How to add IMPACT frames to your animation

this video will introduce you to impact frames in 2d animation I will explain the principles behind how they work and then I'm going to show you step by step how I added these impact frames to this scene to give it a massive amount of impact in fact frames are most commonly found in anime but even in anime the frequency of which you see impact frames being used is quite rare they're reserved for the most explosive scenes so it's a high contrast frame or a collection of high contrast frames which help to pack a punch at the moment of impact they usually depict overexposed light which is too bright for the camera to register if you imagine it's being a camera or too bright for your eye to register they even work on a subliminal level because they flash up too fast for our minds to properly understand so it's more something that we feel rather than something we see an impact frame involves getting the highest contrast you can get on the colour spectrum so the highest contrast you can go to in the spectrum of colour is white and black we want to use that to add maximum contrast most of the time there is a singular point of impact in an impact frame from which the energy is exploding outwards so you want to locate that point of impact in that frame and from that point of impact we're going to describe the forms of our subjects using straight directional lines or at least fairly straight the straighter you can get them the more energy you can put into the frame for this line style I'm particularly inspired by the artwork of Takehiko anoi for his use of straight lines to create extremely kinetic drawings you don't necessarily just fill in the forms with these diagonal lines you're actually describing a very bright light so the dark areas are typically going to be describing the form shadow or or the self shadows that sometimes called and the cast shadows that are set by that very bright light so in anime the most common way to draw an impact frame is the good old pencil and paper methods you know they actually draw it on paper the graphite texture which comes through it adds a really nice grit to the image because the impact frame might only occur for very few frames you actually might not need the animation to be in motion during the impact frame itself you can actually just have the onion skin on and use the previous frame as like a guide and I'm going to show you that when we get into our demo now if you want to create something more complex with more frames involved you can just animate it with rough animation like you would normally and then add the details afterwards we are talking about extremely advanced animation here so it's kind of hard for me to just summarize it in one sentence but that's basically kind of how I would approach it you should always be looking out for the creative opportunities in anything you learn you don't have to do it one to one you can actually take little bits of it and make it your own like in this effects animation scene I used the idea of directional lines to hint at the forms behind the dust clouds it isn't exactly an impact frame but it is taking some of the principles of impact frames like the directional lines use them to distort the figures so that you couldn't quite see them behind the smoke and dust real-life reference of course is always important in a way this is where you need to be creative in where you go to find your sources of reference to base the effect on especially as this is not really a very realistic effect a lot of the time so I looked a lot at TIG welding firework light leaks visual effects really anything involving vivid light I'd say that TIG welding or MIG welding is probably my favorite source of reference for impact frames this light energy which is actually overwhelming for the senses if you look at it with the naked human eye it can blind you like permanently but if you use a camera to look at it it just kind of maxes out the camera sensor to pure white so the highest the camera sensor can pick up is pure white you can see on this example that the reflected light on the nearby surfaces are maxed out to the same value as the light source itself and I think this is a really key part of the way it plays with light you can also pay attention to the fall-off range around the rim of the lights as well as how fast it spreads you know the kind of property of that flickering light this is a piece of animation that I've already made it's already out there on the Internet but for this exercise I think it we could add impact frames if we wanted to and it might might change the scene a little bit so I'll just show you what it looks like right now so that that's what I'm showing right now which is visible but we're gonna add them in right here now this is an important part but it's also quite an obvious part like we're in the time line to put them so I would put it right like here somewhere around here there's where she flicks it out in front we're gonna pause it here and start making some impact frames we're gonna do white on black I'm also going to just set up one of my custom brushes to have that texture that we were talking about the sort of graphite texture so I'm just going to set that up now and I'm gonna try and make it as gritty and textured as I possibly can [Music] now I'm gonna sort out the light table to just show the frame behind now we're showing the previous frame just the lineup from the previous frame we're going to use that as the basis for our impact frame I've identified the point of impact which is right here so right here so all the lines are going to be emanating out from there attempting to describe the form of the character [Music] I'll sometimes check that the lines are in fact emanating from this point I'll just with my cursor I'll just go to that point and then trace that line back down and check that the lines are in fact emanating exactly from that point also there are two different types of ways that you can do these fast lines you can do up and down strokes like this where that's just a single line and they're all connected or what I prefer to do in cases like this is I like to just when the line is coming up I take my cursor off the page so it goes like this you see that so there it's a series of lines all going all downstrokes there looks a little less scribbly and a little bit more calculated [Music] trying to create like a a bit of a halo at like a yeah like a halo effect around that central point I'm gonna call that pretty much done maybe I'll add a few more things to the outside here but on the next one I'm going to do a similar thing but slightly different I'm gonna add emphasis to certain patches and that's gonna give it this kind of flickering effect I'm using the lines to build up textures like the texture is made from a series of lines as well as the texture within the line itself [Music] okay let's try another one so I'm gonna take them my light table I'm gonna skip out that one and go back to that original frame I don't actually want to be too informed by the impact frame that we just did because I'm trying to make something different I've got an idea in my head but it might not work I might have to rearrange them I might have to take some out but that's the nature of something creative is you have to experiment you have to be willing to try something and for it to not go entirely right the first time and to make adjustments if you want straight confident lines I suggest going at it with quite a lot of speed and actually using force and energy in your stroke itself instead of something that's very slow calculated careful do something that's a little bit more just sort of power up and then let it rip and that will create a good line it will create a strong line with lots of confidence in it so now with these lines basically like what I'm trying to do is create I'm trying to create bigger shapes out of the smaller shapes so like the smaller shapes of the lines they're individual lines if you cluster some lines together they start to form a bigger shape and so that's what I'm trying to do I'm trying to indicate larger shapes with wood made up of lines [Music] I'm gonna take just the impact frames and I'm gonna put them on top of my composited scene in After Effects because that's where I put all of the layers together I don't just export it as a whole thing from TV paint although you can't do that if you want but my workflow is just a little bit more complex so I'm gonna load that up in after-effects now okay I'm gonna give you a run-through of what I've done in the compositing which is in After Effects frame by frame first of all a comparison with before so this is it without impact frame okay and this is it with impact frames it definitely adds a big old punch to it having these impact frames in there so first of all we're going along no changes yet but you might notice that the background gets darker as she's powering up and this increases the contrast of the magic spell and just makes it pop out a little bit more so I made the background get darker for this moment coming up to the first impact frame here first of all we have a flare and this kind of eases our way into the impact frame I decided not to actually do like a half impact frame for this but instead just do a very vivid cross flare with the Cross lines and plenty of glow to ease our way into it and then this is the first impact frame now I've got an extra layer here which is I can toggle it on and off here so you can see now that is the overlay so if I take this I can actually show you what is in the overlay here so I'll turn it back to normal so you can see what it is turn the opacity back up and you can see here that it's this image this blurred colorful image I've got loads of these here in a folder where basically when I'm browsing on Internet and I find one of these I just save it to that folder and they come in really handy for compositing for these kind of things so it's just like some nice colors that are unfocused when it's put on there it just adds to the fringes it keeps the values the same so black is still absolute black white is still absolute black so it keeps the contrast but on the fringes where we've got the texture it just adds a nice little burst of color which I really like the look of I've got these black bars in here and that's just because the actual aspect ratio is widescreen but I like to animate with the full frame and then crop where when I need to give to me more freedom in the edits so that's why I've got the black bars okay going on to the next impact frame you can see from these three we've got three impact frames here it starts off with a kind of vignette of these dark lines around and then the dark lines kind of recede and that suggests that the light is expanding and kind of exploding from the center point until we have no lines in the outside edge and we've just got some of the shadows where where she was there the light kind of changes on her for the face of her body there you can actually see that it's completely reflecting then we come out of the impact frames back into normal color except here to ease the transition back from impact frames into normal color I've bumped up the exposure so that it's a lot brighter and then it comes back down I kind of animated it for the values to come back down to normal to zero again so here they're back to normal and that's just pumped comes from observation you know the photons in the frame are still being dispersed they're still around and so it doesn't just go straight from complete white back to normal if there's a little bit of an ease back into the normal colors there okay now we changed the scene and so for this second shot I realized this is another opportunity to show you guys another way that you can create an impact frame and it's a lot faster I do prefer this first method of actually hand drawing them but if you want you can just add this effect called invert which you can find in the effects library here inverts there it is you can slap this invert on so you can see at the point of impact here I've just flipped the colors to be the opposite way round just for one frame and then after that frame bring it back to normal colors I crank the brightness up to 144 and then ease that off again like we did in our previous one only this time with the brightness until it's back down to normal again so this is what that looks like slowed up so you can actually barely see when it's just on one frame you barely register that it's inverted you can't see the orange colors that have come out on it but you can feel it as an audience member you can feel that it's it was a bright flash so those are two ways of doing it obviously the more expert way is to do it where you hand draw all the lines yourself it's more visually interesting there's three frames in this one so means that you do actually notice it as an audience member you can see that something was drawn in there if you are interested in learning more of these effects which sakuga anime is famous for then you might be interested in taking mice a cougar destruction online course which teaches this special you to pond cubes effect step by step it contains over five hours of video lessons as well as an introduction PDF video references and the fla source files i will leave the link in the description to where you can download it that's it for this video a word to beginners and impact frames like the icing on the cake it doesn't make up the substance of the cake itself it's a little trick you can use to enhance the animation you have so they are fun to do but it is a lot more important to work on your fundamentals I would say if you want to support these kind of videos if you get a lot out of them I really appreciate anyone who chooses to support me on patreon thank you for watching I will see you in the next video goodbye

Channel: Howard Wimshurst

Views: 143,040

Keywords: learn flash animation, Howard Wimshurst, impact frames, how to draw impact frames, sakuga impact frames, how to animate with impact frames, japanese animation lesson, yutaka nakamura, yutaka nakamura animation, yutaka nakamura animation lesson, anime tutorial, how to make anime, how to add impact to your animation, how to animate lightning, how to animate like yutaka nakamura, how to animate like makoto shinkai, how to animate like anime, action animation

Id: 6UaUi5fBmJc

Length: 18min 41sec (1121 seconds)

Published: Fri Jan 10 2020