Photoshop is a powerful art creation tool
which has fairly recently introduced the facility to create animation. Whereas
not yet perfect, the animation tools are surprisingly good in light of how
recent this tool set was added to Photoshop.
I created a few tutorials to help with setting
up Photoshop for animation and exploring the tools available to animate using
different strategies.
Animating in Photoshop is clunky if you do not
first set up shortcuts. The first video addresses creating shortcuts to make
animating in Photoshop much easier and intuitive.
There is more than one way to approach animating in Photoshop; my favorite approach is described in this video.
Sometimes, especially when you need to reorder frames or otherwise have direct control of timing, it is more efficient to create each drawing on a new Video Layer. This video approaches animating in Photoshop using this method.
Oddly enough, the tool I like least for animating in Photoshop is the one named Animation. Animation layers in Photoshop I think are more effective for storyboarding, but here is a tutorial showing how you could animate using this approach, should you choose.
I hope these little video tutorials proved useful and have fun animating in Photoshop!
this formatting is making me uncomfortable but I have to tell you something / ask you something that is vital to my career as a student.
I re-read and edited that sentence for an hour, but you’ll probably just glance over it for half a second.
thanks!
– [name]
k
-professor
I have a stock format and structure I use.
Dear Person I am Writing To:
This is an optional sentence introducing who I am and work for, included if the addressee has never corresponded with me before. The second optional sentence reminds the person where we met, if relevant. This sentence states the purpose of the email.
This optional paragraph describes in more detail what’s needed. This sentence discusses relevant information like how soon an answer is needed, what kind of an answer is needed, and any information that the other person might find useful. If there’s a lot of information, it’s a good idea to separate this paragraph into two or three paragraphs to avoid having a Wall of Text.
If a description paragraph was used, close with a restatement of the initial request, in case the addressee ignored the opening paragraph.
This sentence is just a platitude (usually thanking them for their time) because people think I’m standoffish, unreasonably demanding, or cold if it’s not included.
Closing salutation,
Signature.
People always ask me how I can fire off work emails so quickly. Nobody has figured out yet that it’s the same email with the details changed as needed.
MICROSOFT WORD HAS A FUCKING “INSERT CITATION” BUTTON WHY THE FUCK DID NO ONE EVER TELL ME THIS IS SIGNIFICANT INFORMATION FUCK THE SCHOOL SYSTEM THIS IS MICROSOFT WORD 2007 I SHOULD HAVE BEEN MADE AWARE OF THIS IN HIGHSCHOOL WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK I HATE EVERYTHING
you can fucking log your sources into your document and then at the end press a fucking button and it makes a bibliography page for you im
ALSO, if you own Prismacolors Color Pencils and they keep breaking off no matter how much you sharpen them, they are cracked from the INSIDE.
This can be fixed by putting them in the microwave for no longer than 3 seconds! A little thing my art teacher taught me and has come in handy like heck!
OOOOOOOOOH~!!!
re-blogging to save a life
I never heard of this! Will test next chance i get
Prismacolor pencils are such crap that I’ve started pre-emptively microwaving them but an important note: LET THEM COOL OFF FOR AT LEAST A MINUTE BEFORE USING OR SHARPENING AFTER MICROWAVING. The wax that acts as a binder needs a surprisingly long time to set back up again, and you will have slightly melty pencil all over your sharpener/work.*
Another thing you can do to help prevent breakage is to paint a “cap” on the butt of your pencils with nail polish or super-glue. This helps cushion your pencils if you drop them, and helps the wood and lead stick together. Most nice art pencils have caps on them already, but not prismacolor. it takes about 20 seconds to do and will extend the life of your pencils by years.
*If you wanted metly pencil, for some effects, microwave that bad boy for 9 seconds and use immediately, being careful to not get hot wax on your hands.
Aside from talent and innate love of words, writing is a craft, which must be practiced often. When seeking your own approval and even of future editors, you must spot your errors and eliminate any giveaways, which make you appear unprofessional and a novice.
These are the pitfalls you must avoid to elevate your skill.
The following is IMO and YMMV, but it’s based on writing more than a dozen novels and a bunch of short stories, augmented by useful tricks pinched from screenwriting animation and live-action.
(1) Dialogue is a picture, “said” is the hook it’s hung on. What should be more obvious, the picture or the hook? If you have to use something else that can’t be conveyed by the dialogue (why not?) stick to asked, shouted, yelled etc.
Indicating how to speak a line in screenplay – (angrily), (wearily) etc. – used to be done, along with “calling the shots” – how a scene should appear – but both are now a definite no-no except for Really Important Writers (Goldman, Rossio & Elliot, Tarantino…) The director and the actor make up their own minds and, if the writer really wants the line said a certain way then it gets written (usually re-re-re-written) until there’s no other way to say it.
Don’t use purred, barked, snarled, hissed, rumbled, grumbled, mumbled, uttered, muttered, stuttered, quibbled, wibbled, mumped, humped, grumped, wittered, twittered, chirped, burped, expostulated, explained, retorted, queried or any of that lot. Use said, and there are plenty of occasions where the speaker is so obvious that said isn’t even needed.
Ejaculated belongs in smut, and even there it’s not (usually) speech.
(2) Italics for emphasis, thoughts and foreign words are an established convention and I’ve never encountered an editor who objected. That said, I’ve never used bold or underline, and exclamation marks stay in dialogue, but «foreign quotation marks» can have „their uses“.
(3) Changing camera angle with a scene break is the best way of indicating a changed POV. It doesn’t just help the reader, it helps the writer too.
(4) Reduce use of modifiers, yes, but there’s no need to get rid of all of them. The well-chosen ones that remain (they are well-chosen, aren’t they?) will have much more impact because they’re not lost in the crowd.
(5) Clear, uncomplicated vocabulary is good, because then complicated, orotund and prolix vocabulary is a character tool. It also lets you write a period speech or formal quotation without sounding like Sir Walter Scott at a Renfair or the High Court setting out a legal precedent. See (1) and (4).
(6) Over-elaborate names in fantasy… The examples given are Hurtzzhulnaznag and Nákhgolroggu; why are they so long, why are they spelt with double consonants (explain in-context, maybe show someone having trouble, show trouble developing because of the trouble – “What did you just call me?”) and why use a diacritical mark?
Tolkien did (Éowyn, Nazgûl, Grishnákh) but he was a Professor of Philology and knew what he was doing, even if most readers didn’t. Long names get abbreviated in real life, so maybe “Hurtz” and “Nakol” could be their usual version with full name for Special Occasions.
@dduane does it, so I have to step lightly. In fact I’ll stop.
Except to say that,
unless you’re writing comedy, Nyarlathotep and Tsathoggua should never be Nyar-nyar and Oggie.
During my first month with my therapist, I was given this worksheet to read and work on. She noticed that while I was talking with her, that my thoughts followed a lot of these. I wasn’t aware that my anxiety had brought me down paths of low self-worth and stinky thinking.
After a couple of weeks of talking with her, she gave me this worksheet to work on.
While, at first, I thought these weren’t going to work out, I was very surprised to see just how easy they were to use . My homework at that time was to identify which sort of thinking I used on the regular and which ones would best challenge them for me.
So, what do you think? Do any of the maladaptive thinking patterns sound like you? which ways would you like to untwist your thinking?
In storyboards you can’t animate out everything but for a demo reel or a short motion where you want the movements to ‘flow’ better there is a certain trick you can try on programs on Storyboard Pro or Photoshop.
Lets start with this:
This is just a rough board snippet of a guy punching air. It feels kind of choppy. It is made up of 8 unique drawings.
But if you take a drawing of the punching guy and using the select tool you transform skew/translate/rotate/ certain parts of his body you can get this:
And the timeline looks like this:
But I didnt draw any more unique drawings because I just slightly modified the existing 8 unique drawings. Transform an arm slightly and that is enough to fool the brain into bridging that big gap between two animation frames. Even moving the arm slightly down like in the picture below is enough to get this effect.
In Photoshop just use the lasso tool and transform the selection but the vector drawings on SB Pro make this a lot easier.
***For actual production work I would not try this because boards are always scrapped or changed and trying this can lead to frustration down the pipeline during the revision stage.
If you want to try this out just for fun or for your portfolio demo reel I highly suggest trying it out since if done just right they can really make your boards flow better panel to panel. Have fun!
Help Me Improve My Art 