Frame by Frame learning from James Curran.

Firstly how does he manage to make the gif that he exported so small? Full colour and 1080 resolution but only 400 kb? wow! Some one replied said the reason why his gif small is because you can count like, 7–8 colours in there at most. but I notice that when he export for web he didn’t limit his colour into 8, in fact it’s full colour, so what else counts for the big size gif?

The answer I will reveal later. :)

So today I spend almost whole day learning from Adobe live animation video, he once joke inside say I will not give any source file, so if you want, you can copy frame by frame. Guess many people will give up on that, but to me I feel if you want to learn something. Frame by frame is the best way cos you will know how the master do his work. what’s his habit on animation.

So I slow the youtube to 0.5 speed and focus on how he animate and where his cursor goes LOL, take me one whole day to finish watching it and follow his step to animate. So this is what I manage to finish today.

Goes round and round and round and round and ….

James is so good at timing, without any plug he can finish the bounce so smooth and naturally.

So here are the points that I learned today,

1. Focus on the main character, and finish building it then animate it, and then Pre-compose it to use into the next step.
2. Two rectangle shape select merge path, and select substruct can use it to divide the two shapes.
3. Creating a shape in front of your character, and under your character select Alpha matt to the shape, can easily use it as the mask.
4. Duplicate the character and create different effects, use Time Remapping, which very hard for me to understand and get the right loop sequence.
5. When you import the animate video to Photoshop and trying to export gif, you can either import film layers, or you can just open the mov file it self and export. when you select to import layers, the gif will be easily become big. but when you select to open the mov file, the gif is not that big, at least I tried mine is about 800k. previously use the layers is about 4mb. And although the colour plays a part of the file size, but I didn’t really limit any colour, instead I did a experiment is when you import the layers from the mov, you can select “limit every _2_ frames.” By selecting that, PS can help you reduct your frame numbers. such as mine is about 76 frames(O_O God knows why 3secs got 76 frames and James only got 35) and after I select to limit the frames, it become 36 this time, and when I click export Gif it becomes 400kb. Woohoo but the speed of the gif become so damn fast… don’t know why.
6. James is really very good at using shapes to create objects, and they are so simply nice.
7. Didn’t do much on the hand part guess I will try to 0.5 him again next time on the other project of him LOL.

Keep it up so much to learn from After Effect and it’s sooo fun.

Let me know if you know how to calculate the Loop timing, it’s really painful to me .. :(