Procreate Dreams Unleashed! Mastering The Mobile Animation Studio

1. Intro: Hello, I'm David Miller, a Los Angeles multimedia artist, and I want to welcome you to this course on Animating and Procreate Dreams. It's a standalone app from the makers of Procreate. You can import all your specialized tools, palettes, and artwork from the original procreate. Create animations as a mix of frame bay, frame performance capture and key framing export full prores films. Placing a fully functional animation studio in the portability of your ipad, along with the organic interface one gets from drawing with the Apple pencil. I personally fell in love with Procreate dreams at first sight, and have had a blast creating far more naturalistic looking animations while in location near the ocean where I live in cafes. Anywhere I find myself, there's a slight learning curve, of course, as the program itself is noticeably absent of menus and obvious controls. But that's what this course is all about. I'll do a sample project, then we'll break down some larger projects, and I'll showcase all the three forms of animation. I have so much fun using this program. I hope my enthusiasm rubs off on you. So let's dive right in. 2. Workspace, Menus and Gestures: So when you open Procreate Dreams, you see this library and there is an upper right icon, the plus. You tap that. And it lets you pick what kind of project you want to do. Know that whatever you choose, you can always change the pixel dimensions. Also, you can tap this icon, the upper right corner, even if it starts with a particular frames per second, even if it starts with a particular duration, you can always change this after the fact. I usually start with 12.10 seconds because I've been doing frame by frame animations. And that is very difficult to draw, you know, 30, 50, 60 frames in a second of animation. If I did 60 hand drawn frames and it was a ten second animation, that'd be 600 frames. So not just 600 individual drawings, but 600 drawings of whatever is in the foreground background. I mean, you can duplicate stuff, but regardless, you can always change it. After the fact, we'll go ahead and start with a four K white screen. And so we have our stage area, which is this white zone, and also anything beyond it. I'm just going to do a little drawing outside of the white zone to give you an idea of why you have stuff outside of your main stage. The reason for that is you might want things to travel in and out of your frame. So even if you do frame by frame drawings, you're going to do a lot outside of this white work area. So in the time code, if you tap that, you see these options. Show onion skin, edit onion skin and background color. Background color, pretty self explanatory onion skin. If you've ever done frame by frame animation or done a flip book or anything of that nature, it's just the drawing that you previously did. So you can sort of continue on from that previous drawing. We'll get into that in a moment. When we get into the full flip book, when you tap the name of your animation, this is where you can reset properties. So you can change the frame per second, you can change the duration, you can change the pixel dimensions. The share area is where you can export your video, and if you wanted to set your video options, it's under custom settings. The very last option, export it as pros for highest quality, you have the option to export at various pixel dimensions as well. Under preferences you'll see how many undo steps you have to undo an action. There is no reverse icon that you have in regular procreate. So if I were to draw something and then go, oops, I don't like that double tap. That's your undue, it's back out to your procreate Dreams library. It's this icon to the left of the title. And now we're back to where we started. This bit below, we have our timeline, a playhead. It has 10 seconds. If we want to zoom in, it's a pinch zoom. If we want to get a closer view of this track that I'm working on, it's three fingers. Move it up. If you want to shrink it down, it's three fingers. Move it down. 3. Importing Art, Brushes and Color Palettes: So if you're an experienced user of the original procreate, you've probably built up a lot of artwork, color palettes, tools that you like to use there. And if you haven't done this, just know that in the original procreate, you can save custom color palettes. Of course, you have your artworks, but you can also purchase brushes on the open market and import those into procreate. And then the issue is that none of those are present in procreate dreams, but you can bring them into procreate dreams. The way to get these other assets from original procreate into procreate dreams is to use split view. Now there are three dots at the top of your Procreate Dreams menu. You can use that for split view. Alternately, you can into the view of your ipad where you see most of your apps and then position them as a side view. At this stage, you're now able to drag and drop anything from regular procreate into procreate dreams. I'll take my monkey character, bring him over. I'll see it says Importing untitled artwork. Then we have these red areas where I can scale things down. If I open up an artwork and drag it over enough where I can see my color palettes and my brushes, select brushes, I have mine organized by ones that I've purchased towards the top, and then the stock brushes towards the bottom. But I brought all my favorite ones into a primordial creative brush pack, and that's the name of my company. These are the brushes that I use on a regular basis for all my works. And I try and keep them very consistent because I want to have a consistent look between my comics and my animations and so forth. I've already imported this one into Procreate Dreams, so I'm just going to go ahead and grab this one that says Gibley Art Set. What Gibley Art set is, are flora and fauna brushes that evoke studio Gibley, Bring it over to procreate dreams, let it go, imported the art set. Same with color palettes, primargical creative color palette that I normally use. I have these risograph style color palettes that I purchased. I'll go ahead and grab one of those, drag it over, and then if I'm done with messing around in original procreate, I can just swipe that off to the side. Now, when I go into my drawing menus, I have my imported art sets towards the bottom of the palettes. There isn't a re order for these yet in Procreate dreams, I imagine that'll be one of the future features because it's something that's easily doable in regular procreate. Just know that your imported stuff is going to be way at the bottom. This one that says imported without being primarily creative or Gibliartet. This is when I was importing brushes one at a time, and that was a pain. Then I realized I could take the entire brush set and move it over, and life got a little bit simpler after that. Same with my color palettes, the imported ones are towards the bottom of the list. Importing artwork from regular procreate over to Procreate Dreams, I think is a good way to do your workflow because you have other tools in regular procreate that you just simply don't have in procreate dreams. For example, the liquefied tool, which is what I did to this drawing of Mr. Burns. Any of these tools, these adjustments are not available in procreate dreams. The hue, saturation, brightness, color balance curves, You do have a bit of a Gauschin blur that's about it from this list. If you wanted to make use of any of these in your animations, what you'd have to do is create various layers in regular procreate that have those effects. And then you would bring those into procreate dreams and fully animate them there. 4. The Flipbook and Frame By Frame Animation: Play icon is pretty self explanatory. The recorded icon is for performance, and we will get to that in a future lesson. This grouping icon only means something if we have multiple things we want to group together. So we'll get to that momentarily. So this squiggly line icon is the one that we're going to focus on right now. And there's three ways to animate and procreate dreams. You can mix these three together. You can do all just one, just another. But to begin with, I think it's best to learn the flip book, which is not what you see here. It's when you're in the squiggly line drawing menu and you drag down that, you're now really in the flip book. I'm, I'm going to tap my timeline in the lower left, show onion skin, because this is where we're going to figure out what an onion skin actually is. Whatever brush you want to use, you do a drawing, tap the next icon, it's gone purple on me because that's my previous frame. And much like flip books that you might have worked on as a child, you now have a sequence of frame by frame drawings. Now this is very rudimentary. I just started with a single thick black line that I moved around. And they are individual frames. When you want to back out to your main stage and all your tracks, you hit done in the upper right corner and you can see your animation. Aren't we proud of ourselves for that? To get back to the flip book, the squiggly line drag down. You have the option of extending these frames through tap. And now it's created another frame in between. The purple is my onion skin of what came before, and my yellow is what's the next frame. So if I wanted to create something that was like in between of the two, I could do so. Done back out. Now there's new intervals. Back to the flip book. In the upper right corner, we have all of our brushes. We have a smudge tool, we have our erasers, and we have layers. Now, this first layer is always going to be the bottom. And there's no way for me to do the black drawing and then position that one on top and draw color underneath it when you're planning out your animations. And I'm going to go ahead and clear this frame. My advice is, do as much of your animation, your animatic, your basic layouts, your scribbles on this bottom layer. Knowing that you're going to add color and effects and ink lines if you want them, you're going to add all that stuff on the upper layers which you can reposition. Keep in mind that animating frame by frame does not always mean literal things happening on the screen. Frame by frame could be textures looping, it could be background details, it could be energy waves, it could be effects. It could be words, it could be mouth shapes that I have on my other characters. There's a lot you can do with frame by frame animation that isn't standard obvious cartooning. 5. Preparing Art For Procreate Dreams: There's all kinds of workflows to creating an animation and you're going to find the one that works the best for you. For me, I think creating my basic artwork in regular procreate, importing that into procreate dreams, and then adding all the motion effects and seeing what else needs to move around is the best way to do it. Simply because, as I said before, there were extra tools in regular procreate and I'm more familiar in drawing with it. I have more space to work in. When you create your artwork in regular procreate, you have to think about what do you want to have move and what do you want to have Stable, I'm going to do a very basic face. I might want the eyes to move, so I'll put that on a different layer. If we were doing this in Photoshop, it'd be easy to break up in post. But that is a thing that's a little more difficult to do in procreate. Best to think of these things ahead of time. And if you aren't sure, make them on different layers anyways, because you can always combine them down and flat, the hair is going to get its own layer. If I have a bit of hair that's going to dangle in front, that's going to get its own layer to the parts of the face that aren't going to move, like the nose or the ears. I'm going to go ahead and keep on the original face layer. Depending if this was an animation where the person talked, I would draw the different mouth shapes. Mouth shapes are something that I animated a lot because I use Adobe Character Animator, that's a motion capture software and it reads audio and matches the various mouth shapes. But in preparation for a lot of my own animations, I've just created like a universal set of mouth shapes. If you don't know what I'm talking about, you can look up the word phonemes or vizmes. But generally there's like a neutral, a smile, like the letter involves people biting their bottom lip. The letter L in the, putting their tongue behind their teeth and so on and so forth. Those are things that I've created. I already have a mouth set, and I can always import that into any animation, whether it's a three quarter view of a face, a side view of a face, so on and so forth. So we have these bits here. If I was to add extra hair details, I'll put them on their own layer and then of course, any color. Now personally, I don't take the effort to rename all my layers. That would be the smart thing to do. I can usually see pretty well on the screen what they are. But things like the hair details, I'm going to group those which is a little right swipe. And then group if you make a mistake and group something extra like I did this face, you can go ahead and bounce that out of the group. If you forget something, go ahead and add it to the group. Groups I do name because they tend to be a little more complicated to see exactly what's going on in them. If it was things that I drew on several layers and wanted to totally combine, I would flatten all the artwork down. That makes life so much easier in procreate dreams, whatever you're working with is flat. But because it's a hair group and I want to move these individual pieces on their own, I'm going to keep them separate. The only other thing that I think I want to add to this is a little bit of a color fill behind everything because currently there's no color, and when you turn off the background color, it's just line work. I tend to use this really messy method of coloring. I don't know why it appeals to me to have these Jackson Pollock dots that bounce outside of the artwork. Most of the animation that I love personally is very stylized stuff like spider verse or films like Boy in the World, The girl without hands. These are not very standard styles of animating. I think having some unusual choices, very distinctive choices in what you do is pretty important. Be different. If I worked for Disney, the color of this hair is going to be an example of artwork that I do need to flatten. If I was to paint the color on the same layer as this painting over it, I need to paint it on a different layer. But once it's animated, I'll want these things to work in unison. This hair blows or warps, then the color needs to warp along with it. Also, I need to do color on individual layers because this little bit that's dangling over is going to move independently on its own to color needs to go gesture this one then this group is dangling hair bit. This is an example of something that I would flatten. And now it's one piece, this layer that accompanies that portion of the hair group. Those did not want this in the group, pull it out. There we go. And I can see when I move these off, that there's portions of the head that I forgot to color. It's important to get everything behind the hair because at some point in the animation, the hair may move out of place and then he's got part of his cranium that's exposed. Here we go, color to the clothing. And then I am coloring over lines. But that's just a matter of re ordering everything. Uh, if the shirt goes behind the jacket, then it down here, these are all parts of the clothes group. Those. If they aren't going to be moving or animated, then I'll flatten that one down as well. Take procreate dreams. I might use this guy for a social media explainer type video. Go ahead and create social video, Import the artwork. We'll worry about the mouse and the audio later, but as we can see, he's imported as a single track. 6. Turning Artwork Into Tracks: Okay, so I have my character imported and I'm thinking of making some sort of Instagram, real Tiktok, Youtube short, some kind of short form video where this guy talks about something. I'll draw some mouths onto him when I need to. But first I want to talk about tracks. Tracks are these areas down below that have all your information. It could be your visual. In this case it says drawing. It could be audio which is not under the list of the tracks, but it is something you can import with files. You could be text me. If I go into text, I could actually type out something to appear on the screen and animate that text as well. It could be a video track, it could be a photo, it could just be a blank track. It could be another drawing. Same as pretty much any other video editor, motion graphics editor that you'll ever see. There's a timeline. It corresponds to seconds. We have a playhead, which I'm moving around right here. The playhead has some options within it where you can do animations and effects. You can do them live, meaning that there's a recording. And I'm going to go ahead and just show you move and scale being recorded with the record button. So I move this thing around, we go back to the beginning of our track, we see the movement taking place. The other choices you have involved warping, distorting, changing the opacity, Meaning that you can start to see through things. You can take opacity down to zero all the way we'll start our playhead beginning. You can see that this character fades in the duration of the opacity that I just did. If you don't want it to be a performance, if you don't want it to be an animation, you just want it to happen naturally on the screen. Don't have the record icon pick now, any effect that you apply like move or scale. It's always like that. It's not a animation that takes place across the time line. Also within the playhead are the few filters that you have, the blurring, sharpening noise, and HSB is hue saturation and brightness. This is where you can do some slight filtering. Anyway, if you don't like any of these changes, any of these effects, you tap the icon, hold it, then you can either delete the key frame or delete the effect entirely. 7. Live Performance Animation With Effects: So right now I have one track which is my character. I'm going to go ahead and scale him by tapping him and moving these red transform thoughts around. I need to have access to more tracks because I want at least his hair to move around. I'm going to hold my content, convert layers to tracks. And then now it says group twirl down on the group twirl down on the hair. And now I can see the tracks I have within the hair. One of these layer six is totally blank. Just something that was a leftover when I was making my art and procreate. So I'm going to go ahead and hold this and delete content and delete the track layer 12 is my little dang bit of hair. Now this dang bit of hair, I was to select a track, pick it up and move it. You can see it for what it is. If this is going to move at all in my animation, if it's going to have some physics to it, like gravity or wind affecting it, the movement needs to be really subtle. Also, I was to show you what Warp does. I don't want it to look stupid. I think that's what would happen if I did warp. I'm just going to gently rotate this, delete these key frames of Warp. I think all it's called for is just a subtle rotation. The way that you rotate things for animation is you tap the corner icon. You see this little gray. You just move that corner grave bit around. I think that's good enough. Note that the anchor point is the center of my animation. The anchor point is that plus icon, if I go too far, it's going to look really bad. I here and there, animation does not have to be wild and crazy all the time, but I think things need to move on the screen at all times. I think if you just leave a drawing not moving or you only have a small part moving like a mouth, but the rest of the head stays still. It's not really interesting to look at that's like Diana Barbara animation of the 1960s. It's just so cheap and it's unnecessary. We can very easily do subtle animation record icon. And I'm going to pull out so I can see any seconds I'm working with about 5 seconds for the purposes of this video. Just going to subtly rotate it. Now that works for that small bit of hair, the hair on top of the head, different story. I move my play head to the beginning of the track. Select the layer that has the rest of my hair in it, which is layer 11. Again, you can simplify your life quite a bit if you name your layers in procreate prior to bringing it over to procreate dreams, tap the clapboard move. I think Warp is going to work well. You'll notice I have four points to this hair that should be moving around. Don't worry if you can only animate a small portion. If you can only warp one side of the hair. Because you can always restart the playhead and animate the other side of the hair. And it'll do recordings of both. I'll go ahead and grab this upper right corner and I'm just going to subtly move it around. This is what does he changes the mesh and I've got to 9 seconds start my playhead. See the subtle warping of the hair. Really nice. Restart my play head. Now I'm going to get to the left side of his face. I'm going to grab the bottom from the right corner and just warp it around a little bit. Here, a little bit there. Restart my play head. Now the hair looks like it's got a little gentle breeze going in it. 8. Lip Sync With Audio: In this final bit, I'm going to open the flip book. Within my group, of my character. Which means that I'm going to be drawing within the shell. And each frame is not going to be a frame by frame animation. It's just going to be the mouth shapes that I need. This will translate to frames of those mouth shapes on my main timeline. And then I can stretch and place those with whatever dialogue I end up putting in the character. Whatever audio I end up dropping in. I'll put the correct mouth shape to go with the correct syllable where you'd find these mouth shapes. If you were looking for reference, you can Google phoneme or vizeme, or cartoon mouth shape. And you'll find those Each main letter group though it has a particular mouth shape. As I mentioned before, if you say L, you are putting your tongue behind your top teeth. So that's pretty easy to illustrate. If you're doing an F, at some point your top teeth are biting your bottom lip. You can draw whatever mouse shapes you need, however many you need, and if you want them to be multiple frame movement, for example, when someone says it's literal shape on their face. But there's always going to be some transition from sort of long, straight horizontal line, that is our regular mouth into the O. So if you do two frames of motion for that, it's going to look smoother and a little nicer. I do try and take extra time on my mouth shapes, maybe even more time than I'm doing in this particular tutorial. Because these are things that are going to be animated a lot. If you're doing some sort of dialogue heavy animation illustration, you don't want to skimp on the time that you spend on doing mouth shapes. And if you add extra details like the little divot above the upper lip or little shading on the bottom lip, Shading in the corners of the mouth makes the animation look more polished and professional. I don't know about drawing every single tooth on a person. I think sometimes that looks silly. It actually makes people's teeth look worse than if you just do sort of like the white line indicating upper teeth, bottom teeth. It's up to you and a lot of my own personal drawings, I'll put all the taste buds on tongues and maybe even like fingerprints on fingers. And in one sense, that looks a little freaky when you see that as an animated character. So I'm not going to do that level of detail with these mouth shapes. I'm just going to do very basic ones so we can have our frames and we back out into the group of our character. Check the mouse, make sure that they're all the right orientation, that they're in the right position. We'll do some adjustments using the transform tool on each frame. We'll scale them as needed, rotate them as needed, place them further up in the face or further down depending on how much I messed up when I did my flip book drawings. And now that I have my mouth shapes, I'm going to import my audio with this plus icon fine files and I've already air dropped my dialogue, which is the very intro of this particular tutorial onto my ipad. So it's called hello dot wave. I'll add my wave file in and I can see the waveform which is the visual representation of audio. I know my syllables, first word is hello. That's two syllables. And of my mouse shapes, I have an E, so I have an L sound and I have an Sound. So even though hello is two syllables, I think I need all three of those particular shapes to illustrate hello. This is the part where I have to start repositioning things, duplicating as needed, and spacing them out. I'm going to put E L for my. Hello. Hello? Hello. Oh, I'm Davi Miller. The number of mouse shapes you'd want to use for any dialogue can depend on how fast the character is talking and how accurate you want it to be. If you were thinking that this is a lot of work and you don't want to do this, then I would make some more generic mouse shapes and then just utilize them sparingly as needed. But if you're going to do something that's very dialogue heavy and talk and you want your character to be more expressive, then a higher level of detail is needed in your projects, I would have more expressive stuff going on, like a variety of eyebrows, maybe some wrinkles on the face, More blinks, more things to happen with the character. This is something that I learned when creating motion capture characters in Adobe character Animator. That the more animations that you give a character you design, the more lively they are and the more easy it is to get into watching them. I think that's why a lot of people have a hard time watching the old Hannah Barbara stuff because they are not very lively, they're very static. Same with a lot of the older anime, some of the older cheaper stuff that characters just don't emote and they don't move around that much. And compared to something like a Studio Gibley film where characters are very emotive, environments have emotion to them, Everything just kind of like works towards a vibe and a feeling. And you can get so into it, you got to realize that you're competing on some level with other things vying for people's attention. And the more basic and boring your stuff is, the less likely it's going to get any eyeballs. Less likely you are to communicate your message. So now that I've completed everything within my shell and I have my character saying exactly what I want them to say, I can go out to my main group of my character and start doing some performance capture that emphasizes what the character is saying and doing. So if they are doing something that has extra emphasis, I may have their head rotate towards the audience a little bit. I might scale them up as they are emphasizing a point just for that moment. You'll make life a lot easier for yourself if you do all the animations within a shell, within the main group before do your outer performance capture animation. Because if you do the outer performance capture animation that contains everything, the hair, the face, the mouth shapes stuff is going to be moving around when you're trying to make it move within the shell. It's just not worth your time to try and deal with that aggravation. I say do everything inside. Now you know what's going on and you can do performance as if you were an actor on a stage. 9. Tracks And Groups In Depth: Now we're going to take a moment to try and understand tracks a little bit better. If you have worked in any other sort of video editor, you probably have an idea of what tracks are. This is your visual elements, which could be video photo, drawing, frames of drawing that add up to be animation, a color background, a texture, anything that's visual. And then you have the audio elements which are music, dialogue, sound effects. Procreate Dreams does not distinguish between visual and audio. If you want to add visual layers including text, that's pretty easy to understand when you use the plus icon for a new track. If you want to add an audio layer isn't labeled as audio, but you can search file and then whatever you have on your mobile device or your Dropbox or however you interface with Procreate Dreams is accessible to you and you can place that in there. My personal workflow is I do most of my audio editing, if not all, in Adobe Edition, in Adobe Premiere, I just find it's a lot easier to do it there and then focus on creating my animation scenes. In Procreate dreams, there's nothing that says you have to do everything start to finish within one application. Tracks are probably the thing that will trip up most people, because as you add tracks and you group them into smaller segments, you end up having blank tracks. You end up having weird orders to them. Because the more tracks you add, the smaller it looks. If you're not used to zooming in with the three fingers gesture or swiping left to right, if you have something that's like a longer animation, something that's longer than 10 seconds and it can get quite confusing. I've found so far in my animations that I have to keep up with cleaning up tracks that ended up empty because I bounced everything down to a single track instead of the three or four that it was originally occupying. The way that you combine tracks is through this icon right underneath your stage. When you have this grouping icon selected, you can swipe around assets in your timeline and they'll be highlighted red when they're selected. Then you hold with your apple pencil in the middle of one and you're able to group them. You can re, organize tracks however you like them to be organized. Whatever is on top is whatever is going to be visually forefront. This is not a three D program. You can't position things in a lower track but set them in the foreground. Everything is a top down hierarchy. In one case, if I was animating the sun, but I had layers of cliffs, clouds, oceans. The sun needs to be the back layer because of course, the sun would be behind the clouds. Here are the most common things I think people will want to do with their tracks. Number one is to clip it. If you needed to get one of the ends shortened, you can grab the end of it with your Apple pencil, shove it around that way, or go into the playhead menu. Find edit, and you'll see split. And now you have two separate clips that you can move around on their own tracks or delete as needed. Reordering is holding the apple pencil directly on the track, and then you can move it to a different track or position it in a different place in the timeline. You can also duplicate a track or layers within a track. If I wanted to have a second comet passed through the starfield, I would move my playhead to my comet layer hold track options duplicate. Now I have a second iteration of this which I can now move around by selecting that track and also having it outside of my group. One of the things you can do with the visual elements of tracks is change their opacity and how they interact with the tracks below them. This is very familiar to people who have used Photoshop or regular procreate and work with the blending modes or clipping masks. Blending modes, you'll find ones that work best for you. The ones that I use most frequently are multiply, overlay, and soft light or add. When I am working with light sources, soft light and ad are the ones that I use the most. When you're creating a clipping mask, it is going to stay within whatever boundaries are set by the underlying track or the underlying drawing. This is really useful in one of my future projects. In this course, I'll show you how I use the clipping mask to layer looping textures on top of my character. If you want to turn off a track, you can toggle its visibility. In the very beginning of the track, there is a check box. This allows you to turn something on and off. And sometimes if you end up with a track that looks like it's empty and you forget if there's an element somewhere in there, go ahead and toggle off its visibility and see if it makes a difference. When you rewatch the animation, you've created empty tracks. If you have no purpose for them, go ahead and dispose of them. And something that's unique to procreate Dreams, your playhead is something you can bounce around on all your tracks. This playhead you can move around with your Apple pencil. When you do your playback, you'll only see the amount of your timeline that is currently on your screen. So if you have zoomed in to like a three second chunk of a ten second animation, and you're doing your playback, it's only going to show those 3 seconds. If you want to see the entire animation, you need to pinch zoom out and then you'll be able to see everything. 10. Looping Animations: Looping is a technique that I use quite a bit in my animation. I see no issues with having looped animations go over and over. Of course, if you're animating something that's mechanical like an egg beater or a car tire or something. It makes perfect sense to see it cycle over and over with the same animation until you need a change. For things that are more organic, like the ocean or a character's hair waving in the wind, it might make less sense to have loops that go over and over and over. When I make my loops, I will throw a few monkey wrenches in them just to make them feel more broken up and organic. And what I mean by this is if I were to draw four frames of the ocean surf coming in and out. And I decided I wanted to loop this for the 20 seconds of animation. I need an ocean. If you did the math at 12 frames per second, you're going to see the same animation three times every second for 20 seconds. Which means you'd see the same animation 60 times. And that would get very irritating to throw monkey wrenches. And I'll have layers to my loops. Perhaps the ocean is a bit of water color, a bit of sea salt. Maybe I'll hold on the watercolor frames twice every two frames will be the same exact watercolor illustration. Maybe I'll put the sea salts moving around every frame. Maybe I'll create the top of the surf and then slightly warp it or push it around with a smudging tool. And that will last for three frames. Then once I have these frames set up, maybe I'll start duplicating frames and moving them around randomly, or changing their position a little bit. Suddenly your four frames worth of drawing, or your eight frames or however many you have, has a little more variety to it. And it becomes a little more interesting to look at and doesn't feel so stuck in one place. Another way to manipulate your loops and have them become interesting is once you have created your loops, you can group them together until they're part of a larger group. And then use the performance animation feature of Procreate Dreams to warp distort, move them around, scale them, so on and so forth. So they look like they're still moving. It's just maybe the loop itself isn't changing, but its position on the screen has changed. Has altered and has a little bit of liveliness to it. At some point you're going to find yourself re using animation that you've already done and that's okay. I'm here to tell you that every major studio you can name including Disney, including Looney Tunes, Warner Brothers, all that kind of stuff has used Loop Animation. It isn't just the cheap people like Hanna Barbera or cheap anime studios that re, use the same things over and over and over. 11. Keyframe Animation: We have discussed frame by frame animation using the flip book. We've discussed performance animation by using the Record button and moving things around. The third way to animate in procreate dreams is key framing. Key framing is something people using after effects are super familiar with. I find it pretty simple to understand. And using procreate dreams, it simply involves turning on effect. I'll hit my little platboard here. I'm going to have this cliff move forward, as if we're zooming in on the cliff as if we had a camera click, move, move and scale. And now you see my effect is turned on below my track. And I'm going to leave it where it's at, because I want the cliff to start this size. But further down the line, let's say 12 seconds, I want it to be much closer to the camera. Now that I've moved my playhead, I move it down to the effect where I see my moving scale tool stretch it out and I'll push it over there. I've set a key frame. If I back up to my original position, push play, you'll see as if the camera zoomed in on the cliff. If I want to do something in between, I'll go ahead and move my effect there. Maybe I want to do a little rotation as if the camera is kind of a handheld thing. Turn on the rotate by clicking corner, giving a little rotation. Then I'll rotate it back. Let's see what that looks like. It's okay. You know, nothing special. One of those things that's like an additional flourish that distracts from what I want to have happen. So I'll go ahead and delete those key frames now. It's just the straight scaling and moving. You'll notice that it starts slow from the beginning, speeds up in the middle, and then slows down. That's called easing. Easing is something that when you hold, you can see this all expanded. You have a choice that says set easing for position which is left and right and y position which is up and down. And you find the easing when you hold with your Apple pencil. Easing simply explained, there's velocity when things move from key frame to keyframe. I actually like to have a good ease in and out because I like to see velocity change. It's its own form of animation. When everything just moves super smoothly with linear, side to side, up and down, without any change in velocity. It's very boring to look at. It's mechanical and that might be the reason why you do something like that. But for naturalistic animation, I like to leave the easing in. That's really all there is to keep framing though. It is something that is a little easier to control than the performance animation. If I were to start performance animation and then try and move these things around the same time, it can get jaggedy and it might look a little out of control. If that's what you're going for, then fine. But you can see how many key frames are added when I did my performance animation versus just setting the two, the start and the stop point. All three of these types of animation work together. Ultimately, there will be times you want to do the flip book, you'll want to do frame by frame. There are times that you'll want to do performance capturing. There are times that you'll want to just set one or two keyframes. You'll pick up over time what the best tool is for your goal. 12. Project Breakdown 1 - Animatic to Finish: I want to open up some bigger projects that I worked on just to show you what went into them and maybe give some rationale for why I made my choices and see if those choices help you out in your own creative projects. This particular one has a Sphinx character that's flying through the clouds. It looks kind of like how to train your dragon, kind of toothless character. It's actually taken from Gerremel del Toro's Pinocchio. I began this one in the flip book. I did these very quick gestural drawings because in the olden days, this is really how animation was done frame by frame. But also with these super quick animatics, usually by the directors. People like Chuck Jones and Fritz Freeling would do the key frames. And I'm talking about the legitimate key frames, not the modern digital animation term key frames. But they would do the key moments of the cartoons they were working on. And then they had their subordinates do the in between bits where character moves from space to space. Just copying the style of the head animator. This particular flip book really is just scribbles, but it was important scribbles. It was getting out the timing of my piece, and it was getting out the basics of where arms, legs, head wings would be. And it was so helpful to work this way. It's not a way that I particularly am used to working because I like the fact that procreate can go straight to inks and then I can back up and erase when I make a mistake. So this, in a way, felt like it was very time consuming and lengthy. It certainly wasn't time consuming, put my scribbles down. In fact, it actually was kind of a confidence booster because I could start to visualize what was happening and I think my animation was a lot more fluid working this way rather than when I'm trying to do my good drawing. Good drawings, I should say. My professional drawings with the ink outlines and the color in it. In this case, it was a very fluid set of scribbles. And since you can't move the bottom layer of your flip book layers anyways, you might as well make it a scribble pad. You can easily turn off this visibility once you start adding your color and your ink outline layers and your effects and all the other things that you want to pile on top of your character. So my next step is to create two new layers. I know the very top layer is going to be my ink outline on my character, my black details. And then this layer that's empty that doesn't have the scribble or my ink outlines on it is going to be a color. I might create other layers in between. Any thing above your bottom background layer, you can create new layers, reorganize them. Ultimately, what ended up happening was I had a top layer that was the ink details. I had a next layer which had motion lines for the wings. I had another layer which was color. And then my bottom layer which was my sketch scribble. I just turned that off. I just turned off the opacity, the visibility of those. They still remained, but they're turned off. And I had a fluid character that as I grouped the frames, I did incisions in certain parts of the group and looped those segments that I thought could be stretched out or it made sense that the character would glide a little bit longer, which was my original intent when I did these drawings. It's just when you do your flip book drawings and then you go back and watch it. Very frequently you'll see this stuff moves way faster than I intended it to move. And that's okay, because in your flip book you can add additional frames. You'll see the onion skin, purple being your previous frame and yellow being the next frame. And you can make your in between animations accordingly. You're almost always going to get a very fast animation when you do a flip book. And then you'll go back and look at it and say, oh man, that thing went just way too fast. That character walked way too fast towards the sea. Got to slow it down. And unfortunately, procreate dreams does not have a speed duration sort of manipulation tool, but you can always add frames in this frame by frame tool. 13. Project Breakdown 2 - Backgrounds and Textures: So once I've grouped my frames of my Sphinx character. And then as I said, I cut them up and duplicated what I thought needed duplicating. I went ahead and grouped those again. So now I have this one long track that is all the groupings, including parts that I've cut up, reorganized, copied, duplicated, so on and so forth. Now this group is everything that is my character. And now I can use the performance recording tool, which means I can scale my character, I can move them around, I can rotate them, and in the course their flight, this made the animation even more dynamic looking. Even though I didn't do it in sort of the three dimensional camera style where you could like pant underneath a body and go and check out the front of the face. I think that was my original intent when I was doing my drawings, But ultimately I felt like I really wanted to sort of stick behind the character. Instead of acting like a drone camera and flying around and seeing the character's face. I can do another shot where I see that character's face. I love doing background layers in procreate dreams. Backgrounds are usually very hard for me to illustrate. I think like a lot of people, I'm more drawn to working with characters and living beings than doing landscapes and flora and fauna. That stuff just isn't as exciting for somebody who's into the emotional weight of stories. But of course your backgrounds can carry emotional weight. And I think people who pay good attention to their backgrounds and the details of them, you know, that really enhances their storytelling and makes their setting have a lot more very similitude, meaning believability and reality to them. So thankfully, procreate allows you to import all sorts of amazing watercolor, elemental liquid, cloud light, and so on and so forth. So I had an entire day that I spent gathering these tools. I made my cloud layers. And then because I did want this to have a little bit of an Anime manga feel to it, utilize some screen tone effects, some zoom lines that you'd see in a typical manga or anime. Because this character is representative of death in Pinocchio, I wanted them to be zooming towards a light. I created my cloud layers, and as the character zoomed through them, I cut the track, placed a track of clouds above my zooming character and then had that opacity reduced. Put on some Gauchan blur as it came towards the camera, as if we were flying through the cloud as well. Behind the Sphinx faded in the speed lines. Used the performance capture aspect of procreate dreams to make this single drawing of speed lines jittery and rotate around. And then ultimately created some frames of black blobs that grew and grew until my character in theory entered them. And I might make these white in the end because if you're headed towards the after life, it's supposed to be a white light. That's, that's the basics of this animation. It took a few days because mainly I had to repetitively redraw, color each individual frame on the flip book. But I really enjoyed the process, honestly. It turned out a lot better than I imagined it would in the beginning. I did save myself some time by creating a texture loop. These are the dots and the sort of rustic textures that go on top of my Sphinx character. These were just four or five frames that I had going in sequence. Grouped them, duplicated until I could group them again. And then layered them on top of my Sphinx character. It made the character look and feel a lot nicer. Even though it isn't sort of like traditional shading, it isn't consistent shading or textures over the wings. I know in the film I believe the character has eyeballs on the wings, much like the death character boy two. But it is consistent with my style, my artistic style, which involves a lot of collage elements, cut up elements, things that filter in and out aren't necessarily representational of reality. I was happy with my texture loop. Without the texture loop, the character did look very, very cartoony in a very basic way. Yeah, it's up to you what sort of style you want for your animation. One of my favorite things about the modern era is that we can apply textures like construction paper, cardboard, old magazines, old newspapers, rust debris, Any sort of thing. That just kind of adds another dimension to our artwork and it takes it beyond the very flat illustrator. Look. I'm not a big fan of things that are consistently normal textures and don't have any real world grit moving around on them. I like things that feel a little more messy and lived in and I feel like that is a result of coming up in the era, you know, having watched Star Wars since birth. Where everything has lived in atmosphere to it. Thanks for watching. Make sure you check out my full 78 minute course on Procreate Dreams. The link is below. Best of luck to you and all your creative endeavors. 14. Wrap Up: I want to thank you so much for making it through this procreate dreams. Of course, hopefully you've picked up on how to make use of the program. It only took me a couple days before all the gestures became natural. I understood where everything was located and I really was able to just get going on my projects. In retrospect, I think the decision to hide controls and get away from sort of like menus and toolbars and all those things that you see in Photoshop and other kinds of programs is a wise choice. Because whenever I open Procreate dreams, I actually feel like I'm just working in a sketchbook and I'm not being distracted by all this techie stuff. And I've noticed that my animations, my drawings, have been way more organic as a result of that. If you have created anything as a result of this program, I would love to see what you've made and also send me any questions you might have about functions, what to do in the program. I'd be happy to answer them for you. Once again, I want to thank you for making it through and I want to wish you the best of luck in whatever creative endeavors you find yourself involved in.