Adobe Animate

Adobe Animate is a computer animation program that specializes in 2D animation. Animate is used for animating rough sketches, cartoons, vector graphics, and pretty much anything else that does not involve complex 3D modeling, texturing, and rigging to make characters and objects move.

I was first introduced to Adobe Animate in early 2014, which was when I started attending Exceptional Minds, although it was known as Adobe Flash at the time. I was taught to draw things in the program with straight lines that were bendable instead of using the pencil, pen, or brush tool, so that my creations could be outlined as smoothly as possible. One thing that is super helpful with Adobe Animate whenever creating animations is the use of multiple layers that can be locked, unlocked, and turned off, so that nothing gets affected in the foreground or background whenever a fluid animation is happening that may have different poses for however many frames. Another thing that is helpful is the use of the onion skin tool, for scrolling forward or back however many frames to see transitions in poses, which can help create middle transitional poses to make the overall animation sequence a lot more fluid.

Another cool thing I can do in Adobe Animate is to animate cutout animations. What is so amazing about cutout animations is that you don’t have to draw the animations yourself frame-by-frame, but rather grab images that already exist from the internet or whatever source, modify them in Photoshop, and tweak them in whatever way inside Animate to make them look like they are actually animating. For example, you can see in the Canine Airlines video that it is full of cutout animations. Towards the beginning, for the three basset hounds in the very back of the line, upon close inspection, some of their heads are replaced with other basset hound heads to create the impression that they are actually tilting their heads back. In fact, one of the basset hound heads was flipped completely horizontal in one of the frames to make it look like the dog was actually turning his head sideways to look at the plane pulling up to the gate.

Anyway, I am super grateful that I have been given the opportunity to learn Adobe Animate as well as take summer classes at Exceptional Minds to help gain proficiency.