by Joseph Bowie
So you're a glutton for punishment, and you want to forgo all of Lightwave's fancy buttons and network rendering for a more tradition style of animation, hearkening back to the good old days of Disney' golden age and Saturday morning cartoons. But you're also lazy, and you want to do it all quickly and digitally so you can email it to the up and coming whippersnappers whose attention spans run shorter than a flea's big toe nail . Well, it's not too hard. All you need are a few choice Adobe products , a good mouse , and the will to click it a lot . My favorite application to draw animated sequences in is Adobe Illustrator. It's vector based, and has lots of features that can make your sketches look good and your life easier, such as outlines, gradients, and guides. The most important asset Illustrator offers for our purposes are layers. Each layer can represent one complete frame of a sequence, even if it's comprised of hundreds of miniscule shapes, and still remain completely editable. This is important when you import the sequence into After Effects to animate it. One of the nifty time-saving tricks I use when animating in Illustrator is copying and pasting the last frame I drew into a new layer, and then just tweaking it rather than drawing the whole figure over again. You can make sure the shapes in the different frames are in the exact same place on the screen by using the Hollow Arrow tool to drag corresponding points onto each other when the Snap to Point option is turned on in the View menu. |
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Once you have a sequence of pictures drawn, you can open it in After Effects, selecting the Import as Composition option in the Open dialog. This makes a new composition of all your pictures on top of each other sized exactly to the most extreme points on each side. If you change the size of your sequence images later, you'll have to resize this composition in After Effects manually. To animate the sequence, you need to make each image last for a certain amount of time and in the right order. There are a few ways to do this, but the most reliable in my experience is to manipulate each image's In and Out points in the After Effects timeline window. Use Option+] on a Mac or Alt+] on a PC to quickly set the images' Out points so that they last one frame, or however quickly you want them to go. Then simply drag the layers around in the timeline window so that they show up in succession when played. It should look like a stairstep of layers, but you can also fudge things around if you drew the images out of sequence or something.
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If the animated images don't look right and need adjustment, simply edit them in Illustrator, save the file, then right-click on the file in the After Effects project window and choose reload. This is one of the nice things you can do with the mouse that the pencil can't. There's no wasted paper when you can click on undo!
The frames per second setting in the composition dialog box is very important when manipulating your images. The more frames per second you use, the smoother the action, but the more you have to draw. Video is 30fps, films are around 24fps, but most animation is done at 12fps. Disney uses 24fps for its big titles, though they have dozens of (paid) artists working to fill all those frames. 8fps is regarded as the lowest you can go and still fool the eye with your visual trickery. One side benefit to using a lower frame rate is that your file sizes will be cut down dramatically, making them faster to email, download, and stream online.
