Principles of Animation Part 2 - Page 1

So a good year and a half later I've finally found the time to put together part 2 of the principles of animation tutorial. I've actually spent a considerable amount of time thinking about the best way to teach the following principles to you. As you may or may not recall, there are 12 principles of animation, which are:

1. Timing
2. Squash and Stretch
3. Slow In & Slow Out
4. Arcs of Motion
5.  Anticipation
6.  Exaggeration
7.  Secondary Action
8. Follow Through & Overlapping Action
9. Straight Ahead & Pose to Pose
10. Staging
11.  Appeal
12. Solid Drawing

In my last tutorial, we only covered timing and squash and stretch. I took you step by step through my process of creating a bouncing ball. As I began putting together this tutorial I realized that there are many applications for these principles and many ways I could demonstrate them to you. In the following examples, I've decided not to get into how I actually "drew" the objects, or where I placed my pivot points. More importantly, I'm going to talk about the more powerful ideas behind the animation that you see. I'll be answering the questions "Why does it work?" and "Why does it work so well?"

When you put these principles to use, I don't want you all to try and replicate my drawings perfectly. It would be better to try and take these principles and apply it to whatever current project you may be working on. This will cause you to fully understand the many ways in which the principle applies. With that being said, lets get on with it shall we?

In this tutorial you will learn three more principles! They are:

1. Slow In & Slow Out
2. Arcs of Motion
3.  Anticipation

I know, it seems like a lot of material to cover, but I promise it will make your animation a quadrillion times more powerful. So what are these principles exactly? Well lets look first at what they're not:

Lord that's awful. You may not realize it yet, but it is. When you watch this example you can probably pick up on the following drawbacks:

1. It is not moving smoothly
2. It lacks any sort of emotion
3. The whole thing is really kind of messed up

I'm going to attribute some of those failures to a lack of anticipation. Beyond that, the animation also lacks arcs of motion, nor does the animation slow-in or slow-out.  I shall now talk about each of these principles in more detail. Let's start with arcs of motion.

Onwards to the next page!

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