My third year film made at Cal Arts! It follows the story of a young girl named Maddy waiting for her mother and father.
This is a very quick tutorial that goes over one function, the Onion Skin in Photoshop CS5. The Onion Skin is equivalent to the function of a light desk for traditional animation. If you haven’t already, please see my first tutorial about [basic timeline animation] if this is your first time animating.
Start by making a new document and drawing on Layer 1 (in this example, held for 2 frames).
In the animation panel, on the bottom you will see a little icon that looks like an onion. When you hover over it, you’ll see “Toggle Onion Skins”.
Click on it.
You won’t see its effect until you’ve drawn more, but before that, go to the animation panels settings. There will be two options: “Onion Skin Settings…” and “Enable Onion Skins”. Click on the first option.
These are the Onion Skin options. Adobe has a description for each function on their site…
Onion Skin Count specifies how many previous and forward frames are displayed. Enter the Frames Before (previous frames) and Frames After (forward frames) values in the text boxes.
Frame Spacing specifies the number of frames between the displayed frames. For example, a value of 1 displays consecutive frames, and a value of 2 displays strokes that are two frames apart.
Max Opacity sets the percentage of opacity for the frames immediately before and after the current time.
Min Opacity sets the percentage of opacity for the last frames of the before and after sets of onion‑skin frames.
Blend Mode sets the appearance of the areas where the frames overlap.
Generally I don’t play around with these, and for this simple tutorial, they’ll remain at their default settings.
Create a new layer, “Layer 2”. Although it is a blank layer, with the Onion Skin on you can see a light render of the previous frame.
Go ahead with your next drawing on Layer 2 using the Onion Skin’s function as a proportion and movement guide. I’ll be animating a sneeze.
Continue on with the rest of your animation as usual.
A clearer example:
And that’s all there is to it. When you’re done, turn off the Onion Skin and play your animation to make sure it looks good (although you should be constantly going over your frames (scrubbing) to keep everything in check anyway).
The final product:
Achoo!
Kungfu Cooking Girls - 2011 - 9min
Short-film by chinese indie Wolf Smoke animation studio.
…. she bites her lips a lot.
Roger from One Hundred and One Dalmatians , animated by Milt Kahl .milty milty milty
on milt could make a pencil test look like a clean-up drawing
what a beast
Disney’s Pocahontas
reblogging for my hard on for fluid hair animation <3
I actually just had a vagina boner that is beautiful
let’s take a moment to thank my professor for this u_u
The whole film took me altogether about 5 grueling months (usually 10-12hours a day) to do. I often felt my butt was going to grow into the chair I usually sat at.
Please note that this was simply my way of doing my film to achieve the soft-shaded style I wanted; there are many other ways of doing this and some are a lot faster with different results~! :)
- My film on DeviantArt | My film on Vimeo
- My film gifs on Tumblr
- You can see my storyboard animatic here (although the original had music, but like I mentioned, my placeholder music was by Joe Hisaishi, you know, Miyazaki’s composer, so it’s not really legal to upload it).
This tut differs a bit from my dA version, because tumblr lets me put the combination of gifs and jpegs :D.
Here’s a book that will really help you start animating:
here’s some books that are good for composition, storytelling and colours:
- Dream Worlds: Production Design for Animation
- The Art of Pixar: The Complete Color Scripts and Select Art from 25 Years of Animation
- Prepare to Board! Creating Story and Characters for Animated Features and Shorts
I hope these helpedI ask that no one removes the credit or source for this tutorial/guide please. thanks :)
Ack, I completely forgot to add that before you guys do backgrounds and animation and after you have a satisfactory storyboard animatic, it’s good to come up with a colour-script for your film so you know how your film feels with which colours, etc.
This was some of the colour script for my film:
sorry, it was late last night and I forgot D;
Sym-bionic Titan Art Tribute
Sym-bionic Titan was an animated series which aired in 2010-2011 on Cartoon Network. It displayed some stellar animation in Genndy Tartakovsky’s unique style. What I particularly liked were the background designs, managing to be detailed yet clean and simple. I highly suggest that people check out the series, particularly if they’re animation fans.
before I suffered through the untimely end of GLTAS, I suffered through the untimely end of SBT. I loved this show like no other show. That’s why I can’t let them cancel GLTAS…. not again. never again.
Disney’s Pocahontas - Original “Finale” Rough Edit
Brb, I’ll be in the corner, crying.
THIS IS WHY WE CAN’T HAVE NICE THINGS
ASDFGHJKL
So I wrote and animated this tutorial for people working on my short film Bothered, but I figured it would be useful for all animators, particularly beginners. I borrowed some of these concepts from this awesome packet done by Jon Hooper and Michel Gagne, which is also pretty great!
Can we just for a moment actually look at this from an art/animating view?
I like this gif. I really do. I find Jack attractive, and it’s not just because I like teenage boys with white/silvery hair. But as I’ve been looking at it I’ve been noticing all these little things that make CGI movies so realistic in a way, nowadays.
- The strings on his hoodie. As he turns, they move the way you’d expect them to, they look like they have the right weight or something. They fall the right way. Someone watched people turning around in hoodies and made sure this was right. A+ on the physics engine and the lighting system in this movie.
- At the ‘end’ of the loop watch his chest. He’s breathing. ”Of course he’s breathing,” you might say. But he’s breathing. His chest is expanding, like a real chest, not just from sighing or anything, but from just standing there and being a human. You don’t even notice it, like you don’t really notice the breathing of yourself, or your friends, or your family, or anyone else. It’s one of those things that brings subtle life to things and I’m just completely taken over it.
- His ear. ”But Melissa,” you say again, “It’s a fucking ear.” Yes. Yes it is. It is a stylized ear, but look at the lighting. It looks like it’s glowing red dully, and that’s not because he’s frosty and people get red on their ears when they’re cold. It’s because light is going through his ear, and showing the blood in it, and so it looks red. You never really think about it, but ears are pretty thin, and when the right light is on it you can sort of see through it. But only a little. You can see the insides. You know what I mean.
- When he’s turning, his right arm is reasonably loose, and you can see the subtle movements from centrifugal forces or whatever, that his arm moves out and then back in again, and his hand moves with it in a way, and it’s adjusting the staff so that it stays on his shoulder instead of just flinging off into the sunset. And if you look, the staff is making the proper bobbing for balancing, and it’s just like AJDFKSJAFJSDKAJFDA
- His hair. It moves and bounces just ever so slightly, and it’s so shiny and perfect, and I want it, and ajfDSAJFSAKJFSAJFSajfksxjvkaskreqw /dies
- You can’t see it well in this, but throughout the entire movie when there was a particular closeup of Jack’s eyebrows, I was in love. Sure, from far away they look like they’re just dark, but up close there are silvery white hairs in his eyebrows. There are actually a lot of them, but they’re mixed in ever so slightly and it’s giving me an art boner. I recently had to do a lot of work on hairlines and eyebrows, and you don’t really realize how important highlighting a few hairs here and there makes it so much more realistic than just a dark smear for an eyebrow. As for why they decided to make his eyebrows dark, it’s because white eyebrows on a very pale person looks very strange and uncomfortable. It doesn’t show up well on screen, for one, and emotions are shown much easier if the brows contrast with the skin. The same goes for eyelashes. Light eyelashes look unsettling, because we’re so used to seeing darker lashes break up the white of the skin and the white of the eye. (I understand this point is moot with people who aren’t pasty white, but Jack is pasty white.) From what I’ve seen, facial hair is commonly a little darker than head hair on white folks. Unless you’re a weird ginger. But getting back to his eyebrows, it’s fantastic that there’s brown and silver-white in there AND THEY HAVE INDIVIDUAL HAIRS ON HIS FACE
- Also this son of a bitch has remotely realistic fingernails and I was freaking out because nails are terrifying to me.
- The frost details on his hoodie reflect more light than the fabric and it’s SHINY.
And that’s why he feels real.
I think this film definitely deserves a lot more credit for it’s flawless animation.
And aside from Jack Frost, I kind of want to start talking about how Tooth was brilliant. Because seriously, her feathers were God damn realistic as hell and her movements didn’t odd like I expected they would.
Because it irks me when there are those films where there’s a Human/Fairy thing just looks awkward because they’re not really flying, they’re just hanging in the air and looking like they’re dangling from a string. BUT TOOTH WASN’T LIKE THAT. KUDOS TO YOU, ANIMATORS.
And the reason it looks so perfect is because they did a craptonne of tests so that when they animated her, they’d make her fly realistically instead of just thinking something like “U NO WUT SHE CAN FLY COZ MAGIC AND WINGZ LOOK PRETTY SO WE’LL KEEP THEM ANYWAYZ”. No, her wings actually do something. Or at least, they look like they do.
“… tests based on a very simple hummingbird dragonfly kind of creature, with a little bit more weight because she’s bigger.”
OKAY, RIGHT.
I’m not an animation expert, I don’t study graphic design anymore at all, and physics and I broke up ages ago and it was a very messy end to our relationship, but although I’m stupidly educated in the ways of those important life things, I can still recognise when something moves the way it should.
Or maybe I suck and I have no clue.My favourite thing about the baby tooth fairies has to be the feathers though.
Their tail feathers fan out, but you don’t really notice it when you’re watching because it’s so quick and you’re not meant to be focusing on that part of the screen. But they’re all animated individually. They’re all doing different things, their tails are fanning at different times to different degrees, it’s just. WHUT.
HOW
DO YOU
ART AND ANIMATION?!
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