After Effects CS5 303: More Cartoon Animation Basics

31 videos | 137 minutes | by Richard Lainhart

Learn to use Adobe After Effects' Puppet Pin tool to animate characters in the "squash-and-stretch" style seen in the classic cartoons of the 30s & 50s in More Cartoon Animation Basics by After Effects expert Richard Lainhart...

The rubbery, stretchy, squashy characters seen in the popular Warner Brothers or Hanna-Barbera cartoons of the 1930s through the 1950s required intensive hand labor to animate. But with Adobe After Effects' Puppet Pin tool, that kind of organic animation is easy and even fun to achieve. In this new tutorial series by After Effects expert Richard Lainhart, you'll learn all the secrets of the Puppet Pin tool and how to create your own organic animated characters.

Richard starts out by showing you how to import Adobe Illustrator vector artwork to begin your animation project. He then shows you the details of "rigging" your character with the Puppet Pin tool, and how to "spot" your audio track to help make animating your character to music more efficient.

In the next section, you'll learn the details of Puppet Pin's unique realtime animation features, and how to make your characters dance along to your soundtrack. After that, Richard walks you through some of the history behind the "walk cycle" and how to create your own walk cycles using Puppet Pin.

Finally, you'll learn how to automatically create Puppet Pin character animation by linking your character's motion to the dynamics of your soundtrack, and how to use simple Expressions, one of the deeper features in After Effects, to refine your characters' automated animation. No computer programming skill required!

So sit back and learn how to animate—in cartoon classics style—with Richard Lainhart in this “classic” tutorial: More Cartoon Animation Basics!