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00:00 When you're previewing someone's work or your own work, you'll often notice that when you're lip-syncing, sometimes the mouth shapes don't quite match up or the character stops speaking as the audio continues to play.
00:14 So I'm going to show you how you can write notes to someone so that they can go ahead and fix that.
00:19 So I'm going to go ahead and press play.
00:21 [Song]
00:31 You'll notice that when he says "This I swear" his mouth completely stops moving.
00:35 [Song]
00:39 So it's not quite right.
00:41 So I'm going to go to Toon Boom Studio and I know that in this area, he stops his speech right around here.
00:49 So I could add a note in this cell.
00:52 I'll right click and in this cell, what I can do is I can tell someone that I need them to change something.
01:00 So I can go to Add Cell Note and I can say "Fix last few words" and click OK.
01:09 They can see that note, put their mouse over it and then a little box will pop up and tell them exactly what that note says.
01:16 Now of course it never works when I do it on a small size like this but the note does indeed work.
01:21 The note will pop up if you leave your mouse over it like so.
01:25 But once again, I'm working on a smaller screen size and it typically doesn't seem to want to work that way.
01:30 But let me also show you how we can fix that.
01:32 So I'm going to go to the Scene Planning view here and I'm going to scrub my timeline.
01:38 I don't need these guys here.
01:40 I'm going to show you how we can use the Cells panel or palette to fix the animation that's not playing right.
01:47 So I'm going to scrub and I'm going to go towards the end.
01:59 As you can see, there should be an eye here.
02:01 So I'm going to click on Cells.
02:04 Then I'll click on the mouth layer.
02:07 And then what's going to happen is I'll click on Show Preview.
02:09 I get this slider here.
02:11 This slider will cycle through all of my mouth shapes until I find something that looks good.
02:15 So that looks like an eye.
02:20 Right about here he says "S" so let's see if we can find an "S" sound.
02:25 There we go.
02:31 And his mouth should do a little bit of a gasp like so and then he's silent again.
02:36 And that is how you can easily fix your animation.
02:39 So I'm going to go ahead and hit Return.
02:42 "Hear me! As long as the Paladin army stands, you've no fear of the undead. This I swear."
02:52 And as you can see, it looks much better and it plays better.
02:55 But once again, you can also leave notes for people.
02:58 And then hopefully they'll be able to actually see when they hover their mouse over that note.
03:02 And they'll be able to make changes.
03:04 At the very least, they can see that note icon right here.
03:12 A peg is simply an element that gives you the ability to animate something or to move it in the timeline.
03:19 I'll give you an example.
03:21 If you look at the camera in this list here, and I'll go ahead and just drag it to the top of the list,
03:25 you'll see that I have this red line here.
03:28 And if I try to right-click on it, I can't add a keyframe.
03:32 So how do I animate this camera?
03:35 Well, I can attach a peg to it.
03:37 Now, in traditional animation, pegs were simply used to help the artist to register the artwork
03:42 so that the drawings would line up properly.
03:45 So you'd have these little holes and then you'd have pegs in them and the paper wouldn't move.
03:50 So that way you'd be absolutely sure that the artwork would line up.
03:55 So what we can do in Toon Boom Studio is attach a peg to a camera, for example, or any element.
04:01 And I'll show you more about the other elements that we can attach, like eyes and everything else you have in your scene, to a peg.
04:08 So we'll talk about that in upcoming lessons.
04:11 For now, I'm going to go to my camera and I'm going to go to Element > Add > Peg.
04:20 Now we have this peg here.
04:22 Let me move this out of the way.
04:24 And I'm going to take the camera and drag it on top of the peg.
04:28 Make sure you don't drag it to the top of the list because you're moving the element instead of parenting it,
04:33 or rather making it a child of the peg.
04:37 So as you can see now, the camera lives inside the peg.
04:41 Now I can right-click and I can add a keyframe to the peg.
04:46 And I can come over here and add a keyframe.
04:50 And what I can do is I can take that camera now and I can move it.
04:53 So let me grab the camera and I'll move it over here.
04:58 And actually, I have two keyframes.
05:01 But you'll notice that we don't have any motion.
05:04 Now this is one of the things that's very, very important to understand in Toon Boom Studio.
05:08 And let me undo that.
05:10 You don't want to use this tool to make your transformations.
05:14 You want to use this guy right here.
05:17 This is pretty important.
05:19 So on this frame, I'm going to stay there.
05:21 I'm going to go to the last frame.
05:23 And with this guy here selected, now I'm going to move it a little bit in.
05:28 And the difference is we now have these little blue lines up here.
05:32 And this tells us we actually have motion.
05:35 So now when I screw up, we have an animation.
05:39 And we're animating the peg and the camera that is attached to it.
05:44 Once again, if you right-click on the camera, you can't add a keyframe.
05:48 But we can add keyframes anywhere along the timeline on the peg.
05:54 There is an animation technique called rotoscoping,
06:02 which was created by an animator called Max Fleischer back in the day.
06:06 And for those of you who have seen his animated Superman series,
06:10 they used rotoscoping to make the show very realistic.
06:14 And it's still one of my favorite series because it looks so awesome
06:18 and the stories were so dynamic.
06:20 Now, what rotoscoping entails is us taking some live action footage,
06:26 footage of your friends or your favorite pet or anything at all,
06:30 and you trace over it frame by frame.
06:34 Now, there's advantages and disadvantages to rotoscoping.
06:39 When you are doing animation on your own,
06:41 you have a lot more control over the squash and stretch
06:44 and all the super deformations and all kinds of things.
06:47 But with rotoscoping, you're going to get a more realistic look,
06:51 although it's going to be very painstaking to try to copy everything you see.
06:55 So your timing is going to be great.
06:57 I would use rotoscoping to do things like martial arts.
07:00 Martial arts is very difficult to get the timing right.
07:04 So if you want to get that kick perfect, have your friend do a kick,
07:07 film it, and trace over it.
07:09 Now, what we're going to do in this particular lesson
07:12 is we're going to go to photospin.com
07:14 or simply use any footage that you have available to you.
07:18 You don't have to get this footage at all.
07:20 So I'm going to show you that I'm going to use a picture of a bear
07:24 that I got from Photospin, which is right here, this video,
07:27 and this footage is going to be traced.
07:30 I'm only going to do a few frames just to show you how it looks
07:32 and how you're supposed to do it, how you set up your light table,
07:35 so on and so on and so forth.
07:36 So by the time we're done, we're going to have a few frames of this bear moving
07:41 and then we're going to talk about cleaning it up
07:43 so that we can easily color it and how, of course, we can export it as a movie.
07:47 So let's go ahead and get started and create this footage.
07:52 So once again, find a very short piece of footage.
07:56 As you can see, this is 8 seconds long.
07:58 We only want to trace about 12 frames per second.
08:02 So we're going to set up our document for that.
08:04 If you want it super, super realistic, you can go 24 frames or 30 frames,
08:09 but keep in mind you're going to be drawing 24 or 30 pictures per second.
08:16 So the price is super realism, but you're going to pay a lot in time.
08:21 So I suggest 12 to 15 frames per second to get a very nice-looking animation.
08:26 So let's go ahead and get started.
08:32 Okay, what we're going to do now is create a brand new document,
08:35 which will be conducive to getting us about 12 frames that we have to draw per second.
08:41 So in the format list, I would suggest choosing Web Animation Large.
08:48 This gives us a frame rate of 12 and the camera size of 480 by 360.
08:53 Likewise, you can choose any size you like.
08:55 So if you want to do the NTSC, just go ahead in here and change this to 12.
09:00 So you'll be able to change this to custom whenever you change something.
09:03 So it's up to you.
09:05 So for now, I'm going to leave mine as this custom one,
09:07 and I'm going to call it "Bear Roto."
09:13 Click Create, and when our new document opens, we're going to import the video footage.
09:20 So I'm going to go to File, and I'm going to choose Import File.
09:25 And on my desktop, I have that video footage of the bear.
09:30 It's 30 megabytes, and it's 8 seconds long.
09:35 Hit Open.
09:37 Now this is important.
09:38 When we're rotoscoping, we do not want to have an opacity value.
09:43 We want to be able to see the footage completely 100% opaque.
09:48 So we're going to go ahead and turn that off, and hit OK.
09:56 And here's the bear once again, completely visible, nothing on it.
10:00 I'm going to actually rename this layer so I know exactly what I'm doing.
10:05 I'm going to call this "Video."
10:08 And that way I know what I'm tracing over, which will be a layer above this.
10:13 So I'm going to create a new element, and I'm going to call this, well, "Bear Roto."
10:17 Or you can call it "Bear," whatever you want to call it.
10:20 And we're going to be spending our time drawing on this layer.
10:24 We're also going to head over to our drawing view in a moment,
10:27 but I'm going to make sure I have Onion Skinning on.
10:30 So I go to the View menu, Onion Skin, and I do have it on because it says Turn Off here.
10:36 So I do have it on.
10:38 And then I'm going to head over to my Drawing view.
10:43 And then I'm going to turn on the light table.
10:46 And I don't want to see any future drawings.
10:48 I want to see the previous drawings.
10:50 So I'll say Previous 2, or I can even say Previous 1 or whatever.
10:54 And then in this very first blank cell, we're going to start to draw.
11:00 So I'm going to grab my brush, and I'm going to zoom in even more.
11:05 So I'm going to grab the whole bear so I can get a nice view of him.
11:10 And I'm going to start to draw this guy right now.
11:12 So I'm going to start with the ear.
11:15 And I'm just going to worry about the outside of the body first.
11:19 We'll come back and do stuff like the facial features in just a minute.
11:23 When you're rotoscoping, you have to decide methodically what you're going to do.
11:28 I suggest doing one character at a time.
11:32 Draw everybody on the same layer if you can, although you don't have to.
11:37 And worry about other things like hats and props and that kind of stuff later.
11:42 Just draw the outside of your characters so you can do one thing at a time.
11:49 So this is the outside of the bear.
11:52 And now I'm going to draw the details.
11:54 So I'll go ahead and hit the ear.
11:56 And I'm going for a cartoony look as usual because that is my style.
11:59 I'm a cartoonist.
12:01 And I'm going to draw the nose.
12:04 And I'll just do a hint of that nose right there.
12:07 And if you mess up, you can undo a couple times.
12:09 Just press Command or Control Z.
12:13 And I'm going to go ahead and give him a little smile and a little bottom lip.
12:17 And I'll draw a little exaggerated fur like this.
12:20 I'll do a line like that.
12:22 Something like this for this part.
12:24 And then I'll start to add those lines for the claws.
12:28 And do the fur like this.
12:33 And a line like that for the back paw.
12:37 And maybe a couple of lines for the folds in the skin.
12:41 That kind of stuff.
12:43 So let me get rid of those two lines I just put there.
12:45 You can even put a cheekbone if you want.
12:47 It's up to you.
12:48 So that's the first frame.
12:50 Now is the fun part.
12:52 We get to do this a billion times.
12:54 So I'm going to click on the next cell in my exposure sheet.
12:57 Because I have onion skinning on, I can see an outline of the last drawing.
13:01 And yes, you guessed it.
13:03 Here goes the second drawing.
13:05 So just go ahead and continue.
13:08 So once again, the advantage of doing this is we already have a basis for our animation.
13:14 All we have to do now is do the hard work.
13:17 The hard work is taking our time and drawing the outline.
13:23 And we'll do the same thing I did last time.
13:25 Just draw the outside of the bear.
13:28 So I can focus on whatever positional changes there are.
13:34 Don't forget guys, you also do not have to draw one straight continuous line.
13:38 As long as your lines are touching, you'll be able to easily fill it in with the paint bucket tool.
13:44 You can also use the auto gap tool if you need to close any gaps.
13:49 So as you can see here, the face has moved down significantly.
13:52 So the nose is no longer up there.
13:54 It's down here a little bit.
13:56 I'm going to undo that.
14:00 And I'll move the mouth down a little bit.
14:02 And his eyes are down as well.
14:07 So when you're trying to do things like a character doing some special martial arts moves or something like that,
14:12 or things that are very difficult to try to figure out, like a hand opening and closing,
14:17 rotoscoping is a nice technique to use.
14:24 Okay, now let's talk about how we can clean up our lines if we need to,
14:28 so we can create a color palette for our rotoscoped character.
14:32 Now I only have two frames here.
14:34 But I'm going to just show you that I can see I have a little bit of a mistake right there.
14:38 So I can grab my eraser tool and simply get rid of that particular mistake on that area.
14:45 And then I can zoom in and then use my space bar to make sure all of the lines are closed and cleaned up.
14:53 So I can get rid of this extra overlap on the nose if I need to.
14:58 And just take my time and eyeball everything.
15:00 Make sure everything looks nice and neat.
15:05 This, of course, is time consuming, but all animation is pretty much time consuming,
15:09 whether you're doing 2D or 3D.
15:12 I'll go to the next frame.
15:14 And I can turn off the light table so I can just look at one drawing at a time at this point.
15:21 And so far, that looks pretty good.
15:24 Make sure that looks good right there.
15:28 All right, so I'm going to zoom back out.
15:30 And now it's time to give this guy some color.
15:33 So with the color palette, I can rename the palette by going to the options.
15:39 And I can give this guy a name.
15:42 So I can go to Palette, Rename Palette, and call it Polar Bear.
15:49 And I'm going to choose a nice off-white color for his skin.
15:52 So I'm going to just scroll down a little bit.
15:55 Let me go ahead and click here so I can see the bottom.
15:58 Find a nice off-white like this one.
16:02 Grab my paint bucket tool and click.
16:05 Go back to the first frame and click.
16:08 And go ahead and find a nice dark brown for the nose.
16:17 See how that looks?
16:18 Because once again, I'm doing a more cartoony thing so I don't want to have it too dark or completely black.
16:26 So let me go ahead and see if I can find a nice dark brown.
16:29 That looks great.
16:32 And what happens is when you are playing back your animation, you'll have this really realistic look.
16:39 So now that we have two frames done, I am going to show you guys how you can preview it.
16:46 So we can always go to these options here and we can loop and we can press play to play back our animation if we want to.
16:53 Now of course we don't have more than two cells here but that's how you can use these controls here.
16:59 Looping is very helpful when you want to just sit back and look at everything as it plays back over and over again.
17:06 When I loop animation, I'm looking at one section at a time.
17:10 I make sure the face is right and then I'll keep it going and then I'll look at the feet and make sure everything is going well there.
17:17 And I just take my time and really just study the animation and I write notes as to what I need to fix.
17:23 But as you can see, this is a really great technique.
17:26 It's time consuming, extremely time consuming, but the results are going to be great.
17:31 There's a lot of guesswork taken out of it.
17:33 You don't have to worry about your timing.
17:34 You don't have to worry about anything.
17:36 All you really have to do is trace, keep your light table on, create a nice color palette.
17:41 Also guys, don't forget you can always change the tint offset and the tint blend if you need to.
17:45 Create a night time or extreme day time scene for your animations.
17:49 But rotoscoping is a really cool technique.
17:51 So give it a try and see what you can come up with.
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