Providing we are happy with the outcome of your work, this project could lead to further opportunities of illustrating other characters mouth shapes and facial expressions.
These placeholder layers are to be completed as the final handover. Placeholder layers are also included and named representing the movement titles above. Two examples of the movements are included within the illustrator file, as well as the character you will be working off. Please note this photo is just an example and the illustrator is expected to stay within the character’s aesthetic which will be provided. These movements are represented in the attached photo example. Below is a breakdown of the mouth shapes we need drawn. Now that we have completed the final draft of the episode, the next step is to find an illustrator who can digitally draw a single character’s mouth/vowel (12 in total) and consonant shapes.
ADOBE ANIMATE MOUTH SHAPES SERIES
Suspicious Tings is an animated series that comically follows the misadventures of three Australian teenage outcasts (Karl, Vince and Amber) when strange disappearances and murders plague their town.Įach episode will run for approximately five minutes. However, the timeline in After Effects is a unique blend of animation and video editing, as to match it’s composition design, which effectively acts as a hybrid of animation and video editing. I hope this answers your question, but if you have unsure about anything, just let me know.We are a small team of three creators based in Australia, working on start-up animation web series, similar to the likes of The Big Lez Show and Rick & Morty. Like Adobe Animate, After Effects offers a customizable interface. And to make a Keyframe play for a longer period of time, you can select it and press F5. On that frame you can pick a different Keyframe for the symbol, using the Frame Picker panel. This creates an exact copy of the first keyframe and put's it right after the first. To add more, you can click on the first Keyframe on the timeline and press F6. To make an animation with the symbol, you'll need more Keyframes on the main timeline. You should see a dropdown that is set to Loop, change it to Single Frame, to ensure that the animation inside the symbol doesn't play. That panel lets you pick between any of the Keyframes inside the symbol.
Now to change the Keyframe that the symbol displays, first select the symbol and then click Window (at the top) and select Frame Picker. Now you only need the first Keyframe on the main timeline, so you can delete the rest by highlighting them (like you did before when you were copying the Keyframes) and then right click and select Remove Frames. Once you're done editing the symbol, you can double-click anywhere outside of the graphics in the symbol, which will bring you back to the main timeline, where you started. To add the Keyframes to symbol, right click on the first Keyframe and select Paste Layers, which will overwrite the first Keyframe and add the other Keyframes you copied. Now you should see that there's only one Keyframe on the timeline, that's because each symbol got their own separate timelines and layers. To finish the symbol, you can double click on the symbol you have created to edit it. On that window there's a dropdown to change the type of the symbol, set that to graphic. This brings up a window for creating a symbol. Then right-click on any part of the graphic, or press F8. To do that, you can click on the first Keyframe, which will highlight all the graphics you have placed on that Keyframe. Next you want to create the symbol that is going to hold each of those Keyframes you just copied. Now that they're highlighted, you need to right click on them and select Copy Frames. To do that, you should first copy the Keyframes on the timeline, which you can do by pressing the left mouse button on the first Keyframe and dragging the cursor to the last Keyframe.
At this point you could move the Keyframes around to create an animation.īut I would recommend putting those Keyframes into a graphic symbol, which would allow you to easily reuse and swap the mouth shapes in different parts of your animation. When you play the animation (Ctrl + Enter / Command + Enter), you will see that it will quickly jump between each mouth shape. You should now see gray boxes on the timeline panel, which represents separate Keyframes. Change that to Keyframes, and then select import. In window that appear when you import the file, you should see a dropdown next to "Convert layers to:". You could create different mouth vector shapes in Illustrator, with for example each shape on a separate layer, and then import that illustrator file into Animate.