Make Motion Comics

If you don't have your own artwork to work with, it's easy to find some fun public domain material to work with.  We cover one such site, the Digital Comic Museum.

This is the where we take apart the comic panels to make it animation-ready.

We are getting deep into Photoshop's Animation Timeline panel.  This involves turning Layers on and off between frames and setting a duration for each frame.

We'll cover warping and transforming your individual layers so there's added motion between frames.

We cover "tweening", how animators automatically add extra motion between frame movements.

To create a full scene in After Effects, we need to export our animation loops with only the moving parts without a background.  Here we cover how to keep the alpha channel (the "empty space") when making your mini-animations.

Here we talk about how Character Animator actually works with Photoshop layers.

Here we adapt our artwork for the Character Animator template.

Finishing touches in Photoshop to get a fully functioning face for animation.

Preliminary steps in Adobe Character Animator!

Here we cover how to make our talking head have additional movements such as dangles.

Once you have done your motion capture and lip sync, you'll need to export a PNG sequence (the frames) and WAV file (audio).  We discuss that here as well as how to get it over to our final program, Adobe After Effects.

Here we introduce Adobe After Effects and how compositions work.

We have a brief introduction to effects and animation presets.

Here we discuss building up the full scene with more layers and having more lively movements between keyframes by changing their velocity (how quickly or slowly they change).

Parenting means linking one layer to another so that they move in unison.  Here we show how to parent in a fuller scene with multiple layers.

We add placement of backgrounds and try to show more depth between foreground objects with effects.

Adding adjustment layers for special effects that cover all your other assets.

Want to add some additional depth and camera movements?  Here we include some ideas for 3d motion comics.

Since compositions can be nested, we address pre rendering (creating animations a section at a time) and rendering (creating an animation with all of your assets in play).

Here we dig in to Adobe Illustrator to create new comics parts for animation.

In this lesson I add photoshop comics textures to give our new pieces that old comics feel.

Here we introduce the concept of "cycle layers" animation, where Adobe Character Animator uses looping layers to add pop to your scene.

In this lesson we add additional fx touches to our PNG sequence in Photoshop depending on the logic of what each piece of artwork represents.