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The Principles of Animation (Transcript)

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28 views

The Principles of Animation (Transcript)

Uploaded by

mello224414
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© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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The Principles of Animation (Transcript)

These principles of animation come from the Illusion of Life by Frank Thomas and
Ollie Johnson: two of Disney’s famous Nine Old Men. These apply especially in
character animation, but also apply to any movement. I’ll let this beautiful video
interpretation introduce them (link below):

https://vimeo.com/93206523

· 1) Squash and stretch – in 2d animation, squash and stretch is usually


exaggerated a lot compared to real life. It is one of the key factors in making
something look cartoony.

· 2) Anticipation – a movement leading up to the main movement, think of a


pitcher raising his leg up and taking the elbow back before throwing the base-ball.
Almost all movement needs some form of preparation. Often the animation will go in
the opposite direction first.

· 3) Staging – presenting whatever subject you are animating in the frame so


that people can see it in the way it is meant to be seen.

· 4) Straight Ahead and Pose to pose – two different processes of animating


a character. Straight ahead works great for spontaneous fluid movement and FX
animation. Pose to pose works best for rigid structures which need to maintain
their drawing proportions over time.

· 5) Follow through and overlapping action – like anticipation, this is the


movement after the main movement has finished. A movement rarely halts all at once,
there are parts which still remain in motion for a while.

· 6) Slow in and slow out – it takes a while to get something moving at full
speed. It also takes time to slow something to a standstill

· 7) Secondary action – an extra movement to compliment the main movement


(in our swarm exercise, the secondary action would go to the smaller particles in
the swarm we added on later)

· 8) Timing – the time at which certain actions occur, the speed of changes
and the variations in the speed of these changes. If you want a very broken down
version of this, I highly recommend watching this video series by animation legend
Norman Mclaren. It can also be applied to a performance - a character hitting their
action on queue.

· 9) Exaggeration – Putting emphasis on something that happens in real life


– you can use exaggeration on any of the other principles – for example, you can
apply exaggeration to squash and stretch to make a bouncing ball squash more than
it would in real life. The more you exaggerate, the more cartoony it tends to look.

· 10) Solid drawing – demonstrating the solid 3d aspects of an object – you


can often do this by simply drawing the character or object in an angle which is
offset from strict profile angles. For example, instead of drawing your character
looking 90 degrees to the right of the camera, make it a 75 degrees angle so that
we see a little bit more of the far side of his / her face. This demonstrates to
the audience that the form is in fact 3d, not just a 2d cutout. This principle
ideally relies on the animator to be able to draw their character or object at any
angle they choose, by understanding 3d space and mentally breaking the character
down into simple objects.

· 11) Appeal – the magical hard-to-explain X factor in animation. Appeal is


the added touches drawing style or a combination of other principles which can make
the piece of animation pleasant to watch. . Anything which can’t be explained by
the other principles is often explained by this category

When applied, these principles will make your animation look much better. And if
you have ever watched some gorgeous animation from legends like Glen Keane, James
Baxter, Milt Kahl, Eric Goldberg… Their animations look so delightful because they
have a confident command over all 12 principles of animation.

The Principles Becoming Second Nature

Now I understand that I have given you a lot of points to think about with these
principles. It can be a bit overwhelming. But you don’t need to be concentrating on
all of the principles at once – that would be impossible!

Luckily, most of these principles are intuitive so you will find yourself applying
a lot of them without even thinking!

Focus on improving one principle at a time. It takes time, patience and


concentration

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