Welcome back to another blog post for my dissertation - hope you all enjoyed the previous post because it's now for a part of the eighth chapter. This was an enjoyable read and it's helped me learn more about the kind of things to consider.
The Twelve Basic Principles of Animations
Before I touch on those principles, the book gave a good overview on what the purpose of animation is that I wanted to share. The purpose of animation is to tell a story - to capture images of life, and communicate with others.
1. Squash and Stretch
Think of a bouncing ball: when it hits the ground - it squishes, the volume must stay the same so it can stretch. It's a principle that isn't just limited to think like bouncing balls, or tummies even - it's used for facial expressions. Puffing your cheeks will result in stretching around your mouth.
Pic 1: Bouncing Ball example of Squash and Stretch
Pic 2: An image furthur backing up that squash and stretch isn't just limited to a bouncing ball, the principles can be applied to things such as a character jumping.
2. Anticipation
This principle is about giving the audience a clue of what's about to happen next, though it's not always a bad thing on not having any anticipation as it can surprise the audience. However, building up the anticipation towards something and then nothing happens is called being anticlimactic. Understanding this principle helps bring your story forward, it can set up comedic moments or even startle the audience.
3. Staging
This is all about setting the scenery for your movie - be it things like the personality of a character, the mood, a clue, foreshadowing of events and etc. The key here is to make sure that you don't have anything that isn't of any unimportance in the scene - this can lead to the audience getting distracted. Staging can be set as post-production - specifically for colour and lighting adjustments.
4. Straight-Ahead Action and Pose to Pose
Referring to styles to draw your animation.
Straight-Ahead: drawing and changing poses through the scene, beginning to end. This is good for action and spontaneity , but when the characters are hand drawn - loses their proportions and volume.
Pose to Pose: when an animator carefully plans the animation - draws the key poses and then fills in all of the movement that is in between those poses. This works well in computer animation as the software fills in the motion in-between with the use of keyframes.
5. Follow Through and Overlapping Action
This is when certain parts of a character - such as hair, clothing and so on continue moving after the core part of the character stops. Another name for this is "drag" - when the character starts to move then other things catch up to it.
Overlapping action is when things are moving at different rates, such as a head while an arm is head is turning while an arm is moving.
6. Slow In and Slow Out
It describes an action that never just begins or stops instantly either, when it starts it's a slow beginning and then it speeds up and as it reaches the end it starts to slow down. This is used to help pull the audiences awareness throughout all the action. In computer animation, this is achieved by using curves in the animation graph editor.
7. Arcs
It's best described in the sense that people, creatures, and often objects move in a certain way - you'd trace those movements as paths as curves. Linear movements are often seen as mechanical - so this works well with animating robots or certain characters that are supposed to look disturbing.
8. Secondary Action
These are the actions that help benefit the actions a character is doing, should be noted however that if it distracts from what the character is going - get rid of it or rethink of ways to remedy it.
9. Timing
The timing of the story and physical actions. Physical action is all about making sure the actions occur in the right time and pace.
10. Exaggeration
Taking reality and making it more extreme than it already is. More or less anything can be exaggerated: body and head shapes, expressions, actions, aspects of setting, the storyline, etc.
11. Solid Drawing
Referencing real life in your drawings. The book also mentioned that taking a few drawing classes so you can keep proportions, composition and perspective.
12. Appeal
The character must appeal to the audience. They don't necessarily have to sympathize with them - they need to appeal, villains look cool and we enjoy rooting against them. The appeal in characters does have a fair bit to do with the appearance you give them - clothing worn, facial expressions and the way they act towards others.
This covers the twelve basic principles of animation - there are a few other things I would like to mention. When I look at this list I see a few things I will definitely be using for my own animations, that would be Anticipation is one I will definitely add in my future animations, timing is very important as all the actions need to be evenly spread so it's not rushed otherwise it can cause confusion - this happened with one of my animations in college (which will be further explained in a later blog post).
Well, glad you enjoyed the read as much as I did, stay tuned as there will be more in a little bit :)
Bibliography
- Chopine, Ami. "Chapter 8: Animation - It's Alive." 3D art essentials the fundamentals of 3D modeling, texturing, and animation. Oxford: Focal Press, 2011. 103-116. Print.
- Pic 1: "The Prinicples of Animation, Squash and Stretch." evl :: electronic visualization laboratory. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Oct. 2013. <http://www.evl.uic.edu/ralph/508S99/squash.html
- Pic 2: Halse, Sashya Subono. "April | 2010 | Road2Animate." Road2Animate | One way road to character animation…. N.p., n.d. Web. 10 Oct. 2013. <http://road2animate.wordpress.com/2010/04
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