12 Animation Principles You Need To Know

Do you want to learn how to instantly improve  your animations with some simple tips?  Well stick around and I'll show you how. Animation is about bringing things to life  and who was better at doing that than the   golden age of Disney animators? In 1981 two Disney animators   published a book which broke down and  analysed their methods into the 12   principles of animation. So let's go through  them using a simple example: a bouncing ball. Staging is simple. When composing  your shot, what's going on should   be very clear and understandable. For this animation we want our ball to start   on a ledge jump off and bounce on the floor. The main action for the story also can't be   upstaged by anything else in the scene, so while  cute the kitten is just far too distracting.  Get out of here. The actions of most natural   living things will generally follow  a circular path known as an arc.  Exceptions can be made of course for rigid  robotic movements in mechanical objects.  So planning ahead I created this  arc for the ball to move along. There are two methods to animating something. Straight ahead animation is where you draw one   frame after the other, this can  be good for quick fluid motions,   but it can be difficult to have consistent  drawings and keep control of your timing.  I prefer the pose to pose animation method  where you draw each keyframe and then fill   in the poses in between this planning gives you  a lot more control with your actions and timing.  So I'll be using this for the  main ball jump but both methods   have their uses which you'll see later on. The key poses are the ones that must be shown   they are the parts which are the most  important to get your idea or story across.   So for this animation the key poses are going  to be the grounded idle, the peak of the jump,   the impact with the floor, peak of the bounce  and then the resting position. That's all I   need to get the idea across but obviously it  doesn't look very good, so let's keep going. Our key poses are mapped out over the arc, now  I'm going to start with the in between frames.   Let's have a look at some in-between timings. The first one obviously has no in-betweens,   the second one has equally distanced in-betweens,  which is good for a constant motion like running.   The third one shows a slow in where the  drawings favour the final frame causing   that slow in effect. T he fourth one shows a slow  out where the drawings favour that first frame   causing that slow out effect. And the fifth one  shows both a slow in and a slow out. Having a   slow in slow out is really good at emphasizing  those important key frames so that's what I'll   use for this ball bounce. Too much of slow  in slow out can take away from the motion   and make it look more unrealistic, but we'll  refine it later on when we look at timing.   I want the ball to appear somewhat squidgy  so when it's falling through the air,   I'll stretch it out to make it really feel like  gravity is dragging it down and likewise when   the ball hits the floor I'll squash it down to  really emphasize that impact. It really depends on   the material you're trying to get across to  your viewer in the context of your animation,   but even for rigid materials squash and stretch  can help give your animation a little bit of   character. The most important part of this  principle is to make sure the object's volume   is consistent if an object is squashing down it  should also elongate and if it's stretching out   it should also get thinner, keep that in mind  or you'll end up with something like this... In most actions there is an anticipation  before the action occurs, currently the ball   jumps straight from the standing position and  that looks pretty weird. I only added a single   anticipation frame to this animation but it helps  sell this action so much better. This is actually   really important in game animation too. Think  about that big boss battle you just can't win.  A good boss animation will telegraph any actions  to give the player time to react so next time   you're having trouble on a boss look out for  those anticipation frames and maybe you'll win. When an object moves or stops not all  parts of that object will move or stop   at the same time, this is where  overlap and follow-through come in.   This can be applied to anything, body  parts, clothing, accessories, hair. So when the ball stops I made it  so that the top section of the ball   has a little bit of follow-through motion  before returning to the resting position   I'll come back to this principle later  on with some more overlapping motion. Exaggerating your animations can be really  fun the general idea is that if something   is supposed to be sad you make it sadder  and if something's supposed to be happy   you make it happier. We exaggerate the  actions to enhance the believability so   in our case the ball is meant  to squash and stretch as it's   jumping and falling through the air  so I've exaggerated the anticipation   the key poses and the follow through and the  result is a lot more pleasing and believable. If pushed with the same amount of  force we expect a heavy metal box   to move slower than a light wooden one. As animators we can use timing to make our   animations more believable or to subvert  expectations and add a bit of comedy.  For a ball animation the anticipation seems a  bit fast, we can make it slower by increasing   the duration of the frame or we can add more  in-betweens. I think a combination of both works   really well, this drags out the anticipation and  it definitely feels a lot more intense. I did the   same thing when the ball reached the top of the  jump to make it feel like it's hanging in the air   and again when the ball hits the floor to really  emphasize that impact and make it more believable. Appeal is all about something being a pleasure  to look at and a grey scale ball and background   is just a little bit bland really isn't it? So, I transformed it into a little rabbit but   appeal doesn't just mean cute characters.  Villains can be appealing too. Jafar,   Maleficent, The Devil, Feathers McGraw.  It's all about design that is well done   and not over complicated with detail  or complex shapes I just went with a   cute rabbit because it fits the shape of the  ball and I mean come on look at those ears. Even in 3d animation where the character is ready  to go having strong drawing fundamentals will help   you understand how to manipulate things in  different poses angles and perspectives. I   turned the ball into the rabbit's body and head  and drew on a little face adding some squash and   stretch in the eyes and nose. I animated the legs  individually to match the body and the ears were   done using the straight ahead method. This makes  them look really fluid as they move independently   and react to the body, with plenty of overlap  and follow through motion. I then drew an outline   around it all adding in a little tail and just  kept tweaking it until it looked alright. Some   of these rabbit poses were difficult and could  look better if I was a more skilled artist,   but I'm always learning and you should be too. Secondary action is an action that complements   the primary action. If we have a sad character  a secondary action might be wiping away a tear.  So our rabbit's primary action is the jump. I  thought it would be a good idea for the secondary   action to have the rabbit peeking over the ledge  and then taking in a deep breath to prepare for   the jump. This adds a bit more character in  context without upstaging or getting in the   way of the main action. This was animated in  exactly the same way as the ball focusing on   the key poses before adding the in-betweens  using all of the principles I've mentioned.   So this is how our final animation turned out,  let me know what you think in the comments.  I highly recommend picking up this book that  the principles are from, I've added some links   in the description for it and for some others  that I recommend they all give a lot of great   insight and show examples to help take your  animations to the next level. I also have a bunch   of other tutorials on my channel so if you're  interested in learning more go and check this   playlist out thanks for watching everyone make  sure you're subscribed if you haven't already,   and come and join the discord to hang out with  the community and I'll see you in the next video. Right...

Channel: Saultoons

Views: 137,961

Keywords: 12 principles of animation, animation tutorial, pixel art animation, animation, 2d animation, pixel animation, pixel animation tutorial, 12 principles, animation principles, animation tips, aseprite, art, pixel art, beginner, how to make cartoons, squash and stretch, beginner animation tutorial, animation tutorial for beginners, how to animate, pixel art animation tutorial, 12 basic principles of animation, 12 principles of animation tutorial, saultoons, pixel art tutorial

Id: vwk5UA927Ok

Length: 8min 13sec (493 seconds)

Published: Sun Dec 13 2020