Animating a 2D Character within Live Action Video in Photoshop and Premiere Pro
This tutorial takes you through the process of creating traditional 2D animation in Photoshop to be applied over live-action video. Software required: Adobe Photoshop CC, Adobe Premiere Pro CC.
What you'll learn
This tutorial takes you through the process of creating traditional 2D animation in Photoshop to be applied over live-action video. We'll discuss the planning of live-action shots with animation in mind, video editing continuity, and creating video reference for our animation. Moving on to animation, we'll then create the key poses using rough animation to complete our full movement, then create our final line images for the poses. Next, we'll be coloring our animation, applying shadows and reflections to marry our character to the environment, and editing our animation back into our live action edit. By the end of this tutorial, you will have a more thorough understanding of how to create traditional animations digitally that work successfully within a live-action video background. Software required: Adobe Photoshop CC, Adobe Premiere Pro CC.
Table of contents
- Discussing 2D Animation in a Live Action Environment 4m
- Editing Our Source Video 9m
- The Importance of Video Reference 5m
- Editing Video Reference 11m
- Creating Our Animatic Key Poses 11m
- Completing Our Animatic Key Poses 8m
- Timing Rough Key Poses and Creating Actions 7m
- Completing the Timing of Our Rough Key Poses 11m
- Painting out an Element from Our Live Action Plate 10m
- Replacing Animatic Key Poses with Rough Animation Keys 8m
- Continuing the Rough Animation Key Poses 8m
- Finalizing the Rough Animation Key Poses 14m
- Creating Our Breakdown and in-between Drawings 9m
- Creating the Final Line Drawings 7m
- Coloring the Animation Frames 8m
- Adding Shadows, Reflections, and Exporting Our Animation 7m
About the author
Ron comes from a performance background with over 21 years of experience as a Character Animator. Starting in traditional 2D animation, Ron made the conversion to 3D along with the rest of the industry and has never looked back. He has worked in Feature Animation (Pagemaster, Swan Princess), Visual Effects Animation for Film (Van Helsing, Lemony Snicket, The Mist, Snakes On A Plane), and Videogame Animation (Robot Rising, Immortal City, City Of Heroes, Adam Blaster) and was Animation Supervisor ... more