Spring Into Animation: Animate A Flying Bee in Procreate Dreams

1. Introduction: Hey, I'm Isaiah Cardona, and I'm a senior art director that loves incorporating hand drawn animations into projects using Procreate dreams. And if you know me from my animation tutorials on YouTube or my popular online classes, and you know I am passionate about making the world of animation accessible to non animators. This bite size class, I will walk you through a couple quick techniques including frame animation, how to keyframe a parallax effect, and how you use performing mode to give your animation a more dynamic movement. And we'll apply these skills to create a fun springtime animation. This short learning module is suited for anyone who enjoys using Procreate dreams and is looking to learn some new and versatile animation tricks. If you're ready to get started, grab your iPad with Procreate dreams and let's get started. 2. Class Overview: Welcome back. The class project is to create your own springtime animation using the techniques from the class. You have complete freedom, so make sure I have fun with it. And if you'd like to follow along with the exercise, you can download the exercise file in the resources section of the class. Recommend following along with the starter file, and then once you have the techniques down, bring in your own assets and create your own customized animation. If you have any questions throughout the class, please leave a comment in the discussion section of this class, and I'll be happy to help. And the next lesson we'll dive into our animation exercise. 3. Animating Scene: In this lesson, I will walk you through my process for creating this fun bee flying animation. Before we dive into the exercise, let's take a moment to break down the different parts of the animation. First, I have and drawn three frames to create a frame animation for the wings movement. Next, I'm using a parallax effect by animating the foreground and background elements, which makes it look like the bee is moving forward. And lastly, I use the performing mode to animate the bee so it's bumping up and down a little to give it a more realistic movement. That we've broken down the parts of the animation, let's dive into adding frame animation. I have the exercise file already set up with a foreground layer, which you can see is double the size of the canvas. Next, I have a B group layer, and then at the bottom is the background layer. Since we're starting with the wing animation, let's open up the B group. And as you can see, I have one frame already drawn of the wings. Feel free to replace with your own wings drawing. Next, I'm going to tap in the next empty space after the first frame, and then I'll enter drawing mode and drag the timeline down to enter flipbook mode. And now we're ready to draw the second frame of the wing animation. If you'd like to match my wing drawing, I'm using the dry ink brush, which can be found in the default ink brush set. Since the first frame had the wings up, I'm going to draw the second frame with the wings down in a more flattened position. Once done, I will tap on the next blank frame. And this time, I'm going to use the onion skins to help me draw the wings in between both of those positions, and I'll also do that with the line in the center of the wing. Next, I'll do the same thing with the other wing. Once done, I will exit the flipbook mode. And now I'm going to tap on the timeline edit button, and then I will select all three frames. And then I will tap on one of the frames and then tap on group. Since I want the animation to fill the full duration, I will need to duplicate my frame animation group. So I'll zoom out so I can see the full timeline, and then I will tap on the group and then tap on duplicate to duplicate that group. Now I'll repeat this step multiple times until it fills out the full duration. Once done, I will play the animation to review how it looks. Now let's give the B the illusion of movement by setting up a parallax effect. To start out, I'm going to move the action button to the start of the foreground layer and tap it. Now I'm going to tap on move and then on move and scale to add a move keyframe. Now I'm going to tap on the foreground layer and move it so it aligns with the right edge of the frame. Next, I'll go to the end of the timeline and add a new keyframe. This time, I will move the grass layer so it aligns with the left side of the frame. As you can see, when played back, the grass will move from left to right, which makes it look like the bee is moving forward. Last thing I will do is tap in between the key frames and then tap on set all easings, and then I'll tap on Linear. Linear easing will keep the movement consistent so the bee doesn't look like it's speeding up and slowing down. It just has a nice consistent movement. Linear easing is also important if you're trying to loop the animation. Now let's animate the background layer. Just like with the grass, I will start by adding a new keyframe at the start of the timeline, and then I'll move the sky layer to align with the right side of the frame. Next, I'll go to the end of the timeline, and I'll add a new keyframe. And then I will move the sky to align with the left side of the frame. And just like with the grass, I'm going to go back to the timeline and change the easing to linear. And now we have a nice parallax effect which makes it look like the bee is moving forward. We already have a really cool animation, but we can kick it up a notch with the help of performing. To activate performing mode, tap on the record button here. And as you can see, we have this blinking red light letting us know it's ready to record our movements. I'm now going a tap on the B in the screen, and I will slowly drag it up and down a couple of times until we reach the end of the animation. As you can see, now the bee is bumping up and down, which makes that animation look way more dynamic than just having the bee look like it's flying at the same height the whole time. To recap, we just walk through how you use frame animation, key frames and performing mode to animate different elements of a flying bee animation scene. And now that you have these different animation techniques down, feel free to customize the assets to bring your own springtime animation to life. In the next lesson, I will walk you through how I export your animation. 4. Exporting Animation: In this lesson, I will walk you through how export your animation. The first option is to export a video. To start out, tap on the movie title. Next, tap on share to bring up the export options. Next, tap on video. This will bring up an overlay with options to save or share your video. I'm going to tap on save video to save it to the Photos app, and that's it. Currently, Procreate Dreams doesn't support exporting gifts, so I'm going to show you a workaround using Procreate. To start out, you will need to open the Procreate app. Then you will want to tap on Photo in the top right corner. This will bring up the Photos overlay, and I will choose the video that I just exported from Procreate Dreams. Before we export the gift, I'm going to show you how to resize your animation to reduce the gift size. It's important to note that Skillshare only allows you to upload gifts that are around 8.5 megabytes or smaller. So if you're having a hard time uploading a gift to your class project, you may need to scale it down. So first tap on the wrench icon, then tap on Crop and Resize. Now click on settings and toggle on Resample Canvas. And then here I'm going to change the width to 1,000 pixels wide, and the program will automatically reduce the height accordingly. Now we're ready to export. So I'll tap back on the wrench icon, and this time, I will tap on share to get all the export options. Now I can tap on animated GIF. And then in this window, I will just tap on export. And then now I have this overlay with options to save. Now I'll tap on Save Image. And that's it. To recap. In this lesson you learned how to export your animation as a video and as an animated gift. And the next lesson, we will wrap up this class. 5. Final Thoughts: Congratulations on completing this class. I hope you have created an animation project that you are proud to share with the world. I hope this class has shown you how fun and easy animation can be and has inspired you to apply these skills to future projects. I'm very excited to see what you've created, so be sure to post your work to the project section of this class. Sharing your project with the Skillshare community is a great way to help inspire each other and continue growing. And if you would like more classes to help you learn animation, then follow me on Skillshare and check out some of my other classes on animation and motion design. And if you enjoyed this class and found the lessons useful, please take a moment to leave a review. Positive reviews like yours helps other students find the class. Thanks again for taking this class and I hope to see you in a future class soon. Bye for now.