Keyframe Animation Tutorial

get ours and gentlemen welcome to draw with Jezza I'm Jezza and in this video we're going to be making some keyframe animation keyframe animation often referred to as FBF or frame by frame animation by other people who make flash animations essentially is where you have something where you're drawing each individual frame to create the motion so as opposed to tween animation which is more about moving an object for one place to an hour now the advantage to using keyframe animation is the fact that you get a lot more fluidity and a lot more extremity in the poses and in the movement itself but the drawback is that it takes a lot of time and often is very dependent on the creator's knowledge and kind of instincts with with shape with movement and with timing so a lot of that kind of comes into it so it is the kind of thing that if you want to become good at it you got to practice a lot you've got to really familiarize yourself with it but we're just going to jump straight into it now and the thing that we're going to be animating today is a monkey am I going to animate him dancing so I've prepared this clip beforehand for me to use and I'm just going to duplicate it so you can see what I had to work with and if you want to use the the reference file that you can download the link in the description you can come in here and muck around and see if you can create the dancing monkey yourself anyways we'll call this one dancing monkey complete and I will duplicate this monkey kit clip complete okay so we've got two duplicates just so I have them to work with and what we have here is a song that it's going to be looping to okay so what I've done here is I have inside a movie clip that that song playing in the background and I've created a graphic where I have calculated where the beats are 1 2 3 4 as you can see down here I've got the time playing so that in the main timeline where this repeats the 1 2 3 & 4 it moves with music now it's not absolutely perfect because maybe 8 to 12 bars in it might go slightly out of time that's fairly normal so I'm not worrying about that I'll just kind of adjust that specifically as I need to but for the most of it you can see that it's 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 it's pretty in time okay and so the reason I did that is I set it up so in this graphic I can create a looped animation and it will play throughout the song now that means I don't have to animate thousands of frames I just have to animate within the space of 51 frames so I'm going to be doing that today so what I've got here I'm left I've got the monkey I want him to end up looking like but as with all of our drawing tutorials that we do we don't begin with this we begin with the bare bones we begin with shapes like this because the thing especially with frame by frame keyframe animation the thing we want to get right first are the shape and proportions and the timing the timing is the most important thing in the movement because if that if the movement and timing are out because you're spending so much time doing the line work and making it look pretty it's going to be worthless it doesn't matter how good you draw it it's going to look pretty rubbish so I have on the left here my reference for what the final monkey will be I just drew run one frame of him like that so I have that to to work with and then I used that that and the construction lines I used to draw that as my reference and I'm going to use this to create the movement of the actual dancing monkey so the first steps I have to go through first of all I'm going to hide my finished monkey here and lock them and I have two frames to work with I'm not going to I have this frame which is the construction line work of the drawing itself I'm not going to use that because that's still too detailed I want to get really really basic so the first thing I'm going to do is draw what we call the keyframes now with keyframe animation we use keyframes as kind of the anchor points of motion so there are lots of frames in animation but the keyframes are the extremities of movement and extremities of motion and timing so the keyframes of this in particular because we have a beat to follow one two three four via the keyframes are going to be on those beats one two three four and there might also be keyframes in between so like 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 right so we'll be doing those so we'll probably end up drawing I've got that keyframe here of that motion so I'll draw one on this on beat number 2 now 1 & 2 are going to be repeated on 3 & 4 so again even less work to do we're not going to be animating 51 frames we're going to be animating 26 frames of animation so I know that's a bit of bit cheep-cheep of me but I have a specific dance I want them to do and that's just and so as you can see on those four counts two of them are repeated so I'm going to be animating 26 frames of animation so the first two keyframes I'm going to do are this first one that we've seen and the next one so I'll create a new keyframe turn on my onion skin so I see the frame before and using my brush I'm going to draw the next frame using me ever I've here and create my body shape for the next part of the animation so it's going to be pretty much the same thing but flipped over so I feel like it needs to be a little more extreme so I'm going to drag the body forward like this and then drag the leg back and then bring this leg back like that so you can see I've already got that motion if I flip between them you can see that I've got the back and forth okay now that is our that that's the basics of the two main key frames that we're going to be using doing right now we need we need frames in between these two get some actually dance motion because we don't have to Bob or anything like that so I'm going to create a frame new blank frame between these and drag out my onion skin tool which you can see here I'm using Adobe Flash by the way but a lot of these animation principles apply to any animation program you would use the tools can vary though so I'm going to draw a new head but it's going to be lower about here and the torso will be squatted and facing the front and the feet we'll both be centered now I need to figure out what I'm going to be doing with the hands if he's thrusting out his pelvis okay so it's interesting what I'm doing I know I look a bit weird but I'm actually trying to mimic the movement with my body and see what naturally I'm doing so that I get a good point of reference at least somewhat in my head now a lot of animators who work in studios and kind of have a lot more arm need to be accurate will actually film themselves or film things similar to what they're animating to get it right okay so I'm going to copy this frame because it's going to be essentially the same thing and now you'll see that I have pretty much the motion that I want we go okay so let's watch this in context with the music so zoom out okay so you notice it he's not bopping for the three and four so what I'm going to do is I'm going to fast forward now but I'm going to create a make sure that those keyframes are done for the second half of the beat and I'm also going to start doing in-betweens just for the motion itself so I catch up when we're done with that okay so I finished with that and I've got the basic motion here it's a repeated on the other half so up to frame 26 is where it's more the individual animation and then it's repeated up to frame 51 and what I've got is that the keyframes I drew at the beginning the immediate left and right keyframes like this and then I have an in-between like this which is that down motion and then I just drew the frames in between those and it has a really simple sort of motion now I want to break it up a little bit just to add some things a little more interesting and maybe add a bit more extremity to the motion so what I'm going to do is on these mid frames I'm going to bring everything down just a little bit because I want it to really bounce and so now if I just watch that it already bounces more than the second half so I'll just add a little bit of that bounce because I like that and then we'll watch it in context and then we'll see what else we can add to it so if I go out here let's watch this okay so I like that what I'm going to do is add a little bit of extra my arm motion just to break up the symmetry because at the moment the 1/2 repeats into the 3 & 4 so when the 1/2 I'm going to have one of these arms pop out and then the 3/4 I'll have the other arm pop out and that way it'll break it up so on the whole four beats it's it's a whole dance motion rather than just one two being repeated I hope this is making sense okay so in the okay so for this first frame I'm going to have the left arm his left arm pop out like this and then it will in this frame be pulled in a bit here we go and then here is right arm I'm just going to start stretching out and here his right arm will be fully outstretched just as his left arm was in the one before and again it is brought back in there we go there we go so it's really not that much of a difference I forgot to bring that right on that here you're going to make sure everything matches up so on the loop you've got to remember that at the end of the loop before it gets to the start again to have that match up with the very beginning of the loop so I have to bring that arm out a little bit more to match up with the outstretched arm so now when I go outside to watch this animation okay so I'm pretty happy with that he's got a good motion and now I'm ready to draw the monkey now I'm going to be drawing the monkey with construction lines like this but I'm going to be cheating somewhat and this is fairly common because why would you redraw everything when you don't have to redraw everything for example the head and the maracas so what I'm going to be doing is recycling a little bit so I'm going to have this have these follow the motion that we've set up of the body so rather than keyframe animate these I'm going to go through and do it manually by hand and and then that's done all we have to redraw is the body so you can use time-saving things like that because there's no need to redraw every frame of the markers and the head when it's facing pretty much the same way every time I will flip the head like this at one point to save time but it gets the job done so I'm going to go through and match up the head and the hands with the motion of the frame by frame animation okay so I finished doing that and what I've done is in the exact same number of frames that I have new key frames for this simple motion here I've just gone through and added these movie clips these graphics and just made sure that they match on the same frames now eventually I'm going to go through and smoothy's to make sure they are a lot smoother and it isn't doesn't look as choppy as this does but that's going to come later because the next step is to draw in the construction work of the body now I won't have to draw the head in the hand so that will save a lot of time I'm going to go through and do that now I'll show you I'll stop the fast-forwarding when I've done the same key frames of the construction work construction lines but then I'm going to explain what I'm going to be doing next in drawing those in betweens and show you how that's done now I've completely finished doing the rough construction work of these keyframes this animation is on 30 frames per second and each keyframe is about three to four frames apart from each other now the finished production will be every single frame so every frame will have a newly drawn frame on it so it will be thirty drawn frames every second but at the moment for about thirty seconds it's about one two three four five six about ten frames per second so what I'm going to do is I'm going to go through and draw the finished line work first over the construction lines that I've done here I'm going to draw the black outlines and draw the actual character for the amount of frames that we have so for the ten frames over the over the 30 frames and then I'm going to do the in betweens and that will smooth it all out and so the good thing about doing those in betweens is you don't need the construction lines anymore you just basically use the onion skin tool and draw the between them and fill it in so we'll get to that when we get to that and I'll then towards the end I'll do the tail because I want the tail to have its own motion and it's a bit confusing to do amongst all of this so I'm going to go through now I'm going to do all the line work so I'm going to lock all these layers and start doing the black line work of the monkey's body but I'll just go through quickly and show you what we've got here so you can see that it's pretty much exactly the same motion that we had with the really rough construction line work and now we've just got the more refined construction line work so you can see as as with drawing are all our other drawings like if I'm doing a painting in Photoshop or if I'm just doing a sketch in flash I always draw this really rough sort of stuff first and that's the best way to do it because it's the best way to test out not only the shape and the dimensions of the character and get proportions right but in in the instance of animation it's also the best way to get the timing right and the motion right so now that we've got that right now that we've got the timing and emotion in the shape and the proportions all great we're going to go through and do the line work so there we go I've finished drawing the line work of the body and as you can see it's pretty much the same as the construction line work but just more refined so what I can do now is hide my construction line work and draw the in-betweens and I'll show you I'll draw one of them for you so you can see how I do it and then just know that that's what I've done for all of them because this is one of the more time-consuming things so I find it let's see these two first frames here we've got the one with the body out in that position and then the next one here and so the in-between is essentially drawing the body in a position between these two to put between those frames so that the motion is smoother and I'll do that to fill in these large gaps throughout the animation so I created a new keyframe between them and as you can see it's totally blank so I'm going to turn on my onion skin and drag it to one frame on either side and you can see that I can see both frames that before frame in the after frame so this is actually really simple and it takes fairly minimal are sort of familiarity with shape and form and worrying about timing and all this stuff because we've already done that so now it's really just about drawing everything halfway so the neck halfway this arm line everything every line is basically about conforming the two so that it's at a halfway point and it matches so everything so if the arm in the first frame is straight and the arm in the next frame is bent we just begin bending the arm so that we show that it's the halfway point so I'm not going to worry about the head and the rack is at the moment because this is just exclusively about drawing the halfway point between these keyframes so these are our in-betweens and you'll often see that other flash artists or animators hire people just to do in-betweens and cleanup work that's basically this because you don't need to have a great amount of experience with motion and timing or anything like that you just need to be able to replicate what's been done so I've done my in between there and it's already smoothed out that motion and I'm going to go through now and do that between all of these major keyframes okay so I've just finished doing that now what I've done rather than animate every single frame you'll see every now and then there's a double frame now it's quite common for animators to animate on what they're called doubles to animate on doubles which is essentially doing a new frame every second frame this is almost that but it's not singles to animate on singles is doing every frame and as you can imagine animating on singles at 30 frames a second that being 30 new images every second can be quite a lot of work as opposed to animating on doubles which is 15 frames a second essentially is a lot less work so sometimes you can kind of get a mix mixing frame by frame and twins often makes it look quite fluid especially even if you're animating on doubles in the frame by frame sections having tweens in there to smooth it out everything ends up looking quite fluid so as you can see what I've got here you wouldn't even be able to tell if it was doubles of singles because it's a mix of both and I'm very happy with the result so I've got my line work in there and this is completely finished aside from smoothing out this add in the color and adding the tail so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to add color to my line work frame and finish that off and then I'm going to smooth out the head and the maracas frame and then that will be completely done and the last thing to do will be the tail so I'll get to explaining what we're going to be doing when we get there you so ladies and gentlemen I have completely finished most of the animation for this monkey everything but the tail so as you can see I've gone through and I've colored in the body and I've added tweens to the hands and the head so the head neither the little tweaking because I do flip it every now and then but otherwise it's just been pretty much an overall motion tween apply and because the motion the basic blocking of that motion and movement has already been there its I haven't really needed to touch it it's a pretty perfect I'm very very happy with how smooth and inform this dancing monkey looks and as you can see even though the body is completely frame by frame and there the head in hands at wind it all mixes together really smoothly so it doesn't look choppy because sometimes if you're fully frame by frame everything it can look really messy so if I redrew every frame of the head I think it would look quite a bit messy no matter how no matter how knit you are you know and and I think with also the the tweening a kind of smooth things out so what I'm going to do now is I'm going to go through and add the tail so I'm going to go to basically like what I've done with them with the body I'm going to go through and make sure I have a construction line to follow so I'm going to lock everything so what I'm going to do is I'm going to wireframe these and I'm going to follow the motion of the body the bum because the tail needs to react to where the bum is so I'm going to draw a little circle here and every time there's a new keyframe I'm going to draw a circle where the beginning of the tail at the back of the bum would be like this I think and why I'm doing that is this just as my own personal sort of indicator as to where the base of the tail will be and then using my own instincts with um fluidity of motion I can estimate how tail should move because it's not going to move in the same way as the body or the handle arms because it's kind of got its own thing happening kind of like a cloth waving in the wind doesn't matter really what the person who's wearing it's doing it's more how the cloth moves against that so the tail is similar like that it's kind of like this extra dangly bit that we've got a kind of move so that the motion of the bodies of is affects that but also it has its own sort of muscle movement and everything like that so I've gone through and if I play through now you can see that the tail is there and I'm going to bit by bit go through and feel my way through it so I'm going to start off with the tail in this position and so the next thing and I'm going to make sure my onion skins on so I can feel my way through through it so the tails pushed in so I'm going to have it push in like that next frame I have the tail flip back so it's kind of pushed in like this let's see how that looks yeah I'm pretty happy with that so again this is the kind of thing where I'm really going by instinct I can't really talk too much about what I'm doing because it's it's very much um improvised you you so let's play through this so far so you can see that I've got that flailing motion and that's purely based on improvising where I assume that motion will go but the other tricky thing is it needs to meet up in the same place at the end as it does at the beginning so we'll place that key frame there and I'll continue to go through and do my improvised motion and now that I'm close to the end I need to use my end frame as a point of reference I know it needs to kind of curve like that so I need to start moving things in a way that will result in it ending up like that and now I pretty much drawn in between for these frames so now I can get rid of that last frame I'll go through and play this and let's see how it looks with the body in yeah I'm pretty happy with that it flails around a bit but the monkeys dancing quite aggressively so that works so finally what I'm going to be doing is actually drawing the tail so lock my um my reference tail and I'm just going to go through quite simply and draw oops let me just redo that and draw the line work my tail just like that really simple and so I'm going to do that for every frame now so I'll fast forward it so you'd have to sit through all of that and ladies and gentlemen here I am with a complete monkey dancing so break this up into layers I've got the head and the hands and they're tweent as you can see the motion there I've got the torso and limbs which have been frame by frame animated on a mixture of singles and doubles then the bottom I've got replicating the same format of singles and doubles the tail with an improvised motion and all of those together create the final form of the dancing monkey which looks quite fluid and I'm very happy with the outcome there might add a quick shadow underneath him which won't take long to do I'll show you quickly how I do a shadow just to kind of make it look like someone's standing on the ground I get a gradient a radial gradient like that I make the middle black at about 40% and the outside black at 0% like that and then I just shape-shift it to a bear bat and then we've got the shadow with this character here bringing the gradient down here so you can see I've got my finished dancing monkey and let's watch him to a bit of music ladies and gentlemen I am very happy with the result I hope you enjoyed it make sure to if you have Adobe Flash and you want to check out how I've done this I've got the reference files for you to download so go check them out until next time ladies and gentlemen I'll see you later thanks for watching make sure to subscribe if you enjoy my videos you can download the reference files from this tutorial by clicking the link in the description and remember to share any art animation or game you make on newgrounds.com until next time see you later

Channel: Jazza

Views: 310,928

Keywords: josiah, brooks, jazza, jazzastudios, animation, game design, media, newgrounds, armor games, flash, humor, drawing, how to draw, adobe, photoshop, cintiq, 24hd, Adobe Flash (Software), tutorial, Artist, Painting, Educational, Software Tutorial, CS6, keyframe, inbetween, fbf

Id: R76e6wvDSdw

Length: 33min 8sec (1988 seconds)

Published: Fri May 31 2013