#15 Too many characters

Everything's moving sort of fast now. I realized that I only have a week to complete this, and I haven't even finished designing the characters. I might have to do it outside of school. Nevertheless, I'm changing the type of hair the girl has to number three (refer to the last post if you don't understand). That way, not a lot of focus can be put on animating the follow through in the hair.

The proportion/reference lines I will come back to while animating.

Added clothes and color (even though I'm not going to use color for the final animation). She's very tomboy-ish looking. Just for fun and testing some color theory, I put color. I made her clothes very unsaturated so her skin colors could pop out. It looks alright.

It's the end of the week. I think I'm going to finish this outside of school, but I won't make a post about it. That'll have to wait until next year. Now that I think about it, I probably won't post next week. If that's the case, have some fun holidays people.

#14 Character Design & Story

The sound clip came out on the 11 second club website! You can go to it here, or you can read the transcript here:

Voice One: "I don't need to settle down. Tell him! Saul, tell him."
Voice Two: "Carrie... you're not yourself."
Voice One: "Of course I am!"

So by the sound of this, Carrie is Voice One. There's a Saul and a "him" in the scene, and one of those two is behind Voice Two. So three characters will be in the setting, but I'll only have to really animate two of them.  Also, I didn't post anything last week, because I forgot there there was a break for Thanksgiving. I say that to excuse myself for not having the character designs made yet. I'll need to that now...
  

Side note:I was being stupid and saving on jpg. 

I'm now using png.

Without focusing on the story going on in the sound clip, I made the designs for the faces of the characters (this is going to be Carrie). I started out with number one, and I kept refining the construction/proportion lines to find a good model for some 30-year old looking people. Number 6 is when I stopped, deciding it was good enough.

Because I'm stupid, I spent an insane amount of time planning how her hair would look. Going from left to right and top to bottom, I chose number six. Carrie sounds like one of those last century girls that feels she needs to look pretty to get a good husband. Thus, attractive, flowing hair would fit her perfectly.
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OK, I feel like I need to get a rough story people can follow before I go any further. The story is the driving force behind everything, including character designs, so I need to get that on lock-down. I got so caught up making Carrie's Design, I forgot why I was even doing it.

Really quickly, I've come up with the idea that Saul is Carrie's significant other. He has been diagnosed with some sort of disease that turned him into a really depressed dude (how I'm picturing him is sitting on a wheelchair, not talking, not moving, looking down at the floor. Expressionless throughout the whole scene). And this third guy, "him", is Saul's friend. They are all at the hospital where Saul has just been released from. Carrie and Saul's friend have just been told by the doctor that Saul won't get better. This is how they're handling it.

That's it. I ran outta time. I've got to get faster with this planning stuff. 

Until next week!

#13 Title Not Found

I didn't have time to do much this week. With no idea of what I'll do for my long video, I just decided to make another gif...

It's not that great, but it gave me time to think about what I'll do.

I noticed that I suck at animating faces. If you look at the gif above, you'll notice that the face goes all over the place. I want to get better at that. And also, what I suck at the most is at making someone talk (You haven't seen my attempts. They're bad).

Now, a website that I frequent gives animators a small audio clip to animate. It's a monthly challenge where the winner gets the chance to have his/her animation critiqued by a person currently working in the animation industry. I'm probably not going to win since there's people way better than me that enter the competition, but I'm still going to try. It'll give me a chance to see how sounds work in PS and (more importantly) how to animate faces without making them jump around.

As for how I'll go about it, I decided to wait until this month's competition ends so I can start at the beginning of the next one. Next week, I'll create two character models in anticipation of the next voice clip. I'll make a funny and a serious looking character whose genders could easily be reversed for conveniences' sake. If I have extra time, I'll learn how to import sound and make it work in PS. I have yet to look at how that works.

That's it for this week. As a goodbye, here's the sketch I started out with to figure out what my gif would be about.

:D

#12 Are we humans... or are we flamingos?

Tadaa!

I learned this, from my last study:

I'm posting this first so that it'll appear as the thumbnail for people following me. Nobody's following me, but it's good to plan ahead. I like looking professional, haha. 

Anyway, first comes the planning talk...

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My Model Sheet.

 

I figured out the guy's anatomy under the cape. And to see how expressive his figure is, I tried to simplify him,  his name being Elodie, to the point where he's just two shapes. I think it looks pretty good.  I forgot that I wasn't going to use color, so there's no need to worry about this guy looking like Harry Potter. Now, I have to make the Ostrich's Model Sheet. The design of these two need to look connected somehow.

This was really quickly made, so it's not worthy of looking all professional. His glasses were originally supposed to fall off when he transformed, but this is better. His cane is the only thing that falls, which I think to be rather fitting for him.
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So that's all I wrote for the last step of planning. The next part is the animation talk.

This is going to sound crazy, but listen... I like it! My plan for just focusing on what I wanted to learn worked!

 I decided to make it super simple, so I could focus on just the transformation. The things I didn't like was how 2d it ended up looking (because it was just a boring side view), the choppiness of the flamingo, and the rough lines. The rough lines was a dumb mistake. I left the brush as a pencil tool thinking I was going to fill in the animation with color later, even though I said I wouldn't be doing that. The paint brush would have left a smoother line. But gladly, the rest was just extra stuff I didn't really want to pay attention on.

I'm just glad the transformation looks awesome! I would've liked to add more frames so everything could look smoother. But I think I did a good enough job to pat myself on the back. I understand now that, when morphing things, you just have to know where everything begins and where it's going to end up. If you know that, the inbetweening will be a piece of cake!
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*Cue: Human by The Killers*

And that, ladies and gentlemen, marks the end of the second season of this blog! Sadly,  this is the last study I will make for a while.

Anyway, next week I'm going to start planning for my first short film, which will be made exclusively in Photoshop (and probably edited together in Premiere, which I already have some knowledge on... So it's all good there...). It will be from thirty to sixty seconds long, and it will be amazing. I have no idea what it's going to be about, but just know that it will rock your socks off.

This post has gone on for far too long. If you've made it this far, thanks for reading. I will stop... now.

#11 It's Morphing Time

Yo.

This is my last study before I try to make my own short, 30 second long video. I'm scared. Although I am feeling pretty confident about how to use Photoshop.

This time, my study will be over another one of the French school videos, Chaman. I'm sorry for making all of my studies over videos from the Gobelins student animations. It's just that I've found that they all have an insane amount of variety and creativity.

Trying new things out for the blog.

This is a clip from Chaman.

That scene above is the one I'm going to learn from. Only looking at the 'birdman', I love the fluidity of the transformation. To be honest, I have no idea how Vincent Nghiem managed to make everything flow from one extreme to the next. The eyes, nose, and mouth move with a crazy amount of clarity. It looks simple to make, but I really doubt it's going to be easy to mimic.

I also like how it has the same color scheme as my Gific (Comic Gif) from last week.

My friend, Humza, gave me a cool idea for my study. He told me to make a guy with a limp turning into an ostrich. It sounds really hard, and I'm probably going to get annoyed from not doing it right again. But I want to make it. So screw it.
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I made some characters for my cripple:

The numbers, from least to greatest, are the ones that I like the most to the ones I like the least. I'm going with number 2, because his pose is cool and his cape falls over him in a more fashionable way.  Actually, now that I think about it, he looks a little bit like Harry potter. It's probably just because of the color of the cape. And the glasses. But I want to show the glasses falling off of him when he transforms, so I don't want to take that off...

OH WELL. I'll just change the color of the cape.

Also, the cape was just there for decoration, but my teacher thought it was going to be the tail of the ostrich when he transformed. That idea sounds cool, so I'm going with it. I'll come up with everything else next week.

I feel like I'm a bit behind schedule. Again.

Sigh.

#10 Double Digits!

I whipped up a cheap script really quickly.

That's what Mitch is supposed to say. He's going to be all emotionless throughout it, but then he's going to whip out a small smirk after saying the last line.

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And here it is! 

INTROSPECTIVE TIME

I was going to make it just one gif, but I found that it lagged too much if I did it like that. Also, if you haven't already noticed, I didn't have time to finish it all; I didn't even get halfway. That's the problem with animation, everything takes too long to make. And yet again, I didn't even get to the part that I really wanted to work on.

Maybe this says something about me. I wanted to really focus on animating the words coming in from the guy, but I told myself I was going to do that last so I wouldn't be distracted by trying to finish the whole thing on time. You can see how well that turned out. I think I'm a guy that's more focused on the story side of things than the actual animation.

Still, I didn't start this blog to figure out what I like (well, maybe a little). I started it to learn new styles and processes in animation. That's why I won't focus on producing a completed gif next time. I want to focus on actually learning what I intend to learn. 

For my final study, I'll only work on what I want to learn. That might mean the whole thing won't look polished, like no color or smooth lines. The good thing will be that I'll know how to do the thing I actually set out to learn!

Okay, I'm done being so negative. I'll now briefly talk about what I really dug about this "gif comic". Three things, the character, the colors, and the flashing screens effect. You sort of saw how I came up with the character. It came through a creative session I was going through. Now with the colors, I thought of them by first picturing the flashing blue TVs. I thought, "how can I make the character stand out with this mayhem in the background?" So I just went and added some complimentary colors. And the color of the letters was, I guess, a tribute to Annie.

The flashing TV screens are the effects I loved making. That's the one awesome thing I can take out of all of this. I would make a tutorial on how to make them, but I don't have the time to. I think people would have wanted to see that... Sorry. Maybe next time, when I won't be too busy filling in the colors for every freakin' frame. 

Anyway, thanks for reading about my problems. It feels... weird.

#9 I can't say no to Annie

Have I been writing my posts in past-tense? I'm pretty sure I have, since I would usually write them at the end of the week. I don't want to check. I'm just writing this to say that I'll probably start writing in the present tense. That'd make things funner to read, I think. It makes the reader be more involved with the writer. I've only begun to think of this now, so don't judge me.

Anyhow, today, I'm going to start studying the effects in Annie. Upon seeing it, though, you'll notice that it barely has any effects. So what I mean is that I'll study the "word pop-up" effects. I like how they  used intricate lettering to add to the story. I know they probably used After Effects for the glows and maybe some gradients, but I want to be able to make the style just on Photoshop. That's what this blog's about, after all. (That is what I'm afraid of though, that I might have to learn a little about After Effects to see how it connects with PS. I don't mind learning it, the only problem is that the computers I use will more than likely not be able to handle the program.) Oh, and here's the making-of of Annie from one of the animators.

Here's what I'm going to make my study animation have from trying to mimic Annie's style:

• Pop-up words
• Glow to objects
• Active background, probably by flashing screens (although I won't make it as exaggerated to not cause any seizures. I'm tired of making crazy gifs like that.)

To try something different, I won't spend much time studying the short film. Instead, I'll focus on developing my own little clip.

I took the flashing screens very literally. Making this small doodle gave me the idea to make a commercial by a very apathetic man advertising a TV Emporium or something like that. Sadly, I probably wouldn't finish in time. So I'm just going to keep this shot and make the man talk about all of the different features these TV's have or something like that.

These are some character designs I made for the clip. I'm going with the guy on the top right. I'm also going to make things look cool by putting my name on pictures. It makes the sketches look really professional. It's cool! 

Colors add so much. I feel like an actual character designer now. If only my gifs looked just as cool. Maybe I should post the URL of the blog on the pictures in case people see the blog and want to share certain things with other people. I could become popular!.. Hmm, I hadn't really thought of all these things until now. We'll see what happens.

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I wasn't able to start on the actual animation, but a lot of the planning has been done. All I need to do now is actually make the clip. That's what I'll be working on next week. Wish me luck!

#8 Expressions to the Extreme

NOTE: Sorry I'm uploading this late again. When I was planning my schedule for this new season of learning PS, I didn't plan ahead for holidays or when I would get sick. I planned on spending two weeks on each study (refer to the last post if you don't know what I'm talking about), which would give me a total of five days of working on it at school. These two weeks, I only worked on it for three days, so this study didn't end up being as informative as I would've liked. But on the next study, I think it'll all be well. So...

Let's keep it going.

Let me just start by gushing all over Jelly Sunday's animation, because it's pretty awesome how much they were able to convey with such a small number of keyframes. To show an emotional change in the little girl's face, it goes from one drawing to the next with no inbetween except a small anticipation at the beginning. An example of this is at the 20-second mark. I loved that, because it expressed a lot of emotion, but it didn't require much work on the animator's part. And seeing why my animation from last week didn't look so real, I realized that the girl in the short film had a pony tail which kept moving after she went from one pose to the next. Basically I forgot to include some follow-through in my animation. It just made me see how much of the detail in the video was thoroughly thought out.

By the way, I use some words that might not make sense to people reading this if they don't know about the animation principles. If you want to learn, this video explains them perfectly.

Onto the next part of this post, here's the thingy I ended up making:

12 fps 

There are a lot of negatives about this animation, but there are also some positives. First, to start with the positives, I just want to say that this has been my longest gif. For that reason, I also had to cut back on some of the quality. Secondly, I really liked how I didn't have to put much effort into everything. I also liked the colors (although not the color's animation) and the follow through I was able to create with the ears.  

I will now stop boasting about my skills. Here's the negatives...

This animation sort of sucks. I think it's because I  just created this character out of the blue without planning ahead. His proportions change from one pose to the next, and it makes it have a very unprofessional quality to it. Adding to that, I should've moved his body as he changed positions. He looks really stiff. That's what the girl in Jelly Sunday looked like too, but it worked because she didn't have to turn around as much as this guy. 

It's also my style to add wobbly lines to static poses so it looks like the character's still alive. I never noticed until halfway through making it that Jelly Sunday didn't feature almost any wobbly lines. I hate myself for not noticing, but not as much as I do for not making his facial expressions as exaggerated as they could've been.  It looks like I didn't even try to exaggerate his face. That was the key thing I wanted this animation to have. I guess I just lost focus throughout making it. I need to focus on staying focused!

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Next week, the gif I post will be a rough animation of the one I will finish the week after that. I noticed that I don't have time to create a separate gif every week; I will just focus on making an amazing one every two weeks! That's all for this week guys. Peace out.

#7 Season Two of learning PS

For the next couple of weeks,  I'm going to shift the focus of this blog from learning about Photoshop's tools to learning about how other animators use the program. But since it's an incredibly hard task to be able to copy someone else's art style, I'm mainly only going to focus on replicating some part of their animation style. I'll just write down the films I'll study first, so I don't have to keep looking every time I'm done with one:

• The First one I want to focus on is Jelly Sunday for an attempt to animate people in a simple way. I'll be looking at Florian Parrot for this.
• The Second one is Annie for learning how to do effects. I'll look at Xavier Sailliol for this.
• The third one is Chaman to learn how to morph one thing into another, and I'll look at Vincent Nghiem for this.

It took me a while to find all of these. I guess this week was spent just watching some cool short animated films. Also, I missed a day of school this week, because I wasn't feeling well. So I'll start for real next week. I still wanted to do a gif though, and who's to say I can't do it from my house?

12fps

This is the type of animation style I liked about Jelly Sunday, but I'm going to try to make the whole thing way better next week. This is too simple. I know I said I would only focus on the animation side of the videos I'm studying, but if there's time, I think I'll also look at the art style.

See you next week!

#6 Rotoscoping

I finally finished it!

15fps

This took so much time, I couldn't make a post last week. Now that I'm finished with it, I can talk about the torturous workflow I had to go through. And if you don't want to read it, all I can say is that rotoscoping sucks.

So this is what happened.

I asked my buddy, Humza, to do something in front of the iMac's camera. He did some weird eyebrow dance for, about, ten seconds. When we were done recording on Photo Booth, I moved the video clip onto Photoshop. I think Photo Booth automatically records at fifteen frames-per-second so I was grateful for that when I noticed that those were the video settings on PS. At this point, I realized that ten seconds is a lot, so I decided to shorten the clip to two seconds, trying my best to make the video look like it loops just by where I decided to start and end it.

After that, I created a video layer, which is the one I would use to draw on. To not make the video distract me so much, I lowered its opacity to 30%. Then, with the new video layer I had on top, I began tracing my buddy's face frame by frame. The eyebrows were on a different layer so I could play with them without screwing anything else up. The body was also a static layer underneath the face's video layer. I only colored the whole thing, because the lines of the body were showing up behind the face as it moved. This reminds me that I forgot to color the whites of the eyes.

Oh well...

All in all, it was extremely boring. I don't know how people work on rotoscoping without passing out from boredom. It's a lot of work, and the feeling of accomplishment isn't as much as when you create something from your imagination (for me, at least). At least there's no doubt that the animation is going to end up looking good since you're basically just recreating the video reference.

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I think I'm done with learning the basics for photoshop. I want to learn more complicated things about it so next week, I'm going to try to mimic other people's animation style. My plan is to find three animators and make a short animation for each one of them to learn how they do things. Next week, the new season of Animating on PS begins!

#5 Brush settings are neat

To learn about the brush settings, I visited the Photoshop Essential's Brush Dynamics Tutorial here. I'm a big fan of Pascal Campion's work in Photoshop. He makes a digital painting in less than two hours each day, and it always ends up looking beautiful. The thing that gets my attention are the textures he's able to bring to his  illustrations. I'm pretty sure they're made using personalized brushes, so learning how this works is a big deal to me.

First of all, I need to explain what Jitter means. It's in most of the setting options, and I was pretty confused as to what it was. So now that I know, I can say this: Increasing the jitter of something increases the randomness of it.

Shape Dynamics- The first thing one can change in the brush dynamics window. It has the option to change the brush's size, angle, and roundness. They're all pretty self explanatory except for the roundness option. If you increase the roundness, the brush looks more like itself. If you decrease it, the brush will look flatter. So if your brush looked like 'O', decreasing the roundness will make it look like '()'.

Scattering- There are two options to understand within this option: Scatter and Count. Scatter means how far the brush will be scattered around the line you draw in. Count means the rate at which the brush will get repeated as you keep drawing.

Texture- This setting confuses me. I can just tell it requires texture files to do things, and I don't plan on bringing textures into what I'm doing for a while. So I don't have to learn this yet...

Dual Brush- This puts in a second brush of your choice inside the first brush. You can also choose the rate at which the second brush is applied, how big it can be, and how much of it there is.

Color Dynamics- The main thing about this setting is the Hue Jitter. This changes the color of the brush as it's applied. It creates a rainbowy look. The other parts of this setting pretty much just stem from that.

Transfer- This messes with the opacity. That's it.

Brush Pose- So supposedly, this setting changes the tilt/pressure of the brush, but since the tablet I have isn't tilt sensitive, I can't do anything with it. Whoops.

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These next settings don't have options within it. They're more like checkboxes. I'm cool with it, because I was beginning to think I wouldn't be able to remember all of this. I guess that's why I have this blog.

Noise- This just adds a more grainy look.

Wet Edges- I'm a bit confused by this brush, but as far as I can tell, it makes the brush have a lower opacity. It also makes the edge of the brush a bit darker than the inside of the brush.

Build-up- I have no idea. If it's actually changing something of the brush, it's not something noticeable.

Smoothing- I have no idea either.

Protect Texture- Like I said before, I'm not going to be messing with textures. I'm sure this has something to do with textures, but trying to use it with a brush that has no texture doesn't do anything to it.

I don't think I'm going to mess with these last settings. The options I ended up being more interested in were the ones on top. Anyway, now I think that I'm going to start rotoscoping!

I still don't know how to edit my layers on the timeline. So I had to set this gif to 60fps to make it work with what I wanted. Each picture lasts like 5 frames though. At least this one is less seizure-inducing.

#4 Tools and Layers

Hey.

How's your day been?

Why aren't you talking? It's okay to talk to a computer.

...

Yeah, if you talked, you're crazy.
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Anyway, sadly, I think I haven't explored more than twenty-five percent of the tools and layers part of PS. That's why this post is going to be all about that.

Just to be clear, I just talk about what caught my attention. This blog probably wouldn't be the best for beginners on the program, even though I only know about brushes and making new layers

SO.

Tools

The stuff that everyone is supposed to know how to use.

Note tool- This tool is to place small 'notes' on the document. I imagine it'll help to remind myself to fix anything or something like that.

Dodge/Burn/Sponge tool- If I want to add a simple shadow, highlight, or if I want to take away color, these tools would help. The dodge tool is to brighten areas up. The burn tool is to darken them. And the Sponge tool takes away the color. What's cool about these brushes is that the edges of the brush are blurred out, so the brush blends with the other colors.

Mixer Brush tool- This is one of the most useful tools I found just now. It's like the Dodge/Burn/Sponge tools, but I can choose the color and change the properties of the brush. I can't find these types of properties in the normal brush tool.

Pencil tool- It hasn't relatively been that long since I learned about this. I like this tool, because the bucket tool works with it. With a brush, if I fill in an area, it leaves a little white line between the border line and the color I tried to fill in. I hate that about the brush. But I think that the pencil is exclusive to line art. The pencil tool doesn't have an opacity property you can change, so you're stuck with the opaque versions of the colors you choose. This is unlike the brush tool, which has properties that help it blend with other colors.


Layers

Blending Modes-

I was looking at the blending modes for the layers (since I've barely touched them. Ever.), and I was a bit overwhelmed. So I visited this website I found:

http://www.photoshopessentials.com/photo-editing/layer-blend-modes/intro/

I'm just going to copy and paste the most important piece of information I thought helped me understand the blending modes:

"...there’s really only five main types of blend modes. There’s ones that darken the image, ones that lighten the image, ones that both lighten and darken at the same time to boost contrast, ones that compare pixels between different layers, and finally, ones that affect either the color or luminosity values of an image."


It all clicked for me when I read that. The five blending modes are even separated between one another with small lines in PS itself. If it's still confusing, look at the article on the website. It's a little boring but helpful, nevertheless.


Blending Options-

I just stumbled upon this by double clicking a layer... I don't even...

A window popped up which shows you a lot of options to change the layer you selected. I don't think I'm going to have time to thoroughly go through this window. A quick pass through everything in the window made me realize this can be very helpful in creating shadows and highlights on the object of the layer. That's all.

Adjustment Layers-

I don't think I have to go through this. They're mostly used to change the color/tone of the layer. I think most of it is just for color correction.

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I think that's it for now.  The only other thing I want to focus on is brush properties. Maybe in here I can get the brush to have the same properties as the mixer brush tool.

12fps. Did this with the pencil tool. The color fills were really easy to use. It reminded me of the good old times in Flash. The blending options of the layers helped me make the shadow. It was so easy, I'm beginning to love what I happened to stumble upon!

#3 Going back to Kindergarten with Filters

Well here goes my next post.

This week, I became a little kid again and touched everything I could put my hands on. By that, I mean that I looked at everything Photoshop had to offer. I played with all of the filters,  tools, blending styles, etc, but I didn't think much about everything. I was just window shopping, seeing what would look good with what I would want to do. Some of the effects that I could make looked good, so I took a note of them here. Later, when I start making long animations, I can come back here and figure out what to do when I want to have a certain style.

I'll first write where to find the effect, then I'll write what one could do with it. Again, these are just effects I like. They're not everything Photoshop has.

Filters

Filter --> Filter Gallery... --> Artistic Folder --> Cutout

Self Explanatory. If applied to a picture, it will turn it into a sort of collage-looking thing. It makes the picture look like it was drawn. I could use it as a shortcut for making backgrounds, because it keeps the "animated film" style.

Filter --> FIlter Gallery... --> Artistic Folder --> Glass

Also Self Explanatory. This filter would, like Cutout, help with making the background, but I could also add it to an illustration instead. It takes a picture, then it puts an imaginary 'window' in front of it, creating ripples and bumps in the photo.

Filter --> Distort --> Wave...

This probably can do a lot more, but this filter could create a cool broken TV look. You know, like when the image looks barely coherent and it's getting wavy, then pixelated. It'd be hard to animate though, because it only changes the image. There's no option to animate it... Like every other filter.

Filter --> Blur --> Lens Blur...
There are a lot of blurring options, and all of them have a slight difference as to what they do. Lens blur, for me, would be the most ideal to use. There are a lot of small things you can change to the type of blur within this option, and it blurs an image like how a camera would blur its image.

Filter --> Noise --> Add Noise...
To those who know what noise is in movies, then you probably know why I would choose this. When selected, it adds a grainy, realistic look to the image. It adds more tone/feeling to the image, in my opinion.

Filter --> Render --> Lighting Effects...
I don't really know how to explain this. With this effect, you can highlight an area, and it'll turn brighter. The rest of the space will turn darker. It's like adding a 2D spotlight to the image.

There are probably more filters that I would want to use, but I was just testing all of them out with a picture I found in google images. Maybe some of the effects were made to better work with illustrations.

I want to make a gif for every post to keep honing in my photoshop skills. Sorry if I give seizures to anyone. This one was at 15fps.

#2 Got to start somewhere

I remembered seeing an article on Photoshop animation on www.Newgrounds.com, a website that's full of animations made on flash. This is where it's at. As of now, there's a part one and a part two. I will probably be using these articles very heavily. To start, I saw this video...

And I made this...

12fps animated on Photoshop with a tablet!

It's really cool. It's not as hard as I had thought. The only complicated part was making the actions. In Adobe Flash, there's default hotkeys for making a new frame and such. In photoshop, that doesn't exist, so you have to go through a huge process before you're able to make a new frame. Actions let you record the process. All you have to do is set up what you recorded to whatever button on the keyboard you want, then, when you press the button,  the computer goes through the process by itself in less than a second. It's like creating your own personal hotkey.

Next time, I'm going to focus on learning more about photoshop's tools. I feel like I still don't know much about the program besides the brush, eraser, and bucket (and, now, it's animation tools!).

#1: Intro to Me

What's up everyone. I'm Felipe. I'm creating this blog to capture my journey in learning how to animate in Photoshop and, maybe even, learn more about Photoshop. I have already used Photoshop to draw and paint, but I have never tried using it as a way to animate. That has always been an Adobe Flash thing for me. Flash was made for animation, and Photoshop was made for Editing Photos. It was later discovered to be a great tool for illustrating, and then it turned out to also be useful for animating.

I had never put too much thought into learning Photoshop. I didn't have the money to buy it, but then I saw all the great illustrations people were making with it. When Adobe CC came out, I snatched a student/teacher edition for a cheap price. I started learning Photoshop to draw/paint, and as I was watching tutorial videos for it, I saw that there were some animations made with it. That was the moment I realized Photoshop had an incredible capacity to create very original styles with Animation.

Now I want to learn everything about Photoshop. This blog will help organize my ideas and keep everything I learned in a nice, stored place. I'll update this every week with a summary of what I learned, what I'm doing, and what I'm going to do next week.  And I'll try to keep it interesting. It's boring when I try to force myself through a wall of text. It's painful. And who knows, maybe this blog will help anybody else trying to animate in Photoshop.

Animated in Flash with a mouse...