Welcome to Animation for Anyone
Hi, welcome to Animation for anyone. My name’s Ammar. Today’s lesson is a bit of a crash course in animation. We’ll start with how animation works and then I’ll share with you the six ideas that I think are the most important to understand when you first start animating. And after that, I want to show you my thought process about how we can use multiple animation ideas at the same time. Let’s jump in.
How Animation Works
I think the easiest way to understand how animation is working is by looking at a flip book. If you’re anything like me, you might have made little animation flip books out of your exercise books at school. You draw a picture, and then a slightly different picture, and you keep going until you flip through your pages and see your pictures move. This is how pretty much all animation works, recreate still images and play them back quickly to create the illusion of motion. If you’ve never tried it, maybe spend a few minutes, now it’s pretty fun.
Using Digital Animation for Consistency
Flip books are a good way to visualize animation, but they’re a little bit hard to demonstrate the ideas I want to explore today. So instead, I’m going to use a coin and capture the visuals digitally. That lets me play back the animation at a constant predictable speed of 24 frames per second. In future videos, I’ll show you how to do this, but for now, we’re just looking at the ideas behind the animation and how to plan out the movement.
Creating Motion with Frames
So if I want to animate this coin, moving from one side of the piece of paper to the other, I take a picture of it, move it a little and then take another picture and then keep going until I get to the other side. Now, when I play the images back, it feels as though the coin is moving across the screen.
The Importance of Spacing
Looking at it though, I think it feels a bit weird. I think the most important question you can ask yourself while you’re animating is how does this motion feel? This is my guiding principle while I animate. All of the fundamentals we talk about today and in future lessons come back to this one question. So if I ask myself, how does this motion feel? I’d probably describe it as jumpy or jittery. Let’s look at why that might be happening.
Below the coin, I’ve illustrated the exact spacing of each of the frames. You can see that it’s not very even. Some frames are close together ansome frames arere far apart from each other. And that’s because I’ve not been very deliberate about how far I move the coin each time. So if this motion feels jumpy or jittery now, I think we can make the motion feel a bit smoother by making the spacing between the coins a little bit more even.
Now that I’ve evened up the spacing, you can see that the coin moves a little bit more consistently across the screen. There’s no more jumpiness.
Speed and Spacing in Animation
At the moment, the coin moves across the screen in one second or 24 pictures. Let’s see what happens if I move it across the screen in less time. I think we can see two really clear things here. The coin moves much faster and the spacing between the coin is much larger than before. Let’s see what happens if we make the coin take longer to cross the screen. I think that the results here are pretty clear as well. The coin feels like it’s moving more slowly and the spacing between the coin is much closer than before.
Big Idea #1: Speed and Spacing
So this is the first big idea in animation I wanted to show you. Things feel fast when they’re far apart and slow when they’re closer together.
Acceleration and Deceleration for Natural Movement So if I ask myself now, how does this motion feel? I’d say smooth or consistent, but maybe a little unnatural. The coin starts moving suddenly and then stops moving suddenly. So if we wanted to make a more natural feeling, the coin could start moving slowly, speed up in the middle and then slow down at the end.
Big Idea #2: Acceleration and Deceleration
We start slow by having the coins closer together and then gradually get further and further apart. And then we slow the coin down by making the spacing closer and closer until we come to a stop.
Adding Exaggeration for More Lively Animation
For this next step, I’m going to loop the animation so that the coin travels from the left of the screen to the right, and then back again, using the same spacing.
For this next step, I’m going to exaggerate the speeding up and slowing down a little. You can see that the spacing’s changed. So the parts that were close together before are even closer together now, and the parts that were far apart are even further apart.
Big Idea #3: Squash and Stretch
So far, all of our animation has been done using a coin, which doesn’t change shape. I’m going to start using a cutout piece of paper so that we can change the shape as we animate.
Big Idea #4: Anticipation
The fourth idea is about adding anticipation to your motion. This will help build up energy and sometimes add clarity.
Big Idea #5: Overshoot
Overshoot is like a mirror image to anticipation. Imagine you have a really big movement, go too far and then bounce back. Overshoot helps add weight or springiness to your animation.
Big Idea #6: Arcs
The last idea I’d like to talk about today is arcs. Things in nature don’t usually follow a perfectly straight line. More often than not, natural movements follow some sort of arc. Arcs tend to add flow to your motion.
Recap of the Six Big Ideas
So those are the six big ideas I wanted to talk about today. Let’s have a bit of a recap.
- Speed and Spacing – If we make things closer together, they move more slowly, and if we make them further apart, they move more quickly.
- Acceleration and Deceleration – If we gradually get closer and closer together or further and further apart, things feel like they’re slowing down or getting faster.
- Squash and Stretch – This can add life to your motion and also give the audience a sense of what your objects are made of.
- Anticipation – This helps build up energy and sometimes add clarity.
- Overshoot – This is where we let objects bounce back after a big movement.
- Arcs – This helps motion feel more natural rather than rigid and straight.
Applying These Concepts to Improve Animation
So the question is, how do we use all of these ideas at the same time? If you’re working on an animation, you can ask yourself, how does this motion feel?
Final Thoughts and Homework
Now for some homework. Choose an animation medium. It could be anything from a flip book to a program that you’re learning, and take one of the six ideas we’ve talked about here today, like anticipation or arcs, and create a short animation based on that, maybe one to two seconds long. Then take a different idea, maybe squash or stretch, and create a second animation, once again, one to two seconds long. And lastly, create a short animation that uses both of these ideas at the same time.
Hopefully, you’ve enjoyed this blogposte. We’ll look at these individual ideas and many more in future episodes. See you next time.
