Animate a hopping ball - Photoshop Tutorial

- [Instructor] If you have access to the exercise files folder, there is a file called 01_06_hopping_ball. Now if we open that, you'll see the kind of scene that we'll begin working with, just to get the ball rolling, so to speak. So here we go. Very simple, nothing spectacular. And all we're looking at here is five drawings: one, three, five, seven, and nine. I've numbered them on odd numbers so that we'll hold them for two frames each, 'cause otherwise, it'll go too fast. So on each exposure here on the timeline, we have it exposed here and then it reverses. So as you can see here, number six is actually number seven going backwards. Frame number seven is drawing number five and eight is drawing number three. I have set playback down here in the timeline to forever. This button here will play the animation. So let's do something like this from scratch. Close this. We go File, New, and you will see something slightly different on your system, but we want to make a file that's 1920 by 1080, Create. If you have the timeline down here and it's not open, double click here on the word and select Create Frame Animation. This will create a single exposure. And the next thing I want to do is just give it some kind of timing, 'cause right now it doesn't know if it's going to be held for a second or a 10th of a frame. So let's just for the moment tell it 1/10th of a second. So that'll be close enough to 24fps on twos or 12 frames per second. We'll adjust that in a little while. You'll notice that our timeline is fairly simple. There are no layers. There are just exposures and one time timeline level. So the next question is how do we have layers in this very basic system? We'll deal with this in more detail in the next movie, but we're going to use groups or these folders here. So you click on the Folder icon and you'll see Group 1 and we will click on this icon to make a new layer. And let's just make five, and I'll call this folder ball. And you remember the kind of timing we're shooting for, one, three, five, seven, nine. So you'll notice too, they're all exposed. We don't want them all to be exposed. We just want drawing number one to be exposed on this frame. And I'm going to just make a second one for the moment. Make a new exposure by clicking here. And this one shouldn't be the first drawing. It should be the last. So that'll be number nine. And now when I click here, you'll see in the layers panel that we're going from one to nine and back again. So let's just open the image a little bit. Select our brush. In Tools Presets, I would like the shaggy brush. If you want to use a different one, be my guest. I don't mind. We go to the first exposure and I think we start off in, if I remember correctly, just the ball in a standing position. Now we go to the next frame. I'm using F1 and F2. These are keyboard shortcuts that I established in my setup movie earlier in the course, if you've forgotten or you're landing here for the first time. So how on earth do I draw the next position without drifting on number nine, without drifting left or right? So this is where it gets really controllable. So I'm going to put the number one drawing on, bring the exposure down a little bit or the opacity, and that'll be like a backlight. Basically it's like switching on layers. So now I'll go to number nine and there are things I can do too to cheat. The old system was called shift and trace where you would move one piece of paper over another and do your drawing over that. Now the next thing to not do would be this: to move this around. And I'm going to go View, Extras off, 'cause I don't like seeing those lines. So all of this stuff is not good form because if I go back to here and switch it on, you notice it's in a different position. We can use this later on, but we don't want to start having like unique x, y positions for the different layers. So let's just undo all of that. And if you want to move this, get into the habit of using the lasso tool, and this will move it universally. So I'm going to hold down Shift and drag and I think our Extras have come back on, very unhelpful. Anyway, now I can position it as I like. And let's put it to about here. And I can switch off the lower layer now, F1, F2, F1, F2. So the other thing I want to do is color code these. So one way to do that is to right click and make it gray. In the previous setup movie I also established actions, which are keyboard shortcuts. So they are to color code the different layers. And it is Control + F6, F7. F8 is the one that'll color that layer gray. So I use this gray. For me it's a code that I use for the key frames or the extremes. So next thing to do is to make an exposure for the in-between frame. And that'll be number five, fairly basic. So let's make a new exposure after number one. And on this frame we click off here and click on there, one, five, nine. So let's go to here and go Control or Command + F2. And that's my breakdown frame. That's so that I know that this is the main breakdown or in-between, between the two keys. That way it's easier to remember where we are in the order of operations. Now if I want to do this in-between drawing, if you flip quickly enough you could probably do it without a backlight, but it really does help to have a backlight. So let's put on the drawing of where we're coming from and where we're going to. I'm going to select both of those, and just take the opacity down to about here. And I now have a a light table. So let's go to number five and just do... What's going on here? Something strange is going on here. There we go. Weird little bug. Try again. There we go. That's very weird. I'm sure you saw that. I want to leave that in. I'm not going to edit that out. Just to give you a feel for some of the odd little things that can happen when you work in Photoshop. If you trip across these things, they happen to me too, and they happen I'm afraid to everyone. So let's say here we're looking at this ball and it seems to be like a little off center. Maybe it could be a little bigger. I think it's losing a bit of volume. So I draw the lasso tool using the L on the keyboard as a shortcut. And now I can adjust the artwork. Hold down Control or Command. And you can even pinch it in a little bit if you think the shape needs a bit of adjusting, and then Control + D. And now we can switch off the light table. And there we go. So the next step would be to do the in-between frames. Again, just take your time. If you get lost, reset and have a look. Number one, over here, number one. This is the breakdown frame, five. Third frame is drawing number nine. So we want to add an exposure between one and two. And this will be drawing number three. And again, make a little virtual light table. Here we can do something a little more interesting than, you know, this sort of basic in-between. So Undo that. We could hold the bottom onto the ground and just have a tease or anticipate this upward motion. And let's pick the e for the eraser. I'm going to pick the shaggy eraser, which you will have if you've inserted my presets and brush tools. So now on the drawing, we switch off the light table and that looks good. I'm going to insert another exposure here for number seven. So again, we create the virtual light table. You can also set the different drawings to different opacities if it helps you to differentiate one from the other. So number 5, say it can be on 33. Number 9, maybe on 55. And then you can work on number seven. This would really help with more complex drawings where you're working between two images that are quite different from one another. And actually on this one I want to favor the upper position just a little bit so it's not a 50-50. So it just seems to gather at the top a little better. Okay, and now we can switch off the light table. Next thing to do is the downward positions as well. One way we can do that is to copy these exposures here. We can make completely new exposures here and set them manually or I can drag them. So let's click on that exposure, hold on Alt or Option and drag. And that'll make a copy and we can copy this one too. There we go. And that's it. That's how we establish the keys, that's how we create the breakdowns and add some in-betweens. The last thing to do will be to tweak these frame settings. Right now they're not quite where I want. So I'm going to open my calculator. So number one, that's one second. If you want each exposure to be 1/12th of a second, we divide by 12. And the number we need to insert is 0.08. We'll be working on 24 fps. That's 1 divided by 24. Then the number you would insert here is we round it to the first, 0.04. In this case, I want 0.08. We select all the exposures, other, 0.08. Now too, every time you add a new exposure, it'll have the same exposure setting. So let's delete that frame, and here we go. So now when this gets exported, it will actually be on the correct 12 frames per second frame rate. One of the beauties of this sort of style is you can really start adding all kinds of lovely cross hatching effects like this. And again, I'm not really trying to make these super pretty. I'm just throwing them down as an example. And we only have to do them of course, for those. They'll be mapped onto the other exposures. So you can make an actual drawing animate. If you can draw a drawing in Photoshop, there's a very good chance you can make it move as well using this basic methodology. In the next movie, I'll show you how we can expand upon this to add yet more life and vitality using groups to give us different layers in the animation timeline.