Principles of Animation - Page 2

In the previous page I introduced two of the twelve principles this tutorial will cover and the animation we will apply them to. Let's get started.

Presets
Lets start by opening flash and creating a new document. You can use whatever stage size your comfortable with but lets make sure the frames per second is set to 24. This is film timing and its a good habit to get into to make this a default fps speed when dealing with character animation:

[ set your frames per second (fps) to 24 ]

Laying the Groundwork
Create a ground plane. Using the line tool hold Shift and drag the line across the bottom of the stage. This will give us a plane of reference for our ball.
 
Make it a graphic symbol by selecting the line and pressing F8. Then select graphic and name it ground. It should look something like this:

[ create a line and covert it into a graphic ]

Make the Ball
Now let's make the ball. Create a layer above the ground layer and name it ball. Using the Ellipse Tool, hold Shift and drag - creating a decent size ball. Place the ball on top of the line so that it looks as if it is supported by a ground. Select it, press F8, and make it a graphic symbol. What you should have should look like this:

[ draw a ball near your line ]

Timing
We're now at the first principle of animation I'd like to talk about: Timing. Timing is, in essence, how long a given action lasts. This is represented by how many frames an animator assigns to a given action. A big problem with a lot of student animation I look at, is that everything moves at the same pace. In real life this rarely happens. So we ask ourselves "how long do we want this ball falling animation to last?"

This is something that I usually visualize in my head. I close my eyes and see the action taking place and then imagine how many seconds or half seconds it might take. This is a knack and requires lots and lots of practice. It is extremely helpful, if not necessary, to have a stopwatch with you and actually act out the action your preparing to animate.

That way you have at least some sort of guideline to shoot for. In this case, lets suppose we want it to last 1 second. Since there are 24 frames in a second, we'll need 24 frames for a 1 second animation. So lets go to our timeline and select frame 24 for both layers, then hit F5 to make the keyframes extend to that frame. We are creating a frame work - boundaries if you will, for our animation to take place in. This keeps us from being overly ambitious as well as focused on the purpose of our goal. To create a lively ball bounce.

Animating the Ball
Time to make it move! We go to Frame 1 of our timeline, and select the ball. Lets say something that resembles this:

[ place the ball towards the top ]

Ok, first frame complete. Now, in traditional animation, the animators have their drawings play back at 24 frames per second, which could possibly mean 24 drawings per second...but not necessarily. You see, through years of experimenting, animators found out that you can create quite a nice illusion of life by only using 12 drawings per second. Needless to say, that was a lot easier on the animators.

The way they did it was, instead of having their drawings play for just one frame, they held the drawing for two frames. This began to be referred to as "shooting on 2's". You can shoot on 1's, 2's, 3's, 4's, 5's...*holding for 6 or more frames creates the feel of a "hold" to the viewer. Still, according to Richard Williams(Roger Rabbit, Thief and the Cobbler) who was actually quoting an even older animator, "Everything looks better on ones!"

In any case, we're going shoot on 2's for this lesson. Which means, every other frame will be a keyframe. Go to your timeline, and on the ball layer create a keyframe for every other frame by selecting the desired frame and pressing F6.

Your timeline should look like the following:

[ notice the gaps in our timeline ]

There is more to be done. So onwards to the next page!

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