#sel.tutorial

[keonhi]

a (hopefully adequate) tutorial on how I made these animations

some background/context info: I wanted to create an animation that showcased recognizable choreography, stage outfits I liked, and featured each member once. this did make the process of choosing which fancams to use a bit more difficult and involved, but I think it turned out for the better in the end! 

what you will need to create this animation:

photoshop 

some knowledge of working with frames

a video containing the clip you want to animate (e.g., fancams for choreo)

a lot of patience

to make these, you can essentially break it down into parts: 

choose & download your videos/fancams

pick which segment of the video/choreo you want to animate

take screenshots of frames of the clip

upload the screenshots into photoshop, resize them how you want them to fit in your canvas, create frame animation

for each frame, draw in what you want to animate

save as a gif. done!

some advice regarding each step:

1. choose & download your videos/fancams. I picked fancams based on a couple things: the angle of the video and the stage outfits. if you want your animation to be straight on, then you’re going to want to pick a fancam that is the same. I really liked these outfits, but the angle was wrong, so I didn’t end up using that one. to download from youtube, I use 4K video downloader. if for some reason you really don’t want to download the video you can go frame-by-frame on youtube by using the comma and period key (american keyboard)

2. pick which segment of the video/choreo you want to animate. I split the choreo for the second chorus of to be or not to be into six parts, one per oneus member. you can pick whichever kind of clip you like, but try to keep it short if you can (longer clip means more frames you have to draw, and since I was drawing all of this on my laptop’s trackpad, I wanted to keep it concise). 

3. take screenshots of frames of the clip. go through the video you downloaded and take screenshots during the clip you want to animate. you might want to screenshot your whole screen instead of a section, so that the subjects in the video are in the same place in each of your images. you probably won’t want to take a screenshot of every frame — you want to find a good balance between clearly showing the content and keeping the number of frames relatively low so you don’t go crazy when drawing. the frame delay is also something to think about: if you screenshot every frame, the gif will run very smoothly and you can keep the frame delay low. however, if you use every other or every third frame, you’ll have to increase the frame delay. if you don’t have enough frames, the animation won’t run smoothly no matter what frame delay you use. 

if you wanted, you could import video frames to layers into photoshop and limit the number of frames instead of taking screenshots: 

however, I decided to manually take the screenshots because that way I could control exactly which frames I was including. this was important for animations showing choreo, because I wanted to clearly show the key movements and didn’t want to risk missing a frame that was important. 

4. upload the screenshots into photoshop, resize them how you want them to fit in your canvas, create frame animation. if you do take screenshots and upload them, then you’ll want to do that through file > scripts > load files into stack. then browse and choose your screenshots. this way you get all your frames as layers. at this point you can resize them to fit on your canvas the way you like (do it for all of them together so that they’re the same size). you’ll have to create a frame animation (under the timeline option at the bottom of your workspace): 

you’ll then get one frame with all the layers visible. you want to have the same number of frames and layers, one frame per layer, so add in new frames and for each, make a different layer visible (in order). if you were to save it as a gif at this point it would look similar to if you just skipped the screenshots and used import > video frames to layers. 

5. for each frame, draw in what you want to animate. this is the part that takes a long time. for my animations, on a blank new layer above the screenshot, I outlined each member and their clothes in every frame. 

On another new layer (underneath the outline layer) I colored in the clothing of the member I wanted to highlight. I picked the colors using the eyedropper tool. I ended up having three layers per frame: the outline, the colors for the clothing, and the reference screenshot (not visible). I also added in a black background layer underneath all the other layers and made that visible for every frame. once you draw the outline and color in the clothes for every frame, you’re pretty much done! it may help to group your layers (or at least name them something useful, which I clearly did not do). 

6. save as a gif. done! now that you have every frame drawn and colored the way you like, you can make any final changes you want, the frame delay, placement within the canvas, etc. then file > export > save for web (command + option + shift + s on a mac). preview your gif to make sure it looks the way you want, and save it! then repeat for each clip you want to animate :)

if you have any questions or a better way to do any of this please do let me know! i hope that this was helpful and have fun animating~