Hello! My name is Dan,
and welcome to New Frame Plus. It’s time to talk about another one
of the 12 Principles of Animation. We’ve talked about Timing and we’ve
talked about Squash & Stretch. And today is a special day, because we’re going to look at
one of my favorite principles and one of the most important
for video games: Anticipation. If you’ve watched any of the other
videos on this channel before, you’ve probably heard me
use this term at least once. Anticipation is the preparation
for the main action. It’s the crouch that comes before the big
jump. It’s the wind-up before the pitch. It’s something that accompanies
almost every action you can think of, and it serves two important
functions in animation. First of all, it helps to sell the
physicality and power of an action. For an animated action to look right,
it has to have convincing body mechanics and a sense of weight, and those things are
often conveyed through the anticipating action. Like, try to imagine a free runner
jumping from one platform to another without first bending their knees
to maximize the power of the jump. Imagine a golfer trying to
drive the ball down the fairway without first taking
a nice big back swing. Or a pitcher throwing the
baseball without that windup. These actions would all look unrealistic (and
just bizarre) without their anticipating actions. The preparatory movements
are what convey the power. And the more powerful the action, the more
exaggerated that anticipation needs to be. But Anticipation also serves
another crucial purpose: it helps an action
to read better. Anticipation helps to
guide the audience’s eye, and prepare us for
what’s about to happen. When we see that pitcher wind up, we can
already tell what they’re about to do. When we see a Looney Tunes
character take a few steps back and coil up with
their foot raised, we can already predict that they’re
about to sprint off-screen at top speed. With a good anticipation, you should be able to
cut to black right before the action happens and still know exactly what
that character was about to do. Anticipation can also be a
great way to create contrast when you really want
to emphasize an action. Say you're animating
a cartoony character and you want to make them react strongly to
something, like they’re suddenly surprised. Obviously you’d want to have them
do a big bug-eyed expression, but that reaction will feel even
bigger if you first have them scrunch their face up for a frame or
two, just to maximize the change. Anticipation is a great
tool in any animated medium, but it’s one of the MOST
important principles for games, because players aren’t just passively OBSERVING
the movement of characters onscreen, we often have to RESPOND to it. We need visual cues to react to,
and anticipation provides them. How do we know that the huge
monster is about to attack? Because we see the wind up,
which gives us the chance to predict what’s coming next and hopefully
allows us just enough time to get away. A lot of action games are BUILT around the
idea of reacting to your opponent’s tells, of recognizing the incoming attack just
quickly enough to dodge out of the way, and maybe even respond
with a counterattack. Some games, like Sekiro,
demand even more precision, requiring that you not only recognize
that the incoming attack is coming, but also deliver a specific,
precisely-timed response. This sort of game REQUIRES very
well-crafted anticipating actions. Sekiro’s animators and designers had
to do endless frame-by-frame tuning of all the attack animations for
every enemy in that game because they had to ensure that each attack was:
A. visually clear enough to see coming, and B. visually distinct enough to be individually
identified and appropriately responded to. If those animated
anticipations weren’t clear, the entire game’s combat
system simply would not work. But this can all get a little bit tricky when it
comes to animating the player character, because when the
player hits a button, they generally want the associated
action to happen quickly. Many of the best-feeling
games to control are the ones where it seems like actions
come out nearly instantaneously, where the player character responds
immediately to your inputs. Like, when you press the attack
button in a Smash Brothers game, your hit will often land like
1/10th of a second later. Now, that leaves almost no time
at all for an Anticipation, but - if you play Smash Brothers - you know
how responsive those characters feel. Of course, not every genre of game
demands that kind of instantaneous action. In slower-paced action games like
Dark Souls or Monster Hunter, your player character’s attacks will
often have much lengthier windups. And having to factor in that
anticipation time forces players to choose the timing of their attacks more strategically. Or in a turn-based RPG or an
RTS, or any other genre, where the player isn’t controlling
the characters directly, well, in those cases responsiveness
isn’t nearly so big a concern, which means there’s a lot more
wiggle room on animation length. But more often than not,
when it comes to player characters, responsive controls
take priority, so the game animator just
isn’t going to have the luxury of giving each action quite as
much anticipation as we’d like. Which means we gotta look for other ways to sell
the power of the player character’s actions. One common strategy is to extend an action’s
recovery time rather than its windup. This can help to visually convey
the exertion and power of an action without costing additional
time in the anticipation phase. Now, in terms of realistic physicality, it’s
no replacement for a good anticipation, but in terms of game feel,
it does get the job done. And as a bonus, it gives the designers
a handy method of building risk and reward into your move-set,
with more powerful actions leaving you vulnerable for
a longer time afterward. Another approach that
animators often take is to try to sneak an anticipation pose
into the earliest frames of an action, just enough time to reap some of the benefits
without having to lose too much responsiveness. Like, when you press the Jump button in
Anthem, it may only last a few frames, but your javelin will sneak in
a quick crouch before jumping, which adds some nice
springy-ness to the launch. When Mario throws his cap, he instantly snaps
to this windup pose and begins his twirl, which ITSELF actually functions as a kind of visual
anticipation before the actual throw. But sometimes that
window is so tight that the animators can only sneak in
the FEELING of an anticipation pose. Like, the jumping animation in Celeste
has ZERO time for an anticipation. Literally zero. When that jump input gets
received, Madeline is up in the air next frame. So, since an anticipating
crouch is out of the question, the animator instead has her sprite do
an exaggerated stretch as she lifts off, which sort of subconsciously IMPLIES the
existence of a crouched-down squash beforehand? There ISN’T one, but is sort FEELS like there was, which is very cool! Anticipation may not be a tool that game animators
can use quite as often as we’d usually like, but it is still one of the most important
animation principles for this medium. It creates opportunities for
players to react to opponents. It defines how our player characters’
actions feel in our hands. It can even be a game design tool for
creating risk-and-reward opportunities in combat and shaping a
game’s difficulty curve. So much interesting game-play variety,
all built upon one animation principle! But I think that will do
it for Anticipation. Three down, nine to go. Be sure to subscribe so you
don’t miss the rest of them, and consider supporting the
show like all of these good folks. Thanks for watching,
and I’ll see you next time! [music]
