Trying Out a New Animation Program (P. 3)

                                                           Click here to read part one and two.

If you got a post that was very short and all caps in your feed, and shortly after was deleted, that was because I was claiming my blog on Bloglovin'. Since it wouldn't allow me to paste the code to claim my blog on a page or somewhere else, I had to make a post in order to claim it. So you didn't miss any important posts, and that's why that happened. 

Anyway, onto the actual subject of this post. I have been working on animation, and doing more with Adobe Animate. I also tried some animation on Photoshop since that is a software that can be used for animation. In the end I found that Adobe Animate was the easiest for me to use. 

                    Keeping consistency 

One thing I struggled with in animation is keeping consistency. A lot of my older animations did not have consistency, and after a while you couldn't tell who or what the thing I was animating was supposed to be.  So, I decided to try it with this animation: 

Adobe Animate has the ability to easily copy and paste your drawing, which is something I did in this animation but something I didn't do in the other animation program I used. I animated a flour sack character, which is a kind of stock character, since it is used as a way to practice movement like walking and jumping. 

I felt like I figured out how to keep some consistency in this animation. Though one thing I wish I had done was to add more squish and squashing, which is something I find I struggle with in animation, and is something I feel I must improve in the future. 

This is another animation I did. I decided to move the circle and then animate the legs and ears later, it made the animation seem a bit more consistent. 

                              Squish and squash 

Though this animation was made before the other ones (and in Photoshop, which can do animation), I felt it really helped me figure out squish and squash. Though I still feel like I have a lot to learn. (If the animation doesn't repeat, just refresh the page). 

This one has a little less consistency than the other ones. This is partly because I was animating in a different program, and it wasn't allowing me to copy and paste at all. 

Overall, I have found that I have difficulty applying squish and squash to characters, but am able to do it with objects like bouncing balls easily. So this is something I am going to keep practicing.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Have you ever done a flour sack animation? If so, what did you animate it doing?

-Quinley 

Trying Out a New Animation Program (P.2)

                                    Click here to read part one if you haven't already 

 

Having had used a bouncing ball as a test, I decided to apply what I learned by trying out layers for the first time in Adobe Animate. The program allows you to have a lot of layers. 

In this project I ended up using four different layers: one layer for one of the figures, one for the other figure, another for the background, and the last one for color. 

A lot of the animations I made prior to this were not colored. I only used one layer and redrew the background each time I drew a frame, which was very tedious and at the end didn't make it look very good.  Which is why I'm glad this program allows you to have more than one layer. 

I also did an animation of Elm and animated her hair moving in the wind: 

I really like how it turned out. I used four layers for this one: one for the color, one for the hair, one of the figure, and one for the background. 

In the future I plan to post animations that are longer than a few seconds. For now doing animation consistently and doing short animations like this, helps me get back into the habit of animating.    

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Of the two animations I made which one is your favorite? 

-Quinley

Trying Out a New Animation Program (P.1)

Since people gave me positive feedback about my post  describing plans for my future animated short film. I thought I'd tell you more about the animations I am working on, and how it is has been going. I am trying a new program (Adobe Animate) for animation. The animation program I was using before (SketchBook) wasn't working for me (if it works for you that's awesome). 

Since I am trying out the new program, I have had to play around with it, so here is what I did: 

                                          Step 1- Getting it to work/Trying it out  

I decided as a test to do a simple animation technique, the bouncing ball.  From here on, these are my notes that I captured as I was animating: 

Given that I don't fully know how the program works, I thought I should start with something simple and move on from there. I figured out that Adobe Animate can in fact be used for 2D hand-drawn animation, and not just puppet animation, by doing this simple test. Though I did run into things that were bother-some.

This was very annoying to deal with

 Adobe Animate makes it difficult to add a frame for some reason, and I had to draw and then press delete in order for the program to understand that it was a new frame. This made it very tedious over time: to press add frame and then delete over and over. 

Why is it selecting this? 

When I first started using the program, it would just highlight what I was drawing but it didn't do that when I moved to advanced mode instead. These are just some annoying starting points, which is  what happens with every software when you do it for the first time. 

                               

                                                 Step 2- Making a coherent animation 

Now that I know how it works I decided to make a short bouncing ball animation (which is also a thing that you do when you're a beginner animator): 

This is definitely not an animation I'd upload to my YouTube channel or one that I feel super proud of, but it is a very good starting point for animating something simple when you don't know the program that well and are trying out a new animation program. 

Step 3- Color! and a Background!

One thing I wanted to do, that my other animation program made difficult, was to do color and a background. I figured I'd try it out with Adobe Animate (as a test, like before), so I used the same bouncing ball animation I made and this time added color: 

It worked really well, so then I added a new layer (it allows you to have many layers) and created a background (though I did have to move the layer down and copy it in order to do so): 

And it worked. 

Since this is going to be a series, the future posts you will see regarding it will not be test animations (though there will be a few here and there). Instead I will show you what animations I make with the program. 

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Have you animated before? If so, what animation program(s) did you use? 

-Quinley