Animating a short film in Photoshop
A technical retrospective
I spent the last 14 months painting an animated short film called Chamoe in Photoshop.
It’s an unconventional way to paint an entire short film, and I wanted to summarize highlights from the process. I hope this writeup is interesting to both designers and animators who are curious about the techniques, challenges, and problems involved.
This retrospective is a supplement to my biweekly newsletter the-line-between.com (TLB) where I shared the behind-the-scenes of making the film — as it was happening, in detail, every 2 weeks—for over a year.
Here’s what I’ll cover:
- My background for context
- High-level workflow
- Photoshop as an animation tool
- Incremental v. waterfall production
- Inside a Photoshop file
- Crossing the gap
- Takeaways
1. My background for context
I’m a visual artist and product designer. I designed foundational experiences such as media timelines at Twitter. I’ve been an independent advisor and consultant since 2015.
My path here has been indirect: my college major is French, and I’ve no formal training in the arts, fine or otherwise. I’m drawn to animation for storytelling because I find the combination of audio, visual, and motion powerfully synergistic. My foray into the medium is documented in my 2018 series on hand-drawn animation.
My animated micro-short Tuscany premiered in 2021. It received an industry nod from Motionographer.
2. High-level workflow
Though I spent the bulk of my time in Photoshop, I also used a variety of other tools for this project. I drew the storyboard in Procreate for iPad,
used Audacity to edit and cut sound,
Adobe Audition to clean up and restore,
Premiere Pro to create the animatic (sound + storyboard into a rough timeline with subtitles):
and TV Paint to animate the movement, or draw “the lines,” at 24 frames per second (fps):
Finally, I’d shift to Photoshop for color and texture:
I’d then export the sequence of paintings into a video file to drop back into Premiere Pro, where I’d do final production.
3. Photoshop as an animation tool
Chamoe is composed of 10 sequences, or “chapters,” each about 10 to 15 seconds long. There was usually 1 Photoshop file per sequence, but in a few cases there were as many as 3. I ran the layers up into the hundreds quite quickly every time, each file weighing about 1 to 2 GB. There was no file with fewer than 1000 layers, and one had over 5000.
When I began working on Chamoe, I was on a machine with only 16 GB of memory, and it was painful. Photoshop would frequently lag or crash, and I’d run into scratch disk errors constantly. Midway through the making of the film, I was grateful to be able to finally upgrade to a more powerful machine, quadrupling memory and storage in the process.
The shift in productivity was dramatic: rendering 92 frames went from 3 minutes to 5 seconds on the Intel and Silicon machines, respectively.
Photoshop is not a traditional animation tool, but style was a focus and priority for this film, and I’ve preferred the look, feel, and gamut of its bitmap brushes over those of alternatives (such as Clip Studio Paint). Clipping masks also came in handy for the kind of stylistic effect I was going for.
Note that the Silicon-optimized version of Photoshop still doesn’t have the video timeline feature, so I’ve been using the 2021 version to access the video timeline, plus essential plug-ins like Anim Dessin and Animator’s Toolbar Pro. Legacy export remains quite slow.
4. Incremental v. waterfall production
Painting a film in Photoshop like I did is labor-intensive (as is animation in general) and one misstep could affect every painstakingly painted frame that follows. Deciding to, say, change a brush type midway through a 5000 layer sequence, could be very costly.
To mitigate risk, I engaged in incremental versus “waterfall” production. Instead of doing all of the lines across the entire 2.5 minute film, then all of the base color on top of that, then all of the textures on top of that, I fully painted the film one sequence at a time, color to texture.
This meant that if I made a mistake or changed my mind about something, it was largely sandboxed to a 10 second segment, not a 2.5 minute film. Cutting up production in this way, however, introduced its own risks around coherence.
“Style primers” were one way I countered the danger of disjointedness between sequences. These were visual guides I created before painting the sequences themselves; before I could get distracted by details, or lost in the tedium of long hours.
While they were looser paintings that facilitated sequence-specific decisions around colors, textures, and vibe, style primers also functioned as quick-references within the context of the entire film. They helped anchored me as well; I was grateful for the clarity and freshness of perspective they provided when my eyes got tired.
I relied on style primers heavily as I refined the final paintings. At a certain level, this decoupling—of instinct and exploration from refinement and execution—was important for an efficient workflow. However, the very nature of incremental production—consisting of multiple iterations before conclusion—still made room for redirection throughout the process. This balance made fluidity and evolution possible within an ordered system.
5. Inside a Photoshop file
To get a feel for how I leveraged incremental production within a single sequence itself, we can zoom into the way a Photoshop file is organized. Here’s another primer and a corresponding painting from the final cut:
With infrequent exceptions, the animation in Chamoe is composed of a new painting every 2 frames (in the context of 24 frames per second). Each painting itself is composed of multiple layers:
Here’s how the layers stack in a single painting:
With so much work at stake per painting, it was important to vet the smallest decisions before propagating them. Even within a single sequence, I’d test how a stack of layers would play in 12 to 24 frame chunks before feeling secure enough to apply color and texture across ~240 frames.
Overall, these aspects and tools of incremental production (style primers, non-linear application, sequential rendering) helped me maintain stylistic consistency across the film, broke up the tedium that could descend on repetitive brushwork, and allowed learned lessons to compound. Lastly, seeing the animated short come to life 10 seconds at a time gave me confidence around how the final film would look, and feel like, very early in the process.
6. Crossing the gap
I was spinning up my biweekly newsletter on creative process around the same time I began ramping up on Chamoe. As previously mentioned, I shared progress and behind-the-scenes on the making of the film there, every two weeks. Daily work logs helped me organize information for these newsletter issues:
It’s interesting to look back on my level of productivity and the issues I struggled with early on, and compare them to how I was working toward the end. Between those two points are:
- 4 months of gestation
- 10 months of post/production
- Over 2,000 hours of labor
- Over 1,400 standalone paintings
- Over 26,000 Photoshop layers (conservative estimate)
The hours make a difference. This is a predictable and logical conclusion, but it’s one that’s hard to be encouraged by when you’re in the thick of a long-drawn project; the pleasure is hard-won. I recall my dread as I began animating complex movements such as walk or run cycles (human and animal), or when I’d face an intimidating storyboard panel. But then I found myself steadily and methodically making my way through when just a year ago, I’d flailed at similar tasks. Those moments were sweet, and gratifying.
They say it takes 10K hours to close the gap between skill and vision. 10K hours at 8 hours per workday is about 5 years. I’m completing my second year of hand-painting animation— and visible progress is great fuel for a long road.
7. Takeaways
Making Chamoe pushed the limits of my skills and experience. It was twice the length of my previous short film, and only my second. I was apprehensive at the prospect of working on a narrative (versus an experimental) short. I’d never worked without a pre-existing musical score. I’d never before directed or collaborated with a musician.
There was a high level of uncertainty and doubt as I began this project, and I was daunted by the vision projected by my own storyboard. I had limited time, a hard deadline, and had to figure out how to execute as I went. Here are some high-level takeaways, and some things that surprised me.
Don’t rush
I believe a project benefits from lots of exploration and play before a course is charted. Looking back at the trajectory of Chamoe in my newsletters and journal entries, I’m reminded that fewer than 10 out of 14 months were spent doing the actual animating and painting. I invested months into research, simply sitting with ideas. Impatience is easy, but experience has proven, time and again, the value of slowing down in order to move quickly.
Build in some slack
The last months of making Chamoe were stressful because I wanted to premiere on Mother’s Day for both logistical and personal reasons. Ideally, I’d have had 2 months after post-production to take advantage of premiere-only opportunities, but I ended up finishing the film just days before the premiere. This project was an unknown in so many ways when I began, that I fixed the deadline quite late, and then I was stuck with a crazy schedule in order to make it. Rushing at the end is probably almost as unhealthy as rushing in the beginning.
More story, less production
Questions, doubt, and uncertainties from the beginning of this project have resolved into intent, opinions, and preferences. One thing that’s become very clear to me is that, while I enjoyed making Chamoe, I’m now exploring techniques and styles that will allow me to spend more time storytelling versus doing production.
Sharing didn’t spoil the ending
I shared completed sequences every 2 weeks or so in my newsletter. I occasionally shared larger chunks of the film, even a rough end-to-end cut with 90% of it in color just a few weeks before premiere. To my surprise, none of this “spoiled” the film for viewers: people who had followed the making of it from the very beginning, including my mother, have expressed that watching the final cut felt like a novel experience.
In hindsight, this makes sense: if someone tells you a long story a little at a time at 2 week intervals, the effect is dramatically different than if the story were delivered in one sitting. Continuity, and how one tells a story—with pacing, presentation, and a build-up of emotion—makes all the difference in how the story is received and processed.
My mother is an exceptional storyteller; I grew up hearing stories about her childhood and early adulthood—the same stories over and over again, slightly different each time and always riveting. By making this animated short film, I was able to honor the practice of oral history as well as celebrate my family. I grew so much as an artist and storyteller through this process, and the biweekly documentation I engaged in throughout, now feels like a wonderful reference and record for years to come.
Thanks for reading.
