Welcome to the world of Motion Comics! This is a specialized form of animation using portions of original artwork to animate a story rather than individual drawings for each frame or cgi characters. By animating in this style, you are able to keep the aesthetic of individually drawn panels with complicated foregrounds and backgrounds; you are able to make your comics into films.
This class is broken down into 3 distinct approaches, which I used to make my own 14 minute motion comic animation “Innocence of Seduction”:
•Adobe Photoshop – breaking down illustrations into individual components and animating Frame by Frame
•Adobe Character Animator – using your webcam to give Motion Capture animation to Photoshop puppets and Character Animator’s functions to synchronize audio to our character’s talking heads
•Adobe After Effects – placing our characters into a scene, working with Keyframe animation and applying special effects like blurs and camera shake
After I show you how I made my motion comics in these programs, I have a demo using advanced Character Animator and After Effects techniques on how I gave specific animated superpowers to Marvel Comics’ X-Men characters.
Tools:
This class uses animation techniques in Adobe Photoshop, After Effects, and a sub-program of After Effects called Character Animator, so you’ll need access to those to start with. We’ll cover the basics of each program so if this is your first time animating, this class is for you!
For my demo, I chose to use public domain Golden Age comics, so I’ll show you how to break apart and clean up the artwork from these scans. If you need artwork, feel free to follow my example, or use your own illustrations.
Some expectations:
This class is designed to work with flat, comic book-style illustrations.
This class is not for people who are more interested in fully rendered, realistic animation in the vein of Pixar.
Also, we are focused on the technique and not on a final, fully completed 30 minute film with sound and voices. The final stories and editing are so unique project-to-project that I have chose to focus on these animation methods.
Check out the trailer and free lectures to learn more about the amazing world of Motion Comics, and see you in class!
