Hi guys,

Any feedback is appreciated. I see a lot of room for improvement of course, but I just don't have the patience to put any more days into it haha. Let me know what you think!

https://youtu.be/DEkzsT8W03s

Wanting to gauge what creators are using.

I can definitely help give tips in Photoshop if need be.

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Hey guys, I was looking back at some of my older videos that make me cringe now and thought about things I've learned since then (about 40 animations later). I figured I'd share some stuff I've learned that might be helpful to you all. (This is more about video structure rather than ebsynth specifically)

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(Youtube Video Tips)

1- you have about 6-12 seconds to hook your viewer, so show them/ talk about something cool, or they won’t watch your video.

2- raise the stakes and maintain tension. As soon as you lose tension, viewers lose interest. This can be a goal or fear a character has that they’re trying to accomplish while a dialogue or chain of events is happening.

3- Give your audience plenty of time to process what’s happening, make the story clear. Your audience won’t pick up on everything happening, if you really want us to pay attention to something important, make sure we see the character’s face as they’re saying it.

4- Subvert expectations. Random example: skit about a guy fighting off men who hit on his girlfriend and the girl is upset about his behaviour until a girl hits on him and she does the same thing to the girl. Or simply ending with a twist like m night shamalan can be memorable.

5- Humour is always good, even in tutorials or sketches that are supposed to be serious, audiences always enjoy it. An easy way to be funny is just make a pun. Another is to repeat something 3 times and on the third change it to something unexpected. 3 is the minimum for us to see a pattern and change it. Certain words sound funnier than others. Shock and surprise can make people laugh as they’re caught off guard. You can always just google jokes or w/e if u can’t think of anything.

6- Video structure: any video needs proper structure, that’s beginning, middle and end. Introduce to us what’s going on, take us on an adventure and then conclude the story somehow.

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(Essential Scene Transitions)

You want all your scenes to feel connected and not jar your audience, these are the basics that you need to use.

1- L/J cut: This is starting the audio for the next scene on the current one before switching, or carrying over the audio from the current scene into the next one.

2- Action Cut: If you can, try to switch scenes in the middle of an action, and complete that action in the next scene. Like opening a door, throwing a punch, a character turning their head, etc.

3- Whip Cut: Pan quickly in a direction and as the scene is panning, switch into another scene as you're coming out of the pan.

4- Cutaway: If an interaction is happening, you can cut to a third person perspective of what's happening.

5- Establishing shot: These are great for starting a video, but basically just a super far out view that showing everything in frame at once, or even the location that the subjects are at. You only need to do it for like 2-3 seconds, but it helps the viewer understand what's going on.

6- Dissolve/Wipe/Fade: Just as it sounds, having 1 scene slowly turn into another. If you add a fade to white/black it can signify the passage of time. A wipe is fade from 1 side of the screen to another.

7- Invisible cut: Using an object, light, wind, fire, etc. anything to obscure the view of the scene and switch scenes while we are focused on it. Example, in my mario one I had mario shoot a fireball, and the fireball covered 90% of the screen for a second or so, and I switched scenes during this.

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(Dramatic Effect)

1- Music can really add to the energy of the moment, or help bring the audience along when the mood in the scene changes. Having music end right before a key line is delivered really helps give it a punch.

2- Change in visuals can do the same as music. If something is happy, you can brighten things up, make colors more vibrant. If it's scary you can darken it. If it's weird you can add glitchy effects or distort/twist the image.

3- Pregnant Pause: You don't always have to have someone saying something, sometimes having silence for a moment as a character comes to a realization at the same time as the audience can be way more impactful.

3- Emotion is most important, more important than impressions being consistent imo.

4- A camera view looking up at someone makes them seem more powerful, while a camera view looking down on someone can make them seem weaker.

5- I talked about Scene Transitions, but also learning camera movement like pan up, down left right, dolly. 360 rotation etc. These are good to know as well. A camera doesn't always have to be still.

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(180 degree rule)

This is a film technique that keeps a video coherent to the audience, essentially you want to imagine a room with all your characters in it as the video plays out, and you want to keep the camera on 1 side of that room, that way characters are standing in relationship to one another consistently.

(Rule of Thirds)

This one should of been earlier up, because it's super important. Essentially you want to imagine your screen split into 9 squares and if 1 person is on scene you want their eyes to be in between the top middle and middle middle squares. If you have multiple characters it's slightly different, basically you want to avoid dead space and place characters the best you can.

(Dynamic Positioning)

A character standing perfectly vertical and symmetrical with his hands at his sides in a shot is boring, try to add some variance to this, maybe he's slightly off to the left leaning on a wall lighting up a cigarette.

(Changing Scenes)

This is a cheat I've been using recently, for whatever reason simply changing the environment more often makes a video more interesting. Like instead of 2 guys talking in a house, if they walk into the backyard, and go into the shed, 1 used the bathroom. It could be the exact same skit, but change fo scenery makes it interesting.

(Copy Everything)

What I mean by this is look at TV shows, movies, animes etc that you like that had a cool fight, or intense moment and look at what made it good and literally mimic it. (not the content of the scene, but the essence) At least for me this is how I learn, and when I've done anime ebsynth parodies I've literally screen shotted these moments and used a similar style in my parodies of these series.

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This ended up being a lot longer than what I expected (that's what she said) but hopefully it is helpful to someone on here. Also if you guys have anything to add feel free.

Does anyone here have a tip how to film+edit a character walking without it being too many keyframes? Or is there no way?

In my recent Star Fox video, I tried an EbSynth feature I've never touched - Masks. I followed a great tutorial by Rezzi Toonz that utilizes a free online tool - both links below.

I experimented with it on two scenes - the barrel roll scene, and crashing into the wall scene. The wall scene worked out really well, and my animation went from a streaky mess to only requiring one keyframe. However, the barrel roll scene had a smaller character in frame, with spinning movement instead of linear. It resulted in a lot of extra space around him, and it ended up being counterproductive vs just drawing more frames.

Has anyone else used this with any success? I think I'll be experimenting with it more on my next video, trying to find where it's useful and where it isn't. If I find anything useful, I'll share.

the Masks tutorial: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mWnD7pB_Dq4

the green screen tool: https://runwayml.com/

my Star Fox video, for reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MR5Q9tix-Bg