Transcript
Hi everybody. My name is Lamont Wayne, but most of you probably know me by my internet user name Chaos Tune. This is the first in a few tutorial videos that I am going to make for the Go Animate tutorial site. What I am going to do is I’m going to open up a few of my old cartoons. Specifically for this we’re going to take a look at Swords One and we’re going to look at how did I do some of the things that I did.
Today what we’re going to go over is how I did the pan in the beginning of the cartoon. What it is is we’re going to go over how to create the illusion of depth in space. Some people refer to it as the parallax scrolling effect or atmospheric perspective. Really we’re going to show you how to create depth as you move your camera. But just to take a look at this, I’m sure everybody who saw Swords remembers this part. The part where it opens up and there’s the moon and then the clouds go down and you can see how the clouds look like they’re actually floating up instead of just staying stationary. But the moon is staying still and it pans right down into the opening shot.
Now how did I do that? Let’s open up the file here and let’s take a look here. Now this is the actual file and with a little bit of planning, you know, you can do this exact same thing in your videos. I know that this is the old pan effect, but the new camera would work exactly the same way in your animations going forward. What happens is this, the pan, goes down and it’s going to end, down here. The first thing that you need to plan in your movie is the path of the pan. Like the pan is going to start up here, and it’s going to end down here. So in your scene, make sure you set up where it’s going to start and how the elements are going to start up here and how the elements are going to be when they’re set up down here.
Now, what happens is that when this pan comes down, these clouds come up. But they’re not stationary. Like if this were to just come down, then everything would seem flat and actually the moon wouldn’t move because that would stay stuck there. All the clouds would be stuck here and it would just pan straight down. What I did was, and I’ll zoom in here, is that the clouds, as the pan goes down, the clouds move.
Now, with parallax, or the perception of depth, if you were to move a camera, actually, if you’ve ever seen a car drive by you if you see the car in the distance the car seems to be moving slowly. As the car comes closer to you it will seem to move faster as it zooms by you. Then as it goes away it will seem like it slows down. The things that are closer to you will move faster, or closer to the camera will move faster than things that are farther away.
With the clouds, the clouds move up as the pan goes down. So it makes the clouds look like they’re moving. But you can see how this cloud, it says how it moves 65 pixels. This little cloud moves 64. They’re moving at about the same rate. Now these big clouds that are behind it, since they’re farther away from the camera than these little clouds, they move slower. See how this big one, it only moves 36 pixels. This one moves 36, and this one moves 36. The clouds in the front, they move faster so they appear to be closer to the camera than these ones in the back.
Now with the moon, the moon seems to be stationary because the moon is thousands of miles away. So the moon will never seem to be moving in the sky if you walk around. The moon stays with the camera. How does that work? Well, the pan moves down 154 pixels. Well, so does the moon. The moon moves 155. When it rests behind the mountains here, I’m sure I adjusted it a bit within the camera the way that I wanted it to. When the pan and the moon are moving at the exact same rate, the moon moves with the pan so it doesn’t appear to move. It just seems stationary with the camera.
That’s how you do it. You move things, if you were to set this up in your own cartoon the things in the background, in the settings, the things that are closer to the camera will move faster across the field of vision than things that are farther away. And if you’re using a pan or something like that then just move the stationary items with the pan and they will come down.
Let me take a look at the chat. Well, I don’t see any questions so far. Does anybody have any questions about this technique? No questions. But if you do want to research this further, Etourist did write a blog about this and that blog is on the Go Animate web tutorial site for parallax scrolling backgrounds. He talks about it in depth on how to do it. But I hope that will help you a little bit in creating your videos for Go Animate. Good luck with creating your own presentations and have fun animating.
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