IntroductionWelcome| 00:00 | Hi. My name is George Maestri and today we are going to be
looking at cartoon animation using the After Effects Puppet tool.
| | 00:08 | I'm an animation writer, director and producer and I own a
studio in Los Angeles called Rubber Bug and we do a lot of cartoon
| | 00:16 | animation and we've really had a lot of fun with the new After Effects
Puppet tools. So what we are going to show you in this project is
| | 00:23 | one of the first titles that we did actually using this tool,
which is this particular title called Minute Monsterpieces,
| | 00:28 | which is just basically a little one minute monster movie and we'll
go ahead and show you that film and then show you a making of.
| | 00:35 | Now the Puppet tool is a great new way
| | 00:38 | to animate characters in After Effects and anybody who is
doing this sort of work will really benefit from knowing how to
| | 00:45 | use the Puppet tool. In addition to that, I'm going to be
covering a lot of other techniques for animating characters in
| | 00:51 | After Effects such as lip sync and as well as creating segmented
characters with movable joints as well as other things.
| | 00:58 | And we're also going to take you through the process from
initial creation all the way through to final product.
| | 01:02 | So we'll give you kind of the taste of how
to make a completed film in After Effects and
| | 01:08 | using some other packages as well. In addition to After Effects,
we use Adobe Photoshop CS3 as well as Adobe Premiere CS3,
| | 01:16 | although these aren't as necessary. You can certainly use
other packages such as Final Cut for the video editing.
| | 01:22 | Anyway so that's the big overview of what we
are going to be doing, so let's get started.
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| How to use the exercise files| 00:00 | Before we get started, I do want to say that if you're a premium
member of the www.lynda.com Online Training Library or if you're
| | 00:06 | watching this tutorial on a disc then you have access
to the exercise files used throughout the title.
| | 00:12 | Now the exercise files will be on the disc or you'll be able to download
them and they will come up in this folder called Exercise Files.
| | 00:18 | Within this folder, you'll have a directory called Monsterpiece
which has all of the assets for this project. So we are actually
| | 00:25 | going to be jumping around a lot throughout
these directories and I will describe why
| | 00:30 | we've named these the way that we do as we get into organizing
this project. Now it's probably best that you just put this on
| | 00:37 | your Desktop but you could put it anywhere. Just as long as you
know where this folder's at and can get to it, you should be fine.
| | 00:44 | If you're a monthly or annual subscriber to www.lynda.com
then you don't have access to the exercise files, but you can
| | 00:50 | certainly follow along from scratch or
create your own assets. So let's get started.
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1. Getting StartedProject overview| 00:00 | Hello. I'm George Maestri and today we're going to
be working with character animation in After Effects.
| | 00:06 | Now you may know After Effects as a
compositing tool or as a motion graphics tool,
| | 00:12 | but you also can do some very advanced
character animation in the program.
| | 00:17 | We are going to be working with a
project called Minute Monsterpieces,
| | 00:21 | which is a short one-minute monster
film that we did in After Effects.
| | 00:25 | Now, the reason I chose this project is because it
shows a lot of the different techniques that you can use
| | 00:31 | to create character animation in After Effects.
| | 00:33 | We are going to go over the Puppet tool, we are going
to go over lip sync, dialogue and some special effects.
| | 00:39 | In fact, we are going to go over
the entire production of the film.
| | 00:44 | This is also a bit of a tutorial on how to
produce a short character animation film.
| | 00:50 | Before we get too far into it, let's go ahead and take a
look at that film that we are going to be working with.
| | 00:57 | Now, this is the folder that we actually
used for production and I wanted
| | 01:02 | to show you how we organize things, so
let's just go ahead and go into there.
| | 01:06 | And in here we have a directory called Final.
| | 01:09 | You can just watch the movie here.
| | 01:11 | Now I have created this at medium quality, so that
you can download it, so that it's not too big.
| | 01:17 | And I am just going to go ahead and show you
the movie that we are going to be working with.
| | 01:21 | (Movie: Greetings and welcome to Minute MonsterPieces.)
| | 01:28 | (Movie: Today's MonsterPiece is Frankenstein.)
| | 01:31 | (Lightening strikes.)
| | 01:36 | (Movie: Meet Doctor Frankenstein and his assistant Fritz.)
| | 01:39 | (Movie: Frankenstein is obsessed with creating
a human being from the ground up- literally.)
| | 01:46 | (Movie: So it's off to the graveyard they go!)
| | 01:49 | (Movie: Er. So it's off to the graveyard they go.)
| | 01:54 | (Movie: They pick up the parts, put them
together, pull the switch and bingo!)
| | 02:02 | (Movie: Ha-ha. Instant monster!)
| | 02:05 | (Movie: But the monster takes off
with Frankenstein's girlfriend.)
| | 02:10 | (Movie: Villagers figure enough is enough
and end the creature's reign of terror.)
| | 02:19 | (Movie: Or do they?)
| | 02:29 | And there you have it.
| | 02:30 | So that's the movie that we are going to be working with.
| | 02:33 | Now let me scrub through this and
I'll show you some of the techniques.
| | 02:36 | First off, we have dialogue and so we are going to show
you a little bit about that. Some of the Puppet tool,
| | 02:42 | which we are using to animate the arms of this character and for
example, right there where he bends over, that's all Puppet tool.
| | 02:49 | I am also going to show you little bit of special effects
such as this shot here and we're also going to show you how
| | 02:56 | to move characters around such as running and
jumping, so here is where he runs through the scene.
| | 03:01 | So we have got a good variety of shots in this short little film.
| | 03:04 | So let's go ahead and get on to working
with character animation in After Effects.
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| Original storyboard| 00:00 | So let's start at the beginning where this project started.
It started with conversation between myself and the creator
| | 00:08 | of this project, the guy named Charlie Largent who actually
created the storyboard for this. Now most animated projects
| | 00:15 | that you create, especially storytelling projects, you really
want to create a good storyboard and Charlie created
| | 00:21 | a very good storyboard for this, it was almost identical to the
original film. And I actually have this in that Exercise Files directory.
| | 00:29 | In fact let's go ahead and open up Photoshop
| | 00:31 | and open up that file. So I'm going to go out to my Desktop
| | 00:35 | and in that Exercise Files directory, we have Monsterpiece
and I have a directory out here called Storyboard.
| | 00:43 | So from there I can open Storyboard1 and Storyboard2.jpg.
| | 00:49 | So once I open those you will see the storyboard files
themselves. Now these were actually fairly small movies,
| | 00:56 | these are actually at a 100% I believe.
| | 00:58 | In fact, let's just see what these image sizes are.
| | 01:01 | It's only 600x500, which is actually very small considering
how many images are on here. But again he just wanted to
| | 01:08 | email me a very quick sketch of what this film would be.
So from this actually we created the whole film and if you
| | 01:16 | notice a lot of this is very similar to the final film. There are
a few differences here, one of the things is we added the cat in
| | 01:24 | with the announcer here and there's a couple of other
differences with the monster showing up in his underwear,
| | 01:29 | which is something that we added later.
| | 01:31 | But generally the whole flow of the story and all the shots
are pretty much there. So as you can see we start with the
| | 01:36 | opening scene and Charlie's been nice enough to tell us
what happens. We didn't quite have the dialogue at this point.
| | 01:42 | But it pretty much tells us story through the pictures.
And so this is basically the first storyboard here and then
| | 01:49 | the second storyboard has pretty much that same look and feel.
It's a smaller file. So we actually had a total of about 10 shots or
| | 01:56 | something like that. So it wasn't that big, but it can
certainly tell you how a storytelling project takes shape.
| | 02:02 | So from this storyboard what we had to do is we had to actually
put this together to get a sense for how long this film will be.
| | 02:09 | The dictate from the client was to make this approximately
one minute long, as close to one-minute as we could make it.
| | 02:16 | That's why it's called Minute Monsterpieces as we try and tell a
monster story within a minute and that was kind of the theme of this.
| | 02:24 | As I started bringing in this art from the client I needed
to set up things like directories and that sort of things.
| | 02:29 | And I'll tell you a little bit about our directory
structure in the next lesson so let's move onto that.
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| Organizing production directories| 00:00 | So in any production you really want to set
up a nice logical way of storing your data.
| | 00:07 | One of the things I find in production and as you get into it
is that you always have to keep going back to old projects.
| | 00:14 | If you have a project for example,
I had a project that I did last year
| | 00:18 | and the client called and they wanted
something from that project.
| | 00:21 | If you have a standard way of storing things then you can
easily go back through your projects and kind of find things.
| | 00:27 | So we kind of have a rough way of doing our directory
structure for our projects here at Rubber Bug.
| | 00:33 | This maybe a little bit different from other studios but
again the most important thing is that you have a method.
| | 00:39 | It doesn't really matter what your method is.
| | 00:40 | It is just that you have something that you know and that
works for you and that is fairly consistent between projects
| | 00:47 | because then as you go back to projects or
if you've set something aside from month
| | 00:51 | or so when you come back you can still kind of
find everything and that's really important.
| | 00:56 | So in this Monsterpiece directory is pretty much what we
had on our main server here and I have kind of copied most
| | 01:02 | of the files down, although I think I have left some of them out
because this actually worked out to be a pretty huge project.
| | 01:08 | We did have to prune out a few things.
| | 01:10 | But let's take a look at some of these directories.
| | 01:12 | First thing we have- let's just go from top to bottom here.
| | 01:15 | We have an After Effects directory so what
we tend to do is store our project files
| | 01:20 | or our application specific files
such as After Effects projects here.
| | 01:25 | And let's go ahead and view this
as a list here so you can see this.
| | 01:28 | So basically what we have here is we have
a lot of our After Effects files so Shot1,
| | 01:34 | Version1, Version2, Version3, Shot2 and so on.
| | 01:38 | So these are all just our After Effects projects.
| | 01:41 | Here we have assets that we create here at Rubber Bug.
| | 01:45 | So these are modifications to Photoshop files, titles, whatever.
| | 01:50 | Audio, this is all of the audio for the project including
raw dialogues, special effects, the music and so on.
| | 01:59 | Final, this is where we put our finals.
| | 02:01 | Now, actually our real directory
has different versions of this file.
| | 02:05 | So we will have high res versions of this, we will have
a flash version that we put up on our website and so on.
| | 02:12 | So we try and keep master copies of all of our files here,
although I am, again, I am pruning down some of these.
| | 02:18 | Stuff that we get from the client.
| | 02:21 | Now when we work on projects a lot of times our clients
will be sending us images, they will be sending us dialogue,
| | 02:27 | anything that we get from the client we typically
put in this directory that it says from client.
| | 02:33 | Now one of the things we got from our client, and we consider
Charlie, even though we are kind of working with him in tandem,
| | 02:38 | we can kind of consider him to be the client because he
was the one who is actually feeding us all this stuff.
| | 02:43 | So this is all of his original art is coming into this directory.
| | 02:47 | Now we have another directory here for Premiere
and that was our video editing application.
| | 02:52 | And what that is, it is basically again just like
with After Effects, it's all of our project files.
| | 02:58 | Renders. Anything that had to be rendered
out before final assembly goes in here.
| | 03:04 | Storyboard, we have seen this.
| | 03:05 | This is our main storyboard.
| | 03:07 | And tests.
| | 03:08 | Sometimes we will do tests, that sort of thing.
| | 03:11 | Things that we know that we are not really going to keep
and I really don't like keeping those in the renders folder
| | 03:16 | because sometimes the task may just be
a still image or something like that.
| | 03:20 | So typically we'd put those on a separate file.
| | 03:22 | If we need space or something like that, we can delete it.
| | 03:24 | We know it's kind of superfluous to the final projects so
we don't kind of clog up our render directory with tests.
| | 03:31 | So those are the basics of our directory structure.
| | 03:36 | If you are doing sort of project like this again, create
something that's logical and create a filing system.
| | 03:42 | It really, really helps when you
are doing any sort of large project.
| | 03:46 | So let's go ahead and move on to
actually starting to create this project.
| | 03:49 | We are going to start by doing the Leica reel and so I am
going to go ahead and go through that in the next lesson.
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| Using a rough soundtrack for shot timing| 00:00 | As you start any animated project, you need to get
a sense of what the shot timing is in the project.
| | 00:07 | Now with this particular project, we had about 10 shots and
a lot of it was narration, so one of our first goals was to
| | 00:14 | just kind of roughly time the shots against the narration,
so we had a kind of a rough estimate of how long each of these
| | 00:22 | particular shots would be.
| | 00:24 | Now before we did that we had to have some sort of dialogue
track. Now at this point, we hadn't found our dialogue artist
| | 00:32 | or actually a voice talent yet. We were still kind of searching
for that, but we wanted to get started on the project.
| | 00:37 | So we have lot of shots that weren't particularly tied to
dialogue, so we could actually start animating those first.
| | 00:43 | So what we did, we just recorded a scratch
track. I'm going to go to the exercise files here
| | 00:49 | into Monsterpiece and under Audio,
you'll find one here called Monsterpiece-track
| | 00:55 | and if I load that up, you will hear basically this rough track.
Actually it was Charlie, the artist who did this and he was kind of
| | 01:02 | one of the big forces behind this and he actually just recorded
that on a cheap microphone, maybe even his laptop microphone.
| | 01:09 | So you can hear there is a lot of background noise in this
track, but I just want to play you just a small snippet of it here.
| | 01:15 | Let me go ahead and hit Play here.
| | 01:17 | (Movie: Greetings. And welcome to Minute
Monsterpieces. Today's monster piece is Frankenstein.)
| | 01:28 | OK, that's enough of that. So you can hear that
was very noisy, kind of not that great of recording,
| | 01:35 | but for the purposes of getting started which we really needed to do, it
was good enough. We knew we were going to replace it with really good audio.
| | 01:43 | And the most important thing for us at
this point was just to get rough timing, so
| | 01:48 | once we have this track we can actually start to use this
to time it against the storyboard to create the Leica reel,
| | 01:54 | so we're going to go ahead and do that in the next lesson.
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| Creating a Leica reel in Premiere Pro| 00:00 | Once we have a rough audio track and storyboard we can kind of
merge them together to make a Leica reel or a storyboard reel.
| | 00:09 | Now for us we are just doing this for our own internal purposes.
| | 00:12 | Sometimes you'll want to do this for client so
you may want to up the quality a little bit.
| | 00:17 | We actually did a very rough one.
| | 00:18 | But let me show you a little bit about the process of doing this.
| | 00:22 | We used Premiere so actually I am opening up
Premiere here, but you can certainly use any video editor.
| | 00:28 | If you are using Final Cut or whatever.
| | 00:31 | Really all we are doing here is matching audio to still images.
| | 00:34 | In fact you could even do it in After
Effects if you wanted to do it that way.
| | 00:38 | For some reason we kind of have settled on Premiere as our
Leica reel and final editing at this particular studio.
| | 00:45 | So let's go ahead and import some files here.
| | 00:47 | Let's go to the Desktop\Exercise Files\Monsterpiece\audi
and that particular track that I played you
| | 00:54 | in the last lesson was called Monsterpiece-track.
| | 00:58 | I can certainly drag that to the Timeline
but I also need some visuals to go with this.
| | 01:05 | Now I have the original storyboard files
here so I am just going to import those.
| | 01:09 | Those are actually in that same Monsterpiece
directory under Storyboard.
| | 01:13 | So I am going to click and drag those two in
and those are still the ones that I showed you
| | 01:18 | at the very beginning which have 1, 2, 3, 4...
| | 01:21 | 9 images on this one and I believe
like 6 or so on the second image.
| | 01:26 | So these are images that really have
multiple storyboard panels on them.
| | 01:31 | Now one thing I could do is I could actually bring
this into Photoshop and crop them and save them
| | 01:37 | and create a series of 15 or so storyboard panels.
| | 01:41 | But again I am doing a rough Leica reel for my own purposes.
| | 01:46 | So I'm just actually going to use this one image and
I'm just going to zoom in on the particular parts.
| | 01:52 | Now what I'm doing here in Premiere may be a little
bit different from how you do it in Final Cut.
| | 01:58 | You can also do this in After Effects very easily as well, but
let me show you a little bit about this particular process.
| | 02:04 | What I am going to do is click and drag this
storyboard panel here and it shows up here.
| | 02:08 | This is my Edit window here.
| | 02:10 | This is actually my Source window here,
for those who don't know Premiere.
| | 02:14 | So this is where my actual content is coming.
| | 02:18 | And I can actually here that's scrubbed
against this soundtrack here.
| | 02:21 | So if I hit Play...
| | 02:23 | (Movie: ...MonsterPieces. Today's MonsterPiece is Frankenstein.)
| | 02:30 | OK. so now I have a little cut right here between
Frankenstein and when we actually start this,
| | 02:36 | so I can stretch this one still image so that actually goes
from the beginning to the end of this particular scene.
| | 02:44 | But I only really want this first panel
because this is actually showing all of them.
| | 02:49 | So what I can do in Premiere, just
double-click on this and go over to Effect.
| | 02:57 | When you go to Effect what you can do here is- I don't
want to change the opacity, I want to change the motion.
| | 03:03 | So we go to Motion here.
| | 03:04 | We can actually scale this up.
| | 03:07 | And if I scale it up to- actually I have
this number already written down here-
| | 03:11 | about 335 I can pretty much get one of these panels in here.
| | 03:16 | So it's a little over 300% zoom and you get one of these panels.
| | 03:21 | And then what we can do is use this position ones here.
| | 03:25 | So you can see I am just clicking and
dragging on this particular numbers
| | 03:29 | to actually position which one of these panels we want to see.
| | 03:33 | In fact I have already written down my numbers here, so 800
for height and somewhere around 1000 for the x-position here.
| | 03:44 | Actually that's a little bit off so I
can actually just click and drag this.
| | 03:48 | So now that I have this pretty much
set, I've got my first panel done.
| | 03:56 | Now I need to do all of these subsequent panels.
| | 03:59 | Now I click just drag this from my bin and do that zoom
thing again with this particular image but the easier thing
| | 04:07 | to do is take this one that I have
already zoomed and just copy it.
| | 04:12 | So I just hit Copy and Paste.
| | 04:16 | OK. Or Ctrl+C Ctrl+V on the PC; if you are in
Final Cut, it's going to be Apple+C and Apple+V.
| | 04:23 | And now I can take the second storyboard
panel and I can just again,
| | 04:28 | using the positioning controls- let
me just type in a number here.
| | 04:33 | I can just go on to that next panel.
| | 04:39 | Somewhere around there, somewhere...
| | 04:41 | So this is a part where it says meet Dr.
Frankenstein and his assistant Fritz.
| | 04:45 | So now I have got that one already set.
| | 04:49 | So I can now cut to this.
| | 04:51 | Notice that there is actually a pretty big space in the
dialogue and what we are going to do here is start cutting
| | 04:57 | and manipulating the dialogue track so
that we have a good even flow of the audio.
| | 05:04 | And again this is a scratch track so I might leave a
little bit of space and I am going to err on the side
| | 05:10 | of going a little bit long because
that way we can always cut down.
| | 05:13 | If we animate a little too much it's a
lot easier to cut it than to add more.
| | 05:18 | So once we have done all of that, let me go ahead and open
up the project for the actual Leica reel that we finished.
| | 05:25 | And I am going to go into my Desktop again, Exercise Files.
| | 05:32 | And there is the Premiere directory and
under that is Monsterpiece Leica 01.
| | 05:37 | You will find that.
| | 05:40 | And if you open this it's actually going to ask for the file.
| | 05:43 | So it's going to ask for Storyboard.jpg.
| | 05:45 | I actually renamed that to Storyboard1.
| | 05:47 | So if you just select that it will pick that up and
then it's going to ask for monsterpiece track.mp3
| | 05:53 | and there is one called monsterpiece track.wav,
which is what we are actually going to be using here.
| | 05:59 | And here it is, OK.
| | 06:01 | So it's essentially what we have been doing which
is taking these individual panels and zooming in.
| | 06:07 | Let me go ahead and mute the audio
here so I can just scrub through this.
| | 06:11 | So we actually are scrubbing through all of our shots.
| | 06:13 | And we get some timing here for like where he is zooming out.
| | 06:17 | So we can get some nice timing so we can
kind of get a sense of how that plays.
| | 06:22 | So here it comes.
| | 06:23 | He kind of zooms in and out and then he
reaches in and grabs Fritz and drags him off.
| | 06:30 | Again I am trying to get a rough sense of this timing and then
there is a couple places here where I actually did a little bit
| | 06:37 | of zoom in, again using this Motion Controls here.
| | 06:40 | So for example, with this one where we zoom
into her mouth, I am just setting keyframes.
| | 06:45 | In Premiere where you can set keyframes
for this position and scale.
| | 06:49 | And for opacity as well so you can fade out.
| | 06:53 | Again very similar thing, we are kind of
doing a truck in here and then the end.
| | 06:59 | So that's the basic Leica reel and
you can certainly play that back.
| | 07:03 | And we just saved it out to a QuickTime
so that we had it as a reference.
| | 07:08 | Now another thing that we needed to do with this,
from this we actually create a tracking sheet
| | 07:12 | and I am going to show you that in the next lesson.
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| Tracking projects| 00:00 | So once you have your Leica reel cut and you've
got your timing and you like the way it's going,
| | 00:06 | the next step is to actually create a tracking sheet.
| | 00:09 | We call it a lead sheet and other studios call
it by other names, but essentially what is it,
| | 00:14 | it's just a sheet where you list all your
shots, start and end times and you can track it.
| | 00:20 | We do ours in Excel.
| | 00:22 | You can certainly do it just by scribbling on a piece of paper.
| | 00:25 | Back in the old days when we really didn't have
computers, we actually just created them on ledger paper.
| | 00:31 | It doesn't really matter how you create
it, but it's a good idea to create it,
| | 00:36 | so that way you can track your show
and the progress of your animation.
| | 00:40 | So I am actually bringing up Microsoft Excel
and this will be very self-explanatory.
| | 00:44 | I actually put those out on the discs, so you have a
rough template here under Exercise Files, Monsterpiece.
| | 00:50 | I actually have two of these, one is a Blank
Lead Sheet for you to use on your projects.
| | 00:55 | And I have another one called Monsterpieces Lead Sheet.
| | 00:58 | And I am going to go ahead and open that.
| | 01:00 | And essentially what this is, it's just a sheet
that has each individual shot, a start frame,
| | 01:06 | the end frame and then the length of each individual shot.
| | 01:11 | And then I also have a few other ones here and what we
usually do is we just print these out and then when I hand it
| | 01:18 | to the animator, they can just put their initials
in here when this particular shot is done.
| | 01:23 | In fact let me show you how these forms are filled out.
| | 01:25 | I am going to go ahead and open the blank one.
| | 01:28 | And I have set this up with some
formulas, so it makes it very easy.
| | 01:33 | So for example in this first shot, we could say
description would be, what is it, the announcer?
| | 01:37 | So I am just going to type that in.
| | 01:40 | Of course it starts at Frame 0 and then
the rest of these I am going to leave.
| | 01:44 | And then the next one is Dr. Frankenstein and Fritz
and I am not sure exactly what the frame number is,
| | 01:51 | but I can just type in whatever frame number I want and what
happens is I have got some formulas here that actually are going
| | 01:57 | to calculate the end time for the previous shot
and the total length of each individual shots.
| | 02:02 | So as I start putting in numbers here,
it just starts automatically filling in.
| | 02:06 | So it just makes it a lot easier to track your shots.
| | 02:09 | So once you have all of this done- in fact,
let's go ahead and open up the old one here.
| | 02:13 | So once we have this all set, now I have a list of, you know,
| | 02:17 | this is what I need to tackle in
terms of actually animating the shot.
| | 02:22 | And it's actually kind of nice because you print this out
and then you just start filling all these little things
| | 02:27 | so it's laid out, it's ready for animation, it's animated,
it's rendered, and once all these are filled out, you're done.
| | 02:33 | It makes it very easy to track.
| | 02:36 | Sometimes if you try and keep everything in
your head, your head just gets cluttered.
| | 02:39 | I like getting things out of my head
and onto these kinds of forms,
| | 02:44 | so that way I can just put it aside and
I can actually focus on the animation.
| | 02:49 | Kind of my own little Zen way of clearing my head.
| | 02:53 | That's kind of how we organize our projects and how we track
them here at Rubber Bug, so let's go ahead and move on from here.
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| Creating art in Photoshop for After Effects| 00:00 | Now once we have the Leica reel or
the Animatic, the timing, our shot list
| | 00:06 | it's time to start animating. Now all of the
original art that came to us was in Photoshop files.
| | 00:14 | They weren't really standard Photoshop files. They had a lot
of layers in them so that way we could animate them. In fact,
| | 00:20 | let me bring up Photoshop here
| | 00:22 | and I'll show you one of the files, kind of show you how we
receive the art. So I'm going to go ahead and open a file.
| | 00:30 | I'm going to go out to my Desktop/Exercise Files/Monsterpiece.
Now this was one of the ones that came from the client and actually
| | 00:38 | the first shot we are going to work with is scene 4,
Dr. Frankenstein Scene 4, which is how he gave it.
| | 00:43 | Now this is exactly what we got from the client
so I'm just going to go ahead and open that.
| | 00:49 | And this was the original art.
| | 00:53 | And as you can see we got it in layers and in fact we've got
| | 00:56 | two arms here, one with the arm back and one with the arm
forward. Some of these we used, some of these we didn't.
| | 01:02 | We actually got a lot of these where it was almost like pre-animated
| | 01:05 | but because of the Puppet tool and the way that we animate,
we didn't use a lot of this stuff that we were given.
| | 01:10 | We were given several different eyebrows and again,
| | 01:14 | we kind of had different faces.
| | 01:17 | A lot of this is just separating the character out into
layers and of course we have the nice background image there.
| | 01:24 | Now the one thing I also want to say is that these files were a lot
bigger than the final output. In fact let me go here to Image Size
| | 01:32 | and show you that it's actually a 2K image and we are actually
outputting Standard NTSC which is D1 res, is what? 720x480 or
| | 01:43 | if you use square pixels it's 768x576. Something like that.
But it's almost a third the size of this original art
| | 01:52 | but that's actually a good thing. It's always easier
to shrink things, you will still get a crisp image.
| | 01:56 | If you blow it up, you are going to get jaggies.
So we kept all the images a little bit oversized and
| | 02:02 | that way if we need to zoom in or reposition the camera
or do some sort of tracking, we had enough room to do that.
| | 02:10 | So those are some of the tips for creating Photoshop files for
After Effects character animation. Try and keep them big and
| | 02:17 | definitely keep things in layers because that's going to
be really important when you actually get to animating these.
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|
|
2. Animating with HierarchiesSegmenting Photoshop characters| 00:00 | So now we're ready to begin animating and the first shot
we're going to animate is the first shot that we did animate.
| | 00:06 | In fact let me go ahead and show this to you.
| | 00:08 | Let me go ahead and select this composition
here and just do a quick RAM preview.
| | 00:16 | So what this shot is is basically Dr. Frankenstein
holding up the needle and the monster's hand reacting.
| | 00:22 | I wanted to show you this one first because
we actually animated it before we upgraded
| | 00:27 | to CS3 and before we actually had the Puppet tool.
| | 00:31 | So it's kind of a representative of the old way of doing
things. Not that that way is bad, it's just different
| | 00:38 | and it's still a very valid method of animating.
| | 00:41 | So let me show you little bit about how we brought in the art
into Photoshop and prepared it for this particular animation.
| | 00:51 | I am going to go ahead and minimize After Effects and
go into Photoshop where I have the original scene.
| | 01:00 | And I am going to go ahead and close
this for now and I am going to reopen it.
| | 01:04 | I am going to go out to my Desktop to Exercise Files,
Monsterpiece and I believe it's in the From Client directory.
| | 01:14 | Now this is where we actually kind of segment out our
stuff. It's in scene 4 and it's called Frankenstein scene 4.
| | 01:22 | The reason we create a From Client directory is because
we want to save the original art that we were given
| | 01:27 | or any original materials that were given from our client.
| | 01:31 | Typically what we will do is we will massage this stuff
that is given to us but we save that in a separate place
| | 01:36 | so that we don't, we try not to, save over original files.
| | 01:40 | They are almost like your negatives in photography and you
really don't want to mess with those. You want to save copies
| | 01:47 | and we are big fans of saving lots and lots of
copies. We don't care about disk space here.
| | 01:52 | So this is the file that was given to us and let me show
you what's in here. It is basically a handful of layers.
| | 01:59 | There is the background layer, very nice. Frank's face, his
eyebrow and then we have another eyebrow which is very nice
| | 02:09 | and his torso and then we got a
couple of arms. We have one, two arms
| | 02:16 | and notice how these arms actually
have the thread or the string attached.
| | 02:23 | We are actually going to have to separate that out.
| | 02:25 | And we also have the monster's arm.
| | 02:28 | Also notice another little thing is that when it was drawn,
there is actually a little gap here in this string
| | 02:34 | and we have to kind of straighten that out as well.
| | 02:37 | So there are few little tweaks that we have to do to this.
| | 02:41 | So I am going to actually minimize this and I am going to go into
the file that we created which is essentially a copy of that file.
| | 02:47 | So I am going to go ahead and open and I am just going
to go up one directory or two here and we are still
| | 02:53 | in that Monsterpiece folder and I am
going to go into my Assets Directory.
| | 02:57 | Now this is where we create our own assets
and where we save the things that we use,
| | 03:02 | all the art that we are actually using for production.
| | 03:05 | So this is called Frank Scene04 and we like to name things with
numbers rather than letters so 04 is typical for how we name things here.
| | 03:16 | And if you will notice, this file is essentially the same
art. We have just broken it up a lot and this will kind
| | 03:21 | of allow us to animate it a lot more clearly.
| | 03:24 | Let's just go from the bottom up here.
| | 03:27 | We've got a background layer, we've got a neck layer.
| | 03:30 | Now I didn't have a neck layer.
| | 03:31 | In fact, I'm going to go to this
file here. I just had the face layer.
| | 03:35 | So in order to create the neck layer what we do
is essentially zoom in and just do a little bit
| | 03:40 | of cutting. In fact, I am going to turn off his torso here.
| | 03:44 | And I just use the Polygonal Lasso Tool. which is my favorite
Lasso Tool. May not be yours but it's mine and I just take that,
| | 03:54 | I do Cut, Ctrl+X on the PC, Apple+X and paste. And that pastes
it into a new layer and of course I am going to have to name
| | 04:03 | that layer. Be sure to name your layers because when you
want to do After Effects it's going to get really confusing
| | 04:08 | if everything's named Layer 1 and Layer 2 and all that stuff.
| | 04:12 | And then I just drag it below his face and I can turn on his
torso again and you can see I have a nice neck that I can use.
| | 04:20 | And if the neck is too small, you can always just add to it.
| | 04:23 | So I am going to click over to my neck layer and
again I use my handy-dandy Lasso Tool just to kind
| | 04:30 | of create a shape- actually that's not a good shape there. So I
just kind of follow that around kind of like a neck stump there.
| | 04:39 | And because this is a solid color I can just use
the paint brush tool so I just click on that,
| | 04:43 | paint it. So now I have a little bit more neck to
play with. If Frank should move his head way out,
| | 04:51 | I still have some neck to cover that animation.
| | 04:55 | So actually let's go back to the file that was modified.
| | 04:59 | So we got the face.
| | 05:00 | Now one of the things we need to do is he needs to blink so
I took the eyes and I actually made separate little layers
| | 05:07 | from the eyes and what I did with that was I actually cut out
the eyes and then I painted over the face layer to make sure
| | 05:16 | that I had something behind there and
then I created little blinks for him.
| | 05:21 | And we kept the eyebrows. I did also break his torso up. I broke
it into an upper and lower torso so he could bend at the waist.
| | 05:30 | Now this is something we probably
won't have to deal with the Puppet tool
| | 05:33 | but it is something that we did do for this particular one.
| | 05:37 | And also notice how I am kind of fading out these
layers. Here in fact if I hide the lower torso,
| | 05:43 | you can see that when I actually selected this I
actually feathered it before I deleted the lower torso
| | 05:50 | and what that does is that gives me a much better,
much smoother transition from one to the other
| | 05:56 | so that way there is not really hard lines when he bends
and moves. There is a little bit of leeway under there.
| | 06:04 | We zoom out here.
| | 06:06 | OK, the other important thing is that
I actually created more than one arm.
| | 06:10 | We actually had two arms. These are the
arms that were given us, arm 1 and arm 2.
| | 06:18 | So this one with the hard angle and this one with kind of
extended angle were the two that we were given, but when we went
| | 06:26 | to animate we realized we needed little bit more than that.
| | 06:29 | Now we could do one thing where we actually just
took the arms and made a separate forearm and elbow,
| | 06:36 | but for this particular motion he
didn't need to do a lot of animation,
| | 06:40 | he just needed to do just that one
motion of holding up the needle.
| | 06:44 | So it was actually easier for us to just draw the in-betweens
and this is essentially how you would do it in cell animation.
| | 06:51 | We essentially made forearms and that was
our four in between so one, two, three, four.
| | 06:57 | Notice how they all kind of move along an arc and
they just gradually go from one shape to the other
| | 07:02 | and so we are actually going to use those as he moves.
| | 07:06 | And then the other thing was that I did take the string and
we made separate strings. OK? And then the monster hand
| | 07:15 | and of course I filled in that gap in the string.
| | 07:18 | I also segmented that monster's sleeve and his hand because it's
nice to be able to have that hand move within the sleeve there.
| | 07:27 | Another thing is I have this guides set and I really don't
need those so if I want to I could just do a Clear Guides
| | 07:33 | because they actually do show up in After Effects.
| | 07:36 | In fact let's go back in After Effects
and show you the shot, there it is.
| | 07:39 | Now these are all essentially the same layers that I created.
| | 07:43 | So in the next movie we are going to show you a
little bit about how to bring those Photoshop files
| | 07:50 | that we created into After Effects and start animating.
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| Importing Photoshop files into After Effects| 00:00 | So now we are going to import our
Photoshop file into After Effects.
| | 00:06 | Now we should have everything set up, but before we
do that, I want to go through some of the little gotchas
| | 00:12 | that can happen when bringing Photoshop into After Effects.
| | 00:16 | One of the first ones is, let's go through our layers and
the first thing I will look for is things like Groups.
| | 00:21 | Now I put this one in here on purpose
just so I could show it to you.
| | 00:25 | If you bring something like this that has a grouping
like this, it can mess up when it comes into After Effects
| | 00:31 | because it's going to create sub-compositions
and sometimes you don't want that.
| | 00:35 | So probably the best thing to do is to just get rid of it.
| | 00:38 | So I am just going to go ahead and select this and just go
Delete Group and make sure that this file is as flat as possible.
| | 00:50 | So if you are bringing in your own
art, just get rid of the groups. OK?
| | 00:55 | And the next thing I want to make
sure is that everything is named.
| | 00:59 | So let's go through and just make sure
everything has a descriptive name and it does
| | 01:03 | and the other thing is let's go ahead and delete any sort of
layer effects just stuff like this. Like if you put a drop shadow
| | 01:11 | or glow or something like that on there, what's going to
happen is if you bring something like that into After Effects,
| | 01:17 | After Effects has to recalculate that and it's not
very fast at doing it so it can actually really,
| | 01:23 | really bog down your interactivity within After Effects.
| | 01:26 | So it's best to just delete it, rasterize it. If you
delete it, you can always recreate the same effect
| | 01:32 | in After Effects using the After Effects
Engine and it's going to be much, much faster.
| | 01:37 | So once we have all that done, we will go ahead and save it out.
| | 01:40 | Now it's already saved out and I am going to go ahead into
my After Effects project that's going to be an empty project
| | 01:47 | and then all I have to do is either just go File, Import here
or if I right-click on the PC, I can just go Import, File.
| | 01:55 | And then this particular file is on my Desktop
under Exercise Files, Monsterpiece, under Assets/psd.
| | 02:04 | This is scene 4, so it's going to be Frank Scene 04.
| | 02:09 | And are we importing as footage, composition or cropped layers?
| | 02:13 | Well if we import as footage, that's going
to just import it as a kind of flat file,
| | 02:17 | so let's go ahead and import it as a composition.
| | 02:21 | Do we want editable layer styles?
| | 02:24 | Yes- or we can certainly merge those into footage, but we
don't have any so it's not going to be that big of deal.
| | 02:29 | So I am just going to leave this at the default, hit OK,
and it's going to import that file and all of the layers.
| | 02:37 | Now this is actually kind of a big file, about 10 megabyte
somewhere around there. These tend to be around that size
| | 02:42 | and it's also a 2k file so it's actually a pretty big file.
| | 02:46 | So let me show you how it comes in.
| | 02:49 | It creates a composition with the
same name as our After Effects file
| | 02:55 | and then it creates a little subfolder
here with all of the layers for that file.
| | 03:00 | So this is basically everything that we have.
| | 03:03 | In fact, if I double-click on this composition
here, you can see that this is what I have.
| | 03:09 | So all of these layers here show up in this composition
here and they are all layered and ordered in the same order
| | 03:18 | that you have the Photoshop file like for example if I
have the background turned off, it will be turned off here.
| | 03:24 | Some of these strings and arms were also turned on and off,
| | 03:28 | so we can certainly play with those and
so pretty much everything has come in.
| | 03:35 | Now what we have to do is we have to start
organizing this so that way we can animate it
| | 03:41 | and that's using the Hierarchy function in After Effects.
So let's go ahead and save that. It's going to be a little bit
| | 03:47 | of a long lesson, so let's go ahead and cut it here and we are
going to go ahead and pickup hierarchies in the next lesson.
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| Linking character parts| 00:00 | So now we're ready to set up our hierarchies and link
together all of our characters' parts in After Effects. Now,
| | 00:08 | actually I save kind of our raw file out, so that way we'd have
it and so this is on our Desktop/Exercise Files/Monsterpiece/
| | 00:17 | After Effects. And I created another one out here
called Shot400 and what that is is essentially
| | 00:24 | the shot that we created.
| | 00:27 | Now if you want to go a little bit faster, sometimes
your scrubbing speed might not be as fast, I like to keep
| | 00:33 | these files local, try not to store them on a server
because sometimes scrubbing over the network can be
| | 00:38 | problematic. If you have to, that's fine but you'll experience
a hit in performance. But sometimes if you want to you can
| | 00:45 | shut this down the third or quarter resolution that make this scrub
faster. Right now I'm on a very small screen, so I have this at 25%.
| | 00:54 | So let's go through these and let's take a look at how we're going to
organize this. We're actually going to turn off a lot of these layers.
| | 01:03 | I'm just going to go ahead and start turning off layers. Let's
just focus a little bit on Frank here. First thing, I want to
| | 01:10 | do is I want to start creating kind of a hierarchy. But what a
hierarchy is, it's basically just, one thing is connected to other,
| | 01:17 | so when one moves the other moves. So we can start with the torso.
| | 01:22 | There's actually torso and the torso upper.
| | 01:25 | And so right now if I have the torso and I just select
the Move to it and I just move it, it just moves by itself.
| | 01:33 | I'm going to go ahead and do that,
| | 01:36 | change value here. So if I move this torso layer,
| | 01:41 | the upper torso doesn't move with it. So I can change that
by using this little button here, which is Select and Link.
| | 01:48 | So I take my upper torso right here
| | 01:51 | and I just grab that and then link it to my torso.
| | 01:56 | So now when I move my torso,
| | 01:59 | the upper torso moves with it, so what I can do is go through this,
in fact I'm going to kind of zoom up here so you can see more of this
| | 02:05 | and I'm going to start connecting
| | 02:08 | the character together. Now the next thing what's connected
to the upper torso, well it's the neck. So I take that and
| | 02:16 | I connect it to torso upper.
| | 02:18 | And what's connected to the neck? You know again, it's shin bone, that's
connected to the ankle bone and so on and so forth. We've got the head
| | 02:25 | is connected to the neck, so I take the head,
| | 02:29 | grab it.
| | 02:30 | Frank Face is my head and I grab it and I drag it over neck.
| | 02:34 | And you can see here that
| | 02:36 | this is actually telling you right here in this little box
what it's connected to, so the face is connected to the neck,
| | 02:44 | the neck is connected to torso upper.
| | 02:46 | OK so we also have right eye, left eye, blink and all the blinks
and all the eyebrows, so I can actually just Shift-select all
| | 02:54 | of these and just drag those to the face,
so that they all move with the face.
| | 02:59 | And so now, for example I can take the face, I want to move the face,
| | 03:05 | all of those parts move with it.
| | 03:07 | OK. And if I take the neck
| | 03:11 | then the head and the neck move together.
| | 03:15 | Now the other thing is we also need to set what are called
Pivot Points, because if I want to rotate this face,
| | 03:22 | let's say I want to rotate it around the neck.
| | 03:25 | In fact let's go into our Transform Box here and if I
wanted to take this and rotate it, it's actually rotating
| | 03:33 | around this center point right here.
| | 03:36 | And I don't want that. I want it to actually rotate
| | 03:39 | right there where it attaches to the neck. So what I have to do
is I have to change the anchor point. So let me go ahead here.
| | 03:47 | I'm on Frank Face and on the Transform roll-out
and then what I do is I just move this-
| | 03:54 | Look I have a little bit of neck left over there and I may need
to delete. We have to go back to Photoshop and delete that.
| | 04:02 | And so what I do is I go ahead and
position this where it needs to be
| | 04:07 | and then I can just use my Move tool
and move it back right where I want it.
| | 04:16 | OK.
| | 04:16 | And so now when this rotates,
| | 04:20 | yeah I do have that little part there, but we will get rid of that,
you can just go into the original Photoshop file and delete it. So now
| | 04:26 | when I rotate that, it actually will rotate
right around the neck. And we can do the same for
| | 04:33 | all of the parts like for example the upper torso.
| | 04:38 | Also needs to have its Pivot Point set because they all come in
at the middle. So this is actually going to take a little bit
| | 04:45 | of time to setup,
| | 04:47 | but once you have it setup it's going
to animate really, really nicely.
| | 04:51 | So let's go ahead here and set this up,
| | 04:55 | and again we are just moving through
all of the parts of the character.
| | 05:02 | And some of these actually don't need to have Pivot Points
like for example the blinks are never going to rotate, so I
| | 05:09 | don't need to worry about that, things like these arms will have
to or the string and most of these will, so I'm actually going to
| | 05:18 | work through these and get all of these
set and then we are going to pick it up
| | 05:22 | in the next lesson.
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| Animating blinks using Opacity| 00:00 | I've showed you a little bit about how to setup the hierarchies
and pivot points so let me show you the finished version of that.
| | 00:06 | I'm going to go ahead and open a project
and it's in that same After Effects directory.
| | 00:11 | It's called 00, Shot04_00a.
| | 00:15 | Now these names may change because I'm saving as I go along.
| | 00:18 | This isn't really my production directory. I'm kind of saving
out interim files so that you can kind of see the step-by-step.
| | 00:26 | So here's basically all the layers and everything
is setup with their proper pivot points.
| | 00:32 | Now notice how everything is pretty much turned on.
| | 00:35 | Now when we go to animate, we actually do for example
these blinks here. Obviously you want just the blink
| | 00:41 | or the open eye or the closed eye; you don't want both.
| | 00:44 | But I can't keep just hitting this visibility icon
| | 00:48 | because you really can't animate that,
what you can animate however is opacity.
| | 00:53 | So what I need to do is go through this file and kind
of set the opacity down for each one of these objects.
| | 01:01 | So for example, left eye blink. I'm going
to go ahead and turn down the blinker.
| | 01:06 | Same for right eye. Again, I'm just using this transform roll out.
| | 01:10 | I go down to Opacity and I just set it to 0, OK?
And what that does is it basically turns it off.
| | 01:18 | One of the things I did do in this particular file, I moved
the face up in the layering because I wanted the face actually
| | 01:25 | to stay on top and if the arm went behind it, there is
a point here where the arm may actually touch the face,
| | 01:31 | I would rather have the arm go behind the face than on top
of it just because I want to keep the face in the clear.
| | 01:38 | So I actually layered those down and let's go ahead
down to his arms. I'm going to leave Arm 1 on
| | 01:46 | and I'm going to turn off Arm 1A, Arm 2A and Arm 2.
| | 01:54 | So notice all these are there.
| | 01:57 | And then I think there is also an eyebrow and we're going
to turnoff Eyebrow 1 because I like the way Eyebrow 2 looks.
| | 02:06 | So now everything is pretty much turned off
and now we can start animating the character.
| | 02:13 | And one of the things I'd like to do is at the beginning
of our shot, if there is nothing to do, I usually like to
| | 02:19 | at least put a blink in almost right upfront so that way the
character comes to life almost as soon as you see the shot.
| | 02:25 | Now typically with these shots I'm giving myself a little
bit of cushion at the beginning. Try not to start animating
| | 02:31 | until frame maybe five or six so that way
I have a few frames to kind of cut on.
| | 02:36 | So actually I think we are going to start this blink on Frame 8.
| | 02:41 | And when a character blinks, another thing you want to
do is actually move the head a little bit but before I do that
| | 02:47 | let me show you quickly how to animate one of these blinks.
| | 02:50 | I'm actually going to zoom in. I'm going
to hit this zoom thing here and kind of zoom
| | 02:55 | in so we can see his face. So this is zoomed in 33%.
| | 03:00 | And how we animate a blink is very, very simple. All we
have to do is turn on and turn off the eyes that we need.
| | 03:08 | So let's go ahead and use- actually it
looks like I have two right eyes here.
| | 03:12 | I'm actually going to turn- that eye, right eye works.
| | 03:16 | So what I'm going to do is at Frame 8 I'm
going to set a key for Opacity on Right Eye 2.
| | 03:24 | So right there is my key and then for right eye blink, I'm going
to expand that, I'm going to set a key for Opacity at zero.
| | 03:33 | So what I have here- this is a very tight screen
so you are not going to see this very easily here.
| | 03:39 | I have two keys, one that keeps the blink
off and one that keeps the eye open.
| | 03:45 | So what I do is I go one frame forward,
I animate this up to 100%
| | 03:51 | and this down to zero. It looks
like I have got the wrong eye here.
| | 03:56 | So what I have to do here is I think it's actually
this eye is the eye that needs to be animated.
| | 04:01 | So let's go ahead.
| | 04:02 | In fact it looks like this layer, it may be bogus,
so let's go ahead and delete these keys here.
| | 04:09 | And I'm going to go ahead and set a key for
Opacity on right eye and then set it to 0.
| | 04:21 | So now watch what happens, watch this eye here.
| | 04:25 | Basically what happens is at this point right eye blink is off,
it's at zero. Right eye is at 100 and then over the course
| | 04:39 | of one frame I animate this down to zero and that up to 100.
| | 04:43 | Now I have the keys which means I can just
copy and paste keys which is much easier.
| | 04:48 | So all I have to do is move a few frames forward then
I just copy. I'm using Ctrl+C or I believe it's Apple+C
| | 04:54 | on the Mac keyboard and I just go copy, paste.
| | 04:59 | So what I have done is I have copied and paste the 100%
for this right eye blink and the 0% for this Opacity.
| | 05:06 | And then I move forward and now I can copy and paste this
in fact let's do it from here. We can do Copy and Paste.
| | 05:15 | And we can do the same. I'm going to use my
keyboard shortcuts here and now we've got a blink.
| | 05:22 | OK now we can do the same for the other eye.
| | 05:26 | And let's make sure I've got two eyes
here. I think I have got a left eye here.
| | 05:30 | I can... OK, we're going to turn off left eye, actually right
eye 2 is actually our left eye so let's go ahead and use that.
| | 05:39 | I'm going to go back to Frame 8 and this is the travails
of production. Sometimes things don't get named properly.
| | 05:51 | Set Opacity to 0 and 100, move forward and
again we are going to do the exact same thing,
| | 06:00 | turn that down and now I can just cut and paste.
| | 06:04 | Now I have given myself 2 frames to play with here for the
blink and that's about right. Typical blink should be a total
| | 06:13 | of maybe 6 to 8 frames at 30 frames a second.
| | 06:16 | So there we go, there is my blink.
| | 06:18 | Now this is how we are going to do a lot of this animation.
| | 06:20 | We are going to use these little opacity
tricks to turn things on and off.
| | 06:25 | And the nice thing is that once you get this Opacity
pretty much set, you can just copy and paste these.
| | 06:31 | So if I wanted to put another blink down, all I have
to do is just copy these keys and paste them further
| | 06:38 | down so once I've animated one blink,
I have basically animated all the blinks.
| | 06:43 | So now the only other thing I would like to do is give the head
a little bit of motion because when you blink it's nice to have
| | 06:50 | that head also go along for the blink because it
kind of just gives that little bit of emphasis.
| | 06:56 | So I'm going to go ahead and zoom out here a
little bit so you can kind of see what I'm doing.
| | 07:00 | So a few frames before that blink, I'm going to
take that head and I'm going to start animating it.
| | 07:07 | So I'm going to turn on Rotation and Position for this head
and I'm going to move forward to Frame 8 and I'm going
| | 07:18 | to just angle that up just a hair. Not too much. Just like that
and then when he blinks I'm going to come all the way down
| | 07:27 | and I'm going to come down by the end of that blink.
So actually like that and then I'm going to come back
| | 07:33 | up to my neutral position, which is this
keyframe here, so it starts here and ends there.
| | 07:41 | So what I'm going to do is just select these two
keyframes and I typically just paste and if I want to,
| | 07:47 | I could actually just move these a little bit
so it gives a much better sense of that blink.
| | 07:54 | So if this wasn't animating, all that would happen would be
just that little bit of motion here but by moving his head,
| | 08:03 | you actually give a much stronger blink. In fact let me zoom
out just a little bit so you can kind of see that in full.
| | 08:09 | So there is my blink, great.
| | 08:12 | OK, so now in the next one, we are
going to animate that arm coming up.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Animating the arm| 00:00 | OK, so now I have got this little blink here
and now I'm going to animate the arm coming up.
| | 00:08 | So actually I save this out to a file. Just in case you're
coming in in the middle here, let me show you where this file is.
| | 00:14 | It's in that After Effects directory,
it's called 00E. In fact, let me go ahead
| | 00:18 | and open that, just so you can see we are on the same page.
| | 00:22 | This file has just that blink in it, OK.
| | 00:26 | Now I'm going to make his arm come up.
| | 00:31 | Let's just go ahead and animate that. There is a few other
details that I have, but let's just go ahead and animate the arm.
| | 00:35 | I believe in the actual animation he blinks again as the
arm comes up, but we can add that in a little bit later.
| | 00:42 | What I want to do is before he does that, before
his arm rises up, I want him to anticipate it,
| | 00:51 | so again just like with the blink where you have a little bit
of motion to emphasize it, I want him to precede that motion
| | 00:58 | of putting up the hand with a needle
in it with what's called anticipation.
| | 01:03 | Now what anticipation is is that when your arm moves
up, before your arm moves up, it moves back. OK?
| | 01:09 | So just think like if you are going to throw a punch, you
just don't push your hand out, you pull your hand back
| | 01:16 | and then push it out to get some more momentum.
| | 01:18 | Well the body is doing that all the time and it's a great
little animation technique because what you can do is that when
| | 01:24 | in fact he is anticipating right here, he
actually moves up then moves down into the blink.
| | 01:32 | And so what that little move up does is that oh hey he is moving,
| | 01:35 | look at this something is happening and
so we can do that again with the body.
| | 01:40 | So let's go ahead and start playing with the body.
| | 01:43 | I'm going to go to my torso and
I'm going to play with Rotation.
| | 01:48 | I think I'm going to mostly play with Position here.
| | 01:50 | So I'm going to Frame 24 and usually for an anticipation it's
usually four to six frames, so I'm going to move out to Frame 28
| | 01:58 | and I'm just going to lower him a little bit.
| | 02:00 | I'm going to play with his position and just lower him
down and maybe just rotate him for maybe just like a degree.
| | 02:09 | Now the one thing is that when we are rotating such a big
mass, you are going to see that it really rotates a lot.
| | 02:16 | So I'm going to be very careful with
that. In fact, I'm not going to rotate him.
| | 02:20 | And then so it basically comes down. Then I want it to come
up and settle, so I have got what? 1, 2, 3, 4... 1, 2, 3, 4.
| | 02:29 | About 4 frames and I want to bring him back up again.
| | 02:32 | In fact the easiest way to do that is to copy
and paste again, Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, this first frame.
| | 02:40 | So when I brings that there, basically he does this but I want
him to come up over that point. So essentially what I'm going
| | 02:47 | to do is just bring him up a little bit more and then I
am going to settle him back down into that original pose.
| | 02:57 | So essentially what I have got here is, I have
got the torso going up, over and back down again.
| | 03:02 | So see how it comes like that.
| | 03:04 | So basically, he's going to lean
forward, push up and then come back down.
| | 03:10 | Now I can play with the timing a little bit on this,
I may actually want to give it a little bit more
| | 03:14 | because his arm also has to come up,
so now he is going- whoa. OK, perfect.
| | 03:21 | So as he does this, I want him to bend over
so let's go over and play with the upper torso.
| | 03:27 | Now I'm just roughing this out. This isn't going to be exactly
the same as it is in that little animated film that I showed you,
| | 03:34 | so I will just kind of give you a
little bit of a rough guide to this.
| | 03:37 | So what I'm going to play with here is I'm going to play
with- again, I like clicking keys for Position and Rotation
| | 03:43 | because I may actually move it, but I
am thinking in this case I'm just going
| | 03:47 | to be rotating that upper body and let's see what happens.
| | 03:50 | So when he comes down and I'm kind of actually kind
of rotate him for just a little bit like about,
| | 03:57 | about maybe three or 4 degrees, not a whole lot.
| | 04:00 | Again some of this is very subtle. See how he kind of bends down?
| | 04:04 | I think I could actually rotate him forward even little bit more.
| | 04:09 | Again it just depends on how, you know, how
subtle or how broad you want to be with this.
| | 04:14 | So now see how he kind of moves down? And then in fact what
I'm going to do here is I'm actually going to make him move
| | 04:21 | down maybe about 4 or 5 degrees and then as he pushes up, I
am going to bend him a little bit more because what happens is
| | 04:30 | as his body comes up, it's actually this is going to resist
and we actually have this thing in animation called Drag.
| | 04:37 | And so what this does is when I lean him forward a little bit
more, it's going to appear so this lower body is pushing the mass
| | 04:43 | of the body up and the upper body is resisting a little bit.
| | 04:47 | So it basically goes down, up and then he settles, he
straightens back up to zero. In fact I can just type that in
| | 04:56 | because I know that's my default
position and so now I have got- alright.
| | 05:01 | Alright that, OK, that looks pretty good.
| | 05:04 | So now we have to play with the arms
and we want to get those arms moving up.
| | 05:09 | So, basically what happens is as he moves down, Frame 28
is where he is at his lowest point, then he starts moving up.
| | 05:18 | So notice how he kind of comes back this way, so
I really want to time this with the upper torso.
| | 05:24 | So let me look at these keyframes here.
| | 05:26 | He is going to start moving up right here at Frame 32.
| | 05:32 | And so what happens is that Frame 32, I want that arm to
start moving out. In fact here I must want him to be kind
| | 05:39 | of almost leaning back a little bit. Yeah that's even better.
| | 05:42 | So I'm actually going to move him at this very
last frame, we will actually move him -10 degrees.
| | 05:47 | So now he goes. You can even almost see how that arm is going
to move. You can see how that torso is pushing that arm out.
| | 05:57 | So let's go ahead and play with our arms.
| | 06:00 | The arm that's actually on right now is Frank Arm 1 and
so here I kind of want that arm to start moving forward.
| | 06:09 | So I'm going to set a key for Rotation and Position,
but we are also going to be playing with Opacity here.
| | 06:15 | So I'm going to turn that on and actually let's
go ahead and set a key at 24 for Position/Rotation.
| | 06:23 | In fact I'm just going to go ahead
and copy and paste these keys.
| | 06:27 | So now I have kind of a lockdown key and now I'm actually going
to rotate this arm back just a little bit as he comes down.
| | 06:41 | And now I want that arm to kind of shoot forward just a little
bit, maybe a few degrees, and what we have to do here is we have
| | 06:53 | to start going to these other arms that we created.
| | 06:57 | So we are going to do a very quick in between here, so again
I want to set an Opacity key. Make sure that that's set at 32.
| | 07:05 | And we are going to go from Arm 1 to Arm
1A. Again I'm going to set Opacity key,
| | 07:11 | but also I want to set a Position
and Rotation because I may move this.
| | 07:14 | And then I'm going to go to Frame 33 and I'm going to turn
this arm on and maybe rotate that back just a little bit.
| | 07:27 | So again, now I'm going to turn off at Frame 33. I'm going
to go and I'm going to animate opacity to zero for Arm 1,
| | 07:35 | so essentially what it's going to do- there is a little bit of a
pop there, see that? So I want to get a smooth rotation from one
| | 07:47 | to the other, I want to make sure that this
animation is smooth. That's actually better.
| | 07:57 | So then he comes forward and now I want to turn on Arm 2,
| | 08:03 | so essentially what I'm doing is
I'm going through Arm 1, 1A, 2A, 2.
| | 08:10 | So at this point, I'm going to set a key here for the last
position of arm 1 and we are going to start arm 2 here,
| | 08:19 | so essentially at Frame 34, if I'm
going to turn Arm 2 and turn off Arm 1,
| | 08:27 | well what I'm going to do here now here is a little trick,
is before I do that I actually want this arm to be as close
| | 08:34 | as possible to that other arm, so that way when it
actually does animate off you are actually almost
| | 08:42 | in the same position, see how that works?
| | 08:46 | So now his arm is coming out and let's give this another two
frames here. So I'm going to go ahead and set another key
| | 08:54 | for Opacity on 2A and rotate it forward a little bit.
| | 08:59 | But I need to actually match that again to Arm 2.
| | 09:03 | So here I'm going to set ahead and set a key for Opacity
at Frame 37 and at Frame 38 I'm going to turn on Arm 2.
| | 09:14 | And then here what I'm going to do is rotate Arm
2A, which is the one before that, so that it kind
| | 09:21 | of matches and then I'm going to turn the Opacity off.
| | 09:25 | So now I know that this keyframe is pretty much going
to match. So now there we go, that's pretty close.
| | 09:33 | OK, so that's my rough animation of that arm.
| | 09:40 | Now we have to match the string and also put
on a few more little finishing touches here,
| | 09:45 | but you can kind of see how we are working this.
| | 09:47 | So I'm going to go ahead and save this out and let's go
ahead and pick this up and do some of the last final details.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Animating the needle and thread and the monster's hand| 00:00 | Now we have got two more things to do on this,
one is to animate the string or the needle
| | 00:05 | and the other one is to animate the monster's arm.
| | 00:09 | So let's start with the string that's attached to the needle.
| | 00:12 | What I did here- actually I'll turn off these
layers. In fact, let's go ahead and open this.
| | 00:16 | I save this out as 00c, Shot04. So here it is.
| | 00:28 | And what I have done is I have hidden the strings.
| | 00:32 | There are actually four strings in there, but I'm
actually using them two of them, String 1 and String 2.
| | 00:39 | Now what I did was each one of these strings- in fact let me
take this one string and we will kind of move around a little bit.
| | 00:44 | See that the string actually has kind of a coiled shape
at the beginning and then kind of this S shape at the end,
| | 00:52 | so what I did actually was String 1 is kind of going forwards
and for String 2 what I did, essentially I took that same shape
| | 01:01 | and I just turned it upside down, so that way I have kind
of a little bit more of a stretched string kind of look.
| | 01:08 | So what I'm going to do here is I'm going to make
sure that it follows his hand up until about Frame 29
| | 01:15 | or 30 right there. See where it starts to go up like that?
| | 01:21 | See how this comes out like that?
| | 01:22 | I really don't want that to happen,
so I'm right here at Frame 29.
| | 01:27 | I'm going to animate the string here and I'm going to actually
animate the Opacity. The Opacity should be at 100 here.
| | 01:34 | So I'm actually going to animate the
Opacity off on this string at Frame 29.
| | 01:42 | And actually I animate it off between 29 and 30.
| | 01:47 | So now it comes up.
| | 01:50 | And then I want to animate the other string, String 2 on. So I
am going to open up this and I'm going to turn it on at Frame 30.
| | 02:02 | And it's going to be off at frame, I'll type in 0 there.
| | 02:07 | So now what I have got is as it comes
up, you can see it kind of just pops.
| | 02:12 | Now if I get this animation correct, it will
actually look like it's just stretching out.
| | 02:18 | So here on Frame 29, we are going to get this to kind of
rotate down, so I'm actually going to turn on Rotation
| | 02:27 | and I might also worry about Position here, so I'm
actually going to rotate this down just a little bit.
| | 02:33 | And then also right here I'm just going to kind of
rotate it again, so it looks like more like he is-
| | 02:42 | and so you can see how it kind of just pops and moves forward.
| | 02:48 | In fact, right here I need to rotate this down just a little bit.
| | 02:56 | Again I don't want his arm to- OK, that's actually moving up
before he moves. So I need to make sure that, I'm going to copy
| | 03:07 | and paste that key there. Make sure it actually... The best
thing to do is actually move this key before his arm moves.
| | 03:14 | There we go.
| | 03:16 | OK so now when it comes here and it pops onto, at this point
between 29-30, it's actually popping between these two strings.
| | 03:25 | So at 30, String 2 is the only one
that's on, so I want to make sure
| | 03:29 | that I set this key for Position and Rotation maybe even Scale.
| | 03:34 | Now for this one actually I put the pivot point right here where
the needle is. So if I scale it, for example, I can make it look
| | 03:41 | like that string is stretching and when I
rotate it, it actually rotates around the hand.
| | 03:49 | So right there what I can do is I can actually squash this
up a little bit to make it look like it's kind of stretching
| | 03:57 | and then what I need to do now is also move this so that I'm
actually just going to manually- it's not that many frames,
| | 04:06 | it's only a few frames and then I can actually make
this rotate down a little bit here and one more.
| | 04:16 | In fact, I'm going to bring this Scale up now to 100% so it
looks right and then just again, I'm just manually moving it up.
| | 04:29 | And again essentially- I don't need that guide there-
so again I'm just making sure that this works.
| | 04:40 | There we go.
| | 04:41 | Now this is linked to Arm 2, because we are actually
going through from Arm 1 to Arm 1A to Arm 2A to Arm 2,
| | 04:52 | it doesn't really move with that until you
actually get it into that final position.
| | 04:57 | So now let's take a look at that, how that looks.
| | 05:01 | There we go.
| | 05:02 | Now it looks like that string is kind of stretching out and when
it goes through that fast motion, it pretty much looks seamless.
| | 05:09 | So that's pretty much how I did it and maybe
a little bit different in the final file,
| | 05:12 | but that's essentially how that little trick was done.
| | 05:17 | And the last thing is to actually animate the monster's
hand, which is actually responding to that needle coming up.
| | 05:23 | So needle comes up, ding, and then the monster reacts.
| | 05:27 | So right there it kind of dings there and
about between 35 and 40, somewhere around there,
| | 05:33 | so we are actually going to start making
the monster hand react at 40 because really
| | 05:38 | when you animate something you really want one thing to
happen and then the next thing to react to what happened.
| | 05:44 | So this hand really can't react until that little spark comes up,
| | 05:49 | so at 40 I'm going to go ahead and
animate the sleeve and the hand.
| | 05:54 | Now the monster's hand is connected to the sleeve, so if
I animate the sleeve itself then everything moves, OK?
| | 06:02 | Now notice I have this kind of chopped off at the top
there, so I don't have much room to play with up here.
| | 06:09 | What I did was I actually played with scale, so actually I
am going to go ahead and set keys for everything, Position,
| | 06:18 | Rotation and Scale. For me, that's everything.
We don't usually need to animate the anchor point
| | 06:24 | and we are not going to animate Opacity on this either.
| | 06:27 | So at this point, I want to kind of squash
it so I want to actually animate it.
| | 06:32 | So if I do this, if I animate on X, that's
actually not going to squash it in the right direction.
| | 06:36 | I'll actually keep this at 100 and I'm just going to squash it
up. Just a little bit like maybe 93%-94%, somewhere around there.
| | 06:47 | And if I want I can actually expand it just by maybe
1% here because usually when you squish something up-
| | 06:57 | OK, but here actually, what I'm doing here is I'm actually
animating this and I really need to move these keys forward
| | 07:04 | and I need to make this, bring this back to
100 here. Because we need a starting point.
| | 07:12 | So the starting point here is going to
be 100 and then it's going to go up.
| | 07:16 | And notice how well, I actually, I do bring that
keyframe in where it goes 94% up and 102 wide,
| | 07:23 | notice it kind of gives that sense
of squashing and so I can do that.
| | 07:30 | And then I just want to bring it back down again.
| | 07:32 | In fact I want to overshoot this.
| | 07:33 | It's a good 1, 2, 3 and then 1, 2, 3, I'm going to overshoot
this so I'm actually going to copy these keys and paste them
| | 07:44 | and then I'm actually going to reverse this. I'm going to stretch
this down just a little bit, so instead of where this was at 94,
| | 07:53 | this is now at 106 and this is actually skinnier.
| | 07:56 | This is about 96 or so.
| | 07:58 | And then bring it back at 1, 2, 3.
| | 08:06 | Doing this kind of a standard cycle, so I'm going to select
that first frame which is at 100% and I'm going to copy
| | 08:12 | and paste it again. So it goes basically, so what it does,
it goes from 100- we are watching this number right here.
| | 08:18 | It goes from 100 to 102, 94 to 96, 106 and then back to 100, 100.
| | 08:28 | You just see that just gives it a nice squash and stretch.
| | 08:32 | Now we can add some more dynamics to this by actually
animating the hand a little bit separately from this.
| | 08:37 | So as this comes up, the hand is actually going to
resist a little bit and actually the hand is going
| | 08:42 | to move down, so I'm actually going to take this hand.
| | 08:45 | Make sure I've got my Move tool here, select the hand, highlight
it and then we are just going to move it down just a hair.
| | 08:58 | Not so much. Actually that hair is a little
too much here and I'm going to bring it in.
| | 09:08 | There we go.
| | 09:09 | And then as it comes down, we are actually going to bring that
hand down and extend it just a little bit and then bring it back.
| | 09:19 | In fact, I'm just going to copy and paste all these.
| | 09:22 | And if I want to, I can also rotate this hand just a little bit.
So as it comes down, I'm going to rotate it just a little bit,
| | 09:30 | again just to give it a little bit more complex motion here.
| | 09:35 | So as it comes up, I'm going to rotate
it at same negative 1 or 2 degrees.
| | 09:41 | And then as- so it basically comes up, down and then back up again.
| | 09:49 | In fact, what I can do is actually delay these a little bit.
So what I can just take these keys and push them back a frame
| | 09:56 | or two, so that way a little bit more softness, so
that everything doesn't happen all at the same frame.
| | 10:01 | So this is at its maximum, but right now this actually
rotates to its maximum here and moves up to its maximum
| | 10:09 | and then this sleeve comes down, so now I
have got kind of a nice little motion there.
| | 10:17 | So what this is, it's basically motion of this, which controls
everything, and then kind of a secondary motion here on the hand.
| | 10:27 | Here we go.
| | 10:28 | So that's generally how I animated this shot.
| | 10:31 | There is probably a few more tweaks that are in the master
file, but I will put that one out there. It's called Shot 0401.
| | 10:39 | In fact, let's go ahead and open that
and see what the final one looks like.
| | 10:47 | OK, there we go.
| | 10:49 | And again let's just take a look at this.
| | 10:51 | Let's just do a RAM preview and see what it looks like.
| | 10:55 | So you can see a blink and then he anticipates, lifts that up.
| | 11:01 | Now one thing I didn't animate was
there was actually some head motion
| | 11:06 | and another blink, so there are actually a few more blinks.
| | 11:11 | There is a blink here where he comes
up and another one at the end
| | 11:15 | and essentially what I did was I just copied those
keyframes and pasted them. OK? Very similar.
| | 11:22 | So you can kind of see how this first shot was
done, so let's go ahead and move on to the next shot,
| | 11:27 | which is a little bit more complex and I think we animated
that one with sub-compositions. So essentially we broke it
| | 11:34 | up into little parts and animated it a part at a times,
| | 11:37 | it's just going to be a little bit
more complex than this particular shot.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
3. Animating a Run Using Nested CompositionsIntroduction to subcompositions| 00:00 | So now that we've got the first shot out of the way, let's go
ahead and move on to the next scene and that scene is Shot07.
| | 00:08 | It's the shot where we have the monster
carrying the girl in the scene.
| | 00:12 | In fact let's go ahead and play that for you.
| | 00:16 | So you can see we have got a lot of things going on.
| | 00:18 | We have got the monster who is running.
| | 00:20 | We have got the girl screaming, waving her arms, bouncing around
and then at the end we have got a real big zoom in into her mouth
| | 00:28 | which also caused a little bit of problems for us.
| | 00:31 | I want to show you how this is setup so first of all let's
go ahead and open the project so I'm going to go ahead
| | 00:37 | and go to Open Project and we are in our Desktop/
Exercise Files/Monsterpiece/Afx- After Affects.
| | 00:47 | Shot0703 is actually our final version of this shot.
| | 00:53 | Now let's see what we have and then we
will back up and show you how to get there
| | 00:56 | so we have got actually a couple of compositions now.
| | 01:00 | We created this using what are called sub-compositions
so for example, we created the monster separately.
| | 01:09 | In fact I can go through these layers here in their
main composition, which is Frankenstein07 Version 3.
| | 01:16 | We have got obviously a background layer here.
| | 01:19 | Then we have got a Frank layer or the monster layer
and that's just him running through the scene.
| | 01:24 | In fact he doesn't even have any arms but it's
basically just him running through the scene.
| | 01:29 | Then on top of that we put the bride and you
know obviously his hands are attached to her
| | 01:37 | and so we actually have 3 separate compositions so this is
our girl. And in fact what we have done here is and if we look
| | 01:47 | at the girl composition, that's what she looks like.
| | 01:51 | Frank he looks like this.
| | 01:53 | This is just a run cycle and then with her arms
just waving I believe, or is that just her arms? OK.
| | 02:04 | Anyway so we have got a lot of different things in
this composition so before we actually show you how
| | 02:10 | to animate this let me show you a little
bit about the Photoshop files that we got.
| | 02:16 | And what we actually brought into After Effects.
| | 02:18 | So I'm going to go ahead into Photoshop here and
I'm going to open, let's start with the Desktop.
| | 02:25 | Let me go to Exercise Files/Monsterpiece and then
what we got from the client is always in our
| | 02:32 | from client directory and so we actually have two.
| | 02:35 | We have 7 and 7 revised.
| | 02:37 | We can just open 7 revised, which actually is the most
current version. Because what 7 revised is I sent it back
| | 02:43 | and had him break it up into layers. And so he just went through
him and gave me bigger versions of the bride, for one thing,
| | 02:50 | because she had to come close to the camera so I wanted a
bigger version of her head, some mouths that were bigger
| | 02:57 | that we actually wound up using and
then of course the monster and the bride.
| | 03:01 | Now what he did here was he gave me a ton of layers.
| | 03:05 | Now some of this I used, some of it I didn't. And you know it
just depends on how you want to set it up but it's always nice
| | 03:13 | to have more assets than you need so he just gave me everything
he could possibly give me. So we have got a lot of stuff.
| | 03:21 | We have got a bride tongue and so we
have got all of these different pieces.
| | 03:26 | Once I had that I actually created my own file.
| | 03:29 | Before I open that file, let me show you what he did.
| | 03:33 | He actually created some nice groups here for this.
| | 03:38 | What I did was I collapsed those
groups when I created my actual file.
| | 03:41 | Let's go ahead and open the actual Photoshop file that I
used for production so actually I again go to my Desktop,
| | 03:47 | Exercise Files/Monsterpiece and we keep all of our
stuff in the Assets directory under PSD for Photoshop.
| | 03:55 | So this particular file I saved as 07 Version 3.
| | 03:59 | As you can tell we actually went through 3 versions
of this shot before we got it right, which is fine.
| | 04:05 | That's part of production. So I'm reading in that thing,
this file and when we open this file you will see some
| | 04:11 | of the layers are turned on and turned off but
in fact here we can turn on the bride face.
| | 04:18 | We have got some big eyes here. So basically we have
got a ton of things here that we may or may not use
| | 04:26 | but I have actually turned them off at this point.
| | 04:29 | That mouth, that big bride face here, along with
her mouthes and noses and all that sort of stuff.
| | 04:38 | And then also basically bigger versions of the
bride. So we have a whole big version of the bride,
| | 04:46 | a little version of the bride and Frankenstein and all that.
| | 04:49 | I kind of wanted that bigger version of the bride because
she was going to become getting really close to the camera
| | 04:55 | and I didn't know how big I could zoom
her in before she started to break up.
| | 05:00 | The great thing about this though is that if we look at the image
of this, this is a 2K image. So actually I can zoom in to 640x480
| | 05:08 | which is our output resolution, and actually get
pretty close to her so I actually didn't wind
| | 05:13 | up needing the bigger version of the
bride but it was always good to have.
| | 05:17 | Anyways so those are the basics of what we had in terms of
assets so let's go on to the next lesson and I will show you how
| | 05:24 | to set those up in After Effects and go ahead and separate on
all the different elements into groups and start animating them.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Setting up nested compositions| 00:00 | So now that we have our Photoshop files pretty much ready to
go, we can bring them into After Effects and then break them
| | 00:06 | up into separate composition so that we
can animate it a little bit more quickly.
| | 00:11 | So let's go ahead and do that.
| | 00:13 | So I have got my Photoshop files saved out here and I'm
going to go into After Effects and then just go Import,
| | 00:20 | File and I'm on my Desktop/Exercise Files/Monsterpiece and
we are in Assets/Photoshop, to follow along with me on that.
| | 00:32 | So we have got Frank scene 7 version
3, that's what we are working on.
| | 00:37 | Now it's going to ask us whether we
want to import as footage, composition,
| | 00:41 | crop layers composition and the layer
options doesn't really matter.
| | 00:45 | I'm just going to merge my layer styles
into footage. I don't think I have any,
| | 00:49 | but if I do then we will go ahead
and just make everything go faster.
| | 00:52 | So again what this does is it brings in all my layers right
here, all gazillion and +1 layers, and it creates a composition
| | 01:03 | with all those layers. Pretty much
like the Photoshop file that I had.
| | 01:07 | And in that original Photoshop file, I
had some layers kind of turned on and off.
| | 01:11 | So let's go ahead and turn on the proper layers here.
| | 01:14 | If we go up to the top here, we can come down a little bit
and turn off those big eyes and eye whites and then scroll
| | 01:22 | down a little bit more and we will see we have one down
here on Layer 32 called Bride Face and that's our bride.
| | 01:31 | And it looks like Frank is pretty much there.
| | 01:33 | Let's go ahead and start segmenting this out
and start making our nested compositions.
| | 01:38 | So how do we do that?
| | 01:39 | Well, the easiest way is to just copy this original
composition and then just delete what we don't want.
| | 01:46 | I always find that to be best way. So all I have to
do is select this composition, go Edit, Copy. Edit, Paste.
| | 01:53 | I can also use the shortcuts Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, Apple+C, Apple+V.
| | 01:57 | And now I have got two.
| | 01:58 | I have got Scener v3, Scenery v4 which is kind of just
how After Effects names it and they are identical,
| | 02:06 | but what I can do here as I go into this Composition
and just do Composition Settings and instead
| | 02:12 | of Frank Scene 02 this is just Frank himself, so we can go OK.
| | 02:18 | And then I can go through and just start deleting things out of
this composition. Anything that has a word bride in it is going
| | 02:24 | to go, so I will just scroll a way down here. All
the bride stuff including his right and left hand.
| | 02:31 | See right there? His right and left hand are actually going to
be part of the bride, because they really need to be stuck to her
| | 02:36 | and hold on to her, so I'm actually going to scroll down even
further to, I guess layer number 46 and then I'm just going
| | 02:44 | to hit the Delete key. So now I have
got a composition with just Frank in it.
| | 02:49 | Now let's do the same for the bride.
| | 02:51 | So I'm going to go ahead and double
click on my original scene here 07 v3.
| | 02:57 | We will do the same thing and this time we are
going to use the shortcut keys, copy, paste,
| | 03:03 | there we go and take a look at that.
Again everything is in there.
| | 03:11 | And let's go ahead and change Composition
Settings to Bride, OK.
| | 03:18 | And in this case, I want to delete everything
that's monster. They call it monster in that thing,
| | 03:25 | I'm calling it Frank in the composition, but
let's go ahead and just delete all of that.
| | 03:29 | And so that's just the bride, so now we have
all of those assets that we can animate. OK.
| | 03:35 | So now I have got Frank and on Frank, I also want to
delete that background layer as well and in this one,
| | 03:42 | I just want to change his background color to something with
that I can animate against, so I'm going to change it to white.
| | 03:48 | So we now have him and her and now I have
this original scene that has everything.
| | 03:55 | Well I don't really want to set it up this way, so what I'm
going to do is I'm just going to go ahead and select everything
| | 04:01 | above this background layer which is
called Layer 4 and I'm going to hit Delete
| | 04:08 | and then I can just bring in the
bride and bring in Frankenstein.
| | 04:13 | Now I have a very simple composition here and
then I can just animate the action separately here.
| | 04:19 | So that's how we set it up. So in the next lesson let's go
through and make Frankenstein run, so we will do a run cycle.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Animating a run cycle pt. 1: Basic leg motion| 00:00 | Once we have the composition set up, it's
time to start animating and the animation
| | 00:05 | on this is going to happen in a couple of different steps.
| | 00:09 | First thing we are going to do is we are going to
make the monster run or we are going to make Frank run
| | 00:13 | and then we are going to make the girl scream
and wave her arms and then we are going
| | 00:19 | to join them together and animate them going through the scene.
| | 00:23 | In fact let me show you the first step here.
| | 00:26 | We are going to actually animate Frank running. So basically all
this means is that his legs are going to move underneath him
| | 00:32 | and this is essentially just a run cycle and when he
actually comes into the scene here we are actually going
| | 00:39 | to make him start here and just run through the scene.
| | 00:43 | So in this cycle all that's really
moving is the legs and the head.
| | 00:48 | So let's go ahead to our project here.
| | 00:52 | In fact let's go ahead all the way up to the top here.
| | 00:55 | Go to our Desktop/Exercise Files/Monsterpiece/After
Effects/Shot07_00A and this is just the blank scene.
| | 01:07 | So it's basically a monster in the scene with the girl with
no animation. Pretty much how we set it up in the last lesson.
| | 01:15 | So the first thing for animating a run
is figure out how long is that cycle.
| | 01:22 | In this case we have 16 frames per step or 32 frames for the
cycle so right and left together equal 32 frames and 16 per foot
| | 01:33 | so with a run let's choose some of
the basics of how to animate that.
| | 01:38 | We can start with one leg or the other.
| | 01:40 | Now I have done a very nice thing for you in this.
| | 01:42 | I have actually set up all the hierarchies
and all the pivot points for this character.
| | 01:47 | We did that in the last lesson.
| | 01:49 | We didn't really need to go over that again here so
everything is pretty much ready to go, all the hierarchies
| | 01:54 | and pivot points are set up so now it's
just a matter of animating the feet
| | 01:59 | and now here you can see I have broken the feet up into 3 parts.
| | 02:05 | We have leg, shin and foot.
| | 02:11 | Now I could animate these using the Puppet tool but one thing
I can't animate is this motion here. That you really can't do.
| | 02:20 | The Puppet tool really can't make
that legs slide underneath him like that.
| | 02:24 | So I'm actually going to do this via just individual layers
set up as a hierarchy because I think it's actually going
| | 02:31 | to go faster for this particular animation so let's go ahead
and start with the left foot or the left leg so what I'm going
| | 02:39 | to do is just select those three layers and I'm
going to expand them so I have a little bit more space
| | 02:46 | and then first thing I'm going to do is just hit
keys for Position and Rotation on all of these.
| | 02:56 | So that way I kind of just have that initial pose locked
down but this really isn't going to be my initial pose.
| | 03:03 | I want to actually extend it a little bit more so
I'm going to go ahead and select the left leg,
| | 03:09 | move it back a little bit and then
I want to get that last push off.
| | 03:14 | Basically what's the furthest that leg is going to go and
that's going to be my extreme and that's where I'm going
| | 03:20 | to start this animation. And I'm going to move up
to the shin and I'm going to move up to the foot
| | 03:26 | and just kind of get a nice extreme pose there.
| | 03:30 | Now I'm going to go through this to the right
leg as well so I'm going to select all of these,
| | 03:36 | expand them and while they are selected
you can also just set keys for Position
| | 03:42 | and Rotation and that will set them for everything.
| | 03:44 | And now for this leg, again, I usually like working from the thigh
down in this particular type of setup. So I'm going to go ahead
| | 03:52 | and move this leg, rotate it maybe up a little bit more, then
move down to the shin and just get a nice pose out of that.
| | 04:00 | That looks pretty good.
| | 04:01 | So now this is a 16 frame cycle. So we can set another key at
frame 16 which essentially just swaps these two, but instead
| | 04:13 | of doing that I'm actually going to go to
Frame 8, which is halfway through the cycle,
| | 04:20 | and I'm going to do let's call the passing position.
| | 04:22 | Now what the passing position is
essentially where one leg passes the other.
| | 04:27 | So let's go ahead and start with the left leg.
| | 04:30 | I'm going to go ahead and move that
forward just a little bit, rotate it down.
| | 04:36 | Now think about it.
| | 04:37 | This leg is the leg that's moving forward so
this is the leg that's actually off the ground.
| | 04:42 | The right leg is moving back which means it's pushing the
character forward so that one is going to be like what's planted
| | 04:49 | on the ground. So the left leg, the free leg, is actually going
to be off the ground so that means I need to bend that shin
| | 05:00 | and position that and as this leg comes forward this
foot is going to drag back almost like kind of it's along
| | 05:08 | for the ride there and then we need to go back
down to the right leg and make its position.
| | 05:15 | Now this is the planted leg.
| | 05:16 | This is a leg that is planted on the ground so let's
go ahead and make sure we have got a nice firm contact
| | 05:23 | with the ground there and that looks pretty good.
| | 05:26 | Now one of the things I'm doing here
is I'm just doing Rotation keys.
| | 05:30 | There maybe an occasion to do a Position key somewhere down the
road so first thing I'm also going to just go through and copy
| | 05:37 | and paste these Position keys to
make sure that I have a key there
| | 05:45 | in case I set a key later on and it's in between the wrong thing.
| | 05:53 | Alright let's go ahead and zoom that in a little bit. So there is
my passing position but one of the things I'm noticing here is
| | 05:58 | that I do need a position key here on the shin,
the right shin, because there is a little bit
| | 06:06 | of a gap there so let's just go ahead and push that up.
| | 06:09 | There we go. So there is the beginning of that first step.
| | 06:14 | Now let's go ahead and move over
to the end of the step, so Frame 16.
| | 06:18 | Now in Frame16 what's going to happen?
| | 06:20 | This right leg is going to go back so let's
go ahead and just start with the right leg.
| | 06:26 | That rotates back and it actually will move back up because
his hip is actually going to rotate back. And go ahead
| | 06:35 | and move that shin a little bit and
let's go ahead and move that leg out.
| | 06:42 | Again I'm trying to make the exact opposite. So what does
that look like? Let's make that right leg look pretty close.
| | 06:49 | I might have that bent a little too
much there, go ahead and there we go.
| | 06:56 | Kinda bring that leg down just a little bit. And now let's go to
the left leg and that's going to be forward . In fact it's going
| | 07:04 | to move forward because that right hip is going to come
forward a little bit. And that foot is going to be- that's
| | 07:12 | where the foot plants down so again I need
to front of this left leg here. There we go.
| | 07:22 | OK so that's essentially that first step.
| | 07:25 | Now there is a little bit of a problem here.
| | 07:29 | If we look, this is just fine.
| | 07:32 | But right there he's kind of off balance
a little bit, right there on Frame 12.
| | 07:38 | It looks like this right leg, that foot doesn't really look
planted, so I'm going to go ahead and straighten out this leg
| | 07:45 | as much as I can and I'm going to push that back
| | 07:53 | so that way I have got a little bit more
time where his foot is planted on the ground.
| | 07:57 | Now this is just rough.
| | 07:59 | There is a little bit of problems here but we
will tweak that as we go and then this left leg
| | 08:05 | as it comes forward again this knee is going
to be bent a little bit more so I'm going
| | 08:12 | to add in another key here. Again we are at Frame 12.
| | 08:15 | We are halfway between the passing position and that other
extreme and also here, that foot is going to be dragging back
| | 08:25 | as well. So now there we go. So it kind of pops out right there.
| | 08:32 | So that's the first step so let's go ahead from here and
I'm going to break it here and then I'm going to show you how
| | 08:39 | to make the second step and also how to cycle the animation.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Animating a run cycle pt. 2: Overlap and follow-through| 00:00 | So now we have this first step animated and
| | 00:04 | I saved it out in Shot07B.aftereffects.
| | 00:08 | What this is is just that first step.
| | 00:12 | So now we need to create the second step and also cycle it.
| | 00:16 | So, how we create that second step is actually going to be a little bit
easier because we actually have the first kind of like the end position here.
| | 00:23 | So right now we have got this right leg is coming back
| | 00:29 | from Frame 0 to 16 and then
| | 00:34 | in Frame 32 it's actually going to be exactly
at that same position it was at Frame 0.
| | 00:40 | So all we have to do is go to Frame 32
and start copying and pasting keyframes.
| | 00:45 | Now I have to do this a layer at a time.
If I select all of these layers,
| | 00:49 | and copy and paste, it will actually
| | 00:51 | duplicate layers and I don't want that to happen.
So all I'm going to do is go layer at a time,
| | 00:57 | Copy, Paste.
| | 00:59 | And of course if I want to, I could certain
use Copy and Paste from the Edit menu
| | 01:03 | but in this case hot keys are great. Apple+C or Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V.
| | 01:11 | We'll very quickly copy and paste all of these keyframes.
| | 01:17 | There we go.
| | 01:18 | So, now I have kind of got my return
| | 01:22 | but of course we still don't have that passing position on the
back so let's go to Frame 24 there and make that passing position.
| | 01:29 | So what leg is coming forward?
| | 01:31 | That leg. So let's start with the left since it's up here on top.
| | 01:38 | Let me go to Frame 24.
| | 01:43 | On Frame 24 the left leg is the leg that's supporting
the body. So let's go ahead and straighten out that
| | 01:50 | left leg, make sure that's pretty much vertical at this point
| | 01:54 | and straighten out that shin.
| | 01:56 | And maybe even move that shin up a little
bit again to support the character.
| | 02:03 | There we go.
| | 02:04 | And at Frame 24, the right leg is actually going to be the free leg.
| | 02:11 | So, in this case, I'm going actually going
to bend this right leg forward a little bit more
| | 02:16 | and rotate the shin right here,
| | 02:19 | right shin back,
| | 02:21 | and also rotate the foot back.
| | 02:24 | And if you notice here we're getting a little bit of a problem here
with these legs disconnecting so I'm going to take the shin here,
| | 02:31 | make sure it works, this is why we always set
Position keys in case when we need to tweak here.
| | 02:37 | And I'm going to take that left shin here
| | 02:42 | and again I'm going to tweak it just
a little bit to make sure it looks OK.
| | 02:46 | Well that's kind of rough but you get the idea.
We can certainly clean this up later.
| | 02:52 | So there is my cycle.
| | 02:55 | Now, the one thing that's not happening here is the head.
| | 02:58 | And what happens is as these legs move
forward, this foot pushes the head up,
| | 03:04 | or the body up and the head goes up with it and
then as it stretches out, it drops back down again.
| | 03:11 | The motion of the head is
| | 03:12 | almost going to be the opposite of the motion of the body. If you think
of something kind of jumping up and down, anything that's sitting on
| | 03:17 | top of it is going to kind of be
pushed up and then drop back down.
| | 03:21 | So when his legs are far apart-
let's go head up to the head here.
| | 03:28 | Monster Face, OK. So let's go to the face
| | 03:31 | and at Frame 0, I'm going to set a key for Rotation and Position.
| | 03:35 | Now this is where he is dropping back
down so his head is going to be up
| | 03:39 | and it's attached to the neck
so the chin will be up a little bit.
| | 03:46 | Then at Frame 8,
| | 03:48 | we have pushed the body up so the head will come down
| | 03:54 | and it will rotate for just a little bit
| | 03:59 | like that.
| | 04:01 | And then we go to Frame 16. For this one we can
actually create a cycle here so I can just Copy, Paste
| | 04:10 | and we have got a cycle.
| | 04:15 | So now that we have one step,
we can certainly cycle all the steps.
| | 04:19 | So, I can go to Frame 32 and again just
start copying and pasting keyframes.
| | 04:30 | So, let's go ahead and do this for all of these.
| | 04:41 | Once we do that,
| | 04:43 | we have basically our run cycle, now we can certainly
| | 04:46 | copy and paste these more if we want to but I think he takes
like maybe 5 or 6 so we may need to copy the cycle one more time
| | 04:55 | but generally you can see how this works.
| | 05:00 | So now let's go ahead and move on to the bride.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Putting the girl in his arms| 00:00 | So now, let's finish the run.
| | 00:02 | Essentially, what we have is we have Frank doing his cycle
and what we have to do now is attach the bride to him
| | 00:10 | and make him run through the scene and of course,
| | 00:13 | what he is doing is he is actually
scaling up as he moves towards the screen.
| | 00:17 | And this is also a little bit tricky because he is actually
running in perspective so let me show you how we do this.
| | 00:24 | I'm going to go ahead and open a project Shot 07_00C
and here it is and it's basically just him running.
| | 00:35 | Now, the first thing we need to do
is we need to attach the bride.
| | 00:40 | We need to connect all of these things together.
| | 00:42 | We have two compositions, one for the bride, one for
Frankenstein, and we need to connect them together.
| | 00:47 | So, the first thing I'm going to do is just select this Bride
layer and then I'm just going to just parent that to Frank.
| | 00:54 | So, that way when we move him around, she goes along for
the ride and we can certainly move her around a little bit.
| | 01:01 | And I think I want to rotate her a little bit because
she is not quite in his arms the way I would like.
| | 01:08 | Here we go, something like that.
| | 01:09 | We will play a little bit more as we get to her.
| | 01:12 | I just want to make sure that she is kind
of in the scene the way that we want.
| | 01:16 | Now, let's go ahead and take Frank
and move him through the screen.
| | 01:19 | In the original scene, he starts way off on the horizon
and then he comes in so that her mouth fills the screen.
| | 01:26 | So let's go ahead and first of all just start
moving him and get kind of a rough motion path
| | 01:32 | and then we will kind of put his running motion in there.
| | 01:35 | So, first thing that I'm going to do is I'm just going to
set some positions here for Position, Scale and Rotation,
| | 01:40 | and I'm going to go ahead and scale him down.
| | 01:42 | I'm going to scale him down about 25%
because he's going to start way off up here.
| | 01:52 | So somewhere around there.
| | 01:59 | Let's drag him down a little bit more.
| | 02:01 | I'm trying to see where his foot is here. So
somewhere around there we're going to start him.
| | 02:09 | Now, this whole shot is 150 frames and he only runs until
about Frame 64 because we have only looped his feet twice
| | 02:20 | so we have an extra frame about frame 60 or so.
| | 02:23 | So he doesn't run for that long so he needs to be pretty
much offscreen by Frame 70 or so, and then from Frame 70
| | 02:30 | or so up to Frame 150 is where her mouth comes into the screen.
| | 02:35 | So I'm just going to scrub forward here and I'm just going
to set a keyframe somewhere up around here say Frame 50 or 54,
| | 02:43 | somewhere around there, Frank layer, move him
in, and I'm going to scale him up quite a bit.
| | 02:53 | I can go around 300% or so and again, I want to get
him pretty much so that her mouth is ready to explode.
| | 03:03 | So, we can start going down the screen there.
| | 03:07 | And you can see now we have kind of got him
running pretty much through the scene here, in fact,
| | 03:15 | if I zoom out just a little bit, we
will kind of see what we have got here.
| | 03:19 | He is coming in and then she's screaming.
| | 03:24 | But this run doesn't look all that great.
Because when you run, you do bounce up and down.
| | 03:29 | So I'm going to zoom in just a bit here and
move over so we can see the edge of this.
| | 03:36 | So, as he comes in, I'm going to
start making him bounce up and down.
| | 03:43 | So as he- Let's go ahead and start making him move up
and down, so as he comes in, he comes down a little bit.
| | 03:56 | So basically what happens is when he
runs, he kind of tosses himself in the air
| | 04:01 | so his high point is going to be right around here.
| | 04:05 | So again, he is going to come up and then
he is going to come down, going to come up.
| | 04:18 | Now, some of the scaling, I think I
actually need to scale him down a little bit.
| | 04:27 | Somewhere around there.
| | 04:29 | Maybe even move him back a little bit, there we go.
| | 04:34 | So you can see now we are getting
kind of this nice bouncy motion.
| | 04:41 | Again, he's going to go low and then he's
going to go up, and he's going to go high.
| | 04:47 | So again, you could see I'm getting this
kind of bouncy motion as he comes through.
| | 04:52 | This is not totally tweaked.
| | 04:55 | Then what we need to do just kind of bring him
offscreen and start to bring her into center.
| | 05:10 | Then, from here to the end of the scene,
she needs to basically really, really zoom up.
| | 05:18 | I think I zoomed up almost 2000%. Because we're going
straight down her throat, maybe something like that.
| | 05:32 | This is totally rough.
| | 05:34 | And again, what you want to do is you want
to make sure you do a lot of RAM playbacks
| | 05:43 | to make sure that you get the motion exactly right.
| | 05:46 | Now, I'm going through this pretty
quickly and I could probably go through
| | 05:49 | and tweak just a little bit more, but you get to hang of it.
| | 05:51 | Basically, what we are doing here is as he runs,
we want him to bounce in time with those steps.
| | 05:59 | Now, the girl here also needs to start bouncing as well.
| | 06:04 | So, one of the things I want to do is as
he goes up, I'm going to select the bride
| | 06:09 | and I'm going to bring her down a little bit.
| | 06:11 | So let's take a look at what we have got here.
| | 06:14 | In fact, I'm going to start here.
| | 06:18 | So I'm going to select the Position.
| | 06:20 | Let's just do Position, Scale and Rotation here.
| | 06:24 | And so from here, I'm actually going to move her up.
| | 06:31 | So as he moves up, she goes down; as
he moves down, she kind of bounces up.
| | 06:37 | So again, we are going to make her kind of bouncing and again,
| | 06:44 | I want to make sure that she doesn't go exactly
with him, that she kind of lags behind him.
| | 06:50 | So here I have got a keyframe here.
| | 06:52 | I'm actually going to move her keyframe back a frame or two.
| | 06:55 | So, that way, I have got a keyframe here. 1, 2.
| | 07:00 | Let's just make that 2 frame lag
behind him. So there goes up to the top.
| | 07:07 | Now, because she is attached to him, we can actually cycle this.
| | 07:16 | You can actually just take these keyframes and copy and paste
them. And again, I'm looking here at this frame of his position
| | 07:27 | and I'm going a little bit behind that
because she is going to drag behind him.
| | 07:34 | But there is a point where she stops bouncing
because we really need to get her into scene,
| | 07:44 | right there is where we have got a little bit of
a bump there but we can certainly smooth that out.
| | 07:54 | So, the most important thing is getting them going
through the scene, we can certainly tweak that.
| | 07:59 | So let's go ahead and just do a quick little playback there.
| | 08:01 | This is not real time but you see how this works. Great.
| | 08:09 | One of the things I also did with the mouth was I scaled
the mouth and actually moved the mouth to make sure
| | 08:14 | that it went completely black as we went into her mouth.
| | 08:17 | So, we can do that in the next section
which is animating the girl and her mouth.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Animating a screaming girl pt. 1: The arms| 00:00 | So now we have Frank running through
the scene with the bride in his arms.
| | 00:04 | The next thing we need to do is actually
animate the bride herself.
| | 00:08 | Let me show you what that's going to look
like and then we can go ahead and do that.
| | 00:11 | So this is kind of like towards the end of the
shot here or towards the final version of this
| | 00:16 | and you could see she is basically
just waving her arms and screaming.
| | 00:20 | Let's take a look at this.
| | 00:23 | This is basically just her composition so she is essentially
again just waving and screaming and notice how her body is still.
| | 00:31 | We're actually moving her body when we move
the composition here in the final output.
| | 00:36 | So, let's go ahead and open the project where we left
it off, which is Shot07_00d, and let's bring that in.
| | 00:49 | And what do we have here?
| | 00:51 | Basically we have the shot and the bride is not moving yet.
She is kind of dead, so let's bring her to life.
| | 00:58 | I'm going to go over to the Bride composition
and I'm going to zoom in just a little bit
| | 01:03 | and so that way we can kind of get her centered in the screen.
| | 01:10 | And, I'm going to work with her arms first.
| | 01:12 | Now the arms were built just basically in two
pieces. There is this one layer here called the forearm
| | 01:20 | and notice how it also has the hand on it. I didn't feel a need
to really separate that out because it was kind of a small hand
| | 01:27 | so you really wouldn't notice the effect too much.
| | 01:30 | Then we have this thing called wrist but actually the wrist
is really just the little piece of cloth that's hanging off
| | 01:37 | of her wrist, so that's the forearm, that's the wrist.
| | 01:41 | And then we also have Left Arm One so that's the left arm.
| | 01:51 | We have got the same thing over here for the right arm.
| | 01:55 | We have got the forearm, the wrist,
which is essentially that piece of cloth,
| | 02:01 | and the actual arm itself.
So we have arm, wrist and forearm.
| | 02:09 | So those are the layers that we are going to work with and
you can notice their numbers like 11 to 16 in this combination
| | 02:15 | and then I think somewhere in here we have
actually got the bride's torso which is layer 10.
| | 02:21 | So let's go ahead and start animating this.
| | 02:24 | Let's start with the arms and then we will move on
to the head and the lip sync in the next lesson.
| | 02:29 | So let's go ahead with this arm.
| | 02:33 | Probably the best thing to do is just kind of start with kind
| | 02:35 | of almost the middle position here
actually we could start with her arms.
| | 02:40 | Let's just go ahead and start with her arms up so I have
got this all here, I have got this all kind of hierarchied.
| | 02:46 | Again I have got it all linked up and ready
to go so I'm going to just expand these
| | 02:54 | so the forearm and the wrist and the left arm.
| | 02:58 | Now I'm scrolling a lot because I have got the small screen
here but l am also going to expand the right arm here.
| | 03:07 | So let's start with the left one to begin with.
| | 03:09 | So I'm actually going to take the left arm, Left Arm One is
layer 13, and I'm going to go ahead and just key Rotation.
| | 03:18 | We are really not going to worry
too much about Position in this one.
| | 03:21 | So I'm just going to go ahead and key that here. I
am not at zero here so let's go ahead and go to zero
| | 03:26 | and I'm going to go ahead and key that at zero.
| | 03:29 | In fact, I can key Rotation for all of these on this
particular arm and then I'm going to make a cycle.
| | 03:40 | So how long is she going to be waving her arms?
| | 03:44 | Well I don't want exactly the same cycle as his run, which
I believe is 15 or 16 frames, so I'm going to move this out.
| | 03:51 | In fact I'm going to zoom out a little bit
here so I have little bit more room to scrub.
| | 03:56 | I'm going to move this to about 18 so that way we
are not in sync with what everything else is doing
| | 04:02 | so that way it will look little bit more natural and I'm
going to go to her left arm and I'm going to rotate it out.
| | 04:11 | So, now it goes out and then I'm
just going to make another cycle here.
| | 04:15 | So let's just make a standard cycle, let's make it
36 frame cycle so that way it's not exactly the same.
| | 04:24 | So now it goes back and forth.
| | 04:26 | But we also have to worry a little bit
about how this is going to actually animate.
| | 04:31 | So when the arm pulls the hand and the wrist and the forearm out,
| | 04:37 | this is actually going to drag behind. It's
a common animation technique called Drag.
| | 04:41 | So I'm going to move somewhere towards the middle of the end
here, so somewhere around here, and I'm going to bend this.
| | 04:49 | Oops. I'm sorry. I'm going to actually grab the forearm here
and I'm going to bend it, it's is actually going to bend back.
| | 05:02 | So as she rotates it back. And then when she rotates forward so
she starts rotating forward at 18, I'm going to go 2 or 3 frames
| | 05:14 | after that, maybe 4 frames after that, and then
I'm going to straighten this back out again.
| | 05:20 | So now, right there it seems like it's going a little bit too fast
so maybe spread those keys out just a little bit, there we go.
| | 05:33 | So, now I'm going to go to 32 and go ahead and copy and paste
that frame there so now we have got a little bit of- there we go.
| | 05:53 | So now as she waves her arms, it's a little bit more
natural, it gets little bit more natural bend in her arm.
| | 06:01 | So what frame is that? That's Frame 15
and then we unbend it at what? Frame 26.
| | 06:08 | So I'm just kind of mentally taking a note of that because I
am going to do the next arm. I'm going to do the right arm.
| | 06:14 | So let's go head back to zero and let's
go ahead and make that same motion.
| | 06:25 | So I'm going to key all the Rotations at zero for the
right arm, move forward to about 18 and rotate this forward.
| | 06:37 | If we want, we could also offset this by a frame or
two to give it little bit more life but I'm just going
| | 06:42 | to do it exactly on the beat so that both arms move the same.
| | 06:46 | It's such a short animation, I don't think you are going
to really notice too much of a difference if I offset them.
| | 06:50 | And then I'm going to go ahead and copy and paste that
one frame here on right arm so that we have a cycle.
| | 07:00 | So now I have got both arms moving the same and then I'm
going to go ahead and bend that forearm. Go up to right forearm
| | 07:11 | and bend it just a little bit and then I'm
going to straighten it out right around here
| | 07:18 | around Frame 26 or so again just straighten it out.
| | 07:24 | So now it looks pretty good.
| | 07:27 | Now the only other thing we need to do is we need to worry
about these little pieces of cloth that are kind of hanging
| | 07:33 | out for wrist so those are actually called left wrists.
| | 07:36 | So as it moves down, it's going to
happen, drag is going to push this up.
| | 07:41 | So I'm going to rotate this so that it moves up and then when
it comes down like this, it's going to drag back a little bit.
| | 07:55 | So actually I'm going to kind of set a key here and then as
it moves up, this is going to kind of move back like that.
| | 08:06 | Then I'm going to go to Frame 36 and then
I'm going to copy and paste that keyframe
| | 08:14 | so we have a nice cycle, there we go. It looks good.
| | 08:17 | Now let's just do this for the other wrist.
| | 08:20 | So, right wrist. Again it's moving down so that's going to
drag back like that and then when it comes back up it's going
| | 08:35 | to drag this way and then at Frame
36, you copy and paste the final.
| | 08:45 | Now this one doesn't have as much give effect, we can
probably rotate this just a little bit more right here
| | 08:56 | and maybe even overshoot this just a little bit on this side.
| | 09:04 | Here's a little hint here.
| | 09:05 | We've got this little piece of cloth on this side of the line.
| | 09:08 | If it goes over to the other side of that line like
it does right here and actually breaks through,
| | 09:14 | you'll have a really strong piece of animation because the
eye usually sees silhouettes and so if you go all the way
| | 09:20 | over to the other side, it will make a lot
stronger than if you do something where you kind
| | 09:24 | of keep it right there. This is a lot stronger than this.
| | 09:27 | So, let's do that.
| | 09:32 | See that gives a lot more bounce and
that's pretty much all we need for that.
| | 09:39 | So that's the basics of the arm so
let's go ahead and in the next lesson,
| | 09:44 | we'll go through the head and the
facial animation and the scream.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Animating a screaming girl pt. 2: The head| 00:00 | Now we have animated the arms.
| | 00:01 | In fact let me just scrub through that.
| | 00:03 | I just copied some keys to cycle that arm animation.
| | 00:07 | And now we have to work with the head and the
face and actually do the lipsync of her screaming.
| | 00:12 | Well actually we didn't do lip sync
because we actually didn't have a track
| | 00:16 | of her screaming. We didn't hire a voice actor for that.
| | 00:19 | We just used the canned scream, which is this one here.
| | 00:23 | In fact let me play that for you.
| | 00:25 | (Audio: Woman screaming.)
| | 00:27 | It's about a half second long, about
15-20 frames long, somewhere around there.
| | 00:31 | And because it's just a simple effect
we decided to just kind of animate
| | 00:36 | with that sound and then just plug in the scream afterwards.
| | 00:40 | For the scream let's go ahead and work with the mouth first.
| | 00:44 | Now how we animated the mouth was very simple.
| | 00:47 | We just used some scale tools.
| | 00:50 | The layer that is the mouth is called
this one called Bigger Mouth.
| | 00:56 | And if you notice here if we go to the Scale parameter
here you will notice it's already scaled down a lot.
| | 01:04 | Why that is
| | 01:04 | is because in the file itself this was actually a mouth
that was almost as big as the frame and we wanted
| | 01:10 | that because we really wanted to zoom in and go down her throat
so we needed a big mouth and so I just scaled it down here
| | 01:19 | so that it fit on her face and then when
we actually get to the point where she's going
| | 01:24 | into the camera we can make the mouth go bigger.
| | 01:28 | So let's go ahead and start with this animation.
| | 01:30 | I kind of wrote down the numbers as
to where you have the major points of this.
| | 01:34 | I kind of animated it just kind of by eye
so let me try and get this pretty close.
| | 01:38 | I have the scream starting somewhere around Frame 35 or so.
| | 01:45 | So let me just show you how this works.
| | 01:46 | I'm going to go ahead and unlink the scale right here
and I'm also going to start setting keyframes. So now
| | 01:52 | if I want I can make her go like this
or I can make her go like that.
| | 01:57 | And so I'm going to set just an initial keyframe
here kind of almost like a mouth closed position.
| | 02:04 | You know I may want to have it position there
because sometimes you may want to move this mouth up
| | 02:10 | or down just a little bit as her
mouth opens so you might need that.
| | 02:15 | And if I want I will just turn the Rotation just in case.
| | 02:18 | So now when a mouth opens to scream, it actually opens
very, very quickly over about 3 or 4 frames so I'm going
| | 02:26 | to go 3 frames ahead to Frame 38 and I'm
going to make kind of like my extreme here.
| | 02:32 | I'm just going to go ahead and open up
her mouth and so now she goes like that.
| | 02:40 | And if I want to I could actually have maybe a few
keyframes down here at 0, in fact I'm just copy and paste these.
| | 02:48 | And maybe just have a few, like maybe if
she is taking a breath or something like that.
| | 02:52 | Maybe just kind of like a little bit of motion there.
| | 02:56 | And then right before she goes open I kind
of want to have almost like an anticipation.
| | 03:06 | Remember how we did anticipation
with some of the other animation?
| | 03:10 | We can actually just kind of shrink it just a little
bit and bring it down so just kind of make almost-
| | 03:19 | Like that. And then I'm going to
hold it open and around Frame 50
| | 03:25 | or so. In fact what I can do here is I
can just copy and paste that open frame.
| | 03:30 | In fact I may want to just reduce it just a
little bit, bring it down like a point or two just
| | 03:36 | because as you scream your mouth will get smaller
just naturally as your jaw relaxes, like that.
| | 03:44 | Ah! OK. (Laughs.) I might scream here. And
then another 3 or 4 frames for it to close.
| | 03:51 | So I'm just going to go ahead and
select this kind of closed mouth position
| | 03:56 | and so now in fact I can probably extend
it even a little bit more right here
| | 04:01 | There we go. And then what I can do is I can just
go ahead and do that again for that second scream.
| | 04:11 | So I'm going to go move ahead a little bit here and I'm just
going to kind of again just slide in kind of a hold key here.
| | 04:20 | And maybe expand it just a little bit because you
want to kind of give it just a little bit of life.
| | 04:25 | Now her head is going to be moving as well
so you won't really notice this as much.
| | 04:29 | And then I'm going to go ahead and create
another open mouth position right here.
| | 04:42 | And what I did before was actually kind
of close it down just a little bit
| | 04:46 | and then I opened it again at
somewhere around Frame 85 or so.
| | 04:52 | So what I did was kind of almost like she is kind of
gasping for breath. She kind of opens her mouth silently
| | 04:57 | and then the scream happens again. And then she screams again.
| | 05:07 | To the point here where she is
kind of coming into that frame
| | 05:12 | and so what I need to do now is expand that mouth to the point
where we fly down her throat and I believe this happens somewhere
| | 05:21 | around Frame 100 or so. I'm trying to remember.
| | 05:27 | And so at this point I'm really going to start expanding
this a lot and just making this mouth really, really big.
| | 05:35 | So then I'm going to go over here and now this is a
point where I'm kind of just switching between these two.
| | 05:44 | And here let's go back to the point
right before she goes really wide.
| | 05:49 | I'm going to go ahead and copy that
Position and Rotation key so that way
| | 05:54 | when it comes here I can actually move this off
of her face and get it into the right place.
| | 06:03 | So all I have to do here is just
move this up a little bit and over.
| | 06:07 | And now we got it kind of blacked out, so something like that.
| | 06:12 | I don't know if that's exactly the way it was in the animation
but it's pretty close. So now what we have to do is add
| | 06:19 | in some head motion. So at this point when
it's like this, I want the head to be still
| | 06:26 | because this is really kind of a matching frame.
| | 06:28 | So I'm going to go over to the bride's
head here, Bride Face on layer number 6,
| | 06:34 | and we are going to start setting some keyframes here.
| | 06:36 | Well the first thing I want to do is open
kind of a lock in Position, Scale and Rotation
| | 06:40 | for this frame, at Frame 100 where she comes into here.
| | 06:46 | And then I'm just going to work backwards from there.
| | 06:53 | So before her mouth goes open or before she screams, I want her
head to kind of come down. I want her head to anticipate that.
| | 07:07 | So as she is moving, she is also bouncing though because what's
happening as she is bouncing with Frankenstein so I'm going
| | 07:16 | to go ahead and start animating some keys here.
| | 07:20 | So first thing I'm going to do is
just go ahead and set some rough keys.
| | 07:23 | I'm just going to go ahead and just jog this a little bit
and do some rough keys for Rotation and Scale and all that.
| | 07:33 | So that way I have something to start with.
| | 07:36 | And then somewhere around Frame 17 I'm going
to go ahead and just move her head down.
| | 07:41 | In fact one of the things I can do is I'm just kind of going to
free form this and then when she screams, I want her to kind of come
| | 07:50 | down a little bit more and then come back up because
when she screams I want this to be like that.
| | 08:05 | So that adds a lot of emphasis to that scream. Moving
the head when she screams adds a lot of emphasis to it.
| | 08:12 | And now I'm just going to go ahead and settle that head
back down after the scream and just keep doing that.
| | 08:19 | Then she is going to go ahead and scream
again somewhere around here. There it is, OK.
| | 08:25 | So again I'm just going to go ahead and move this head down
just a little bit right before and then right when it comes up
| | 08:31 | I will go ahead and move that head up and
maybe give a little bit of Rotation to it.
| | 08:38 | And then just maybe play with Rotation a little bit
right here so that way- and let's just see how she looks.
| | 08:48 | Now this is just rough. It might not be exactly...
There she goes. So basically that's what I have done.
| | 08:58 | Now the other thing I did, and I showed you how
to do this in the other lesson, was you also want
| | 09:04 | to add in some blinks to add some realism to this.
| | 09:07 | Now how we add in a blink is just essentially by we have
an Eyes Closed layer and if we animate the Opacity of that
| | 09:16 | up then basically we have a blink. So we basically animate her
eyes and her eye whites off and animate her eyes closed on.
| | 09:25 | So what I'd like to do is when she screams I'd like to close
her eyes so let's go ahead here to Frame say 34 and I'm going
| | 09:34 | to set Opacity for Eyes Closed and Opacity for these two layers
here, which is her eyes and that little white thing in the whites
| | 09:47 | of her eyes, essentially the white behind her eyes.
| | 09:50 | So right there I have got this Opacity
at 0 and these Opacities at 100.
| | 09:57 | So at Frame 35 I'm going to go ahead and animate this up and
these down and that gives me my little blink. And then I'm going
| | 10:11 | to animate that off again so what I can do is just select these
keys, copy and paste them to kind of hold those eyes closed.
| | 10:19 | And then select this key right before there just
the one before there, and actually I'll go one after.
| | 10:26 | So I'm setting this at 45 so at 46 I'm going to
copy this frame or this key right there. Copy, paste,
| | 10:38 | copy, paste.
| | 10:43 | And then she screams again right there.
| | 10:48 | Now once I've got that all I have to do is copy and paste
all of these keyframes and I've got my second blink.
| | 10:56 | So let's see how that works. Blink and so on.
| | 11:02 | The timing on that second blink will probably be
adjusted a little bit, but you get the idea of it.
| | 11:09 | In fact let's go ahead and readjust that
just a bit so I'm going to go ahead
| | 11:12 | and select these three keyframes
and just move those back just a hair.
| | 11:21 | So let's go ahead and take a look at
what the final of this looks like.
| | 11:24 | I'm going to go ahead and open a project.
We're going to go ahead and open up 00F.
| | 11:36 | And let's take a look at that.
| | 11:38 | OK, so there she screams and then she closes her eyes again
so I had the blink a little bit earlier and she screams.
| | 11:46 | And here is what she looks like comped in.
| | 11:51 | OK, so basically I gave you the principles and you
pretty much see how that works so let's go ahead
| | 11:57 | and move on from here just a more complex stuff like
the Puppet tool to give her a little bit more life.
| | 12:03 | We will do that in another chapter.
| | Collapse this transcript |
|
|
4. Animating Using the Puppet ToolThe basics of the Puppet tool| 00:00 | Now, we're going to learn about the Puppet tool. What the Puppet
tool does is it allows you to create realistic deformations in
| | 00:07 | bitmaps, vector graphics, or text. Now we are going to be
working mostly with bitmaps here, but it applies equally
| | 00:15 | for all the other types of art. Let's go ahead and open a file,
we are going to continue working with that file where Frankenstein
| | 00:22 | runs away with the girl. We are on our Desktop,
| | 00:25 | Exercise Files/Monsterpiece/After Effects/Shot0700F
| | 00:33 | has a Frankenstein.
| | 00:36 | So, here we have the shot, if I just
go here to Frank scene 07 version 3
| | 00:41 | and you can see he is running with the girl. Now, when he
is running, the girl is kind of stiff, she is not really moving,
| | 00:49 | she looks like a cardboard cutout and if we want to, we can
give her a little bit more dynamics. We can make her dress
| | 00:54 | kind of flap in the wind, we can make her bounce up and down in
all the right places and so on. So, let me show you how to set up
| | 01:02 | the Puppet tool and then we will go ahead and animate her.
So, actually I'm going to go over to this Bride composition here,
| | 01:09 | with just her screaming and we are going to
work with her body, now that is layer 10.
| | 01:16 | Now, here actually I have another layer in here, which the
artist gave me, in order to kind of almost simulate that effect
| | 01:23 | of her kind of bouncing up and down and if you notice,
| | 01:26 | well it's not really all that great because in order for this to be
realistic, you really need a lot of the different layers to do that.
| | 01:34 | But the Puppet tool really solves that problem, so let's
go ahead and play with it. We are on Right Torso One,
| | 01:40 | which is layer 10 in this file and the Puppet tool is right here, we've
got a couple of options. If we click here, we've got the Puppet Pin Tool,
| | 01:48 | the Puppet Overlap Tool and the Puppet Starch Tool. So I'm going to go
to the Puppet Pin Tool and then we can't start laying stuff in here.
| | 01:56 | you can also add the Puppet tool as an effect here, pretty
much the same way, just Distort effect, just Distort, Puppet.
| | 02:04 | OK those are two routes to the exact same place. So what
this does is it puts a puppet effect onto this layer,
| | 02:11 | we can then start laying in the puppet pins.
| | 02:14 | So, I'm going to lay in just few, I'm going to lay one here at tail
of her dress, one at her ankles, one right around her knee and one at
| | 02:22 | her hips. And now, I can take my selection tool and if I
want to I can select any one of these pins and I can move them
| | 02:30 | and you can see how easily that distorts, let me undo that.
| | 02:35 | And if you notice here, when I move one of these pins
however, it really effects this one up here which is unpinned.
| | 02:43 | So, what we have to do is we have to make sure that we pin down those
parts that we don't want to move. So I'm actually going to go ahead and
| | 02:49 | add a few more pins here, I'm going to add one here at the
shoulders, one at the neck and one right here at her chest.
| | 02:57 | Now, if you notice in the Effects here, under Puppet, we have got Mesh 1
| | 03:02 | and now what Mesh 1 has is all of those puppet pins
that I have created. So, we have 7 pins here and you
| | 03:10 | notice here as I select them, they show up in yellow here.
| | 03:18 | OK.
| | 03:18 | Now, there are couple of things also. There are also these
other pins here, there is Overlap and the Starch tool.
| | 03:24 | Let me show you how those work as well. I'm going to go back to my
Move tool here, so let's take the tale of this dress. If we want to,
| | 03:33 | you know if there is an opportunity to animate it up here, we are
going to run into a problem, now this is not something that will happen
| | 03:40 | in this animation, but I'm just doing this for
Effect. When we animate this part of her up here,
| | 03:46 | is this dress going in front up or behind her hips?
| | 03:51 | Where does this go? Right now, it's going to default to in front up, but
let's say we wanted it to go behind, how do we do that? We do that by
| | 03:59 | using the Overlap tool, so I'm actually going to go ahead and undo this,
| | 04:05 | I'm going to undo my moves here and then I'm going to go to my
Overlap tool and I'm going to place an overlap point right here at
| | 04:14 | the bottom of her dress.
| | 04:16 | So, now when I select this Puppet Pin Tool and when I select this pin
and I move it up, you are going to notice here, what I did was actually
| | 04:23 | created another overlap pin, which was that one that we just
drew in and that overlap pin has a couple of options here.
| | 04:31 | One is in front,
| | 04:33 | so if we dial it down to zero or less than zero, means it's behind it
| | 04:37 | and the extend is how much of that goes behind.
| | 04:40 | In fact we just dial it up here. And you can see now that when
this puppet pin moves, it always moves as little Mesh behind
| | 04:48 | the dress, so that can be handy for other applications of the
Puppet tool. Now, the other one that we want to deal with is
| | 04:54 | called the Puppet Starch tool.
| | 04:57 | Now, the Puppet Starch tool basically determines the stiffness of
something, so you can actually put for example Puppet Starch Pin here
| | 05:05 | and if we go, here in addition to that overlap, we have
a stiffness and so that stiffness one again allows us to
| | 05:14 | stiffen up this area, so it doesn't deform.
So if we want to we can increase that
| | 05:22 | increase that and give it a bigger extent. So that way when these
other parts of this body moves, those don't. So, those are the
| | 05:29 | basics of the Puppet tool, so let's go
ahead and show you a real life application
| | 05:34 | in the next lesson.
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| Creating bounce with the Puppet tool| 00:00 | Let's go ahead and use the Puppet tool now to animate the girl.
| | 00:04 | So, let's go ahead and take a look at the scene here. We've got Frank.
| | 00:08 | Scene Version 3 and he is running her through the scene.
Now, she kind of looks like this cardboard cutout, so let's go
| | 00:15 | ahead and add some puppet pins and start
animating her. I'm going to go over into her composition
| | 00:21 | and I'm going to select her layer here.
| | 00:27 | Bride Torso One, let's make sure that's the right
layer. OK. And then I'm just going go to Distort, Puppet,
| | 00:34 | just add in that Puppet tool effect and let's start laying in some
puppet pins. So I'm going to go up here to the Puppet Pin tool
| | 00:41 | and we've got some options here. For one I can show the mesh as
I start to draw it. So go ahead and click one here at the back,
| | 00:48 | one at the ankle,
| | 00:50 | you can see this mesh now, this is what it's actually using to distort.
And let's set one right here at his hands where his hand hits the knee,
| | 00:58 | one at the hips,
| | 01:01 | and then one at the shoulders, one at the neck and then one
here at the chest. So I've got like 7 of these puppet pins.
| | 01:10 | I'm going to open up, expand my Puppet
effect and expand the Deform effect.
| | 01:18 | Now, when you animate a puppet pin,
| | 01:20 | each puppet pin has just one variable and that's for Position.
So I'm just going to expand all of these. You'll notice that when
| | 01:27 | I put this in, it actually already put a keyframe in here.
| | 01:32 | So, what I need to do is, I'm actually going to
| | 01:34 | expand this just little bit so we can see this a little more
here. I'm going to go ahead and select all 7 of these keys
| | 01:42 | and I'm going to move them to zero.
| | 01:47 | And now, I want to- in fact let's go ahead and
| | 01:51 | undock this.
| | 01:55 | So I can actually see this in real time.
| | 02:00 | So now what I want do is take this and make sure
that her composition syncs up with this composition.
| | 02:09 | So, what I want is I want to start playing with
how she bounces. So, when he is at his high point,
| | 02:15 | she is kind of like the opposite, so as he is moving up, she's
moving down. So, all I have to do here is just start selecting
| | 02:24 | and moving these puppet pins. So I'm going to go ahead
| | 02:28 | and just start selecting these. So as he goes up, I want her to
go down and I also want this to go down as well, the dress. And
| | 02:43 | we can also probably do her hips a little bit, make her hips
bounce just a bit, but I want to make sure that his hand doesn't
| | 02:49 | go too far behind there.
| | 02:52 | So, these are the three points. 1,
| | 02:55 | 2,
| | 02:55 | 3. Maybe a little bit of ankle here, so let's do 4. So, I'm going
to actually try and animate all of those points. You can see here,
| | 03:02 | I've got keyframes for all of them and so now when he goes
| | 03:06 | down here, she is going to go up, OK.
| | 03:13 | And her hips are going to go up, this is going
to go up, this may go back just a little bit,
| | 03:19 | so you can see now, we are getting a really nice secondary motion and
this is something you really can't get, with just swapping out bitmaps.
| | 03:27 | So, again, we're just going to continue and I kind of like just doing this a
little bit free form because it gives a little bit more of a natural look to it.
| | 03:34 | If I just copied and pasted keyframes it would be
| | 03:39 | a little bit static looking
| | 03:41 | or a lot like we are doing cycles. So,
again I'm just going to move this up,
| | 03:46 | move her hips up a little bit,
| | 03:48 | move this up.
| | 03:55 | So when this is here I can move these back down.
| | 04:13 | And so again, we are getting a nice bounce effect there.
| | 04:18 | When it comes down again, her parts go up and so on.
| | 04:27 | That's basically how it works. Very simple. And if we
want to, we can take a look at this in real time here.
| | 04:38 | So she has got a lot more bounce to her
and it gives a lot more sense of motion.
| | 04:43 | So that's the basics of how to animate with the Puppet
tool and let's go into this and take a look at it.
| | 04:49 | So basically all we were doing is we're creating keyframes
| | 04:52 | for each of these puppet pins and each puppet pin has its
own position, it has its own curve, you can use whatever
| | 04:59 | animation tools you want on each of these pins. Now,
remember the pins actually are moving relative to the layer.
| | 05:06 | So if I actually took this layer itself and moved it, these
effects still work relative to the center anchor point of that layer.
| | 05:15 | OK. So, that makes it
| | 05:18 | so everything is relative to the center point here. So,
those are the basics of animating with the Puppet tool.
| | 05:25 | So let's take a look at the final version of the scene as I animated it.
| | 05:29 | I'm going to go ahead and open a project
| | 05:33 | and that is Shot07_03 which is actually is my final.
| | 05:39 | And you can see I have got-
| | 05:42 | in fact let's turn on Frank here.
| | 05:45 | You can see we've got all the parts moving.
| | 05:49 | So, let's go ahead and use the Puppet tool for
some other things and we will move on from here.
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| Dig cycles pt. 1: Introduction| 00:00 | So, now that we know the basics of the Puppet tool, let's use it
to do something a little bit more complex, and that's this scene.
| | 00:08 | I'm going to go ahead and scrub this for you. It's the digging scene.
Now, this is probably the most complex animation we did on this
| | 00:14 | because this dig is a little bit complex in terms of how it's
planned out, in terms of animation. In fact, if you want, we can
| | 00:20 | open up the final version of this. It's in our Desktop\
| | 00:25 | Exercise Files\Monsterpiece\After Effects\Shot-03_01,
| | 00:33 | which is our final version, and then I'm going to create some
interim versions as we go along to show you kind of the step by step
| | 00:40 | of how we actually do one of these dig cycles.
| | 00:43 | Let's just kind of break down the shot.
What I did was I created that dig cycle,
| | 00:48 | which is essentially the characters just digging
and then I cycled it just by copying keyframes.
| | 00:55 | So, it made one dig
| | 00:58 | and then you just copy it and off it goes. And then, once we
cycle that, we bring this composition into our main composition.
| | 01:05 | And so what I do is I have an overlay for the ground.
In fact, let's just go from the back to the front.
| | 01:10 | So we have a background. We have the actual
grave itself and then we have an overlay.
| | 01:16 | And then, they basically just cycle and all we
do is just animate them moving down as they dig.
| | 01:24 | Very, very simple.
| | 01:27 | So now, with digging,
| | 01:29 | we've got a couple of issues here. First of all, if you
notice, let's go ahead and zoom in just a little bit here.
| | 01:39 | If I take a look at Dr. Frankenstein here, the guy in blue,
| | 01:45 | we have a lot of Puppet tool going on here. Now, look at
these arms. What we did was we used the Puppet tool for the arms,
| | 01:51 | for the torso,
| | 01:53 | and a lot of other things and also on Fritz, we did
pretty much the same thing. His arm kind of bent
| | 02:01 | using that Puppet tool.
| | 02:02 | And so on. So, we are going to go ahead
and animate Frank on the next lesson.
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| Dig cycles pt. 2: Shovel| 00:00 | Let's go ahead and start animating this Dig cycle here.
| | 00:04 | Now I'm just going to start with a blank project
here, which has all the characters in it ready to go.
| | 00:10 | We are on our Desktop/Exercise Files/
Monsterpiece/AFX/Shot 03_00A.
| | 00:18 | And this is essentially a blank version of the file that we
had, which is just no animation and it's pretty much all set up.
| | 00:26 | I did leave the puppet points in. We know how to put those
in and I will show you where I put them in the character.
| | 00:32 | Let's start with Dr. Frankenstein.
So I've got two characters here.
| | 00:38 | We've got Dr. Frankenstein and Fritz, so let's go ahead
and turn off all those layers that are not Dr. Frankenstein.
| | 00:45 | I'm going to go ahead and scroll down here
and Shift-select everything above Frank
| | 00:51 | and just turn them off, so we don't have to see them.
| | 00:54 | Now we are going to animate him digging.
| | 00:56 | Let's go ahead and show you how I set up some of the layers here.
| | 00:59 | We have a torso layer, we have a left arm, we have a shovel
and then I have hands. I have a separate hand for right hand
| | 01:15 | and left hand and I also have a separate arm.
| | 01:19 | Now the one thing is I did make this
hierarchical. I kind of linked everything together.
| | 01:24 | So the shovel actually has the hands attached to it, so I have
these little hand layers and those are attached to the shovel.
| | 01:35 | And so what I can do with that is I can animate the shovel
itself and the hands will go along with it and then all I have
| | 01:42 | to do is kind of match up the arms and the torso to make it all
come together. So it's going to go make the animation a lot easier.
| | 01:49 | The main object, the thing that's actually has to be stable in
this is the shovel, that's the thing that's moving the most.
| | 01:55 | So it's better to animate that first rather than try
and animate his hands and match the shovel to his hand.
| | 02:02 | It's much easier to animate just the
shovel, so let's go ahead and do that.
| | 02:07 | This is animated on a 20-frame cycle, so I'm going to zoom
out a little bit, so I can see Frame 20 here. There we go.
| | 02:14 | So let's start with adding in some blank keyframes to start.
| | 02:17 | Now what happens when you dig is basically you anticipate.
You dig the head of the shovel into the ground and you lift up
| | 02:25 | and toss it over your shoulder and then repeat. So I'm going to
go ahead and go about 4 frames up and I'm going to anticipate,
| | 02:33 | which means he's going to rear back on that
shovel to give him a little bit of momentum.
| | 02:38 | So what I'm going to do is just select the shovel layer and I'm
just going to pull that shovel back just a little bit, something
| | 02:46 | like that. Not too much, you don't really have to.
| | 02:50 | So basically he pulls back.
| | 02:53 | In fact I might want to rotate this down
or maybe rotate it up just a little bit.
| | 02:58 | Again I'm trying to think of how his hands are going to
move this. So he comes back. OK, so that's at Frame 4.
| | 03:09 | Now we go forward a few frames, let's say to
Frame 9 and now he is going to dig that shovel in,
| | 03:16 | so I'm going to go ahead and rotate this down just a little bit.
| | 03:20 | In fact when he rotates down, it's going to be more
like that and I'm just going to push that down and
| | 03:26 | I was going to dig where? Right below his feet,
because that's where the ground is.
| | 03:30 | So he is going to go just below the
ground, so something like that.
| | 03:34 | So he goes down and then it's going to come up
and he is going to toss that over his shoulder.
| | 03:41 | So that's going to take a little bit longer, so
let's say I'm going to go to Frame 14 or so,
| | 03:46 | 14 or 15 and first thing we are going to rotate it up, so
he throws the dirt over his shoulder and then I'm going
| | 03:52 | to put it forward just a little bit.
So let's see if that works.
| | 03:58 | Let's see. Maybe bring in a little bit back here.
| | 04:01 | Again I'm just kind of roughing this out. We
can always tweak it as we kind of finalize this.
| | 04:07 | So there he's kind of throwing it over his shoulder.
| | 04:13 | OK. And then we have to come back to the original position.
| | 04:18 | So I'm going to go ahead and select those
keys at Frame 0 and copy and paste them.
| | 04:23 | So now what do we have?
| | 04:24 | We have a kind of a cycle, so if we want to we can
continue the cycle just by copying and pasting keyframes.
| | 04:36 | OK so it's a 20-frame cycle, so
now he digs, dig and so on. Great.
| | 04:43 | Now the next step is to animate the hands and in the next lesson,
we will animate, using the Puppet tool, his hands and his body.
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| Dig cycles pt. 3: Arms and body| 00:00 | So now, we have the shovel motion here.
| | 00:03 | I saved this file out in case you
are picking this up in the middle.
| | 00:06 | We are in the After Effects directory, Shot 03_00B.
| | 00:13 | So again, this is just the shovel doing the dig cycle.
| | 00:17 | So now, we need to match the body to the shovel.
| | 00:20 | We can start by doing the torso.
| | 00:23 | So let's click on Layer 33, Frank Torso and
what this is basically just the body, in fact
| | 00:32 | if you want, you can move some Position keys here.
| | 00:35 | So as he rears up here, I want the body to come
up just a little bit and then when it comes down,
| | 00:45 | I want the body to come down and then lean back.
| | 00:48 | Now, one of the things we did do was
we put in some Puppet tool pins here.
| | 00:52 | In fact, if we click on the Puppet effect you
can pretty much see these Puppet tool things.
| | 00:56 | So we have some stuff for his torso, so we
can actually bend him over a little bit.
| | 01:01 | So when he kind of digs in, we can give him
a little bit of a waist bend, which will help.
| | 01:06 | Let's start by moving him a little bit.
| | 01:08 | So I'm going to go ahead and just put Position and Rotation.
| | 01:13 | So as he comes up, I'm going to go ahead and just
move his body up just a little bit in Position
| | 01:22 | to move him up and rotate him just a little bit.
| | 01:26 | Again, I'm trying to kind of almost
match the arms a little bit, not too much.
| | 01:32 | So now, he comes up and then we've
got Frame 9 is that maximum there.
| | 01:38 | And so now, we are going to bring him down a little bit and
maybe rotate him- well again, we can't worry too much about Rotation
| | 01:47 | because we have got these feet here. We can
actually do a lot of that with a puppet pin.
| | 01:51 | And then, he lifts it up and throws it over his shoulder
and at that point, actually I'm going to start here.
| | 01:57 | I'm going to copy those keys at Frame 0 and paste
them, so that way he is up and then I'm going
| | 02:03 | to bring him just a little bit more and
maybe just rotate him back just a little bit.
| | 02:09 | Again, I'm really watching his feet here. So watch.
| | 02:14 | He puts it down and then tosses it up.
| | 02:17 | Now, we have to bring him back to the cycle point.
| | 02:20 | So I'm going to go ahead and copy and paste this key here
that was at 0 so that maybe we have got an exact match.
| | 02:28 | So it goes down up, down up, pretty good.
| | 02:32 | So now, we have to also animate the bend of the torso.
| | 02:36 | So we can go to the Puppet tool.
| | 02:38 | I have actually two of them on here but the one that's active
is called Puppet 2, and we have got some puppet pins here.
| | 02:44 | Puppet 4 is the shoulders.
| | 02:47 | Puppet 3 and 2 are the bottom point and
Puppet 1 is the middle of the character.
| | 02:55 | So let's go ahead and set keys for all of these.
| | 02:59 | So when it comes up, we don't need a puppet pin at
that point, but we do need to set some keys here.
| | 03:05 | So I'm going to copy and paste those keys.
| | 03:07 | And then at Frame 9, I'm going to select Pin 4 and
bend him over just a little bit. OK? Just a little bit.
| | 03:18 | Right here, we might even want to bend him back.
| | 03:28 | And then as he comes up, again we are going to rotate him
back because he is tossing it over his shoulder and then,
| | 03:37 | I'm going to select all of these keys and go to Frame
20 which is the beginning of our cycle and paste them.
| | 03:44 | So now, I really only animated his shoulders.
| | 03:48 | I really didn't animate much else.
| | 03:49 | The lower part of his body was pretty much solid.
| | 03:54 | So now, we have got that motion.
| | 03:57 | Now, if you notice, these arms really don't match.
| | 04:00 | Well, this is where the Puppet tool comes in pretty handy
and what we need to do is just start animating these arms.
| | 04:09 | So, let's go ahead and start with the right arm, which is
Layer 29, and I have got some puppet pins here. 3, 2, 1.
| | 04:18 | 1 is the shoulder, 2 is the elbow and 3 is the wrist.
| | 04:24 | So let's go ahead and set keys for
those and then he comes up here.
| | 04:30 | Frame 4 is that maximum.
| | 04:32 | So, what I'm going to do now is I
am going to start matching these.
| | 04:35 | I'm going to actually zoom in a little bit more here.
| | 04:38 | Let's go ahead 50% here and there we go.
| | 04:44 | So now, we can see what is going on here.
| | 04:46 | So, as he comes up, what I need to do is
match this to the wrist, this to the shoulder
| | 04:55 | and then somewhere in between is going to be that elbow.
| | 05:00 | So, you can see that looks pretty good.
| | 05:04 | And then Frame 9 is that other maximum.
| | 05:09 | And I may want to turn off his head
a little bit here, Frank Face.
| | 05:12 | I'm going to turn off his head.
| | 05:13 | Let's just deal with the body.
| | 05:15 | Let's go back to the arm here.
| | 05:17 | I'm going to go ahead and grab this arm, push it in
and we are going to match that up as best as we can.
| | 05:39 | So, that's actually a little bit far.
We could actually almost-
| | 05:47 | Again, I'm trying to get something that works.
| | 05:50 | Now, when his face is over this, you might not see
as much so we might be able to cheat some of this.
| | 05:55 | He's stretching a little much here but
I think once it animates, it will be fine.
| | 05:59 | So, we get it down and then Frame 14.
| | 06:05 | A lot of times what I will do here is I will just kind of
copy and paste that start position here so that I have kind
| | 06:10 | of am going a little bit more to where it needs to be.
| | 06:14 | So now, I can select his elbow and his wrist.
| | 06:17 | I'm going to actually move that
wrist there and then move the elbow.
| | 06:21 | So, that way, it's pretty close.
| | 06:23 | And again, his head will cover some of this.
| | 06:36 | There we go.
| | 06:38 | Then at Frame 20 I'm going to copy and
paste those original frames. Not too bad.
| | 06:46 | GReat. So let's go ahead and do the same.
| | 06:48 | In fact, if I want to, I can actually copy and
paste the cycle for this and for the torso.
| | 06:54 | So I'm copying and pasting the cycle
for the hands and the torso.
| | 07:00 | Let's go head down to the torso and I'm going
to go ahead and copy and paste these ones as well.
| | 07:09 | In fact, I can copy all of these keys.
| | 07:14 | I'm going to copy those and just again we are going to cycle it.
| | 07:17 | So, now that we have got this cycle
here, all we need to do is that left arm.
| | 07:24 | So let's go to the left arm here.
| | 07:31 | Basically, it's just again moving puppet pins.
| | 07:34 | So, I'm going to go to Frame 0, lock in my position.
| | 07:39 | Frame 4 is where it comes up.
| | 07:43 | And so, actually that's not too bad but again, I want
to make sure I put keys on every single one of these.
| | 07:50 | So, there is Frame 4, Frame 9.
| | 07:54 | Move that up a little bit, and this is where he really stretches.
| | 08:04 | I'm going to try and split the difference
between these three, there we go.
| | 08:08 | And then, Frame 14. I'm going to try and
keep that as straight as possible, there we go.
| | 08:28 | Now, you can see right here. Here is
one of the problems is this is rotating
| | 08:33 | but this is intertwining along a
straight line, look at that motion path.
| | 08:37 | So, what we have to do, we may have to go through frame by
frame along these five frames and kind of sync all of these up.
| | 08:44 | So I'm actually going to go through here.
| | 08:47 | This is one of the places where we may
have to do a little bit of groundwork.
| | 08:52 | Now, the one thing you can't do with the Puppet
tool yet, hopefully you will be able to soon,
| | 08:56 | is be able to link puppet points hierarchically
to other parts in the scene or to each other
| | 09:02 | so that way you can kind of create almost like a bone structure.
| | 09:06 | There we go.
| | 09:06 | That didn't take too long.
| | 09:08 | Now, he has to come back to 0.
| | 09:11 | So again, I'm going to copy and paste
those and when he comes back to 0 again,
| | 09:20 | we are intertweening here along a
straight line and we can't be doing that.
| | 09:24 | So, again, we are going to have through this, a frame at
a time and just make sure everything kind of syncs up.
| | 09:40 | In fact, I'm going to go ahead and
select both of these. There we go.
| | 09:57 | And we will go ahead and just finish this.
| | 10:02 | And I think this will be basically our dig cycle.
| | 10:06 | Now, I haven't animated the head, but again,
that's pretty simple. OK. So there.
| | 10:13 | So now, we have got that hand.
| | 10:15 | Notice the nice stretchy quality of this.
| | 10:18 | This has got this real kind of rich animated quality to it.
| | 10:23 | It's got almost like a cell animation quality.
| | 10:26 | So let's go ahead and take a look at what we have.
| | 10:30 | So with him, you can see we have got this nice dig cycle.
| | 10:35 | So we started to put the shovel and then just
everything else matched, and it pretty much goes.
| | 10:40 | So let's turn on his face and we still need to animate his head
and his face and everything else, but you get the general gist
| | 10:49 | of how this particular technique works,
and let's play that one more time.
| | 10:58 | Perfect, isn't that nice?
| | 11:00 | OK, so, let's move on from here.
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| Dig cycles pt. 4: Finalizing| 00:00 | Now let's finish up the scene. I'm going to go
ahead and open the almost finished version of this
| | 00:05 | which is Shot03_00c.
| | 00:09 | Now this has our dig cycle.
| | 00:13 | The finished one, with the head of Dr.Frankenstein on him.
| | 00:16 | Now this also has Fritz animated. Now I do want to go through a few
things with Fritz as to some of the differences in his animation.
| | 00:24 | It's pretty much done the same way,
| | 00:27 | but...
| | 00:31 | he's a little bit different, because his hand kind of goes
behind his shoulder. In fact, let's go ahead and zoom in on him
| | 00:40 | and I'll show you what's going on here. Now with him, we pretty
much animated him the same way. We animated the shovel first
| | 00:48 | and the shovel was attached to the hands and then we used the
Puppet tool on the left and right arms in order to make his body move.
| | 00:57 | I didn't even use the Puppet tool on his body because
he's so rotund, he really can't bend at the waist.
| | 01:02 | But the one little difference is right here.
| | 01:05 | He has two left arms and what they do is
they actually animate between here and here.
| | 01:10 | We actually have to animate the opacity of that arm, right here,
so we actually turn this arm off and then we turn the other
| | 01:18 | left arm on and they both have puppet pins in them.
| | 01:22 | So basically what we're doing is we're
just turning on and off those arms as
| | 01:27 | his arms go back and forth.
| | 01:30 | OK. So that's the basic difference between how he's
animated but otherwise it's pretty much identical
| | 01:36 | process to how we did Dr. Frankenstein
and then all we did is we added some
| | 01:42 | dirt in there and those are essentially
just some layers here and basically they just
| | 01:48 | animate some opacity and it just moves. So it's basically a cycle
since little flicks of dirt just pop on and then they expand
| | 01:57 | and disappear as they move off and we cycle all of that.
| | 02:02 | And then once we're done
| | 02:05 | what we're going to do is just go and bring in this dig cycle layer.
| | 02:09 | And so that's our layer.
| | 02:11 | And now all we have to do is animate this
so we can just do a simple transformation
| | 02:17 | and in fact all we have to do is animate Position here.
| | 02:21 | So we're just going to get a good start position right there.
| | 02:24 | And then over the course of the shot,
they're basically just moving down.
| | 02:30 | So they move down as they dig.
| | 02:34 | In fact I'm going to start them
| | 02:36 | right about there.
| | 02:41 | And that's basically the shot.
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|
|
5. Animating Special EffectsCreating a monster pt. 1: Introduction| 00:00 | In the next few lessons, we are going to talk about
| | 00:04 | special effects and the special effects
that were used in Minute MonsterPieces.
| | 00:08 | The first one that I want to show you is probably the most complex
of the special effects and that's the creation of the monster.
| | 00:15 | In fact, let me go ahead and just play that for you.
| | 00:21 | So the monster
| | 00:24 | comes in in this blaze of static and skeleton bones and then
pops into his boxer shorts. So probably the most complex part was
| | 00:33 | this beginning part where obviously it fades in from white here,
a few effects as he kind of comes in and then we have got this
| | 00:41 | chatter effect as the skeleton kind of chatters and the sparks fly
off and then the skeleton kind of fades to an outline of the monster.
| | 00:53 | And then we have this burst right here.
| | 00:56 | The monster comes in
| | 00:58 | and then one more little burst right here.
| | 01:01 | And that's the end. Now this shot originally
| | 01:04 | we just had him coming in this way but then we added the
gag of the boxer shorts afterwards so this actually has
| | 01:11 | two different files to it. So let me show you the first file in
Photoshop so you can kind of see the components that we're working with
| | 01:19 | and then in the next lesson we'll go through and
actually show you how we build this up from layers.
| | 01:25 | Now this Photoshop file, this was all that was given. Now we have
a bunch of different layers. We have this skeleton. We have this one
| | 01:32 | called skeleton backdrop, which I don't think we used. We actually
copied this skeleton layer a bunch of times and blurred it
| | 01:38 | to make that effect.
| | 01:40 | Got lots of little lightening layers here that we used.
We've got an eyes open, eyes closed so we can blink
| | 01:48 | and then we've got the monster himself
| | 01:51 | and then we've got a monster glow.
| | 01:54 | Actually two monster glows here.
| | 01:58 | So we use that when the skeleton's kind of
overlaying on the outline of the monster.
| | 02:04 | And then we have this burst, the yellow and the white burst and
of course the background. So these are basically the layers.
| | 02:11 | And from this, we basically built this whole little animation here.
| | 02:17 | Pretty much just using these elements.
So it's just really more of an animation
| | 02:21 | and a few little effects to get us by.
| | 02:25 | So in the next lesson, let's go ahead and actually dive
into this and show you how we built this layer by layer.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating a monster pt. 2| 00:01 | Let's start animating this shot where the monster is born.
| | 00:04 | These shots of special effects shots usually have a lot of
layers into a lot of little things and they are all kind
| | 00:09 | of combined to create one of these more complex effects.
| | 00:14 | And in this particular shot, there
is actually 3 major points here.
| | 00:19 | There is the point where the monster spins in or actually
the skeleton spins in and there is a yellow burst
| | 00:25 | and then we have kind of this chat or electric shock
effect as the monster is kind of slowly revealed.
| | 00:33 | And then we have another yellow burst
and then the monster appears.
| | 00:39 | So let's go ahead and work on this first part.
| | 00:41 | If you notice here there is a couple of elements here, there is
it fades in from white and then it actually fades in into almost
| | 00:49 | like a Lens Flare Effect and then the monster spins in and
then we have a yellow burst with some of these lightning balls
| | 00:59 | which we will do later and then we come into this.
| | 01:02 | So let's go ahead and just go through
this first part of the shot.
| | 01:04 | I have got a blank project setup here on the Desktop
under Exercise Files/Monsterpiece/After Effects/Shot06_00A.
| | 01:15 | Let's go ahead and open that and this is essentially all
the layers in that Photoshop file that we are playing with.
| | 01:23 | And the most important layers for this first part
are the skeleton, now we don't need the monster,
| | 01:29 | so I'm going to go ahead and turn off these
layers here at this Monster Glow and all of these
| | 01:34 | and then this white burst we don't need that, the yellow burst
we don't need that right now, although we will use it later.
| | 01:42 | Now the Giant Glow is used basically to bring it in
from white, so let's go ahead and just start with that.
| | 01:48 | This is actually very easy thing to do, all we have
to do is essentially just play with the Opacity
| | 01:54 | of this, but we also need to make it pure white.
| | 01:56 | And actually before I do that I'm going to go up here and turn
off this skeleton layer, so we just play with this one layer.
| | 02:01 | I'm going to go to Giant Glow which is Layer 15
and first thing we need to do is make it pure white.
| | 02:08 | We would also have a little bit of blue around the edges here,
so I'm going to go into Effect and into a Color Correction.
| | 02:14 | Now we can use any number of effects to get it
to white, we use saturation or any of those.
| | 02:20 | Brightness contrast seems to work just fine, so let's go
ahead and use that and essentially just turn up the brightness
| | 02:26 | until it's white somewhere on there, set a key.
| | 02:30 | Now for some of these I'm actually going to be using numbers
that I cleaned from the animation, from the final animation.
| | 02:38 | Now sometimes you are not going to know exactly what
these numbers are until you do some back and forth tests.
| | 02:45 | So sometimes for experience, I'm just going to give you
the numbers that we came to through trial and error, OK.
| | 02:51 | So for this brightness, it actually figured about 10
frames to actually go from full brightness all the way
| | 02:57 | down to 0, in fact I can just type in that number.
| | 03:01 | So for Opacity we start a frame 8 at a 100%
and then by frame 20, it actually fades to 0.
| | 03:13 | So there we go, now you can see that's kind of
a nice way to get into that background layer.
| | 03:17 | Now in the background layer, we actually started with a Lens
Flare to kind of give it that burst of light from creation kind
| | 03:25 | of effect, so for this I actually chose the
background layer and I added an effect which is
| | 03:32 | under Generate I believe, it's called Lens Flare.
| | 03:34 | We have all used those and you can see how that works.
| | 03:37 | For Lens Flare, it's very similar to the one in
Photoshop and we have different types of flares.
| | 03:44 | Now this is the Zoom lens, we also have a Prime
lens, the one we relevantly use is the 105 mm Prime,
| | 03:50 | which gives more of kind of that burst of light.
| | 03:53 | You can see the difference here, this is
more concentrated on the rings around it,
| | 03:57 | this is again with the Zoom, it's
even more concentrated on the rings.
| | 04:02 | The 105 Prime is more concerned with the burst of light, so I
am going to go ahead and take that and just kind of bring it
| | 04:09 | down towards the middle there, actually
if I center it all these rings go inside
| | 04:14 | which gives me a much better effect
and kind of more of what I want.
| | 04:17 | And then all I need to do is deal with the brightness
of this effect, I want a really bright lens flare
| | 04:24 | to start with, in fact I wanted to be almost white.
| | 04:26 | So in fact I'm actually going to pump that way up and pump it
up to over 200% and I'm going to do that at frame effective,
| | 04:34 | I'm going to actually have a need
to bring this back a little bit.
| | 04:37 | These start at frame 10 as the white of that giant glow fades
out, I'm going to have that lens flare come in and then fade
| | 04:47 | out to 0, by about Frame 30, so actually
I'm really taking almost a second
| | 04:54 | to fade in, so I'm actually going to fade it to 0.
| | 04:59 | So now I have got this and that comes down
to 0 and then in that as it comes to 0,
| | 05:08 | we are going to actually bring in our skeletons.
| | 05:11 | So let's move up to that skeleton layer, go ahead all
the way up here to skeleton and let's turn that on.
| | 05:18 | Now you can see when I turn him on, he is above all of
these other layers, so I need to bring him back in terms of,
| | 05:27 | he needs to start smaller and he also
needs to start with an Opacity of 0.
| | 05:34 | So he actually starts coming in right
around Frame 15, so let me start there
| | 05:39 | and on Frame 15, let's go ahead and make his Opacity to 0.
| | 05:47 | Now he actually starts spinning up as we come up here, you
can see this lens flare kind of reduces and it starts to get
| | 05:54 | at the point where we can actually see
what's behind it right around frame 19.
| | 05:59 | So that's we are going to start animating up the
monster or at least the skeleton of the monster.
| | 06:05 | Now if I animate him all the way up to a 100%, we
pretty much give away the creation of the monster,
| | 06:11 | but we don't want to do that, we want to kind of
leave this in mystery a little bit as it comes in.
| | 06:16 | We kind of want to gradually reveal the monster.
| | 06:19 | So one of the things I do is, I just bring
the Opacity down, so you can't quite see him.
| | 06:26 | That also kind of embeds him a little
bit into that lens flare kind of makes
| | 06:31 | that to coincide, but also I want a little bit more mystery.
| | 06:35 | So one of the things we did was we blurred him.
| | 06:38 | I like using Fast Blur, because well for one thing,
it's fast and it's an easy enough blur effect to use.
| | 06:44 | So adding a Fast Blur and then I'm going to blur him a
lot, I'm going to blur him somewhere around 50 or so.
| | 06:51 | So you can almost not see him, OK,
but we can still make out some of this.
| | 06:57 | And also he seems to be fading in just a little bit, in fact
I'm going to go ahead and set a key here for the blurriness.
| | 07:03 | So one of the things, we also did was we added another
brightness contrast to the monster or to the skeleton
| | 07:12 | and if you notice here, if we go brightness contrast, look at
how that effects kind of almost exenterate that blur effect.
| | 07:19 | So we actually brought up brightness contrast a lot at the
beginning here and if we bring down the contrast again,
| | 07:26 | that's the effect we want almost kind of like
you can tell it's a skeleton but not really,
| | 07:32 | so that's really the effect that we want to get.
| | 07:34 | Now we have to spin him up, so I'm going to go down
here to my Transform tools here and let's just go ahead
| | 07:41 | and play with them this is all happening on Frame 19 by the way.
| | 07:44 | So first thing I want to do is just rotate him,
| | 07:47 | so he rotates almost a full 180 degrees or
so and then we need to shrink him, OK.
| | 07:54 | And I think we started right around 45% or so.
| | 07:57 | One of the things I'm looking at here is
this lens flare, looking at that ring right
| | 08:02 | around there just to kind of see where he is coming from.
| | 08:05 | And so you can see there that as he spins up and he spins up
really over the course of maybe about 10 frames to Frame 28 is
| | 08:13 | where it kind of comes to his maximum
point and then I'm going to zoom him up.
| | 08:18 | In fact, I zoomed him up just a little
bit over 100% here, so let's see.
| | 08:23 | There we go, OK.
| | 08:25 | So now you can see how all of these effects layered on
top of each other kind of bring that monster in, OK.
| | 08:34 | So now once he is in, we still need to have that
yellow burst which brings us into the next part of it.
| | 08:41 | So the yellow burst actually starts pretty quickly,
it actually starts almost as a lens flare.
| | 08:47 | We really don't want to have this background there for that long,
so one of the things as we have got lot of things happening here
| | 08:53 | and then it kind of goes to just background with
skeleton, we really don't want that to happen.
| | 08:59 | So I'm actually almost starting this
burst almost right as the monster comes on.
| | 09:05 | So I'm actually going to start this
yellow burst here at Frame 16, I believe.
| | 09:11 | So I'm going to turn that on and see here it is.
| | 09:17 | And one of the things is you can see this burst really
isn't quite centered on him, so one of the things I'm going
| | 09:23 | to do is I'm going to scale up just a little bit and then
that will give me the room to position it a little bit,
| | 09:32 | position it up so that it's kind of centered right there.
| | 09:35 | So I'm just scaling up just enough,
so that I can get it centered.
| | 09:38 | In fact, I can probably keep it at a 100% right here, so now I
am going to actually set keys for Position, Scale and Opacity.
| | 09:46 | And at this point, I'm actually going to bring the Opacity down
to 0 and then as we bring the Opacity up at Frame 30 right there,
| | 09:57 | you can see now this burst is going to come up right
around here, I need to scale this up a little bit.
| | 10:03 | So I'm actually going to play a little bit with Scale
and copy as it's kind of comes in we are going to copy
| | 10:11 | and paste this 100% Scale keyframe and then I'm going to
scale it really big, so that it pretty much fills the screen.
| | 10:20 | And then from here I can just fade it out.
| | 10:24 | So here is going to still be at a 100%, so you can just
jog that keyframe and then I'm going to bring it down.
| | 10:31 | But we are going to go ahead and do that in the next
lesson, because we have got a lot of stuff going on here,
| | 10:37 | so let's go ahead and move on to that in the next lesson.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating a monster pt. 3| 00:00 | Let's move on to the second part
of this monster creation process.
| | 00:05 | We have already done the first part which is kind of
spinning the monster in and now we have got this part
| | 00:10 | where we have got the skeleton slowly
dissolving into the monster himself right there.
| | 00:17 | And so let's take a look at this, there are these sparks
which we will add the sparkk later in another lesson
| | 00:22 | but let's go ahead and focus on this skeleton here.
| | 00:25 | We have got the skeleton and then a kind of outline of the
monster kind of starts seeping in and then a little glimpse
| | 00:34 | of the monster and then one big burst
and then there is the monster.
| | 00:39 | So let's show you how to do this kind of
chatter effect and slowly bring that monster in
| | 00:44 | and then we will go ahead and do the sparks and everything else.
| | 00:48 | So I have got a file out there in that same directory
Shot06_00B, this is pretty much the first part of that animation.
| | 00:59 | Now from this point forward, we need
to actually have a little bit more.
| | 01:03 | So one of the things I did is I took that skeleton layer which
is this layer here and I actually just duplicated it twice,
| | 01:12 | I have actually two here; Skeleton 3 is the one we are
actually going to be working with right now which is Layer 9.
| | 01:19 | And so as this comes in, we want to
start fading into this particular layer
| | 01:26 | and then we want to create kind of a chatter effect.
| | 01:28 | So what we do is actually right here where this is at
maximum we are going to start fading in this skeleton layer.
| | 01:37 | We have got Skeleton 3 Opacity, I'm going to tow
that down to 0 and then as it comes in I'm going
| | 01:45 | to actually just start fading it up a little bit.
| | 01:49 | Now I don't want to fade it up a 100% because again we are doing
pretty much the same thing we did the last time is we are kind
| | 01:54 | of slowly revealing this.
| | 01:57 | And also because we are slowly revealing it again we want
to put on some effects here, I'm going to actually go ahead
| | 02:02 | and put on another fast blur and I'm going to put in a similar
value to what I had before somewhere in the 50s or 60s somewhere
| | 02:11 | around there and we are going to slowly bring him out of
that and I really want it to be kind of blurry right there
| | 02:18 | and when he gets blurry like that it kind of fades
out a little bit which actually I kind of like.
| | 02:22 | So let's just go ahead and play with this.
| | 02:24 | We may want to add some brightness contrast
to this or some saturation later to kind
| | 02:29 | of make him pop but let's just work right now on the motion.
| | 02:32 | So right here I'm just going to start putting in Position,
Rotation and Scale keys and then every two frames I'm going
| | 02:40 | to just use my timeline here, go
1, 2 I'm going to just change it.
| | 02:44 | So I'm going to rotate a little bit, I'm going to make it maybe
a little bit bigger and then I'm going to change the Position
| | 02:50 | and essentially what I'm trying to do is just create kind of
a randomness so it kind of goes like that and then I'm going
| | 02:56 | to go 1, 2 and then rotate him again so
maybe rotate him the opposite direction.
| | 03:02 | Again what I'm trying to do here is create a bit of that
chatter that we have and then just keep going with this.
| | 03:13 | And essentially what I'm doing is I'm just kind of
plugging in almost random keys but not really random
| | 03:19 | because I do want to control them a little bit.
| | 03:20 | I could for example put some sort of noise or something
like that on this but I actually like doing it annually
| | 03:27 | because you can see we get kind of little bit more of an effect.
| | 03:30 | And then once you get a few of this in, let's just do one
more here and so essentially what I'm doing is I'm kind
| | 03:39 | of going either side of 100 so one of these keys
will be above a 100, the next one would be below
| | 03:45 | and so that way you get kind of this effect here.
| | 03:47 | If I want to, once I get kind of a nice little cycle
there I can just again move two frames forward here
| | 03:54 | and just copy and paste those keys and send out.
| | 03:56 | I have got kind of a good little cycle there.
| | 03:58 | And then I'm going to continue this on, I believe this
goes until around Frame 65 or so and so if I want to,
| | 04:06 | I can again copy and paste some more of these keys.
| | 04:10 | And just to get him chattering. OK,
right there it kind of repeats itself.
| | 04:15 | But we are also going to be playing with things
like the blurriness and that sort of thing.
| | 04:19 | So let's go ahead and add the key to blurriness and so then as
he comes out you can actually kind of make him become blurry
| | 04:29 | or less blurry, more blurry and then again a little bit less
blurry so again he is just kind of slowly revealing himself.
| | 04:38 | Now I have done this again with another layer and
I have just actually left that animation in there
| | 04:44 | so now I have got two layers, I have got the Skeleton2 layer
and so now you can see I have got two layers here, OK.
| | 04:55 | And now what we also want to do is start adding
in basically do the same thing for this monster,
| | 05:02 | for this monster outline here this Monster Glow 2.
| | 05:05 | So I have got a layer 16 here, let's go ahead down to Monster
Glow 2, we have got actually 2, we have got Monster Glow
| | 05:11 | and Monster Glow 2, I'm going to
work with this layer right here.
| | 05:14 | And then what I want to do is essentially
just again the same thing I want
| | 05:19 | to start fading this in and start chattering it as it fades in.
| | 05:24 | So I'm going to go ahead and play with Opacity.
| | 05:27 | I'm going here about Frame 49 and I'm going to go ahead and
just start fading in the Opacity and again I want to just add
| | 05:34 | in another fast blur effect and again blur it up a little bit
and then over course of maybe 2 or 3 frames I start fading
| | 05:42 | that in but I don't want to fade it in too much.
| | 05:44 | It's going to be building up so that it starts becoming
more and more visible and then right around Frame 77
| | 05:51 | or so it's actually going to completely fade out.
| | 05:54 | And so now once I have got that kind of Opacity set I
can start sending in the Position, Rotation and Scaling.
| | 06:00 | Again I just do this on twos so essentially what I do
is I zoom in from one of this and rotate it one way.
| | 06:08 | And again now I'm looking at what we have underneath there and
I'm kind of trying to almost put this in opposition to that.
| | 06:15 | So when one is moving right, the other is moving left, when is
zooming in the other one is zooming out and so on and so forth.
| | 06:23 | So you can kind of just start playing with this.
| | 06:27 | It's just kind of a quick little thing that you can do, again you
are just almost just creating generating random keys so that way
| | 06:36 | so you can see how it's kind of coming in like this.
| | 06:40 | And again I'm just dropping in a bunch of keys here
and again I just want to make sure I get Position here.
| | 06:49 | So again we are just getting this kind of
layer-upon-layer of random motion as it comes through.
| | 06:55 | And if I want to, I can also copy and paste
these keys because they are kind of random,
| | 06:59 | you are not going to really notice that that's going to happen.
| | 07:02 | Now also as this is going, I also had another layer happening
here on the monster so I have got another Monster Glow layer.
| | 07:11 | One of the things I'm doing with that is I'm actually
adding more color into it so actually I believe
| | 07:16 | in this other Monster Glow here we put some effects to do levels
| | 07:21 | and so what those levels we is they actually
give it a little bit of that Edge Effect.
| | 07:26 | And then on top of that I also wanted to play a little bit more,
it seemed like this background here was just a little too blue
| | 07:32 | if he was sparking and there was all sorts of stuff going
on, we would probably add a little bit more effect there.
| | 07:39 | So what we do is we actually go down to this yellow burst
| | 07:43 | and we just start playing again, playing
with some of the Opacity of this.
| | 07:47 | So we can actually just add some Opacity, bring it down if we
want to and just again start playing with it kind of adding a bit
| | 07:59 | of randomness again, this is what we are doing.
| | 08:02 | We can actually kind of create more of a burst effect just by
zooming this in, OK so we can now create more of a burst.
| | 08:12 | Then by Frame 72 right around here we actually
want to create the burst that creates the monster.
| | 08:20 | So at this point I'm going to fade this up to a 100% and then
add the Scale so that it comes all the way in and then it's going
| | 08:30 | to fade out somewhere around 81 and 82, somewhere around there.
| | 08:35 | So basically we have got, right there it's
shrinking and I really don't want it to be shrinking.
| | 08:45 | So at that point I actually do need to make the Opacity
kind of low and there we go, something like that.
| | 08:53 | And again you can play with it.
| | 08:55 | And then I have got the skeleton left over here so
which layer is this let's go ahead and find that.
| | 09:00 | I believe it's Skeleton3 OK so let's go ahead and take a
look at that and see where, we should probably fade it to zero
| | 09:11 | by about here so let's go ahead and play with the Opacity
a little bit on this one and bring it up and bring it
| | 09:18 | down little bit and then right about here where it stops
shaking, you need to bring it down to zero so right there.
| | 09:28 | And then right here when it bursts that's where the
monster appears so let's go ahead over to the monster layer
| | 09:36 | and add that in as well so I'm going over
to the layer 14 and this is our monster.
| | 09:41 | And also he has some eyes, he has eyes open and eyes closed.
| | 09:45 | I believe he comes in with his eyes closed so first thing
I'm going to do is go ahead and just bring up that Opacity
| | 09:52 | so now we have got his eyes closed and let's take the monster.
| | 09:57 | And the monster starts in somewhere around in the early
60s right around here is where he starts fading in.
| | 10:06 | So actually I'm going to go ahead and dial his Opacity down
to 0 and I'm going to shrink him down just a little bit.
| | 10:16 | Look at those eyes, those eyes actually need to fade with him.
| | 10:20 | So I'm going to actually have to set a key for Opacity here
and bring his eyes down to zero and set a key here for Opacity
| | 10:28 | on the monster Scale, Position, Rotation here at Frame 62
and then he zooms in and it becomes maximum right there right
| | 10:38 | around Frame 79 or 80 so right there he needs to be pretty
much at a 100% extra light bringing him a little bit
| | 10:45 | over in fact let's go ahead and bring up those Opacity.
| | 10:49 | So essentially he kind of zooms in but I also want
him to rotate in just a little bit as he comes in.
| | 10:57 | So as he comes in here I'm just going to go
ahead and rotate him back to zero right there.
| | 11:04 | So essentially what he is doing is going from about 80%, 90%
with a small Rotation and then he comes in but as he comes
| | 11:13 | in I also want him to settle so I actually want him to actually
come in a little bit big so right here I'm actually going
| | 11:21 | to scale him up so he is a little bit bigger than
a 100% and then I'm going to go 3 frames out
| | 11:27 | and then bring it back to a 100% so that way he kind of settles.
| | 11:33 | So, then as it bursts right there, we still need to play with
Opacity here because really we want him to kind of zoom in.
| | 11:46 | So I really want to dial down his Opacity
here so as he comes in, there we go.
| | 11:55 | In fact this might be a little bit early, I can actually
bring that a few frames forward, there we go, OK.
| | 12:03 | Now also I still need to work with his eyes.
| | 12:05 | So as he comes in right there, I'm going to go
ahead and keep his eyes at zero here at Frame 71
| | 12:13 | and then right there I need his eyes to
kind of come out as well, here we go.
| | 12:21 | So there we go.
| | 12:22 | So that's kind of the basics of this effect.
| | 12:25 | Now we also still need to add the lightening to that as well.
| | 12:29 | So let's go ahead and do that in the next lesson.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating a monster pt. 4| 00:00 | Now let's go over some of the final little details of this.
| | 00:03 | Let me show you the shot one more time.
| | 00:05 | This is actually the final shot and so one of the things we also
added in was these little lightening bulbs that kind of came out,
| | 00:13 | kind of at semi-random intervals and
just to kind of highlight that effect.
| | 00:19 | So let's go ahead and open one of the projects
here. Shot06_00C and this essentially has the shot
| | 00:32 | that we had before and here is the shot as we have it so far.
| | 00:37 | Now this doesn't have the lightening in it
so let's go ahead and add some of that in.
| | 00:41 | Now I have got some layers here that came with my Photoshop
file and these are all just different little lightening bolts.
| | 00:49 | Probably the easiest way they work with these is just to take
a couple of them, I'm just going to take Lightening 4 and 5
| | 00:56 | and let's play with those and let's just
do the lightening at the very beginning.
| | 01:01 | Now how this works is very simple.
| | 01:03 | All you have to do is just kind of scale it.
| | 01:06 | So as we scale these you can see they just naturally go out.
| | 01:11 | So as you add some scale to it they
will just naturally come in and out.
| | 01:16 | We can always add an effect in.
| | 01:19 | I like Blur because electricity gives kind of a blurry effect
so let's kind of just add little bit of Blur, like maybe 10
| | 01:25 | or 12 somewhere in there, on each of these. So on Lightening 5
and Lightening 4, I'm going to go ahead and add that Fast Blur
| | 01:33 | and just blur it you know about 10-12, somewhere in there.
| | 01:39 | OK, so then as he comes in all we have to do is just again
play with Opacity and Scale. So here I'm going to go ahead
| | 01:48 | and somewhere around Frame 18 or so is where I'm at,
| | 01:54 | I'm going to go ahead and animate all these
Opacities down to 0 and I'm going to just turn
| | 02:00 | on Position, Rotation and Scale for all of these.
| | 02:05 | And then essentially just animate the Opacity up and scale it out
right there. So let's go ahead and make sure that Opacity works.
| | 02:22 | We don't want to rotate it, make that 0 and
just scale it to the point where it comes out.
| | 02:32 | So you can see that now all you have to do is just
position these frames here, all those keyframes
| | 02:38 | so that they kind of go out with it.
| | 02:42 | And let's do the same for those ones on the top there. So let's go
ahead and turn up the Opacity here so you can see them somewhere
| | 02:55 | around there and then this will essentially lead this
yellow burst so basically you just want them to kind
| | 03:04 | of precede that a little bit and then there you go.
| | 03:11 | And that's basically how all of these work. So what we
can do is we can just continue this effect with this some
| | 03:18 | of these other ones here as he is
chattering and as the skeleton is kind
| | 03:22 | of forming we can again just add a
little bit of a blur onto one of these.
| | 03:36 | Somewhere around there and then just play with Scale. So we just
play with Scale, maybe a little bit with Position here and Opacity.
| | 03:51 | So now I'm just going to go ahead and scale
that in, take the Opacity all the way down to 0.
| | 04:07 | And move this forward a few frames. Bring up the Opacity to
about 40% and then just as we go over the course of maybe 8
| | 04:18 | to 10 frames just scale this so that it completely leaves
the screen. So you can see how they are kind of going out
| | 04:26 | and that's basically it. And then just repeat
as necessary for all of the other effects.
| | 04:34 | So let's go ahead and move on to just finishing up the animation.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating a monster pt. 5: Finalizing| 00:00 | Let's go ahead and finish up this shot.
| | 00:02 | This shot actually took a long time to animate.
It's one of the more complex shots so that's one
| | 00:06 | of the reasons why I wanted to show it to you.
| | 00:08 | So let's take a look at that.
| | 00:10 | OK we added in additional sparks and everything. Now all we
have to do is make the monster appear with his boxer shorts.
| | 00:18 | Now that was something that we actually didn't have in the
original but we thought it was kind of cute to just kind
| | 00:23 | of toss that in so it's just another little gag.
| | 00:25 | Now how we did that was we essentially just created
another Photoshop file which had essentially the Monster
| | 00:31 | in the exact same pose pretty much and just with his boxers on
| | 00:36 | and so we just brought that in and
created a separate composition.
| | 00:39 | And the only thing we did in this composition was
actually just add in this little mouth motion here,
| | 00:45 | he had two mouths. One was kind of a smiling mouth, the other one
was a surprised mouth and so we essentially just put those in.
| | 00:54 | And then I just dragged in that whole
composition as another layer.
| | 00:58 | Now all we have to do is fade in this. So let's go ahead, I think
somewhere around Frame 100, let's go ahead and bring that in.
| | 01:07 | We have two layers here,
we have monster and monster with boxers.
| | 01:12 | So in the monster layer, layer 15, let's go ahead and set a
keyfame for 100. In the other layer, the one with the boxers,
| | 01:20 | let's go ahead and set a keyframe for
0 and we are talking about Opacity here.
| | 01:25 | And then essentially over the next say 2 or 3 frames,
we will fade 1 to 10 and 1 to 10. To essentially- bam!
| | 01:38 | OK so it comes on but we also need to add
something a little bit more to make him pop.
| | 01:44 | So what we did was actually this nice little trick here,
| | 01:47 | all we did was on the very top layer we
created a new layer. Actually we created a solid
| | 01:52 | and we just made it a white solid and then we drew a mask.
| | 02:05 | So we go into the white solid and we use our mask. Well in fact
we are just going to do an elliptical. Ellipse tool and just kind
| | 02:17 | of draw out the ellipse that we want and move it into place.
| | 02:23 | So now we have this mask and we can also feather this
mask a little bit and there is kind of our little pop.
| | 02:30 | And then right before he changes, we want to start this
animating so actually I'm going to go into the Transform section
| | 02:38 | of this layer and again we are going
to set keys for our Position,
| | 02:42 | Scale, Rotation, Opacity. Turn the Opacity all the way down.
| | 02:45 | I'm going to scale it down just a little bit and again just
reposition- in fact if I want to, right there is my anchor point
| | 02:54 | so let's go ahead and just center that along that anchor
point so that way when it scales, it will scale evenly.
| | 03:02 | And then as he pops, so he goes 1, 2 ,this is
basically where we expand it, turn up the Opacity.
| | 03:16 | In fact I might want to move all of these back by a frame or two.
Let's see. And then we just bring it back down to where it was.
| | 03:25 | So essentially right here I like to actually just
keep it growing and then just fade that down to 0
| | 03:33 | so it kind of gives that nice pop effect. OK.
| | 03:40 | And that's basically all we did. I think actually I
did add in another of those little lightning bolts
| | 03:46 | when it came in so let's go ahead and do that.
| | 03:49 | I believe it's lightning 3 was what I actually added in.
| | 03:53 | So as that comes in...
| | 03:59 | we just ah- in fact I just need to move these over here.
| | 04:03 | So as it comes in, pop! There we go and then there we go. OK.
| | 04:09 | So that's essentially that shot.
| | 04:11 | Now we have found a couple of other little special
effects that we did, some actually use the Puppet tool,
| | 04:16 | some are Motion Blur effects. So let's go
ahead and go through some of those as well.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating smoke and bubble cycles| 00:00 | Let's take a look at some more special
effects that we use to Minute Monsterpieces.
| | 00:05 | Shot I'm going to use is Shot 02, which is basically where
we introduce Dr. Frankenstein and his assistant Fritz.
| | 00:13 | And there is a couple of nice little effects
in here. One is this bubbling beaker here,
| | 00:17 | you can see the bubbles kind of and
the sparks kind of fly out of it.
| | 00:20 | And then we have another little effect here towards the end, let
me go over here, and that's where Dr. Frankenstein kind of zips
| | 00:29 | out and we kind of wanted to get a
nice little dry brush effect on that.
| | 00:34 | So let's go ahead and start with the
bubbles and we will show you how to do that.
| | 00:39 | I'm going to open a project file.
| | 00:43 | Let's go start from the Desktop/Exercise Files/
Monsterpiece/After Effects/02_00A and here is our shot.
| | 00:56 | Now in this one I have kind of turned off all the bubbles.
| | 00:58 | As you can see here, all the animation is there.
| | 01:01 | In fact this animation was done pretty much the same way
we did the dig animation with- the rigs were very similar.
| | 01:07 | We have basically Puppet tools in the
arms, but the arms themselves are separate.
| | 01:13 | But let's go ahead and get on to the bubbles,
actually the bubbles and the beaker itself are
| | 01:20 | in a separate layer here, right there is a layer for the bubbles.
| | 01:28 | And let's go ahead here and I have actually a bunch of
little bubbles here, but let's just focus on one set of these,
| | 01:34 | so I can show you how one is animated in cycle and then
you can just repeat that for the rest of the bubbles.
| | 01:42 | So let's start by just making this a simple bubble cycle here.
| | 01:46 | Now when it bubbles, what it does is it comes
out small, grows and then it kind of dissipates.
| | 01:51 | So essentially what we have to do here is just animate a
little bit of Scale, Position and so on and Opacity as well.
| | 02:01 | So this will go ahead and start at 0
Opacity and we are just going to go ahead
| | 02:05 | and put that bubble right there in the mouth of that beaker.
| | 02:09 | Then over the course of say two frames or so, we are going
to go ahead and reveal that. But we don't want to reveal
| | 02:20 | that at 100% Scale, so I'm going
to scale this down a little bit.
| | 02:25 | Scale it down to maybe about 50%
and then just bring that out there.
| | 02:33 | Essentially it comes up. I'm going to zoom
in here, so I have little bit more space.
| | 02:38 | We are going to go probably 6 to 8 frames, so I'm just
going to go about 6 frames out, bring it all the way up.
| | 02:48 | Somewhere like that and what we want
to do is as it comes up to this point,
| | 02:55 | we want to grow the bubble, so essentially
the bubble gets bigger.
| | 02:58 | As it comes up. Over the course of about 3 frames, we basically
fade out the bubble to 0 and shrink it down as we do that
| | 03:09 | and also bring it up just a little bit higher right there.
OK? But right here, I want this bubble to be at a 100%,
| | 03:20 | so I want to make sure that Opacity is set, there we go.
| | 03:26 | Now I have the animation, so I can just duplicate
that layer and just modify the keyframes.
| | 03:31 | So if I want, and this is basically how I did it, was I just hit
Ctrl+C or Apple+C and V for paste and now I have got two layers
| | 03:40 | with that same bubble on it, but obviously this second
layer I want the keyframes to be offset a little bit.
| | 03:47 | And I want the bubble to go in a different place,
so what I'm going to do here is on layer Bubble 4,
| | 03:56 | I'm just going to go ahead and move this second bubble
kind of out of the way and also move this keyframe.
| | 04:05 | Essentially, I have got this kind of going in two different
paths and now that goes that way, that goes that way.
| | 04:12 | And I just can duplicate those layers as much as I want and once
I have them duplicated then what I can do is I can start cycling
| | 04:20 | and so I just select all the keys in one of these layers
and I can paste. Copy and paste, one of my favorite tools.
| | 04:28 | So again I can just - and essentially what happens is as
it comes down, you can also see as it animates back down,
| | 04:40 | the Opacity is 0 so you don't really
see it. So essentially that cycles.
| | 04:46 | The sparks are pretty much animated the same
way except we add in a little bit of Rotation,
| | 04:51 | so let's go ahead and do in one of the sparks here.
| | 04:54 | We scale it down so that it kind of fits the opening
of that beaker and we are going to set some keys
| | 05:01 | for Position, Scale and Rotation as well as Opacity.
| | 05:05 | And then I'm going to animate the Opacity down and then over the
course of two frames, I'm going to go ahead and make it visible
| | 05:14 | and kind of bring it up out of the mouth of that beaker.
| | 05:19 | And then go about 6 frames out and then animate it up and
animate it to somewhere around 100%. You don't have to do a 100%.
| | 05:31 | The other thing I like to do is I
like to rotate it so as it comes up,
| | 05:36 | because this has this pointy edge, it's
nice to actually rotate that as it comes up.
| | 05:42 | And then you go 1, 2, about 3 frames out and you
continue the rotation, but then you fade it out to 0.
| | 05:51 | And for these actually I like to scale them up and
again right here I need a key to bring it up to 100%.
| | 06:01 | So if you bring it up over 100%, it'll look
like it's kind of sparking, it's kind of exploding,
| | 06:07 | and you can also animate it down if
you want. It doesn't really matter.
| | 06:11 | And then again, what we can do is we can go few frames out
and cycle it. Just by copying and pasting those keyframes.
| | 06:22 | Now at this point it has to be at 0 and also
we have to make sure that a Position key here-
| | 06:28 | If you notice here I have got this Position key, it's kind
of hanging open, so I need to make sure I close that out.
| | 06:34 | So I'm just going to copy and paste that keyframe and I'm
going to do the same on the cycle, because what you have to do is
| | 06:40 | when you start cycling, you got to make sure
that you have got your end position locked down.
| | 06:45 | So that way you don't have one thing
cycling at a different rate than another.
| | 06:50 | And so now once we kind of have that cycle there, you can see
how now the bubbles are starting to come out and what we did
| | 06:57 | for the actual animation let's go ahead
and open- I'm not going to save this.
| | 07:03 | But I'm actually going to open Shot02_00B
and let's go to the bubble cycle here.
| | 07:13 | There we go.
| | 07:14 | So I have got a couple of these different sparks here
| | 07:17 | and essentially we're just bringing
them up and doing the same thing.
| | 07:23 | And so then when we bring them into the
shot itself, so there is your bubble cycle.
| | 07:29 | So let's go ahead and work on the next
shot Motion Blur Dry Brush effect.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Creating a dry brush effect| 00:00 | Let's take a look at another effect and that's kind of the
Dry Brush effect that we had as he zips out which is right here.
| | 00:08 | Let's just go ahead and open the file. We're going to open the project,
it's in the same directory in your After Effects directory on your
| | 00:15 | desktop in the Exercise Files folder called Shot02_00D.
| | 00:23 | And let's bring that up. Now I'm going to turn this to quarter so that
I can scrub a little bit more quickly, it's going to be little bit grainier
| | 00:29 | but we really want to be able to scrub this. So let's take a look
at how he zips out. First thing he does is he does an anticipation
| | 00:36 | he goes backwards before he goes forwards and then he leans
over classic snagglepuss and he's off. So let me show you
| | 00:45 | how this was actually set up.
| | 00:47 | I'm going to scroll down here,
| | 00:50 | and the two layers that are really critical here
are layer 24 and 25, in fact let me turn those off.
| | 00:58 | Layer 25 is his straight up and down torso,
| | 01:03 | layer 24 is his bending at the waist torso.
| | 01:11 | Let's take a look at how that transitions over, you can see
that's where it pops over. And the thing was that he was bending
| | 01:17 | over just so much right here that we had to just
draw another torso in order to kind of make it work.
| | 01:24 | So what we did was we actually have two layers here named Frank
torso so that's a little confusing. But if you look at him,
| | 01:31 | this one here of him straight up down actually does have the Puppet
tool on there and that actually gives him a nice way of bending.
| | 01:38 | Once we go into this other part here,
| | 01:43 | you can see we also have a Puppet tool,
| | 01:46 | some Puppet Pins setup on this one and this one's actually a
full body one and that gives us the ability to move his arms just
| | 01:53 | a little bit and do a nice little anticipation before he moves off.
| | 01:57 | Now also notice that
| | 01:59 | this frame where he starts to zip off where the beaker disappears,
his foot disappears, his hand disappears, I think one of his eyes
| | 02:06 | disappears but that's OK because once it zips off, it zips off
in just a few frames so you are not really going to notice that
| | 02:12 | that beaker disappears. Another thing we do when he zips off is actually
I scale him wide. Again I want to get kind of a long blur effect.
| | 02:23 | If he was at a 100% here,
| | 02:26 | then it wouldn't fill up as much of the screen so by scaling him
about 25% on the left or right axis, it will make it much stronger.
| | 02:37 | So all we have to do now is essentially just add some blur effects
and do a little bit more. So essentially what I did here was
| | 02:46 | blurring sharpen and I just added a Directional Blur.
| | 02:50 | And then the direction I believe is 90 degrees.
| | 02:54 | We need to animate that up so basically I'm just going to go
| | 02:59 | set a key on Blur Length and then move forward
a frame and then just blur the heck out of it.
| | 03:06 | Now one of the things that I found with this was that as you blur it,
| | 03:10 | it starts to get transparent and it
doesn't quite read as well as it could.
| | 03:14 | So one of the things I did was I
essentially just copied and pasted this layer.
| | 03:20 | In fact I'm just going to turn that on, and I made a second layer
here of just his torso with a little bit more stretch on it,
| | 03:28 | just to give it a little bit more width and again I'm going
to go ahead and put that Directional Blur on that one as well.
| | 03:36 | Again 90 degrees
| | 03:39 | and...
| | 03:41 | I'm not sure how much that's going to be blurring but quite a bit.
| | 03:45 | If you blur it enough, you get that kind of
nice Warner Brothers kind of double effect there.
| | 03:52 | Now also the other thing that needs to blur is his face.
| | 03:56 | So let's go ahead up to Frank Face and again,
| | 04:01 | same thing, we are just going to go ahead add a directional
blur effect, we can either add it here or there and again,
| | 04:09 | 90 degrees. And in this case we're going to have to animate it.
So I'm going to ahead set a key here for blur length of zero
| | 04:19 | and then just amp it up.
| | 04:23 | Now the one thing as you're seeing these things behind here but that's
actually just the background kind of showing through a little bit.
| | 04:31 | When you have this sort of blur, it tends to smooth
these fast motions out and make them read a lot better.
| | 04:37 | Now we also added a little bit of blur here at the
very end, in fact let's go over to the end here when
| | 04:45 | Frank comes out, in fact I left that on and essentially we just
added a little bit more blur on him as well just to give him
| | 04:54 | more stretch and smoothness as he comes out.
| | 04:58 | So those are the basics of that Dry Brush effect.
So let's go ahead and move on to some other stuff.
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|
|
6. Animating Lip SyncsThe basics of lip syncing| 00:00 | In this chapter we are going to animate
dialogueue in After Effects.
| | 00:05 | Now we did do some rudimentary dialogue in the previous
chapter where we animated that girl screaming but we are going
| | 00:11 | to go a lot deeper into animating dialogue in this chapter.
| | 00:15 | We're going to set up a slider so that we can step between
the various mouths, we're going to import a soundtrack
| | 00:21 | and we're actually going to scrub
and animate against that soundtrack.
| | 00:26 | Now before we do that, we also have to set up the character
for animation and before I even do that, let me just go ahead
| | 00:33 | and show you this first shot so we can refresh
our memory as to what we are actually animating.
| | 00:38 | This is just the first shot of this film.
| | 00:41 | (Movie: Greetings.)
| | 00:43 | (Movie: And welcome to Minute MonsterPieces.)
| | 00:48 | (Movie: Today's MonsterPiece is Frankenstein.)
| | 00:56 | So that's the first shot.
| | 00:58 | It's really just his head bouncing around
and the mouth syncing to the dialogue.
| | 01:04 | Of course there are some bubbles and that sort of thing on
the glass but really we are focussing on the lip sync here.
| | 01:10 | So it's a very simple setup but it will
show you exactly how to do lip sync
| | 01:15 | for any other type of After Effects character animation.
| | 01:18 | Now the most important thing in creating lip
sync is getting all the mouth positions right.
| | 01:25 | You have to actually draw those or create those in Illustrator
or After Effects or wherever you are creating your art.
| | 01:33 | We are doing this in Photoshop so let's go
ahead and take a look at this file in Photoshop
| | 01:38 | and let me show you all the different layers for the mouths.
| | 01:41 | We are going to open a file, go into our
Exercise Files/MonsterPiece/Assets/Photoshop/
| | 01:48 | Scene01v1.psd and this is the shot
that we are going to work with.
| | 01:55 | Now if you notice in this file, we
have a bunch of different layers.
| | 01:58 | We have got a layer for the curtains, we
have got a layer for the title and so on.
| | 02:03 | The layers that are most important to lip sync are the
ones that are a little bit below there, right here.
| | 02:08 | So we have the face layer.
| | 02:10 | You can turn that on and off and above that, we have the mouths.
| | 02:15 | We have E, we have teeth that lay on top of
the E- this can actually serve double duty.
| | 02:21 | We can either pick this mouth shape or this
one and then we have a number of other ones.
| | 02:27 | Now these are all just standard animation mouth positions.
| | 02:30 | We have got E, we've got O, we've got W, we've got M, U, which
is essentially the same as O, and then we also have some teeth
| | 02:41 | that lay on top of that and then we also have one for
A and I and some more teeth that lay on top of that.
| | 02:47 | Now having the teeth on a separate layer is actually
very handy because you can very easily swap between one
| | 02:53 | or the other and you don't need separate layers for each.
| | 02:57 | So now once we have all of these layers in our Photoshop
file, we can go ahead and set these up on sliders
| | 03:04 | so that we can animate them in the next lesson.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Setting up mouths for animation with time mapping| 00:01 | So now let's take this basic Photoshop
file and set it up for lip-sync animation.
| | 00:06 | Now the setup for this is a little bit
different than typical After Effects setup.
| | 00:11 | So let me show you what we have got here.
| | 00:12 | I'm going to go ahead into After Effects
and we are going to open a project.
| | 00:16 | It's going to be on the Desktop\Exercise\
Files\Monsterpiece\AfterEffects.
| | 00:21 | It's called Shot01_00A and this is essentially just a
blank file set to the proper length and I've gone ahead
| | 00:30 | and turned off the curtain layers
because we need to see what's underneath.
| | 00:34 | So what we are going to focus on right now are layers 5 to 13.
| | 00:38 | Now these are the mouth layers.
| | 00:41 | Now if we wanted to we could just animate these like we
animated the blinks for example. We could just turn Opacity on
| | 00:48 | and off for each of these layers to make the mouths turn on and
off and do the lip-sync but that would get really complicated
| | 00:55 | because you have got about 10 layers
here that you need to worry about.
| | 00:59 | There is a much easier way using sub-compositions
and time remapping so let me show you how to do that.
| | 01:05 | Well the first thing we need to do is actually
just select all these layers as I have done
| | 01:09 | so I have just Shift-selected layers 5 to 13 and
we are going to create what's called a pre-comp.
| | 01:15 | So I'm going to go into Layer and here we are going to
do Precompose and there is a shortcut called Ctrl+Shift+C
| | 01:23 | if you want to use that and once I hit
that it's going to bring up this menu.
| | 01:26 | It's going to ask for a name. Let's just call it
Mouths. That seems logical enough and then do we want
| | 01:32 | to move all the attributes into a new composition?
| | 01:35 | Yes. And do we want to open the New Composition?
| | 01:38 | Yes, we do.
| | 01:38 | Let's go ahead and hit OK and so it opens a new
composition and so let's show you what happens here.
| | 01:44 | In the original one it's taken all those layers and
basically collapsed them into one composition called Mouths
| | 01:51 | and now we can go into this composition here and just animate.
| | 01:56 | Now we are not going to actually
animate the lip-sync in this layer,
| | 01:59 | we are just going to set up a short
animation where we have one mouth per frame.
| | 02:05 | Then once we go back into the main composition, we are
going to use time remapping to actually select our mouths.
| | 02:12 | So let me show you how this works.
| | 02:14 | And the first thing we need to do is we need
to get all these layers to one frame long.
| | 02:20 | Well the easiest way to do that is to set your time slider
to 0, Shift-select all of the layers and then hit Alt
| | 02:28 | and the Right Bracket, which is the key
just above the Enter key on your keyboard.
| | 02:34 | Now what it does is it actually shortens the
layers to wherever this time slider is plus 1.
| | 02:40 | So if the time slider was at 6, these would all go to Frame
7 and stop so basically it would just make it 6 frames long.
| | 02:49 | So let's go ahead and start setting up our mouths.
| | 02:52 | Before I do that, I really want to be
able to see what my mouths looks like.
| | 02:55 | So I'm actually going to go into my composition settings, go to
my Background Color and let's just go ahead and make that kind
| | 03:01 | of a light grey so that I can see what's in there.
| | 03:04 | So now all I have to do is start setting
up 1 per frame of each of these mouths.
| | 03:10 | So what I can do is, the first frame is this A mouth with teeth.
| | 03:15 | If I slide this out one frame, this layer 2, we
have A mouth without teeth and then if I want to,
| | 03:22 | I can do the same here for the teeth and the U mouth at frame 2.
| | 03:28 | At Frame 3, mouth would be U without teeth, Frame 4 would
be M, W at Frame 5, Frame 6 would be O. But the one thing
| | 03:43 | about this O mouth is that it's almost exactly the same
size as that U mouth. So what I want to do is just go ahead
| | 03:50 | and shrink that a little bit, shrink it by
about half, and then make sure that it's...
| | 04:07 | this mouth is basically over the other mouth.
| | 04:11 | So that when I slide them that they are
all in the same position. There we go.
| | 04:16 | And now let's go ahead with the teeth
and E and then an E without the teeth.
| | 04:24 | So I have got 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9.
9 mouths, but my composition is way longer than that.
| | 04:31 | Well we can certainly change that. All we have to do
is I know it's 9 frames long so all I have to do is
| | 04:37 | go in the Composition, Composition Settings
and just change that to 9.
| | 04:42 | So now I have a 9 frame long movie
with one mouth per frame. Great.
| | 04:48 | Now let me show you how to set this up for lip-sync.
| | 04:50 | We are going to go back into our original scene where we
have mouths and let's go ahead and select this layer 5, Mouths,
| | 04:56 | and expand it and in fact I'm going to zoom in
just a little bit here so I can see what I'm doing.
| | 05:02 | Now all I have to do is do a Time Remap on
this so I'm going to go ahead and right click
| | 05:07 | over this, go into Time, Enable Time Mapping.
| | 05:13 | You can also hit this hot key here, Ctrl+Alt+T, and
what that does is notice how it makes the movie longer
| | 05:19 | and what it does is it puts in two keyframes here and the real
key to this Time Remap trick here is this field right here
| | 05:28 | and this gives me the actual frame number of each mouth.
| | 05:34 | So Frame 0 is this mouth. Frame 1
is this mouth, Frame 2, 3, 4, 5.
| | 05:43 | Now all I have to do is just dial in the number and I can
dial in the mouth. Pretty cool, huh? In fact let's go ahead
| | 05:51 | and delete these keyframes and let's go back here and you can
see that if we go back to Frame 0, you can see that all you have
| | 05:58 | to do is left-click on this and just
slide it and it basically works almost
| | 06:04 | like a slider and each one is just a different mouth.
| | 06:07 | Now there is also one other thing. It's when we actually
animate this, we do need to hold between keyframes.
| | 06:14 | So let's actually move the slider out
here and just move it up to like 8 or 9.
| | 06:19 | If you notice here, as I go through this, actually this
was two but let's say let's bring it up to like 8 here.
| | 06:26 | So as I scrub through this, you can see
it actually scrubs through all the mouths.
| | 06:30 | That's because it's not holding this particular keyframe.
| | 06:33 | So let's go back to 0 and I'm going to select that keyframe
and again right-click over it and just say Toggle Hold Keyframe.
| | 06:41 | When I do that, now it's going to
hold that keyframe no matter what,
| | 06:46 | until it hits the next one. So it's almost like an On/Off switch.
| | 06:50 | So for example we are going to start with this
one and then at this frame we go to this one,
| | 06:54 | and then at a different frame we go to this one.
| | 06:59 | So now when you have that Toggle Hold Keyframe on, you
can just go between all of these. Isn't that pretty cool?
| | 07:09 | OK. I'm going to delete these first two keyframes
and I'm going to go ahead and save that out
| | 07:14 | and so now in the next lesson, we are
actually going to do the actual lip-sync.
| | Collapse this transcript |
| Animating the lips| 00:00 | Once we have the mouths setup, it's
time to actually animate the dialogue.
| | 00:05 | Let's go ahead and open the file.
| | 00:07 | It's called Shot01_00B and this
has the mouths with the Time Remap.
| | 00:16 | Go ahead and import the audio track.
| | 00:19 | Go Import, File and it's in Exercise Files/
Monsterpiece/Audio and it's called Monsterpiece01.wav.
| | 00:29 | Now once I have the audio into the project, I can just click
and drag it onto the composition and I typically drag it right
| | 00:38 | over the mouth layer, so that way I can just
see that audio track against the mouths,
| | 00:44 | so I actually have my visual reference
right here as I animate the mouths.
| | 00:49 | Now one thing I want you to check before we actually
start animating this dialogue is check to make sure
| | 00:55 | that you're set up to display your timeline as frames.
| | 00:59 | Now let me show you how to do that.
| | 01:00 | We are going to go ahead into File.
| | 01:02 | On Project Settings, we are going to go ahead
and make sure that this is set to Frames.
| | 01:07 | Now typically it's set to Timecode, it maybe set to
Feet and Frames but we want to set that to Frames.
| | 01:13 | And the reason we want to do that is because that way your
Time Remap isn't reading out in time code it's actually reading
| | 01:20 | out in whole numbers, in frames and
that's important for animating lip sync.
| | 01:26 | When we animate dialogue, we want to be
able to scrub through the soundtrack.
| | 01:31 | Now there is a couple of ways to actually hear your soundtrack.
| | 01:34 | One way is just to hit the decimal point key on
the bottom right of your keypad on your keyboard.
| | 01:41 | (Movie: Greetings. And welcome to...)
| | 01:44 | You can always hit Escape to stop and in fact in
Composition, you can actually go under Preview, Audio Preview,
| | 01:51 | you can even go from here forward, which is that decimal point,
or you can then actually just preview the entire work area.
| | 01:57 | Now if you want to scrub through the timeline, all
you have to do is hold down the Ctrl key and scrub.
| | 02:04 | (Movie: Greetings...)
| | 02:06 | This is what I use the most, so that
way I can actually hear the soundtrack.
| | 02:11 | Now that we have all that out of the way
let's go ahead and start animating the mouths.
| | 02:15 | Now first thing, I want to do is set the very first
mouth position, the position that the character will have
| | 02:21 | when you first see them on the screen when they're not speaking.
| | 02:24 | Right now we have that set to this open mouth and we
really don't want that, we want a different type of mouth.
| | 02:30 | So what I can do is just place my mouth over this Time
Remap on this Layer 6 and if I just click and scrub,
| | 02:37 | you can see I can just step through all the mouths.
| | 02:40 | So I just want to give him kind of a neutral
closed mouth and that's mouth number 4.
| | 02:46 | You can also just type in these numbers.
| | 02:49 | And what some people do is they actually
make a little cheat sheet.
| | 02:52 | They actually write down the mouth and put
the numbers next to their screen and just type
| | 02:57 | in the numbers rather than having to scroll through them.
| | 03:00 | Personally, I like scrolling because it's a lot more interactive
for me, but you can also just type in the numbers if you want.
| | 03:06 | So let's go ahead and set up our first mouth position.
| | 03:10 | First of all we need to find out
where exactly this dialogue starts.
| | 03:14 | You can actually see the waveform here
and it's starting right at around 26-27.
| | 03:19 | (Movie: Greetings.)
| | 03:22 | So I want to get that G sound.
So the G is kind of like a closed mouth.
| | 03:26 | It's a consonant type of sound, so you want to
get a mouth shape that kind of approximates that.
| | 03:32 | So I'm going to start off with number 7, which is
kind of a closed mouth, kind of showing the teeth
| | 03:38 | and I'm just going to go ahead and dial that in.
| | 03:41 | (Movie: Greetings.)
| | 03:42 | Gr-greetings.
| | 03:44 | So I'm going to go forward about 2
frames and I'm going to get an R sound.
| | 03:48 | Now what is an R?
| | 03:49 | A R is almost like an ooh sound.
| | 03:51 | It's kind of a pursed lip sound, so I'm
going to go to number 6 and dial that one in.
| | 03:58 | (Movie: Greetings.)
| | 04:00 | E. Gree-tings.
| | 04:02 | So the E is basically an open mouth.
| | 04:05 | An E is not as open as for example an A, but you
can certainly- so I'm going to do Greetings,
| | 04:12 | I'm going to actually use that one, number 0.
| | 04:17 | Greet-tings.
| | 04:19 | So what's the T?
| | 04:21 | The T is going to be showing the teeth.
| | 04:23 | Now if you have never animated a lip sync before,
it may take you while to get the hang of it
| | 04:28 | but after a while it becomes kind of a habit.
| | 04:31 | You know which mouth to put against which sound and one of
the rules of thumb that I like to use is that mouths tend
| | 04:39 | to open very quickly and they tend to close slowly.
| | 04:42 | So when you have a vowel, you tend
to open the mouth very quickly,
| | 04:45 | like usually over 2 frames, and then
the mouth closes down more slowly.
| | 04:50 | So for example here, it pops open at E
and then it takes a while to get to that T.
| | 04:57 | (Movie: Greetings.)
| | 04:59 | Greet-tings. Another open mouth and then one more closed mouth.
| | 05:06 | So now we have...
| | 05:07 | (Movie: Greetings.)
| | 05:13 | And then you have to find out where exactly that mouth is going
to, it actually just kind of close down to a neutral position.
| | 05:19 | So I'm having that close down at around 57 and then you can
go through it and just keep doing this for each mouth position.
| | 05:27 | Let's go ahead and play that through.
| | 05:29 | (Movie: Greetings.)
| | 05:32 | Greetings.
| | 05:34 | Now the next one is going to be "and."
| | 05:36 | (Movie: aaaand.)
| | 05:38 | You can hear that "and" so that's going to be an
open mouth like that and we just keep going through
| | 05:44 | and we just basically are matching this
up to the soundtrack and if we ever want
| | 05:48 | to see how it plays again we can just do the preview.
| | 05:51 | (Movie: Greetings.)
| | 05:53 | And if we want to we can actually do a RAM preview.
| | 05:56 | (Movie: Greetings. And wel-) And that's basically how it works.
| | 06:03 | So now you have got the basic workflow of this.
| | 06:07 | Now I'm not going to go through the entire soundtrack.
| | 06:10 | I will let you go ahead and do that on your own, but once we
get through the mouths then we can go ahead and do the acting
| | 06:17 | and make the character actually move
and we'll do that in the next lesson.
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| Animating the head and body| 00:00 | So once we have all of the mouth positions in it's now
time to actually animate the rest of the character.
| | 00:07 | I'm going to go ahead and open a file called Shot01_00c and
this is essentially the character with his mouth fully lip-synced.
| | 00:18 | In fact let's go ahead and just do a
quick RAM preview so we can see that.
| | 00:22 | (Movie: Greetings.)
| | 00:24 | (Movie: And welcome to Minute MonsterPieces.)
| | 00:29 | (Movie: Today's MonsterPiece is Frankenstein.)
| | 00:33 | OK and he doesn't talk on Frankenstein because the
title card actually fades in as he says that word.
| | 00:41 | So let's go ahead and animate the rest of the character.
| | 00:44 | Now one of the things you can see is that if you
just animate the lips it's actually pretty dull.
| | 00:49 | Most of the life of the character comes from the actual body,
the head, the chest, all the parts of the character animating.
| | 00:58 | Lip sync actually does start in the body, it starts in the
diaphragm, in the lungs and there is a lot of head motion.
| | 01:05 | You can also gesture. There is a lot of
people who talk with their hands, for example.
| | 01:10 | So there is a lot of other visual cues
you give to the audience with dialogue.
| | 01:16 | Now this character is actually pretty easy
because he is sitting in a very stable position
| | 01:21 | so really all we have to do is work with the head.
| | 01:25 | Go ahead and play with that.
| | 01:27 | I'm actually go ahead and take this Monsterpiece01 layer,
drag it down so that it's on top of this Face layer, layer #6,
| | 01:35 | because that's the actual layer of his head that we want to
start moving around and I want this wave file right next to that.
| | 01:45 | So I'm going to set some keys so that way we can start animating
it through Position and Rotation. Those are really all we need
| | 01:54 | to work with and at this point I really just want to get to that
first piece of dialogueue and start animating the head to the dialogueue.
| | 02:02 | If you think about it when the head actually animates you
want to kind of get it to bob in time with the dialogue.
| | 02:10 | Now typically how I do that is that I tend to move the head
up when there is a big vowel because when there is a big vowel,
| | 02:17 | which is actually an open mouth sound, the mouth does open
and when the mouth opens usually the head tends to tilt back
| | 02:24 | so that you can open the throat to give more volume to the sound.
| | 02:30 | So let's go ahead and do something
similar to that with this character.
| | 02:34 | I have already set a keyframe at 0 and let's just go
ahead and scrub through. I'm going to hold down my Ctrl key.
| | 02:40 | (Movie: Gree-greetings...)
| | 02:42 | So right there where he says Greetings, I really want to tilt
the head down so that way it gives me more room to tilt up.
| | 02:49 | So I'm going to go ahead and copy some keyframes. I'm
going to copy those keyframes at the beginning, Frame 0
| | 02:55 | to about Frame 25, and then I'm going to scrub.
| | 03:00 | This way he says Greetings, I'm
actually going to tilt that head down.
| | 03:03 | So I'm going to go into the Rotation and I'm
just going to rotate it down just a little bit.
| | 03:13 | I'm going to rotate it like that.
| | 03:17 | (Movie: Greetings..)
| | 03:19 | So when he says Greetings, you can see he has
got this open mouth. At that point I'm going
| | 03:23 | to tilt the head back and I'm going to lift it up.
| | 03:26 | Now I can either grab the head here or
I can just use the position keys here.
| | 03:33 | So let's see what it does.
| | 03:34 | (Movie: Greetings...)
| | 03:36 | So it goes Greetings, so it kind of comes up when he
says Greetings and then he is going to settle back
| | 03:41 | down to kind of what I would call the neutral position.
| | 03:45 | So I'm just going to copy and paste these keyframes
again so that way he kind of just settles down.
| | 03:51 | And he may actually rotate forward just
a hair, like that, so let's see how that plays.
| | 03:56 | (Movie: Greetings...)
| | 03:59 | OK, so that looks pretty good.
| | 04:01 | His head is kind of bobbing to extenuate
the sound, to give him a little bit more life.
| | 04:06 | But let's go ahead and do one more of these.
| | 04:10 | (Movie: And welcome...)
| | 04:12 | And welcome.
| | 04:13 | Welcome is going to be the big vowel.
| | 04:15 | In fact if you look at a dialogue here
you can just see where the sound is big
| | 04:20 | because the waveform actually gets
taller as the sound gets louder.
| | 04:24 | So again I'm going to just go ahead and set a keyframe here.
| | 04:31 | (Movie: Greetings...)
| | 04:33 | I'm going to copy and paste this Position key.
| | 04:39 | And now let's go ahead and set this.
| | 04:41 | (Movie: And wel...)
| | 04:42 | And again I'm just going to- I tend to tilt the head forward as
he starts to talk so that way it gives a little bit more contrast
| | 04:49 | when his head tilts back up for the large vowel.
| | 04:52 | And I can even move the head down just
a hair to give it more room to pop-up.
| | 04:59 | (Movie: wel-welcome...)
| | 05:08 | OK, so when he says welcome, I want
to pop the head up and tilt it back.
| | 05:17 | (Movie: And welcome...)
| | 05:20 | And again then settle that back down
to kind of a more neutral position.
| | 05:24 | I kind of just mentally have what I will call the neutral
place and then either I move up from there or down from there.
| | 05:31 | The neutral position is kind of like a center balance position.
| | 05:35 | (Movie: And welcome to...)
| | 05:37 | And welcome to.
| | 05:38 | You can kind of see how this works.
| | 05:40 | Now this is very rough and there are a lot
of things that I would tweak about this.
| | 05:44 | But you kind of get the hang of it.
| | 05:46 | You basically just go through the sound
track and get that head moving in sync.
| | 05:50 | Now once you do that you can also add some other stuff into that
| | 05:55 | for example he has got his hand on the
champagne glass so he lifts that up.
| | 06:00 | We also put a cat in the shot and
we'll animate that in the next chapter.
| | 06:05 | But this just shows you the general overview of how to finalize
lip sync, get the head and the character moving in sync.
| | 06:13 | So let's go ahead and move on in the next chapter.
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|
|
7. Putting It All TogetherRendering with After Effects| 00:01 | Let's go ahead and finalize this project.
| | 00:04 | Now, for any short film like this, the
finalization process is pretty similar.
| | 00:08 | What you want to do is first of all render out all of your After
Effects files and then bring them up in some sort of editor.
| | 00:16 | We use Premiere Pro but you can certainly
use Final Cut and you can even use After Effects.
| | 00:21 | We also get our final sound mix.
| | 00:23 | We get our final effects mix or music
mix and we bring those together.
| | 00:28 | And actually we do finalize our audio in Premiere because
all we are just doing is dialogue, music and effects,
| | 00:35 | so it's not really a real hardcore audio mix.
| | 00:38 | So, let's go ahead and talk a little bit about rendering.
| | 00:42 | These were animated as 2K image files.
| | 00:46 | We did that because well, first of all, the artist gave it to
us that way. Second because by giving it a full resolution,
| | 00:53 | it allows us a lot more options when we do go to render.
| | 00:56 | So, for example, if we wanted to do a movie,
we could certainly render out a 2K movie file.
| | 01:01 | Now, we are actually outputting 640X480 for most of these.
| | 01:06 | So, let's take a look at how we do that.
| | 01:08 | Now, for this rendering, we pretty much just rendered
as we went and you could certainly batch all these up
| | 01:14 | and render on a render farm if you wanted to, but these things
render fast enough so you don't really need to worry about that.
| | 01:20 | So basically, all we have to do is go Composition, Add to
Render Queue and that will add each scene to the Render Queue,
| | 01:27 | so you have to load up each scene and
then add it into the Render Queue.
| | 01:31 | And then, of course, we have render settings.
| | 01:33 | Typically, for these, we just use the defaults.
| | 01:36 | There really is no reason not to use Best
Quality or not to use Full Resolution.
| | 01:41 | You typically want to use all of that.
| | 01:43 | For output module, typically, we use QuickTime.
| | 01:47 | So we actually output to QuickTime movies and for
the compressor, we use the Animation compressor.
| | 01:54 | Now, a lot of people use no compression and
some people use some of these other compressors,
| | 01:59 | but typically what we find is that
the Animation compressor works great.
| | 02:03 | It's also a lossless compressor.
| | 02:06 | So, you get a little bit of compression
but you don't lose any image quality.
| | 02:09 | And most importantly, it's a compressor
that every version of QuickTime uses.
| | 02:14 | Sometimes when you get into these esoteric
video compressors, you kind of have to make sure
| | 02:19 | that the place you are sending the
movie to also has the compressor.
| | 02:23 | So when we use Animation compression, we are pretty much assured
that everybody will be able to read the file without having
| | 02:29 | to download some sort of video codec or something like that.
| | 02:32 | So we typically do 30 frames a second and make
sure if this set to High, Millions of Colors and so on.
| | 02:40 | Now, the next thing is we do have to stretch this.
| | 02:43 | Because this is basically 2012x1500,
we need to squish it down to 640x480.
| | 02:50 | Now, this is a little bit off. It should actually
be 2000x1500, but that is extra 12 pixels,
| | 02:56 | I don't think it's really going to
matter when you squish it down that much.
| | 02:59 | So we are not going to really worry too much
about that extra little bit of squishing
| | 03:04 | that we are going to get in the horizontal direction.
| | 03:06 | So, first thing I'm going to do is unlock this aspect ratio
and then I'm just going to type in the values here, 640x480.
| | 03:14 | Now, if you want to, there is a lot of nice defaults here for
some of these other standard formats, but we are doing 640x480
| | 03:21 | and we don't want to do audio output on these because
actually the audio is going to come from a separate source.
| | 03:27 | So let's just go ahead and click OK, and then all
we have to do is give our scene name so I click here
| | 03:32 | on Output 2 and then just find my directory where I render.
| | 03:38 | Now, we have a Renders directory
and basically how we put the files
| | 03:42 | into that directory is just a shot number
plus the resolution. So this is 640
| | 03:47 | and the version, if there is multiple versions of this.
| | 03:49 | So I'm going to go ahead and overwrite that and
then, all we have to do is hit Render and off it goes.
| | 03:57 | In the next lesson let's go ahead and show you
how we bring all of this stuff into a video editor.
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| Editing with Premiere Pro| 00:00 | Once you have all of your After Effects
files rendered you can bring them
| | 00:03 | into a video editor and start assembling the final project.
| | 00:08 | Now we're on PCs here and so we use Premiere Pro CS3.
| | 00:14 | You can certainly use any other type of video editor.
You can certainly use Final Cut or you can use Avid
| | 00:20 | or really any other type of editing program should work but we
are using Premiere so let me bring that up and let's go ahead
| | 00:26 | and start showing you how to start pulling in
your elements and cutting the final project.
| | 00:31 | The first thing I do is I bring up that original like Leica reel,
which kind of has the rough timing of the project and that kind
| | 00:39 | of gives me a guide to use for cutting
the final project together.
| | 00:44 | So if you don't have Premiere you can just
follow along, but if you do have Premiere open
| | 00:48 | up a project called Monsterpiece Leica01, which is the
original Leica reel when we first started this project.
| | 00:56 | Now I can play a little bit of this.
| | 00:58 | (Movie: Greetings....)
| | 00:59 | So that's the original storyboard that we had.
| | 01:02 | Now on top of this, what I'm going to do is start
laying in the rendered files as we create them
| | 01:08 | and I'm also going to start matching the audio.
| | 01:11 | The final project that we actually created is going
to be timed slightly different than the Leica reel
| | 01:17 | but again Leica reel gives us some very good guide to go with.
| | 01:21 | And let's go ahead and start by importing the audio.
| | 01:24 | We are going to go to Monsterpiece/Audio/Monsterpiece01.wav.
I'm going to bring that in and then all I have to do is click
| | 01:32 | and drag that to the timeline go ahead and expand this.
| | 01:37 | It matches up reasonably well to this original soundtrack and
I'm actually going to turn off this original soundtrack here
| | 01:46 | so that way I can see it and then I can match to it
without actually having to listen to that other track.
| | 01:52 | This is my clean track and again with this storyboard as well we
are going to have an ugly track and then we are actually going
| | 01:57 | to have a clean track and these can be deleted later but
I like to keep them around for just visual reference.
| | 02:04 | So as we bring in the video we can just go to our render
directory so right click here and just go Import and I'm going
| | 02:11 | to go up to my Renders directory and here is all of the files. Now
I have 1 through 10 but notice that 9 is missing and 9 is missing
| | 02:22 | because actually in production we actually combined 8 and 9.
| | 02:26 | Once you have the files in probably the easiest
way to line them up is to just keep them selected
| | 02:32 | and I could click and drag them to the timeline.
| | 02:35 | Now this is how we do it in Premiere,
may be a little bit different in your editor.
| | 02:39 | And once we do that- in fact let me zoom out
here- you can see they are just all lined up.
| | 02:44 | Some of these cut points aren't exact to
the Leica reel but they are pretty close.
| | 02:49 | Once we play it you will notice that maybe
some of the audio might not line up exactly,
| | 02:53 | but that's part of this editing process
is to try and get this pretty clean.
| | 02:58 | So let's just do a quick playback and see how it looks.
| | 03:01 | (Movie: Greetings. And welcome to...)
| | 03:05 | OK, that looks pretty good. And one of the things I
noticed here was I had rendered some of these with audio,
| | 03:11 | but what I can do is I can actually just drag this audio
because we are not going to actually be using this audio.
| | 03:17 | That way I have a complete track here.
| | 03:20 | Now I want to show you something that's
a little bit closer to completion.
| | 03:25 | Go ahead and open the project monsterpiece05.premiere project.
| | 03:30 | No, I don't mean to save that.
| | 03:33 | OK so here we are.
| | 03:35 | Let me zoom out a little bit.
| | 03:37 | You can see here we have done some more work.
| | 03:39 | Now one of the things is we added in the
title card where it says Frankenstein.
| | 03:44 | We also did some other things.
| | 03:46 | If we go to this girl's mouth we
actually have to fade up the next shot.
| | 03:50 | So we can see how this shot fades in and so what we did was
we just did a little bit of a cross-fade here and we did some
| | 03:56 | of the other little editing tweaks to kind of tighten it up.
| | 03:59 | So those are the general guidelines for
editing and in the next lesson we are going
| | 04:04 | to show you a little bit more about
how to finalize the end product.
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| Final output and audio| 00:01 | Now that we have everything kind of edited
together, let's go ahead and finish up this project.
| | 00:05 | Let me just show you the process that we go through.
| | 00:07 | Now first of all we have this original project that we have
which has our audio and then what we do is we actually just drag
| | 00:15 | that sequence in here and create another
sequence with just this track in it.
| | 00:20 | And what we can do here is we can actually
do our color correction and if we want
| | 00:25 | to do any audio processing, we can do it here.
| | 00:27 | Now what we did was we actually had a third step that we
went through and what we had was we did have some revisions
| | 00:34 | where we put the monster into his boxers, for example.
| | 00:37 | So we actually have a couple of these extra shots
so actually I have this timeline called DV Master
| | 00:44 | or this sequence called DV Master and that
actually has our final output and our final mix.
| | 00:50 | So let me show you what the mix looks like.
| | 00:52 | Now for audio typically what we do is we have just a separate
track for the score so these are different score pieces.
| | 01:00 | (Musics plays.)
| | 01:08 | And what we did to create those is essentially we sent
off the rough cut, which was this, to the composer
| | 01:16 | and then he kind of underscored what we gave him.
| | 01:20 | So it pretty much fits to the action on the screen,
move stuff around drastically, it does pretty much fit.
| | 01:25 | So, we actually have a couple of different underscore pieces
here and some of this is just we have actually cut the soundtrack
| | 01:35 | and kind of moved it around to make sure that it fits.
| | 01:38 | Then we also have some- there is one called Sound Balance.
| | 01:41 | What that is essentially is...
(Buzzing sound) basically just sound effects.
| | 01:50 | So we have some sound effects and then we
also have some additional sound effects.
| | 01:53 | Now these are mono sound effects, the ones here are stereo so
we are actually putting these on little bit of a separate track.
| | 02:00 | So for example a jail door. (Door slams)
Those sorts of things. (Door slams)
| | 02:09 | There it goes. OK, let's stop that. So essentially
we have all of this pretty much together.
| | 02:14 | Now to finalize this we have got all of
this. It actually looks a little bit messy.
| | 02:18 | So, in order to finalize it we need to create a clean
version where we can do all of our final processing,
| | 02:26 | such as final audio effects and final
color correction, that sort of thing.
| | 02:30 | So what I do here in Premiere is I actually just
create a new sequence. So we can just call that whatever,
| | 02:38 | I usually call it final or something like that. Something that's
glaringly obvious and then I scroll up and I find the sequence
| | 02:46 | for my master edit and so what I do is I just drag that
in. Adjust the timeline so everything fits in my window here.
| | 02:56 | So essentially what this is is everything in
here, all of this kind of this complicated edit,
| | 03:04 | it's all boiled down into just one little movie.
So it's kind of like a sub-composition in After Effects.
| | 03:12 | What I can do here is I can do my
final processing before I do output.
| | 03:17 | Now one of the first things I do is, especially when it's going to
the Internet, is we like to compress the audio just a little bit.
| | 03:25 | Now Premiere has a really nice audio effects library and so
what we typically do is we go in and we use the Dynamics effect.
| | 03:34 | Now essentially what Dynamics is is a compressor
limiter. Typically that's what it will be called
| | 03:39 | in most audio applications and maybe
some other video applications.
| | 03:42 | So if I take that, you'll notice here I have my Dynamics
on this particular one here and typically what I do here
| | 03:51 | is I go through- you can actually go through this custom
setup here and it's got this nice little control panel here.
| | 03:56 | But I actually just go down to the individual parameters here
and I make sure that I have a little bit of compression going
| | 04:03 | on here, it's a little less than a 2:1
compression ratio and what that's going
| | 04:07 | to do is that's going to reduce the Dynamics a little bit.
| | 04:09 | Now that will affect kind of this stereoscopic,
grandiose quality of it a little bit. Not too much
| | 04:17 | but what it also will do is it will make it more consistent
so when somebody listens to it on their laptop speaker,
| | 04:24 | it will still sound good and when somebody listens to it
on just regular stereo speakers, it will also sound good.
| | 04:31 | And then another thing I'd like to do is I like to limit it.
So typically I limit it to about probably -8dB or -9dB, somewhere
| | 04:41 | around there and what that does is it makes
sure that it never gets so loud that it will clip.
| | 04:47 | And I just want to make sure that nothing ever gets
louder than negative, somewhere between -8, somewhere
| | 04:54 | around there. -8db and -9db is typically how much we limit it.
| | 04:58 | Now for the video track, you can do a
bunch of video effects on that as well.
| | 05:04 | Typically we like to leave it alone, but in this case
we actually had a little bit of saturation problems
| | 05:11 | and so one of the things we did was some color corrections
and we did some hue saturation on this particular one here.
| | 05:20 | And actually what we did was so we went through the Color
Balance here and we just reduced the Saturation just a little bit
| | 05:29 | because what we found is when we actually played it
| | 05:30 | on an NTSC monitor actually the reds were
kind of blowing it out just a little bit.
| | 05:35 | So we just dropped the Saturation just a hair.
| | 05:38 | Now you can do all sorts of global effects here, which
can actually be nice, and some of these are just going
| | 05:44 | to be little subtle things to just balance out your levels and make
sure that everything is really nice and clean before it goes out.
| | 05:52 | And then once we have that then all we have to do is just is
output it. Select your sequence and then you go File, Export
| | 05:59 | and then you can export it to any sort of movie file you want.
| | 06:02 | You just go here into Settings and
this is very similar to After Effects.
| | 06:07 | You have your file type, so we can use QuickTime.
Your video compressor, Animation. If we want-
| | 06:13 | we can whatever frame size we want and so on and so forth.
| | 06:18 | Another way to export it is to use the Adobe Media Encoder and
what this is is this kind of actually exports it to the web.
| | 06:27 | Out of Premier Pro you can actually export it to Flash video so
this is great. You can certainly just great all of your own parameters
| | 06:35 | that you need in order to export it
to a website or something like that.
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ConclusionGoodbye| 00:00 | So those are the basics of how we finalize
these films and that's pretty much it.
| | 00:06 | So, hope you enjoyed the title and talk to you next time.
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