Procreate Dreams Animation & Illustration: Explore the Art of Movement

1. Intro: Bringing movement and life into my drawings has been such a magical experience. Hi, my name is Marine Well Worm. I'm an artist illustrator and top teacher here on Skill share where I've taught more than 80,000 students to tap into the creativity that lies within. Today we're going to be doing a class about a new found love of mine and procreate dreams, this incredible app that has only heightened my love for this subject. And that is animation. I want to show you that animation doesn't have to be complicated once you understand where everything is located in procreate dreams. It's a powerhouse of a tool that is also so easy to use and has allowed me to create animations that I never thought that I'd be able to do. I'm going to teach you all three types of animation that the app allows, keyframing, performing and frame by frame animation. Performing is one of the most fun aspects of this app, where it allows you to wield your apple pencil as though it were a magic wand to move things around at your will. And that's really exciting. We're going to be mixing that along with some frame by frame animation, but also some key framing, which is also surprisingly fun. We'll talk about parallax animation, Edward Moybridge and the Zol Pratoscope. We'll build tiny micro stories that range from cute little encounters to contemplative animations. And I want to show you all the little intricacies and complexities that make this app so powerful. And that allow you to create movements and stories that are really exciting and fun to play around with. We'll be building these projects from scratch. We're going to be doing a bunch of different projects that will lead you through step by step with a little ghost and a bee, a group of birds and a snowy contemplative window. And I can't wait to show you the different ways that you can make this app your own. This class is for beginners to procreate dreams in order to really understand how it works. But it's also wonderful if you want to join in because the projects look or sound fun to you, remember to put on your explorer's cap to approach everything with a lens of curiosity and discovery. And let's get started. 2. Becoming a Movement Investigator: Art is a way of deepening our relationship to ourselves and to the world around us. That's very true for me. Art has allowed me to see better. To pay attention to small details and the little beauties that I encounter on a day to day basis. It allows me to kind of slow down and observe the world at a pace that feels more connected to myself. And animation is also one of those things that allows us to deepen our relationship to ourselves and to the world around us. Obviously, illustration is more about the, I guess, static version of the world that you can explore through color, through composition, through texture, through shapes. But all those things are also there when we're doing animation with the added component of movement. So to me, there's really just this continuum between illustration and animation. And I think that's why I find it so exciting. Art has really forced me to learn things about how the world works, how light works, how shadows work, how colors shift. And animation is also a way for you to start deepening your understanding of how things move, how things shift, what that tiny difference in movement, in speed or in amplitude can have on a movement. And so as an artist and illustrator, I consider myself an explorer of the visual animation allows me to also become an investigator of movement. And so that's what I'll invite you to do today as we embark on these exercises is just to start honing and understanding that this is just an added layer to your experience of the world and of yourself. Because of course, whatever it is that you decide to animate, we'll say stuff about what you care about, what inspires you approach everything with this lens of curiosity and of discovery. Because I think it's one of the most instrumental ways that we can really start deepening our artistic journey in these projects. Today, I've, of course, decided what we're doing and how we're doing it. Because what I really want is for you to come away from this class with an understanding of how the app itself works. So that you can then use those tools to deepen your own connection to the animations that you want to be creating. I also want this class to be a means of showing you that animation doesn't need to be complicated. That you can build everything from scratch within the app itself for you to see the joy and the discovery it is of integrating and adding movement to your illustrations. We're going to be exploring the three different types of animation that you can do within procreate dreams and that is key framing, performing and frame by frame animation. And a bunch of mixes of all those different types as well. I'm very excited to share with you my love for this app and for animation itself. So grab your ipad, grab your Apple pencil, and let's get started. 3. Interface Tour | The Basics: Let's start off with a little interface tour so you can really get a lay of the land and know where all the different parts are in order for you to be able to create a project. So here I am with my ipad and I'm going to just go ahead and click the Procreate Dreams app so that we can get started. When we open the app, we're met with what is called the theater. And this is where your projects live. So just like the gallery in procreate the theater, you can see your projects skim through them. You can select them, you can duplicate them. You can share them by long, holding on it and clicking Share. And you can also see the locations of your different projects. So on the left hand side, you can see that all my projects live on my ipad locally. But the cool thing is that you can also now save them on your icloud drive. And you can see that I haven't set this up yet, but I would recommend that you do this so that you have a backup of your projects and you don't lose them. If ever you lose your ipad or you don't have a back up of your ipad at all. So I would definitely recommend doing, we're going to create a new project, and I'm going to do that by pressing on this little plus button here on the top right. When I do that, I met with many different presets for the type of project that I want to be creating. This is really awesome if you just want to jump in and get started. Let's say I wanted to create something on my phone, a little animation that would be perfect for Instagram or Tiktok. Then I can hit the four K Social button and it already creates the resolution and size that I want. In order for that to work today we're going to be actually working with screen size because I think that's a good one to start out with. But I do want you to notice one other thing. You can see that it's written four K on each of these, but that resolution is something that you can change simply by clicking on the four K button. You can see here that you have the option to do two K HD or even 720 P. I'm going to keep it at four K because that's a very good standard size and it gives me a lot of room to play with. It's a pretty nice resolution, but it is a slightly bigger file. So if you have space issues on your ipad, then you could go a little bit smaller. For example, HD is usually a good size to use. Up on the top right here, we have three little buttons where you can set the settings for your frames per second and the duration of your animation. So in terms of the duration when you're starting out, the animations that you're going to make are probably going to be shorter animations. Maybe 5 seconds, maybe 10 seconds, maybe 30 seconds. So that's something that you can already predetermine. And it'll kind of save it for next time that you want to come and make an animation. In terms of the frames per second, this is going to determine the smoothness of your animation, or like the visual effect of that smoothness 24 frames per second, which is what it's set at now is that cinema look. It's what I'm filming with right now and it's a great one to use. It's honestly the one that I use the most often. But you also have frame by frame animation, which is 12 frames per second. That's an awesome number of frames per second as well, because it creates that hand drawn glitchy. I call it textural animation look, but it's really fun to play around with that as well if you're just working in frame by frame or you want that look. However in cinema, I can still achieve that frame by frame look simply by duplicating my frames. That's really cool to know. And even though I'm working in cinema, I can still get that look. If I want to include some frame by frame glitchy animation in the middle, we're going to keep it at 24, for now, 30 seconds. And finally, I want us to look at these two options between draw and empty. So I want you to know that between these two, there isn't really a major difference. You're going to be able to do the same things in this one as you are in this one. The only difference is that if I click on Draw, then the app immediately opens me up into draw and paint mode, which is amazing. Because since I'm an artist and illustrator, I love drawing. And sometimes I just want to start out with drawing right away. And I don't need to deal with adding a content track in which I'm going to draw. So it's just a little shortcut if you really want to get your hands active immediately and jump right Today though, I'm going to start with the empty project so that we can see how you can build the project from scratch and get to the drawn paint mode in a different way. Here we are in our project and we are met with two things. The stage, which is this white part, and the timeline, which is the bottom part. The stage is really where your animation lives, where your drawings are going to be. Where you're going to be able to add like maybe videos or photos. And you're going to be able to animate everything. This is really what your audience is going to see. You also have the backstage, which is the section behind your stage. And you can see, if I pinch and zoom, I can move this around. The backstage is going to be important in your animation because sometimes you'll have things that live in the backstage and that come into your animation for example. The timeline, which is the bottom half of your screen, is going to be the part where we're really going to be working and creating the animation, creating content tracks, building and trying things out. You can see the literal timeline here with the seconds going by over here. Now let's look a little bit at the settings. If I click on the title of my project, that is how I get into my preferences, my settings. You can see here, if I click on Properties, we get back to this frames per second, duration and resolution, which I was looking for earlier. I have different options for different parts of the app. And you can see here the playback mode, loop, ping pong, and one shot, which if you're familiar with the procreate animation assist. That's going to be very similar to that where one shot, it just plays your animation in one shot loop where it loops it and ping pong where it goes back and forth. That's a good one to understand that it lives over here. We also have the share mode where you can share your animation as a video, as images, a single frame, or the entire procreate dreams file itself. Finally, the preferences. This is going to be adjustable according to what you prefer. I'll talk you through some of the things that I've picked. Pressure and smoothing is not something I've played around with yet, but if you're familiar with procreate, it's also where you can see how sensitive your apple pencil is and the app is to the Apple pencil. You can have stabilization. Let's say if you have a very shaky hand or you just want a little bit added stabilization for when you draw. That's absolutely the case. We have also motion filtering options here, but we'll get into that a little bit later. But it also has to do with stabilizing the movement that you're creating. Here are the things that I have on. I have dynamic brush scaling on because I like that. I have my brush size and opacity side bar on the left because I'm right handed and I enjoy that. I have enabled painting with finger turned off because sometimes I like to use my finger to tap back onto the screen and I don't want that to draw a mark on my stage. So I just turned that off for me because of the way that I use. I do have enabled timeline edit with finger and I do have rotate stage with pinch zoom turned on. You can have the undue options, so my rapid undue delay is a little bit longer, it's 1 second, so that I don't erase too many things all at once. And I have the enabled undue and redo gestures. And I'll show you what those are, if you're not familiar with what they are, but it's basically the two finger tap and the three finger tap. And finally the stored undue steps. Proque dreams is amazing because it can keep absolutely everything that you've done. And that is the stored undue steps. And that would be if I had infinity activated. But it creates very, very large files. You still can do that, but I kind of keep mine at 50. You could keep yours at 100 if you really want to have a little bit more history of what you've done. But I think 50 is a good middle ground so my files aren't too big. And finally, the help center. So I'm going to click on Done and we're back into our project. Finally, let me show you how you can get out of your project when you want to get back to your theater and see the different things there. You have this little icon on the left here with little squares that are different sizes, just like your different projects that would live in the theater. So if I click on that, that is how I get back to my main theater. I'm going to click back into the project and I'm going to show you how to get started. 4. Interface Tour | Draw & Paint and the Background: Now that you have the lay of the land in terms of where things are pretty much situated within the app, we're going to start building the project and understanding how we can build the project. The base building block of any animation that you create in Procreate Dreams is a content track. That is where all your content is going to live, whether it's drawings, videos, photos, audio, any other file. I'm going to click on this little plus button here, and there's a menu that appears. The first item on that menu is Track, which is that base building block where everything is going to live. Underneath that you see photos, video, text, and files. Whenever you click on any of these things and you select one of those, then that will bring that in to your timeline as a track. We're going to start out with creating just an empty track. I'm going to click on that. And now you see this sort of gray bar appearing on the bottom of your time line and a playhead. And you'll see that this playhead moves. And this is where you're going to be able to scrub across your animation and know where you're situated within the time line on the ruler. You can see exactly where you are according to the seconds and then also the time code up here that gives you a little bit more precision. But we want to do some drawing, so let me show you how to get into the draw and paint mode, which was that other initial option that you could choose right at the beginning when you were creating your project. I'm going to come in here and click on this little squiggly line over here. Which means that I'm entering Draw and Paint mode, which you can see on the top left. Well, you'll also notice is that the backstage and the stage now have the same white background, which means that I can draw anywhere along both of those. I can of course, zoom out or I can also zoom in if I really want to get into some details. If I want to pick a different brush, then I just have to click on this little brush icon where I have access to all the inbuilt brushes or any brushes that I imported as well. To the right of that, we have the smudge tool, which allows you to smudge different colors together. We also have the eraser tool, which allows you to erase. But of course, you can also click on that and get access to the brush library for the eraser, which will give you options for different types of erasers. For example, if I do something a little bit more textured, it's going to erase in a slightly different manner than I'm using just a regular round brush On the left hand side, I can choose the brush size, whether I'm in eraser mole mode or in painting mode, and I can also change the opacity. Then finally, we have here the drawing layers, which is just like in procreate the different layers on which you can draw. You can add different layers where you can have different things appearing on those different layers. You can toggle them on and off. You can use different blend modes, which will change the way that layer is blending with the other layers on top of or behind it. That's really fun to play with. I'm going to come back to normal. Then you can also change the opacity of a single layer. This is very similar to procreate. If I want to clear a layer, I can simply long hold and tap clear. Or I can also just tap away from the menu. And with two fingers, do the undue gesture, which undoes the different things that I did little by little. Or I can wrap it, undo by holding everything. And then it brings me back to a completely clear canvas. I do want to show you one more thing. If I'm drawing something over here, well, you'll notice if I into my timeline is that there's a frame that was created. It's only a single frame. If I want to extend the duration of this, I can long hold on the frame itself, not the play ahead on the frame. Then click Fill Duration. Now you will see one of these tracks that has appeared and will be filled for the entire length of my animation. If I zoom in again and I want to just very quickly see the entire thing, I can actually do a quick pinch and that shows me my entire animation. That's a really fun shortcut that I often use when I'm working on my different pieces. We have the two finger tap undo. We also have the three finger tap, Redo also very useful if you undid too many options or you decide, actually I did like that thing that I did. You can always come back to it. By doing that, undo and redo. I want to actually create a background with one single color and preferably not white, just because it's more fun. I want to show you another way, rather than like filling it in by hand, which is definitely something that I could do over here. Once I've selected my color, let's say I'm going to go for maybe a light purple. You can use this opportunity to start already personalizing your animation. And I'd invite you to pick a color that you enjoy. I'm going to actually drag this all the way to my stage and that will drop the color onto my stage and make it entirely purple. It's just like the color drop in procreate. But let me show you another way to change my background. I'm going to tap undo. And I'm going to head over to the time code. If I tap on the time code I met with stage options, we have things called onion skins, which is useful when you do frame by frame animation. But we also have background color. If I click on that, I can now go ahead and pick whatever color it is that I want. I could also make it transparent, but for now we're going to make a solid color of your choice. I'm going to tap away from that, and now I have my entire screen filled with one color. Here's one more fun little tip about the color wheel, whether I'm in the color wheel on the top right or whether I'm in the color wheel. In this section, if I double tap at the hours of the clock along that wheel, it'll snap to the purest form of that color. Let's say I want it to be, if I double tap in the black section around 06:00 it'll bring me to a pure black. If I go to this pure purple, it'll bring me to that pure purple. If I go to pure white, I double tap. There are these points along the wheel where it'll bring you to the edge of that wheel. And that's a really fun little trick to get to know about. I'm going to set my color back to a nice purple that I might enjoy. I think something like this. Now I can click Done to exit the drawn paint mode. 5. Ghost | Opacity, Gestures & Good Habits: Now we're going to embark on our first little project, which is going to be about a little ghost and a little B. We're going to use the background that we created just before as the starting point for this project. If you followed along exactly, then you clicked on Done and you are out of the draw and paint mode. You're back into this regular mode with your stage and your timeline. But we're going to be drawing a little ghost. We want to go back into the drawing mode by clicking on this little squiggly line. If you skipped over the beginning of the interface and you want to get the same background, you can use the color drop feature, which I'm sure you are aware of if you skip those parts or click on the time code and change the background color over here. But we want to draw a ghost. I think you'll agree with me that drawing on only a half of a screen could be a little bit annoying. At times you might feel a little bit constricted. Sometimes it's fine and it's not a big deal. But a lot of times I like having a bigger space to move around in. That's absolutely possible when you're in this draw and paint mode and we're going to be using this little horizontal gray line in order to help us. If you press on that and you go up and down, you'll see that this moves. And if you go down far enough, a little flip book appears and we are in full screen mode. I'm going to click done again to show you the other way, and that's just by dragging up. Whether you push it down or drag it up, you can enter this full screen drawing mode, which is really wonderful and allows me to feel free when I'm drawing. Similar to procreate, we have this additional thing called the flip book, which is of course important when we're doing frame by frame animation. For now, we're not going to care too much about that. But you can notice how it changes as we work on our drawings. Since we're going to make a ghost, I'm going to come up here and pick a white color. I could go pure white by double tapping here, but I'm going to actually give it a very light blue tinge. Quick note here a little bit down the line in the animation, we're going to apply a fun color effect to our ghost. I did want to give you a little heads up on what you might want to implement in terms of the color of your ghost. In order for this color effect to be very striking, the one that I do, I have a more subtle effect that can also be fun. But if it's your first time trying procreate dreams and discovering all the different aspects of it, I think it can be fun to really dive into that starker contrast and really see that color effect happen for the color of your ghost. You can see that I picked a color that is very light. It's almost white, but not quite. If I picked pure white, the color effect that we are going to explore later would not work. There does need to be a little bit of color within your ghost if you want to have that color effect in order to have a stronger color effect, which is what I recommend if it's your first time, then I would advise you to choose a color that has a fair amount of saturation in it. You can go for a blue or a pink something. And if you look down here at value that has a slightly higher saturation level. Mine was I think at around 12% or maybe 22% but maybe something around 40 or even you could go higher. And I'll show you an alternative way of then at the end, making your ghost closer to White. '. I really do love the six pencil, so that might be an option, but I'm actually going to maybe use the pen Danny inking brush. You can of course, pick the same brush as me if it's your first time or you just don't want to deal with making those decisions. But of course, I do recommend that you start trying to experiment with things that you might enjoy more. If there's a brush that you particularly love, use that one. I'm going to come in and create my little ghost. I could color drop the white inside it, but I really love drawing. I'm going to come and color it in this way. This specific brush that I used has already a little bit of transparency to it. You'll notice that. That's fine. I'm happy with that because it's a ghost. But if I'm using a brush that's more opaque, come in and change the opacity of the layer. It's slightly more transparent and feels a little bit more ghostly. Maybe I'll just do that here, but first I want to. Use the eraser to make some eyes for this. I'm going to use maybe the six pencil for the eyes. I'm actually going to angle them towards the right side because our little B is going to be coming from the other direction. I'm doing two oval eyes here. But you could of course do square. Yes. Or circular eyes. And you can play around with the size of them, the placement of them. If I come here to my layers, you see I can change the opacity to make it more or less ghostly, but maybe just go down to 87% just to have that little added transparency. Now I'm going to click on Done. We can see here there's this frame that was created with our little ghost. If I click on that, my ghost disappears. But my frame is only a single frame and it's not spanning the entire length of the animation. I'm going to want to make this frame longer in order to fill the whole space. I do want to point out though, this one created itself at the zero second mark, but it's also possible that your frame didn't get created exactly with the beginning of the animation and that it got created somewhere over here. You'll have noticed that I'm able to move this frame along just by long holding it that can help me place it back at the beginning. You can see those two lines appear so that I'm really sure that I'm starting the animation in the right spot. However, let's say that I forgot to do that and my frame is not really aligned with the beginning. And I'm like, okay, yeah, I wanted to fill the duration of my animation with this little ghost. I long click on my frame. It brings up this menu. I click on Fill Duration. Now if I quick pinch and zoom out, it looks like I have my ghost the entire way of my animation. I'm like, oh great. And then I do all my animation. And then I realize at the end, oh no, my ghost doesn't appear right at the beginning. What do I do? In that case, what I can do is I can zoom in. If I click just on the little side of that frame, I can extend it. I can actually shorten and extend the length, the duration of this track. Now quick pinch, I know that my ghost is present on the entire animation. But we said that we were going to create a project with a ghost and a little B. Now is the time where we're going to add our little B. I'm going to click this plus button on the right and add another track which gets created above the one that I just made. I'm going to enter draw mode. I'm going to just flick that gray line to enter full screen mode. I can see here already on my flip book that I have frames on the left and the right. This isn't an indication to me already that I am not at the beginning of my animation. I need to go back to the first frame until I can't go anymore. And then I'm sure that my B is going to be there from the beginning. I'm going to pick another brush. This time I think I'm going to go with my six pencil. I'm going to be creating an outline for my B. I might choose something closer to black or maybe a very dark blue. In order to create that outline, I said her two characters were a ghost and a bee, so I'm going to be drawing a B. But here's another one of those opportunities where you can personalize this animation. You could, instead of drawing A, draw a lady bug or a dragon fly, or a butterfly, some other little insect that will act in a similar way to a bee. I'm going to make my E on the right side of the stage. I'm going to create some ahead like she and start making some shape for my B. I'm going to add a little I, then maybe I'll have a few stripes. This is just a good habit to start training when you're thinking about animation. Is that different elements should live on different layers. Because then you can actually animate them in different ways independently of one another. We're not going to be animating the wings on this one, but just so you can get into this habit, I'm just going to show you how you can start prepping for that, especially if you're working with illustration files from procreate. It's really great to hone that habit of having different elements on different layers for the wings, I'm going to click on Plus. Here. And I'm going to draw the wings on this separate layer. But of course my should be yellow, right? I'm going to add another layer up here. I'm going to pick a yellow color. This one's actually pretty good. I'll take that one. I want you to notice that if you're not familiar at all with procreate, since I added that layer. If I just draw, now I'm covering over those nice little stripy black lines that I made. That's not what we want. I'm going to take my layer and move it to be underneath my little. I might actually do the same thing with the wings where I'm going to first bring it underneath here, change the color to a white color in those wings. Of course, now I'm realizing that I also forgot to color in the face of my B. I'm going to go back to that layer and finish adding some of that nice color there. I also feel that this white is a little bit too bright. I'm going to come in and lower the opacity of that. But I think my B is pretty cute. I'm pretty happy with that. And I'm going to click done again. Here we have our B on a single frame. I'm going to want to extend that duration. I will long hold on my frame and click fill duration. I could again do the quick pinch in order to out and see my entire animation. But I'd like to show you a few more gestures that can be very useful as you start animating different things. You can use three fingers in order to change the way that your timeline works. For example, if you see me scrubbing left and right, you can see that these frames are moving inwards and outwards. That's a really, really useful one. Then if I take my three fingers and I move vertically up and down, then my tracks will be getting bigger or smaller. And that can also be very useful, especially if you have many different tracks within your animation. Then of course, you can just use a single finger to move your timeline around. One final little note for good habits to implement in your animation journey. And that is organizing your tracks and keeping track of where your tracks are. There's a great way of doing that is that if you long hold on a Track, it brings up this menu and you can click on Highlight and pick the color that you want. And that will be the color of the track itself. This is not something that's going to appear in your animation. It's purely for you, the person animating, in order to know where you're at, what track corresponds to what. One of the easiest ways that I like to do that is to make my highlight match the color of whatever element is on that track. Since this is my, my B is yellow, I'm going to highlight this track in yellow. You'll see this little highlighter in yellow at the top of your track. I'm going to do the same thing with my ghost. I'm going to highlight this one in gray because that's similar to my ghost. Let me show you what that would look like with one of my other animations so you can get a sense of why this is important. I'm going to go back to my theater in order to find another animation to this animation called Snowy Window. You'll see that here I have different tracks with different colors on them. If I take three fingers and I make my tracks very thin, you can see now that my tracks have very distinct colors. And I know exactly what each one of these tracks correspond to. Which means that I can easily navigate within my animation. 6. Ghost | Performing & Moving Your Drawings: Now we're going to get into the animation of our ghost and our little insect, whether it's a bee or a lady bug or something else that you chose. In procreate dreams, there are three different main types of animation, performing key framing, and frame by frame animation. During our class, we're going to look at all three types of animation, but in this section, specifically, we're going to be looking at two of them. Performing and keyframing. Performing is, I think, one of the most powerful things that procreate dreams is able to do. It feels really revolutionary in terms of how animating programs work. I'm going to show you exactly why that is. Let's come back to our ipad. If you want to be able to animate things, you also need to be able to understand how selecting works within the app. Here we are. We are outside of the draw and paint mode. We're just in the general view and you can see that my B track is selected. None of these icons are selected. And I do just want to mention what the purpose of these other three icons are, because we mostly looked at these first two, the plus and then the drawn paint. This little triangle is the play function. You can see that when you click on it, my playhead moves along the timeline. Right now, I don't have anything animated. Nothing's moving. But you do see that time is taking by and that it is moving forward. Within that animation, I can of course press pause and then we come back to this regular view. Here's another little quick trick. If you flick your playhead to the left side, it'll automatically start that playing of the animation. This little circle is how we enter performing. When you click the Perform button, then you'll notice on the top left, it's written ready. And there's a blinking red light, just like a camera that's filming ready action. That's the idea here. And we'll get into how we perform in just a minute. I'm going to click Stop though. To get out of that mode, I just want to quickly mention these little rectangles which correspond to the timeline edit. We'll also get into that a little bit further down the line. For now, I want us to deselect that and to just make sure that our track is selected. What you'll notice is when my B track is selected, there's a little box that can sometimes appear around the object of that track. Right now it disappeared. How do I get it back again? It's actually pretty simple. I can simply tap anywhere on the stage, and this little box called the bounding box appears around the object of my track. This is the select tool. It selects whatever is on that track. If it disappears, I just need to activate it by tapping, and I need to make sure that nothing else is selected. Now let's try performing. I'm going to click the little circle again. It's written ready and we have the bounding box around our little B, which is the track that we're going to be animating if I use my Apple pencil. Now, the app is going to be recording whatever movement it is that I am drawing on the app. Let me show you as I move my little B, You can see here, this little playhead moving forward. And it's the movement that I'm making along the timeline. If I lift up my apple pencil, it stops exactly at the place that I stopped. I can start it up again simply by touching the screen and moving again. Every time that you touch the screen, it starts. Every time I let go, it stops. And you can see that there are all these little key frames that are being added on a key frame track underneath your B track. These are automatically created as you're moving your B. I'm going to do it one more time, just so you can see now I have tons of key frames all along my timeline. Let me flick the playhead all the way to the beginning so we can see this movement. You can see it's a little choppy. I obviously wasn't paying too much attention to how I was doing the movement, but it's pretty okay. There is one thing that I do want to show you is that if you click on Modify, you get motion filtering that will smooth out the kinks of your animation instead of big movements. It'll smooth them over a little bit. Let me show you the difference. This is with 100% of motion filtering and with 0% 0% has a little bit more geometric ness I feel to it because I wasn't really paying attention. You can play around with that depending on what works for you and for the animation that you're trying to create. I'm going to click on Done. I'm going to undo the performing that I did, so that I can actually perform it in a way that I like. I tap a few times until I see these key frames disappear. I'm going to come back to the beginning of my animation. I want to show you that I can also move things without performing them. For example, right now I realize, oh, my B is already in the frame, but I would like it to actually come into my frame. Nothing is selected here. I'm going to tap on the screen to make the bounding box appear. And I'm just going to move my backstage just like an actor waiting for its entrance. I want to make sure that my playhead is at the beginning of my track. I'm now going to click record. The movement that I'm going to make is I'm going to have my come in, float around a little, then come and look at this ghost, and hover, and then fly out. That's the main path that I want to do. Let's try that. Also, I just want to point out that you don't need to click within the bounding box, especially because my B here is very small. I want to actually try to stay a little bit further away so that I don't scale it. Because if you get too close to it, then you can end up scaling. Instead of just moving it, I'm going to have my coming in, looking at this ghost and then zooming out. I can flick the Playhead to replay that and see what I think. That's not too bad, but I'm not a huge fan of the movement. I'm going to just redo that. I tap with two fingers to undo that performing and I'm going to try again. I want to place my playhead right at the beginning to be sure that that's working well. Okay, let's try this again. I'm pretty happy with that, so I want to move on to my ghost animation. 7. Ghost | Performing Warp and Move&Scale: This time we're going to do a different type of performing because moving is one of those ways, but there are actually a bunch of other ways. We're just going to tap quickly on the playhead. You'll see this menu appear called Action. Here you can see that it's written Move, Filter and Edit Move. The moving scale is similar to what we just did, but this time we're going to do a warp. What you'll see on this warp is that there's a grid that appears on my object. Here is actually something that I'm going to be able to mention. You see how my grid is not only on my ghost, but it goes out further, like it's a whole rectangle where there is apparently nothing. That probably means that without meaning to, I created a mark on my stage. It could be a very slight mark, but my bounding box understands that it's there and it's going to include that. One of the things that I just want to be careful and that's why I deactivated the drawing with finger is instead of just tapping on the screen with my apple pencil, I can use my finger and that helps prevent some of that. What I might do here is I might increase the number of controls to compensate for that. I just want a few that are near the ghost's body. Let's do six. Of course, you could do it vertically as well, but I don't want that many. I'm going to leave it at four for that one. Let me show you what this does. This is a really, really cool function of performing with the warp. It's one of my favorites, and it allows you to create a movement that's almost like breathing or flowing. Something that's very organic and really perfect for animating a little ghost or any other living being that might be breathing. A sheet flowing in the wind. Grass flowing in the wind. There's a bunch of different ways that you can use this. I want to make sure that my playhead is again right at the beginning of my animation. I can also quick pinch to make sure that I can see the entire length of the animation. I'm going to take one of these nodes and start breathing just very gently. Sometimes I do little circular movements. I'm going to keep going the entire length of the animation. I made my animation actually 30 seconds long. But we're going to actually shorten this animation. I'm going to continue with the breathing until the end of the animation, just in case I'm going to go back to the beginning and we're going to redo another one of these warp performings in order to give an even greater illusion of this breath. Because having one movement is good, but having two is even better and makes it look more natural. When I'm doing the second one, I'm also observing the first one. I'm trying to either work with it or against it, since my ghost, it's not really breathing. It's in between a breath and a sheet flowing in the wind. It can do both of those things. Playing around with that is really fun. Okay, then finally we're going to animate the ghost so that it moves. I'm going to bring my playhead again to the beginning. You can see that right now it's a weird keyframe and I don't have my playhead. I want to make sure that I'm on my ghost track so that the little film icon comes back on. I can click that, click on move this time. Click on move and scale. I'm back to that performing where I can just move my ghost, just like I did with the B. I'm still performing. It's still going to record the movement here. I want to make sure that it's ready. I'm just going to start letting it hover a little bit as though it's floating. And then maybe the B is looking at it and then it's a little bit shocked, the little by little floats away. I can see if I like the way I did the movement there. This one feels a little too glitchy to me, so I might redo it. But I might try just a little bit of motion filtering just to see if that makes it a little better. That's a little better, but I don't like the movement at the end. I'm going to redo this entirely. I'm going to click, pause, and I'm going to double tap in order to completely get rid of that entire track that got created. Bring my playhead to the beginning of my animation with this ghost. Click on move and scale and start animating it a little bit more. I can play that back again, so I'm gonna flick this to the beginning. You can see my ghost backing up a little, maybe a little worried and then finally floats away. I'm much happier with that movement. I'm going to keep that one and click in order to finalize that. I just want to notice now. Okay. At what second did I finish the animation? In other words, at which moment does the ghost entirely leave the frame? I would say it's about, yeah, 20 seconds. I'm going to go back to my settings by clicking on the title properties and I'm going to change the duration of my animation to 20 seconds. Now you'll see that the additional part is grayed out. It doesn't matter. I could spend the time to shorten the tracks in order to make them fit, but it doesn't really matter because it won't be taken into account. 8. Ghost | Color Magic: Keyframing the HSB Filter: We've been playing around with performing in a few different ways, but now I'd like to introduce you to key framing. In performing, there were automatic keyframes created as we were performing in key framing. We're the ones who place and create those keyframes. We're going to do it in a really fun way. This is, I think, one of the hidden gems of procreate dreams. It's like a little nugget of joy. I thought this one would be very fun to include. It's going to be using filters. We're going to see what that is. I want to make sure on my app that I have nothing selected here and that I have my playhead on my ghost track. At the beginning of my ghost track, I want to tap the playhead. Instead of clicking on Move, I'm going to click on Filter. There's a new menu that pops up with different options of different filters. Every single one of these is really fun to play with. I encourage you to experiment with them. The one that we're going to do is HSB, which is a color filter. What you'll notice is that a new keyframe track was created. A new keyframe was created right where I had opened up the menu. Now as I move this key frame playhead left and right, you can see that it's grade out. But every time I tap it, it turns white and the menu appears. This is the motion that creates and places key frames. I'm going to tap with two fingers in order to delete those. I'll leave this first one. I just want to move to basically the spot where the B is approaching the ghost. I would say it's right about here. I'll place another one of those keyframes on that track there. I'm not going to modify any of the percentages or the numbers here that are all find in my book. But we're going to move ahead a little bit further and I want to place another key frame just before the B, maybe A here. I'm going to bring up the menu. I want to make one thing clear before I play around with this. Because of the specific brush that I used, the impact of this filter is going to be less than if I had used a different brush. I'll show you an example, another version of this animation that I made where you can see this like very stark transition in this one. It's going to be a little bit more subtle depending on the type of brush that you use, the transparency, it's going to react differently to this filter. And that can be also very fun to play around with. What I'm going to do is I think that it would be fun if my ghost turned yellow, similar to the bee, in reaction to the bee coming up and looking at it as though it's getting a little flustered. Let's say if you have like a yellow background, you could make it pink as though it's blushing, or you could just go completely wild and do some other color. That sounds fun to you. I'm going to go down to my yellow, Like I said, this is going to be a very subtle shift here. I'm also going to maybe increase the saturation up to 100% I'm going to just play around with the brightness to see, maybe I'll make it a little bit more orange. If I go back to this initial one, you can see that color which is definitely more white. And then this one, which is more yellow. Again, this is a subtle transition, but you're going to see that it's really fun, no matter what if it's subtle or if it's a transition. I'm going to also click in between the two key frames and I'm going to set the easings. I'm going to make them linear. This just means that the speed at which things shift is the same the whole way through. For a lot of these key framing animations, you actually want to use the other option, which is ease in and out. Or ease in or ease out where there's an acceleration and a deceleration before the shift, because there are a lot of movements or things in life where that is a more natural thing. But for this one specifically, we're going to stay with something more linear. Finally, we can go back to this first one. And I just wanted you to have this so that I could show you that we can delete key frames even though we've placed them. If you long hold on this keyframe, click on Delete key frame and it will be gone. Here we are at the end of our animation, we can have a look at the final result. We're going to take four fingers and tap the screen. That puts us in full screen mode. I'm going to just gently tap the screen again to bring this up. And press on left, so that I'm sure that I'm at the beginning of my animation. And then press play. I want to show you one last thing that is, what if you want to include a background to your animation? Our background is very plain, very simple here, just so that you could get a sense of how it works. But I want to show you that you can import files from procreate. That can be very helpful if you want to add a different type of background. For example, I'm just going to swipe up from the bottom, I have my procreate icon that's already here. And I'm just going to take it and drag it and place it right next to Procreate Dreams. I have this illustration here, which I think could be a fun alternative. I'm going to come and bring this one in and just drag it in like this. It might not be the right size, I might need to adjust it. You can actually see that I didn't place it right at the beginning. I'm going to do that little trick at the beginning where I hold the side of it and pull it back. Then I'm going to also scale this by making the bounding box up here. I'm going to swipe that away so that we're back here. I'm going to tap quickly so that I see the bounding box. I'm going to simply make that bigger. I might also take away my background color and make it completely white. Let's see now what it looks like. That's one really fun way that you can also complexify some of your animations by adding in some of your other illustrations that you've made in order to make animations a little bit more fun and a bit more engaging. Finally, let me just show you another version of this same illustration, but where the shift between the colors is a little bit more intense. In this one, you can see my ghost starts out looking entirely white. But when the comes to check them out, he changes colors very quickly to a quite bright orange. I want to show you what it is that I did in terms of the key frames that allowed me to have that more intense effect. If I come in to my animation here, if I come to look at my ghost over here, you'll notice that actually I have three different color keyframes placed here. Let me show you what my original color of my ghost was. I'm going to delete all of these key frames so that you can get a sense of what the original color of my ghost was. My ghost was a pretty bright blue. If I color pick this color, I go to my color. You can see in the value that I'm at about a 49% saturation. That's actually what's going to enable me to have that massive color shift. If I add those key frames back then you can see the different color shifts that I did. What did I do? I applied that HSB filter from the beginning and made it much lighter. You see how my brightness is up to 84% here, That's why I'm able to get that very bright white looking ghost. I then created another frame where I kept that same brightness of 84% and placed it a little bit further down the line to the moment where I wanted the transformation to happen. Then finally, I added this third key frame. With my resulting color, the color that I was aiming for, you can see the hue has changed to something closer to orange. But my saturation is up to 87% and my brightness is down to 50% You can really see that each one of these sliders is going to have a massive incidence on the intensity of the color effect. This is something really fun to try to explore. Let me show you just a little example of how you can try to explore these color shifts. I'm going to just take a square canvas on here and I'm going to leave the background as is. I'm going to draw with a few different colors here. I'm going to maybe use an inking brush, let's say syrup. I really just want to see these shifts in hue here. We're at 49% of this level of blue. I'm going to come down to maybe an 18% so you can see the difference. I'll do one more that is very unsaturated, maybe one more that has maximum saturation. I also want to show you maybe with a few other colors. We're going to start with a high saturation, a mid saturation, and a low saturation. I'm going to click Fill Duration. I'm going to click filter HSB. I'm going to move this one so we have a little bit of time to see the transition. We're going to just play around with this. You can see if I just move the brightness, look at how those colors shift, I'm going to bring it back to 50% because whenever you bring in the HSB filter, it starts off, no matter what color you start out with, this 1805050. It's from that starting point that you're applying the filter, I can increase the saturation or I can simply change the hue. Let's just try with the hue change. I'm going to of course, need to add another key frame here. I need to keep this one at 1805050. And it's from that starting point that you're applying the filter. If I play this, you can see that color change. I'm going to just extend that, so you can see the shift happening a little bit better. That's with just the hue change. But I can also, of course, let me look back. I was at 18180. I can of course, just change the brightness or just the saturation, Put this back to 50 and change just the saturation level. Or I can change all three. You see how these ones even disappear because they become white. Their brightness is so high that they're indistinguishable from white. The HSB filter is super fun and a little tricky to understand right when you start using it. But if you play around with the different formats of what it is that is possible, then you'll be able to learn how to master it and use it in ways that you want to apply within your animations. 9. Drawing The Windows: Cutouts & specificity: Next exercise, we're going to be using the theme of windows as the starting point for acquiring some more tools in procreate dreams and becoming more familiar with it. Windows is a subject that I have always found very fascinating. I feel like they have such a narrative component but also something very poetic and very contemplative. And so I thought it would be fun to create a snowy window today. Again, it doesn't need to be complicated. We saw with the ghost and the e, simple shapes can make some very, very fun animations. We don't need to create something very, very complex in order to already enjoy the fun of bringing our drawings to life. And so a window, the most simple, basic form of it, is going to be the one that you think of even when you're a kid. If you see kids drawing little houses, they'll often do squares, two lines, that intersect each other, and that can be your window. However, I do want to give you a few examples of other types of windows and window inspiration because I think that we often also limit ourselves to the first thing that comes to mind. And sometimes it can be really nice to actually do some more research and become more specific about what kind of object it is that we're drawing. So here's just a few examples of different kinds of windows so that you can try to remember also in your life, what windows you've encountered. And maybe you could use something from your own life as the starting point, as the inspiration for the window that we're going to create in the app today. Even the difference between having a square window, a rectangular window, and what the different proportions of that rectangle are, whether they're thinner and longer, shorter, and stouter. Those little subtleties will still have a very big impact on the overall look and feel of your final drawing. I just want us to start complexifying and understanding that these subtle differences can bring a lot to your work. You can use that knowledge in the animations that we do today, even if we're staying in the realm of things that are quite simple and fast to make. For this specific animation, we're going to be making a snowy window, which I think is very fun, very sweet, very cozy, and also has a lot of poetry in it. But we're also going to be able to dive into a little bit more details about key framing. And also talk about the subject of parallax animation. Since we want to immediately start off by drawing a window, I'm going to click on the plus button here. I'm going to do the screen size. We're going to keep the 24 frames per second. I think for the duration I'll make it a little shorter, maybe 15 seconds. I'm going to skip the empty function and we're going to go directly into draws so you can get a sense of what it's like when you just want to dive right in. I click on Draw, and you can see there's a content track that has already been created. I'm already in draw and paint mode, as you can see here, selected. And I have my stage ready for me to draw on it. I'm going to just flick down that little gray horizontal bar so that I'm in full screen mode and I can start drawing right away. I'm going to go ahead and try to pick a color that seems fun to me. Maybe something on the pink side of things. I'm going to drag and drop that right into the center so that I have that solid color there. What I'm actually going to do is to cut out the window from this solid color. I'm going to use the eraser. I'm going to pick a brush. I think this marker could be a fun brush to use. That's the one that I'm going to go for. Place my window in the center right now. But if you'd like to place your window a little bit off center, then that's fine as well. I'm going to maybe just start off with figuring out what my base shape is. And you'll notice that we don't have the hold function which allows you to create quick shapes lines, perfect lines, perfect circles, perfect squares, perfect rectangles as we do in procreate. I know that that's something that's in development in the future for procreate dreams, but for now we don't have that. It's going to have a bit more of a hand drawn look. Your lines might not be exactly straight. That's also fun because it can. Bring out some of that hand drawn cozy aspect to it, this illustrative hand drawn style. I'm okay with that. I'm going to maybe create something like that. I don't like that, so I'm going to do it again, but I like the imperfection here. I'm going to just lengthen the bottom of that. For this, I actually want to add in the different panes of the window, in the slats. I'm just going to pick my brush, come down to the marker, make sure I'm using the same color as my background. I'm going to go in and add here. I've noticed that this brush actually isn't the right one for me because as it's a marker, it's doing some marker layering effect with the color. That's okay. I'm just going to go in and change my brush for something that doesn't do that. Maybe I'll come back to the six pencil. It is something that I really love. Yeah. That's not going to have that same effect when you're wanting to make straight lines. I will tell you that moving with your entire arm is a helpful thing to do. Don't move from the wrist, move from the entire arm. Also know that it takes a lot of practice to get good at making straight lines. I'm still not very good at it. I have gotten better at it, but there's always room for improvement. But that's also what makes it fun to play around with. There we go. It's not perfect, but that's fine. I'm okay with it. Another thing that you might want to pay attention to is the width of these lines. I'm eyeballing it here, but if you really wanted to be a little bit more precise, you could check for the middle of your window and then really pull that line there and then cut the rest of it into two or into two. And just make it a little bit more mathematical, if you will. I'm actually okay with slight wonkiness of it, the non mathematical quality of it. I am wanting to add a little bit more detail around the frame of my window though, for that rather than using the eraser. Because it's the inside of the house basically, or the building that we're in, I don't want to use the eraser because whatever we put underneath it will be seen through. What I will want to do is more choose a lighter color or a darker color and then paint over the top of that. However, what I'm going to do is I'm going to do that on a separate layer by clicking on these little squares. I'm going to click on the little plus. This is where I'm going to add that additional layer of the details of the frame of my window. I think I might go for something a little darker, something like that. I'm going to also experiment with just a slightly thicker line. You can see the shadows. I like the unequal quality of this line. It weaves in and out of being seen. And that this thicker line gives that impression of there being a slight shadow. I could add another one, a really thin one just around the edge here. If you look at actually like real windows and you start observing them, you'll notice that there's way more frame than you think there should be. Sometimes there's like three layers of outlines across it. You'd have another one that's even bigger over here. That's the fun thing is that when you start observing real objects, you realize how much your brain forgets to look at or just doesn't even register as being important. But in your drawings, this is really what makes drawings very interesting, is that specificity. This looks a little bit almost like a church window with that added line. In order to just make this a little bit less formal, I don't know. For me it has a feeling it's a bit too formal for my taste. I'm going to actually add a second little window because Why not? I'm going to go back to that first layer. I'm going to use the eraser again. Yeah. I'm using the Mercer and I'm going to try maybe a square window. What if I added another one? A third one. Just a very thin window over here. I'm going to go back and color pick the color that I used earlier that's purple. The way that I can do that is by just tapping with my finger holding and then scrubbing until I see the darkest version of that color. Yeah, I think that's it. And you can see here that it changed. I'm still in my six pencil brush and so I'm going to come and add my details around them. For this one, I'm not going to have any pains. I'm going to actually just add just an outline on the edges of this one. I was actually initially thinking that I would get rid of those little white lines there where I didn't make it quite straight. But on second thought, I actually like that how it's bleeding out of the lines that breaks the formality that I wasn't liking as much. That's something that I'm going to keep rather for this one, I think it would be nice to have some pan, window panes. I'm going to go back to my original layer and I'm going to color, pick that background color. I'm going to just experiment, What if I did it just a regular stereotypical window? That's all right, but I'm not a huge fan. Let's see what else I could do. I could just do one horizontal line. I like that a little better. Let me try a few more. What if I did two lines cutting it up in thirds? I'm not a huge fan of that one either, so I think I'm going to go back to the one that I liked first, which was this one with the two panes that are slightly unequal. I could also decide that there's a thicker line there with maybe a little latch. I think that's not bad. I'm going to keep that. I'm going to add that little outline on the inner edge of my window. I'm going to yet again color pick, or I can just go back here and pick that color that I color picked earlier. Since I'm adding that thicker slat of wood, I'm actually going to skip over that part. So I'm not going to put a shadow there. I'm going to add just a little bit of shadow onto the latch and maybe just the lower edge of that piece of wood. I'm going to say that my windows are done. Now that I look at it again, I would actually love it if my windows were all a little bit lower. You see there's also this difference when you are looking at something full screen versus looking at it when it's a little bit further away. That gives you a bird's eye view. That is very helpful in order to understand what you might like to change compositionally. I'm going to go ahead and adjust that. There's no selection tool exactly the way that there is in procreate, but there are ways that you can move things around. I am back in this regular mode. I don't have drawn paint activated. All I want to do is tap the screen, have the bounding box appear and then move it down to the level that I'd like to bring it. I'm just going to go into drawn paint mode, color, pick the color of that background, drag and drop the color. And you'll notice that there's a little bit of a line in between the two where the two intersect. So I'm just going to go in and fill in the tiny gap. Now I'm here with my illustration in the way that I want it to be. With the composition a little bit more balanced. I'm going to click on Done, and of course I'm going to long hold on my frame and click Fill Duration. Quick pinch to zoom out. I now have those windows across the entirety of my animation. 10. Window | Precision in Your Keyframing: All right, so we could keep the background white if we wanted. But we're going to be animating some snow. I think it would be fun for it to not be white unless you want your snow to be colorful snow, which could also be fun. I would recommend going for maybe a light blue, a light green or something on the lighter end of the spectrum or alternatively on the darker end of the spectrum. That's what I think I'm going to do. I'm going to go more for a dark color, need something along these lines. Sounds pretty good to me. Before we move on, I want us to continue building those good habits. So we're going to highlight our windows in the dominant color of that drawing. Now we get to build the snow. This is the fun part. I'm going to click plus here. Add a new track, and I'm going to make sure that I move it underneath the track that we just created. Why? Because I want the snow to be behind the windows, of course. Unless I want to have the snow be in front, which could also be super fun. In that case, it would be as though I'm outside of the windows looking into the house that maybe has its lights off, for example. I'm going to click Draw and Paint. I'm going to pick a light color. This light blue sounds really nice to me. You could go pure white as well, since it's something more like snow. But I think having a little bit of a tint could be nice. Once I've done that, I'm going to come in here and I'm going to move my stage out of the way, just a little towards the bottom. And I can actually bring up this flip book and the full screen mode in order to make this a little easier. The brush that I have picked is the dry ink brush, but you can experiment with a bunch of others. I think ink bleed could be fun. I think the six pencil could also be fine. I'm just going to start adding a little bit of snow here and there. Above the drawing edge is made. One of the things that I want to make sure of is that I'm staying within the bounds of my drawing. What I mean by that is if I imagine two imaginary lines that go up here, then I want to just make sure that I have snow that goes all the way to the edges, it can actually go past. I'm fine with that. That's not a problem. But it's really just for me to have like a marker for the moment where I might move my drawing out of the way and only have the snow. I'll show you what I mean by that. I want to make different sizes of snow flakes. I'm going to move this with two fingers down a little bit. And this is where it becomes important to have just an idea of where the edges of my stage are. I am going to want to create the snow 200% of the width of my canvas. If I take my drawing, basically, I want it to be two times the size of my drawing, approximately. You don't need to be super precise about it. All right. I can double check to see if that's big enough. 12, I'm not quite big enough. I'm going to zoom in again. Just add in a little bit more snow, I would say. When you're drawing, especially on the same level, it's good to keep the same zoom because the brushes work slightly different than in procreate. If you create your drawing a little bit out, then once you zoom back in, your brush will be a little bit more pixelated. I think that looks pretty good. I'm going to click on Done. Of course, on my frame that has been created, I want to fill the duration to make sure that I have it on the entire animation. I'm going to use three fingers to just bring in my animation a little bit tighter. We're going to start moving the snow. In order to do that, I'm going to proceed like I did earlier. I'm going to click on the little playhead and we're going to click on Move and move and Scale. The interesting thing is that we were looking at the move and scale keyframing earlier. But you can actually be way more precise in terms of your keyframing. Let me show you what that means. I'm going to click on that little keyframe and click on Expand, move, and scale. Once I do that, you see there are a bunch of little key frame tracks that appear. This is the breakdown of all the different types of move and scale that you can do. We actually just want the snow to move vertically down. We don't want it to move left and right. We don't want it to zoom in, we just want that downwards movement. What I'm going to do is I'm going to first come and delete these key frames, which aren't important to me. We have now only the X axis and the Y axis. The Y axis is the vertical one where we want the snow to fall, and the X is the horizontal one. We don't really want our snow to move on the horizontal plane, but we do want to anchor it in a certain position on that X axis. Since I placed my snow in the right space here, I want to just hold this keyframe and move it a little bit to the right, just so I'm sure I don't touch that one. I know that that's my X position, that I want to keep in that position. Now, my Y position, I'm actually going to, on the starting one, bring it down just a little. I'm going to bring that bounding box down. But if I see the snow appear, then I'm going to scoot it back up so it disappears. Just so that we start the animation with snow already falling. If you wanted to keep a little bit more space between the beginning of the snow and the animation, then you can of course, just leave it as it is. I'm going to slide my key frame playhead all the way to the end of here and mark my new keyframe. I've activated it. I have a new key frame that's appearing. I'm going to come over here, activate the bounding box of my snow. And pull my snow down all the way down until I can't see any snow. And I can zoom back in if I'm not seeing that very well. There we go. I want you to already notice that if I tried to move it all the way to the right, for example, it would just come back to that same location, but on the Y axis that we have created. That's because we have this X that is placed and in one single spot, we have solidified our X axis position. No matter where we try to put it, it's always going to snap back to that position. And that's why it's important to keep that one around. I'm going to read just that one like that. As a final step, I want you to hold the space in between the two key frames. And we're going to set the easing to linear. We're going to use four fingers to tap and look at our snow falling and see how that works. I think that's really fun. It's cute, it really is coming together now. But we can bring this a little bit further. 11. Window | Parallax Animation & Gaussian Blur: But we can bring this a little further. I want us to first collapse the move and scale. We're going to come back to the beginning of our animation, and we're going to create a new track. Now you'll notice of course, this track is created on top of all the other tracks that we have. I want to bring this one down. I want to move it all the way underneath my other tracks. I'm going to click Draw and Paint again. We're going to make a second track of snow. We can deactivate this first track of snow so we don't get confused between the two. By clicking this little check box over here, I'm going to use the same brush and more or less the same zoom in order to create my snow. But for this one, I actually want to make it pretty much the thickness of the drawing itself. Instead of having it be twice the size, I want it to be similar size. The reason that I want to do that is because when we animate it, we're actually going to be animating it at half the speed approximately, of the other one, in order to make it go a little slower. And that gives me the opportunity to talk to you about parallax animation. Parallax animation is when you have different tracks that are moving at different speeds. More specifically, it's when things move faster in the front than they do in the back. It's like when you're in a train. When you're sitting in a train or in a car and you're looking out the window, you see the things that are close to you zipping by at an incredible speed. It's almost insanely blurry. You can't really even catch what you're looking at. But if you look out into the distance, then you'll notice that the landscape is moving at a much slower rate. If you look at a tree that is in between the far away mountains and the road that's flitting by you, that is going in a speed in between those two. That's a really important element of animation to understand how things move and how we perceive movement. And that's going to help add a little bit more realism into your animations. We're going to use this principle in order to make our snowy window a little bit more realistic. Once you've finished drawing your snow, we're going to click on Done. And I'm going to, again, fill duration for that. I'm also going to do the same thing that I did in the previous track, where I click on move and scale and then expand, move and scale. I'm going to move my key frame out of the way. I'm going to delete these other key frames just to keep a clean slate. I'm going to check where the position my starting position is going to be. I'm going to bring it a little bit closer to my windows. I'm going to take three fingers to make my animation a little tighter so I can see the end of it. Bring the play head all the way to the end. Create a key frame on the y axis. Come here to my stage, bring the snow down to that finishing position. One final thing before we look at the animation. We're going to add one final key, framing, and that is a Goscian blur. I'm going to, on the same track, click on the playhead again. Click on Filter. Gaussian blur. Gaussian blur is fun. It's that blurry effect that you have when things are maybe further away or when your camera lens, you move it around so that you have that blurry background effect. The Gaussian blur enables you to do that with your layers, which is really fun. We don't need to go super intense, we're just going to go, I think at about 1% for this one. If you actually want to see the effect. I don't know how well you can see it, but I will show you. We have this Gaussian blur here. You can see that if I have zero, you see the snow still. And if you move it to the right, at some point you almost don't even see it. We're really just going to add a little bit of Gaussian blur to that you can tap away. Come back to our animation. Before we're going to play the animation, we need to do one final thing. We need to click Reactivate, or other snow track to make sure that everything is on there. I will also highlight this in gray and this one also in gray. So that I know that that's my snow for finger tap. To put it in full screen, let's watch the results of what we did. You can see how that difference in speed of both of our snow layers really creates a more realistic effect in terms of the window that we've made. This was really fun. I really enjoyed making this snowy window with you. I do want to show you other possibilities. We took some time to create our window. If you love drawing and illustrating, you can always spend a little bit more time on the illustration itself. Before you bring in the animation, I want to show you one of these illustrations that I made where I spent a lot of time on the illustration itself before bringing it into the animation. This uses the exact same parallax animation effect as the one that we explored. I do have a slightly different speed on this one and you can see also how that shifts the mood, the spacing, the timing, give it a certain look and feel. The illustration that you make will also participate in that. I also want you to notice that as we're playing this, it's just looping. It reminds me that you can actually also create a loop on the window that we created. In order to do that, I want us to come back to the project and I want you to click on the title of your animation. We want to go down to timeline. And you can see that right now one shot is activated. But if I click on loop, then we have that looping effect of the animation, which is really fun to look at. Parallax animation is something that you can use for snow, for rain, for things like that. But of course, its most common usage is also for landscapes, if you have your camera moving within a landscape itself. 12. Wingflap | Separating Elements, Editing Anchors: In this section of our class, we're going to look at two different ways of animating birds. The first one is going to be slightly shorter and the second one is going to be longer. They both have their beauty and their value when we want to be animating birds. Let's start off with the first one, which is going to be pretty simple. I'm going to create a project. We're going to go with screen size. Again, I want to make sure that your duration, I don't know, it's maybe 12 seconds. Let's say your frames per second will be 24. We're going to click on Draw, and I'm going to set the background. I'm going to click the time code and pick my background color. I can go with a blue, like a light blue or a darker blue since we're doing a sky. But you could also imagine choosing a color that's more a sunset color or a dawn color. A pale yellow, orange, pink. You know, there's a variety that you can choose from. I'm going to go with this one and I'm going to immediately put myself in full screen mode by pulling that little flip book here. I have a reference of some birds from the side. If you want to get an idea of what you're looking for, what kind of shape you're looking for, I'm going to actually be doing, mind pointing in the other direction, towards the right, but you could also do it pointing towards the left. Of course, I'm going to first focus on just the body, not the wing, which we're going to be doing next, but just that body. And so it's kind of like a flattened ellipse with, you know, obviously the slightly pointy beak at the end. I'm using as a brush, if you for reference, I'm using the procreate pencil in sketching, which is also a dear favorite, I think it's a really great sketching pencil to use, and I love the texture that it has on the edges. So I'm just going to fill in this sort of flattened ellipse. And if I'm not mistaken, I think these birds are brown *******, which is, that's the name of them. They are very cool birds. I'm going to click done and I'm going to fill duration by long holding on my drawing. And I'm going to actually create another track in order to draw the wing. So I click on this, plus I click on Track Draw in Paint Mode, and I can immediately start drawing. There's of course, that straight line, which is the front part, and then we have that kind of triangular shape with a curve for the other side. I'm just going to fill that in, make sure that I'm happy with my silhouette. I'm pretty happy with it. But I do want to show you something that I could do if I didn't like the placement of my wing. I'm going to click done and I want to again, long hold, fill duration. Then I can just tap the screen, make my bounding box appear, and then I can move things around just like I would if I were selecting it individually. That's why it can be useful to place elements on different tracks like I did here. I can go back and just simply adjust. Once I'm happy with it, I can let it go and my wing is placed. But what's another reason that we might want to separate the different elements of our animation? Here's a really important one. I want to make sure I'm nice and zoomed in in order for this to work. Look at what happens if I click in between those two dots. There's a red line that appears at the edge of where my bounding box was. And now if I move that around, you'll see that it's kind of crunching around this anchor point, the little white cross in the middle here. I'm going to double tap to go back. What I want to do is I want to first come and click these three little dots on the top right and edit, Anchor. This is really vital anytime you want to be animating a character or animating anything that has one swivel point around which you'd like to move or scale or do something. I'm going to bring my anchor down to the middle of the wing where it would connect along the body of the bird. I want that to be my anchor point because I want my wing to be flapping just like this. I'm going to click done to make sure my anchor point is nice and saved. And I'm going to come and do the exact same thing. Just so you can see the difference, I click in between the two dots so that a line appears and look at what happens this time. That is what we're going to be wanting to do while performing. So that we have that wing flap of the bird. I'm going to come back here, want to make sure I'm right at the beginning, which I am. And I'm going to click a little circle so that we can perform. Of course, since I'm putting my Apple pencil down directly as soon as it starts, it's going to start recording. I want to make sure that I start the flapping movement right away. I don't need to be rushed as I'm doing the movement, but I want to make sure I do do it during the entire length of my animation. I also want to come up to my motion filtering and reduce that to 0% It really captures the movement that I was doing. Let's look at what that looks like. It's nice. It's a very nice flapping bird. So now I want to click on Done, and we're going to zoom out a little bit. And now we're going to be able to talk about groups. 13. Wingflap| The Importance of Grouping: And now this gives us the opportunity to talk about groups. This is something that we haven't talked about yet, but that is going to be very instrumental within your animations, especially as they increase in complexity. Let me show you what that is on the left here. We've looked at almost all of these except for this one, the little rectangles, which to me the way that I remember what they're for is I imagine them to be nesting boxes. And that's kind of how I visualize groups to be. It's almost as though you take this thing and that thing and you put it all in a box. And that's what grouping is. If I click on this icon, you see timeline edit appear on the top left. And what you'll notice is that my apple pencil becomes a kind of glowy magic wand, which is kind of cool and which shows you how you select things. If I move this across one of my tracks, then it becomes selected. If I move it again across the track, it gets selected. And I can do this in many different ways. I can of course, circle it if that makes it easier. But I can also just strike through it and that also selects it. So now I have both of my tracks selected. What I can do is I long hold on any one of those selected tracks and I click Group. And do you see how it created one single track out of both of those tracks? That's what I've done. I've put both the body and the wing in a little box group together so that they can act as one unit. If I tap on this little arrow on the right, you can see that my tracks have not changed. I have one track for the body and one track for the wing. And I can, of course, come and modify things in there without any problem at all. But I can also come and animate the entire group itself. The box that holds the body and the wing, and that's what we're going to do now, in order to start this off, I want my bird to be starting backstage. Not already in the middle of my stage. I'm going to make sure I'm de, selected from everything, tap the screen to make the bounding box appear, and I'm going to move it right backstage. I want to make sure that my playhead is at the beginning. And now we're going to do some performing. I click the circle and we're going to move the bird across the screen very slowly as it flaps across the landscape. If I play that back, you can see that my movement is a little jittery. I might redo that with a little bit of motion filtering on. But I'm also going to adjust the size of my bird so that I can make it a little smaller and have it be the entire length of my animation. I'm going to come up here to motion filtering and I'll just put a little then while making sure that performing is turned off, I'm just going to adjust the size. I'm going to bring my bird back into the center so I can see it. I'm going to make it smaller. And you can see that it's getting smaller according to my anchor point that is placed on the bottom right. That's okay. In this instance, it doesn't really matter because our animation is very simple. But if I did want to make sure that I'm scaling it according to the middle of the bird, then I want to come and edit the anchor. Place it in the middle of the bird and then come and scale in that way. I'm going to make it a little smaller so it's like a little bit in the distance. And I'm going to place it again outside of the frame, click performing, and have this bird very slowly come across. It's cool because you can see almost, it's like gliding as though it caught a current of upwards wind, which is really fun. But if I wanted to make a movement that was a little bit more active as though it were really flapping, then I would come in and make that movement with the wing a little bit faster. Now that we know how to animate a bird in this very simple but beautiful way, I want to show you a different way that you could also animate a bird. And it's going to give us the opportunity to talk about frame by frame animation. 14. Eadweard Muybridge & The Zoopraxiscope: I don't think that we can talk about frame by frame animation, especially in the case of animal movements such as a bird flying without mentioning the name Edward Moybridge. Edward Moybridge was a pioneering photographer who lived in the 1800s. Photography had been invented very recently in 18 22, and so this was a very emergent technology and art form at this time. There was also a debate about whether or not when horses were trotting, if their legs were clear of the ground at any point, or if there was always at least 1 ft in contact with the ground. The reason there was this debate is our human eye can only see so much and the movement of a running horse was too fast in order for people to be able to determine with accuracy how the horse actually moved. And so Moybridge was hired by Leland Stanford in order to settle the debate. And he created an entire system in order to be able to better capture the movement of a running horse and settled the debate once and for all, he did that by creating a track with trip wires that when the horse was running across, would allow Moybridge to take photographs at very fast intervals and thus to have an accurate rendition of how horses move. This was revolutionary and the debate was settled. There is one moment when horses run where all their hooves are off the ground as though they are flying. This started his passion for capturing animals in movement. He produced over 100,000 images of humans and animals in motion, and also invented the zoopraxiscope, an ancestor to cinematography, the way that we know it today. In this case, it was a device which enabled the projection of moving images from painted glass discs, allowing them to give the illusion of movement. 1883-1886 Moybridge captured more than 100,000 images of animals and humans in motion using the same system that he did to capture that horse. Nowadays, we kind of take it for granted that we can see things moving at speeds that our eyes are not able to process. You know, we have soul motion capabilities in our smartphones. But think about how incredible that must have been to be able to capture all these movements that you had never had the capacity to see or understand in their full fledged form before this technology. It's really incredible. And it's also an invaluable tool if you're interested in animation in frame by frame animation. And in understanding what those subtleties are that happen when animals, humans, and objects move through space. So for our next exercise, we're going to be using some of these images that Moybridge took as a starting point for our frame by frame animation. It's an incredible resource that I think anyone interested in animation should really put in their back pocket and refer to regularly in order to strengthen your knowledge of how things move. So let's start out with some birds and get drawing. 15. Birds | Illustrating Frame-by-Frame: Let's start out by creating a new project. I'm going to click Plus. We're going to go back to our screen size. And I'm going to click on Draw. I'm going to create another background color here. I'm going to go for kind of a mid blue. Once I'm satisfied, I'll click done. And I want to show you the reference that we're going to be using. This reference shows a parrot flying. And if you actually count them, if I'm not mistaken, I think it comes out to 24 images of this pair of flying. We're not going to be drawing all 24 of them though. If you did, then you would be able to probably get a very smooth animation. But I also want to show you that frame by frame animation can also be really fun if you reduce the number of frames that you draw. And so you can get that very hand drawn. I call it kind of glitchy effect. We're going to do that even though our project is in 24 frames per second. So I've highlighted here the frames that we're going to be drawing. We're going to click on drawn paint right here. We can flick up that little horizontal bar in order to come full screen with our flip book. The flip book is the thing that is going to be very useful for us when we're doing frame by frame animation because it allows you to see what comes after and what has come before. We'll need onion skins in order to help us do that. Let me just show you what that means. Let's say that I pick a color and I draw something. You'll see something that appears on the first frame of my flip book. If I go to the next frame, this turns a different color. And that's because I have onion skins activated. If I click on my time code over here, then I get the stage options where I can see hide onion skin or show onion skin. I can also edit this. If I am hiding the onion skin, then I can't see what happens in the frame before what I drew. Sometimes you want to do that if you want to maybe add some details and you don't want the additional colors or confusion of the previous frame. But when you're trying to create a motion, then you want to have these onion skins activated. I edit them here. Backwards onion skins. Show you the frame that comes before and forwards is the frame that comes after. Let me just go, this is where I'm drawing here. And then let me draw another one over here. And you can see, I still can see those scribbles that I made before. If I go back to this frame, you'll see that I have both a slight purple color and then a slight yellow color. The purple is the frame before it, the yellow is the frame after. And that's something that I decided in the stage options by editing the different colors for that. You see here, I chose a purple, here I chose a yellow. I also can decide how many frames I want to be seeing at one time. So I have four frames activated here, which means that I will be able to see in a pale color the four frames previous to the one that I'm drawing now. And of course, I can change the opacity of my onion skins, which can also sometimes help if my colors are too similar to one another. I keep mine usually at around 20, 30% But of course, adjust as needed. Since I'm working with a dark blue background, this purple might actually be better if I make it very slightly darker. I'm going to actually clear my frames here so we can get started on the bird drawing. And I wanted to show you this trick. If you don't know it, I use it also on procreate and it's very useful you take three fingers and you just scrub on your screen and that will clear the frame entirely. You see that's entirely gone. That one's entirely gone. I could alternatively just long hold on the frame and click clear frame. You'll have noticed also that I have the option to cut, copy or even duplicate frames, which can also be very handy. Let's start with drawing our bird. The difficult thing here is that I'm going to ask you to really think about the silhouette of the bird. Luckily, the photograph shows this very white light bird on a very black background. So it'll be a little bit easier to see that silhouette here. We get to practice the notion of seeing things as they are rather than seeing them as how our mind thinks they should be. Our mind is always taking shortcuts and trying to simplify things in a way that often skips out on the important details. If I look here at the profile of my bird, I'll see that it looks, I don't know, a flattened ellipse, but with weird ridges and such, especially on the bottom part. I'm not going to be too precise, but I do want to get a little bit of that sense. I want to come and color that in. I could also color drop if I preferred that. And I'm going to tap on the next one. Actually, here's a good little trick is I actually put the flip book often on the left side. And then I can use my left hand to change frames and then my right hand to draw or opposite, if that's if you're left handed. For a second one, I'm going to draw this one. I want us also to just notice the position of the bird here. Where is my head? I think I'm going to try to really keep my head at the same level, more or less. It doesn't need to be super precise. But just so that you don't have too much, too many changes here, I want to simplify. There's all these like little feathers that you can see on the wing. I don't want to be too worried about that, I really want to just focus on the silhouette here. I'm actually more interested in doing a bird that is maybe more similar to like, let's say a crow than a parrot. I'm going to just add a little bit of sharpness to the head to indicate that there's a beak. Even though I don't see that in my image, the differences between birds are actually very subtle. All these small details, we're going to have an incidence on the type of bird that your eye is reading. I'm going to do the next one, and this time you can see that we're not actually drawing all 24 of them. And I picked several of these I know work because I tested things out beforehand. But if you wanted, you could test out other variations and see if they work as well, or if they work better, or if they work worse. It's really interesting to kind of note how the frames that you pick will have an incidence on how that movement reads. I really like the shape of the wings. It's almost like a square shape, which is funny for this one. I'm actually going to also include the back wing, even though you see it in shadow. I'm just going to offset it a little bit so you can tell the difference of, I can use the pressure sensitivity of my apple pencil in order to make that difference a little bit. I'm going to adjust the shape a little. If I see that it needs some adjusting, I would say it maybe should be a little bit more like that. I could also come in and add just a few dense in the feather to show that separation that I see happening. I'm going to move to the next one. This one is going to be pretty similar, but it's going to be a slightly more compact shape as compared to that first one. In this one, you definitely see both wings. I want to make sure that I have both of them in there. If I could just look at the silhouette I'm going to show you. It, it's just almost like a blob like that. I would say I can even just come in and fill that out and then dig out the details after that. The thing is also if you have too much of a big size difference between your drawings, you'll be able to come back and scale them a little to adjust them if you really feel that it's too bothersome. All right, I might come and dig out a few of these details I'm going to use. Actually, maybe that would be more useful as using the same brush for the eraser as I am for my drawing. Specifically, I'm just going to come and bring out a bit of that, maybe a little bit of those feathers. Again, I can see where they are because of my onion skin as well. That's cool because I can refer to that rather than the photograph the racer and then honestly these ones in the back. I don't want to get too caught up in the details, which I have to admit I'm falling into that right now just because I love drawing. But we're really here to understand also how the app works. It's more about that than anything else, but you can flip between the different frames to see how that movement might look once it's animated. You can get a sense of that. I actually really like the yellow that's coming through there. That's really nice, even though it's just the onion skin color. All right, now we're on our second to last frame. You'll see this is a big difference in position. There's a very big transition. You see how these two were quite similar. If we had done the one right after that, it's also quite similar. But then there's this massive transition. As soon as the bird lifts up its wings, I want to still maintain my face the head at a similar place. I really want to remember that I'm focusing on the silhouette here. I have two ridges, these big triangles. I'd say something like that. Actually. I'm going to back that up a little bit. When you're looking at Silhouette, it's important to look at how things align. For example, I noticed that, oh, I was making this triangle. But look, there's a longer line on the bottom of the bird's body before that triangle. If I actually look at the triangle itself, I'm going to just delete. Erase this so you can see this a little better. If I look at this triangle of the wing, it looks like this. That can give me a better anchor. Then finally, the wing in the back, which part of it is in shadow, but I'm going to include that here because it's an important part of the bird. It has that separation of the feathers that we had over here. I can also bring that in a little. I'm going to fill this in. Of course, I can always adjust if I don't like the shape that I ended up making. Do you see how if I had asked you to draw how a bird flies without looking at a reference, you would probably not have picked these specific types of shapes that we're drawing. This is where you really get to see the difference between what things actually look like and how your brain tries to remember what they look like. That often our brains are a little bit skewed in that respect. I'm also realizing that it's actually not a pure triangle. There's a little bit of a break up here. I'm going to bring that in because I think that's the wing that is folding. That's good to include. I don't want to bring it too far up because I do want to make sure that there's that body of the bird and that there's space for that as well. But this is definitely one of the stranger shapes of the bird flying in other iterations that I did. I don't think I brought in that line here. If I don't like that, then I can always adjust that at the end. All right, I'm going to come in and bring in some of that separation of the feathers which we have here by scrub between these, I think I get a good sense of that movement. I can also think about where the body is, for example. Now that I think about it, I think there would be a little bit of the tail sticking out here. If I look really precisely, I do see that. I'm going to come in and add that over here. That one works. Okay, finally, our last one. This is a fun one. It's maybe more similar to that first bird that we saw where you really have the wing that's arching up. I might actually exaggerate that even a little bit just so we can have that shape. But I am going to start out with, again, the silhouette. I want to make sure that I have my body, it's angled in a similar way to the other ones. I might actually bring this one up a little bit more. I'm going to ignore the leg here just because I think it's a bit superfluous. And most birds, when they're flying, they tuck their legs. They really only bring their legs out when they're about to land. Also, the direction of your marks can be useful to evoke. Form, I haven't really used that here, but it is something to note if you do want to do that a little bit more, I'm going to just use my eraser for these tiny little feathers over here. And maybe I'll exaggerate this just even more so that we have a good sense. 16. Birds | Retiming Frames: All right. I'm going to click on Done and we're going to come back to our animation and you can scrub through with the playhead to get a sense of what that animation is going to look like. I'm pretty happy with that. There is one thing that I do want to do is check the position of my first frame relative to my last frame. Because I'm going to be wanting to loop this movement of the bird flying. What I'm going to do is I'm long hold on this click duplicate. And I'm going to move this one to the end. I can just see if the position is correct. This looks all okay. But do you see how that looks a little bit more forward than this one? What I might do is I might change the position of this one so that it connects a little bit better. With that one, I want to make sure that nothing is selected here. I want to make my bounding box appear by tapping on the screen. I'm just going to move it just a little. That looks good on that end, and that looks much better on that end. You see, you can always move things around if you feel like they're not aligned very well. Also, if you have one of your frames, I'm actually pretty happy with the size of my different crow frames. But it has happened to me that I will draw a frame maybe larger, and then in the next frame, it's smaller. Again, when you play the animation you scrub through it kind of looks like the bird is like, suddenly scaling and size in, in a weird way. So remember that you can also come and modify the size of your drawing just by coming in and simply reducing the size here. Or making it a little bigger if you need. Now that I'm happy with how these connect, I'm going to delete this last frame which I duplicated. And I want to pull back my animations because now I have this gap. So it's not starting at the beginning anymore. What do I want to do to do that? I can just select this one and long hold the side of my frame. If I pull that, then I'm lengthening the length of my frame. That can be really useful to know, but how do I now get this to be the same size? And to drag all these together, we're going to come back to this timeline edit. I'm going to actually select all of these. I'm going to come to the one that is longer. And I want that side to be activated. Just the side if I tap another finger onto my screen and then I move it, then it'll shorten that one and bring everything along with it. Do you see how this is a really useful tool? If I did it without having my second finger down on the screen, it would just do this just like it would if I didn't have the timeline edit activated. I'm going to come here and make it all the same size. Actually, if we play this and we click on Play, you can see that it's super fast, like almost too fast. What I want to do is even though I'm in 24 frames per second, I want to give that illusion that I'm in 12 frames per second, or that hand drawn glitchy effect. What I want is I want to make each one of my frames a little longer. I'm going to actually operate in the same way that I did to bring them all back to the beginning. I'm going to tap on one of the sides. It can be any one. It can be even all the way at the end. But I'm just going to do one in the middle here for ease of use. And to show you, I want to make sure that I have the right side selected. Put one finger down on the screen, and I'm going to pull this to the right. That just made all my frames longer by one frame. But I actually want to do a little bit more. I might do three frames. I could even try four frames and see what that does. But let's try with three frames to see. Because we did so few frames, we only drew seven of them. That's why I'm trying to elongate each one of them a little bit more in order to make that movement seem a little bit longer, a little bit slower. So I'm going to zoom into this, and that already looks much better. Let's see what it looks like with four. I'm going to hold one of those on the side, finger on the screen, and lengthen by one frame. Let's play that. That works as well. Four frames works. Three frames works. At some point, it'll start becoming too slow. Let's do an example. Let me try doing like, I don't know, maybe that's six frames. I'm not sure. This is a little too slow. You don't get the illusion of a movement. You really get, oh, okay, this is something that is very like hand drawn and maybe they didn't time it right. So that's why it's important to play around with the length of your frames, and that'll have an incidence on the movement that you see. Okay, I'm going to come back to, I think this was three frames. You can actually see how many it is by counting here, 1234. That's four frames for each drawing that I made. Now we're going to be grouping again. I have these all selected as a reminder, if you somehow lost that and you're in this mode, I click on the two little rectangles. I can select the different frames that I just drew and I'm going to long hold on that and click group. Now if I click in this, I have all my different drawings within there. What I'm going to do now is I'm going to duplicate this group. I'm going to long hold it and just duplicate. And you'll see that it'll put another one of those right after the one that I just made, my animation. I don't remember what length I made, but it's probably longer. This is only 1 second long. I'm going to actually make this duplicated a bunch of times. I'm actually going to maybe even go over, just to be sure I have 12 seconds here. I want to make it go even longer than those 12 seconds. So I'm just going to keep duplicating. Keep duplicating. I made it even longer than my animation. You can see that with the black filter on the end here. I'm going to add one actually, just for good measure. So I'm going to duplicate this one even more so that it's even longer. So now I want to group all of these together so that we have one animation of our bird. That's why this image of the nested boxes is really useful because that's really what it is. It's like one of those Russian dolls with like little tiny boxes within boxes. I have each one of my frames, which is inside a group. I have those groups, which is one movement of the bird flapping, many of those all lined up, and I want all of those to be in one big box that I can move in the ways that I want. 17. Birds | Groups: Staggering & Differentiating: Let's just play back this animation. So we can see really our bird flying in the full length of our animation. Of course, you can always refine your animations each time that you do them. And you could really take the time to make it absolutely perfect. But I also like that kind of imperfection in the ways that they connect, so that it gives that very hand drawn effect. Now's the fun part, because yes, we animated one bird earlier, we animated another. But I want to show you here how the groups can be an incredible tool to play with in order to animate different things. I'm going to just go ahead and take this specific bird that we drew, and I'm going to duplicate this group. So I'm going to come and move it underneath this one. I'm going to do that one more time over here. What I'm actually going to do is I'm going to start placing them, not exactly in the same spot. I don't want them to begin in the same spot. I want them all to start at the same time. But they're going to be at different places of the animation itself. But obviously they're all glued together here in the middle of my stage. I'm going to try to differentiate them in order to gain a little bit more clarity. This second one, I'm going to move it over here. Maybe I'll make it a tiny bit smaller as well. Then this third one, maybe I'll put it over here and I'll also make it a little bit smaller. I can already start to hit play just to see what that looks like. You can see that you're getting a sense of how you can use these groups in order to make a fun little group of birds. I do find that they're a little bit too close together, especially these two. I'm going to take this one, the top one, and I'm going to maybe put it up here. I just want to find a spacing that I enjoy. I think that's not too bad. I just want you to play around with that until you find a configuration that you like. I'm really looking also at how they are flying. I don't want there to be too much overlap or them to have too many of the same movements at the same time. I just so happened to get it the first time around, but in previous iterations I had to finagle them and just move them maybe just by one frame or 1 microsecond or whatever in order to get that nice shifting of the different flying patterns. All right, so now I have my three birds that are flying around in a little group together but they feel a little bit static. I'm going to come and add a little bit of movement within this. I'm going to come and hit the performing. I'm going to just move this one just very gently, up and down, nothing too extreme. I want to still keep it at the same spot that it is, but just moving it a little bit closer or further away from its companions. I might do that also with this one in the back, so that there's another little movement, a little bit more variation. Okay, if I play that back, you can see that that just gives a little bit more sense of movement and life to these. I'll do it with the last one. Finally, I'm going to come and group these three birds together. I'm going to select them long hold group, all three of these birds are all together now. 18. Birds | Subtle Scaling & Parallax Animation: Now that we have our group of three birds moving organically with each other, we're going to add a little bit more movement, by the way. Little caveat. I have a tendency to call these crows instead of birds just because I think they're black. Even though the shape of the head doesn't look like a crow. Exactly. For some reason it makes me think of that. We're also doing a group of birds, which obviously you have this close association between groups of black birds and murders of crows. If I say crows instead of birds, bear with me. Our birds are going to be moving across the screen since our frame by frame animation was really this profile view. But rather than keeping it exactly the same size the whole way through, I think it would be interesting to add a little bit of depth to that. Even though our birds are from the profile, we can add a little bit of scaling so that it looks like they're moving away from us or coming towards us. Since we are in a profile, we don't want this movement to be too exaggerated because otherwise it'll destroy the illusion of realism. We're going to add a little bit of scaling, but just a touch, I'm going to make it look like my birds are moving away from the camera. But you can, if you choose, make them look like they're coming towards the camera. I want to make sure that I have performing active. We're going to make sure that we are on the track with our birds. The bounding box appears. Remember we have these 12 seconds. I really want to make this movement very, very subtle. I'm going to come to the corner here and immediately have that little, very tiny scaling happening. Let me play that again, so that I can see the difference in the scaling. You can also maybe notice that in the beginning, my movement was a little faster. And then as the crow started becoming smaller, I slowed down that scaling a little bit. That's because things that are further away move less fast than things that are closer to us. You can also use that in your animation, whether it's something that's coming towards you or further away is to keep in mind that principle of parallax animation. We did this scaling so that it's as though the camera is a little bit more fixed and you're seeing the birds move across. But I did want you to know that you could, of course, keep the crows even in that single position without any scaling, and instead have a landscape move in the background so as to evoke that movement as well. There are different ways that you can do this, but we're going to make the birds move across our screen. I want to deactivate performing. I want to stay a little bit further away from my bounding box so it doesn't scale, it doesn't get confused with scale. I just want to move them backstage. You can see I'm moving them down on this lower third of my stage, because since mine are going to be moving away from the camera, I thought it would be fun to add a little bit of perspective. I'm going to make the birds start off closer to me in the lower half of the frame and have them end at the top right of the frame as though they were going a little bit further. It's more similar to a stereotypical landscape with that depth perspective. Now I'm going to bring my playhead back to the beginning. We're going to start performing. I'm going to take my time. We still have these 12 seconds, so I don't want to rush too much, but if you did want to have a faster movement, you could of course, come and shorten the length of your animation by going into the settings that is behind the name of your animation. I don't like how I sped up right at the end. I'm just going to move some of these frames down and see if that makes it a little better. The speeding up happens over here. I'm just going to move just a little bit. I can of course zoom in and then just look at that little part. That's a little better. I'm still going to move this a little bit further. That's much better. I'm happy with that. We're going to come and duplicate this entire group of three birds. Of course, you can see that it's placed right behind it. I'm going to come and put it on top, but I'm going to put it at a different beginning, starting point than the other one. So that we get a slightly different moment of the animation. For that, I can play this back to just see if that works. That works pretty well. But I'm going to try and move this a little bit further out of the way, see if that makes a little bit more difference. Yeah, I think that's a little bit better. They're a little bit more separate even though they become a tighter group at the end there. 19. Birds | Final Touches, Renaming, & Blurry Pixels: One final thing. We're going to come in and differentiate one of these birds as compared to the group. I'm going to come into this top group. I'm going to open it up. I'm going to go a little bit further down into the animation to see which bird I might pick. I think this one is a good one to create that differentiation. What I'm going to do is I'm going to start a little bit further, like maybe 3.5 almost 4 seconds. And we're going to do another performing. But this time I'm going to have this bird kind of move away from the group before coming back into it, just to add a little bit more interest. All right, let's play that back. I'm just realizing that there's still a little end of the bird left over here. So I might actually move this bird out of the way just before the animation ends. Okay, let's pinch back and look at the entirety of this animation. That's much better. I really like the movement of the one that's coming apart, coming away. To finish this off, I want to make this group of three birds, a slightly different size as my initial group of three birds. Just to differentiate them a little bit more, I'm just going to come and scale that entire group just a little and you can see how much of a difference that creates. What I like about this is that it really shows you the power of grouping and performing and key framing as well. And how using all three of those can be an incredible tool to create animations that would be very difficult to do, uniquely frame by frame. One last note is I want to show you how you can rename your files and you can simply long hold on the file, click Rename, and I'm going to write crows flying. I do want to show you a few other iterations that I did so that you can see what happens. Let me show you this one where instead of having the birds move away from me, I've had them move towards me. You'll see that the drawings are a little bit more simplified. What you'll also notice, and I left this frame like this, so you could see it, is that the marks that I made, they get a little blurry when I'm zooming in. When the scale is really coming towards me, you can see that blurriness. And that's because of the fact that procreate dreams, it can work at resolutions that are way higher than procreate can. When you're drawing, the level of pixels are going to be corresponding to the level at which you drew them. This is really important to know. For example, if I'm drawing something by having my canvas super zoomed out and I draw something. Then when I come back to my regular size canvas, I might have that blurriness If I want to make sure that I have my edges crisp. I want to draw at the level that I'm going to be looking at the animation. But of course, if you're making the animation a little bit smaller, if you're scaling smaller, then you don't have that problem. However, this can actually be a very useful tool in my first iteration of these birds flying, which uses the same principles that I just taught you. I use this blurriness to my advantage. Let me show you, In this animation, you can see the birds are moving from far away towards the camera. As they come towards the camera, you see that blurriness happen. But that actually mimics what happens when you're using specific lenses and your focal point is at a different point than the subject that's moving closer to you. You can use this to your advantage within your animations. In any case, it's a very important feature to understand. 20. Boundless Possibilities: Before I share with you some parting words about this process that we did and what I hope you'll take away for the future. I did want to show you a few different ways that I've used procreate dreams in order to animate my own illustrations. In this class, obviously we were doing simpler versions of these things so that you could really acquire the tool in itself. But I just want to show you that it doesn't stop there. And that you can bring in your own style, your own animation style, your own illustration style to create the kinds of micro stories or fun little animations that you would like to see. You've seen, of course, my Snowy Window, which was one variation of a parallax illustration, but there are many more you can use performing in order to animate only a single element made like this one, which is a little bit eerie, a little bit darker, but which to me felt very personal and very true. You can use it to animate little stories that are exciting to you, that capture your animation or make you laugh. You can bring a single element into a more complex illustration and see what it is that you can add to this illustration. In order to make it a little bit more interesting to watch, you can use rotate and performing in order to inject just the slightest bit of movement and wind to a landscape or have a leaf blowing in the wind on a city street. You can practice simple principles of animation by creating illustrations with colors and textures that make it more exciting for you to learn it. These animations can be the beginnings of stories, or the entire story in itself, and I hope that you've gotten a sense of that as we built these projects together. Animation is a really exciting endeavor to pursue, and the possibilities are boundless. So I hope you take some time to continue to explore how to bring movement and life into your drawings. 21. The Power of Art & Final Thoughts: First off, can I say huge? Congratulations on getting to the end of the class. I know that it was a pretty big class. We delved into a lot of different topics, a lot of different projects. And I always like to remind you that it's important to celebrate each one of those milestones. Even if you just did one project, that is not to be taken for granted. And each time that you show up in front of your sketchbook or in front of procreate or procreate dreams, each time that you take the time for yourself to embark and continue discovering your artistic journey, that's a win. So please celebrate yourself and thank you for trusting me as your guide today, I hope that you have a better understanding of the app itself and about all the powerful features that it allows. And maybe it'll give you ideas for your own animations. And that's actually something that I'd like you to take away and start thinking about right away. Yes, this class is ending, but I don't want this class to be the end of something. I want it to be the beginning of something. Can you maybe grab a little notebook and start jotting down ideas of animations that you might want to explore? You don't need to know in advance how you're going to do them, but just start collecting different material, different inspiration, and take that time to discover what it is that lights you up creatively. If you remember at the beginning of the class, I said that we were explorers of the visual. And now that you have done some animation, you are also a movement investigator. Become curious about the things around you and how they move. Notice the speed. Notice how things will slow down or speed up before they stop moving. Notice the subtleties of the ways in which they move and maybe what that does to the shape of the thing that you're looking at. It's so fun to start cultivating this deep presence to the world around us. Whether that's for illustration purposes or for animation purposes. I really hope that that's something that you'll start becoming more excited about. About deepening this relationship to the world around you. To the things that you encounter on a day to day basis without ever having realized it before. That's the cool thing. So much of our life is taken for granted. We're just used to seeing things move. We're used to seeing things change, color change, light. And when we take a little moment, step back and be like, wow, that color shift is actually really interesting. Or whoa. I didn't realize that when this leaf moves, its shape changes. Those are such magical moments. I don't know how else to explain it. But for me, it's enriched my life in a way that I never thought possible. And that I never even knew was the case when I started art. Even before I was, you know, doing art at the level or at the intensity that I do now. I knew that I loved art because it gave me this space to reflect and to dream and to imagine. But I didn't understand how much it can bring to your life, how much it can enrich your experience of life. I realize that this seems like very big and dramatic, but it's not. That's what it was for me, that's what it is for me. And so, and you can probably tell I'm getting emotional about it because that's the power of art. Art is this incredible medium that not only welcomes all the parts of ourselves. Not only does it give us a space to relax, unwind, to process different emotions, To express things that are maybe inexpressible through words. To challenge ourselves to get better. It has all these incredible components to it, but on top of that, it also helps us connect to the world around us in ways that are richer and more fulfilling. I hope you enjoyed the projects that we did today. I would love to see them if you feel like sharing in the project section and if you'd like to use a hashtag, if you're sharing on Instagram, please use the hashtag, Procreate Dreams with Marine Oil and please also leave comments to your fellow creatives. Because this is how we support ourselves on this incredible journey that art and animation allows us. I also hope that you will fail both miserably and beautifully. Because when you fail miserably, it means that you exploded out of your comfort zone, which is such an incredible thing to be proud of. So please fail miserably and beautifully, and take all those learnings from your terrible animations, your terrible drawings to continue your journey onwards. If you enjoyed the class, it would mean the world to me if you left a review or shared it with a friend. And if you'd like to continue connecting, you can of course click the Follow button on my profile so you can see when my next class is out, Follow me on Instagram where I do share whenever it is that I do publish in another class on Patrion where I have a lovely little community of people and where we get together every month for live drawing sessions and where I also share sketchbook tours and other art logs. Also, please don't hesitate to let me know in the discussion section whether you have certain things in animation that you might like to learn in the future. Thank you so much for joining in today. I can't wait to see what you make and see soon.