Morphing Animation

Tuesday, February 8 @ 1:00 pm

Upload your animation in .mp4 to the morphingAnimation on the Google Drive, and add it to your website

Morph:

1. To change smoothly from one image to another by small gradual steps using computer animation techniques. 2. Undergo or cause to undergo a gradual process of transformation.

Bill Plympton, Your Face

Instructions: For your first animation project. use the onion-skinning technique to create a hand-drawn computer animation of (at least) one object morphing into another. The animation should be at least 3 seconds at 24 fps, which means you should have a minimum total of 72 frames.

Advanced Students: Your animations should be at least 6 seconds long :)

How to create your animation:

1. Brainstorm and create a plan for your animation. Consider the following:

What is in the frame and how does it move?
How does one object relate to the next in terms of shape? How does it transition? Identify correspondence points.
Where is your camera in the scene? Is the camera close to or far away from the object? Does this change?

2. Set up your Photoshop document according to these specs (shown in the image):

800 x 600 px
150 dpi
RGB Color mode

Save your document to a new folder on the Desktop or in Documents named Morphing Animation. Name the Photoshop file using the naming convention yourLastName_Morph.psd. (This folder is important, as it will also contain your exported animation later.)

3. Open the Timeline window by navigating to the Window menu > Timeline, then go to the Layers menu > Video Layers > New Blank Video Layer.

Now open the Timeline drop-down menu in the upper-right corner of the Timeline (image left, it looks like four small horizontal lines) and select Set Timeline Frame Rate. Set it to 24 fps.

4. Now open the Timeline drop-down menu again and click Enable Onion Skins. Open the same drop-down menu again and open Onion Skin Options. Change the settings to those in the image, if they aren't already set. (Note: your preferences for these settings may evolve, feel free to experiment.)

5. Start animating! Use what you've learned about the Principles of Animation to practice Anticipation, Follow Through, Slow In/ Slow Out, and Arcs. It's ok to make mistakes - the point of this project is to give you practice with drawing in Photoshop, working with the timeline, and making things move within your frame.

6. When you’re finished, export (render) the animation in your timeline by navigating in the menu to File > Export > Render Video (image right). In the dialog box that pops up, press the Select Folder button, and navigate to the same folder you saved the Photoshop working file in. Then name the file YourLastName_3seconds.mp4, and set the fps to 24.

The other settings should be fine by default, but make sure they look like the image below. Once you've exported, upload your .mp4 file to the folder linked above.

Past Student Work

(These are from a different assignment and hand drawn, but may give you ideas):

(And these are not my students, but from a similar assignment :)

Love

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