*ABSTRACT: I’m well versed in Adobe Animate, and it is a good tool for learning animation, but I’ve been predominately using it for the bulk of my animation for the past 3 years. I think it’s time (probably long overdue) I branch away from that and learn how to use other software and discover new concepts that I can apply to my project that I may not be able to do as well in Animate.
Research – Hunting for a Viable Animation Platform : Animate vs. Photoshop?
Being that this is going to be a 2D animated short, it’s expected that I’ll be needing to draw, and draw a lot, and for that I felt that I’d need to find a software in which I’d be comfortable working long hours animating that is compatible to my drawing process. When I lay out the foundational work for beginning an animation (or drawing designing in general) I happen to do a lot of etching before erasing and fine tuning my line art, instead of longer, continuous strokes. I just find it easier to draw by the wrist instead of the arm as I tend to draw “smaller” on a canvas, adding bits of detail as I discover the subject in the composition.
The Thing with Adobe Animate…
I’ve animated projects in Adobe Animate before, and has been my go to since I started animating seriously, but it doesn’t recognize the etching approach all that well. Etching is like a type of dotted, gestured sketching, with multiple short lines and quick marks. It’s a rather jagged style of drawing by nature, and Animate is programed for predetermine and smooth drawn out, singular lines. This had put Animate in favor of making determinate, focused strokes and can in turn work against the etching approach. You can’t exactly stop mid stride and take it in another direction without Animate potentially misinterpreting it. (which has become frustrating at times because it will take a small gestured inching and expand it a mile across the canvas). That’s not bad in any way, but you have to be sure of where you’re taking your pen across the canvas, and despite having erasers and an undo command, animate essentially has the mindset of “no take backs” that might be cumbersome if you are like me and are indecisive with the pen or draw with the wrist.
I still adore animating in Animate, and I highly recommend it to anyone who wants to get more into 2D animation (especially with cut-outs/puppets or basic, web-based animation) but it doesn’t leave much room to explore with traditional style animation. That’s not to say that it can’t be done; it very much can! The drawback to traditionally animating (as in predominately animating frame by frame and not tweening as much) in Animate is the program limits you on what you can reliably do without pushing the software to the point of self-destruction if you don’t apply some work arounds. I know I can animate a short film in Animate if I had nothing else, but I feel that I should try to experiment with other applications to see if animating in other software might suit my production style better and is easier to work with traditionally.
Impressions on Photoshop’s Animation Capability
I’ll be honest, I’m not a big fan of animating in Photoshop. First off, it’s Photoshop – built for designing or image enhancement, it’s not exactly a leading power in animation at first glance. Secondly, while it does have animation properties, they are clunky and not as streamlined as Animate has, both in functionality and aesthetic. Instead of having frames on a timeline, Photoshop treats layers as frames, and then records them on a timeline. The last experience I had animating in Photoshop, I had to continuously toggle visibility on several layer just to get the illusion of movement, and if I messed up one frame, I affects all the previous frames it was used on prior and I’d had to needlessly go back and fix them, or start the whole sequence all over again. Animate has its qualm, but Photoshop was a whole other level of “why be like this?” for me. Then again, I was still breaking out of novice level at animation when I first tried photoshop, and being that I’ve developed my design skills thoroughly through the app, I think I’m ready to try it again for animating, now that I understand better on what it can and can’t do. But where photoshop lacks in animation properties, if makes up for in its design benefits and capabilities.
Since photoshop was more designed for manipulating images and designing, there is a plethora of brushes and other tools that I can use (or even make myself!) to spice up the look of my animation in a way that would be much harder to replicate in Animate, such as having multiple textures in a single scene (it’s a general rule to keep things simpler and fluid, but Animate would start to massively slow down or even explode if I drew a grassy field instead of making it outside the app and then import it into the software.), and the brush capability in Photoshop is widely superior to the library offered in Animate (it’s hard to work with hair/fur in Animate like how it can be with Photoshop without issues popping up or using a loophole.) I’ve found that animation on Photoshop can be approached in two ways, being Frame Animation, and Timeline Animation. Frame Animation was what gave me ill impression from my first attempt at animation on Photoshop, where it was copied over layers being toggled for visibility. It was painstakingly tedious to go through animating that way since there wasn’t really a way to use onion skinning aside from toggling layers with opacity. The other method I tried was through a timeline animation feature that Photoshop has. I looked through some videos on YouTube and this seems to be the one that most people used animating on photoshop. It’s a little bit better (I can at least onion skin there) but I have to keep readjusting frames to specific lengths (adding a new frame will start as spanning the entire timeline and you’d have to scale it down to the length of the actual frame you want to animate with), which makes the process actually longer than what would be in Animate, at least how I’ve figure out to animate with it.
Comparison between animating in Photoshop with animating in Animate
These are some brief examples of animating a character I had done in both programs. It took me significantly less time grasping and animating in Animate than mulling over rearranging frames in Photoshop. Animate is just more streamlined compared to the latter.
Final Verdict? Photoshop may not be the best route for animating bigger projects…
For this project, I’m going to need to focus on animation for the brunt of the production process, but not in a way that I have to keep adjusting settings just to get 3 frames situated properly (there’s apparently an extension plug in called “animdessin2” that ameliorates this a bit, but when I looked it up, it was supplied from a random GitHub platform. I don’t think GitHub is malicious or anything, but I’d rather not take the risk of downloads off the internet that aren’t readily available/visible on a recognizable website.) That’d just take too much time that I wouldn’t reliably have. Photoshop has the fluidity and a variable brush content that I’d be looking for, but it’s functionality with animating it so painstakingly clunky, it might take me longer to animate something in photoshop than I would in Animate, which is quite the deal breaker for me. If I had unlimited time, perhaps I’d utilize Photoshop for more animation. Apparently it’s the closest to the traditional on paper style of cel animation, but unfortunately I don’t think it’d be a long-term option for me to rely on working with in the timeframe I have to deliver this project. Photoshop offers some liberties with the brush library, but I don’t think it would be the best program alone to carry the majority of my animating for the project, at least not for 5 whole minutes (that would take way too much time based on how Photoshop’s animation properties are set up). I at least know now that I have Animate as a solid back up, but I’ll still be on the lookout for other potential applications to experiment with for animation. Either that, or I may need to get more accustomed to drawing with my arm instead of my wrist, or just get out of the habit of drawing small…