The creative brief for this project is to animate a line  and animate it any way that you want to. Part of the learning process is also coming up with ideas on  how and what to animate. So we're gonna keep it simple  because align is as as simple as it gets. So don't worry about not being good at drawing  or anything like that and animate it any way you want. I'm gonna animate it spinning in a circle. So it's just a very simple thing  that if you don't have your own idea,  you can just follow along with what I'm doing so  that you just get, you know, in the practice of animating  and putting pen to paper and actually doing the animation.

So grab a pencil or a pen and a post-it note stack  or the corner of a notebook will do just as fine too. We are, we're gonna create a little flip book  and it's okay if you don't know how to animate just yet. That's kinda the point of this exercise, is  to get a baseline to have something compared to at the end  of the course, you can see how far you've come  and how much you've learned. So we're gonna want at least 12 drawings so  that we can see the animation work. And I like to start kind of a few, uh, pages in so  that you have a little something to help  with the flipping motion. So, because I know I'm gonna do 12 drawings  and I want the line to spin around in 360 degrees,  all I have to do is just divide 360 by 12 drawings,  and that means each drawing needs to change by 30 degrees.

So let's get started. Now, if you don't have any pencil or paper around,  or if you would just prefer to use your computer,  you could actually use your web browser to animate  with free websites. I have a list of them in the PDF that's associated  with the downloads for this course. So if you would like to skip ahead in the types  of animation mediums we're gonna use, you could go ahead  and use that now as well. And keep in mind, now,  this animation medium then would be called 2D  digital animation. Whereas what we're gonna do with a post-it notes  and paper is 2D traditional animation.

In a future lesson, we will be using this  animation medium together. So don't worry about that,  we're gonna come back around to it. So for now, I'm gonna get started with the post-it notes  and 2D traditional animation. So, one trick to this is that I'm gonna use the corner here  because that'll give me more corners to  work on if I wanted  to try again if I mess up or something like that. So if you work in a corner,  it's actually better than working in the middle. It'll give you more room to work if you mess up.

So let's begin. So I'm going to go a few pages deep here,  and I'm gonna just draw a straight line  and I'm gonna draw a perpendicular to one of the edges so  that I know where I'm starting and where I'm going. So I'm just gonna draw a little line here. So I'm using a black pen so  that it's a little more easily seen. And one other trick is if you actually push down kind  of hard, you'll be able to see on in the next, uh, page  where you had marked so that you can, uh, know where  you drawing was, so it won't go too off center  and and wobbly. So let's go to the next page.

And I know I need to go 30 degrees,  so I'll do something like that and I'll draw one here,  and then I'll go to the next page and I'll draw another one,  and then I'll go to the next page and just continue on. And you don't have to stay with 12 drawings,  you can actually do more than that. So we're just gonna go until, you know,  I think we have enough and it looks good,  so you can already start to test it just even  after a few drawings to see  to make sure you're staying in the right place. So I'm going a little bit off, so I wanna make sure I stay  a little higher than where I'm going. So I'll do the next one. We'll Go straight up and down again.

So now we've gone 180 degrees. I'm just gonna do that a little bit harder  so I can see where it was. So, you know, animation, it takes some time  and it takes a lot of patience. So, you know, don't get too  frustrated if this takes some time. That's part of the enjoyment too. It's, it's a bit of a meditation here.

So now we just have, uh, 90 degrees more to go. And then the final drawing is back to the beginning  of just a straight up and down line. So let's test that out. So there is our first animation  of just a line spinning around. So it's that simple. And you don't need any kind of crazy  software to achieve this.

So now that we've completed our animation, we'll be able  to save this and compare it to what we do with  that same creative brief  after we've learned all of these animation principles. So it'll be really fun to see the progress you've made  by the end of the course, the different ways you think about  animation, when you approach a creative brief  that's very open-ended, like animate a line,  and the kinds of things and tools you're going to have  after taking this course. It's gonna help you be creative  and think of appealing ways to create motion. In the next lesson, let's get started with some  of the history behind animation,  where these principles come from  and who brought them into existence. I'll see you in the next class.