Subtitles of the Movie

Well, all good so far; loads of tips and tricks covered. Previously, for example we saw how to use Illustrator's Live Trace to assist us in turning photographs into sketched or water-colored images. We could use Active Sketch for this too and no, they don't look like photographs but that's the point. I want their purposely-sketched or water-colored properties to be part of the children's film. So as a reminder, let's look at this short, ten-second clip to see how it was created. I've compressed its file size for this tutorial so you'll notice the playback quality has suffered as a consequence and additionally, at present, there's no sound included. OK, here it is. Right, how was it made? Well, as stated earlier, we used Live Trace as the starting point for this image. I made the sky transparent in Photoshop afterwards so that any layer underneath could be seen when imported into Premiere Pro. Also, on this Live Traced image, I added a fairy on a toadstool and another apple in the corner. Then I moved to Premiere Pro and animated using keyframes of a photograph of a real sky. This gives the impression of a fairly quick-moving sky. From here I exported the clip as an image sequence using Premiere Pro's Export function and media encoder. You'll remember this saves each frame of a clip as an individual image, ready to be further manipulated in Photoshop or even After Effects. I used Photoshop where I meticulously but purposely not too carefully painted in pink seagulls in the sky and animated a face on top of the apple in the bottom-right corner. So when it plays back, it looks like the apple is talking. OK, so all it requires not is an audio track recorded of the apple speaking. Bad job alert: what is the first word an apple learns to say? Core! Anyway, to further improve it, perhaps I could place another partially transparent layer over the top of grass gently moving at the foot of the clip. What else? Music and sound effects perhaps. Possibly even live-action footage that has parts of its image area keyed out with a chrome filter. We'll look more at this in the Overlay section of Chapter 7. So there you go. All good fun so far. Before we go to the next chapter though, let me take you back to Photoshop to have a look at a couple of extra skills you'll need to get the best out of its animation feature. Right, here we are in Photoshop. I've got the image sequence in place so all I need to do is draw on top of every one of the image sequence to give the impression of movement and life. OK? As I'm talking, I'll just do the first few frames of a seagull in flight. Clearly, for the whole of this ten-second clip to become a realistic movie, you do need to animate ever single frame. Have you noticed how it can be a little difficult to remember what you drew between frames and where you drew them? Well, rather than struggle, Adobe solves this by allowing something called Onion Skinning. If you're Adobe Flash user, you'll know all about this term but if not, it's essentially a method of superimposing a semi-transparent view over your frame of the previous frame. So the frame you are working at the moment has the previous frame just superimposed over the top of it so you can see where you last drew. You get to it in Photoshop by going here and then clicking here. You'll have probably noticed the view does become darker whilst you create new frames with Onion Skinning on. Don't panic; even if you're' scared of the dark, it'll soon be light again. Once you've done animating, you take this Onion Skinning facility off again so it all gets brighter again to its correct level. Now all we need to do, if we know we won't be adding any more to it, is render it as a new movie and here's how. Just click here on File, Export, Render Video and work your way through the self-explanatory settings. I'll chose AVI here as my format. Then all you need to do is click Render to complete. OK, that's all there is to it. Let's have another look before we move on. What's the first word an apple learns to say? Core. Good one. A lot of work but very effective. In Chapter 6 we'll look at audio. Can you look at audio? Anyway, you know what I mean. Before I get bogged down in semantics, let's go.