Procreate Dreams beginner tips – Danni Fisher-Shin shares her animation insights

Since I’m a cel animator primarily, definitely the Draw & Paint Mode to hand-draw my frames - but I often use it in tandem with the keyframe functions to lighten the workload.
It’s similar to cel animating in a program like Photoshop, in terms of it being a very natural interface with lots of amazing brushes but cuts out the middleman of having to export my cel animation to another program (usually After Effects) to add camera moves and any other keyframes. I love being able to super simply use both keyframe and frame by frame animation in a way that feels much more natural and streamlined.

I think creating a simple cel animation, grouping that, and keyframing that group is a great way to get a feel for multiple functions you’ll find useful in Procreate Dreams. So, any sort of sprite, like a character walking, a butterfly flapping its wings, etc that you can then move around with keyframes is a great starter to get a feel for these tools.

I love using the grouping function to make easy cel animated loops for further keyframed animation. Grouping a few hand-drawn frames and duplicating the loop, then adding keyframes on the grouped animation over a longer span of time creates the illusion that the entire longer keyframed animation was hand-drawn.

If you already use Procreate, it’s pretty much the same at its core, which is lovely. Personally, I love that we’re now able to draw outside of the canvas, which is a big asset for me. The Smoothing setting in brushes is useful as well for keeping lines smooth and cohesive over numerous frames when cel animating.

It’s my opinion that practicing the basic animation principle exercises (like ball bounce and slide, and box falling), are always useful no matter the program being used to animate.
However, I think exercises that combine frame by frame and keyframing and grouping would be my personal recommendation for learning with Procreate Dreams; I recently did a demo of this on a Skillshare livestream where we created a cel animated loop of a bee, a depth-scrolling background from one cel animated flower we duplicated and keyframed, and then used the Performing feature to make our bee loop fly through our scrolling environment. Something utilising the basics of the app in that vein to get the feel for each capability is definitely useful.
I also have a full-length Skillshare class utilising all of these principles and tools specifically for animators learning to use Procreate Dreams, so check that out for a more in-depth answer to this question!

My go-to process in Procreate Dreams is to create any background or layers I need in Draw & Paint Mode, then add any camera move keyframes with the keyframing feature - I also use Draw & Paint mode extensively to create frame-by-frame animations, and then keyframe those within the environment I’ve created.
I use the Grouping capability for that, so my most-used functions are definitely Draw & Paint Mode, Keyframing and Grouping. Performing can also be incredibly useful for creating natural-looking animation over longer spans of time without having to hand-keyframe every movement!

Procreate Dreams is a bit like a mashup of a desktop cel animation program and a keyframe animation app like After Effects; so it’s combining a lot of basic principles of both.
My essentials are using Procreate Dreams' Draw & Paint Mode to create frame by frame animation and any background layers, using the keyframe function to add extra animation on top and any camera moves, and using the Grouping feature to essentially 'precomp' things I’ve already animated or want to keyframe together, for ease and efficiency. 

As a cel animator, I find storyboarding very important and tend to pipeline mine directly into preliminary keyframes for my animations. I do this in Procreate Dreams, pacing out my storyboards on the timeline to create a simple animatic, which I adjust basic timing on and then add more frames or animate directly from there with those moments as my core keyframes to build on.
My most effective way of creating storyboards is thinking of each moment or beat I want to hit in the piece, then using them as a rough layout to figure out what looks best compositionally and what will punch up these moments in animation. 

Matching the movement of the camera in live-action footage is always an inherent challenge, so if you’re just starting, working with a locked-off camera is a great way to take a lot of the work out of it.
If you’re a little more advanced, I personally love using wild camera moves to add intense, depth-filled animations that would be harder to map out without the live-action camera in play; just make sure you have good points of reference to track to in the footage, like markers on the ground or specific small things in the environment to track to, so you can more easily integrate your animation in a convincing way.
Otherwise, just have fun and play around with it! Even without intense tracking, animation over live action can be incredibly fun and stylized in ways that you wouldn’t normally think of with just one or the other as a medium.