Producing a simple animation sequence

Hello students, welcome to Kwickprep. Can you make a real animated video in just a few minutes, without drawing forty eight pictures? Yes, you can. Today we will build a simple animation sequence in Synfig Studio, from a blank canvas to a finished movie file.

First, a new term. An animation sequence is a set of frames that play in a fixed order. It shows one small action or story. Every sequence has a start time, an end time and a frame rate. Our example will be a ball that rolls across the ground and then bounces.

Here is the full plan in five steps. First, set the canvas size and the end time. Second, draw the objects. Third, turn on animation mode and set waypoints at different times. Fourth, preview the animation and fix mistakes. Fifth, save the file and render it into a movie.

Open Synfig Studio and create a new file. In the canvas properties, you set three things. Image size is the width and height in pixels, like four eighty by two seventy. End time is the length of the movie, like five seconds. Frame rate is the number of frames per second, and twenty four is a common choice.

Now draw what you need, while animation mode is still off. Use the rectangle tool to draw a green strip of ground. Use the circle tool to draw a ball above the left end of the ground. Choose the fill colour in the toolbox before drawing. Each shape you draw becomes its own layer in the layers panel.

Why did we keep animation mode off while drawing? With the mode off, the drawing stays the same for the whole movie. With the mode on, every change is saved at the current moment only. So if you draw with the mode on, you may create extra waypoints by mistake.

Before clicking, plan the motion in a small table. At zero seconds, the ball is at the left, on the ground. At two seconds, it has rolled to the middle. At three seconds, it has bounced high up. At four seconds, it has landed back on the ground.

Now follow the plan in Synfig. Turn animation mode on, and the canvas gets a red border. Move the time slider to two seconds, and drag the ball to the middle of the ground. Move to three seconds, and drag the ball straight up. Move to four seconds, and drag it back down to the ground. Waypoints now appear at each of those times.

Look at what Synfig did. Small waypoint marks now appear in the timetrack panel. All the frames between the waypoints are tweened, that is, calculated by the software. For the first roll alone, that is forty eight frames. And you made only four moves with the mouse.

Next, always preview your work. Press the play button below the canvas to watch the sequence. You can also drag the time slider slowly to check any single moment. If the ball is in the wrong spot, go to that time and drag it again. If a waypoint is wrong, right click it in the timetrack panel and remove it.

Pause and predict. Suppose you set waypoints only at zero and two seconds, and the end time is five seconds. What does the ball do from two to five seconds? It simply stays still. After the last waypoint, the value does not change, so the ball waits there till the end.

Last, save and render. Saving with File, Save As keeps an editable project file ending in .sifz. Rendering with File, Render turns the project into a video or a set of images that anyone can play. In the render window, choose the file name, the target type and the quality. Then click Render and wait for it to finish.

Here are common render targets. The gif target makes one animated image, good for web pages and chats. The png target makes one image for every frame, useful for editing later. The ffmpeg target makes a video file, like mp4 or avi, good for sharing. The exact list can differ a little with the Synfig version.

Let us revise what we learned today. The plan is canvas, draw, animate, preview and render. Draw your objects with animation mode off. Set waypoints with animation mode on, at different times. After the last waypoint, the object simply stays still. Save the .sifz file to edit later, and render to share your movie.