- Hi, YouTube.
I'm Debjyoti Saha, an animation filmmaker.
My class on Skillshare just launched.
It's all about animating reels on social media
and this video is about learning the basics of animation
and how you can use them
to make your animated reel.
I hope you are having fun.
Now we are going to deep dive into production.
And the first aspect of production is rough animation.
Let's get right to it.
So what we are going to do is come straight back to Photoshop
where we are going to do our rough animation.
Now we open a new document
which is of the same HD 1080 into 1920 pixels.
Create new document.
First things first,
we hit this little dropdown button over here
and change the Photoshop from essentials tab
to the motion tab.
And the motion tab is where
all the magic of animation happens.
Here, I'll just give you a brief overview
of the animation tab.
If you click on this little dropdown box,
you will see two options.
One is create video timeline
and the other, create frame animation.
Both of these are used in their own unique ways
to make your animation process smoother.
For the sake of this project,
we are going to go with create video timeline.
And the reason,
you'll get to know in the process.
What we start with is what we have.
We have our basic background layer
and we have something
which is also a layer over here
and we kind of have a similar edit timeline
similar to what we are having in Adobe After Effects.
So this is your background layer.
We are going to make a new layer on top of this
and immediately you will see
that there is another layer forming right over here as well.
The secret to animating
on Photoshop is to imagine these layers
as individual frames.
If you notice over here,
there's 30 FPS written in brackets,
which means that the default frame rate
of this particular project is 30 FPS.
What we need to do is bring it down to 24
and animate on twos like we discussed.
So we hit this small dropdown menu
and there's an option called set timeline frame rate.
You kind of go into that
and you hit 24 FPS over here
and ta da, you have a document
that has 24 frames per second as frame rate.
Now we are all set
to start our animation process in Photoshop.
What I'd like to do
in this part is kind of figure out the area of work
and usually, during the upper
and lower aspects of the video,
a lot of things kind of go unnoticed.
So we'd like to keep all the action
and all the good stuff happening over here
because we want the eye of the audience
to linger around in this particular area.
So what we are going to do right now is open our folder
and get our animatic,
drag this into our Photoshop document
and hit okay.
So first shot is roughly of this length
according to our animatic.
So we are going to drag our timeline
according to that.
And now what we have is like a layout of sorts
with the animatic acting as the base,
one which we can do our rough animation.
So we have this puddle and we know
that around this time,
our pair of gum boots is going to come in
and kind of splash on screen
and we draw our first frame
where we see the boots for the first time.
So we have pose A over here
and pose B over here.
And now we know
since this is a jump
and we are ending the jump,
we are already in the midst of an arc.
If the arc comes over here,
we know the foot is going to fall somewhere around here.
The foot is going to come in the same exact way.
This is point A,
and this is point B.
So we're going to draw the inbetweens over here.
And the inbetween would be somewhere,
I'm guessing around here.
It is not easy to do this arbitrarily,
so we are going to switch on
another option right over here
that is going to help us a lot.
We're going to go to the dropdown menu
and we are going to hit enable onion skin.
And what this is going to do is expose the frame
before this and after this for one frame.
You can always go down
to your onion skin settings over here
and kind of manipulate
to two, three, four, whatever you want.
I kind of keep it at one,
so I stick to that.
So we have our first frame and our last frame
and the middle frame would be somewhere around here.
Just going to go ahead and draw this.
This is interesting
'cause we are drawing on the basis
of our knowledge of the arc
and also keeping in mind
a little bit of stretching before a squash
that is going to happen upon impact.
I've drawn something like this.
Very simple.
Right ahead, I'm going to go into the next frame,
which is going to be
in almost the middle of this frame
and the final frame.
But here, I'm going to play around with it a little
where I'm going to stretch the boots out nicely,
at least the tip of the boots
and see what it does
when we'll play this in motion.
Yeah, just rough volumes right now
just to understand the motion.
And if we disable onion skin
and we just crop through it,
we are already seeing a little bit of squash
and stretch happening
just because we have elongated
the tip of the foot over here.
Right now it's coming to a still
so we also kind of need a frame
that is our squash frame.
We are going to quickly get this layer
also inside of our animation group
and that's how the timing is playing out right now
if you play it by Spacebar.
And if you notice,
all of these frames have been dragged
to be a part of this video group.
And a video group is essentially,
like an animation layer
where you have a particular number of frames
that shows a motion or a piece of animation.
So when we play out,
it kind of plays out like this
and we are going to draw a squash version of the same
but we are not going to draw another from scratch.
What we are going to do is cheat a little bit.
We're going to duplicate this layer below this
so this becomes your frame in front
and we are going to hit Command + T or Control + T
and hit this mesh icon over here.
And what this does is allows us
to manipulate this frame even more
without actually having to draw again.
So this gives us a fair amount of freedom over here.
Of course we'll need
to actually exaggerate the squash frame a little more
so that it does make sense upon impact.
Let's see this.
We have a stretch frame right before impact
and boom, down and pop.
It comes right back in action.
This is interesting.
Let's see how it plays out.
Let's see the timing of this.
Pop.
Something I like to do,
always make sounds
of the kind of action that is happening
so that I kind of have a vocabulary
in my head of how this might play out like
and try to have that as reference
for what I see on screen.
Say for example, if this was a piece of cake,
we would like a little more jelly-like motion
just to give it that feel of that super soft fluffiness.
But of course we know gum boots are not that fluffy
so we are not going to go ahead
and do that extra squash and stretch on this.
So this is our primary motion of our character.
So another aspect
that we need to animate of this is the water
that is splashing.
We already have a rough diagram of our water body.
Now we are going to go ahead
and animate the splashes.
We are going to create a new layer on top of this.
We are going to reduce the time, of course,
for how many frames it's going to stay.
And right about around here is the impact frame.
So of course,
the first frame is going to be a big splash.
So now we are going to draw these bunch of frames
for the splash.
And what you need to keep in mind here
is that we are going to animate the splashes
in straight ahead animation
because there's no particular way
we can do this pose to pose.
And trust me, this is going to turn out way nicer
in straight ahead animation.
Remember when we were talking about animation principles
and I was talking about pose to pose
and straight ahead animation
and I had mentioned
that elements like fire and water do not have
a particularly defined way of movement?
This is where our idea
of straight ahead animation kind of comes in.
So we have our impact frame
and we know that a couple of frames later,
I'd like this same water
to spread a little more
before being impacted by gravity.
Again, we are going to cheat a little bit
and manipulate these same exact frames
by creating a duplicate of it
and we are going to stretch out these areas really nicely
so that it creates
that elastic watery approach.
So let's see how that plays.
Pop, boom,
you're seeing it spread a little more.
That is kind of registering fine right now.
Okay, next frame.
Again, take the marquee tool,
delete your canvas,
so now you have a new blank frame
and you turn on your onion skin.
If this is getting confusing,
you switch off your animating layer
because it's difficult to work
with so many transparencies working at one time.
Okay, the next frame would be
where the water is kind of digressing towards the side.
I'm just drawing arbitrarily
of where I think the water's next frame can be
so that the motion is believable.
Blank new frame and just draw this bit
with as much fun as you want.
You can also add in water droplets
just to show how all of these streaks of water
kind of separate out
into water droplets before falling.
And the next frame would be a continuation of that.
We are reaching the ground.
We are coming to ease again
after the huge splash.
I think we need one more frame over here
where the water has almost come to a standstill.
Something like this.
Great, perfect.
We are going to disable our onion skin
and we are going to play back.
Let's see how that looks.
Okay, I think there is a bit too much of pause over here
on the first frame.
So this can really be there for two frames.
Let's try two frames exposure for the first frame.
Let's see.
Okay, better.
This is interesting,
but we can actually also play along
a little more with this.
Also, if you see the motion,
the particular arc the water is kind of following,
it's kind of very small
and I really want the ending bits of the frame
to kind of go out a little more.
That kind of makes the animation
or the arc a little fuller
rather than keeping it concise
because water is free, water can move.
What I'm going to do is for these frames,
I'm going to just stretch this out a little more.
We don't need to get the exact thing right,
but just to get the motion right around here.
This is great.
I think also this frame is stretching out
a lot more than intended,
so we can actually kind of reduce this bit.
And also in this frame,
this can go a lot more closer to the ground.
Great.
As you're seeing,
that animation is quite intuitive.
This process of back and forth is a very common thing
in the process of rough animation.
So we have our main character
that is animated in pose to pose
and we have our water effects animation
or the water splash animation
that is animated in straight ahead.
That's the end of shot one.
This is the place
where you kind of mess around
with the timing and spacing
and also the drawings
until it really clicks for you.
Because in cleanup,
we are going to focus on details
and style and stuff like that.
So feel free to just go back,
make all these little tweaks
and little enhancements
that will help your animation really breathe life.
Thanks for joining me for this lesson.
This was one part of my class
on making an animated reel
for social media on Skillshare.
Join me in the full class
to learn how to turn your ideas
into an animation step-by-step.
Click on the link below.
I can't wait to see you there.
- [Narrator] Thanks for watching.
If you enjoyed this video,
feel free to like and subscribe
to stay up to date
on all of our latest videos.
(upbeat guitar music)