I spent a lot of time figuring out how to assemble this hand-drawn animation I made at the Don Bluth Masterclass, so here’s a tutorial if anyone else is curious too. If you aren’t aware of how the animation palette works, this short video can get you started. The instructions below will take you from paper animation to film in Photoshop CS3 Extended:

1. Scan all of your drawings. (This is faster on an autofeed scanner like the Brother MFC-6490CW.) Set the scan resolution relatively low (150 DPI Grayscale is what I used), and name them according to the frame number.

2. Adjust your images in Photoshop as needed. I had to rotate all of the drawings 90 degrees CCW and adjust the brightness to -120 and the contrast to +100.

3. Scan your layout. If it is bigger than your scanner size, assemble it in Photoshop. Ensure that the size and resolution matches your animation drawings EXACTLY, or you may need to adjust it.

4. Use “Place” to import all of your drawings as separate layers in Photoshop. Set each frame to “multiply” to see through to the background. Move the frames around to align with your layout. The layers will show the title of each file, which should be the frame number.

5. Open the Animation menu (under Windows) and switch to “timeline” mode (the tiny button on the lower-right of the palette).

6. Using the top-right pulldown from the Animation menu, change the document settings to 12 fps if you animated every other frame (on 2′s), and 24 fps if you animated every frame (on 1′s). Set the length accordingly.

7. Select all of your animated frames (not the background), and using the same pulldown, choose “make frames from layers.” You’re almost there! Preview using the “play” button if you like, and make sure to save!

The next steps involve creating a panning action in the video window. You may skip to step 10 if you don’t need it.

8. Reduce your resolution to 72 dpi for on-screen viewing and change the size of the canvas to a standard video window size (I used 480p:  480 x 848 pixels; save a copy at a larger resolution if you want to use it later). Notice that this clips off the edges of your canvas, but the rest of the image is still there. Link your layers using the pulldown in the layers menu. On the animation palette, click on the position stopwatch for EACH LAYER (You must do this because you are changing the position of all of the layers, hence animating the animation).

9. Now, if you want to the pan to be even you can set a keyframe for the first and last position of the pan and you’re good. However, if you want the animation to remain in the center of the window as the image pans, you need to drag the window to where you want it for EACH FRAME. Yeah, fun times. Registration marks on your paper will help with this process. Move the playhead to the next frame and reposition the artwork. A keyframe will be created automatically. Holding the shift key will help you maintain your vertical position as you slide the image from right to left. Press play to check that you’ve done everything right before you get too far.

10. To finish your video, Select Edit>Export>Render Video. Select Quicktime options and change compression to MPEG-4. After your video renders, watch it to make sure everything worked! Wow, maybe not the easiest way to do it, but definitely the cheapest if you only have Photoshop!

I hope this tutorial was helpful. If anyone has suggestions or shortcuts to improve the above, please let me know!

MDR

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