At last, I’ve got to the end of my Cartooning Animate Tutorials by working out how to get a couple of pteranodons gliding through my scene. Not quite in the way described in the tutorial but at this stage I’m just pleased to have got it to work. Having established the principles, I should be able to do something more creative.
Tag: Adobe Animate
The Monster Book
Perhaps I should have left it in it’s component pieces as in my previous post, but no, I just had to see it animated.
As previously, this is animated using Adobe Animate but the set up here is slightly more complicated as each component – arm, jaw, leg – is a separate Movie Clip Symbol on a separate layer.
A Monster of Many Parts
The final animation in the Cartooning book and this time it’s getting quite ambitious, constructing a dinosaur from separate pieces of artwork, so it will be animated like a cut-out shadow puppet. I look forward to seeing how it works out but I like it at this stage, in its component pieces. It reminds me of plastic dinosaur construction kits. In the mid-1970s I had to supply illustrations for John Man’s The Day of the Dinosaur. I bought all the dinosaur kits that I could find and presented them to my brother Bill who was recovering from appendicitis. Being the caring brother that I am, I also supplied him with the appropriate plastic enamel paints and got him to paint them too. I’ve still got all the models.
Shape-changer
Continuing with the simple animations from the Cartooning book, here’s an exercise in shape changing. Hissey and Tappenden didn’t specify that these mysterious events should be taking place above the little town of Horbury in the Calder Valley, but why not? This is a Shape Tween in progress.
Adobe Animate Shortcuts
As with any Adobe software, you can speed up your workflow in Animate by learning the keyboard shortcuts and Hissey and Tappenden include a helpful list (in Flash, but the keyboard shortcuts have been retained in Animate). Getting really familiar with these by sticking a few labels to my Microsoft Sculpt Ergonomic Keyboard also helps me grasp the basic workings of the program.
Dog-eared
Another simple animation from The Professional Step-by-Step Guide to Cartooning by Ivan Hissey and Curtis Tappenden. This is about as simple as animating gets: one layer is the paper background, then there’s the puppy, minus its left ear, and finally the ear itself, pivoting up and down on an anchor point on the puppy’s head.
You convert the ear into a Symbol and the book mentions that in Flash you can store as many as 16,000 symbols in the library! Probably more now that Adobe has replaced Flash with Animate, but I intend to keep things as simple as possible. One Symbol is a start though.
Flying Saucer
After quite a break I’m launching myself back into animation with this tutorial from The Professional Step-by-Step Guide to Cartooning by Ivan Hissey and Curtis Tappenden. Writing in 2010 they used Adobe Flash but I’m using its replacement Adobe Animate.
We have lift-off!
Desert Opera
Still on the ‘just keep drawing’ prompt from Mattias Adolfsson’s The Art of Sketching course, I was beginning to run out of abstract shapes as a starting point for my drawings. The abstract curves that I started off with suggested a roof or a tent and by the time I drew in the stone steps and circular base I found myself thinking about a stage set; one with a revolving stage.
For the characters that might inhabit this desert base, I was thinking of an opera, perhaps a Philip Glass production, but inevitably in setting it in the 1930s or 40s I’ve ended up with Indiana Jones stereotypes. Although the zookeeper with the camel, if drawn in Hergé’s ligne claire style, could have a walk-on role in a Tintin adventure.
Like a Rubber Ball
Continuing with Richard Williams’ Animator’s Survival Guide, here’s my second attempt at the bouncing ball. Williams doesn’t suggest the set of steps, that’s just something that I couldn’t resist trying.
I did think of doing this again using stop action and a coin but I’m keen to introduce an element of drawing. This is still deliberately basic: it would be easy to have the ball squish slightly as it hits the step but Williams advises that it’s easy to overdo that kind of thing.
I used Adobe Animate to add movement to a single Fresco drawing, saved as a PSD Photoshop document, with the ball on a separate layer.
For the sound of the ball bouncing I used a pair of trainers, banged together. I couldn’t keep up with the speed of the bouncing ball, but it was so satisfying to cut and paste the soundtrack to match the precise moment that the ball makes contact with the step.
Camel Train
At last I’ve got those camels actually walking across the Gobi Desert. This is another Adobe Animate scene for my rhubarb animation, drawn in Adobe Fresco on my iPad Pro.
Mammoth Task
As a change from Character Animator, I went to another Adobe program, Animate, for the mammoth sequence. There’s a tool that adds a mesh to my drawing, so that I can deform the shape from frame to frame. Also very useful is that if I bend the trunk on frame 25 of a sequence it will add a smooth transition. When I worked on Watership Down we had key animators, who drew the start and finish of the movement of a character and other animators who filled in the gaps, a process known as tweening.
Once I’d mastered the techniques of tweening and warping the mesh, I then had difficulty bringing the whole thing together. My final lesson was that everything: the mammoth’s trunk, its right ear, its left ear and even the tusks, which don’t move at all, needed