Photoshop Induction 2: Working With Flipbooks

In today's Photoshop induction we were taught how to use the timeline feature to create a frame by frame animation. It is something I already knew how to use as I had used photoshop to produce my animations on at Art Foundation, but it was nice to recap as I have been out of practice. 

We started the session by learning how to use the scanner, so we could work with the flip-books we produced previously. Scanning was easy, but I found that cropping the photos so that they were the same size was quite hard, and I came across a few problems.  I was using a fixed crop tool (yes this is the exact terminology… possibly) but I still found that my images were different sizes. It turns out I hadn't changed the resolution and that's why they were all different. But instead of going back and resizing them all individually, I was shown how to record an action so it could be repeated at the click of a button. I wish I would have learnt about this before, as this could have easily come in handy. 

Here is my first attempt at putting together my scanned images. I used the second flip-book sequence as it is my favourite out of the three, and I think it has gone okay. However, my original drawings have smudged for some unknown reason, and the frames don't quite line up resulting in the animation being jumpy. To begin with I didn't really like this, but the more I look at it, the more it is growing on me. It reminds me of an old black and white film. I did attempt to improve this however, and the result you can see below:

I created this animation using the brush tool. I drew over my original frames and then 'erased' it by using white. Rather than redrawing the ball, i copied it onto a new layer and repositioned it. When the ball was coming into contact with the wall/floor, I used the skew tool to change the shape of the ball. This maybe considered cheating, or might not even be the most effective use of this tool, but hey ho. Bite me.
As a first attempt, I don't think I've done too bad.