Frame by frame Animation – Animate
Animating Frame by Frame means you draw a new image every frame (or every second, third,..) and then play those images after each other.
Frame by Frame or sometimes also called cel aimation (from celluloid) can be done analogue or with different software. Photoshop, Procreate, Krita, Blender, Animate,.. to name a few.
Creating frame by frame in Adobe Animate is a easy and because Animate uses Vector it’s also scaleable. You can also quickly transfer your animation to After Effects to combine it with other animations or to give it some special effects.
Adobe Animate Basics
Devon Kong has provided a lovely series of tutorials that give you an overview of the basics in Adobe Animate.
While the technical details might differ in every program, the overall workflow is most often similar to this:
- Define a frame rate
- Decide on animating on 1s, 2s, or 3s
- Draw motion path and timing guides
- Create rough animation with only a few lines or dots
- fine-tune timing if necessary
- Sketch Animation
- Clean up animation frames
Let’s go through this with an example in Animate:
Know How before we start
Animating on ones or twos
Please watch this video to get to know the process of animation on different frame counts:
Straight Ahead or Pose to Pose
Swoosh animation in Animate
This was just a very simple introduction into working in Animate with Frame by Frame. If you like this and want to work on a more complicated project I recommend this tutorial.
The voice over is weird, but the content is great 🙂
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Keyboard Shortcuts – Animate
For all shortcuts the following rules apply:
- On Windows → Command = Strg
- On older Keyboards and on Windows → option = Alt
Draw
B Brush Y Pencil P Pen E Eraser Transform
V Select A Subselect Q Transform Spacebar Move canvas Shift + Spacebar Rotate canvas Timeline
F5 Extend frame F6 Add keyframe F7 Add blank keyframe Shift + F5 Delete frame Shift + F6 Delete keyframe option + drag keyframes Prolong selected keyframes evenly Playback
Enter Play , Previous frame . Next frame
Want more?
Here are a few great tutorials to get you going: