Create A Comic Book Style Animation

Nov 4th in Workflow by Lyndon Alvarez

There are many ways to make yourself look cool like rescuing babies, planting trees, or even hiring someone with consistently bad breath to hang out with you so you become the social favorite by comparison... it does work. But I think the comic book super hero method ain't too bad either and so today you'll learn some helpful workflow tips integrating Photoshop along with how to take your footage and give it that comic book style.

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Author: Lyndon Alvarez

I'm a freelance graphic designer who works at a local production studio in Tulsa, OK. I have a strong passion for understanding the art of creating movies. If I'm not working on a paid project I'm creating something w/ audio or video. I enjoy movies with heart more than movies with a budget, but both together are definitely nice. Simple enough... i hope :)

Preview

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File size 2.5MB

Tutorial

Download Tutorial .flv

File size 265MB


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User Comments

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    jan November 4th

    looks great!

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    Xinou November 4th

    great thnx ^^

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    A.D.K. November 4th

    Thanks for the effect from this tutorial. I’ll try it as soon as I can.

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  4. good input

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    paul November 4th

    niceeeeee – love it

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    Fernando November 4th

    That a pretty cool tutorial!! Thanks and congratz

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    Konrad November 4th

    Really, really nice.

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    Steven November 4th

    Nice tutorial !!!
    U can upload the preset of your comikBook effect for Photoshop ???

    THX

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    Abojung November 4th

    good one. aetuts is doing great recently..loving it…

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    Lyndon November 4th

    Thank you all for your comments, I’m glad you all like the tutorial so far :)

    @ Steven, there is not a comic book preset for photoshop on the site but i’m sure i can figure out how to upload a preset if you wish. i will say its a lot easier to do it yourself in the sense that you’ll be able to create an effect that matches your shot, given that under different circumstances footage varies from shot to shot. Just drop your email homie.

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      Steven November 5th

      OK good
      Thanks for all

      amys94fr@gmail.com

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    Raven November 4th

    A couple of things. As was noted by Lyndon….CS4 has a built-in cartoon effect plugin. It is very easy to use and is very versatile. Red Giant also has a plugin called ToonIt. Also very easy to use and very versatile. However, it costs about $300 to upgrade to AECS4 and $399 to purchase ToonIt. So he shows a way to do this without either one of those….of course, you’ll need photoshop…which if you don’t have it…will cost you about $300 for CS3 and $600 for CS4. I had to kinda laugh at that.

    At any rate, very good PS training here. Good technique to giving any photograph a cartoon effect. However, not only do you not need CS4 or ToonIt to do this tutorial….you don’t even need After Effects. As far as I know, most decent video editing packages (FCP, Premiere, Avid, Vegas) all let you export image sequences. With the masking and text tools available in all these packages you can do pretty much everything that was done in AE. It might be slightly easier to do with AE…but then again it was be MUCH easier with ToonIt or CS4…and all for the same price as PS would cost you.

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      Lyndon November 4th

      I understand what you’re saying, but the reason I worded it like that was because I had myself in mind. Before i purchased AE i kept in mind what it was I needed to be successful w/ making short films. There is editing video and audio, making dvd’s, designing dvd covers, tweaking stills, etc. So if you’re like me, then you hit up the student discount and bought the adobe bundle for around $500 (which is considerably less than purchasing photoshop and ae as stand alone apps, minus everything else that came w/ the bundle).

      So in a nut shell, if you’ve got the software to do it but lack the extra cash for an upgrade to CS4 or a 3rd party plug-in… then hey, this tutorial might be for you :)

      Thanks for the clarification Raven, I tend to get my words in a mix at times.

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    John Dickinson November 4th

    A stylish look indeed. Keep in mind that the entire PNG sequence preparation, Action recording and batch processing step is not necessary if you use Photoshop Extended. Simply import the Quicktime directly into Photoshop (convert the layer to as Smart Object) and apply all of the filters directly to the movie. Check out http://www.motionworks.com.au for tutorials on using Photoshop Extended with video.

    Best wishes, John Dickinson.

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      Lyndon November 4th

      Awesome, I’ll definitely make the switch. Funny thing is i watched one of your tuts, boxing one w/ photoshop im sure, and didn’t connect the dots :)

      Thanks for the input, you’re a great teacher.

      -Lyndon Alvarez

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      geoff brown November 5th

      A great suggestion! 2 great tutorials with a healthy symbiotic relationship.

      Thanks for all the help guys!

      -geoff brown

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      Modisana November 5th

      Nice to see that this is one of the sites you visit as well Mr Dickinson. I love your tutorials and have learned quiet a lot from them.

      Im just a fan saying wassup :-)

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    Raven November 4th

    So….according to John Dickinson this entire tutorial should really be on psd.tutsplus.com.

    I think this truly a first…..a NON-AE tutorial….on aetuts.com.

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    pell November 4th

    hey lyndon!
    awesome tutorial! thank you so much for explaning so well and detailed. I think, I learned a lot … :)

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      Lyndon November 4th

      No problem man, I’m glad you enjoyed it :)

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    luantran November 5th

    Wow, Video tutorial free. Thank AEtuts.com, thank Lyndon Alvarez
    Tuts nice

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    Veli November 5th

    awesome tutorial, I will try this for my next project. thanx

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    Creative Media Films November 5th

    Great Job….This was the BEST EVER!!! THANK YOU!!

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    CaddieCate November 5th

    jus curious, bt are u related 2 Llyod aLvarez?

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    jink November 5th

    hey are you related to lloyd?

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    tomson November 5th

    Nice !!!

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    Falsh November 5th

    awesome tutorial !

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    Lampião Rei November 5th

    Pretty original!
    Thanks from Brazil.

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    Lyndon November 5th

    Cool, glad you all like it and no I’m not related to llyod… although that might be pretty cool :)

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    Creative Media Films November 5th

    A Lyndon ,

    Let me ask you this how much footage would you suggest to use? Should i use clips or could I do that with 10min of film? Thankz and by the way very NICE!!

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    Ben November 6th

    Wow, I figured out how to do that in the 5 seconds after I watched the preview. I think I am way better then I ever thought I was.

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    Lyndon November 6th

    My reccomendation is that you use clips. If you have simular shots as far as lighting goes then you can work on one particular image then batch process that effect to a series of images. Just create a folder w/ diff. stills, all similar shots, and batch process the effect to the bunch.

    Open the folder and browse through the images to figure out whats going to work for you. That would and will be my approach when working on a project. I hope that helps you a little and thx, glad you like it.

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    DinxDesign November 7th

    Looks awesome, going to try It soon thnx.

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    rikrdo November 10th

    great tutorial
    i actually apply it to my own footage and it came out very well thanks for sharing this.

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    Veli November 10th

    I just tried this tutorial and it worked out great. I dont have CS4, so I think this is a very cool way of giving a cartoon effect to your video in CS3.
    Thanks again!

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      Lyndon November 10th

      Thanks man, not a problem. I will say that i own a copy of cs4 and have used toon it which are both much faster but, in my opinion, lack in overall control for the final result (toon it is nice though, a cool plug-in to have w/ a bundle). Glad you could put it to use.

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    Thomas November 11th

    Nice tutorial.. I have been using the standard plugins for after effects for some time, but didn’t like the result, at all..

    Thansk

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    vivek November 13th

    cool tutorials.the size of tutorials are big.

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    BrianF November 13th

    This is a really good tutorial. I find it very helpful for somebody trying to create a comic. My class just read the comic book story “Persepolis.” It is not that great to me but some people in my class liked it. It is a deep story in a sense that you see the main character change throughout the story through the revolution and everything.

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    Lyndon November 13th

    Glad to see people still commenting on this tut. All it needs now is billy :)

    Thank you everyone.

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    Dan November 30th

    hay dude Awesome tut am having a problem i copied exactly what you said in this tut and the batch process starts sweet but after the 25th Frame of my png sequence it Errors out with Error: The object “layer “Layer 0 copy 2″” is not currently available. but its strange how it does it after 25th frame every time
    can anyone help me with this problem thanks.

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    ignitionlab December 9th

    Like the style of the final piece. Also if you dont want to go through the png process you can always render out from AE using the .flm format and then do the photoshop work.

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    Alp December 18th

    Hey Lyndon, that was very useful and thank you sharing your abilities with us. I liked it and I promise to use this style in my projects. And also I will say ” This is from Lyndon!” :D Many thanks again…

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    Lyndon December 30th

    Thx you all ;)

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