Speaker 1: Animate CC is a crazy app. It's one of the world's most popular animation tools, and that's despite Steve Jobs personally trying to kill it, Adobe almost never updating it, and the fact it was originally designed to make websites. In the first few minutes of this class, I'm gonna show you everything you need to know to start making and sharing your own animations. And then every minute of the class after that, I'll show you new tools that will make Animate CC easier to use and more powerful. I will mention quite a few keyboard shortcuts, and I'll have a list of them in the description below. I'll be covering lots of ideas today, but don't be afraid to pause and rewind sections or try out little side quest animations if a tool inspires you. So let's jump in. So I've opened Animate CC, and I'm gonna click on Create New. Then I'll set my resolution. So at the moment, I'm gonna set it 1920 by 1080. You can change this later if you like, it's not a big deal. And then I'm gonna set my frame rate to 12 frames per second. You can do any frame rate you like. Once again, 12, I find useful for 2D hand-drawn animation. I'll click Create. Now we've got our canvas in front of us. This is also sometimes called a stage. And we've got our timeline at the bottom. I'm just gonna press B for the brush tool, or you can select the brush tool over in the toolbar over here. And I'm gonna start drawing a little ball. I'm using pressure sensitivity because I'm using a tablet. You can turn the setting on and off on the panel over here, and you can change the stroke width over here. So if you don't have pressure sensitivity and you're using a mouse, you might find that your brush is a bit thick. So you can use this slider to make the stroke width a little bit thinner. So we have our first frame of animation. Time to make our second frame. Each new frame in Animate CC is called a keyframe. I can make a new keyframe by going to Insert, Timeline, Blank Keyframe. But as you can imagine, doing that over and over again is gonna get pretty tiresome. What you can do instead is press F7 on your keyboard. And you can see it down here. It's got a new blank keyframe. It's a different color. And now I can't see my old keyframe. So what I need to do is click on this little button here for onion skinning. And that will show me the previous frames and the future frames while I'm animating. So I'll quickly trace this previous drawing. Then I'll select it by pressing V or by using this little selection tool over in the toolbar. I'll click on the line work and then drag it around. You can actually use the arrow buttons if you want a little bit more precision as you move it around. So that's my second keyframe done. Now I'll just press F7 again to make a new keyframe and I'll just animate away. Just frame by frame, figure out nice little bits of spacing as I go. If I want the ball to move slowly, I make the images close together. And if I want it to move quickly, I make them a little bit further apart. At this point, you might be wanting to zoom in and out. And you can do that simply by selecting the little magnifying glass tool on the side, or you can press Z to zoom in and Alt Z to zoom out and just click where you wanna go. And then if you wanna move around the canvas, you can hold down space bar. This will give you the hands tool. And then you can click and drag the canvas around like it's a piece of paper. I want this animation to loop, but I'm running into an issue now where I can't see where the first frame was in my onion skinning. So all I need to do is drag this onion skin slider a little bit further back to the start of the timeline. So I can see that first frame of animation that I wanna loop to. Now I'll just quickly turn off onion skinning. And if I wanna play things, I can click on this little play button at the top of the timeline or press Enter. And what you'll notice straight away is it's not looping. So what I need to do is press this little loop button on the timeline, but then it's not looping the whole timeline just yet. So we need to drag this little slider at the top of the timeline, which is the loop range all the way back to the start of the timeline. Now when I press Enter, we've got a nice little loop. I've kept this really rough, but you can keep it as clean as you want. And also I've let the size change a little bit over time. So it feels like it's moving through space a bit. So now we have our line work. I wanna fill in this line work with a color. That's really easy. We just select this paint bucket tool or press K for the shortcut. Now I'll choose our color picker. I can choose one of the existing swatches or I can go up to the little swatch picker here and choose one of our custom colors. I'm gonna choose a yellow color and I'll just click in the middle of our circle. At this point, you might find that your fill tool doesn't do anything. And that could be because you haven't closed all the gaps in your drawing. The easiest way to fix this is to go over to the tool menu over here and click on close gaps. I often use close large gaps. And of course, the other way to do this is just to use your brush tool to fill in any of those little gaps that are left in your drawing. Now I'll just step through each frame and fill it in. You can drag through the timeline to do this or you can use a faster method which is stepping through the key frames using the comma and the full stop button. Okay, now we're finished. I can press enter and watch back our animation. It's looking kind of cool at the moment but I think we can add some extra ideas. So what I'm gonna do is create a new layer. I'm gonna create a new layer above this existing layer. I'll quickly change my brush color and then I'll go down to our layer panel here and click the plus button. This will create a new layer on top. And I'll also click the lock button for layer one. And this will mean that I can't accidentally edit the animation I've already done. Now I'll draw in some leaves and fill them in. And I want this to stay still throughout the whole animation. And you can see in the timeline that there's no little breaks in this key frame. And that means it's gonna hold for the entire time. If you ever want to extend how long a key frame's holding for, you can simply press F5 which will give you a little bit of space in the key frame. And then if you want to move them around, you can just click on them and click and drag to where you want them to go. And that will just retime where they go and put them on different layers as well. If you want to delete some of these key frames, you can shift select them and then press shift F5. And that will just delete your key frames or any hold frames that you've got selected. So the last part of this animation I want to create now is a little stem for the flower. So I'll make a new layer and then animate straight ahead a little stem. So every new frame I want to create, I just press F7 again. And that'll create an empty frame on the timeline where I'm at. So I'll just use my onion skin and blast through this animation straight ahead to loop back to the start. Now we have a nice little looping animation of a flower and I want to export it to share it with people. So there's two main ways to do that. We've got export to Swift, which is a special flash file or export a video. Exporting a Swift keeps everything in vector format, but it's really hard to share on the internet. While exporting video will be a lot easier to share on Instagram and things like that, you won't keep any of that vector information. When I say vector information, I mean that unlike normal video software, Animate CC uses mathematical lines to create its images. And that means you can scale it up to any size you like without it getting pixely. I'm going to start by exporting to Swift. And the best way to do that is by pressing control enter or command enter if you're on a Mac. This will open up a new window and you'll have the name of the file at the top, untitled.swift. It'll save it in the folder where your animation file is saved. But because our file isn't saved anywhere, now seems like a good time to actually save our file somewhere smart. So we'll go to file, save as, or command S. And I'll just save that somewhere with a name like flower and then a version number. And now you can see this file on your computer. But as I said, Swifts are kind of a funny file format. They're good for using in After Effects or just previewing your animation. Unfortunately, they're harder to share on video platforms. So let's make a video file instead of a Swift file. I'll go file, export, export video and media. This will bring up a dialogue box which will let us export a H.264 and send it straight to Media Encoder. Media Encoder is actually a separate app from Animate CC. So if you haven't installed it yet, you can install it from your Creative Cloud Suite here. Okay, back to this dialogue box. H.264 is just the encoding format and it's a pretty common format for internet videos. I'm using all the default settings that I've been offered. But if you wanna pause it and check them against your settings, you should do that. And unfortunately, Media Encoder is notoriously glitchy and I had a hard time doing this the first time. So I actually had to make sure Media Encoder was open. And once it's open, you can go back to Animate CC and click on the export button. And once you've done that, it'll run it straight through Media Encoder. And once again, it will save it automatically in the file directory where your main file is stored. So at this point, we're only eight minutes in and you have a movie file that you can share with your friends and all the skills you need to start making your own animations. Over the next 15 minutes, I'm gonna show you how to take this animation a little bit further using some of the more powerful tools within Animate CC. So let's jump back in and I'll show you what I'm gonna do. A big part of Animate CC we haven't touched on yet is the idea of symbols. So rather than try to explain what a symbol is, let me just show you how I might use it in this animation. So let's say I wanna put a face on this flower but I don't wanna redraw it for every single frame. I've created a new layer to put the face on and now I'm drawing it in on that layer. Of course, I could redraw this face every single time or copy and paste it, but a more flexible way would be to create a symbol of the face. So I press V and select all the elements in the face and then I'll head up to modify and then convert to symbol. And then I'll change my symbol type to graphic and I'll rename this flower face. And now I'll click OK. And when I select the face now, it has a blue box surrounding it. And that's telling me that the face is now an object and the object in this case is the flower face symbol that we've just created. So it's gonna treat it as a single entity. And now I have my face, I can just go through my animation and move it on top of the flower exactly where I want it for each frame. So rather than creating an empty key frame for every single frame, I'm actually gonna create a new key frame based on the previous one. So rather than pressing F7, we're gonna press F6 and this will create just a duplicate of the previous key frame that we can edit. So you can watch me here, I'm just creating a new key frame and then pressing F6, dragging the face to fit on the flower and then pressing F6 again and then doing the same over and over again until I'm through all of my animation. And if I play it back, I think that's looking pretty cool. But what's extra cool is now we can start playing with the power of symbols. So let's just say I wasn't happy with this face. I could double click on it and now we're inside the symbol. I can tell I'm inside the symbol because everything else in the document is a little bit grayed out and we can see a little flow chart up here that says scene and then flower face. So the fact that flower face is here means that we're inside the flower face symbol. Now I'm gonna redraw this face and what's gonna happen is every time we've used that symbol, it's gonna update with this new face. So once I'm happy with this new face that I've drawn, I'll double click on the background again and that will take us out of editing the symbol. So now we can see our old timeline here and if I press play, you can see that all of the frames have been updated with this new sad face. I actually kind of liked the happy face more. So I'm gonna re-edit the symbol and throw that happy face back in. Then I'll just double click on the background again, then I'm back in my main timeline. So I feel like I've made a bit of a mistake here. I've made my animation quite small in the frame. The composition isn't that nice. It's not centered. I wanna move it around. What I could do is unlock all of these layers and then drag select over all of my drawing, then press Q for transform and try to transform the whole thing. The disadvantage of that is that when we go to the next frame, we're gonna have to transform it again and that's gonna be really hard to do consistently throughout the animation. But luckily, Animate CC has a solution for this. It's called edit multiple frames. So if I click on this icon here and then drag out this little header here, it shows me all of the frames of my animation that I've selected. Now I can select all of the images that I can see, press Q to enter transform mode and then hold shift to uniformly transform all of my animation. Now I can move it around and I can turn off edit multiple frames and we can see our animation has all been edited all at once. Another solution to this problem would be to combine all of this animation and all of these layers into a single symbol. So let's try that out now. I'll select my top layer and then shift select and then select my bottom layer. Then I'll right click and say convert layers to symbols. I'll rename the symbol to flower and I'll make sure the type is set on graphic like it was before. Now we can see all of our layers have disappeared and we've only got one layer called flower and we've got a single symbol sitting on our canvas. Now I can press Q and translate and rotate and deform this all at once and I can also press control D to duplicate it and I can start editing these all separately. I'll just put this one here and duplicate again and put this one over here and now we've got three copies of the same symbol all playing at once. And just like before, if I double click on this symbol I can start editing it and we'll update all of the other symbols. So I'll change the fill color of these leaves to purple and then double click on the stage and you can see all the flowers have purple leaves now. Something that I've noticed with this scene though is that all of these flowers are perfectly in sync with each other which feels a little bit unnatural. So what I wanna do is start offsetting these flowers and that's really easy to do. If we click on the symbol and then head over to this objects properties area here we can use the frame picker to change the first frame of the animation. So rather than starting from frame one it will start from frame three and then I'll go over to this other one and start it from frame six. There are a few more options here we could choose not to loop the animation or we could reverse the loop of the animation but I'm gonna keep it just looping animation as it is right now. And if you're wondering what I mean by starting from frame six you can just simply click on the symbol and then you can see the timeline within the symbol. And so when I say frame three it's saying frame three from this timeline within the symbol. Okay, so we've got our flower guys little bouncing around here but as you've probably noticed I've used a really rough line to draw these guys. And that's because I'm using a brush tool and I'm drawing pretty loosely but what if I wanted to have a more controlled vector look to my animation? How would I do that? I'll double click on my symbol go into my animation I'll find a layer that I wanna clean up and press the lock button. Now I'll create a new layer on top and this will be our cleanup layer. And because things might get a bit confusing I'll rename the layers by double clicking on the name and then typing in a name. So I'll name the bottom one leaf and the top one leaf underscore cleanup or CU. Now I'll right click on the rough layer and go to properties and I'll select 50% opacity which will lower the opacity of the entire layer making it a little bit see-through and a little bit easy to draw over the top of. So far the only drawing tool I've showed you is the brush tool but there are a couple of other ones. So this time I'll use the line tool rather than the brush tool and this creates a vector line. So I'll quickly change the color to black and I'll click and hold at the start and end of the leaf here. As you can see it's created a really thin line which is probably too thin. So I'll press control Z and I'll change the stroke width in this property bar here. Now click and drag along the entire length of the leaf and that's created a nice straight line and obviously that's not what we want. We want a curved line. So I'll press V which is our selection tool hover over the line and then click and drag which will bend the line into a nice curve. If you've ever used a vector program before you might be more used to using a pen tool and Animate CC has a pen tool and I use it a fair bit. It works like this. It creates bezier handles but I think that it's a little bit less intuitive than just using a line tool but you know feel free to experiment with what works best for you. I'm just going to use a line tool to finish off the rest of the lines in this leaf. Now if you've been watching closely you might have noticed I've made a very slight mistake here. The stem colour and the leaf colour lines are different colours. One's a dark grey and one's a black. So I'm going to update my lines around the leaf. I can't use a bucket fill to do that. I need to change the stroke colour. I'll start by selecting the lines and the easiest way to do this is actually to double click on the line and that will select all of the lines that are connected together then I'll hold shift and select any lines that I've missed and then I'll go over to the properties and change the stroke colour in the colour and style option. When I click on this little box it automatically goes to an eyedropper tool which then means I can hover over our stem colour click on it and it will change the colour to that stem colour. You can also change the stroke width and all that sort of stuff in this option too without having to redraw them which is a super powerful tool. So if I press control enter we'll preview this with a swift and if you're watching really closely you'll notice I've made another really small mistake. I've left on the rough layer below the cleanup layer. A weird quirk of animate CC is that even if you turn off the visibility of a layer it will still show up in the render. So what you also need to do is turn it into a guide layer so we can do that by right clicking on the layer and clicking on guide. Now if I preview the animation again you can see that the rough layer is no longer visible which is exactly what we want. Okay so we've learned loads and loads but I wouldn't feel good about leaving this lesson unless I showed you one last thing and that's using what's called a motion tween. I don't use a lot of motion tweening in my own work but it is a really powerful technique so let me show you how we might use it. I'll start by drawing in an extra element when we get a new layer we put our sun at the top let's put a little face on him and then fill in the sun with some orange then I'll press V and select all of the elements of the sun right click on him and say convert to symbol I'll call the symbol sun I'll right click on the layer with the sun in it and say create motion tween. Now we know that's worked because the layer has gone yellow which means there's a motion tween on it and if we go to the end of the layer and drag the sun where we want it to go just like magic the sun moves itself across the screen we don't need to keep animating every single frame ourselves. Looking at the animation though I think that the sun moving across the screen is a little bit fast so what we need to do is add more time to our animation. So we need to add some frames to all of our layers so I'll click an empty frame at the top hold shift and then click an empty frame at the bottom and that will select frames in the middle of all of our layers and then I'll simply press F5 a bunch of times until I've extended this timeline out. So I've extended it to 48 frames now when I play it back you can see that the sun animation is much slower but it feels a bit funny moving in a straight line like this so let's spice it up a little bit. I'll go to the first frame press Q for our transform tool I'll translate it down and also scale it down a little bit then I'll go to the last frame and do the same thing and then I'll go to the middle of the timeline press V and hover over this green line and that will give us a little indicator that we've got a curve tool. So I'll just drag this curve tool up so that we make a nice arc in the motion and I'll scale it up in the middle as well. Now when I play it back it has a nice arc to the motion and it changes scale as it goes. I want to add one more detail to this animation I want to make the face look like it's moving like it's looking at the flowers as it's going over the top. To do that I'm going to animate the face within the symbol using the exact same technique I've just used to animate the whole sun. So I'll double click on the sun and that will give us a look inside the symbol and then you can see there's only one frame of animation here so we need to extend the timeline out and usually I try to make the timeline the same length as our main animation so I'm going to make it 48 frames. Last time I extended the timeline by pressing F5 lots of times this time I'll just go to frame 48 press F5 once and that will extend an empty keyframe all the way to frame 48 for me. Now I'm just going to transfer the face onto a new layer by clicking on it and saying Ctrl X and that will cut it out and then I'll fill in these gaps with the bucket fill tool. I'll create a new layer and now I'll select my new layer and press Ctrl Shift V. If I press Ctrl V it'll put the pasted object into the middle of the layer and reality I want it to be pasted where it was before so Ctrl Shift V will paste it where we want it and now with the face selected I'll convert it to a symbol I'll call it little face and then I will create a motion tween again so this time I'll start on this side of the head and then move it to the other side of the head. This will be that counter rotation which will make it look like the whole face is turning. You may have noticed I put the keyframe in the middle of the timeline then and really I wanted it at the end of the timeline so I've just clicked on the keyframe and just dragged it to the end of the timeline. Now if I play things back you can see that the face looks as though it's turning as it's going over the top of the flowers and there you have it an absolute speed run on how to use Animate CC to make animation. I've compressed about a month's worth of education into about 20 minutes here so don't be afraid to watch parts of this back again and check out the other videos on the channel for more free animation classes. And feel free to ask or maybe even answer some questions in the comment section. I'll catch you next time.