Animating on Photoshop

Today during our session we were introduced to the ins and outs of animating on Photoshop. We learned how to use onion skins, layers, frame rates and how to export the file afterwards. I have never tried animating in Photoshop before so it was a pretty new thing for me. Although with my experience with Flash it seemed kind of similar, maybe more difficult and time consuming but the principals were the same. The differences that seemed most striking to me were that it is frustrating to animate on Photoshop unless you have been shown multiple times how to. You have to look for certain tools or actions in the menu bars (like for instance onion skins) whereas on Flash you can just point and click- everything is there on the screen. And what frustrated me the most was the fact that if you want something to stay the same for a few frames, you have to copy and paste it in every single frame, whereas in Flash you just press F6 and the new frame obtains the same content. And working with frames is impossible- deleting a frame, swapping, or inserting more frames without having to re-draw the rest of them… Well I did not come across these options. But don't get me wrong, animating on Photoshop provides a lot of good features- variety of brushes, blending options, etc. those can help produce a really good result and it is more efficient then drawing by hand. Well you can judge for yourselves-

The first one wast an attempt of getting used to animating on Ps. Basic pendulum, squash and stretch kind of principal. And the rope situation… well I don't even… eh.

The second one was a task we had to do- animate the four elements- fire, wind, earth and water and try to plan out our process before hand-making idea notes or sketches. Like this-

This was a third attempt to come up with an idea. And as I probably mentioned in previous posts- ideas do not come easy to me!!! We were told to just write down all the random words or ideas that come to us and work on the ones that we like, creating sort of an idea tree. To me, this was probably the most useful thing we learned today…

To sum up- Photoshop has some great advantages, but comparing to Flash it's unnecessarily difficult and a bit primitive as an animation programme. Well at least, now I know how to work on both, just in case.