Now it’s on to the fun stuff, where you actually get to make pictures move! The best and easiest way to get to know the program is to work through THIS TUTORIAL provided by Adobe. It asks you to create an Adobe account in order to download some assets that you can work with. If for some reason you don’t want to do that, you can always use your own scene and characters.
Again, the best way to work through these tutorials is to watch A LITTLE BIT AT A TIME. Do not sit and watch the whole video (or worse, all of the videos) and expect to know everything. That’s silly! Watch a few minutes, pause the video, and then go perform those same actions. Come back and watch a bit more and repeat.
You DO NOT have to hand in the video of the skateboarding apple, but it will be pretty obvious if you haven’t worked through the tutorials, so take the time to LEARN SOMETHING NEW!
Adobe Animate used to be called FLASH. Sometimes you will hear the program still referred to as Flash. They are essentially the same, with some additional upgrades in Animate.
To open Animate, you may need to search for the program. If so, use the search bar at the bottom left of your screen.
You may also need to right click on the icon and set it to “Pin to taskbar”
When the program opens, choose “HTML5 Canvas.”
I like to customize the layout of my screen. At the top right of your screen, there are links to different Workspaces.
I like Classic:
The one thing that I don’t like about Classic is that the Timeline is at the top. So I move it.
Grab the Timeline tab at the top:
And move it to the bottom of the window until you see a blue bar appear. It should stay there from now on.
I also like a double row of icons in the Tools pane at the left. Click and drag the edge of the Tools pane and expand it a bit:
As with any project, your first step should ALWAYS be to SAVE!
Before you start, I also recommend changing an important preference. To open the preferences box, you can click Control + U or go into the Edit menu to open Preferences.
The important one for me is the Auto-Recovery option. Right now, your work is saved every 10 minutes. I personally think that’s too long. I can do a fair bit in 10 minutes. I’m going to change mine to 3 minutes: You can play around with the settings if you like. If you find that your computer is too slow, you may be saving too often, so you may have to bump that number up.
I don’t like the default grid, though, so I like to right click on it
and change the grid size to 20 x 20. I also like my elements to snap to the grid.
DRAWING TOOLS!
Let’s start with some basic drawing tools. They are grouped together in your tools pane:
We’ll start with the basic tools in the middle:
Here’s a good video about those tools. Click to stream or download. The videos will play bigger and probably better if you download them before watching.
You will need to draw a scene for me using these tools. Make your stage 720 x 486 and your fps 25. Use as many of these tools as you can and create an interesting and colourful scene. Don’t just draw random shapes, set a scene that you can animate later! You might just save yourself some work down the road…
Once you have gathered some information for your first animated video – and ONLY once you’ve got some good notes WITH SOURCE LINKS, you can start to play around with the program that we’re going to use to make the video.
For this one, I just want something quick, easy, and fun. This is not going to be the next summer blockbuster major motion picture.
There are many free video editing/building programs online. I’ll explain one below, but if there’s another one you want to try or let me know about, just talk to me first. We used to use a program called Powtoon, which you’re welcome to try instead if you prefer.
It seems to work fine if you put in a fake email address, so you can choose whether to use your real one or not. You’ll need to know how you logged in so that you can work on your video again tomorrow, so make sure you know how you logged in.
I know you. You’ll be tempted to pick one of those fancy templates and go from there. But if you know me, that’s not going to fly. You’re going to need to do this the “hard” way. Choose
Give your project a name that accurately reflects its content/purpose
ex:
Your finished product needs to be:
INFORMATIVE!
INTERESTING!
IMPRESSIVE!
So you’ll want lots of good quality content and you’ll want to make something that makes sense and is interesting and fun to watch. Always make choices that serve the finished product. Don’t choose something silly and lighthearted unless you’re making a silly, lighthearted video. Don’t choose something plain and boring unless you’re making a plain and boring video. Get it?
You will need to UPLOAD photos and probably videos that you get from other sources.
You will probably also want to use some of the free footage that is included at the site
Build your video by adding to your timeline at the bottom, adding text and images as you go.
Silent videos are BORING! Make sure your video has effective music and perhaps even sound effects or narration! Choose effective and appealing colours!
TAKE YOUR TIME and build a GOOD video! Do not try to do this as quickly as possible! Have someone else watch your video and give you feedback. When I watch your video, is it going to make sense? Is the information you’ve included COMPLETE? Are you missing important steps/concepts/ideas?
The content determines the length of the video. You need to be able to fully and completely tell whatever story you’ve set out to tell.
Once you’re done, you’ll need to PUBLISH your video. You may upload your video to YouTube if you wish. Use your channel or add it to our class channel! You can skip that step if you don’t want to do something that public. No matter what you do, when finished, you need to create a document (Google or Word, probably) containing the link to your video, and then drop that video into your OneDrive account for me to view/mark. If you don’t drop off a link, I won’t watch or mark your project.
Your task was/is to make an animated presentation. Any good animation TELLS A STORY! Make your story interesting and FUN to watch!
You should take some of the animation history contained in the links below. It should contain some of the most significant developments in animation. Your presentation doesn’t have to contain ALL of the details but it should show the major events/types of animation and it should be in YOUR OWN WORDS. Yes, some of the links contain well written summaries, but you should be creating your own.
Your presentation can have the information written out or you can record your voice as the narrator.
As much as possible you should be using materials in your video that are LEGAL for you to use. These include items that you’ve created or photographs that you’ve taken yourself, or CREATIVE COMMONS images, music, and video clips. There are links to many great sources of CREATIVE COMMONS materials on my LINKS page under “Copyright Free Content.”: http://www.misterjrobson.com/links/
Step #1 is ALWAYS to plan out your video a bit. You’ll want to gather some information and make some notes about the topic. If you have no information about the topic, it doesn’t matter how pretty your video is, because it won’t be good.
You can find some of your own sources of information, depending on your topic, but there are some that I highly recommend linked above. Please look through the information and MAKE NOTES. Take important events, concepts, people, devices, etc. and write them down in a Google or Word document. You need to have SOURCE LINKS for ALL of your information and content (photos, music, etc.) Those will go in the credits of your movie, but for now, they should be in your planning document.
Once you have enough quality information AND SOURCE LINKS, you can show me your document and then move on to making the video.
