Procreate Dreams: How to Animate a Short Film

1. Procreate Dreams: How to Animate a Short Film: If you've always wanted to learn how to create your own animations, but you thought that the process was too long and too complex. Well, this class will show you not only how Procreate Dreams has completely changed the way animation can be done, but it also allows you the means and the tools to do anything animation related in one app. Hi, my name is Shevorne. I'm an artist and an animator. I have over 15 years experience working in the animation industry. And in this class, I'm going to teach you how to use procreate dreams to fully bring your ideas to life through the power of animation. I'm excited to share my professional experience with you, to share tips and tricks that I've learned in the industry. But most of all, to show you how you can do all of your animation inside one powerful app. This app breaks new ground by making hugely complex processes, incredibly simple, straightforward, and even intuitive. It's built entirely with you in mind. It puts animation in your hands. And really this is the first time that an animation software offers easy access to the entire production process. In this class, I've designed a project that will not only teach you all of the features and tools of procreate dreams, but it's one that emulates the professional production pipeline from start to finish. We're going to start out with an idea concept, and we're going to storyboard that idea. We're going to turn that storyboard into an animatic. From there, we're going to design backgrounds and characters. We'll then move into animation. And then finally, we'll composite all of our pieces of the puzzle together and make a fully finished animated sequence. Throughout this process, you're going to learn the key features of procreate dreams. You'll learn all about the interface, the layout, the stage, and timeline. I'll also show you the gestures that you need to use to navigate around this interface while also speeding up your workflow. From there, you'll learn the three main ways of animating in procreate dreams. You're going to learn all about Flip Book, where you get to animate frame by frame as well as using the onion skin feature. You'll also learn how to animate with key frames in the timeline. This will give you the capability to animate looping cycles with ease. Finally, we'll animate with the performing feature in Procreate Dreams. A feature that literally records any action that you perform on the stage. Along the way, you'll learn how to draw and paint in Procreate dreams, you'll learn all about key animation principles such as timing and spacing, squash and stretch. And as well as that, you will learn how to build out an animation project according to a blueprint that you can then apply to any project at all, from a short sequence to a fully animated film. So I hope you're ready to see your animation dreams Come to life. And to start exploring this app with me today, grab your ipad and meet me in the next lesson. 2. Your Class Project and Your Class Challenge: In this lesson, I'm going to explain to you your class project and your class challenge. For this class, we're focusing on a simple animation in an easy style that we can layer and build up in order to create a more fuller final piece. With that in mind, I'm going to stick to two or three really simple cycles. That will, again, the key to animation is being able to re, use assets or pieces of animation to help you build out a big project. Rather than having to do everything over and over again. For your class project. I want you to complete one or two simple cycles following my demos and then composite them together with a background into one final file using a couple of different shots and camera angles. Your final film could have music and sound effects as well, and I'm going to show you exactly how to do that. Now, this looks really super simple, but there's actually a lot of complex parts to this animation. We've got a storyboard and an animatic going on. We've got a background that we'll actually paint from scratch over and procreate. Plus we've got at least three animation cycles that we can use. So if you can follow my process, then that will be amazing and you'll end up with a short movie clip like this. But you certainly don't have to have all of this in your project. Just a couple of shots with a background and a character animated will be fantastic. But part of the goal of this class is not only to teach you to build an animated scene like this, but it's also to give you the tools and the processes that you can use to create your own animations going forwards, even to animate an entire short film. So what I've done is I've built out the class project to emulate a proper professional production pipeline. Starting from the storyboard and working progressively through to the final phase of compositing and adding sound effects in music. Okay, so that's your class project. Now, I want to offer you a class challenge. This is something I haven't done before, but I thought it would be a really good opportunity to do it in this class. I want you to add something new or something different onto the class project. With that in mind, the challenge is I want you to add a scarf onto the character of the polar bear. Meaning that you'll need to animate that scarf blowing behind them in the skate cycle. Plus I'd also like to see if you can add one more camera angle into the short. That is a camera angle that's different to the ones that we've storyboarded. It could be a close up of the polar bear as he skates through. It could be a close up of his feet skating along. I'm totally leaving it up to you. But just a short extra shot in there I think will be really interesting to see. I think this challenge will give you a great opportunity to take this project one step further and to get you to think creatively like an animator. So up next, in the next lesson, let's take a quick tour of procreate dreams and get familiar with the software before we dive into the project. 3. Taking a Tour of Procreate Dreams: So in the next few lessons, I'm going to walk you through the basics of procreate dreams and show you the main features that you'll need to know in order to get started. If you really have a good understanding of the interface and you know how to use the gestures, you know how to use the timeline and the tools. Then you can skip ahead and go straight to the storyboard lesson. What I'm going to explain now is how to get started, how to open up a document, how to adjust the properties, how to use the drawing and painting tools, How to navigate your tracks and your content within those tracks, and how to use the gestures. When you first open up procreate dreams, you land in the theater. This is where you can access all of your files. It's also where you can delete files. You can group them together, duplicate them, or share them. I'm just going to go ahead start a new file by hitting the plus button right away. You can choose different formats if you wanted to. You could scroll through some of the templates, but I usually just opt for the wide screen by default. But I just want to point out, you can also tap this button here to set your project resolution to either HD or four K. For this class, let's keep it on HD because I think that's plenty big enough for our purposes. Then I'll go ahead click empty, and straight away you're into the animation space. This space is separated into the stage at the top and the timeline at the bottom. The stage is where you draw everything, and the timeline is where you animate those drawings. If I click on this icon here, I'll access Drawing Mode, and you'll see that the square on the stage, this is the stage. In other words, it's the frame of your movie, and the space around it is the backstage. And this is where you can have assets, or characters, or elements, and have them animate on and off, Just like in procreate in drawing mode, you've got access to all your colors up here, you've got different brush sets over here. You've got the smudge tool and the eraser tool. You also have layers in procreate dreams, which is really nice. And I'll be using my layers a lot during the lessons in this class. But just to quickly show you, if I add a new layer above my drawing, if I can then tap and hold on that layer, drag it underneath, and then maybe add a different color underneath that, that allows for us to be able to build up more complexity in our drawings. And we use that drawing then as a single asset to animate. If you click off of the draw button, then you're back into the timeline. Now there are a few buttons here that are very important. The theater icon will bring you back out to your theater. Don't worry about having to save your files. Procreate Dreams automatically saves as you work. If you click on that and go back to the theater, you can easily jump back in exactly where you were. If you tap on the movie title of your document. Here's where you can pull up the properties and set different properties for your stage or timeline and things like that. Make sure that your document is set to 24 frames per second. The only thing you might want to change is the duration of your animation. You just need to click on the time code there and you can choose whatever duration you want. The only other thing that I changed in my document to mention is that I toggled off enabled painting with finger and that just means that my file is only going to recognize painting with the apple pencil. I found that a lot easier to work with in case my hand touches the screen, it's not going to create a mark. If you click on the time code, there are a couple of options here that you can access. One is you can change the color of your stage, which becomes very useful when you're animating, particularly with lines. And you can also access onion skin. Now, onion skin is a tool that's really important for animators. And we'll be using this a lot throughout the lessons in this class. But just as you know, that's where you can find it on that time code over there. On the time line itself, you will have all of your content and your tracks. The content is where you add key frames so that you can move your drawings that are on the stage when you're working with content on the timeline. You can drag it around. If you click on this time line edit button, this is where you can grab multiple content and tracks and group them together, allowing you to add further animation on top of your groups. Once we start animating our project, all of these tools and these functions will become very clear. And you'll learn much more about them in the application and the ing of each of them. Really, this becomes very intuitive very quickly. Speaking of working intuitively, in the next lesson, I'm going to show you the gestures, appropriate dreams. When you're ready, join me there. 4. The Gestures in Procreate Dreams: When they say that Procreate dreams puts animation in your hands, that's more than just a description. This app was built and designed for touch. The intuitive nature of the gestures is one of its most powerful features. In this essen, I'm going to explain all of those gestures so that you know how to work with them. The pan pan is using two fingers to tap and hold, and you can pan the stage. Or you can pan along your time line to zoom, you can to zoom in. And you can pinch on the timeline to zoom in as well. Now to undo, you can just tap two fingers, and that will undo the previous action. Or you can use three fingers to redo. You can redo the action that you just undid. All right. Timeline gestures use three fingers and you can scroll up to make your timeline bigger so you can see your content more clearly. Or you can use three fingers to scroll down and collapse all of your content tracks if you wanted to get a bird's eye view of your timeline. You can also use three fingers horizontally to make your time line to zoom into a specific time on your timeline. Or to zoom out and get, as I said, the whole timeline visible. Lastly, on the stage, you can use your fingers to rotate, especially this is very useful if you're in draw mode. You can really turn and angle your canvas and get the exact angle that you want for drawing. Now if you were watching your animation and you wanted to see it play out fully, really nice thing to do is to use four fingers and tap on the screen to bring it into full screen. Once you're in full screen mode, if you tap the play button is down at the bottom so you can hit that play or you can use your finger to scrub through. And then when you want to get out of time line or out of full screen mode, use four fingers again. Tap on the screen, and you're back in. You're back in there, okay. Those are the main gestures. Now if you wanted to explore this a lot further, basically, I would say just dive in, start experimenting, and get used to this way of very intuitively and gesturally working your way around the workspace. You can also check out Procreates Help. Center at Help.procreate.com There's a fantastic handbook there that goes through the entire interface, all of the gestures and the tools. Like I said, as we move forward in this project, we're going to be learning all of these hands on. We'll get to know them very well when you're ready. I'll see you in the next lesson. 5. Creating a Storyboard: In this lesson, we're starting pre production. We've got our concept. My concept is this polar bear and penguin ice skating. So what I'm going to do is start to storyboard out the frames or the panels that I have in my head. I'm not going to make it too complicated, but I do want to, before I do anything else, just jot down those visual ideas. Jumping into procreate dreams. The first thing I'm going to do is make a new document. The frames per second is set at 24 for the duration. I'm going to change this up and go with something like 24 seconds just to make it long enough. Okay, I'm going to tap on draw mode and I'll choose a color and a simple sketching brush, just to start out. Now I know that for my first shot in the sequence, I want to have a nice wide opening shot, just so that I can establish the scene and establish where we are. I want to be able to show the landscape basically, and let the audience know where exactly all this action is taking place. I'm giving myself as much space as I can. I've got mountains in the background and also some rocks and things in the foreground. This foreground is going to really give us that depth and that sense of space. You'll see that as soon as I've made a drawing on the stage that has created a frame down in the timeline, that's essentially the frame that's going to represent my first camera shot, basically. Then to do the second shot, I'm just going to simply come down to the time line. Then I'm going to copy that first frame by tapping and holding on that frame. Choose copy, and then I'll paste it right beside it. Now I've got two frames with essentially the same drawing, but I'm going to change up this drawing slightly. In this frame, I'm going to have the polar bear, so this is where the character skates on screen and we get our first glimpse of him in this shot. Okay, great. I'm going to continue in the same way for my third shot though. I'm now going to change it up slightly and this is the shot where I want the camera to start panning along beside the polar bear as he skates. I'm just going to go ahead in the timeline and start drawing again. And you'll see that the onion skin shows me exactly what my previous shot was. I'm more or less copying this, redrawing it, because I want to indicate on the storyboard that this is going to be the camera pan, the polar bear is in the middle. And we're going to animate this guy skating on the spot if you like. So we're going to do a skate cycle where he's on the spot. And what's going to happen is, is that the background will be panning along and it'll give the impression or it'll give the effect that we're moving with him. Then I'll go ahead to the next frame. Start drawing again, and that frame is created in the timeline. And this is where I want the character of the penguin to be introduced. The penguin is going to be sitting on one of these rocks. As the rocks pan along in front of the camera, he will come into view and we'll see him looking at this podo bear skating past. Now directly after that, the most obvious thing to do is to actually show the reaction shot of the Penguin. Now what I'm going to do is just in draw mode, you can see there's a little handle at the top of the lower half of the screen. I'm going to pull that up and go into flip book. From here I can just do my close up drawing. I'm going to keep a rock here in the foreground and draw the character of the penguin sitting on the rock. We want to get the penguin's face and see him doing like a double take or very surprised at what he's actually looking at out there on the ice. The next shot after, after the camera pan is going to be a close up of the Penguin. Okay, so that's my little Penguin. And he's like looking on, in amazement at what's happening. If I come out of flip book, you can see that's the next frame. Let's go ahead in the timeline and continue drawing in this frame. What's going to happen or what I want to happen in the animation, is I want the penguin to jump off the rock and go off onto the ice and join the polar bear. In this shot, he's going to be jumping up. Then finally my last shot is going to be the Penguin joining the Polar Bear on the ice. For that shot, or at least for the storyboard. I just need to actually go back and copy this drawing right here because it's the exact, pretty much, nearly the same background. I'm just going to erase out the parts that I don't want of that frame. There you go. Now I can go back to flip book a bit closer and draw my two characters in this last final shot. Skating off together. That's essentially my entire storyboard with this animated sequence. Really simple, really easy. I think the way that it's crafted is going to make life very easy for us to animate. Because it's essentially one scene, one background, but there's a nice tempo of different shots. The very last thing that I want to do before moving on is actually time out the storyboard. Because this is not going to be any use to us. It's nice to get the ideas down, but we really do need to know how long each of these shots are in terms of time, so that we can plan our animation. Right now, each of these panels, or each of the frames in the timeline is just one frame, which is essentially one 24th of a second. So I'm going to hit time line edit. I'm going to drag through all of these. If you double tap, you can zoom in really, really close. You can see there every frame is just one frame. I'm going to tap and hold on the edge of my first frame, then I'm going to put my finger down onto the track and just drag that first frame out. When I do that, every other frame gets dragged out to the exact same time. Now I've got a little bit more space within each of these panels. Okay, that's great. But now I'm going to start to think about each shot in terms of how many seconds I want it. For example, I think I'd like my first panel here to be maybe a second long, so I can drag that out by simply tapping on that single frame. Make sure you don't select everything, just tap the edge of that single frame, hold down with your other finger and drag it out. That's great. My second shot where the poly war comes in could probably be about the same length. I'll just do the same again. Tap on the edge there, drag it out maybe to the three second mark for the pan. I definitely want the pan to last for a few seconds. I'll zoom in. This is my second half of that camera pan, and I'm going to drag that one out to round about there. Then we see the Penguin. Let's give that maybe a second and then he jumps off. That could probably be about 2 seconds, let's say. Then the final shot, we definitely want to read the final shot. We want to be able to give that a good bit of time, maybe let's make that something like 4 seconds. But either way, this is all quite a subjective process. It really is up to you if you want to have this be very fast paced and snappy, or if you want to maybe give it a bit more time and space. But if I play it back now, polar bear comes in, camera pans along, penguin reacts, jumps down, Penguin and polar bear skate off. I think that timing feels very nice to me, It feels very good. I'm happy with that. I might make some minor tweaks here and there, maybe that shot needs to be a tiny bit longer. But overall, I think that's great. I'm happy with that. I'm going to move on to the next phase of the project. 6. Painting the Backgrounds: In this lesson, I'm going to paint up the background for the animation. Now I'm going to do this in procreate and then I'm going to import the layers of the painting over to Procreate Dreams. Because I want you to see that process as well. It's really nice the way the two apps complement each other and it's seamless to integrate. Now, you don't have to create a background from scratch. In this class, you're more than welcome to use my painting and simply focus on animating your characters. That's perfectly fine. If you like. I'll leave the file for you to download in the Projects and Resources tab. But I did want to include this as part of the class so that you get to know and understand the full process altogether. I'm over inmprocreate what I'm going to do, I've started with a very wide canvas because I know that in my mind I'm going to need extra elements at the sides to allow for camera moves when I'm doing the long pan. But I'm just laying down some lines to give me an idea of my framing. For example, these lines here indicate my main frame or my main stage. The way I approach background design for animation is very simple. Just start out with as rough a drawing as you like. Really just this is about sketching your ideas out in a thumbnail fashion. For me, I know in this animation, I want to have a nice wide scene of the landscape. In other words, I want to have space where the characters are going to skate in the center of the shot. That basically means sketching out far away hills or mountains and sketching out some rocks and things in the foreground. Now as I go, I'm going to be naming my layers as well. That's really important for later on down the road because when you start to import your layers into procreate dreams, you want to be able to know exactly what layers you're dealing with. My sketch is really as simple as that. Now I'm going to start painting it and adding color for that process. Again, start simple and work in detail slowly. Just put down areas of color. I'm going to put down some color for the ice and another layer for the, putting down some color for the sky. Now with that in place, you can then start to build up textures and build shading and values and all of that to give more detail to your background. I'm just using the selection tool and choosing rectangle and drawing out a box really and then filling that rectangle with color. Remember that the whole idea for this background and for backgrounds in general in animation is that you want to stay simple and clear. Background art for animation is not like a detailed illustration. It's a backdrop to the action, to the animation that's taking place. If background painting is not your strong suit, it's fine to go with what is most simple. You don't have to overthink it or do very complex illustration here. We just want something that is going to be a nice backdrop. I'm painting the sky and just choosing texture brushes to build up some interesting tones and colors and blending that in along the ice. I'm also going to just add some texture, colors and tones. It's very experimental. I'm really working things out as I go. Sometimes when you're creating a painting without reference material like I'm doing here, it can take a while to find the right approach in your painting. I'm just experimenting with brushes. I'm seeing what works and just working through it like that. You don't have to have a very specific plan in mind and you can change things up if you need to. The most important thing that I'm trying to keep at top of mind is that I want to create a sense of depth and space in the painting. Something like the mountains in the background. I want to keep them very vague. Don't give them too much detail, because you want to give the impression that they're really far away. Less detail the better. Just all I'm focusing on is giving it a little bit of shadow and a little bit of highlight to that local color or base color that I've chosen. That's all it needs really to give the impression of far away mountains. To draw the rocks in the foreground. I'm going to use the selection tool. And draw it shapes and then just add a flat color. And then again go over it with texture brushes to build up a nice, interesting surface area. I know I want rocks in the foreground, but I also want rocks that are going to be used in the camera pan. This is something important to think about when it comes to planning out your animation. I know that I want the camera to move along. What I'm doing here is making two layers of rocks. That way I have enough rocks to be able to make that camera pan work. Finally, in the background, I'll give a vague impression of a tree line simply to add interest and to add contrast into the composition. And to do that, I'm just using a rough brush, making some dark marks like that, and then adding a little bit of white to give the impression of snow. I think this is coming together. I love the composition here and I think this is going to give me exactly what I need for the animation that I have in mind. It's going to give me that sense of space. And it's also going to give me the opportunity to do that camera pan because I've made this shot wide enough. I've added in enough background elements. As I said before, the beauty of the sequence that we'll be animating in this class is that the way it's boarded out and the way it's planned so far we can simply re, use this one background for all of the shots within the project. That's amazing. In the next lesson, I'll show you how to add this file into Procreate Dreams. 7. Adding Background Art to the Timeline: Now we're going to add the background art to the timeline. And we're going to match it up with the storyboard panels and add our camera moves. What I'm going to do first in Procreate Dreams is select everything on my timeline with the Timeline Edit tool. And I'm going to convert this to a group. That way all of my story war panels are in one group. That means that I can now click the playhead on this group. And I can choose Filter And apply an opacity filter to open up the two apps at the same time. Look for these three dots at the top of the screen. There they are, Choose split few, and pull up procreate. Then I'm going to start to drag the layers of my background in one by one. It's important then just to import all of the layers in the right order. I want the sky to be at the very bottom. Then I'm going to move up through the layers that way so that at the very top of the layers inside approcreate dreams, the very top layer is the layer with the rocks, they're all in my procreate dreams document. What I'll do now is just tidy up the layers a little bit, then group everything together into one group. And drag it over to underneath the storyboard, because I want to be able to see my storyboard on top of the background. The background comes in a lot bigger than the stage. What I'll do is just scale it down. And you can at this point, if you want to arrange the layers a little bit, you can. Okay. I've matched my background up to scene one and that's my establishing shot with the polar bear skating in shot. The next scene over or the next shot really is the pan. What I do is I find a cut in the storyboard, which is right there. Then you can tap and hold on the group and duplicate it. Now I've got the background for my second shot, but this one is going to be moving, it's going to be my pan. I'm going to start with the mountains. I will turn off the storyboard group by just checking off that little tick on the group itself with the mountains track selected, drag the artwork over. Then come down to the start of the track and click on Moving Scale. And then go up to the end of the track. And tap it again. And move the mountains over slightly. I don't know if you notice there's also a slight tempo to the movement. It starts slow, speeds up, and it ends slow. What I want is a nice constant, even speed. Click on the keyframe track in between your two keyframes that you've just created. And click Set all easings to linear that one layer done. We're going to now repeat that process for the foreground elements, for the little bit of snow that I've got, and for the rocks on this piece of snow. I'm just going to put a moving scale and slide that over on the rocks. I need to animate these rocks coming in from off screen. I've got layers on both of these tracks. I'm going to add key frames and go to the end. Move them along slightly and make sure that the second layer or the second layer of rocks gets moved and comes into view fully because this is the rock where the penguin character will be sitting. All right, that is our pan done and it's looking pretty good. It's very nice, smooth and even motion. Okay, the next shot that we have is this close up. For this a shot in animation, you don't actually need a background in animation terms. This is called a color card because it's a close up. You can get away with just having a color behind the character. What I'll do is just literally grab the sky from my previous copy pasted here and scale it down so it fits. Then I'm going to go back over and grab that rock as well and paste that on a track above The sky. Looks good, but what I think I might do is quickly jump into mode. I will pull up my timeline or pull up my flip book just to get full screen. And I just want to finish off painting some color along the bottom just to fill it out. There we go. So you can see how one of the mindsets, if you like, of an animator, is to think about how you can re use elements or re, use parts of your project over again instead of redoing things all the time. Okay, for the last shot, again, I'll just copy the background from the first opening scene pasted in here. That is it. We've got all of our shots composited, matching up our storyboard. Exactly. We've even got our animated camera pan in this document. All right, in the next lesson, we'll start to animate our characters. 8. Polar Bear Rough Animation: So in this session, we're going to start our first animation cycle. So the way I approach it is I like to work out my animation in a separate file so that I don't mess up my master file that has my storyboard and my background already worked out in it. So I'm going to animate my proto bear in a separate file and then bring that in to, you know, the final animation file for my first animation is a very simple skate cycle. What we're going to do is first of all, draw very, very rough to work out the main poses of the cycle. Then we're going to go back and add in the in between that we need in order to flesh out the action or the motion. Then finally, we'll do a clean up pass where we tidy up the linework and we add color. This first pose is going to be the first key pose, really, of the podo bear standing on one leg. I'm just drawing very, very rough this pose where he's standing with his legs straight back out. And that's my main key pose. Now that I have that drawing, what I'm going to do is the same pose for the other leg. So I'm going to add a new frame and I'm going to redraw the exact same pose, but this time I'm going to switch legs and remember that this is going to be a cycle, meaning that we're going to have the animation loop on looping. So he's going to be skating on the spot and that'll give us a lot of flexibility to move the actual animation around and it will look like he's skating past. Okay, now I've got two main poses, but there's also a third main pose in a cycle like this. And that is the middle pose where both of his legs are on the ice and he's crouched down in essentially a squashed pose. He comes down and then he skates it out again onto the other leg. I'm going to go back to my first drawing. I'm going to click this Add button. And I'm going to add a new frame in between here. Because I have onion skin turned on, I can see exactly where I'm going to draw and how I need to draw that crouched pose. One really good tip is to make sure that all of the parts of your drawing are following arcs. Sometimes I draw an arc like this just to help guide me to know where things should be or what path they're traveling on between one pose and another. And then I simply erase that guideline out afterwards. Okay, so that's our third pose. This is three essential key poses that describe this action on the skating action, if you like. Now, all I need to do is add a few more drawings in. I want to add in some in between between each of these main poses. And those in betweens are going to smooth out the action and make it look a lot more fluid and a lot more flowing. I'm going to go back to my first drawing. I want two in between here. Between the first drawing and the crouched middle drawing. Now for this leg, I'm going to draw him. He's coming into this crouched pose. I want his leg to be dragging downwards a little bit from that position into the crouched pose. Something like that. Here's where in between, it's really useful to use onion skin. That's great. Okay, now I'm going to do one more. So that looks like he's slowing down as he comes in and his back leg will be coming down like this. What I'm doing is I'm trying to make, I'm drawing it in between what I see is the purple drawing, which is the previous, and the yellow drawing which is the subsequent frame. Those are my guides. I in between literally in between all of those lines. Now I've got my main pose. I've got two in between. I've got this crouched down pose, and I've got my third key pose. I just need to add two more drawings between the crouched down pose and this last key pose, so that it's the same on either side of this middle crouched pose. Okay, those are all my drawings and that's pretty good, simple enough. But I'm going to need to draw the second leg swing if you like. Basically, it's the same process for him skating on back onto that other leg. What I'll do is I'll just copy this crouch pose because this is definitely going to be the exact same drawing. It's not going to change when he goes from one leg to the other. I'm going to paste it here in the timeline. This will give me the drawing that I need to reference in order to make my in betweens on this side. Okay, so I just need to do my last two in betweens, but I need to reference the first frame because remember this is a cycle. We want the animation to wind up back on that first frame so that it loops continuously. So just copy that first frame over and now you know exactly where your in betweens need to go between the crouch down and that final frame. Now the last step is that I'm going to select all of my drawings using the timeline edit tool. And then I'm going to double tap to get right down to see where you can see everything frame by frame. Because I want each of my drawings to be at least two frames in length. Simply to start off with, I want each drawing to be on two frames. I'm going to grab, tap, and hold on the edge of this first frame and drag it out. All right? So that's okay. Okay. This standing pose here is going to be held because this is obviously where he's skating along nice and freely, and his leg is back like that. Just tap and hold on the edge of that and drag it out should be long enough. I think there you have a really lovely, smooth and even looking animation. Yeah, it was really only about eight frames on each leg that we have to draw. That's perfect, but it works. It's really, really nice. In the next esson, I'll show you how to clean up your rough animation and add color. 9. Polar Bear Clean Up Animation: In animation terms, the clean up process refers to when animators literally clean up their animation. You always want to work out your animation in a very rough way. And then go back in and refine things and give it a nice clean line and add color. In this lesson, we're going to do our clean up. Okay, this is my rough animation. Everything's working. I'm going to use the time line edit tool to select everything and make a group. And then I'll make a new track above this so I can start the cleanup on the group. I'm going to add an opacity filter again, basically just hitting the playhead, choosing opacity and lower it down so that the track is a little bit faded out. Then on this track, I'm going to start drawing again now. I still want my animation to have that very hand drawn look. I'm not going to be too precise about my line work. I'm going to keep it a little bit rough and hand drawn because I personally like that style. I'm going to just really follow the drawing underneath closely. Just aim to redraw everything with less lines. Something like this will work well then once I've got the line work done, I'll add the color. The way I'll do this is I'll actually go up to the layer stack here in draw mode and add a new layer there. Drag it underneath my line work. And add my color there so that the line stays on top. Okay. Now, because my polar bear is white, it's going to be a little bit tricky to paint him up against the white background. So I'm just going to add a swatch of color underneath all of my layers, all of my tracks in the timeline. And just a simple blue color so I can see what I'm doing. Because we're doing frame by frame, hand drawn animation. It is inevitable that things will shift and change. That's just part of what I think is a nice look and feel to this animation. But the one thing that I definitely don't want to change too much is the head, because that's the thing that people will be looking at. If that changes, it becomes really obvious. I'm going to animate everything on two tracks. I'm going to keep the head the same and just copy it for each frame on one track. And then I'll draw to the body of the polar bear on a track. Underneath essentially all my animation is going to be on two tracks, the head track and the body and legs on the other track. Because all we're doing now is simply re drawing each frame by frame. We don't need to worry too much about moving things separately, we're just literally tracing over the rough drawings underneath and each frame, but just keeping the body and the head separate. That way the polar bear will look nice and consistent throughout all of our animation. Just copying the head over to the next frame, fit it in, you can zoom in, you can match it up to the rough drawing and then move back down to the next track and trace over the body and legs for each pose. All of this process is really just tracing. We've done our animation actually in the rough pass. This pass now should be as simple and as straightforward as just tracing and copying. Now if it feels like a lot of work, just keep in mind it's actually only a handful of frames. Once you get into it, you fly through this clean up phase really quickly. Just make sure that your process is very nice and orderly. Make sure that you're making two layers for your drawing, one for the line work, one for the color. And make sure that you've got two tracks in your timeline. One for the head, which you'll copy from pose to pose, and the other for the body and the legs. You can see that I'm making very small, slight adjustments on my animation here. I'm not following the rough drawings exactly. I'm using the rough drawings as a guide. That's up to you. You can make those little slight revisions as you work. Okay. Another thing you'll notice is that the onion skin feature works for whatever track you're on. If you are on the head track, you're not going to see the onion skin for the body and vice versa. Okay, great. So now I've done everything. I've grouped my entire animation into a folder and I'm going to copy and paste that group over just to extend the duration out. And play it back. There you go. That's really quite a lovely, smooth and even Skate. I love this. I think this is working really well. When you're ready, I'll see you in the next lesson. 10. Penguin Blink and Jump: In this lesson, I'm going to animate our Penguin character. This is going to be a very simple animation in this scene that we're going to work on. It's literally just an eye blink and a jump. I've got a new document and I've pasted my storyboard panel in here. For reference, what I'm going to do is just add a new track, then pull up the flip book and start. But don't forget to add an opacity keyframe to the storyboard just to bring that down a little bit. Makes it life a lot easier. The only thing I want to point out here is that what I want to do is put the eyes on a new track in my timeline. I'm adding a new track here on this track is where I'm going to draw the eyes. Now, it might seem a bit complicated to put the eyes on a separate layer, but for me, I find this is the best way to keep things organized, as well as the fact that we want the blink to happen without having to change anything else in our drawing. I don't want to have to redraw the entire Penguin and when I'm doing the eye blink for that reason, it's just really easy to keep your eyes separate and just change them up. When it comes to making them blink, basically so great, I've got the penguin body done. I will drag that out, and then drag the eyes as well over about here now, I'm thinking that I want to have 22 eye blinks before he jumps off the rock. I want one at about, say, Frame 17. This is where I'll do the first blink. Okay? I'm going to pull up flip book and start to draw. Because my eyes are on their own track, I can easily see the onion skin. That's another thing to note. If you have the eyes on the same track as the character, you might not be able to see the onion skin so easily. The way we're going to do this blink is a standard formula for eye blinks. It literally, it's going to be going from an open eye like this. Then we want to have the eyelid come down about one third shot like this. What happens here as well? The pupils will move up slightly, then we'll go to a two thirds shut, and then we'll go to completely shut for two frames. Then on the open side, when the eye is opening again, we only need one frame where the eye is about two thirds open. That there is the standard formula for a regular cartoony eye blink fairly easy and straightforward. Now if you can't see your onion skin very well, then just go in and what you can do is adjust the color of your onion skins. Or adjust the opacity so that you can see the pupil and the eye bit more clearly. Then just start to redraw according to those poses that I just explained. This is the one third shut pose. Then I'll go ahead and do two thirds shut like that with just a small bit of the eye white showing. Then finally, the eye shut completely, which we will hold for a second frame. Then to finish it off, all I actually need to do is copy that previous one third shut, copy that frame, paste it over here. And then again, copy the eyes wide open. That's your blink. So what you can do then is use the timeline edit tool to select these frames. This is your eye blink. Group them and then copy that group and just paste it further down the timeline. Copy your open eyes and extend that track out and extend the body track. Now if you play it back, you should have a really nice simple couple of eye blinks like this. Perfect. Okay, that's done, very simple animation. But I think it captures his disbelief at this polar bear that's skating. Next, I want to animate him jumping off the rock. Again, I'm going to do that frame by frame. From this set of position, I will draw him going up and then down and jumping when he is jumping off the rock. Just keep in mind that he's coming forwards in space. When he jumps off, he's coming towards us. I want him to get a bit bigger as he comes forward. Okay, those are all of my rough poses. I'll group them, go through the exact same process again as I did previously and redraw this for animation. Again, I'm keeping the eyes here on a separate track because it's just easier to see them in the onion skin. If they were on the same track as the penguin body, it would be harder to see them. The one thing that you want to make sure is that something like the eyes is going to be moving in a nice smooth and clean. If the eyes are anyway off, that'll really stand out. Okay. Now I do want to point out a couple of things here. I'm aware that as I'm doing this, my colors are slightly off, but that's okay, because you could even treat this as another rough pass. And then once all of the animation is tied down properly, then you can go back in and really tidy things up. And that's what I'll do. I'll make sure all my colors are matching up afterwards. The other thing that I wanted to point out is that in the scene when the penguin is jumping towards us, make sure that you do make him slightly bigger as he comes towards the camera. Don't have the body be the exact same in volume. You want to kind of give that impression that he's coming closer. So just keep that in mind when you're doing your animation. Okay, so then finally we'll play our animation back if you think, you know that you need to add a couple of in betweens at maybe at the start of the jump or at the end you can go ahead and do that, but that's really it. I think that's perfect. And believe it or not, we just have one more scene to animate and that is our Penguin skating. So when you're ready, I'll see you in the next lesson. 11. Penguin Skate Cycle: We've just got one more piece of animation to do and that is our Penguin skate cycle. This is going to be really easy because it's a very simple, very stylized character. We'll fly through this, I'm going to open up a new document and I'll hop straight in and start roughing out some thumbnails for the animation. As I said, because this character design is so simple, it's going to be very easy. I am going to have a main pose that will be like this. Let's say his leg that's back is facing us. That's the front leg. Let's say that's going back. Then the other pose that I want to draw, the other key, or extreme pose, is going to be the opposite leg. Exactly the same as when we animated the polar bear. But maybe a bit simpler to draw. It's just two poses. We want a pose in the middle, that'll be our squashed pose. Or the pose where both feet are on the ice, right? So then I'm going to go back to my first pose and I want to add in two in betweens to get us from that extreme pose to the squashed middle pose. And then from the middle pose, I want to add two in betweens. That will take us from there to that next extreme pose. To complete the cycle, I need to do the same thing on the other side or for the other swing of the leg. For that, I can copy these drawings over simply, and that completes the cycle. That's because this character is so simple. The legs are basically just like these lines and the body is just one shape. It's perfect. It's really easy and very, very straightforward. Okay, next up, I'll select all of the frames and I'll make sure that each frame is at least two frames long by just tap and hold on the right edge of the very first frame. Place your finger onto the timeline and drag that out to frame number two. So now I know each frame, each drawing I should say is two frames long. Okay, So that's a very nice and zippy skate. But what I will do, I think, is just extend out both of my key poses. Give them a bit of a hold and just make that a little bit longer. Give the pause on those frames. Tap and hold again. Place your finger onto the track and drag the edge of that frame out and that's perfect. Okay, that's a lovely little skate. I think I'm happy enough with that. What I'll do is go ahead and clean it up and add color. If you want to, you can copy your Penguin from the last animation. And color pick from the body, and color pick from the beak and things like that to make sure that you stay on model. Now it's simply a matter of following the rough animation and painting this up frame by frame. Because this animation is so simple, there's no need to put elements on different tracks or anything like that. The only reason that I'm using another layer in my drawing is to indicate that one leg is behind the penguin body and one leg is in the front. But you don't have to do that. If you don't want to, it's not going to be that noticeable. If you really want to, you could have something like the beak, Have that on a separate track in your timeline instead of having to redraw it every time. If you feel that the shape changes a bit too much, that's something that you could look at. If you wanted to keep it consistent, I would recommend doing that on a separate track. But for me, not too fussy about that, I think keeping everything on one track is just keeping it very, very simple. Okay. So that's all done. I think that looks really good to me. I'm very happy with that. What I'll do is select everything, select all the frames, group them, and then duplicate that group simply to extend the animation out a bit. Believe it or not, that's our character animation completed. We've now done our storyboard. We've painted a background. We've even composited the background into our storyboard file and added camera moves. We've animated a polar bear skating, and we've animated our Penguin. All of the animation is to now be brought back into that main master file and move into the composite phase. When you're ready, I'll see you in the next lesson. 12. Compositing the Animation: Now we are actually in post production. Believe it or not, we have successfully achieved full animation design and storyboard, and now we just simply need to composite or compile all of our scene together. I will hop back into my original master file that has my backgrounds in. If I scrub through this file, you'll see that this is what we originally built up with our shots. Everything's in order. We've got our camera pan and now I'm going to go and pick up my animation files. I've got my first animation, which is the Polar Bear skating. I simply will copy that group out of this file, then go back into my scene and paste it in here. At the beginning, this I want to match up with my first shot. That's perfect, that's in place. I'm going to bring the playhead to the front and just scale them down here. Create a key frame off screen and then go to the end of the group, create another boovid scale key frame. And then I can drag him in like that. Perfect, he skates on. That's great. All right, the next scene is the pan. So I'll copy and paste the Polar Bear. Place them in the middle. Then I'm going to hold down on the key frame track and just delete those keyframes. Because in this shot, the camera is paneling, so we want the animation to be in one spot. Get rid of those moving scale keyframes, drag the character into the middle and just scale them up a little bit. Then I will copy the group again, really, to make sure that we have enough animation for the duration of this shot. Okay, great. And just make sure to trim the animation to the cut. To the cut of the scene. Okay, so just make sure to trim the animation to the cut of the scene. Just drag the edge of that group to where you see that red line that indicates your cut. Perfect. Okay, our next shot then is the penguin close up getting that reaction shot. I will grab that animation out of the animation file and bring it in here and paste it onto the timeline just after the polar bear. If you do need to scale up or scale down your animation, that's fine. You can go ahead and do that. And then grab the potter bear again. So copy and copy the previous group, paste it here twice so that I have enough animation. Then I will tap on the time line edit, select both of those, and group them again, because I want to create key frames for this entire chunk of animation. If you like, I will go ahead and set a key frame at the beginning, move and scale, and then one at the end and have the Polo bear skate right the way through. Then lastly, go grab my Penguin animation and paste that into the file, adjust it and scale it down as needed. Then it's totally up to you. You can play around with the timing of how these two characters move. You want the polar bear to skate through all the way first, and then the penguin tries to catch up with him. Or maybe you want both of them skating in at the same time. That's totally up to you. Another very cool thing that you can do is you could even have them skate off and then flip them. What you could do is click on these three dots here and then choose flip horizontal. Now you can have them skating back on again. Maybe they skate off and then they turn around and they skate back on screen, and then they move off into the distance. Okay, there's one final shot that I need to finish because I skipped over it to get all of the other animation in. But this is very, very easy. It's the very last thing I'll do. I'm going to swing back to the camera pan in the beginning and I'm going to add in a very simple drawing of the penguin, all right? Because I wanted him to be sitting on the rock as the camera pans along. The reason I wanted to do this separately is just to show you like a handy way to do something if you need to add in something on animation that's already moving. For example, like this, I want to add the penguin. The way that I solve this is it would be very tricky to try and match up the movement or the motion of the pan, but what you can do is just simply go into the actual rock itself, go into that, go into draw mode, and then add a new layer in your drawing of the rock. And put a guide on the rock so that you know where you want the Penguin to be. Then I'm going to place my Penguin in the right position. Key, frame him out, make sure it all matches up. Make sure that he is in the right place at the beginning and the end. Then I'll go back into the rock drawing, go back up to my layers and delete that guide. Okay, and that's it, that's perfect. Our animation is complete. Well, nearly There's one last final thing that I want to show you, and that is how to add sound effects and music to your animation. So when you're ready, I'll see you in the next lesson. 13. Adding Sound and Using the Performing Feature: Now I'm going to add sound effects and music to this file. Whenever you add any sound to anything that moves on screen, it immediately gives it life and believability When I'm animating something, I always like to have the sound underneath all of my content layers. That just keeps everything nice and ordered in your timeline. So I've left the sound effect I'm going to use and the music track for you to access over in the Projects and Resources tab. So go ahead and download that onto your device, then once you have it on your ipad, go over to the plus button and choose Add Files. The first file that I'll bring in is the sound of skates on ice. Click open and there you see it on my timeline. Okay. Just like any other piece of content, you can drag it around and move it about if you need to. If I play it back, it's a little bit out of sync, but that's okay. As I said, you can just move it around and match it up to the frames that you want. Exactly. You can also edit it right here and Procreate Dreams. You can copy and paste and cut the content like that because he's not on screen in this shot. I'm going to leave Skate Sound out, but then I'll place it in here again. And at the end now I also have some music coming in. Skate Sound isn't going to be quite so overbearing, but let's go ahead and add in the music. You can actually see the web form on the track and that makes it so much easier to know where to place it. I'm going to drag it off to the side so that the music starts as soon as the scene opens. Let's play it back, so that's good. But we do want the sound to fade out at the end. Again, inside procreate dreams, that's so easy. You just go to the end. And you can even trim the music track if you need to to the length that you want. But roundabout here, I'll just tap on the playhead and you can see it has the option to adjust the levels. My first key frame here for the levels is going to be at 100. Then I'll go to the end, and then I'll drag it down to zero. Okay, now the final piece that I want to add onto this animation is I want to use the performing feature in Procreate Dreams and adjust that final shot where the penguin and the polar bear skate off. It's so much fun to use performing in procreate dreams. You can literally simply drag your elements around and it will animate them for you. Let's go ahead and do that. What I'm going to do is turn off the sound timeline by just checking off the, on the layers of the audio. Just by taking that tick off that will mute those tracks. Then I'll come up to my final scene, which is here in this group. So I'll just open that group up. I have them already skating from one side to the other. You can leave those key frames as they are. Tap on the performing button and it'll turn red. And you'll see up on the corner there it says ready. Now, as soon as I touch my pencil to the screen, whatever action or motion that I do on screen will be recorded and animated in real time. I'm going to use the scale function and I'm going to scale the polar bear up a little bit and scale him down as he goes out. And that'll give the effect of him coming towards us. Turn that off and play. That's really nice. That's a lovely natural fluid motion which gives it just that natural feel. I'll turn that layer off and I'll do the same with the Penguin. Back up to the Penguin. Go to the start. Turn on performing, everything's ready. I'll do the same for the Penguin. This is such an intuitive and remarkable way of animating. It seems like it would hardly be possible to do it, but for some reason, somehow procreate is able to record what your pencil does on the screen and turn it into key frames. All right, so that's our animation. Fully finished, fully animated, and even post produced with sound and sound effects. So it's a really simple scene, but it has all of the components of a proper animated short film. And the process that we've gone through to get here mirrors something that you would do in an actual animation studio. 14. Conclusion and Wrap Up: Well, congratulations on getting to the end of the class. The project now is complete and the only final, final thing that I did, which you certainly don't have to do this, but I added some clouds. It's not essential to have in your project. I just thought it might be a nice way to open up on the scene. All I did was really simply use a few very large brush strokes, and I applied scale animation onto them to give the effect that they're scaling up. All in all. Here's our final clip, Now it's over to you. I really hope that you've learned a lot in this class and that you've had as much fun as I did in creating this very simple animated short. More importantly, I hope that you've seen the power of procreate dreams. And that you've realized the potential that it can hold for you to be able to really easily create your own animations without having to jump across different software or different apps. Finally, I really hope that you've learnt easy, straightforward and simple way to build out complex animation projects by just breaking them down into stages and taking each stage one step at a time. Don't forget Re using assets and Re using animation cycles is the way to cut your project work load down. Also my last tip is don't forget sound effects. Supercharge your animation sound effect will make anything that you've animated seem even more impactful and more real. Before I sign off, I just want to point you in the direction of some additional resources and classes that you can take. First up, definitely go and check out Procreate Dreams online that go to Procreate.com forward slash Dreams right here under the support tab. They have tons of really useful articles and tutorials. Also, don't forget to explore more classes here on skill share. There are so many great classes on offer. You can browse through here and find classes to expand out your skill set. It's just left for me to say, thank you so much for spending time with me today. I really hope that you've learned a lot. I hope that you post your project up in the Project and Resources tab and I'll be there and I'll be able to give you feedback and answer any questions that you have.