The Principles of Animation

oh hello thank you thank you welcome to the principles of animation my name is Justin Amazon I have about 40 minutes worth of material that I have to do in about 20 minutes so let's do this so I'm an animator I don't have time to show you my actual tutorial so just believe me this is kind of a collage of the past three years there are different shots that I worked on anyway this is Frank and Ollie so like Disney Legends back in the day they are two of the nine old men and in 1981 they they published a book that is kind of this compilation of things they learn from like way back when like in the 30s or whatnot and this kind of compilation consisted of a lot of different concepts and there's this famous list that you can find that we called like the Disney's 12 basic animation principles the it's a list of course because humans love to make lists and the number in which it's put there is it's a little bit nonsensical because it's not like if you learn this thing you need to learn first squash and stretch or whatnot so let's just get rid of the list so think of it as all these different concepts things that you're gonna have to learn to to do to master if you want to be a good animator I am still learning you know I'm not I'm not on some mountaintop you know shouting down and everybody still a learning young boy trying to do better every time and the thing is if I had to like think about the all these different concepts they all get a little bit jumbled up because the way they connect to one another there's like that Venn diagram going on where it's hard to explain something in a vacuum you might remember let's see last year I had a talk there was a massive failure I had massive technical problems but the the underpinning idea of it was that as a hypothetical what if I had to take those principles and I had to teach it to a younger version of myself so this guy doesn't know anything about the principles at all so that's the challenge that I put forth a little bit and this is the way I would do it right now as of today doesn't mean I won't change it up and do something else like three years later or whatnot so it's you know there's a bit of subjectivity going on there but let's just start off with the list so if I had to I pathetically talk to young healthy you know past version of me I would first strip away the numbers just for a second just think of it as like individual concepts and you know I would take away straight ahead action and post opposed because those things are workflow related things they are not principle in and of themselves also it's missing layered action or layered animation also appeal is the thing you strive for it's not a principle enough itself so take those things out follow through an overlapping action are two separate entities that should not be combined so splitting those two things up stating it was is one of the broadest things out of all the things there and it's it's insane how many things it touches upon cinematography directing acting choices all those things so there's some subjectivity in if I want to split them up I could split them up in like ten different things but I decided to split them up into two categories two things and then renaming some of these things because if I go back things like ease-in and ease-out better name for it is spacing which is the term that is used for animators in in the field also it just threw a symmetry in there because that's stuff that I use a lot and I use it as a principle and I get a lot of appeal out of it so you know suck it that's what I'm gonna do and then this is the way I would kind of order things it was not easy to come up with this list and I had to redo it a couple of times also I don't want to throw at you some definition some like quotation marks from the masters or whatever that you know spacing is the blah blah blah as an example for this I just want to show you examples that's all I want to do and this is the list I came up with given that constraint so timing in rhythm just like a painter just like an illustrator or whatnot you have a canvas that you have to work within it could be measured in centimeters in pixels whatever it is but that's your canvas so it's very much our canvas also but frame rate is also a canvas so it adds another dimension to it another for stuff that I can't get into now because of legacy or whatnot 24 frames per second has become kind of the standard for frames per second and if you're learning animation I would recommend starting off that way and then going on from there if you want to go 40 60 whatever it is or 12 frames per second there's certain ways that you would tackle that differently than 24 frames per second 24 frames per second is a good starting place so you know it's do the the kind of boring thing a bouncing ball okay so we're gonna do it's just a basic bouncing ball so there's gonna be a and a B that's gonna be up and a down so it's basically as if you just let go of a ball so there's going to be the extreme pose up and then let's just say a translator whatever you're good to go down now we know this because of gravity or whatnot it's gonna go a little bit less up every time so a translator up a translator down okay so if you play it something wrong of course in heresy so it's doing all the right poses but it's not actually doing it in the frame rate in the dimension of time it's uh what you it should be happening of course is that those things shouldn't be that even it should be squashed together so it kind of bump bump up up up up and if you do that all of a sudden you're thinking in those terms of thinking in time now rhythm also kind of comes into it because if you have a lot of different acting beats happening let's say you know you have a character is who's doing this that this that this so it's like five different things the way those things happen if they're very even you do this that this that this it's going to be not as interesting as to split up and do same let's do something else with that rhythm so if you just beat it out and you go hit hit hit it's not going to be as interesting as ten tenten or ten does or you know you can do different things didn't turn that done there are the hypothetical layers and this is in acting exercise you know there's a stream in front of you and you're imagining what is the most interesting way of crossing that Street so you do you know you ask a lot of people to do it and the least interesting way is step step step step step that's like the least interesting way of seeing somebody do it more interesting is step step step step step zap if there's changes up to rhythm a little bit so you cannot get a grasp of that okay next up I don't have a lot of time spacing that is you have the two extreme you have like two extreme poses and between every single key frame there's going to be some space in which that thing travels so that's the space now if I move my hand from A to B I might slow it down so the spacing gets really narrow the the the more I get to the end final position which is kind of slowing down so the further the spacing the faster I'm actually traveling so you might think of this as being kind of blocked meaning these are all the posts that we really need and then we need to figure out what is happening in between those poses so we got the computer to just do it linearly you would get something like this this doesn't look good the spacing is all kind of flat so if you just kind of look at what what is happening there and I put like lines there just to indicate where it's the kind of center of mass it's putting a breakdown in the straight in the middle and then of course there's gonna be a second breakdown it's also in the middle and then you have some in-betweens it's all kind of it's all exactly the same space but what if you just find it it looks a little bit better at the top gives a little bit more natural but of course it gets all wonky and then it looks kind of weird so we just look at that it's gonna be exactly the same way there's gonna be that breakdown in the middle and then it's favoring the beginning post and favoring the end post now these two versions are examples of spacing different spacing but they're automatic they're given to us by the computer and we need to do something more intellectual I guess we need to come up with what should the spacing be so if I take a ball and I drop it it's gonna favor the the topmost part so I'm going to do a breakdown there we're gonna favor the first part and then I'm gonna do another breakdown that favors it and then the in-betweens and then it looks better nice topic squats and stretch anything can be squashed and stressed to a certain extent I mean if it's a bowling ball then maybe not but maybe you're exaggerating it it a little bit of it but you need to remember its cause and stress it's not squash or struts by that I mean you don't just take whatever it is and just scale it down and you're done it's scaled down and scale out so it always keeps the same consistent shape or volume if you will you can push this further of course and it always should feel like it's the same density going on so you don't want that you don't want just scan down for scaling up because then it starts to feel like if you just imagine a liter of volume of something it just feels like it's losing mass and gaining mass so out of the examples that we just did how do we apply that to this so we have exactly what we did now we take the post where it kind of pushes down hits the floor and we just squash it down and stretch it up and then the one just before then that's the one where it has gained the most amount of momentum so we do the flip side to that exactly the opposite and on the way down it's gaining that momentum so all the other ones need to kind of go into that and then they look kinda nice next topic ARC's let's say we have exactly the same thing but now we have the ball and we just want to push it give it a little bit of a nudge in that direction okay so now we kind of just have the blocked version of it we have where it goes up where it goes down it's all the same thing but now it's just pushing it to the side so here all the different extreme poses the thing is you know you might take what you just learned and apply it to this and go okay draw straight lines figure out the spacing the breakdown the problem is you're doing straight lines when it should be an arc because the momentum in one direction is not necessarily going to affect anything in the other direction so if something's dropping down and you push it that push in that direction is going to be exactly that it's it's physics it's physics it's basic okay keep on going so it looks more appealing looks cool there's something wrong though based on what we just learned we did the squashing strats it's happening but it looks weird because the squash and the stretching should always be in the direction in which things are happening so just by tilting it because now we're kind of going in this tilt yeah just follow that okay that looks better it's subtle but it's better any given like this failure here from last year he's moving and if you pick any point in his body he's moving in arcs and if you if you forget that and you're animating a character he's gonna feel like kind of rigid and stiff and weird but and I am actually a little bit static at this vision next topic let's say everything's the same except like we have the ball and it's going in one direction now I guess its flipped that direction but we're gonna start from the ground so what happens when we start from the ground it looks like somebody just kicked it it came out of nowhere like there's a lot of energy that I've got exerted but it came out of nowhere so we're gonna squash it down first and then we're gonna go there so this is all about winding up I want to throw this thing I'm gonna go back and then throw it so this is the anticipation and this is exerting the force it's like coiling a spring and then spinning or whatever it is this gives inanimate objects a lot of agency so be aware of that so if you have if I'll ball and drop it and it just bounces down you won't think that ball is a human being or person or character but if you do something like this now all of a sudden that ball wanted to jump so there's a certain level of agency that the viewer is going to give it to it next topic draw and follow through so imagine that I'm imagine that I have a yo-yo and you know and it's not actually spinning but it's kind of on the string and I want to go here and I want to stop so if I start going that yo-yo it's basically inertia that yo-yo wants to stay put so it's like it's like an annoying toddler that doesn't want to do what you say you want to do so you go and the toddler is like no and then it'll drag along finally with you but at some point you stop you're like telling the toddler stop and it's like no and it keeps going so that's so this is the track where you have to drag that toddler around and then when you stop the the toddler's gonna do that follow through so there's and that's not necessarily a lot of agency in it but it's it's basic inertia so here's what it looked like with nothing animate at all so I gave I gave this ball a little weird pink pony tail thing so let's say the ball is pushing up but instead of just having it do nothing it's actually wanting to be we're used to be so it's dragging behind same way if it reaches the top it reaches usually kind of an ethical equilibrium and then on the way down it wants to be there at the equilibrium so it's like no I want to still be up there and it kind of drags behind that is drag but the follow-through is when you as the ball hits the ground and wants to go in another direction that little annoying toddler keeps wanting to go in the same direction it used to be in so it kind of pushes down when it should be going up and that's it a symmetry copy-paste it the exactly the same saying the pony tail thing but now it's kind of like bunny ears and this guy is just kind of jumping up and down easy peasy problem is it's it's very symmetrical and like if you thought of it very objectively this is fine it does what it should be doing but if you gave it a symmetry then it's more appealing so like you strive for that appeal and this is not just in the like the first posting or the last posting this is like throughout the entire animation you're making sure that they're behaving differently this also applies to poses this applies to I mean all of these things I'm really breaking it down to the bare bone basic levels and this everything applies to bigger idea so it applies to posing for example and facial expressions in this case you have exactly the same well pretty much the same facial expression but the difference is I went in there and I tweaked a lot of these different little bones to give it that asymmetry so if I just flip it just something a little bit more appealing about it next topic overlapping arguing this is not to be confused with follow-through or second direction but I'll talk about that later or the ball has now graduated in becoming a ball boy yes sure why not and if I if I post him in a pose so this is opposed to a and then I want to end him and oppose B so there's another post there and if I just out of these two things are these two connect streams if I just made everything move at exactly the same time it would feel weird it would be like so like all these different body parts all this stuff would just flow I like to start and stop at exactly the same time it just looks weird so you have to do a breakdown post and that one will start inferring what is going to be the overlapping action what is leaving the action and what is kind of being delayed and comes after everything else so in this case for example I'm doing the the eyes I'm making the eyes lead so going from one post to you know making making the eyes go first and by the way this is the simplest version of this the more breakdowns you then add to it the more you start making all these smaller decisions like the hands might not stop at the same moment or whatnot but this is one decision another one might be the hips are leading the action so maybe the hips go first and maybe the arm swings first and then everything catches up to it so overlapping action starts touching less about inertia and more about agency and acting choices and just an example in the wild this is Dixie and when he rotates around he eating with his chest so his so his head kind of swings around catches up with it so second direction this is this is such a vague term just on the liquid stick scale I'm giving a talk right now but my second reaction is drinking iced tea so think of it this way so in this case you have you have parents and the child and they're talking to one another and what they're talking about is what the scene is about but they just happen to be eating right now or not eating like picking their food and that's a secondary action it was more of an acting choice you know the this dude is pouring himself some iced tea while he's engaging with a guy and and the cliche the the cliche that will stick in your mind is actors using cigarettes that is the cliche because it can be kind of a crutch to an actor so they're giving a performance and they might give a performance but it just happened to be smoking it doesn't really interfere at all but they might also use it to complement the primary action or the primary acting choices so in this case I think she's saying something about paying and you can see she splits upper line does a little thing as your pain so it now compliments the way she delivered that line so by the way a secondary action doesn't always have to be something like the primary one is they're talking and the secondary one is like a thing they're doing you can have you can be you can be like dancing on the dance floor and you happen to be smoking so like you're dancing and you know the seeker is there but like you know it's not the main thing but you might be a smoker that hasn't smoked the whole day and you're like a heavy smoker and it's all about the cigarette but you're on the dance floor so you like smoking but you just have to be dancing because so now you flipped it around acting choices alright exaggerated everything I just thought you told you about it can be pushed further so squash stretch you could push it further you can you can take arcs and you can make them more extreme and push them further you can take timing rhythm and just wrap it up usually you take posis and you wrap them so far that they break like they don't make sense anymore you know take them back the the tendency for for beginners is to just go a little bit further a little bit full and then you don't end up where you need to be like it takes forever just as an example smile happy hungry more smile more happy more hungry this also has to do it like you know if you do a breakdown post or whatever you know maybe it's leading with the hips but maybe it's really leading with the hips users just push it further back stop it consistency this applies to like the world the characters the animation style also so if you have if you have a character it's very minute this is it's why they do model sheets for example so that Cinderella is the same one from this shot to the next shot otherwise you're like really confused like who who at the slipper who with the glass shoe I don't understand what's happening so you do these model sheets and you make sure it also depends on a lot of variables like from what angle are you seeing the character but this also is a broader thing because if you have even the same intellectual property and your enemy this is the top one is from 2014 i animated that one and i animated the bottom one from chosen 60 that's the same same guy and he's searching for things or whatever but it's different animation stuff and you can see it and I'm not just talking about the character design but the animation style itself though they would not belong together in the same world so there were choices being made deliberately and then you have to stick to those choices and work within those boundaries so you know maybe stuff like gravity is not a thing you know when it serves the purpose of a joke you know you can't take things for granted next topic this is this such a freaking big one but just that's an example so like here you got eighteen three to seven you got you got a shot where Bohr is the big white guy he just got punched and he fell on a dresser and on that dresser there's gonna be a figurine holding a razor blade and he's gonna notice it he's gonna take it up and he's gonna start using it into the fight okay let's just talk about the elements that are there so there's kind of a foreground element going on there with a bust there's the little figurine there's poorest of course there's the agent and then there's you know background stuff you know sometimes that back will interfere but sometimes not it's fine so what if what if I think the you know we can adjust this a little bit more this it looks actually kind of weird what if we took the camera a little bit in change the lens and moved it a little bit to the side that already feels a little bit better now rotate borås so it's facing us a little bit more the figurine is facing him which would be great if we saw things from his point of view but we're not him so you know maybe turn it around so then we have a like nice silhouette of that figurine and right now it's kind of in it snow so let's push that a to the side and the HN is kind of coming out of the frame so let's push him back so yeah now we got our frame took awhile and it's the same information being relayed but one is more appealing is this the actual final shot by the way so this applies also to just clarity of posing I'm condensing so much into small time so you know you're if you're doing posing if something can read just on a silhouette level that's great and you want to strive for something like that can't always do it but you know that's great next topic readability and focus so if something 24 frames per second if some things there for one frame it can kind of pass along and then you you notice it but not you don't read it it needs to be there for at least two frames if it's 24 frames per second that's gonna be 112 112 of a second but if you hang on to it longer it's going to be more readable to the viewer so these are the three bouncing balls first one it's just one we've done before second one it holds that extreme pose of squeezing down for two frames works within that post third one for three frames so you can see the difference so if you want to emphasize that downward pose of that squashing maybe you can maybe you need to go with the you know three frames but you know this is also you know if one if something is a bowling ball is something that water balloon it's gonna be different but that's besides the point but maybe you are extending your possibility of your world so much that you're kind of breaking it and in that case you maybe want to hone it back down so there's a lot of choices to be made there in just readability this also applies to like if you're doing a walk cycle anyone I have character that you know when you have the extreme post of extending the leg and then he's pushing his weight on the leg if that straight foot post is only one frame then it's not gonna be as readable as having it be roughly two frames working within that pose and then you get that extra weight down on it this also applies to like lip sync for example if you're doing like MPB or sometimes like ma Papa you you want if you can depending on dialogue you want to hold it for like two frames just makes it more readable where am I yeah so it's also if you have a thing coming up in your screen and the viewer might not already know what it is like it may be the viewer didn't know this was a razor blade it wasn't really established so how long do we have to linger and make the viewer catch up to this information so if he just kind of lands there takes the thing and kind of runs away with it we what happened it's just motion blur it's like watching a Transformers movie so just as an example you saw the agent throws towards the punch and it gets kind of blocked by by Boris so you can't grabs it so I did a lot of experiments with how long should that stay because if he if he does it and just right away it goes to the next move we didn't really see what happened it was very kind of confusing it's just a lot of motion blur but if he lingered for too long this is by the way it holds for roughly nine frames if he if he started lingering a little bit longer than that then it starts feeling like the agent is just punching he got stopped and he's waiting to be punched again or whatever he's not actually reacting to the situation so there's this fine line sometimes where you want to push the readability but not so far as to whatever the urgency of the scene is now there's also the matter of focus I am you know when I'm animating that thing I'm leading the eye towards that focal point of where he catches the hat now if something else happened on the right side of the screen and maybe at the same time you're gonna be kind of distracted by that thing that happens on the right side and your eye is gonna be like do I look here or do like there and that's gonna be a problem because if things happen exactly the same time and you won't have time to go back and forth and really like understand what's going on then it's just gonna be a missed opportunity so you know if you have any kind of a shot there's only gonna be a one focus focus point that the reader that the viewer gonna look at and this might not be the best example but it's one example at least so you know you're looking at the dog Oh a chicken comes in now we're looking at a chicken and you know the dog is laughing and then the chicken is doing that thing another so it's not that he laughs at the same time as the chicken comes in it's at least going and that's where the rhythm thing comes in also this happened this happens this this this is this and I hope there if I met my younger self here somewhere this would be something that would be kind of helpful and this is not I mean I I'm not I don't want to put myself on any kind of a pedestal this is something that is a bit subjective like these are principles that already exists and I'm just rearranging them a little bit to cater somebody that might not know them in a way that I think makes sense so I don't want to do what the whole clique baby thing of being like these are the new principles so maybe this is like the very subjective list of healthy as of 2017 right now and it might change in the future and you know everybody so I'm gonna meet a couple of new animators out there at the bar you're gonna punch me in the face for doing this anyway so that's my thing thank you [Applause] Oh

Channel: Blender

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Keywords: 3d, de balie, 2017, blender 3d, bcon, blender, presentation, conference, amsterdam, talk, open source

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Length: 28min 37sec (1717 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 02 2017