Lessons

Lesson Info

How to Make an Animated GIF Using Adobe Illustrator CC

Hello everyone. We are going to make an animated GIF in illustrator. This looks it looks okay. It could be better. Alright. I'm going to show you the tools and you're going to make prettier stuff than I have. All right, let's get into it. Okay. So to make our little bubble, bubble blowing whale open up animated gif. We're going to start with this group at first. Okay. And we could decide now like basically just lots of art boards with slight adjustments. Okay then you export those, adjust all those art boards to Photoshop to stitch together as a gift. Now, a couple of things you could do, you could like every outboard just have them moving forward a little bit more. Okay, that would do something. Okay. I'm gonna use the puppet pin tool now the puppet pin tool, it destroy it kind of distorts what we do quite a bit. So, and if you're doing this on your own, you're finding a little bit tough. It is a little bit tough with the puppet pin tool, but I think it has a really cool effect. So th...

is is my first art board. I'm not going to just start this one. This is when he's going to stay the same now. It's going to be lots of art boards. Open up the outboards panel and the naming convention is quite important. Right? So I'm going to call this whale while even 01 and the Naming Convention has to be sequentially ordered for this to work. Right? And you can't just put it in one. Um, because when you get to 10, there's the two digits not one digit. Okay so you can kind of just go 1234 all the way to 10 because it freaks out when it sees or there was just one digit now there's two so there has to be oh one if you want to do 100 different upwards I hope you're not okay it's gonna take a long time But you'd put in 001 Okay just to get the sequence right. The other thing to know is that illustrator is not made for this right? We're kind of doing it as a bit of a hack because it's fun and because the main tool to go off and do this for something like motion graphics would be aftereffects. I love it. I know it very well so I'd go and do it in there but I understand there's a big learning curve with that one. So you know if you've got skills and illustrator you might just stay here because because you know so well alright so I need another outboard. The quick way is to click hold and drag it. So I've got a second one. Cool and what we're going to do in this one is I'm gonna slip that all grab my puppet pin tool, I'm gonna pin him in the tail there there, put them there anywhere. I kind of just wanted to stay still. It depends on what you want to do right? So this is what we're gonna do, breathe in, breathe out and we're gonna do it per every frame so be prepared sometimes though I need a bit of a denser just to give a bit more control I want just as kind of body popping out. Alright so this one here is just going to be a little bit out and then I'm gonna duplicate it again. Okay go over here, grab my black arrow back to my puppet pin tool a bit further down, duplicated again. There's gonna be a lot of this now to speed up your time. Um you've got to click on it with the black arrow first then back to your puppet pin tool. Now your puppet pin tool doesn't have a shortcut by default. If you go to edit keyboard shortcuts and click on the tools you can go through and add your own shortcut to it up to you. I use Q. Because I think you was the default for lesson two which I never use. Okay so that's my handy trick. Hit Q. And a keyboard. Get him a bit bigger. Do one more with us and then we'll speed it up. Right so wiki cook it cuchi down. Okay and we're gonna go to the next one. Now I'll go into super fast mode to do the next couple. Alright that didn't take very long and now because I got to a point where he's gonna start breathing back in right? And I could totally just manually try and do this or because I wanted to kind of loop perfectly what I might do is his breathing out is exactly the same as in breathing and just in reverse. Right? So I'm gonna try and do that. So what I need to do is to make sure we don't get lost. I'm gonna name my orders here, I get really kind of confused sometimes with that was in general but we'll speed this up sort of. What now is another few art boards, maybe another four or five. So instead of having duplicating them, I'm just gonna make a new outboard. Okay and Now if they end up going off the page you can just grab them with the art board tool, hold shift, click on the ones you want and kind of move them around, it's up to you. So this is where it gets a bit inception. So this one is going to be whale or fast with this again. Okay so this is where I get kind of confused sometimes because at this distance it's really hard to do copying and pasting because the output to get a little mixed up. So I want this one to go there. So I want I'm just looking at here whale five to go to whale seven so I'm going to zoom in. Okay so well five seven. Okay, how do I get to it? I'm just gonna use this over here for some reason it's not jumping to it. You are seven. Cool. And I'm gonna hit command F rather than command v. Command F gets it back exactly where it got off the page. So the next one is what we want from 5-7 we want now, if you're watching this and you're like just copy and paste them, this is where my brain gets bottled. So I'm just going to slowly but surely work my way through and we'll speed it up. Okay, we're back. That could be it. You might just want the breathing and now to kind of get a feel for first of all that I ended up over the side. So what we might do just we can reorder them. Okay, we can go into here actually this option here and say actually could you make them in one line please? Or reorder them in two columns? Ok? And click. Ok. I'll just order them straight up and down. So And let's have a little look at way of kind of previewing what it's looking like. So with it zoomed in at 100% or full screen, which is command zero. Okay? Or control zero on a pc. You can just kind of toggle through this. Right? So go all the way at the beginning and hit this arrow here, next, next, next next And this is our very exciting animation. Okay, so what I'd like to do when he starts breathing back in is I'm gonna do one last thing you can skip ahead now, but I'm gonna get him to blow a little bubble and so when he gets to here, he's going to start blowing a bubble and this bubble's gonna be pretty exciting. It's gonna be the same color as this. Actually no, he's gonna be blue even cool. So my lips tool is, he's gonna blow a big bubble to start with and it's going to get smaller and I'm gonna set it kind of about there. Maybe push it behind him. Of course, I'm going to copy this. Move to my next outboard command. V sorry, command if okay to get it kind of back where you got it or control it from the Pc and I was going to move it up a little bit using my keyboard shortcuts. Okay? And shrink it down a little bit. Um If you're doing this kind of shrinking stuff, maybe smart guys can be a bit of a pain. So you turn those off. Alright, next one. We'll go back copy him, paste them now. I'll get the we'll get it to speed up now. So you're not watching this okay, in your back. Um Yeah, very exciting. And he breathed out of bubble. Cool. So we've got our animations right and we've made sure our naming conventions are all right in here now. It's about getting these outwards out and into Photoshop it's easy enough to file, go to export, we're going to use this export screens. Okay, make sure they're all selected. Okay. And I'm putting mine into a folder called whale on my desktop. You put yours wherever you like. And in terms of the resolution, keep it high now we'll we'll cut it down and Photoshop later on, so we'll make it um, PNG jpeg, it doesn't really matter at this stage. Okay. And let's make sure there's no prefixes. Just one scale. Yeah, make yours look like mine. Let's click export upward and you'll see in here. I've got my sequentially numbered, you could name them afterwards. Okay. It doesn't matter. You don't have to do it in illustrator. But now the trick is in Photoshop. Okay, go to file. Open, click on the very first one, so no one and click on options and this is the magic trick. Okay, You can say I was like, oh one and check if there's a sequence open. If you've numbered them correctly, it won't have an error. If it's you can't even miss one. If you've got, if you're missing oh four, it'll freak out now frame rate, you can come back here and Try this a couple of times. There's ways of overriding it afterwards, but 30 frames per second is fine Now in Photoshop. The trick is to go to window workspace and switch it to motion. Weirdly photoshopped some pretty cool video stuff. Video editing. Okay. But for the moment, what we want to do is let's just hit the play button here, okay. To see what our thing does and that is our super exciting animation at the moment. It's happening a bit fast. Okay, so there's two things. One is if yours is really hardcore and can't play it back because it's freaking out, you can go to resolution, turn it to 25% and it looks worse up here but it exports just fine. Okay, if it's slow minds looking fine because it's quite simple, next thing you'll do is right click it and this is a speed, you can speed it up or slow it down. So if you want to speed it up, crank it up um and it shrinks down, right? But if I wanna slow it down, It weirdly doesn't jump back out. That's the weird things. If I slow it down to maybe the lowest is 25%,, I have to drag this out. Just keep dragging until you get the whole thing. Okay, so you might have to drag it twice. Like I did there just keep dragging it until it's all the way out because otherwise There it is there it goes out to 14 frames so you can zoom out this way Dan. That's better. Just drag the end out so now I can see it all hit play it's probably too slow now. Yeah, after all that 50%, it shrinks down fine. But remember doesn't go up, just drag the end out now. It's about exporting it. Okay. You don't have to do a gift. We're we're doing a gift because gifts are cool. Um, and they're easily, you know, you stick it on social media and they play automatically on lots of websites. Okay, facebook included. Now what we're going to do is fire will do the X will do the gift away first. So go file export. We're gonna have to use this old school safer web version. Okay, file export, save for web and at the top here preset, depending on the quality and size, you'll have to play around with this one. It's either um, any of these options work. Okay. For export basically the more numbers you have 32 looks fine from my if you've got a really detailed graphic, it might have to get up to 122 colors. 128. But the file size is gonna be a lot bigger. I'm giving mine small. Everything else you can play around with. It makes very little difference. The big thing that does make a difference is looping loop once or forever. That's what we want. Hit play. It doesn't, it's not a good representation here in this kind of export window. So don't sweat it. If it's not quite right then we hit safe and we're gonna call this one whale gift. Very exciting. It's taken us a while and a bit of a disjointed class. I know like yeah. Anyway, so I've got my gift, it's on my desktop of headspace by on my Mac. Ah look at him doing all these gift Nous. Now there are some artifacts up here that's just from the puppet pin tool. I didn't really kind of take much notice of them. I should have fixed that up before I carried on. But there's my bubble blowing. It's kind of it's okay. Um, you can also do a video version. So back here in Photoshop there's an export it as a generator. No export render video. Okay. And in here, when it eventually pops up, We're going to, we're going to export an MP four. It's a really common format. Okay, so we'll have whale dot mp four and down here we're going to use adobe media encoder and it's going to be the format H 40. is the most common one to use. Okay, gives you an mp four on my Mac quicktime as well. Now, quality ratings, you can play around with this, you can get quite low because um ours is such a simple um animation in terms of the speed, you can call it with this frames per second is gonna play like it did originally in Photoshop, the lower you go, the more jumpy it is, but the slower place. Okay, so up to you how you want to do it. I'm gonna leave mine at 30 click render kick back and relax depending on how long it is and let's check it in. Um my desktop is my MP four double clicking and genius. Mhm It's not looping though but yeah that is how to do animation in w illustrator now there are lots of other things you could have done um as our bubble blowing whale exciting. No but you know you have the tools now right it could be moving lots of things, could be moving around, you could use a puppet tool, you could use a liquefied tool. There's lots of things you could do to your animation just make sure that the sequence numbering is correct and then once you get into Photoshop you can export the gift or mp four. Alright so it's the end and it is homework time. Okay I want you to do something better than what I did, you can use the whale it's fine or something else we've drawn in this class or anything you'd like. I'd love to see your animation. Okay, posted to me on the website here under your projects and yeah or on social media. Alright, I'd love to see it on instagram and bring your own laptop and on twitter. I am dan loves adobe. Alright friends let's get on to the next video