Back to Blog Index

Tutorial: Hand Animated Effects in Adobe Animate

No items found.

Hand drawn effects can be easy, very easy in fact.

In this lesson Sara Wade is going to take you through all of the basics you need to know to be able to get going in Adobe Animate.

You'll create a variety of vector effects that you can use to give your animations that little bit of extra pizazz that make people go "Wow, how did they do that!?"And did we mention that these are vector, as in fully scaleable, super light weight, easy to draw and easy to use? That's right. All of those great benefits of the vector format blended seamlessly with that hand drawn feel right in Adobe Animate. Pretty slick, huh?We'll then take those effects from Animate and composite them into our scene in After Effects to finish out our project. So grab a drawing tablet, or your mouse, and get ready to get animating!

{{lead-magnet}}

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Tutorial Full Transcript Below 👇:

Sara Wade (00:00:17):

Hey there, Sara, here with school of motion today, to talk to you about accent and effect animation, this stuff is the cherry on top of your already awesome motion graphics work today. We're going to learn how to do some things in Adobe animate that are really tough to do in after effects. It doesn't matter whether you're working on a commercial, a short film, or an animated infographic. You can bet you're going to want some accent animation to draw the viewer's eye. Exactly where you want it to be. This kind of animation that we'll do today will make your work stand out from the crowd. One thing we're going to do is build a library of hand, drawn animated effects. Don't worry if hand drawn animation, isn't your thing. You don't have to be an amazing 2d artist to make some amazing 2d hand-drawn animation. We'll learn techniques that can be done with or without awesome drawing skills.

Sara Wade (00:01:03):

The drawing tools and animate will allow you to adapt different workflows depending on your own level of skill. And as your skills improve, you can change your workflows accordingly. So let's get started. Okay. Let's check out what our starting point is. I've just opened up Adobe after effects and in here, you'll see that we've got our timeline. We've got all of this basic animation in here. It's pretty cool. Uh, it's not quite where it needs to be. However, so we've got these planets kind of scaling on in, in a neat bouncy sort of way, but set quite enough. I'd like some sort of effect when they come on stage and then we've got the ship flying through, but the ship looks like it needs something to me. It needs some propulsion. It's it's obviously got jet fuel. It's gonna need some flames back there to really make it feel like, you know, it's burning through space.

Sara Wade (00:01:52):

And then finally, when these planets are shot with this little laser that the ship shoots out, uh, they explode, but nothing really happens. They just disappear. So we want to add an explosion effect to those planets. So the first thing we're going to do is pop over to Adobe anime here. I've got just a new untitled file. Um, the first thing I want to do is I want to set this file up to match my after effects composition. So I'm going to go to the modify menu and choose document. And then I'm going to set my resolution to 1920 by 10 80, because that is what my after effects file is set to.

Sara Wade (00:02:32):

Let's give them one more thing. We want to make sure that we are using the same framework, which we are. We've got 24 frames per second. After effects is 24 frames per second. That's super important because we want our animation to be obviously at the right speed. First steps done, our documents set up. It matches. The next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to import to stage the render I've got of this before the effects. So this is just a render of what we just looked at after effects. I'm going to go ahead and hit that import button. And what I want to do is embed H 2 6 4. So when you're taking renders from after effects to Adobe animate, they've got to be, um, these are basically, there are only a couple of formats that you can show see on the timeline. One of those is FLV, we're not going to worry about that.

Sara Wade (00:03:17):

We can't output that directly from after effects. It's an extra step we just don't want to add, but the other one is an HT six for quick time. So I've rendered this out without the effects as an HTA two, six for quick time, and now I'm going to embed it in the timeline hit next, just leave all that at the default and hit finished. Wait a minute. And there it is. So now I can scrub through the timeline to visually preview what I've got. I can also hit enter to which will kind of do the equivalent of a Ram preview. It'll just play what's in the timeline. The same way that after effects would play it. If you were to hit the space bar and then I can just click anywhere on the timeline to stop it. So you see, we've got our animation in here into Adobe animate and that's going to help us get the rest of our animation set up.

Sara Wade (00:04:04):

Okay. So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm going to go ahead and save this file. Uh, let's see what this is going to be our VIP content. So we've got start a new folder in here and we will call this animation source, um, because we're not going to, we're going to save this in a different place than our footage, just so that we have the source files for animate, separate than where we're going to output this for, uh, taking it back into after effects. So animate document is totally fine and we'll just call this our base animation. Uh, the reason for that will become clear a little bit later, but this is going to be my basic file. And then later on, we're going to take each animation that we create and we're going to put them into their own files so that they can become the start of our own effects library.

Sara Wade (00:04:52):

So let's hit save for that. Okay. So we've got our file. We've got our video. We're definitely on our way to being able to create something super cool. The next thing we want to do is just set up a few more things. So let's go back to that modified document. I'm just going to set that background color so that it matches, uh, just for consistency sake. And then the next thing I want to do is I want to sort of set up my color palette. So this frame, I stopped on this frame because it's got most of the colors that we're going to want to set up swatches for. So the first thing I'm going to do is I'm just going to grab that orange and I'm going to go add swatch, let's move this to the side so you can see that. So I want up here and then that first link is add swatch, and I'm going to do that for each of the major colors.

Sara Wade (00:05:42):

So let's zoom in, I'm using control plus to zoom in same key code as you're probably used to with after effects. And that's just because I want to make sure I get the exact color I'm going to a swatch for that looks like we've got both of the orange colors and it looks like we've got a yellow there. So we want to make sure we get that, that looks a little bit grayed out. We might brighten that up a bit and I can do that by just clicking this and then going to this guy, let's just grab the brighter version of that. And again, I'm going to add swatch and then just so that we get all the colors, we've got a basic setup with everything that we need. So let's get into the blues. Now we've got this darker one that we set as the background add swatch for that. I've got kind of a nice middle blue here, and then we've got this light blue, but it looks like there's a gradient over this earth. So we want to get sort of the middle value.

Sara Wade (00:06:53):

And then just so that we've got enough for variety, we're going to grab sort of one of the lighter values from the ship. And so now when I dragged down here, I've got this whole palette already set up. And then of course white is, it looks like white is part of this palette too. We don't need to add a swatch for white. Um, I feel pretty confident that the straight up white is going to work for us. So that is going to make it easier when we start to create our animations. Okay. So one final thing I'm going to do before I get into animating is I'm going to select this layer here. Actually let's move animate back over so that we can see the left edge. Uh, so I've got this as called layer one. I'm just going to double click on that to rename it.

Sara Wade (00:07:37):

And I'm going to call this, uh, just I'll call it before video because that's sort of our guide, uh, and to make sure that it doesn't render out when we start rendering out these effects, I am just going to make this layer right, click and make it a guide. And so guide layers and animate, they don't render, they don't export similar to, you know, a guide layer and after effects. So the next thing I'm going to do is set up layers for each of our different effects. The first effect I want to do is I'm going to do sort of a plasma ball to bring these planets onto the stage. I'm going to call this layer, plasma ball animation.

Sara Wade (00:08:24):

And the next thing I'm going to want is I'm going to want some ship flames and finally, uh, an explosion animation. And this is just going to help us stay really organized. And the next thing I'm going to do is I'm going to lock all these layers. That's going to ensure that when I'm working on a particular animation, I'm not going to animate anything else accidentally. So let's start first with our plasma ball animation. We're going to create that plasma ball for this earth planet, because it doesn't have rings. It's just going to be the easiest one to sort of cue that off of. So I'm going to go down here and let's just go, the earth is fully on screen here. And again, I'm just using this video is referenced this isn't my final clip. So it's okay that it's not on frame one and it's okay that it's not going to be centered.

Sara Wade (00:09:27):

So I'm just hit F six key. That's an add key frame. And just to put a key right there, this is where we're going to start our in animation. Uh, what I'm going to do is I'm going to animate a plasma ball. I'm going to say about six frames of animation. This is going to be something that we can hand draw really quickly and animate, and then loop and export it as looping footage or export it as footage, and then loop it in after effects. This kind of thing is really tricky to do with the shape layers and after effects. You can't typically just draw frame by frame in that software. And so that's why we're using animate for this task. You can see over here on the right, I've got all these different drawing tools. Um, the main ones that we're going to be concerned with today are the pencil tool, which works like you might expect similar to the pencil tool and a lot of other software programs.

Sara Wade (00:10:20):

So down here, you'll see the pencil draw tool. It basically draws lines. Um, you can choose the style of the line. We're going to stick with solid. You can choose the width of the line, and this is where it gets pretty exciting and animates. So let's just draw a practice line here, just a squiggle. Uh, so you'll notice that it's exactly as I drew it, but what I can do with this pencil line is select it and then I can smooth it, or I can hit this straight in here. And if I want it to be more of a straight line, I can do that. Let's undo that we want a smooth line in fact, or I can leave it just as it is. So go back to the pencil tool and you see this drop down here. Let me excellent. Move this over bit.

Sara Wade (00:11:02):

So you can see these, these little pop-ups. So again, if I'm got the pencil selected, I can grab this little dropdown and I can draw in smooth mode and that's going to automatically smooth anything I draw, or I can draw in straightened mode, which is going to straighten those lines out. I didn't draw those perfectly straight. Like again, this one I curved, but see it does its best interpolation of that. Or I can draw an ink mode, which is going to be sort of as close to how I moved the pen. So let's delete all of these because we don't. Well, actually, before we delete them, let's talk about one more thing. So now that I've got these different lines, one of the really cool things about the pencil tool in anime is this width selector. So I've got just a straight with, but then I can do this.

Sara Wade (00:11:51):

And that gives me more a cartoon line variation. Again, I can make that bigger and that's going to let you see a little bit more, how that works. Now, if I select each segment, you can see the different way that width is applied, but if I select the whole thing and apply it, it's going to apply it to the whole, the whole distance. And again, something like this, we get even more line variation. There are a bunch of different ones to choose from. I think for this explosion, I'm going to stick with this one. Uh, so let's just keep that set up in our settings. Uh, I don't think I want quite that much width. Let's take that down to align with a five and let's just delete all these.

Sara Wade (00:12:38):

So now I'm going to go back over here. I'm going to grab my drawing tablet. You can use, um, you know, a Syntech, if you want, I'm just using a tablet for this one. Either we'll work. Honestly, a drawing tablet has really changed, changed everything if you're not using one, definitely consider it. So the first thing I want to do is I'm going to zoom in a little bit, just so I can focus on this part of what I'm working on. And then I'm going to go down here again, that pencil tool is grabbed, and I'm just gonna sort of draw this blobby little line around here, maybe like that. And those aren't quite connected, connect them like that. And then you see, you got that funky little lump there. I'm just going to go ahead and grab that and delete it. And that should look just fine.

Sara Wade (00:13:33):

Um, this isn't the color I want. I think I want my plasma ball to be one of the blues again, because I've got those swatches saved in there. That's going to be pretty easy to do. Oops. And I didn't even select the swatch. There we go. So we've got that swash. That's looking pretty plasma ball, like, um, let's just get the, we'll get the outline of the ball set first. And then we'll go from there with filling it in with kind of a plasma texture. So I'm going to go two frames ahead. I'm going to animate this on twos. It's not going to be a super fast animation or anything. Super detailed. So two should be sufficient. I'm going to hit the F six key to add a key frame and then the backspace to delete the contents of that key frame. So I've got one plasma frame and actually before we do the next one, oops, let's just grab this and adjust it a little bit.

Sara Wade (00:14:28):

And so that's one of the things I just love about working in anime is the ability to just sort of drag these lines around and edit them in a really just intuitive and friendly way. Again, these are all vector lines so we can drag them around, like you would expect to be able to drive drag a curve line and illustrator. And then again, be able to scale them to any resolution that we want. That's going to make this an invaluable part of our effects library that we're building here is we can, you know, we can export this at 1920, by 10 80. We can export it at, at 4k. If we need to, it doesn't matter. It's factor. It's not going to lose any resolutions. So that's another real benefit to working this way. So we want to go back to this frame. We want to draw a new frame, but we want to see the other frames.

Sara Wade (00:15:18):

So onion skinning, you can see down here, I've got two different buttons. This is the regular onion skin button, which is showing me the whole line. And then I've got onion, skin outlines, which, um, I think we're going to use this one in our case because it's just going to make it a little easier to see what's going on. And for that matter, let's just grab this line. And for now, what I did is set that back to a straight line. Let's just close this group. That's going to give us a little more room to see down here. So I set that back to a regular straight with just cause it's going to make it easier for us to see what's going on as we work. And then that's a five let's go ahead and set that back to three. It feels a little bit thick. Okay. So back to our second frame. So now we can see our first frame and what I want is just a few different places. I want the plasma to bubble out a bit. So the onion skin is on. I can see my last frame. I'm just going to really quickly go through and draw some places where it's bubbling out. I'm just going to pick about three spots to have that plasma really bubble up.

Sara Wade (00:16:35):

Looks like down there. It looks like a good spot to do it. So now you see we've got some bubbling spots, again, F six backspace. And on this one, I'm going to have this cause some of them bubble up and some of them bubble back down. So this one's going to stay at the same level, but move a bit, actually, let's go back and start that over. Some of these are bubbling up. Some of these are bubbling down and I've got that nice guideline to show me what happened just before this frame. And what did we say? I think we said we were going to do about six frames. This'll be our fourth bubble, the sky back down. And maybe this guy comes up a little bit and this is coming back down. This guy comes up a little bit. This comes down and this doesn't have to be really super crazy detailed.

Sara Wade (00:17:47):

What I want to see. I want to see what my first friend, because this is going to loop. I want to be able to see the first frame when I draw the six frames. So, and the fifth frame. So I'm just gonna, I'm gonna do here is right click on this guy, copy frames. And then, so that's going to be my fifth frame. That's gonna be my sixth frame. And then right here, I'm going to paste frames. And that's just going to, all that's going to do is allow me to see that result, that goal with the onion skin tool, just kind of even some of that out.

Sara Wade (00:18:29):

And then the sixth frames. So now is where having that goal in the green is going to really come in handy because we're effectively, at this point, you just drawing an in-between to get us back to the beginning of that loop. And so this one is going to go right along in between what that's got going on. All right. So that's looking pretty close and now we don't need this guide anymore. I'm going to turn off onion skinny. I'm going to delete this and let's just see what that looks like. Actually, one thing I want to do is I want to turn on this button, which is actually not that button that says, edit multiple frames. We're going to turn on this button, which is going to allow me to loop the playbacks. So I've turned on that loop button. And then I just drag that little looping indicator to either end of what we just worked on. And then I'm going to stop at the beginning and just hit the enter button.

Sara Wade (00:19:26):

Okay. So that lets me see basically what that looping animation is going to look like. It's just an outline right now, but I think it's going to do, I think it's going to do okay for us. It's it's sort of bubbling around. That's just great. So let's turn off that loop button. The next thing I want to do is I want to give this a little more of a cartoony look. So I'm going to, the first thing I want is it to have a fill. So let's go to the fill here and let's create a new gradient fill again. We're using our swatches that we created earlier and let's go from actually, let's go from this very dark blue, uh, to this light blue. Maybe not quite that dark about let's go from this blue to that blue. And then we're going to drag this guy over to the middle because we really want, actually I want to add the opposite of that. I want the middle to be blue. And what I'm doing here is I'm just, I'm double clicking on these two, set the color.

Sara Wade (00:20:27):

And then if I want another, I can click here. I don't want another. So to get rid of this, I'm just going to drag it off and then it's gone. So this is a nice kind of gradient fill. Let's just drop it in there and see how it looks. It's not quite in the middle. Keep in mind. Your gradient center will be where you click that fill tool. So I think I do want another here. Let's go. I don't want to quite that dark, but I want something in between those two. So the easiest way to do that is just to click right here. That's going to create a new one and then we'll delete this guy and we'll have that guy there. So, but we created this swatch, but we didn't have that selected. So it's not editing that how we expected. So what I'm going to do here is add swatch.

Sara Wade (00:21:19):

Now I've got, as you can see down here, I've got that gradient saved, which is exactly what I wanted to know. I can click, oh, well that filled it. Um, I was going to say, I can also just click this, select it and drop it down and set it to anything. And then when I set it back to that, it comes back and it's exactly that gradient, this isn't again, it's still not quite how I want it. It's not quite plasma Bali enough. Let's just play with that a little. What I want is those edges to feel like they're glowing a little bit in the center to feel like it's kind of about the size and shape of the planet and not that's looking about right to me. So again, let's, um, and that swatch, so we get that exact gradient and then this outline, I want it to be a little bit of a contrast.

Sara Wade (00:22:11):

So I'm going to go back and let's make the outline, just going to play around here and see which of these looks the best. Let's go back here and select this one. And then down here, I'm going to again, grab that Tuni outline. So now you see you've got that sort of line with looks a little more hand, drawn, a little more cartoony. Um, let's dial this guy back. In fact, let's just, let's keep this, uh, just a two color gradient. That's looking almost exactly like I want it. The one thing I want is it to be centered a little bit better. In fact, what I can do here is just see the outline. I just want to get a quick guide for where that planet is. So I'm going to create a new layer, a move animate over. In fact, I'm just going to make animate a little bit less wide and you'll be able to see after effects behind there.

Sara Wade (00:23:16):

Um, but that'll let us just see, you know, these menus and things without having to constantly move animate back and forth. So I'm going to create a new letter layer and this is just going to be our planet guide layer. I'm just going to do a quick circle. Oops. In fact, let's make sure that we are drawing no fill and a plane. Let's go with a red line just so it stands out. Um, again, this is just going to be a guide. That's all I want it for. That looks about right. I'm just going to match that up and all really all I want out of the Slayer is it for it to be there and be an outline. So I just hit that outline, uh, which basically has it showing up only as an outline. Okay. So that's gonna, that's gonna work perfectly for us. So back to our actual frames, we don't want those an outline. We want to actually see that just to get an idea, actually, let's pop this guy in front of here. That's going to help us even more. So now we can see that green outline and that's going to help us to center those gradients. So let's get this guy back to again, let's grab this, make sure we have a swatch for the latest and set this guy to that latest swatch. And we want to just click right in the middle.

Sara Wade (00:24:43):

All right. So that's looking pretty centered with that. You can see that faint green outline of this guide layer here. I turn it off and back on again. It makes it a little easier to see. So what we want to do is we want that in every single frame. So let's just go ahead and click through this guy is not filling. Let's find out why it might be easier to see if I turn off the outline. So somewhere the reason this isn't filling and what that's telling me is that somewhere it's not connected and it looks like here might be the culprit. And so what I did is I just dragged what looked like a jagged outline until it had that little dot, which meant that it was connecting. And now let's see if it worked. This is, I have this problem pretty frequently said, don't be surprised if you think something's connected. And it is in fact not. So now that film looks like we fixed the problem again, we've got something here, not connecting. Let's see if we can find out, I suspect it's over there.

Sara Wade (00:25:52):

And it's not unusual to find if you pick up your pencil a lot or your, your pen on your tablet a lot, when you draw it, it's not unusual that you'll find in several areas where you don't have the lines connected as you thought. And so then the last thing we're going to do is we're going to make sure that we have the same outline on each of these. So just going to select that outline, grabbed that color, grabbed this, um, an easier way than doing this for each and every one of these. And in fact, I think I'm going to change that color yet again, back to that lighter one. But so instead of grabbing each and every one of these, we've got this set up how we want it, we've got the line with set and all of that stuff. So what we can do is we can grab this ink bottle tool. What the ink bottle tool does is it adds an outline to something that doesn't have an outline. So if I dropped the ink bottle tool over top of the outline, that's there, it replaces it with the settings that we currently have.

Sara Wade (00:27:01):

So now I've got some funky fun line weight. This one is not looking exactly how I thought it would. So let's figure out why it looks like we lost some of our line there. So let's go delete what we've got there and just go back with that ink bottle tool and see if we can figure out what's happening. And sometimes you get some wonkiness here. There we go. So that gives us the full outline just now and again, especially with these very line widths, you'll get an unexpected result. Okay. So what we had to do there just to stop that weirdness is just select a slightly different one. I think it's still going to match up fine with everything. It actually matches up a little better. Okay. So we've got our plasma ball, uh, that is looking pretty good. I'm going to keep my planet guide because I'm gonna use that for the explosion that I create as well.

Sara Wade (00:28:02):

Um, but our plasma ball is looking pretty good for now. So let's just lock off that layer and move on to the next one. Okay. So to get started with that ship animation, I want to find a frame where the ship is about horizontal. Okay. So this looks like it's going to be the one. Uh, I've got a key frame right here. Uh, I added that with shift F six. So what I want to do is be able to draw all of the flames coming out of the ship with the ship in this position. Uh, but that's not going to work because if I draw a frame and then scroll the timeline, the ship moves. So what I'm going to do is draw the first frame here, and then I'm going to create a movie clip. And in that movie clip is where I'm going to do the animation.

Sara Wade (00:28:41):

So instead of using the pencil tool, like we use last time, I'm going to use the paintbrush tool for this one. It's similar to the pencil, but it works just a little bit different. We can draw as a fill or we can draw as a stroke. We're going to stick with the stroke. And we've got some different options over here, as far as object drawing, similar options that we had, uh, to the, the pencil tool. But I'm going to go with, actually, I am going to go with smooth. I was going to go with ink, but, uh, we're just going to grab that. I've set it to orange. I'm going to keep the same funky line width. Uh, and then I'm just going to go ahead and draw some flames coming out of that ship back to let's zoom in a little bit so that we can just be a little bit more accurate here.

Sara Wade (00:29:26):

Let's just start with a straight up line weight. I think that's going to give us a little more accuracy when we're just getting this laid out. And again, I've got the advantage of just sort of grabbing and moving those curves around with these vector tools, which is just a really nice, precise way to edit. I think I'm going to do these flames about 15 frames or so. Okay. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to take all of this guy. Um, let me just put a fill in that really quick. So it doesn't look quite so empty and the same way we filled that other guy, but we're going to use a solid fill on this one. And then I'm just going to select this whole thing and I'm going to hit the F eight key. So what that's done is that's creating a symbol, uh, in animate.

Sara Wade (00:30:21):

There are different types of symbols. We are going to use this as a graphic symbol. Basically the ones we're going to talk about really quickly are movie clip and graphic. Um, they're both pretty relevant to this. So a movie clip is something that is going to loop continuously. Uh, the important thing to note though, is if I were to make this a movie clip, and actually I can show you the difference once we get this animated. But if I were to make this a movie clip, uh, it's going to show up in its first frame on the timeline, but when I export it, it's going to be looped. Um, however, if I export as an image sequence, it's, we're not going to see the exact effects we want. So I'm going to stick with graphic and I'm going to call this and see just for moving clip or motion clip and we'll call it MC flames.

Sara Wade (00:31:07):

So what that did now is this is now a clip, uh, to just really quickly explain the difference between a graphic clip and a regular movie clip. I'm going to double click in here and I'm just going to create a second frame actually, before we create that second frame, let's go back to this paintbrush tool. And I just want to really quickly kind of give this just a little bit more. Okay. So that's just a little bit of extra, you know, dimension to our flames. Okay. So that's my first frame. I'm going to go two frames ahead again. I'm animating on twos and delete that I'm going to turn on those onion skin. Ah, I can't really see. So I'm going to go with regular onion skin, those outlines. Weren't very visible. I want to see the full deal. Uh, so I'm going to draw a second frame here and then we'll go back to talking about those different types of movie clips. So I can see my onion skin, and what I want to do is have different parts of this expand and contract. So I'm going to have, I'm going to have this edge here, sort of grow.

Sara Wade (00:32:21):

This one is going to sort of wiggle up a little bit more. This one's going to grow or this one's going to shrink, and this is just if you study flames and the way they move, it's pretty typical for one portion of the flame to expand while another contracts. And then we're going to go ahead and add that little bit of detail in there. And this is just, this just gives it a little bit more of a cartoony look, it's a little bit more fun. Let's go in and delete those little extra mess up lines we did. And again, we're going to grab that, fill back to that lighter swatch fill there. So now I've got two frames of flame and we can go back out to scene one. You'll see at the top there, like if I double-click to go back into the movie clip, you can see that you're seeing one MC flames.

Sara Wade (00:33:29):

If I click scene one, I'm back out of it. And so this is how, where we can really see the difference. So this is on the stage as a graphic clip. So if I go two frames forward, I can see the next frame of it. I can see how that flame is changing. Whereas if I were to grab this and I were to, um, oops, not there. And when I were to make it a movie clip, then all I'm going to see is the first frame. I'm not going to be able to scrub through it on the main timeline. That's not what I want. I want to see my animation. I want my animation to, um, export exactly like I'm expecting it. So I want to be able to see everything. So we're going to keep that as a graphic clip and then with graphic clips, I can, I can do different things with them if I want this to play over and over and over, I just set it to loop, which is what it is now. I can also set it to play once. Um, I can set it to play once and start on frame too.

Sara Wade (00:34:27):

So I guess the difference isn't so evident there. So if I go back to starting on frame one here, or if I set it to start on frame three, which is our second frame, you'll see it. It's changing where it starts. I want it to play once I wanted to play on frame one. Uh, I can also do a single frame if I just want to hold it for a while. So I can do all of this with the same clip, just in how I set it to show up. So graphic clips, super flexible. So we're going to stick with graphic clip. We're going to go with play once first frame one, and then we're going to go back in here and double-click inside of it and just keep on animating. So I've spent this up a little bit, but don't be afraid to just play with those flames.

Sara Wade (00:35:07):

Think of them as little wiggly snakes and just have fun while you're drawing. So now we want to get back out to what we had as our starting frame, and that's going to help me create my in-between. And in-between, it's exactly that it's a shape in between two other shapes. So we want something in between our current last frame and that beginning frame that will bridge the gaps. So to speak, we're going to copy frame. I'm going to put this here. That's going to give us somewhat of a straight in between to draw here. We might actually need to. That's a pretty, pretty drastic difference in the way those flames are looking.

Sara Wade (00:35:54):

And I'm just going to draw the first one closer to the previous frame. And the second one closer to that beginning frame that we copied to the end. All right. So now we've got, let's see, we're going to delete this guy because he was just there to give us a reference, right? So we've got a few frames of animation here. Um, one thing we're going to do before we double this is we're going to go back and add a little bit of, you know, some little just sort of things coming off of those flames. So let's just grab our brush tool really quickly and speed through some of this addition of a little flame bits flying off the end. We're going to go back out here. And what I'm going to do is make this a nested, uh, movie clips. So actually just to see what we've got here, I'm going to go to loop and I'm just going to play this and it's looking pretty good, but we want it to be a little bit longer.

Sara Wade (00:37:02):

We want it to be longer without having to draw any more frames because we've got some good variation in our frames already. So I'm going to make a nested movie clip. I'm going to select this. I'm going to hit F eight. And again, this is going to be MC flames. Let's just call it flames multi, because it's going to be multiple flames. And then we're going to go in here. And so now what we've got is this it's only by default when we create any movie clip, it creates it with one frame. So we're going to have to add frames to see all of our animation. I think we had, I just double-click to get in there. It looks like the last frame of that was 14. So let's go back out to flames, multi we'll, just go to 14 and hit F five. That's going to give us all of our frames.

Sara Wade (00:37:49):

So now what we want to do to double the length of this is I'm just going to go ahead and duplicate this layer. I'm going to drag it out here. And this may rain. This doesn't always work. It depends on how well our animation matches up, but I'm going to wit this selected. I'm going to go to modify, oh, sorry. Modify transform. And I'm just going to flip vertical and let's just see if this works. We may have to draw another couple of frames to make this work, but let's. Yeah. Okay. So I've got this vertical flip here and it doesn't match up quite as nicely as I'd hoped, but if I go up here and then I just, uh, do a quick rotate, that's going to be a little bit better. So I think what I can do here, what I can basically do is get away with doing half the animation for twice the time.

Sara Wade (00:38:55):

And it's still, I think it's going to still look. All right. So let's give this a try. Um, the next thing we're going to do is go back into that clip and we want to fix our line weight. So we went back to that straight up line weight just for the purpose of getting everything drawn out so that it wasn't, you know, affecting our perception of the drawing. Um, but now we want to go back and we want to make it a weight of three, and we want to give it some more variation. This is also going to help us to see all the places where we have little extra segments that need to be cleaned up. Sometimes these will be happy accidents like right here. I think that's going to look pretty cool. Uh, and then in here we can select this line. Uh, we just want that to be a fill actually, maybe not.

Sara Wade (00:39:49):

It does look a little better with the line, so we'll just leave it. Um, but yeah, so this is a happy accident. We're going to leave that guy, but a lot of these segments you'll find that they need to be deleted. And actually what I'm going to do is select the whole frame and then just de-select the fills. Cause that's going to be a little quicker in this case. And as I go through, I'm just going to delete any of those funky little edges that appear once I changed to that different line width that said just takes a few minutes to go through and make sure that all looks super tight, just like you want it. Okay. So back out to flame multi let's just play this and see how it looks. In fact, let's try that. Whoop.

Sara Wade (00:40:42):

That's looking pretty good. You know, I'm pretty happy with it for now. So let's just stop that. Stop the loop. We're going to go back out here. It's not following our ship because, um, we're gonna, we're going to take care of that part in after effects, but for now I think it's, it's looking pretty. Okay. We've got a nice flame. So ship flames, we can chalk those up to being done and move on to our explosion. Okay. So we are going to do our explosion. Oh, a little bit differently. Um, we're going to go back to where we've got that plasma ball ending over the earth. I'm going to set a key frame there. Um, remember we created that green layer, um, that light outline that we can see, we're just going to use that as a guide for our explosion. So, but what I'm going to do is I'm going to, instead of drawing outlines, like we did for the flames and like we did for the plasma ball, which actually we're going to make, we're going to make disappear just so that we're not distracted by them.

Sara Wade (00:41:45):

We're going to animate this one using fills and we're going to use fills and gradients at the same time. And in a minute, you'll see why this is going to make this process just really nice and fast for us. So smoke is a lot different than flames. It's lighter, it's wispy, or it tends to float instead of sort of lick the air the way the flames do. So the way the smoke is going to work is it's going to explode out really fast. And then it's going to take its time dissipating in a wispy kind of floaty sort of way. We're going to use gradients to show that sluttiness with this one, we're going to do a gradient, but we're going to have it be more of a puffy smoke type gradient. So what I'm going to do is the very outer edge of it.

Sara Wade (00:42:34):

I'm going to go with white and then the inner most part is going to be that dark orange because it is, it is smoke. You know, it is, um, it's smoke coming from our exploding stuff. So let's see this gradient looks pretty good. Might get us close. We'll have to experiment a little and see, um, we may change this, but let's go ahead and add a swatch, just so we have a save of this and then I'm gonna use this paint brush tool. And so you see the paintbrush tool, unlike the paint brush tool we used here, sorry, this is just the brush tool, not the paint brush tool, but the brush tool. It's got a little bit different set of options down here. So with this one, we were drawing outlines with this one, we're drawing straight up, fills with no outlines. So you can see, you can do object drawing.

Sara Wade (00:43:25):

Um, we're not gonna do that. Um, we are gonna do the brush mode is just to paint normal. Um, later on we'll use paint spills to paint over something we we've selected and then the brush size we're going to go with, um, big, and then here you can use pressure and use tilt. Um, we'll give it a try using pressure, but usually, um, I don't actually press that hard on my tablet. So I usually get a better result if I don't, but let's just see how that looks. So that's looking pretty cool. I mean, for just a little ball of smoke, we got all that just by doing that teeny tiny bit of effort. Um, and actually, you know, what that worked out pretty well with using pressure. So I'm going to stick with it. Um, again, I'm going to go out here. I'm going to have six delete and I'm going to turn on onion skinning, go back. So I can see that. So that, that was our first frame of smoke or second frame of smoke. We want it to be about half way and what I'm doing is filling this in as, because you'll see if I start again, same frame, it draws a new gradient inside and that's actually a really powerful little trick that we want to use to keep making the smoke. So that's frame two smokes going to explode out pretty fast, just zoom out a bit.

Sara Wade (00:45:01):

I want this explosion way out here and I don't want to take the time to fill everything in, but if I use the fill tool, I get two different gradients. I get the one I drew and the one inside, but what I can do is select them both. I can go to any old color and then back to that swatch and while a one single gradient, which looks just lovely. Um, so this guy, not the best in-between, it's not quite as you know, I've got little and then I've got big. So biggie smalls and mediums, not quite so medium. So I'm just going to go ahead and quickly instead of drawing it over, I'm just going to transform it let's even go 300, well, maybe two 50.

Sara Wade (00:45:50):

All right. So we've got a pretty good explosion coming out. Let's just turn on the turn off onion skin. So we can, I comes out pretty quick. That's exactly what we want. Let's go back to a biggie here and go ahead and add another center in, and again, grabbing that brush tool and do this one a little bit different. So actually, you know what I want this, whoops, careful. If you're not, uh, if you slide your pen, you'll probably have that problem too. So we want actually let's undo that. Go back to how that was. I was going to say, we want this inside to be part of the outside, but we're going to take this whole section and make it that color. And then we're going to go back to this gradient, but we're going to change this gradient a little bit. Um, I'm going to get rid of that and I want this to be this integrating here to be a little bit different. I want it to go from super dark to slightly less dark. In fact, I may even let me just reverse that. See how that looks.

Sara Wade (00:47:13):

We can grab this. And what I want to illustrate here is that this inner smoke ball is sort of, it's kind of imploding on itself. It's starting to make a ring smoke. In fact, we want this to be a gradient, but not a super strong one. So now we can see almost like that smoke is kind of starting to form a ring. And so then when we go to this next frame, let's turn our onion skin back on. We can just barely see that outline. Let's go ahead and make this there. Now we can see that a little bit better. Um, we can see where the smoke is starting to become like a ring of smoke instead of a straight up puff. And then, yeah, we're going to go ahead and go back to that first smoke gradient and draw it just a little bigger than this one fact, you know what?

Sara Wade (00:48:23):

I'm not totally happy with this frame. And the reason is, um, I think I want that ring to be a little bit of a contraction of the, so actually I'm going to copy this with control C. I'm going to go here, delete that control shift V which is going to paste it in place, and then I'm just going to make it, oh, let's just say one 20 and rotate it a little bit. In fact, let's even dial that back to one 10. I just want it to be a little bit different and what's basically happened. Is that inner parts going gone away? Let's rotate this a little more.

Sara Wade (00:49:06):

Yeah. Okay. That's gonna look just perfect. And so from here, the explosion is not necessarily going to get much bigger, but what we're going to start to see is that smoke dissipating. And so this is another, just, this is just another part where you're going to be so happy to use this gradient fill painting because it makes it so much easier. Okay. So wait. So we had that, oh, we accidentally did too many frames. Let's shift up six, which removes a key frame and that is the same frame. So we're going to go here and we're going to delete, and here is where we're going to adjust gradient paint, dissipating smoke. It's going to be super fast and it's going to take about twice as many frames to dissipate as it did to get here. All right. So let's take this onion skin off and let's just see what that looks like.

Sara Wade (00:50:03):

You know, it almost looks like it's shrinking back on itself a little bit and I don't want that effect. So what I'm going to do, actually, let's just, let's give this a quick loop play to make sure that we are, and we'll just stretch that out so we can, it's pretty close, but what I'm not liking is because of the way I ahead animated instead of working posts to posts is that these smoke puffs are kind of almost contracting back in a little bit and that's okay. A little bit, but I don't want it to do that too much. So I'm going to go in, and I'm just going to grab these and just kinda just smush them out a little bit using that onion skin tool so that I can see posts to pose. So now you see how these are just sort of they're dissipating, but they're dissipating outward just a little bit. And that is the behavior I want. So that's what I'm doing here. I'm just moving that in between frame in line with that, that idea. And then I'll redraw that last frame, but that, that won't take long at all.

Sara Wade (00:51:25):

All right. So now things are dissipating in the way I want. And then I'm just going to again, grab that, that brush tool. All right. So onion, skin off back to that loop tool. Yeah. That's looking, that's looking about how I want it. So finishing touches on this now, like everything else, we want to add some cartoon outlines. So I'm going to go back to this first one. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to use that ink bottle tool that we talked about briefly, a couple animations back. Let's see, let's make sure I'm just going to use this guy to make sure to get my settings set up. That is one of the limitations as you can't really set up the pen tool before the ink bottle tool before you use it. So I like three, I like this width. We'll see how that works. So let's delete this guy. Let's grab that ink bottle and just go frame by frame, adding the outlines we want.

Sara Wade (00:52:44):

And you do have to click kind of near the edge. If you click in the middle, nothing happens because when you're using that ink bottle tool, basically it's looking for an edge to outline. So as long as you click near the edge or relatively close to the edge, you should be okay. It doesn't have to be exactly on. You can see I'm just clicking kind of close. Sometimes it'll be a miss, but yeah, just as long as there's an edge that the software can find nearby, you should be good to go. And I think these little tiny ones actually start to look, you know, you just make a dot with a brush tool, but then you add this funky outline and it starts to take on a really neat character that you just kind of get for free by combining these two tools almost there.

Sara Wade (00:53:41):

And then we may play around, you know, an app. Once, once we go back to after effects, we can play around with the opacity of the, so I've got the smoke, but what I need now is the fire. Um, every explosion starts with kind of a fireball in it. So let's grab all of these. And what I'm going to do is I'm going to cut the frames. I know that seems risky. We're going to insert a new symbol. We're going to call it MC explosion paste frames. And so why I did this is because I basically want to take that loop tool away. I want this to have two different layers. And I was, it was getting a little bit sloppy here having, you know, already having this guy. So to bring this guy back now that I made, made the explosion into its own little clip.

Sara Wade (00:54:35):

I can bring it back just by grabbing it from over there. Again, we want to make it a graphic clip and it should be by default because that's what we've been using. Yeah. And so that's going to work pretty well. And so now we can go back inside it by double clicking. And so that's the smoke I'm going to call this layer smoke, and I'm going to make a layer above it and I'm going to call it fire and that's gonna be our exploding layer. So let's F five to add a frame. And then we'll drag that there. What we want to do is basically add some blank frames before we get to that smoke. Because before the, you know, before the smoke happens, we need the explosion to happen and the explosion is going to be quick. Um, actually it might even be quicker than this.

Sara Wade (00:55:31):

I think we just need about two frames before to add that explosion. And so for the explosion, um, it depends on what style you're going for. I'm going to go for just kind of an old, old school comic book style, you know, a kablam type of thing. Um, you can use the pencil tool, you can use the line tool. I'm going to use the pencil tool and the straighten. And that's going to give me a shortcut to a bunch of connected lines. So, you know, the, viewer's not really even going to notice this frame, but what that's going to do is give us a reference point when we are dragging this around in, after effects that street and tool I'm going to go back to ink. Let's straighten tool is just a straightening, a little too much. It's taking out all of our angles. So that's what we're going to start with there. We're going to just make that plain fill.

Sara Wade (00:56:34):

That's going to be our first frame. And again, it's more just for reference so that we don't have a blank first frame or something that's so big or so or so small that we can't see. Our next frame is going to be the real deal. And again, this is our planet for reference that we were using. We can still see it because we double click to get inside of this. If we had just gone through the library and double clicked, um, to get inside this explosion, we would not see now we don't have that reference anymore. So if we go back out to scene one and then go into our explosion, that's how we get to still have that reference of the size of the planet. So let's go ahead and go back to, let's see we were doing the pencil tool and I just want to make something really big and JAG it, you know, like a comic book explosion, at least that's what I'm hoping. Oops. We do not want that to be a curve. So let's see if we can straighten this out a little bit.

Sara Wade (00:57:48):

There we go. That's where that straightened tool works. Just how we want get the initial drawing with all your pointy goodness. And then grab that straighten tool, and it's just gonna make it all straight lines eliminates any curves that you accidentally drew. And then we're just going to go in and, and just kind of funk it up a little bit by dragging some of these out. It's the, one of the really fun things about vector animation tools. So I've got that outer outline. I want one inside of that too. So we'll have to draw this one a little more carefully, but just a bit, not too much. We don't want to spend all our time being careful because we do want a little bit of spontaneity here. Okay. So again, grab the sky straighten tool. Lovely. And let's just go and clean up some of those extra lines that, and I'm going to zoom in and do one more level of this, again, back to that pencil tool, because it's so quick, even if you draw a pretty sloppy again, you know, that middle star looks terrible and all we need to do is boom.

Sara Wade (00:59:23):

Not so terrible anymore.

Sara Wade (00:59:28):

Is there some great, just little shortcuts? Okay. So now let's get some fills in there and get the, starting to look like a real fireball or a real explosion ball. And then we'll make the outermost one, the reddest one. And you know, I was going to say, we can play with that line. Wait, let's give it a try. But honestly, I don't know that we're going to, I don't know if we're going to really need to, well, first of all, let's, let's make these lines show up a little bit and make this out. Let's see if this outline white looks okay. You know what it does, let's go with it.

Sara Wade (01:00:15):

Let's take all these and let's just see what they look like with a different line weight. The great thing about this is if they don't, if they look terrible, we can just change it right back. Not super pleased with that one, but this one's looking pretty decent. Just clean up these little slops. I saw one down there too. That's kind of fun. I'm going to make that line weight a little bit thicker. Three seems to be working well for us today. Odd numbers tend to do that. All right. So that's level two of the explosion or while it's framed three, but it's the second drawn frame. And then for this one, we're just going to do the same exact thing and shrink it back a little bit. Let's shrink it back to about half its size, maybe rotate it. Boom smoke. Okay. So, and you know what we want to overlap that smoke just a bit.

Sara Wade (01:01:27):

So let's, let's see how that looks. Let's just go ahead and play that. That's pretty good. Pretty good. There are a couple of ways we can do this. So the first one is that we can take all of these and we can cut the frames out. And again, we can go in and in certain new symbol and we can call it just emcee smoke. We can paste the frames. Let's go back to scene one. There's our explosion. We'll go back into that. And then we had overlapped it by two frames. So we'll put an F six there, go in that library and grab em, see smoke.

Sara Wade (01:02:09):

Whoops, didn't mean to drag that guy. Um, let's turn this off so we can see smoke. I turn it off. I guess we didn't actually turn it off. We just put it to outline mode. And so now we've got our smoke in there. Now we can take this whole movie clip graphic clip and we can adjust the alpha value of it. Um, there are a few limitations to doing it this way. We may have to zoom in to see them. Okay. And so you can see if I go up to a hundred percent, I've got a solid outline and I've got a great aunt for the inside, but if I start going down, that outline becomes a double outline and that's, that's basically the limitation. What I'm going to do is I'm going to keep this fully opaque and I'm going to export these two things separately. So I'm going to export MC smoke separately from M C explosion fire. We'll just, um, cut frames. And then we will, um, see explosion fire paste frames here.

Sara Wade (01:03:30):

Okay. Time to start our effects archive. Um, let's just save this file so we don't lose anything. I'm going to go file new. I'm going to make this one for the plasma ball. So I'm going to make it, uh, bout the same aspect ratio as a S as the circle, uh, 24 frames per second. Again, it's an action script three file. Um, that doesn't matter too much. And then what I'm going to do is I'm going to go in here and I'm going to grab, uh, let's see, that was going to be, oh, plasma ball. We didn't make that into a clip yet. So let's do that. Let's cut frames, insert new symbol and see plasma ball paste frames. Now we've got our plasma ball all on its own. Go back to scene one, just for consistency sake. Go ahead and drag that.

Sara Wade (01:04:31):

Oh, we've got that frame lock to no wonder when let us drag it. And this doesn't really, you know, we don't necessarily have to do this, but just because we want to be able to see all our effects in one place. All right. So I'm going to take plasma ball and I'm going to copy it and paste it. Control C control V. And let's see how many frames is. This looks like we go up to frame 12th. So we'll go back out and we'll add exactly 12 frames using F five. And it's still a graphic clip on the play once setting. So now we've got our plasma ball in here. What we can do. Um, we can make it a little bigger, but we don't need to, we can modify this document and actually make the documents smaller. And I'll show you why in a second.

Sara Wade (01:05:26):

Um, because we can export this at absolutely any size we want. So let's try 300 scrap this guy. We'll just center it to the stage. You know what? Let's make it even smaller. I just, and then again, center the sky to the stage. All right. So we're going to go ahead and export this first. Let's say save, all right, we've got our animation source and we've got our base animation. We're going to call this one plasma ball. And this is the beginning of your animation effects archives. So I can use this plasma ball. You can use this plasma ball in any project you want. And in a second, we'll see that you can use it at any resolution you want. So I'm going to go export movie and let's see, this is not where I want to put it. Um, we'll go back to this or where we at VIP content, we're going to go into the footage, assets animation and okay.

Sara Wade (01:06:39):

This is where I want to put it. So I'm going to call this plasma ball, underscore aim and export, and I'm going to export it as a PNG sequence and the underscores. It's just going to give you a little separation between the frame number and the name. Um, we're going to go ahead and just put it out here just to stay organized to plasma ball, underscore PNG export as a PNG sequence, and I'm going to hit save. And it's going to ask me, uh, do you want to do the minimum image area or the full document size, but documents 200 by 200? Uh, the minimum image area is 1 61 by 1 67. But what you can do is you can easily, you know, double this. So let's say we do the full document size and we want it twice the size. Let's do it at 400.

Sara Wade (01:07:24):

Um, and then go back to minimum momentary. And we know that 3 22 by 3 34. Um, we didn't have to do the math in our head. It's all working out perfectly. Uh, so we can export this at twice the size, just so we have a great resolution once we bring it into after effects and everything's going to be just lovely. So let's export that, and then we're going to do the same thing for each of these. It's getting back here easy enough. Um, let's see, assets, what assets do we have? That's some old stuff. So let's just go ahead and delete these old ones. And I'm going to make a new folder and assets.

Sara Wade (01:08:15):

I'm going to call it Ana interpret footage main. We're going to make sure that we're matching up our frame rate on that. That's going to be 24 explosion, fire and explosion smoke do not need to loop, but they do need to be 24. Now the flames, we want this to loop. We want it to be the 24 frames per second. So I don't know how many times we're going to need it to loop. Um, for the duration of this, this animation, let's just say 20, just to be on the safe side. We can always come back and change it. And then the plasma ball I knew I needed to loop. Maybe not that many times. Um, we'll set it to three for now. If we need more, we can come back and adjust it then. Okay. So now you go into my after effects timeline. I'm going to add these things where they go.

Sara Wade (01:09:20):

All right. So the first thing I'm going to start with is that plasma ball. Let's see, I've got a planet appearing here. Looks like the first one. Let's go ahead and get that guy going. I'm going to just to stay organized. I'm going to drag it down here. That looks about right. It's not quite in the right place and it's not quite the right size. So let's go ahead and hit the S key for scale. We'll try 60. That might be a little small. We'll try 70, 70 looks good position here. And I think what we want to do is once that planet comes into play, we want to make this, um, we want to just make it fade out. So I'm going to hit T for opacity. I want to go ahead and key that. Oops, I don't want to keep it there. I want to key that opacity felt there and let's see, we'll go to here. Take that down to zero. You know what I think I want to bring it up a bit to just by two frames. You know what? We can actually position it a little bit better now that we can see there. All right. That's looking pretty good. My drag, this frame out just a smidge, just

Sara Wade (01:11:33):

All right. So we're just going to, now that we've got that plasma ball effect, we're just going to copy that frame. It's looking pretty much like we want it to, We're going to put it just two frames before the earth, actually, you know what we should've done just to be a little bit cleaner, just drag that back to there. So we don't have extra frames. Let's put this one over the earth And I think we can change actually the scale as well. Let's try 55 might be a smudge too small. 60 is going to work great for the earth. So, all right. And then we'll make one more for see if we can find we've got the earth. We've got Saturn Mars. There we go. There's Mars and Mars sound. Okay. And again, we want that just a little bit before. In fact, I think I wanted to phrase before Let's go ahead and get this position in the right spot. That looks pretty close and let's figure out the scale here. I think we can do let's try 45 45. Perfect. Looks good. And let's just double check the scale of this guy. What scale did we have here? 70. Let's try 65 and see if that's, you know what, I'm going to go back up to 70 actually, because of those rings, I think is just,

Sara Wade (01:13:47):

All right. So we've got those, this little plasma ball helping us animate those planets on. And the next thing we want to do is add those, um, explosions when the planets go off. So let's start an explosion here and let's see, we're going to go back to Saturn plasma ball. We'll go ahead and drag that explosion. So we are going to have the smoke and the fire. So actually we're going to want to, uh, pre-camp these together. So let's do that really quickly. So I'm just going to go new composition, same settings as everything else. I'm not too worried about that. We can, we can adjust that after, but let's go explosion, fire. Let's put that right in the middle and we'll do explosion smoke that right in the middle. Actually they're not lining up perfectly. That's because of the way I drew the fire.

Sara Wade (01:14:48):

Again, we think we had a two frame overlap. Oh, and we want the fire above the smoke comp one. We're going to rename the sky and we're going to call it explosion. So let's go to this guy, went to TKI or change that opacity. And what did we want to try? 60%, I think is what we were playing around with. You know, it looks a little light on the white background, but we'll wait and see how it looks in our animation comp. So now we've got our explosion. We can go ahead and add that. And I'm going to speed through this because it's essentially the same as what we did for the plasma ball placement.

Sara Wade (01:15:37):

Okay. Now let's get our flames to follow that little ship around. So we've got our ship here and we've got our flames in the imported animation section. Let's just go ahead and drag that to the stage. Uh, I'm going to put this behind the ship because I want these to come out of the ship. I'm gonna use the Y key and the pan behind tool to move the anchor point of those flames. I'm going to position them. Let's just put them right about there. They use the WQ just to rotate them a little bit, get them kind of at the same angle of the ship. And let's see, they look a little bit too big. So let's use the S key we'll scale this down to about 60%. Let's go 65. That's looking pretty good.

Sara Wade (01:16:43):

And we'll just, we're just moving these around until they look like they're about in the right spot. And then I'm going to go down here and I'm going to make the ship, the parent of the flames and perfect they're following along exactly how I want them to. Um, let's see. They look a little bit wonky up there. Let's just adjust right now. We're good to go. Everything is working just as we want it. And, uh, flames are following the ship. They're scaled appropriately looking good time to render. All right, we got our ship animated. We put everything together and after effects and now we've got this awesome final render. So let's just recap a little bit of what we did here today. We learned how to take our footage from after effects and stick it into Adobe animate, where we learned some different techniques for creating vector based hand, drawn accent and effect animation. We then learned how we can take that back out of animate and back into after effects to composite it together with the rest of our work. So now it's your turn. Go try this. Make your own effects library, sign up for your free school of motion student account so that you can get the source files for this lesson, as well as all of the other lessons on the site, go out there, try this, make your own hand drawn effects and happy animating

EXPLORE ALL COURSES

Dive into real-time 3D with our Unreal Engine beginner's course by Jonathan Winbush. Master importing assets, world-building, animation, and cinematic sequences to create stunning 3D renders in no time! Perfect for motion designers ready to level up.

Explore this Course

Unlock the secrets of character design in this dynamic course! Explore shape language, anatomy rules, and motifs to craft animation-ready characters. Gain drawing tips, hacks, and Procreate mastery (or any drawing app). Ideal for artists seeking to elevate their craft.

Explore this Course

Elevate your freelance motion design career with our guide to client success. Master a repeatable method for finding, contacting, and landing clients. Learn to identify prospects, nurture leads, and develop a thriving freelance philosophy amidst chaos.

Explore this Course

Rev up your editing skills with After Effects! Learn to use it for everyday needs and craft dynamic templates (Mogrts) for smarter teamwork. You'll master creating animated graphics, removing unwanted elements, tracking graphics, and making customizable templates.

Explore this Course

Stand out with Demo Reel Dash! Learn to spotlight your best work and market your unique brand of magic. By the end, you'll have a brand new demo reel and a custom campaign to showcase yourself to an audience aligned with your career goals.

Explore this Course

Illuminate your 3D skills with Lights, Camera, Render! Dive deep into advanced Cinema 4D techniques with David Ariew. Master core cinematography skills, gain valuable assets, and learn tools and best practices to create stunning work that wows clients.

Explore this Course

Master After Effects at your own pace with Jake Bartlett's beginner course. Perfect for video editors, you'll learn to create stylish animated graphics, remove unwanted elements, and track graphics into shots. By the end, you'll be equipped for everyday AE needs and more.

Explore this Course

Revolutionize your Premiere workflow with customizable AE templates! Master creating dynamic Motion Graphics Templates (Mogrts) in After Effects to speed up your team's work. By the end, you'll craft easily-customizable templates for seamless use in Premiere Pro.

Explore this Course
Your download is in your inbox!!!
Check your email (spam, too) for the download link!
Please check the spam folder if you don't see the message within a minute or two. Google likes to hide your downloads, sometimes.
Oops! Something went wrong while submitting the form.

Not sure where to start?

If you’re a beginner, here are some great courses to help you get started:

After Effects Kickstart

Dive into the fundamentals of motion design with our most popular (and recently updated) After Effects course.

LEARN MORE

Photoshop + Illustrator Unleashed

Master the basics of Photoshop and Illustrator and gain invaluable insights in this introductory level course.

LEARN MORE

Design Kickstart

An introduction to the design principles behind all great work.

LEARN MORE

More Advanced?

If you’re a more advanced student looking to up your game, here are some great options:

Animation Bootcamp

Learn the art and principles of creating beautiful movements in Adobe After Effects.

LEARN MORE

Design Bootcamp

Learn to design for motion in this intermediate-level, project-based course.

LEARN MORE

Cinema 4D Basecamp

Learn Cinema 4D from the ground up in this exciting introductory C4D course.

LEARN MORE

Now is the time to learn the skills you need to advance in your motion design career: