2D Animation on the iPad with Clip Studio Paint Pro

This was originally NDA material for an ongoing project but the client switched directions (again) so this got scrapped. Luckily, I recorded a bunch of BTS for it for later Patreon usage and get to drop it early :)

A bit into my process on how I did this:

First, this is my first animation made 100% on Clip Studio Paint (CSP Pro). It's honestly a pretty exciting way to do things with 1 major setback that I wouldn't fully recommend to anyone:

CSP Pro (for iPad) only lets you work within 24 frames.

Yes you read that correctly. The ipad version of CSP Pro only lets you work within 24 frames. I used it anyway because I needed to work in new environments (at a cafe, at a friends house) so I set it to 6FPS which generates 4 seconds of animation (6 x 4 = 24). So what you're seeing here is an animation made at 6FPS.

I will be exporting these as separate frames and using Photoshop to finalize. I want the animation to be closer to 5 or 6 seconds so this was great for simply plotting out the animation.

Outside of that major setback, CSP is actually AMAZING for 2D animation. It allows you to work within animation folders and you can see "shells" or outlines of the last frame to work very easily. These shells appear in green and blue, one for the frame before it and one for the frame after. This makes it REALLY easy to draw the in-between frames. CSP was literally built to animate versus Photoshop's timeline that is a lot less intuitive. If you skip to a time in an animation, it will automatically select the layer for you while Photoshop does not do this. In Photoshop, you have to go to the time of the frame AND select the frame in order to edit what you see on the canvas. Which if you saw my previous video about how I animate in photoshop, made me very frustrated and lead to a huge loss in time.

I may test the CSP EX version (for desktop) to experience all of the benefits of the program without the 24 frame restriction... and when I do, I shall screen record the entire process. 

For now, here's a sequence of animations I created for almost no reason and a timelapse of how it was made, exported from CSP Pro :) 

In the time lapse, you'll see I had a very rough draft of what each character was doing (skate, spin, take a selfie, take a step) but I wanted more dynamic movement.  At 1:10,  I went back and sketched over the original sketch of the girl spinning with a new more zoomed in view. This was mind blowing to me because having the original animation under the new drawing helped me out by taking out the guess work of where her limbs would be at that frame. I just had to focus on drawing it better and closer!  

The shells help a ton, and the key was creating blobs of movement and replaying the animation over and over... once the blobs felt right, I just went back in and re-drew things... even as many as 3x over. I'll probably take these animations and use them for a for-fun project in the near future... and to test out CSP EX because in theory, its an amazing program for 2D animation.

Here's more information on CSP Pro/EX animation