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Creating Cell Animation in Photoshop

Even though there are many animation applications available, none will give you the control over your individual frame look like Photoshop can. I am not suggesting that you give up your 3D rendering application, AfterEffects, or Premiere, what I am saying is that for some purposes, creating cell animation using Photoshop may be the best option.

I usually find myself turning to Photoshop when I want a particular effect in part of my entire animation that I am not able to produce easily in another application. For example, I am working on a very large project now and needed an animation of rapidly changing binary numbers to use as a texture map. But, things were not quite that simple. I also wanted several layers of this animation at various different motion blurs and overlapping transparency.

Cell animation requires detailed attention and record keeping for complex projects, so I started out by roughing out the layout of the screen on paper and figuring out the minimum number of frames I needed to get the required effect.

The first action I need to take was to create the text. In order to keep the aliased look of computer type and to control the line length, I used SimpleText to type my lines of binary numbers. I could play with the window width to experiment with different line wrap options. When things were looking the way I wanted, I took a screenshot (Macs: commad-shift-3 - PCs need a separate utility). To generate the text moving, I cut the first line of text and pasted below the last line of text. Then I took another screenshot. I continued until the last line of the original text was in the first position. I had a complete loop.

Once in Photoshop, the real work began.

1. Open the screenshots (I had six). You will have to open them from within Photoshop, or drag them over the Photoshop icon.

2. Use the crop tool to crop the images so that only the text shows.

3. Create a new, 640 x 480 document with a black background. Copy each of the text frames to this new document. The frames will show up on different layers.

3. Go to the first frame layer. Select the MagicWand tool and uncheck the Anti-alias and contiguous boxes. Click in the white area around the text. Hit the delete key to remove the white. You will be left with black text on a transparent background. I changed the color of the text to white by simply inverting the layer. I set the layer transparency to 50%. Repeat this for each layer.

4. In order to keep things organized, you will need to rename each layer. Double click the layer that contains your first frame. Rename it "frame01". Rename the second frame layer "frame02" and so on. Save your document before you go any further (name it "framecomp.psd"). You will want to save every time you make a major change.

5. Now, arrange the layers so that they are on top on one another. The layers should be aligned so that the numbers do not appear to "jump" too much from frame to frame (unless, of course, you want them to:).

6. Save.

7. Now, it's time to duplicate this file. Go to the IMAGE menu and choose DUPLICATE. Give the new file the name frame002.psd and click the OK button. Create one duplicate for each frame (I had frame001-006). Save each file. Then, resave the first file as frame001.psd. Keep the files open.

8. Go to the first file again. Hide all layers except the frame01 layer. Save the file. Now we need to convert this file to the PICT format. Flatten the image (LAYERS > Flatten). Choose FILE > Save as… Create new folder, named "frames", and save the file as a PICT (32 bit, no compression). Repeat this process for each file, hiding all layers except for the one that you want to be visible in that frame.

9. When you are done, you will have a list of PICTs in your folder. You can use a utility like PICTStoMovie or Graphic Converter to create a QuickTime movie from these files. Both of these utilities can be found on the WWW. Both can create movies from hundreds of stills as long as there is a number in the filename.

To use PICTStoMovie: Open the application, find your folder of items. Select the first item in the list.

Click the Open button. Set the number of the first frame, the number of the second frame, and the steps between frames.

Set your compression options. I would suggest that you use no compression.

I set my fps (frames per second) to 30 since that is what my final output needed. I kept the compression to None since I will be using this clip over and over again in different combinations. I usually do not use compression until the final output (keeps experimentation options open, too).

Here is an animated gif version of the output from this tutorial.