ANIMATION PRINCIPLES

1. SQUASH AND STRETCH

This action gives the illusion of weight and volume to a character as it moves. Also squash and stretch is useful in animating dialogue and doing facial expressions. How extreme the use of squash and stretch is, depends on what is required in animating the scene. Usually it's broader in a short style of picture and subtler in a feature. It is used in all forms of character animation from a bouncing ball to the body weight of a person walking. This is the most important element you will be required to master and will be used often.

2. ANTICIPATION

This movement prepares the audience for a major action the character is about to perform, such as, starting to run, jump or change expression. A dancer does not just leap off the floor. A backwards motion occurs before the forward action is executed. The backward motion is the anticipation. A comic effect can be done by not using anticipation after a series of gags that used anticipation. Almost all real action has major or minor anticipation such as a pitcher's wind-up or a golfers' back swing. Feature animation is often less broad than short animation unless a scene requires it to develop a characters personality.

3. STAGING

A pose or action should clearly communicate to the audience the attitude, mood, reaction or idea of the character as it relates to the story and continuity of the story line. The effective use of long, medium, or close up shots, as well as camera angles also helps in telling the story. There is a limited amount of time in a film, so each sequence, scene and frame of film must relate to the overall story. Do not confuse the audience with too many actions at once. Use one action clearly stated to get the idea across, unless you are animating a scene that is to depict clutter and confusion. Staging directs the audience's attention to the story or idea being told. Care must be taken in background design so it isn't obscuring the animation or competing with it due to excess detail behind the animation. Background and animation should work together as a pictorial unit in a scene.

4. STRAIGHT AHEAD AND POSE TO POSE ANIMATION

Straight ahead animation starts at the first drawing and works drawing to drawing to the end of a scene. You can lose size, volume, and proportions with this method, but it does have spontaneity and freshness. Fast, wild action scenes are done this way. Pose to Pose is more planned out and charted with key drawings done at intervals throughout the scene. Size, volumes, and proportions are controlled better this way, as is the action. The lead animator will turn charting and keys over to his assistant. An assistant can be better used with this method so that the animator doesn't have to draw every drawing in a scene. An animator can do more scenes this way and concentrate on the planning of the animation. Many scenes use a bit of both methods of animation.

5. FOLLOW THROUGH AND OVERLAPPING ACTION

When the main body of the character stops all other parts continue to catch up to the main mass of the character, such as arms, long hair, clothing, coat tails or a dress, floppy ears or a long tail (these follow the path of action). Nothing stops all at once. This is follow through. Overlapping action is when the character changes direction while his clothes or hair continues forward. The character is going in a new direction, to be followed, a number of frames later, by his clothes in the new direction. "DRAG," in animation, for example, would be when Goofy starts to run, but his head, ears, upper body, and clothes do not keep up with his legs. In features, this type of action is done more subtly. Example: When Snow White starts to dance, her dress does not begin to move with her immediately but catches up a few frames later. Long hair and animal tail will also be handled in the same manner. Timing becomes critical to the effectiveness of drag and the overlapping action.

6. SLOW-OUT AND SLOW-IN

As action starts, we have more drawings near the starting pose, one or two in the middle, and more drawings near the next pose. Fewer drawings make the action faster and more drawings make the action slower. Slow-ins and slow-outs soften the action, making it more life-like. For a gag action, we may omit some slow-out or slow-ins for shock appeal or the surprise element. This will give more snap to the scene.

7. ARCS

All actions, with few exceptions (such as the animation of a mechanical device), follow an arc or slightly circular path. This is especially true of the human figure and the action of animals. Arcs give animation a more natural action and better flow. Think of natural movements in the terms of a pendulum swinging. All arm movement, head turns and even eye movements are executed on an arcs.

8. SECONDARY ACTION

This action adds to and enriches the main action and adds more dimension to the character animation, supplementing and/or re-enforcing the main action. Example: A character is angrily walking toward another character. The walk is forceful, aggressive, and forward leaning. The leg action is just short of a stomping walk. The secondary action is a few strong gestures of the arms working with the walk. Also, the possibility of dialogue being delivered at the same time with tilts and turns of the head to accentuate the walk and dialogue, but not so much as to distract from the walk action. All of these actions should work together in support of one another. Think of the walk as the primary action and arm swings, head bounce and all other actions of the body as secondary or supporting action.

9. TIMING

Expertise in timing comes best with experience and personal experimentation, using the trial and error method in refining technique. The basics are: more drawings between poses slow and smooth the action. Fewer drawings make the action faster and crisper. A variety of slow and fast timing within a scene adds texture and interest to the movement. Most animation is done on twos (one drawing photographed on two frames of film) or on ones (one drawing photographed on each frame of film). Twos are used most of the time, and ones are used during camera moves such as trucks, pans and occasionally for subtle and quick dialogue animation. Also, there is timing in the acting of a character to establish mood, emotion, and reaction to another character or to a situation. Studying movement of actors and performers on stage and in films is useful when animating human or animal characters. This frame by frame examination of film footage will aid you in understanding timing for animation. This is a great way to learn from the others.

10. EXAGGERATION

Exaggeration is not extreme distortion of a drawing or extremely broad, violent action all the time. Its like a caricature of facial features, expressions, poses, attitudes and actions. Action traced from live action film can be accurate, but stiff and mechanical. In feature animation, a character must move more broadly to look natural. The same is true of facial expressions, but the action should not be as broad as in a short cartoon style. Exaggeration in a walk or an eye movement or even a head turn will give your film more appeal. Use good taste and common sense to keep from becoming too theatrical and excessively animated.

11. SOLID DRAWING

The basic principles of drawing form, weight, volume solidity and the illusion of three dimension apply to animation as it does to academic drawing. The way you draw cartoons, you draw in the classical sense, using pencil sketches and drawings for reproduction of life. You transform these into color and movement giving the characters the illusion of three-and four-dimensional life. Three dimensional is movement in space. The fourth dimension is movement in time.

12. APPEAL

A live performer has charisma. An animated character has appeal. Appealing animation does not mean just being cute and cuddly. All characters have to have appeal whether they are heroic, villainous, comic or cute. Appeal, as you will use it, includes an easy to read design, clear drawing, and personality development that will capture and involve the audience's interest. Early cartoons were basically a series of gags strung together on a main theme. Over the years, the artists have learned that to produce a feature there was a need for story continuity, character development and a higher quality of artwork throughout the entire production. Like all forms of story telling, the feature has to appeal to the mind as well as to the eye.

Audacity vs Cool edit pro

another important aspect of being an animator is being able to manipulate and record sound for animations. Two programs which i have had previous experience in using are audacity and cool edit pro.

Firstly i will talk about audacity which is a free program it has a fairly simple layout and is easy to pick up for first time users it supports a wide range of auio sound waves such as wav mp3 Aiff. i found that this program was easily used for sound removal by simply cutting coping and pasting another feature i found handy was the unlimited undo feature here you could retrace your previous sound manipulation back to earlier stages handy if you make mistakes.

The second audio editor that iv used is cool edit pro this is a much dated sound editor but still has the same potential as any other sound editor around today. Today it is no longer known as cool edit as it is now an adobe product called adobe audition. This program does more or less the same amount of editing as audacity i.e sound removal and noise reduction but does it in a more professional manner with much greater sound quality although it is more difficult to use for beginners and aimed at more professionals i.e sound engineers and musicians

quick character sketches

software comparising

Since starting the computer animation module at uni i'v had experience in using servral diffrent animation programs for both 2D and 3D animation. these programs have ranged from simple 2d animating programs such as the vector driven program xara which was introduced to us a the start of 1st year this program was farily simple to use. Xara X is drawing and illustration software, used by world leading artists. The next step was to familarlise ourselves with macromedia/adobe flash and toonboom studio these 2 program these programs both focused more primary on the animation aspect although they were used for diffrent types of multimedia work.
flash
Flash offers a wide selection of manipulating vector graphics and interactivity as well as its web authoring capabilities. Although flash does not have the same drawing capabilities as toonboom i find in my opinion that the quality of animation you can produce is high quality and is made easier with the tweening and keyframe techniques. The drawaing tools in flash are more suited to those users who lack the talant in freehand drawing such as myself ifound it was easier to to manipulate shapes and lines to the way i wantimg them as well as beeing able to group multiple objects together and found the hud easier to navigate when using the layer syestem from which i created diffrent drawings which could be moved around the scene without affecting other objects. another tool i found very useful in flash when crating animations was the onion skin tool here i was able to crate one drawing then move onto the next frame while keeping an outline of the previous frame i found this helped in the manipulation of movement for characterssuch as walk cycles etc.
Toonboom studio
Toonboom studio on the other hand is a far more specialized 2d animating package its tools and interface mirror that of flash it still makes ue of the frames and onion skin tools but i feel whenever i use toonboom i cannot produce the same detailed drawings as in flash due to the lack of manipulating tools found in flash. This is why i decided to to my final animation in 1st year in flash as i felt more confident using this program but for then final group animatic i will choose to use toonboom as the final iwould liked to have produed an animation in both programs before i move onto the world of 3D animating.

dont tip the paperboy (comedy sketch)

liquid snake who is a evil genius in the hit video game metal gear solid makes an appearance in this story where his funding for metal gear rex is explained. It all starts when he delivers Sunday papers where he makes a substantial amount of money in tips thus spawning his career as a global terrorist but is found out as he accidentally leaves a nuclear warhead in the home section of the sunday mail and is banned from delivering papers

a step too far (comedy sketch)

This story comprises of three friends who are standing out in a back garden admiring the night air when one friend accidentally slips and falls through the door and is knocked out cold. the other 2 friends panic not knowing what to do they instinctively pick their friend up and throw him over a fence. as panic sets 1 friend falls to the ground and starts digging until his knuckles bleed while the other runs around franticly making meh noises while kicking the falling friend in the head all the time a extremely raciest tiny Lego man sits on a fence and watches.

wee sas stikfas dude 12fps

thought I'd add this stop motion test i did using a stikfas guy and some jenga blocks also used fx home visionlab studio to add in the rather shabby gun fire but meh it was my first attempt