Using Symbols in Adobe Animate

Joey Korenman : Hey everybody. This is Joey and I am super excited to introduce a new tutorial creator here on school of motion. Taylor, John Peters is a motion designer who has worked for some of the biggest studios in the world, including giant ant. You may have heard that in this tutorial, Taylor is going to show you how he works in Adobe animate. And he'll start by introducing you to symbols, a powerful tool for creating traditional animation. Taylor is awesome, and you're going to learn a ton. So if you're ready to dive into a program that you may not be very familiar with, go download the project file at the link below and let's get started.
Music : [intro music]
Taylor Jon Peters : What's up, everybody let's get into this. First of all, I'm just going to show you a couple of demos, what symbols can be used for in flash. And then we can go into making symbols, and then I'm going to open up a project file that I have with a character. And we're going to start moving towards making a little bit of a rig for a person's head using frame selector option or frame picker rather. But first of all, let's just take a look. What these things do. I think a really good way to look at symbols in flash are just, just consider them like compositions in after effects. You can away from your main timeline and flash make sub comps that contain animation in them. And then from there, move around these parent comps and you can just layer a bunch of animation. You can loop things.
Taylor Jon Peters : You can, um, hide a bunch of different angles of objects and stuff and use frame picker and select those objects and not have to draw as much. And as much as I'm an advocate for forget about the software, learn the fundamentals, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. This, you know, sometimes you just don't want to have to like be like a pure traditionalist and like draw everything. This saves you time. And there's been times where I'll be like cleaning up someone's work. And they did these refs and they copy and pasted a bunch of things like say, you draw a ball or something. That's like really good on model. And like, you just, you killed it. And then you needed to move it across 80 frames, just like a linear movement across the screen. And you copy and pasted every single thing. Now, when you need to go clean that up, you're going to have to go clean that thing up 80 times.
Taylor Jon Peters : Whereas if you use a symbol, you can, as long as you're proactive with what you're doing, you can make sure that, you know, you're going to be using a duplicate object, start with a symbol, and then only have to clean up that thing once. And that's a super useful thing, but we're going to get into that more later. First of all, I'm just going to show you, um, some of, some of its features. So the first option under graphic, you have options to different looping options. You have loop play once in single frame. So I'll show you what the benefits of loop are. I'll just play these two lovely gifts. I mean, they're not gifts, but looping animations. I have a flag that loops and then I have a Bush that gets blown over and then comes back and loops. So, I mean, right off the bat, you can see that this would be useful if you were trying to populate an environment with a bunch of bushes.
Taylor Jon Peters : Wow. Um, and so basically the way this is working is you have a symbol and that symbol is filled with an animation. Um, you can have as many layers, you can do everything that you can do in the normal timeline, just in, um, just in, in the symbol. And then when you move that symbol, now, all of a sudden you have, you have this, this composition. If you think about it, that way that, uh, you can move around scale and kind of do anything you want with, you can actually animate it outside of that comp if you wanted, um, it's incredibly useful. And with these loops, you can, um, of course change the start frame. So if we have that one started to, and then like, we'll move on to start a four. And now we have a nice bit of offset animation in there.