Principles of Animation Part 2 - Page 2

Now that you have a good idea of what we are about to do from the previous page, let's begin by discussing arcs of motion.

Arcs of Motion
This concept relates to how things move. More appropriately, how living, organic, non-mechanic things usually move. Now while the subject of our animation is a mallet and a button (man made objects), we can imagine that a human being would be swinging this mallet to smash in the button. So arcs of motion refers to how the source of the action moves. Lots of really old animators would study how people move. What they found is that most natural motions move along a curved path, or an arc, not a straight line. Lets onionskin our mallet and see what kind of arc its moving on:

WOW. That's pretty hideous. The animation lacks any arc or smooth pattern! I can not stress enough the importance of using your onionskin to check your arcs of motion when working in Flash. It is the equivalent of traditional animators page-flipping!

Lets look at the same drawings when they are positioned correctly to make a nice arc:

If we do an onionskin, notice that now have this nice looking specimen:

So you can now see that the mallet has a certain pattern to it. The arc is literal here. It now moves the way it would if a really old robot was using it, nut that's not good enough for us. We want LIFE in our animation right? We want it to look like its being used by a human, (or for you Battlestar Galactica fans out there) a cylon at the very least. So lets learn about the next principle, slow-in and slow-out.

Slow-In and Slow-Out
The basic jist of this principle is that we add more drawings to the beginning and to the end of our sequence. In essence, the animation slowly moves into the arc, and then slowly leaves. If you observe how people move, how actions are made, you'll begin to witness slow in slow out in life. It all has to do with inertia and gravity where it takes more effort to begin or end a sequence of movements. Now do ALL things slow in and slow out? Absolutely not! It's up to you as an animator to experiment and find out what types of actions slow in, but don't slow out. Here are a few examples:

Slow in, but don't slow out
A car driving fast from a distance, but as it passes you, it whizzes by.

Slow out without slowing in
Someone getting ready to sneeze

Slow in and slow out
Our example here today.

So without further ado, let me show you what I mean:

The following image shows the onionskin for the above animation:

By adding more drawings at the beginning and ending of the action, we achieve a more lifelike feel to our animation. You must experiment with how many drawings any particular action needs for slow in, slow out. Sometimes, you may only need one, other times, you might want 5 or 6. Eventually, you'll develop a feel for how many drawings you'll need.

So now our animation is moving correctly, and it even has a nice, subtle slow in and slow out. But I don't know, it still seems to be lacking a certain something. There's still some room to add more life to our animation! But how? Let's find the answer in our next (and my favorite) principle, anticipation.

Onwards to the next page!

1 | 2 | 3