Flag Waves: House Flags From The National Maritime Museum

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Search online for a vector of the flag. I ended up creating my own in Adobe Illustrator and saving it as a .png, just so I could ensure it was high quality. (I also diluted the colors a bit to make it less jarring than the true red and blue.) Continue to work around the flag, adding more loops with the Burn tool below and above the original. In the corners, just match the direction and shape of the original loops.

There’s only one handle on the Flag distortion, about a third of the way along the top edge. Grab it and drag it to create a more traditional flag shape. You can choose to wave it up or down; I’ve chosen to go up first. Press the Image Warp button on the Options Bar, and choose—naturally enough—Flag as the distortion preset from the pop-up menu (the menu will default to reading Custom). The initial effect is a little extreme, but it’s a start. Shedding more light on these flags is senior curator Sue Prichard’s excellent introduction, which explains the history of what’s effectively maritime corporate identity, and how boat owners have used the rather limited visual vocabulary at their disposal to come up with endlessly new and exciting designs. Without changing anything, wave warp is pretty aggressive. It has fast, short waves and can feel pretty chaotic. To calm the effect to a gentle flap, I lessened the height to 6, the width to 142, and the speed to 1. You can adjust the effects in the timeline or in the effect controls to suit your video and intention. Now it’s time to adjust the rest of the flag so it’s waving more effectively. You can drag the handles, or the corner points, or the four interior intersections in Image Warp to move it around. Try to make it look less stiff by waving the edges in a more realistic, organic way. When you’re satisfied, hit Enter.

Use Command T/Ctrl T to enter Free Transform mode, and adjust the size of the flag so it fits onto the existing tape attached to the flagpole. Don’t perform any more distortions yet. All we’re interested in here is the approximate size. Account icon An icon in the shape of a person's head and shoulders. It often indicates a user profile. Wave warp can be used for things other than flags, but that’s where it gets a bit more complicated. You might want to pin the edges so they don’t warp! You might want to have it start and stop waving! To learn about those, see this guide to wave warp and other distort effects. Before you start distorting, turn the flag into a Smart Object. You can do this by choosing Layer > Smart Objects > Make Smart Object. You won’t see any initial difference, other than the fact that the icon in the Layers panel now sports a tiny Smart Object logo in the bottom right corner. The Burn tool darkens the image; the Dodge tool brightens it. You can hold Alt or Option to temporarily access the Dodge tool. Drag another loop just above the original Burn loop, to add the highlight to the flag.

And there you have it—a simple waving flag animation! Of course, you can manipulate the wave warp values and set keyframes to change the way it waves throughout a video if you can’t handle a tutorial being this simple. Niche maritime history doesn’t easily lend itself to lavish coffee-table style publishing, so hats off to Four Corners Books and the National Maritime Museum Greenwich for taking a punt and producing this quite dashing catalogue of house flags. Head over to the effects panel. (If it doesn’t show up in your window by default, go to Window > Effects.) Search for “wave warp”.

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According to 17 USC Section 105, the American flag is public domain. (Using a different flag? Most flags are free for anyone to use.) This means that you can use its image in your video projects and you don’t have to pay or credit anyone. Here’s the result of the work so far. The flat artwork we started with now looks much more like a real rippling flag—so much so that you barely notice that the design of the flag itself isn’t really rippling.