2D Animation With No Drawing Skills in AE

This lecture will explain why just having a character with emotions and feelings is not enough, you have to make him or her, do something about it. That is the basic concept behind emotional expressions.

This lesson talks about the next element you need for a successful simple animation. No matter how simple your characters are, they have to have a good relationship, and for that, you need to understand the secret to start a relationship.

Now that you understand the foundation to start a relationship between 2 characters, this lessons gives you a couple of examples to help you understand the concept even further.

This PDF reviews Emotional Expressions, Body Language, Character Relationships and Examples.

This lesson will walk you through the different body shapes you have at your disposal when creating a simple character from basic geometric shapes.

This lesson explains how to the position of the shoulders and legs can change how your character is expressing. You will learn the basic elements to control the body language of simple characters.

In the last lesson you learned how the arms and legs can be controlled to suggest emotions with your character, now in this lesson, you will learn about how expressive the mouth can be.

It doesn't matter if you have good imagination, in animation you always need references. From a mirror, pictures or videos. You can even record yourself. This lesson will teach you the importance of references to get excellent poses for your characters.

This lesson will guide you through the practice of creating different characters, using a variety of geometric shapes.

These are the free tutorials by Mr Klay to create Human characters for animation.

This lesson will tell you where can you find Voice talent online as well as some guidance on the prices. Depending on your budget, you can pay from $5 to $100 USD.

This lesson has the downloable ZIP file that contains all the project files for anyone interested in following along.

This lesson will guide you to have everything ready for the creation of your animatic.

Now, let's start the animatic, which is the process of transforming the storyboard into a slideshow of all the frames with all the sound, music and dialogue.

This is the final version of the animatic for "who is Better", the third version.

And also, this is the last lesson imparted by Jessica, in the following lessons you will be guided by Mark to accomplish the animation for Who Is Better.

This PDF will help you refresh the concepts learned in the Planning a Project section.

This is the introduction for the next series of tutorials that will help you rig the characters for the animation.

If you don't have Adobe After Effects, check this lesson to learn how to get it.

This lesson is for Absolute Beginners: How to create a new composition

This lesson teaches you how to create a circle, and fill it with pink color.

Once you have the circle as the body, we will use thin rectangles as legs and arms

This is an explanation for the Absolute Beginners who don't know how expressions work in After Effects

Check this lesson to get a free plug in that will make your character rigging process much easier

This lesson is what you need to be able to do cut out animation: Forward Kinematics

Once you have forward kinematics done, you are ready to take your rig to the next level: Inverse Kinematics

This lecture repeats the riggin process but on the other arm and the legs

Our final goal is to connect the limbs to the body, and for that, we will need controllers. This lesson will show you how to create them

Now that we have the controllers, we can connect the arms and legs to the body

This lecture shows you how to work with shy layers to keep a clean timeline

Before start drawing any mouth, you first have to do a research to know what emotions does your character need. This lesson will show you how to do the research from the storyboard

With the list of mouths you created on the last lesson, you will now draw them on the body for your character. Mouth by mouth

We have 5 different mouths, and now we are going to set the ground for the lip sync

In this lesson we go over how to animate the first mouth, from a closed shape into an open one

This lesson is a review of the last one, because the process of animating a mouth is done on the other 4 mouths

We have the mouths animated, but now, we need to prepare expression controls for the lip sync. This lesson will show you exactly what expression control effects you need and on what layer

This lesson teaches you how to do a head turn effect, by scaling the mouth when you move it to the sides.

The flip switch is what can get your character from happy to sad with just one click. This lesson teaches you how to do it.

We have everything ready, all we have left is the final steps for the lip sync

The character is now lip-sync enabled. This lesson will test our work.

In the shortfilm for who is better, the character "Simple" starts to get crazy by turning sadness into laughter, in the procces she wiggles her body. This lesson teaches you how to automate that effect.

Now that we have everything ready, all we got left is an optional step to make the character simple look a little more appealing: Add Some Shading.

Well, you have a character rigged and ready to be animated. In the next series of tutorials you will learn how to animate it.

This lesson will teach you how to get the EASE AND WIZZ plug in

Changing the angle of the elbows or knees can be a bit tricky, but in this lesson, Mark will show you how to do it by animating the stretch.

This lecture, is the second part of the last lesson, in which you learn how to change the angle of the elbow or knee.

Sometimes the voice talent says the words in very peculiar ways, and sometimes the auto-lipsync is not working smoothly because of the soundwaves. This lesson teaches you how to fix that.

Timing is one of the principles of animation, so knowing what the basic frame units are for each movement proves to be very helpful.

This lecture covers how many frames should you use for reaction movement of your characters.

After some animations at 24fps, you will discover that each movement is almost always between 5 and 10 frames long. See why.

Aggressive movements can sometime trick the audience into believing that the movement is done in less that 5 frames. The secret is, long anticipations.