Photoshop Animation Eases

Amy Sundin : Hello, everyone. Amy here at school of motion and welcome to lesson three of our cell animation and Photoshop series. Today. We're going to cover the next super important principle of animation. Easing eases are the key to really bringing your animation to life. Some of you may be familiar with eases from using the easy button and after effects. Now we're going to learn how to actually draw an EAs frame by frame. Thanks one more time for our friends at Wacom who have saved us from hitting undo a million times when we draw by creating the Sinti, we have a lot of ground to cover in this lesson, so let's get started. All right. So welcome to part three of our frame-by-frame and Photoshop series here. And today we're going to take a look at something called eases to start out with now. Some of you may actually be familiar with these from your time and after facts, but when you're actually drawing them, it's kind of looks a little bit different than what you're used to and say the curve editor.
Amy Sundin : So let's take a look at this really quick, and we're going to play this animation back. And if you look, we have these four different balls and they're all kind of moving a bit differently, even though all of them are on twos up here. So why is that? Well, if we take a look at this spacing chart, like we had in our lesson for our ones and twos demonstration, you can see that each of these has a different sort of spacing on them. So let's take a look at each one individually. Now this first one up here, this one is going to be called linear spacing. Now on linear spacing, everything is completely uniform and it just moves at a consistent rate the whole time. Now this is the kind of spacing that we were using last time with our little Sprite guy that was going on that infinity path.
Amy Sundin : So we did change the way that he feels by manipulating the timing. But now we're going to learn how to change the way your animation feels by manipulating the spacing instead. So the next type of ease that we have here is going to be called the easy ease, or slow out and slow in. And this one you might be familiar with from after effects by hitting that F nine key. So let's take a look at this one. And if you look it's going slower at the very beginning and the very end, and it's speeding up through this mid part and that's because the more overlap or the closer together, your spacing going to be the slower, an object is going to appear to be moving. Our next type of spacing that we're going to look at is the ease in now easing in, or sometimes this is called cushioning in is going to be where you start out really fast and you kind of slow into the motion.
Amy Sundin : And then the inverse of that is going to be the ease out where it's starting off slow. So it's easing out and going faster at the end. So these are the four different kinds of spacing that we're going to use as we're doing our animations. And of course you can always play with these and, you know, experiment with different kinds of spacing, adding more frames at the end to even ease it in even stronger or manipulate different things. But by adding easing to our animation, we can really bring life into it and give it a more realistic, feel, a nicer motion than using these linear sort of movements. So now that we have this newfound knowledge of eases, we can move on and do some really cool stuff with it. And the next part of our tutorial in this lesson, we're going to jump into drawing pretty quickly.
Amy Sundin : So let's take a look at a quick tip to get you going. So it may not be something that you think about all the time, but it's actually very important to warm up when you're drawing a lot of illustrators out there do this, they'll just do warm up sketches and everybody's got their own routine, but here's what mine is. So I'll just go in and I'll just kind of start drawing shapes. And then I just keep adding onto those and it doesn't have to be anything that really makes sense. It's just something fun to get yourself going.