TABLE OF CONTENTS

TABLE OF CONTENTS 1

A little bit about me 2

Getting started 3

Pre-Production 3

Character Design 3

Storyboard 6

Time to get started 6

Basic Terms for story board 7

Animatic 9

Using Moho/ Anime Studio to create your animatic 9

Final Thoughts 12

Additional Resources 12 This book was written originally for the Smith Micro Blog however with the announcement of my newest course: Create an explainer video for your first paying client with Moho/ Anime Studio. I have decided to take the information from the blog and make it into an Ebook to give you a quick guide and get you some ideas of how to start planning out your animations.

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A little bit about me I started creating Explainer Videos in 2015 a year after I had picked up Anime Studio and started learning animation. You can find a few of the (public) explainer videos I have created and their respective dates of creation below: HydroTrax™ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LcpKO__PHuM (Feb 2015) AppTrax™ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IOPNnoej3wo (March 2015) JobTrax™ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=63c-9ptc4UQ (October 2015) Avalon™ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0tLwI0Ct_tA (July 2016) Along with explainer videos I have created courses for production studios, animations for the new IOS 10 Sticker App and my own personal animation projects

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Getting started So you’ve finally purchased your 2D animation software, it’s loaded up and you’re ready to start animating! Not so fast, there are several questions to consider before you begin. Here are a few:

● What are you going to animate? ● Who is going to be in the animation? ● Do you have a story line? Script? ● And most importantly, why are you creating this animation?

Pre-Production Time to go back to go back to one of the first steps in production, Pre-Production - this where all the planning takes place. So close the software and pull out a piece of paper and pencil. It’s important to answer the questions mentioned above or create your own and formulate a game plan ahead of time. Coming up with a solid plan will allow your animation to flow better and to keep your animation’s theme clear and concise.

Character Design So let’s start off with your character. Is your character going to be a human, animal, humanoid, monster? It helps to create a character your audience can emotionally connect with. For example: you decide that your character isn’t going to be an actual human, but making your animal or monster have human characteristics or even giving them a human-like name, will allow your audience to relate to them. Don’t know how to create your character? Not to worry! Learn how by checking out my course ‘Character Design Made Easy with Anime Studio Pro’ For this particular example, we went ahead and created a monster.

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Now it’s time to give our character some personality. So we are going to pick three personality traits to define our character.

1. Goofy 2. Curious 3. Adventurous

Now give your character a name: Blue This will help you immensely with your animation because now you know what your character will look and act like. Again, it’s important that your animation is believable and relatable. So now that we have our defining personalities, here is the finished product!

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For more tips and tricks on animation, check out the course: Animation MADE EASY with Anime Studio

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Storyboard Now that you have developed your character it is time to write a story for your character and plan your animation using storyboards. A storyboard is a sequence of drawings, typically with some direction and dialogue, representing the shots planned for your animation. For this example we’re creating a simple, short animation with only one character and with very little background animation, also there will be no dialogue. We will however, get some audio clips from Pug dogs making grunting/ howling noises. Think of your storyboard as the plan for your animation. You will use it to plan your key character poses, your camera, and the scene transitions. Even though it might feel like an extra step it is so important to get into the habit of planning your animations with storyboards. It really helps to keep everything organized and start to come up with your timing. Let’s take comics for example:They are one of the best representations of how a storyboard should look. The difference between the two is, a storyboard doesn’t need to be as detailed and your story board itself will be mapped out a little differently, you will have your scene, dialogue (if any), camera angles, and other details describing your animation and what is happening in the shot. When you create your storyboards you can decide how much detail you want to go into it, but remember, the more detail, the better idea you will have of what your finished product will look like.

Time to get started! First, let’s take our character ‘Blue’ and give him a really cool/ simple looping animation. Animation: We will have him (Blue) walk to the edge of a cliff, jump off, fall, hit the ground, pick himself up, and walk to the end of the cliff to jump again. Below is an example of how I would plan out my storyboard with my character ‘Blue’.

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Basic Terms for story board Shots/ Scenes - A series of un-edited frames. Think about going from one scene to another you are looking at one set of images and now another set of images. Possibly a different setting, angle, character etc. Camera angles - The placement of the camera in your animation. Is the camera close, far away, angled, etc. These are the most basic terms I will refer to. So in my animation I have: SCENE 1 One continuous shot - Camera Angle: Far away (long shot)

1 - walking - shot in his contact pose 2 - standing at the end of the cliff 3 - looking down 4 - crouching down - anticipating for the jump 5 - leaving the ground tongue dragging behind 6 - reaching the top of the arch in the jump 7 - Falling down towards ground opens mouth to scream 8 - Falling out of scene

If I were to continue on the next scene it would be something like this:

SCENE 2 One shot - Camera Angle: Really far away (long shot) - Character falling

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Animatic Now that you have developed your character and planned out your animation, it is time to add audio and create an animatic! What is an animatic? Simply put, an animatic is an "animated" storyboard used mostly to help you create a timing/rythm for your animation. Since you have already completed your storyboard it is now time to give it some life! One of the first things to consider after creating your storyboard is if your animation will include audio. Will it have dialogue, if so, who will be your voice over artist? Will you want music in the background, sound effects etc.? That can usually come later. It is good to have all of these recorded and ready to go. This will help you plan the timing of your animation. Note: The animatic will help you get an idea of how you want your animation's timing, obviously it won’t be perfect. The perfecting comes during the animation stage.

Using Moho/ Anime Studio to create your animatic The great thing about Moho is, it really can be used as an all in one animation tool during pre-production. Later you can take it into After Effects or Premiere or another preferred software and do the editing, compositing, and final renders for the post production. For our example with our character 'Blue', I gathered various sounds from YouTube of goofy dog noises, (breathing, howling etc.) and I will use those to help me plan out the timing of my animatic. First, let’s take all of the images from our storyboard and sound files and import them into Moho. Your Layers should look something like this more or less (see screenshot below).

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Here, I have all of my layers of images and sounds that I want to use.

1. I'll take the images (from top to bottom) and turn on my layer visibility for all of the layers.

2. As I go through each key pose I will turn off the first layer revealing the second, turn the second layer off revealing the third, and so on.

3. You will want to space the key poses according to the dialogue/sound that you have

created.

4. Now, I am going to take the sounds of the dog noises that I edited in Audacity (sound editing software) and place them according to the key poses that are being shown.

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*See example image below

Now that I have taken and placed all of my key poses and sounds I have a short animatic of the first scene of 'Blue' jumping. Next, I'll go through the key poses in my timeline and mark/block out each key pose, camera movement, etc. and give it a description. Doing this allows you to see what actions are happening when you go through and start animating your character and scene on your timeline. That’s it for creating an animatic! Here is what the animatic will look like in action: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YsGwfYBPnLA ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Bonus video: Finished Animation https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jIJ4v3E2sC4

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Final Thoughts

I hope you have enjoyed this example for Pre-Production. Honestly, Pre-production is something I can talk a lot on as it really is the most important stage and your entire animation will depend on how well you planned out this part in the production cycle. I will go into a lot more detail when I release my next course: Create an explainer video for your first paying client with Moho/ Anime Studio As always thank you so much for your support and checking out this Ebook. Because of you and your support I get to do what I love! Best regards, McCoy Buck

Additional Resources: Moho Pros - Facebook Group (Intermediate/ Advanced) Moho Pros Beginners Moho/ Anime Studio Tutorials Free Moho/ Anime Studio Courses Handy Drawing Tool Guide (free) Handy Rigging Tool Guide (free) Paid Moho/ Anime Studio Courses Understand and Apply Binding Techniques (Intermediate) Animation MADE EASY with Anime Studio Live Workshops LIVE Workshop - Animating Cool Dude

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