An introduction into the principles of animation and an a exercise in timing and spacing
In animation there are 12 main principles as outlined in by many famous Disney animators Frank Thomas and Ollie Johnston in their book 'The Illusion of Life' originally published in 1981. These were developed over time as many of the original Disney animators, and other studios at the time, would find that they could convey things such as weight and speed through their drawings thus creating much more lively characters and worlds. These are:
1. Squash and Stretch
2. Anticipation
3. Staging
4.Straight ahead action and pose to pose
5. Follow through and overlapping
6. Arcs
8.Secondary Action
9. Timing
10. Exaggeration
11. Solid drawing
12. Appeal
For my first assignment it was all about timing and spacing. It can be easy to mix the two up as they tend to work in tandem with each other but they are two different things. Timing is how long is takes to get from one frame to another while spacing is the way frames a arranged.
For example, When animating a bouncing ball the timing would be the point where the ball hits the ground while the spacing would referring to how close or apart the ball is on even frame. The closer the frame are together the slower it will appear and the farther apart the faster it will be.
The bouncing ball exercise show how this information can be put to use. As the ball hit the ground the it the kinetic force of the throw and gravitational pull of the earth causes ball the fall quite quickly but once to bounces back up will it slow down at the top of the arch as it fights against that gravity which then pulls back down again with each bounce having a smaller arch.
Another great example is the pendulum which shows how the use of spacing is often used to 'ease in' and 'ease out' of an action or motion.
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The first exercise I did was the pendulum. In which which drew and curved arc for the pendulum or ball to follow. Using the ellipse tool the draw a circle to represent the end of the pendulum and by coping and pasting the drawing object to save time on drawing a perfect circle every time.
I used the onion skin to help with the spacing of the pendulum have it slow down at is highest point as it fights to stay in the air and then speeding in up at the down on the arc as it isn't fighting with gravity at this part.
The video is actually of my second attempt as I didn't have mu USBs at the time to take my work home. So instead of waiting till retrieving it back on Monday, I just decided it would be better just to do it again. At least you can't say I didn't get my fair share of practise in.
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Afterwards, I was tasked with creating a bouncing ball going from the left side of the screen to the right side.
Though I did it the wrong way around.
This one I actually managed to do quite quickly as I use to doodle like the bouncing ball quite often when I used to mess around in some on whatever free animation software I can find.
However, before animating it I would mark out where a wanted the ball to land as this help to figure out where I wanted to ball to land. I used the same ellipse tool for my ball just as and easy way to keep the ball the same size throughout the animation.
I also made a cartoon ball to better test out squash and stretch. With this one I had drawn three versions of ball and copied and paste them interchangeably so it looks at little more hand drawn.
Here's another version that has been extended.
Afterwards I experimented with two more balls of different weights. For these one I used video references off of YouTube. With YouTube you can scroll through the frames one by one using the , and . buttons just like you would on ToonBoom which just meant I mark out the points along each bounce.
Pixilation Project Filming and post production For this project we were tasked in creating a short film using the pixilation method. I go into further detail in a another post but to put it simply pixilation is a style of stop motion animation in which real people and objects are used to achieve effects that are not possible in real life. All scenes in order of appearance- For this scene I wanted to give the idea of it a dreary day. The rain effect was done using paper cutouts of raindrops and manually moving them for each scene. This was done simply because I was still quite new to software like After Effects and I really love working with paper. To achieve this scene a placed my tripod where I wanted and using a Bluetooth clicker I was able to take a shot each time a took a step forward without having to use a timer. This scene was a joy to create as a lot of the extra details were done of the fly. Not exactly a a professional way of doing things but it's rare to get to create
Team Gilliam - Project 1 - Attraction I made some rough storyboards on posted notes I had around the house. Though they looked very pretty I was told they weren't all to clear to read so I tired to simplify things a lot more. Some scenes were also not do able with the equipment that we had around the house so the opening part was simplified to just a zoom into the bookcase. Here are version iterations of the storyboard. You can see in the later ones that the art style is constantly changing and that's because unlike I want you might see in a studio where there's team that solely works on the story board. Yet because of Covid restrictions we were going through at the time and just how small our team was we decaded that everyone would storyboard there own parts. Once that was done we would merge them together in a basic video editing software to get a feel for how everything would looks. With this in mind we had to communicate clearly what happed within each scene so that
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