Frame by Frame Animation

This is a frame by frame animation I made using Adobe Animate.

It took about 30 minutes to make which was fairly tedious, however it was satisfying to see the frames all come together into a moving gif. To speed things up a bit, I animated half of the frames for the circle shape of the head, the copied and pasted them and reversed them in the timeline to make the animation loop. I also added colour to make the gif look more interesting.

To make the frame by frame animation easier I used the full stop and comma keys to go ahead/back frames easily, and converted all of the frames in the timeline to blank keyframes. I also turned on onion skin so I could see what was drawn in the previous frame and make sure everything was in place.

Adobe Animate - Timeline

The timeline in Adobe Animate is similar to any other timeline such as one in Premiere or After Effects, as it works in frames. However it can contain multiple layers of drawings and animations. This means that each layer can be dedicated to a different thing, such as one for a character, one for a background, one for an object and so on. Additionally, as well as working in frames it can contain tweens for things to move slowly without frame by frame animation. Similar to this, there are keyframes in each frame which represent what is going to happen in comparison to the previous frame. There are also different tools in the layer pane which can make a layer visible/invisible, show a layer as an outline, and lock/unlock layers. The timeline can contain drawings, symbols and audio.