Life, which pretty much was telling the story of how the Disney Studios came together, and the whole methods and processes that they came up with throughout 50 years of developing animation from scratch. Then in this book they show the whole story and also these 12 Principles of Animation, which they found to be the ground rules to develop good animation and give animation this magical feeling, this illusion of life. This is the list of the 12 principles of animation. This is points for you to watch out and tools to really make your animation come to life and improve your animation. I've been working with animation for 6 years, and I don't know these by heart. If you ask me, I'm not going to be able to recite like number one, this. But this is something that I always come back to. I'm learning the levels of depth, of all of these different principles. The more experience I get, the more I revise those contexts as well, the more I understand all of those principles. Don't create the expectation that you need to know all the 12 principles and know them by heart. This is something that you're going to be continuously learning, and learning how to bring those into your work, and understanding all the different levels of each of those principles inside your work as well. But I think it's just important that you know that they exist, and that you can always go back to them whenever you need a little bit of a refresher, whenever you're considering how can I make this better? These are very important tools for you to always come back to. Unfortunately, today we have a very tight session so we cannot speak in detail about all of them, but we are going to be talking about number 2: anticipation. But I highly recommend you guys to give a swift Google at 12 Principles of Animation afterwards. This very first video that I marked in red by Alan Becker. He gives a very summarized, amazing overview of all the 12 principles and with animated example. So its just a really good summary, easy to understand. If you just google 12 Principles of Animation, you're also going to find really amazing content of all the 12 principles. Another piece or resource that I would like to really recommend. This is my top number 1 animation bible that I always go back to. Think this book was released around early 2000 by Richard Williams, which was the Directory of, "Who Framed Roger Rabbit." This book is my personal animation Bible. I know that a lot of people also use it like that, but it's got lots of tips and tricks. It covers the animation principles, but also very heavily on character animation as well. I always go back to it whenever I'm trying to explore something that I haven't done before, especially connected to character animation. So this one is definitely a must have, always consulting it on my shelves. Intro. Now, going to the third business, today we're going to talk about anticipation.
3. Why Anticipation Matters: Today, I chose to focus more on anticipations. We're going to talk about why that's important and show a couple of examples as well. Very early in the days when guys were starting to experiment with animation, how does it work? What works for the audience? What doesn't work? It was a new form of art, and they were understanding what worked and what didn't work. They found out very early that audiences couldn't necessarily easily follow the animation, unless there was a planned series of events leading the eye. Sometimes when the audiences were watching animation, they couldn't really understand the message. By the time they saw something they were like, but what was that? Then it was too quick for them to understand what was happening, and that's how animation anticipation came to be. They realized that actions in animation happened very fast. For example, throwing a ball can take only two or three drawings to complete, which is definitely not enough time for the audience to simulate what's happening. However, if the character before throwing the ball, the character winds up, pauses, and then throws the ball. That makes the whole action a lot clearer for the audience. Real life example, you see this guy throwing a baseball, but before he throws it, he gathers all of this energy, the body goes in the opposite direction. He crawls up, then he extends his arm, and then he throws. Because there is this moment, this preparation for the action, in the opposite direction, the action gets a lot stronger and you have time to assimilate what's happening. This is one of the most obvious and most used examples of anticipation. We've seen it like throughout, all the time in animation as well. One example that was a part of my childhood, I don't know if it was a part of your childhood as well, but it was this, the famous poke-ball throws. But they pretty much always the same principle, before you throw it, you wind up, you gather the energy, you do this iconic super powerful pose, and then you throw it. It's all about gathering enough energy, conserving it, and then you create enough tension in contrast for the audience to know precisely the next thing that is going to happen, which is the throw and the release. Anticipation is this preparation for an action. It takes place in almost every action, but certainly in every big action. Why do we add anticipation in animation? Because it gives a clue of what's going to happen next. It helped leading the eye of the audience in the right direction, therefore, helping them understand the message as well, that has been communicated. It helps the action read better. It creates contrasts and tension between the different body poses, therefore amplifying the action as well. It makes the action more realistic and believable by adding a sense of weight, physicality, by adding body mechanics as well, and sometimes it also gives us insight into what the character's thinking. Because a lot of times before we actually do an action, we think about it. When we think about is not like our bodies are perfectly still. When you think about it, we have different facial expressions, different body expressions. This preparation is also going to interfere in how we pose to our bodies as well. If there's one thing that I want you guys to take from today's session, and I would be really happy if that's the only thing they could see from today's session, it's turning your radar on and starting to spot anticipation in places. Not only in animation, anticipation is literally everywhere. Whenever you're telling a story, there is anticipation, because anticipation is a part of creating rhythm. There's anticipation in music, there is anticipation in movies, anticipation in choreography. Anticipation is everywhere. It's all about creating that difference in energy and creating the hold and the release. If anything, if you guys just get out of today's session with your radar turned a little bit on and started to spot anticipation here or in this funny cat video, that's why it's funny. Because there is a little bit of anticipation before the cat drops the glass on the floor or something like that. That's already, I think, a big win. If it's [inaudible] to notice those things.
4. Examples of Anticipation: I wanted to show you guys a couple of examples, in animated pieces, and I was like, well, I bet that if I google like Disney gift, I'm going to find a lot of good examples because the moment that you have your radar on, you can kind of spot anticipation everywhere. For example, in this Aladdin shot, two very obvious moments of anticipation, I mean, if you really analyze it, you can find anticipation almost anywhere, but two moments, for example, this guy is about to give a big hit with his sword, and you can see that here, his buddy curves in like an inverted c just before he throws the very big hit with his sword, and this is creating like big anticipation before the big hit. Another little moment that I spotted as that, Aladdin just before it he jumps to this side, you can see that his body squashes and goes a little bit down, this anticipation is very subtle a bit slighter, but you can see that he goes a little bit down and squashes before he makes the jump to this side. I really love this example when I saw it because it's subtle anticipation, but it's also like when anticipation can help build the comedic feeling in a scene as well. So you can see when the genius is counting his fingers and Sebastian goes on his hand and go in the opposite direction, and is counting, counting and then just about before things start to get a little bit absurd, between having like multiple fingers, there's a bigger anticipation. So his hand goes a little bit higher up for a longer pause, and then he's like, and that's the joy of anticipation right there, as well as creating like that pause for that communicate afterwards, just go. That's another way that you can use anticipation to amplify that funny moment. Another one from Lion King, and here you can see this beautiful Ben's move just throwing his hips to the front, which is like a perfect, if you would pause this frame you could perfectly draw like this C-shape, but just before he goes on this C-shape, he goes on the extreme opposite, he goes on this inverted C with like his bottom going behind, he's just like extreme opposites like body positions, and that's what makes us so funny. That's what makes it really good. That's what makes it feel good as well. They have this very contrasting opposites, sort of body positions. Still on Disney, here you can see this big, powerful happens because Simba is like gathering all of these oxygen in his chest. He's getting all puffed, getting his body up and that's immediately followed by him leaning over and you can see what he's about to do. Even if we didn't see the roar, you would be able to anticipate what he's about to do. In a very similar note, here we have this one from Mulan that she does. It is not as extreme as the symbol one, is a bit more subtle, but you can see she pretty much does the same before she goes yelling at this little dragon dude. She goes a bit behind, gathers the energy, you can see it in her face she's getting angry and then you anticipate, you already know which is going to come at the dragon. But very similar dynamic happening with Simba dude and Mulan as well. Then just also to clarify and give you guys more examples. I went through a couple. I just went through my portfolio and I was like, oh, I wonder what I can show here that is examples of anticipation. I went through some very old stuff like this is one of the first things that I've done when I was a freelancer like years ago. It was funny to notice because I was coming with this critical eye of like trying to find moments of anticipation that would be good examples for you guys, but actually when I was animating this, it was not like I'd done it consciously, like, oh, I need to include anticipation here. It was more like I just added those moments because it felt right to the message and it felt right to the acting, but it was way more like a natural thing rather than a conscious like I need to add anticipation. Which is funny to see how yet sometimes we do it right, even though we might not even be conscious about it. But for example here you can see that dad is coming up in the scene, and then he put his hand around the waist, that's a big anticipation. Like he put his hand around the waist and you see him looking at the kid like, oh yeah, he's about to tell the kiddo for something like he's investigating the scene. Then you can see the kid raising the hand. He totally didn't have to, like who does that before getting a drink? That's very cartoony, but that helps you really see that he's about to get the drink, and it adds a lot of like, yeah, it just makes the moment a lot more fun as well. Another third, little anticipation that happens is that the dead really yet now he gathers the energy up before his torts vacuuming, which makes it super, super cartoony and fun, just not, and then he starts vacuuming. For the motion graphics people. Because a lot of the stuff in my portfolio nowadays has been more character animation, so I wanted to bring an early example that is more connected to motion graphics because anticipation and as I said, it's everywhere and so of course, emotion graphics as well. This is a couple of animations that I've done for the Sydney Writers Festival some years ago. You can see a couple of examples of anticipation here and how playing with the rhythm and establishing that contrast and that tension also helps you cut and transition between different, different moments and it's almost like you can use anticipation as a trigger for a change of state. For example, here now there's going to be scaling down and then you explode with all of those shapes. That's scaling down, coming with a burst afterwards. The scaling down is the anticipation that helps communicate that burst feeling, and then, let it just room for a little while, and then when you have the, now that they're jumping, that last jump at six a while, that creates a huge anticipation and you're waiting for something to happen the moment that it hits the, how do we call that little sign? I forgot, sorry the name in English, but when the sign hits the ground, you expect something to happen. That's another example of anticipation. In this little shot, a couple of different examples here. Before she throws the racket in the air, she anticipate by going the opposite direction and then throws it, and then there is a long anticipation, very extreme, even like slow motion moments that just like really going for the racket, and then like the ping-pong, the throw becomes a lot more intense because there is a big anticipation just before that. Classic example also that everyone gives, when teaching anticipation is the jump. You just don't jump out of nowhere, you need to collect some energy, and that's why before jumping, everyone flexes their knees because you're collecting energy going the opposite direction before they jump. In this case is a little square, has no knees, so therefore, it has a little squash and then creates enough energy to jump. Just one that is more like based on timing and spacing of the drawings, but you see this little planet decelerating, bring this low and then you let go, it's going to fall on the black hole and then falls. One very subtle, super subtly example of anticipation this hand that comes and removes the barbecue lid, I didn't have to do it, but how subtle anticipation can help even like the tiniest movement reads a little bit better. The end comes in like pushes the lead a little bit down, making it squashed a little bit to the side and that helps creating even more contrast on the moment that the lid gets removed. You anticipate that the lid is going to get removed before it does. This little guy, rolling chubby heart. You know, when he's already leaning forward, you can tell what he's about to do. I think here also anticipation plays a part in just making him look funnier because he looks like very slow and a bit fattened and like, oh yeah, he's very slow to move and he's rolling. Classic example, this little jellyfish, it goes in a very, open up with completely opposite like body shape even, it goes down and it opens up, and then it gathers the energy to come up, so big anticipation here. This is two bigger anticipations here at this moment. It's interesting how sometimes, and with character animation, things can get very detailed and getting ready, and more complex when it comes to anticipation, because there's a lot of anticipation that you can communicate even with facial features. You can see that this girl Is looking at these guys like, I don't know about them, and then first she looks at the flowers so she's already leading your eyes and telling you like, this is the direction that I'm going to go. First she looks and then she goes, and then you can see her hand going backwards, and you know what's about to happen in the next shot, like she's reaching out for the plant. So two different little anticipations there. She looks at the flowers, kneels, and then she goes back with her hand like I'm going to pick up the flower. Enough of me rambling. That was a long intro. So what we're going to do today is we're going to do a quick practice on creating anticipation in animation using after effects, and if we have enough time, I'm also going to do a quick demo in Photoshop and show you guys a little practice in Photoshop as well. Let's do this.
5. Creating Basic Movement: We're going to start with little exhibition exercise by making a square jump inside After Effects. First I'm going to create this first square, just moving up and down without any anticipation. Let's start a new project, and I'm going to click on start a new composition. We're going to start a new composition, and I'm going to make it just the standard high-definition, so 1920 by 1080. I'm going to put it at 24 frames per second because that's the traditional frame per second ratio. I'm going to put three seconds and I'm going to put my background color set this to white. Don't mind this pixel aspect ratio thingy. Here we go. We have our composition. Today, unfortunately because we have such limited time, I'm not going to go through that deeply on interface and timeline and explaining all of those things, but I'd dive in a little bit deeper in my other class. There's loads of other classes in the future as well that are more basics of After Effects. But since today we have to focus a little bit more on exhibition and be more fast in the business, I'm going to dive straight into it. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to create a square. Here you have your menu with all of your tools. I'm going to create a square. I'm pressing here, holding in here you can see all of the shapes. I'm going to select the rectangle tool. Before creating the square, one thing that is always good to do is, not always but most of the times, is press option, if you're in a Mac or press Alt and then you drag. Then you can also press shift if you want to make your square regular, but if you just want to draw a rectangle, you can just release shift, and it draws a rectangle. I'm going to draw a square. The reason why I pressed Alt is that, if I draw it pressing Alt, it gives me access to this path thingy, which is going to prove itself to be very useful afterwards. Because what happens if I don't draw my square holding Alt is this. I don't really have access to the path in the way that I want, but we're going to get to that. In the meantime, just trust me, when I tell you, you press Alt or Option, you drag and you press shift as well to create a regular square, and then you release. I'm going to call this square 1. I just pressed enter to rename this layer square 1. I'm just going to set the thickness to 10. Then I'm just going to commend, double-click this tool, this little guy to bring the anchor points to the center of my shape. Then what we're going to do today is make this square jump, super-simple. How would we make a square jump? We need to set position for the square, and it needs to be on the ground at some point, and it needs to be higher up at another point. What I'm going to do is here. Let me just make the timeline a little bit bigger, maybe it doesn't want do that. It doesn't want to do that. Anyway, I'm going to go to one second. Here on my shape, you see we have this lovely drop-down menu. If you're not familiar with After Effects, it's very similar, just Adobe stuff in general like the layer systems, some of the shortcuts. I know we can look a little bit daunting in the beginning because it's got a lot of panels and all of that but I'm here. I'm going to hold your hand. We're going to make this. We're going to power through this. Just one pro tip, if you ever mess or question how the panels are looking and maybe you dropped this to the wrong place and you're like, "I don't know how to navigate this." You can always come to window workspace and then I'm going to put animation. Then you just come to the standard animation panels, so you don't have to panic if you ever put things in the wrong place and all of that. Anyway, going back to making our little square jump. Here we have our shape, and here we have this lovely drop-down menu, as I told you guys, with my rectangle properties. But what I'm actually interested is this transform, second drop-down menu here. Here you can see there is all these lovely properties from my square that I can change around. I can change the scale of my square. I can change the rotation of it. I can change the opacity and I can animate all of those things as well. What I'm going to do is, I'm going to set a keyframe. I'm going to move this little guy here to one second, and I'm going to set the keyframe for position here. How I set keyframes is by pressing this little stopwatch here. Then I'm going to move to one second and-a-half, and press shift arrow up, and I'm going to move my square up. You can see that automatically already generates a second keyframe here because the program already understands, I can't delete it. The program already understands that if I move this shape, and I mean already in a different moment of my timeline, it already understands that I wanted to be in another place. Then the magic of After Effects is that, if I set this keyframe here, and this keyframe here, you can see that it already generates all of this middle animation information that is going to move my square from one point to another one. That's called interpolation. It's like the program is calculating all of those different places and position that it wants my square to be in. I'm going to put it high up, and I'm going to bring it down again. Here I literally like just drag and dropped, command C, copy this keyframe, came here to two seconds, command V or control V, if you're in Windows, and then copy the keyframe here. Here we have a square, sort of jumping. Is it really? It's very lame. It's moving. I know that when we start to animate, we get very excited whenever we get one thing to move, but it doesn't mean it cannot get better, and that's what we're after.
6. Improving Timing & Spacing: Now we're going to create a second square, based on the first one, but the second one will have an improved timing and improved spacing. What I'm going to do now, is that I'm going to copy this guy. First I'm just going to select it and press ''U'' and that gives me access to all the key frames that I have put for this specific layer. So I'm going to leave this guy here. I'm going to command or control if you on Windows, ''Command D'', press ''U'' again. I'm copying this square and I'm going to select all of my position, the keyframes for this guy. Shift right arrow to the side, so we can compare the changes that we're going to make between the different squares. Now, one thing about this way, let me just start with this one, so we can see it. It's moving up and down. But the problem with this movement is that, is extremely linear. There's no difference of speed in this movement at all. One thing that I always recommend people to do is like, whenever you're trying to make something move, do it with your body. Do it with your hands, if you're making something jump, do it with your hand, like how would that jump? How would the spacing of the timing of your action behave in that moment? If you're jumping, how does it usually look? You're going to be like linger for little bit longer in the air and then you. So you do it a couple of times, with your hand, your body if you can. It depends on where you are. If you're in a studio, and you can do it with your full body, depends on how you are as well. If you can do full body, that's even better. So what we're going to try here, is to make this a little bit more believable. We're going to try to make this linger here in the air for a little bit longer and see how it feels. I'm going to take my second square. I'm going to select one of the key frames here, this middle one and this is the magic of after-effects is called the graph editor. Once you have a keyframe selected and you click here, here is where you can change the speed between your key frames. You can play around with the curves. If your graph editor didn't come like this, it might have come like this. So sometimes, there is this other graph editor which is the value. The value graph. I just right-clicked. Here you can see like you can toggle between the speed graph or the value graph. Honestly, like playing around with either of these is very personal. I find that people's brains work differently. I can't wrap my head around the value graph. I'm one of those people. I'm a speed graph person. My brain works with the speed of things. That's what I'm going to teach you guys today. But feel free to experiment around and see how you understand and emission better. But what I'm going to do here is that, I'm going to get this middle keyframe, where the square is high up. I'm going to put an easy ease and what happens here? It gives me those handles and I can adjust the speed curve. I'm just going to get very extreme. I can show you guys, what's happening here. If you think about this as a speed graph, what this information here is telling me is that, this movement is going to start really fast and then here in the middle is going to get various slow and then become fast again. This is precisely what's happening now with this second square. You can see that now from getting from here to here. This moment is really fast, but then the lingers here at the top for longer and then it comes to the ground again. This is a lot more believable in terms of like reality and physics than the first one. I hope you guys agree? Cool. But what is this missing really? It's just jumping out of nowhere as if it's like dragged up by this unknown force. What is missing is anticipation, which is going to make it better because then it's going to collect enough energy and then it's going to jump. That's what we're going to do right now.
7. Adding Anticipation: Now we're going to make a third square look more realistic by adding anticipation. We're going to once again press the square, duplicate it. You can either like to select all the key frames. You can either come and drag and drop or you can also come to your position and then that automatically selects all the V key frames. Then I'm going to move this to the right. Now I have a third little square, which is precisely the same as my second one. Now what we're going to add is anticipation so before it jumps, it's going to squash, and it's going to gather all the energy it needs and then jump. What we're going to do now is I'm going to tick the eye of these other ones and I'm going to drop down this menu to have access to my precious path that I mentioned in the beginning of this session. I'm going to create a little key frame for the path of this square. What I want this guy to do now is I'm going to drag this key frame here. In the beginning it's going to keep the square shape and then it's going to like a human that you flex your knee and then you go little bit down to create the energy so you can jump. This is going to do the same but in the square world. I'm moving a couple of frames ahead. I need to click on the right stuff. I need to be with this selection tool selected and then I'm going to drag and drop so I can select these two vertex from the top. I'm going to move it down with shift arrow down so it's squashed a little bit and move, or maybe not that much. Move a little bit to the sides as well. Because one thing that you have to be aware of as well when you're squashing and stretching shapes is that they need to keep the same volume. Whenever you're changing some things vertically, it needs to be compensated horizontally like it needs to contain the same volume of the shape. Otherwise, it looks wrong as well. Here this guy's a little squashed. But we can even play around with the shape a bit and here you have like illustrator. You can change your shape around a little bit. Here, I selected this Convert Vertex tool and I'm going to make my square like a little bit move around here on the edges. That was a bit too crazy. Let's see how this guy behaves now. Here, at this point on the moment that it jumps, I wanted to go back to the very same squarely shape. I'm going to Command C, Command V, the same shape. I'm actually going to make the square retain this shape for long enough just before he jumps. Then I'm also going to use the speed graph on the path transformation to make that speed a bit better. It's going to stay in this like squashed shape for awhile and then, that was a lot better in terms of energy. It's like gathering the energy before the jump and then, you can always come and play around with it giving like a subtle, middle squashes while the moment that it lands. Here for example, and the principles that I've mentioned, squash and stretch is one of them as well. You'll find a lot of the times that inside the principles of animation, a lot of them are very just intertwined and very connected and overlap with each other. They're very integrated so whenever you're talking about one, you end up talking about the other ones as well. I'm just going to add a little bit of stretch to this guy in this contact pose. I'm going to make sure that it preserves its shape here at the top. I'm just copying this key-frame here where it has the MySQL query. Here, it's in the contact pose because this is really fast. It's going to get more stretched. Then here you have a big change, big contrast with it getting squashed and then going back to latest query. I'm just going to change the speed of these guys a little bit so here, it should stay as a normal square at the top for the longest. I'm making these very extreme, but just to make it as easy to spot as possible. Eve, I have a question for you. Do you try to note the original scale of objects before you start manipulating them to know what you're trying to get back to you or do you just go with it and go by feel? Yeah. I mean, in this case it's also very easy for me to get back to original because it just have key frames here that kind of untouched. Then I can always like copy-paste and get it back to the original state. Here, I'm doing like very quick and dirty. I usually go like very symmetric like okay, I press Shift, Right, two times so I have to press Shift, Left two times as well. I tend to go more precious about it that I'm doing here, I'm doing it very speedy. But also like when you're not able to retain volume, that well, it usually shows when you're animating, you're like, oh, okay. No. This go like abnormally stretched or something like you can see when it doesn't feel right in animation and you can adjust it as it goes. Like a lot of the times I'm going to animate something and then I leave it playing for minutes and I'm watching it and then I go and I make some tea and then I go back with fresh eyes and I'm like, I think I spend a third of the time just looking at my animations and trying to understand what's wrong with them. Then I'm like, okay, I'm going to move this and then go back to it, back to tweaking it. In here at this very less key frame, I just want it to go back to the original pose a bit more quickly after squashing. Just making it quite extreme here, but it's a very liquid square and depending on how much squash and stretch it add to your shapes, they're going to feel different. They're going to feel that they are made of different materials as well so that's another thing to keep in bringing into consideration. But yeah, let's just compare the three squares that we have now. We were so happy about being able to move this one, but look at how horrible it looks now in comparison to the other ones.
8. Tip: Onion Skin in After Effects: Before we wrap this after effects section, I'm just going to show you a little trick on how you can add onion skin inside after effects which will help you understand your frames and your animation better inside after effects. I don't know if you guys are familiar with the concept of onion skin, it's something more connected with traditional animation but it's this idea that you can see the frames before and the frames after in a transparent layer and you can see the drawing that go before and after it. You can have that in after effects as well so you can see. Layer, new adjustment layer. I just need to move this zoom thing, yeah. Here on my effects window, I'm going to press CC wide time. I need to have my adjustment layer selected for it to work and here I'm just going to amplify the amount of steps that I want to see, 12. Here, maybe a bit less, 12 was a bit much. Here it's almost like you can see the ghost of all the frames as if you were drawing them and this is where it gets really interesting. You remember my horrible first square. Look at how evenly spaced all of these drawings are. I'm going to actually just put like you can only see one frame a head and one frame ahead. The drawings are very, very evenly spaced and that's what we call a linear movement because they are very evenly distributed. Whereas on my second square that I made the timing much better, what happens is that look at the spacing between these drawings. There is a much bigger gap between these drawings and here it gets tighter, the drawings are very close together. The closer together the drawings are, the slower the movement is going to be. That really helps most of the times creating anticipation because you're having this pores and you're creating tension for something bigger to happen. Here the drawings are very close together and then they become further and further apart and then it falls. Then the same at the very last one. But in the very last one you even see slightly bigger gap getting closer and closer together like squashing, then big release. The funny thing like some other principle of animation, timing and spacing. Here we, especially these two first squares actually, then remove this one so we focus on these. They have the very, very same timing. They're moving up and down in the very same amount of time, the same key-frames all within one second but the spacing of the drawings is completely different. How my drawings are spaced out and the closer or further away they are from each other, that's completely different and that makes the perception of the animation change completely as well.
9. Bonus: Animating in Photoshop: Last, I'm going to very, very quickly walk you through how I would handle a scene and try to bring more anticipation and better timing, better rhythm, but inside Photoshop. So when I was starting to learn animation, there was this short film that came out from one of my very favorite animators called Charles Huettner, and there is a short film called the jump, that I very recommend you guys to watch it, it's amazing, even though now he does even more mind blowing stuff. But I was very mind blown overall of the shots, but there was this specific shots that I was like, how did he do it? If I can really recommend you guys to do something whenever you find an animation that you love, download it, play it frame by frame, figure out what's happening, how did this person make this move so good? Play it frame by frame, understand what's behind it, and if you will, just recreate it as well. I'm all up for coping as an exercise. Don't ever copy stuff and claim that it's yours, but as an exercise, understand how someone did something, I think it's a very valid exercise. So there was this shot, let me just find it. Here we go. Just right here. That felt so good, that a little bloat followed by the explosion. I loved it and I couldn't wrap my head of like, how did he do this? How does this move so good? The part of why this is so good is that, it has amazing timing, amazing spacing, amazing, and you can feel that all the stretch, and the tension, and that the shape is about to blow up, because he builds all of these like anticipation little elements that give you that lead as well. Even those details with the, let me pause it, you see all of these expanding like the rupture lines. All of those details are so, so juicy. So whenever you find an animation that you loved by all means, download it, study it, understand what's good about it, and learn it yourself. Let me just open Photoshop. I'm not going to be able to show the whole thing, but just walking us through the principles of how I would tackle this can be helpful. So I'm going to Photoshop, create new, I'm going to set it to 1920 by 1080, create. If your Photoshop didn't come with this timeline, a little tab, I'm going to close it. You can always come to Window, Timeline, and then here you can press "Create Video Timeline". First thing that you have to do is a couple of things actually, you want to make sure that you're enabling timeline shortcut keys, because that way you can navigate back and forth between the frames with, mine is not enabled, but once you enable it, you can, why is it not enabling? Something happening. Okay. So usually when you enable it, you should be able to navigate your timeline using your shortcut keys. I don't know what's happening. Is the live stream glitch that comes to prove you wrong. Anyway, they want to make sure they you have that enabled, and you want to make sure that you set your timeline frame rate first before you start working, so, I'm going to set it to 24 frames per second. So one thing if we want to do an explosion, how I guess, we would normally go about is that, and here I'm just going to explain how the drawings would go. This is a very common mistake that you'll see like junior or unexperienced animators do, is that, they would draw the first, the tiny little circle and then the big bloated shape, and then they're like, okay, but it has to go from here to here, so, then I'm going to draw an in-between here, a middle one, then I'm going to draw an in-between here, and then an in-between here, and then I'm going to in-between and make this bigger and draw very linear in-betweens as I showed you guys on that first example with the square, and then, so, this is going to bloat now, and then you would take the biggest, the moment that is fully bloated, and then now it's starting to disintegrate, and then the pieces are falling apart, expanding. So what you usually see with junior animators is that, their drawings are very linear and the difference between the drawings of the spacing is very linear as well. I'm going to show you an example that I did that illustrates that. They would usually come up with something like this. It reads like an explosion, but the spacing between the drawings is super, super, super linear. I made here a wrong explosion, and here you can see how my drawings, I'm going to activate my onion skin here so you can see it, but you can see the spacing between my drawings is super, super linear, then it's disintegrating, expanding, and that's okay. It reads like something that is blowing up, but not with the best timing. That compared to this, this is a lot more power, and this even has, like when we're talking about multiple levels of anticipation, this even has like a little bit of a shrink before it gets enlarged and then it explodes. This even has a little bit of those stretchy marks adding even more tension and anticipation. I won't have the time actually to go through how to maybe do this whole thing. But I'm going to quickly show you how I would begin tackling it. So I'm going to close this explosion wrong [inaudible]. So here on this diagram of how we would go about the process of animating this is that, instead of doing that, would be like, sorry, this is my tiny first post, this is the big one, and here we have what would be, what's the middle between these two right here? So instead of drawing an in-between here and an in-between here, what I'm going to do is bring this middle post, so, it's, sorry, there's something wrong with my screen. So it's my second pose and then have a lot of drawings building up to the blue team. There's two different ways it can animate inside Photoshop, and for like a more in-depth tutorial, I would really recommend you taking a look at this Photoshop Animation Tutorial on Vimeo by Alex Green, who's a really good friend and a terrific animator as well, I also teach more about animating Photoshop in my other class, but just a quick overview, very, very quick on how I would tackle this is that, maybe we could do the first part of that bloating. Just through layers, just normal layers inside Photoshop, and I'm going to make this little one, this first one, my little circle. Now, it's working. Roughly, place it in the center and then I'm just going to copy this layer and then Command-A, just delete the content. You can either set your onion skin here, enable your onion skin, and come here so you can see your previous frame or you can also set a little shortcut so you can see your own scheme. I set a shortcut with Command-O. On my class, I also teach you how to set the shortcuts, but here, I'm going to make my final bloated circle, which is going to be the big one. I want it to last for two frames. This is perfect. What I would do now is I'm going to copy this little first circle, Command-A, and I'm going to delete the content. I'm going to bring this guy in onion skin and see the difference between them, and then, draw in the middle. Remember when I said that I'm not the best illustrator and I cannot draw beautiful circles. This is it. Actually now, these layers, there are much longer than I wanted. I just want them to last for two seconds. The first one can later for longer. It's a small circle for a while. Cool. What I would do now is, between these two guys, I'll create a lot of in-betweens. I'm going to do a bit of a cookie show method now and show you the official explosion file. This is precisely what I'd done. In the first small circle here, and then here, I added that second anticipation, so it shrinks. It's getting even more energy like shrinking and then it shrinks, and then it already goes to that middle stage instead of having a very linear growth, already goes to that middle stage. I'm going to turn this layer off just for a second, so we are not focusing on that. Then, I added a lot of in-betweens until it gets to the final bloated shape. Then, between the final bloated and the first layer of explosion, you see that I didn't even draw the circle disintegrating or something because this is when you get the big impact, when there is a big change of state between the final bloated shape that you have all of that anticipation building up up to that moment, and then you have a big like shoots like [inaudible] , and this is where it gets like [inaudible] , really, really nice. There's so many things you can add to help the anticipation and the tension to feel even better. I played around with adding those sort of stretch marks as well, and that enhances the tension and the bloating of the shape even more. I just want to show you guys because you can see here that my layers is colored different. This is because these are two different ways of animating inside Photoshop. One way is with the layers that I was showing you guys just before. You're just going to create new layers, you put one after the other one, and that's how you create animation inside Photoshop. Then the other one, which I used both here for the very end and for the stretching marks is through video layers. Just quickly showing for whoever doesn't know, if you come here to Layer, Video Layers, New Blank Video Layer. I'm just going to draw a little something here just to show you guys how it works. It's really fun to play around, especially when you're playing around with animation that you're just drawing, one drawing after the one, not really doing any pose-to-pose action, you're just like animating straight ahead, this can be super, super helpful also when you're coloring as well. But how you do it is that you make a drawing here and then do a little squiggle moving around. Then, if I move to the next frame, it's going to be blank. That's the magic of the video layer. Here I'm going to Command-A, select the whole content of my layer, Command-C, copy, move to the next frame, Command-Shift-V. I'm copying the same drawing from the previous frame into this one because, here I'm working on twos. If you're not familiar with that, I'm also explaining it better on my other class, but I'm working on a base of 24 frames per second. But here, I'm repeating the same drawing every two frames. It's the way the traditional animators at Disney used to work as well, so that way, you don't have to make a new drawing every single frame. But just to quickly show you how video layers work and how you can have a lot of fun with it, I'm going to activate onion skin. I'm going to untoggle all of these, so I don't get distracted by them. Here, I'm going to draw the next frame, Command-A, Command-C, copy, go to the next frame, paste it, next frame. I'm trying a new frame, Command-A, Command-C, go to the next frame, Command-Shift-V. Is it in place? Command-A, Command-C, go to the next frame, Command-Shift-V. It's just like really easy to do something move and can be really fun at all. Command-A, Command-C, go to the next frame, Command-Shift-V to paste the same drawing. Command-A, Command-C, Command-Shift-V. Here, if I play just these couple of frames that I did, you see this little whoof, this little squiggle going around. This is the method that I use to draw both the little stretch marks and the little explosion at the end as well. Instead of going pose-to-pose and finding the in-betweens of the shape, it was more about like just drawing, making one drawing after the other one, combining those two different methods. Okay. Sorry, this Photoshop bit was very, very rushed but in my class, I go through it much, much slower, but I hope this just gave you a little bit of insight on how to think about anticipation in a frame-by-frame approach as well, and how that can come through, how you space your drawings when you're drawing them and making sure that everything's not moving like a linear, and you're creating differences in contrast, in tension, frame, playing around with the timing, and the rhythm of your animation as well.
10. Q&A: Now we're going to open it up to questions from students. One is, how do Aftereffects and Photoshop interact in your process? Do you move back and forth between them? How do, have to fix on Photoshop? It depends on what I'm doing. It depends on the design style. It depends on the animation style. Because if I'm doing something that looks a lot more like vector-looking, then I usually just do everything inside After Effects. But if it's something that needs a more textured look, or if the animation is a bit more wild and you have perspective shifts and it needs to be more fluid and and it needs a more like frame-by-frame approach. Then I just go also shredding to Photoshop. But again, a lot of the times what I do is that I create like a skeleton of my animation inside After Effects is like I did with this gallery over here. Yeah. I create a skeleton based from my animation inside After Effects that is very ugly. Then I draw details frame by frame in Photoshop and build up all the textures inside Photoshop. I do that for a lot of the work that I do. In what situation do you feel like the movement becomes even better when you make an anticipation before the anticipation? Is there ever a double anticipation? Yeah. I'm so sorry I didn't mention that. Yes, there is such a thing as multiple levels of anticipation. I do feel that in character animation, that happens a lot and especially with facial features. Because it's almost like a part of acting like those subtle facial features that show like, oh yeah, she's thinking about this and I'm just going to look there because, all of those little indicators, they help build up the message so much. That actually helped. It happens a lot in character animation I feel like the bigger the action, the more it benefits from having multiple levels of anticipation for sure. Honestly like almost every single election is going to have insufficient, even if subtle. Just something, I don't know. That's the funny thing of going back to my work and try to spot where it had anticipation of stuff because it's something that at some point you don't really rationalize, you just do it like unconsciously. Yeah. Kara, I'm Sheila. Isn't that video layer instead of working on twos, what if you want to work on force? Oh, yeah. I mean, so sorry. I wish we had more time. I'd already done what is a goal like more through in-depth in all of that. Basically, the amount of frames that you're working in, that's going to determine how smooth or not your animation is going to feel. The more frames you have for one animations move through is going to feel some people are really crazy and they work like 60 frames per second. I don't know if you guys watched "The Hobbit" the movie movies, it felt so weird to watch it because he had way too many frames. I think it was like 48 frames per second. We're not used to that. When we watch a lot of frames we're like, oh, that's too buttery like that's really, really smooth. It's a bit annoying. I don't know, I don't like it. Sometimes it can be a bit of a stylistic choice. Having less frames, it can be quite charming to have something that has less frames, as in it feels a bit choppier like the jellyfish that I did. I don't even know if it was like on force or it was a very, very low frame rate. Just because like the style was really crazy with all of the shading and stuff at night. It just took me forever to do like this little cycle. It was a bit of an economic decision to make it like that because it was for a music video that the whole side was like this. They made a decision like let's make the frame rate really low. We can actually pull off this style. But it can be like a stylistic choice, but it can also be faster actions might need more frames, so you can really feel it. You can even within the same film, you can have a variation like have scenes, have shots that are on twos. Shots that are on 12 frames per second, but inside a base of 24. But then have specific moments there you're working in ones. If you really want to feel like a hit or an explosion or a specific action, if you want to feel it better, then you add frames in once. I'm sorry, if the question didn't make sense for people that don't have a lot of experience. But in the future I promise that it will.
11. Final Thoughts: We've got to the end. Thank you so much for joining me on this anticipated journey and I hope that you come out of it having a better understanding of what anticipation is. Being able to recognize it, feeling inspired, not only to exercise, do a little exercise on anticipation on your own but also to dive deeper in all of the audit principles of animation and understand them better, understand their power as tools to help you create better animation as well. I would love to see your exercises if you guys minister to your little jumping squares or your own little explosions, mixed stuff explode, that's always fun. I would love to see that on the projects as well. We encourage you guys sharing that, and yeah, thanks for tuning in. If you want to check my other class or seeing more of my work, you can check my scooter profile. I don't know if you guys are all familiar with animation. It's a multi-platform community that I started with a couple of friends some years ago. It's community for women trends and non-binary people working with animation, yeah is animation, yes, some people know it. Always go and follow animation and support minorities in the industry as well. Thank you.