Procreate Dreams Unleashed: Motion Comic Mastery

1. Procreate Dreams Motion Comics Intro: Procreate Dreams is the new animation app from the makers of the amazing drawing app Procreate. And it's ideal for one of my favorite mediums, motion comics. Motion comics use limited animation with enhancements full of special effects and sound designed to bring comics illustrations to life. Full animation is a labor intensive work and it's not ideal for people who are more skilled at creating two dimensional compositions. As a lifelong comics fan, I found this to be a good way to generate short form videos as teasers or additional products or trailers to my own particular comics work. In this course, we focus on key frame and performance animation as opposed to the frame by frame work you associate with traditional animation. If you have existing comics in procreate that you want to see brought to life. Or if you want to start from scratch motion comics and Procreate Dreams is the course for you. So let's dive right in. 2. Why Motion Comics: I always want to advocate for the style of motion comics because it's not necessarily something that is celebrated. It's neither fish nor foul. It's not a comic book and it is not an animation. In the anime Warner Brothers two D animation, three D animation sense. The earliest motion comics that I can point to are the ones that were created in the 1960s. They were Marvel Comics cartoons. They basically cut up the artwork and moved it around. But the great thing about those motion comics is it kept the aesthetic of the original artists work. So if you saw Jack Kirby, Captain America moving around on screen, that was Jack Kirby's artwork. It wasn't somebody aping it or doing a poor man's version of it. There have been many motion comics over the years. Some of the more famous ones are the panel to panel ones that I used to look at in the early 2000s that were from the Marvel Ultimate line. Those were simple web comics that had guided browser and occasionally had characters pop out and sound effects pop out, and word balloons fade in and out. There's also the Watchman motion comic, which once again took the original artwork, but using more modern technology moved things around. This one was notorious because it had a single male actor providing all of the voices, all the narration, including the female characters. In the 2000 '20s, I think that motion comics have a real strong value because so much content is geared towards short form video, meaning something that's like 5 seconds long, 10 seconds long, 30 seconds long. You see these as Instagram reels, Tiktoks and Youtube shorts. And this is the way a lot of people consume their media. A lot of the way that people get their advertisements. And it's a great way to have something that just leaps off of the feed, the scroll that people do when they're swiping through their social media and really grabs a viewer. And you can turn those viewers into your readers. So from my point of view, motion comics are useful as an art form unto themselves. They're useful as promotion for short term video. If you do want to prep this for some sort of animation, this is a great way to create your basic animatic. And it is another digital product that you can use as a bonus. Maybe if you're doing a Kickstarter or some other sort of crowd funding campaign. The motion comic is a bonus that you include with it. Same with Patrion, any other source of crowd funding. It can be added as a perk. They definitely make a more immersive experience, including audio. If you wanted to really guide somebody towards a particular emotion of a scene. Adding music, adding dialogue, sound effects is a way to do it. This class will be separated into two basic sections. The first is going to cover moving existing artwork you have from Procreate into Procreate Dreams. If you already have comics work panels that are generated in Procreate, start there. If you're starting from scratch, I encourage you to skip to the next section, which is going to focus on creating art and motion comics from scratch and Procreate Dreams. 3. Basic Controls: Very quickly, we are going to go over the interface in Procreate Dreams, where all the basic controls are and how to import your artwork from regular procreate over to procreate dreams. This is a little bit of a learning curve only because they don't have the controls explicitly marked the way that they might be in regular procreate. Most of what you can do in regular procreate is over here. And then I'll highlight some things that we're currently not able to do in this very first generation of procreate dreams. To begin with, this is our area with our library. We have the plus icon in the upper right corner. We hit that, it gives us a selection of pixel dimensions that we can work with. These are things that can change once you've already started it. So if you start with a square and realize that you wanted to create an animation that is a four K social, you're absolutely able to change that after the fact. There are limits to the dimensions that it can create the pixel sizes, but it's unlikely that you're going to need that for any other reason than you wanted to create artwork that you ultimately wanted to make large scale posters of and things like that. In that case, I would suggest creating things in regular procreate and then importing them over. But we'll go ahead and pick the basic four K wide screen. We'll pick empty. Then when you touch the number icon below that, you see the stage options. This upper part is called the stage show onion skin, edit onion skin in background color. Onion skin is in frame by frame animation where you can see where things previously were. It's not something that we're going to be doing a lot of in this particular course, but just know it's there when you tap the name where it says Dream 59, this is where you see your properties at the top. How many frames per second, how many seconds, And then your pixel dimensions, frames per second. You can change this for motion comic purposes. I like to keep it a lower frame rate, around 12, but if you wanted things that animated a little more smoothly, you'd go for the higher frame rate. Personally, I can't stand to see something in 60 frames per second, or 120 frames per second. And I can think of one purpose for animating that way, and that's if you were going to slow it down in another program. The number of seconds for your duration is adjustable. This starts at 6 seconds. But if we wanted to go ten type ten, there it is. Share is where you get your videos out of procreate dreams. We have a blank screen, we have a play record group, and then drawing icon. This is if you want to do some initial drawing, you have a single frame within your timeline. Then if you wanted to scale Mile Swirly through the entire timeline, you hold on this highlighted red area, fill duration. And now it's spread all the way across course, it's just a little bit of swirly smoke. I'm going to tap with two fingers to undo. I'm going to tap with two fingers to undo again, all the way back to a blank screen. The plus icon next to the drawing icon is where you can add tracks. Could be a drawing level, it could be a photograph, a video text, and then where it says Files. That's where we import our audio off of our ipad. When I hit regular track, it's empty. Of course, I could do a drawing within this track. I can also do a drawing above it. I'll go ahead and fill duration with both of these. Then within the playhead, we have a few options. The way that this guy and his hair are currently drawn is out of the boundaries of my four K widescreen. If I hit done, you can see where it's actually cropped. But you're totally welcome to draw outside the barrier of that. That's especially useful if you have something like a scrolling horizon clouds. I'll do clouds that extend way out to the side and then have them move through the background of my scene. In this case, I'm just going to give a little wiggle to his hair so it looks like it has life to it. There's two places I find my transform options. Number one is within the playhead, I tap that. I also have these filters and I have the ability to split a track, which is where you just do a cut like so. You can also grab the ends of these with your apple pencil and move around. I'm going to double tap to undo that split. Now I said I wanted to move his hair around under move. I have these options and move and scale. That's where things change position over time. Double tap to undo that. I have warp, which gives you these impact points that you can now reposition things a little bit as I move down my time line and add a little extra warp to it. This gentleman's hair moves with the breeze. If I need to reposition a key frame, you can do that. Hold it with your apple pencil and move it around. If you need to delete that keyframe, go ahead and delete it. And now it's just a straight, little bit of a warp on the edge of his hair when you start doing transformations with your playhead. When it's up here and it's a little clapboard on the track, it's not going to do anything. You need to move it below to where your effects are. Now if I wanted to do a rotation, I tap one of these red corners and I have my little rotation icon. It's going to rotate around an anchor point, which is that area in the middle between his nose and his eye. If for whatever reason you want to move that anchor point around these three dots is where you edit anchor point. You can position it, say put it on the point of his nose, hit Done. It fully rotates around that axis. If you need to do other transformations that you're familiar with from Photoshop or regular procreate, the three dot menu also has flip horizontal and flip vertical. Your transformations are in two places within the playhead under move and within those three dots, me moving the playhead around and doing my adjustments is something that I can do on my own. Setting key frames and then timing it out as I view it with this. But there's also performance capture animation, which means with the Record button, if I pick up and move stuff around, it's going to set key frames throughout those seconds that I was doing my performance animation. And now and I play it, this guy is like all over the place. And those are the very basic controls for procreate dreams. I'm going to go ahead and clear this guy out. His hair was on that track and his face is on this track. And I hold and I clear. One other thing you can do in the drawing icon is access the flip book. This is where you can do traditional frame by frame animation. In this class, I don't do frame by frame animation for my character, my figures. But I do do it for elements within the drawing icon and on a fresh track. I go ahead and pull down where this little tab is. I see my flip book here. Let's say I wanted to make some loops of fire, got flames, pick my color. And that's frame one, frame two, frame three. Then when I hit done, we see that I have my motions. If I needed these to be a little longer, instead of one frame at a time, there's two ways to do that. One is to go back to the flip book and start duplicating frames. I've duplicated the first two frames, and there's two instances of each, and then the last one is just by itself. It doesn't look as lively because it's fire. But maybe for other purposes it would look okay. Then you can also duplicate frames in this content. Just hold your frame down. Duplicate this icon of overlapping rectangles is for grouping items. Once I've circled them, while I have that icon, I have a choice of group and now they're all together. This is something you can copy paste, duplicate. You can re order tracks, you can blend tracks that's within the long press. All of these and more controls are things that we're going to get into when we get into our actual lessons. I just wanted to give an overview of what's going on in procreate dreams. If you've never opened this app up before, I encourage you to look at my course that's entirely about learning the basics of procreate dreams. We really want to get into our motion comic stuff. 4. Importing Art, Brushes and Color: I want to import things that I've already drawn in regular procreate. If you are familiar with regular procreate, you probably already have a huge library of drawings that are suitable for working in animation. The way that I'm going to have regular procreate import into this is I actually need to open it next to Procreate Dreams. I'll go ahead and tap my icon. Hold it with my apple pencil. Move it to the side. Now I can see a lot of my stuff. If I want to import a whole drawing over, I grab it, drag it over, and it imports. If I have specific tools that I want to import, I need to be within a piece of artwork, going to buy brush menus if these are things that I want to import. Because you can see I've added a lot of third party brushes. Take the one called comics half tone, drag it over. That's how it imports. Then the last thing that you can import, much like the drawings in the art, if you have a particular color palette that you want to import, go ahead and grab it, bring it over. Currently in procreate dreams, you cannot just straight import brushes and color palettes and make them, they all need to go through regular procreate first and then you can move them over to procreate dreams. Now, my shady Batman, that I've moved over if I only wanted to move like particular layer over two options. One is I can group things by highlighting them and then hitting group or I can also just drag individual layers over. Now this Kathy looking character is involved with my Batman. I'll go ahead and double tap to get her out of there. When you import a full piece of art like this Batman, that has many layers, but I imported the entire art file. It says drawing if I need to get to the individual elements so I can do things like move his eye around. Long press here. One of my options, I long press on the track, and one of my options is convert layers to tracks. Now everything is on its own track and I can effect them individually. 5. Animating A Cover Part 1 Working With Existing Art: I'm going to go through the process of creating a motion comic cover. Because I've already designed this cover and procreate, not super happy with it, I know it could be a lot better. I also think that animating covers is kind of my top priority if I want people to see these comics. Having the information of what the comic is and, you know, the striking image that most people would put on their covers is kind of like a great place to start. I'll start with the original artwork. This is what I came up with. I never really got a good color scheme for this particular character. I'm not happy with it. I don't think they leap off the page. I think since I've done this cover, I've done some research into character design and found that having like a very heavy black core is a great way to have your main character stand out amongst everybody else. I'm going to go over to the original artwork I had in procreate and I'm going to group all the layers that I need for my character and flatten them. It's important to flatten these layers because if you don't, you're taking all these elements one at a time into procreate. I still can break up some of the stuff that's off to the side of the character. Meaning, things that I think I can manipulate and redraw extra elements but in my original drawing are kind of like blocked by other bits of the head. That includes the ponytails and that's going to include the arm. So I will get the side view going from procreate, take my flattened layer over into procreate dreams. There it is. Now that's a track all its own. I'm going to go into the track options by long pressing on the track with my apple pencil, I'm going to duplicate that track. Ultimately, I'm going to duplicate tracks for everything that I want to move around, and I'm going to erase out the parts that I don't need, and I'm going to redraw the parts that I do need in the case of this first ponytail. It's really simple because I just need it to go from where the hair tie is out to the rest of the hair and then I go back to my original character on the first track I imported and erase out that ponytail. The second ponytail is kind of drawn funky, it's blocked. I'm better off just duplicating my first isolated ponytail. And then within this playhead, if you long press it, you see your transform options. Currently they're kind of limited. Procreate dreams says they're going to be adding more, but at the moment, distort, move and scale are the ones that I will use to get this ponytail where I want it to be. If you need to rotate around a particular anchor, the way that you change where the anchor point is is these three dots in the upper corner. You tap those, it shows you your cross hairs which is your anchor point. And now you can place it where you want it to rotate around, which in my case is hair tie is because that's the axis, things would rotate around. In reality, I'm also going to place this ponytail track lower than my character. You can see through it because I never colored in my character. To do that process of coloring is kind of time consuming. So I'm going to fast forward through some of it. But essentially it's no different than anything you color in Photoshop or regular procreate, you switch to a drawing icon, which is this wavy line. That's where we do our drawing. And with your track selected, you can add a layer. You're going to have your color on one layer and your line work on another. And I'm going to position my color layer below the line work by holding and moving the layers around. And once my coloring is full now I can't see through my character and the ponytail behind also get its own coloring. I do want my entire character to move around on my cover. But it's important to me that things that have physics, like dangling hair, move around first. Because ultimately, all these layers are going to go into one shell. They're going to go into one group, which is the part that moves across the screen, forward, backwards, all the components of the character. And within that group are these smaller elements that are going to move. Moving around the hair, the arm. And what I ultimately did was move the eyes around as well. Because I found having the eyes fixed in one spot did not look very lively process of drawing and blinks and other things, you definitely can do that. It's a lot easier if you start your artwork from scratch, knowing that you're going to animate this particular drawing. I didn't draw that way, so I have these kind of big bug eyes to begin with, I'm just going to move her pupils around. It's only going to be a 56 second animation anyways. A character who never blinks or squints in the long term looks pretty odd to stare at on a screen. So to move the hair around and simulate some physics, it's just going to be a simple matter of doing some rotations, some scales, and possibly some distortion. And you can do this either as a key frame, which is where you set the direct points where you want things to go, or you can do this as a performance, which is where you have this record icon here. And as you do your distortions move, rotations, transforms all that stuff. It's recording what you do live. I love performance capture animation. I use Adobe character animator, which is motion capture. I think it's a great way to have naturalistic animations and things that just don't look like they go from A to B to C and don't have any sort of like randomness to them. Whether you do rotations, one pass, and then you back it up and do sort of moving scale or distortions. It's up to you, just know that if you are going to do move and scale first, the other two choices for transformations, warp and distort will be unavailable to you. They're not going to let you warp things after you've already kind of rotated around a bunch. Because that would throw off the warp a lot. The last thing that I wanted to move around on my character, I did want them to fight some sort of enemy. So I wanted their swords to move. The first sword is really drawn in place and it's blocking a lot of the character. Don't think I'm going to move that. But the back sword for what would be her right hand definitely has room for movement. So I'm going to once again duplicate my track with my full character. That has the arm. I'm going to erase the arm off that full character. I'm going to have the arm be alone on its own track. So I'm going to erase the character from the arm. And then I'm going to redraw the bits of the arm that are missing that would have been behind the person. And of course, on an arm, the anchor point is going to be the shoulder. That's the part the arm rotates around. So I set my anchor point to the arm and I gave it a little bit of motion. And now that I have these main components of my character moving around within their body, I'm going to use this group icon. It's the thing that looks like a rounded rectangle. And I'm going to group these layers with my apple pencil. You draw around them. Whatever is red is unified, it's attached to each other, but you need to long crass within one of these tracks. See the option where says group. And now you can group those layers and then once again in the playhead go into my transform options. You can see this is a character, I can now move around, scale them, rotate them. So if I helps me think of it as nest within nests, if you've never done any sort of animation where you have a rig, meaning stuff that's attached to other stuff to move around. Much like our own skeleton is a rig for all the motions our particular body does. You can still access these internal layers by going to the front of your group where you see this toil down, toilet down. And it's all the layers of your drawing. And like I mentioned in the lesson discussing moving artwork from procreate into procreate dreams. If you bring in a piece of art that already has several layers separated in procreate. Once you bring that in to procreate dreams, it comes in as one piece of art. And if you long press on that track, you have the option to split artwork into tracks. So that just makes all the layers their own thing. 6. Animating A Cover Pt 2 Utilizing Assets: Moving and coloring the character are genuinely the heavy lifting I had to do for this particular project. The rest of the material, including the background, this creature that rises up and threatens her. The logo and the number two animation were a lot simpler because they weren't the main focus. Because in the case of backgrounds, I sort of have a system for myself involving almost painterly skies with the blur effect applied. And then loops for anything else that I need if it's moving grass waves of the ocean. A lot of the imported brushes that I've gotten off of Ets and gum road are really suited for this kind of material and it doesn't take too long to make this fo blood splatter was a lot of fun to make. I just used a variety of watercolor brushes. I had ones that had different detail, look really organic, and mix them with splatter. And also a little bit of the smudge tool, use the flip book animation. So they're one frame at a time. You get to see the blood splatter start very small. I have my brush turned down pretty low. And then it grows as each frame advances. And as it dissipates, I start setting my opacity of my frames a little bit lower. A little bit lower on my brush and on the frame. And ultimately I have this splatter that I can then group and then use transform move and scale to put where I need it to go. And as large as I think it needs to be, my monster character needs to rise up, be threatened, and then disappear. So the only challenge in that was to make sure that this hulking, undefined silhouette did not block too much of my main character at any given time. And that was just a matter of rotation and scaling. And the same goes for my logo. The way that my main character had been moving around in my initial animation was blocking where the logo needed to be. So again, just an adjustment to make her fit on screen. The sound effects and music that I added are from a third party called Splice. This is a site with subscription that allows you access to musical loops, sound effects, foley. And it's a very easy process for me to find things like zombie snarls, waves crashing, sword slashing. And I did find some anime style grunts for my female lead because I found with her mouth wide open and pretty much always wide open. And every drawing I've ever done for her, because it very much is like a demon mask character, thought she needed to have some sound come out of her mouth. The final product is 8 seconds long. It has music start part way because I wanted to set the scene for the world for the first few seconds and have the music kick in when she actually does something. In hindsight, if I was to do this project from scratch, I would have made sure that her front arm was illustrated on its own layer rather than on the same layer as the rest of her body. Because I would have loved to have her front left arm move as well as her right as a motion comic, As a cover that I would put out on Tiktok or Youtube shorts or Instagram reels. I'm pretty happy with the final result. As with all good motion comics, it's a showcase for the art that's actually within the comic. It's not meant to be a animated trailer for something that ultimately looks nothing like the interior artwork of the comic book He 7. Animating Light: One of the things that I've done on this motion comment cover is animate the light on the swords. I think that little traveling special effect really sells the image, especially since energy effects are a way of animating and having some motion and interest that doesn't require you to really redraw a lot of stuff. You don't have to create new sections that are so specific, they just need to be a light effect and it just needs to travel up and down on the sword. So I'm going to put a light effect on my logo because I think my logo, as much as I like the lo fi nature of it, I think having a little bit of a sheen on it brings attention to it. Right now, you really only look at the character and you look at my giant issue two in the corner, but my logo is not as poppy. Anyway, so what I'm going to do is create a new track right above my logo. And then I go into my drawing tool and these are going to be single images that I just move around. I really don't have to go into the flip book mode I can if I want, but if I'm just going to draw one thing then I don't need to do that. Scale up to my logo. You have a selection called Luminants. Within Luminants are the flares, the light pens, light leaks, and so on. I'm going to use the light brush, make it as big as I can, have it pure white Without being too cautious. I'm just going to throw some light over it. Maybe that's too big. I'll double tap and just have that sheen. Now it's going outside of my logo, The way that I get it to go within the boundaries of the layer that's below it is called a clipping mask. To get to the clipping mask, you hold on your drawing, you pick clipping mask. Now it's within that box that says Primordial Creative Comics, the title of my T. I'm going to stretch this out as long as I think I need it. And once again, moving scale. Tap my playhead. Moving scale, It's going to slide right across my title. I'll start from one end and then drag the playhead to the end of my selection. Bring it down now, Let's see what we've got. I like it. I also like that my spacing, which I didn't plan this out to be this way, but it's kind of consistent, lighting wise, with what's happening on the swords, as if there was like a beam of light that went down there. I can also pick it up and move it around. If I think it needs better placements, certainly can duplicate it. But it's a real easy effect to have something be shiny, have some sheen go across it. It's just a matter of clipping masks, illuminance brush, and moving scale within your boundaries. Now, in the case of this pointy bit at the end of the sword, those are actually individual drawings. Within the flip book, you'll see that we start from nothing. We start with a small point, brush gets a little bigger, gets bigger, gets smaller, gets smaller, and soft, change the scale of your brush, change the opacity of your brush. That's if you want to have a frame by frame animation. But as far as the machine goes on, the sword and what's happening on my logo, that's entirely just one drawing being repositioned within a clipping mask. 8. Working From Scratch: At this point, we are going to create a motion comic from scratch in Procreate Dreams. And I'm going to use the blank paper approach. You are welcome to make your motion comics however you want to. If you're starting from scratch, instead of importing existing artwork from regular procreate, you can absolutely create something with reference. Meaning you can get a video screen, record it, film your friends doing some movement, some actions. Find existing footage online and dump it in procreate dreams and animate right on top of that. That's called rotoscoping. You absolutely can bring in photographs. I have done animation where I actually took a bunch of photos, stuck them in after effects. How to move around the way I wanted them to, and then animated on top of that just to get the motions correct in the program I'm more familiar with, which is after effects. But I think over time I'm not going to be doing that as much. In procreate dreams, you can absolutely do redraws of existing artwork. I have a lot of artwork that I made for comics prior to getting familiar with regular procreate. And they were done with just, you know, Marker and Bristol Board. And I like them, but I never put them out. And now that I've had a couple years of using the tools of regular procreate, I think the fact that I never put these things out makes them ideal for redrawing them in procreate dreams and having them become motion comics. Things that I can put on social media and Youtube and have a little bit of, you know, liveliness to them and probably find an audience better than they ever would if I just kept them on paper and made a Zen and had it online in my Etsy store, or, you know, tabled at a comic or something that nobody would buy those. So I'm going to go with the blank paper approach. And I am thinking of using these as a panel to panel swipe for something like Instagram where you could have ten panels. Whatever the size is of your very first one is what everything else has to be. So I'm going to stick to this existing square format that they have, because I think it's ideal for Instagram. And I'm going to make use of a lot of comic assets that if you've never imported brushes, this is a great time to scour the internet, et gum road. Wherever people give away or sell brushes, you can find almost any kind of brush you possibly could want. I use brushes that are influenced by studio gib, anime, and I use those for my vegetation. I really love the look of those. I have used comic brushes that have vintage half tones, vented shading. There are ones that create word balloons, either like traditional American style or anime manga style. You can find almost any kind of brush you want out there and import it. It might cost you a couple bucks, but believe me, it's worth it. Rather than having to redraw stuff all the time that you use all the time. Standard duration of viewing something online is maybe like five, 6 seconds, maybe less. So I really want to keep my animations short and punchy and to the point. I don't want to stretch out fade ins and fade outs and make people stare at a screen longer than they likely to do. So just know that one of the cool things you can do in motion comics, if you're going to do this sort of like panel to panel thing, is that you can vary the duration of your panels. Meaning some can be short and punchy, especially if it's like a quick action. And then some can be a little bit longer if it's a more dramatic moment. If you have a lot of dialogue that you're going to fade in or showcase on the panel, You can absolutely change the duration of how long these things last. You can also make them loop, which is very hypnotic to a viewer. And it's also a neat trick if you have something happening like a very mechanized scene. Now, when we consider what kind of things are going to go in the panel, let's just say that they need to be meaningful. They can just be random drawings of cool stuff that don't advance the story. Because a lot of times on a motion comic, if in a social media swite, people have the sound turned down. They maybe aren't reading dialogue as much as looking at things, so your storytelling has to be very direct. Each panel should either advance the story or the gag, if it's a joke kind of comic strip. And they should add detail like setting the scene, what kind of materials an object is made of, if that object is relevant. And in an ideal world, I think you would be able to do both in a panel. You would both advance a story and have detail. That's really the art of storytelling versus just making pretty pictures. Another consideration is what advantage you can take of this particular format. And by that I mean if you've ever been to a three D movie, you can see they plan shots that take advantage of the three D format. An element like depth of a set is more considered in a three D film. And they'll have things that come towards the audience. So we have to be considerate, actions, reactions, elements like wind, light and sound, word balloons, lettering and sound effects. And then any sort of motion or effects related to those things, like opacity, blurs, and so on. Actions are the clearest of these considerations. 9. Drawing And Motion From Scratch: We make a list and we say, what's the action in the panel? I'm going to do something that involves a fast character who runs like a flash or a quicksilver type of character. They're going to go from point A to point B. And for the sake of our lesson, I'm going to have him do a little bit extra in the panel. He's going to have a bucket of water and he's going to put out two fires. In a regular comic, that's multiple actions, and it might be two panels, at least. Sometimes in a comic you've got a fast character, they're going to do more in the panel than they regularly do. And then I really like in older comics, an effect they did called the Luca effect, which is where you see multiple iterations of a fast character in one panel to accomplish my action. The first thing I'm going to do is of course create my character. I'm going to key frame him moving from one place to another. The character stops long enough to toss water that needs to flip the other direction to do the same with the second fire. I'm totally okay with using the same loop for both. So it's a matter of making one drawing that's fast, the water motion. Then I group those and duplicate that group. My copy can be flipped to go opposite direction to take care of that side. And because this is a fast character, I can cheat on the motion by key framing, a blur effect as well as an opacity effect in between the stop and start points. Once I kind of have all my drawings together, I can also split so the middle sections can be smudged and the character has the illusion of a motion blur that way, since there isn't a motion blur effect currently in procreate dreams. The other action on the screen involves burning piles. So I can make these using a fire brush and want to make the loops in a flip book. I'll group those and then underneath that loop I'll have my burning rubbish piles. The reaction to the action is the fire converting to smoke. So my fire flip book loops will cease at the moment that my character runs up to them. And I need to split my loops, delete those sections, and at that point I also need to add some flip book smoke. Which I'll mess around with the frame duration and opacity and blur to see what feels right for smoke effect. Because generally, the smoke is going to travel a little bit slower than firewood. This is me thinking out the logic of what my things in my scene would do. And this brings us to elements. The aforementioned fire, smoke, and also water from the bucket are the elements I'm playing with. Luckily, I have elemental brushes that I can use to make use of all of these things. I also think a fast character should kick up dust. Lastly, I think the fire from these burning piles would create a smoky sky. So I'm not going to do my standard blue sky clouds. I'm going to have a polluted skyline. And move it around a bit by key framing some moving scale. 10. Illustrating Sound FX and Adding Sound: Fun. I'm going to illustrate sound effects for what I think is the most important moment, which is the fire being put out. The sort of hissing of water going onto a fire. It would be too cluttered to have all the sounds be illustrated. So having the sounds of the running, you know, having a sound effect on screen for that, I just think it's unnecessary and it would be way too much. I do love the tropes of comics, like the stuff they did going back historically, including thought balloons, sound effects, weird panel shapes breaking out of the panel. Even though many of them are considered old hat, I think that's like a great thing to drop into your motion comics because it really plays up the fact that this is still a comic and it's not animation. It's not Legends of A, it's not the Simpsons, it's got a lot of other stuff that it can play with that a regular animated show just isn't going to jump into. One of the bits of comics I like is the sound effects of Frank Quietly in the Batman and Robin comic he did with Grant Morrison. He basically makes the sound effects part of the illustrations. Famously, we have this boom sound effect in the shape of the explosion. And with procreate dreams, I'm not going to do the same thing Frank quite did. But I can use smoke brushes to evoke the smoke sound effect. Or I can use a clipping mask in the smoke layer and have my thick flat lettering be composed of smoke. So now I have my sounds from spliced. To add those sounds would be running water, fire, and the fire going out. And have my thick flat lettering be composed of smoke. And that is the consideration that I put into designing this particular panel. If this was an ongoing comic strip for Instagram or whatever social media you think you might try and promote your comics career, your comics makings on. I can make use of ten panels. That is a lot of work and I'll be honest with you, part of the joy of doing comics versus animation in the first place is that you can make a lot of these a lot faster than you can an animated short, 10 seconds of animation if you really put in the effort and do flip book drawings for every frame that something moves across the screen. Even if you did 12 frames per second, you're still looking at 120 drawings for a ten second bit of animation. That's only for the parts that move. We're not talking about the parts that are background effects. For me to create this motion comic panel was not anywhere remotely the amount of work that it would take, nor does it feed into my ultimate goal, which is to get people to be interested in the actual comics. If you are a comics maker, if you are a lover of the art form, if you love comic strips, anything that is a blend of image and words to tell your story, then we lean into those effects with motion comics and we should make use of everything that's been established by the previous 150 years of comics history. 11. Wrap Up: I want to thank you for making it all the way through this course on motion comics and Procreate Dreams. Procreate Dreams being a new app. There isn't a lot of motion comic stuff out there right now. But I get the feeling that once creators understand that all the comics they've already put together in regular procreate can now be something more, something extra. I think you're going to see a lot of it on the horizon. A lot more than you've seen in the past where maybe you had to utilize after effects. And that involves sitting in a computer. And we're already sitting at computers for a long period of time. You know, I can take my ipad Pro to the ocean, I can work on it on public transportation. And all of a sudden that extra time and being in places that are a little more inspiring than a desk really changes the kind of artwork I make. I'm really grateful for the team at appropriate for designing this additional bit of software. If you have made anything as a result of this class, I'd love to see what you made. Go ahead and post a link to it below. Or e mail me directly at Info at Primordial Creative.com Best of luck to you in your own creative endeavors.