Typography in Motion: Animating Type in Adobe Fresco | Tracey Capone | Skillshare

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Typography in Motion: Animating Type in Adobe Fresco

teacher avatar Tracey Capone, Illustrator, Photographer & Designer

Watch this class and thousands more

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Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Watch this class and thousands more

Get unlimited access to every class
Taught by industry leaders & working professionals
Topics include illustration, design, photography, and more

Lessons in This Class

    • 1.

      Welcome to Class!

      3:21

    • 2.

      The Class Project

      0:46

    • 3.

      The Class Downloads

      0:36

    • 4.

      Animation and Motion Overview

      11:04

    • 5.

      Animation 1 | The Wiggle

      15:43

    • 6.

      Animation 2 | The Jumping Bean

      18:01

    • 7.

      Animation 3 | Flashing Lights

      11:55

    • 8.

      Animation 4 | The Write on Effect

      19:59

    • 9.

      Animation 5 | Mask On Effect

      23:30

    • 10.

      BONUS | Animating Texture in Adobe Fresco

      9:55

    • 11.

      Motion Export Options in Adobe Fresco

      8:12

    • 12.

      Convert a PNG Sequence to GIF in Photoshop

      10:21

    • 13.

      Wrapping it All Up

      1:40

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About This Class

Have you ever wished you could add your own, unique text animations to social media posts, blog, or videos but learning complex animation software, like After Effects, just isn’t in the cards right now? Or, maybe you want to be able to create robust animations on the go using your iPad or Windows device? Well then, this class is for you.


Hi there! I’m Tracey Capone, I’m a Chicago area artist and teacher and, in this class, I’m going to show you how to create fun text animations using Adobe Fresco.

Adobe Fresco has been a go to part of my creative toolbox since it was introduced in 2019. When they introduced animation to the mix back in 2021, I was so excited because it meant I could create animations on the go in one of my favorite apps, anywhere I could take my iPad!

I've spent the last several months, since animation was introduced, creating a variety of text animation sequences. In this class, I’m going to walk you step by step through how I create them so that you can add a fun pop of animation to your own designs!

We’ll start with an overview of the animation and motion tools in Adobe Fresco and how they work.

Next, we’ll sit down and sketch out our animations so we can plan out our end results and give ourselves a good head start in creating our final set.

Then we’ll create five different animations together:

  • A Wiggle
  • The Jumping Bean
  • Flashing Lights
  • The Write on Effect
  • and Mask On

As a bonus, I’ll also show you how you can easily animate your favorite textures because, I’m sure you’ll agree, texture makes everything infinitely better!

Now, if you’re like me, and not a hand letterer, don’t worry! We’re going to using fonts to create our animations.

We’ll discuss:

  • Which fonts work best for each type of animation sequence,
  • How to pull in and set up your fonts, and
  • How to create your animation so that it’s natural to the human eye.

Finally, we’ll talk about the various ways you can export your animations so that you can load them on sites like GIPHY or on to your website, newsletter or blog.

The best part? The animation techniques you learn in this class can be applied to other illustrations you create in Adobe Fresco, not just text and I’ll be using tools that everyone has access to, whether you’re on the free or premium version.

Are you ready to punch up your posts and videos with some whimsical animations? Come join me in class and let’s start animating!

PLEASE NOTE: The class is beginner friendly but it is recommended that you have at least some experience with Adobe Fresco. If you are brand new to the app, I recommend starting with one of the great introductory classes out there, before taking this one.

I'm a full time artist and teacher out of the Chicago area.

 I’ve been using Adobe products for close to 20 years, for both my photography and illustration work. While I’m not a motion designer, I’ve been using After Effects to create my own animations from scratch, for my blog, social media, YouTube tutorials and my online classes for the last several years. When Adobe introduced animation and motion in Fresco in 2021, I was so excited because it meant I could also create my animations anywhere I wanted, right on my iPad.

I look forward to seeing you in class! If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to ask in the Discussion section of the class. If you would prefer, please feel free to email me at hello@traceycapone.com. 

Happy Creating!

Music Credit: "Going Home," by The David Roy Collective on Artlist.io

Meet Your Teacher

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Tracey Capone

Illustrator, Photographer & Designer

Top Teacher

Hello and welcome to my Skillshare channel! I'm so happy you're here!

My name is Tracey. I'm an illustrator, photographer, teacher and self-proclaimed digital art nerd who loves all the apps, and sharing everything I know. Being able to help students understand more complex applications, like Affinity Designer, and hearing about that moment of clarity when everything came together for them is truly satisfying.

not just the how, but also the why... I believe understanding why I take certain approaches, or use particular tools, will help you absorb what you learn and better prepare you to work on your own later. to embrace the perfectly imperfect... in my mind, it's the best way to develop that sometimes elusive creative voice!

and finally... See full profile

Level: All Levels

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Transcripts

1. Welcome to Class!: [MUSIC] Do you want to create animated text for your social media posts, website or online tutorials? Or maybe you'd like to create animations on the go using your iPad or Windows device? If so, welcome to class. Hey there, I'm Chicago Area artist and teacher Tracey Capone, and in this class, I'm going to show you how to create text animations using Adobe Fresco. I've been using Adobe products for close to 20 years for both my photography and illustration work, and more recently animation. Fresco has been a go-to part of my creative toolbox since it was introduced in 2019 and it's quickly become an integral part of my daily creative practice. Now, I'm not a professional motion designer, but I've been using After Effects to create my own animations from scratch, for my blog, social media, YouTube tutorials, and online classes for the last several years. When Adobe introduced animation and motion in Fresco, I was so excited because it meant I could also create my animations anywhere I wanted, as long as I had my iPad with me. I spent the last several months since animation was introduced in Fresco creating a variety of text animation sequences. In this class, I'm going to walk you step-by-step through how you can create your own. We'll start with an overview of the animation and motion tools in Fresco and how they work. Then we'll create five different animations together: A wiggle, the jumping bean, flashing lights, the write on effect, and mask on. As a bonus, I'm going to show you how you can easily animate your favorite textures. Because if you're anything like me, I know that you'll agree that [NOISE] texture makes everything infinitely better. Now if you're not a hamletter, don't worry, we're going to be using fonts to create our animations. We'll discuss which fonts work best for each type of animation sequence, how to pull in and set up your fonts, and how to create your animations so that it's natural to the human eye. Finally, we'll talk about the various ways that you can export your animations to load them on sites like Giphy, your blog, newsletter or website. Now you may be asking yourself with all of the free animations out there, why create your own? Writing your own text animations not only allows you to create them around your brand, whether it's a particular color palette, font or set of key phrases, it also allows you to set the tone of whatever message you're trying to convey. Plus having a collection of your own animations on hand saves you the time and hassle of having to sift through tons of animations to find just the right one. The best part, the animation techniques that you're going to learn in this class can be applied to other illustrations you create in Fresco, not just text. I'm only going to use tools that everyone has access to, whether you're on the free or premium version of the app. Now this class is beginner friendly, but it's recommended that you have at least some experience with Fresco. If you're brand new to the app, I recommend starting with one of the great introductory classes out there before taking this one. Now Fresco may not be the go-to for text animations, but I'm a big fan of making the tools that you have available to you, work the way that you need them to. If you want to create your own text animations but learning more complex animation software just isn't in the cards right now, this is the class for you. Come join me in class, and let's start animating. [MUSIC] 2. The Class Project: [MUSIC] The project for this class is to create your own animations using one or more of the methods you'll learn in class. The wiggle, jumping bean, flashing lights, the write on effect, mask on, and the bonus animated texture. Once you've created your animations, save them in GIF format and you'll be able to share them to the projects and resources section of the class. Sharing your project not only helps others see what they'll learn but potentially helps more students find the class. Next up, I'll show you how to download the 10 free textures for the class. I'll see you there. [MUSIC] 3. The Class Downloads: [MUSIC] The downloads for this class include 10 high resolution texture files, which will be animating later in the class. You can download these from the projects and resources section, just be sure to access the class through a browser and not the Skillshare app. You'll need a password to access a link, and I'll put that up on the screen right now. [MUSIC] Next up, an overview of Fresco animation features. I'll see you there. [MUSIC] 4. Animation and Motion Overview: [MUSIC] Fresco's animation feature has some distinct advantages over animation in other apps. The first being that the animation sequences are created at the layer level, and each layer can hold multiple frames rather than one frame equaling one layer. Fresco has no overall layer limits regardless of your Canvas size. These two things together mean that you can ultimately create as many animations as you'd like within a single Canvas as long as the objects that you're animating separately are broken out into their own layers. Fresco allows you to create both paths and frame-by-frame animations and both can be created within a single Canvas. Finally, in addition to the animated layers, you can create as many static layers as you'd like within the same Canvas and everything will get exported together. Let's head into Fresco and take a closer look at how animation works. [MUSIC]. Before we begin animating in our texts, I wanted to do a quick overview of how animation works in Fresco. I mentioned in the opener that you can create multiple animations within a single Canvas as long as you have your layers broken out separately. You also have two different ways you can create an animation, path animation, and frame by frame. Now in this class, we're going to be focusing on using frame-by-frame animation to animate our text, but I'll show you how path animation works as well. I have three different shapes here broken out on two, three separate layers because I want to animate them independently from one another and using a different method. I'm going to animate the square using frame-by-frame animation and the circle and oval using path animation with different settings. Let's start with the square. To turn on animation, you'll select the layer that you want to animate and select the little icon here at the bottom with the three circles and the play button. Now, my screen is set up for a left-handed person. If yours isn't, your icon might just be opposite of mine. Once you select it, a contextual menu will come up at the bottom. I'm going to skip over the top part here. Play all is going to allow you to play back your animation throughout creating it as well as when you're done. We'll skip path animation for now again, we'll do that with a circle on the oval. When you head into settings, the very first setting that you can change is the overall frames per second for your Canvas. As you scrub up, it's going to get faster and as you bring it down, it will get slower. I recommend trying different frames per second with each animation you create because you may find that you get a different look depending on what you choose. The next setting that you can change is the playback mode. You can choose from Loop, Boomerang, or Play once. These are standard playback modes for animation. In this class, we'll be focusing mostly on Loop, but there's at least one animation where we'll use Boomerang because it provides a much smoother effect. Just like with frames per second, I suggest trying the different ones just to see what works best with your animation. You can also turn on and off onion skins, which are going to help you with both positional animation as well as when you need to trace an object like we'll be doing when we create the wiggle effect. It's going to allow you to see a number of frames before and after your current frame so that you can keep on track with what you're creating. You can change the number of frames that you can see, as well as the opacity. Finally, the document timeline is going to allow you to see multiple animations within a document in a single timeline. I don't actually turn this on, so you won't see me turn this on throughout this class, but just know that it's there. With this box, I want to have it come up, get thinner, come back out to its regular size, and then come back down to its original position. Now there's a couple of ways that I can approach that. I can duplicate this shape and create that over a series of frames or I can tap this plus sign and it's going to give me an empty frame, so I can trace out this box or use one of the shape tools to create a new shape. Now I actually don't want to do that. I do want to use a duplicate of my shape. The first frame that you'll see is always going to be the layer you have selected. You can change that as you start creating frames, you can drag things to different spots in the sequence, but initially, the very first frame is always going to be whatever you have selected in the layer. To duplicate this, I'm going to tap on that frame and now I have two frames of the same exact shape. I'm going to select my "Transform tool". It's going to ask me whether I want to choose the selected frame or the entire layer. Now, remember, I want to move this up and because I have two frames within that layer, if I choose entire layer, it's going to move both one and two up. I only want to move frame 2 up. I'll choose selected frame, I'm going to hold my finger down on the touch selector here and just drag this up. It's going to help me constrain my Y-position, so it goes straight up. I'll hit "Done" to accept that change. Now I can duplicate that again, choose my transform tool again and I'm going to make it thinner. Again, hit "Done," I'll duplicate it, bring it back out to its original size, and then I'll do one more frame again, duplicate it, grab my transform tool and bring it back down. Once I hit "Done," I can hit "Play" and the animation is going to run through. Now this is really fast, so let's go into settings and I can move that down, so it's a lot slower and you can see the animation a lot more clearly. I can also choose between Boomerang or Loop, or I can choose Play once as well. Now I do want to know, and I'm going to pause this. Because I have my onion skins on, you can see that I have onion skins for each frame there and as I go through it, the onion skins are in different positions. That's basically how frame-by-frame animation works. Now again, I could go through here and I could drag things around in different order. It's going to make for a very different animation. You can see it's double jumping there. But once you create multiple frames, you can drag things around so that they're in different locations in the animation sequence. We've looked at frame-by-frame animation, let's look at path animation. Now, path animation is actually technically still frame-by-frame animation. The only difference is you aren't creating the frames yourself, Fresco is doing it behind the scenes. To create a path animation, you'll select the icon and you can just draw out any shape. Once you're done drawing, it's going to send your shape along that path. Now you can change your settings here so I can speed that up using my overall Canvas frames per second. I'm going to bring that back down. But I have some additional effects that I can apply as well. I'll tap this fx icon. Now of course I can change the blend mode and opacity just like any other layer but in addition to that, I can add multiples of my shape. I can scatter those multiples, bring that back down. I'm going to skip over ease and in ease out because I'll show you how that works with the oval here. Now, in addition to the speed settings within the overall Canvas settings, I can actually add frames to this. I mentioned at the very beginning that this is still a frame-by-frame animation, it's just that Fresco is creating the frames. If I add frames, it's going to slow it down and if I remove frames, it's going to speed it up. Now I can still change this. It's going to make it even faster but this allows me a little bit more control over the actual path animation as well. Let's go ahead and bring that back up to a pretty normal speed, that's a little frantic. There's one more thing that I want to show you with the circle here. I can delete that path and start over again if I want. I can also add multiple paths. I can draw out another path and it's going to add another shape. I'm going to can add as many as I'd like and Fresco is going to create a frame-by-frame animation behind the scenes each time I do that. That gives me a little bit more control over where my multiples are than the path effects do. Again, I can just delete the ones I don't like and I'm back to where I started. There are a couple more settings that I want to show you with path animation and it's easiest to show you where the shape like an oval. I'm going to draw out a straight-ish line and it's automatically going to send my oval along that path in a pretty uniform speed. Now, I can go into settings and I can play around with these two options, either original speed or uniform. I can also turn on or off, ease in and ease out. What this is going to do is it's going to have it hesitate at the beginning and slowly easing and then it's going to slow down at the end. You can see it's easing in, speeding up, and then slowing down. Let's take a look at one more setting here. I'm going to turn off ease in and ease out temporarily. The last one I want to show you is aligned path. If I click on that, it's going to align my shape to the actual path. This comes in handy for something like creating a car on a road. Obviously, you wouldn't want the car running this way, you want it running along the road. Turning on a line, the path is going to do that. Now let's play around with something here. If I add multiples and I scatter those multiples, I randomize the alignment path, I could create something like a school of fish. Those are the various ways that you can create animations within Adobe Fresco. Remember, if you want to animate objects independently of one another and make sure they're broken out into their own layers, that's going to give you the ability to create either frame-by-frame or path animation and you can set different settings for each of those path animations if you'd like. We're ready to begin creating our first text animation and we're going to start with the basic wiggle. I will see you there. [MUSIC] 5. Animation 1 | The Wiggle: [MUSIC] The wiggle is created by the imperfections that occur when you trace an object across a series of empty frames. Take this hi, for example, as I trace it across a series of six frames, the wiggle becomes more intense because I'm adding imperfections as I go. By Frame 6, it's way more intense than it was on Frame 2. Which fonts work best with the wiggle? The short answer. All of them. Single line, handwriting fonts are going to be easiest to animate because you're literally tracing a single line. But remember the animation I just showed you have your weight fonts also work. It just takes a few extra steps to create the animation. You need to trace the letters across your empty frames and fill them in as you go. As you add imperfections, just like previously, the wiggle is going to become more intense. Let's go ahead and head into Fresco and take a closer look. We're ready for our very first animation. We're going to be doing a basic wiggle. It's a very common animation that you'll see on Instagram. Now, I mentioned in the opener of the video that you can use any font that you'd like for this, however, the thinner handwriting fonts are going to be the easiest and quickest to animate because you're just tracing a single line. For the purposes of this lesson, I'm going to use a heavier-weight font because it's a little more complex, you'll need to outline them and then fill them in either by hand or using the fill tool across your empty frames. Because it's more complex, if you can create this one, any other font's going to be a piece of cake. I'm going to be using a font called Metallophile Sp8. That is an Adobe font that you can download with a subscription. Now, overall, for this lesson, I'm only going to be using tools that you have available, whether you're on the free or paid version of the app. For the fonts though, I wanted to note for this lesson as well as the rest. The exact font that I'm using isn't important. What is important is the type of font. If you don't have this one available to you, don't worry about it. Just find the font that works best for what you want to create. There's plenty of built-in fonts to choose from. I've turned off the previous animation and I'm ready to create a new one, so I'll go ahead and tap to add a new empty layer. I want to make sure my text tool is selected, and I'll just tap to add a new line of text and I'm just going to type out the wiggle. I'm going to keep it all on the same layer, but two lines, and I wanted to stylize this text. I'm going to select both lines here and choose style text. If you don't see style text, you can also access it over here in layer properties. The first thing I want to do is change my font, so I'll tap texts there and I'm going to type in, actually, I already have this in a search, I'm just typing Metallo and Metallophile will come up. If you are on a subscription and you want to import fonts, you can do that by hitting the plus sign there. You can also go to more fonts that are built-in with Adobe. Now, these lines are very far apart, but I'm not going to use the layer properties to change that. I'm going to change that in a different way in a little bit. For right now, I'm going to say this is done. I'll just close that. I want to make this a lot bigger. I'm going to grab my transform tool. I find it easier to use the transform tool to change the size rather than the layer properties. I'll hit done. Now, this next step is very important for a couple of reasons. We're going to be creating this animation by tracing the letters over empty frames. I have my animation on down here, and with this layer selected, you can see this is grayed out. I can't actually select empty frames because you can't select empty frames with a text layer. I need to convert this to either a vector layer or a pixel layer, depending on which type of brush I'm going to use to trace out my letters. Now, I know that I'm going to use a vector brush. I just prefer to use them. I'm going to select my layer, select the three dots here, and at the very bottom, you'll see convert to vector layer or convert to pixel layer. I'll go ahead and choose convert to vector layer, and now you can see it changed that to a dot. The dot signifies the vector in here. At this point, that's no longer great, which means I can add an empty frame if I need it. The other thing this allows me to do is stylize this a little bit more. I wanted to take this there, I'm going to grab my selection tool and select it. Then I'm going to use my transform tool and make it a little smaller and move it right about there. You don't have to do this. It's totally up to you how you want your final animation to look. But just know that if you do want to do something like that where you alter the text, you need to make sure that you can invert the layer first. I'll hit deselect and I'll make this whole thing a little bit bigger. At this point, I've prepared my font, I prepared my text, it's converted, and I'm all set to start creating the animation. One of the reasons that I chose this particular font is that it gives me a head start with the imperfection. It's got a wonkiness to it. If your a favorite font that you want to use for this animation happens to have a lot of straight edges and perfect corners. You can use it. Just keep in mind that if you keep that perfect letter or a phrase with the perfect straight lines and corners as part of the animation. Every time the animation cycles back to that frame, because it's the only one that's going to be perfect. It's near impossible to trace it out perfectly each time. It's going to be very obvious, and it's going to create a pattern that you don't necessarily want that takes away from the wiggle effect. If that font happens to be your favorite and you just like the overall shape of it. What I would recommend is pulling it in the way that I just did here, adding an empty frame and tracing it out, and then going back and getting rid of that first perfect frame. To get my animation started, I'm going to add an empty layer. Remember, I converted this to a vector layer, so that means I need to use my vector brush to trace it out. If I accidentally grab a pixel brush, Fresco is going to automatically add a pixel layer. You can't use a pixel brush on a vector layer and vice versa. I'm going to choose just the basic round brush. I've also turned off all of my taper and pressure dynamics and things like that. I just want a regular, straight, almost monoline brush. I can always bring this back to where it was by hitting this reset button once I'm done. What I want to do is trace out my shapes and then I'm going to use the fill tool to fill in the rest, so I don't have to do it all by hand. In order to use the fill tool, you need how to completely closed shape and easiest way to make sure that you do that when you're tracing is to start and end inside of your letter. That also allows you to stop when you need to. I'm going to start on the inside here and start tracing and I'm not worrying about being perfect is again, I want those imperfections. Well, I'll go ahead and overshoot that and then come in. If I zoom in here, you can see that I have these little spots here because of onion skin, where it's not quite hitting the original line. I'm okay with that. I'm going to leave that as is. One of the things that you want to avoid with this. It's one thing to have little imperfections like that. Make sure as you're tracing this, you're not making your trace a lot bigger or a lot smaller than the original letter, and keep an eye on that over here frames, that's why it's important to have onion skins on. If you do that, it's going to have a look more like it's breathing than wiggling. Just keep the size relatively close to the original one. I'll just go ahead and continue this around. I'm going to grab my edge here and start tracing this out. I know this seems a very tedious process and it is. I don't like how that looks. That came out way too far and that's not going to look right. What I'm going to do is I'm just going to put my finger on my touch selector, and that's going to allow me to use my vector brush as my eraser, and then bring it back so I can stay on my brush, I don't have to go to the eraser. I'll just go ahead and start from the inside here and come down. Again, this is also a good way of allowing yourself a break. If your hand gets tired or you need to move your Canvas, you can just start from the inside and start tracing again. I'll just go ahead and overshoot that, and come in. I'm going to speed this up at this point, so I will see you on the other side of this. [MUSIC] I have my outlines here and one thing that I want to do is just zoom in before I fill these in and make sure that there's no strange little bump outs or places that are too concaved that might stick out too much, because just like with the straight lines that I was talking about previously, if in one of your frames you have a very obvious bump or dip or something like that, and it's the only one, it's going to stick out and create a pattern that you don't want. Just check what you're doing as you go through. I think these look fine. Now I'm going to select my Fill tool, and just fill these in. I'm going to turn my onion skins off temporarily so that you can see. If I scrub back and forth between these two, you can see the wiggles already starting. Again, it's important that you stay with the original size of your letter. If these were a lot bigger, it was going to look like it's breathing in and out, and I just wanted to have a wiggle and that's it. Now, I want to do this over a series of six empty frames, so I'm going to add another empty frame, turn my onion skins back on, and I'm going to continue tracing this over another four frames. I'm not going to do that on camera, I'm going to go ahead and do that off camera and come back when it's done. I'm not quite done with my last empty frame, but I wanted to bring it back because I wanted to show you something. At this point, I'm at my sixth frame and I have my onion skins on for six frames before and after my current frame. As you get further along in the frame-by-frame animation, this becomes a lot more opaque and it's more difficult to see that very first frame. If you get to that point and you just want to check where you're at against the first frame that you created, you can always drag this in the sequence to the first one so that the darkest one that you see is actually that first layer, and then you can just go back to tracing it. Again, this is just to make sure that you are on track with the general size of your letter. You could also turn down your onion skins. The thing about that though is that if you are off track and these final frames aren't quite where you want them, you're not necessarily going to get that. To do a double-check, you can always bring it back as the second frame, so you can see that first one. I'll just go ahead and fill these in, and then I can just keep this here if I want or I can drag it back. Then once I do that, it's going to change it back to frame 6. I'm going to turn off my onion skins right now. Let's go ahead and play back that animation. It has a nice wiggle to it. Let's just see what the frames per second is. I have 12 frames, and let's just see what seven or eight looks like. That might be a little too slow. Let me try nine. Now, I have this set to boomerang rather than loop, and here's why. If I put it on loop, it gives it a choppy feel, especially if you're only using four or five frames. When I use boomerang, what it's doing is it's effectively adding 12 additional frames. It's going up and then coming back. Really, you have 12 frames instead of six, which means you have less patterning. One final double-check that you can do with this before you export it, it's just a scrub through the animation by hand using the timeline here, and all I'm doing is just checking to see if there's anything that looks off. With this E here on this particular frame, I feel like it's bumped in a little bit too much. I'm going to make sure I'm on that frame, I'll make sure I have my vector brush selected, and I'm just going to fix that a little bit. Now if I scrub through, might still be a little too obvious. Don't feel like when you create these frames, you can't go back and change them at all. You can also use your eraser if you want. But just remember at the end of the day, if you have a single imperfection rather than consistent imperfections across your animation, that single imperfection is going to stick out. It's always a good idea just to go back and check things. I like how this is looking. I like the piece of it. I feel like the wiggle looks good, I haven't gone too big or too small where it looks like it's breathing. I'm going to go ahead and call this done. [MUSIC] The wiggle effect is created by the imperfections that occur when you trace an object across a series of empty frames. Slight imperfections are desirable, but stay close to the size of your original text, otherwise the effect looks more like it's breathing than wiggling. Turning on your onion skins will help you stay on track. So turn them on in Settings so you can see frames before and after your current one and keep an eye on things. Choppy spots or spots that have gone astray can easily be fixed with your brush or eraser on each individual frame. Consistent choppy spots can add something to the overall effect, but individual ones are going to be very obvious in your final animation. The specific font that you use doesn't matter. Single line handwriting fonts or even your own handwriting will be easiest to re-create. Middle or heavier weight ones will require a little bit more work as you'll need to trace them and fill them across your layers. Remember to change your font to either a pixel layer or vector layer, depending on which type of brush you plan to use. You can't create MD layers with a text layer. Once you're done, test out your animation and adjust your frames per second. Usually doubling the number of frames gives a nice rate, but play around and try different settings. Finally, the boomerang tends to work best with this type of animation as it creates a smoother effect than looping, which can make it look choppy. Next up we're going to take a look at the jumping bean. I'll see you there. [MUSIC] 6. Animation 2 | The Jumping Bean: [MUSIC] Let's take a look at how jumping bean works. Individual letters are moved up and down across duplicated frames, as the letter comes down its color shifts, and the next letter begins to rise and fall. This continues for the entire word until all letters have jumped and shifted color, so which fonts work best for jumping bean? Cursive fonts don't work. Print fonts work best because you can easily animate each letter individually, and while the weight of the font doesn't matter, heavier weight fonts will show the color shift better. Let's head into Fresco and take a closer look. [MUSIC] All right, we're ready for our second animation, I call this one the jumping bean for obvious reasons, the letters are going to jump across the word in sequence. As they jump up and come back down, they're going to change color, and the next letter in sequence is going to begin to rise and fall. Now I mentioned in the opener of this video that this particular animation works best with print fonts rather than cursive fonts that have connectors because you need to be able to individually select and move the letters. So I've written out my words on a new layer. I'm using a font called Anton regular, which I believe maybe one of the built-in fonts. But again, just like with the previous animation, the specific font that I'm using doesn't matter. I've already mentioned that I recommend using a print font for this so that you have separate letters. I also recommend using a heavier or medium weight font, because if you are going to do the color change and you use this at a smaller size, you're going to want to make sure that you can see the color change and if you have a thinner font, it's going to be more difficult to do that, then go ahead and choose any font that you'd like. Now this is still a text layer, and I've left it that way because there are some changes that I want to make using the text tools before I convert the layer to a vector layer. Just like with the Wiggle, because I want to use the transform tools to move my letters up and down, I need to convert it from a text layer because I can't do that otherwise. But before I do that, I want to have live text so I can make some changes. I'll go ahead and select my "Text tool", and I want to select both words and the exclamation point, and I'll move this up here so you can see what's happening. I'll go to my layer properties, and the first thing I want to do is give each of these letters a little bit of breathing room. I want some room that I can not only select them, but so that they have a more individual presence and they aren't squashed next to the other letter. This is a little bit tight, so I'll go to my kerning down here at the bottom, and if you just start dragging up, it's going to begin moving everything to the right. I don't want to go too far, I'm only going to go about 30. But I do however, want to make an additional change to the exclamation point, I'm going to have it do a little bit of a wobble at the end and flip back and forth and then as it comes to rest, that's when it's going to change its color. I need to give it a little bit of room to do that. I'll just drag this over so that just the N and the exclamation point are selected, I'll go back down and I'm going to drag this up further. I don't need to go too far, is just about 70 there. Again, I just want to have enough room that when I tilt it 15 degrees either way it's not going to hit the N. Now that I've made the changes to the spacing in my letters, I'm ready to begin animating so I can go ahead and convert this. Again, I'm not converting this because I need empty frames, we're actually going to be using duplicates, but I'm going to need to convert this so that I can use my transform tools on the individual letters. With my layer selected, I'll go to the three dots and I'm going to choose vector layer, but you can choose pixel if you'd like. The way that I'm going to animate this is to have a letter rise all the way to my top line that I'm going to designate, and as it comes back down, when it gets to about the halfway point, it's going to change color and the next letter in the sequence is going to rise to the top, and that's going to continue all the way across. I'm going to have the exclamation point rise and fall, but I'm also going to have it do the wobble that I talked about. What I want to do is give myself some guides to work with. You could do this organically and just move them up to where you want, it's totally up to you, I just find it easier to work with some guides. The first thing I'm going to do is turn on my "Grids", you can find that in the icon here. Again, don't forget my screen is flipped for a left-handed person, so yours might be on the other side. I want to give myself the top line as well as that halfway point, so with my vector brush, I'm going to choose black here and I'll give myself an empty layer. Now this is a layer that's not going to get exported with the final illustration or animation, it's just going to give me what I need throughout the animation. I'm just going to draw my line and hold it straight, and let's do that. I can actually just select this one, and I'll duplicate that. Let's just bring that down to give myself a halfway point, so right about there, and I'm going to duplicate that one more time, I want to give myself a baseline. Before I do that, I really want to adjust my letters to have them really sitting on a line somewhere, so I'll grab that layer and I'm just going to move this up, hold your finger on a touch slide if you want to keep it straight. It's already about there, so I'm going to grab my "Guide layer" here and I want to duplicate this line again, I'm in the wrong layer there. I want to be in that one and I'm just going to bring this to the very bottom. I just wanted to give myself a baseline there, that's where I know all the letters are going to land and I'll hit "Done", and I can turn my guides off, and I'm just going to keep these on. Again, we'll start with the J, it's going to come up to the very top and the very first frame of animation. It'll come down to about a halfway point and change to a light pink and the U is going to go up, and I'm going to continue that all the way across. The first thing I want to do though, is make sure I have my texts layer selected, and I'm going to give myself about five frames of it in this position and color just to set a baseline for the animation so that you can see, started as red and then it ends as pink. I'm going to duplicate this five times, and then I'll duplicate it one more time and this is where we're going to start animating the letters. All right. The first thing I want to do is select my, J, with my rectangular selection tool. I'm just going to draw a box over my J, I'm going to stay on that frame and grab my Transform tool. I'll hold my finger down on the "Touch selector", and I'm going to drag this all the way up to the top. Now you can go up further if you want, I'm just going to go to about there, so it's at the very top of the letter and I'll hit "Done", and that is the first frame, de-select, and duplicate that again. Now I want to select it again, grab my transform tool, and I'm going to bring it halfway down and I'll bring it to about there, hit "Done", and I want to change the color. Make sure it's pink, so I'll go ahead and select this light pink and I'll deselect that one and I want to, on that same frame that number 7, grab my U here and I'm going to drag this all the way up to the top. The reason that I'm doing this incrementally is because doing it that way is going to give you a much smoother animation and it's going to just give it a little bit more emphasis on the jump by doing it incrementally, So hit "Done". Alright, let's go ahead and duplicate that frame. I'll go ahead and select the U again, and I want to bring it this about halfway down, I'll bring it to about there. I also need to bring my J all the way down and this is where planning comes in handy, I almost forgot to move my J, which would've been a problem, and I'll bring that right about there. Hit "Done", I also want to make sure I changed the color of my U, and on this frame I'm now going to add a third letter into the mix. I want to select my M and because my U is halfway down, I want my m all the way up, so you can see it's ramping. De-select, duplicate the frame, I want my U to come all the way down to its resting point and then grab my M. I want to change the color and drag it halfway down and you can determine what halfway is. But I would just be consistent across the board. I'll deselect and now I want my P to go back up. For the first couple of frames, you're only working with two letters, but after that you've got three going at the same time, so it's something to keep in mind. You want to make sure again that you plan it out so that you can keep track of everything. De-select. Now I'm going to continue this all the way across the word until I get to the end, because again, I'm going to handle the exclamation point a little bit differently and I want to show you what I do with that, so I'm going to speed it up at this point and I'll come back when I get to the end. [MUSIC] I have gotten to the point where my N is about halfway down and it's changed color and I want to begin working with the exclamation point. I'm going to add a duplicate frame, grab my selection tool. Actually, I want to backup. I'm not going to add a duplicate frame just yet. I want to bring my exclamation point out to the very top. One of the things that I recommend, is that you have an order in the way that you do things. You move the first letter, you change the color of the next letter and drag it to a point. Do it in a particular order all the way across because it's going to help you keep track of what you're doing. I actually just lost the order of what I was doing and that's why I almost forgot to bring the exclamation point up to the very top on that same frame. I'll deselect that and now I'll add a duplicate. I'll grab my N and bring it back down. If you feel it's not quite where you want it, you can just use these little arrows. It doesn't have to be perfect. These lines aren't going to be showing once the animation is done, but you want to make sure it's pretty close to where it was because otherwise, you're really going to see it and the animation is going to jump. I've brought this one down. I want to bring my exclamation point to about halfway and I'm not going to change the color until it's done wobbling. I'm going to bring it halfway. I'm still going to do this incrementally so that it's got a more fluid movement. I'll go ahead and hit "Duplicate". I don't need to re-select it. Just bring this back down. At this point, I want it to wobble. I'm going to bring it 15 degrees one way and then 15 degrees to the left as well. I'll go ahead and duplicate that frame, grab my Transform Tool. I'm going to hold my finger on the Touch Selector and it's going to allow me to snap it to 15 degrees. You can see it's pretty close to that end. This is why I wanted to move it out a little bit. It's not hitting, so I'm not going to worry about it, but I do want to duplicate the frame. Put my finger on the Touch Selector. You can see what happened. Alright. What I should've done is restarted it because it actually grabbed part of that N. I'm going to hit "Done" and I'm going to backup, deselect. I want to make a new selection. I'm going to use the Lasso Tool instead, because it's going to be very difficult to do that with the rectangular one because of that really tight space. Now I know that I haven't selected any of that N. I'll hit my transform tool and now I can go ahead and bring this to 30 degrees. Let me just make sure right perfect. I'll hit "Deselect". I don't need to redo that. I can actually just use duplicates to this. I'm going to do about three of each of these. I'm going to duplicate this frame where it's going to the right and then drag it to the end. I'll go to the second frame in where it's coming to the left, duplicate it, and drag it to the end and I'm going to do that a few times. I want it to wobble back and forth about three times. Let's just see. Now I want it to come to a straight point. I'm going to duplicate this frame and once again, use my Lasso Tool. It will be a lot easier than using a rectangular marquee. Select it, put my finger on the Touch Selector, and pop it into place. I'll hit "Deselect". This is the point where I want it to change to pink, when it comes to its resting point. I'll grab my Fill Tool and change it to pink. Let's go ahead and turn our guides off. I'm going to run through the animation just to check and make sure everything looks good. I'll go back to that layer and I'll hit "Play". This looks good. I like how everything is running, everything landed where it was supposed to. The issue is that as soon as the exclamation point is done wobbling and changes color, it immediately starts up again and it doesn't sit on this pink color at all. I'm going to stop that and bring it to the very end of the animation. I'm on my 26th frame. Now, Fresco has no way of creating a hold. What I mean by that is you can't tell it to automatically add a set number of duplicates of this frame, you need to duplicate them yourself. I'm going to take this final frame and I'm going to duplicate it about 20 times. I have 20 copies of the completely pink letters all at the very bottom, so that it's going to basically hold at the very end and then start up again. Let's run through that again. Its going to wobble, hold, and then start up again. You can do that as long as you want. I just stuck with 20 because I think that's fine. You could also add more at the very beginning if you wanted it to hold on red longer. I think five frames is fine for that. I like how this looks. One recommendation I have is that before you make those duplicates at the very end, run through your animation because if you find a spot that you need to fix, you're going to need to fix it on that frame and every subsequent frame. Because remember, it's repeating across the entire animation. Doing it before you create those duplicates means you're going to have to correct a lot less frames. Just keep that in mind and run through your animation before you do those and the frames. [MUSIC] This animation works by selecting each letter individually, moving it up and back down to the original point over a series of frames. Rather than working with empty layers, we created them using duplicated layers for consistency across the animation. As each letter comes down to it's original point, its color shifts so that by the end of the animation, the entire word is a different color. Handwriting fonts or anything with connectors doesn't work, as you need to be able to animate each letter individually. Print Fonts do work best as you can easily select an animate each letter. Finally, the weight of the font doesn't matter. However, heavier weight fonts do show the color shift better. Next up, we're going to take a look at the flashing lights animation. I'll see you there. 7. Animation 3 | Flashing Lights: [MUSIC] In this animation, we're going to create flashing lights by selecting letters at random and briefly changing their color over a series of duplicated frames. This particular animation works best with heavier weight print fonts rather than cursive fonts that have connectors. Letters are selected at random and their color is briefly changed before moving on to the next frame. Let's take a closer look. Now, here we're ready for Animation 3, which is flashing lights. This is similar to the last one jumping bean, except that we're not actually moving the texts so much as the color. We're going to individually select letters like we did last time. This time though at random and we'll briefly shift their color over a series of duplicated frames. Now, just like with the last one, handwriting fonts or anything with connectors, isn't going to work with this animation as you want to be able to select individual letters. The weight of the font doesn't really matter, though again, if you plan on using this at a smaller size, you're going to want to use a medium to heavyweight font. Because when it's scaled down, it's going to show the animation better. I've set up my letters and I'm using a font called Poppins black. It's a heavier weight font, but again, if scaled down will still show the color shift very easily. Now we're not going to be moving any actual type in this animation. The motion is going to come from the random color shifts that are going to happen across the letters over a series of duplicated frames. It's the randomness of the color shift that's going to give the overall animation a more natural feels. So we want to be very careful when we're selecting our letters so we can avoid any patterning. Now unlike the jumping bean, we're not going to be using any selection tools for this. However, we will be using the fill tool to change the color of individual letters. In order to do that, we need to convert our texts layer to either a vector or a pixel layer. But remember when we do that, we lose any life type, which means that anything you need to change what the text tool, you're not going to be able to be sure that you have the font of your choice and any changes that you need to make it with the text tool are already done before you convert your layer. Now I've already made the changes that I wanted to do and they're similar changes so what I did with the jumping bean. I use the text tool to change the kerning of by letters, so I spread them out a little bit. I also adjusted the lighting between the two lines. I just pulled them closer together. Once I was done, I went ahead and converted my layer from text to a vector layer. Mine is all set to start making the color shifts. The way that I want my animation to look is that I want it to hold in this state for the first four or five frames. It's going to randomly color shift over a series of additional duplicated frames and at the very end it's going to flash back and forth between all red and all light pink until it finally lands on light pink and again holds for several frames. One thing that you have to remember is as you change your letters, you need to remember to change them back. The easiest way to do that is to create all of your duplicates upfront. I'm going to go ahead and create 40 duplicates of this layer. I'm going to speed it up, so I'll be right back. [MUSIC] I have my 40 duplicate frames setup, and before we begin shifting our colors, I wanted to explain why I just set that up ahead of time. With this animation in a single frame, we're going to pick two or three letters to change to a different color. We'll move to the next frame, which will be a duplicate frame, and then pick two or three more and shift their color. But we need to make sure that the two or three from the previous frame are changed back. Let me show you what I mean. I'm on my very last frame here and I have my Color Fill tool selected and the light pink that I'm going to change the letters to. I'm just going to randomly pick three. Now if I were to duplicate this frame now, these would still be pink and I needed to choose red so that means I need to grab my color picker again, choose the red, change this back, go back and change this to pink, and then pick two or three more. It's not that that's difficult, but over a series of about 40 frames, you're adding a lot of unnecessary time to the creation of your animation. The other thing that you do is run the risk of forgetting to change the colors back. The reason that you want to make sure that they're shifted back is so that you don't see any patterning or any hold throughout the frames. Let me back out of this and I'll show you why we're using duplicates. I want to take this back to the original state. I'm back to frame 40 and everything is red. Let me back one frame up to 39. I have my light pink selected, and I'll just choose three letters at random. If I go to my duplicate frame that's already in place and already in the original state, I don't need to remember to change those letters. I can just pick the next two or three letters. Now I can flip back and forth between these two. Now, I picked the same letters in this case, which is something you want to avoid. But again, this is just a way of avoiding additional rework. When it comes to these animations, think about how you want your final result to look and think about ways that you can save yourself time over the course of creating the animation as well as avoid pitfalls like forgetting to make changes that you need to. I'm back to the original state where I have 40 duplicates of this frame and I'm going to head back to the beginning of my animation. I want the first five frames to be held in this state, so all red. I'll skip right past five, go to six. At the very end, I'm going to use the last several frames to flash back and forth between all red and all pink a few times and then have it land on all pink and hold it for a few more frames there. I'm going to start on frame 6, selecting two or three letters, moving to the next frame, selecting two or three more. It's up to you how many letters you'd like to choose at each frame. I find two or three random letters gives a better effect. But that's totally your choice. I'm just going to select these three. Now the trick is going to be remembering what you just selected, because remember, if I flip to this one, you no longer see it. I had L, G, and S selected, so I want to pick two or three that aren't any of those letters so I'll go with I, H and F. I always try to choose at least one on each line. I have F, I, and H. Let's use T and A this time. I'm just going to continue this over about 30-35 frames. I'm going to speed it up at this point and I'll see you on the other side. [MUSIC] I have done that across 35 frames and what I tried to do is just make sure that I'm not picking one letter more than others. It's difficult again, you're starting fresh with each frame, so it may be difficult to keep track. I recommend scrubbing through and just making sure that one of your letters isn't flashing more than the others, unless that's the effect that you're going for. I think mine looks pretty good. I'm on frame 35, which means my next one is going to be all red, and this is how I want this. Now, I actually could just do a few more because I really don't need these additional frames. I think I will just randomly select just a few more frames until I get to 40 there. Now I'm on my final frame and I have all read. Again, I want this to flash back and forth between all red and all pink a few times and then finally land on all pink. I'm going to duplicate this frame, and I'm going to change all of the letters in this frame to pink. At this point, I don't need to keep doing that. Instead, I'm going to duplicate this frame, drag it to the end. I'll go back to the pink, duplicate it, drag it to the end. This is similar to what we did with the exclamation point and the previous exercise. It's just a little easier to see in this case. I'm going to do that about three or four times for each one. I know that I want this to land on pink, so I want that to be my last duplicate. I need another pink one and I'll do one more red and then one more pink. We'll move that to the end and this is the end-state that I want. At this point, I'm going to add about 10-15 frames of this color. I have a total of 60 frames. I just added about 10-15 of this pink. Let's go ahead and hit "Play" and see how it looks. It starting on red and it flashes between the letters. I don't see any letter flashing more than the others and it looks like all of them flashed at least two or three times and that's another thing that you want to keep an eye on. If you've missed any of the letters that's going to show up as well. Just keep an eye out for whether you need to go back and fix that. It holds on the pink and then it goes back to the red and starts all over again. Now you could speed this up. But I find this particular one if it's too fast, especially when your colors are in the same family and relatively close together, it's harder to see that color shift. It just looks like a flickering light instead. I'm going to bring that back down to about five. I just find that works a lot better. I'm going to do one final check before I call this done. I like how this looks. I think it's animating at a nice pace. I don't have any patterning where I'm not picking a particular letter or I'm picking one too much. I'm going to go ahead and call this animation done. [MUSIC] Letters are individually selected at random and their colors are briefly shifted over the course of a series of duplicated frames. Texts layers need to be converted to either pixel or a vector so that letters can be selected individually and filled in with a different color. Make sure to select your font before converting as once you convert it to either pixel or a vector, it's no longer live type. The randomness of the color change is what helps this animation look natural so try to avoid patterning when you're selecting your letters. Handwriting fonts, or anything with connectors won't work with this animation as you need to be able to select the individual letters for animation. Finally, any weight font will work, however, heavier weight fonts will show the color shift more easily. Next up, we're going to take a look at the fourth animation, the write on effect. I'll see you there. 8. Animation 4 | The Write on Effect: [MUSIC] The write on effect mimics handwriting by gradually revealing a word or a phrase and the natural direction and speed at handwriting. The effect works best when using either a cursive or handwriting font. Print fonts can be used. However, they are more challenging to animate naturally. In this effect, we're going to use masks to hide our texts non-destructively. Then uncover the text by animating a mask reveal. By doing so incrementally in the same natural direction as our handwriting, we can mimic smooth writing when it's played back at a higher frame per second. Let's head into Fresco and take a closer look. We are ready with animation for the write on effect. Now, this is another very common animation that you're going to see on social media or on websites. What we're going to be doing is mimicking handwriting and using the masking feature in Fresco to do that non-destructively. Now there's a few considerations when it comes to choosing the font, and I mentioned a couple of them in the opener of the video. This effect works best with a handwriting font, but it doesn't have to be cursive. The heavier-weight print fonts are going to be more challenging to animate on, and they may not read as well unless you're using some sort marker font. But I recommend trying out your favorite font and just see how it looks. Now we're going to be creating this again by animating a mask reveal. In order to do that naturally, we want to think ahead as to how we would naturally write a word on and reveal our mask in the same direction. Now before we get into actually creating the animation, I want to talk a little bit about how masking works in Fresco. I have this leaf shape here that I created, and this is actually a vector shape that I pulled in. However, I do want to note that masking in Fresco is all pixel-based. Even if you're starting with a vector shape, just note that when you start using the masking feature, you're going to be forced to use pixel tools, so it is something to keep in mind, especially when you're sizing your document. Now the first thing I want to note about masking is that it all starts within the layer itself. I'm going to tap on my leaf layer here and then tap again to get my layer action menu. There's two ways that I can add this. The first is to create an empty mask, which you can see created a white mask there over the entire layer. Now nothing happened because again, it's a white mask and with any masking in any app, white reveals and black conceals, so in order to hide the leaf, I'd need to tap the layer and hit "Invert Mask." The other way that I can create the mask is again to tap the layer to get the layer actions menu, and mask layer contents. Now the same thing happens that happened with the previous one, nothing is concealed because it's giving me a white mask on a black background. I'd need to tap again and hit "Invert Mask." Now it's giving me a black mask in the exact shape of my leaf and the leaf is [inaudible] concealed. I want to draw your attention down to the bottom here. As soon as you add a mask here, it's going to give you a very small contextual menu at the bottom, showing reveal and hide. Now in other apps, when you're using masking, you're going to use a brush and either use white or black to either reveal or conceal with your mask. In Fresco, it's all done here. If I have "Reveal" selected, anything I do with any color brush is going to reveal my mask. If I have "Hide" selected, it's the opposite, I'm going to hide it. Again, the actual color of my brush doesn't matter at all. What matters is what you have selected down here. Now another thing you'll note is as soon as you add a mask, it's automatically going to choose the pixel brush. Again, the masking feature in Fresco is all pixel-based, so you can't choose either the live brushes or the vector brushes. However, you can choose any pixel brush. It doesn't have to be a basic brush, which means you can actually reveal your mask using a texture brush as well. Beyond the pixel brush, you can also use some of the shape and fill tools down here. I could grab my lasso tool. I could use one of my built-in shapes and I can use my fill tool and I'll show you how that works in a moment. Let's start with the pixel brush though. If you look at your layer here, it looks like the leaf layer is completely gone. But if you flip, that's the original leaf layer, and if I flip back, that's the mask. This is a key thing to remember because especially in the next two animations, we're going to either be animating the mask or we're going to be animating the layer, and you need to make sure that you're on the right one so that the animation runs properly. I'm on mask layer and I'm going to make sure "Reveal" is selected. I'll go ahead and select one of the pixel brushes. I'm going to start with just the basic hard round brush. On reveal, if I start drawing on this, so you can see that it's starting to reveal the leaf shape from under the mask. I can go ahead and hit "Hide" and the opposite is the case. Now again, I don't need to just use a basic round brush, I can use any of the texture brushes. If I grab one of my favorite texture brushes here, I'll use the pigmented brush from one of Kyle Webster's packs and I have it on reveal and I just start brushing across this. You can see that it's coming in a little bit more faint because it's doing it with texture rather than a solid brush, and if I zoom in here, you can see the nice texture from that brush. Then conversely, I can go ahead and hit "Hide", and the same thing is going to happen. Now I mentioned previously that you can also use some of the shape and selection tools. While I'm on my mask layer here, if I grab my ellipse tool, for example, and just drag out an ellipse, I can grab my fill tool, and it's going to fill in within that circle shape so that if I deselect it, you can see it creates an oval there. I can do that with any of the shapes. I can also grab the lasso tool and draw a shape that I want. I, again, fill it in. It's going to fill it in in certain spots because, again, remember, we used a texture brush to reveal some of our mask. A couple of final things that I want to note about masking. There's a couple of ways that you can show the mask on your illustration. You can choose red overlay if you'd like. I personally find on layers works better for me. You can also copy your mask, cut your mask and paste it, and we are going to be using that in the bonus animation and I'll show you how to do that. Then, the other thing that I want to draw your attention to is you can unlink your mask. If I have this linked and grab my transform tool, everything is going to move together. If I unlink it by clicking on that icon. If I grab my transform tool while I'm on my mask layer, I can drag that around and you can see that it's staying within the shape, but I can move it freely from the shape itself. The same thing goes for the shape. If I grab my selection tool, I can move that around independent from the mask. Again, this is going to be something that we use in one of the upcoming animations; the mask on as well as the texture. We need to work independently, so unlinking and linking is going to be key. Then, one final note, you can also turn your mask off simply by tapping that icon there. That's it with the masking. Let's go ahead and start diving into the actual animation. I have my letters in place and I'm using a font called learning curve, which is a connected cursive font, but again, the specific font that I'm using doesn't matter. You can use any font you'd like. But as I mentioned previously, handwriting fonts, whether cursive or otherwise, do work best for this effect. I have two copies of my layer here, and the reason for that is once I mask this top layer, it's going to disappear and onion skins aren't going to work in this case. What I want to do is give myself a guide because I'm going to be animating the mask reveal, and I need to see the direction that I'm going in. As I mentioned previously, it's important to think ahead as to how you would write on the words naturally and animate your mask in that same direction to make it run more smoothly. How I would write this on is to start here at the left and come up. I would complete my w and then come back around and start my r up again and continue this until I get to about there on the t, come to the top, start my t to complete my little hook there. Create my e and my crossbar over my t. Now I'm going to save the dot over the eye for the very end. I'll write to the o, start here and come around and up, down, up, and then complete it, and then again on the very last frame add my dot. That's the way that I want to animate my mask on. The first thing I'm going to do is give myself a mask for this top layer, so I'll tap and I'm going to mask the entire layer contents, so I'll just you create empty mask. Again, it's giving me a white mask to start, so I need to invert that. Now of course it's still showing because I have my layer here and this is going to be my guide layer, so I don't need it to be this opaque. I'm going to select it and bring the opacity down to about 10 or so. I just need it enough that I can see it so that I can animate my mask on properly. At this point, you want to make sure that you're back on the mask layer for that top layer. Again, the color of your brush doesn't matter. The only thing that matters is whether you have reveal or hide on. I also want to make sure that my animation is on, so I have my frames there. We're going to be creating this over a series of duplicated frames because as I add a reveal, I want that to stay in place as I go to the next one. I have the basic hard round brush selected, you can choose a textured brush if you'd like. I'm going to animate mine with a regular opaque brush with no texture, and I'll zoom in here. Now the first few frames, I actually want it to be completely blank. I'm going to duplicate this a few times. I'll start animating on my fourth frame. With my brush selected and the contextual menu on reveal, and making sure that I'm on my mask layer, not the actual text layer, I'm going to start animating this on, and I want to do this in small increments rather than larger chunks. Doing it in smaller increments over a lot of frames is going to give a much more smooth animation. Then if I do it in larger chunks over a few. Each time I do, I do want to duplicate my frame. I'm going to bring this up. I'll hit duplicate and again, just add a little bit more. Now in this particular case, I'm going to stay to the left side of this shape and then come back down on the right. I'm going to bring my brush down a little bit. Add a duplicate. I just carefully draw line there. This animation is not a quick one. It is going to take time and it takes a lot of frames. One of the things that I will caution you is because you will end up with a lot of frames. You want to do this slowly and just keep an eye on what you're doing so that you can correct things as you need to. If you accidentally reveal something, let's say I hit something there. Instead of deleting the entire layer, I can just hit Hide and get rid of that. Make sure I'm back on reveal and just start up again. I hit Duplicate. Come up to the top. I'm just going to keep doing this as I come back down. As you need to just adjust the size of your brush. Once I get back to this part where I don't have to worry about it, I'll bring it back up because otherwise, it's going to take me a lot longer to do this animation. Again, I'm doing this in very small increments. I'm going to speed this up at this point until I get to the t. Just remember that I'm going to be revealing this in the direction that I would write the word on. I'll see you once I'm done. [MUSIC] I've animated on the first part of my first word here and I stopped the t. I think I might add just a touch more here so that it comes a little closer to the t itself, it doesn't have to be perfect, because this is going to be running through at a high frames per second. You're not going to see little things. I'm going to duplicate that. I'm going to start at the very top of the t now and come down until I get to about here, and make my brush smaller. This is where it's important to take your time. I want to make sure that I'm not animating on any part of the crossbar, so I'm just being really careful to stay inside here. I'll come down. I'm just going to keep going around until I get to about here. My brush is really small, so it's taking me a little bit more, but I'm in some tighter spots here, so I just want to be careful, go to our ripe about there. I'm ending my t. I'm going to add a duplicate and start doing my crossbar. Now you could do the crossbar after you do the e, it's up to you. I'm not going to do the dot over the i until the very end. Now I'll duplicate and I'll start out with my e. I want to stay within my space right here. I'm just going to draw lines. Went a little overboard there. Let me hit Hide. Again, it doesn't have to be perfect, but you can really see spots like this. You just want to keep an eye out as you're going through. I'll just keep going around. I'm going to speed this up at this point again until I get to the very end. I'll come back before I finish the dot over the i. I'll see you there. [MUSIC] Both of my words are written on. One final thing left to do is to animate on the dot over the i. I've added a duplicate frame. Now instead of using the brush, I'm going to use the Lasso tool. I want to make sure I'm on my mask layer. I'm going to trace around the edges of the dot and then use my fill tool to fill it in. Once I hit Deselect, it's in place and it's going to pop up on that final frame. A couple of dots about playback settings for this particular animation. For some reason, the loop animation tends to get a little bit buggy. I don't know if it's a problem with fresco that's going to be fixed or it's just how it works. I find that when I play back, if I just do it on Play once, it works perfectly fine. Once you export it, it seems to be just fine. It's just the playback mode that gets a little bit buggy. I haven't set to play once my frames per second or all the way up to 40. Because the higher frames per second are going to make this run more smoothly along with animating it on incrementally. I'll hit Play. You can see it's writing it on, puts a dot and then it sits there. Let's go ahead and pause that and turn off our guide layer so it's completely blank. I'll hit Play again. It's writing it on in the direction that I would have written this on. Now, I'll show you how it looks with loop. Sometimes it runs fine when it's doing playback and sometimes it gets a little bit of a hiccup. You can try it. See it just went right back and started it up again. I just find that playing it back on Play once works best. I just want to check and make sure that everything is riding on smoothly. One final thing to note about this animation is if you are going to export it with a loop animation and you want it to hold in this state before it starts back up again, make sure that you're adding those duplicate frames at the end like we have previously, anywhere from 10, 30, 40, 50, however long you wanted to hold, just add some duplicate frames at the very end. I like how this animation is running. I think it's running smoothly and the increments are good. I'm going to go ahead and call this animation done. The animation mimics handwriting by writing on a word or a phrase over a series of duplicated frames. Using frescoes masking feature, we gradually reveal more of our font until the entire word is complete. Doing so in tiny increments over many frames, will give us a much more fluid animation that if it's done in larger increments over a few. This animation works best with handwriting fonts, though they don't have to be cursive. Heavy weight print fonts are going to be more challenging to animate but try out your favorite font and just see how it looks. For best results, think ahead as to how you would naturally write on your word and unmask it in the same pattern. Finally, a higher frame per second is going to give this animation a much smoother and more natural feel. Next up, we're going to take a look at animation 5; mask on. I'll see you there. [MUSIC] 9. Animation 5 | Mask On Effect: This animation uses fresco's masking feature to hide two lines of text and gradually reveal them over a series of duplicated frames. Both lines of texts are placed opposite of where they'll finally land and masks are placed over each of them, making them invisible. Each line of text is then moved out of it's mass gradually over a series of duplicated frames until both words land exactly where we want them. Let's take a closer look. We're on our fifth animation. This one is called mask on. We're going to have a line mask on first and then two layers of text are going to come up from the bottom and the top and emerge at the same time. Now the cool thing about this particular animation is we're going to be working entirely non-destructively. We'll be using a live text because we don't need to change the fill color or use any selection tools so we can keep the text live. We're also going to be using masks so that we can make changes at any point in time. I mentioned in the beginning of the video that any font is going to work for this of any size, weight, or type. I personally find that using similar fonts if I'm using two lines, gives them a much smoother animation than trying to work with two very different fonts, but it's completely up to you. Again, because you are working non-destructively, you can test different things out as long as you remember to adjust your masks accordingly. Let's go ahead and get started. I haven't set up my text yet because before I do that, I want to show you two ways that you can easily create the line that the text is going to emerge from. I'll give myself an empty layer. The first method is to grab the rectangular selection tool and just drag out the shape. It's going to give you a selection which you can then just use the fill tool to fill in. Now the downside of this one to me is that the only way you have of adjusting this before you fill in the shape is to use the add or subtract tools here. If I needed to make this smaller, I would flip it to subtract and drag some away and vice versa. Once I fill it in, if I grab my fill tool and just tap and add either a vector or a pixel, now I can transform it however I need to. But again, I don't have that flexibility upfront. The other approach that you can take to creating that middle line is go to the bottom here where you'll see this ruler. If I tap and hold, it's going to give me the ruler but you'll also see these additional shapes. If I choose square, I have this faint, slightly transparent square here with a bounding box. I can make the shape that I want upfront using the bounding box and I can adjust it however I need to. Then with my fill tool on an empty layer, I'll just tap and again it'll ask me if I want a vector or a pixel, I'm going to choose vector. If I turn this off, I have the line in place. If I needed to, I could go in and grab that transform tool. I just find this approach to be more flexible upfront and a lot easier to adjust. I've set up my text now and I'm using a font called Apparat Black, which I believe is one of the built-in fonts. But again, as I've already mentioned, the exact font, type of font, and weight of font don't matter with this particular animation. Just play around with different fonts to see what works best for you. Again, because we are working non-destructively, you can adjust it as we go as long as you remember to adjust the masks. The way that I want this animation to work is that this pink line is going to emerge from this middle line to the top, and vice versa. The red is going to emerge from the line and hit the bottom. I'm starting opposite of where I want it to end and I do want to note that I have each of these on their own separate layer because we're going to be animating each of them separately and giving each one of them their own mask. I temporarily turned off the text so we're going to start by animating the line first. The very first part of that animation is that the line is going to animate on and then the two lines of text are going to emerge at the same time. Not everything is going to happen at the same time, but overall, we want to have the same number of frames for each layer. It's really important that as we're animating this line, we need to keep track of how many frames we use because we need to duplicate these, that number of frames before we begin animating them. You'll see what I mean in a moment. The very first thing I want to do is I want to add a mask to this The process is going to be the same as what we used for the write effect. I'll select the layer tap and I'm going to choose mask layer contents. Now my initial mask is inverted. I need this to hide the line and then the line is going to emerge from it. I'll tap again and hit "Invert Mask". I don't know if this is a bug in fresco or it's just how it is with this particular type of mask on a shape but if I zoom in, you can see that I still have a very faint line here. The easiest way to resolve that is to unlink the mask, which we're going to need to do anyway because we're only going to be animating the mask. I have a layer selected and I'll unlink that. I'm going to grab my transform tool and I'm just going to hold my finger down on the touch selector and slightly bring this out until that disappears. I don't want it to come out too much, I just wanted enough that those faint lines disappear. I'll hit "Done" and now that's all gone. If you hold your finger on the button, it's going to do it from the center and do it evenly. I have my line mask now, the mask is unlinked which means that I can animate the mask separate from the actual line itself. I want to make sure I'm on that layer. Now the way this is going to work is over a series of frames. We're going to gradually move the mask to the right so that it gives the appearance of the line emerging from the left side. Let me just do this manually so that you can see what I mean. I'll grab my transform tool, again, I'm on my mask layer. I want to make sure it stays even so I am going to hold my finger down on the touch selector and I'll just start dragging this across. As I drag across, again, I'm constraining my exposition. It's making that line look like it's appearing from the left, even though technically it's stationary. Let me go ahead and move that back. Now it's really important that you stay on track with that animation. The other important thing is that you do it incrementally. I just did it all at once but in order to have the animation run smoothly, you need to do it in shorter spurts over a series of frames rather than big chunks because otherwise, it's going to look very choppy and not read the way that you want it to. Let me hit "Done" here. I have my first frame in place and I'm going to leave that completely blank. I want it off because I want this whole thing to go back to an initial state where nothing is showing. I'll just go ahead and hit "Duplicate" and this is the point where I want to start animating the line on. I'll grab my transform tool. Again, I want to make sure that I'm just choosing the selected frame. I'll put my finger down on the touch selector and I'm just going to drag this across till just a little bit of that line is showing. I'll hit "Done" and I'm going to keep doing that. Again selected frame. Now I just messed that up because I didn't hold my finger down. Let's back up and I'll start again. Hit "Done". I'm just going to keep doing this until the entire line is showing. [MUSIC] I have done the entire line, I've moved the mask off of that line to the entire thing is showing. Now you may have seen as I was going through, there were a couple of times where I needed to back up because I accidentally pulled the mask down. The problem with that is it's going to expose things ahead of where you want them to be exposed. Just keep track of what you're doing and make sure that you backup if necessary and just start again. It's really important to keep your finger down on the touch selector just to maintain that position, Right now I have 12 frames, I'm going to go ahead and hit play on this. I want to go back to my main layer so that I can do that. I just want to see how that's animating on. Let's move the speedup. Maybe move it down a little bit, a little too fast. What's going to ultimately happen is that once that mask is off screen, we're going to then hold this for as long as it takes to animate our two text layers on. Right now it's starting fresh each time and that's not how it's going to end. I just want to test that ahead of time to make sure that there's nothing I need to adjust before I move to the other two text layers. We've animated our line on over a series of 12 frames. It's important to note that even though each of these elements is on its own layer, and we're ultimately going to be animating each layer independently. Overall, the number of frames for each layer needs to match. That's going to ensure that the animation starts and stops when it's supposed to and no single layer is starting or stopping before the other two layers. The first thing I want to do is I want to add masks to my two text layers. Now remember the pink is going to animate up and the red is going to animate down. Once I have that mask in place, I'm then going to duplicate each of those layers 12 times. They're just going to sit in place with their masks for those first 12 frames while the line comes on to the screen. Let's start with the pink here. Unlike the mask that we created for the line, I'm actually going to create these masks using the rectangular selection tool. I want this line of text to animate from the very top of the red line. I'll grab the rectangular selection tool. I'm just going to make sure that I'm on that layer and just start dragging across. I'm just getting a rough start here because I can always adjust this once the mask is in place, but I'm trying to get as close as possible. I have my selection in place. It's covering both the line and the text because I don't want the text to appear like it's coming up through the line itself, I want it to come up from the top. I'll tap and hit create a mask instead of mask layer contents. Again, it's going to give me a mass that I need to invert. I'll invert that and now it's gone. If I were to unlink this mask, go back to my text layer, grab my transform tool, I can then bring this text up from the top of that line. You bring that back. I want to do the same exact thing with my red text. I could simply select this copy the mask. I can just paste my mask and then move it up this way. Grab my transform tool, put my finger on the touch selector, and I'm all set. That's an easier way to do it again when it comes to creating these animations make it as easy as possible for yourself so that you don't lose track of anything and it doesn't take you a lot longer than it needs to. Both of my masks are unlinked, which is exactly what I want because I want the masks themselves in this case to stay in place and we're going to animate the text. It's going to be opposite of what we did for the line. I want both of them to come on at the same time, but remember I need both of them to sit under their masks for at least 12 frames before I begin animating them on. I want to select my layer here and I'm going to tap and duplicate this 12 times. As I do that, you're going to see the line start animating on. We've animated our line on, and in my case, I've done it over 12 frames. We've created the masks for our text and then duplicated the two lines of text to give each of those the same number of frames as it took to animate the line on. Now your number might be different from mine, it just depends on how many frames it took for you to animate your line onto the screen. Just make sure that all three match. We're ready to begin animating our text on but there's a couple of things that I want to note first. The first thing is that we're going to animate one line of text on at a time. We want to make sure that when we animate the second line, it's done over the exact same number of frames. But in addition to that, we want to make sure that we animate it in roughly the same increments. Because we're creating the first line you're going to see as you go across the frames, how it's coming on and you just want to keep an eye on that and you'll see better what I mean when we start creating it. The other thing that I want to mention is that right now because we don't have any hold frames on this line where we duplicated this 12th frame, just like we did with the previous animations, it's going to begin again and run through its animation as we're creating our text. Don't worry about that we're going to fix that on the backend once we know how many frames we need for our text. Because at that point we're then going to duplicate this 12th frame over that exact same number so that everything runs at the same time. I'm going to start with my pink line of texts. That's going to come up from the bottom, emerged from the line and land the very top. I've got that layer selected. It's important to make sure that you have the text part of the layer selected and not the mask because we're going to animate the text in this case, and I'm going to duplicate my frame. Again, just like I mentioned, the line disappears because it's going back to the first part of its animation, but you'll see it animate on as we animate our text on. Don't worry about it right now. I'll go ahead and grab my transform tool and choose selected frame. Again, I don't want to do the entire layer. I'm going to hold my finger down on the touch selector and just drag this up until I start to see the text. I just want to emerge right about there. I'll hit done. I'm going to duplicate my frame again. You can see that when I did that, the line started animate on. Now eventually once we're done, the entire line is already going to be on and stay in place. But until we're done with the text, we don't know how many hold layers we need for this yet. Just keep an eye on that. I've duplicated my line, I'll grab selected frame again, I'll hold my finger down and I'm just going to move this up a bit more. You can also use the incremental buttons here, just going to do it much more slowly. It's up to you. I'll hit done. Duplicate my frame again, the lines coming on a little bit more. Selected frame. I'll hold my finger down. I'll move this up a little bit more. I'm just going to speed this up at this point. [MUSIC] It was about five frames to do that. Now I might find that I want to adjust that. I might have to go back into my frames and move things around. What I'm going to do at this point though is I'm going to go back to my line, go to my 12th frame, and I'm going to duplicate this last frame until I get to 18 because that's the exact number of frames I have for the letters. With that layer selected, I'll hit Duplicate until I have 18. This is going to give me a better gauge when I'm doing the other one. Now I want to animate my red layer on from the top to the bottom and the same number of frames. Right now I am on frame 12 here, and I want to duplicate that frame and you can see that the pink layer is starting to peak on, so that gives me a nice indication of how I need to animate the other. I'll grab my transform tool Selected frame, hold my finger down, and I'm just going to bring this on until you start to see it peak through. You can see that I have roughly the same amount coming on there as I do there, so I'll hit Done. I'm going to keep going. Selected frame. Hold my finger down keep pulling this down. I'll just speed this up at this point. [MUSIC] I have that animated on, in 18 frames. Now, I'm finding this is a little too far down, which is not a problem. I'm going to grab my transform tool and selected frames, and I'm just going to tap that back, that's roughly the same spot. Now have same amount of space between this one and this one. Let's just run our animation and see how it's looking so far. If I hit Play, the line's going to come on first. Let me slow that down. The line will come on first, and then the two lines of text. Now obviously it's popping right back to the beginning because we haven't done any hold frames yet. But really I just want to make sure that everything's coming on at the same time. I'll speed it up a little bit. I like how it's animating on. I like how the line is working first. At this point, I just want to make sure that I have the exact same number of frames, which I do. If I pause this, I have 18 frames for both letters and my line. Now at this point I want to go ahead and create hold frame. So I want it to hold in this position before it goes back to the beginning and starts to animate on again. I'm going to create, I would say probably about 20 duplicates of each [MUSIC]. I have 38 frames for each layer, my two layers are taxed on my line. Let's go ahead and hit play and see how that's looking. So it's going to animate on hold for 20 frames, and then it's going to start back up again. Now with this particular animation, if you want, you can go into settings and change that to boomerang, and in that case it's going to animate on hold for 20 frames and then hold for another 20 frames as it cycles back and then it's going to animate itself off. Now the only thing about this one is because of the current way we had it set up. It animates off and then kicks right back into place again. If you want it to hold for a little bit before it does that, you'd actually need to add a few more of these empty frames. You need to duplicate that for each layer, so that everything matches and that's how it's going to hold. [MUSIC] Just want to double check and make sure that we have the same amount of frame, so 48, 48, and somehow we have 47 so let's go back here. I'm going to do one more, we should have 48 now. Let's hit Play it going to animate on. Hold, go backwards, animate off. It's going to hold for 10 frames and then kick back in again. Again, you can put it on boomerang and have it animate itself off. You just need to make sure that you add a number of empty frames at the very beginning. Otherwise, it's just going to kick right back on again as soon as it animates itself off. I like how this is animating on, I think it's running nice and smoothly. I don't need to adjust any of the increments everything is spaced nicely. I actually like how the boomerang animation is running. It's up to you whether you want it to run a loop or boomerang, just make sure that you adjust your frames accordingly. But I'm going to go ahead and call this particular animation done. [MUSIC] Live text can be used in this animation, so converting to a pixel or a vector format isn't necessary. While live text is editable and it means that you can change your words. Remember to adjust your masks accordingly, so words aren't showing through. Lining up your masks upfront is going to help you create a seamless animation, but because they're non destructive, they can be adjusted at any point if necessary. Any font of any weight and size are going to work with this animation, so play around with your favorite one and see how it works. Keep track of how many frames you create so that all of the layers in your animation have the same count. This is important for keeping the animation smooth. Revealing your text in small increments over multiple frames will give you a smoother animation than revealing in larger increments over less. Finally, a faster frames per second tends to give this a much smoother effect, but play around with different settings and see what works best. Next up, we're going to take a look at the bonus animation, animating texture. I'll see you there. 10. BONUS | Animating Texture in Adobe Fresco: In this animation, we'll be creating a mask from text and animating texture within that mask over a series of duplicated frames. This animation works with any font, though it works best with heavier weight fonts, whether it's print or cursive. Because we'll be animating our texture inside the mask, heavier weight fonts are going to show that movement better if the animation is used at a smaller size. You start with a line of text and we create a mask from the layer's contents. From there, texture is either created in fresco or pulled in as a file and we apply a layer mask to it. The mask and the texture are unlinked and we start moving and flipping the texture over a series of frames, thus creating the animation. Let's go ahead and take a closer look. We're at our final animation and this is actually going to be the easiest of the six animations that we did. It's going to be less of a text animation and more of a texture animation. We'll be using our text layer to create an exact mask of the word or phrase that we want to animate our texture inside of. As I mentioned in the opener of the video, you can keep the text layer as a base layer of color or you can get the color directly from the texture like I have here. I'm going to go ahead and create using a base layer of color just so that you can see how it's done. But again, if you don't want to do that, just either hide or discard the texts layer once you've created the mask. Let's go ahead and get started. My word is all set up and I'm going to go with a font called Poleno. Just like with the other exercises, the specific font doesn't matter, but the type of font does. You can ultimately use any font you'd like with this animation, it's just going to depend on what size you plan to use it at. The reason I say that is if I were to shrink this down and use it as a sticker on an Instagram story, if there's not a lot of real estate within the letter to see the texture animation at a small size, it's not going to read the way that you want it to. I recommend with this particular animation if you know that you're going to be using it in a much smaller size, go with the middle or heavier weight font. If you're going to be using it at a larger size, the font doesn't really matter, so pick whichever one you like best. You can take a couple of approaches to pulling texture in for this animation. The first is that you can add an empty layer, grab one or more of the built-in brushes and create your own texture. Or if you already have a favorite texture that you want to use, you can go to the place menu and pull it in that way. I'm going to do that, I have some textures sitting in my files. You're welcome to use the textures I provided with the class or you can use your own favorite texture if you have one. I'll go to Files, now I know that I want the color for my final animation to come from the base layer of texture, that pink, red color. I don't want any color coming from my texture, so I'm going to choose one of my black and white ones. I know that I want this to be the focus of the texture so I'm going to hold my finger down on the touch selector and I'm going to rotate this. Now I need this to be bigger than the word. The reason for that is we're going to be moving the texture around to animate it. If it's too small and you move too far to the left, right, up or down, then there's the potential for the layer underneath to peek through and you don't want that. I'm going to bring this up and bring it right about there, and I'll hit Done. For right now, I don't need this texture layer. I'm going to turn it off because I want to create a mask from my text layer. I'll go ahead and select it, tap again and I want to mask layer contents. When I do that, you can see an exact mask in the exact shape of my letters is created. Now I don't need this mask for the letter itself, I just need it be text to create the mask. I'm going to tap again, I'm going to Cut mask, and I'll go back up to my texture layer and turn it on. Now I want to add that mask back to this layer, so I'll tap and hit place mask and I'll just choose Done. Again here's the mask and if I flip, there's the texture. Now, you want to keep an eye out for something if you're on your mask layer, and you see this icon where it shows that it's linked, you want to make sure at this point that it is unlinked. The reason for that is if I keep this link, and I go back to my texture and grab my transform tool, everything including the mask is going to move together, and we don't want that. We actually want the mask to stay where it is and we want to be able to move the texture independently. I'll go back to my mask click that and just make sure layer mask is unlinked. Now if I go back to that texture layer, I can move this around and you can see that the mask is staying right where it's at. We're at the point where we can start animating our texture. Again, I've made sure that my mask is unlinked to that I can move the texture around independent from the mask. My animation is already on and I'm on that texture layer because that's what we're going to be animating. This is fine as my first frame, I'm going to keep this and I want to duplicate this. I'll go ahead and tap and hit Duplicate. I want to move this to a different position. So there's a couple of ways that you can do that. One of the biggest goals when you're doing this is to make sure that you're not doing it in a pattern because especially if you have a lower number of frames, you're going to see a very distinct pattern, if you're not careful about how you move it. I want to grab my Transform tool. Again I want to choose Selected frame because I only want to move the texture on this particular frame. The first thing I'm going to do is go up here to the top and I'm going to choose vertical flip. That's going to give me a portion of my movement. Then I'm just going to randomly drag this maybe up into the right. You can go in any direction that you'd like, and I'll hit Done. Now I have my second frame and you can see those moving there already. I'll hit Duplicate to that again. This time I'll go with say horizontal flip and maybe I'll move it down into the left so I have some movement there. Now I recommend doing at least four or five frames if not more, I tend to do about 10-12. I'm going to go ahead and do that now and I'm going to speed it up so I'll see you when I'm done. [MUSIC] I have my frames in place and I'm just going to hit Play to check my movement here. I see some nice movement, no patterning. I don't have any lettering peeking out from beneath it where I pulled it too far, one way or another. I'll go into Settings, now this is set to four already from my previous layer of texture. I am going to just bring that up. You could certainly do that obviously that makes it a lot faster. This is great for something like if you're creating static for a television or you're doing old time movie film. Where you're using newsprint texture to create a grid? That speed works really nicely. For the purposes of this animation, now I'm going to keep this at four. I have my movement in place, but again, I want the color from the text layer to come through so I'm going to select this layer, so I'll turn off my animation. I want to make sure that layer is selected and go to my layer properties. I'm going to change my blend mode to something like overlay. Now if I wanted to, I could also change my opacity, but I actually like the levels and the layers there. I like how that red is coming through but in some of the spots where the texture is hitting and playing with that color, it's giving me that PG color. Let's hit Play again and I like how that looks. At this point I could go ahead and export this. If you do use these two, all you really need to do is make sure that these are the two layers that are showing, and when you export it, and I'll show you more about exporting in the next video, those two layers will go together. Just make sure that everything that you want to export is visible. You could also group this if you wanted to, but it's not necessary. [MUSIC] Heavier weight fonts tend to work best with this animation because they allow your texture animation to be seen even when it's used at a smaller size. Type is used to create a mask to place over the texture, but it isn't necessary to the final animation. That said, if you do want to keep your original non animated texts layer in place as a base color, you can export everything together. Remember to use all of the tools and the transform tool including flip vertical and horizontal, to create a more random, and therefore natural effect. In order to animate just the texture, be sure to unlink your mask from the texture layer and be sure that your texture layer is visible in the layers panel. Finally a low frames per second tends to work best with this animation as higher frames per second has a more frantic feel. Next stop, we're going to talk about exporting options, I'll see you there [MUSIC]. 11. Motion Export Options in Adobe Fresco: [MUSIC] All right, so we've created our animations and we're ready to begin exploiting them. Now Fresco offers multiple ways to export your final animation as GIFs, MP4s and PNG sequences. The one that you choose is ultimately going to depend on where you plan to use your animation. We're going to talk about the various formats in a moment. But before we do that, let's go ahead and take a look at how to set up your canvas to get it ready for export. The first thing that you want to do is think about where you want to use it. I want to use this one as a animation sticker that I can upload to GIPHY and use in Instagram or messaging, which means that it needs to have a transparent background and everything else that I had behind it needs to be off. Pause this for a moment. The very first thing that you want to do is make sure that the layer that Fresco puts in place automatically is turned off. Just select it and hit the little eyeball. Any other opaque layers that you don't want showing up are turned off. Now if you think back to the texture layer where we had two layers where I created a solid that I used as the color base and then the texture on top of it. I would want those two layers to remain on and they would get exported together. I have my layer ready to go. It's on a transparent background. Let's go ahead and go into the export and talk about the various formats that are available to you. Once you're ready to export your animation, go up to the Share button at the top and choose publish and export. You'll see motion at the bottom and you can change the filename as well as choose from the three different formats, MP4, GIF, and PNG sequence. Let's talk about GIFs first. They're the most widely accepted and commonly used format, but they're also the oldest format. One of the biggest issues with GIFs is that they don't support transparencies including partial transparencies like shadows. Where a fully transparent background is needed, Fresco is going to create anti-aliasing and add what's called a mat around your animation to pad the illustration itself and prevent it from looking choppy. If you have a shadow or a partial transparency, they're not supported at all in GIFs. If you need to use a shadow with your animation, you're going to need to use a background of some sort or export it as a PNG, which we'll talk about in a bit. The one final issue with GIFs is that they also have a much lower visual quality than other methods, so they're more difficult to use at a larger size. Let's talk a bit about the mats that I just mentioned. When I choose GIF, I'm given two options, no transparency and white is transparent. If I choose no transparency and generate my frames, it's automatically going to add a pure white background in the sides of my canvas. Now if this will work for you, that's fine. The problem is again, this is the size of my canvas and there's all sorts of padding here. If you do plan to use something like this, I recommend cropping in closer to your animation so you can change your canvas size and Fresco before you export it. That way you don't have all of this unused space that's padding whatever you're placing it on. If I choose white as transparent and generate my frames, it's going to give me that mat that I mentioned. You can see a very faint white line around all of my letters. Now, the actual letters themselves are untouched, but the white line is very choppy because of the anti-aliasing. Fresco is forcing transparency where transparency doesn't exist with GIFs and that's fine, except for a few things. The first is if you plan to use this as a text sticker, an animated text sticker in something like GIPHY, that white mat is going to show up. Now it's become pretty widely accepted that these exist. If you go on GIPHY or sites like it, you're going to see a ton of animations that have that white mat around it and it's just been accepted, and in a very small size where you'd be using it in a story or something like that, it's a lot harder to see. The other issue though, is if you do need to use it at a larger size, as of this recording, Fresco doesn't allow an option to either change the mat color to something other than white or turn it off entirely. Now in the next video, I'm going to show you how to take a PNG sequence from Fresco and create a much cleaner GIF out of it. As well as how you can use Photoshop to turn off the mat or change the color. But if you plan to export directly from Fresco, just know that when you export with a GIF, you either export with a background or with this white mat. The next option that you have is MP4. Now, MP4s have some more options to them. You can actually store both audio and video. Though in Fresco, there's actually no way of adding audio as of this point. There's two versions of mp4 in Fresco, automatic and web ready. Automatic is going to be at the size you created it, web ready is going to reduce the size a little bit. I don't see much of a difference in quality when you change it. The smaller size of MP4s is what makes them actually desirable. Sites like Facebook and Instagram actually require this over GIFs and PNGs for posts and other things. Keep that in mind. The biggest issue with MP4s is that they support no transparency at all, whether full or partial, because they use what are called JPEG encoding. You can't do any transparency. That's going to lead me into the final option, which are PNGs. Let's go ahead and take a look at that. All right, so when you choose PNG sequence, the first thing you're going to notice is that there are actually no other options. That's it. You choose PNG sequence and there's no other drop-down boxes. The biggest downside with Fresco and this PNG sequences that it's not actually animated. It doesn't export an animated PNG, but it exports what's called a PNG sequence. What that is is a snapshot of each frame that you created as a PNG file. What you're going to get is a zip file with an image of each frame and then you need to take it into another app and animate it. Now again, in the next lesson, I'm going to show you how to take it into Photoshop and animate it. But if you don't have Photoshop available to you, there are a number of free sites out on the web that you can use as well. The other downside to PNGs, specifically animated PNGs, is most sites don't accept them at this point. Even though they give you the cleanest export and you can use transparencies, unfortunately, while most of the browsers actually accept them, sites themselves don't. What it all boils down [MUSIC] to is you need to think about where you plan to use your animation, what other tools you have available to you if you choose an option, say like PNG sequence, and decide what's going to work best for your animation. Let's take a quick look back at our lesson. GIFs are the most widely accepted animation format, but they're also the most archaic and have a much lower visual quality than any the other format. They don't support transparencies of any kind so mats necessary where a transparent background is needed. Partial transparencies aren't aloud for at all so if you've created a shadow, you're going to need to create a background element or save it as a PNG sequence. Mp4s have a much smaller file size, but they don't support transparencies at all because they use JPEG encoding. PNG format does allow for full or partial transparency and has a much higher quality than GIFs. The problem is Fresco exports a PNG sequence rather than an animated PNG so you're still going to need to animate the frames in a separate program. Next up I'm going to show you how to take a PNG sequence from Fresco and create a much cleaner GIF in Photoshop. I'll see you there. 12. Convert a PNG Sequence to GIF in Photoshop: [MUSIC] I'm here in Photoshop and I want to take that PNG sequence that I just exported from Fresco, and I want to convert it first to an animated PNG and then finally export it off as an animated GIF. Again, the reason that I'm doing that here is because, as of right now, Photoshop provides more options when it comes to mattes and GIFs than Fresco does, so I can choose white, black, I can choose a custom color if I'd like. Before we head into the animation though, there's a couple of things that I want to note. The first is I am in Photoshop for desktop. As of right now, Photoshop for iPad doesn't have animation features, so you'll need to use the desktop version of the app. The other thing I want to note is that when Fresco exports a PNG sequence, it's going to give you a ZIP file. You'll need to make sure that you unzip that before heading into Photoshop. I've gone ahead and done that here. I'll just double-click and open it, and you can see that I have five PNG images here. But if you think back to my animation, I actually only created three frames, but I switched the playback to boomerang. To compensate for that, when Fresco exported my PNG sequences, it gave me those two additional PNG images to make that boomerang effect. In essence, it's one, two, three, two, one, but for the purposes of the video timeline, it's labeled one through five. Now, there's a really easy way to open this as a video file in Photoshop. The first thing you want to do is make sure that your options are open down here. If it's not, just click "Options," I'll click the first PNG file, checkoff image sequence and click "Open." It's going to ask me what I want my frame rate to be. Now, I chose seven in Fresco so I'll stick with that here. You'll see it gives me a video group here in my timeline as well as in my layers here. I want to focus down here in the timeline. The first thing I want to do is make sure that I go to this cog and click Loop Playback so that it doesn't just run through and stop. I have my resolution set to 50 percent and that's actually just fine. If you find that Photoshop is running clunky or slow, you can always change your resolution to help it along. I'm just going to go ahead and click "Play." Now, what you may find is that the first few times it runs through the timeline, it runs clunky. You can see it stopping there, and that's not what I want, but I find that as it runs through it starts to learn it. I'm not sure if that's what it's doing, but I do find it smooth itself out. I'm actually going to stop that so I can show you. You can run through your play head here. You can also run through it here. If you feel like your animation is not running as fast as you'd like, you also have the option of changing its speed. You can just click here on this little play button. It's going to give you speed and duration. The duration is based on whatever your speed is. Let's say I want to put in 125 percent because I don't feel like this was running quite as fast as I want it to. It's changed my duration because it's going to run through those five frames much more quickly if I click Play. I actually like this a lot more than the way it was running at 100 percent. It's running the exact speed I wanted. That's all to say that you have the option of either speeding up or slowing down the play through if you want, again, just by clicking this little play button here. At this point, I have animated PNG. Now, I'm not going to save it as a PNG, I'm going to export it as a GIF. But that's how easy it is to create that in Photoshop. But let's take a look at how we can export our file as an animated GIF. To export my GIF, I'm going to go up to File, Export, Save for Web Legacy, and it's going to bring up a dialog box for me. Now, my file is really large because I created this in Fresco at a much larger size than I needed to. If you remember, I worked with vectors and I have no texture in this. I'm going to change my image size to 1,000 pixels just to keep my file size relatively low. The other thing I want to do is make sure that GIF is checked off here. If you have a lot of colors in your GIF, you can make sure that the maximum number of colors are showing, which is 256. I don't change anything here, but what I do change is the matte options. This is where, under this drop-down box, you're going to have all of the options that you're not necessarily seeing right now in Fresco. I can choose no matte, I can choose the eyedropper color, so I can use my eyedropper to select a color somewhere, I can use the foreground or background colors, white, black, or if I click other, it lets me put in a specific hex code. It's really up to you what you want to use. Now, where you'd use a custom one is, let's say you have a website that does not have a pure white background, but you want to have a matte behind your GIF. You can just go ahead and click "Other," key in the exact hex code for your website, and you're all set. Now, I'm going to save this off two ways. The first thing I want to do is save it with no matte, and then I'm going to save it with a white matte so that you can see the difference. Before we do that though, I'm going to zoom in here. Now, I'm zooming into 800 percent. You can see that I have an anti-aliasing here in the spots where there's a lot of curves, which in this particular case there's a lot because the font I worked with had a lot of curves, where I have some straight lines so you can see that I don't have that choppiness. But again, I have this zoomed in to 800 percent, and that's not how I would be using it. If I were going to use this it'd be more likely used in something like Instagram where it'd be much smaller, and you can't see that aliasing. If I start clicking "Play," I just see that wiggle and that's without a matte on it. Because I started out with a really clean PNG sequence, I'm getting a nice, clean output even with a GIF file. I'll go ahead and stop this. Let's change it to black so you can see it better. If I zoom in, you can see it gives me that nice, little, black outline there that's going to protect the edges of my text so that the anti-aliasing hits that black outline rather than the text itself. Now, if I zoom in really close, it's going to look like it's on everything because again, I'm zooming in to 800 percent, which is not where I would use this. Let me change this to white. The first thing I'm going to do is make sure that forever is checked off down here. I'll click "Save," you want to click "Save" and not "Done." I'll change this to coming soon white matte, and I'm just going to save it into the same file. Now, I want to go back up into my File and Export options, because again, I want to save this off this time without a matte so you can see the difference. I'll change this to none. Again, I'll change my image size so we're comparing apples to apples. Make sure forever is checked. I'll click "Save" and I'm going to do coming soon no matte. Let's head into the previews for both of those so you can see the difference. I have my two GIFs here, one with the white matte and one would no matte. I'm going to go ahead and hit the Spacebar to give us a preview. This is the one with no matte. You can see that even at this really large size, it's really clean. There are imperfections or is anti-aliasing and the curves spots, but I would use something like this to load to GIPHY so that I can use it as a text sticker on an Instagram story or in messaging somewhere, I would use it really small. Those imperfections aren't really going to matter. Let me scroll down to the one with the matte. This is the one with a white matte. Of course, the text is fine, but you can see the anti-aliasing and the banding around it. Now, this would be great if I needed to use my GIF at a larger size on a website and I wanted my text to look untouched. I could, of course, match my matte to whatever color background I have, and it would look great. If I have a choice so, I would more likely use this on Instagram than I would this, because even though this does have the anti-aliasing again at a smaller size, you're not going to see it. Now, hopefully one day they will add the same options in Fresco that they have in a Photoshop. They're constantly adding to Fresco all the time, so it's possible, but for right now, if you do have access to Photoshop for desktop, this is an option to either turn your matte off or set the matte color to whatever you'd like. If you don't have Photoshop and you still want to do this, there are other free options out there like Easy GIF and other websites out there. They may not work as well, but they do a pretty good job of creating an animated PNG, which you can then convert into a GIF. [MUSIC] Let's take a quick look back at our lesson. You only need to select the first PNG image and image sequence at the bottom of the open dialog box to open your animated PNG. To match your speed, set the frames per second, the same number that you chose in Fresco. Once you're inside Photoshop, you're going to see a video group in both your layers panel and the timeline at the bottom, and this is your animated PNG. Remember, if you want to slow your animation down or speed it up, just click on the timeline and change the speed. When you're exporting, choose Save for Web Legacy under the Export in the File menu and make sure GIF is selected as your option. Once that's selected, choose what color of matte you'd like, white, black, foreground, background, eyedropper or custom or turn it off completely. But remember, if you do work with no matte, there will be anti-aliasing around the curves in your design, but when you're starting with a PNG sequence, it's typically pretty minimal. Next up, we're going to wrap up the class, so I'll see you there. [MUSIC] 13. Wrapping it All Up: [MUSIC] We're at the end of class and I'd like to thank you for trusting me with your time and creativity. I hope you're excited to create your own text animations using Fresco. I'd love to see your animations. Remember, if you create a project, please share it to the Projects and Resources Section. Not only do you help future students see what they'll learn when they take the class, when you share a project and leave a review, you'll help more people find it. If you share one of your animations in a story you post on Instagram, tag me as I'd love to share it with my own followers. I have lots of new classes in the works, so be sure to head to my profile and click the ''Follow Button'' so you'll be notified when I post a class. You'll also find my entire lineup of digital illustration and photography classes. Information about my Facebook group that's dedicated to all things digital texture where you can share your work, ask questions or share your own tips and tricks in a friendly environment. You'll also find a link to my YouTube channel where I share short digital tutorials that compliment my classes here on Skillshare. Finally, a link to my newsletter. When you sign up, you'll receive a giant brush and texture pack and regular freebies. If you have any questions about class or a suggestion for a new one, post them in the discussion section below or send me an email. The link is in my profile. Thanks again and happy creating. [MUSIC]