How I Make Storytime Videos in Adobe Animate (Flash)

I've been giving a lot of comments and questions on how I make my animated story time videos and so this is an overview I'm not going to talk about every single thing but I'm gonna give you a general idea of how I make these first up there are several different animation programs out here I'm fairly new to animation and I am using Adobe animate but before I can actually jump into this animation software and start to draw and create something I need to have some audio that I'm going to animate - it all starts with the script I just write one and then I need to record that script now I'm not gonna go into all my gear specifically here of what might can tablet I use that sort of thing if you want to see that I've got a page on my website that talks about all my gear but that's just gonna slow down the process I want to talk about how I actually create this thing in the software first up I use a generic audio recorder I use the Windows voice recording app that just comes with my computer and make sure I get in close to my mic I speak clearly that sort of thing so it's not uncommon for me to record parts of my scripts in different ways sometimes especially if I'm trying to be funny it just doesn't come off that way when I listen back to the audio later on so whenever I do a line where I'm just not speaking normally I record that line a couple different ways all right I can pick the best one and use that sometimes moving away from mic adds a little bit of extra comedic effect I took it because I was making the big bucks how much did I make hold on let me find the invoice once I have this big long 20 minute audio file I usually narrow it down to like five to eight minutes I cut everything out that I don't need to use for audio editing I'm using Premiere Pro that is total overkill I've been using it for years to make my normal videos I know really well and it came with my Adobe subscription so why change obviously there's other stuff out there I know a lot of people use audacity things like that you can use whatever you want so first up I'm going back to that big audio file I'm listening to my lines I'm picking the best performance from each one and I'm splicing it together into almost like a radio play if the video calls for it if it works I might even sync a little bit of music underneath it now the one thing I do make sure of here is the audio has to be consistent I don't want the music to blast out my voice it's all about the story and the story I'm trying to tell if you can't hear what I'm saying that's not effective at all so I always make sure that my music is lower then really it probably needs to be but I want the music to add to it not overwhelm it alright enough about audio so I'm now done with it what do I do I export it as a WAV file you can use different audio formats in Adobe anime but I like WAV files actually I don't really like them I just read somewhere that they do better in Adobe animate like it streams better sounds good to me WAV file it is alright now that we're done with all of that we can move on into Adobe animate we can start drawing now a couple things about how I've got this set up along the bottom you're gonna see I've moved my timeline down here I think it started up at the top along the left hand side is where I've placed all my tools because I'm familiar with that from other Adobe programs and over here on the right hand side the only thing I really have open is my property menus and then my library which contains all of my symbols I like to keep things clean and I like to keep things organized so my first step is to take that script and I break it down in my sketchbook I physically sketch in my sketchbook all of the different frames that I'm gonna be using in my animation really really rough thumbnails of the things that I want to draw out in this video what this animation is gonna look like it helps me organize my thoughts before I start drawing my next step is to go into Photoshop or a program like that and I'll do some pencil sketches and then I'll copy and paste those pencil sketches into Adobe animate and these act as roughs that I create the actual artwork for here I like to use the brush tool and I like to make sure that my brush is big right now I don't have a tablet set up but usually there's an icon at the very bottom of my tools that lets me adjust my pressure sensitivity as well or toggles that pressure on as far as color palette I use a very limited color palette for me animation is all about speed and so I don't want to spend a lot of time picking colors so I've chosen just a handful of colors that I use mainly my outlines of my characters are this dark grey color like that and then if I draw a shape I'll just fill it in with one of the other shades of grey like this medium size gray I'll use the paint bucket tool and fill it in with that I'll pick a color of white I'll fill it in with that get rid of everything on the stage here and show you what I'm talking about if I go over to my cymbals I've already created cymbals for a lot of things that are going in this video this is the little guy in the middle that I had all the fingers pointing at you could see he's just made up of the basic shades of grey' what I do first is is I draw all of my elements and I create them and build them into symbols some of these symbols are still and I still have to animate them some are animated here's one that is animated and if I hit enter you'll see him patting himself on the back that's just a simple little animation I got to get rid of that guy I'm gonna get rid of that guy I also with every animation I do I'm using a lot of the same elements for example my character I want to look the same so I different have different bodies that I can drag out onto the stage that look slightly different here's one with his arm sticking up I think this one over here is it's like a shrug animation and then I have a bass head that I can draw drag out onto the stage can move my body down like that it's a horrible body let me get the other one in here there we go and then I can grab both at the same time and I can move them anywhere I want them on the stage now I can drag in his eyes and a mouth and a nose I could adjust the dough's to put it at the right place actually it should be down a little bit you get the idea I have all of these things that I use in video after video so I have all of those saved to my library once I get the major pieces drawn that's still only about half the drawing because what I end up doing is I end up doing a lot of frame by frame animation and a lot of in-between type animation once I get the core things draw so I might have a character in here but I'll go in and I'll show the character waving his arms in the air or something like that or I show different elements that have drawn zooming in and out or sliding across the screen let me go to an animation that's already finished so you can get an idea of how it actually looks so what we have here are my timeline at the very bottom this little squiggly orangish line this is my audio file and if I hit enter he'll ants web designer that's my day job that is what pays the bill when I hit the return key it plays it back and forth for me and also what you see happening here let me hit it again as designing web sites has got more complicated I have my animations contained oftentimes within symbols I like to keep this clean I'm sure some people probably have 50 different layers in their main timeline I like to hide a lot of my layers and a lot of my complexity so I will make a symbol for I guess a scene or a couple lines if I double click into that you can see how it looks and I'm going to increase this timeline so you can see a lot of my complexity is in here and if I scrub back I can see that website image coming in and I'm gonna scrub forward a little bit got my hand going up and down and now I'm gonna have my character move out and the website move in and then I have all of these things popping in and each one of these things like this garbage can icon that's a symbol this YouTube icon that's a symbol and you'll see on my timeline wherever there's blue with an arrow if I right-click on it what that is is that is a classic tween is what it's called so on the first frame you see it's really small and in the middle frame it gets bigger and then it gets a tiny bit smaller so it kind of has that pop in effect here's another little trick I use is I have an image in here which is just a really poorly drawn map that I threw in here and I want to show my car driving on this map here check out what the video don't forgive that'll require me to work for that company on site in their office with their team the road and everything in it is a symbol if I click on it you can see here that all the stuff is there there's this light green line that might be kind of hard to see that is a path and what's happening is when I hit this blue part is that little puck is traveling along that path to the office and then in my main symbol I am moving the entire image over so I have multiple pieces of movement going on once I've kind of created that illusion of movement if I want that puck to move really fast I just have less space between these two keyframes so now when I go you see that puck move really fast to the office and if I wanted to take longer I just add more space and now it's a slow moving puck and this is all contained in the symbol in the upper left hand corner you'll see you have your main scene which is what I created and then symbol 12 I'm really bad about naming my symbols I just kind of make a lot of them and I don't to name them the other thing that's going on here is if I keep playing this air team after doing this a half-a-dozen time you see the phrase their office is kind of shaking that's because I'm holding in on this one space for a long time and what I don't like to do in my animations is I don't like to have a lot of dead space like I don't want more than one or two seconds of no motion at all so this is a trick that I use is I'm gonna click into this symbol so you can see it's just like text that I've written over twice so I hand wrote this text and then down here in the frames the second set of frames here is me redrawing it and so it's just on a loop and it loops over and over and over again and it makes the text shake a little bit so even though I'm holding it on this scene for like five or six whole seconds I have the text moving so there's a little bit of animation and movement in there now the very first animation I ever did was was about this donut store and when I did this animation everything moved because I thought that'd be kind of cool but what I realized is one that takes a long time to draw everything twice but also it's kind of exhausting for your eye to follow all that another thing you're gonna see in this time line of this animation and I do this from time to time is I do lip synching and so lip synching is frame by frame animation and every frame is a little bit different I think at the time I hand drew all of the mouths too let's see what this frame is about and then there's always that person who's like oh no thanks I don't want a doughnut I'm gonna dye it what they really mean is only the coconut one was left yeah so that was my very first animation it wasn't the first one I actually published on this channel it's just the first one that I drew another thing I like to do are pop in and outs this is a great way to transition this is an image it starts really small and then when I go to the middle frame it's bigger but over the next two frames it gets a little smaller I kind of like that pop in ease in and out effect that I do i I'm an ually make that a little bit bigger it's a nice effect here you can kind of see it here last person out of the conference room make sure you leave the door open if you use the printer make sure there's more paper in it if you see the company mascot don't feed it when it's molting so that's the pup in effect pretty subtle just a small touch stole that pop over effect from other youtubers I like the way that they bring things in let me explain Studios in one of her videos she did the same popping effect but she twisted the image into place while she was popping it in I've really overused that one I've actually studied her videos a lot because there's a lot you can learn from the minimalist feel to her animations there are a lot of elements that she pours a lot of time into and you can tell she spends a lot of time animating little things and there's other parts where she takes shortcuts but all of the things she's doing are serving the story which really makes a lot of sense because you kind of have to budget your time pretty well when you're animating a video by yourself here's another frame a little bit later in this video this one actually took some time I actually drew a background yay for me and I have that background just rolling I'm talking about the kitchen and I think I use this a little later on actually I introduce a character a little bit during Dungeons & Dragons just when you think you got to figure it out you learned that they're using the fifth edition rulebook and you're still on the fourth and if I if I go back to here there's a transition here so we have the kitchen in the background we have the Viking here and of course the Viking is a symbol that I've moved around you see the blue animation lines here on this layer I have my rulebook coming in and it's shrinking it starts off much larger and it gets smaller and right about what it hits you can start to see the background fading out and what does the rulebook do it gets small and then it gets a little bit bigger and then it gets small again as if it's addition look I have gotten a little bit more sophisticated with my lip-syncing over on the right hand side I now have left mouths and somewhere I have right mouths and I can actually just pull my mouths in as I need them so I'm not hand drawing them so this is how this scene came together also a shout-out tune animations is in this one it's you hey have you seen my salad it had pecans on it No so anyway I'm still learning I don't think my lip-syncing is that good but I'm still learning and getting better at it so anyway when I am done and I'm ready to export you can export a lot of different stuff from flash I go up the file I go to export and I go to export video and I make sure it's the right size I'm usually doing it at high def which is 1920 by 1080 and then I just click export it takes a little bit of time and it also turns on a program called Adobe Media encoder so it does take a little at a time to export before you do export there's one last thing that you should do I'm gonna go up to file and I go to go to publish settings this is really important the options here are audio stream and audio event it is setting it up as an mp3 and it defaults to the worst possible audio that you can imagine change your bitrate not a good up to at least 128 or if you want to go higher you can go to 160 but otherwise your audio is gonna be really really muted and sound muffled and yucky so make sure you do that before you export to so anyway that's how I do it I know this is a really quick overview like I said I'm just starting out I'm learning this stuff as I go I've got a ton left to learn I know flash can do so much more than what I've done with it so far and with every video I try to learn one or two new tricks so if you have some tips or tricks or you have any questions that maybe I didn't cover in this video let me know down below in the comment section that is all I have for today thank you guys for watching to the end I really appreciate it and I will talk to you later [Music]

Channel: Brad Colbow

Views: 147,269

Keywords: Adobe, adobe animate, natimations, let me explain studios, rebecca parham, storytime, animation, how to, tutorial but not really, adobe premiere, audio

Id: l3C96qjFpYc

Length: 14min 29sec (869 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 25 2018