Frame by frame Animation – Animate
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
The workspace in Animate
Setting up your keyframes to work with
Drawing motion and timing guides
Make rough animation with only lines and/or dots
Fine tune
Sketching Animation
Clean up Animation
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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: