Telling a Character's Story with a 2D Looped Animation

1. Introduction: Hi and welcome to my Skillshare class. My name is Vera, I'm a freelance illustrator and animator, and I'm based in Hamburg, Germany. I have a passion for character design and traditional animation and in my class I will teach you how I design characters that tell a story within themselves and show you how to create a 2D animation with them. This class is for a bit more advanced artists who are comfortable with working in Photoshop and for anybody really who's up for a challenge, you will learn a process on how to approach character design, and quite literally give your art another dimension. For the class project, I would like you to make a reference sheet, to concept and design a character to board out a little story for looped animation and to animate your character. You can easily tag along on the provided character and story guidelines or you can apply these steps to your own character and story ideas. I'm excited to see what you're coming up with and let's jump right in. 2. The Brief: So for this lesson, we will start with The Brief. I have prepared a character for you, and I will outline it straight so you can just tag along on what I'm doing. So here we go. It's a goblin girl. She is skittish, she is kleptomaniac, she is unpredictable, she's animalistic and ferocious, but she is also lovable. We're going to use the character design then to create an animation where the character reacts to a butterfly. I will include the butterfly animation for you so you don't have to worry about that. Otherwise, if you want to make a butterfly animation, just go wild and knock yourself out. If you already have a character design and you just want to do the animation, you can skip the first lessons on preparation, concept, and character design, and go ahead to the story development. Our animation videos. 3. Gathering Reference Materials: We're going to start by thinking about the character. We're going to get to know the character. We're going to sit down and we're thinking who is this character? How's she acting? How does she look like? You will go ahead and find references that help you create your character. Life is really the best source of reference that you can get. But otherwise, I will use Google and I will use Pinterest. You just go and look for references on how they appear. For instance, species in this case, goblins. The gesture, how do they hold their bodies? How do they move? Expression references, what they look like? Their clothing, accessories, hair adornment. If you want to upload your project later, I would love to see your mood board, or your reference materials in there as well. Let's move along. 4. Where Inspiration Strikes: It isn't always easy to come up with a character, so I like to pick a character that is existing in a book or a movie, in a series or something or a show. In this case, I picked Nott, The Brave. She's from Critical Role, which is a show where they play Dungeons and Dragons. It's a YouTube channel. It's very entertaining, and you can get to know Nott a bit better, if you like. Otherwise, just ignore what I just said and just go ahead with the brief. What I like about Nott, is that she has a contradictory element to her. She looks like a little girl, but she actually isn't. The accessories, the things that your character wears on them, the clothing that they wear, everything tells a story. It's all about the little things and the detail, and this is what we're going for. 5. Reference Sheet: Whatever reference you can find, you just gather it somewhere and just slap it into a document. It doesn't matter. It doesn't have to be pretty. It's just for you really. As long as you understand what you're doing with it, that's fine. To sum up, this is how I work. I just gather all the pictures I want to use in a folder, then I open a Photoshop document in the size of an A3 or A4. I put all the pictures in. I organize them by theme, and then I just save it, and I have everything that I want to look at in one sheet. You can see I've gathered a bunch of reference materials. First of all, I have these character designs that I have gathered, which were made by other artists. I collected them for no specific reason really just because they spoke to me in a level. It's just a helpful guideline to see how people approached in. Maybe you find something here that you haven't thought about. Let's take this one for instance. If I look at it, I can relate with this character. It tells me how she feels. It's not only her expression in her face, and her little bit hunched gesture, it's also, and that's what I want to point out here, her ears, her big, pointy ears that are emoting with her. Her ears indicate how she feels. Then next up, this here, I looked at it and I felt she feels a bit too old for me right now. I think she's a bit younger. For my design, I want to make her a bit younger. But what I like about this design, for instance, are the big eyes. That's what I like about this one. Also, what I didn't really think about before was the earrings and the nose ring that I might take along. Then the last reference picture here is actually from an animation, which is amazing. You should go find it because it's just wow. What I like about this design is her teeth. It shows her animalistic traits. Next up, I have looked for reference pictures on eight-year-old girls because I felt, yeah, that could be her age. I will just find some materials, and I was not disappointed. I found some of these girls that looked really cute. At the same time, really annoyed, and upset somewhat. I've really liked the expression on this one. It just tells so much. I don't know what she seeing, but it clearly is not something she likes. Then I can relate with these, especially because I think that's how I looked most of my life as a young girl. I will just take along those. Then there's another trait that I want to cover, which is a bit animalistic and unpredictableness of her. I was looking for animals, and since I like the ears on the reference that I found. I decided that a cat would probably depict what I like about this character or what I think the character might act like. You know how cats are. They are like, yeah if you pet me, I like you. But I might also decide to just claw you in a moment. I might accept your petting right now, but I might also just bite you. Just be careful. You can see how their ears turn and how they expose their teeth. Coming back to teeth. I wanted to get more into that, so I found some ragged teeth materials for another cat. I think it's like a cheetah or leopard or something. I don't know. Just this very typical child mouth with big gaps in there. Yeah, stuff like that. That is my reference sheet. I then started noting down the points that I had on them, so I don't forget them. I also started sketching on top of the layers. Let's jump to the next lesson and get started with sketching. 6. Sketches: Now that I have gathered all my references in one sheet, I will just go and put another layer on top and then I will just take notes on top of that. Here are the traits that I had already marked out for you in the briefing. I pointed out the characteristics that I liked and each of the reference pictures. She's actually a rogue that will inform a bit of the character design, of course. I just went ahead and made some character sketches without any plan really. Just simple shapes, quick sketches, trying to capture the emotion and in this case, translating a character that is the cat onto a character that is goblin, or as some human, shape to figure. If you have reference pictures of animals, that is a nice challenge for you to try and translate, the expressions in their faces to a human face. You can train your observational skills by looking at reference pictures and trying to capture their essence and quick sketches. When you feel like you have an idea about what this character is, you can start sketching out some little poses, some little moments, how she acts, expressions, stuff like that. Just have fun. I was thinking about how would this character react to certain things and how would she interact with her environment. There she saw this butterfly and then the next picture is like she's like [inaudible] she enjoyed the butterfly. Once you've got to feel for your character, just gather all your sketches in a sheet as you did before with your reference pictures and upload them to your project. 7. Character Design: Now that we know our character, we're going to go ahead and create a Character Design. You can now tie down the decisions you made in the sketches we made before. It'll be a lineup of the character to show you how to treat her from different angles and to inform their design that will be moved in 3D space. When designing for animation, you always want to keep in mind that every line that you make is going to be moved. Just try to stay simple. You can also go over the top part. I'm a lazy person, I try to reduce everything as much as possible. I don't have that much work when it comes to animation. You can see how I built up the design from very simple shapes. Once I have established the silhouette for the front view, I just copy that and I put it mirrored on the other side. To establish the back view, I can erase several lines. It's just about keeping the silhouette and having a bit of an easier time. It's a bit of a cheat, but it works. Your Character Design has to be consistent in where you're putting things, in the angles of how you're putting things and stuff. Everything you do is keeping in mind both other views of the element that you are looking at. Once you've established your rough Character Design, you can go ahead and create the final linework. When you're creating the line work for a character that's going to be animated, keep in mind that you're going to draw these lines a lot. You can also stay rough. That is up to you. This is how I do it. This is how I like it. Like a bit of a clean line and that's why I create my line work for the final lineup like this. I have established that she's wearing a collar. I will use this element to indicate space. When I'm turning her around in 3D space, in my head, I can see how the opening of the collar moves, for instance, and how the color is draped around her body. These lines will help you guide the animation later. Every line that wraps around the shape will inform how it moves through space. When you're designing your character, just keep in mind to have such indicating lines along your Character Design. It'll make it much easier for you to later have a consistent movement and to see how the character moves in space. Remember to put in details but sparingly, just keep in mind every line that you are drawing in your design will have to be animated. I keep everything as simple as possible by giving the most information for myself. When I add the clothing to my character, I keep in mind the shape of the body underneath and I try to mimic the forms, and I try to emphasize the form. For the sleeves, of course, I could have gone with something very tight, but instead, I let them be a bit loose and so they have a bit of room to move around her arms if I want to move the arms. That will give me more possibilities to play with movement in my animation. I didn't include an expression sheet here. I wanted to be flexible when it came to my animation. It's always helpful to have an established form of extremes of what the face can do. Think of squash and stretch. If you squeeze together your face as much as possible. This is one extreme and if you raise your eyebrows and you open your mouth and you make huge eyes, that is another extreme. Same as with the expression sheet. You can also establish colors for your character. I don't have a guideline on that for you because colors are very subjective. Whatever fits for your Character Design, choose a nice color palette. Here's a little advanced tip for you if you want to check how your colors relate to each other. In terms of value, you can change your view in Photoshop to black and white and you can see how the colors relate to each other on a gray-scale spectrum. If you establish colors for your character so you can add that to your animation later, I recommend you setting up nice little color swatches as this so you can easily pick the colors when you're coloring in your animation. Next level sheet is some shading if you want to shade your animations. I used a dark purple hue. I put it on a multiply layer on 50 percent and that is how I did my shadows. If you want to do that, also put that in your reference sheet for further use. To sum up, keep it simple, remember your sketches, have indicating lines. Use simple shapes. Think about elements that might move on your character, such as hair or clothing, and remember, every line you use will have to be animated. Are you ready for animation now? Let's go. 8. Story: In this lesson, I will talk about story. Now we have established that character. We know a little bit about her. We have an idea who she is. We have an idea of what she looks like. But now we want to know what she does. I give you the prom that there's a butterfly flying by. What we're aiming for is have a little loop in the end. A little animation that goes round and round, will be about 5-10 seconds. There's not a lot of time we can tell a story. I was wondering about how will this character react to butterfly. Many people would think, butterflies are cute. She might have it land on her finger or she might just watch it fly by, or else desert cute butterfly flying by, so the little goblins girl Grexit at, eats it. When you tell a story, it's always a bit more interesting when you have an unexpected punchline in their. When I'm animating, I want to start with story beats, so I have little points in time that I can jump to from point to point so I have this point and I have this point and I have this point. How I get there is the story that I'm telling you. I can tell it this way or it can tell it that way. Having the story beats up is the baseline and the construct of what we're going to make later. Then when you have your story construct, we can move along to the animation part. 9. Setting up Photoshop for Animation: Let's set up a Photoshop file for animation. Shall we? Startup Photoshop, go to File New and create a file, a 1,000 by 1,000 pixel with a 200 DPI resolution. You can also do a different size. This is just how I like to work and go to View and enable the timeline, and then you can create a timeline by clicking there. So here are a couple of things that I would like to make sure before we get started. We want to set it to 24 frames, so we can animate on this properly. You can see if you drag a layer, you grab a layer by the end, it has this little black arrow thingy. You can scale the length of your layer in the time. To get started, I set up a background layer and wait for about seven seconds. If you grab this little arrow down there and you drag it to left and right, it will give you a more detailed view of your frames. So the further to the right it is, the more frames you can see in your working area, and the further to the left it is the more far overview you get. You see when you create a new layer, it will give you this very long as thing, which we don't want. I haven't figured out how it is easier, but this is how I do it. I do it once and then I create a layer that is two frames long, and then I can just drag it to the new layer button over there, and it creates another layer that is also two frames long. If you drag your layers into one layer, it will create a video group, which is really nice for an overview. So once you have a lot of layers, it gets a bit messy. Otherwise, when starting out, it's good to have your frames on different layers so you have a bit better control over the length of your frames. For instance, if you make your animation and then you say, "The timing isn't quite right. I need this one to be a bit longer." You can easily adjust that, and very important, if you want to split a layer, you can just put your playhead somewhere, select layer, and click on the scissors to split the layer there and create a new layer. If you click down here, it'll convert your animation to frame animation. I have never understood how this is supposed to work because it gives you seconds to work with and it's so confusing for me, so we don't want to do that, especially because when you convert it back, it will do this, and you will have to do everything again, or you can just go back in time if you have your history settings accordingly. Yeah. Now you have your Photoshop file and we should be able to work with that. 10. Principles of Animation: Before we get started, I need you to get familiar with a couple of principles of animation. This is one of the most important principles, when it's applied, it gives your animated character and objects the illusion of gravity and of weight. Think about how an object is tossed in the air and hits the ground. It will stretch when it's traveling up or down, and when it hits the ground it will squish. It's very important to keep the object's volume in mind. Keep the volume consistent. When you stretch something it needs to get thinner and when you squash something it needs to get wider. Anticipation helps to prepare the viewer for what's about to happen. When it is applied, it has the effect of making the object's action more realistic. Consider how it might look if you were to jump in the air without bending your knees or perhaps throw a ball without first pulling your arm back. It would appear very unnatural or even impossible. In the same way if your animated movement doesn't have this anticipation to it, it will feel very awkward. When something comes to a standstill after being in motion, different parts of the object will stop at different rates. Also, not everything on an object will move at the same rate. If your character is running across the scene, their arms and legs may be moving at a different rate from their head, this is overlapping action. When they stop running, their hair will probably continue to move for a few frames before it's coming to a rest, that is follow through. The best way to understand slow-in and slow-out is to think about a car and how it starts and stops. When it starts, it will start moving slowly before gaining momentum and speeding up. The opposite will happen when the car breaks. In animation, that effect is achieved by adding more frames at the beginning and the end of an action sequence. You have more frames for a slower movement and you have less frames for a faster movement. When making an animation, you want to stick to the laws of physics. Most objects follow an arc or a path when they're moving, so your animation should reflect that. When you toss a ball into the air, it follows the natural arc as the effect of the earth's gravity is acting upon it. Secondary actions are used to support or emphasize the main action going on in a scene. For instance, the sudden movement of a character's hair as they walk, or maybe a facial expression or a secondary object reacting to the first. Whatever the case may be, the secondary action should not distract from the primary one. For this principle of animation, we have to look at the laws of physics again and we have to apply what we see in nature. In this case, the focus is on timing. If you move an object more quickly or slowly, than it would naturally move in the real world, the effect won't be believable. Using the correct timing allows you to control the mood and the reaction of your characters and objects. That is not to say you can push things a little bit, especially if you're creating an imaginary world, but if you do be consistent. Too much realism can ruin an animation, making it appear static and boring. Instead maybe add some acceleration to your characters and objects to make them a bit more dynamic. Find ways to push the limits just beyond what's possible and your animations will pop. They say there's two ways of animating a scene. The one principle is called straight ahead animation, and the other one is called pose to pose. Say you had action involves drawing frame by frame from start to finish. You will get fluid and realistic movements but it might feel a bit lost. You might lose consistency in the masses and character design as opposed to post technique where you draw the beginning frame and the end frame and a few frames in between and then you go back and complete the rest. This technique gives you a bit more control within the scene and it allows you to increase the dramatic effect of a motion. People mind, Squash and Stretch. Consistency of the Masses. Follow Through and Overlapping Action. Slow In and Slow Out. Secondary Action. Timing and Spacing, and your Arcs. 11. Animation: I have laid out my story beats for my animation first. You can see in the top right corner, some of my nodes on the timing. I made basically a timeline for how it's moving from frame 1 to frame 5. It's helpful to keep those things in mind. Once you've established your story beats and where they are in your timing, you can just animate straight ahead. It's good to have the neutral pose as a reference in the background. I animate on 24 frames per second. That means I don't draw 24 frames per second, I usually work on twos. That means I draw 12 frames a second, unless I have a very fast movement. In that case, I go from twos to ones. I actually draw frame per frame. If I wanted to be super smooth, I draw only on ones. But otherwise, it's enough if you animate on twos. I'm trying to get clean lines here, so I redraw lines, [inaudible]. It's different from person to person how they prefer to animate. Some might just go ahead and lay out the lines and they're perfect at first try, but I'm not that person. Also for me, it's important to keep the bigger picture in mind, so I zoom out a lot. I replay what I've already animated, so I see how the first frame, and the second frame, and the third frame work together, and if they actually form a movement or if it's just in a while. I got lost along the way while I was drawing. If you have elements in your animation that stay still, you can just copy them. You can see how I use the ears to emphasize her emotion. When she sees it her eyes move and her ears move too. When she's getting ready to jump, her ears help to anticipate the movement. So what we have here is a smear frame. Because it's a very fast action, I used as little frames as possible to tell what is happening and to emphasize the motion of her arm, I directed it through the frame. If you have a motion that is holding so your character stands still, you can still add little motions into the design to give it a bit more life. Add some secondary action at a blink or a movement of an eye because if you have just a still frame without anything moving in there, it gets a bit awkward. Here I have animated only her pupils, so I still have movement, but just a little bit and the emphasis is on the focus point, the butterfly. I've pointed out the arcs in my animation for you. If you enable the onion skin settings in Photoshop, you can see how the landmarks of your character move along. Here are the most extremes of my character design. You can see I have not been very bold, but I was being consistent in the masses and the squash and stretch could have been a bit more squashy and more stretchy, but I think it works. Then I will just take that along as a learning experience. When it comes to coloring, if you want to color your animation, I recommend to first export the line work of your character animation and then re-import it as a smart object, so you don't have to pick the right frames at every point in time. This way you can just go to the next frame and then I use the Magic Wand to select the empty space around the character. I invert the selection and then fill it with color. Once you have the shape of the character filled, it is easy for you to lock the alpha channel and then just paint into the shapes. You can also use the selection tool, it's up to you. Same process for the shading. As I said before, I use the dark purple that I put on 50 percent and set the layers to multiply, so this way you get a nice and warm shadow. When you're animating the shadow, keep in mind elements that are overlapping each other. Just don't over complicate it. Once you're done with your animation, you can give yourself a pat on the shoulder for it because it's a shit ton of work. You can just export it as a video or as a GIF and attach the final animation to the class project. 12. Last Words: Thank you so much for taking my class. I hope you enjoyed it and you learned something. If you would give me a rating, that would be amazing. Leave some comments. If you have any questions, don't hesitate to ask. I'm excited to see your class projects and until next time, bye.