Transcript for:
Adobe Animate Beginners Course

[Music] welcome to this free adobe animate beginners course in this fully comprehensive four and a half hour tutorial you will be learning all the tools and basics of adobe animate if you would like to learn everything there is to know about using the software like a pro get access to the full course by clicking the link in the description box down below now let's get started hello on this first lesson i'm just going to give a rundown of the actual interface and the basic tools of this program before we get on with the actual animation so adobe animate as soon as you open already has a few presets that you can choose um when you're actually working with an animation you should choose one that fits your objective better but for now just for demonstration i'm just going to click on full hd which is the file format that is best for video for example now full hd is just the size of your file let me try and create a new one to show you so full hd is 1920 by 1080 pixels if your computer isn't very strong or powerful you might want to use hd for example which has the same radio but has a lower resolution or you can just create a file that is smaller has a different shape whatever is best for you and more comfortable for practicing i just like to keep it on full hd okay so when you start you might have this huge white canvas in front of you if you want to zoom out just press ctrl minus and now you can see the full canvas now your interface might look a little different maybe it's a little more open like this and adobe animate also has different workspace setups so you can change that up here on workspaces i believe that it already defaults to the basic one which is the one i'm using right now it might be still a little different because i've already made my own changes but this is basically the setup now the classic one like it used to be when it was adobe flash looks like this honestly i think it's very convoluted and i don't like to see the timeline on the top i prefer it on the bottom but you can also manually set things up as you start working more and more with this you might see what's more comfortable for you i'm just going to keep it on the basic one because i think it's pretty minimalistic and it has everything you need for now at least so on this first video i'm going to talk mostly about the toolbar because this is what this is the part you use to actually create the images and drawings and whatever you want on this program so before everything i actually like to keep a certain window open which is the property window so it might already be here on the corner it has these little sliders as an icon i'm just gonna pop that out like that or i can also keep it like that but it's going to close maybe no so let me backtrack the properties panel is going to be on this little icon with the sliders and i'm just going to keep it open it's my own preference because the properties window is based on context so depending on where you have to select it it's going to change and if you can't find the properties you'll just go over here on windows and click on properties and it's going to open the window for you like that so the reason i like to keep it open is because the properties are going to change depending on when you have selected it's contextual so right now i have the select tool but if i go over let's say to the brush tool it's going to give me the brush settings instead of the selection settings so i like to keep it open because it shows you all the potential of that tool and it even helps you understand it better the more you use it so that's why i have i like to keep it there so to show you how all these tools work i'm just gonna select a color over here just gonna keep it black and i'm gonna draw something simple on the screen okay so the properties did leave i'm gonna keep it open like this so i always see it okay so i use the brush tool so i'm gonna start with that basically it's the one that i use the most because i like to draw hand-drawn animation so i like to use the brush because it's a much more natural form of drawing because you just use your tablet and it even has the pressure sensitivity and all that so the properties already show you several things that you can change the most basic ones would be the size this is where you can change them i believe there's also a shortcut for that yes so different from other softwares the icon of the brush doesn't really show you the size so that's why it's good to have the properties because by using the bracket keys these ones on your keyboard you can lower and increase the size of your brush you can also set the smoothing as you can see one of the things that bothers me a little bit about adobe animates brush is that it has these little squigglies that come up when you draw but if you go that all the way to 100 it kind of gets rid of it i just think that sometimes depending on what you draw if you make something really sketchy it didn't really happen much here but sometimes it deforms your drawing a lot so when i'm sketching i like to use a lower smoothing even if the drawing itself might look a little bumpy but i'm going to keep it on 100 because that makes it a little prettier i'm actually going to redraw that circle so you can see the difference that that might make i'm going to increase the brush size and that's a little better this the the circle isn't actually very perfect but it's going to be enough to show you everything that i want to and you can also see different shapes for your brush if you like to draw with a square brush you can do that and it may be basic but honestly you can get a lot of things done just with the brush tool and going back to the order of the toolbar another very important tool is the selection tool so when you have the selection tool selected um the properties that will show are actually the document properties just because this tool itself doesn't have much to change so here you can set the size again so when you set it up at the beginning and you end up changing your mind you can you don't need to create something new you can just change it here you can also change the frame rate of your animation which i'll explain a little bit more on the next video for now i'm just gonna stick to the tools so the selection tool basically if you drag it on your screen it can select a number of things that are on your screen so and you can also move it you can also click and drag and deform and break the shapes that you have and depending on how you want to draw this can be really useful i don't use it much but there are artists that do a lot it all depends on what you prefer to do down here also is the free transform tool which is similar but basically as soon as you select something it goes to the free transform mode you can also go into that let's say if you want to transform something and you hadn't selected this you can just press q and it's going to already use it's already going to show you this little transforming box that you have on this tool so down here there are some properties about uh the transform it basically changes the way you transform the object that you selected i'm just gonna it's going to default onto free transform i just went back to that so you can basically reshape things with it so if you want to change the proportions you just go on the on the corner if you want to keep the proportions you can just hold shift and it's just going to resize your drawing you can also oops you could also just go through the sides and if you hover your brush right oh i mean if you hover your cursor right over the side you can skew it so if you don't really remember these shortcuts so you don't like using them you can if you want to keep the if you want to keep the proportions you can just click on scale and like that you don't have to press any buttons to keep it on its original scale you can also distort this one is really fun if you want to make things in perspective so let's say you drew the circle but you want it to be tilted to a side you can do that and that makes it sort of look like it's going back in space but you can you can have a lot of fun with it it really it's even more flexible than the normal free transform tool so also if you see me going back on the things i did i'm just pressing ctrl z so that undoes everything you do so i draw something but it's not the way i want it to just press ctrl z and if you want to redo that you press ctrl shift z basically and it's very very important so next up another selection related tool is the lasso tool so instead of having that classic box that you do when you slide this one allows you to draw out the shape again it works very well with more complex drawings so these were our selection tools now to the more drawing related tools first up we have the pen tool now it's already selecting the last thing i drew for some reason the last thing i selected i'm just going to see if clicking out of it it doesn't do that yes so adobe animate has some things that are a little bit fussy with that sometimes the the pen tool is very similar to what you see in adobe illustrator in which you don't really organically draw something you kind of create a line point by point and you can also create curves just by sliding your brush so if you're used to that this can be really good to make very precise line art and we'll get into line art and making your drawings look good at a later stage but just so you know that this exists and once you master this tool it can really really give you a lot of flexibility pretend i did not undo all that next up is the brush tools so i was using the classic brush tool which as i said is the more classic one it's more simple and when i'm just sketching and doodling things on this that's what i prefer to use and i already sort of showed you the different things that it can do there's also the fluid brush which is basically a brush tool that has a lot more it's basically a brush tool that has a lot more properties so you can change for example the taper of your brush so you can do this but the roundness isn't very high here you go so as you see the roundness was down and it made it a little bit more squared but i put it on 100 and now it's a perfect circle if you want the taper to be a lot more noticeable you can drag that up and it kind of looks like an ink paintbrush it's really cool so you can just have a lot of fun with the different settings that this has and put this down a little bit there you go and it's more similar to the sort of brushes that you see in photoshop and it's a lot more similar to the brushes that you see in other drawing software and for a long time this brush was not even available adobe has recently started to give a bit more attention to adobe animate and just give us a lot more possibilities to draw here next up is the eraser it's pretty basic you can just erase things and you can change the size as the other brushes it also responds to pressure sensitivity so when it says minimum size is the one is the size that shows up when you give it a very light pressure and then you can pressure the the tip of your pen a little bit more and it increases just like the brush the eraser is actually selective to what you draw sometimes so for example the brush tool that i used over here it uses fills so i can select it to only erase fills actually it was already selected and it will erase these but for example the pen tool only draws with strokes so if i use it over the pen tool it does not erase it even let me zoom out it shows a little white outline wherever you draw but it's not going to stay there so even if i do that it's not really erasing it's just showing me the line that it created but it can also erase everything if you just wanted to so i did this and it's going to erase the lines as well or it can only erase lines like that and not fills i'm going to explain more about the difference between strokes and fills on another lesson but i'm already showing you that they exist because they're already part of certain properties of the tools that i'm showing now something that will actually help me show you how strokes and fills are different is with the shape tools so we are on a rectangle tool so as as the name says you can just make rectangles but i'm talking about the strokes and fills right now you can't really see that because everything is black if i select this as you can see it has selected the fill if i click here it has selected the stroke to select this this tool without clicking on it i just press the v key so it goes straight to that now if i want to change the color of the fill so i can show you better i selected a red color and now you can see it has a fill and a stroke in different colors so i can actually even remove the fill like this i can break the line and just do everything i want basically and you can so the difference between lines and fills is that the lines or better the strokes you can change your you can change the size at a later stage if you prefer it is it is a lot more vectorized in a way when something is vec is a vector you can modify it a lot more instead of bitmap such as photoshop but adobe animate works only with vectors when you are drawing so lines you can also when you want to distort them let me try that yes they all move together but the fills they are basically a filled in shape so when you do that it's only going to bend one of the sides just like here the brush is a fill tool so it's only going to move the edge of your shape whereas the brush tool which is sorry the pen tool where i i use it here is going to move everything with it so let me just fix that square there we go and the the shape tool has other things so it also has an oval tool why is this stroke gray there we go now i change the stroke to back to black and also has a polygon tool which here on the properties you can set let's say you can make it a polygon and it's going to have six of five sides like it says here or you can do that and set it to eight and it's going to be an octagon if you want it to be you can also create stars and just like the other tools it has a lot of flexibility that you can see here on the properties let me go back here to the rectangle so i i change the subtools by clicking and holding and a lot of tools actually have this so they have sub tools down here which sometimes don't even have much to do for some reason the transform tool can change to the gradient transform tool and the lasso tool also has different settings that you can choose so as for the shape tool it has different shapes that you can create next to it is the line tool is a even more rudimentary version of this pen tool but you can only kind of create the individual lines you can't really connect them as well as the pen tool i prefer using the pen tool if i want to create straight lines but it also has the normal old let's say line tool that existed way before the pen tool did back in the day i guess so these were the basic drawing tools there's also the text tool but i'm not really gonna get into it right now it's pretty basic as well because we're not really gonna use this much for animation now now that i'm talking about it for example a tool that i don't use much you can really organize everything that you want down here on the three dots icon so let's say i don't really use the the text tool so i'm just going to drag it out and it's going to go back to its place i might go into other tools that are here that i'm not talking about right now but i have the ones that i use out here because i realized over time that these were the ones that are most important to me this pen tool also i don't use i don't know why it was there okay so now we have the fill tool let me deselect that and it's the paint bucket tool that we all see in different softwares so it's going to fill in fills or the other lines i don't think it yeah it only works with fill so it's not going to to color your lines if if you've made them you actually actually have to you actually have to select them and then change the stroke and all that so that's something important to remember let me go back to that but you can fill in lines that you've made like and if you if you've closed a certain line you can actually fill it in like that and you can also fill in fill created lines with the brush tool as well so this is obviously really handy when you're when you're drawing and let's say you you've created a character and you just want to fill in all the colors after you've lined it uh basically just use the paintbrush tool it also has some properties that you can either select down here it's also up here in the properties tab to close or not close gaps so right now with these simple shapes you can very clearly see what is open and what is closed here is an open shape these are closed but when you're actually creating some drawings you can really it can be really hard to notice if a shape is closed or not just like i did here now because it's vectorized you can really really zoom in and see that it's not closed at all but if you are down here at the paint bucket tool and it says don't don't close gaps and you click here it's not going to close that's why i like to keep it on close small gaps because it's going to do it for you and if you have really large gaps you can also make it make its tolerance a little larger and then we're getting to the end this is the eyedropper tool so it lets you pick up the colors that you have already seen on your screen even the background it already sets straight to the paint bucket tool because a lot of the times when you're picking up colors it's when you're using that and it's actually pretty pretty practical that it automatically goes to the paint bucket tool as we'll see when we're working with drawings it also selects the background color for some reason if you need that but if i wanted to use this red again it already selects the fill color if it's the one on on the front now yeah you can actually just change around the color that you have on your fill over to the stroke if you are actually selecting the color for the stroke so let's say i chose this and i want to make a red stroke but if i do that it's going to go for a fill because generally speaking if you're using the eyedropper tool usually it's for fills so it already automatic automatically does that but you can click on this little swap icon you can also just press x and it's going to swap the two colors over here and now you have a red stroke color if that's what you wanted and lastly i've already kind of spoken about these but you can use the hand tool to move around your canvas you can also if you're using any other tool if you hold the spacebar you're just going to automatically be in the hand tool and you can pan your canvas like that but if you don't want to keep pressing it you can just select it another uh very another sort of secret of this program is that you if you double click on the hand tool it will center your canvas on the screen and lastly is the zoom tool so you can use ctrl plus and minus to zoom but you can also select this if you click it's going to zoom in and if you hold alt and click out you will and click it will zoom out also if you don't want to hold alt to zoom out you can just select it to zoom out like that if you want to zoom in again just select it again so these were the basic tools that i feel like are the most important when you're starting out in case you're new to this software on the next video i'm going to talk about the timeline which i think is the most important part of the software when you're working with animation so see you next time hello on this lesson i'm going to talk about the layers and the timeline tool in general so i've already set up my file basically the same as before but on this one i have already set my fps or frames per second to 24. now that's just my preference because i like working with hand-drawn animation but if you like paper doll animation or motion graphics 30 frames per second might be better because it will make your animation smoother but for hand-drawn and practicing purposes 24 is more than enough if you want to change the fps for your file you just go on the general document settings and the fps window is right over here so before we get started with the timeline which is probably the most important part when working with animation i want to first of all explain layers in case you're not familiar with them layers are very important in digital art because they allow you to stack images on top of each other so this helps you to not have to rework a lot if for example you made a mistake and it helps you just generally organize your drawings and your work a lot better than working traditionally so over here is our layer window and i'll create a few just just for you to see how it kind of looks if you have a lot of layers and as you can see they have this order to them they are one on top of the other and the most recent ones are put on top of everything else so to demonstrate a little better for example i'm going to just draw a random line and this is on the bottom most layer now if i go to the layer literally on top of that one and draw a different line and i'm going to use a different color for you to see this is going to be obviously on top now the difference this does when working on the same layer or separating in different layers is that you can change this for example if i drag the first one over the second one like i did just now it's going to be on top of the one that was previously on top of the black line and i can undo that and now it's like it was before so when i say it preserves your drawings if you separate them by layers is that if i disable the layer on top which is on this little eye icon it just it only erases that one that i selected all the information that is on the specific layer and i can just put it on back again now i'm going to show you what would have happened if i had done everything on the same layer i'm just going to delete these ones on the top because we don't need them right now just using the trashcan layer with the ones so you just click on the trashcan layer and it will delete the layers that are selected that are in blue so again i'm going to keep everything on the same layer so i'm not going to select layer 2. i'm going to draw a line and then with another color so you can differentiate and draw another line now let's say i did not like the the red line obviously right now because i just did it i could have just undone but sometimes if you're way too far in your drawing and you've already done a lot of other things and you can't really go back as far or it will just delete everything that you've already done the problem with having something underneath is as you can see the selection tool won't really select the entire line like before because if i select the red one which is all still one single shape it will have sort of erased the things that are underneath it so this is what happens when you draw on the same layer and when it comes to the selection tool it will select the things that are the same color so this one i can separate the red line specifically because it's different than the one under it underneath it wait i keep pulling the vertices if you click on it and then drag it there you go but had i done it in black and i'm still on the same layer that's an even bigger problem because now that everything is the same color it will all become one single shape you cannot separate them anymore so if you want to use different layers but still separate the shapes i'm sorry if you want to use the same colors but still have them separated that's when separating your layers is very important because if i draw that on the same with the same color on a different layer it will no longer select them like one single shape because layers they will keep the selection from doing that and now i can easily separate them or select them on their own in case you want to change something about it and now i'm just going to explain some other functions in the layer window so let's say you're sketching something and i like to sketch with a different color usually i actually use some shade of blue so let's say i just want to draw a smiley face and now if i wanted to finalize the drawing because it might be too rough and i want to make it look nicer then of course i would go to a different layer and just draw over it now something that might be really useful when you're working with several layers is if you want to isolate a layer and make sure that you don't let's say accidentally draw inside it you can lock it so on this little lock icon you just click it on the layer you want to lock and now you can't really do anything on it you can't select it you can deform it and you can't even draw on it it will even warn you if it's locked and if you click on yes it will unlock it for you so i like to do that when i'm sketching because it might really prevent me from from making a terrible mistake and if you start as i said if you start finalizing a drawing on the wrong layer it's going to end up erasing the sketch underneath it yeah that's not even gonna look better but that was just for an example now another thing that might be useful when you're using sketches is lowering the opacity of the layer you can do that by double clicking on the paper icon over here or or you can right click and click on properties it's the same thing so over here you can also lock and unlock it and on visibility is where you can change the opacity so if i click here and click ok it's going to lower the opacity just to show you what that means i'm going to unlock it so i can select it opacity is basically the transparency of your drawing so if it's on a hundred percent opacity it means it's completely opaque and so nothing can go through it but since it's on 50 it is half transparent you can really see that when you put a different background underneath it you can see that the darker background shows through you can also customize the amount of opacity that you're lowering it already sort of defaults to 50 but if you click you can type the amount that you want or you can slide to an even lower or bigger amount and like this oh sorry there we go and with 10 you see it's barely even visible i'm just going to keep it normally visible like this and i'm going to get into the other properties later and really explain them better but another useful one that i already wanted to touch on is the guide layer so when you choose guide layer it basically it doesn't really change anything that you can do on the layer but also it changes the little icon over here but it's also another thing to help you when you're exporting your animation so that the guide layers they will not be exported in the final file and again this will make more sense later on but i wanted to leave that explained now and i put it back to normal now let's say another thing that is very important when it comes to organization is folders so here we have two layers and let's say this is one certain character and i've sketched him and i've finalized his drawing and this one actually looks worse but you get what i mean and now i want to draw a new character and you know i'm gonna start drawing it and all that stuff but so i can keep myself even more organized it's very important to use folders basically you click on the folder icon over here now this folder will be for our first character and so if you want to put these two layers that i've used previously you just hold shift so you can select more than one layer select the ones you want and drag them inside the folder and now the folder will only contain these and you can even collapse it by clicking on this little arrow and if i let me keep them all visible here and if i click on the eye icon it's going to affect all the layers inside of it and as you might imagine with very complex files this is very important and again if i want to create a new one i have two folders with my two different characters and they all just stay together like that i'm just going to keep the original one and now for the final things i'm going to explain is just the other icons that you can see over here they're pretty simple so the one over here it says show all layers as outlines if you click on the one here on top is going to affect all the layers that you select but you can also do that by clicking the specific layer you want to be affected by that so as you might have seen if i click on that it's going to all just become an outline and that might be useful if you again you're sketching or you want the layers to just have a very low contrast this can be pretty useful and you can also deform things still as outlines i personally don't use this very much but some people might prefer using it also if for some reason you want to change the outline which it really isn't the the true color of your layer again it's the one that is actually on the object on your canvas these colors are just to separate them and differentiate them in the properties you can change that to any color you want also these are all preset as i said default swatches but you can create new colors and specific colors by clicking on that color wheel and lastly is the highlight option so it really is just again to make layers more easy to find so if you click on this it'll just create a little line over here to highlight the layer like that so that was all i had to say about layers and let's get to the timeline in the next video hello so now i'm going to talk about the actual timeline so this is the part where you get to organize the frames of your animation as soon as you open your file you already have one layer and one frame set now i'm going to see if i can increase the size of this i believe it's over here so if you just click on here it will sort of zoom in for you and that doesn't really change anything it just makes it a little easier for you to see all right so over here it basically just counts the number of frames for you and because mine is set to 24 frames per second when it hits a second it already marks it for you just to make it a little easier for you to time your drawings so now that i haven't drawn anything yet as you can see this little icon over here has a blank this frame that is the only one we have it has a little white circle inside it or better it's a blank circle it means it hasn't been filled yet there is no data inside this frame yet and as soon as i draw something it becomes filled in and a little lighter so there is information inside of it now you can let's say extend that frame by clicking on insert keyframe and it will create another identical frame next to it and if i click on insert blank keyframe it's going to create a new frame without any information in it so now comes a little bit of differentiation on the types of frames next to it says inserts frame so as you can see it didn't say keyframe that means that it's only going to hold the drawing for more than one frame this is all the same one but if i want to create a new frame it will become blank and i can draw anything else so we had a circle and now we have a triangle and if i want to hold this circle for a longer time i just keep pressing on insert frame and it will last longer the difference it makes for inserting a keyframe i'm just going to delete this one if i were to click on this one they may seem the same but they are two different frames because if i were to add anything to this sorry so if i were to add anything to this drawing it's not going to affect the the one after it because they are separated they may look the same but they have been separated as two different frames and when i say a frame is held this is when i'm talking about timing so i can play the animation by clicking play and let's let's extend this one for a little longer and create a new blank frame and let's draw anything random again and just draw a triangle so you can really differentiate as you can see i've held this one longer than the second frame so it stays longer on the screen and this one only stays for one frame but it's pausing on the end we can really see the actual timing if we put this on loop so i'm just going to click on this and you drag this slider all the way to the end so it loops the entire animation so yeah as you can see one single frame is very little time it's like a blink okay i'm just going to delete everything for now so the the remove frames button it only it only really works if you have selected the specific frame you want to do that on so i'm just going to start from scratch again and for now i'm just making very random drawings and i'm not really going into the animation principles because i just want to show you the actual function of everything here but let's say you want to make this ball move right and you want to keep it very similar to the one next to it because if i create a new frame i don't see anything so it's very difficult to know where exactly it was i wanted to move in to the right so you might think this is very hard and yes it is so for you to have a better idea of what came after the frame you were working at there is the onion skin tool now the onion skin basically allows you to see behind so this was the previous frame so it's showing you a little hint of it on the back so now if i want to draw a similar thing next to it i can and now it's sort of moving and i can keep going like this i'm just going to make a few more to show you a little bit more about how this tool works so i've drawn a few little circles and if i play it it moves right so about the onion skin as you can see the ones that are coming after are highlighted in green and the ones backwards are red now you can customize your onion skin almost entirely before we get to the actual settings you can see there are two little sliders next to it this is how much how much other frames are exposed so if you want just one frame behind or after you you can just set it to a single frame and again you can make that a lot longer a lot like that and they keep going darker and darker so if you click and hold we can go to advanced setting settings so this is where you can really customize everything now for example you can set it to outlines so the outlines can be very useful if your onion skin looks very convoluted but generally i like to just keep it filled you can also change the colors of the the color of the onion skin also you can just keep this open in case you like to change them around a lot you can also make the opacity of them a lot lower again this can help if it looks too convoluted i think 50 is a pretty good number let me do that and again you can make them a lot fainter as they go by so if i really make this a lot higher you can see how faint the ones weigh on the back already look like again i like the default 10 but honestly depending on what i'm working i just keep this open and just i'm changing them all the time and the other settings over here will make more sense as we go and yeah it says all frames again if you have a really long animation it will select everything and so on now the yeah the show keyframes only will work better if we have a lot of frames that are being held for a longer time these are all keyframes meaning they aren't held they're all just one single frame one after the other but let me just hold them for a much longer time so i'm just adding with this button and i'm holding them for five frames each just show you again the difference this makes now everything will move past a lot slower than before before they just zipped through very fast but now that they have five frames each they go by pretty slowly and as you can see i have this range but now that there are a lot of frames to be held in front of me it doesn't even show me obviously i can just do this so i've extended this all the way to the point where it finally touches the next frame so if i'm working on something that is way back it's already going to be very faint and it's going to become stronger as i move closer but because they are so far apart sometimes they can be very they start to become very faint you can change that by saying show keyframes only i'll show you some very basic tools on the advanced settings some things will make more sense as we start making more complex animations but really this is the most basic and universal thing that you can see about onion skins and it's really what you're going to use the most alright so a little more about how frames are made so as you can see i've done this in a pretty traditional way as in drawing them each as new drawings now there are many different ways that you can go about this let me do this again with a little circle going by except for example if you really want to make this look very a lot more consistent for example you can create a new keyframe which will basically copy and paste it next to it so our onion skin is on now it's not showing us anything because there are on the same they are on the same place but i want to make it move so i can just select it hold shift so that it goes it moves straight and now it is exactly the same drawing but it has moved and i can keep doing that so the drawing can stay the same as i said before one single frame is actually very fast and on hand run animation usually things are held for two or three frames so that's what i mean when i say that even if we set it to 24 frames per second it doesn't necessarily mean that they there will be 24 drawings per second if i kept doing this like this by holding them by two frames there will be 12 drawings per second actually and as you can see they already moved a lot slower now i could keep doing this by hand but adobe animate already has some things that let's say are sort of automatic so let's go back to just having one single frame over here and let's say as i was doing before i want to make this circle move from one side of of the i want to make this circle move from one side of the canvas to the other so i could keep doing that by hand which gives us a certain effect or i can do this automatically so let's say i want it to take exactly one second so i'm going to go here and create a new frame as you can see because i went all the way to another place in the timeline it's going to hold this frame for 23 frames and then change to the 24th now because it creates this copy it might look a little run a little weird if you're working with hand-drawn animation but it does that because it's already thinking we might be using tweens so what are twins they are what i've been saying the automatic animation so okay i want it to take a full second it's going to start on one end and on this new frame i want it to go all the way over here so for now it's just going to keep holding it and then suddenly change you want it to move on every single frame of these so if i select this first frame and create yes insert classic tween now it's going to create it's going to turn it into a symbol which i will explain a little later on next video but for now i'm just gonna let it do whatever it wants and now it's going to animate on its own let's say so this can really help by simplifying the animation process but it does create a very different feel to it and animating things makes it makes things look a lot more organic and this already goes on sort of motion graphic territory but we will go into more complex ways of animating this but for now i just wanted to show you the very basic timeline tools one last thing i wanted to show is that if you're still starting out and these little little circles and icons are still kind of confusing to you we can actually change that by going over here and it gives us even more options about the presentation of the timeline itself so over here we are on the standard view but if we put on how is it preview right it actually previews the actual drawing so instead of having to scrub through the timeline to find the drawing you want it's going to show you the actual drawings of each layer so that can help you sort of just see what you're actually working with if you're still a beginner this might actually be helpful and there are many things you can make the little icons shorter it can be taller i feel like for me it's medium is just fine and the the rest of the things aren't really that relevant but i feel like preview can really help you if just these little squares are still a little bit confusing and you're you might struggle to visualize them at first but once you work with a lot of animation and you have a lot of layers on the preview can be a little bit convoluted because there's going to be a bunch of drawings in your timeline but that's the basics of the timeline and very soon we will actually start animating see you soon hello so on this lesson i'm going to talk a little bit about symbols just sort of showing you they exist i'm going to show some scenes that i've produced in the past with symbols at a later date when we're creating more complex animations but i just want to explain quickly what they are and the difference between these two types of symbols because a lot of people ask questions about this so symbols are a way to sort of repeat an animation inside your your timeline it's really good for looping animation or just something really repetitive that you want to sometimes reuse in a scene and it just allows you to also save a little clip of animation and just save drawings for later in the library because it gets saved inside this little library on your file now it's a little hard to explain just with words so i'm actually going to animate a little bit here so you can sort of understand better now before that i'm just going to set this layer as a guide and you'll see why i just don't want it to show up in the animation later so i drew this little fairy it's just a very simplified version of a fairy just the body and then the little wings like this and i like to draw them like this because it's actually a little bit simpler to animate so let's say you want to draw a lot of little fairies or butterflies flying around in the background of the scene now they're going to be moving around and batting their wings and it can be really difficult and frustrating to how to draw every single frame of that so what we can do is animate a little stand-alone fairy moving its wings and then just repeat that along our scene so i've only drawn the first frame and that's always what you want to do when you want to create a symbol is don't really animate straight on your timeline just draw the first thing or just do a little squiggly line so that you can actually generate a symbol so you're going to select your your fi sorry so first you're going to select your layer and press f8 on your keyboard and now it's going to say convert to symbol and always go to name your layers of what they actually are so i'm going to say fairy movie clip and this is going this is kind of redundant but usually just names are always very good to be as straightforward as possible so over here you have your symbol types and i'm only going to cover movie clip and graphic and not button because button has more to do with what used to be called flash games when anime was called adobe flash and it has more to do with coding and making little games and it's not really used in animation at all at least what i know about so first we're just going to create a movie clip it really doesn't initially make much of a difference and i'm pretty sure you can change that if you've accidentally made the wrong type but let's first just make a movie clip so a very important thing about symbols is that they have their own timeline with its own layers and you can sort of stack layers inside of a single symbol it's and it's not even going to show on your route timeline as it's called or the main timeline and you can see this by clicking twice on your symbol by the way when you create a symbol is going to be inside this little box click twice and now over here you can see it's saying that we're inside the symbol if you have anything else on your canvas it's going to be sort of dimmed so it shows that you're isolating this so now it only it has its own little timeline as you can see before we have two layers one with this little text that i made and our symbol and in here the symbol only has one layer and for now i'm just going to keep it at a single layer but if we created a bunch of layers if you're let's say animating a whole character inside a symbol and we came back it's still only going to be sort of everything inside the symbol and i'm even going to do this so that we can differentiate so let's go back inside the symbol and i'm just going to delete all these layers and i'm going to animate this very very simply i'm going to extend these layers then create a new one get my onion skin on and now i'm going to move the wings i could redraw them but honestly this is already so simplified i'm going to use the lasso tool and press q move the pivot point to the base of the wing and just rotate it a little bit move it a little bit to the right and do the same with the other one rotate it and now if i go back and forth it's moving its wings it's going to be just that really just so i can show you just so i can demonstrate so i'm scrubbing the timeline without my mouse by using the larger and smaller these two keys on my keyboard so that you can just go back and forth without using your mouse it's really good to go from one frame to the other so you can compare easier so let me loop that to kind of show you how it looks by pressing enter it plays your animation and it's just very very rudimentary animation for now but that's i think this is enough so let's go back here so the symbol is only exposed for a single frame so it's not going to actually show you this animation we just created okay so our symbol is only being exposed for a single frame so it's not going to show us anything because we don't really have any animation being played on the root timeline so i'm just going to go over to 24 frames so i can have a single second of this fairy moving its wings so i'm just gonna create this frame i'm gonna hide that so that it's not flashing and okay if you play your animation you'll see that it's not really doing anything and that's the thing with movie clips it doesn't really show on your actual canvas the looping that you just created but if you press ctrl enter you're going to test your animation and when you test it's always going to loop on itself and it's showing you how the animation turned out and you might be wondering like why doesn't it play and stuff i believe it sort of takes less power from your computer when it when you use a movie clip because it doesn't have to actually show you the animation on your timeline and soon i'm going to compare the movie clip and a graphic next to each other so that you see the actual difference but just to already show you movie clips actually have a lot more flexibility when it comes to blending modes if you've ever used photoshop or some sort of digital art software you'll know blending modes basically it's it's a way to manipulate colors and you can create lights and shadows um i'm going to show this to you when we're actually sort of illustrating in adobe animate and how you can use effects and again blending modes to make everything look more finished but i'm already gonna say that movie clips have blending modes and graphics don't so if you are thinking about using a a symbol to add effects to your animation then make a movie clip because you can do all these things over here there are actually a lot more settings that you can do you can set where it's going to be on the canvas and all that stuff but honestly i don't use the rest of these things i don't think they're very common but blending modes can be very very useful and now i'll show you the difference when using blending modes on symbols and without symbols but okay we created created this for now it doesn't make much sense what's going on with symbols but i'm just going to recreate the same animation using a graphic so again when you select a symbol you can actually just change the kind of symbol it is thankfully you don't have to redo everything if you make a mistake but i'm just going to copy and paste sorry not the actual drawing but the layer so i'm just going to duplicate the layer i'm going to call it fairy two now i'm going to set the first symbol as a guide so that it doesn't show when we test the animation by the way since i was talking about the whole test animation thing by pressing ctrl enter now is the time where i really can show you the difference between guide and normal layers so as you can see this little text thing that i made it's only exposed for one single frame so i could start the class with something um but let's just put it back as a normal layer so if i press ctrl enter it's going to flash on the beginning of the animation every time even though even if i hide it from the timeline if i sort of this sort of creates a preview of the actual exported animation for you and it's still showing so if you don't want a layer to ever show when you export or test your animation you want to make it a guide so for now i'm just going to cr just going to leave the guide as on so now i'm just going to keep the first symbol as a guide so that it never shows when i'm testing so you can see which one i'm i'm showing you anyway so now i'm just gonna change this to a graphic so i've transformed this to a graphic now before we actually get to playing our animation you need to go down here to looping and generally i'm going to use play graphic in loop that's i think is the most useful form of using a graphic now over here there's lip syncing now i'm going to get to lip syncing later but yes graphics can be used for lip syncing animation when you have the little method and you just sort of change the drawing depending on the sound now i'm not going to show you this because it's an entirely different way of using graphics for now i'm just mostly showing you the most used use of the graphic but over here you want it to be looping and make sure that it's looping all of the frames so it's sort of starting on frame one and and ending still on frame one so it's not going to show you anything i'm suspecting this is a sort of error on this version of animate because generally this should be automatically going to the very end of your animation so you sort of want to drag it out to the right and it's going to be on the maximum on all the frames because sorry when you go in here it only has eight frames and you can't really do that inside the symbol you need to be outside of it so it only has eight frames so even if i put a large number like 50 it's going to go straight to 8 because that's the number of frames this actually has but anyway now that i fixed the loop thing if we play it it's actually working on the timeline it's actually showing you the loop so you don't really need to test your animation when you're using graphics and i think if you're making something really simple as i said a simple loop i think graphic is great because you don't need to keep testing and you know what's actually going on but as i said before it doesn't have blending modes i think honestly you can still sort of edit some of the things like the brightness and the transparency which is alpha in this case and that's i think is great so when you click on the symbol on the outside without actually going inside of it because when you're inside you only you get to edit the actual frames just like on the root timeline but when you're in the root timeline and just select the symbol this is where you can actually edit it so as you can probably see the difference on the graphic it doesn't have all those options before so it's not as flexible because and honestly this is kind of sort of programming talk so i can't really go that deep into it but basically the graphic is directly rooted on your main timeline so that's why it shows and but because of that you can't really edit it too much you can't really create blending modes you can sort of add some effects just sort of editing the brightness and stuff and even though a lot of animators will tell you that graphic is the one to go sometimes when i made my short film i actually only use movie clips because i needed to have those effects however if you really need to use a graphic for some reason and you want to add effects you'll have to do this on the actual drawings and that also means on individual frames so that's why it's hard to use effects because sure you can go inside and now it will have the blending modes if you go over to frame so as it says you're editing only the frame and this is where you can actually add the other effects but then you have to do this on every single one and if you're using the movie clip you can do a lot more things with effects and you can also program it apparently so yeah they both have their own uses and i think it comes to personal preference which one you actually use it also depends on your project as i said on my short film i actually use movie clips because i wanted to add effects all right so one last very common use for symbols when it comes to looping you can do this on either of them i'm going to use the graphic because it's going to be more visually understandable so you have this little fairy batting and swings but you also want it to be moving around so this is where looping is really interesting because let me move it all the way here it's still going to be on the same place so that's something cool you can move it around and you're not just going to be moving one single frame because let's say you did this all over your root timeline which will sort of look like this if you grab this frame and move it it's only going to move the single frame so that's why using symbols can be useful sometimes you might even want to throw all of your layers of a single character in a symbol because it just makes everything a lot easier to move around and adjust and that's actually a mistake that i made a lot when i animated my short film is that i didn't do that to my characters so actually i'm already going to give you a little trick in case you actually end up doing that so you want to move a character that already has several frames you can actually select several frames at once and by that you're going to use this little tool over here so i noticed that right now on the default interface on the current version if it's not showing on your on your tools right over here you go on customize timeline tools and it's going to look like this and you just click on it and it's going to show up and you can also sort of organize the tools i believe but anyway if you click on it you can select a range of frames that you want to edit and as you can see they sort of show up at the same time and this is where you can edit them as if they were all in the same layer sort of and you can move them around but as you can see it's a bit of a hassle so that's why it's really good to not only organize things in layers but also in symbols so you can really just make things a lot easier to correct and adjust as you go because you don't you're not necessarily making mistakes sometimes you're just adjusting things and polishing them as you're finishing your animation for example but anyway i sort of digressed so let's say i want this fairy to be flying from one side to the other of our canvas so i'm going to go to the last frame and create a new one where i want it to go so i'm going to press shift so that it moves straight and now i want to go from here to here and that as i showed you on a previous lesson i can make it automatically move by creating a classic tween and wow it moves pretty fast actually but as you can see it's batting its wings it's kind of hard to see because it's moving really fast so i'm going to make it a little longer and yeah you can see it's batting its wings as it goes so that's what makes symbols really practical because sure this is really simple animation but for example you can draw somebody walking in a walk cycle and only have to draw them moving in place and then just adjusting their movement across the scene and so on if there's a character in the background just sort of doing random movements to add some life to your animation you can do that in a symbol so that it's looping around and those are the basics of symbols and we will be coming back to them every now and then and i'm going to show you a little bit more possibilities inside of them but yeah that's how they work and see you next time hello so for the next few lessons i'm going to talk about the 12 principles of animation these principles have been used for several decades when it comes to learning and teaching animation because they've really boiled down all of the factors that come into making a quality animation and when you keep them in mind and really understand each of these principles they can really improve your work so these principles they were sort of created back in the day with walt disney and the nine old men which were sort of the first animators to work with them and ever since then they've been kind of polished and adapted to the different kinds of animation that we've developed but honestly they've they stayed they have stayed pretty strong over time because it's really it really goes down all the way to the basics and they're kind of timeless so the first one i'll be talking about and it's usually the first one to be talked about all the time is timing and spacing and it really is the most important thing to keep in mind i think timing and spacing it's part of all the other principles you really can't do them without keeping all of this that i'm going to talk about in mind and they are tiny and spacing they're kind of put into the same principle because they walk hand in hand and you can't really talk about one without talking about the other and we've sort of already talked a little bit about this when i was showing you how to use the timeline it really comes down to how you use it and how you organize your drawings but not just that it really it also has to do a lot about a theoretical understanding about how things move so before we get into the very complex bits the more complex bits i'm going to start off with an example so we're on the first frame and the circle or the ball is always used in examples because anyway we got to keep things simple right so let's say you you have a ball that starts here and ends all the way here right so just because i have these two the the two spaces right the two places that the ball is going to move from point a to point b we don't really know how long it's gonna take it could take a minute it could take a second the space is still the same so because the space is still the same it all comes down to how you distribute your drawings to give life to this animation so i'm gonna start sort of actually animating to to give you an idea so as usual gonna keep my onion skin on and already uh sort of something i like to do to keep my drawings more or less consistent is that you know since it's going to be all the way to the other side or anyway you're going to make a drawing next to each other you might get it terribly wrong if you just draw it like that it could be a lot bigger a lot smaller you might not even notice which is kind of part of the human eye nature you know sometimes we don't notice these sort of things so something you can do with the onion skin is actually use it as a reference so if it's something more complex obviously you can sort of play some guidelines but since this is just a circle i can actually sort of trace it and use that as reference and i'm just going to sort of animate this straight ahead and for now i'm just gonna keep everything more or less evenly spaced now i like to make the drawings from scratch because i just like the look of it honestly i feel like actually hand drawn you know actually making every frame more or less from scratch i think it it gives it a more a cooler flow to it and as you can see we can already the animations already sort of taking shape just a little bit more to go one or two more keep pulling it like that okay i think this is good now it's zipping out it's zipping through pretty fast so i'm actually just going to add some extra frames and you can call this animating in twos because i'm holding each frame for two frames each drawing for two frames so okay as you can see i'm gonna keep it sort of smaller i think this is better the ball is moving from one place to the other and it just suddenly stops right so let's just keep this looping so the ball is moving pretty much evenly right because it's doing that because all the drawings are spaced more or less equally i don't change the distance very much if i expand this onion skin you can see them all at once and i kind of spaced them so that the edges would always touch in between each frame so if they're all moving the same amount of space in the same amount of time it's going to move evenly and let's see this gave us 18 frames so if i were to extend the exposure of each drawing to let's say 4 frames it would take twice as long on the other hand the animation will look a lot more choppy because there aren't much there aren't many frames in between anymore literally these frames are called in-betweens first for a reason and if i would if i were to do that it goes slower but it's also very choppy and so to make that smoother you need to add more and more frames so the general thinking with that is if something is moving fast you use less frames and if something is moving slow you use more frames because when something is going fast this just sort of zip from one point to the other you don't really need to add a lot of drawing to that but okay this animation is pretty bland right it just evenly goes from one side to the other so in the real world things don't really move like this right things gain and lose energy so they accelerate and then lose acceleration they they slow down to a stop or when something if you think about a car i think cars are a very good example because when you stop you don't just straight up stuff right you slow down it's not like this ball which from in one millisecond it's moving and the other one it's not so to make things smoother generally we do something in animation that's called easing in or is easing in and easing out also known as slowing in and slow out depending on depending on i don't know the academy that people go to the vocabulary can be a little different but they're basically the same thing what i'm gonna do now is i'm gonna duplicate this animation so i have the same amount of frames and the same amount of time i'm not gonna change the timing but i am going to change the spacing of these frames what am i going to do i want this ball to slow out so it's going to come out of this position slower and then slow in it's going to go into this position slower as well and we do that by bringing the drawings closer to each other remember what i said when things are closer they're usually slower when the drawings are closer i mean i'm going to always keep the these exposed so i can kind of get an idea and i'm sorry that sort of going to increase the distance more and more with this example i sort of i like to work back to front and with each drawing the distance is increasing between one and the other and the this one is sort of in the middle i think this is gonna work nicely now we didn't have many in-betweens here we can probably add some frames or we can just sort of space this out a little better so it's not that choppy all right i think that worked pretty well let's loop that again and as you can see now this is a lot smoother isn't it it just feels more natural and almost everything in animation has this it does this almost on every on the beginning and the end of most movements always keep in mind usually on the very beginning of a pose the first drawings are closer to each other obviously this is just a very general a very general rule and if you do this too much sometimes things can look a little strange but it's something very important and you might think that oh because this one is moving slower in some bits it's gonna take longer right but that's not true as i said the timing is still the same so if i put them next to each other i'm gonna press this button that is edit multiple frames i think we've talked about this before oops turned on the camera we don't want to talk about the camera yet and i'm going to do this with this one as well just select the layer to choose all of the frames and we can see the drawings clearly even they may be spaced out differently but we play both balls reach the end together at the exact same time so it's sort of an optical illusion and that is the most basic timing and spacing sort of example that i can give but easing in and out and this sort of thing it's not just to make things look better it's also it has to do with how things move and how we actually see some things and what i'm talking about specifically is perspective so this is when this is what i mean when i say that when you're an animator you really need to just pay attention to how things move in real life you're you're gonna start looking at the most trivial things in your life you know like a bouncing ball or how someone waves their hand and so the example that i like to see a lot is when you're looking at something that is spinning so just it's very it's very hypothetical right but imagine there's like this floating ball actually i'm just gonna draw an actual circle i feel like that's gonna be wiser and i'm going to wait to use a black line use gray no filling please okay so we have this is just sort of the trajectory right and see make this a little smaller so we can like this i need some space underneath i don't really need to use the canvas right it still goes beyond it anyway so there is this ball and it's floating in space and it's just going around in a circle and for this example it's moving evenly right so it's not accelerating or anything is just evenly moving around the circle trying to eyeball this a little i think i increase the brush size by accident but okay create another layer okay sorry just getting the buttons wrong but so this is let's say this is the top view so if you're if you're kind of having a bird's-eye view this is the trajectory it's following it's spiraling around but what if you were looking at this straight so if we flatten this the circle is just going to be a line right and the extremes are going to be here and as well as you know it's going to be in front and all the way on the back but i'm not even going to talk much about the whole the difference in size we can even kind of get away with making them all more or less the same size so let's say you're trying to animate a ball moving around but you're looking straight at it and so you think okay so this these are the two extremes and now i need to in between this i need to fill these out to give that impression so between this one and this one this is the middle right wrong because it's moving away from you and the more it moves away it's no longer moving very much horizontally to you i mean yeah horizontally it's not moving much across your eyesight but when it's moving here it's kind of moving like inside right the whole like physics arrow little thing is moving away from you and not as much there's not much space it's going through for in your perspective so if we draw a dotted line right because i made them more or less on the same distance if you draw a dotted line the midpoint between this part and this is actually closer to the edge so okay let's animate this right so i'm gonna do this somewhat roughly and then this one is here and i'm probably gonna time this out differently but for now i'm just i just usually do everything in twos just to get right now i'm not even thinking about the timing of the drawings themselves but mostly about the spacing and then sort of the same thing all over again and here and here that's pretty fast but you can kind of imagine it's it's spinning around right it's doing this but you're only looking straight at it and it slows down slightly on the edges and that's why spacing isn't just an effect it it really it really is all about how things move in real time and it you have to be in timing is is that thing where when something is moving slowly you need to actually detail things a lot more now as you can see the middle the middle drawing kind of disappears in the middle of this animation because it's going so fast now that's the thing if you want to you want this to be more visible but you can't really add more drawings right because it's you're gonna mess up the the timing if you do that because the more drawings the more frames you actually add you're slowing things down so something that we can do is make an alligate allegated in between which basically is going to mimic motion blur so what is motion blur it's something that originated from video cameras right because if you capture a movement that is too fast you're it's going to have a smear because the camera captures something in mid movement right so it's not going to be perfectly on one location so with this frame because a lot of animation is also a lot about this illusion as if something was captured with a camera oh wow what was that because that's kind of how we've gotten used to things moving as well it's taking a little long let's see how this looks oh yeah it goes back as well here you can sort of do the same thing wait gotta erase this as well and you see these drawings are very rough it you don't need to be that that perfectionistic with really simple things like this so obviously it's not perfect as i said but you kind of get that idea that it's zipping through your eyes and your eyes can't really capture all whoops i banged my microphone so with this allen getty drawing or a sort of stylized motion blur and um [Music] yes okay let me do that again so with this elongated drawing or it also can be seen as a stylized form of motion blur you don't necessarily need to do that you could do these little air lines as well but this is this is very reminiscent of very traditional animation you know you see this a lot in old cartoons it's sort of mimicking how your eye sometimes can't capture a full image this isn't only about cameras honestly it's something that we perceive as well so it really gives more i guess impact to your animation and so with this sort of spacing thing in mind you can really this is how you also give a more believable idea to whatever movement you're making because let's say something is hitting a wall that's another good spacing example so you're drawing i was looking at an an animation it was the the woodpecker character so you know this character was thrown against the wall and you know it got all the way and then poof he he hits the wall and we're gonna get into squashing and stretching in the next lesson but you've probably seen if you've seen a lot of of old cartoons you see a lot of this very exaggerated um movement of things so obviously you know on that scene that it was originally thrown the character probably you know gained some acceleration so it you know was closer here than it's sped up but it because it's suddenly hitting something it's not going to slow down so that's what i say you can't take it on face value that everything eases in and out because it's not going to ease in here it's suddenly gonna stop and something you can even do to make it even stronger is actually just keep accelerating him maybe he doesn't even need that but animation is a lot about exaggeration and that's actually a principle some principles of animation are a bit more vague and i think exaggeration is one of those of course we need to keep in mind how things move in the real world but in animation especially and very actually it's not even limited to cartoony things even on more realistic animations we kind of need to push things a little and i don't know it just sort of it seems more believable i don't know it just it just works most of the time so yeah let me see if i can actually animate this on the go so i'm already gonna do a little bit of maybe squashing i only have behind so it's gonna start slow let me do that and it's going to start sort of smearing as well right like i'm just really winging this so i'm not here's going to be the wall sorter actually so this is another bit of a trick when it comes to digital stuff you know something's going to be static just draw it on another layer it's going to be exposed all the time you need don't need to keep drawing it all every all the time or copying it just put it on a different layer so it doesn't need to keep getting replaced and then poof i don't know something like that i wonder if that's any good yeah it kind of worked look at that so i'm not quite used to straight ahead animation which i'm already spoiling a few of the of the concepts because i think it's very important also to you know become familiarized with these but look at that that's kind of funny if you imagine someone like an imaginary person throwing this whatever there's a sticky ball onto a wall yeah it kind of looks fine so as you can see i really stretched that out on the on the end because you really want that impact to to hit you know if i just kept it you know just a straight little ball it wouldn't be the same so a lot of the time you know i kind of meant went you know just every single frame and i just drew one after the other but you don't need to work like that and i usually don't because i'm just sort of playing around with animation right now but if it's if it's useful to you you know you can first draw the first where it's gonna start okay so it can be very helpful for you to sort of lay down the most important poses and even the trajectory because i got things pretty straight but sometimes that can be kind of hard even i thought it would be a lot wonky a lot more wonky i mean so you can get a different you know on a separate layer you can grab a different color and you know this this ball is going to be thrown on this direction so you can always have this guideline and you know draw the first pose first and you know skip a few frames draw the last one so you can kind of have an idea you know on the first on the beginning of this lesson i when i was spacing that first little ball i didn't work exactly from start to finish right i kind of went back let me actually find it yeah these two right yeah the top one i mean so when i was adjusting the frames to get that you know ease in and out effect i you know started in the beginning then then i adjusted the end and then i just sort of filled in what needed to be fixed and so animation doesn't you don't need to work in chronological order as well as what i'm saying and yeah those are the basics of timing and spacing and this isn't the only moment i'm going to talk about it as i said i think this is probably the most important thing it's always there i feel like timing and spacing is animation that's basically what it comes down to so i'm always gonna you know i'm gonna show so many so many examples along these next um these next lessons that i feel like the principles they kind of stack on top of each other as we know we i'm going to add squash and stretch on the other one but they're still going to be timing spacing and then on the next and the next we're just going to keep adding more and more elements to these animations we can even continue using this example of something going from one space to the other but keep adding more principles and in the end we might have i don't know like a character running so in the end we might have a character running but all of these things all of these basic you know little ball zipping from one side to the other it's still gonna be it's still gonna come down to these same principles all right so see you in the next lesson bye bye hello for the next animation principle i'm going to talk about squash and stretch this is also one of the most prevalent principles and techniques that you can see in hand-drawn animation so it's it comes from the concept that things in real life unless it's like made of stone but especially more organic things like humans themselves which are you know their flesh and bone so no matter what you're talking about a lot of things are a bit squishy and obviously for us it's a lot more subtle but this concept was taken into animation to make things seem a bit more fluid and natural but in animation of course it's a bit more exaggerated but it can really it can really give this this feeling of volume and it seems more real right like it has a mass of its own but there are a few let's say rules about it how to how to make it how to make it look right because sometimes if you exaggerate too much or don't really keep some things in mind when you squash something too much they might be they can look i don't know too wide and weird or if you stretch it everything looks skinny and brittle so a famous example to sort of introduce the idea of squash and stretch is thinking about the half how was it it's a half filled bag of flour so you think of a bag a flower right if it's just sitting on the ground it's it's kind of like a pillow so there's those little little corners like a pillow and it's just gonna sort of distribute its weight on the bottom and it's going to stretch to the sides and if you were to grab it from the top and lift it from the ground it would stretch to its maximum capacity but it would always keep its volume right no matter no matter how you grab it or how you twist it it's still the same bag of flour so it needs to keep a certain proportion even when you're drawing so some people actually use the actual bag of flour in animation exercises draw a bag of flour falling or some people even give life to the bag of flour and make it you know make it walk make it jump or whatever it's actually a really fun exercise so what i mean about something keeping its value is that as i drew on the beginning of the class you know if if you have this little ball and you can kind of imagine it as a ball of dough right so if you were to squish it it's going to get smaller on these sides but it's going to get wider on the horizontal part so you always sort of have to you know explore the proportions so that they always look right more or less because sometimes some people especially beginners they might forget that you know you have to sort of compensate on one side so that it doesn't lose actually lose its shape and this is very good again to make some movements seem more fluid so i'm going to go back to the good old bouncing bow and show a bit how this can aid in the in the movement as well so before actually animating i'm going to set a sort of trajectory oh my god i'm going to sort of set a trajectory for the ball i'm not going to go too far just from the top and then going back lower the opacity lock it okay so let's think about the main poses right so when it's at the top also when you're doing squash and stretch you should also keep in mind when to do it as in the actual timing of your animation think about really the fix physics of it if this were you know stretchier than it was really in real life when would it stretch when it when would it squash what would it return to normal so a general you know thing to keep in mind is usually on the most important poses it's going to be more or less back to normal because as we'll see in in later principles you you need to really make things really clear as in the staging of a certain movement or a scene so you want your audience to understand what's going on so when it's slowing down and the ball has you know when it when it bounces back up it's going to lose that energy and at some point it's almost going to stay still right the whole thing about how gravity and the weight sort of cancel each other out and this is a moment where it kind of sticks a pose so and also thinking about as i said about the physics of it because you know the forces are sort of cancelling each other out there's no reason for it to be stretching or squashing because it's just on that on that point where it's not really affected by anything and let me see something okay and then the new update kind of already adds frames to the other layers which can be fun but i'm still getting used to it but sometimes if i was setting a guideline like i did here you would want to add a bunch of frames so that it wouldn't disappear as you go so before we actually i'm not really gonna do all the frames one by one i i'm going to set the key poses which is basically just these two really and and then i'm going to work on on this one and i accidentally copied this one back all right oops hmm like that actually i'm gonna start animating just in twos all right it's not that predictable there we go okay i'm confusing the buttons so it's going to start nice and slow and you know in the beginning you still wanted to sort of stick that same shape because it's not for a single frame that we're going to actually see it's it's shape right you have to hold it for a few for a free draw sorry you have to hold it for a few drawings so that your eye can really perceive what's going on oh sorry and honestly it's only going to stretch closer to the ground that it's accelerating i still wanted to to look harder let's say and what's that okay so of course when you're animating you also want to think what what your character what your object is made of so that it looks more convincing because if this was a bowling ball then i would probably not add almost any squash and stretch definitely not as much here though even though in real life you know a bowling ball would never really move like that you might you might also want to actually you know just slightly squash it a little bit because it's not much about if the material actually does that but it's kind of again a trick of the eye to sort of again it's like an exaggeration it might make the hit look a little bit more convincing so i'm gonna see i'm gonna try and add a little bit of stretch right now but we'll see how this goes because so basically what i have in mind is that at the very end it's going to stretch a lot because again it will sort of make this land a little better now i think this one is not very i think it needs to be a little skinnier and i'm going to make pretty much the same shape again let's see how this is going okay now i can release speed up so again just kind of take the distance between drawing in the other and increase it hmm let's see if this will work so already adding some some tricks to this when something is hitting the ground be it a ball or you could do a frog jumping or whatever generally when something is contacting a surface when it's actually on the first contact you want it to actually touch that place because depending on the spacing of your animation you might think like oh actually it would it would end like the last frame before contact will like end right before here and the next you know it'll be on the ground but it's one of the things that will make it look a little bit more satisfying to to the eye is making sure that there's at least one frame that is making that contact oops now we keep going and add a lot more frames just make sure i'm not running out and on the next frame uh you don't really need to make it contacting as well it might actually look a little uncanny so next frame you want to want it to already have left the ground obviously it depends on how fast you're making this object move but generally speaking on something that is moving fast like bouncing or quickly jumping and you know you can always adjust the position of this as well i think that's all right and here there's not much acceleration to be to be had like it's it's going to bounce off of the ground and it's already going it's still going to be pretty pretty fast and as i was saying on a previous lesson like you don't want to ease in and out of every position right like you don't have to do much easing from the point it kicks right from the point of bounces i mean it's not going to look like it's bouncing if you make it slow down you know start slow from here this isn't very accurate oh i'm drawing into the same drawing whoops i forgot to add a blank frame as you can see like this needs to be a little fatter because it seems like it's just shortening and you know thinking about position of a drawing while also thinking about timing and spacing it can be kind of tough and honestly i'm not quite used to this so yeah you might also think that you can actually do and i should have done actually is um for example think only about the timing of this so just draw a rigid ball figure out the timing and spacing of this just don't think about this the stretch the stretch and squash and then kind of you know do a very rough no need to make the lines all perfect and then go over that since you've already established exactly where each drawing will be then you just have to kind of go over it and and just fix that that squash the squash and the stretch not doing this right now because it's just like a circle and it's easily adjustable but if you're doing a whole character for example you might go you want you might want to actually fragment and do things one one piece at a time okay and here in the end for example i instead of two frames i held it for three it's very subtle but sometimes you know you don't need to keep this timing exact all the time especially when something is slowing down it might be easier to actually you know space out space the timing out in between frames and yeah i think it looks pretty satisfying i love watching these things over and over honestly i think bouncing balls are just so nice to look at in animation so yeah and this you know it can go on for so many different things because when it comes to character animation this can be very effective on faces as well a very good example is when a character is chewing now i'm not quite sure if i'm gonna pull off a character chewing like not actually animating but so anyway i'm just gonna stick to you know the smiley face but if it was chewing you know the mouth would go up and you know the whole face would kind of go with it so the jar is going to go up so it can kind of you know squash a little bit and then when it's opening its mouth and this you can really see when you're doing this on the mirror as well it just looks really sad but you know what i mean right when you do this on when you're chewing in front of a mirror sorry this this drying looks really dumb but um you can see how you know your nose gets pulled down by the mouth and all that but when you're when it comes to animation you can really just kind of do that to the whole face and stretch it out you know so this might happen again when it's fr when they're frowning or when they're smiling even you know they can really pull those the cheeks outwards and the the face can kind of squish a little bit um and let's say a character is stretching or even when with every especially with very strong movements you can apply that to anything so you know if uh if uh uh if it's if someone is stretching their arm really far away instead of you know this is their arm you can like kind of taper it a little bit on the ends again sometimes it's good to think of things oh my god that hand but you know what i mean i kind of think the things are made out of rubber obviously don't go too far with it or it might look a little bit too gimmicky but if that's also your intention then go for it but you know you don't need to go get too anatomical about this but you know again you have a stretched arm and they fold it so here's your elbow so because your forearm is going into you can actually pull the skin back a little bit and that's kind of a stretch or a squash you know that can really give some form to the characters and objects that you're that you're drawing and as i show more examples i think it's easier to go to show as we go but this is a very simple yet very effective effect to to stay to keep in mind sorry so yeah that was squash and stretch and i'll see you on the next one bye bye hi again congratulations on getting this far i hope you're enjoying this course and starting to see some great results if you like the tutorial so far and would like to check out the extended version of the course head to the description box below where you will find our full adobe animate beginner to advanced course with more than 20 lectures and many more projects to complete now let's continue hello so on this video i'm going to talk about straight ahead animation and poster pose animation now this principle talks about the main methods of animating so these aren't rules but just methods and everyone has their own way of animating of course but these are the most simple but these are the two main approaches of animation and spoiler alert there's actually a third one but let's get to the main the main concepts so first off what are these methods right so you might might have heard me already mentioning some terms and mentioning this principle when i talk about in betweens and keyframes and all that so okay straight ahead animation is a lot what i've been doing on those real-time animations that i'm doing to exemplify some some concepts so basically i go you know i draw the first drawing then i go to the next frame and i draw the next one and i go you know as it says straight ahead i don't do much planning i just kind of go with the flow and draw one thing after one frame after the other whereas supposed to pose it implies more planning so you draw a key frame or a key pose at first then draw the next you know important thing that's going to happen and then you know time it out you know there's going to be you know many frames that are going to be empty and then you go and fill in as you go and you know you don't have to go frame by frame you can kind of go back and forth until you've filled in the entire animation and i've kind of done both of these things on the past videos and you know there's an actual name for them and it can be a very conscious decision as to you know which approach you're going to choose for a determined animation so as you might imagine there are a few pros and cons to each of these methods so i'm mostly just talking about you know the pros in this so you know straight ahead as you might imagine you know it's very fluid it's very spontaneous and it can be very artistic and expressive but you know you can kind of lose the point of a scene you might not be able to you know let's say a character is moving from one point to the other and sometimes you can't really land the right the right you know spot that your character is supposed to to to arrive at you know sometimes you can't really as it says you can't really plan ahead very well sometimes so you might not really reach the very exact points you might want your character to reach it's not very you know you can't really plan ahead so sometimes you might miss the mark a little bit whereas poster pose is kind of the opposite you have a lot of a lot of control you can stage which is a principle we'll get on later but you know you can make things clearer and if there's a very specific very specific thing you know visually that your scenes need needs to have a position or a certain movement you can really you know pick it apart and generally is very it's a lot better for very complex animations so be it you know a character that has a lot of detail to it like very flowy hair or flowy clothes usually things that flow around your character they're very they become they can make your scene your animation very complex to tackle so as i've been saying you know you can do one thing at a time and you know fragment your animation a lot better with poster pose and you know i i talk a lot more about pose to pose because it's you know it's more complex than straight ahead straight ahead is just what it is you just go and do it and post a pose is as you might imagine better for more commercial projects so if you're if you have like a tv show especially tv shows they work on a very tight deadline and and budgets so with post to pose you can you can tell how long the scene is going to be you can already time it out before you even get to filling out all the single frames they that's still still are left right so generally straight ahead is not used very much in the most the most commercial and you know the the more normal industry i mean animation industry things you see but straight ahead is very good for very for very artistic and i guess abstract animations you know people that just work with a much more abstract and sort of experimental animation it usually involves a lot more straight ahead animation so it's still present you know but you just it's kind of on a different scene in animation so i'm going to show some examples that i've already animated in my short film because the truth is you can't really do one or the other usually what we do when we're animating is a bit of a mixture of both so i'm going to show one that is a lot more pose to pose and another one that leans a lot more to straight ahead and one that you know kind of mixes both so this is just the rough version of a scene this girl is walking up behind this fence and she's going to kneel and look into the fence so it's flashing like this because the animator because i have i had an animation team behind this he like deleted sort of the in-between spot so he could animate he didn't really need to do this but some people did this and so it's a lot more choppy right it's not especially over here you know you see she like snaps directly to the next pose so this was a very pose to pose approach this whole project i went like this because it's again poster is a lot better when you're working with a team so then the animator went in and in between this see this yeah there you go and now it's a lot a lot smoother and oops and in the end i you know finalized everything and it's nice and smooth but even like that you know when you're doing the in-betweens you're basically doing straight ahead animation usually what we do we get you know the main like over here obviously it's very few frames so it's not even that straight ahead but some people you know the they have a lot broader keyframes and they just kind of you know plan out you know the starting and the ending point and just kind of go straight into straight ahead animation until they complete uh whatever movement they want and this was a scene that is a lot more abstract it's from the same short film it's actually really simple but again i just you know i think straight ahead can somebody sometimes just be called winging it and it's like a dream so there's these trees they grow out then there's this little these little glowing eyes and they disintegrate and that's it and i didn't really i didn't really do any sort of poster pose in this i just you know i had this blank thing and i just you know timed out these drawings and it was really simple but a lot of people do these abstract animations with things moving around and they just kind of do just gonna go and let the drawings take you and then with the eyes again i did a lot of these sparkles in the film and again i feel like effect animation is also something that uses a lot of straight ahead because it really has a lot of fluidity and it's very it's very organic and effects they have to be organic so when you're doing you know sparkles be it you know like fire or water or whatever straight ahead is usually how you go it's really hard to plan out these things you kind of you know let the randomness be part of it and it's really satisfying to make and much like one in a previous lesson you know when i animated this bouncing ball it was very hybrid you know and i guess even leaning more to straight ahead but remember that you know where was it sorry yeah you know this is sometimes people when they do straight ahead they might not even you know plan out when it comes to this this isn't really this doesn't qualify as opposed to post but what i'm saying is that straight ahead doesn't need to be just winging it you know it's it's just a method of working so you know you can chart out the trajectory of something moving and then just straight ahead it you know even though i did actually yeah i drew this little squishy ball before so i could kind of have a gauge as to how much would it stretch and how much it would go back so the truth is it's not as rigid as you know looking at the concepts might seem and everyone has their own way and you kind of have to adapt depending on what you're working on basically so yeah that was a little bit on animation methods and see you next time bye bye hi so for the next principle i'm going to talk about arcs now as usual with animation it's a very simple thing but it's it really adds more realism and makes your movements more accurate when you think about these so this principle it basically points out how pretty much everything in the world every movement most of the these movements they follow an arc shaped trajectory things don't usually move in a straight line and if you if you think if you end up animating things too straight they will look very robotic and they won't look real or natural so as an example as i've kind of already teased with this little icon to think about arcs is like thinking you're animating a stick and it's going to go from this position to this position right so in the middle obviously you're not going to draw it like this right because this is obviously wrong you can tell that it shortens right because things move in an arc so this is a very obvious example and it works like this because it's physically limited to this shape but this example kind of is is good to imagine this when you're when you're animating so i'm talking about another example it's like if you're if you're animating in a hand and they're sort of pointing at something so let's just imagine this is like a hand with a pointing finger and it's going to again just sort of move and point at something so if you even do this this motion with your own arm you know i think a lot of these you know it's very common for animators to act out their own animations as simple as a movement might be because it makes you realize how it's actually done and so if you're in between you're you might end up just making exactly like well in between like oh well and i'm just gonna trace right in the middle right but okay you'll have in between a drawing i guess i wouldn't say successfully but it'll be animated but when you're when you're making this so you know there'll be the arm and all that stuff think about again animating this in an arc and i recommend watching cartoons and see how much they actually do this and again in animation it's these things are usually very exaggerated and because exaggeration is a very important part of animation and it just makes things a lot more appealing so you know it doesn't have necessarily have to do with as i said physical limitations like this one that i said and actually even you know the arm thing when you're animating a hand or whatever it's also it also has to do a little bit with that right it needs to still move within the axis of your elbow and there's just so much of a movement that can be done without actually generating an arc but you can create create arcs with pretty much anything you're moving so this on itself is a really simple principle honestly there's not there's not much to say about it um but it's it's good to remember when it comes to in-betweening because in commercial animation when you're working on you know a bigger project or something like that there's usually a supervising animator and an in-between animator so if you're either of those this is when the arc can become a problem because if you're an in-betweener you know again another just very hypothetical example is that you know if you have your keyframes over here uh an in-betweener might end up you know oh it's going to move around like that so you know you might end up sorry so the in-betweener will just fill in the blanks and go right here but as you can see we don't have an arc at all it's going to be very very stunted very stuck so it's important to always as as some animators say watch your arcs so this is something to keep an eye out when you're in between or if you're a supervising animator anyway you're the one creating the keyframes sometimes you know it's it's good to help out your fellow animators and create guidelines so you know you know it's going to be moving in an arc and some some animators might even mark out where spatially they want the in-betweens more or less so this is something you might see in animation or and like this doesn't have to be just when you're working with more than one person you can do this to with yourself because as i said the more guidelines so because as i said on the previous lesson the more guidelines you put on your you know your work in progress the easier it's going to be so might as well you know so yeah this was a quick one but i don't know all right so this was a quick one but as usual very important and i'll see you on the next animation principle see you hello so today's lesson on the next animation principle is anticipation now as the word says anticipation is basically the action before an action and this just makes things a lot more convincing and as usual just more natural more easier to understand and all that so what are examples of anticipation let's say the more classic examples so imagine you're gonna kick a ball right you're playing soccer and as usual there's always a ball in these examples um you know this also kind of goes down to physics right because for you to successfully kick a ball and make it go far oh i think my microphone kind of made a sound there okay so imagine you're gonna kick a ball and as usual there's always a ball or a circle in these examples but if you want that kick to be effective and you know you want the ball to go far you're not going to you know have your your leg resting over there and then just suddenly you know kick it right just move your head forward let's say you're sorry my head leg so if you're going to kick a ball you're not just going to let's say push your leg forward and touch the ball right that's not really going to make it go very far there's not going to be enough impact when you kick a ball first of all you you know go back so you can build up that energy and you know the further you start your kick the more power is going to have to really kick that ball that ball really far so you know again really obvious example but this can be applied to almost anything and even in real life basically any movement every action has some form of anticipation even if it is just that you're thinking about doing something before doing it unless it's a very unless it's a very unless it's a very automatic sort of response usually we think before we act and even that thought and that let's say sometimes you plan things down in your head before doing that that shows as anticipation it can show on a face you know when someone is thinking through and their eyes might flick around and then they go and say something or do something that is a form of anticipation so anticipation isn't just about you know momentum or you know building up energy is also a thing that has to do with acting i forgot to create a new layer here so anticipation is also a way for the audience to understand what is about to happen so it makes let's say the the viewer is kind of is able to keep up with with what is going on in the screen so it can make things just land a lot better it can be used for very simple actions for example if someone is looking at a drawing or i don't know a map of some sort and they want to point at something so let's see let's draw a little hand why did i choose a hand for an example there so before they actually put down their finger to the to the page they might probably you know lift up their hands and then touch the page here okay that looked a little bit janky but it can make us it can make even the movement more fluid because you can sorry i'm like getting stuck let me just oops sometimes this can really there we go okay and not only that does this make things a little bit more convincing because if they lift the their finger their hand up and then point is it kind of gives this idea that the person is you know sort of um aiming where they're going to to point they might be thinking exactly what they want to say what they want to show again it just looks a little bit more convincing and it also makes your your movements a bit more fluid because then you can kind of use the momentum of even if it's very slight of the hand just going up and then easing out of that position instead of it just straight up going down okay i'm gonna try and give an example but honestly i'm not sure if it's gonna look very good so this can be even when something is very static already let's say someone is just standing still and they're gonna start walking so when they do that the preference is that they don't just you know suddenly start striding even the position kind of looks a little bit awkward so usually what happens is they take like a step before the step and again that is anticipation they're gonna give a little step outwards to create a better again a better position to actually start working and i'm just kind of keying these positions and yeah then you know they i'm gonna i'm not gonna animate a whole um walk cycle but you know what i mean and obviously there are many ways to like take this first step but again it's kind of creating momentum so it's not always about going backwards before going forwards it's just you know uh again an action before the action a sort of build up that also kind of happens but you know anticipation it really is more notable when again you go backwards before going forwards or you go forwards before going backwards you go down before going up all that sort of stuff it's really it really is the the best guideline you know just to kind of go to the opposite posit to the opposite direction so yeah but again there are little things to keep an eye out for these little you know pre-actions they're also they are also a sort of anticipation and as i said sometimes if something is looking awkward you're you are moving your character let's say it's a very awkward position to start an action again to start that step then maybe it's because something is missing and it's a moment for you to let's say maybe film yourself doing whatever your character is going to do and really catch those micro actions that we get sometimes and again as a sort of reminder that if there is an anticipation there's also a sort of reaction to what is going on so anticipation also it also means that something can happen after an action is done so if you haven't a bow and arrow for example oops so sure it's going to start here someone's going to pull it back it should actually bend a little bit but it's all right and okay the the arrow's gone so the action is done but but you're oh my god but the bow is not gonna just you know go back to its original position right away it's going to you know sort of shake a bit i'm gonna have that little reverb and i'm not trying to make the most accurate animation right now but that's also something not only does the anticipation sell in action but also the reaction to it and another thing that is part of this this whole anticipation um concept is oh where is it yeah the the invisible anticipation so this is a sort of as as the name sort of suggests it's something that the eye doesn't really notice but it's very effective and it's used a lot in video game animation apparently because it can sort of it creates a snapping sort of effect and i'm going to show a scene that i already showed here that was that more abstract sort of scene i created on the short film so when these eyes show up and they open you might notice that the eyes kind of blink before even though they're already closed before they open they sort of close even more and then they stay so let's see where is that here so they were closed they kind of go down a little bit then up and actually now that i'm looking back i should have probably done a follow-through sort of thing right they should have kind of um stretch a little bit before settling down on that final position so you know when you look back on things sometimes you notice things that could be better but there was a little bit of anticipation and i knew that when i animated this again it's very minimal animation but that literally just you know it's it's one drawing yeah it's held by two frames but basically a frame of anticipation but it makes things snap a lot better and that's the invisible anticipation it's sometimes just one or two frames and you can barely see it but it really helps and you know sometimes and the invisible anticipation is it can also be the anticipation of another anticipation it makes it snap even better so if someone's holding again a ball like on that on the on a baseball game before they actually you know do the the classic anticipation of [Music] going back and then throwing the ball let's see why is that doing that all right i used it all in one one frame sorry about that so i'm gonna draw that again draw that maybe a little better okay so they're just you know holding the ball they're waiting for the moment so they might go forward a little bit and this can be just again a couple frames you can go a little bit further and i mean honestly i think they can even you don't even need to be very minimal this one is a more exaggerated sort of example and this this arm is really weird i'm just going to accept that so they're going to go forward stay there a little bit and here you can even you know make the the arms sort of go so i just start to bend back you can sort of speed up a little bit and anyway so this is the person hasn't even thrown the ball yet this is all just a huge anticipation and it also makes it even more convincing so sometimes things have to go have to they need several takes of anticipation before they actually commit to the action and i think that's very fascinating and a lot especially in games because the reaction to a certain input in a video game it needs to be very fast so that it doesn't feel like there's a delay from you know you pressing the button and then i don't know your character like doing a little sword swipe sometimes these anticipations they they need to be like really really fast and minimal and sometimes it's just a single frame and that's why you know video game especially more classic like uh cartoony video games they're they're very they're very snappy with their animation and it's actually very satisfying so you know pretty a pretty classic sort of small anticipation is when someone notices something right they like looking and they even do a little bit of a squash that's a bit off center really exaggerated but it's fine i don't know if i'm going to fully animate this but oh okay sit down we made a new one and then they actually hit that pose of the surprise can even be very close okay that was a little bit too snappy or let's see and then they hold the position again there's a reaction to that it's still going to stretch a little bit before settling down and yeah it's very very simple but it it really makes things a lot more satisfying and you know depending on what's going on you know after they shoot up they don't even need to settle down on the last position they can still you know wobble even more down um sort of how the bow and arrow works you know it it can have several reactions after that so those are the basics of anticipation and see you on the next lesson hi so this lesson is about follow-through or overlapping action those are just two names in which this principle is known for and it is very common in character animation and that is because characters usually have a lot of um a lot of details about them whether it be clothing or their part or their body parts or something and so what happens when a character is moving and in most cases when you can actually see this as let's say a character is moving and they suddenly stop but not all things stop at the same time if let's say they have earrings the earrings might you know keep going they might you know wiggle a little bit when they stop moving or you know if they have any appendages such as let's say a bunny if this bunny was shaking its head you know to the other side you know the the ears they're gonna follow but they're gonna go through the action right that's why it's called follow through even though they are following the same action they might actually take a little longer to catch up so you know when they get to the extreme pose here to to the right you know the ears are going to flop to that side and then when the bunny goes back to having like their head straight the ears might still take a while to get straight again and realistically speaking they might even you know before getting straight again they might go to the other side right they might flop a little to the left before standing still and we even saw a little bit about that on the anticipation video because i feel like those two kind of go hand in hand you know there's the anticipation and then there's follow through sort of the reaction of a movement so i guess it's a pretty simple thing to wrap your hand about and so i guess it's a pretty simple concept to wrap your head around so i thought i would animate a little bit just so you can see i feel like it's good to just kind of see how it's done because when you're first getting started it might be a little bit overwhelming so something that has a lot of overlapping action is hair especially long hair you know if you if you're animating let's say a girl with really long hair it's it's gonna there's gonna be a lot of follow through and you know hair is very flowy and light so i thought i would just animate this will be a bit hypothetical i'm just going to kind of make a floating head so i'm also going to work a little bit with symbol animation here because i don't want to waste too much time animating the face so with i feel like with follow through and overlapping action this is when we start talking about more complex animation so i'm just gonna draw a cute little face okay so i selected it pressed f8 and i'm going to turn this into a symbol just going to keep it as a graphic sorry so i think i'm going to make her move to a side and then just kind of go back so that we have because you know follow-through isn't just about when something stops it's as something is moving so i'm gonna give her oops if you're going to edit a symbol you got to go into it again okay oops i had the previous lesson open there right now we have to animate this let's see i think maybe a second might be okay so this is so something to be aware of when you're doing symbol animation is that is that different from frame by frame animation when you're making something move the keyframes are only let's say the extreme poses which is also another term for in animation you know extreme poses are usually your key frames right even in frame by frame animation speaking because they're well key poses they are important poses and when it comes to let's say motion and digital animation a keyframe is exactly that it's going to sort of dictate let me see i'm just thinking maybe i don't need i can i can animate this symbol on the root timeline because here yeah there we go we can just animate the symbol so yeah i'm gonna get into the the difference between those two things let's say i wanted to go here and these are just keyframes and the rest are going to be in betweens but they're going to be sort of computer generated whereas when we're talking about you know technical names when i'm doing frame by frame animation you know um let's say i'm just animating a stick moving and i'm going to make it move i'm creating a whole new keyframe you know in the software these are all called keyframes and i thought i would just clarify because those are two terms are kind of it's the same word for slightly different things so over here these are all when we're talking about you know the technical terms for the software these are all key frames because there are different completely different and independent drawings and if i recall were to call some of these in-betweens is because you know i made the extreme poses and then i'm drawing them making new drawings in between them and that's why they're called in-betweens this comes from traditional animation but in here i'm gonna do some tweening which is let's say the digital form of this so if i were to click here i'm just gonna insert classic tween and it's gonna do that for me so yeah this is a bit too fast let's see 15. i don't know i i'm thinking of making it a bit more i guess um okay it's kind of hard with a pencil so you can just click and drag and you can adjust this okay and then frame 24 i could actually copy the frame i think let's see if we could just paste that no it's not the same so create a new in between i think we can click and drag okay there are some technical things that sometimes i need to work out okay it's more or less the same thing so here as well in a created classic tween and we don't need the onion skin quite yet okay it's gonna do that but i don't want it to be so aggressive so i'm gonna create some easing so over here on properties we can click on classic ease let's see yeah ease in and out and the quad is just kind of the the normal one honestly i yeah there's like bouncing animation there's like a bunch of presets but let's see is that working yeah there we go got to press enter oh that is fast might have to adjust that i'm going to do this here as well let's see yeah there we go i'm gonna now i'm gonna add some because that was a bit much got a bit loss over there okay cool let's make this nice and even okay and it's good that we have some extra frames over here okay so because you know i'm going to be hand animating this and i don't want this to be super long and tedious so i'm probably going to decrease the number of frames right here because now it's you know there's a new drawing every single frame and i'm not sure if i'm going to get around to really drawing in the hair moving because i'm going to animate the hair by hand because i think it's a bit more um comprehensible i guess so i'm gonna duplicate this just so i can um just so i can you know have a backup so i'm i really want to just kind of get give a demonstration on this class on you know using using the software for a bit more of a more elaborate animation let me just check something yeah okay it's recording all right so what we can do is you right click and yeah convert your frame by frame animation keyframe each frame oh we can yeah every other frame let's see yeah that's interesting i didn't know it had this oh but it created an awkward one single here and this might actually i think i spaced them out a little bit too much and that's why it's so fast so what i'm gonna do is i'm just gonna drag them over to be a little bit closer let's see oh that's eerie cool okay that's going to be a little bit easier to work with 15 oh i see i'm going to create an even number yeah there we go now we can make every other frame it's a bit choppy but i think it's going to make it a little easier to work with so actually because i did that i'm gonna copy it again because if i decide to oops actually animate everything let me just do that again every other frame and every other frame okay and i'm gonna animate the hair over here and use a slightly different color slightly now i'm gonna use blue okay okay so before we actually start animating let's define how this hair is gonna look like i'm just gonna make it sort of how i did my one of my characters it just has a bit of a bouncy around sort of shape it's gonna make things a little easier okay and i'm going to lock this layer so that it doesn't show the onion skin or as it might look a little cluttered actually yeah i don't know i think looking at the future one kind of confuses me let's see i might turn this back on at some point oh yeah i was gonna talk what's the difference between animating and a symbol on the root timeline and inside the symbol well it's basically you know a sort of again a preservation a preservation of the original drawing because if i click inside the symbol i can't do that because it's locked you know that's all the symbol is and there's a keyframe in here but i think that was just an accident yeah i don't know why there is one in there but it's still the same drawing you know the the animation isn't actually inside the symbol um i don't really plan on making it loop so it's not there's not really much of a reason for me to do that and just a reminder you can actually put symbols inside symbols so if i still wanted to preserve the animation inside a symbol i could do that and still have this standalone symbol be its own symbol inside the other timeline you can just basically stack things over each other all the time but here i you know i don't intend saving this animation for for future use or anything so i prefer to animate it on the root timeline because then it's directly embedded in this timeline and not inside the symbol so if i were ever to access the symbol inside this library it's just going to be this drawing i hope that made some sense okay so let's get to overlapping action so because this girl is gonna shake her head um she kind of looks like a ghost when she's doing that for some reason but okay the overlapping action is going to start from you know from the very beginning you know if i were to use this exact drawing every time it will look stiff like she glued her hair in place or something so when something as light as hair especially is dragging behind already when she stops when she starts moving the hair is going to take a moment to you know sort of catch on to that motion so this part is directly attached to her head so there's nothing we can do about that it's always going to be attached but for the mo for the most part everything's just kind of going to kind of stay in place at the bottom and yeah as you can see that didn't make any sense because it was kind of going back so if it's going to move it's going to move with her for now so we're going to try and make this still stay in place see still is already dragging behind her i'm not gonna yeah i'm just gonna keep the previous one oh this this frame already is starting to get far away so you know more and more it's gonna drag it's first going yeah also this effect is also called drag so there's a lot of terms in animation it depends on what you're talking about honestly it's kind of funny when you're animating it looks like the hair just gave up in the middle of this still get making a drag quite a lot in the back and again this is a also an example of that sort of hybrid animation i was talking about i did a sort of pose to pose with this though you know this was a lot simpler because i didn't have to draw manually draw these inbetweens and now with overlapping action i think this is a moment where people use a lot of straight ahead animation when they're doing overlapping actions because it gives that fluidity and just generally it's a lot easier to work with but you know if it's gonna hit a very specific pose i might do that you know over here at some point i want the hair to really you know flip back i might you know just just key that you know draw the drawing i want it to be but i don't know i might actually just let's see there we go sometimes i like to already prepare some of these empty keyframes i always forget what the yeah it's f6 so you can sort of just use your keyboard and it can be really fast like that and in the end there's going to be more frames for the hair but for now i'm just going to keep it like that you also have to be very aware of when when she starts slowing down because the moment she starts to ease into the second position the drag is also going to have to start to lower but again kind of delayed you know it's still gonna be speeding up even yeah here she's already dragging she you know hits that position and she's already for now there's not much of a difference so you know the hair the hair doesn't know she's slowing down yet and you kind of have to to think about it like that like it's not affected by by her slowing down and here she's already you know she has slowed down but if you kind of see the distance between these perhaps it can still be more or less the same you know it's still really still dragging and again she's already yeah okay she's already moved started moving to the left but the hair it's still going you have to think relatively in these cases you know okay the head has gone to the left but we know that it's not let me it's not very consistent okay let's get kind of getting the height for that okay so the hair is still relatively to the hair itself it's still moving to the right here still moving to the right probably it's really going to shoot out the other side it's going to go way beyond the point that she went you know again it can be a common mistake because you know she she's gonna stop here but the hair it's gonna it's gonna shoot back to the other side because there's nothing really stopping it like on the bottom it's gonna be attached to the head on the top let's see i still wanted to go beyond that point let's see if that's too much i don't think so yeah again relatively it didn't really move that much from this frame looking at just the hair sometimes you can even you know it can be even useful to look at just that and here i'm just going to kind of i think it's gonna still go up a little oops oh man accidentally undid some of the stuff there but it's fine it's gonna go up a little bit yeah there we go and you know i could have actually done some some stretching over here i kind of wanted to keep it right right on the same sort of proportion but this is when you know a squash and stretch can be pretty cool for the hair especially you know usually when we're animating it's hair is usually just this one big mass instead of individual strands so it's kind of like it looks like it's made of rubber and here i think it's you can kind of stretch it out a little bit because i think it became a little fat i'm gonna just roughly erase some of that out oh wow she stops pretty fast here okay she's already she's slightly slowing down here so if she's only started to slow down the distance is barely noticeable here and the hair is still going to go still going strong you know yeah i stretched it out quite a bit over here i think it looks cool though let's see okay sh here she's already stopping maybe the hair can slow down just a little bit make it a little closer perhaps let's see and here she stopped the hair is nowhere near stopping so you know it's still gonna go and i don't even know how many frames i'm still gonna do round one of seven to make an empty frame [Music] and she took let's say two or three frames to stop maybe the hair could take about four because the hair for being lighter and having a lot less control over its movements like the head is going to take longer to stop as well especially because it's lighter we think i could exaggerate this a lot more i'm thinking let's see i don't know if that's gonna look good oh yeah okay i'm gonna add a few more frames make it really like settle down here i'm going to start slowing it down so i'm going to go a little bit longer i mean further away you know so it and it could actually hold maybe a frame or two let's see it holds for four frames maybe just three if you add that extra little frame and kit it can really and then it's kind of almost repeat that previous frame i think the yeah the hair kind of became shorter over time but you know just some practice i'm focusing mostly on the movement rather than staying faithful although you know obviously staying faithful to the drawing is important this little wave is probably kind of shortened over time but and then it can even go further again you know give it that little shake okay maybe hold it for just three frames let's see should it settle down here i think it should get an extra frame over here so whoops add two frames make a blank keyframe here and now we can just look at these two and i'm going to create an in between specifically of these two i'm gonna make it closer to the previous one than the last one if i can it's very minimal yeah there we go that's cool shift f5 to remove frames and center that oh that's cute i'm proud of that yeah it gave a pretty cute bounce on the end so yeah that was some overlapping action for you and yeah i think that's my tip you know just look at that onion skin and kind of see the relativity between you know the distance between frames because that's what telling what's telling you how fast or slow it's going so if the distance starts to shorten it means it's going slower so you know i knew that the hair still needed to kind of keep that same distance and only start to slow down later so as you can see you know i was going straight ahead with this animation and you know it went off model as we say you know it kind of lost its proportions a little bit let's see this is the last frame this is yeah it really changed shape um which you know it's not it's not that great you know but you know it looks pretty smooth so you can barely tell you know if you're not pay attention to that but this is another way that i actually didn't mention um i i said that wrong so this is another uh method that i didn't mention on that um post-pose or uh straight ahead animation is that sometimes people you know exactly to to get that nice flow and you know organic feel let's say of this overlapping uh action of the hair you know i could do exactly what i did right now just go straight ahead you know not thinking too much just really getting the flow of the movement itself and then as i said i noticed it went a little bit off model or you know not exactly off model but it changed shape over time so i would go and give it a second pass maybe kind of go post to post to make sure like i would you know draw over this one and then go over to this last slide in which it's not that that similar and on a new layer of course but then i would go and you know give it the right shape it was supposed to have so that when i'm animating these last few frames i have this reference of the ending point i know how it needs to be exactly on that last frame to make sure that i didn't change this the shape or the size accidentally so a lot of people do the straight ahead animation as a sort of test you know to use as a guide when you're actually cleaning up and that first straight ahead pass isn't even used in the final animation but it really it can really help you get that feel because sometimes pose to pose can be a little bit it can look you can really lose the flow because it might really look like you're going pose to pose instead of it being one single fluid motion so yeah i also wanted to talk about that when it comes to combining straight ahead with a more calculated animation it's totally a thing that you can do so yeah i hope you like this more demonstrative sort of uh lesson and i believe the next ones will become more and more like that just incorporating the principles over the other and we're gonna start constructing you know more complex characters and making some little short animation tests and yeah i'm excited to see you on the next ones see you later hi so this video's principle is secondary action so this principle relates a lot to character animation and what is what it is about is that when a character is you know portraying some idea there are usually little actions little gestures in its body that can help fortify that action that action and that idea that they're putting out so for example it's not just when someone is sad but they might also try and how is it wipe a tear away from their face i'm going to do that again so for example a character can be sad and not only you can see that on their expression but they could be wiping a tear away so with that example in mind you have to think that the secondary action it's you know it's complementing it's adding to that primary action so you don't want to draw attention away from what is the most important because the primary actions should be you know they're sad and they're wiping a tear away but if their expression is the the most important part of this scene there they shouldn't be you know covering their face for example the secondary action shouldn't take away the attention from from the primary action so it has a lot to do with acting and making making let me see so this has a lot to do with acting and just making gestures and emotions more clear to the viewer and again this is this just goes to add to a more believable performance and all that so i'm going to show an example i'm gonna animate an example now so i had this character and i want them to be upset about something that someone said or something that he sees so to show this in a scene so in an animated way you know if i would just you know keep him still and just change his expression um it would be it would be very very dull right there's a lot more that happens when someone reacts to something so i think the first thing i want to to make him do is just sort of take a step away you know when someone is shocked by something they sometimes you know they take a step away to show that they might be that they are upset or even intimidated by something um here let's see i'm just going to give some extra time here before the first reaction let me think this is way too tiny and there we go that's a bit more visible for me so i'm going to animate very very oh my god so i'm going to animate many things in his face but again some people call this a building block method where you know let's just go one thing at a time so i'm going to just sort of time out you know the movement that his head makes before before going any further and i'm not even gonna think about his ears just really the head shape so let's already keep in mind some some principles i'm going to anticipate he's going he's going to you know kind of have also an arc is going to go sort of in this direction but before before that i'm going to just add oops f7 there we go that anticipation now i'm not sure if it's gonna be just one frame and honestly i think i'm just gonna copy this drawing and animate it okay let me see so basically i just press you know ctrl c to copy and ctrl shift v to copy it to paste it in place oh my god i keep pressing the wrong buttons there so i'm just gonna add a few frames just to make this a little easier what oh i'm pressing this wrong thing there we go so it's kind of weird because it feels like he's getting smushed but honestly i think it's just because the the ears are missing so it looks like he he's like flattening let's see last one okay i'm gonna add how do i make it blank okay okay we go to the last frame click on add a blank keyframe but then it does that to the last one sometimes it can be a little fidgety and okay i don't want to look forward i don't want to look forward there we go i'm going to really sort of ease use this first one nope no i want to extend this thank you okay i think he knocks he goes way too much but i don't know let me just keep animating this for now i'm gonna start making this a bit more dramatic some copying always the last one i made so i can put paste it on the last position okay copy paste it now he's gonna start slowing down maybe one more it's really sort of easy ease him into the that last position honestly i think this this anticipation went even a little bit too far this is just sort of one of those very subtle i'm gonna make him not go so much forward but mostly just up i think i think that's going to be yeah i think that's better so i'm actually you know him stepping back like this is already a sort of secondary and um secondary action because you know the main action here is his expression he's going to you know he's going to have an expression change um so that's the thing this is only aiding to his reaction but when something is moving that's usually what we want to lay out first let me think what's next so maybe we should you know get on with actually animating his face now that i think about it probably should have actually animated his expression changing first and then changing his um his spacing but okay so that's what i said i kind of did a straight ahead pass of this and what we can do is create a new a new layer and i'm going to just copy this original drawing because it's going to be my base for for the rest of the the animation his expression is pretty neutral but it's exactly because this is already serving as my reference for the character and that's the thing don't don't think that you're wasting time in testing things um you know usually with more complex things you should thumbnail your drawings which means you know making um how they call it exploratory drawings you know it's not about you know getting the finalized the final look of something but you know exploring laying something out you need to see things to see how they work sometimes so i'm going to lower the opacity of this or opacity i don't know so that you know we can then use this as reference uh let's see i'm thinking ahead a little bit so and then we yeah we're gonna animate um oops let's see then i'm gonna have to sort of okay so i'm gonna like sort of spoil what i'm thinking but i think the a a pretty big secondary action that i want in this scene is for him to sort of lower his ears by the end of the scene is they're going to be kind of like this which by the way i think this is why you know these like animal people are so popular in animation because animals really they have so much potential and their extra parts in their body you know like whiskers and tails and generally more expressive ears they just have so much potential and and they can be so expressive and i kept thinking about a secondary action example and i just really wanted a character with like ears like animal ears because i think they are like a perfect example of this so okay i'm going to redraw again sort of i'm going to lock this one so i don't actually i'm just gonna hide it and again because i know i'm gonna redraw the ears i'm not gonna bother with them now and do that again because the the other you know layer that i made it it's basically it basically turns into a guideline right just like sometimes you know with the bouncing ball i you know drew the the the way the the path it was going to follow i should you should also you know create guidelines that are actually animated so that you can uh you know get something out of your brain so that you have to don't have to think about so many things at once talking about you know these guidelines um that is very very useful when you're drawing something in perspective so sometimes the character is coming up close to the camera so they're going to be far away they're going to you know increase in size so please never animate that tread ahead it's so hard so a lot of time you know people would literally draw these guidelines to kind of keep at like a low opacity at all times while they're animating so that they can always get you know like the proportions right and they literally have these lines set out for them so that's just a very very classic example of animation guidelines anyway wanted to put that out let's see because a good tip with secondary actions is that don't time everything exactly the same you know like oh he's gonna react exactly at the same timing that you know his head turns to the side uh i might even do that now just to still you know kind of time things correctly but then i might delay his expression a little bit so i think he [Music] no he can raise his eyebrows his eyes are pretty much going to stay the same but then his expression i can become more neutral and i'm not gonna animate his whiskers either let me see um nope uh f6 yes and then [Music] maybe raising just a little bit more so kind of you know the character hasn't quite processed what just happened whatever has happened um oh i think i accidentally added a frame over there but i think it timed pretty cool you know gives it a little bit more time to start the actual movement now when you i like to work with pretty flexible frame rates like this but you know if you want to keep a steady frame rate only like two frames at a time that can also lead you to time and space things differently because you know removing a frame from this kind of animation sometimes makes a huge difference so sometimes it's good to have in mind what kind of animation because i don't know i might i can imagine that sometimes there could be a limit depending on production stuff you know if you're working with a large team sometimes to have that fixed you know maybe 12 drawings per second can't be useful i'm not sure though and i usually work in 12 drawings per second and keep the you know the animating on ones for really detailed and things that need to be really smooth then you know you can add those ones in between and smooth out your animation but usually it's good to have in mind how how many frames you're actually going to use because then you know as i said adding ones after animating in twos can mess up your timing so there's always going to be some adjustments to make over there anyway when i'm drawing it involves a lot of just staring and just thinking for a large amount of minutes so for the whoever's editing you know feel free to cut out if i'm taking way too long but animation is a lot about you know replaying those two frames you drew a million times until so what i'm thinking is that this slight expression change can come even just like a single frame before when he's still not even moving and sometimes you know when i said about that invisible invisible anticipation it can be a lot about that you know just break the secondary the secondary actions by a couple of frames can give it a much more natural flow so okay so his eyebrows i'm gonna start to slant i mean i could just i'm just gonna redraw things honestly with hand drawn stuff i don't mind just sort of lining things again i should yeah from now i'm gonna copy this outline so i don't have to keep redrawing it now this if i was you know animating this for something this would still be a rough pass so i'm not you know my line art is still pretty rough so i don't mind you know having this sort of broken broken outlines and stuff uh let me copy that okay gotta remember to not end up copying something else okay so that the eyebrows oops i'm gonna you know come a little bit lower the eyes are still i still don't want the eyes to change much again i'm sort of i sort of want to break up the expression change a little bit as for the mouth yeah i'm gonna make it you know i'm gonna make it sad now i think i think it's important to really mark that i think the the mouth can really okay actually yeah no the mouth changes oh okay so yeah this was a little bit too dramatic because i want this to be smooth um let's make like an in-between of that and the mouth as well perhaps this could be the next one and this wait no i want this one to hold i'm just gonna let me see there i think that would kind of mess up the timing because here he's kind of stopping his head on the top so i don't want his expression to change in the middle of that and then his expression can start to change here but it's only really going to become clear on the next couple of frames and here i'm just animating everything in one place i'm not thinking about the head movement at all i mean i am you know when it comes to the timing of it but it's gonna animate it all in one place okay so now his eyebrows can i don't really think the eyes themselves are going to change that much honestly and the expression itself i think is going to be kind of subtle in the eyes i think i want them to become a little bit wider like that and the mouth is going to stay pretty much the same and here i'm just going to give it the last bit of exaggeration i think this is going to be our final expression which i think this one wait i think this eye is going to move too much let's see yeah his eyes kind of become wide and you know they kind of cross a little bit i think that's a cute look okay so i think this is good and we can actually make this head move now so here's gonna stay in place i'm gonna turn off the onion skin because we don't need that now and i'm gonna i think i'm just gonna use the arrow keys for these few first ones and here so it's gonna move i'm just going to insert a keyframe so it's going to be the same drawing but it's going to just move a little bit now i'm going to use the mouse let's see that hmm i think this anticipation is too smooth i'm not sure i think it's okay okay so i think we could say this is the primary the primary action you know um you know he steps away and you know becomes upset i think those are the most important ones uh they kind of they kind of walk hand in hand the the expression on itself i think wouldn't communicate as much let's save let me just check here all right i like to check every once in a while that we are recording because oh my god um i'm gonna rename things okay so now i want to animate the ears which for me are going to be the the big secondary action in this and you know just to preserve things make sure you know if i if i really don't like the ears i don't have to go back and animate them again i'm going to do them on a separate layer and it's going to follow the same frame rate right like i don't with these things if things are attached you it might be better to not have them you know diverge with the main frames as they can look a bit awkward but i don't know obviously uh like i did with that hair example you know it after it stops you know it can pretty much just go wild with the rest of the um the follow through and stuff but when when there's not too much uh overlapping stuff you might want to follow the same sort of frame rate so the ears already exist on that one okay deadline we don't need that anymore let me see i think on the first frames it's gonna stay the same oh yeah it's gonna start moving right that's the previous frame i don't honestly i think it stays pretty much on the same yeah the drawing doesn't change that much i think it goes up a little yeah okay so this is the same drawing so i don't want to make it look really awkward so i'm just gonna paste the same one so that it like the ears aren't moving on their own okay so i'm gonna add a bit of drag to the ears so he's gonna start moving backwards but i want the ear sort of to flop to the back a little bit like that let's see it's going to give some some life to the ears for once like that yeah and so this is going to end about here you know kind of look at the distances but they're gonna sort of flow to the back a little and this one looks smaller like that maybe and yeah because of the um the follow through the ears i think they should settle on whoa what and the mate is being weird sometimes you gotta restart animate because it just decides to be weird yeah i didn't like it it didn't like the the main drawing to be is going to give it a bunch of frames so that it's not going to be that long but just to make sure i should really update mine i think it's a bit glitchy since the last update always be careful with the adobe updates because they love to mess up like the basic stuff when they decide to change it okay yeah the ear so again um what was i talking about um yeah the the follow-through of the ear um again i think i want that secondary action to hit like a little after the main action you know the secondary action doesn't necessarily need to be at the same time by the way i feel like i need to make that clear sometimes it's something the character does before or even after the main action it kind of when it's done before it's almost a form of anticipation right it it makes it clear um to the viewer what's about to happen but when with overlapping sorry with secondary action um it kind of you know it can give some more personality to whatever your character is about to do you know like someone i don't know rubbing their hands before grabbing something like they're anxious or excited to do that or whatever so yeah for the most part i'm just gonna do some follow through on this on these ears they're not gonna move that much like independently sad yeah now yeah the final oh i drew on the wrong layer um it's not that bad actually just use the lasso tool i want to keep it nice and separate most for the most part there just cut it with ctrl x ctrl x it copies and deletes whatever you selected i know copying is a pretty basic um command but i only learned it like pretty late in my digital art life for some reason okay so here we are already independent let's say from the main drawing right so we can start um oh yeah let me just also extend this because it's kind of weird to keep adding frames when they don't exist so i'm just gonna do that you know animate i always like to just create a bunch of frames to to make the timeline a little easier to to control okay so here from this point this is when the character is actually going to move their ears so that they're droopy second i need some water sorry i'm gonna even mute that in case it's uncomfortable okay i'm just thinking about how yeah we can even key this right so since everything's going to stay in place you can do this easier so i want it to look like this maybe i think it needs to be more exaggerated yes something like that it's really really sad little ears and you can add some frames just in case okay now i want to look forward more than back we only have two frames so i don't know if this is gonna be enough but you know we can since i know for now that oh there's only two frames to go or better two drawings to go i can space that out a little better so again remember the easing and the arcs of the stuff i don't want to space them thinking about the tips of the ears right um i don't want them ugh i don't want them to be you know evenly spaced i want them to ease so maybe something like this right um the middle one i mean the second frame is on the middle of the of the path it's just some classic sort of easing tips but let's see i might add a different frame and since i add if i add an extra frame i might have to redraw them because the timing is going to be different i'm i'm just thinking about the follow-through if it because i keep thinking they might want to i might want to make them bounce back before going down but for this example i don't know so i'm still going to figure out how this year is going to move it's a bit of a long stretch of movement okay and then it ended up kind of evenly spaced honestly but i don't want the i want this distance to be smaller than the distance so i'm gonna just edge it a little closer let's see hmm yeah i wanted to wait a little longer it kind of kind of goes straight away i felt like that was a bit robotic so thinking way there maybe maybe even more i think i'm gonna do what i said and now i'm going to make it bounce back a little bit get some follow through there here yeah i'm gonna make it go back to where it was right let's see yeah that's cool i actually think this one went too smooth i think it's the it can be either just the spacing of the ears or maybe even the timing i wonder if we get maybe just remove this one frame going to keep that frame on just a single one and i'm going to give this one even more of an ease just so it sort of snaps yeah and this one too when something moves really fast from one point to the other sometimes it's not a problem that you don't you know you don't have to fill in every single position again because if you draw every single position you're gonna you're gonna get a really small you're gonna get a really slow animation so and having something literally snap to a position again can make the animation really snappy and sometimes that's what you want yeah that's cool and again some follow through i'm gonna make it bounce back just a little bit like that this is gonna be the actual final pose i think yeah very cute okay so those were the ears um one final frame there and now the whiskers so the whiskers i think i want them to they're kind of they're gonna you know like kind of go down like this um kind of in between you know when the arc is the the head is settling down but before i don't know or it can be more timed with with the head again i don't want to distract too much from the ears and the head moving because i think those are again the the ears are another main point of this animation so i don't want the whiskers to be like really um i don't want them to draw too much attention i might actually just animate on the same layer as the ears they're going to be sort of the the compliments and again on a more complex animation you might want to maybe draw these with different colors so that you remember you're drawing on different layers or whatever but just for this example i think it makes it a little bit clearer okay i don't want to look forward yet these are going to be basically the same let me see already adding some drag let's see but not too much i feel like they shouldn't be that we just get the proportion of that okay so they line up with this little cross here oh they're dragging a bit they're like moving how is it they're gliding a little bit the ear the yeah the nose kind of shrunk but i think it stays pretty pretty consistent after that so i can adjust that later oh yeah these are the same drawing right so i'm gonna just copy these sometimes better to just have the same reference there we go okay so now yeah again i think the whiskers are mainly just going to be a sort of overlapping action sort of oh these glided a lot i feel like they're yeah it's kind of hard to keep these consistent i feel like they're dragging too much to the side here and even with these can even stretch them out a bit here kind of like a motion blur i don't want these to like bend over too much they're just gonna just kind of gonna do this with something as thin as whiskers you know i feel like the squash and stretch does it need to be like oh so the whiskers have to be thinner now that they're moving like no they're they're already so thin and almost abstract sometimes you can get away with just drawing them longer so here they're really thick so that that like literally is the opposite of what we want um let me just check yeah that is decreasing the size not sure about them like sort of bending into like that maybe they can just stay more like a little bit stiffer and here they're gonna start settling down to their normal size oh yeah i wanted them to shrink right let me see yeah on these final i can just take like two frames or something i think here actually they can start to shrink a little not shrink like i don't know the word they're gonna start to move down a little bit here oh actually i should have yeah i should have drawn the whiskers on a separate layer because i'm gonna have to keep copying them when they're standing still because yeah so yeah there's that that that was a mistake [Music] when in doubt just just draw everything on the same layer here they're gonna go down yep you know just can use my mouse and yeah even if you're on one specific layer um it's gonna select everything so just gonna lock the the the base head one and i'm gonna select only the whiskers and just copy them again with a layer just for them i wouldn't have to do this but it's a short animation so it's fine oh yeah there's the neck the neck isn't gonna do much yep that's pretty good the whiskers just kind of follow the the general expression and then the the ears do that actual secondary action whoops sorry um okay now i'm just gonna animate the neck i'm i'm not gonna do the same mistake and now i'm just gonna with these kind of layers i just go really quick and create the same [Music] let me see actually here with the neck yeah this is where i stopped moving it stops moving how the neck the the oh my god the so as for how the head is gonna move in relation to the neck you know i think when it anticipates it the neck is sort of stretching here and then here it you know it's gonna slump the head is slumping down into the shoulders again you know thinking about you know if there was a whole body here if i were to just just sort of pace the neck exactly where the rest is it would look just how the head is looking right now like it's he's just like floating around it's like a floating cat and actually you know i want to imply that this is like i don't know a little little cat person oh you know with like like a human with a with a cat head and you know they act like humans do instead of being a floating cat so because it does go forward a little bit i am going to take the head forward but keep the same relation to the shoulders yeah like that kind of keep the shoulders more or less on the same place uh okay lines up more or less with the nose now the shoulders can go a little bit to the back like i mean the shoulders can kind of go down a little i feel like you know still can follow a little bit of the motion don't need that much there we go shoulder is going to be like here here [Music] but this one i kind of want the shoulders to slump a little more yeah awesome so and you can you know you can play around a lot with these secondary motions they can it can be very subtle for example if i really wanted you know the cat to have those sad eyes that can add some little sparkles on its eyes like he's like he's steering up or wouldn't work that much with this character but if it was a person you can make their their lower lip sort of tremble you know like there's the just make the the lip go up and down um there's so many little things to add to the acting of the character um and yeah that was a little little demonstration of secondary action i really like this little guy really cute um and yeah if i'm correct this was the the last of the main um my voice kind of shook there so this was the last of the main uh principles i'm gonna go through some of the more theoretical ones on the next class just to kind of get them over with because it's better to just demonstrate them all at once i think and yeah thanks for watching and i'll see you next time alright so i have already covered basically all the main principles so far and now there are just a few left that i kind of just want to talk about quickly now in the end and these are the principles that i want to talk about i think these principles are some of the most general principles of animation and i feel like i can explain them pretty quickly um i think that the one that i've been mentioning the most so far is exaggeration and it really means exaggeration in a very vague and general way honestly i feel like a lot of the things that i've been talking about they in animation they are benefited from exaggeration even if it's just slightly exaggerated but you know anticipation um overlapping action all those things you know um they can really they they need to be very clear and sometimes that means that they need to be exaggerated and it just creates a more appealing performance and especially with cartoons like a very with very comedic sort of cartoons exaggeration is your best friend usually just go as far as you can go and it will it will be fun you know so i think it's something present you know exaggeration is present in basically all the principles and it's something that you should keep in mind because creating very subtle things and animation is pretty hard so it's usually better to go the other way and exaggerate so the other more general principle is appeal appeal is mostly about a quality character design and not just character design really just a prop design and backgrounds layouts and all that it comes it only really works with experience but you know if you're looking at animation classics especially the old disney movies you see that even the most despicable villains are very entertaining and appealing again they have very solid designs and appeal has a lot to do with good draftsmanship and it is again i think i can talk more about appeal if i go to solid drawing so solid drawing i feel it's it came from when sorry let me think that through a bit a little better so solid drawing you know it's it's probably the most important when we're talking about hand drawn animation but again solid drawing isn't just about the act of drawing in general it's also about the composition and again knowing what is most appealing but i think it still is very important even in types of animation that you don't really have to actually draw much like you know the paper doll animation or 3d animation but having an idea about you know what visually works best is still very important knowledge and a lot of people you know especially again i am talking mostly about hand-drawn animation now but the general advice is that don't even start animating if you still haven't figured out how to draw you know because it's way too many things to think about and you will get more quality animation by having more solid drawing because animation to create believable characters it's a lot about creating depth and let's see so the book that i've been using for most uh the most reference in these principle lessons is the illusion of life by frank thomas and ollie johnston and they give this really good tip about avoiding twins as they call it it's a very common mistake when people are starting to draw and especially animate is that they won't only draw but anime characters moving sort of in this mirrored uh fashion you know the the hands do the same thing and you know even their their placement you know they are straight ahead looking at the camera and you know these sort of angles if you look especially at film not animation but you know live action first off camera angles are very carefully chosen and rarely will someone be looking straight um towards the camera and again good actors don't usually act uh in this symmetrical way you know there's um usually this asymmetry is a lot better and it's not only about how things are you know making each side look different but obviously this is a very simple drawing but i i wanted to to sorry i i got lost in thought there so and it's not only about the pose but what's also important in avoiding these very flat angles in your drawings is that it also creates more depth to your character so having these little overlapping lines like over here on the leg maybe on the arm you know having your face in perspective this is a very you know simple drawing but if your character has eyes usually you know the eyes will be in perspective as well and you know making your character look like it has mass like it has volume is also very very important and actually in this example i might have not uh made yeah i did not make a very good example of something is that you know you should avoid parallel lines and here i do that a lot and so in my case this isn't even the most solid and appealing drawing ever but animation favors organic shapes and more fluid shapes more than very rigid ones especially again with hand-drawn animation and you know the book talks about a lot about these organic shapes that aren't symmetrical you know usually you know they will be like they just do these really abstract drawings about you know the kind of lines that you should look for when you're drawing let me see yeah just in general things uh already the shapes themselves they will um they will oh my goodness what's the word okay so the shapes themselves should suggest movement you know not just on the animation itself because animation means movement but even on this shape and again this might have not been again this might not have been the best example i was mostly just talking about twins but for example when people are constructing characters for people paper doll animation my my speaking is terrible today sorry um so when people are creating characters for paper doll animation you know they usually work with shapes and i'm actually going to construct a character in one of the next lessons but it's so common that let's see i'm just gonna pick like gray you know they draw the head sorry let me prepare things properly so in very you know beginner sort of animation especially when people are drawing with uh sort of paper doll styles we see extremely rigid and just very geometric things and i'm not saying that the drawing can't be geometric because you know people who pull off the geometric style it can look really good but i'm talking mostly about just this sort of drawing where you know things are extremely straight you know and even and way too symmetrical as well that's why an animation [Music] as i was speaking you know we rarely draw characters looking straight at us because this straight design is not very appealing you know we usually want you know the three quarters because it just creates a lot more appeal you know you can you have this fluidity of you know the profile and all that stuff and a lot of characters are designed to only be looking sideways and never um and never forward we see you know if you've watched phineas and ferb how phineas is basically a triangle i don't remember how his hair is but you know he he's and in some episodes they make the mistake of making him um look forward and it looks awful you know they make him sort of like this and then his nose is looking up and i don't know who had that idea because the purpose of the character was never to look directly forward and again with paper doll animation the exact thing happened where people because they're working with very uh very flat shapes because this sort of geometric style is it really is more practical to work with but kind of how i was i'm gonna draw with the pencil i really can't keep working like this you know they make the the arms and they're gonna be extremely rigid and well even anime sort of corrected that for me animate itself doesn't really like straight shapes with the brush and it loses so much of that appeal that i was talking about because i feel like solid drawing it creates a peel and it's you know again those are i feel like those two principles are almost the same i just feel like appeal is a more is a broader term it comes down to like design principles and all that whereas solid drawing is the more technical approach and it's just a more specific part of appeal so again i was talking about paper doll characters and i feel like i'm gonna go more in depth in that in in the video i actually create but you know you can still apply uh hand-drawn you know like hand drawing and handmade things to paper doll characters and that geometric style it really is a trap if you don't really know what you're working with so last but definitely not least is staging and this one is definitely the most general principle but i think the most important i think it takes everything in account and again it's a very uh general term but let's start from what the what the word might already make you think um so about the stage of it makes you think about the stage like in a like in a play or the scene itself so taking for example the short film i i directed um staging is a lot about being as clear as possible in in your work so if the scene is supposed to be spooky make it really spooky so you know i put all the elements that make someone realize this is a spooky scene you know the the dark forest the creepy eyes looking back you know the character being you know scared because being scared of the dark uh it really this is this has a lot to do with staging you know just you know making sure that her expression is readable and everything you know points towards this feeling that you want the viewer to to feel when they're watching and the same goes to you know i also wanted on the same short film to show the forest in a completely different light quite literally and make it look like a safe and you know good place to be in and you know with the color palette even the angle the the elements on screen they you know they all convey what i want what i want with this environment let's see and you know staging can also be related to acting and that comes from your character's body language again when i was talking about a secondary action i said it had a lot to do with staging because it makes the action that your character is performing clearer because you're adding more and more things that are pointing towards that let's say the emotion that they're feeling right and staging also has to do again with visual being visually clear as in let's see the angle that you're shooting let's say um shooting we wouldn't we don't really have a camera here but anyway you know you want you want the angle and the composition of your scene again to favor whatever you're trying to say there so if a character is pointing at something not only let's say again the problem with the straight angle you know it's not very good because the silhouette for example isn't very readable because again here the silhouette is clear because we can clearly see where that that arm is pointing at you know and the whole thing with silhouette also has to do with solid drawing you want your characters to have a clear a clear shape and here if we were to just fill this in you wouldn't see his arm much at all not completely you know actually the the arm that is resting here is clearer than the one that is actually performing the action so it's only it's actually drawing the intention away so again staging it really comes down to every single principle you know how you're animating things how you're drawing things how you're placing things in a scene and yeah it just sort of i feel like the the principles as you study them they become broader and broader and at the same time it also feels like they're becoming more and more specific so there are principles that talk about everything and there are principles that are extremely specific about what they're talking about like overlapping action versus just the word appeal in general you know they are very um they really made a really good job with how they organized the principles because i feel like it's a very effective way of remembering each of them so yeah that was the end of the principles next up i'm just going to make some more specific applications of adobe animate you know you see me working on it and i want to talk about some more technical stuff for last so next up i'm going to talk about more you know software specific things and anime before we wrap everything up but i really wanted to talk about the principles and you know also give some examples and show you how i work in this software because when you know the principles you can animate in any way be it on paper or basically any software you know there are people who animate on softwares that don't even have animation um interfaces you know people really find a way to create an animation somehow you know even if it's just by creating individual drawings and then compiling then them in some sort of video editing software you know the soft the the animation software it's it's here to facilitate things obviously and if you have access to one such as adobe animate that's great but knowing the principles knowing the theory and you know practicing animation no matter how you're doing it it's the most important part and the rest is you know just technical stuff however there are things that yes it's important to know specifically how to work inside the software and i'm gonna uh talk about that in the next classes such as you know how to build up a scene in this software how to create a rigged character and how to you know create that hierarchy of body parts but i'm not going to go into detail right now but yeah i hope this was informative bye bye hey there congratulations on completing this free four and a half hour adobe animate essentials course it's a pretty awesome achievement and i hope that you have enjoyed it you are now ready to get started on creating some cool stuff if you would like to uncover all the hidden tips and tricks of working with adobe animate click the link below in the description box the beginner to advanced course consists of many more hours of exercises and demos which will turn you into a pro in no time you will be able to learn more about animating and work together with the instructor on many awesome projects if that sounds like something you want go check it out thanks for watching and see you soon