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. So 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. Adding Frame Animation: In this lesson, I will break down my animation process and then we'll walk through an exercise for creating a looping frame animation sequence. Before we dive into the exercise, let's take a moment to break down the different parts of this animation. First, I have hand 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. Last, I've used the performing mode to animate the bee, so it's bumping up and down a little to give a more realistic movement. Now that we've broken down the different parts of this animation, let's dive into adding the frame animation. I have the exercise file already set up with a foreground layer. Next, I have the B group layer, and then at the bottom is the background layer. And it's important to call out that I've designed the background and foreground layers to be much wider than the frame size to help create that parallax effect. Now, since we're starting with the wing animation, let's open up the B group. As you can see, I already have one frame already drawn of the wings. Feel free to replace with your own wings drawing. Next, I'm going to convert the group into a flipbook. I'll just tap and hold on the group until the content options appear. Now I'll tap on Convert to flipbook. And now we can tap on Edit flipbook to open up the flipbook mode. And as you can see, all the tracks are available now to draw on in the flipbook. Before getting started, I'm going to take a moment to organize my tracks by tapping on each name and renaming them. This is a really helpful practice to do. As your animations get more complex, you'll be able to find the right tracks easily. 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 inking 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. I'll also be doing that with the line in the center of the wing. Next, I'll do the same thing again with the other wing. Now I'm going to hover back and forth over the three frames to preview the motion. Since I want this animation to fill up the full duration of my video, I will need to duplicate the three frame sequence multiple times. To do that, I will start by tapping on the multi select icon here, and then I will select all three frames, and then I will tap and hold on one of the frames to bring up content options, and now I'll tap on duplicate. Next, I'll select all six and duplicate could just keep duplicating the original three frames, but this makes it go quicker. And now I'm going to continue duplicating my frames until I have filled the full track. Once done, I will play the animation to review how it looks. And that's looking great. To recap, in this lesson, I walked you through how to create a looping frame animation sequence using the flipbook mode. In the next lesson, I will walk you through how animate the parallax scroll to B looks like it's actually moving. 4. Animating Parallax Scroll: In this lesson, I will walk you through how a keyframe a parallax effect and how it give your be some more lifelike movement. To begin, let's make sure the action button is at the start of the timeline. Now I'll go to the stage area, and I'll tap on the background layer and move it so it aligns with the right edge of the frame. Next, I'll repeat the step with the foreground layer. Tip, you can press down on the stage with one finger while dragging an object to enable snapping, which will help you move objects in a straight line. Next, I'll go to the end of the timeline, and with the grass layer still selected, I will drag it to the opposite direction so it aligns with the left side of the frame. Now I'll go down to the background layer and repeat the process so it adds a new keyframe with the layer aligned to the left side. Last thing I will do is tap in between the keyframes, and then I will tap on set all easings. Then I will tap on linear. Linear easing will keep the movement consistent so the B doesn't look like it's speeding up or slowing down. It just has a consistent movement. Linear easing is also important if you want to loop the animation. To enable looping playback, you will want to first tap on the movie settings icon. And then you'll just tap on the timeline section and then go up and tap on loop. And as you can see, now we have a nice parallax effect, which makes it look like the bee is moving forward. We already have a really nice animation, but we can kick it up a notch with the help of performing. To activate performing mode, tap on the perform button down here. And as you can see over here, the action icon has changed into a recording icon, which lets us know it's ready. Record our movements. Then I'll tap on the bee in the screen, and I will slowly drag it up and down a couple of times until we reach the end of the animation. And as you can see, Procreate Dreams has automatically added in the keyframes for the bee. In playing the animation, we can see how everything looks now, which is looking fine, but the bee's movement feels sallow. I'm going to adjust the motion filtering. Adjust this, you will need to hold down on the perform icon. And now I'm going to reduce the slider. And as I'm doing that, you may notice that there are new keyframe that are starting to pop up on the timeline. Now when I go back and play the animation, you can see the bee is bumping up and down a lot more organically. Motion filtering is a great way to make the animation more smooth or more organic. So feel free to play around that with your animations. And that's it. To recap, we just walk through how to create a parallax effect by keyframe the background and foreground layer, and then using performing mode to create an organic motion for the flying bee. Now that we have these different animation techniques down, feel free to customize the assets to bring your own springtime animation to life. And in the next lesson, I will walk you through how I export your animation. 5. Exporting Animation: In this lesson, I will walk you through a couple options to export your animation. The first option we'll walk through is how to export a video. To start out, tap on the movie settings button. Next tap on share to bring up the export options, and then 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. Now let's walk through How Export and animated GIF. So let's go back to our movie settings, and this time, instead of tapping on video or another option, we're going to tap on Advance Export. And from this screen, we will tap on format. This will bring up a new screen, and we can change it to gif. Next thing you may want to adjust is the resolution of your gift. Typically, I will go with something like 720, but to optimize our gifts to share on Skillshare, I'm going to go with 480. If you're struggling with the size requirements, I recommend always lowering the resolution. Now that we made our changes, let's tap on preview to view those updates. And once you played back the gift and are satisfied, go ahead and tap on the share button at the top. And then in the pop up, we can tap on Save Image to save our gift. And that's it to recap. In this lesson you learned how to export your animation as a video and as an animated gift. Videos are great for sharing your animation on social media, and animated gifts can be an easy way to share it in your student project. Now it's your turn to export your animation and share it in the student project. And the next lesson, we will wrap up the class. 6. 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.