4 New Ways to Practice Animation!

today I'm sharing four animation exercises and not one of them is a bouncing ball there's the old saying practice makes perfect but if I'm honest I'm not really that interested in perfect animation I'm mostly focused on giving you a set of tools that will help you make the animation you want to make practice is great at building confidence using those tools though so in this class I put together four exercises that will help you build your confidence as an animator practice the skills you already have and maybe pick up a few tips and tricks along the way these are all beginner friendly but I'll show you how to increase their difficulty if you want an extra challenge I'll be using animate CC but you can use any software or medium you like I've tried to keep things fresh and come up with some new exercises you might not have seen before they're called the magic dot the Jelly Jump the switch which side note is maybe the most useful animation shortcut there is and the morph let's dig in the first exercise is something I call the magic dot this is where we create a simple Dot and try to make it as interesting as possible using only the power of animation so I'm going to create a new scene it's at 12 frames per second and it's 1920x1080. you can do anything you like I like 12 frames per second for 2D so the first thing I'm going to do is just draw a DOT and then I'll turn on onion skinning and make a new empty frame and then my goal now is just to bring as much life to this dot as possible and the reason I like this exercise is because you don't really need to be able to draw to do it you can be a stop-motion animator you can be a Motion Graphics designer you can be trying things out for the first time and you can really get a sense of what different spacing does to the speed and the energy of your emotion so if I want to make things move slowly I make them close together and if I want to make them fast I make them further apart you can see I'm animating on arcs at the moment but let's see what happens when I want to animate on a straight line go nice and quick and slow down really quickly and now maybe I want to do some extra fast motion so I'm going to start using a smear it's good to know that this isn't stretch or squash this is a smear because it's using different volume so this is a bit more like a motion blur in live action footage so I'm just going to smear this out go really quick and then slow down really quickly Let's uh let's see how that looks yeah as you can see you can get some really interesting movement very rapidly and you can just experiment make mistakes make new discoveries really quickly this exercise is fast enough that you can do it multiple times and test out different ideas so I'm going to make a new layer on top of the old layer and try again this time I'm going to try to add some depth to the image by making the dot bigger as it gets closer to us and smaller and have tighter spacing as it gets further away each of these passes only takes you know a few minutes so I'm able to play around with lots of little ideas just as an experiment I decided to join all of these dots together and it created quite a cool abstract animation it moves in a pretty appealing way and that's because all of the elements have special attention paid to their spacing and arcs this won't just be the case for abstract animation pretty much any object or character you animate will benefit from spacing and timing ideas that you learn with this exercise next up we have the Jelly Jump in this exercise we're going to try to make a block of jelly or Jello depending on where you live jump in the air and settle down we're focusing on creating weight using anticipation and overshoot so we have a drawing of some jelly here in animate CC I've split it up into layers so that I can lock the background layers the first thing I'm going to do is create the most important keyframes so we've got our starting frame I'll create a new frame at the top of the jump and I'll duplicate the first frame and use it as the final frame I'll make it hold for a while by pressing F5 and I'll play that back that doesn't really feel like a piece of jelly jumping right now so what do I need to add well I'm going to add a anticipation pose so this is where it squishes down a little bit and to do that rather than redrawing it you can redraw it if you if you're so inclined but in this example I'm not going to I'm just going to transform it so I'm moving the center transformation like the the orientation point for the transformation down to the base so that as I transform it the bass doesn't move around too much I'm going to squish it down and then what we know about squash and stretch is that it needs to retain volume so if I squish it down it also needs to squash outwards and let's just see if that feels about right I think yeah I think maybe just a little bit further out yeah okay I think that's about right it goes into the air and then I'm going to have a squash pose when it comes back down and this squash is a bit of overshoot so I'm just going to make a new keyframe here I'm pressing F6 and that means that this one I can squash down do a similar thing to what I did with anticipation so now I have the extremes so we've got first pose anticipation we've got the jumping pose the overshoot and then the settle pose old okay so that's pretty cool uh now I think we need to look at the spacing here so we want the motion to explode upwards hang in the air and then come back down quickly so to do that it's going to make a new keyframe and I'm going to make this one ease into this pose that's uh ahead of it and then I'm going to ease out of this pose yeah and this this is really weighted towards that top pose so I'm just experimenting with the PA with the timing here and if I'm honest I think the timing all feels a bit crazy so it feels a bit slow in the air doesn't it so what I think we need to do is change it so it's not on threes there and on three there and then I think this overshoot is a little bit slow as well so I'm going to move this around so that feels pretty cool but it doesn't feel a lot like jelly and I think one of the reasons jelly feels the way it does is because it has loads and loads of overshoots so when it comes back down I think we could overshoot further so rather than coming to its final pose here let's just put a series of overshoots that get less and less as they go along I think that that's feeling a lot more bouncy and fun at the moment this feels a bit choppy because the Project's at 12 frames per second and we're skipping every other frame so it'd be good to fill in the gaps with some in-betweens this is feeling pretty nice now uh there are loads of other things you could try when you're doing it yourself you could see how many overshoots you could fit in at the end or maybe you could play around with adding a stretch frame like I'm doing here this is a fun exercise because it's a simple way to practice overshoot and it also makes you think about a pretty common five pose pattern and that's pose anticipation action or breakdown overshoot and end pose this is something that's really useful for loads of different kinds of animation if you want to make this exercise more difficult you can try putting another cube of jelly on top and animating it responding to the cube below this can get tricky as you start to think about how all the shapes are interacting a third exercise is something I call the switch our goal here is to transition between the two very different keyframes as quickly and easily as possible we'll do this by hiding the transition behind motion this is something that sleight of hair magicians use to hide things from the audiences and it's endlessly useful in animation you could take a lot of drawings or some sort of real sort of thinky problem solving to figure out how to get from this keyframe to this keyframe but what I want to do now is show you that you can hide this morphing behind some motion and your audience's brains will fill in the gaps for you I'm going to duplicate this keyframe and because they're basically at the same spot um I'm going to use anticipation like a little jumping motion to hide this transformation so we anticipate down and then for this pose I'm going to duplicate it I'm just going to overshoot upwards so this makes it feel like we go down we travel upwards really quickly and then settle back down now we'll just time this out a little bit better so I'll hold for five frames dissipate for four frames overshoot for two and then hold now these are guesstimates so let's see how they work so you can see straight away just a couple of drawings no real sort of morphing we're able to get from one keyframe to the other really quickly and now I'll just go in and fill in a couple of uh easing easing in betweens some uh some slow in slow out sort of thing so I'm just going to duplicate this let's see how that looks from so you can see really quickly I'm able to get between two very different keyframes very quickly we don't always need to use this uh anticipate overshoot formula if we're moving our character or our object across the screen so over here we can just use a little bit of easing to hide this transformation so in this case I'm just going to have a really subtle start to the motion and what this will do is sort of lead the audience to expect a big movement then I'll just uh keep going across so we're building up a little bit of momentum here now I'll take my next frame I'm switching right at the the fastest point of the motion so so if we switch at the fastest point of the motion that's when it's going to be the least obvious that we're changing shape entirely so that works pretty well and I might just make a little bit of a subtle transformation here it's not essential I don't think because most of the work's done for us already but I'm just going to squash it down a little bit and then I might overshoot upwards here and that just uh you know relates to the height change that's happening so it feels like it's moving upwards overshooting and then settling back down and we can do this uh we can use this technique in loads of different situations so if I want to switch from a more complicated shape like this heart to a skull you can see I've mapped out a few keyframes here we've got the first keyframe the anticipation frame the overshoot frame and the saddle frame one thing that's different with this example is that I've actually gone to the effort of redrawing these these keyframes so this isn't just a transformation of the other heart frame so you can see here I've created stretch in the skull by extending the Jawbone down and then it compresses here so what I'm doing now is creating a little bit of follow-through overlapping motion so that it feels like the Jawbone follows the skull up a little bit that just loosens things up a little bit and now I'm just going to overshoot a little bit with this girl just to give it a bit more weight I'll test it out maybe re-time it a little bit now so you can see straight away that this would have been quite a hard thing to morph between between this thing and this thing they're quite complicated shapes especially the skull if you want to really push this idea you can even use it to create stylized character animation by popping between key poses a fourth exercise is called the morph this is a lot like the switch but rather than hiding the transition between two different keyframes we're going to exaggerate it so with this exercise we want to take two very different keyframes and blend between them in this example I'm using a square and a triangle the simplest way to do this would be to Overlay the two keyframes and just in between the shapes so this is what I'm doing here I'm focusing on easing during the motion so it feels nice and soft but as you can see it looks kind of cool but I don't think we're really embracing the transition so when I'm thinking about morphs I like to think about the transitionary state and what interest we can bring to the motion by experimenting with what happens in the middle so for this example I decided to make the 2D Square rotate through space and become 3D for a moment as it morphs into the Triangular shape another Direction I could go would be to have a slightly gooey transition where the shape melts and twists as it morphs the main thing to think about is how to entertain the audience with the transition and add some interesting surprising detail I find morphs are usually easier to animate using Straight Ahead animation so animating one frame after the other I'll keep the final keyframe in mind but I won't start referencing it until I get to the end of the process adding a broad motion like movement anticipation or rotation can help add interest it's also helpful to think about what the object is made of in showing that in the frames you make can be a good way to make the morph look more interesting in this example I'm transitioning between a flower and a dagger this is a more complicated transition but I'll use the same ideas here I'm adding a simple rotation to the dagger which I'll carry over into the movement of the flower and I'm thinking about how each of the parts could be revealed in interesting ways so I'm taking the handle of the dagger and splitting it so it blooms open to reveal the petals and then the handle grows out of the center of the flower like a plant might I've also carried some of that rotational movement from the flower into the petals as they fall off and disappear and there you go four ways to practice your animation skills start simple don't be afraid to try each of these exercises multiple times and if you want to learn more about animation fundamentals check out the other classes on this channel if you've got ideas for future classes let me know in the comments below and I'll catch you next time

Channel: Alex Grigg // Animation for Anyone

Views: 540,349

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Id: _hYtN46s-Lk

Length: 14min 29sec (869 seconds)

Published: Sun Oct 30 2022