in this video I'm gonna show you how I made these animations using Adobe
Fresco and After Effects
Fresco is Adobe's latest mobile drawing
application that has these amazing reactive watercolor and oil paint
brushes that create these really natural blending effects I really wanted this
look in animation but there are no animation tools or timeline in fresco so
how do we do it with a little bit of planning and compositing and After
Effects it's not too hard at all for something really simple like a bouncing
ball we can start straight in fresco on a new layer I've got a guide for the
ground and I'm gonna draw our ball near the top of the canvas here and I'm
going to draw a rough outline of each frame of the animation on this layer so
we've got another ball starting to fall downwards and another these will
accelerate more as they reach the bottom stretching out a bit as well after this
contact point where the ball touches the ground the ball is gonna squash and
flatten out in the next frame a classic squash and stretch and let's keep
flattening that for three frames there the guide is done now we're gonna follow
this guide and draw each frame on a new layer on a new layer I'm gonna select
this watercolor brush and draw the outline of our first circle shape in
purple and then fill in the bottom right area leaving the area on the top left
for our highlight and then I'm gonna change the color of the brush to teal
fill in that highlight and then blend it with a purple just by touching the edges
really and I'm gonna follow that same process for the next frame on a new
layer hiding our first layer so that doesn't get
in the way the variation between the blending of the colors is going to get
this animation a nice painterly feel and then we continue that for the rest of
the frames it really doesn't take that long once we get down to our final
squashed ball at the bottom I'm gonna make another new layer and draw that
sequence following the ball bouncing back up if you wanted you could skip
this part and just duplicate those falling frames either in fresco or in
After Effects but because this is so quick and it's so few frames I think
it's worth it in this case there we are now we can export that as a PSD so we
can import it into After Effects you can get the PSD from your iPad to your
computer by using airdrop or Dropbox or a million other ways now we're in After
Effects ready to import it we can do that by pressing ctrl I on the
keyboard or just going up to file import we're going to select our file and make
sure we import it as composition and not footage and select import and click OK
and that creates a comp with all of our layers separated down here we need to
shorten all of these layers to one frame long so to do that I'm gonna select our
bottom pixel layer here hold shift and click the top one to select all of them
and because that playhead is at the very start of our composition we're gonna
hold alt and click the right square bracket on our keyboard and then it's
going to trim them all down to one frame and while they're selected we can put
them into a sequence by right clicking selecting keyframe assistant and
selecting sequence layers and clicking ok now they are all in a sequence we
don't really need this guide layer at the front here so let's delete that
select them all and then drag them across and now we can press spacebar and
watch our animation
I've also got this watercolor paper texture over here that
I'm gonna drag over on top of a comp and then I'm gonna set that to multiply just
to give it a bit more texture and make it seems a bit more watercloury that
watercolor texture is a series of four images of watercolor paper that I took a
photo of check out my looming textures tutorial for a more in-depth look at
that or you can download this one in the project file but I know what you're
thinking a bouncing ball that's a really simple animation where you didn't even
need a timeline or playback to figure out the timing what about if we want to
animate something more complex for something more ambitious all you need to
do is get your guide frames into a PSD and then import that PSD into fresco you
could render them out of After Effects as PNG sequence or whatever other
animation software you're using and then drop those into a PSD what I did for
this animation was to make the first rough pass in Photoshop using the
Photoshop timeline and then what we need to do is copy all of these frames and
paste them into another PSD that is because fresco will not accept PSD s
that have a timeline or frame animation in them then I send that PSD to my iPad
where I opened it in fresco and each of these frames was on a new layer I just
paint over each frame in fresco and then import it into After Effects in the same
way to sequence the frames and add our overlaying texture
I made a short playlist of some related videos that'll think you'll enjoy if
you've made it this far I'll see you in the next video and please consider
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Subtitle: Zoe J Marriott